Under Your Skin (34 page)

Gaby, I didn’t kill her. I promise you that on my life. I don’t know how to make you believe me, but I did not kill her. I could never have killed her.

I turn to the second page. His tears have fallen on the paper and in places the ink has smudged. He used a fountain pen, and proper stationery—watermarked Basildon Bond and a Montblanc nib for letters of condolence and adulterous confessions.

The grain on the second page is thicker—he’s used the wrong side of the paper—and the writing is spikier. There are only a few lines left:

I can’t go on lying anymore. It is a terrible thing I have done, and I don’t know what else to do or say. I am so sorry, my darling. I only hope that in time you will forgive me.

Philip

I fold the two sheets of paper and return them to the envelope. Then I lay the envelope down next to me on the bottom stair. A window is open somewhere. A cold draft brushes my neck.

The Waitrose bag is still at my feet and I pick it up. The plastic handles dig into my fingers as I take it into the kitchen and place it on the counter. I put the food away, arrange the alliums in a vase. Philip’s medicine I leave on the counter.

The phone goes and I answer it, unthinking. It’s someone calling themselves PC Evans. I vaguely recognize the name. “I have some bad news, I’m afraid,” he says. “DI Perivale asked me to bring you up to speed with the case.”

“The case?”

“Unfortunately, the DVD you supplied had no recoverable prints apart from your own. As for the suspect you identified on VIPER, he is a news reporter with the
Sunday Mirror
. We’ve had a word with him, told him not to be such a silly bugger. They’re all scum, I’m afraid. Not much else we can do.”

“Okay,” I say.

Then I walk slowly upstairs.

Philip is scrunched up on our bed, his face entombed in the pillow. He is wearing new shoes. The price tag is still stuck to one of the soles.

For a fraction of a second, I think he is dead. I stand in the doorway, considering him. Then I kneel down and say his name, and he turns his face to me, blotched and red and tear stained, eyes squeezed by swollen skin, a ruin of a face.

“Philip,” I say again, and like a desperate child conceding need, he pulls himself up and buries his head in my chest and sobs. His hands claw at my top. Is it grief for the girl, or anguish at his actions, or guilt, or fear at what I might say? I don’t know. All and nothing. His body is racked. A creature, not a man. I can’t quite bear it at first—
we didn’t mean to fall in love
—but after a few minutes, I touch
him. First his hair and then his shoulders. The strokes are light, then firm, like a massage. I knead the anguish out of him. Pity like a small caged bird beats inside me.

Time passes. His shudders slow and then stop.

When he raises his head, he shields his eyes with his hand so I can’t look at him. Gingerly, I lift his hand away.

“I’ve made your shirt all wet,” he says in a small voice.

“Budge up.”

He moves over, and I lie next to him. We stare at each other.

“I’m so sorry, Gaby. I’m so sorry for everything.”

He says sorry again and again.

I interrupt: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was an
affair
. I thought you didn’t need to find out. Everyone at work has affairs. I just thought . . .”

“You just thought?”

“I thought I could get away with it.” He groans. “Pete Anderson once told me a little extramarital is something extra, a treat for working so hard, a perk of the job.”

My stomach turns. “But you were in love with her?”

He lets out a noise, a strangulated moan. “I don’t know. I wasn’t going to leave you. I would never have left you and Millie. I got in out of my depth.” He has stopped crying, taken control of himself now. “She reminded me of you. As you were when we first met, so fiercely independent, so determined to put the past behind you and make something of yourself.”

He is gazing at me with tenderness.

“She even bit the corner of her lip the same way you used to—half confident, half desperately insecure. The day she was in the kitchen, when your mother was ill, she was so sweet with Millie. I . . .”

“When I asked why you didn’t tell me, I meant when she
died,
Philip. How could you not have told me then? How could you have kept it to yourself? I just don’t understand.”

He closes his eyes. “I was terrified. Gaby? Please. Listen to me. I didn’t know that the dead woman, the body you—
my wife
—had found was Ania until the police came to my office. I thought it was a teenager. You told me it was a teenager.”

“I didn’t. I said ‘a girl.’ You misunderstood.”

“I almost passed out when the policewoman told me her name. I had been worried about her. She hadn’t been answering her phone. I hadn’t seen much of her for a week or two. She’d been in Poland for a wedding. I was supposed to have gone to her flat, but then you threw that date night at me. I’d been trying to ring her, I had been round there . . . I never imagined . . . I got through the police interview—it was you they were worried about, not me, they had no idea. I could see the policewoman giving me funny looks—I was sweating; I told her I had eaten something dodgy. They took my alibis and they went away. I was sick in the loo, Gabs, really, I just couldn’t . . . And then I just got on my bike and cycled. I didn’t know where. I spoke to you from the middle of Hyde Park, told you I was still at the office. I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I waited until I knew you’d be asleep before I came home.”

“I saw you that night downstairs, at your desk. You looked as if you were working.”

“I was dying.”

“So you lied to me, and you lied to the police? You didn’t think either of those things mattered? All this evidence that linked
her
to
this
house—the soil from our front garden; the Tesco receipt, the clothes? Even when they suspected
me,
even when they arrested me, took me to a police station, put me in a cell, and kept me there overnight.” I have raised my voice. I can’t stop myself. “You didn’t come back and sort it out. You let them think
I
did it.”

He begins to bite his hand. I pull it away from his mouth. He has started weeping again. “I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t tell the police.” The words are only just decipherable.

“Why?”

He shakes his head.

“You need to tell me,” I say.

A long silence and then finally: “I was there.” His hands cover his face. “The night she died. I was there.”

“Tell me,” I say again. Gently, I take his hands away.

He puts them on his head, presses them down hard. “I did use the gym. I did go to Nobu and for a nightcap at the Dorchester. I was with people most of the time. But there’s a window, a forty-minute gap, when I wasn’t with anyone. Bob thought I was on a call, but I wasn’t. I left Nobu and cycled to her flat. She hadn’t been answering her phone, and I was worried.”

“And you fancied a quickie?”

“No. Gaby. Don’t.” He turns to me, his face anguished. “She wasn’t in, and I didn’t want to come home so I cycled back. I thought I would have to come clean. I thought the police would find out, but no one seemed to have noticed I was gone for a bit. I’d got away with it. And no one knew, you see. I’d used a pay-as-you-go phone, and I destroyed it. We always met in secret. I hadn’t told anyone. Not even Pete. I was scared. It didn’t look good, Gaby. My girlfriend—dead—and me outside her flat the night she died. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“So you thought life could go on as if nothing had happened?”

“No. I tried. God, that weekend in Brighton, the hell of trying to pretend. I cooked up that work trip, just to get away. I needed time to think.”

“To grieve?”

“I suppose. Yes. I only had one meeting. I could have been back in thirty-six hours. I sat for hour upon hour in my hotel room, or random bars, drinking myself into oblivion, trying to pull myself together, trying to work out what to do. The strain of those phone calls, pretending everything was fine, making up boat trips and karaoke.”

We stare at each other until at last I say, “So who killed her, Philip, if it wasn’t you?”

He lets out a bellow, like childbirth. “I don’t know. An old boyfriend. Tolek? His jealousy drove her mad. Or someone she met? There was another English bloke before me. Everywhere she went, men fell for her. She wasn’t that pretty, but you couldn’t take your eyes off her. She just had something, you know.” He lets out another terrible sob. “Or some nutter? I don’t want to . . . But not me, Gaby. I promise you, not me. Please believe me.”

“Ssh.”

“She pulled me in, Gaby, enchanted me. It was like a dream. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

I stroke his hair. I wish he wasn’t saying this, trying to absolve himself. It grates.

“It’s okay,” I say.

His limbs loosen a little. He nestles into the pillow. A corner of the duvet is free of our bodies, and he subtly nudges it so it covers his shoulder.

“You sent her flowers and bought her expensive presents—Agent Provocateur. You gave her my clothes.”

He puts his hand over his face. I can’t quite hear what he says.

I don’t pull the hand off this time. I just say, “Did you really love her?”

“I did, but it was more—”

“More of a physical thing?”

I’m feeding him his lines. He nods.

“Even with that tattoo? Tasteful as those cherries were. I don’t think of you as a tattoo man.”

“She was different. It was all different. I was a different person when I was with her.”

He is removing himself from the equation, shucking off responsibilty. It wasn’t him. It was “a different person.”

He puts his hand on my face now, cups a whole cheek. “I’m sorry, Gaby. I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Well . . .” I breathe in soap and coffee and the salty lemon scent of his body. Then I can’t think of anything else.

A pause. “I should go to the police,” he says.

I put my hand over his to keep it where it is. My tears are catching in his fingers. “Millie will be here any minute,” I say into his skin. “Go later. Maybe even tomorrow. What’s a few more hours? Let’s have our day.”

He releases a sigh like a shudder. He looks at me with hope and trust. I hold his life, the beating heart of it, in my hands. “Where would I be without you?” he says.

We lie for a little while longer. I don’t know how long. I lose track of time. Maybe it is only minutes when noises erupt below our window. Car doors, laughter, voices, the clattering of gates.

I leave Philip in the bedroom and go downstairs and open the front door wide, and there is Millie, in shorts and bare feet, her face rosy with country walks and fresh air and home cooking. And coming up behind her is dear Robin, cheerful and no-nonsense, holding a handful of muddy rhubarb.

We hug and shriek a little. Millie jumps up and down and makes a cross face at my hair and Robin makes a dash to the loo because her pelvic floor is shot to shreds. I hold the rhubarb and wonder what I’m supposed to do with it. Then Philip is on the stairs, his cheeks silvery with cold water, and Millie gives a yelp when she sees him, and he comes down and picks her up and swings her round and kisses and hugs her, a noise in the back of his throat like a growl. Then Robin emerges from the loo, still zipping up her jeans, and says something about a family reunited, and for a moment I forget about it all and think everything will be all right.

•   •   •

We have our day. We roast chicken, which Millie is too full of sausages and chips to eat, and we play Racing Demon, a holiday treat. We go for a walk, over to the playground, and Philip sits next to me on the bench, his fingers coiled in mine, protection from the nudges and the stares. They don’t know me, these people. They think they do, but they don’t. You have to make more of an effort when you’re not on the telly, when you’re no one in particular. As soon as this is over, I’m going to work harder at things like this.

Later, at home, I find a recipe, in the shiny cookbooks, for a cake with rhubarb, and we curl up on the sofa, the three of us, and eat it watching
House of Anubis
. Philip tries to stay awake. Millie taps him when his head lolls. His eyes seep. His nose runs. Hay fever, or jet lag, or grief. I’m watching him dissolve.

When his BlackBerry chirrups, he doesn’t notice, or perhaps he doesn’t care.

My phone doesn’t stop: Philip’s parents back from their cruise, with tales of the Ancient World and Modern Plumbing. Can they come at the weekend? Is that okay? Their heads are full of Sparta and Byzantium, the lovely couple they met from West Byfleet. I want to tell them everything that has happened while they’ve been out of contact, but I don’t. A neighbor will tell them, or one of their friends. It can wait. Texts and missed calls from Jack I don’t read or return. My voicemail fills and overflows. Everything turns to liquid.

Robin gets back at 5:00
PM
, flushed, her curly hair wild. The sky has darkened; thick clouds have chased her from the station. I tell her she’s an allegorical representation of health and fecundity. “I’m certainly that,” she says. “Doc says I’m tickety-boo down under.” She gulps down a cup of tea and a slice of cake, but she’s bushed, her boobs are bursting, and she’s bloody desperate to get back to her baby. “What about you, little lady?” she says to Millie. “Do you really want to come back with me?”

“I want to stay with Mum and Dad,” Millie says. “But I also want to go to Roxanne’s party.”

“We’ll come and get you at the weekend,” I say.

Robin heaves herself to her feet. “Are we going to do this, or are we going to do this?”

I carry Millie to the car. I feel her hot arms on my neck, her legs at my waist, her small, muscular body wrapped around mine. I belt her up and kiss her forehead and her chin and both cheeks. Philip kisses her and bends to say good-bye.

We stand and wave. I chase the car up the street, shouting, “See you in two days!” Drops of rain polka-dot the pavement. When I turn round, Philip has returned to the house. The brickwork, wet now, has darkened. He has left the front door open, and I close it behind me.