Beneath the Skin (41 page)

He didn’t reply. He stared at me instead and said in a whisper, “Darling. I’ll be back, darling.”

The paramedics picked up the stretcher and carried it out. Links shouted at one of the uniformed officers.

“Two of you go with him to the hospital. Caution him on the way. Keep him fully secure—no access.”

I watched him go. He looked at me steadily until they turned the corner, with his bright eye, his friendly murderer’s face. He was smiling at me through his mask of blood and blisters.

Then: “What about Fred?” I said.

Links gave a sigh. “We’ll interview him immediately. Or as soon as we can.”

“What about me? Can I go?”

“We’ll give you a lift home.”

“I’ll walk. Alone.”

Links stood firmly in front of me.

“Miss Blake, if you refuse to go in a police car and with police protection, I shall have you restrained.”

“I think,” I said, as coolly as I could manage, “I think I would feel safer on my own.”

“Very well,” he said heavily. I saw fear in his face: He was looking at public disgrace, a career in tatters.

“I was always safer on my own.”

What did I do next? What does one do when a life has been given back?

I spent the first day and night at my parents’ house, helping my father paint the garden shed and lying facedown on the faded chenille counterpane in my old bedroom, the smell of mothballs and dust in my nose, while my mother clattered anxiously round the kitchen, making milky cups of tea and baking ginger biscuits that I couldn’t eat. Every time she saw me she would gaze at me with her red-rimmed eyes and press my shoulder or put her hand cautiously on my hair. I had told them something of what had happened, but I had left everything out. Everything that mattered.

Then I went back home and I cleaned my flat. My first thought had been that I would move out immediately, pack up my bags and begin again—but what would be the point of that if I couldn’t begin again with me? I didn’t want to. So I threw open the French windows, and I put on an old pair of cotton dungarees that looked as if they had been given to me as a joke—certainly I couldn’t remember buying them. I turned on the radio so it was blaring cheerful, inane music through all the rooms. I went through every drawer. I filled bin bags with torn tights, old envelopes, scraps of hard soap, empty toilet rolls, leaking pens, moldy cheese. I put newspapers in a pile of recycling, bottles in a large box. I folded clothes or hung them in the wardrobe, filled a laundry basket with washing, put bills in piles, poured bleach down the sink and lavatory and anywhere else that looked like it needed it. I defrosted the fridge, scrubbed the kitchen floor. I cleaned the windows. I dusted, for Christ’s sake.

It took two days. For two days I just worked, morning till evening. It was like meditation. I could have thoughts without really thinking, let memories bob around without pursuing them, without tracking them down to their source. I didn’t feel euphoric, and I hardly even felt relieved, but bit by bit I felt I was crossing back over into my life. I picked up Morris’s business card from my desk and remembered his bright eyes watching me as he had been carried away, and put it with the other rubbish in the bin bag. I screwed up the paper covered with my jottings from the case files Cameron had filched for me and threw that away too, though not before copying down Louise’s address. I collected two small buttons from the floor. Cameron’s? I held them for a minute in the palm of my hand before depositing them into a shoe box, which from now on would be where I kept my sewing things.

I screened all my calls—and there were a lot of them, because the first tremors of the story had reached the media. There were even pictures of us—Zoe, Jenny, and me, though I didn’t know where they had managed to get hold of the one of me—in a line across the top of page three of the
Participant
, as if we had all of us died. Or all lived. Reporters rang, and friends suddenly wanted to get in touch, and Cameron rang several times with a hissing, secret urgency, and people I had met once or twice in my life rang, breathless with discovering that they knew someone who was suddenly and briefly a little bit famous. I didn’t pick up the phone.

Not until early on the morning of the fourth day after, a blowy beautiful day when the sun was streaming in through the open French windows and the first few autumn leaves were scattering themselves under the pear tree, where I had first put my arms round Cameron and kissed him. I was thinking about beginning on my garden next, hacking down the nettles, when the phone rang and the answering machine clicked on.

“Nadia,” said a voice that made me stop in the middle of pouring boiling water over a tea bag. “Nadia, it’s Grace. Grace Schilling.” Pause. “Nadia, if you’re listening to this, can you pick up the phone?” Then: “Please. This is urgent.”

I crossed over to the telephone.

“I’m here.”

“Thanks. Listen, can we meet? There’s something important I need to tell you.”

“Can’t you tell me over the phone?”

“No. I need to see you.”

“Really important?”

“I think so. Can I come to your flat in, say, forty-five minutes?”

I looked round at my gleaming home that smelled of bleach and polish.

“Not here. On the heath?”

“I’ll come over to your side. Ten o’clock, by the pavilion.”

“Fine.”

I was early, but she was already there. It was a warm morning, but she was huddled up in a long coat, as if it were winter. Her hair was pulled back austerely, which made her face look curiously flat, and older and more weary than I had remembered. We shook hands formally and started walking up the hill, where a solitary man was flying a huge red stunt kite, which flapped and jerked in the wind.

“How are you?” she asked, but I just shrugged. I didn’t want to be talking about my mental health with her.

“What is it?”

She stopped and took out a pack of cigarettes; struck a match into the cup of her hand and inhaled deeply. Then she looked at me steadily with her gray eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nadia.”

“Is that the important thing?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well.” I kicked a stone out of our path and watched as it clattered away into the grass. Above us, the red kite swooped and danced. “And what did you want me to say back?”

She frowned but didn’t reply.

“Do you want me to forgive you or something?” I asked curiously. “I mean, it’s not me who’s dead.” She winced. “I can’t just hug you and say there, there.”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if she were swatting a cloud of insects away from the space between us.

“I don’t want that. I’m saying sorry because I’m sorry.”

“Did they send you, then? Is this a group apology?”

She smiled and took a drag of her cigarette. “God, no. Everybody has been forbidden to have contact with witnesses.” Another dry smile. “Pending legal proceedings and internal inquiries. And TV documentaries.”

“Are you in trouble then?”

“Oh yes,” she said in a vague tone. “That’s okay. We should be in trouble, Nadia. What we did was—” She checked herself. “I was about to say unforgivable. It was unprofessional. Stupid. Blind. Wrong.”

She dropped her cigarette on the path and ground it out with the toe of her narrow shoe.

“Maybe I should be taping this for Clive’s solicitor.”

She frowned. “Yes, he’s taking legal action. And Zoe’s aunt. I don’t care, really. I do care about Zoe and Jennifer. And you. I care about what you went through.”

We turned off the path and walked down the hill, toward the pond. Ruffles of wind blew across the surface of the water and showers of leaves fell at our feet. A small child stood with his mother, throwing chunks of bread at the fat, indifferent ducks.

“It wasn’t really your fault,” I said cautiously. “It wasn’t your decision, was it? I mean, not telling us what was going on.”

She looked at me and didn’t respond: She had decided to take the blame full on, not slide away.

“For what it’s worth,” I plowed on, “I think that within the limits of the situation, you weren’t as dishonest as you could have been.”

“Thanks, Nadia. But I don’t think I’m going to put that on my résumé. It’s strange,” she continued. “I am always talking about taking control of one’s life, but it got out of control. One step taken—to keep the press out of Zoe’s death, not to scare the local population, not to make ourselves look incompetent, or worse—which led to the next step, then the next, and before they—we—knew it, we were on this road and couldn’t turn back. And we ended up lying and lying and not looking after the people who looked to us.” She smiled ruefully at me. “That’s not an excuse, by the way.”

“All that fear,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never really been able to believe in God. Have you?”

She shook her head.

“There are these two women,” I said, “I feel connected to, though I never met them. And then there are these two men, who I did meet, of course. Did you?”

She took a deep breath.

“I met Fred when he was questioned after Zoe, and then I met Morris of course after you had discovered he knew both you and Jennifer Hintlesham.”

“I need your help here, Grace. You know about this. They seemed normal. Could you imagine them, you know, when you met them, could you see that they could be killers? Was there anything about them—I mean, Fred, for instance. Did he have a history of violence?”

“He does now.”

“I mean . . .”

“I know what you mean. You want me to say that these men are different, don’t you? You want to put a label on them: dangerous. Or: mad.” We stopped by the side of the pond and she lit another cigarette. “That’s what’s going to happen, of course. People like me will question Morris and they’ll discover that he was abused or neglected, that he was hit or pampered, that he saw a video or fell on his head off a climbing frame. And someone will eventually get in touch with the press to say that Fred hit them five years ago, or whatever. And then there will be politicians and various pundits getting hot under the collar and saying why wasn’t it spotted.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t anything to spot. When people commit murder most of them do it to someone they know. That’s what the numbers say. Fred was jilted by Zoe and he was humiliated and furious and then, by bad luck for both of them but especially for Zoe, found himself alone with her. And he killed her. It’s as simple as that. It happens all the time. He’s probably no more murderous than a lot of people, except he happened to commit a murder that went unnoticed because the woman happened to be receiving threatening letters from somebody else.”

“Comforting,” I said dryly.

“I didn’t think you were asking for comfort. I don’t think you have ever asked me for comfort. That’s not your style, is it? Morris, well, Morris
is
different, of course, and maybe you could call him mad, in the same way you can call anyone who commits senseless crimes mad. Or evil, if you believe in those kinds of terms. But that doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? Because what troubles you is that for all the terror and all the horror and the death, this has no lesson, no label.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.” We walked on, back to the path we had left, and for a few minutes we didn’t speak.

“Can I ask you a question, Nadia?”

“Sure.”

“It’s been bugging me. How on earth did you get to see all the files?”

“Oh, that. I had sex with Cameron Stadler and then I blackmailed him.”

She looked at me as if I had just slapped her face. Her face looked comical.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

She started laughing then, an unsteady and not entirely cheerful sound, but I joined in and soon we were holding on to each other’s arms, giggling and chortling like teenagers. Then she suddenly stopped and her expression became grave.

“You can’t go round feeling guilty for the rest of your life,” I said.

“Want to bet?”

“Not really.”

We came to a fork in the path and she stopped. “I go this way,” she said. “Good-bye then, Nadia.”

“Bye.”

She held out her hand and I shook it. Then I started walking back the way we had come, to where the kite still swung in the air.

“Nadia!”

I looked back. “Yes?”

“You saved us,” she called. “Us, yourself, the other women who would have come after. You saved all of us.”

“It was just luck, Grace. I was lucky.”

It was too cold for snow. The sky was icy blue and the pavement still sparkled with the frost of the previous night. My breath smoked in the air, my eyes watered, my nose felt red and sore, and my chin stung above the itchy wool of my ratty old scarf. The wind was a knife. I walked quickly, head down.

“Nadia? Nadia!” A young voice gusting across the street. I turned and squinted.

“Josh?”

It was. He was with a group of boys and girls about his age, all of them muffled up in thick jackets and hats and jostling against each other, but he crossed the road to me. “I’ll catch up with you,” he shouted at them, waving them off. He seemed solider than I had remembered him, less pallid and weedy. He stopped a few feet from me and we smiled at each other a bit awkwardly.

“Joshua Hintlesham, I’ve been thinking about you,” I said, aiming for the bright notes.

“How are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good,” he said, almost as if there were some doubt about the issue. He looked around edgily. “I should have got in touch,” he said. “I felt bad. Coming around with Morris, all that. Everything.”

It seemed more than five months ago since he had sat on my sofa, a pitiable heap of frail bones. I didn’t know what to say to him, because too much lay between us: a great mountain of horror and loss and fear.

“Do you have time for coffee or something?” He took his woolly hat off as he spoke, and I saw he had dyed his hair a bright orange and put a stud in his ear.

“What about your friends?”

“That’s all right.”

We walked together without talking until we came to a small Italian café. Inside it was dim, hot, and smoky, and an espresso machine hissed and spluttered on the counter.