Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  “That's what I always seem to find,” said Zach bleakly.

  Morris nodded at me pleasantly and was gone.

  I have found her. My perfect third. She is small, like the others, but strong, full of energy. She glows with it. Skin like honey, glossy chestnut hair, but all in a tangle, green-brown eyes the color of a walnut, copper-colored freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks. Autumn colors for the end of the summer. Firm chin. White teeth. She smiles easily, tips her head back a bit when she laughs, gestures when she speaks. Not shy, this one, but at ease with herself. Like a cat by the fire. Her skin looks warm. Her hand was warm and dry when I shook it. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was right for me. My challenge. My sweetheart. Nadia.

  THREE

  “We ought to have another trick or something.” Zach frowned at me over his frothy pink milk shake. “Something new, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “If we get invited back to a house.”

  I have two magic tricks (three if you count the wand that collapses into segments when I depress a little lever at the base, amazing to anyone under the age of four). The first one involves putting a white silk scarf into an empty bag—the children know that it is empty because several of them have put their grubby little hands in it before I start—and then, hey presto, when I pull it out it's turned a tie-dyed pink and purple. In the second, I make balls disappear and reappear. They're basic tricks. Extremely basic. Rudimentary. But I've perfected them over the years. The point is to make the audience look in the wrong direction. Then if they gasp, resist the temptation to repeat it. And don't tell anybody—even curious parents—how they're done. I once told Max. I did the balls and he was amazed. And curious. How d'ye do it? How d'ye do it? He went on and on. So I showed him and I watched his face fall in disappointment. Was that all? What did he expect? I shouted at him. It's a fucking trick.

  I can juggle, too. Only with three balls, like everybody else. Nothing hard. But I don't use just multicolored beanbags; I can juggle with bananas and shoes and mugs and teddy bears and umbrellas. Kids love it when I break eggs juggling. They assume that I do it on purpose, that I'm just clowning around.

  Zach is much better at the puppet shows than I am. I can only do two different voices and they sound exactly the same. Sometimes we do cook-a-meal parties—you come along with all the ingredients and teach a group of children how to make fairy cakes and sticky icing and hamburgers and how to cut circular ham sandwiches with pastry cutters. Then they eat everything while you clear up the mess. And if you're lucky the mother makes you a cup of tea.

  I'm the clown, the jester, noisy and bright and chaotic and falling over my own feet. Zach's the glum, serious sidekick. We'd just been to the party of a five-year-old called Tamsin—a roomful of tyrannical little girls in dresses that looked like meringues—and I was sweaty and exhausted after all my animated screeching. I wanted to go home, have a nap, read a newspaper in the bath.

  “Insects,” Zach said suddenly. “I heard of a guy who takes bugs and reptiles to children's parties and the children just touch them. That's all there is to it.”

  “I'm not keeping insects and reptiles in my flat.”

  He slurped his milk shake and looked wistful.

  “We could get some sort of insect that would bite the children. No, that wouldn't work. We'd be prosecuted. What would be better would be one that passed on a serious disease to the children, so that they got very ill, but only much later.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Don't you hate ‘Happy Birthday'?” he said.

  “Hate it.”

  We grinned at each other.

  “And you were terrible at juggling today.”

  “I know. I'm out of practice. They'll never invite us back. But that's fine, because Tamsin's dad put his arm around me.” I stood up to go. “Do you want to share a cab?”

  “No, it's okay.”

  We kissed each other and wandered off in our separate directions.

  Going back to the flat has been strange for the past few weeks, since Max left. I had only just got used to him being there: the toilet seat up instead of down, the wardrobe full of his suits and shirts, freshly squeezed orange juice and bacon in the fridge, another body in the bed—at night telling me I was beautiful, and in the morning telling me to get the fuck up because I was late again—someone to make meals for, someone to make meals for me and rub my back and order me to eat breakfast. Someone to make plans with and alter my life for. I had occasionally resented it, the limiting of my freedom. He'd nagged at me to be neater, more organized in my life. He thought I was a slob. He thought I was too dreamy. The things he had once found charming about me had begun to irritate him. But now I found that I missed sharing my life. I needed to learn to live alone once more. The delights of selfishness: I could eat chocolate in bed again, and make porridge for supper, and see The Sound of Music on video, and blue-tack notes to the wall, and be in a bad mood without worrying about it. I could meet someone new and begin the whole dizzying, delicious, dismaying round again.

  All around me, friends were beginning to settle down. They were in the jobs that they had trained for, with pensions and prospects. They had mortgages, washing machines, office hours. Lots were married, several even had babies. Maybe that was why Max and I had separated. It had become obvious that we weren't going to open a joint bank account and have children with his hair and my eyes.

  I was beginning to make convoluted scary calculations about how much of my life I had already lived, and how much time I had left; what I've done and will do. I am twenty-eight. I don't smoke, or hardly ever, and I eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I walk up stairs instead of taking the lift, and I have been known to go running. I reckon I've got at least fifty years to go, maybe sixty. That's enough time to learn how to develop my own films, to go whitewater rafting and see the northern lights, to meet the man of my dreams. Or the men of my dreams, more like. Last week I read a newspaper story about how women will soon be able to have babies when they're in their sixties, and I caught myself feeling relieved.

  Probably, I thought, Max would be at the party I was going to tonight. I promised myself, as I went home through the clogged traffic, that I was going to make myself look lovely. I would wash my hair and wear my red dress and laugh and flirt and dance and he'd see what he had walked out on, and he would see that I didn't give a damn. I am not lonely without him.

  I did wash my hair. I ironed my dress. I lay in a bath full of oils, with candles all round the edge, although it was still bright daylight outside. Then I ate two pieces of toast and Marmite and a cool, gleaming nectarine.

  In the end, Max wasn't even there, and after a bit I stopped looking round for him every time someone new walked through the door. I met a man called Robert, who was a lawyer with thick eyebrows, and a man called Terence, who was a pain. I danced rather wildly with my old mate Gordon, who had introduced me to Max all those months ago. I talked for a bit with Lucy, whose thirtieth birthday party this was, and her new boyfriend, who was about seven feet high with bleached hair. He had to lean right down to me; it made me feel like a dwarf, or a child. And at half past eleven, I left and went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant with my old friends Cathy and Mel and got mildly drunk, but in the nicest way possible. Spare ribs and slimy noodles and cheap red wine, until I started feeling cold in my thin red dress. Cold and tired and I wanted suddenly to go home and climb into my large bed.

  It was past one when I came back to the flat. Camden Town comes alive after midnight. The pavements were crawling with strange people, some languorous and some rather frenzied. A man in a green ponytail tried to grab me, but shrugged and grinned when I told him to piss off. A beautiful girl, wearing almost nothing, was twirling round and round on the pavement near my road, like a spinning top. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her.

  I stumbled in through the front door and turned on the hall light. There was a letter on the doormat. I picked it up and looked at t
he handwriting. I didn't recognize it. Neat black italics: Ms. Nadia Blake. I slid my finger under the gummed flap and slid out the letter.

  FOUR

  “Did he ransack the flat as well?”

  “What's that?”

  Links gestured at the mess, the cushions on the floor, the papers piled up on the carpet.

  “No,” I said. “It's just me. I've been a bit busy. I'm going to deal with it.”

  The detective looked nonplussed for a moment, as if he had just woken up and wasn't exactly sure where he was.

  “Er, Miss er . . .”

  “Blake.”

  “Yes, Miss Blake. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I rummaged around and found an ashtray, carved, as it happened, in the shape of the island of Ibiza. I suddenly started worrying about possible drug connotations, but Detective Chief Inspector Links apparently had more urgent things on his mind. He didn't look a well man. I've got an uncle who's had three heart attacks and still smokes, even though he has difficulty exerting enough suction to keep the cigarette alight. And a friend of Max's is recovering from a major nervous breakdown that involved him being institutionalized. That was a year ago but he still talks in the quavery voice of somebody trying not to cry. Links reminded me of both of them. Watching him light his cigarette was an exercise in suspense. His fingers shook so much that he could barely get the match together with the end of the cigarette, and then only for an inadequate microsecond. He looked as if he were trying to light it in the crow's nest of a North Sea trawler rather than in my relatively draft-free living room.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Can I get you something? Would you like some tea?”

  Links started to speak but was seized with a fit of bronchitic coughing that sounded very painful. All he could do was shake his head.

  “Some honey and lemon?”

  He carried on shaking. He took a dirty-looking handkerchief from his side pocket and wiped his eyes. When he spoke it was in quite a low voice, so I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying.

  “It's a matter of . . .” He paused for a moment. He kept losing the thread of what he was saying. “Of establishing access. That is, who has access.”

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “You already said that. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to over one sick letter. It'll be a big job. I have people to stay quite often. My boyfriend was here a lot. There are people in and out all the time. I was just away for a couple of months and a girlfriend of mine stayed here. Apparently it was virtually open house while she was here.”

  “Where is she now?” Links asked in what was not much more than a miserable gasp.

  “I think she's in Prague. She was doing some work there on her way back to Perth.”

  Links looked round at his colleague. The other policeman, Detective Inspector Stadler, looked a better insurance risk than Links. A bit wasted maybe, in an oddly attractive way. He was just completely impassive. He had straight hair combed back over his head, prominent cheekbones, and dark eyes, which he kept focused on me every second as if I were very very interesting but in a slightly odd way—I felt more like a car crash than a woman. Now he spoke for the first time:

  “Have you any idea who the note may have come from? Have you had anything similar? Any threatening calls? Any strange encounters with people?”

  “Oh, endless strange encounters,” I said. Links perked up and looked very slightly less like one of the undead. “My job involves going into different houses every week. I should explain that I'm not a burglar.” They didn't smile at all. Not remotely. “Me and my partner, we entertain at children's parties. The people you meet—honestly, you wouldn't believe it. I can tell you that being hit on by the father of the five-year-old you've just done a show for while the mother is in the kitchen lighting the candles on the cake—well, it lowers your view of human nature.”

  Links stubbed out his cigarette, which he'd only just half smoked, and lit another.

  “Miss, erm . . .” He looked down at his notebook. “Miss, erm.” He seemed to be having trouble reading his notes. “Erm, Blake. We have, erm, reason to believe that, currently, or as of the more recent, er, months, there may have been, er, other women also targeted by this person.” He kept darting glances toward Stadler, as if in search of moral support. “So one aim of our inquiries will be to establish, or, that is, to attempt to establish, possible connections between them.”

  “Who are they?”

  Links coughed again. Stadler made no attempt to fill in for him. He just sat and stared at me.

  “Well,” he said finally, “it may not be appropriate, as of this stage of the inquiry, to, erm, furnish precise details. It may hinder aspects of the investigation.”

  “Are you worried I might try to get in touch with them?”

  Links took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. I looked across at Stadler. For the first time he wasn't looking back. He seemed to be finding something of great interest in a notebook.

  “We'll keep you as in touch with our progress as we can,” Links said.

  “Investigation?” I said. “It's just a letter.”

  “It's important to take these matters seriously. Also, we have a psychologist, a Dr. Grace Schilling, who is an expert on, er. . . She should be here”—he looked at his watch—“at any minute, really.”

  There was a silence.

  “Look,” I said. “I'm not stupid. I had a break-in about a year ago—well, nothing was taken. I think I disturbed them. But it took the police about a day to get here and they did sod-all about it. Now I get a single nasty letter and it's a major operation. What's going on? Don't you have real grown-up crimes to solve?”

  Stadler snapped his notebook shut and put it in his pocket.

  “We've been accused of not being sufficiently sensitive to offenses targeted against women,” he said. “We take threats of this kind very seriously.”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “That's good, I suppose.”

  Dr. Schilling was the kind of woman I rather envied. She'd obviously done really well at school, got fantastic grades, and still looked rather intelligent. She dressed pretty elegantly as well, but even that was in an intelligent sort of way. She had this long blond hair that looked great but that she'd obviously pinned up in about three and a half seconds to show that she didn't take it all too seriously. She certainly wasn't the sort of person you'd catch standing on her head in front of a group of screaming tots. If I'd known she was coming I really would have tidied up the flat. The only thing that irritated me was that she had this air of extremely serious, almost sad, concern when she addressed me, as if she were presenting a religious TV program.

  “I understand you've been in a relationship which ended,” she said.

  “I can tell you that that letter wasn't written by Max. For all sorts of reasons, including the fact that he would have trouble composing a letter to the milkman. Anyway, he was the one that walked out.”

  “All the same, that might mean you were in a vulnerable state.”

  “Well, a pissed-off state, maybe.”

  “How tall are you, Nadia?”

  “Don't rub it in. I try not to think about it. Just a little over five foot. An emotionally vulnerable dwarf. Is that the point you're trying to make? You should be all right, then.”

  She didn't even smile.

  “Should I be worried?” I asked.

  Now there was a very long pause. When Dr. Schilling spoke, it was with great precision.

  “I don't think it would be . . . well, productive, to get alarmed. But I think you should behave as if you were worried, just to be on the safe side. You have been threatened. You should act as if the threat means what it says.”

  “Do you really think somebody just wants to kill me for no reason?”

  She looked thoughtful.

  “No reason?” she said. “Maybe. There are a lot of men who feel they have very good reasons for attacking or killing women. They may not
be reasons that would convince you or me. But that isn't much comfort, is it?”

  “It's not much comfort to me,” I said.

  “No,” said Dr. Schilling, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking to somebody else, somebody I couldn't see.

  FIVE

  They stayed and stayed. After a couple of hours Links received a message and shambled away, but Stadler and Dr. Schilling remained. While Schilling talked to me, Stadler went out and came back with sandwiches, cartons of drink, milk, fruit. Then, while he took me through the flat examining my security arrangements (to be substantially upgraded), she retreated into my kitchen area, made some tea. I even heard the rattle and clink and splashing of washing-up being done. She returned clutching mugs. Stadler took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

  “There's tuna and cucumber, salmon and cucumber, chicken salad, ham and mustard,” he announced.

  I took the ham, Dr. Schilling took the tuna, which made me think the tuna must be vastly healthier and that there was something slightly squalid and frivolous about my choice.

  “Are you some kind of medical policewoman?” I asked.

  Her mouth was full, so she could only shake her head while laboriously attempting to swallow her sandwich. I felt a moment of triumph. I'd caught her looking undignified.

  “No, no,” she said, as if I'd insulted her. “I do consulting work for them,” she said.

  “What's your real job?” I asked.

  “I work at the Welbeck Clinic,” she said.

  “What as?”

  “Grace is being too modest,” Stadler said. “She is eminent in her field. You're lucky to have her on your side.”

  Schilling looked sharply round at him, and went red, almost in anger or distress, I thought, rather than embarrassment. All these looks and whispered asides. I felt like an intruder into a group of old friends who had their own special catchphrases, jargon, their shared happy history of working together.