Beneath the Skin (33 page)

“Would you like to wait here?” she said.

I followed her through anyway. Together, we went into a large living room, obviously freshly painted in slate gray, with large French windows giving out onto a newly dug-over garden. On the mantelpiece there was a photo in a silver oval frame of three children. No Jenny. Was this what would happen to me, if I died—would the waters just close over me like this?

The room had maybe ten or twelve people in it, all holding glasses and standing in clusters. Maybe they had been friends of Jenny’s and now they were gathered here to welcome the new mistress of the house. Gloria went up to a solid-looking man with dark, graying hair and a jowly face. She put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He looked up sharply at me and walked across.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sorry to butt in,” I said.

“Gloria said you had something to tell me.”

“My name is Nadia Blake. I’m being threatened by the same man who killed Jenny.”

His face hardly altered. He looked around shiftily as if he was checking whether anybody else was paying attention.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, what do you want?”

“What do you mean? Your wife was murdered. Now he wants to kill me.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said evenly. “But why are you here?”

“I thought you could tell me things about Jenny.”

He took a sip of wine and began steering me toward the edge of the room.

“I’ve told the police everything that’s relevant,” he said. “I don’t quite see what you’re doing here. This has been a tragedy. Now I am just trying to get on with my own life as best as I can.”

“You seem to be managing pretty well,” I said, looking round the room.

His face turned purple.

“What did you say?” he said furiously. “Please leave now, Miss Blake.”

I felt in a panic of rage and mortification. I started to make a stammering attempt at self-justification. Even as I spoke, I saw a boy, a teenage boy, sitting alone on the window seat. He was skinny and pale, with greasy fair hair and dark smudges under his eyes, pimples on his forehead. He had about him all the awkward spindly hopelessness of male adolescence; all the messy, terrified confusion of a son who has lost his mother. Josh, the eldest son. I stared at him and our eyes met. He had huge dark eyes, like a spaniel’s. Lovely eyes in a plain face.

“I’ll go now,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. It’s just that I’m scared. I’m looking for help.”

He nodded at me. Maybe his face wasn’t so cruel, really, just a bit stupid and complacent. Maybe he was just like everybody else. A bit weaker, maybe, a bit more selfish.

“Sorry,” he said with a helpless shrug.

“Thanks.” I turned on my heel, trying not to cry, trying not to care that everyone was looking at me as if I was some beggar who had forced her way in. In the hall a little boy on a trike pedaled furiously across my path and stopped.

“I know you. You’re the clown,” he shouted. “Lena, the clown’s come to visit. Come and see the clown.”

“I’ll have everything,” I said firmly. “Eggs and bacon, fried bread, fried potatoes, tomato, sausage, mushrooms. And what’s that?”

The woman behind the counter inspected the contents of the metal container.

“Black pudding.”

“All right, I’ll have that. And a pot of tea. What about you?”

Lynne had gone slightly pale, maybe at the sight of what was being piled onto my plate.

“Oh,” she said. “A piece of toast. Some tea.”

We carried our trays out of the café into the sunny garden on the edge of the park. We’d arrived when it opened and we were the first. I chose a discreet table in a corner and we unloaded our plates and cups and metal teapots. I began eating. I attacked the fried egg first, cutting into the yolk so that it spread around the plate. Lynne looked at me with what I took to be fastidious disapproval.

“Is this not your sort of thing?” I said, wiping my mouth with the paper napkin.

“It’s a bit early in the day for me.” She sipped her tea delicately and took a caterpillar-sized nibble out of her toast.

It was a beautiful morning. Tame sparrows stalked around the table legs in search of crumbs, squirrels were chasing each other along branches of the large trees on the other side of the wall in the park proper. For a blessed few seconds I just pretended Lynne wasn’t there. I took bites of my heart-attack breakfast and washed it down with mahogany-brown tea.

“Do you want me to move away from the table?” Lynne asked. “When your friend arrives.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “You know her.”

“What?” she asked, looking startled.

This was the bit I enjoyed. It must have been the magician in me.

“It’s Grace Schilling.”

I took a triumphant bite of grilled tomato attached to a piece of bacon.

“But . . .” Lynne stammered.

“Hm?” was all I could manage from my full mouth. I could see she was trying to decide which of fourteen questions she was going to ask.

“Who . . . who arranged it?”

“I did.”

“But . . . does DCI Links know?”

I shrugged.

“Dr. Schilling may have let him know. That’s not my problem.”

“But . . .”

“There she is.”

Dr. Schilling had walked into the eating area. There were several tables occupied now—people with children, couples spreading out the Sunday papers—and she hadn’t spotted us yet. She was smartly dressed as usual, maybe just a bit more casual. She wore dark blue trousers that came only halfway down her ankles and a black V-necked sweater. And she wore sunglasses. She caught sight of us and walked across. She took the sunglasses off and put them on the table with a bunch of keys and, I was interested to see, a packet of cigarettes. She looked at us warily. She had her normal cool expression and I felt in an amused way as if I had been caught sitting in a pigsty with my head in the trough.

“Do you want some breakfast?” I said.

“I’m not really a breakfast sort of person.”

“Black coffee and a cigarette?” I said.

“That’s usually all I can manage.”

I looked over at the aghast Lynne.

“Could you get Dr. Schilling a coffee?” I asked.

Lynne scampered off.

“It’s a bit like having a PA,” I said with a smile. “I quite like it. Did you talk to Links?”

She lit a cigarette.

“I told him you had asked to see me.”

“Is that all right?”

“He was surprised.”

I cleared up the last of the egg yolk with my fried bread.

“Can you be discreet?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the files,” I said. “Well, some of them. It wasn’t exactly through the normal channels, so I’d rather you didn’t talk about it too much.”

She was startled. Of course she was. I was getting used to the look. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and shifted in her chair. She was ill at ease. Did she feel she had lost control? I hoped so.

“Then why did you tell me?”

“I need to ask you some questions. I know that you’ve been lying to me solidly.” She looked up sharply, opened her mouth to speak but didn’t. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested in that anymore. I want you to realize that I know about Zoe and Jennifer. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. I’ve got no illusions. All I want is for you to be frank with me.”

Lynne returned with the coffee.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked.

“Sorry, Lynne, but I think this conversation had better be private,” I said.

She flushed and moved away to a neighboring table. I turned back to Grace Schilling. “I don’t have any opinion one way or the other about the general ability of the police. But obviously you’ll understand that I don’t have any confidence in their ability to protect me from being killed. You, they, whatever, have had two women under protection and they’re both dead.”

“Nadia,” said Grace. “I can appreciate how you feel, but there were particular reasons for that. In the first case of Miss Haratounian—”

“Zoe.”

“Yes. In that case the degree of threat wasn’t appreciated until it was too late. In the case of Mrs. Hintlesham, there was a problem . . .”

“You mean the arrest of her husband?”

“Yes, so you should realize that your situation is entirely different.”

I poured myself a new cup of tea.

“Grace, you may have misunderstood me. I’m not here to score points against you, or gather information for a complaint, or to get some reassurance. But please don’t insult me by saying I shouldn’t be worried. I’ve seen the police memo, which you’ve also seen, about how the scene of my murder should be dealt with.”

Grace lit another cigarette.

“What do you want from me?” she asked impassively.

“There was no report by you in the files I saw. Maybe that’s because it says things about me I wouldn’t like. I need to know what you know.”

“I’m not sure I know anything useful.”

“Why me? I hoped the files would show something we had in common. I couldn’t find anything beyond the fact that we’re all little.”

Grace looked reflective. She took a deep drag on her cigarette.

“Yes,” she said. “And you’re all striking-looking, in different ways.”

“Well, that’s very nice. . . .”

“You’re all vulnerable. Sexual sadists prey on women the way a hunting animal preys on other animals. It chooses ones who hang back, who are unsure. Zoe Haratounian was new to living in London, unsure of herself. Jenny Hintlesham was trapped in an unhappy marriage. You’ve just split up with a boyfriend.”

“Is that it?”

“It may be enough.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

She paused again for a while.

“There will be clues,” she said. “There are always clues. It is just a question of recognizing them as such. A French criminologist, Dr. Locarde, once famously said that ‘every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of the crime—something no matter how minute—and always takes something of the scene away with him.’ Until we find out precisely what those clues are—and we will find out—all that I can say is that he’s probably white. Probably in his twenties or early thirties. Above average height. Physically strong. Educated, possibly to university level. But I’m sure you’ve worked most of that out for yourself.”

“Do I know him?”

Grace stubbed out her cigarette and started to speak, then stopped and for the first time looked really unhappy. She was having obvious difficulty pulling herself together.

“Nadia,” she said finally. “I wish I could say something helpful. I’d like to say it’s not somebody you know well, because I hope that the police would have established some connection with the other women. But it might be a close friend, might be somebody you’ve met once and forgotten about, or it might be someone who just saw you once.”

I looked around. I was glad I had chosen to meet her on a sunny morning with children running around making a racket.

“It’s not a matter of sleeping,” I said. “At the moment I don’t dare close my eyes because when I do I see the photograph of Jenny Hintlesham lying dead with . . . well, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I can’t accept that there is someone I have met, who is walking around leading a normal life after having done that.”

Grace was running a long, slim finger around the rim of her coffee cup.

“He’s highly organized. Look at the notes and the effort taken to deliver them.”

“But I still can’t believe that the police couldn’t have protected these women after he’d said what he was going to do.”

Grace nodded vigorously.

“In the last few weeks I’ve done some research. There have been a number of cases of this kind. One was a case a few years ago in Washington, D.C. A man made murderous explicit threats in notes to women. The husband of the first woman hired armed guards and she was still murdered in her home. The second had twenty-four-hour police guard and was tortured and killed in her own bedroom while her husband was in the house. I’m sorry to talk like this, but you asked me to be frank. Some of these men see themselves as geniuses. They’re not geniuses. They’re more like men with an obsessive hobby. What they are is motivated. They want to make women suffer and then to kill them, and they devote all their energy and resourcefulness and intelligence to carrying it out. The police do their best, but it’s hard to combat such singleness of purpose.”

“What happened to that killer in Washington?”

“They finally caught him at the scene.”

“Did they save the woman?”

Grace looked away.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “All I can say is that this isn’t a sweating psychopath living in a cardboard box under a bridge. He’s probably functioning perfectly well at the moment. Ted Bundy returned from committing two separate murders and, according to his girlfriend, he didn’t even seem tired.”

“Who’s he?”

“Another man who killed women.”

“But why go to all this trouble?” I protested. “Why not just attack women in dark alleys?”

“The trouble is part of the pleasure. The point I’m making, Nadia, is that you’ve got to give up all your commonsense views about character or motive. He’s not after your money. He doesn’t even hate you. At least, that’s not how he sees it. He may see it as love. Think of the letters he sends: They are love letters, in a perverse way. He becomes obsessive about the women he chooses.”

“You mean he’s the train-spotter and I’m the train.”

“Well, sort of.”

“But why? I can’t understand all this effort, writing notes, doing a drawing, taking terrible risks delivering the notes, and then killing these ordinary women horribly. Why?”

I looked Grace in the eyes. Her face was now almost a mask, expressionless.

“You think because terrible things are happening there have to be big motives. At some point, this person will be in custody and someone—it may be me—will talk to him about his life. Maybe he was savagely beaten as a child, or abused by an uncle, or suffered a head injury which resulted in a brain lesion. That will be the reason. Of course there are plenty of people who were savagely beaten or abused or injured who don’t grow up as sexual psychopaths. It’s just what he likes doing. Why do we like doing what we like doing?”