Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  I didn't close my eyes. I looked at Fred and he looked back, slightly smiling, sure of himself, while the sweat from his forehead dripped on my face, my neck, and our hands slipped on each other's drenched bodies. He was still strange to me: his high forehead, full mouth; his long, slim, smooth, rather soft body. Even after an evening of dancing and then sex he smelled clean, yeasty. Lemon soap and earth, grass and beer. I pulled the damp sheet off us and he stretched out on the narrow bed and put his arms under his head and grinned at me.

  “That was nice,” I whispered.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “You're not meant to say that,” I said. “You're meant to say something like, Yes, it was nice.”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you ever had sex that's as good as that?”

  I couldn't help giggling. “Are you serious? You want me to say, Oh, Fred, I never realized it could be like this.”

  “Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

  I looked at him. He wasn't smiling. I'd hurt his feelings. He looked humiliated and angry. Men.

  I sat up, legs crossed, shook two cigarettes out of the pack lying on the floor, lit them both, and handed one to him.

  “I've never had sex with a gardener before.”

  He took a drag and blew a perfect smoke ring into the air, where it hung for a second before dissolving.

  “I'm not a gardener. I garden. I help out.”

  “Like: I'm not a teacher, I teach?”

  He blew another smoke ring and watched it.

  “You're a teacher. I'll be out of this job as soon as I can.”

  “Oh.” I felt a surge of resentment. “Thanks a lot. Well, have you had sex with a teacher?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. His face broke into a leer.

  “Never with a famous teacher.”

  I didn't want to think about that. All evening I'd been drinking and giggling and dancing and getting stoned and trying not to think. I'd had enough of stupid jokes about watermelons, and of newspaper articles calling me petite, blond Zoe, and weird letters on the doormat. Of people whom I'd never met thinking about me, having fantasies about me. Maybe there was someone standing outside the flat at this moment, looking up at my open window, waiting for Fred to go. I felt completely sober now.

  I dropped my cigarette into the glass by the bed and heard it sizzle.

  “Those last letters . . .”

  “Ignore them,” Fred said briskly. He closed his eyes. “What are you doing this weekend?”

  “They scared me. They were . . . oh, I don't know, purposeful.”

  “Mmm.” He stroked my hair lightly. “We were thinking of a picnic on Saturday. Out of town. Want to come?”

  “Do you do everything as a group?”

  He leaned down and kissed me on my breasts. “I can manage some things on my own. And what's the problem?”

  “Nothing.” There was a silence. “Would you stay the night, Fred? I mean the whole night. If you'd like to, that is.”

  It was as if I'd told him there was a bomb under the pillow. His eyes snapped open and he sat up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I've got to be at some old lady's house near Wimbledon first thing tomorrow.” He stepped into his boxer shorts, his cotton trousers. God, what a speedy dresser he was. Shirt on, buttons done up, socks, shoes from under the bed, patting his pockets to make sure his change was in there. Jacket from the back of the chair.

  “Your watch,” I said dryly.

  “Thanks. Shit, look at the time. I'll ring you tomorrow, make plans.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don't worry about things.” He ran his hands over my face, kissed me on the neck. “Beautiful woman. Good night.”

  “Bye.”

  After he'd left I got up and closed the living room window, in spite of the dense heat. The room felt more claustrophobic than ever. I looked out at Holloway Road. It would be light in a few hours. I checked the landing window, which I'd already checked several times that evening, got my watch from the bathroom: 1:45. If only it were morning already. I was tired, but not sleepy, and time creeps when you're scared. My sweat prickled on my skin, suddenly chilly, and I picked up the sheet from the floor and wiped down my body with it, before wrapping myself up in its thin folds and lighting another cigarette. I wished I had tea in the flat. Maybe there was some whiskey somewhere. I went into the kitchen and pulled a chair up to the high cupboard. There were a load of empty bottles, which one day I was going to take to the bottle bank, and no whiskey. But there was some peppermint liqueur that a parent had given me at Christmas and I'd never touched. I poured a slug of it into a mug that had lost its handle; it was green and viscous and cloyingly sweet, and rolled in a burning ball down my throat.

  “Ugh,” I said out loud, and noticed suddenly how quiet it had become; just the occasional minor earthquake of a passing lorry, the slap of someone's feet passing under the window. It was 2:15.

  I shuffled to the bathroom in my sheet; cleaned my teeth and splashed water on my hot face. Then I lay down in bed and tried not to think about it. I couldn't help it. I turned over the two last letters in my mind. The first, of course, I'd thrown away. But I remembered most of it. The second I had put on my desk. The police obviously weren't convinced it was by the same person; I knew it was. They weren't treating it seriously; they didn't know how it felt to be a woman lying alone in a shabby flat on Holloway Road, fearing there was someone out there, watching.

  Despite myself, I got out the letter and read it again, lying in bed. I knew this man had looked at me; I mean, really looked at me. He'd seen things that even I hadn't bothered to notice about myself: like the stained finger. He was learning me, the way we never learn even lovers. Maybe he was memorizing me, like for an exam. He'd been in here, I knew he had, whatever the police said, and looked at my things, touched them. Maybe he'd gone through letters, photographs, clothes. He might have taken things away. He'd seen me asleep. He wanted to see inside me, he said. Not be, see. I felt nauseous, but maybe that was just the peppermint liqueur, which still lined the inside of my mouth like glue, and the drink I'd had earlier, and the sweaty sex, and the tiredness, and—oh fuck it.

  I closed my eyes and put one arm over them so I was in complete darkness. London crouched outside my window, full of eyes. I heard a drop of rain, then another. My mind wouldn't stop; I couldn't make it slow down. I went over and over the letter in my mind.

  “As I said before”: That was the funny thing. What was it? He would like to see inside me. As he had said before. But he hadn't said it before, had he? I tried to reconstruct the first letter, the one I'd thrown away, in my mind. I could remember only fragments. But I would have remembered. What could that mean?

  A thought stirred, something I wished I could ignore. I sat up, dry-mouthed, swung my legs out of bed, and went into the living room, where I dragged the cardboard box out from under the sofa. There were dozens of letters in there, some not even opened. This could take ages. I went back into the bedroom, pulled on my tatty old tracksuit; then I poured myself another horrible mug of the liqueur, lit a cigarette, and began.

  I just needed to glance at each letter to make sure, although actually I could tell by the handwriting on the envelopes that they weren't from him. My dear Zoe . . . Miss Haratounian. . .Go back to where you came from, bitch. . . . Have you found Jesus? . . . You smile, but your eyes look sad. . . . Good for you . . . If you would care to donate to our charity . . . I feel we have met somewhere. . . . If you're into S&M . . . I'm writing this from prison. . . . I would like to offer you a word of hard-earned wisdom. . . .

  And there it was. Suddenly I could hear my heart beating hard, too fast. My throat felt too narrow to breathe. The handwriting, black italic. I picked up the envelope, which hadn't been opened. There was a stamp on this one; my address, post code in full. I took a violent swig from the mug, then slid a finger under the flap and tore open the envelope. The letter was short but to the point.

  Dear Zoe, I wan
t to see inside you, and then I want to kill you. There is nothing you can do to stop me. Not yet, though. I will write to you again.

  I stared at the words until they blurred. My breath was coming in little ragged gasps. Raindrops burst against the windows, slow, heavy summer rain. I jumped to my feet and bumped the sofa over the floor, until it was rammed against the front door. I picked up the phone and dialed Fred's number with shaky, inept fingers. It rang and rang.

  “Yes.” His voice was thick with sleep.

  “Fred, Fred, it's Zoe.”

  “Zoe? What time is it, for fuck's sake?”

  “What? I don't know. Fred, I got another letter.”

  “Jesus, Zoe, it's three thirty.”

  “He says he's going to kill me.”

  “Look . . .”

  “Can you come round? I'm scared. I don't know who else to ask.”

  “Zoe, listen.” I could hear him strike a match. “It's all right.” His voice was gentle but insistent, as if he were talking to a small child who was worried about the dark. “You're quite safe.” There was a pause. “Look, if you're really scared, then call the police.”

  “Please, Fred. Please.”

  “I was asleep, Zoe.” His voice was cold now. “I suggest you try to sleep yourself.”

  I gave up then.

  “All right.”

  “I'll call you.”

  “All right.”

  I called the police. I got a man I'd never talked to before who took down all my details with painstaking slowness. I spelled my last name out twice, H for horse and A for apple. Every time I heard a sound, I stiffened and my heart raced. But of course no one could get in. Everything was locked and bolted.

  “Hold on a minute, miss.”

  I waited, smoked another cigarette. My mouth felt like the inside of an ashtray.

  In the end he told me to come into the police station in the morning. I suppose I had wanted policemen to rush around and protect me and sort everything out, but this was all I was going to get. If anything, I was reassured by the tone of dullness and routine in his voice. Things like this happened all the time.

  At some point, I fell asleep. When I woke it was nearly seven o'clock. I looked out the window. It had rained heavily in the night, and the downfall had cleaned the road; the leaves on the few plane trees looked less bleached and shriveled, and the sky was actually blue. I'd forgotten about blue.

  SEVEN

  I got to see more important policemen this time, so that was something. If the officers in uniform who had called round at the flat looked like members of the school rugby team, then the detective who talked to me in the police station looked more a geography teacher. Perhaps a little more smartly dressed than any geography teacher I had had, in a navy blue suit and a sober tie. He was large, heavyset. I mean almost fat. His brown hair was cut short and precise. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Aldham.

  I wasn't led to an interview room or anything formal like that. He met me at the reception area and then punched some numbers to open a door to let me through into the real police bit behind. He made a mistake the first time and had to punch in the numbers again, more slowly, with some cursing under his breath. He led me to his desk and sat me down by the side of it, which made me feel even more like an awkward pupil going to see her teacher after school. Or before school, in this case. I had had to phone Pauline to say I'd be in late and she wasn't pleased about that. It was not a good time, she said to me.

  Aldham read the two letters very slowly with a frown of concentration. I spent five minutes fidgeting and staring around the room at people arriving, talking on the phone. A couple of officers were laughing about something I couldn't hear at the far end of the open-plan office. Aldham looked up.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I'm getting one for myself.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Biscuit?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I'm having one.”

  “It's a bit early in the morning.”

  It was quite a long time before he hustled awkwardly back, the plastic cups almost too hot to hold. He dipped a digestive biscuit into his tea and carefully bit the wet crescent of biscuit.

  “So what do you think?”

  “What do I think? Well, but I—that's your job, isn't it?”

  “I don't know. What did the other letter say?”

  “It was horrible so I threw it away. It had some weird stuff about what I ate. And there was something about being afraid of dying. It sounded as if it was someone who had been spying on me.”

  “Or somebody who knows you?”

  “Knows me?”

  “It might be a joke. Don't you think you might have some friend who's doing this for a laugh?”

  I hardly knew what to say.

  “Someone's threatening to kill me. I don't see any joke.”

  Aldham shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “People have a funny sense of humor,” he said. There was a silence. I was thinking desperately: Could I just be wrong about this? Maybe it was nothing to make a fuss about. “Hang on a moment,” he said at last. “Let me have a word with someone.”

  He took a folder out of his desk and inserted the two letters. He took that and his tea and walked heavily across the room and out of my sight. I looked at my watch. How long was this going to take? Was it worth getting my own files out of my bag and doing some work on the corner of Aldham's desk? I wasn't quite in the mood. When Aldham finally returned, he was with another man in a suit. He was a smaller, slighter man, graying, who looked as if he was a bit farther up the food chain. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Carthy.

  “I've looked at your letters, Miss . . . er . . .” he mumbled something that was apparently an attempt at my name. “I've looked at the letters and DS Aldham has filled me in on the details of the case. These are certainly nasty pieces of work.” He looked around and pulled a chair over from an unattended desk. “The question is, What's actually going on here?”

  “What's going on is that somebody is threatening me and they've broken into my flat.” Carthy grimaced. “And I'm being harassed. That's a crime now, isn't it?”

  “In certain circumstances. We have every sympathy for your concern,” he said. “But it's difficult to know how to proceed exactly.”

  “Don't you think this person sounds dangerous?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Look, miss, I understand you've had other mail of this kind.”

  I gave yet another recapitulation of my moment of fame, and the two detectives exchanged a brief smile.

  “The melon thing?” Carthy said. “That was great. We've got the newspaper photo on a notice board somewhere. Everyone thinks you're a heroine here. Maybe you could go and say hello to some of them before you go. But about the letters: I reckon that in all probability this is just the sort of thing that happens when you become a celebrity. There are sad people out there. This is their way of meeting people.”

  I finally lost patience.

  “I'm sorry, I just don't think you're taking this seriously enough. This person hasn't just written letters. He's been in my flat.”

  “He may have been.” Carthy gave a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. Let's think about a couple of things.” There was a moment's pause. “Your flat. Is it easy of access?”

  I shrugged.

  “It's just a normal conversion. There's a common entranceway from Holloway Road. There's a pub patio thing next to the backyard behind.”

  Carthy wrote something on a large pad of paper that was balanced on his knee. I couldn't see whether he was taking notes or just doodling.

  “Do many people visit your flat?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “One a week? Two a week? On average.”

  “I can't answer it in that way. I've got friends. A bunch of them came round for a drink last week. I've got a new boyfriend. He's been around quite a few times.” More sc
ribbles on the pad. “Oh, and the flat's been on the market for six months.”

  Carthy raised an eyebrow.

  “Which means that people have been visiting the flat?” he said.

  “Obviously.”

  “How many?”

  “A lot. Over the entire six months there must have been sixty, seventy, maybe more.”

  “Have any people come more than once?”

  “A few. I want them to come more than once.”

  “Have any of them seemed strange in some way?”

  I couldn't help laughing grimly.

  “About three-quarters of them. I mean, they're complete strangers rummaging through my cupboards, opening drawers. That's what it's like trying to sell your home.”

  Carthy didn't smile back.

  “There are various motives for harassment of this kind. The most common is of a private nature.” He was sounding embarrassed. “Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?”

  “Not if they're relevant.”

  “You said you have a new boyfriend. How new?”

  “Two or three weeks. Very new.”

  “Does that mean that a previous relationship ended?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean no. I wasn't in a relationship.”

  “But have you had a recent personal, that is, er, sexual liaison?”

  “Well, fairly recent.” I was blushing hopelessly.

  “Did it break up painfully?”

  “It wasn't like that,” I said. Now it was my turn to go red. “I've seen a few people at different times.”

  “A few?” He and Aldham exchanged a significant look.

  “Look, that sounds wrong.” I was flustered. I knew what they were both thinking, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn't make it worse. What made it so ludicrous is that compared to almost anyone I know, I'm a nun: an awkward, embarrassed, inarticulate nun, too. “I've gone out with, seen, whatever you call it, two men in the last year or so.” They both went on looking at me as if they were not at all convinced by this low number. “The last of them was months ago.”