Beneath The Skin

That left two letters to Josh and Harry, duplicated messages from Lascelles about sports day; various advertisements and solicitations that I filed straight in the bin. And then after all that there was one letter, addressed to me. Now, whenever there’s a letter addressed to me it almost always turns out to be a bill from a mail-order company that goes straight into Clive’s pile. If not that, then it’s a letter from a mail-order company who have obtained my address from another mail-order company.

But this was different. The name and address were neatly handwritten. And I couldn’t recognize the handwriting. It wasn’t Mummy’s or a friend or relative. This was interesting and I almost wanted to savor it. I poured another cup of coffee, took a sip, and then opened the envelope. It contained a folded slip of paper that was much too small for the envelope, and I could see straightaway that it didn’t have much writing on it. I smoothed it out on the table:

Dear Jenny,

I hope you don’t mind if I call you Jenny. But you see I think you’re very beautiful. You smell very nice, Jenny, and you have beautiful skin. And I’m going to kill you.

It seemed like the silliest thing. I tried to think if someone was playing a practical joke. Some of Clive’s friends have the most awful sense of humor. I mean, for example, he once went to this stag night for a friend of his called Seb and it really was awful, with two stripper-grams and lipstick on everyone’s collar. Anyway, Jeremy came down and we started talking about some of the problems with the kitchen. In these last horribly hot days I’d been worrying about the Aga and I wanted to see if the skylights above could be made to open. There were these funny window catches I’d seen in House and Garden that could be opened with string. I showed the picture to Jeremy but he wasn’t impressed. He never is unless he’s thought of it himself. So we had a big bust-up about that. He was very funny about it, really. Stubborn, though. Then I remembered the letter and I showed it to him.

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t find it funny at all.

“Do you know who might have done this?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“You’d better call the police,” he said.

“Oh don’t be so silly,” I said. “It’s probably just someone playing a joke. I’ll make a fool of myself.”

“Doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter if someone’s playing a joke. You must call the police.”

“I’ll show it to Clive.”

“No,” Jeremy said firmly. “Call the police now. If you’re too embarrassed then I’ll do it for you.”

“Jeremy…”

He was an absolute pig about it. He rang directory inquiries himself and got the number of some local police station and not only that-he then dialed the number himself and then handed me the phone as if I was a toddler talking to her granny.

“There,” he said.

The phone rang and rang. I put my tongue out at Jeremy.

“Probably nobody’s home… Oh, hello? Look, this is going to sound really stupid, but I’ve just been sent this letter.”

TWO

I spoke for a few minutes to a girl who sounded like one of those people who rings you up and tries to give you a quote for some dreadful metal window frames. I was dubious and she sounded bored and she said she’d arrange for somebody to call round, but there might be a bit of a delay and I said it didn’t matter to me and I ended the conversation and thought nothing more of it.

I went back to Jeremy, who was helping himself to more coffee from the Hintlesham self-service canteen, as Clive has christened the commune we’re perched in at the moment. The old dears had knocked through left, right, and center, replaced all the paneled doors, hacked out every chimney piece, and hunted every surviving cornice into extinction. I know that everybody was doing that in the sixties, but it looked as if they were trying to pretend they lived in a council flat at the top of an apartment block rather than in a semidetached house on the end of an early Victorian terrace.

Much of the job was restoring the house to a style that suited its history. The only place where I drew the line was in the kitchen. The Victorian kitchen was a place for scullery maids and cooks, and we hoped to do ourselves a little better than that, but I still wanted a period atmosphere. The tricky bit was not to end up with the style that Jeremy calls farmhouse Ikea. I’d made Jeremy redo the plans about eight times. There also happened to be a tricky pillar that we had to work around. I wanted just to take the wretched thing away, but Jeremy said the back of the house would fall down.

We were right in the middle of discussing his latest bit of cleverness when there was a ring at the door. As usual I left it to Lena, since the only people coming into the house were carrying pots of paint or radiators or strange copper pipes. I heard her yelling for me at the top of the stairs. Being shouted at in my own house is an experience I rank alongside chewing tinfoil. I walked up to the ground floor. Lena was standing at the open front door.

“If you’ve something to say to me, could you come and tell me?”

“I did tell you,” she said in an innocent tone.

I gave up and walked toward her. I saw now that there were two policemen in uniform standing on the front step. They looked young and uneasy, like a couple of Boy Scouts who were asking to wash a car and weren’t sure what reception they’d get. My heart sank.

“Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“Yes, yes, it’s very nice of you to come round. But I can’t think that it’s necessary.” They looked even more awkward. “But come in. Since you’re here.”

They both wiped their feet with immense care on the mat before following me inside and down the stairs to the rudiments of our kitchen. Jeremy made a face at me that basically meant, Should I make myself scarce? I shook my head.

“This will only take a minute,” I said. I pointed out the letter where it still lay by the stove. “You’ll see it’s just something stupid. It’s really not worth any trouble. Can I get you some tea or something?”

One of them said, “No, madam,” and the two of them looked down at the note while I got back to work with Jeremy. After a few minutes I looked up and saw that one of the officers had stepped just outside the French windows into the garden and was talking into his radio. The other was looking around at the room.

“New kitchen?” he said.

“Yes,” I said and pointedly turned back to Jeremy. I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation about interior decoration with a junior police officer. The other one stepped back inside. I don’t know whether it was the uniform, or their black boots, or that they’d removed their caps, but they made this really rather large basement room feel small and cramped. “Are you finished, then?” I asked.

“No, Mrs. Hintlesham. I’ve just been talking to someone back at the station. Someone else is going to come over.”

“What for?”

“He wants to have a look at your note.”

“I was actually planning to go out later this morning.”

“He’ll only be a minute.”

I gave a sort of huffing sigh.

“Really!” I said in a reproving tone. “Isn’t this just a waste of everybody’s time?” They answered only with lumpish shrugs that were difficult to argue with. “Are you waiting here?”

“No, madam. We’ll be in the car outside until the detective sergeant arrives.”

“Oh, all right.”

They shambled out shamefacedly. I went up with Jeremy, which was just as well because a tin of National Trust paint in entirely the wrong shade had arrived. One of my main discoveries during this whole horrific process