Under Your Skin (2 page)

We’re at the tennis hut. I ran back when the siren stopped, when the blue light spun through the trees. I shake their hands, suddenly overcome with a strong desire for physical contact. I can’t think about crying; I’m not the one who’s dead. PC Morrow, who looks about twelve, holds my arm as we walk. She is small and freckly, with light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail; she is almost pretty, though her eyes are a bit too close together, and one of her front teeth is badly capped. She tells me she was just going off her shift when the call came in. “Already had my mind set on a bacon sarnie. Ketchup. Bit of brown sauce.” She’s putting me at ease. DI Perivale doesn’t care about that. He’s stalking ahead—shoulders hunched, his jeans hung low at the back. He puts each foot in the ground like a skier places a ski pole, determined, as if to give balance.

I don’t have to tell them where she is. It’s obvious. Once we’re
close, DI Perivale tells me to wait on the path—or rather he shows me to wait by putting out his arm like a barrier.

“CID. He’s just come on,” PC Morrow whispers apologetically. “We’ve called for the dogs. The soccer team will be along in a sec—eight minutes if they’re on a blue light, that’s my guess.”

“The soccer team?” I ask, thinking of the soccer field only a few feet away.

“SOCO—Scene of Crime Officers. They’ll seal off the area and conduct a fingertip search for evidence.”

I ask her what sort of evidence, and she says, “Anything. Footprints, the weapon, of course, fibers, blood, hair, paint, glass. It’s amazing what they pick up. So we can’t have you contaminating the scene.”

“I hope I haven’t already contaminated it,” I say.

She gazes into the undergrowth and tuts, wonderingly, “You really would think people would pick up after themselves.”

For a bizarre moment, I think she means the body and I half laugh in shock, but then with her chin she gestures to a scrunched-up McDonald’s bag, spilling squashed polystyrene and bits of lettuce.

“Do you think that might be evidence?” I say, studying it.

“More like bloody litter. Not to mention what all that fat and salt does to their arteries. Kids probably.”

“Kids,” I repeat, thinking, Who else has been out here?

DI Perivale is still crouched over the girl. He isn’t touching her; just looking, and then he’s on his phone. He calls something out to PC Morrow—sounds like a stream of numbers—and she makes a call herself. Exhaustion seeps into my neck and head. When she hangs up, I ask if I can go, but she says she has to take down a few details first.

I explain that I am needed at work and she nods. “I. Can. Understand. That,” she says. Drawing out the words, distinguishing between the pace of my life and the priorities of hers. After she confers with DI Perivale, the two of us walk back to the café to find
a bench. She says, “You look a bit different. I’m not being funny or anything, but you look younger than you do on the telly.”

I laugh. “It’s the hair. Big hair. Big, red, daytime-telly hair. It’s quite fine naturally, but for the show it’s got so much lacquer in, it’s like a helmet.”

“Do you have a hairdresser to do it?” she says, and when I nod, she asks, “What, every day?”

“It’s very surreal, this,” I say, “talking normally when . . .”

“I know. Your first body is always a bit of a shock. Someone said to me there are two smells a police officer gets an instinct for in the first year. One: dope. The other: death.”

“There
was
a smell . . .” I say.

She wrinkles her nose. “Like an old people’s home—sour.”

“Something else,” I say.

As she reaches for her notebook, she lists, in the manner of someone cataloguing books they have recently enjoyed, the dead bodies she has seen in two years on the beat—a suicide (hanging), a traffic accident, and a couple of heart attacks.

“A suicide?” I say.

“Yes, golly,” she says. “You get a lot of them in this job.” She tells me how women and men do it differently, overdoses and slit wrists, hangings and shootings. And I know I could stop to think about this, but it is all too much. I want to get home now, have a quick gulp of coffee if I have time, drink it in the car if not. I’m aware, guiltily, of being irritated by her chattiness. Maybe she’s not being kind and intentionally putting me at ease; maybe she’s just
like
this. So I interrupt and start telling her what happened (“Ooh, slow down,” she says): how I had been running and I don’t know what led me down that path, but something had, and how at first I had thought the pale, elongated shape was a swan or a porpoise . . . She writes down what I say, asks if I saw anything, or anybody. I mention the runners, the dog by the pond. No one else, no.

“Nothing else out of the ordinary?”

“Just . . . the girl.”

She is reading back what she has written down. I decide to ask her about the dotting on the girl’s face. “Little spots,” I say, “the sort of rash you look out for when you have a baby in case it’s meningitis.”

“Ah, that one I know,” she says, putting down her notebook. “Petichiae—sign of asphyxiation.”

“And she had these marks round her neck—like she had been cut with a cheese wire—but also bruises, abrasions, like fingerprints. Do you think her neck was cut, or she was strangled?”

“We’ll have to wait for the pathologist on that one,” she says. “I’m no expert, but finger marks in a case like this often don’t belong to the assailant but to the victim. You know, when they’re fighting to get the ligature off?”

I shiver involuntarily, and then do it again because it makes me feel better. A gray hoodie is knotted round my waist. I untie it and put it on over my T-shirt. I can feel the shock settling, becoming something more normal,
explainable
.

PC Morrow says, “Can I have your autograph?” and I turn, instinctively smiling, hand obligingly raised, before I realize she just wants me to sign my statement.

When I look up, DI Perivale is trudging back down the path and I can hear new sirens in the distance, coming up the Wandsworth one-way system, getting louder. Dogs and SOCO, people with cameras and things—what, sticks?—to prod through grass, to find evidence, to find out who did this.

It’s a peculiar feeling, and I don’t know if you’ll understand, but it’s like letting go. It’s no longer my body. It belongs to them now.

•   •   •

Snarled in traffic from Stockwell to Waterloo, incrementally delayed, forty-five minutes telescoping out into ninety, I miss the morning
production meeting, which puts me on the back foot all day. If—as a person who has found a dead body—I’m not already on it.

Stan Kennedy, my cohost, is in the green room when I walk past, chatting up a couple of the guests—a midwife who has won the Pampers Award for Excellence, here to talk about childbirth in relation to a new sitcom, and a woman about my age whose teenage child killed himself a year ago after a period of Facebook bullying. Snuffling about under the table for dropped Danish-pastry crumbs is a lurcher, who, Dawn the assistant producer tells me, has “stolen the nation’s hearts” as the result of a YouTube clip in which he plays football with a chicken. Life, death, and a dog, it’s all in a day’s work here on
Mornin’ All
.

If Stan sees me, he doesn’t look up. Life would be easier if he and I got on. He is laughing loudly as I head for makeup, the throaty trademark guffaw that makes him so natural and likeable, in which his whole being seems concentrated on the person before him. Even the bereaved mother will be charmed, smiling down at her feet, smoothing invisible creases from her skirt. He does it to everyone except me. It’s war by omission. My friend Clara, who has met him a couple of times, says it’s the jaggedness of his eyeteeth that make him so attractive—the sharpness of his canines offset the slightly feminine features. His lower lip is much thicker than his upper lip—as if he’s been punched. Clara, the minx, says it makes you want to bite it.

I can still hear it, his affable cigarette-and-booze bellow, when I get down the corridor to my dressing room. Something about his laughter always makes me feel left out. Annie is waiting, edgy at my lateness, tubes lined up, BaByliss Big Hair Rotating Styler at the ready. I come in on an apology; I hate making her job more difficult than it already is. I don’t know if she’s been told why I’m late or not—from the car, I gave the producer a rundown of what had happened, and she might have passed the message on.

“You look like death,” she says when I sit down. Not, then.

I wish I had time to confess. She’s lovely to talk to: I’m always telling her that, trying to make her feel better about her job. Actually, though, I am probably just trying to make
myself
feel better about all this looking after I don’t deserve. It’s not the right time, though. It’s almost 10:00 a.m. Annie is too tense to chatter, and I’ve already put my head through a crimson Diane von Fürstenberg and now I’m ready for Bobbi Brown. I hold open my lips for Sangria or Old Hollywood, close my eyes for Wheat and Sable, Toast and Taupe. She’s probably right, though. I bet I do look like death—violet patches under my eyes, the lids creping more every day. My hair isn’t as thick as it was; the Titian is fading into—what, salmon? I think about Mother’s hair, so bright, so rudely vibrant when I was a child, and yet by the end a sort of dirty orangey pink. The dead girl’s hair was red, too. It can’t have been natural. Is it mad to say she looked familiar?

“There—” Annie says, standing back, “you look more alive.”

“You’re brilliant,” I say, though actually I’m the one who’s brilliant—all that shimmering pigment, all those light-reflecting microparticles. I’ll look decent enough out there. No one will be able to see the tiny muscle that’s twitching in my eye. It’s not me, though, this look, this big hair. To be honest—which I never would be to Annie—I think in the magnifying mirror I look like a tranny. Women turn into men when they get older, men into women. I can’t remember who told me that. Aging is a bugger. Still, as Clara says, the alternative’s worse.

Could I have taken today off? Was it enough? Even when my mother was sick, I hardly missed a show. There were nights when I didn’t go to bed; I just dealt with the horrors of her illness and hammered back down the M4 in the early hours. I stood in front of the cameras smiling, the whiff of vomit on my fingers. Do a lot of women feel this? That it’s only luck that has got us where we
are? One slip, one lapse, and we’re out. But this morning, perhaps I shouldn’t have come in. When you get close to tragedy, sometimes, at first, it can be hard to see it. We had a couple on the show once who had been packing up at the end of a skiing holiday when their toddler was killed by a snowplow, suffocated by the displacement of snow. One unbearable detail: after they had taken the body of their tiny child to hospital, they drove across the Alps and took the ferry they had already booked. You can’t even begin to compare my experience with theirs, I know, but I suppose what I mean is, people do odd things under stress.

Annie wants my fingers so she can paint my nails scarlet to match the carnations in the vase on the coffee table in the studio. She has her instructions. These details matter. If she notices the shaking in my hands, she doesn’t say. I press my palms into the towel on the dressing table, feel the tremors up my arm.

The red nails. The red flowers. The long-sleeved red dress. I think about blood and death, bloodless death—those marks across the girl’s neck. I wave my red-tipped hands at Annie. “Am I not too red?”

“You’re jolly,” Annie says. “Uplifting on a gray old March morning like this. God knows we need it.”

•   •   •

I never intended to become a daytime television presenter. I was a researcher and a reporter and then the offer came up and Philip was keen and I said yes before I thought of saying no. It’s a funny old job. It’s not acting and it’s not journalism. You can’t really imagine it being high on anyone’s list of ambitions. No one respects a daytime television presenter. We’re assumed to be “vacuous,” even farther down the food chain than our colleagues on news—“Cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between,” to quote Kate Adie. “When Mr. Blair starts to bomb Baghdad,” Richard Ingrams
said, “we shall be informed of the fact by a smiling bimbo with a perfect set of teeth.”

When I see contemporaries from Oxford, serious players in publishing and academia, or bump into any of those bods I trained with on the BBC Trainee Scheme—now producers on
Panorama
or behind the scenes in policy—I am hardened to affront. “How’s the world of rudely bent bananas?” shouted some bloke across the floor at the National Television Awards the other night. I was a researcher with him on
Newsnight
. God knows what he does now, but he seemed to be wearing the same shirt. I smiled and said, “Pull down your trousers and I’ll let you know.” Everyone else on his table laughed.

I feel shifty remembering it. It wasn’t funny. They only laughed because I am (a bit) famous, a household name. Their chortles were worse than his jibe, really, because of that. Thing is, I know daytime TV is associated with the long-term unemployed, and the terminally depressed, and only marginally preferable to silence as an accompaniment to the ironing. “Household” is the right adjective here. But I also know there is a lot to be said for what I do and that not everybody could do it. It’s not about a set of perfect teeth, or the ins and outs of EU vegetable regulations; it’s about speaking to the viewer directly, one at a time, the common touch. We’re real life in your living room, Stan and me, and there is a skill to that.

Despite everything, I’m on the sofa today before him. Annie says he likes to get there first so he can josh about my tardiness, “my busy, juggled life,” as he calls it. I’ve told her it’s all just joking, lighthearted banter, feeding into the faux-rude repartee between us that makes the show the hit it is; that he doesn’t “mean” a word of it. But behind the smiles, the claps on the shoulder, I fear he does, that it is a tiny little element in the one-upmanship, his campaign to replace me. He doesn’t know for sure that I earn more than he does, but he can’t bear the doubt.