Under Your Skin (16 page)

“I have seen the police,” she says. “They came here and asked me questions.”

“What did they want?” I ask.

“They had many questions. They want to know about you—”

“About me?”

“The night the woman was murdered. They want to know if you left the house.”

“What did you say? Did you say I was here?”

“I don’t know. I say I think you were here.”

“Okay. And did they ask you about Ania Dudek?”

“Yes.” She gives an annoyed tug to her collar, as if it has caught at the back of her neck. “Like you ask me before. They go on and on and on.” She is frowning. “Do you know why?”

“I think they think that maybe you did know her because of some oddities that have arisen in this murder case . . . It’s why they wanted to see me. It would all be cleared up if one of us had ever been to her flat, or given her clothes, or had a meal with her.”

Marta’s eyes flicker away.

“So she wasn’t your friend?”

She shakes her head, chewing on the skin to the side of one finger.

“Are you sure? You never had any contact with her? I thought perhaps you might have been friends and fallen out.”

“She may have attended my church . . . I don’t know.”

“The one on Balham High Road. Near Tesco Express?”

She shrugs. “Many, many Polish people go to my church.” She says it with some disdain, as if she isn’t Polish herself. “Maybe I met her once or twice. I don’t know.”

“Did you tell the police that?”

She nods again. For a moment, I think she is going to add something, but she seems to change her mind. She looks at me, almost as if she is waiting.

I decide to risk it. “Did you ever borrow my credit card, Marta? I don’t mind. I would much rather know, and it would explain so many things.”

“I don’t use a credit card. I don’t own a credit card.”

“So not the one in my wallet? Or perhaps I left it on the shelf by the front door? I know I sometimes forget to put it away.”

“No.” She is looking down, concentrating on a tiny scattering of crumbs on the table, corralling them into a corner and scooping them into her hand.

I let out a heavy sigh, release it through pursed lips, feel the breeze of it on my hands. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it all, trying to find answers. Someone has used my card, you see, and if it was you . . . well, that would be fine. I’d be relieved.”

Suddenly, startlingly, she’s off. She stops combing the crumbs and starts talking very quickly about identity fraud and about a friend from her language course who lives in Colliers Wood and how a person in a shop had taken an imprint of this Colliers Wood person’s credit card and used it to run up bills, buying flights to Lagos and—she says this with increased shock and indignation—a Kärcher high-pressure water cleaner, “very, very expensive” in B&Q.

“Golly,” I say. “I suppose it’s a possibility.” And it’s true. It
is
a possibility. Only I am distracted by her delivery. Her English is
better than I thought. It’s not broken at all. It’s glued together, like a badly mended vase; you can see the globs of adhesive along the cracks.

“Yes.” She stands and sweeps the crumbs off her hand into the bin. Then she opens the tall cupboard for the mop and fills a bucket and starts swiping it in large regular swoops over the floor. “So be careful,” she says.

I lift up my feet when she reaches me. “Oops,” I say as streaks of shiny wetness engulf my chair. “Now you’ve got me trapped.”

She doesn’t smile. I watch her, still turning up the corners of my mouth, aching with the effort to prove I’m joking, but her face doesn’t crack. It has the faint flush of someone who knows she is being studied. I wonder again if she’s lying, if she has something to hide, or whether it is just the cultural difference between us that makes it seem that way. Not everyone conducts their social life with smiles; not everyone makes their face do half the work. I feel a twinge of guilt, and doubt. Is Martha a liar? A thief? A plausible suspect?
Really?

•   •   •

Before we go to bed, we clean the house. We are uncomfortable allies. Marta vacuums the stairs, and I go through every room, rearranging and adjusting. We don’t talk much—the odd word here and there: “Can you pass the Pledge?” Marta closes all the shutters, blocking out the eyes and lenses. She checks the basement, too, which I haven’t done, not with the lights on the blink. All those Saturday night TV thrillers of the 1970s—
don’t go into the cellar
—have a lot to answer for. A basement remains a basement, even when it has been dug out and fitted with a high-tech gym.

Marta doesn’t flinch. I hear her moving around in Philip’s office—small sounds, the puff of the spray, the squelch of a mop.

While she is down there, I phone Mrs. Matthews, Izzie’s mother,
who manages to express concern about my situation without completely concealing her consternation at being caught up in it herself. I’m too grateful to mind. She calls Millie to the phone and just the sound of my daughter’s breath before she speaks makes my heart sing. She is completely herself, as if yesterday morning never happened, chatty, cheerful, upbeat. She got twenty-one out of fifty in her spelling test, but “that’s good, Mum, Sophia got fifteen!” Izzie has a bed on stilts. “But not with another bed underneath. A
desk
!”

She asks if Dad is back yet and when I say, “no, Mills darling, not yet,” she replies, with sweet indulgence, “Busy old Dad.”

I tell her I love her, and she makes a noise that is half tut, half groan. Even her contempt is soothing to my soul.

I change my sheets. They are cool and smooth and smell of laundry, but I miss the old ones. I find one of Philip’s shirts in the closet and wrap it round my pillow. I breathe in the scent of him. I know I shouldn’t.

He’ll be awake soon—11:00
PM
our time will be early morning there—and he’ll ring as soon as he is.

It rains in the night. I’m aware of the drops pattering against the window, gusts going down the chimney. The window is open a crack and the wind creeps in, touches the duvet cover, crawls across my skin. When I close my eyes, all I can see is Ania Dudek’s face—the milky membrane that covered her pupils, her protuberant tongue, the gouges and livid cuts across her neck. In my half sleep, her hands claw at me.

I keep the shutters closed and dress in the light that slips in around them, a set square of luster. In the kitchen, I eat breakfast—a bowl of muesli—standing up, looking out. Philip didn’t ring. Perhaps, if he didn’t get my message until after breakfast, he didn’t want to wake
me
. He’ll ring in a bit. I know he will.

The hornbeams and the taller trees in the gardens that back onto us block the lower windows of the houses behind, but if you were standing on the upper floor, you could see into my kitchen. Once, I saw a man at that top window, half naked, no details, a blur of flesh, monochrome, pale against dark. Our kitchen wall is all glass. What was it the architect said? “Inviting the garden into the kitchen.” Well, the garden can bugger off. I’m getting blinds.

I’m early for Steve, and so I sit on the bottom of the stairs, looking at the front door, tensing for the tinkle of the gate, the sound of his footsteps. The newspapers stare reproachfully up at me from
where they have fallen on the doormat, half curled, half splayed, like rolls of defrosting pastry. I wish I could thrust them deep into the bin, or hide them, as Millie did with
Struwwelpeter,
that gruesome collection of cautionary tales, which I once found tucked behind the bath. I have to read them, though. It’s my job. Current affairs, or the flotsam and jetsam that follow in their stream, are my life. I’ll go through them in the car, Steve as moral support. I shall incorporate them, and whatever cautionary tales they contain—“The Dreadful Woman Who Found a Body”—into the bustle of the day.

Work. Work will help. I’ll feel better at work. But Steve is running late, each extra minute agony. Five minutes . . . ten . . . fifteen . . . Where is he? Then a niggle, a thought blooming like a bruise. Terri had given me her number and said to call.

She answers on the first ring. “Terri,” I say quickly, “only to say I’m fine. I’ll be with you shortly. Just waiting for Steve to roll up.”

“Gaby,” she says, in a tone I don’t like: too friendly, too surprised, “Gaby, honestly, as I said in my text, take the day off. Take a few days.”

“Not necessary. Tell you the truth, I need to come back. I’m ready. Oh, and don’t text, I’ve lost my mobile, remember?”

Her voice fades slightly as if the phone has slipped, or her mouth has turned. “I think you should have a few days at home.”

“Honestly, I’m totally fine. I haven’t read the papers yet, but I’m going to get on to them in the car. I am going to be hot with ideas, I promise.”

“What about the police?”

“I’m on bail!”

She doesn’t answer. I hear clattering in the background, cameras moving, doors shutting. A long, uncomfortable silence in which my hand clutches the banister so tightly I hear it creak, feel the post beneath it shift. I think of India, with her bright, white smile. Something inside me cracks open. Finally, Terri says, “I’m sorry,
Gaby. The big cheeses don’t think it’s right for you to come in, not just at the moment, not while the enquiry into this murder is still ongoing.”

My mouth is dry. “If you want me to be the story,” I manage to say—“ ‘The Foolish Woman Who Thought She Was Safe’—then I’ll be the story.”

“Gaby, I really . . .” She can’t say it. She’s too embarrassed. The silence gapes between us. I imagine her perched on a desk, staring out the window, staring at the wrinkled surface of the Thames.

I think back to before this phone call. How did I imagine I could go to work, carry on as if everything was normal? “You’re right. It doesn’t matter that I’m innocent. It’s the wrong type of publicity. The show must come first,” I say. A list of statements, not questions.

I can hear her relief. “Have a few days’ rest, clear things up with the police, speak to Alison Brett, do some damage control. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

•   •   •

“TV Gab Loses Cool,” “Gaby Mortimer in Police Investigation,” “
Mornin’ All
Presenter in Dawn Arrest.” Worst of all: “Gaby Lashes Out.” My teeth are bared in that photo, like one of those Rottweilers that mauls kids. An insert pic provides a close-up of the shin with which my “vicious foot” made contact: a plum of a bruise, plus a nasty nick. The reporter in question “sought medical treatment.” Bless.

I go back to bed. I don’t know what else to do. My life, so solid, so impermeable, is dissolving, slipping between my fingers. Was it ever solid? Was it ever impermeable? I feel like I am falling, with nothing to cling on to. This murder enquiry has affected everything. It has stripped me down to nothing. Who am I? Who are my friends? I thought I was a nice person, kind, the sort of woman people liked. I thought I was safe in that. And it matters to me. I realize that now. I care what people think. I really do. I’m generous
to the people I work with, the receptionists and the ADs and the stylists. I bite my lip with Stan. He has nothing on me. Nothing. I’m
fucking
charming. The effort I have gone to maintaining my poise, my cheerful, unruffled stance, smiling for the photographs, p’s and q’s, and all it took was those few blinding seconds outside the house. A personality, a persona unraveled. I’ll never be “that nice Gaby Mortimer” again. Even when they have all forgotten poor Ania Dudek, when she has slipped from the public memory, I’ll be the TV presenter who may or may not have killed someone, and attacked a photographer.

I try and sleep, but I fail. I cry a bit.

At 10:00
AM
, I ring Alison Brett in publicity. Her assistant answers and says she is in a meeting. I turn over in bed, lie on top of my hands, bury my face in Philip’s shirt. It’s 6:00 p.m., the end of the working day, in Singapore. Philip will have got my message eight hours ago at least. Why hasn’t he rung? I know I didn’t say what had happened, but he must have heard from someone else—a text from a friend, a snippet on Sky News?
Surely
. And then,
not to ring
? He could have been in meetings, I suppose, in a world of numbers, cut off from
Daily Mail
gossip, and he thought he’d ring me later. I should have been less cool in my message, but then that’s how he likes me: cool, poised, successful. His celebrity wife. Would it be so wrong to break that?

I think about how things are between us—the distance, the lack of connection, the dark ravines and jagged edges. I search my brain—the day he came to surprise me after work. I saw him in reception before he saw me, leaning forward in his city suit, a fish out of water, a look of slight confusion on his face. Or the time another cyclist knocked him off his bike at Waterloo. He limped home, stood in the doorway calling for me, his elbow at a funny angle, blood pouring from his knee. My heart turns. The distance between us doesn’t seem so gaping.

I pick up the phone before I can stop myself. He doesn’t answer. I should hang up, but I don’t and I do everything I have told myself not to. I leave a garbled message, begging him to ring, my voice choked with tears, thick with need and panic and self-pity: all the things he hates.

After I hang up, I realize too late that the intimate memories that gave me courage were about
his
vulnerability, not mine.

•   •   •

And then Clara calls.

I will be bobbing on a raft in an ocean, shipwrecked, my skin blistered, a seagull for lunch, and Clara will eventually find me.

“Gaby!” It’s all she has to say. Her tone tells me she has seen the papers, that she knows I’m in a state, that here she is, my friend, ready to give me what I need.

“I texted you yesterday. Ken, head of physics, told me you hadn’t been on
Mornin’ All
and I thought you were ill, but then when you didn’t reply, I thought maybe you and Philip had gone away or . . . I’ve been in lessons. I had no idea, Gaby, until I saw the papers in the staff room just now.”