Under Your Skin (7 page)

In one of the photographs, a shadowy figure hovers behind me, in the hallway. It takes me a moment to work out it’s Marta.

Steve looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” I say. I drop the newspapers to the floor, beneath my feet. “How’s your wife? Any ob-gyn news?”

“Nothing serious,” he says. “Polyps.”

“A polyp?”

“No, polyps.”

For some reason we both laugh.

•   •   •

Terri accosts me at the door to the production meeting. Boris Johnson, booked to come and talk about his “estuary airport,” has begged off with a gippy tummy. She needs something serious, something “current affairs-y” to plug the hole.

I head her off. “What else have we got?” I say, sitting down. It’s quiet in the room, tense with a feeling of anticipation.

Dawn, the assistant producer, consults her clipboard and reads out what I remember from Friday: a flirting master class from the presenter of a new dating show; Simon Cowell in the kitchen, doing his signature lamb brochettes; India’s ’Appening Apps; Kate Bush, recently back from the dead (“It’s me. I’m Cathy. I’ve come home”) with a new album; three pretty actresses from
Downton
in to talk about . . . well,
Downton
.

I am racking my brains. I made a mental list on the weekend and I run through a couple of my ideas—they’re not brilliant: the rise in flash mobs (a rock choir in Berkshire is taking over a shopping mall in Basingstoke); a blind high-street coffee test (Starbucks, facing dire quarterly figures, has gone for double shots).

A silence descends. No one looks at me, apart from Terri and Stan, who has his feet up on the other end of the table.

“It’s just . . .” Terri begins. She pushes the bridge of her black thick-framed glasses—fashionably unfashionable—farther up her nose. “I was thinking . . . you know, the big story from this weekend is . . .”

“You.” Stan has taken his feet down off the table. “You, sweet pea, are the story.” He doesn’t sound as confident as he might. I wonder if he is working out what’s in it for him, whether he’s weighing up the pros and cons, whether his publicity consultant has suggested
he
get caught up in a police investigation.

“I was thinking,” Terri says again, “an item about what it felt like to have gone through your terrible experience. You talking directly to the camera, telling your side of the story. We could get
a psychologist in, sit them next to you on the sofa, to explain what sort of aftershocks to expect. ‘My trauma,’ that sort of thing.”

Alice, the new researcher, looks up. “Adam Phillips says he can get here by ten a.m.”

“It’s not my trauma,” I say. “I just found the body. It’s not my tragedy. It’s not about me.”

“I don’t know much about the dead woman,” Terri continues. “What was she—some Polish cleaner turning tricks on the side?”

I wince. “I’m not sure . . .” I begin.

“Whatever. I just imagine that her life wasn’t that close to yours, that she moved in”—she shrugs, as if even she is aware of dangerous assumptions—“different circles.”

“Two worlds collide,” I say, “that sort of thing.”

“Exactly.” She rubs her fingers quickly back and forth at the top of her head, as if making pastry up there. She has short hair, bleached at the tips. She often does it. It’s not an itch, but an impatient gesture, conveying a desire to get things going, to hurry things along.

“The outrage you feel,” Dawn suggests. “You among many.”

“I’m not outraged,” I say.

“Maybe we don’t know enough, but it has definitely shaken up the middle-class enclaves of . . .” Terri, who is Hackney born and bred, tries to remember where I live, “New Malden or wherever.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, thinking protectively of Jude, Margot, and Suzanne.

“Come on,” she urges, like someone coaxing a child into a coat. “It’s good. We need you. It’s fascinating.”

“I don’t care,” I say, trying to stay calm and focused, trying to block out swathes of panic by visualizing Longman’s timeline of the Second World War. “I don’t feel comfortable with it. I’d rather not do the program at all rather than exploit her.”

“My horror.” Stan has put on a deep, gravel-scraping dramatic voice. “My heartbreak.”

I probably wouldn’t have reacted, except that I see him court a look from India. She’s curled up in her chair, twisting her hair, trying to keep out of it. He winks. And perhaps it’s priggish of me, perhaps in different circumstances I’d be finding it funny, too, but I feel something snap.

“I don’t feel horror,” I say. “I don’t feel heartbreak. A poor woman has
died
.”

I’ve raised my voice. Embarrassed, no one looks at me. Stan smirks.

Luckily Dawn, who has been tapping away on a laptop while this has been going on, saves me. With a satisfied click of her fingers, she says she’s checked and we can bring forward Britain’s fattest woman, on a video link from her home in Tyne and Wear. (She hasn’t left the house in four years.)

“The live
feed,
” Stan interrupts, in another movie-trailer voice. Later, of course, he will be the model of anguished sympathy.

Alice suggests we get Adam Phillips in regardless—cue him up for psychological insights into obesity—and Terri, panic suppressed, seems at least placated. I’ve got away with it for today, and with any luck, tomorrow my story will be stale.

I have five missed calls after the meeting, and a heap of texts, including one from Jude Morris. “You dark horse! Why didn’t you say? You must think Margot, Suzanne, and I are idiots!” Clara has phoned twice, and Margaret, Philip’s mother, once. Our dearly beloved, dearly departed ex-nanny, Robin, has left a voicemail: “Hi, hon. Blimey, what’s going on? Can’t leave you guys alone for a minute!”

I ring Clara on the way to makeup, but she must be teaching because it goes to voicemail. So then I try Jude instead. “Do you hate me for not telling you?” I say when she answers. “It’s complicated. I will explain.”

She says of course she doesn’t hate me. I tell her I’m sorry, that I
am the sorriest of sorry things—a construction Millie and her contemporaries use all the time—and she laughs. “But no more lying.”

I’m just about to put the phone back in my pocket when Stan catches me. “Yeah,” he says. “Well done. Right decision, bro, I think.” His breath is an unpleasant cocktail of garlic and mints.

“Thanks, bro,” I say.

“But you’re mad not to take a couple of days off to recover. Don’t feel you can’t, or that you would be letting the side down. It might go against the grain. I know you soldiered on when your mother . . . whatever . . . and only took two weeks off when you had your kid all those years ago.”

“Back in the distant mists of time,” I say.

“But we would all entirely understand. I was saying to Terri, India’s desperate for the experience on the main sofa. Be interesting to see what kind of chemistry we whip up. I know you’re an old pro, but you’d be doing her a favor.”

“That is so kind, Stan,” I say, saving the “old pro” up for later. “I really appreciate it.”

•   •   •

I ring Robin from the car on the way home. She wants to know what’s happened—Ian’s mum brought the
Mail
up this morning “and we were all, like,
what
?” But a day is a long time in the life of a new mother. My shenanigans have been swept off the agenda by the bewildering complexities of a four-month-old body clock. Robin is trying to get the baby’s nap “home and hosed” before Ian’s “rellies” arrive for supper.

“Sometimes,” I tell her, “I can’t believe you’ve lived here eight years. You sound like you’ve just lugged your backpack off the Tube from Heathrow.”

“I lucked out, didn’t I, finding you waiting for me at the top of the escalator.”

“Robin, we’re the ones who lucked out.”

I can hear Charlie fussing, hiccup-worrying in the way babies do when they want to go to sleep and don’t know how.

“Come on, hop to it,” Robin says. The cries become more insistent. “Oh, come on. I need you to sleep. I’ve got to get blimmin’ cooking.”

“Do you remember that brilliant advice you gave me—that you should rock a baby really quite forcefully? It’s counterintuitive, but it works. Eventually you reach that moment when the crying becomes rhythmic and then their eyes slowly close.”

“You should have more,” she says.

I almost sing my answer. “Too late now.”

We talk a bit longer—about the baby and his erratic sleeping patterns, how Ian’s mum thinks a bottle would help. I keep talking, telling her what a great job she is doing, what a wonderful mother she is, because I can tell Robin needs the cheering and the distraction, but after a few minutes, her voice gets quieter. “So, are you all right?” she whispers.

“I’m fine,” I say.

Robin yawns. “I might grab forty winks.”

“That’s my girl,” I say.

•   •   •

A man is sitting in a car outside my house when Steve pulls up. I think of ringing the police, but it turns out they’re here already.

DI Perivale has brought PC Morrow with him this time. She grins when I stop in the doorway of the kitchen, a wide-mouthed “me again” Wallace and Gromit grin. Marta has let them in, though she has gone out to collect Millie, “leaving them to it,” in DI Perivale’s words. My cleaner is in the house, PC Morrow adds, as if I might be worried about security. I can hear Nora shunt the Hoover back and forth in Marta’s room, the gurgle of water in the pipes as she Mr. Muscles the guest bath.

I lean against the doorframe for a moment, not sure I have the strength to move. My legs feel wobbly. “Haven’t I answered all your questions already?”

PC Morrow, who is sitting on the bench, wrinkles her freckled nose. Her forehead is without lines. She is wearing tiny gold hearts in her ears. “I know it’s a real pain,” she says, “but . . .” DI Perivale, at the head of the table, is studying a piece of paper in his lap, and because he’s not watching, she rolls her eyes and shrugs.

“If you wouldn’t mind sitting down for a few minutes,” he says, looking up, as if I have just been ushered into his office. “It won’t take long, but it is important.”

I unpeel myself from the doorjamb and sit. I think about offering a cup of tea, but something in his tone tells me I shouldn’t.

“Have you seen this woman before?” DI Perivale asks. He has a slither of lettuce caught between two incisors, and a blob of what might be dried ketchup on the upper breast of his zip-up Adidas top. If I were a forensic pathologist, I’d say he had had a Big Mac on the way over.

He spins a photograph toward me.

I dread looking at it.

It was taken in a garden, by a climbing frame. Two children are stretching from the lower bars. One of those red plastic climb-in toddler cars has been abandoned at her ankles, and she is leaning back to grab the smaller child’s legs, smiling broadly. She has those front teeth that lean in a bit, as if they have been pushed, and her dark red hair is pulled back in two bunches. She is slight, with a thin, narrow face, and thick fake eyelashes. One of her earlobes has about six rings in it.

The picture makes me unbearably sad.

“Are those her kids?” I ask.

“Do you recognize the woman?”

“Yes, of course . . . Who is she? Are they her kids?” I ask again.

“We know she was Ania Dudek, aged thirty, of Fitzhugh Grove, SW18.”
Was,
he said, not is. “The family she worked for in Putney reported her missing when she didn’t show up on Saturday. It’s their children in the photo. She was working for them in the capacity of weekend nanny.”

“Ania Dudek,” I repeat. A nanny. At least they weren’t
her
children. A nice job with a nice family in Putney, that congenial safe suburb where Nick Clegg lives. Not really two lives colliding at all.

“Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No.” I shake my head. “Nothing.”

“You ever been to Fitzhugh Grove?”

“No. I know where it is, of course.” It’s a group of high-rise buildings on the edge of the common, formerly owned by the local authority. “But I’ve never been in.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod.

“And Ania Dudek has never been here?”

“No.” I look across at PC Morrow, who has put on a sort of “rather not be here, but I have to” face, a stab at female solidarity. I smile at her. “Never.”

“Interesting.” He produces another sheet of paper. It’s a torn-out page from a magazine—a cutting—in a thin plastic folder. It’s an advert from the
Lady
for a live-in nanny in the Wandsworth area. The moment I see it—from the shape of the words, the layout—I know it is the ad I placed last summer after Robin gave in her notice.

“Any notion why this might have been stuck with a magnet to Ania Dudek’s fridge?”

I had sinusitis last winter and the infection went to my inner ear, causing sudden lurches of imbalance—unilateral vestibular dysfunction, the doctor called it. It wasn’t so much vertigo as a precipitous spinning; the room would shift on its axis. I have this sensation now. I’m staring at the table, at the plastic folder; I can
see the sky and the clouds reflected in its transparent surface, and for an instant or two, I don’t know if I am sitting or falling.

I manage to say that I have no idea. DI Perivale is asking questions, which I can hardly hear, because, as the dizziness passes, I am left with a roaring confusion in my head.

“Did she come for an interview?” It’s the first time PC Morrow has spoken. She’s nodding, as if already confident of the answer.

“I wish I could say she had,” I say eventually, “but she didn’t.” I cast my eyes around the tidy kitchen. “If I could lay my hands on last year’s diary I could show you who came. Oh I know, I’ve got a file with their CVs. I could dig it out.”

“Just tell us what you remember,” PC Morrow says.

“I remember everything from that summer. My mother was ill and our old nanny, Robin, was getting married—which was obviously wonderful, but also meant she was leaving us, so that was sad. For us, I mean.”

DI Perivale looks impatient.

“Anyway. I had two days of interviews. I saw about six young women. Actually, that’s wrong—five women, one man. Two were English; one was going to university in September, so that was hopeless; the other couldn’t drive. There was an older Armenian woman who wanted to come up by train from Croydon every morning. The man was South African: great if we’d had boys. A nice Portuguese lady: she seemed great, but her English was nonexistent . . . I had a few more to see, but my mother’s health worsened, and on the third day, we found Marta.”