Beneath The Skin

I looked at him.

“You mean brave like Zoe and Jenny?”

He didn’t reply.

Mum had made a neck of lamb stew, with rice-overcooked so it stuck together in lumps-and a green salad. I used to love lamb stew when I was a girl. How do you ever tell your mother you’ve gone off something? It was hard to eat, gristly and with too many sharp splinters of bones. Dad opened a bottle of red wine, although neither of them ever drink at lunchtime. They were so pleased to see me. They fussed over me, as if I were a stranger. I felt like a stranger with these two nice old people, who weren’t really old yet.

Always cautious, making their way through life in a gingerly fashion. They were careful with me, as well, waiting up for me every time I went out in the evenings, putting a hot-water bottle in my bed on cold nights, telling me to put on an extra layer when it was cold, sharpening my crayons for me before the beginning of each new school term. It used to drive me insane, their care, the way they thought about every detail of my life. Now the memory made me feel intensely nostalgic: a lump of homesickness beneath my ribs.

I thought I would wait until after lunch to tell them. We drank coffee in the living room, with mint chocolates. I could see Cameron sitting at the wheel of his car. I cleared my throat.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.

“Yes?”

Mum looked at me expectantly, apprehensively.

“I… there’s a man who-” I stopped and looked at the pleasure flowering on her face. She thought I had a serious boyfriend at last; she had never thought much of Max as a long-term possibility. I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “Oh, it’s nothing really.”

“No, go on. Tell us. We want to hear, don’t we, Tony?”

“Later,” I said, standing up abruptly. “First I want Dad to show me what’s going on in the garden.”

The plums were ripening on the tree, and he was growing runner beans, lettuce, and potatoes. There were tomato plants in his greenhouse, and he insisted on giving me a plastic tray of cherry tomatoes to take back with me.

“Your mother’s got some jars of strawberry jam she has set by for you,” he said.

I took hold of his arm.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad, I know we’ve had our disagreements”-homework, cigarettes, drink, makeup, staying out late, politics, drugs, boyfriends, lack of boyfriends, serious jobs, you name it-“but I just wanted to say that you’ve been a good father.”

He made an embarrassed tutting sound in the back of his throat and patted my shoulder.

“Your mother will be wondering what’s keeping us.”

I said good-bye in the hall. I couldn’t hug them properly because I was holding the tomatoes and the jam. I pressed my cheek against Mum’s and breathed in the familiar smell of vanilla, powder, soap, and mothballs. Smell of my childhood.

“Good-bye,” I said, and they smiled and waved. “Good-bye.”

For just one moment, I let myself think I would never see them again, but you can’t be like that; you can’t walk down the path and get into the car and smile and keep on going if you let yourself be like that.

All the way home, I pretended to sleep. I told Stadler that he should stay in his car after he had done his check round the flat. I wanted to be alone for a while. He started to protest, but the pager strapped to the belt of his trousers bleeped, and I slammed the door in his face.

I sat on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. I listened to myself breathing. I waited, not for anything to happen but for this feeling to go away.

Then the telephone rang, as if it was ringing inside my skull. I reached out a hand, picked it up.

“Nadia.” Morris’s voice was hoarse and urgent.

“Yes?”

“It’s me. Don’t say anything. Listen, Nadia. I’ve found something out. I can’t tell you over the phone. We’ve got to meet.”

I felt the fear growing in my stomach, a great tumor of fear.

“What is it?”

“Come to my flat, as soon as you can. There’s something you’ve got to see. Is anyone with you?”

“No. They’re outside.”

“Who is it?”

“Stadler.”

I heard the intake of Morris’s breath. When he spoke again, he was very calm and slow.

“Get away from him, Nadia. I’m waiting for you.”

I put down the phone and stood up, balanced on the balls of my feet. So it was Cameron, after all. My fear ebbed away, and I was left feeling strong, springy, and full of clarity. It had come at last. The waiting was over, and with it all the grief and all the dread. And I was ready and it was time to go.

TWENTY-ONE

As I walked through my front door my head felt very clear. I knew what I was going to do. Matters had become simple for the moment. The layer of fear was still there, but even that had receded a little. Cameron was out of his car and beside me in a second, looking questioning, hopeful even.

“I’m going up the road to get some food for supper,” I said.

We walked along together. I didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “For everything. I just want to make it all right. For you and me. Us.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

He didn’t reply. We walked across High Street and along the pavement until we were standing outside Marks amp; Spencer. We mustn’t have an argument, nothing to arouse his suspicions. I put my hand on his forearm. Contact but nothing excessive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not dealing with things in a rational way at the moment. It’s not the time.”

“I understand,” he said.

I turned to go into the shop. I gave a sigh. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Don’t worry.”

The Camden Town Marks amp; Spencer has a small back entrance. Up the escalator and out, and within a few minutes I was on an underground train. Going down the escalator to the platform, the warm air blowing past me, I had looked back. He was definitely not there.

As I sat on the train for the short journey, I tried to make sense of what Morris had said. I felt as if I had been trapped for weeks in a thick mist and now it was not exactly lifting, but it was becoming thinner and some sort of landscape was starting to become visible. If it had been a policeman, if it had been Cameron, suddenly what had seemed impossible became simple. The police had easy unquestioned access to Zoe’s flat, to Jenny’s house. My heart sank. To my flat. But why would they do that? Why would Cameron do that?

I only had to think of Cameron’s gaze and I knew the answer. I remembered my first meetings with the police, Cameron in the corner, his eyes fixed on me. Cameron in my bed. I had never been looked at like that before, never touched like that, as if I were an infinitely attractive and strange object. I’d felt he wanted to look at me and touch me and penetrate me and taste me all at the same time, as if nothing could ever be enough. It had been wonderfully exciting at first and then repellent, and now it seemed appallingly understandable. To be right next to the woman you were terrifying, to fuck her, to find out all her secrets. What a turn-on. And yet, what evidence was there? Had Morris found something I could use?

Morris’s flat was only a few minutes’ walk from the tube station. The main road itself was packed with crowds