Beneath the Skin (26 page)

“Who are they?”

Links coughed again. Stadler made no attempt to fill in for him. He just sat and stared at me.

“Well,” he said finally, “it may not be appropriate, as of this stage of the inquiry, to, erm, furnish precise details. It may hinder aspects of the investigation.”

“Are you worried I might try to get in touch with them?”

Links took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. I looked across at Stadler. For the first time he wasn’t looking back. He seemed to be finding something of great interest in a notebook.

“We’ll keep you as in touch with our progress as we can,” Links said.

“Investigation?” I said. “It’s just a letter.”

“It’s important to take these matters seriously. Also, we have a psychologist, a Dr. Grace Schilling, who is an expert on, er. . . She should be here”—he looked at his watch—“at any minute, really.”

There was a silence.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not stupid. I had a break-in about a year ago—well, nothing was taken. I think I disturbed them. But it took the police about a day to get here and they did sod-all about it. Now I get a single nasty letter and it’s a major operation. What’s going on? Don’t you have real grown-up crimes to solve?”

Stadler snapped his notebook shut and put it in his pocket.

“We’ve been accused of not being sufficiently sensitive to offenses targeted against women,” he said. “We take threats of this kind very seriously.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s good, I suppose.”

Dr. Schilling was the kind of woman I rather envied. She’d obviously done really well at school, got fantastic grades, and still looked rather intelligent. She dressed pretty elegantly as well, but even that was in an intelligent sort of way. She had this long blond hair that looked great but that she’d obviously pinned up in about three and a half seconds to show that she didn’t take it all
too
seriously. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d catch standing on her head in front of a group of screaming tots. If I’d known she was coming I really would have tidied up the flat. The only thing that irritated me was that she had this air of extremely serious, almost sad, concern when she addressed me, as if she were presenting a religious TV program.

“I understand you’ve been in a relationship which ended,” she said.

“I can tell you that that letter wasn’t written by Max. For all sorts of reasons, including the fact that he would have trouble composing a letter to the milkman. Anyway, he was the one that walked out.”

“All the same, that might mean you were in a vulnerable state.”

“Well, a pissed-off state, maybe.”

“How tall are you, Nadia?”

“Don’t rub it in. I try not to think about it. Just a little over five foot. An emotionally vulnerable dwarf. Is that the point you’re trying to make?
You
should be all right, then.”

She didn’t even smile.

“Should I be worried?” I asked.

Now there was a very long pause. When Dr. Schilling spoke, it was with great precision.

“I don’t think it would be . . . well, productive, to get alarmed. But I think you should behave as if you were worried, just to be on the safe side. You have been threatened. You should act as if the threat means what it says.”

“Do you really think somebody just wants to kill me for no reason?”

She looked thoughtful.

“No reason?” she said. “Maybe. There are a lot of men who feel they have very good reasons for attacking or killing women. They may not be reasons that would convince you or me. But that isn’t much comfort, is it?”

“It’s not much comfort to
me
,” I said.

“No,” said Dr. Schilling, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking to somebody else, somebody I couldn’t see.

They stayed and stayed. After a couple of hours Links received a message and shambled away, but Stadler and Dr. Schilling remained. While Schilling talked to me, Stadler went out and came back with sandwiches, cartons of drink, milk, fruit. Then, while he took me through the flat examining my security arrangements (to be substantially upgraded), she retreated into my kitchen area, made some tea. I even heard the rattle and clink and splashing of washing-up being done. She returned clutching mugs. Stadler took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

“There’s tuna and cucumber, salmon and cucumber, chicken salad, ham and mustard,” he announced.

I took the ham, Dr. Schilling took the tuna, which made me think the tuna must be vastly healthier and that there was something slightly squalid and frivolous about my choice.

“Are you some kind of medical policewoman?” I asked.

Her mouth was full, so she could only shake her head while laboriously attempting to swallow her sandwich. I felt a moment of triumph. I’d caught her looking undignified.

“No, no,” she said, as if I’d insulted her. “I do consulting work for them,” she said.

“What’s your real job?” I asked.

“I work at the Welbeck Clinic,” she said.

“What as?”

“Grace is being too modest,” Stadler said. “She is eminent in her field. You’re lucky to have her on your side.”

Schilling looked sharply round at him, and went red, almost in anger or distress, I thought, rather than embarrassment. All these looks and whispered asides. I felt like an intruder into a group of old friends who had their own special catchphrases, jargon, their shared happy history of working together.

“What I really meant,” I was saying, “is that I’m a children’s party entertainer. I often don’t have much pressure on my time during the weekdays when everybody else is in their offices. But you, Dr. Schilling . . .”

“Please, Nadia, call me Grace,” she murmured.

“All right, Grace. I know that doctors are incredibly busy people, which I’ve discovered every time I’ve wanted to see one. I freely confess that this is very pleasant sitting here and chatting, and I’m extremely willing to talk about my life in whatever detail you want. But I was just thinking why a grand psychiatrist like you is sitting here on the floor of a crappy bedsit in Camden Town eating a tuna sandwich. You’re not looking at your watch, you’re not receiving calls on your mobile. It seems strange to me.”

“It’s not strange,” Stadler said, wiping his mouth. He’d had the salmon. I bet the ham sandwich was the cheapest as well as being the most unhealthy. “What we want to do is to make a plan of how to proceed. We want to give you informal protection, and the purpose of this meeting is to decide what kind. As for Dr. Schilling, she is an authority on harassment of this kind and she has two objectives. Most important, of course, is to help us to find the person who has sent you this threat. To do that she needs to look at you and your life, to get a sense of what has attracted this madman.”

“It’s my responsibility, is it?” I said. “I’ve led him on?”

“It’s not your responsibility in any way,” Grace said urgently. “But he chose you.”

“I think you’re being daft,” I said. “This is a guy who gets off on sending rude letters to women because he’s scared of them. What’s the big deal?”

“You’re not right,” Grace said. “A letter like that is a violent act. A man who sends a letter like that has—well, he may have—crossed a boundary. He must be considered dangerous.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“Do you think I’m not getting frightened enough?”

She drained her mug of tea. She almost looked as if she were playing for time.

“I may advise you what you should do,” she said. “I don’t think I should tell you what to feel. Here, give me your mug. I’ll get some more tea.”

Subject closed. Stadler gave a cough.

“What I’d like to do,” he said, “if it’s all right, is to talk to you a bit about your life, who your friends are, the kind of people you meet, your habits, that sort of thing.”

“You don’t look like a policeman,” I said.

He gave a slight start. Then he smiled.

“What’s a policeman meant to look like?” he asked.

He was a difficult man to embarrass, or at least for me to embarrass. I had never met anyone before who looked me in the eyes the way he did, almost as if he were trying to look inside. What was he trying to see?

“I don’t know,” I said. “You just don’t have a police look about you. You look, er—”

And I ground to a halt because what I was feeling my way toward saying was that he was too good-looking to be a policeman, which was both a deeply foolish comment and miles away from being remotely appropriate to the situation and, in any case, Grace Schilling had just come in with more tea.

“Normal,” I said, belatedly ending the sentence.

“That’s all?” he said. “I thought you might say something nicer than that.”

I made a face.

“I think it’s nice not to look like a policeman.”

“Depends what you think policemen look like.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Grace asked with a touch of irony.

Then the phone rang. It was Janet. She was checking about our arrangement to meet. I covered the mouthpiece.

“It’s one of my best friends,” I said in a stage whisper. “I arranged to meet her for a drink early this evening. By the way, she definitely didn’t write the note.”

“Not today,” said Stadler.

“Are you serious?”

“Indulge us.”

I pulled another face and made an excuse to Janet. She was very understanding, of course. She wanted to chat, but I wound the conversation down. Grace and Stadler seemed a bit too interested in what I was saying.

“Is this some kind of joke?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m beginning to feel persecuted,” I said. “But not by the sad bastard who wrote that letter. I feel like something lying on a card with a pin through me. I’m still wiggling around and somebody’s looking at me through a microscope.”

“Is that what you feel?” asked Grace earnestly.

“Oh, don’t start,” I said hotly. “For God’s sake, don’t tell me that that’s significant.”

Anyway, it was only half what I felt. We sat there for the afternoon and I made tea and then coffee and found biscuits in a tin. And I dug out the scraps of paper that I call an appointment book, and I went through my address book and I held forth about my life. Every so often one of them would ask a question. It started to rain for the first time in days and days, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel like a rare specimen being examined prior to dissection, but instead like someone spending time with two rather strange new friends. Sitting on the floor with rain running down the windows, it just felt reassuring as much as anything.

“Can you really juggle?” Stadler asked at one point.

“Can I juggle?” I said pugnaciously. “You watch this.” I looked around the room. There was some fruit in the bowl.

When I grabbed two wrinkled apples and a tangerine, a puff of tiny flies flew up into the air. Something was going off in there.

“I’ll deal with that,” I said. “Now look.”

I started juggling with them, then, rather carefully, walked up and down the room. I stumbled on a cushion and they fell to the floor.

“That gives you a general idea,” I said.

“Can you do more than that?” he asked.

I made a scoffing sound.

“Juggling with four balls is very boring,” I said. “You just hold two in each hand and throw them up and down with no interchanges.”

“What about five?”

I made my scoffing sound again.

“Five is for mad people. To juggle five balls you need to sit in a room alone for three months and do nothing else. I’m saving up five balls for when I get sent to prison or become a nun or get stranded on a desert island. They’re only toddlers, and in any case it’s only a phase I’m going through while I work out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

“That’s no excuse,” said Stadler. “We want to see five balls, don’t we?”

“Minimum,” said Grace.

“Shut up,” I said. “Or I’ll show you my magic tricks.”

I can’t explain what happened next. Or at least I can’t explain it so it makes proper sense.

Grace Schilling left. She put her hands on my shoulders when she said good-bye and stared at me for a moment, as if she were going to kiss me, or cry. Or say something deeply serious. Then Stadler told me that they had arranged for a policewoman, Officer Burnett, to keep an eye on me.

“She’s not going to stay here, is she?”

“No, I wanted to explain this to you. Lynne Burnett will be the officer primarily assigned to your protection. At night she or, more often, other officers will be placed outside your house, mainly in a car. Not a police car. During the day she may spend some time inside, but that’s a matter for you and her.”

“At night?” I said.

“It’ll just be for a while.”

“What about you?” I said. “Will you be around?”

He looked at me for just a couple of seconds too long, so that I almost started thinking about saying something else, and then the doorbell rang. I started, blinked, smiled blearily at him.

“It’ll be Lynne,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to answer it, then?”

“It’s your flat.”

“It’ll be for you.”

He turned on his heel and opened the door. She was younger than me, although not much, and rather lovely. She had a large purple birthmark on her cheek. She didn’t dress like a police officer. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a light blue jacket in her hand.

“I’m Nadia Blake,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sorry about the mess, but I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors.”

She smiled and blushed.

“I’ll keep out of your way as much as possible, unless you want me for something,” she said. “And I’m rather good at tidying up. Only if you want things tidied,” she added hurriedly.

“Everything’s got a bit out of hand,” I said. I glanced across at Stadler and smiled, but he didn’t smile back, just looked at me thoughtfully. I went into my bedroom and sat on the bed, waiting for him to go. I felt tired and odd. What was going on? What was I supposed to do all evening with Lynne hanging around? I couldn’t even feel relaxed going to bed early with cheese on toast.