Beneath The Skin

ONE

Everything seemed to be happening, but then our house at breakfast time always seems to be rather like one of those medieval castles with donkeys and pigs and all the serfs coming in for shelter at the first sniff of trouble. In the weeks since our move, it had got even more chaotic, if that’s possible, and the medieval castle had a building site slap bang in the middle of it.

Clive had left the house at six, which is even earlier than usual because at the moment he’s working on some sort of horrific takeover bid. Just before eight Lena drags the two older boys into the Espace for the school run. Lena’s our nanny-slash-au-pair thing; lovely-looking girl, Swedish, infuriatingly blond and slim and young, though she has this thing through her nose that makes me wince every time I see it. Goodness knows what it must feel like when she blows her nose.

Then people started arriving. Mary, of course, our priceless cleaner, who came with us to Primrose Hill. She’s a treasure, except that I have to spend so much time standing over her and telling her what to do and then checking she’s done it that I’ve said to Clive I might as well do the cleaning myself. And then there’s all the rest of the people who were meant to be improving the house but instead have been reducing it to a slum full of brick dust. The rewiring and replumbing had been finished at the end of the week before, and the best that could be said about the house at that point was that anything from then on had to be an improvement.

I was satisfied, though, despite everything. This was what I had always wanted, what Clive had always promised me. A project. The house was down to bare boards and walls, back to the beams and rafters, practically. Now I was going to turn it into a home we could be proud of. I know you’re supposed to fall in love with a house but this house wouldn’t be worth falling in love with for another six months at least. There had been two old dears living there before in what looked like a secondhand bookshop that nobody had gone into since the fifties. The question wasn’t what to change, but what on earth one could possibly keep.

I spent four months with Jeremy, our clever architect, head down over plans, tanking him up with espressos. It was just a matter of being simple. Rip out everything. Put new roof on. Then kitchen and dining room in the basement, living rooms on the ground floor, Clive’s study on the first floor at the back, then bedrooms all the way up. Attic conversion for nanny to get up to whatever nannies get up to without scaring horses. Lavatories left, right, and center. A suite for Clive and me. Power shower for the boys in hopes it might persuade them to wash occasionally.

So this morning Jeremy popped in at around half past eight with Mick to go over a problem with an arch or beam or something. Closely followed by Francis, who we’ve brought with us to do-by which I mean completely redo-what passed for the garden. Hundred and twenty foot, which isn’t bad for London, but it looked like a giant rabbit run until Francis got at it. The ruck of electricians and plumbers have gone, thank God, but Mick comes with his entourage. Tea and coffee all round, of course, as soon as Lena gets back to make it. Somewhere in the middle of it I pop Christo-who’s four-along to his play-school thing, which he’d joined when we moved in. I’d become a bit dubious about it: no proper uniform, just blue sweatshirts, and wall-to-wall sandboxes and finger painting. But it was hardly worth chopping and changing. He’d be at Lascelles Pre-Prep in September anyway and, what is more, off my hands, which would be something of a relief.

Then it was back to the house and finally a sit-down, a coffee, and the quickest of glances at the paper and the mail before getting down to work-i.e., walking around stopping people knocking through the wrong wall and doing some liaising. Leo, my faithful handyman, was going to be dropping in and I’d been sweating over a list of things that needed doing. And I needed a serious discussion with Jeremy about the kitchen. That had been the really hard part of our planning. The thing is, in any other part of the house, if you get something wrong, you can live with it. But if the fridge door opens and blocks the cutlery drawer, you’re going to be irritated by it twenty-five times a day until you’re old and gray. What you ought to do ideally is build the kitchen, live in it for six months, then do it again properly. But even Clive isn’t rich enough for that. Or at least not patient enough.

Lena wandered in and I gave her some instructions. Then, while she got going properly, I sipped some coffee and finally got down to the paper and the post. I have a strict rule of never giving the paper more than five minutes, if that. There’s nothing in the papers anyway. Then the mail. In general, ninety percent of the mail is for Clive. The remaining ten percent is divided among children, pets, and me. Not that we’ve got any pets just at present. Our grand total of pets for 1999 consisted of one cat, missing and presumed dead, or having a better time in someone else’s house somewhere in Battersea. One hamster, buried in unmarked grave at end of Battersea garden. I’d been thinking of getting a dog. I’d always said that London wasn’t a place to keep dogs, but now that we were two minutes from Primrose Hill I can sometimes be caught with a wistful expression on my face considering it. Haven’t mentioned it to Clive yet, though.

Hence, mail was speedily dealt with. Immediate pile of anything with Clive’s name on it or variations thereof. All bills ditto. I can spot a bill at fifty feet, usually without even needing to open it. Anything addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Hintlesham, ditto. As usual, I put these letters in a pile, carried them upstairs, and deposited them on the desk in Clive’s sanctum for him to deal with when he got home or, more likely, over the weekend.

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 has been that to make sure that the actual things you’ve ordered actually arrive, and then that the actual things you’ve asked to be done with them are actually done, is more than a full-time job. While I was on the phone trying to sort it out with a gormless female at the other end, I heard the doorbell ring and while I was still talking a ratty-faced man in a gray suit was shown into the room. I gestured toward him while trying to get some sense out of, or, to be more accurate, into, the woman on the phone. But it’s embarrassing to get cross with somebody you’ve never met while someone else you’ve never met stands right next to you looking expectant. So I brought the call to a close. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Aldham and I took him down to the basement.

He also looked at the note and I heard him swear under his breath and he leaned down very close to it as if he were desperately short-sighted. Finally he gave a grunt and looked up.

“Have you got the envelope?”

“What? Er, no, well, I think I chucked it in the bin.”

“Where?”

“It’s in the cupboard there, by the sink.”

I couldn’t believe it, but he went and pulled the bin out, lifted the top off, and started rummaging in it like some down-and-out.

“I’m sorry. I think there may be tea and coffee grounds in there as well.”

He lifted out a scrunched-up envelope that looked a bit damp and brown and generally worse for wear. He held it very delicately, by a corner, and put it on the side near the letter.

“Excuse me a moment,” he said, and took out a mobile phone.

I retreated across the room and put the kettle on. I heard fragments of his conversation: “Yes, definitely” and “I think so” and “I haven’t talked to her yet.” Apparently from then on it was bad news for Sergeant Aldham. Because his side of the conversation turned into squeaked questions: “What?” “Are you sure?” At last he gave a resigned sigh and replaced the phone in his pocket. His face was red and he was breathing heavily as if he had just jogged here. He was silent for a while.

“Two other detectives are on their way,” he said in a sullen tone. “They would like to interview you, if that’s possible.” Aldham was mumbling now. He looked miserable, like a dog that had been kicked.

“What on earth’s going on?” I protested. “It’s just a silly note. It’s just like an obscene phone call, isn’t it?”

Aldham perked up for a moment.

“Have you had any phone calls?”

“You mean obscene ones? No.”

“Can you think of anything that might be connected with this letter? Other letters maybe, or someone you know-anything?”

“No, of course not. Unless it’s some stupid joke.”

“Can you think of anyone who might play a joke like that?”

I was nonplussed.

“I’m not very good on jokes,” I said. “That’s more Clive’s subject.”

“Clive?”

“My husband.”

“Is he at work?”

“Yes.”

Things were a bit sticky after that. Aldham hung around looking embarrassed. I tried to get on with things, but his doleful, drab face put me off. It was quite a relief when the front doorbell rang, not much more than a quarter of an hour after Aldham had first arrived. I went to answer it and Aldham trailed me in a slightly absurd way. This time the front door was positively crowded. At the front were two slightly more upscale-looking detectives and with them were a couple more uniformed officers and two other people, one of them a woman, coming up the steps behind them. In the street I could see two police cars and two other cars with them, all double-parked.

The older man was balding, with gray hair cut very short.

“Mrs. Hintlesham?” he said with a reassuring smile. “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Links. Stuart Links.” We shook hands. “And this is Detective Inspector Stadler.”

Stadler didn’t look like a policeman at all. He looked more like a politician, or one of Clive’s colleagues. He had a smartly cut dark suit, a discreet tie. He was rather striking looking, in a way. A bit Spanish, maybe. He was tall, well built, and had very dark hair that was almost black, combed back. He shook hands as well. He had a curious soft handshake that pressed my palm with his fingers as if he were finding out something about it. It was rather disconcerting. At any minute, I thought, he would lift my fingers to his lips and kiss them slowly.

“There are so many of you,” I said.

“Sorry about that,” Links said. “This is Dr. Marsh. He’s from our forensic department. And he’s brought his assistant, Gill erm…”

“Gill Carlson,” said the woman gamely. She was a pretty little thing, in an un-made-up sort of way. Dr. Marsh looked like a scruffy schoolteacher.

“You’re probably wondering why there are so many of us,” Links said.

“Well…”

“A letter of the kind that you have received is a kind of threat. We need to assess its seriousness. In the meantime we have to ensure your safety.”

Links had been looking me in the eyes. But with that he slowly shifted his gaze toward Aldham, who began to look even more abjectly embarrassed.

“We’ll take over from here,” he said quietly.

Aldham mumbled something to me. I think it was good-bye. Then he eased his way past us and was gone.

“Why did he come?” I asked.

“A misunderstanding,” said Links. He looked around. “You’ve recently moved in?”

“In May.”

“We’ll try not to cause too much disturbance, Mrs. Hintlesham. I’d like to see the letter and then I’d like to ask you one or two questions and that will be all, I hope.”

“Downstairs,” I said faintly.

“Beautiful house,” he said.

“It will be,” I said.

“Must have cost a bit.”

“Well…” I said as a way of not getting into a discussion about property values.

And so, a few minutes later, I found myself sitting at my table with two detectives in the middle of a half-completed kitchen. For reasons that I didn’t remotely understand, the two uniformed officers were wandering around the house and garden. The letter had been read by everybody and then lifted with tweezers and inserted into a transparent plastic folder. The crumpled, sodden envelope was put into a small polyethylene bag. There was one item for each scientist, and they left clutching them.

Before speaking to me the two men whispered to each other, which I found mildly irritating. Then they turned to me.

“Look,” I said. “Can I just say that I don’t think there’s anything remotely I can tell you? It’s a horrible silly letter and that’s all there is to it. I don’t know anything about it.”

The two men looked thoughtful.

“Yes,” said Links. “We’ll just ask a couple of routine questions. You’ve just moved into this house. Did you live in this area before?”

“No. We lived miles away, south of the river, in Battersea.”

“Do you know a school called Laurier?”

“Why?”

Links sat back.

“One of the things we try to do is to establish connections with other threats that may have been made. Do you have children?”

“Yes. Three boys.”

“Laurier is a state primary school just off Kingsland Road in Hackney. Is it possible you ever considered it for your children?”

I couldn’t suppress a smile.

“A state primary school in Hackney? Are you serious?”

The two men exchanged glances.

“Or maybe you’ve met one of the teachers. A woman called Zoe Haratounian, for example.”

“No. What can the school have to do with this letter?”

“There were… er, incidents associated with the school. There may be a connection.”

“What sort of incidents?”

“Letters like the one you received. But can we continue with our questions? Has this letter come out of the blue? You don’t connect it with anything else, or any other person, no matter how remotely?”

“No.”

“I would like to assess how many people have access to this house. I see that you’re having work done.”

“That’s right. It’s like Waterloo Station here.”

He smiled.

“Which estate agent did you use?”

“Our house was sold by Frank Dickens. Bunch of sharks.”

“Have you ever used Clarke’s?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe,” I said. “I was looking for ages. I must be on the books of almost every estate agent in London.”

They looked at each other again.

“I’ll check it out,” Stadler said.

One of the officers came down the stairs. Yet another woman was with her. Tall, with long blond hair, some of it up on top of her head, looking as if it had been pinned up by a blind man in a dark room. She was wearing a business suit that looked as if it could do with a run-over from an iron. She was carrying a case and had a raincoat over one arm. She looked harassed and out of breath. Both detectives looked round and nodded at her.

“Hello, Grace,” said Links. “Thanks for coming so quickly.” He turned back to me. “This may seem strange to you. Somebody has picked on you. We don’t know why. We don’t know who this person is, or anything about him. But we have you. We can’t look at his life but we can look at your life.”

I felt suddenly alarmed and irritated. This was becoming tiresome.

“What do you mean, look at my life?”

“This is Dr. Grace Schilling. She’s a very distinguished psychologist and she specializes in the psychology of, well, of people who do things like this. I’d be very grateful if you’d talk to her.”

I looked at Dr. Schilling. I expected her to be blushing or smiling at Links’s flattery. She wasn’t. She was looking at me with narrowed eyes. I felt like something stuck to a card with a pin.

“Mrs. Hintlesham,” she said. “Can we go somewhere quiet?”

I looked around.

“I’m not sure there is anywhere quiet,” I said with a forced smile.

THREE

“Sorry about the mess,” I said as we tiptoed across the room between packing cases toward a sofa. “This is going to be a drawing room in about twenty years.”

She took off her crumpled linen jacket and sat down in the uncomfortable old basket-weave chair. She was tall and slim, with dark blond hair, long thin fingers. No rings.

“Thank you for giving me your time, Mrs. Hintlesham.” She put on a pair of spectacles, the kind with no frames at all. She took a notepad and a pencil out of her bag and wrote something at the top. Underlined it.

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t got a great deal of time to give. I’m very busy, as you can see. I’ve a lot to get through before the boys get back.” I sat down and smoothed my skirt over my knees. “Do you want coffee or tea or something?”

“No, thanks. I’ll try to be quick. I just wanted us to meet.”

I was feeling agitated. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, why she seemed so serious.

“Quite honestly, I think the police have got themselves in a bit of a sweat about it all, haven’t they? I mean, it’s just a stupid letter. I wasn’t going to call them at all and then suddenly it’s like Piccadilly Circus in here.”

She looked thoughtful. So thoughtful that she hardly seemed to be paying proper attention to what I was saying.

“No,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t remember your name-my mind’s like a sieve. Early senility, I expect.”

“Grace. Grace Schilling. This must all be strange for you.”

“Not at all, actually. I told the police, I just thought it was a joke.”

Dr. Schilling was the one with the suit and notebook; she was the doctor. Yet she was shifting uncomfortably in her seat as if she didn’t know quite what to say. Of course that wretched chair is enough to make anybody uncomfortable, but I still didn’t know what she was playing at.

“I don’t want to give you a psychology lecture. I just want to do anything I can to help you.” She paused as if she was trying to make up her mind. “Look, as you know, there are men who just attack women at random. This letter you received is obviously something different.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“He’s seen you. Chosen you. I wonder if this person has been close to you. He says that you smell nice. That you have beautiful skin. How does that make you feel?”

I laughed a bit self-consciously. But she didn’t. She leaned closer and looked at me.

“You do have beautiful skin,” she said.

She didn’t say it as if it was a compliment but just as if it were an interesting scientific observation.

“Well, I try hard enough with my skin, for goodness’ sake. I have this special cream.”

“Are you often aware of people finding you attractive?”

“What a question. I can’t think how this is going to help you. Let’s see. Some of Clive’s friends are awful flirts. I suppose there are men who look at me, you know the way men do.” Grace Schilling didn’t say anything, just gazed at me with that calm and mildly anxious expression on her face. “I’m nearly forty, for goodness’ sake,” I said, to break the silence. My voice came out louder than I had intended.

“Do you work, Jenny?”

“Not in the way you mean,” I said, almost belligerently. “I don’t have a job the way you do. I have children, and this house.” Take that, I thought to myself with some satisfaction. “I haven’t worked since I got pregnant with Josh, fifteen years ago now. Clive and I always agreed that I would give up. I used to be a model. Not in the way you probably think. I modeled hands.”

She looked baffled. “Hands?”

“You know, in posters for nail varnish and things like that, consisting of nothing but a giant hand. In the early and mid-eighties lots of those hands were mine.”

We both looked at my hands, lying in my lap. I try to keep them nice. I have a manicure once a week, and get the cuticles seen to, and I rub this expensive lotion on them that I’ve always used, and I never wash anything up without wearing gloves. But they’re not like they were. They’re plumper, for a start. I can’t take off my engagement and wedding rings any longer, not even when I use butter. Dr. Schilling smiled for the first time.

“It’s a bit like someone’s fallen in love with you,” she said then. “From afar. Like in a story. Or someone close to you. It might be somebody you’ve never seen before or someone you see every day. It would be useful if you could think about men you meet, if any of them act strangely, inappropriately, towards you.”

I gave a grunt.

“The boys, for a start,” I said.

“Maybe you could describe your life to me.”

“Oh dear, you mean a day in the life?”

“I want to get an idea of the things that are important to you.”

“This is ridiculous. You can’t catch somebody by finding out what I think about my life.” She waited, but this time I beat her at her own game. I just stared back. In the background, I could hear a great crash, as if somebody had dropped something heavy. Probably some oafish policeman.

“Do you spend a lot of time with your sons?”

“I’m their mother, aren’t I? Though sometimes I feel more like their unpaid chauffeur.”

“And your husband?”

“Clive is madly busy. He’s-” And then I stopped myself. I didn’t see why I should give this woman a detailed explanation of something I didn’t understand myself. “I hardly see him at the moment.”

“You’ve been married how long? Fifteen years?”

“Yes. Sixteen this autumn.” God, was it that long? I gave an involuntary sigh. “I was very young.”

“And would you describe it as a happy marriage, close?”

“I wouldn’t describe it to you at all.”

“Jenny.” She leaned forward in her chair and for one horrible moment I thought she was going to take hold of my hands in some touchy-feely way that would make me sick. “There is a man out there who says he wants to kill you. However ridiculous this sounds, we have to take it seriously.”

I shrugged.

“It’s a marriage,” I said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. We have our ups and downs, our silly squabbles, like everybody.”

“Have you told your husband about the letter?”

“The detective asked me to. I left a message at work; he’ll phone later.”

She looked at me as if she could see through me. It made me feel uncomfortable. There was a long pause.

“Jenny,” she said finally. “I know that one of the things that you feel, or will feel, is violated. And what’s worse is that some of our efforts to help you may feel like a violation as well. There are things I need to know about.” She looked around at the chaos of the house and gave her knowing smile again. “Think of me as like your surveyor going round the house looking for bits where the water might get in.”

“Tell me about it,” I said in mock bitterness.

She leaned forward again.

“Has your husband been faithful, Jenny?”

“What!”

She repeated the question, as if there was nothing strange about it.

I glared at her and felt my face going red. My head was starting to hurt. “I think you should ask him,” I said as coolly as I could.

She made a mark on her notepad.

“What about you?”

“Me?” I snorted. “Don’t be stupid. When on earth would I find time for an affair, even if I wanted one, unless it was with the gardener or the odd-job man or the tennis coach? I virtually never meet anybody else. Look, you say you are just doing your job and you have to ask about these things, but really, you’ve done it and now I just want to get on with my day, whatever is left of it, that is.”

“Do you find these questions intrusive?”

“Of course I do. I know it’s an unfashionable view, but I like to keep private things private.”

She stood up at last, but she wasn’t ready to leave quite yet.

“Jenny,” she said. I was irritated by the way she kept using my first name. I hadn’t told her she could. It felt like an insurance salesman keeping his foot in the door. “All I want, all any of us want, is to put a stop to this and get out of your life. If anything comes into your mind that seems significant in any way, let the police know or let me know. Let us decide what is or isn’t important. Don’t be embarrassed to tell us, will you?”

She almost seemed to be pleading with me. It made me feel better, more in control.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll put on my thinking cap.”

“Do that.” She turned to go. “And Jenny.”

“Yes.”

She hesitated, then thought better of it. “Nothing. Take care.”

Later, they all went-except that Stadler man, the one with the bedroom eyes. He told me they would be opening my mail in the morning, just to be on the safe side.

“No more nasty shocks for you,” he said, and gave me a smile that was perilously close to a leer. Honestly! I glared at him. “And,” he added, as if it was an afterthought, “we’re leaving a couple of police officers outside the house.”

“This is getting beyond a joke,” I said.

“Just a precaution,” he said soothingly, as if I were a horse. “And during the day there will be a woman officer who’ll be here most of the time.” He smiled. “Continuity for you.”

I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t obscene, so I just glared.

“She’s here now. Hang on a minute.” He strode to the door and shouted: “Lynne! Lynne, can you come in here for a minute? Mrs. Hintlesham, this is Officer Burnett. Lynne, Mrs. Hintlesham.”

The woman was almost as small as me, but much younger, almost young enough to be my daughter, with light brown hair, pale lashes, and a birthmark on her left cheek that made her look as if she’d been smacked in the face just before she came in. She smiled at me but I didn’t smile back.

“I’ll try and keep out of your way,” she said.

“Do,” I snapped. I pointedly turned my back on her and Stadler until they had both left the room and I was blessedly alone again.

The kitchen was full of empty mugs, and there were a couple of cigarette butts by the back door. You would have thought the least they could do was clear up after themselves. I rang Clive again, but he still wasn’t available.

Lena brought Chris and Josh back. Harry was being dropped off by another mum after football practice. I told Josh, in vague and reassuring terms, about a stupid note and there being policemen outside. I thought he might be a bit alarmed, or impressed. But he just leaned against the kitchen door, chewed his lower lip, and shrugged before loping off to his bedroom with two peanut butter sandwiches and a tankard of milk; I don’t know where all the food goes.

I dread to think what he gets up to in his room. He closes the curtains and there’s loud music, and bleeps and shrieks from his dreadful computer games, and incense, probably to cover up the cigarettes he smuggles in. I make sure it’s always Mary who tidies up in there and changes his sheets. I don’t go in his room, I just shout through the door for him to do his homework, practice his saxophone, turn down the music, bring down his dirty washing. He’s grown up all of a sudden. His voice has broken, he’s got little pimples on his forehead, soft hair on his upper lip. And he’s so tall. Much taller than me. He’s got that odd, man’s smell about him, as well, underneath all the lotions and gels that he and his friends seem to wear nowadays. Not like when we were young.

Chris is too young to understand, of course; I didn’t say anything to him, just gave his squashy little body a hug. He’s my baby.

Then I drove to the reclamation center but it had just closed so I didn’t get the hooks, which was the last straw.

Clive rang to say he wouldn’t be home until late, so after Harry got back, and after I had put Chris to bed with a story, I had supper with Josh and Harry. Lasagne that I’d taken out of the freezer earlier, with peas, and for pudding ice cream with chocolate sauce. No one spoke much. I watched them shovel food down their throats as if it were fuel. I didn’t eat very much. It was too hot.

The boys drifted off into their own rooms again, so I poured myself a glass of white wine and sat downstairs with the TV on, leafing through magazines. We needed a dining room table. I knew what I was looking for, something in grainy dark wood, long and simple, a refectory-type table. I’d seen one I quite liked recently with little mosaics of different-colored wood set into the surface, like coasters. Jeremy said I ought to find the perfect chairs first, since they are always more difficult. He told me about a client of his who had waited eight years for the perfect chairs. I told him I wasn’t that patient.

Clive still hadn’t come home. From Josh’s room came a booming bass note from the awful electronic music he listens to. I drew the curtains, seeing as I did so the two policemen sitting in their car. We should have a dinner party as soon as we buy the table, I thought. I could wear my black dress and the diamond choker Clive had given me for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. I picked up a cookbook and thumbed through the summer recipes. Champagne to begin with. Then iced chervil and cucumber soup, tuna scented with coriander, apricot sorbet, cold white wine, on the table those peachy roses from the garden that Francis planted when we arrived. I put my glass against my forehead. So hot.

I heard the key turn in the door. Clive kissed me on the cheek. He looked gray with tiredness.

“God, what a day,” he said.

“There’s lasagne if you want some.”

“No, I ate with some clients.”

I looked at him: expensive charcoal-gray suit; black shoes, well polished; purple and gray tie I’d given him for Christmas; slight paunch beneath his well-ironed white shirt; little threads of silver in his dark hair; a hardly discernible double chin; frown marks just beginning to appear in his high forehead. A distinguished man. I always thought that in a strange way he looked at his best when exhausted, late at night, just after walking through the door. First thing in the morning he was busy, fussy, nervous, distracted, before he put on his lawyer’s mask and went to work. He took off his jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair, then lowered himself onto the sofa, sighing. There were circles of sweat under his arms. I went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of white wine, very cold from the fridge. My head was still sore.

“I’ve had an extraordinary day,” I began.

“Oh yes?” He kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, changed the channel on the TV with a flick of the remote control zapper. “Tell me.”

I think I told it badly. I couldn’t convey how strange it felt, how seriously the police had taken it. When I finished he took a sip of wine and looked away from the screen.

“Well, it’s nice that someone appreciates your skin, Jens.” Then: “I’m sure it’s just some crank. I don’t want crowds of policemen running all over the house.”

“No. Mad, isn’t it?”

FOUR

I never go downstairs before I put my makeup on, not even on the weekend. It would be like going down without clothes. As soon as I hear Clive leave in the morning, the front door clicking behind him, I get out of bed and have a shower. I scrub my body down with a loofah to get rid of any dead skin. I sit at my dressing table, which Clive says looks like something in a starlet’s trailer. There are pitiless lights all the way round the mirror, and I examine myself. I found a few gray hairs in my eyebrows yesterday. There are lines I didn’t have last year, horrible little ones above my upper lip, ones that run down toward the corners of my mouth and give my face a droopy, depressed look when I am tired, slight pouches under my eyes. Sometimes my eyes ache; probably it’s from all the dust in the house. I have no intention of wearing glasses yet.

My skin no longer has the bloom of youth, whatever that stupid man wrote in his letter. I used to have beautiful skin. When Clive first met me, he told me I had skin like a peach. But that was a long time ago. He doesn’t say things like that any longer. I sometimes think it’s more important to say things like that when they’re not true. Looking in the mirror I sometimes feel my skin is more the texture of a grapefruit now. The other day, when I put on my green dress to go out to the school fete, he told me to put on something that the children wouldn’t be embarrassed by.

I make sure there are no stray hairs between my eyebrows or, God forbid, on my chin, then I start with foundation, which I mix with moisturizing cream so it goes on smoothly. Then I put this wonderful wrinkle concealer round my nose and under my eyes. My friend Caro told me about it. It is unbelievably expensive. Sometimes I try to calculate how many pounds I’m wearing on my face. In the day, everything has to be invisible. A tiny smudge of beige eye shadow, the smallest trace of eyeliner, mascara that doesn’t clog the lashes, maybe lip gloss. Then I feel better. I like the face that looks back at me, small and oval and bright, ready to face the world.

Breakfast was awful as usual. In the middle of the chaos there was a knock on the door. Officer Lynne Burnett, except today she was in her ordinary clothes. She was wearing a gray skirt, blue blouse, and woolen top. She looked quite smart, in a drab kind of way, but for some reason I was irritated by the idea that this was what she had worn for hanging around with Mrs. Hintlesham. To blend in with the landscape, no doubt. “Call me Lynne,” she said. Everybody says that. Everybody wants to be your friend. I wish they’d just get on with their job. She told me that her first task was to look at my mail when it arrived.

“Will you be tasting my food as well?” I asked sarcastically.

She blushed so her birthmark became livid. The phone rang and it was Clive, who was already at work. I started to describe what was going on but he interrupted me to say that Sebastian and his wife were coming to dinner on Saturday.

“But we haven’t got a dining table,” I protested. “And we’ve only got half a kitchen.”

“Jens, the documentation we’re preparing for next month’s merger is over two thousand pages long. If I can coordinate that, I think you can organize a dinner party for a client.”

“Of course, I’ll do it, I was just saying…” Mary came in through the door with a mop and started ostentatiously cleaning round my feet. By the time I’d started speaking again, Clive had rung off. I put the phone down and looked around. Lynne was still there, of course. Well, obviously, but it was a bit of a disappointment all the same. There was a part of me that hoped she would have gone away, like a headache. But now, after that phone call, I had a headache and I had Lynne.

“I’m going out to talk to my gardener,” I said frostily. “I suppose you’d like to come and meet him.”

“Yes,” she said.

With his long plaited hair down his back, Francis may look like he should be in a caravan heading for Stonehenge, but in fact he’s an absolute genius. His father was actually something grand in the navy and he went to Marlborough. If you look at him with narrowed eyes you could sort of imagine him working in the city like Clive, except that apart from his three-foot-long hair he’s also an alarmingly deep shade of brown and has those strong sinewed arms you get from lugging heavy things around all day. Some people would probably say that he’s rather good-looking. I don’t want to know about his personal life, which I gather is rather busy, but he’s one of the few people I trust absolutely.

I introduced him to Lynne, who blushed. But then she seems to blush all the time.

“Lynne is here because someone’s written me a mad letter,” I said. Francis looked puzzled, as well he might. “And Francis is here full time for the next month at least,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Lynne asked.

Francis looked at me. I nodded and he gave a shrug.

“First we dumped concrete and rubble into a skip,” he said. “We’ve brought soil in. Now we’re doing some landscaping and laying paths.”

“Are you doing this on your own?” Lynne asked.

Francis smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. “Francis has got his collection of lost boys who come and work for him when he needs them. There’s a whole subculture of gardeners drifting around London. They’re like the pigeons and the foxes.”

I gave a nervous glance at Francis. Maybe I’d gone too far. People can be so touchy. Lynne actually got out her notebook and started asking about working hours and firing questions about the fence and access to the house. She wrote down the names of all the casual workers he used.

All in all, it was a relief to leave the house, however late. Or that’s what I thought, until Lynne told me that she would be coming with me.

“You’re not serious.”

“Sorry, Jenny.” Yes, she calls me Jenny, although I haven’t told her she could. “I’m not sure about the level of support we’re providing, but for today I’ve got to stick with you.”

I was about to get cross when the doorbell rang. It was Stadler, so I protested to him instead. He just gave me his smile.

“It’s for your own safety, Mrs. Hintlesham. I’m just here to touch base and make a couple of routine checks. Do you have any objection to us monitoring your telephone calls?”

“What does that involve?”

“Nothing that you need bother about. You won’t even notice it.”

“All right,” I grumbled.

“We want to compile a register of people you have dealings with. So over the next day or so, I’d like you to sit down with Lynne and go through things like your address book, appointment book, that sort of thing. Is that all right?”

“Is this really necessary?”

“The more effective we are now, the quicker we can wind all this up.”

I’d almost stopped being angry. I just felt a mild disgust.

First stop was at the reclamation center for the brass hooks. I nearly bought a round stained-glass window that had come out of an old church but at the last minute changed my mind. At least Lynne didn’t come into the shop.

She did come into the shops in Hampstead, or at least stood just outside staring neutrally into windows full of women’s clothes. God knows what the shop assistants made of her. I pretended to ignore her. I needed something for Saturday. I took an armful of clothes into the changing room, but when I came out wearing a beaded pink top, wanting to see myself in the long mirror, I caught sight of Lynne’s face, staring through the window at me. I left empty-handed.

“Find what you wanted?” she asked as we left. As if we were friends on a spree together.

“I wasn’t actually looking for anything,” I hissed.

I popped into the butcher’s to buy the sausages the boys like so much, and then wandered round the next-door antique shop. I had my eye on a mirror there, with a gilt frame. It cost £375, but I thought I might be able to get it for less. It would go perfectly in the hall, once we had it painted.

I had arranged to meet Laura for lunch, so after I had picked up Christopher’s name tags for all his Lascelles school clothes, I drove down the hill, Lynne’s car in my rearview mirror. Laura was already waiting. It should have been fun, but it wasn’t. Lynne sat in the car outside eating a sandwich. I could see her as I fiddled with my arugula and roasted red pepper salad. She was reading a paperback. If an axman came into the room she probably wouldn’t even look up. I couldn’t quite concentrate on anything Laura was saying to me. I cut the lunch short, saying that I had to dash.

Next stop, Tony in Primrose Hill. Normally I love having my hair done. It makes me feel cosseted sitting in the little room full of mirrors and steel, trolleys laden with colored lotions, the smell of steam and perfume, the lovely crisp sound of scissors cutting through locks of hair.

But today nothing worked. I felt hot, cross, out of sorts. My head banged and my clothes stuck to me. I didn’t like the way I looked after the cut. The new shape of my hair had a peculiar optical effect that made my nose too big and my face too bony. In the traffic on the way home a kind of road rage engulfed me, so that I revved impatiently at traffic lights. Lynne kept patiently behind me. Sometimes she was so close that I could see her freckles in the mirror. I stuck out my tongue in the mirror, knowing she couldn’t see it.

For the rest of the day, she followed me like a faithful dog-the kind you want to kick. She followed me when I took Chris to play with a chum of his down the road, a scrawny little boy called Todd. What kind of parent calls her child that? Then I had to collect the boys, because it was Lena’s night off. Wednesdays are always a nightmare. Josh was at the school after-hours computer club, which was always held in a trailer that stank of boys’ sweaty feet. Usually when I come to collect him he is paired with another boy called Scorpion or Spyder or whatever stupid nickname they’ve chosen. Josh used to call himself Ganymede, but last week he decided that was too effeminate and changed it to Eclipse. That’s his password. His best friend is called Freak, spelled with a Ph: Phreek. They’re all madly serious about it.

But this evening Josh was sitting slumped in a chair and the rather sweet young man who came in to teach them every week was crouched down beside him, talking to him intently. I remember that when I’d first met him a few weeks earlier, he told me that everybody in the club called him Hacker. I think I’d pulled a face and he’d said that that wasn’t his real name and I could call him Hack. “Is that your name?” I’d asked, but he only laughed.

All the boys were still in their uniforms but Hack was wearing ancient torn jeans and a T-shirt with lots of writing in Japanese on it. He was pretty young himself, with long, curly dark hair. He could almost have been one of the sixth-formers. At first I thought Josh must have had an accident, or a nosebleed, but as I drew nearer they both looked up and I saw that he had been crying. His eyes were red-rimmed. This startled me. I couldn’t remember when I last saw Josh actually cry. It made him look much younger and more vulnerable. How bony and pale he was, I thought, with his bumpy forehead and his protruding Adam’s apple.

“Josh! Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The tone was cross rather than miserable. He stood up abruptly. “I’ll see you next term, in September, Hack.”

Hack. Honestly. No wonder Josh was such a mess.

“Or lose you. To a summer love,” said Hack.

“What?” I said.

“It’s a song,” he said.

“Is everything all right?”

“What, that?” he said, gesturing at Josh. “It’s no big deal, Mrs. Hintlesham.”

“Jenny,” I corrected him, as I do every week. “Call me Jenny.”

“Sorry. Jenny.”

“He seemed upset.”

Hack looked unconcerned.

“It’s probably school, summer, all that stuff. Plus he just got whipped on-screen.”

“Maybe his blood sugar’s low.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Give him some sugar. Jenny.”

I looked at Hack. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me.

Harry was round the other side of the school, in the large and drafty hall that doubled as the theater once a year for the school play. When Josh and I went in, he was standing by the side of the stage with a yellow dress over his trousers and a feather boa round his neck. His face was scarlet. The sight of him seemed to cheer Josh up considerably. Up on the stage was a motley crew of boys, a couple of whom were also wearing frocks.

“Harry,” called a man with a small mustache and a bullet-shaped head with hair cut brutally short. Probably gay. “Harry Hintlesham, it’s your entrance. Come on! ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.’ You should be walking on as Roley says that.”

Harry struggled onto the stage, tripping over the dress. “ ‘What jealous Oberon,’ ” he muttered under his breath. His hair looked sticky with sweat. “ ‘Fairies, skip off, I have long-’ ”

“ ‘Skip hence,’ ” roared the mustache-man. “Not ‘off,’ boy, ‘hence’-and speak louder for goodness’ sake. Rehearsal’s over anyway, can’t have parents seeing it in this state. It won’t be ready till Christmas. And speaking of parents, your lovely lady mother has arrived, Titania. Skip hence. Good evening, Mrs. Hintlesham. You light up our dingy hall.”

“Jenny. Good evening.”

“Try and get your son to learn his lines.”

“I’ll try.”

“And get him to wear deodorant, will you?”

She’s dead. Of course. As I wanted. Of course. And I feel cheated of her. Of course. Forget it. Another one. Another she.

She wears too much makeup. It is like a mask, smoothed over her face. Everything about her face is glossy and cared for-shining lips, dark lashes, creamy skin, neat and glossy hair. She is a picture that is constantly being touched up and polished. An image presented to the world. She can’t hide from me. I imagine her face stripped down. There would be lines round her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth; her lips would be pale, soft, nervous.

Walking down a street, she glances constantly at her reflection in the shop windows, checking that everything is still in place. And it always is. Her clothes are ironed, her hair fits her like a cap. Her nails are manicured and painted a pale pink; her toenails are pink too, in their expensive sandals. Her legs are smooth. She holds herself straight, shoulders back and chin up. She is clean, neat, bright with energy and purpose.

Yet I have watched her. I see beyond her smile that is not a real smile, and her laugh that, if you listen carefully, very carefully, is forced and brittle. She is like a string on a violin that has been tightened to the thin screeching point. She is not happy. If she was happy, or wild with fear, or with desire, she would become beautiful. She would be liberated from her shell and become her true self. She does not realize she is not happy. Only I realize. Only I can see inside her and release her. She is waiting for me, sealed up inside herself, still untouched by the world.

Fate smiles on me. I see that now. At first I did not understand that I had become invisible. Nobody can see me. I can go on and on.

FIVE

It’s very late, almost midnight, but it’s still almost indecently hot. Even though I’ve opened the windows upstairs, the wind that blows in is warm as well, as if it had blown across a desert. Clive isn’t back. His secretary, Jan, phoned and told Lena he wouldn’t be back until very late and now it’s very late and indeed he’s not back. As usual I left him some sandwiches in the fridge and had one of them myself, so that’s all right.

The house is quiet now. Lena’s out doing God knows what until God knows when. The boys are asleep. Just after eleven I went round and switched their lights out. Even Josh was asleep, exhausted by the rigors of an evening spent on the phone. Everything’s done. I’ve started to pack for Josh and Harry, who are catching the plane tomorrow. It’s going to be quiet in the house over the next few weeks, for various different reasons.

I’m not in general especially keen on alcoholic drinks. Clive’s terribly clever about wine, but it’s not something I would ever bother about if it were just me. But that night it was so incredibly stifling and I felt a bit on edge so that suddenly the idea of a gin and tonic came into my head as if it were in a magazine advertisement. I imagined a beautiful sultry woman, darkly tanned, in an exotic location with a drink that was so cold the glass was glistening with moisture. She would be sweating in a sexy way and in between sips she would press the cold glass to her forehead. She would be sitting alone but you would know that she was waiting for some pretty amazing man to arrive.

So I had to have one, of course. Unbelievably, there was no lemon in the house except for a rather dry leftover slice in the door of the fridge, which would just about do. I made the drink and I felt I needed a snack. All that I could find was one of the packets of cheese puffs that I put in Chris’s packed lunch. So I sat and nibbled my way through the packet, which took only a minute, and I was almost shocked to discover that the drink was finished. I had made it with very little gin, so I thought I could manage just one more to take upstairs to the bath.

I wasn’t sweating prettily and sexily like the girl in my magazine advertisement. My blouse was wet in the back. My bra was damp, there were dark patches of moisture around the edges of my knickers. My skin was clammy everywhere. I could smell myself. I thought I was going to rot.

The bath was warm and foamy and blurry. By the time I was halfway through the second drink, nothing seemed to matter as much as it had. For example, although I had mixed this rather pungent bath foam into the water, I then washed my hair as well and then rinsed it out in the bathroom without even showering separately. That’s not the normal way I behave. Did I mention that a second note had arrived?

Just after lunch today there was delivery after delivery: the right kind of paint, kick-space heaters that should have arrived a month ago. It was like a rugby team marching in and out, and at the end of it all, Lena found an envelope addressed to me lying on the doormat. She brought it to me. I knew what it was straight away but I opened it anyway.

Dear Jenny,

You’re a beautiful woman. But not when you’re with anyone. When you’re just alone, walking down the street. You bite your top lip sometimes when you’re thinking. You sing to yourself.

You look at yourself and I look at you. We’ve got that in common. But one day I’ll look at you when you’re dead.

It gave me the creeps a bit, naturally, but mainly I was cross. No, not cross: furious. I’d had days now, two days of Lynne hovering about, being nice enough in a statuary sort of way but always hovering, always being just a bit irritating, a bit ingratiating, a bit too determined not to be offended when I snap at her. And then the police car parked outside. People always watching me, keeping an eye on my day. And this was all the good it had done. So when I had read the letter I went off in search of her. She was on the phone. I stood in front of her, waiting until she got embarrassed and hung up.

“I’ve got something you might be interested in,” I said, handing her the letter.

That lit a rocket under her. It was barely ten minutes before Stadler was sitting in my kitchen, staring at me across the table.

“On the mat, you said?” he asked in a sort of mumble.

“That’s where Lena found it,” I said tartly. “Clearly he’s making private arrangements for his mail. To be honest, it makes me wonder what the point is of all this disruption if he can still walk up to the house and deliver a letter.”

“It’s disappointing,” Stadler said, pushing his hands through his hair. Handsome-and he knows it, my grandmother used to say with disapproval of men like that. “Did you see anybody approaching the house?”

“People have been approaching the house all day, tramping in and out.”

“Was anything else delivered?”

“Yes, lots of things.”

“Could you describe the people who delivered them?”

“I didn’t meet any of them. You can talk to Lena about that.”

I was walking busily around the kitchen. Stadler was sitting at the kitchen table looking gloomy, poor thing.

“Tell me what you’re actually doing about all of this,” I demanded.

“Doing?” he repeated, as if the question didn’t make sense.

“Yes, you know, forgive me for being stupid, but just spell it out for me, will you?”

He put his hand on mine and I let it lie there, hot and heavy. “Mrs. Hintlesham, Jenny, we’re doing everything we can. We’re doing forensic tests on all the letters, we’re trying to find out where the paper came from, we’re looking at the fingerprints in your house in case he should have broken in. As you know”-he attempted a rueful smile but it didn’t suit him-“we’re going through all your friends, acquaintances, contacts, people who work or have worked for you, to try and establish any connections between you and the, er, the other people who have been targeted by the writer of these letters. And then, of course, until he is caught, we are making quite sure you are safe and protected.”

I took my hand away.

“Is there really any point in carrying on with all this?” I asked.

“What?” said Stadler.

“All this ridiculous fuss about opening letters and hanging around the house.”

There was quite a long silence. Stadler seemed to be finding it hard to make up his mind what to say. Then he looked up at me with his very dark eyes, almost too dark.

“This is serious,” he said. “You’ve read the letters. This man has threatened to kill you.”

“Well they’re pretty nasty,” I admitted. “But really it’s the sort of thing you have to put up with living in London, like obscene phone calls and traffic and dog mess on the streets and all that.”

“Maybe,” said Stadler. “But we need to take it seriously. I’m going to liaise with DCI Links in a minute, but what I’m going to suggest-and I’m sure he’ll agree with me-is that we need to make this environment more secure.”

“What do you mean?”

“All the work being done here must stop. Just for the time being.”

“Are you crazy?” I was aghast. “These builders have a six-month waiting list. Jeremy’s off to Germany next week. The plasterers are arriving at the beginning of next week. Do you want to see my folder? This isn’t something I can just shut down and start up again when you feel like it.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hintlesham. But it’s essential.”

“Essential for who? Is it just going to help you because you aren’t doing your job properly?”

Stadler stood up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry we haven’t caught this lunatic. But it’s difficult. Normally there’s a procedure, knocking on doors, looking for witnesses. But when a madman picks on somebody at random, there’s no normal procedure. You just have to hope that you get a break.”

I almost laughed, but I stayed coldly silent. This ridiculous man wanted my sympathy. He wanted me to say “There, there” because it was so hard to be a policeman. I felt like throwing him out, him and the rest of them.

“What we have to consider,” he continued, “is that he has made a serious threat on your life. We want to catch him, but our first priority is your safety. I don’t feel we can take any more risks with that. The alternative would be for you to move away from this house to somewhere more protected.”

I’d felt like there was a volcano trying to erupt deep in my stomach. The second prospect was even worse, so I had agreed, in a sort of cold fury. I asked when he wanted them to leave and he said straightaway, while he was in the house. So I stomped around like a nightclub bouncer and briskly ejected everybody. Then there was an awful hour of phone calls and half explanations to baffled people and attempts to make vague commitments for the future.

I drank the last of my gin and tonic and got out of the bath and wrapped myself with the big soft towel. It was so hot and so steamy in the bathroom that my skin remained clammy however much I rubbed it, so I walked through to the bedroom. The doors on the fitted cupboards had full-length mirrors on them. They were to have been ripped out next week. I stood in front of one of them and watched myself as I dried my hair and then my body. Even then I still felt damp in the heat of the evening, so I tossed the towel down on the carpet and stood and looked at myself. It was something I hardly ever did, not naked, without makeup.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be unfamiliar with that body, to see it for the first time and to find it attractive. I narrowed my eyes and tilted my head to one side, but it seemed almost too much of an effort. I suppose it happens with all married couples after years together and children and all that, and hard work-you just become part of the furniture, something you hardly notice except when it starts to go wrong. Maybe that’s why other things-I mean other people-might seem more enticing. I tried to imagine what it was like when Clive and I had first seen each other in, well, in that sort of way, and the funny thing was that I absolutely couldn’t. I could remember our first time. At his first flat in Clapham. I could remember all the details. I could remember the play we had been to see beforehand, what food we had eaten afterward. I could even remember what clothes I was wearing, which he had then taken off, but what it had felt like, to see each other’s flesh for the first time-that had gone.

I’d had only one serious boyfriend before that. Well, fairly serious, to me at any rate. He was a photographer called Jon Jones. He’s pretty famous now. You see his name in Harper’s and Vogue. He did a nail-varnish commission using my hands, and one thing led to another. I was quite nervous really, about sex, I mean, that sort of thing. I wasn’t sure what to do. I was obedient, really, more than anything. I’m not sure how exciting it actually was technically, but the idea of it-of him-was exciting.

I was almost in a dream and then I realized I was standing naked in my room with the light on. The curtains were open. The windows were open. I walked to the window quickly to close the curtains and then stopped. What did it matter after all, to be looked at? Was it so bad? I stood there for a moment. The wind blew in hotly. I felt as if I would have given anything for a breath of cool breeze. It was too hot to close the window but I turned and switched off the light. That amounted to the same thing.

I lay down on the bed, on my back with the covers off. Even a sheet would have been agony. I touched my forehead and my breasts. I was already sweating again. I moved my fingers down across my stomach and between my legs. I felt warm and wet. I touched myself gently and looked up at the ceiling. What would it be like to be looked at for the first time? What would it be like to be wanted? To be lusted after. To be looked at. To be wanted.

SIX

I’m good at packing. I always pack for Clive when he has to go away for a few days. Men are hopeless at folding their shirts properly. Anyway, now I was packing for the boys, who were off into the wilds of Vermont for their summer camp. We’d heard about it years ago from a friend of a friend of a friend at Clive’s work. Three weeks of rappelling and windsurfing and sitting round campfires and, in Josh’s case, probably eyeing up nubile young girls in skimpy shorts. I said as much to him as I was carefully laying the T-shirts, shorts, swimming things, and trousers into his case. He just looked glum.

“You just want us out of the house,” he muttered.

Everything he says now is in a mutter that I can’t quite catch. It makes me feel as if I’m going deaf.

“Oh, Josh, you know you loved it last year. Harry doesn’t think it’s too long.”

“I’m not Harry.”

“Don’t say you’re going to miss me,” I said teasingly.

He gazed at me. He’s got huge dark brown eyes, and he can use them to look pathetically reproachful, like some fuzzy donkey. I noticed how bony and pale he was looking; his collarbones jutted out like knobs; his wrists were a mass of tendons. When he took off his shirt to put on his clean clothes for the flight, his ribs were like a pair of ladders climbing up his skinny body.

“You could do with some fresh air. As could this room. Don’t you ever open your windows?”

He didn’t answer, just stared moodily out at the street below. I clapped my hands to wake him up.

“I’m in a hurry. Your father is taking you to the airport in about an hour.”

“You always think you’re in a hurry.”

“I’m not going to have an argument with you just before you go off on holiday.”

He turned and looked at me.

“Why don’t you get a proper job?”

“Where’s your deodorant? I’ve got a job. Being your mother. You’d be the first to complain if I didn’t drive you around to your parties and clubs, and cook your dinner and wash your clothes.”

“So what do you do while Lena’s doing your job?”

“And I’m doing up this house. Which you seem happy enough with. Okay, what are you going to do in the short time you’ve got before you leave? Why don’t you go and see Christo-he’s going to miss you.”

Josh muttered something and sat down at his computer.

“In a minute. I want to look at this new game. It’s only just come.”

“That’s why it’s good you’re going away. Otherwise you’d spend two weeks in the dark in front of a screen. Anyway, while you’re here you might as well strip your sheets and put them out for Mary.” Silence. I started to leave the room and then stopped. “Josh?” Silence. “Will you miss me? Oh, for God’s sake, Josh.” I was shouting now.

He turned sulkily. “What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

I left him locked in a form of unarmed combat in which every blow sounded like a falling tree.

I hugged Harry, though he seems to think that eleven is far too old to be hugged and he stood stiffly in my arms. He’s an eager boy, none of Josh’s moodiness, thank God. He’s like me, not one to brood. You can tell just by looking at him, with his brown curly hair and his snub nose and his stocky legs. Josh looked spindly beside him, his skinny neck sticking out of his new, too-big shirt. I kissed him on the cheek.

“Have a wonderful time, Josh; I’m sure you will.”

“Mum…”

“Darlings, you’ve got to go. Clive’s in the car. Be good-don’t get in trouble. See you in three weeks’ time. Bye, darlings. Bye.” I waved to them until they were out of sight.

“Come on then, Chris, it’s just you and me for the next three weeks.”

“And Lena.”

“Well, yes, of course, Lena too. In fact, Lena’s going to take you to the zoo soon, with a picnic lunch. Mummy’s got a busy day.”

A busy day cooking for this wretched dinner party that Clive had foisted on me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been alone in the house. It was oddly quiet, echoey. No Josh and Harry, no Chris and Lena, no Clive, no Mary or Jeremy or Leo or Francis; no banging of hammers, whistling of workmen as they slapped paint onto plaster; no ringing of the doorbell as gravel, or wallpaper lining, or electric cables got delivered. Well, almost alone. Lynne was always around somewhere, like a bumblebee that occasionally buzzes into the room and then out again.

This house used to be a building site, which was bad enough. Now it’s a building site that’s been abandoned: wallpaper half put up in the spare room, floorboards ready to be laid in the room that will be the dining room one day, dust sheets in the living room, all ready for the painting that isn’t going to happen, the garden full of weeds and holes. The police may not be able to find the person bothering me but they’ve certainly blocked my plans. And that Schilling woman had got quite angry with me.

She came around again. More of that irritatingly grave and attentive expression, which I bet she practices in front of her mirror. Pushing and pushing, into my life, about Clive, men, generally, scratch, scratch. She says it’s a standard part of the investigation. I sometimes feel she doesn’t really care about the criminal at all. What she really wants is to solve my other problems. To change me into something else. What? Her, probably. I keep wanting to tell her that I’m not a door that will one day open onto some enchanted garden inside me. Sorry. This is who I am: me, Jenny Hintlesham, wife of Clive, mother of Josh, Harry, Chris. Take me or leave me. Actually, just leave me, leave me alone, to get on with my life again.

I don’t enjoy cooking that much, but I do like preparing dinner parties, if I’ve got plenty of time, that is. Today I had loads of time. Lena wouldn’t be back till teatime and Clive was going straight from the airport to a golf course. I had been through my recipe books, which are still all in a cardboard box under the stairs. Because of the heat I had decided to go for a real summer meal: fresh, crisp, clean, with lots of good white wine. The canapés with wild mushrooms I’d have to do at the last minute, the gazpacho I had made late last night, while Clive was sitting in front of the TV. The main course-red mullet in a tomato and saffron sauce, to be served chilled-I could do now. I made the sauce first, just a rich Italian goo, made with olive oil, onions, herbs from the garden (at least Francis had put in the herb garden before everything was put on hold), lots of garlic, seeded and skinned plum tomatoes. And when it’s really nice and thick, you add red wine, a touch of balsamic vinegar, and a few strands of saffron. I do adore saffron. I laid the six mullet into a long dish and poured the sauce over them. They only had to cook at a moderate heat for about half an hour and then I could put them in the larder.

For pudding I was doing a huge apricot tart. It always looks spectacular, and apricots are gorgeous at this time of year. I rolled out the puff pastry (I’d bought it ready-made: there are limits) and laid it in a dish. Then I made the frangipane with ground almonds and icing sugar and butter and eggs, and poured it over the pastry. Finally, I halved the apricots and popped them on top. There; just a hot oven for twenty-five minutes. Perfect with gobs of cream. The wine and the champagne were already in the fridge. The butter was cut into little knobs. The brown rolls I was going to pick up this afternoon. The green salad I would do just before we ate.

We were going to have to eat in the kitchen, never mind Clive’s important client, but I pulled out the Chinese screen so the room was divided in half, and covered the table with our white lace tablecloth, the one my cousin gave us for a wedding present. With our silver cutlery and a mass of orange and yellow roses in a glass vase, it was a brilliant improvisation.

I had invited Emma and Jonathan Barton along as well. God knows what this Sebastian and his wife would be like. I had a picture of a fat City of London type, with a paunch and broken veins in his nose, and a hard-bitten, ambitious, power-dressing wife, bottle-blond and heavy round the hips. I don’t envy women like that, even though sometimes they patronize people like me.

I wanted to look good this evening. Emma Barton has got round hips and big breasts and full lips that she paints bright red, even in the morning for the school run. She seems a bit obvious to me, but men certainly seem to like her. The trouble is, she’s getting on a bit now; she’s probably my age, maybe a little bit older. And pouting and wriggling is all very well when you are twenty, or thirty, but it starts to look ridiculous when you’re forty, and when you’re fifty it looks positively pathetic. We’ve known the Bartons forever. Ten years ago he was all over her, furiously possessive, but now I’ve seen his eyes stray to women who look just like Emma used to look then.

At six o’clock I had a long bath and washed my hair. Downstairs, I heard the door open and Lena come in with Chris. I put on a dressing gown and sat in front of my mirror. Lots of makeup this evening. Not just foundation, but blusher on my cheekbones, gray-green eye shadow, dark gray eyeliner, my beloved wrinkle concealer, plum-colored lipstick, my favorite perfume behind my ears and on my wrist-I’d splash more on later as well. Usually, between courses, I come up to my bedroom to repair my face and put on perfume. It gives me courage.

I put on a long black dress with spaghetti straps, and over it a delicate maroon lace top with black velvet around the neck and cuffs, which I bought for a small fortune in Italy last year. High-heeled shoes. My diamond choker, my diamond earrings. I examined myself in the long mirror, turned slowly round so I could see myself from every angle. Nobody would think I was nearly forty. It takes a lot of effort, to stay young.

I heard Clive come in. I must go and say good night to Chris, make sure he’s properly settled before everyone arrives. Had I remembered to put the chocolates on the sideboard?

Chris was sunburned and fretful. I left him listening to a Roald Dahl tape with the night-light on, and prayed he wouldn’t make a fuss during the meal. Clive was in the shower. Downstairs I put a voluminous apron over my glad rags, and spooned the wild mushrooms over the canapés, shredded lettuce into the salad bowl: just a green salad with the fish. Elegance lies in simplicity. The sky outside the kitchen window was the color of raspberries. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Josh and Harry would be at their camp by now, American time.

“Hello,” said Clive. He looked bronzed and gleaming in his suit; there was a sheen of success about him.

“You look smart. But I haven’t seen that tie before,” I said. I wanted him to tell me how chic I looked tonight.

He fingered the knot of the tie.

“No, it’s new.”

The doorbell rang.

Neither Sebastian nor his wife, Gloria, was the least bit like I had expected. Sebastian was tall, with a startlingly bald head. He would have been rather distinguished-looking in a sinister, Hollywood way if he hadn’t been so obviously on edge. There was a faint air of contempt in Clive’s manner toward him, a touch of the bully. With a sudden flash of intuition, I realized that Clive was going to shaft Sebastian in his wretched takeover bid, and this dinner party was a cruel charade of friendliness. Gloria, the City headhunter, was much younger than her husband-in her late twenties, I would have guessed. And her blond, almost silver hair didn’t come from a bottle after all. She had pale blue eyes, brown slim arms, neat ankles with a thin silver chain around one of them, and she wore a perfectly simple white linen shift and very little makeup. She made me feel overdressed; she made Emma look blowsy.

All three men were attentive to her, turning their bodies subtly toward her as we stood on the half-built patio and drank champagne. She knew how pretty she was too. She kept lowering her lashes and giving secretive smiles. Her laugh was a little silvery peal, like a delicate bell.

“Nice tie,” she said to Clive, giving him that smile. It made me want to spill wine on her dress.

They had obviously met before; well, I suppose they would have, given their jobs. She and Sebastian and Clive and Jonathan stood in a group and talked about the Footsie and the futures market, while Emma and I stood by like gooseberries.

“I always think the Footsie index is such a comical name,” I said loudly, determined not to be ignored.

Gloria turned politely toward me.

“Do you work in the City too?” she asked, although I knew she knew I didn’t.

“Me? Goodness, no.” I laughed loudly and took a gulp of champagne. “I can’t even add up my bridge hand. No, Clive and I decided that when we had children I would stop working outside the home. Do you have children?”

“No. What did you do before?”

“I was a model.”

“A hand model,” said Emma. My friend, Emma.

“They are nice hands,” said Sebastian, rather stiffly.

I waved them in front of everyone. “These were my fortune,” I said. “I used to wear gloves all the time, even during mealtimes. Sometimes I even wore them in bed. Mad, eh?” Jonathan poured more champagne in our glasses. Gloria was saying something softly to Clive, who was smiling down at her. Upstairs Chris started crying. I poured the champagne down my throat.

“Excuse me, everybody. Carry on. Duty calls. I’ll tell you when dinner’s ready. Please have some more canapés.”

I turned over the tape for Chris and kissed him again, and told him if he called downstairs again I’d be annoyed. Then I went into our room. I put on more lipstick and brushed my hair and splashed perfume down my cleavage. I felt the teeniest bit tipsy. I wanted to be lying in bed, between clean, ironed sheets. Alone, thank you very much.

I drank fizzy water with the soup, but then I had some lovely Chardonnay with the fish, a glass of claret with the Brie, a rather nice dessert wine with the apricot pudding, and the coffee was like a little jolt of clarity in between the alcohol fuzz.

“What a manipulative girl,” I said to Clive, afterward, when I was wiping off my makeup with a cotton pad and he was cleaning his teeth.

He rinsed his mouth carefully. He looked at me, with my one eye on and one eye off. “You’re drunk,” he said.

I had a sudden, utterly disconcerting fantasy of slapping him, plunging my nail scissors into his stomach. “Nonsense.” I laughed. “I’m just tipsy, darling. I think it all went quite well, don’t you?”

SEVEN

My big vice is catalogs, mail order. That’s mad in a way because it’s not me at all. If there’s one thing I believe in it’s that the objects in your home have to be exactly right. The thought of having the second-best object, that you chose because it was a little bit-or a lot-cheaper, and having it squatting there in the corner of the room year after year, accusing you, well, that’s my idea of torture. You need to touch things before you buy them, walk around them, get a feeling of how they would look in the particular space you’ve envisaged.

So I shouldn’t bother with catalogs. The towels that look fluffy in the picture may feel synthetic when they arrive and be just a different enough shade to clash with the wooden frame of the wonderful mirror you found in that market last summer. The salad spoons may look heavy but feel tackily light when they arrive. And I know that theoretically you can return them and get your money back, but somehow you never get around to that. It’s indefensible and Clive is pretty contemptuous of it, if he happens to notice it, but then he’s got his wretched wine catalogs, which he pores over late into the night.

So when catalogs arrive I can’t resist flicking through them, and there’ll always be something that catches my eye: trainers or a baseball jacket for the boys, or a clever pencil holder or a slotted spoon or an amusing alarm clock or a wastepaper basket that might look good up in the den. As often as not they’ll end up stuffed in the loft or the back of a cupboard, but sometimes they’ll turn up trumps. In any case, it’s such fun when they arrive, brought by special delivery that you have to sign for. It’s like an extra birthday. Better in some ways. If I were being sarcastic, I might say that while boys-and certain men who shall remain nameless-might forget a birthday, at least overnight delivery doesn’t fail to deliver the lampshade you ordered, even if you don’t care for it quite as much as you expected to.

Slightly naughtily, these mail-order companies then pass your name on to other companies, especially when their computers have probably cottoned on to the fact that you’re pathetically likely to buy things you don’t really need. It’s a bit like being the most popular girl in the school. Everybody wants to be your friend and you don’t always want to be theirs. I mean honestly, sometimes I get advertisements from the most extraordinary people. Just last week I got a brochure from a company that makes ponchos out of llama hair. Twenty-nine pounds ninety-nine, and you could get two for thirty-nine ninety-nine, as if anybody who wasn’t living in the Andes would even want one. I didn’t consider it for a second.

All of which is a prelude to what happened on the Monday when I came downstairs in the middle of the morning and saw the normal dross on the mat. Not real mail, of course. Just the usual bunch of silly colored flyers offering to deliver pizza with a free Coke and clean our windows and give a valuation for a house and pull out our original window frames and replace them with metal and double glazing. And among them was one that said “Special Offer Victorian Interiors.” So I opened it.

I bet you don’t know how you open a letter. You do it every day but you never think about it. I know because I’ve been forced to dwell on it. You pick up the letter, turn the front of it, the address side, away from you. If it’s stuck firmly down, you pry away one corner of the stuck-down flap and tear it slightly. The point is to make space so you can insert your second finger and push it along the fold, tearing it all the way along. That’s what I did and the curious thing was that I didn’t feel any pain. I opened the envelope and saw a dull glitter of metal and that the envelope seemed to be wet in places, wet and spotted with red.

It was only then that I felt not pain exactly but a dull ache in my left hand. I looked down and it took a strangely long time for me to take in what I was seeing. There seemed to be blood everywhere, splashes across my fawn trousers, drip-dripping on the floor; my fingers were wet with it. I still didn’t properly understand, so I looked stupidly into the envelope as if it might have been spilling warm red paint onto the floor. I saw the dull metal. Flat pieces stapled in a line along a piece of card. I didn’t see at first what they were and then suddenly I thought of my father, sitting on the edge of the bath when I was a little girl watching him with white foam on his face like Father Christmas. Old-fashioned razor blades.

I looked at my fingers. A steady stream of blood was trickling down onto the bare board. I lifted up my hand and inspected it. There was a deep livid cut in the second finger. I could feel it pulsing, oozing out blood. That was when it began to hurt and I felt dizzy and cold and hot all at once. I didn’t scream or cry. I wasn’t sick. Instead my legs gave way and I slipped down onto the blood and half-lay there. I don’t know how long I was like that. Just a few minutes, probably, before Lena came down and ran to get help, and Lynne appeared with her mouth in the shape of a perfect O.

She is wearing cream slacks and a maroon shirt. Her hand is bandaged, and every so often she holds it in her healthy hand, carefully, as if it was a wounded bird. Her hair is pushed behind her ears in a way that makes her face look even thinner, her cheekbones more gaunt. She looks older already. I am putting on the years.

No earrings today. No perfume. Reddish lipstick that makes her face look pallid. Powder too thickly applied, so I can see specks of it on her cheek, her forehead. She walks as if she is in a dream, her feet scuffling the floor. Her shoulders are slumped. Every so often she frowns, as if she is trying to remember something. She puts her hand against her heart. She wants to feel her life beating against her palm. The other one did that too.

She was so carefully held together and now she is coming apart. Bit by bit, the shell is cracking open. I can see her. The bits of her that she never wanted to show anybody. Fear turns people inside out.

Sometimes I want to laugh. It has turned out so well. This can be my whole life. This is what I have been waiting for.

EIGHT

“Does it hurt?”

Detective Chief Inspector Links leaned toward me. Too close. But at the same time he seemed far away.

“They gave me pills for that.”

“Good. We need to ask you some questions.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake.”

The police have been good for some things. They can get you to the front of the queue in the casualty department and they give you a lift to the hospital and back and make you tea. It’s the other stuff that’s been a problem.

“I know it’s a difficult time. We need your help.”

“Why? I’ve had enough of your questions. It seems simple enough to me. There’s a man out there who seems to keep coming to the house. So can’t you just arrest him while he’s posting envelopes through the door?”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

Links took a deep breath.

“If someone really sets his mind on doing something, then-” He stopped abruptly.

“Then what?”

“We want to go through some names.”

“Go on, then. Do you want a cup of tea? It’s in the pot.”

“No, thank you.”

“Do you mind if I have one?” I poured myself a cup, but then, somehow, I put the teapot down on a plate and very slowly it toppled and crashed to the quarry-tile floor, shattering. Boiling tea splashed everywhere.

“Sorry. It must be my hand. How clumsy.”

“Let me help.” Links started picking up broken pieces of china. Lynne mopped the floor, making herself useful for a change. Then we sat down again at the kitchen table. Lynne passed a file over to Links, who opened it up. There was a list of names, with photographs attached. There were teachers, a gardener, a real estate agent, an architect, all sorts; suits, T-shirts, clean-shaven, stubble. The pain or the pills or the shock had made me feel slow and dreamy. It seemed almost funny to be looking at this list of drab people I’d never met.

“Who are they? Criminals?”

Links looked uncomfortable.

“I can’t tell you everything,” he said. “For legal reasons. But what I can say is that we’re trying to establish any possible connections there may be between you and, er…” He seemed to be searching for the right word. “Areas where similar problems have been reported. Anything here that rang any kind of bell could be useful. However remote. I mean, this estate agent, Guy Brand. To take just one example. I’m not suggesting anything, but an estate agent has access to many properties. And you have recently moved house after looking in many areas of London.”

“Yes, I met hundreds of estate agents. But I’ve got the most dreadful memory for faces. Why don’t you ask him?”

“We have,” said Links. “They couldn’t find you on their books. But their record-keeping seemed to be pretty haphazard.”

I looked again.

“He might be familiar. But then estate agents have a sort of look in common, don’t they?”

“So you might have met him?”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I just mean that if you proved that I had met him, then I wouldn’t think it was impossible.”

Links didn’t look very satisfied with that answer.

“I can leave these pictures with you, if you like.”

I shrugged.

“Why would he do this?” I asked. “Go to all this trouble for something so nasty?”

Links caught my eye and for the first time he looked distressed and unable to conceal it.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I hardly need reminding of that, do I?” I responded tartly. At this very moment there were about eight of them, crawling round the house like ants, taking things away in small boxes and plastic bags, muttering to each other in corners, looking at me as if I were a wounded animal. I couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into them. They were very polite, in their way, but still there was practically nowhere I could go to be on my own. I raised my voice. “What I want to know is what your lot are doing while I’m working away, racking my brains to help you?”

“I can assure you that we are all working hard too,” he replied. Actually, he did look a bit weary, now I came to think about it.

As I went upstairs I passed an officer coming down with a stack of papers. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, leaning on it for a moment. I splashed cold water on my face with one hand. Blood was starting to seep through the muslin wrapped around the other. Afterward I sat at my dressing table and applied more makeup with my inept left hand. I was looking a bit ragged, what with one thing and another. My hair could do with washing. In this heat you almost need to wash your hair every day. I rubbed cream into the smudges below my eyes and put on some lip gloss. I had to admit that this was getting me down. I wished Clive would ring back so I could speak to someone who wasn’t a policeman. I had already told him about my hand and he had been very shocked and insisted on talking to Stadler on the phone, barking questions at him, but he hadn’t come rushing back, as I had hoped, bearing flowers.

Then Detective Inspector Stadler wanted to talk to me about the details of my daily life. We had to retreat into the sitting room because Mary wanted to wash the kitchen floor.

“How’s your hand, Mrs. Hintlesham?” he asked in that soft, deep, insistent voice of his.

On this hot day he had taken his jacket off and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to just below the elbows. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. When he asked me questions, he always looked me directly in the eyes, which gave me the feeling that he was trying to catch me out.

“Fine,” I replied, which wasn’t exactly true. It stung. Razor cuts are always horrible, that’s what the doctor had said when she strapped it up.

“This person,” he said. “Obviously knows that you used to be a hand model.”

“Maybe.”

He picked up two books, and I saw for the first time that they were my appointment book and my address book.

“Can we go through some things?”

I sighed. “If we have to. As I told that senior officer of yours, I’m very busy.”

He looked evenly at me in a way that made me flush.

“This is for your benefit, you know, Mrs. Hintlesham.”

And so I watched my life passing before my eyes. We started with my appointment book. He leafed through each page and fired questions at me about names, places, appointments.

That was my hairdresser, I said, and that was a checkup with the dentist for Harry. That was lunch with Laura, Laura Offen. I spelled out initials, described shops, explained arrangements with handymen and French tutors and tennis coaches, lunches, coffee mornings, reminders. We went farther and farther back, through events I had forgotten, couldn’t even remember when he reminded me of them: all the negotiations for the house, the real estate agents and surveyors and the tree surgeons and planners. The school year. My social life. All the details of my days. He kept asking where was Clive when this happened, when that happened.

Finally we got back to New Year’s Day and Stadler closed the date book and picked up my address book. We went through every blessed name. I took Stadler through the old neglected dusty attic of my social life. So many who had moved away or died. Couples who had separated. And those friends I had just lost touch with-or who had lost touch with me. It made me think about how much of a social asset I’d been over the last few years. Could this person really be one of those names?

As if that wasn’t enough, he produced Clive’s accounts for the house. I tried to tell him that I didn’t deal with any of that, it was all up to Clive, that I have no head for figures. But he didn’t seem to hear. £2,300 for the living room curtains, which we hadn’t hung yet. £900 for the tree surgeon. £3,000 for the chandelier. £66 for the front door knocker that I fell in love with in Portobello Market. The numbers started to blur. I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I certainly couldn’t remember the quarry tiles being that expensive. Dreadful how it all adds up.

When we’d finished, he looked at me and I thought, This man knows more about me than anyone in the world except Clive.

“Is this all relevant?” I asked.

“That’s the problem, Mrs. Hintlesham. We don’t know. For the moment we just need information. Lots of it.”

Then he told me to be careful, just like Links had said. “We don’t want anything else happening, do we?”

He sounded reasonably cheerful about it.

Outside, the leaves on the trees had turned dark, dirty green. They hung limply from the branches, hardly stirring in the sluggish warm breeze. The garden looked like a desert, the earth was baked hard and was run through with cracks, like an old piece of china; some of the plants that Francis had recently planted were beginning to droop. The new little magnolia tree would never survive. Everything was parched.

I rang Clive again. His secretary said he’d popped out. Sorry, she said, though she didn’t sound sorry at all.

Dr. Schilling was different. She didn’t march into the room with a pile of names to check and bark questions at me. She looked at my hand, unrolling the bandage and holding my fingers in her slim, cool ones. She said she was very sorry, as if she was personally apologizing for it. To my horror, I suddenly wanted to cry, but I certainly wasn’t going to do that in front of her. There was nothing she would like better.

“I want to ask you some questions, Jenny.”

“What about?”

“Can we talk about you and Clive?”

“I thought we’d done that already.”

“There are some more details. Is that all right?”

“I suppose so, but look…” I shifted uncomfortably. “This doesn’t feel quite right. I just want to be sure that your questions are just about catching the person doing this. You probably think I’m completely mad and have an awful life, but I’m happy with it. Is that clear? I don’t need your help. Or if I do need it, I don’t want it.”

Dr. Schilling gave an embarrassed smile.

“I don’t think any of that,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “I just wanted to be clear.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Schilling. She looked at a notebook that was open on her lap.

“You wanted to ask about Clive and me.”

“Do you mind that he’s away so much?”

“No.” She waited, but I didn’t say anything else. I knew her tricks by now.

“Do you think that he’s faithful to you?”

“You asked me that before.”

“But you didn’t answer.”

I gave a huffy sigh.

“Since Detective-whatever-he-is Stadler now knows when my next period is due, I suppose I may as well tell you about my sex life as well. If you really want to know, just after Harry was born he had a-a thing.”

“A thing?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Yes.”

“How long for?”

“I’m not exactly sure. A year, maybe. Eighteen months.”

“So it wasn’t just a thing, was it? It was rather more serious than that.”

“He was never going to leave me. She was just extra. Men are such clichés, aren’t they? I was tired, I had put on some weight.” I touched the skin beneath my eyes. “I was getting older.”

“Jenny,” she said gently, “you were only, let’s see, in your late twenties when Harry was born.”

“Whatever.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“Don’t want to talk about that. Sorry.”

“All right. Have there been others?”

I shrugged.

“Perhaps.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t want to know, thank you very much. If he has some stupid fling, I’d prefer he kept it to himself.”

“You think he does have affairs?”

“I’ve just said: maybe, maybe not.” The unbidden image of Clive looking down at Gloria entered my mind. I pushed it away.

“And you don’t?”

“As I told you last time you asked: no.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Not close to it?”

“Oh, stop it, for goodness’ sake.”

“Do you and your husband have a satisfactory sex life?”

I shook my head at her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t.”

“All right.” Once again, she was unexpectedly gentle. “Do you think that your husband loves you?”

I blinked.

“Loves me?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a big word.” She didn’t reply. I took a breath. “No.”

“Likes you?”

I stood up.

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “You’re going to walk away from this conversation and write it up in concise notes, but I’m going to live with it, and I don’t want to. Clive isn’t sending me razor blades, is he, so why do you want to know all this?” I stood at the door. “Has it ever occurred to you that what you do is rather cruel? Now, I’m rather busy, so if you’ll excuse me.”

Dr. Schilling left and I stood alone in the sitting room. I felt as if I had been turned upside down and emptied all over the floor.

NINE

I could hear the wind rippling in the trees outside. I wanted to open the windows, let the night breeze blow through all the rooms, but I couldn’t. I mustn’t. Everything had to be closed and locked. I had to be secure. The air inside was stale, secondhand. Heavy, hot, dead air. I was shut up in this house, and the world was shut out of it, and I could feel it all returning to chaos and to ugliness: wallpaper hanging off the walls, plasterwork abruptly stopping, floorboards torn up so you could see the dark, grimy holes beneath. The dust and bits and pieces of years and years working their way back onto the surface. All the unfinished work, all my dreams of perfect spaces: cool white, lemon yellow, slate gray, pea green, the stippled hallway, a fire in the grate throwing shadows across the smooth cream carpet, the grand piano with gladioli on top, the round tables for drinks in cut-glass tumblers, my prints hanging under picture lights, long views through the windows of green lawns and graceful shrubs.

I was sweating. I turned my pillow over, to find a cooler patch. Outside the trees rustled. It wasn’t quite dark; the street lamps cast a dirty orange stain across the room. I could see the shapes of my surroundings, my dressing table, the chair, the tall block of the wardrobe, the paler squares of the two windows. And I could see that Clive still wasn’t here. What time was it? I sat up in bed and squinted across at the luminous numbers on the alarm clock. I watched a seven grow into an eight and then shrink into a nine.

Half past two and he hadn’t come home. Lena was out till tomorrow morning, staying with her boyfriend, so it was just me in the house, me and Chris, and all those empty disintegrating rooms, and outside a police car. My finger throbbed, my throat hurt, my eyes stung. It was quite impossible to sleep anymore.

I stood up and saw myself dimly reflected in the long mirror, like a ghost in my white cotton nightdress. I padded across to Chris’s room. He was sleeping with one foot tucked under the other knee and with his arms thrown up like a ballet dancer. The duvet was in a heap on the floor beside him. His hair was sticking to his forehead. His mouth was slightly open. Maybe, I thought, I should take him to Mummy and Daddy’s house down in Hassocks. Maybe I should go there myself, get away from all this ghastliness. I could just leave, get in the car and drive away. Why not? What on earth was there to stop me and why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. The light was on in the hall, but all the rooms were dark. I gulped. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. Stupid. This was stupid, stupid, stupid. I was safe, absolutely safe. There were two men outside, all the doors and windows were locked, double-locked. There were ugly iron grilles on the downstairs windows. A burglar alarm. A light that turned on in the garden when anyone passed it.

I went into the room that would be a spare bedroom, and turned on the light. Half a wall was papered, the rest just lined. The rolls of wallpaper were stacked in the corner, waiting beside the stepladder and the trestle table. The brass bed was in pieces on the floor. The room smelled musty. There was a hot bubble of rage in my chest; if I opened my mouth it would come out as a scream. A scream that would go on and on, ripping into the silent night, waking up everyone in the city, telling them to beware. I pressed my lips together. I had to put my life in order. Nobody else was going to do it for me, that was clear. Clive wasn’t around. Leo and Francis and Jeremy and all the rest of them had gone, as if they’d never been here. Mary crept round me as if I was contagious, and I was lucky if she emptied the wastepaper baskets nowadays. Tomorrow I would tell her I didn’t need her anymore. The police were all stupid, incompetent. If they had been my workmen, I would have fired them by now. I would just have to rely on me. It was just me, now. I felt a tic start up under my right eye. When I put my finger there, I could feel it jumping, like an insect under my skin.

I picked up the box of wallpaper paste and read the instructions. It all seemed simple enough. Why did everybody make so much fuss about it? I would start with the room and then I’d move through my life, putting it all back together again, just like it was before.

Clive arrived home about half an hour later. I heard the key in the door and froze for an instant, until I heard him take off his shoes and pad into the kitchen, where he turned on the tap. I didn’t stop what I was doing. I didn’t have time. I was going to finish this before morning.

“Jenny,” he called when he went into our bedroom. “Jens, where are you?”

I didn’t reply. I slapped the paste onto the wallpaper. “Jens,” he shouted, from our bathroom this time, the one that was going to have Italian tiles one day. The hem of my nightdress was sodden with paste, but that didn’t matter. The bandage on my hand was soaked as well, and my finger throbbed harder than ever. The most difficult part was putting the paper on straight, and without any bubbles. Sometimes I put on too much paste and it stained through the paper. That would dry, though.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” He stood in the doorway in his white shirt and red boxer shorts and the socks that bloody Father Christmas had given him last year.

“What does it look like?”

“Jens, it’s the middle of the night.”

“So?” He didn’t say anything, just stared around the room as if he didn’t quite know where he was. “What does it matter if it’s the middle of the night? What does it matter what time it is? If nobody else is going to do it, I’m going to do it myself. And you can be pretty sure that nobody else is going to do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that if you want something done, do it yourself. Mind where you step, for goodness’ sake. You’ll ruin everything and then I will have to do it all over again and I don’t have time for that. Had a good day, did you? Good day at the office till three in the morning, darling?”

“Jens.”

I climbed up the ladder, holding up the sticky paper, which twisted round on itself.

“I blame myself,” I said. “I’ve let everything go to pieces, that’s what. I didn’t notice at first, but now I see. A few silly letters, and we let the house fall down, fill up with dirt. Stupid.”

“Jens, stop this now. It’s all crooked anyway. And you’ve got glue in your hair. Come off that ladder now.”

“The master’s voice,” I hissed.

“You’re behaving in an unbalanced way.”

“Oh really! How should I be behaving? I’d like to know. Take your hand off my ankle.”

He backed off. A violent ache sprang up behind my eyes.

“Jenny, I’m going to phone Dr. Thomas.”

I looked down at him.

“Everyone uses that tone of voice with me, as if there was something the matter with me. There’s nothing the matter with me. They just need to catch this person and we’ll be back to normal. And you”-I flourished my gluey brush at him so a drop fell on his frowning, upturned face-“you’re my husband, in case you had forgotten, darling. For better or for worse, and this is for worse.”

I tried to smooth the paper onto the wall, bending down at a painful angle with my damp nightdress slapping against my shins, and prickles of dust and grime on my feet, but it creased terribly.

“It’s hopeless,” I said, staring round the room. “It is all completely hopeless.”

“Come to bed.”

“I’m not in the least bit tired, thank you.” And indeed I wasn’t. I was fizzing with energy and rage. “But if you want to do anything to help, you can phone Dr. Schilling and tell her it is at the very best dull, thank you very much. She’ll understand what I mean. You look pathetic in your socks,” I added spitefully.

“All right. Have it your own way.” His tone was a mixture of indifference and contempt. “I’m going to bed now. You do what you want. That strip is on back to front, by the way.”

At six, Clive left for work. He called good-bye as he left, but I didn’t bother to reply. Chris got himself up that day. I shouted at him to get his own breakfast. He stood and watched me for a few minutes, looking as if he was about to cry. Just the sight of him, standing in his blue pajamas with teddy bears, looking sad, with his thumb in his mouth, made me feel scorched with anger and impatience. When he tried to hug me, I shrugged him off, telling him I was all sticky. When Lena arrived, he ran to her as if I were his wicked stepmother. A new sidekick and pretend-best-friend, a small woman with a face like a fox who introduced herself as Officer Page, marched round the house, checking all the windows. She came into the spare room and said good morning to me in a careful voice, as if she was pretending that it was quite normal to find me decorating in my nightclothes. I ignored her too. Idiot. I had no use for any of them, no confidence in them at all.

When I had finished the walls, I had a bath. I washed my hair three times, waxed my legs, shaved under my arms, plucked between my eyebrows. I applied new varnish on my nails and put on more makeup than usual, lots of foundation because my skin looked oddly blotchy, a bit of blusher to give me color, eyeliner. My face was a mask. But I couldn’t keep my hand steady. The lipstick kept going outside my lips, which gave me the look of a drunken old woman. I got it right eventually: discreet plum color, hardly noticeable. It was me again in the mirror. Jennifer Hintlesham: immaculate.

I chose a thin black skirt to wear, with black mules and a crisp white shirt. It was meant to look businesslike, chic, cool. But the skirt hung off my waist. I must have lost weight. Well, every cloud has a silver lining.

I told Lena to take Chris to the London aquarium and then buy him lunch. Chris said he wanted to stay with me, but I blew him a kiss and told him not to be silly, he would have a lovely day. I gave Mary a week’s wages and told her she shouldn’t bother to return. I ran a finger over the top of the microwave and showed her the dust there. She put her hands on her hips and said she never wanted to come back anyway; the job gave her the spooks.

I made a list. Two lists. The first was of things to do in the house and didn’t take me long. The second was for Links and Stadler and was more complicated, and I drank four cups of strong coffee while I was doing it. They had said anything I could remember might be relevant, hadn’t they?

Dr. Schilling and Stadler arrived together, looking grave and mysterious. I asked them both to come into Clive’s study.

“It’s all right,” I said to them. “Don’t look so anxious. I’ve decided to tell you everything. Do you want some coffee? No, then do you mind if I have some more? Oops.”

I spilled a large splash on the desk, and wiped up the puddle with a document that was lying near the computer that said “Without Prejudice” at the top.

“Jenny…”

“Hang on. I made a list of things I thought you should know. I tried ringing the Haratounian woman, you know.”

Grace looked at Stadler, stared at him as if she was ordering him to tell me something. Stadler frowned back.

“I’ve met lots of strange men, if you want to know,” I said. “In fact, as far as I’m concerned, you’re all strange. No one sticks out as odd because everyone sticks out.” I laughed and drank some more coffee. “My first boyfriend, in fact my only boyfriend if you don’t count Clive, was called Jon Jones. He was a photographer-still is, maybe you know of him, he takes pictures of models wearing almost no clothes-and I met him when I was a model, only a hand model, of course, so I didn’t have to take my top off, or not in public, but he took loads of pictures of me in private. When we broke up, except that’s not what it felt like, breaking off-it felt as if he just ever so slowly withdrew his interest so that one day I couldn’t be sure if we were going out any longer. Yes, well, when that happened, and that’s about when I met Clive, I asked for the pictures back and he laughed and said he had copyright, so he must still have them somewhere.”

“Jenny,” interrupted Grace. “Would you like something to eat?”

“Not hungry,” I said, taking a violent slurp of coffee. “I was putting weight on my hips, anyway, before all of this. I don’t think I’m a very sexual woman, actually.” I leaned forward and hissed under my breath: “The earth doesn’t move for me.”

Grace took the coffee cup out of my hand. I noticed I’d left a ring on Clive’s desk. Never mind. I’d put that wonder polish on it later and it would vanish, like magic. I’d clean all the windows too, so that it would look as if there was no barrier at all between me and the outside world.

“That’s not what I wanted to say, though, except she keeps on asking about my sex life. I’ve made a list of men who I think act oddly towards me.” I waved it at them. “It’s rather long, I must say. But I’ve put asterisks by the side of the oddest ones, to help you.” I squinted at the list. My writing was rather erratic this morning, or maybe I was just too tired to see straight, except I didn’t feel tired.

Stadler took the list out of my hand.

“Can I have a cigarette?” I asked him. “I know you smoke, even though you don’t smoke in front of me, because I’ve watched you out of the window. I watch you, you know, Detective Inspector Stadler. I watch you and you watch me.”

He took a packet out of his pocket, took out two cigarettes and lit both, then handed me one. It felt oddly intimate, and I jumped away from him and giggled.

“Clive’s friends are odd,” I said, coughing extravagantly. The ground swam when I took a puff, and my eyes watered. “They look respectable, but I bet they all have affairs, or want to have them. Men are like animals in a zoo. They have to be put into cages in order to keep them from running all over the place. Women are the zookeepers. That’s what marriage is, don’t you think, we try and tame them. So maybe it’s like a circus, not a zoo. Oh, I don’t know.

“I tried to think of everyone who had come to this house, even those people who weren’t in my address book or date book. I don’t know where to start. Obviously there’s all the men working in the garden and in the house. Everybody knows the way that sort of men behave. But to be honest it’s the same everywhere I go. I mean everywhere. When I see the fathers at Harry’s nursery school, or when I’ve gone into Josh’s computer club. There are some pretty odd fish there. And… there was something else I was going to say.”

Grace laid a hand on my shoulder.

“Jenny, come with me and I’m going to make you some breakfast,” she said.

“Is it still only breakfast time? Goodness. Well, at least I’ve got plenty of time to clean the boys’ bedrooms. But I haven’t gone through the list properly.”

“Come on.”

“I got rid of Mary, you know.”

“Did you?”

“So now it’s just me left. Well, me and Chris and Clive. But they don’t count.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’re not going to help me, are they? Men don’t, in general. That’s been my experience, anyway.”

“Toast?”

“Whatever. I don’t care. God, this kitchen’s in a mess, isn’t it? Everything is in such a mess. Everything. How on earth am I going to do it all, with nobody to help?”

TEN

Things got a bit misty after that. I said I wanted to go out shopping and I think I even started looking for my coat. But I couldn’t find it and people all around me kept telling me not to. Their voices seemed to be coming in at me from all directions, and also scratching at me from the inside as if there were wasps inside my skull crawling around my brain and waiting to sting me. I started to shout at them to get them to go away and leave me alone. The voices stopped, but I felt them gripping my arm. I was in my bedroom and Dr. Schilling was so close to me that I could feel her breath on my face. She was saying something I couldn’t understand. I felt a pain in my arm and then everything faded very slowly into darkness and silence.

It was as if I was at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. Every so often I would emerge and see faces, which would say things I couldn’t make out, and I would sink back into the comforting darkness. When I woke up it felt completely different. Gray and cold and generally horrid. A policewoman was sitting by the bed. She looked at me and got up and left the room. I wanted to go back to sleep, just be unconscious, but I couldn’t make it happen. I thought of what I’d done and then tried not to think of it. I don’t know what had become of me, but there was no point in dwelling on it.

After a time Dr. Schilling and Stadler came into the room. They looked a bit nervous, as if they were coming into the headmistress’s study. It seemed funny until I remembered that they probably just thought I would carry on behaving stupidly. I must have been feeling better because then I felt irritated by these people in my bedroom. I looked down and saw I was wearing my green nightie. Who had got me out of my own clothes and into this? Who had been present when it was being done? Another thing to try not to think about.

Stadler stayed just inside the door, but Dr. Schilling came forward clutching one of my French earthenware mugs that are really for the children. People didn’t understand. The Hintlesham kitchen was a complicated operation and nobody had it in their head except for me. God knows what else was being done down there.

“I brought you some coffee,” she said. “Black. The way you like it.” I sat up to take the warm mug in the hollow of my hands. The bandage made it a little awkward but protected me against the heat. “Would you like your dressing gown?”

“Please. The silk one.”

I put the coffee down on the bedside table and got into the dressing gown with much wriggling. I thought of being thirteen years old and wriggling into my bathing costume on the beach while tightly bandaged in a towel. I was being as stupid now as I had been then. Nobody cared whether they saw me or not. Dr. Schilling pulled a chair up closer and Stadler stepped forward to the end of the bed. I was determined not to speak. I had nothing to apologize for and I just wanted them to go away. But I never have been able to bear silences, so I did speak.

“It feels like visiting time in hospital,” I said with more than a trace of sarcasm. Neither of them spoke. They just kept looking at me with ghastly expressions of sensitivity and sympathy. If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it is the idea of being pitied.

“Where’s Clive?”

“He saw you during the night. It’s Tuesday. He had to go to work but I’ll ring him in a minute and tell him how you are.”

“You must be pretty sick of me,” I said to Dr. Schilling.

“That’s funny,” she said. “Because I’ve just been thinking the same. I mean the opposite, I suppose. I think you must be pretty sick of me. We’ve been talking about you.”

“I bet you have,” I said.

“Not in a bad way, I hope. One of the things we’ve been arguing about. Or, rather, talking about.” She gave a glance across at Stadler as she said this, but he was fiddling with the knot in his tie and didn’t seem to be paying any attention. “I feel, we feel, that we may not have been open enough with you and I want to do something to correct that. Jenny…” She paused for a second. “Jenny, firstly I want to apologize if you feel that I’ve been intrusive. I think you know that in my day job I’m a psychiatrist treating patients. But here my job is to do anything I can to help the police catch this dangerous person.” She was talking to me very gently now, as if she was a doctor talking to a child in bed with a temperature. “You have become an object of somebody’s obsessive attention. One of the ways of catching the person is to find out what it is that has attracted the attention, and that can sometimes mean that I become pretty intrusive myself. But I just want to say that I know that you already have a perfectly good doctor and I don’t want to replace him. Nor do I want to tell you how to run your life.”

I gave her a sort of sarcastic frown, if such a thing is possible. I suddenly had this image of the two of them deciding to come in and treat me delicately and “sensitively.” That funny Jenny Hintlesham who needs careful handling.

“I suppose you’ve discovered that I’m completely batty,” I said. This was planned to be a crushing put-down but it came out all wrong. Dr. Schilling didn’t smile.

“You mean yesterday?” she said. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to talk about anything that had happened with her. “You’re under a great deal of pressure. We’re all here. We’re trying to do something to help. But the pressure is on you. You’re the one it’s hard for. I want you to know that we appreciate that.”

I held up my bandaged hand and looked at it. Maybe it was just my silly imagination, but it seemed to hurt more when I looked at it.

“You feel my pain, do you?” I said with some bitterness. “I don’t want you to be sympathetic with me,” I added quietly. “I want you to make all this go away.”

I expected Dr. Schilling to get cross or flustered, but she hardly reacted at all.

“I know,” she said. “Detective Inspector Stadler is going to talk to you about that.”

She moved her chair to the side, but still close to me. Stadler shuffled forward. He had the expression of a kindly local constable who had come to a primary school to give the little tots some road-safety advice. It looked very odd on his libertine’s face. He pulled up a chair.

“All right, Jenny?” he said.

I was slightly shocked by his using my name just like that, but I just nodded. He was very close. I saw for the first time that he had one of those dimples in his chin. They almost tempt you to put your finger into them.

“You’re wondering why we can’t just catch this man, and I know what you mean. It’s supposed to be our job, isn’t it? I’m not going to give you the standard lecture, but the fact is that most crimes are bloody easy to solve. Because most people don’t put much effort into their crimes. They hit somebody or steal something and somebody sees them do it and that’s it. We just pick them up. But the sort of person who does this is different. He’s not a genius but this is his hobby, and he puts a lot of effort into it. He could just as well have been wearing an anorak and spotting trains. But he’s picked on you instead.”

“Are you saying you can’t catch him?”

“He’s difficult to catch in the normal way.”

“He’s come to the house. Under your noses.”

“Give us a break,” Stadler said with an embarrassed smile.

“But that’s crucial,” Dr. Schilling interrupted. “He could just attack women if he wanted. But for him the point is to demonstrate his power and control.”

“I don’t care about his psychology,” I said irritably.

“I do,” said Dr. Schilling. “His psychology is one of our main ways of catching him. We can use it. And one of the main ways of doing that is to see you the way he does. That’s not nice for you, I’m afraid.”

“We’re depending on you,” Stadler said. “It puts even more pressure on you, but we’d like you to think about your own life and to let us know if there is anything out of the ordinary.”

“This isn’t just an ordinary Peeping Tom,” said Dr. Schilling. “It could be somebody you bump into in the High Street more often than you expect. It could be a friend who’s suddenly a bit more attentive to you, or a bit less attentive. He wants to show his power, so the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings, for anything new or out of place. He wants to show he can get things to you.”

I gave a snort.

“It’s not so much a matter of new things arriving,” I said. “It’s more the old things disappearing.”

Stadler looked up sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing that will be of any help to you. Have you never moved house? It took two moving vans to shift us and I’m convinced that there is a small van somewhere going round the M25 with all the objects that didn’t make it. Shoes, bits of food mixers, my favorite blouse-you name it.”

“This was all during the move?” asked Stadler.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “This man couldn’t have stolen all of that unless he’d pulled up with a van and four helpers. Even you would have noticed that.”

“Still…” said Stadler, looking lost in thought. He leaned over to Dr. Schilling and whispered to her, as if anything they were saying could be interesting enough to be secret. Then he looked up. “Jenny, could you do us a favor?”

It looked like a rummage sale organized by a blind madman. After phoning ahead, the two of them had taken me to the police station and to a special room where, Stadler told me, there would be objects on display. In the car, Dr. Schilling put her hand on mine in a gesture that gave me the creeps and said that I should just look at the objects and say whatever came into my mind. The only thing that came into my mind was what a wretched lot of hocus-pocus it all sounded.

The stuff itself almost made me laugh. A comb, some rather tacky pink knickers, a fluffy teddy, a stone, a whistle, some definitely pornographic playing cards.

“Honestly,” I said. “I can’t see what you expect-”

And at that very moment I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and given an electric shock all at the same time. There it was. The funny little locket. I remembered different things at the same time. A day and a night in Brighton on our first anniversary. We’d gone to better places in later years, but that had been the best. We walked in all those little dinky shopping streets just away from the front and we’d laughed at the awful souvenir shops, and then at the same moment we’d spotted that in a jeweler’s and Clive had walked in and bought it just like that. And another stupid thought had come into my mind: That night in the hotel Clive took all my clothes off but left the pendant on. It had hung down between my breasts. He had kissed it and then kissed my breasts. It’s mad, the things that stick in your mind. I felt myself blushing and almost had to stop myself from crying. I picked it up, felt the familiar weight in my palm.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Stadler.

“It’s mine,” I said.

The most idiotic expression came over his face. It was almost comic.

“What?” he said, almost in a gasp.

“Clive gave it to me,” I said, as if in a dream. “It was lost.”

“But…” said Stadler. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” I said. “There’s a fiddly clip at the back that opens it up. There’s a lock of my hair inside. Look, there.”

He stared.

“Yes,” he said. Dr. Schilling was gawking as well. They were looking at each other, open-mouthed. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

And he ran, ran, out of the room.

ELEVEN

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all. Not anything. I felt as if I were looking at one of Josh’s wretched computer games that get posted through our front door and that make his grumpy face light up, but I didn’t even know the language, the alphabet it was written in. It was just dots and dashes and signs and codes to me. I looked over at Dr. Schilling, as if she could tell me what was going on, but she just offered me her meaningless reassuring smile, the one that gave me the shivers. Then I looked at the locket again, sitting among the curious pile of objects. I reached over and touched it with one finger, lightly, as if it could blow up in my face.

“I want to go home,” I said, not really meaning it but needing to say something to break the silence in the drab little room.

“Soon,” said Dr. Schilling.

“I want to have something to eat. I’m hungry.”

She nodded, but in an absentminded way. She had a little frown on her face.

“When did I last eat? It must have been ages ago.” I tried to remember back through the last few days, but it was like peering into inky darkness. “Is anybody going to tell me how my locket got here?”

“I’m sure they’ll-”

But then she was interrupted by Stadler coming back into the room with Links. They both looked intensely agitated as they sat down opposite me. Links picked up the locket by its chain.

“You are quite sure this belongs to you, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“Of course I’m sure. Clive’s even got a photo of it somewhere for our insurance.”

“When did you lose it?”

Now I had to think.

“It’s hard to say. I remember wearing it to a concert. That was on the ninth of June, the day before my mother’s birthday. A couple of weeks later I wanted to wear it to Clive’s work’s bash, but I couldn’t find it.”

“What date was that?”

“You’ve got my date book, for goodness’ sake. But it was in June sometime, the end of June.”

Stadler looked down at a notebook in his lap and nodded as if he was satisfied.

“What’s important about it? Where did you find it?”

Stadler looked into my eyes and I made myself not look away. For a second I thought he was going to tell me something, but the moment passed, and he looked down at his notebook once more with that secret satisfaction on his face.

There was a brief, strange hush in the room, then I raised my voice:

“Won’t someone please tell me what is going on, for goodness’ sake?” But my heart wasn’t in it. My anger seemed to have all seeped away. “I don’t understand.”

“Mrs. Hintlesham,” said Links, “can we just establish-”

“Not now,” said Dr. Schilling suddenly. She stood up. “I’m taking Jenny home. She’s been under great strain; she has been unwell. Later.”

“Establish what?”

“Come on, Jenny.”

“I don’t like secrets. I don’t like people knowing things about me that I don’t know. Have you caught him? Is that it?”

Dr. Schilling put a hand under my elbow and I stood up. Why on earth was I wearing these cotton trousers? I hadn’t worn them for years; they didn’t suit me at all.

Everybody was behaving oddly. The house was full of a new kind of energy, as if the curtains had been pulled back, the windows thrown open. Nobody told me anything, of course, but Dr. Schilling came back with me and a bored-looking woman officer. Links and Stadler pitched up soon afterward. They were all beckoning to each other and muttering things to each other and looking at me, then looking away when I caught their eye. Dr. Schilling didn’t seem as happy as the others.

“Do you think you could phone your husband, Mrs. Hintlesham?” asked Stadler, following me into the kitchen.

“Why can’t you phone him yourself?”

“We want to talk to him. We thought it might sound more civilized from you.”

“When?”

“Straightaway.”

“What on earth for?”

“We need to clarify a couple of points.”

“We’ve got a drinks party this evening. An important one.”

“The quicker we can talk to him, the quicker he’ll be free.”

I picked up the phone.

“He’s going to be irritated,” I said.

He was very irritated.

The phone rang. It was Josh and Harry, calling from America, early morning for them, although they sounded as if they were just round the corner and at any moment would come charging into the house. Harry told me he had caught a pike, whatever that is, in the lake and he had learned how to sailboard. Josh asked me how things were at home; his voice jumped from boy’s to man’s, the way it does when he’s overemotional.

“Fine, darling.”

“Are the police still there?”

“I think they’re making progress.”

A little gust of hope blew through me.

“Do we have to stay out here another two weeks?”

“Don’t be silly, darling, you’re having a lovely time. Have you got enough money to last?”

“Yes, but-”

“And did I pack the right clothes? Oh, and remember to tell Harry that there are spare batteries for his Walkman in your backpack.”

“Yeah.”

I put the phone down feeling the conversation hadn’t been a success. Christo trailed past, dragging a blanket after him. I felt a sharp pang of guilt when I saw his blotchy, sullen face.

“Hello, Christo,” I said to him. “Can Mummy have a hug?”

He turned to me.

“I’m not Christo,” he said. “I’m Alexander. And you’re not my mummy.” Lena called to him from his room in her singsong Swedish accent and he raised his yellow head. “Coming, Mummy,” he shouted, darting a glance of triumph at me as he went.

I changed my trousers for a yellow, low-waisted sundress and threaded earrings into my lobes. I looked in the mirror. I wasn’t wearing any makeup. My face was thin and pale, my hair was a mess, my eyes were oddly bright although the skin under them was all papery and frail, and there was a long red scratch on my cheek. How had that got there? I hardly recognized myself anymore.

Dr. Schilling ordered me to eat the omelette that she made, using the herbs I’d been saving for dinner after the drinks party. Never mind. I ate it in a few forkfuls, hardly chewing it, stuffing in brown, slightly stale bread after each rapid mouthful. I hadn’t realized how famished I was. She watched me as I ate, leaning her chin on a hand, staring at me as if I puzzled her. Soon, I thought, I would get control back, clean the house, bring back the workmen, the gardener, the cleaner, take a deep breath and find the energy to be Jenny Hintlesham all over again. Tomorrow. I would begin again tomorrow. But just for this once, there was something pleasantly anesthetizing about being looked after. It no longer felt like my own house, just a place I was sitting in, waiting for something to happen; everyone was waiting for something to happen.

My eyes clicked open. A key in the lock, a door slamming loudly, heavy footsteps in the hall.

“Jenny. Jens, where are you?”

Grace Schilling stood up at the same time as me. Stadler and Links were there before us. We all converged by the staircase.

“What’s going on?” Clive scowled; his voice was loud and abrupt; it made my head ache. At that moment he saw a box of his precious documents on the hall floor. I saw a vein pulsing angrily in his forehead.

“Mr. Hintlesham,” said Stadler. “Thanks for coming.” He was much taller than Clive, who looked square and hot next to him.

“Yes?”

He was talking to Stadler as if he were a particularly low-grade functionary.

“We’d prefer it if you could come with us,” said Links.

Clive stared.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Why not here?”

“We want to take a statement. It would be better.”

Clive looked at his watch.

“For God’s sake,” he said. “This had better be important.”

“Please,” said Stadler, holding open the door for Clive, who turned to me before leaving.

“Phone Jan and tell her something,” he snapped at me. “Anything that doesn’t make us both look stupid. And Becky. Go to that party and make sure you are jolly, as if everything is perfectly normal, do you hear?” I put a hand on his arm but he shook it off violently. “I am sick of this,” he said. “Utterly sick.”

Grace Schilling went too, buttoning up her long jacket purposefully before striding out the door.

I rang Clive’s office and told Jan that Clive had a bad back. “Again?” she said sarcastically, which I didn’t understand at all. I told Becky Richards the same, two hours later, and she laughed sympathetically. “Men are such hypochondriacs, aren’t they?” She sniggered.

I looked round the room, at all the women in their black dresses and all the men in their dark suits. I knew most of them by sight, at least, but suddenly I couldn’t summon up the energy to talk to them. I couldn’t think of a single thing I had to say. I felt quite empty.

TWELVE

Clive didn’t arrive and I felt more and more out of place standing there fiddling with the glass in my hand, looking at pictures in hand, walking from one room to another as if I were urgently on my way to meet someone, somewhere. I realized, almost with a feeling of horror, that being at a party on my own had become an utterly unfamiliar experience. It felt wrong, too. I’ve sometimes joked with Clive that when I go out to a party with him I know that it’s really him people want to see and that I’m really there as Mrs. Clive.

So it was a relief rather than a hideous embarrassment when Becky told me there was someone at the door for me.

“A policeman,” she said with awkward puzzled delicacy.

Because we all know what the idea of a policeman at the door means for ordinary people like us: There’s been an accident, a death, a disappearance. But I wasn’t an ordinary person like them anymore. I went to the door feeling unworried. Stadler was there on the doorstep with a uniformed officer I hadn’t seen before. Becky hovered for a moment, helpful and nosy. The officer didn’t speak and I turned and looked questioningly at Becky.

“If there’s anything I can do, I’ll be inside,” she said and moved back, reluctantly.

I turned back to the officer.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I was sent to tell you that your husband won’t be along. Mr. Hintlesham’s still being interviewed.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”

“We’re just trying to clear up some details.”

We stood there on Becky’s doorstep looking at each other.

“I don’t really want to go back to the party,” I said.

“We can run you back home, if you like,” Stadler said. Then he said: “Jenny,” and I blushed violently.

“I’ll get my coat.”

Nobody spoke to me on the short drive back. Stadler and the officer murmured to each other once or twice. Back at the house, Stadler walked up the steps with me. As I turned the key in the lock it felt for an absurd moment as if the two of us were coming back from an evening out together and we were saying good night.

“Will Clive be back this evening?” I said firmly as if to show myself how stupid that was.

“I’m not sure,” Stadler said.

“What are you talking to him about?”

“We need him to corroborate some details of the investigation.” Stadler looked around casually while speaking. “Oh, and there’s one other thing. As part of this extra push in the inquiry, we would like to conduct a more detailed search of your house tomorrow morning. Do you have any objection to that?”

“I don’t suppose so. I can’t believe there’s anything left to look at. Where do you want to search?”

Stadler looked casual again.

“Different places. Some of the upstairs. Maybe your husband’s study.”

Clive’s study. It had been the first room we made habitable in the new house, which was a bit rich because nobody inhabited it except Clive. Wherever we had lived, Clive always insisted on that: a room that was his private lair, for his own stuff. When we were planning the rooms for the new lair, I remember protesting with a laugh that I didn’t have a sanctum and he said that didn’t matter because the whole house was my sanctum.

The room wasn’t exactly kept locked and bolted, but it hardly needed to be. The boys were strictly forbidden on penalty of torture and death from even entering the room. I wasn’t absolutely excluded, obviously. I’d sometimes go in while Clive was working on the accounts or writing letters and he wouldn’t get cross with me or tell me to go away. But he would turn toward me, take the coffee or hear what I had to say, and then wait until I was finished and started to go. He always said that he couldn’t work if I was in the room.

So there was a feeling of something forbidden when-after checking round the house, getting undressed, and putting on my nightie and dressing gown-I went into the study. I put the light on and straightaway felt guilty, walking across the room and pulling the curtains shut so that I truly felt alone there, at almost midnight.

The room was Clive. Neat, precise, well ordered, almost bare. There were just a few pictures. A small blurry watercolor of a sailing boat he had inherited from his mother. An old etching of his public school that he’d been given as a boy. There was a photograph of Clive with a group of his colleagues at a celebration dinner, all cigars and red shiny faces and empty glasses and arms round shoulders, with Clive looking just a little hunted and awkward. He was never happy being touched, especially by other men.

My husband’s study. What was there here that could possibly be of any interest? I wasn’t going to search through his things, of course. The idea of doing that while he was away at the police station would have seemed terribly disloyal. I just wanted to have a look. It might be important if I had to speak on his behalf. That’s what I told myself.

The study contained two filing cabinets, one tall and brown, the other short, stubby gray metal. I opened them both and flicked through the folders and papers, but they were incredibly boring. Mortgage documents, instruction booklets, endless receipts and bills and guarantees, invoices, accountants’ letters. It made me feel a small glow of love for Clive. This was what he did so that I didn’t have to. He let me do just the interesting, creative part, and he did all this. And it was all done, all arranged. There was nothing pending, no bill unpaid, no letter unanswered. What could I ever have done without him? I didn’t look at the individual pieces of paper. I just wanted to check that there was no file containing anything that wasn’t boring.

I closed the second filing cabinet. It was all so stupid. There was nothing here that could possibly be of any interest to the police unless they wanted to read through our mortgage agreement. Just more misdirected effort. I could have told them if they’d only asked me.

I rolled back the top of the desk. It made a horrible noise and I looked round nervously. I was careful not to do anything that couldn’t be undone in a few seconds if the front door were to ring. Nothing of interest, needless to say. Clive always said that one of his strictest rules was always to clear his desk before he got up from it. There was nothing on the work surface but pens, pencils, erasers, a rather expensive electric pencil sharpener, rubber bands, paper clips, all in some container or dish specially meant for them. There were pigeonholes with envelopes, notepaper, cards, labels. If nothing else, the police would certainly be impressed.

All that remained were the drawers. I sat at his chair. Above my knees was a shallow drawer. Picture postcards. I examined them. All blank. Then the drawers on either side. Checkbooks, new and empty. Holiday brochures for the winter. A whole lot of paperwork from Matheson Jeffries, where Clive works. All blessedly tedious.

The bottom right-hand drawer contained some large, bulky, brown envelopes. I examined the top one. It was full of handwritten letters. The same handwriting. I looked at the end of one of them. It was a long letter on three sheets of paper. Signed Gloria. I knew that one of the wrongest things you can do is to read anybody’s private letters without their permission. “Nobody ever overhears good about themselves” was a saying that came into my mind. I knew I mustn’t read them and what I really ought to do was to put them back and go to bed and put all this out of my mind. At the same time it occurred to me that in the morning the police might be reading these letters for reasons of their own. Shouldn’t I have some idea of what they contained?

I compromised by skimming the letters and looking at a phrase here and a word there. It may seem difficult to make sense of letters in that way, but words seemed to jump up off the page at me: darling… I miss you desperately… thoughts of last night… counting the hours. Funnily enough, my initial feeling was not anger against Clive or even against Gloria. At first I just felt contemptuous at the triteness of her letters. Do people having secret affairs have to express themselves in the same old hackneyed phrases? Couldn’t Clive do better than that? Then I thought of her at dinner when I had last seen her, leaning over to whisper something to him, looking over the table at him, and my cheeks burned. I carefully put the letters back in the envelope. The last letter was the most recent. I shouldn’t have read them; it would do nothing but harm, cause more pain, more humiliation.

Just one more bit. One paragraph, not just a phrase. I would allow Gloria a paragraph to do herself justice. The last one of that most recent letter. I needed to know where I stood.

“And now I must close, my darling. I’m writing this at work and it’s time to go home. I can’t bear not seeing you, but in September we’ll have Geneva.” Geneva. A business trip. He hadn’t mentioned that yet. “It seems awful to admit, but sometimes I hate her too, nearly as much as you.”

I laid the letter down for a moment and swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away. Hated me. So he hated me. Not loved. Not even liked. Not indifferent. Hated. I looked down at the letter again. “But we mustn’t. We’ll work things out and be together somehow. We will find a way, I trusted you when you said that. All my loveliest love, Gloria.”

I folded the letter and slipped it into the large brown envelope carefully, at the bottom, where it was meant to be. I looked at the other stuffed envelopes in the drawer, and even the thought of what they contained filled me with such desolation. I lifted the top one and underneath it was a photograph. It was a woman but it wasn’t Gloria. She looked as if she was at a party. She was holding a drink and she was raising it to the photographer in a jokey way and laughing. She looked different from any woman I knew. Fun. Small and slim and very young. Dark blond hair, short skirt, strange all-over-the-place blouse. But all quite casual-looking. I thought for a mad moment that she looked nice, that she could have been my friend, and then I felt angry and sick and I couldn’t bear any more. I put the photograph back under the second bundle and closed the drawer. I left the room, remembering to switch off the light.

THIRTEEN

I was in the dark. My life was the dark place. Everything I had once taken for granted now loomed over me, horrible. I had thought there was someone out there who wanted to harm me, and that had seemed terrifying enough, but now I realized nowhere was safe. Not out there, not in here, not with the person I had been married to for fifteen years, not in my own house, my own room, my own bed. Nowhere.

Josh and Harry were in America, in some tent up a mountain, far from home. Christo was pretending I wasn’t his mother at all. And Clive hated me; that’s what he had said to Gloria. Lying in bed that night, I tested that word, like testing a battery by laying the tip of your tongue against it. Hated. Hated. Hated. The word stung in my brain. My husband hated me. How long, I wondered, had he hated me? Since Gloria, or for years and years? Always?

Outside, there was a faint sigh of wind in the limp trees. I imagined eyes out there, watching my window.

Maybe my husband wanted me dead.

I sat up in bed, turned on the light beside me. That was ridiculous. Mad, a mad thing to think. Except, why were the police holding him for so long?

At dawn, after a night of jumbled dreams, I went into Christo’s room and sat beside him while he slept. Light was filtering in through his fish curtains; it was going to be another scorching day. He had thrown off his covers and his pajama top was unbuttoned. The fluffy dolphin that Lena had bought him at the zoo was clasped in one fist. His mouth was slightly open and every so often he mumbled something incomprehensible. Today, I thought, I would arrange to send him with Lena to my parents. I should have done it before. This was no place for a child to be.

The police arrived early, three of them, who moved into Clive’s study like a task force. I pretended they weren’t there.

I made Christo and Lena a cooked breakfast, though Lena, who never ate anything, merely picked at the grilled tomato with her fork and tried to push the rest of it into a pile so it would look as if she’d eaten some. And Christo, after piercing the yolk of the fried egg and smearing it round his plate, said it was all yuck and couldn’t he have his chocolate flakes instead? What was the magic word? I asked automatically. Please. Please could he not eat this disgusting mess.

The police left, carrying boxes. It was just a few months since they’d all been brought in and piled high at random by a group of surly and resentful removal men. Christo didn’t ask where his father was, because Clive was usually gone before he woke up anyway. Gone before he woke up, back after he had gone to sleep. Hated. My husband hated me.

The kitchen was a mess. The whole house was a mess now that I’d sent Mary off. I’d clean it tomorrow. Not today. I looked down at my bare legs. They needed waxing again, I thought, and my nail varnish was beginning to chip.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Hintlesham?” Lena asked me in her singsong voice. What a pretty girl she was, so blond and slim in her tiny sundress, her delicate arms tanned from the summer. Maybe Clive had thought so too. I stared at her until her face swam.

“Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“Fine.” I put my fingers against my face; my skin felt thin and old. “I slept badly…” I trailed off.

“I want to watch the cartoons.”

“Not now, Christo.”

“I want to watch cartoons!”

“No.”

“You’re a bumhole.”

“Christo!” I seized his upper arm and pinched it fiercely.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

I let go of his arm and turned to Lena, who was looking demure.

“Today is a bit complicated,” I said vaguely. “Maybe you and Christo could go to the park, take a picnic, go to the bouncy castle.”

“I don’t wanner picnic.”

“Please, Christo.”

“I wanner stay with you.”

“Not today, darling.”

“Come on, Chrissy, let’s choose your clothes.” Lena stood up. No wonder Christo loved her. She never got cross, just chanted things at him in her funny voice.

I put my head in my hands. Dust and dirt everywhere. Ironing to be done. No one to help me. Clive in the police station, answering questions. What questions? Do you hate your wife, Mr. Hintlesham? How much do you hate her? Enough to send her razor blades?

They left together, hand in hand. Christo wore red shorts and a stripy shirt. I stared at the congealing food on their plates. I stared at the window, which needed washing. And there was a spider’s web on the light above me. Where was the spider, I wondered.

The doorbell rang and I jumped. It was Stadler, crumpled and sweaty, with stubble on his face. He looked as if he hadn’t gone to bed.

“Can I just ask a couple of questions, Jenny?” He always called me Jenny now, as if we were friends, lovers.

“More questions?”

“One,” he said, with a tired smile.

We walked downstairs, where he turned down offers of coffee and breakfast. He looked around.

“Where’s Lynne?” he asked.

“Sitting outside in her car,” I said. “You must have passed her.”

“Right,” he said dully. He hardly seemed awake.

“You wanted to ask a question?”

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s just a detail. Can you remember where you were on Saturday July seventeenth?”

I made a feeble attempt to recall and gave up.

“You’ve got my appointment book, haven’t you?”

“Yes. All you wrote on that day was ‘Collect fish.’ ”

“Oh, yes, I remember.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was at home. Cooking, preparing things.”

“With your husband?”

“No,” I said. Stadler gave a visible start, then a smile of suppressed triumph. “I don’t see why you need to look surprised. As you know, he’s hardly ever here.”

“Do you know where he was?”

“He had to go out, he told me. Urgent business.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I was cooking a meal for us. He told me in the morning he had to go out.”

I remembered the day clearly. It had been Lena’s day off. Harry and Josh had lounged around and squabbled, before going out with separate friends; Christo had watched television most of the day, and played with his Legos, and gone to bed early, worn out by heat and bad temper, and I had sat in the kitchen with the ruined day behind me and my beautiful meal spread out on the table, long-stemmed wineglasses and flowers from the garden, and he hadn’t come back.

“He was out the whole day then?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you be precise about times?”

As I spoke I could hear my own voice, flat, sad.

“He left too early to be able to go to the fishmonger’s. He came back at about midnight. Maybe a bit later. He wasn’t there when I went to sleep.”

“Are you willing to make a statement repeating all that?”

I shrugged.

“If you want. I assume you’re not going to tell me why it matters.”

Stadler startled me by taking hold of my hand and holding it.

“Jenny,” he said softly, his voice like a caress. “All I can tell you is that all of this will soon be over, if that is of any comfort to you.”

I felt myself going red.

“Oh” was all I could manage in response, like some village idiot.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

I didn’t want him to go, but I couldn’t say that, of course. I pulled my hands away.

“Good,” I said.

I lay on my bed in a puddle of sunlight. I couldn’t move. My limbs felt weighted down and my brain sluggish, as if I were under water.

I lay in a cool bath and closed my eyes and tried not to think. I wandered from room to room. Why had I ever liked this house? It was ugly, cold-hearted, unsatisfactory. I would move from here, start again.

I wished Josh would call me. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to stay there if he hated it so very much. It wasn’t worth the wretchedness; I saw that now.

I went into the boys’ rooms and fingered the clothes in their wardrobes, the trophies on their shelves. We were all so very far from each other. I caught sight of myself in the long mirror in the hall-a thin, middle-aged woman with greasy hair and bony knees, wandering about like a lost thing in a house that was too large for her.

Outside, the sky was hazy with heat and fumes.

Maybe we could move to the country, to a small cottage with roses round the door. We could have a swimming pool and a beech tree the boys could climb.

I opened the fridge and stared inside.

The doorbell rang.

I was unable to speak. It was just not possible. It wasn’t real. I just shook my head as if I could clear the confusion away. Links leaned closer, as if I were short-sighted and deaf as well as mad.

“Did you hear what I said, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“What?”

“Your husband, Clive Hintlesham,” he said, as if it had to be spelled out, detail by detail. “An hour ago. We charged him with the murder of Zoe Haratounian on the morning of July seventeenth, nineteen ninety-nine.”

“I don’t understand,” I repeated. “This is mad.”

“Mrs. Hintlesham, Jenny…”

“Mad,” I repeated. “Mad.”

“His solicitor is fully involved. He will appear at Saint Steven’s Magistrate’s Court tomorrow morning. They will make a bail application. Which will be refused.”

“Who is this woman, anyway? What’s she got to do with Clive? With me and the letters?”

Links looked uneasy. He took a breath and spoke in a slow, patient voice, quietly, even though there was nobody around to hear.

“I can’t tell you in detail,” he said. “But because of the special circumstances I thought I should prepare you. It seems that your husband was having an affair with her. We believe he gave her your locket. Her photograph was among his possessions.”

I remembered the photograph I had seen last night: an eager, laughing face, a glass in her hand lifted in a toast to the future she didn’t have. I gulped, and a wave of nausea swept over me.

“That doesn’t mean he would kill her.”

“Miss Haratounian also received letters like yours. Written by the same person. We believe that your husband threatened her, and then killed her.”

I gazed at him. A jigsaw was beginning to click together, but the picture that emerged made no sense, it was just a scribble of violent images. A bad dream.

“Are you saying that Clive was the person writing those letters to me?”

“All we are saying at the moment is that your husband is charged with the murder of Miss Haratounian.”

“Tell me what you think.”

“Mrs. Hintlesham…”

“You must tell me. It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

Links was silent for some time, visibly trying to make up his mind.

“This is very painful,” he said. “I wish you could be spared it. But it is possible that he wanted to rid himself of this woman, for whatever reason. Then, having done that, it seemed that nobody knew that he had met her. For that reason, if you were… well, targeted by the person who did that murder, he wouldn’t be a suspect.” Another long silence. “It’s one way of looking at it,” he said uneasily. “I’m sorry.”

“Could he loathe me that much?”

Links didn’t speak.

“Has he admitted it?”

“He still denies even knowing Miss Haratounian,” Links said dryly. “Which is a bit rich.”

“I want to see him.”

“That’s your right. Are you sure?”

“I want to see him.”

“You don’t believe this, Jenny? Jens. You can’t possibly believe this ludicrous charge?” In his voice I heard a mixture of anger and fear. His face was red and unwashed, his clothes were stained. I gazed at him. My husband. Jowly cheeks, a thickening neck, eyes that were slightly bloodshot.

“Jens,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”

“Jens, it’s me, Clive, your husband. I know things have been shaky recently, but it’s me.”

“Shaky,” I repeated. “Shaky.”

“We’ve been married for fifteen years, Jens. You know me. Tell them it’s ridiculous. I was with you that day. You know I was. Jens.”

A fly settled on his cheek and he brushed it away violently.

“Tell me about Gloria,” I said. “Is it true?”

He flushed and tried to speak and then stopped.

I looked at him, the hairs in his nostrils, the grime of dirt on his neck, the flaky skin by his ears, dandruff in his hair. He looked good only when he was carefully groomed. He wasn’t one of those people, like Stadler, for example, who actually look better after staying up all night. Who could stay up all night and still seem sexy.

“I don’t think there’s anything more to talk about, do you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

“Good-bye.”

“You’ll see,” he shouted. “You’ll see and then you’ll be sorry. You are making the biggest mistake of your whole stupid, little life.” His fists came down on the table between us, and the moon-faced policeman at the door stood up. “I will make you suffer for it, see if I don’t.”

There was only one police officer outside my house now, and he lay in the car, half asleep behind a paper. Clive’s office looked like a burglar had been in there. The house was a building site of half-finished rooms. The garden was a wasteland; nettles grew in the beds that Francis had prepared for the flowering, sweet-smelling shrubs; the grass was yellow.

I opened a bottle of champagne and drank a glass of it, but it made me feel violently sick. I ought to eat something, but that didn’t seem possible. I wanted Grace Schilling to come in and make me another herb omelette, runny and good. I wanted Josh to call me and say he was coming home.

I sat alone in the kitchen. I was shamed and I was free.

FOURTEEN

A day of frenetic activity calmed me down. That was what I needed. It stopped me from dwelling on things too much; it muffled the jangling in my head that I couldn’t make go away whatever pills I took for it. The morning was sunny and it hadn’t yet got horribly hot, and as I sat at the kitchen table with Lynne, I felt almost calm. She was wearing her uniform again. There was a feeling of things being over and winding down and farewells. We had worked our way through almost a whole cafetière and I’d made some toast that we both nibbled. Lynne asked if she could smoke and not only did I say she could but I asked for a cigarette myself and went and found a saucer we could use as an ashtray.

My first puff felt sinful, as if I was fourteen years old, and then I felt soothed. Maybe in my new life I’d start smoking again.

“I used to do this to lose weight,” I said. “At least it was a welcome by-product. I gave up when I was pregnant with Josh. My bottom and thighs have never been the same.”

Lynne smiled and shook her head.

“I wish I had your figure,” she said.

I looked at Lynne with a critical eye.

“You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “You haven’t seen it the way I see it.”

We both took puffs from our cigarettes. Mine felt amateurish after all these years. I would need a lot more practice.

“So you’ve been busy?” Lynne asked.

“An awful lot of things need sorting out.”

“When do you leave?”

“I’m flying to Boston this evening.”

“Do the boys know yet?”

I very nearly laughed at this.

“The idea of informing Josh over the phone that his father-well, it didn’t seem such a good idea. No, I’m sure that Dr. Schilling would recommend doing it face-to-face.”

“It’s probably better.”

“And I spent most of the afternoon on the phone to my architect and my various builders and Francis, my brilliant gardener. We’re flying back at the beginning of next week and then we can get going on the house.”

Lynne lit another cigarette and then caught my eye and lit me one.

“Won’t that feel strange?” she said. “Starting all that again?”

“It’s different this time,” I said. “That’s why it took so long on the phone. They’re going to come and patch things up, slap some white paint on the walls, put some shrubs in the garden. Then I’m putting the house on the market.”

Lynne’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“What I’d really like is to burn the house down with everything inside it and make a run for it. But selling it will have to do.”

“You’ve only just moved in.”

“I can hardly bear the sight of it. I’ve been unhappy here. I suppose it’s not the house’s fault, but still…”

“Have you talked to Dr. Schilling?”

“Why should I talk to her?” I said, a bit belligerently. “Grace Schilling’s job was to use her professional skill to catch the man harassing me. Well, he’s caught.” I stopped myself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. Again.”

“That’s all right.”

“In fact, all in all, this probably hasn’t been the most enjoyable job you’ve ever had to do.”

“Why?”

“Trying to look after a bad-tempered, miserable woman.”

Lynne looked serious.

“You shouldn’t say that. It was awful. We all felt terrible for you. We still do.”

“Still?”

“Look, we’re glad we caught the person who did this. We’re not glad for you that it was Mr. Hintlesham.”

I took some time to reply. I was looking over Lynne’s shoulder at the garden. It was difficult to believe that even Francis could get this into a salable shape within a fortnight. We’d see.

“I just keep remembering details of our marriage and wondering how it could have happened. I know we had difficulties, but I don’t see why he had to hate me so much. What had I done to him, what had that poor girl, Zoe, done except climb into bed with him?” Lynne looked me in the eyes. She didn’t turn away, I’ll say that for her. But she didn’t reply. “And even if he hated me so much, would he have wanted to kill me? And to make me suffer? Well, could he? Say something.”

Lynne looked a bit shifty.

“I’ve got to be careful,” she said. “With the committal hearing and everything. But people do things like that. Mr. Hintlesham had met somebody else. He knew that you wouldn’t give him a divorce.” She gave a shrug. “The last murder I dealt with, a fourteen-year-old boy killed his granny because she wouldn’t lend him the money to buy a lottery ticket. It’s like one of my sergeants used to say: You don’t need qualifications to be a murderer.”

“So he could have done it. Do you think he’ll be found guilty?”

Lynne paused before speaking.

“The Crown Prosecution Service say that we’ve got to be confident of a seventy-five percent chance of conviction before we charge anybody. As far as I know, there was no hesitation about charging your husband. We’ve got the clear connection with the dead girl, Zoe, and his attempts to lie about it. There’s the lack of an alibi. His threats against you, his affair and motivation. We’ve got a good case.”

“What if the murder is tried separately?” I asked cautiously.

“No chance,” said Lynne. “The identical notes to the two of you make the cases inseparable.”

“Half the time I think that he’s innocent and will be found guilty. The other half I think he’s guilty and that he’ll go free. He’s clever. He’s a lawyer. I don’t know what to think.”

“He won’t get off,” said Lynne firmly.

We drank up our coffees and finished our cigarettes.

“Have you packed?” she asked.

“That’s on my list,” I said. “I’m only taking a small bag.”

She looked at her watch.

“I think I’d better go,” she said.

“I’ll feel strange being unsupervised,” I said.

“You won’t be entirely unsupervised. We’ll keep an eye.”

I pulled a slightly sarcastic face.

“Does that mean you’re not entirely sure?”

“Just to see you’re all right.”

And she was gone.

I didn’t have lunch. No time. Packing was a little more complicated than I had suggested to Lynne. Normally I’m a world champion at packing exactly the right amount, but I was feeling a bit strange and I felt I was doing everything a little bit slowly, as if I were underwater or on the moon. And even though I was doing things more slowly, I also had to think about them more carefully.

The phone kept ringing, as well. I had rather a long conversation with Clive’s lawyer. It consisted of us slightly dancing around each other. I wasn’t at all clear that we were on the same side, and by the end of it I was wondering whether I oughtn’t to think of getting my own lawyer. Several people rang for Josh: his violin teacher, that fellow Hack from the computer club who said Josh had asked him to drop a game round, and Marcus, one of his friends. And a couple of my friends-or Clive’s friends-called who had clearly heard that something funny was going on. In each case I put them off with a series of excuses that didn’t quite amount to bare-faced lies.

With the state I was in, I thought I’d better leave in hugely good time for the plane, so I ordered a cab and ran around the house in a frenzy of closing windows and half-closing curtains. I had phoned Mary. She would come in and switch on lights in the evening. Anyway, what was there to steal? They were welcome to it. One thing more. Long transatlantic flight. Soft shoes. I had a pair of nice blue canvas slip-ons. Where were they? Had I even unpacked them since the move? I remembered. Bedroom cupboard. At the top. I ran upstairs. In the bedroom-our bedroom I would once have said-I looked around. I could see nothing I’d forgotten.

There was a knock at the door. I don’t mean the front door. A rap at the bedroom door.

“Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“What?” I said, startled.

A face peered round the door. I was completely baffled for a moment. You know when you see a face completely out of its normal setting. A good-looking young man in jeans and a T-shirt and a black work jacket. Long dark hair. Who was he?

“Hack. What are you-”

“That’s not my real name. That’s just something that impresses the boys.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Morris,” he said. “Morris Burnside.”

“Well, Morris Burnside, I’m in a bit of a rush. I’m off to the airport.”

“The game,” he said, brandishing a gaudy package. “I rang, remember? Sorry, the door was open and I wandered in. I shouted from downstairs.”

“Oh. Well, you’re lucky you caught me. The cab will be here at any moment.”

He was actually panting, as if he’d been running.

“Yes, I’m really glad because… It’s not just the game. I saw the evening paper. There’s something in it about your husband being charged.”

“What? Oh, God. I thought that might happen.”

“I’m really sorry, Mrs. Hintlesham. And I know how difficult it will be for Josh.”

“Yes, I know. Hang on, I’m just reaching down these shoes. There.”

“That’s why I wanted to come and see you right away. You see, I’ve been thinking about it, and Mr. Hintlesham couldn’t have done it.”

“That’s very nice of you, er, Morris, but…”

I slipped my shoes on. It was almost time to go.

“No, it’s not just that. I know how your husband can prove that he’s innocent.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s absolutely foolproof. When they find your body they’ll know he can’t have done it.”

“What?” I asked dully and felt a wave of alarm.

He was close to me and there was a very sudden movement, something flashing over my head and drawn tight around my neck. He was now right against me, his breath hot on my face, and looking down on me.

“You can’t speak,” he said to me almost in a whisper. His face was so close to mine he could have kissed me. “You can hardly breathe. One pull on this and you’ll be dead.” His face had gone red now, gorged with blood, his eyes staring at me, but his voice when it came was almost gentle. “It doesn’t matter now. There’s nothing you can do.”

I lost control. I felt warm and wet between my legs. I was peeing myself. I heard it trickle and splash on the floorboards. I thought of my waters breaking. That was a good thing. Christo was away. Christo was with my parents. Josh and Harry were far far away. That was good.

His face crinkled in disgust.

“Now look what you’ve done,” he said. “With your clothes on as well.”

This was the last thing I was ever going to see, his face, and I wanted to ask why and I couldn’t.

“Pity about the cab,” he said. “I thought I’d have a long time. I wanted time to show my love for you but now I’ve only got a little time.”

He tightened the cord again and held it in place with one hand. He reached to one side and the other hand reappeared. I saw a blade.

“I love you, Jenny,” he said.

All I wanted was blackness, to sink into numbness. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.