Under Your Skin (20 page)

“I don’t think anyone’s scum.” Animals, Caroline Fletcher called them. “Anyway, I’m a journalist myself. I’d never use that term.”

“But we’re not all bad,” he continues. “I mean, some of us are. Probably me.” He has prepared what to say, self-deprecation at the ready. “And post-Leveson, we’re all better behaved. We’re not hacking your phone. We’re not even knocking on the door. We’re just hanging around, waiting, living in hope.” He sighs, less like hope, more like disappointment. Maybe the speech sounded better in his head. “I know you’re using the back,” he adds. “I was parking when I saw your daughter and that woman leave this morning.”

My head turns sharply. “You saw them?”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t told the others.”

“Consideration, or self-interest?”

He laughs. “Bit of both.”

The admission of ambiguity, the humor or self-knowledge: it’s like a salve. I mean, none of our motives is ever straightforward. I
think about Clara’s suggestion to sell my story to one hack to be free of the rest. Does that tactic work? I don’t know. I would ask Alison Brett, if she showed any interest, which it doesn’t look as if she’s going to. It’s not my reputation she cares about anyway; it’s the show’s. She doesn’t care who killed Ania Dudek. I’m on my own in that, but I also need to do something if I am to be rehabilitated, if I am ever to be that nice Gaby Mortimer again.

We pass a piece of apparatus for Wandsworth Common’s “Trim Trail”: a horizontal plank of wood on two struts, just off the path near the pond, meant for sit-ups. I walk across, balance my bum on it, and say, “Five minutes. Not to talk. This is off the record. You have five minutes to persuade me.”

He sits down next to me with a sigh of what I can only imagine is heightened hope. He is wearing a suit with a thin waterproof jacket over the top—the jacket puffs up like a buoyancy aid. He’ll be getting mossy stains on the seat of his trousers. I’m oddly touched by the fact he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Listen, then,” he says. “I believe you are innocent.” His expression is so earnest and heartfelt, I laugh. He grins, his eyes disappearing, brackets around his mouth. “Give me an interview and other people will see that, too. I can help you prove it.”

“I’ve got a lawyer for that.”

“Yeah, well”—he winces—“you haven’t really. Caroline Fletcher is only the duty solicitor.”

“Caroline Fletcher?” I’m startled, rattled he knows her name.

“What do you think we all talk about, hanging around for hours outside your door?”

“The football?”

“Mainly that, but the odd other thing slips in. A duty solicitor is always on to the next job. They only care about getting a suspect off the charges. In your case, Caroline Fletcher won’t give two hoots about your public profile.”

“I suppose you’re right. Even an innocent person needs the best legal representation . . .”

“I could give you a list of celebrities whose careers have been ruined, regardless of whether they did what they were accused of or not.” He looks quite grim for a moment, a dark set to his mouth. Not all cheerfulness, then. “I could write a sidebar on it.”

“Well, thanks for the advice. I’ll get a better lawyer.” And agent, I think to myself: I won’t make that mistake again.

“No! You don’t need that. You just need me. Give me an exclusive, a nice in-depth profile, and I’ll turn this thing around.”

I look at his face, trying to read it. A handsome face, but one Philip’s mother would call “lived in”—a large nose, smile creases on the cheeks, wild eyebrows, brown irises with strikingly dark rims. “How do I know you won’t do the dirty? You might be stitching me up.”

He shrugs. “You just have to trust me.”

He holds my gaze for a moment and then looks away. A firm chin, broad shoulders, a determined mouth: the sort of man who in a previous generation would have run a battalion, earned the respect of his troops. Journalism: the new armed forces. Is he to be trusted? Who knows? How old is he? The pent-up energy, the enthusiasm of a young man, but a fan of weariness around the eyes. That bitter flash earlier. About my age? But then I’ve started thinking everyone is “about my age,” until I find out they’re actually twenty-eight.

“How old are you?”

He shrugs. “Forty. Old enough to know better.”

About my age. Well,
almost
.

On the path, two young women with frog-shaped buggies have stopped, their heads turned toward us. There is a second when my face falls into its muscle-memory minor-celeb smile, but there is no smile back, no bashful dawning of why they recognize me. Their eyes narrow. I can hear whispers. They think I can’t see their lips
move, or they don’t care. What do you think she was doing, getting mixed up with that dead woman? Obviously unhinged. Kicking a reporter like that. Did you
see
the bruise?

I do need somebody, even Alison Brett agreed with that before she hung up. Perhaps Hayward knows how to tinker with search engines—bury my bruise way down on page twenty-three, where no one ever looks. Google-washing, Google-bombing, Google-bowling. We had a media manipulator on
Mornin’ All
a while back—some story to do with George W. Bush. I know it can be done. We can use each other. A symbiotic relationship. Goby fish and snapping shrimp. Or those birds that sit on the heads of African wildebeest.

A large brown dog barrels over and starts digging the bark with its two front paws, pausing to sniff the newly formed hole and then frantically redigging. Earth is spraying onto Jack Hayward’s suit trousers; he’s collecting mulch in his cuffs.

He laughs and calls the dog to him. “Come, boy.” The dog, tail wagging insanely, noses about a bit in his crotch, licks his hand, and gambols off. Hayward watches him disappear. Somewhere in the distance, a voice shouts, “ROGER!”

“Okay,” I say. “I’m probably mad, but okay.”

“What, you’ll do it?”

I nod. I shall have to be alert. That’s all.

He makes a gesture with his elbow, and his fist and says, “Kerching!”

“If you do that again, I’ll change my mind.”

“Sorry,” he says, and then does it again, more mutedly, as if behind my back.

He is pretending to be more carefree than he is. I’m intrigued. Perhaps he is playing a part, but he’s hardly alone in that. I will have to keep my eye on him. We will just have to see.

I get to my feet and sweep a few globules of dog-displaced grassy
mud from my lap, and we start walking back in the direction of the house. It has begun to rain. He is talking, with the attention to detail of someone for whom food is important, about the various goodies he has in his car—Italian sourdough from the bread stall on Northcote Road, some Somerset brie from the cheese shop—“thought it was worth trying”—and a couple of bottles of Belgian beer—“not very cold, but beggars et cetera.”

“Are you thinking of coming back now?” I say. “This minute?”

“If that’s all right?”

Dark spots of rain on the path ahead, a rushing in the top of the trees. I frown, trying to look as if I am considering the matter, weighing the pros and the cons, still in control of the situation, while inside a tightness I hadn’t realized was there eases a little. Maybe it is loneliness, or despair, or the dread of an empty house, but I have that feeling—one I haven’t had in a long time—when you don’t want to let a person’s company go.

•   •   •

Jack goes to the car to collect his gubbins—as he calls them—so I am alone for a few minutes. I try Alison Brett again, but she doesn’t answer. I didn’t think she would. I pull a comb through my hair and make a stab at lunch. I chop tomatoes and slice mozzarella, chuck on salt and olive oil. I grate a couple of the zucchini-substitution carrots from the supermarket delivery, grating my finger along the way. Now they’re grated zucchini-substitution carrots with extra finger. I rack my brain. Didn’t Carol Vorderman do something clever with carrots in the
Mornin’ All
kitchen? I throw in some dried tarragon and a slop of orange juice from the fridge. I’m hurrying, which is ridiculous, because there is no hurry—no one, it seems, is going anywhere.

I look up and see Jack crossing the lawn. I must have left the back door open. I’m disconcerted—it seems a bit
forward,
if nothing
else—but I don’t have time to think because in seconds he is in the kitchen. His hair and clothes glisten. He makes one of those horsey
brr
noises that people make to express any sort of cold or discomfort, and unzips his mac. I ask if he needs a towel, but he says, “I’ll survive.” Unlacing his shoes, he bends over the edge of the bench. Rain scatters against the window, blurring the garden into green clumps. I chuck him a clean tea towel, whether he wants one or not. Overarm. See how casual I can be? It floats to the floor a few feet from him. He stoops to pick it up and gives his face a quick rub before handing it back.

“Thanks,” he says.

I’m rootling around in the fridge for a bottle of wine when he says, “Top salads. Where did they come from? It’s not bread and cheese. It’s a feast.”

That’s why I was hurrying. I wanted him to see the salads spirited onto the table and be impressed. I was showing off. And now he
is
impressed—“a feast,” he said—and I feel foolish. It’s just carrots and orange juice and he’s just a hack. I am not the sort of woman to need male approval. If Jack Hayward thinks I’m nice, that’s enough. I don’t need him
to move in
. What is the matter with me? Why am I flustered?

I’m holding a bottle of rosé, but I slide it back in next to the milk and take out the carton of juice instead. “Orange juice okay?” I say. “Though you’ve already got some of that in the carrots. Or would you prefer tea or coffee?”

“A hot beverage,” he says in a funny voice, which makes me think he’s feeling awkward, too. He has laid the bread and the cheese on the table, spreading out the wrappers as if they were bone china platters. He is browsing the recipe books on the island shelf. He isn’t a big man—a little less than six foot—but he’s stocky, broad in the shoulder. He seems to take up more room than I’d bargained for.

“I’ve got a Nespresso machine,” I say pointlessly. “Krups.”

“Or I’ve got these Belgian Trappist ales, but they could do with chilling.”

He crosses to the fridge and, clinking them out of a carrier bag, finds space for them inside. If he sees the bottle of rosé, he doesn’t say anything.

I click on the kettle, just for something to do, and find plates—wincing with the clatter—and the two of us sit at the kitchen table. He has hung his waterproof politely over the back of a chair.

Serving, I hold the spoons at a self-consciously high angle. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t said yes. There are stages I have missed. I should have checked his credentials, confirmed Jack Hayward exists, that he hasn’t made up the name, or co-opted someone else’s, that he is who he says he is. I remember Alison Brett saying never to let a journalist in the house. Even writers on the high-class Sundays want to make jokes about your bathroom fittings. Too late now. We eat. It’s an odd feeling—the rest of the house is so shuttered and dark—peculiarly domestic. “Pass the salt,” he says. “A pinch of salt is bloody good with these toms.”

Philip and I haven’t sat at the kitchen table in months. If we’ve eaten together, we’ve eaten out.

“They’re Riverford,” I say.

“River what?”

“You’ve heard of Riverford—organic veg boxes up from Devon, left on the doorstep every Tuesday. Our old nanny, Robin, introduced us to them.”

“Very posh. Muddy veg for the middle classes.”

“Don’t give me that—you and your Somerset brie that you ‘thought was worth trying.’ ”

“All right, you’ve got me there. And yeah, I’ve seen their vans.”

This exchange makes me feel better, less twitchy. This man isn’t looking around—sizing up the house, valuing the Craigie Aitchison. I’m the one studying every gesture, dissecting every word.

“What do you think of the brie?” he asks, stabbing a chunk of it on the end of his fork, studying it like a botanical specimen. “Pleasant but not quite brie-y enough, is it?”

“Oh, I think it’s quite brie-y,” I say.

“I know what it needs.” He jumps to his feet and collects the beer, which can’t have had time to get much colder, and unscrews the tops.

“Can you cook?” I ask, taking one from him.

“Not bad,” he says. “I’m an everyday cook. I like simple ingredients, seasonal.”

“Saying that these days has become tantamount to a moral code.”

He laughs. “True. My mum was good. Four kids. I’m the only boy. She taught us all to cook. You?”

“My mother wasn’t really the teaching-to-cook kind. More of a baked-beans-out-of-the-can sort of person.”

“I’d say you have natural talent. The . . . er . . . carrot salad has an interesting flavor.”

I sip the beer straight from the bottle. It tastes like caramel. I can feel it slipping down my throat, like that ad they used to show for Castrol oil. “Do you live locally?”

“Brixton. For now. I’ve got a flat above a launderette, which is handy.”

Intriguing: a man of his age in a flat above a “handy” launderette. “No Mrs. Hayward?”

He prongs another corner of brie onto a torn piece of bread. “No current Mrs. Hayward.”

Divorced, then, getting back on his feet. “Kids?”

“Ah.” He wipes the olive oil juices on his plate with a piece of bread. He has barricaded the carrot in one corner. He’s working hard to avoid it. It wasn’t tarragon Vorderman used, now I think of it, but coriander. “Really good those toms. No. No kids.”

I ask him how he ended up as a reporter and he launches into his
life story—South Yorkshire, youngest child, mother dead, dad still alive, did a journalism course somewhere, a London evening paper, followed by the
Express
—or does he say the
Mirror
?—freelance these days. I don’t take much in. I’m after different sorts of information—how clever he is, how kind. Can he really disentangle me from this mess? Will he write a good piece? Is he to be trusted? That slight Yorkshire accent, associated with honesty, sharpens when he talks about his family—the short vowels, the
g
in
youngest
clung to like a security blanket.