Under Your Skin (13 page)

“Olive trees?”

“Yes, and a wisteria, which we are hoping”—I cross my fingers in the air, the kind of cozy gesture I use all the time on
Mornin’ All
—“will flower. They can be stubborn when transported.” I feel on safe ground now. I have my TV face on. I am far away from pregnant murdered women. I am in control. I direct my explanation to de Felice, trying to pretend he’s actually interested. “And a line of lovely green
Alchemilla mollis
interwoven with heuchera ‘Purple Palace,’ and two large pots on either side of the door with French lavender in.”

“Okay. Yes.” Perivale has found the right notes. He looks up. “Are you aware of where Muddy Wellies sourced those plants?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, let me tell you. The olive trees and the wisteria were both purchased at Evergreen, a wholesale nursery in Banstead. They don’t grow their plants on-site, but procure them from specialist growers. Quite often from . . . Italy. The olive trees are propagated in gravelly shale—sandy orange in color. Quite rare, that soil. And the wisteria: now here’s a thing. It comes from one spot in Tuscany, the Pistoia Valley, where the soil is different. It’s heavy, silty, beige in color.”

I don’t like not knowing where this is going.

“And on the floor in Ania Dudek’s flat,” he continues, a light in his eyes that is almost like excitement, “just inside the front door, we found mud shavings—minuscule, curved in shape. And here is an interesting fact, our laboratories, ooh, they are clever, they’ve looked at that mud under the microscope and it’s almost striped—sandy orange mixed with beige. And when I visited you the other day, blow me down if I didn’t pick up some dirt on the bottom of my shoes. And guess what?”

“What?” I can’t tell, unless I look under the table whether he is wearing those brogues now.

“It’s a match.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Not to mention tiny fragments of volcanic pumice stone that they add to pot plants.”

“Like my lavender.”

“Like your lavender. So, we now know, thanks to the miracle of science, that those grooves of mud we found in Ania Dudek’s flat came from your front garden. And one more thing.” He slightly lifts his shoulders, like a parent telling a child they can have ice cream. “How do you think those grooves of mud got into the flat?”

“On the bottom of someone’s brogues?”

“Almost but no. Asics, Gaby Mortimer. Those clods of earth, they slot exactly into the ridging on the bottom of trainers like the ones you gave us. Asics.”

“But everybody has Asics,” I cry.

“So I ask you again—this is your last chance—have you ever been inside Ania Dudek’s flat in Fitzhugh Grove, London SW18?”

It would be easy to say yes. He so wants me to. He’s longing for it. He’s desperate for it. All that work on the soil. Perhaps they would let me home if I said yes. Is this what torture is? I haven’t even been water-boarded and I am almost willing to say whatever they want. Who knows how that sodding sod got there?

“No,” I say wearily, apologetically even.

But I’m wrong. Perivale doesn’t look disappointed. He wasn’t longing for me to say yes. He looks triumphant. “How, then,” he says, producing a sliver of paper from his file and thumping it on the table, “do you explain
that
?”

The sliver of paper has curled up like one of those dark red mood-reading fishes you find in crackers. I try to remember what curling-up means. Millie would know. Shy? Passionate? Or maybe just Utterly Bewildered.

“Am I allowed to touch it?” I say.

He tuts, smoothes it out with his hand, holds the errant corner down so I can read it. A Tesco receipt:

“Can you see what it is?”

“Yes. It’s a receipt for a pizza and . . . er, a bottle of wine.”

He is just smiling at me, that almost-foppish face contorting into a grin. He hates me, it occurs suddenly; that’s what this is about. He actually hates me.

“Yes. Correct. Found on the bedside table of Ania Dudek, along with a few coins. And what paid for that pizza and that bottle of wine?”

I scrutinize the second half of the receipt. “MasterCard Sale.” The last few numbers. I stare at them, trying to make sense of what I can see.

“Do you remember what you were doing on Wednesday the eighth of February this year?”

“I’m sorry . . . I don’t. Not without . . . No.”

“Perhaps you could check. Have you worked it out? The credit card that paid for the pizza and the wine is registered to your name. Isn’t that a strange and peculiar coincidence, seeing as you have
never been inside Ania Dudek’s flat
? They were paid for with your credit card. So, you can understand, can’t you, why things are beginning to stack up? We’ve got the advert from the
Lady,
the newspaper interviews with you, the clothes, the mud from your shoes, and now a receipt for items purchased with a credit card in your name.” He rocks back, studies me as if from a great height. “What do you have to say about that?”

I know I am still sitting on a chair because my fingers are gripping its sides, but I could be floating: the rest of my body flickers and melts, as if I am looking down at it through water.

“Do you have anything to say?” Perivale repeats.

“I’d like to see a lawyer.”

Oblongs of light. The panes are bottle-bottom thick, hardly glass at all. Only whiteness penetrates.

Grit in my eyes, or so it feels. Ash, sulphur, at the back of my throat. Neck so stiff I can hear it crackle as I move.

I peel myself off the mattress—my skin has stuck to the plastic; it’s like pulling off Scotch tape. A stench of sweat rises from the blanket. It is twisted under my armpits. It’s me who smells.

It has quieted out there, just the sound of muttering. Praying? All night, it was shouting and hollering. A gravelly voice down the corridor singing off key, “Roxanne.” Another, a higher scream: “Shoot me. You hate me, don’t you? Come on, fucking shoot me between the eyes.”

It’s peaceful now. They’re asleep. Or someone shot them between the eyes.

I have to pee. Cold, shiny aluminium. No paper to wipe the seat with. It’s a different cell from yesterday. I’ve been upgraded.

Last night’s plate of lasagne congeals a foot away by the door.

I perch on the edge of the bench. I am in yesterday’s clothes. You don’t get pajamas in a police cell. Who knew? My teeth are furred. I asked the custody sergeant if I could have a toothbrush and he said if I were desperate, I could see a doctor; I was entitled to a medical examination. But not a toothbrush. You’d think it would
be a contravention of European law. Isn’t dental hygiene a human right? It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just the sort of compact fold-up they give you on airplanes would do. Or even that chewing gum you get next to the Durex machines at motorway service stations.

I miss my daughter.

I wish I had got through to Philip. I wish I had told him and he was on his way home.

Fear and panic begin to well again, pooling, spilling. I can’t comprehend it. The series of events that set this in motion was a drip, drip of oddities, I can see that. But they were explainable, an interlacing of coincidence. We looked alike, Ania and me. What did that add up to? Nothing. The ad, the cuttings, the clothes . . . Maybe she stalked me. Maybe she didn’t. The world is full of peculiar things. We had a cat on the show once—Mr. Paws—who got lost after his owners moved and managed to find the way back to his old home, a hundred miles from Norwich to Luton: a real-life incredible journey. Or those twins, separated at birth, both married to women called Linda, both with sons called Guy and dogs called Badger. I mean, just extraordinary.

But the soil . . . the receipt? How did they get into her flat? How do they link to me? This is the worst kind of nightmare, this piling of seemingly impossible evidence.

Last night, when she arrived, Caroline Fletcher, the duty solicitor, wrote it all down, listed it, then looked up at me with an expression that seemed to say, “Well?”

I made a gesture with the cuffs of my blouse as if to say, “No, nothing up there.”

I had—have—no explanation to give. Why should a receipt from my credit card be found in the dead woman’s flat, unless someone else used it? It lives in my wallet, though I have been known to leave it by the front door, when I’ve paid for a takeaway. Someone else must have used it.

Caroline Fletcher, with her choppy salt-and-pepper bob, her black trouser suit, is a decent person. She has a good heart, I am sure. She has never watched an episode of
Mornin’ All,
she confessed. “Too busy. Family, though the last is about to leave for uni, thank God. Work. The eternal juggle.” Sharp, too, I suspect. Mistakes have already been made, she told me: “We’ll have you out of here, don’t you worry.” Then, returning into the room after her discussion with Perivale, after “full disclosure,” with slightly less confidence: “Quite ridiculous. Perivale says you are a flight risk, that you are a wealthy person with the means and the wherewithal to escape if you were so inclined.”

“What does that mean?”

Her mouth set in a grim line. “That he will fight bail.”

“But . . .” I couldn’t speak. “They can’t keep me here.”

“They can.”

“But my little girl.” It came out like a wail.

“It’s quite absurd.”

Some of the mistakes, she went on, watching to check I was pulling myself together, were mine. I should never have agreed to be interviewed without a lawyer present. All those casual little chats I got sucked into: they all counted. I wouldn’t have been “emotionally fit.” In her opinion, he was determined to catch me out. “He’s obsessed with this ‘lie’ about not touching the body. It happens all the time.”

“What, people lie about touching bodies?”

“No. People miss things out, or they exaggerate—an overdramatization here, a little fib, an egging of the pudding there. It’s human nature. Confusion, self-consciousness, a desire to talk. Not enough people deploy their right to silence. More cases are won or lost in the interview room than in the courtroom. And you had suffered a shock. You should have called . . . Who did you say your lawyers were?”

“Withergreen and Spooner.”

“You should have called Withergreen and got them down here.” With her “Withergreen” she was letting me know she’d been round the block a few times. I wasn’t just slumming it if I stuck with her. She could Withergreen with the best of them.

“I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Irrelevant,” she said.

It was the most chilling thing she said.
Irrelevant
. It hardly mattered if I had done it or not. I was embroiled. I had entered a process, parallel to the normal enterprise of my existence, with its own directives. You muddle along; you think your life is your own possession, that it has its own discrete identity, that the police, the law, are part of the community, an embellishment, there for when you need them, like hospitals and crosswalks and shops selling ready-made frozen meals. But they are not. They are waiting, all the time they are waiting, for something like this to happen, to trip you up and snatch you and show you that it was the life you thought you were in control of that was the embellishment. Your life was just
nothing
.

One discovery has set in motion all this. If I hadn’t gone out for a run, if I hadn’t found the body, would I even be here? I let out a deep groan.

•   •   •

Breakfast is a bacon and egg sandwich—in one of those sealed triangular boxes—and a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. I eat both, actually. On the tray is tea in a paper cup, the circular tea bag attached to the side with a dangling piece of metal—the sort of tea bag you get from the hot-drinks trolley on a train. It tastes harsh, but then so does my mouth.

The policeman who brings it in backward, pushing the door to my cell open with his elbows, is the same young chap as yesterday.
He has a pale, peaches-and cream complexion; you can’t imagine him shaving.

“Oh lovely! Breakfast in bed,” I say. “You spoil me.”

He blushes. “Sorry. It’s not much.”

The effort I am putting in to keeping my face up, when I would rather curl into the fetal position, reminds me of being in hospital the morning after I gave birth to Millie, smiling at well-wishers, thanking them for their muffins and teddies and flowers, and all the time in pain from the stitches and worrying if I’ll ever pee again.

I say something about this to the sweet constable.

He looks flustered: too much gynecological detail. I’m not convinced he even locks the door. I could probably make a run for it if I were
so inclined.

•   •   •

Caroline Fletcher is later than she said she would be. When she finally comes, I am brought to her in another interview room—a different one from yesterday, less freshly painted.

She is wearing the same black suit with a different shirt. Yesterday’s was rich dusty pink—silk or polyester; this one is cotton with a fine blue-and-white stripe. Same shoes—black loafers, but no tights or pop socks. Her hair is a little less ordered, slightly oily, her parting askew. When you’ve spent the night in prison, when you don’t know if you are ever going to come out, these tiny details tell you everything. The cotton shirt, the bare feet, they talk about a shift in the barometer, a rise in pressure—it’s warmer out there today, sunny even. Spring may be pushing through. Fletcher’s messy hair, her lack of punctuality—she’s been busy this morning. The world turns without you. It doesn’t even notice there’s one person not there.

It’s day two. Two days not at work. Yesterday, I could hardly believe it. I watched the minutes tick by. I kept thinking, Stan will
be flirting with the entire Flash Mob, which was my idea anyway. Now it’s time for India’s ’Appening Apps . . . Thursday, so it’ll be “Up the Garden Path” with Roger Peedles . . . Who is in the kitchen today? . . . I
can’t remember
. When 12:30 p.m came and went, I almost wept with relief.