Under Your Skin (10 page)

I talk too much on the way. I always do when I’m nervous.

“Do you like sitting in the back?” I say. “Does he drive you around like a chauffeur?”

“Very funny.”

“So you’re just keeping me company?”

“Something like that.”

“All this rain,” I say after a bit. “Must bugger up a crime scene,”

“Can do so indeed,” Perivale replies.

At the police station, we hurry straight through past the desk and down a corridor. The room we enter is smaller than the smallest rooms you see on
Vera
or
Scott & Bailey,
and if there is a two-way mirror, it’s extremely well concealed. It’s not very well insulated either, like one of those 1980s conversions. Sounds of the station drift through the plyboard: laughter, talk, a voice saying, “I’m sorry, but if she thinks she can talk to me like that, she’s got the wrong woman.”

Perivale steers me to a chair and asks if I want a cup of tea. Then he disappears out through the door, leaving it open, and I stare around me for a few minutes. The walls are off-white, recently
painted, though the decorator has missed a bit above the skirting—a calligraphic smear, a missing jigsaw-piece streak of darker paint underneath. My mind has started flickering all over the place, as if trying to find some comforting thought to latch on to. I wonder if they use ordinary decorators from the Yellow Pages to paint police stations, or whether it is in someone’s line of duty. “Oi, Robson, you’re on paint. Counterterrorism this afternoon. Crown magnolia this morning.”

“No offense, but I’m not the one running around like a blue-arsed fly.” It’s the same voice through the wall.

“I’m sorry, but . . . ,” “No offense, but . . .” People only say those things when they mean the opposite. They’re not sorry! They do mean offense! The English language is inherently contradictory. How often people begin sentences with “Yes. No . . .” Perhaps equivocation is a British thing. Or maybe not. Trying to buy a train ticket in southern India, just after we married, Philip and I couldn’t work out if we could reserve seats. “Yes,” the man at the ticket office kept repeating while shaking his head. Perhaps ambiguity is the human condition, a desire to say the opposite of what we really mean.

“Here we go. Can’t guarantee its quality, but at least it’s hot and wet.”

Perivale has come back, with another man in tow. He is as tall, but with less hair, more portly round the waist, as if he spends most of his day at a desk, or in meetings. He has the kind of body type, a python that has swallowed a goat, that Dr. Janey,
Mornin’ All
’s resident health expert, says is the most dangerous. He is wearing a gray suit with an electric blue shirt and a thin black tie, an attention to style that suggests he is oblivious to the treacherous fat congealing round his organs. Perivale is wearing a suit, too, an unfashionably baggy black one, unlined: I’ve only just noticed.

Perivale introduces me to Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fraser.
He has a Scottish accent. I wonder out loud if he is from Aberdeen and he looks surprised and says he is. He opens his mouth to ask how I know, but Perivale, rubbing his hands, says: “Right, let’s get going.” Neither of them has brought tea for themselves. Perhaps it would be giving the wrong message. This is not a social occasion. I rack my brains to think if Morse ever drinks tea in the interview room.

Perivale switches on a tape recorder. I tell myself it’s no different from that “turn over your paper” moment at the beginning of an exam. It’ll be finished before I know it. “First of all, you are not under arrest. You are free to leave at any time.”

“That’s good, then.” I make to stand up.

“But if you did, we might have to arrest you.”

I suspect he is joking, but I feel a trickle of anxiety. Perivale’s manner has changed. It’s almost as if he is enjoying knowing something I don’t.

He opens a document wallet and lays the photograph of Ania Dudek on the melamine table in front of us. “Just to confirm, you have never seen this woman before?”

A jolt at the sight of her face. My eyes unexpectedly fill with tears. “No. Not before I found her. I’ve told you that.”

“And you’ve never been in her flat?”

I pretend to rub my eyes, to get the tears away. “No.”

I assume he is repeating these questions for the sake of the tape recorder, or the DCI. I look across at Fraser, and he gives me a quick, surprisingly sweet smile. Perivale is just being pompous for the sake of it. I’m only a witness.

Then from his cardboard file Perivale slides out something else. At first, I think it is the advertisement from the
Lady
, but the sheet is broader, the paper thinner, more yellowy, the conflagration of text and photo altogether different. Creases across the cutting suggest it has been folded. Even upside down, I can see the photograph is of me.

“Do you have any idea why Ania Dudek would have had a copy of this—‘My Perfect Weekend: TV Presenter Gaby Mortimer Enjoys Her Family Time,’ an article that appeared in the
Telegraph
on Saturday the seventeenth of September last year?”

For a moment, I don’t understand what he means. Then my heart thumps in the back of my neck. I study it, trying to gather my thoughts. Lines leap out: “Friday night is movie night. As the only child of a single parent, family is vital to my well-being. My husband makes sure he is home early and we order a takeaway; sometimes, we eat it in bed in front of the TV . . .” I think it was June when I spoke to the journalist; they must have kept it on file. It’s like a time capsule, a touchstone of a happier time. There’s a sidebar Q&A. For “Dream weekend?” I’ve answered, “Muddy walks with my daughter and husband.”

I look up, feeling the color come back. “I can’t possibly think why she would have it. It’s peculiar. Do you know?”

Fraser and Perivale are both staring at me. I look back down. My brain feels hot. I think it through out loud. “Maybe she
thought
of applying to be a nanny, which is why she had the ad from the
Lady
and then didn’t, for whatever reason. Her application was too late perhaps. Then she became, you know, curious. I don’t live that far from her. She might have recognized me. Maybe she cut it out to show someone—‘This is the woman with the job.’ What do you think?”

I look to Perivale hopefully for answers, but he sets off on one of his tangents. I’m trying to concentrate. I am still bothered by the cutting, even if he isn’t. He tells me he has searched Ania’s flat and that when he searches a scene, “I have a quirk: I tend to follow the left-hand wall round a room. If you go to Hampton Court Maze and follow the left-hand hedge, you get to the middle. You solve the problem. It’s a good technique. Blood distribution, saliva, little bits and pieces—I’m not going to miss it.”

He has caught my interest, though I am not sure where this is going. Maybe he’s just showing off to his DCI.

“Anyway, we didn’t find her mobile phone, which makes us think someone decided it was worth disposing of. It’s amazing what I
did
find, though. In a pile of magazines, for example, not just that”—he gestures with his chin to “My Perfect Weekend”—“also
this
.” From the document wallet he removes a sheath of papers, fans them across the table. Pages from
Easy Living, Metro,
the
Guardian
’s
G2, Vogue
: all interviews I have given in the last year.

For a moment, I can’t breathe. A sharp pain in my diaphragm, like acute indigestion, a surge of throat-throttling alarm. I have to force myself to inhale. I try to concentrate on filling my lungs with air, diffusing oxygen into my bloodstream, gaseous-exchange alveoli, intercostal muscles, O-level biology, the life cycle of the frog. Not just one short piece. A file. A whole file of cuttings.

“Why do you think these articles were there?”

I swallow hard. “I’ve no idea.” Why does he think
I
know about all this? He should be telling
me
. Bloody hell, this is weird. “I have no idea at all. I mean–”

“Did you give them to her?”

“No. Why should I? I never met her.”

“Please think before answering the next question.” Perivale does that slow pulling down of his jowls with his fingers. It means he has something serious on his mind. “Take your time. I want you to think carefully.”

From his Pandora’s box file he produces two photographs. One of them is of a green cowl-necked top; the other is of a silver cardigan, cropped, with three-quarter-length sleeves. They have been photographed laid flat on what looks like a canteen table. Both items look familiar.

“These clothes were found in the flat of the dead girl. Do you recognize them? Think. Don’t feel you have to rush into it.”

I don’t say anything.

Fraser moves, and the leg of his chair squeaks against the lino floor. It seems to hurry Perivale along because he doesn’t wait for me to think any more and the next thing I know he has placed two more items on the table, lining them up next to each other.

“Now do you recognize them?” he says.

The new items are stills from
Mornin’ All,
taken from the Web site. In one I’m talking to the singer Tom Jones, gesticulating, laughing, and wearing the cowl-necked green top. In the other I am listening to Stan interrogate the mother of a persistent school-refuser in the silver cardigan.

I can’t think clearly. I loosen my sweater at the neck and a gust of my own body scent rises up. It’s too much to take in. “I don’t know. I’m baffled. This is so disturbing.”

“Are you sure you don’t know?”

Could it be a coincidence? Or she saw the items and copied me? She had a similar body shape, and they are both tops that suit women with narrow shoulders and big boobs. Or perhaps they were in a bag I took to charity. Or is Marta involved? Could she have been lending some of my things out? And then I think of a solution—it fits both the clothes and the magazine articles—though it’s a horrible solution. I don’t like it at all. “Do you think she might have been my stalker?” I feel sick.

The two policemen look at each other. Something passes between them.

“Why did you lie about touching the body?” It is the first question DCI Fraser has asked.

“I didn’t lie. I forgot. Is she my stalker?” I can’t put it all together.

“Why did you say you didn’t know the victim when you obviously did?”

“I
didn’t
know her!”

“And your alibi.” Fraser looks down at some notes. “You say you
were with your daughter and her nanny for some of the evening, but for the rest of it you were alone. Is that right?”

“Yes. My husband didn’t get back until three a.m.”

“That’s an incomplete alibi,” Perivale confirms.

“What? Does it matter if it’s incomplete?”

Perivale emits a sarcastic sort of laugh.

“Why do you care about my alibi?” I get to my feet. Suddenly, I realize where this is going. I feel scared, but more than that, outraged. “You think
I killed
her?”

Perivale says nothing.

“Even if she was my stalker, that’s not a motive. I wouldn’t have killed her.” Are they insane or just really stupid?

“No one, out of television cop dramas, really cares about motive,” Fraser says. “In my experience, who, where, and how are more important than why.”

Perivale stands up. “We’ll see you again. Don’t go on any long trips.”

•   •   •

The moment I get through the door, I run upstairs to my wardrobe—demolishing neat pile after neat pile, scattering garments in my search. When I have finished, I stand in the middle of my bedroom, clothes tangled at my feet.

Marta and Millie are both in the kitchen. Millie is sprawled on the sofa, apparently doing her homework, though her books are all over the place and she doesn’t seem to have a pen. Marta, in latex gloves, is scrubbing the sink. Millie throws herself at me, demanding to know where I’ve been and what collective nouns I can think of because Marta doesn’t know any. I dart a look at Marta, who isn’t smiling.

We sort Millie’s homework (a quiver of arrows, a squabble of seagulls, a posse of police), and I put her in bed with her pink rabbit
and her bear (a congress of stuffed toys). Afterward, I catch Marta on the landing and ask if I can have a word.

“Yes,” she says standing on the top stair, one hand on the wall, the other on the bannister, blocking the way, with her pale face tilted, not moving.

It seems bossy to insist she comes downstairs, so in the gloom there, halfway up, halfway down, I ask her whether she has seen the jersey top or the silver cardie, whether she remembers if I took them to Suffolk at Christmas, or gave them away? She shakes her head a few times. “And my bracelet,” I say, “the gray thread with the silver balls—have you seen that?” She shakes her head again.

“Did you know Ania Dudek, the woman who was killed? She was Polish. A little older than you, but I thought you might have come across her, moved in the same circles?” Even as I am saying this, I realize it’s tactless, possibly even hurtful. Marta hasn’t shown signs of moving in any circle at all. I gaze at her, stricken.

“I am here to improve my English,” Marta says. “Polish companions do not interest me. Is that all?”

“I . . . yes.”

She climbs the last stair and pushes past me, gently, and I catch a faint, but distinctive trace of fig. How odd. She is wearing the same perfume as me. She opens her door, just a sliver, and slips in, closing it behind her, though not before I have a chance to see piles of clothes all over her floor. I stand there for a second, feeling that I have trespassed or crossed a line.

The doorbell goes and I almost fall, face first, down the stairs.

I open the door a crack and there stands a large man with crates full of plastic bags, crinkling as the contents shift. It’s the Ocado supermarket delivery. I open the door wide to let him in. He carries the handfuls of groceries into the kitchen. “Where do you want us? Down here, is it?” They are terribly polite now there is a “driver feedback questionnaire.” I don’t realize the Ocado man
hasn’t closed the front door until I am back up in the hall. It has been wide open all this time. Gusts of wind, rain, litter, anything, anyone could have come in when I wasn’t watching.