Under Your Skin (30 page)

All sorts of things are wrong. The meanness of his tone, and “TV’s Gaby Mortimer.” A low blow. I look at him. Perhaps Christa’s right not to trust him. His eyes meet mine. I can’t read his expression. He runs a finger and thumb through one eyebrow.

“Only teasing,” he adds after a beat.

•   •   •

I leave Jack standing on the corner, on his own. “No soup?” he calls after me.

“No soup,” I say, without turning round.

I walk very quickly, legs like scissors. I have an almost obsessive need to get home, to hunker down, to feel safe. I cut through the posh modern apartment building that abuts Fitzhugh Grove and cross the cricket pitch only feet away from where Ania’s body lay. A movement in the bushes. A person? No, just a dog. I’ve been suppressing it, trying to, but the image of her battered neck, the superficially incised curvilinear abrasions, as Perivale called them, is suddenly so immediate I think I might be sick. I can’t whistle, but I hum, throat vibrating, to chase the ghosts away. A man, a British man, Christa said, but she didn’t know who. Does Tolek know? The trees close in. I start to run.

The café and its courtyard when I reach them are a bustle of mothers and nannies and small children, a bramble patch of bikes and scooters and dropped bread sticks.

The sky is a cerulean blue. Children dance. Spring has sprung without her.

No red-and-white police tape, not even a torn remnant ribboned in a branch. Nothing to show it happened here at all.

•   •   •

Perivale is sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Marta, when I get home. Fear presses into my chest. I should tell him what Christa told me. For God’s sake, he should already know. It’s on the tip of my tongue. All I have to do is open my mouth and let the words out. I would be free of this. But I promised Christa, and it’s here, the information, inside me. I can use it anytime, when I need to, just perhaps not now. So instead, I do what I always do when I’m in a state. I become arch, study the situation over my shoulder, hold any real emotion at bay. “Ah. DI Perivale,” I say. “Déjà vu.”

He stands. I move forward as if to kiss him, once on each cheek, as if this were a social call. I pull myself back just in time. Marta, barefoot in leggings, slips past me at the door. Has he interrogated her properly?

“Sorry to intrude,” he says. He is unshaven, white tips to his stubble. His jowls have aged faster than his scalp. “We have had a minor—” He breaks off. “You’ve had a haircut.”

“Yes.” I put my hand up to touch the new blunt ends. “Do you like it?” I don’t know why I ask. It’s just the question that came next.

“Certainly different.”

“I will take that,” I say, painfully coy, “as a compliment.”

He gives a mock-courtly bow.

“Yes, as I was saying, we have had a minor development. I wondered whether you would mind coming down to the station.”

It’s not a question, it’s a statement. A command. Could I say I
did
mind? Could I lie down on the floor, right here, and bang my head and scream until he went away?

“What sort of minor development?” I say. “Minor development like having found the killer?”

“Not in the Ania Dudek case, though things”—he tucks his polo shirt into the droopy waistband of his jeans, each stab conveying a certain self-satisfaction—“are progressing. Gone back to the flat, had another dig about. Most illuminating. More evidence in the pipeline.”

“In the pipeline?” I say. “Didn’t you look there first time round?”

“Very funny, I don’t think,” he says. “No, the minor development I refer to is in relation to your stalker. Another resident, a neighbor of yours, reported a person behaving oddly at around eleven
AM
, and one of my officers was dispatched in time to apprehend the alleged perpetrator. So if you’re not
doing anything,
perhaps you could come down to the station for a look at the VIPER. I’ve got the car outside.”

“The viper?” I say, surprised. It is an odd use of language. “As in ‘viper in the nest’?”

“Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording system.” Each word is like a poke in my side. “It’s the database we use these days instead of the old-style ID parades.”

“Who knew?” I say.

•   •   •

PC Morrow—
Hannah
—is at the front desk when we arrive. She waves at me, a little trill of her fingers, and calls, “Hiya!” I wonder if Perivale has any idea how disloyal she is, how much she’s been spilling down at the café.

“Caroline Fletcher anywhere handy?” I ask Perivale as we parade the corridors.

“You don’t need Caroline Fletcher,” he says. “As you are the victim in this case, and not the suspect.” He stops dead outside a room, peers in through a small square window. “Unless you insist.”

“No, of course not. You’re right. Why would I need Caroline Fletcher?” His hand is gripping my elbow in a manner that is not reassuring. Just being here brings it all back, the terror and the claustrophobia. My legs feel sodden with dread.

He pushes the door open. It’s another of those small white cells, only this one has a desk, three chairs, and a computer. We sit down, and he fiddles about for a while. The red light above the CCTV camera on the wall blinks.

The door opens and PC Morrow scurries in, slinking into the third chair and mouthing, “Sorry, oops,” over Perivale’s head.

“Okay.” Perivale has got the information he needs up, though the screen is murky and PC Morrow has to lean over and show him where the brightness button is before we can see clearly.

“Right,” Perivale says, with a little extra pomposity to cover this blip in his technological prowess. “What you are about to be shown
is a series of twelve short videos, each of a different person, face on and side view, matching the description you gave us of your stalker. Please study each video carefully and indicate to myself or PC Morrow if you see the man you recognize. This session is being filmed”—he points to the CCTV camera—“and voice recorded”—he points to a table in the corner—“to ensure neither myself nor PC Morrow influence your decision in any way.”

“No coughing or nudging,” I tell PC Morrow. “Got it?”

He sets the program in motion and I watch face after face shudder and spin across the screen. Short hair, squat features, wide faces. Millions of pixels. I wonder about the third. I am almost convinced by the fifth. I am losing confidence in my own memory by the eighth, but the ninth . . . “That’s him,” I cry. “That’s definitely him.”

“Percentage certitude?”

“Hundred percent,” I say. My eyes bore into the screen. The stocky stance, the narrow forehead, the bellicose set of the eyes. I shudder. “Yes, hundred percent. It’s the man who was outside my house, the man in the red Renault.” Perivale clicks off the machine and stands up.

I ask him if I was right, but he tells me he doesn’t know, that it isn’t his case. He couldn’t be in the room with me if it was. He will inform PC Evans, the officer in charge of this file, and someone will be in touch.

A spasm of unease. “So you don’t know if there were any fingerprints on the DVD?”

“I can find out.”

“And that man, do you know if he is in custody or—”

He winces. “He’ll have been video recorded, possibly cautioned, and released.”

“So. Yes. Okay.”

I push my chair back and join him at the door. “I don’t understand—if it’s not your case, why did you come and get me? Why did you sit with me just now?”

Perivale pulls down on his speckled jowls. “Come on,” he says. “Do you really imagine I would miss an opportunity to spend time with you?”

PC Morrow giggles nervously. I don’t know what to say. All the jokes I’ve made, the “no coughing or nudging,” is this what they have led to? This cringing stab at flirtation. Have I let him think he knows me? Or was Jack right? Is it just a sign of how misjudged this whole investigation is?

I’m so riled, I can hardly speak. “I wish I could say the feeling’s mutual,” I reply eventually.

•   •   •

Marta is back in the kitchen, standing at the island counter. Clara once said, in her experience (years of staff room coffee breaks), that people divide into two types: drains and radiators. Clara herself is a radiator: no question. Robin is a radiator. Marta is definitely a drain. I ask her if she saw anyone suspicious poking around this morning, and she shakes her head. “No. I see no one.” She has been eating cereal and she puts her bowl in the dishwasher and the milk back in the fridge.

I watch her as she shifts around the kitchen, small, careful movements. She sits back down at the table, her eyes scanning a magazine. I decide, this time, to skip the preamble. “I was spring cleaning this week,” I say, trying to smile, “and I had a little dust round your room.”

Little dust
. I can’t even talk to her about this without making myself cringe.

She looks up, her eyes heavy.

“Found my jeans! They must have been put away there by mistake . . .”

She has flushed. She doesn’t actually have to say anything, and I can see the struggle in her face. Finally, she says, “I’m sorry. I borrow them. I just see if they look good.”

My heart softens slightly. “And did they?”

She looks down at the magazine. “No.”

“Well, that’s one mystery cleared up. The other thing, I couldn’t help noticing all the envelopes and the box of receipts under your bed.”

Her fingers spread a fraction on her mug. She is wearing black nail polish, with a diamanté star in the center of each nail, the sort of manicure that demands a nail bar or a beautician. The world seems to be shrinking to a few people, tight points on a graph.

“It’s just, I wondered . . .” She is waiting tensely to hear what I am going to say. “I don’t want you spending your own money on things like that,” I conclude. “Sending things home or whatever. You know, let me pay.”

Her face is rigid. “No,” she says. “Don’t pay. It’s fine.”

“But all those presents home.”

“Not presents. They are not presents home. I sell.” She puts down her mug, pulls the ends of her ponytail to tighten it. “I sell on eBay.”

“On eBay?” I can feel myself getting closer. “What do you sell?”

“Just things.”

I watch her carefully. “Things?”

“Things I find . . . things I buy cheap.”

A haze clears. The screen brightens. You just have to find the right button. It is as clear as it is shocking. She has been taking my clothes, siphoning off the odd item here and there, stealing them.

It’s a relief to sit down. My legs are leaden. “Did you sell anything to Ania Dudek?”

Her face closes. Her hands rest on the table, flat. “No.”

Is she lying? “Do you know,” I continue carefully, “I’ve got a big bag of clothes upstairs you could have. They’re just going to charity otherwise. Keep the proceeds. You’d be doing me a favor.”

She rubs under her eyes. “But . . .” she begins.

I am a little gratified to see the traces of mortification, a different
sort of blush, higher on the cheeks. I should probably be outraged, but I am aware of a grudging respect. Was it so bad? I get sent so much. Some of those clothes still had their labels. I didn’t even notice them gone.

“Did you tell the police about your eBay business?”

“No.”

“Did they ask if they could see you again? Did Perivale ask you any questions earlier today?”

“No.”

I lean back. “I’m baffled. All the evidence they have about Ania Dudek’s murder is tied not to me but to
this house
. It could be anyone. Today, Perivale said he had dug up something
else,
though I’ve no idea what that is. It might not be connected. The peculiarity for me is, why aren’t the police questioning you as much as me?”

She shrugs. “Perivale tell me. He know I am not the murder.”

I find it harder than I imagine to put what I want to ask into words. “How do you know?” I say eventually.

“How do
I
know I am not the murder?”

I let out an involuntary laugh. “How do
you
know that
he
knows that you are not the murderer, yes.”

“I know because I could not have done it. I was with another person the whole time.”

“Do you mind me asking who?”

She starts telling me a story, and to begin with, I can’t work out where it is going. It’s about Millie and a bad dream and how the night Ania was murdered “Millie was frightened and came into my bed.” Details land in my brain—Marta sang to Millie and told her stories about a chicken—but I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t hear how the story ends.

“Sorry? What did you say?”

“I said so I told the police I could not kill Ania Dudek, because I was with Millie all night.”

But I’m still not really listening, or concentrating, because I don’t care about that. I don’t care who killed Ania Dudek. Or whose alibi Perivale has followed up and whose he hasn’t. All I can think is that when Millie had a nightmare she went not to me, her mother, but to Marta; she curled into her back, tangled her limbs with hers. This woman, who may be complicated and a little bit deceitful, who may borrow my jeans and use my perfume, sung to my daughter the night Ania died and hugged her and kept her safe.

And for a moment that’s all that matters.

•   •   •

When my mobile rings, I almost don’t answer. I have been lying on my bed in semidarkness. Marta has gone to her evening class. Creaks and groans and rasping come from the walls. Traffic on Trinity Road is heavy tonight, or the wind is in the wrong direction. Every now and then, the house shudders. My thoughts have returned to turmoil, rationality subsumed by indecision and fear.

“Hi,” Jack says. “I’m ringing to say I’m sorry.”

I try to sound unconcerned. “What are you sorry about?”

“I’m sorry I was rude and insensitive.”

“That’s okay.”

“Well, it’s not, is it? I should never have called you ‘TV’s Gaby Mortimer.’ You’re not TV’s Gaby Mortimer.”

“Well, that’s nice!”

“You know what I mean. You’re more than just TV’s anything.”

“Thank you.”

“I was being a cock.”

“A cock?”