Under Your Skin (4 page)

“My colleague,” he adds casually, “tells me the one next door went for five million.”

I flush. He’s just making conversation, but I feel uneasy. I don’t know why he’d say that. We stand there, looking at the house, looking at each other, and I’m not sure what to think. And then he says something I’ve been dreading, because I was hoping my part was done. I was thinking it might be over.

“Have you got a minute?”

•   •   •

Marta must have escaped upstairs, though I didn’t hear her go. The ironing has gone and so has my unfinished mug of herbal tea. She must have put it in the dishwasher.

I tell DI Perivale to please sit down, but he doesn’t. I fill the kettle from the tap, for something to do, and I can hear the faint noises
of his shoes, the little creaks in the leather, as he shifts his weight. He is wearing brown brogues, the ones with perforated holes on the toe caps that you associate with Jermyn Street, posh cobblers who whittle things by hand.

“Do you live nearby?” I ask.

“Battersea.” He has his back to me. “The other side of Clapham Junction.”

“On the up,” I say, and then hate myself for it.

“Nice picture. Your daughter do it?”

I’m flustered. Of course he only had to Google—I did “A Life in the Day” in the Sunday
Times
just the other week—but it is unnerving when people you’ve never met know things about you. That’s what I tried to explain to the constable I spoke to last summer when those odd stalker-y things started happening. (In show business, you’re no one until you’ve been stalked.)

“Craigie Aitchison,” I say, moving to stand next to him. The picture is of a dog against a simple background, Play-Doh-blue sky and jelly-green grass. There is one tree, a dark tapered streak, like the head of a paintbrush. Deceptively simple, of course: there is something isolated and meditative about the dog. I think you are supposed to think about Christ. “It’s a Bedlington terrier,” I say.

“A
Bedlington
terrier, not just any old terrier. And another olive tree. Obviously a bit of a theme around here.”

“I think it’s a cypress. You know, death and all that. My husband bought it years ago, but when Aitchison died, prices rocketed. Quite a clever buy.”

“Quite a clever buy,” he repeats, as if he has never heard anything so stupid in his life.

The note I am hoping for next is playful. I probably just sound prickly. “There are four hanging at the Tate. Elton John has one.”

He shrugs. He is younger than I thought he was. I had imagined him in his fifties, but he’s about my age, I think—early forties. His
mannerisms, the stoop, intended perhaps to hide his height, the droopy jowls, which he accentuates by pulling on the side of his mouth, as if removing crumbs, make him seem older. No gray in that brown hair—Philip’s temples are sprinkled with silver. There are hollows below this man’s cheekbones, an elongated chisel: more weight on him and he would almost be attractive. With his long hair, his bone structure, he is like a dandy gone wrong.

Enough of this.
“Right, tea. Builders okay, or do you fancy something more left wing?” I could shoot myself.

“As it comes,” he says.

He has sat down at the table at last, having shrugged off his Barbour and hung it neatly on the back of his chair. He looks out at the back garden now—at our lovely green lawn and landscaping, the raised beds, the trampoline, the clever “tree house” contraption that runs on struts along the back wall, behind the row of hornbeams. Philip decided we had to have the garden redone when we dug out the basement: the builders made such a mess.

Something out there in the shrubs, thrashing in the March wind, seems to interest him. Maybe that’s what happens when you are a policeman: your eyes hook on every small detail because you never know what is important, what isn’t.

“Did you touch the body?”

I almost drop his cup of tea. I am carrying it to the table, and the hot water slops on that delicate triangle of skin between thumb and index finger.

“Ow.”

I run my hand under the tap, watch the water spool over my skin. For a moment my brain focuses on this, the water and my skin. And then all I can think about is the woman’s hair, the lank, stringy texture of it.

“Her body?” I say. “No. I didn’t touch her
body
.”

When I turn round, he is looking at me.

“Did you know the woman?”

“No.” I take a deep breath, shake my hand dry. The moment has passed. “As I told your PC, I’ve never seen her before. Have you found out who she is?”

“Not as yet. No.”

I sit down opposite him, on the bench that runs down one side of the table, with my back to the garden. He has launched into his interview now—small talk over. He asks me to run through what happened. He doesn’t take any notes. It is a seemingly informal chat, but as I talk, every gesture feels self-conscious, like I’m on display. It’s a generally understood social norm that the person listening looks at the person speaking, who is allowed to look away. DI Perivale doesn’t look at me at all, though—I’m the one who’s watching him—until the moment I pause, and then his eyes swivel back, skewer into mine. It’s disconcerting. I tip my head, gather my hair into a ponytail, and twist it round to make it stay like that, a habit of mine that suddenly feels unnatural, like someone pretending to be relaxed. Same sensation when I burrow my hands up the sleeves of my sweater. Best to try and stay still: it’s what we tell guests on the show. Sit on your hands if you need to. My neck is hot. When I have finished my narrative—the identical story PC Morrow wrote down earlier—I tell DI Perivale that he is making me feel guilty and defensive, like I’m walking through security or past bouncers at the doors of expensive shops.

“Do that often, do you?”

“What?”

“Walk through doors of expensive shops?”

I give his arm a frisky slap. It’s not a comfortable moment. His skin, below the short sleeves of his polo, is pale with dark, spidery hairs. He looks down at my hand, at my crimson nails. “I had to have it on for work,” I say, taking it back.

He gives a half smile.

“You’d better drink your tea,” I say. “Sorry I can’t be of more help. I wish I had seen something, anything. I’m sorry it’s been a bit of a wasted journey. That poor woman, though.”

“No journey is ever wasted for me.”

He is perhaps one of those men who feels less inadequate when making other people feel small. He reminds me of my boss on
Panorama
when I was a trainee—Colin Sinclair, with his big black leathers and his little red Suzuki 125. “You might say that; I couldn’t possibly comment,” he would venture at any observation even remotely controversial. Or when my train was late: “I believe you; millions wouldn’t.” His brain was lost unless he could find a little worn groove to slot into, until he found a preconceived idea to latch on to. And this policeman seems to be doing the same. And a body out there . . . if it is still out there.

“Is she still there?” I ask. “In the middle of the common? Or have you moved her? I’ve no idea what happens in these situations.” I tap the table, touching wood. “Luckily.”

He rubs his face. “We’ve taken the body away. She’s with postmortem.”

“Did you, they, SOCO find anything? Anything at all that might tell you what happened? Was it a mugging, do you think? Or a rape? A random killing? Is there some maniac out there we should all know about? Sorry to ask these questions, but it would be nice . . . to know.” To my surprise, I think I might be about to cry.

“We need to wait,” he says, not unkindly. “We’ll know more later. My motto: ABC. Assume nothing. Believe no one. Check everything. I will be in touch. I promise.”

“I suppose auto-asphyxiation is out of the question?”

“Even assuming nothing,” he says, “I think we can rule out auto-asphyxiation.”

“It’s funny how no one had ever even heard of it before Michael Hutchence, and now it’s the first thing we all think of. ‘Oh. Auto-asphyxiation,’
we all say, people of the world now, unshockable. But it’s still such a weird thought, to find strangulation sexually exciting.” I’m gabbling, being facetious, a habit when I’m nervous. He’s just staring at me, half bored, half interested, as you might stare at a brightly striped fish in an aquarium. “You don’t know who she is? No mobile phone . . . or wallet?”

“No.” He gives an almost theatrically heavy sigh. Perhaps he is not so insufferable. “At the moment, we know nothing.”

I feel suddenly very sad. “I suppose you are used to this sort of thing.”

“Not really.”

“Well, I am sure you’ll do a good job,” I say inadequately.

“There’s nothing else at all you can remember?”

A memory washes over me, the shock of a cold wave. “An odd smell. Almost . . . it sounds stupid, but almost like bleach.”

He nods. “I noticed that. The pathologist will confirm.”

“And her eyes? I meant to ask? They looked like they were covered in wax.”

“Conjunctiva. Nothing to do with how she died, more about when. It happens when the pressure drops behind the eyes—the eyeballs soften. It gives them a thin, cloudy, filmy appearance.”

“The light goes out.”

“Indeed.”

I look at my watch. Millie will be back any minute, and I wouldn’t mind him gone before she gets here. I need to think about what to tell her, and how to tell it. And I must ring Philip. It’s terrible that I haven’t. During my mother’s final illness, I was on the phone to him every day. It’s peculiar, disturbing, that I haven’t spoken to him yet. Another sign, if I needed one, of the distance between us. I get to my feet and collect the DI’s mug, rolling up my sleeves as an indication that I am about to wash up. I see him looking at my arms. I follow his eyes. My inner forearms are scratched and grazed, seed pearls
of dried blood at the crease, and my bracelet’s gone, the bracelet Philip gave me for my birthday. I must have dropped it. That isn’t what the policeman is interested in, though. I give my wrists a rub.

“Undergrowth,” I say. “When I was pushing through. I didn’t even notice. Good thing I was wearing a long-sleeved dress for the show or viewers would have been sending me literature on self-harm. Be nice to me,” I add, in an American accent (why?): “I am literally scarred by the experience.”

Luckily, he doesn’t seem to hear. He is putting his jacket back on. It is greasy around the cuffs and at the hem where his fingers have held on to tug at the zip.

“I just need to take a DNA swab for elimination purposes,” he says, “and I tell you what would be really helpful: the trainers you were wearing this morning. For the tread.”

“Of course.”

He rummages in his inside pocket for a plastic bag and cotton bud and, in a sudden, almost hilariously humiliating sequence, I have opened my mouth, emitting a little haze of lemon and ginger, and he has stabbed the cotton bud in, pulled it out, and sealed it in his little bag. I leave the kitchen in a hurry and run upstairs. I pound the stairs more noisily than I need to. I let out a laugh. He had that plastic bag there, waiting. I think of boys I knew in the past, in my Yeovil teenage years, and the ever-ready foil-creased Durex in their back pockets. In the bedroom, I make a silent scream at my own face in the dressing-table mirror, just to release some tension. I grab the trainers from the cupboard and run back down. When I pass Marta’s room on the half-landing, I hear music from behind the door—a thumping electronic sound, too much bass for my liking.

DI Perivale is in the room that opens to the right of the front door—he has just wandered in there by himself, as if he owned the place. It is two rooms knocked through, a pale, creamy, sumptuous display of a room, glass coffee tables and sink-in-able sofas and
puffed-up cushions, a room, of course, we never use, and DI Perivale is standing by one of the fireplaces, looking at the framed photographs.

He picks one up. I know what it is from here. It is of Philip and me on our wedding day. I am laughing into the camera, and Philip has one arm round my waist, pulling me to him. Philip, wild dark hair, wide-eyed, ridiculously boyish, is in a baggy charity-shop suit. I’m wearing a wrinkly white dress—in that clingy polyester that was the edge of cool back then; it shrunk up when you washed it; you had to pull it into shape with the iron. In the awkward sideways pose you strike when you think you have to squeeze to fit into the frame, I look as if I am about to topple down the steps of Chelsea Town Hall. I remember thinking, I can’t believe he’s chosen me! He’s married me! We had a party in the pub, and the rest of the weekend we spent in our flat with no clothes on, because we were newlyweds, newly-
mets
—we’d known each other six months—and those were the days when we couldn’t get enough of each other.

DI Perivale holds the photograph out and to my surprise I have to resist the temptation to dash it from his hands. I make some comment about how young we look, but he has an odd expression on his face, as if there is something I am not getting.

“Is it just me?” he says.

“Is what just you?”

He shakes his head, getting rid of a thought. “Sorry. Nothing. It’s just . . .”

I take the photo and pretend to study it, and then I put it back on the mantelpiece. It makes me feel sad, the picture. I take a while lining it up so it is symmetrical with a picture of Millie doing gym.

“So,” he says, “I expect you will be hearing from us.”

“Really?” I say. “Oh, victim support. Of course.”

“Victim support?”

“We had a visit from an officer concerned about my mental health when my mobile phone was nicked out of my handbag
during a trip to Cineworld. She was really quite persistent. So I imagine you’re offered counseling when you find a dead body. Or maybe I’m wrong about that.”

“I suppose the real victim of this crime isn’t in a perfect position to receive counseling in this particular case, however persistent.” It’s a reproof, and he is probably right, but I do wonder whether he realizes how awful it is to be an ordinary person and find a body.

“A lot of alliteration in that sentence,” I say.

“Plosives. A
p
is a plosive.”