Under Your Skin (36 page)

I should have rung the police. I was going to. I took out my phone. And then I put it back. I thought about Millie, and a different sort of adrenaline took over. I started thinking, my thoughts racing. Would it look like a break-in, a robbery gone wrong? I paced the flat again. Was there anything to place me here? I hadn’t drunk the tea: good. Had I touched anything else? Perhaps her neck. I went to the kitchen and used a tea towel to open the cupboard. I found the bleach and sprayed her with it. I tried not to look at her face, the bulge of her eyes and tongue. A glass of water, spilt. Her necklace was lying on the floor. It must have broken in the struggle. I put it in my pocket, along with the drawstring from the hoodie, sticky from her neck. I wanted to sit down, but I didn’t dare. I had to act fast. I had to keep moving.

What else? What else? An hour went by, or two, or three: I lost track. All I could think of was DNA; had pictures in my head from
CSI Miami,
microscopic close-ups of the double helix. I must have left something, a fragment of skin, a drop of saliva. I wish I had known more about it: how long it survives, what it survives on. Would it matter if I had? My DNA wasn’t on record, but once they found out about Philip—because they would, he would come forward as soon as he heard—once the affair was in the open, I would be a suspect. And then if my DNA was on the body . . . ?

And then suddenly an idea grew to move her out onto the common, where I could “find” her myself. That would explain my DNA. And it was better: a random mugging or a psychopathic murder. I had to hurry. I made myself look at her body again. I wasn’t sure I could touch it, let alone lift it. She was light, slim, a few cells growing inside her, not a baby, not a baby, no, not a baby. I tried
hoisting her over my shoulder, but a body . . . they don’t talk about a dead weight for nothing. I lay her back down, her T-shirt caught under her armpit. I caught sight of the cherry tattoo on her lower back.

I thought hard, scanned the flat. If there was a pram or a buggy or a . . . and then my eyes fell on the wardrobe. Something on top of it: a hold-all, an enormous squishy suitcase on wheels. I pulled it down, and zipped it open. I picked her body up off the bed again, cradled her, and then forced her in, her arms folded, her knees bent back. I threw the bottle of bleach in there, too. I could close it almost, but not to the top. A bit of her hair got caught in the zip.

It was a quiet night, light drizzle, some big match on the television. I took the narrow chestnut path from the flats to the common; a two-hundred-meter dash, the suitcase bumping, scraping. I sobbed the whole way. It’s a path people avoid at night, too dark, too spooky. And no one was out: luck, serendipity: so much of this has been about that. It must have taken three minutes to get there, the longest three minutes of my life. When I got to the trees, I had meant to lie her down gently, but in the end, in my haste, after I had torn loose the strands in the zip, I yanked her out of the case by her hair. I just left her there, on the ground, under some saplings, only a few feet from where I had seen them kiss.

I shiver and run on, past the wooded copse, back to the bowling green. I’ve run round this part three times this evening now. I’m stuck, entangled. I don’t seem to be able to get free. I reach the little cabin where the skanky black and white cat used to live. I sit on the step. I’m still sobbing. I wish I could stop. I’m crying for her, and a bit for him, but mainly—and I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong—for me.

You think you know about these things from detective books and TV dramas. It is both easier and harder. The line between living and dying, in contemplation, such an unimaginable cavern, infinite in its width and depth, is just a delicate thread in the end. It snaps
like cotton. The knotting is harder. You make it up as you go. It’s the little things that catch you out.

I blow my nose on the corner of my top and try to think clearly. I’ve made mistakes, I know. I’m close to being caught. I have been all along. I go through it again. I do it all the time. I need to be cautious, but caution slips into paranoia before you know it. Her phone: I threw its components—the battery and the casing and the SIM card, along with the bottle of bleach—into separate Dumpsters. (That’s this area for you: two “refits” on every street.) For the suitcase, I chose a Dumpster piled so high with rubble, it would have been taken away the next day. The chain, I took home; I don’t know why. Murderers often collect keepsakes. I’ve read about that. I’m just following type. But I hid it well. A house has a hundred hiding places when it comes down to it, toothcomb or no toothcomb (how self-aggrandizing, the clichés of the job). A bag of frozen peas early on, and then later in the back of Philip’s drawer—I liked the idea of him crushing it a little more every time he opened it—but the running machine is better. No prints—I wore Marta’s latex gloves; they will just think it was Philip who wiped it clean. The Nautilus was clever. It’s the sort of place men would choose, the sort of place men would look. It’s easier to find there, and they will—tonight, or tomorrow morning.

A train rattles along the railway in the cutting down behind the shrubs. It vibrates up my vertebrae, under my skin.

I still had the drawstring from the hoodie,
the murder weapon,
when I got home. I scrunched it in my hands, tried to make it go away. I thought of flushing it down the loo. In the end, my hands shaking so hard I stabbed myself a million tiny times, I rethreaded it back into the hoodie. I knotted it onto a safety pin and inched it along, and then when it was all the way through I undid the knots and stretched out the neck so the drawstring disappeared into the seam. I put both his hoodie and the running trousers I had been
wearing in the laundry. My own matching running top was already in there. Marta would wash and iron them by the following lunchtime—I knew that. It was a risk, but to wash them sooner would alert suspicion.

Philip came home and got into bed and I made sure our bodies didn’t touch. I had to force my limbs not to twitch, my mouth not to howl, my eyes not to open. I waited until it was nearly light, and then I took my running gear and Philip’s hoodie out of the dirty clothes basket, got dressed, and left the house.

The shock of seeing her again, lying in the copse where I had left her, was beyond words. The savagery of my own actions, the finality of it, the sickening spectacle of her body; it was physical, my horror. I think a part of me thought she wouldn’t be there, that I had dreamed it, that it was some nauseating fantasy in my head. But I had to check, and there she was, lifeless. I had done this. She was barefoot. Her bra had come unpinged—the bra Philip gave her, though I didn’t know that then. She looked so vulnerable. I forgot she was Philip’s lover for a moment. She was just a young girl, someone’s daughter, with the rest of her life brutally cut off.

The police came, Morrow and Perivale. Let’s face it, I’m an actress by trade, not a journalist, but the shock, the desperate sadness, it wasn’t faked. I managed to ask the questions I thought I should ask and the ones to which I wanted answers (the rash on her face). I went to work, got through the day. It was when Perivale came later that I began to make mistakes. I panicked. I gave him my running top, not Philip’s, the one I had been wearing, in case they found the string, but it bothered me. What if the fabric was slightly different? I knew I’d touched the body, but in my terror I couldn’t remember
what
I had done. Or what the right thing to
say
was. I overthought it for a moment, tried to think what a woman, a witness, in my position would remember, what she would say. The seconds ticked and it became too late to say anything.

I got the words out later, “unburied” the memory. It shouldn’t have mattered, but something in the delay triggered Perivale’s suspicion, a tiny thing, a mishandling of information, with exponential consequences. Or was it me? Was it my manner? I have tried so hard all along to react appropriately in every circumstance, funneling the dread and foreboding I felt so much of the time, the blind fear, into the sort of shock and outrage an innocent person might project. All that evidence he trotted out, the photographs laid out like trophies. How hard my brain had to work. The soil: I should have swept Ania’s floor, that was stupid. The cuttings: how peculiar of Ania to have squirreled them away—keepsakes of her own. The clothes: I was baffled by them. It didn’t occur to me that Philip would have rifled so creepily through my wardrobe. The secondhand shop, Marta, and her eBay: both seemed plausible explanations. Reminders of her pregnancy were like a blow to the head. And then Perivale produced the credit card receipt. Philip had used mine by mistake: that was obvious. But what possible explanation could I come up with? Did Perivale see the agony in my eyes, behind the flippant comments, the off-key jokes? Was that what it was?

Damp from the step has seeped into my tracksuit bottoms. I shift along the bench. I feel like lying facedown. Other people’s emotion, other people’s suffering, it’s gotten to be too much. Christa’s sadness, Tolek’s anger. Someone dies and it isn’t over. The misery goes on and on.

The weekend he couldn’t get hold of her, when I knew she was dead, and he didn’t, how twitchy he was, how desperate. The lunch with his parents: I might have been in hell, but I kept it together, just as I kept smiling, kept my face on, at work. I loathed him for ignoring his father, his self-indulgence. I remember thinking, I’m glad she’s dead. The day he found out was different, the phone conversation in which he could hardly speak. When I saw him in his office that night, staring blankly at his screen, the anger went,
consumed by remorse and pity. I had to force myself just to stand there, not to wrap him in my arms.

I expected Philip to go to the police. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, waiting, but he didn’t. I was tense with anticipation. When he stayed quiet, I had to adjust, think ahead, keep my brain turning. And once I was arrested, Philip
had
to keep away. I longed for him with every nerve in my body, but I had to play it down or there was a danger he would rush back. He would come armed with lawyers and injunctions—but it was too risky. He would have told the police everything, perhaps even suspected me himself. Singapore played into my hands. As long as he was out of the picture, I didn’t have a motive.

I manage to get to my feet and immediately duck down. A man is hovering by the café, peering across. Has he heard me scream or sob? Has he seen me? I try and stay still, but my whole body shudders. I cover my eyes.

Imaginary voices, creaking boards. The police, the hacks, I could cope with them, but the feeling of being spied on, followed, the pranks played by guilt to keep itself diverted, is driving me insane. My stalker didn’t exist. He was a cry for help, a failed bid for sympathy at the height of Philip’s affair. Philip hardly noticed. I brought him out again last week, one last flight of terror, the DVD purchased with the Polos in the corner shop in Putney, to divert attention, try and convince Perivale someone was out to get me. All those suspects I kept finding, throwing them in my path like meat before a dog: Marta, Tolek, the man in the red Renault. All of them innocent. The police kept on coming.

A sudden movement in the bushes—a bird rises, squawking. My heart pounds. The thing is, Perivale
is
out to get me.

A vibration in my pocket. My phone.

Jack.

I switch it to silent. I stand and scan the area. No sign of the man
by the café. He seems to have gone. I’ve got to pull myself together. I’ve got to keep going. I can’t give up. I haven’t got much time.

I used Jack at first—a despairing response to the trap I was in. Was he using me, or not? I needed to investigate and I couldn’t do it alone. A sympathetic write-up was an extra bonus. Ania had friends, people she might have talked to, employees; I had to find out if anyone knew about Philip. Choosing Jack was random. I wanted him to help me, but I didn’t want him to be too clever, too good at his job. I watched and listened, considered everything he said and did, adjusted my opinion by a million daily calibrations. I had to be in control. It was fine at first—he seemed a little lackluster in his interest, had other work to follow through. But there were difficult moments. He was both more sentimental and sharper than I realized. He remembered names—Caroline Fletcher’s, Millie’s, and Clara’s—too promptly for my comfort. He knew Philip was in Singapore. There was even a moment down by the river, when I thought he’d guessed.

I liked Jack. I
like
him. He is gentle and funny and straightforward. And the heart-rending thing is, he likes me. He knows things, too. I told him. In the restaurant, I drank too much. I opened my mouth, let him see into the dark morass of my soul. Here’s the odd thing: it drew him closer, made him more interested. And perhaps I began to fall for him, with all the loss of control and dignity that that implies.

Shifts and adjustments; they’ve been needed all along. As soon I discovered Christa knew Ania had another man, “the baby father,” I tried to head Jack off. I couldn’t risk him getting any closer to the truth. But he was out of control. He’d gone rogue, passionate in his determination to prove my innocence, meeting Tolek, Hannah Morrow, and her loose lips. And then whatever he did to get the diary from Christa—charm and threats. The diary is the clincher. Philip will be named in there. Down in black and white. Even if he doesn’t go to the police himself, the truth is out.

This is the end. And the ironic thing is: Jack did it for me. He ruined my life out of kindness. It’s all gone wrong. You make it up as you go along. You have to make the best of what you have.

•   •   •

I’m calmer now. Altogether calm. I have to think. I have to act.

I start walking in the direction of the house. I must pace myself. It’s busier out now, a couple of dog walkers on their evening constitutional, a gaggle of kids horsing about on the parallel bars.

We used to come out here, Philip and I, when we first moved in, stroll out over the common when we got back from work. We would link arms and talk about our days, my hopes, his ambition. We would do the house up, when we had the money, dig out the basement. “Fill it with children,” I remember saying.