Under Your Skin (18 page)

“I haven’t written anything down,” I say.

“Can you remember doing anything you
didn’t
write down?”

“I probably went for a run, or had a bath, made supper. It seems terribly unfair.” I hold up my arms. “It was ages ago. Do I get penalized now for having a bad memory? Is this what happens to people?”

“Perivale says he wants to see you. He’ll be in touch over the next couple of days.”

“Is he still in the street?”

“No,” she says slowly. “When I spoke to him just now, down at the station, he said to tell you not to go anywhere.”

“Is he down at the station, then?”

Did I
imagine
him outside?

“Yup. I got the impression he’s running out of ideas, but he’s persistent, I’ll give him that. He seems to have no interest in looking for a motive, or in pursuing any other suspects. I don’t know what you’ve done to piss him off, but he’s obsessed with you. He won’t let it go. He’s like a dog with a bone.”

“S
omeone
killed that poor woman,” I say.

“Anyway. I’m here if you need me.” She is standing, checking her watch and, with a haste that could almost be said to contradict her words, heads back toward the front door. “Don’t, whatever you do, talk to him on your own.”

•   •   •

After Caroline has gone, I switch on my phone. Several texts, a couple from Clara (“Not on the sofa then, you cheeky minx?,” another, a little later, “You alive?”) and one from Terri, left last night, telling me not to come to work. Two missed calls—both from Clara. None from Philip—just a single text, sent late on Wednesday: “Arrived safely. Will ring you later.” Nothing else.
No voice
mail, no sign that he was thinking about me at all. I can only think perhaps he’s lost
his
phone. Or fallen off the edge of the world. But of course he hasn’t. I stare at the screen. I grit my teeth. I’m sick of making excuses for him. Millie is dancing around the kitchen, and I think, to hell with him. I’m better than this. I can manage on my own.

I cook supper—an unadventurous pasta with tomato sauce. Banned from watching more TV, Millie finds her own entertainment,
skipping to the front blinds, peering through and springing away again, squawking if she’s spotted. It’s like that car game she plays, Sweet ’n’ Sour, when she makes faces at pedestrians and scores their response. In the end, I join in, stand and squint out, too. There are two reporters at the front gate, leaning against it, chatting. Another’s legs are poking from a car. He’s listening to the radio. I can hear the burbling voice of Radio 5. A can of Pepsi Max is spiked on one of the wrought-iron railings, like Oliver Cromwell’s head.

Then a shape goes by, clashing colors, a familiar gait. I hear a jaunty voice—“Excuse me! Thank you!” It’s an impression of Miss Hyatt, my primary-school headmistress, the way she used to jolly up her imperatives, corralling her charges with a sort of bossy exuberance that brooked no complaint. There is only one person on this planet who still quotes Miss Hyatt, who could part a gaggle of tabloid reporters with that intonation, purely for her own amusement.

“I got the Tube from work,” Clara cries, after I have let her in, “and then the train and then I walked. Sauv blanc.” She thrusts out two bottles of Blossom Hill and, from her Daunt Books bag, wrestles several enormous packets of Kettle Chips. “And salty snacks.”

“I can’t believe you’ve come.” She’s wearing a duffel coat and a bobble hat, a woman who knows a deceptive sun when she wakes up to it. North to South. London is a forest, a desert, a blasted heath. She’s crossed the Sahara, the frozen wastes of Antarctica. “I can’t believe you’ve come all this way.”

“Do you like my disguise?” She pulls her hat down over her face. “They let me walk straight past. They didn’t realize I was
the
Clara Macdonald, DT supremo of Highbury Tech.”

I hug her, my nose prickling with unexpected tears, and she emits a self-conscious “Aw,” still stirred with the adrenaline of her own surprise, still carrying the imperious breeze of Miss Hyatt.

We go into the kitchen, and with my back to her, wiping my
eyes on a tea towel, I open the Blossom Hill, “Nisa Local’s finest.” Millie sits on Clara’s knee—“Auntie Clara” she calls her, which has always irritated Philip: no “aunties” allowed in his family, related or otherwise, far too common. Millie eats the crisps, to make up for the appalling pasta, and Clara tells stories from our childhood, about the summer my mother was sick and had to go to a special place to get better and I stayed with her family for
a whole month,
“a month of sleepovers, though we called it ‘staying the night’ then,” until, finally, we coax her off to bed.

I tuck Millie in and kiss her carefully. She puts her arms round my neck. The talcy smell of her pajamas fills my nostrils. I breathe it in deeply until it seems to knot around my heart. Nothing will ever come between me and my child, I think. For a moment, I wish Clara hadn’t turned up, that I could snuggle down with Millie and close my eyes. All my worries, all the trauma, if it could just boil down to this.

“I love you,” I say.

“I love you more.”

“I love you more than that.”

I stay there for a bit longer than I should. When Millie was very little, Philip and I used to lie on either side of her until she slept. Sometimes he fell asleep, too, and I would watch them both, the movement of their chests, the flutter of their eyelids. I have to stop remembering things like this. I rub my eyes. I must go downstairs. I will tell Clara everything that has happened since Thursday, but I want to order it in my mind first. As long as I can keep it clear in my head I’ll be all right. If I start splurging everything out to my oldest and dearest friend I might not stop. All these fears about my marriage, my job. This murder has set it all in motion. Being selective might be a lapse of faith in our friendship, but that trendy media scientist we had on the show recently said something about atoms and electrons and nuclei and how an atom will react to fill
its electron shell. Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’m just trying to shift the energy level, trying to keep my nucleus happy with a full electron shell.

Clara has moved places when I get down and is sitting with her back to me, looking out at the garden. The light is on in that upstairs window across the two gardens. It’s a bathroom, I think. It must be, with that flat, white light. Or an office. I look for shapes moving, but the rectangle is blank.

Without turning round, she says, “Where’s Philip? Is he not here?”

“He’s away.”

Something flashes in her eyes as she turns, or maybe I imagine it. “And he didn’t come back when he knew you’d been arrested?”

“Not so far.” My tone is so light you couldn’t catch it if you tried. “To be honest, he hasn’t even rung.”

“That’s just
ridiculous
.”

“It’s just possible he doesn’t yet know. I haven’t been able to get through . . .”

I have this feeling again. It comes from nowhere. It’s as if I am standing on the top of a precipice. I could tell her anything and she would be on my side.

I sit down and refill our drinks. Condensation pearls on the outside of my glass, and I run my finger across and down it in patterns while I talk. I explain that I missed out a lot earlier. I tell her that I think Perivale hates me, and I run through his coincidences: the physical similarities, the clothes, the cuttings, the Italian soil, the credit card receipt.

Clara puts her glass down while I am talking, and when I have finished, she looks at me intently. “Why do the police think you did it?”

“They don’t seem to be interested in motive at all. They have some vague thought, I think, that . . .” What shall I say? “That she was my stalker and I killed her to . . . stop her stalking?”

“It’s a bit far-fetched.”

“I know.” I haven’t talked much to Clara about my stalker. It makes me feel uncomfortable, as if I am drawing attention to my semicelebrity status. When Philip mentioned it at that Chinese meal the other week, I saw the same look cross her eyes that she gets during discussions of a particular form of learning difficulty she refers to as “middle-class dyslexia.”

“Was she ‘stalking’ you?”

Inverted commas.

“I don’t know. One always assumes a man . . . A report in the US a couple of years ago said sixty-seven percent of stalked females were stalked by males. But—” I break off, frown.

“So what’s your explanation?”

“The coincidences tie Ania Dudek not to me so much as to the
house
. I don’t live here on my own. Marta is a possibility—for some of it anyway.”

“And what does she say?”

“She denies everything. She denies knowing her, giving her clothes, nicking my card to buy pizza . . .”

“And do you think she’s telling the truth?”

“I don’t see why she’d lie. I don’t really like her. I do have this feeling that she’s hiding something, but I haven’t got any proof. And . . . I don’t know, perhaps it’s all my fault.”

Clara is looking at me.

“Not liking her, I mean.”

But she is still looking at me, waiting.

“Philip,” I say, after a moment. “You’re thinking about Philip.”

“He does live in this house, too. All the evidence could link equally to him as you.”

I take a big swig of wine. I know Clara dislikes Philip, but I can’t quite believe she would suspect him of murder. “True,” I say.

“Gaby.”

“Philip’s not a murderer,” I say. “He’s a wanker and he’s obsessed with money and status and he’s probably fallen out of love with me, but he’s not a murderer.”

She laughs and I do, too, though I didn’t mean to be funny.

“Also, he’s so organized and cool and considered. If he wanted to kill someone he’d do it cleverly. It wouldn’t even look like a murder. Not messy and raw, like this one. He wouldn’t make any mistakes. It’s just not Philip.”

“Fair enough,” she says.

“Plus he’s always at work and he has an alibi.”

Clara puts her hands in the air in surrender. “Okay! I think we’ve established you’re not married to a mad ax murderer!”

“That’s a relief. More wine?”

I refill her glass, and she smiles at me above it. But when she puts it down, she says, “He has to come back, though. He needs to be here. He is your husband. I don’t understand why you haven’t rung the hotel, his office, his colleagues. Wouldn’t he be useful, with the legal situation, not to mention moral support? For Christ’s sake, Gaby, it is okay to ask for help. Occasionally, for once, it would be nice if you let someone else look after you.”

I lick my finger and use it to pick up a shard of crisp from the table. I put it on my tongue, where it rests like a fragment of card. “I’ve forgotten how to behave normally. I can’t be myself. Every action when I’m around him is self-conscious.”

“Why, Gaby?”

I brush the tips of my fingers together, gritty with salt, try again to swallow the crisp. “I don’t think he likes me anymore—that simple. He’s going to leave me, I think. He’s building up to it. Not sure, but probably.”

“Gabs.”

“It’s fine.” The crisp sticks at the back of my throat. I look at her again and smile. “Possibly there’s someone else, I don’t know.”
Color rushes to her cheeks. She’s been thinking this for months. “Probably at work,” I add. “He definitely seems to live there.”

Possibly. Probably.
Definitely
.

“Oh, Gaby.”

“Honestly, Clara, I’m okay. I’ve got Millie.”

Something ripples beneath her features, a spasm. “And me.”

“And you.” I put on a crinkly old-lady voice, wrinkle my shoulders. “I’ve still got my eyesight, my
health
.”

“We need to get you through the next few days,” Clara says. “Don’t think about Philip—he really
is
a wanker. We’ll worry about that later.”

“I can move to Suffolk with Millie, start again.”

“Exactly. But in the meantime, you need a plan. Two plans. Several plans.” Clara plunders her bag for a pad and pen. The pen is sparkly with a feather on the top. “Nicked from one of my year sevens. Right. Churchill’s War Rooms.” The sentiment that floats between us is swept away by activity. This is how Clara copes, how she always has. I think about her lists and her mind maps, her index cards and revision cards. She was the first person I knew to buy a Filofax.

We agree that, for the immediate future, I am stuck at home. Perivale has said I am not to stray too far, and I don’t want to annoy him any more than I already have. I should win him over, prove reliability, shake off this image he has of me. We can’t accuse Marta of anything. We have no proof. For the next few days, though, until it is all sorted, it would be good if Millie were somewhere else, somewhere safe—a place where there weren’t predatory journalists or police officers on every street corner. My heart aches.

Clara suggests Philip’s parents—until I tell her they’re away—and says her parents would help (they were lovely to me when I was growing up), but that her dad is in hospital for his dodgy knee. She asks then if any of my local friends might leap into the breach.
A small chasm opens up. I think about Jude, whom I never got to know, and say, “Local friends? What local friends?” and she stares at me.

“Do you have local friends?” I say.

“
Yes
. Everybody has local friends. Local friends, Gabs, are the secret to happiness.”

“I’ve been busy. And it’s awkward, being on the telly. And Philip—”

She raises her finger. “No excuses. When this is over, you’re going to sort yourself out.”

For now, she says, she could take Millie home to Islington, tonight, this minute. Pete could look after her while Clara’s at school (she doesn’t break up until Wednesday). Something delicate crumples in my chest at the immediacy of that. The dream I had when I was pregnant, the cat struggling out of my arms in downtown Bombay . . . waking her and kissing her good-bye, the confusion on her sleep-pouched face.

Clara’s still working it through. She has another thought: Suffolk. Robin. I could ask Robin anything when she lived with us—to work the weekend, to move her holiday and she would be saying, “Sure,” even as the words left my mouth. It was up to me to decide whether she minded, to calibrate the disappointment behind her eyes, the shifting of plans. So now. Is the baby too young? Is it too much of an imposition?