Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

  I moved back out of his reach. He was lying sprawled on the floor, twisted, whimpering. What I could see of his face was a livid blistering red.

  “If you move one inch towards me,” I said, “I'll break every fucking bone in your body. You know I'll do it. I've seen the pictures. I've seen what you did to Jenny.”

  But still I moved backward, never taking my eyes off him. I glanced around quickly and found the phone. Still with the iron in my hand, the cord trailing on the floorboards, I dialed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I put the receiver down and stood there, as far away as it was possible to get from him in that room. He was still slumped on the floor groaning and wheezing. I wondered if he was gathering his strength, if he would raise himself to his feet and come at me. Should I go back to him and hit him again? Should I run to the front door and out? I couldn't move my feet. There was nothing I could do. Suddenly I started to tremble in every bit of my body. I leaned back against the wall to try and steady myself.

  I saw some traces of movement, tentative at first, then more purposeful. He was pulling himself up, groaning with the effort. I quickly saw that there was no prospect at all of his getting up. His legs were clearly useless. All he could do was drag himself, whimpering with the pain, so he was leaning against the bookshelf. He pushed himself up a bit farther and twisted so he could look at me. He was really badly burned on his face, blistered across his cheeks and forehead. One of his eyes was almost closed. Saliva was spilling out of his mouth, running down his chin. He coughed.

  “What've you done?”

  I didn't speak.

  “I don't understand,” he said. “I didn't do it.”

  I took a firm grip on the iron.

  “One move, and I'll smash some other bit of you.”

  He shifted slightly and cried out.

  “Jesus.” He panted. “It hurts so fucking much.”

  “Why did you do it?” I said. “She had children. What had she done?”

  “You're mad,” he said. “I didn't do it, I swear, Nadia. They told you. I was a hundred miles away when Zoe was killed.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I know you didn't kill Zoe. You were going to but you didn't. You killed Jenny.”

  “You're wrong, I swear it,” he said. “Oh God, what have you done to my face? Why did you do that to me?”

  He was crying now.

  “You were going to kill me. Like you killed her.”

  I was having difficulty in speaking. My breath was coming in uneven gasps, my heart beating hard.

  “I swear, Nadia,” he said in little more than a whisper.

  “Shut the fuck up. I've seen the pictures. In the drawer.”

  “What?”

  “Of you and Fred, the ones you took down before I arrived.”

  He didn't miss a beat. “I admit I hid the pictures. I got in a panic because it looked bad. But it doesn't mean I killed anybody.”

  “The way you panicked when we were due to meet Louise at the flat?”

  “No, that was a real message. Nadia, you're all confused here. . . .”

  I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I wanted him just to admit to what he'd done and to say something, however inadequate, that would make it comprehensible. Now I realized that he would never give up, and that I would never understand. He would lie and lie and maybe even he would grow to believe all his lies in the end. I stared at him, his peeling face, his writhing body, the one eye gazing up at me.

  “I ought to kill you,” I said. “I should finish you off before the police get here.”

  “Maybe you should,” he said. “Because I didn't do it, Nadia, and there's no evidence against me. And they'll let me go and they'll send you to prison. But could you do it? Could you, Nadia? Could you kill me?”

  “I'd like to do it, I promise you.”

  “Do it then. Come on, darling. Come on.” Spittle ran down his face. He tried to smile.

  “I'd like to make you suffer the way you made Zoe and Jenny suffer.”

  “I'll help you,” he said, and with much panting and groaning, he started to crawl toward me across the floor like a big fat horrible slug. His progress was very slow.

  “Come any closer and I'll smash your head,” I said, taking a firm grip on the iron.

  “Do it,” Morris said. “You're going to prison anyway. They're going to let me go. Even if they don't, I'll be out soon. Wouldn't it be better to get rid of me?”

  “Stop it, stop it!” I shouted and started to cry. I felt he was wriggling around in my head as well as on the floorboards. I was about to fling the iron at him when there was a banging at the door and voices shouting my name. I looked around; there were lights outside. I ran across and opened the door. It turned out to be easy. It took no more than a couple of seconds. A blur of figures rushed past me. There were a couple of police officers in uniform and Cameron. Over his shoulder I could see two police cars, and another was arriving. Cameron looked at the scene. He was sweating, his tie flapping over his shoulder.

  “What the hell have you done?”

  I didn't speak. I just bent down and placed the iron on the floor.

  “Did you call an ambulance?”

  I shook my head. He shouted across at one of the officers, who walked out.

  “She attacked me,” Morris said. “She's gone mad.”

  Cameron looked from Morris to me and back again in obvious bafflement. “Are you hurt?” he said to Morris.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I'm so fucking hurt. Mad.”

  Cameron walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You all right?” he whispered.

  I nodded. I kept looking at Morris slumped on the floor and every time I looked at him he was staring back. Staring at me with an eye that never seemed to blink. The officer bent over and was saying something, but he just kept on looking at me.

  “Sit down,” Cameron said to me.

  I looked around. He had to lead me across the room to one of the chairs by the table. I sat so I didn't have to see Morris. I thought I would throw up if I had to look at him for one more second.

  “Now, Nadia, I have to say this before we do anything more, so listen to me. You don't have to say anything. But if you do say anything, then in the event that charges are brought, anything you say may be used as evidence. Also, you have a right to a lawyer. If you wish, we can arrange for one to be provided for you. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “No, you have to say out loud that you understand.”

  “I understand. I don't mind talking.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Look in the drawer. Over there.”

  He went over to the open front door and barked out something about a scene-of-crime officer. An ambulance arrived noisily. A man and a woman in green overalls rushed in and bent down over Morris. Cameron stared at me. From his pocket he took thin plastic gloves that were more like the rubbishy ones they give away in petrol stations than the kind that surgeons use. He opened the drawer and looked at the photographs.

  “He knew Fred,” I said.

  The scene was becoming farcical. Cameron was staring stupefied at the picture. Morris was whimpering in pain as they cut his trousers off him. Then Links arrived.

  “What the hell . . . ?” he said, trying to make sense of what happened.

  “She attacked Morris with an iron,” Cameron said.

  “What the fuck—Why?”

  “She said he did the murder.”

  “But . . .”

  Cameron handed Links one of the photographs. He stared at it. Then he looked at me.

  “Yes, but still . . .” He turned to Cameron. “Have you cautioned her?”

  “Yes. She says she's willing to talk.”

  “Good. What about Burnside?”

  “I haven't managed to talk to him.”

  Links leaned down by Morris and showed him the photograph. In response he just shook
his head and groaned. Then he came over and sat by me. I was feeling calm now, clear-headed.

  “Did Morris attack you?”

  “No,” I said. “If Morris had attacked me, I would be dead now. No, not dead. Dying. Being killed.”

  “But Nadia,” Links said in a gentle tone. “You do realize that, well, for example, Morris Burnside couldn't have killed Zoe Haratounian. He wasn't there.”

  “I know. I know who killed Zoe.”

  “What? Who?”

  “It suddenly came to me. You all got it into your heads that the person who sent the notes must have killed her. But what if somebody else killed her first?”

  “Why would anyone else kill her?”

  “I was thinking about something that Grace Schilling told me. Something about how the criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene and always takes something away. You've heard that?” I looked up at Cameron, who was busying himself with the contents of the drawer. “I saw the forensic report of the crime scene. Do you remember the report on the shirt she was wearing when she was found?”

  “Yes, I do, but how on earth do you—”

  “Do you remember what it said?”

  “It shared the background traces of the flat in common with her other clothes, the carpets, the beds. Just her and her ex-boyfriend.”

  “But the shirt shouldn't have had traces of Fred. She came into the flat carrying it in a plastic bag. She had bought it the day before with her friend, Louise.” I twisted my head to look over at Morris. He was paying attention. “Fred left traces of hair on Zoe's shirt while he was strangling her.”

  I thought I almost caught the tiniest trace of a smile on Morris's face.

  “You didn't know that, did you?” I said to him. “Your friend killed Zoe before you could.” I looked at Stadler and Links. “Two murderers. See? Two. Didn't you think about why the murders were so different? There wasn't any fucking escalation. It was because they were done by different people. Was that why it was so violent, Morris? Did you punish Jenny because you'd missed out on Zoe?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

  “But there was a compensation,” I said. “You suddenly found yourself with the perfect alibi. It gave you a chance to get at me from close up, to really watch me suffer.”

  “But how could Fred have done it?” Links asked. “Miss Haratounian wasn't even intending to return to her flat.”

  “I don't think he planned it,” I said. “That's what I've been puzzling about, sitting here. I was thinking about that strange thing that was stolen, the crappy hanging from the wall that Fred gave her. Why would anybody take that? I don't think it was taken. I think Fred took it back. I think he came to collect his stuff. Zoe came back suddenly and he grabbed the cord from her dressing gown and strangled her.

  “That's why the forensics were so difficult. The thing he took away was something that had belonged to him. What he brought to the scene was just more of what was already there. More Fred. Too much Fred. And he had the perfect alibi as well. The police knew he couldn't have written the notes. And who else would have killed Zoe but the man who said he was going to? Funny, isn't it, Morris? You and Fred made a great team, if you'd only known it.”

  The paramedics had lifted Morris onto a stretcher and were inserting a drip.

  “Are you going to look in his pockets?”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know. I think he was going to attack me.”

  Cameron glanced at Links, who nodded. Morris's nice new trousers were now in halves. They had endless pockets, and Cameron started rummaging in them. I saw something glisten in his hands. He was holding up a wire.

  “What's this?” he said to Morris.

  “I was doing some repairs,” he answered.

  “What repairs were you doing that needed piano wire tied into a running noose?”

  He didn't reply. He stared at me instead and said in a whisper, “Darling. I'll be back, darling.”

  The paramedics picked up the stretcher and carried it out. Links shouted at one of the uniformed officers.

  “Two of you go with him to the hospital. Caution him on the way. Keep him fully secure—no access.”

  I watched him go. He looked at me steadily until they turned the corner, with his bright eye, his friendly murderer's face. He was smiling at me through his mask of blood and blisters.

  Then: “What about Fred?” I said.

  Links gave a sigh. “We'll interview him immediately. Or as soon as we can.”

  “What about me? Can I go?”

  “We'll give you a lift home.”

  “I'll walk. Alone.”

  Links stood firmly in front of me.

  “Miss Blake, if you refuse to go in a police car and with police protection, I shall have you restrained.”

  “I think,” I said, as coolly as I could manage, “I think I would feel safer on my own.”

  “Very well,” he said heavily. I saw fear in his face: He was looking at public disgrace, a career in tatters.

  “I was always safer on my own.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  What did I do next? What does one do when a life has been given back?

  I spent the first day and night at my parents' house, helping my father paint the garden shed and lying facedown on the faded chenille counterpane in my old bedroom, the smell of mothballs and dust in my nose, while my mother clattered anxiously round the kitchen, making milky cups of tea and baking ginger biscuits that I couldn't eat. Every time she saw me she would gaze at me with her red-rimmed eyes and press my shoulder or put her hand cautiously on my hair. I had told them something of what had happened, but I had left everything out. Everything that mattered.

  Then I went back home and I cleaned my flat. My first thought had been that I would move out immediately, pack up my bags and begin again—but what would be the point of that if I couldn't begin again with me? I didn't want to. So I threw open the French windows, and I put on an old pair of cotton dungarees that looked as if they had been given to me as a joke—certainly I couldn't remember buying them. I turned on the radio so it was blaring cheerful, inane music through all the rooms. I went through every drawer. I filled bin bags with torn tights, old envelopes, scraps of hard soap, empty toilet rolls, leaking pens, moldy cheese. I put newspapers in a pile of recycling, bottles in a large box. I folded clothes or hung them in the wardrobe, filled a laundry basket with washing, put bills in piles, poured bleach down the sink and lavatory and anywhere else that looked like it needed it. I defrosted the fridge, scrubbed the kitchen floor. I cleaned the windows. I dusted, for Christ's sake.

  It took two days. For two days I just worked, morning till evening. It was like meditation. I could have thoughts without really thinking, let memories bob around without pursuing them, without tracking them down to their source. I didn't feel euphoric, and I hardly even felt relieved, but bit by bit I felt I was crossing back over into my life. I picked up Morris's business card from my desk and remembered his bright eyes watching me as he had been carried away, and put it with the other rubbish in the bin bag. I screwed up the paper covered with my jottings from the case files Cameron had filched for me and threw that away too, though not before copying down Louise's address. I collected two small buttons from the floor. Cameron's? I held them for a minute in the palm of my hand before depositing them into a shoe box, which from now on would be where I kept my sewing things.

  I screened all my calls—and there were a lot of them, because the first tremors of the story had reached the media. There were even pictures of us—Zoe, Jenny, and me, though I didn't know where they had managed to get hold of the one of me—in a line across the top of page three of the Participant, as if we had all of us died. Or all lived. Reporters rang, and friends suddenly wanted to get in touch, and Cameron rang several times with a hissing, secret urgency, and people I had met once or twice in my life rang, breathless with discovering that they knew someone who was suddenly and briefly a lit
tle bit famous. I didn't pick up the phone.

  Not until early on the morning of the fourth day after, a blowy beautiful day when the sun was streaming in through the open French windows and the first few autumn leaves were scattering themselves under the pear tree, where I had first put my arms round Cameron and kissed him. I was thinking about beginning on my garden next, hacking down the nettles, when the phone rang and the answering machine clicked on.

  “Nadia,” said a voice that made me stop in the middle of pouring boiling water over a tea bag. “Nadia, it's Grace. Grace Schilling.” Pause. “Nadia, if you're listening to this, can you pick up the phone?” Then: “Please. This is urgent.”

  I crossed over to the telephone.

  “I'm here.”

  “Thanks. Listen, can we meet? There's something important I need to tell you.”

  “Can't you tell me over the phone?”

  “No. I need to see you.”

  “Really important?”

  “I think so. Can I come to your flat in, say, forty-five minutes?”

  I looked round at my gleaming home that smelled of bleach and polish.

  “Not here. On the heath?”

  “I'll come over to your side. Ten o'clock, by the pavilion.”