Under Your Skin (8 page)

I am talking too much, trying to give them as much information as I can. Then an idea, an obvious thud of explanation. “I mean, maybe this . . . this Ania thought about applying for the job, if that’s her profession, and didn’t.”

“Yeah, that could be it,” PC Morrow says. She looks at Perivale. “That makes sense.”

“You know,” I continue, with relief, “how sometimes you stick things on the fridge and forget about them?”

“Yeah.” PC Morrow wrinkles up her nose. “I’ve got some all-protein diet stuck on ours. Have I looked at it?”

“You don’t need to diet,” I say, “and that high-protein Dukan thing—terrible for your breath.” She gives a squeezed hunch of her shoulders, as if she would laugh if she could. I think again how young she is. “Our fridge” is probably her mum’s.

DI Perivale takes the plastic envelope, puts the photograph on top of it, and lines them up in front of him on the table. I can see specs of dandruff in his part. I wonder if he is married, has kids.

“Okay. One more question.” He hasn’t looked at me, but he does now—his eyes seem to bore into mine. “I have asked you this before, but I am going to ask again. Did you touch the body?”

“The body.” I gaze at him. I try and think back. My head is fuzzy. If I can’t bear to think about her body now, how could I have touched it then?

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know I touched her hair.”

“Did you take anything from the body?”

“No.” I feel uneasy again. I don’t understand the direction these questions are taking. I feel as if I have forgotten something important.

“You didn’t take a St. Christopher on a chain from round her neck?”

“No. Why on earth would I do that?”

He rubs his face, his eyes, with his thumb and fingers. “Look—Edmond Locard. The Locard Principle: every contact leaves a trace? Have you heard of that? Well, it’s one of the first things you learn at Hendon. Hair, flecks of paint, fibers, makeup—particles travel, move, shift. Every mote of dust has its own identity. Cotton has
twisted fibers that resemble ribbon; linen looks like tubes with pointed ends.”

“Okay . . .”

“And although the killer seems to have sprayed her neck with bleach—”

“So that was the smell?”

He nods, and continues, “We found certain fibers, certain DNA on her collarbone, which . . . It would just be helpful if you could rack your brains. Now, I know you were traumatized, in need of victim support”—he gives me a gnomic jut of the chin—“but if you could just tell us everything that you remember, it would help us a great deal in our enquiries.”

I look up. Nora has tiptoed into the kitchen with a bucket and mop. I didn’t hear her coming. She wears slippers when cleaning; her feet whisper as she walks. I get up from the table to rummage around in the hall for my purse and dig out her money. It occurs to me to postpone paying her until next week, but I hate to do that. She has a family back in the Philippines and sends most of her wages home.

When I walk back into the kitchen, DI Perivale asks if Nora is local (maybe he wants to check her papers), and I realize I couldn’t tell him, even if I wanted to. She has cleaned for me—emptied my bins, scrubbed my loos—for years and I don’t know where she lives. I sit down. Is it my imagination or do PC Morrow and DI Perivale exchange a look?

“So just to be clear,” PC Morrow says, “apart from the hair, nothing of you touched anything of Ania Dudek’s?”

You know if you forget a word or a name, the worst thing can be to rack your brain; that often it is when you think of something completely different that it comes to you? Maybe it was the reflective diversion about Nora that prompts me. Or maybe I would have got to it anyway, in my own time.

“I did touch her,” I say. My head has cleared. “I mended her bra strap. It was one of those bras that attaches at the front and the strap was dangling out; it had come unpinged. So I did touch her. I did it up. I don’t know why I didn’t mention this earlier. I think it was because you said ‘body’ and I know I was careful not to touch the actual body.” I’m shaking my head. I remember suddenly the stiffness of the hook at the top of her bra, the coldness of the fabric. “I can see myself doing it. I don’t know why I did it, but I did, she just looked so . . .”

“Aha.” DI Perivale sounds as if he has just solved a clue in the
Times
crossword. He asks if I have suppressed taking the St. Christopher, too. I shake my head fiercely. “Okay.” He nods.

I ask if they know
what
killed her, and he says, “Cardiac arrhythmia, caused by pressure on the carotid artery nerve ganglion. The superficially incised curvilinear abrasions: self-inflicted bruises as she struggled to remove the ligature from her neck.”

I feel myself blanch. “And what about
who
? Do you have any leads on that?”

Perivale stares at me.

“No boyfriend?” I say. “Aren’t they usually the first in the frame?”

“A boyfriend.” He nods. “But not in the country at the time.”

“And no obvious murder weapon,” PC Morrow adds.

I am desperate for them to leave now. I don’t want to hear any more, but Perivale starts talking more about fibers—polyester threads, apparently, look like smooth, unwrinkled rods—and then he asks, for the sake of elimination, if he can take away the clothes I was wearing that morning. I fetch the jogging bottoms and the T-shirt and the gray running top as quickly as I can. And then, just when I think we must be done, he asks me where I was the night before the killing, between 4:00
PM
and midnight. I don’t understand why he is asking this.

“Well, I wasn’t on the common,” I say, “not then.”

“She wasn’t killed on the common,” PC Morrow says chattily. “She was killed in her flat. We know that from the pooling of the blood in her body.”

An exasperated frown knits DI Perivale’s brow. “When the heart stops,” he continues, in the dum-di-dum tone of someone repeating information for the umpteenth time, “blood settles in the lowest part of the body, causing the skin to become pink and red in that area. The hypostasis on Ania’s body suggests she was killed with her legs in a lower position to the rest of her—this is consistent with indentation marks found on the cover on the bed in her flat. There were two cups of tea there, one untouched, and a glass of water that had been knocked over.”

“I was here,” I say, “at home. I had a nap, a run—just a quickie—then a shower, some supper, read to my daughter, watched a bit of telly . . .”

“What did you watch?”

“I can’t remember.
Mad Men
, I think.”

“Can anyone corroborate that?”

“Marta. Millie, for the early part of the evening.”

“And what about later?”

“I went to bed early, alone. My husband was at work and then out with colleagues.” I am being helpful, but I am also wondering why they want to know where I was. I
found
the body. Do they think I
killed
her? I can feel panic and the beginning of fear. Is this what a police investigation is? Pointless queries? Bureaucratic quagmires?

Maybe he just has to ask, though. Maybe it’s policy—like having an HIV test when you’re pregnant—because then he moves on and asks a couple of questions about my stalker: the file on it “has drifted to the surface.” I tell him the stalking, if you can call it that, began at the end of last summer, which DI Perivale at least finds sufficiently interesting to write down.

“It may just be a coincidence,” I say, “but I’m sure I saw someone watching the house on Saturday, and when I came in just now, there was a thuggish man, looking a bit suspicious, in a car outside.” I try to speak casually; I don’t want them to think I’m making a fuss.

They both stand up. PC Morrow makes a circular movement with her shoulders, massaging out the tension.

“That thuggish man outside?” DI Perivale shrugs. “He’s one of ours.”

•   •   •

After they leave, I take a run. It’s like getting back on a horse: I have to do it sooner or later. I don’t have my Asics, or my favorite running clothes—I don’t know when I’ll get them back—but I’ve got a pair of old Dunlops hanging around and some tracksuit bottoms, which will have to do. I tie Philip’s gray hoodie round my waist. I probably won’t need it, but it hides my bum.

You can get to Fitzhugh Grove across the common—a path leads from the soccer field into John Archer Way, a new road created out of nothing when they built the modern housing estate, and then along a row of towering chestnut trees. If you take that route, though, you have to broach the police cordon, and even if you work round it, those big chestnuts, with their thick, reaching branches, turn the path into an uninvitingly dark corridor, so instead I pace along Trinity Road beside six lanes of thundering traffic. At the entrance to the grove, rattling in the vibration from passing lorries, is a yellow sign, appealing for witnesses. I jog on the spot for a bit, pretending to read it, and then I walk a little bit farther in—just to where the cars are parked, blocks of flats separated by scraggy patches of grass. I can see the roof light of a police car whirling by the second tower, turning the wall intermittently orange. I feel drawn in, entangled. At the last minute, I turn on my heels and run home instead.

Nearly at my house, just before the gate, a bulk comes out of the shadows, between me and it.

I stifle a scream.

“Oh, don’t,” the man says, putting out his hand. “Sorry. Gosh. Sorry. Did I scare you? What an idiot. Sorry.”

I push quickly past him. He doesn’t block me—he moves easily out of my way. I catch a whiff of Polos, and tea, and the artificial bouquet of fabric softener.

“Sorry,” I say, when I have put the front gate between us.

“No, I’m sorry. After the shock of what’s happened, your nerves must be shot to shit.”

I laugh. “Shreds.” I can see him properly now. He is not much taller than me, with curly hair and mad, haywire eyebrows. He has big brown eyes, appealing, slightly crinkled at the side, quizzical.

“Shreds. Shit?” He makes a surprised face. “Where did
that
come from? Anyway, sorry to bother you like this.” He puts his hand out. “Jack Hayward. We spoke on the phone.”

I nod, shake it. “Two worlds collide sort of thing.”

“That’s the one. I thought it was worth a try to ask you personally. It’s such a good story. I’ve found out a few more things since then. I’m freelance. I need a break. Give me a break.” He opens his hands.

“Have you thought of getting a proper job?” I ask, not unkindly.

“I tried a proper job. You know, they make you go every day? And you have to wear a tie and sit at a desk?”

“Unbelievable.”

“People go on about the watercooler and how much fun it is around there, but have you been to a watercooler recently? Dead. Nothing. Some guy from accounts, that’s all. I’m telling you the party’s moved on.”

“Maybe you’re just going to all the wrong watercoolers.”

I’m smiling, but still backing toward the door.

“Please,” he says.

“I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Please?” He pushes.

I’ve got my key out. “Another time maybe,” I say. “When things are quieter.”

•   •   •

Philip rings at 8:00
PM
He won’t be home for supper. He’s had a difficult day. He can hardly speak for exhaustion, or stress. His words are stunted and cold.

We haven’t spoken much since Sunday lunch. He was so rude to his parents I could hardly look at him. He spent the meal either fiddling with his phone, or leaving the pub to make calls, or staring at the table, as if he couldn’t bring himself to engage with any of us. I love Philip’s parents, but Margaret, his mother, is no good at confrontation. She just kept smiling as if nothing was wrong and Neil, a retired headmaster from the days when erudition was more important than charm, plowed on with his disquisition on the history of pub names while I desperately tried to compensate for Philip’s distraction with an enthusiastic stream of Oh reallys and No, I didn’ts! It was heartbreaking. Margaret and I were the last to leave the table. “Sorry about Philip. Lot on,” I said. She looked at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask more. The urge to confide, to feel her reassuring arm on my shoulder, was briefly overwhelming. I wanted to tell her what I’m actually scared of: that Philip is drifting away from me. But she smiled again, and gave a cheerfully clipped laugh. “Philip will be Philip.”

“The police have been,” he tells me now from his desk at work. “I had to come out of a meeting.”

“The
police
?” I say.

“It was about the dead woman.”

“
Why
?” I ask. “Why did they need to speak to you?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. He has put his hand over the
receiver or has put it down on the desk. I want to scream to get his attention, but when he comes back on the line, I force myself to sound calm. “They’ve been here, too,” I say. “They know who she is. A woman called Ania Dudek.”

“Yup. They said.”

“What did they want with you?”

“Routine. Because you found . . . her.”

He goes again. Or I think he does.

“And?” I ask when he comes back.

“Er . . . Just questions, Gaby. Okay? About where I was. Where
you
were.”

“Please don’t sound so irritated. I’m sorry you’ve been disturbed at work, but can you just tell me a bit more? Please?”

He lets out a deep sigh. His voice sounds distorted with the effort. “Sorry. Yes. I can’t believe this has happened to you . . . Why you?”

“I know,” I say.

“You said she was a teenager.”

“No, a woman.”

Another silence. Is he actually talking to someone in his office at the same time? “The policeman was checking what you told him . . . about finding her and . . .” I can hear a distant clicking, like a ballpoint pen being retracted and extended. “Basically checking details of time and place.”

“My alibi, you mean? They’re checking on my alibi?”

“Sort of. Not that I’m much good to you.” He gives a bitter laugh. “It was back-to-back meetings, followed by work drinks, followed by work dinner. I’ve got a list of alibis as long as my arm. Pity you can’t have one or two of mine.”