Under My Skin

by Sarah Dunant

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It slipped my mind.”

  But for the first time I had also surprised him. I could tell he was thinking back to the receptionist’s testimony, seeing if it would fit one interpretation as well as another. Obviously well enough to give him room for pause. “How do you know for sure?”

  “Because Olivia told me. And,” I said before he could interrupt, “because it fits. It was clear he was suspicious of me at the time. He even mentioned Olivia to me to see what impact it would have. Anyway, you haven’t found any other evidence of a lover, have you?” He shrugged. “Oh, come on, Michael. By now somebody must have checked the Amsterdam flight reservations for possible female names that might connect?”

  He smiled just a fraction. “All right. Yes, and no. As far as we can tell, he was traveling on his own.”

  “See.”

  “But in which case why didn’t she tell us about the row?”

  “I don’t know, maybe that klutz Rawlings doesn’t say please enough. Listen, the guy had had someone threatening him.”

  “That’s only what she says.”

  “What? You really think she tried to sabotage her own health farm, and sent a set of anonymous notes to her husband herself?”

  He shrugged. “Put it this way. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Is that how you do it? Find a similar crime and solve it that way. What is it? A new kind of cost-efficiency saving?”

  “Hannah …”

  “I suppose you’ve checked the handwriting?”

  “It’s not the same. But we’re having it analyzed.”

  “How about forensics?”

  “Well, Olivia Marchant’s fingerprints are all over his office, but,” he said before I could get in, “that doesn’t mean anything. We’ve taken scrapes from her apartment and we’re going over the car. We’ll know soon enough if there’s anything there.”

  For “anything” read blood on the upholstery or bits of eyes on her clothes. In which case, bye-bye Hannah, hello lawyers. He was right. They would know soon enough. Though, of course, that was no guarantee they would tell me. It had to be said that things weren’t looking exactly rosy for Olivia. And she wasn’t helping. “But what I don’t get is why she isn’t sticking up for herself more. What does she do during these interviews?”

  He shrugged. “Not a lot. She just sits there looking blank. Very calm, very far away. Weird.”

  “She needs a doctor.”

  “She’s seen one. She’s in mild shock, but nothing bad enough to stop her answering questions. Listen, Hannah, nobody’s out to screw her. It’s just there’s stuff building up against her and she isn’t that interested in denying any of it.”

  “So let me talk to her. Maybe I can find out why. It might save you some time in the long run.”

  He made a clicking noise. “Rawlings’ll have me back on traffic duty.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I can see that he scares the living daylights out of you. Let me see her just for one minute. It’s going to look dreadful on your record, harassing the wrong woman.”

  Chapter 17

  I got what I wanted. I took Olivia into Carol’s office, where we had sat five nights before, where she had been so lovely in the night glow and so very certain of herself and her cause. Now, with the daylight streaming in, it was something of an illusion exposed. The face was still impressive, although a little ironed out around the eyes. But the sunshine was crueler to the neck: look closely and you could spot a few telltale rings, a few dry little creases. Had her face not seemed so young, you probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have thought her an attractive woman growing old gracefully. It was the contrast that made it so much more unsettling. Maybe necks are harder to keep young. Or maybe there had been limits to Marchant’s powers after all. Now I realized that in all our other meetings she had worn some kind of scarf or polo neck. It seemed she no longer cared. Oh, Olivia. What are you going to do now he’s gone? Who’s going to iron out life’s wrinkles and pin up those jowls? But she had other things on her mind.

  “They think I did it,” she said at last.

  “Yes, they do. But then you’re not telling them any different.” She shrugged. “Why didn’t you answer the phone Tuesday night when it rang?” I said sharply.

  She sighed. “Because I’d taken a sleeping pill. I was tired and upset and I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “But you didn’t tell them that?”

  “I said I was asleep. They weren’t interested in knowing any more.”

  “And what about the row the receptionist overheard at the office that afternoon? Why didn’t you tell them it was about me. If you don’t tell them, they don’t know.”

  “They don’t want to know. They just want quick answers.”

  “Christ, Olivia, what is wrong with you?”

  She stared at me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. “Why should you care anyway? I thought you weren’t interested anymore. I thought we had to ‘leave it to the police.’” She shook her head slightly. “Does this mean you’re still working for me after all?”

  “Only if you didn’t kill him,” I said to see what kind of response it got.

  She gave a bitter little smile. “See. Now you think it, too.”

  “I don’t think anything, Olivia. Except that if you didn’t do it I can’t believe how a woman of your intelligence can be so stupid, however much pain you’re in.”

  The remark stung her, as I intended it to do. She looked up at me. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

  “Why don’t you try me?”

  She looked at me for a moment. I had seen that look once before in this room, when she was staring at Lola Marsh, watching, waiting, trying to define the malice in the motive. Then eventually she spoke.

  “You want to know if I killed my husband, right? Let me tell you about Maurice and me. I was twenty-nine when I met him and for as long as I can remember I had been ugly. My mother used to say—what was her phrase?—that I’d been ‘ruined by a trick of nature,’ inheriting her body but my father’s face. I don’t remember him well—he died in a car crash when I was nine—though he never struck me as ugly. She was right about me, though. D’you know what I looked like?—one of those women from the Habsburg dynasty after centuries of inbreeding. We had a portrait once in the gallery I worked in. A Spanish duchess, she was. I couldn’t even look at her. It was like looking in a mirror.

  “Then I met Maurice. He was just starting out in reconstructive surgery. He was interested in me right from the beginning. It was at an opening and I’d been working late. He came up and started talking to me. He said he’d been looking at me across the room and did I know that I had the most lovely eyes. I thought he was laughing at me. But he was absolutely serious. Then he told me what he did and how easy it would be to make my eyes light up my face. Those were his words. I remember them exactly. I was so embarrassed I was rude to him. He didn’t care. He was excited. For him it was a challenge. He was so sure, he even offered to do it for free, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He came back the next day, took me out to dinner, and asked me again. Three weeks later he did the first work on my jaw.

  “It took four operations in all. Step by step I didn’t notice the difference. Then one morning I woke up, the bruising was gone and there I was, a Habsburg no longer. And he was right. I was beautiful underneath.

  “A few months later my mother died and my father’s money came to me. There was quite a lot of it. We used it to set up in business. His first clinic and a small health club in the city, before such places became fashionable.

  “And that’s how we started, Maurice and I. Not exactly the most conventional way to fall in love. But the only way I know about. And that’s how it’s been ever since. A sort of partnership. I’ve looked after him and the business, and he’s looked after me. Kept me from my Habsburg past. Maybe it was need as much as love, I don’t know. But whatever it was, it worked. Gave us both what we wanted
.” She shook her head. “Even now every time I look in the mirror I see him reflected in my face. Killing him would have been like killing a bit of myself.”

  Life stories. You hear a lot of them in this job. For this one read Pygmalion with a touch of Faust. But being extraordinary doesn’t necessarily make something untrue. And for what it’s worth, it didn’t feel like she was lying. By comparison, my own love life made thin dramatic gruel—sporadic moments of passion or obsession followed by long retreats of boredom and regret. On the other hand at least I didn’t find myself emotionally decomposing in the aftermath. And not just emotionally. Maybe there’s something to be said for not being that touched by a man.

  I wondered briefly why they had not had children. Together twenty years—they must have thought about it. Maybe the physical ravages of pregnancy had always outweighed the passion and joy that any child might have brought. Theirs was, after all, a relationship of priorities. I looked at her. Beneath the left eye the skin on her cheekbone twitched a little—an involuntary movement, as if the strain of the hidden construction was beginning to take its toll. I had a sudden flash of a suspension bridge, tight and majestic, all the weight borne on a few shimmering steel cords. What happened if they snapped? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “So,” she said, “are you still working for me, or do I have to wait until the scientists prove me innocent?”

  “They might be more help to you than I am,” I said. “I’m not exactly getting very far.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “Perhaps that’s because you don’t know enough,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid there’s something I haven’t told you. At the time I didn’t think it was important, but now … well …”

  Clients, always the same. Always a little added extra hidden away in the back of the brief. Just because they pay you, they think it’s their prerogative. I tell you, you need to be a mind reader to do this job properly. I looked at her. Sex, I thought. It’s got to be sex. “I’m listening.”

  “About six months ago, not long after we’d bought Castle Dean and I was living here full time trying to get it started, Maurice came to me and told me that he was having an affair with a patient.”

  Yeah. Bingo.

  She gave a wry smile. “I already knew, of course. Well, cosmetic surgeons can be very powerful figures in women’s lives—as I know better than most. In the past there had been maybe one or two that had ended up in bed with him. But he was always very careful, and it was never serious. That was part of the deal between us. But this one was different. He told me it had started out casual, but that she’d become very involved and now she was threatening to go public over the affair if he didn’t agree to leave me and live with her.

  “He said he was scared of alienating her. That he wanted to finish it, he just didn’t know how. It was typical of Maurice, really. Getting carried away with the power of his own creation, then expecting me to bail him out. Only this time I didn’t. I suppose I was angry he’d let it go so far. So I told him it was his problem. That if he wanted to leave me, I wouldn’t stand in his way, but that I wasn’t going to humiliate myself getting involved with some crazy woman who thought she’d found a way of blackmailing him for a meal ticket.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. But a week later he came back and told me that it was over. He didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. He even bought me a present. A holiday in the Bahamas. While we were there, he asked me to give up the health farm and come back to London to live with him full time. To keep him from temptation, no doubt. In the end we compromised. I brought in Carol to run the place so that we could spend more time together in London.”

  “And is that when he did the last face-lift?” I asked, somewhat appalled by my cruelty, but needing to see her reaction.

  Once again she surprised me by not being offended. “What do you want to know, Hannah? Whether or not the knife was a substitute for sex between us?”

  You bet, I thought.

  “The answer is no.” She paused and gave just the ghost of a smile. “Although maybe it was occasionally another way of showing commitment. Does that make any kind of sense to you?”

  I gave a little shrug. Not really. But if I began to worry about ideology again, she might find herself without a private eye. And right at this moment she needed one. “What about the other woman?” I said after a while.

  “She disappeared out of our lives completely. He never said who she was and I never asked. Months went by and everything was fine.”

  “Until the letters started to come,” I said softly.

  “Yes.” She paused. “Until the letters started to come.”

  “Is that why you didn’t show them to him?”

  “No. It never occurred to me they were connected. Not at first. I mean it was all in the past. He never mentioned her. No, I didn’t show him because I really didn’t want him disturbed.”

  “Olivia,” I said quietly, “either you tell me the truth or I leave right now.”

  She stared at me, then closed her eyes. “I swear I didn’t know they were from her. How could I? But yes, I suppose I didn’t show them to him because I didn’t want to take the risk. Whoever wrote them was obviously desperate. If it was her, I didn’t want him to feel responsible.”

  “So what about me? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it had nothing to do with you,” she snapped. “Because whatever had happened between us before was private and unimportant,” she continued fiercely. Since it seemed so important for her to believe it, I didn’t contradict her. Or at least not with words. She shook her head. “Anyway, from something he’d said at the time I was sure that the relationship had started when she came back to complain about some treatment or other. I thought if you were any good at your job you’d be able to find her from that description. And if it wasn’t her, if it was a genuine crank, then it was most likely to have been an angry patient anyway.”

  Maybe, I thought, maybe not. I let her stew in it for a bit.

  “Well,” I said at last, “is that it?” Because, of course, I was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  “There’s one more thing. The afternoon before he died, when we had the row about you coming to the clinic—”

  “You showed him a copy of the letter?”

  She nodded, suitably impressed by my deduction. I decided not to tell her it hadn’t been that hard. “He was so furious at the idea of you spying on him that the only way I could get through to him was to tell him the whole story.”

  “And he recognized the handwriting?”

  “Yes. I saw it immediately in his face. But he didn’t say anything. He just told me that if any of this got out, it would ruin the business, and that I’d been stupid to get you involved. He said I should get rid of you immediately and that he’d handle it. He told me it had nothing to do with me and I wasn’t to worry. That he’d sort it out …” She hesitated. “I started to tell you that morning at the flat after … but you didn’t want to hear. You said you couldn’t work for me any longer and we should leave it to the police. But they were already looking for a reason to accuse me. If I had told them about the affair, they would have just twisted it against me.”

  And there was some truth in that. Still … “Well, you’re not exactly convincing them of your innocence now by not telling them.”

  She shook her head, and I watched that subtly older neck swallow a few wild gulps of saliva as she tried to keep back the tears. They had come out of nowhere, surprising her as much as me. She dropped her eyes and I waited while she struggled to regain control. At last she spoke again, but so quietly that I had to strain to hear her. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I did kill him. I mean I was the one who showed him the letter. Maybe if he hadn’t seen it, he would never have … I mean he might still be here now.”

  “Maybe,” I said deliberately, resisting the emotion. “But he isn’t and you are. And you don’t strike me as the kind of woman to let someone else destroy
it all without fighting back.”

  She looked at me and I thought I caught something of the old spark in her eyes.

  “Anyway, if you don’t tell them, I’ll have to. Otherwise I risk getting done for withholding evidence. And I can’t afford that.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell them.”

  “Fine.” I got up and went to the door. “Last question, Olivia. And I strongly suggest you tell me the truth. Do you have any idea who this woman was?”

  She looked at me. Maurice had been right, she did have lovely eyes. The kind you could fall into. She shook her head. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I keep seeing Lola Marsh in front of me. When she came to me that day and said that she wanted to work with Maurice, well, it was clear she knew all about him and the business already.”

  “She’d never been a patient, though.”

  “No. And I even checked her handwriting before you came in that night. It wasn’t the same at all. But I keep remembering her manner. That barely contained fury. Maybe you were right about that night. Maybe I shouldn’t have just let her go.”

  “So why did you?” I said, though I already knew the answer.

  “Because in the end it couldn’t have been Lola.” And she laughed. “Just think about what she looked like, poor squat little troll. Not his type at all. No, believe me the only infidelity that Maurice would have allowed himself would have been a beautiful one.”

  Chapter 18

  Grant, of course, was waiting outside for me. He’d obviously put himself on the line, letting me see her for so long, and he needed to know it would pay off. So I told him she’d made a confession, then counted to five before I added that it wasn’t quite the one he was looking for.

  He was so eager to get back to questioning her that he didn’t bother to make sure that I had left the building. We didn’t even banter anymore. But then that was all right with me. I always lose interest when the plot picks up. Must be something to do with displaced adrenaline.