Under Your Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

it. But I have to tell her what happened. I don’t want to alarm her, I say, but she needs to be cautious. She should make sure the doors and windows are locked. She is not to walk across the common, not with Millie, not alone. She should be on her guard. We don’t know who is out there, I say, searching for alarm on her face, seeing only impassivity.
    She stares at me from behind two drapes of black hair. When I have finished, she looks away, bites at a piece of skin at the corner of a nail, and then picks at it with her thumb. She tells me she is always careful when she is looking after Millie and is always sure to put on the burglar alarm. It’s probably just my imagination, but she sounds a bit defensive, as if I have made up the whole story just to get at her. I must have said it all wrong.
    I stare at the magazine open in front of her. It’s a photo spread of Pippa Middleton, and Marta has doodled on the page in pen, though they are not really doodles, more like score marks. She seems to have scratched out Pippa Middleton’s face.
    I ask her how her course is going—she is learning English at a school in Tooting. I mention some bar I’ve heard about where young people go that “sounds quite jolly.” I can’t believe I’ve just said that. Quite jolly? Bloody hell. No wonder she hates me. But I worry for her. When the doorbell rings, I flee, grateful for the reason to shut up.
    A tall, dark-haired man in baggy jeans and a dirty-green waxed jacket is standing there, slightly bent over, his back to me. He is looking closely at a leaf on a branch of the olive tree nearest to the path. He turns before I get a word out and says, “Press your own oil, do you?”
    It’s DI Perivale.
    “Only dug the olive trees in a month ago,” I say. “We had the whole garden done, back and front, a complete redesign. A company called Muddy Wellies. We hope to but I don’t know yet. There are only three trees, so even with a hot summer, probably not.”
    He steps forward, puts his hands out, as if measuring distance. “Nice gaff. Big for just the three of you.”
    To cover my surprise that he knows anything about me at all ( the three of you ), I lean back and survey the repointed red brickwork, the three floors of window, the elegantly tapered Victorian gable, the thick entwined ropes of newly planted wisteria, as if seeing my house for the first time.
    “My colleague,” he adds casually, “tells me the one next door went for five million.”
    I flush. He’s just making conversation, but I feel uneasy. I don’t know why he’d say that. We stand there, looking at the house, looking at each other, and I’m not sure what to think. And then he says something I’ve been dreading, because I was hoping my part was done. I was thinking it might be over.
    “Have you got a minute?”
    •   •   •
    Marta must have escaped upstairs, though I didn’t hear her go. The ironing has gone and so has my unfinished mug of herbal tea. She must have put it in the dishwasher.
    I tell DI Perivale to please sit down, but he doesn’t. I fill the kettle from the tap, for something to do, and I can hear the faint noisesof his shoes, the little creaks in the leather, as he shifts his weight. He is wearing brown brogues, the ones with perforated holes on the toe caps that you associate with Jermyn Street, posh cobblers who whittle things by hand.
    “Do you live nearby?” I ask.
    “Battersea.” He has his back to me. “The other side of Clapham Junction.”
    “On the up,” I say, and then hate myself for it.
    “Nice picture. Your daughter do it?”
    I’m flustered. Of course he only had to Google—I did “A Life in the Day” in the Sunday Times just the other week—but it is unnerving when people you’ve never met know things about you. That’s what I tried to explain to the constable I spoke to last summer when those odd stalker-y things started happening. (In show business, you’re no one until you’ve been