The guy behind me hooted. The lights had changed and I was still in la-la land. I hit the accelerator. In fact, my outburst had been premature. Kate hadn’t come to ask me to spy on him. She’d laughed at the very suggestion of it. Said that she just wanted my advice on the problem, my “expert detective mind.” Maybe that was the truth, maybe it wasn’t. But even turning it into a joke had cost her, and I could hardly bear to watch her trying to make light of it. She had left swearing me to secrecy and she promised to think about the health farm if only just to get away for a few days. What she would do about Colin she didn’t say.
I drove in a growing frenzy around the Chelsea Embankment looking for a legal parking space, my mind still raking over it all. I kept thinking of Colin, humping it in some young woman’s bachelor flat every morning before work. Trouble was, it was as incongruous as it was distasteful. I just couldn’t see it. I mean there was something so … well, steady about Colin. So I didn’t like him. That was only because I thought she could have done better for herself. But even if she had sold herself short, there had never been any question in my mind that Colin loved her. So maybe I didn’t like the way he showed it: the house, the kids, her becoming the traditional wife and mother, at home all day and at night turning into the business hostess when he needed her. But that was the whole point. A guy like Colin was traditional. Boring. He didn’t have the imagination to go elsewhere. Or did he? Oh, Hannah. The trouble with men is women like you just don’t understand them.
Given that I was about to spend the next half hour in the company of one, it wasn’t the most helpful of feelings. I stuffed Kate and Colin into a box marked “not to be opened during working hours,” spotted a meter that wasn’t working and parked, badly. I ripped off the official “Out of Order” sticker and left a lying little note on the windscreen to the parking warden, about how I’d put the money in but it hadn’t registered.
The hospital was tucked away around the back of the Embankment not far from the Tate Gallery. I ran all the way. The health farm had done me more good than I realized. I could still breathe when I arrived.
You knew it was private the minute you got in the door. Not so much a case of looking for what was different as finding anything the same. The entrance and lobby were newly designed, with fresh paint and corporate landscape paintings placed at strategic points to soothe the eye. In the reception area there was a glass table with a stack of glossy magazines (this month’s) and a very arranged bunch of flowers. It looked more like the headquarters of a multinational than a hospital. But then for all I knew about private medicine it probably was.
The lady at the desk was different, too. More spit and polish than your average health worker. Especially the polish. She looked a bit like a debutante who’d gone through the season without catching anything, and was now reduced to earning a living. She had a gold broach holding up her scarf at a cheeky angle and pearl studs in her ears. Studs, mind you. Maurice Marchant had not found her. Yet.
She knew where to find him, though. Fourth floor, right at the swing doors and down the corridor. I went up in a nicely decorated lift. The swing doors were nice, too, and the corridor. At the end of it there were two nice comfy sofas, another glass table, and yes, you guessed it, more of this month’s magazines. There was also a good-looking gal in a white coat. I was so late that the next client had gone in before me. Breathlessly I explained about the road works and the ghastly traffic accident in Parliament Square. She listened sympathetically and offered me a cup of coffee while I was waiting. Mr. Marchant would, of course, do his best to fit me in. There’s a lot to be said for money, I thought. Shame everyone can’t have it.
I settled myself down. To guard against another tidal wave of family feeling I applied myself to the magazines. They turned out to be quite an education when you really look. It’s amazing how many references you can find to cosmetic surgery these days, and how enough column inches can make anything seem respectable.
For instance, there was a “How to Remake Yourself in Time for Summer” article, which included suggestions from face packs to face peels, and from daily push-ups to a little lipo; a consumer guide to simple surgery entitled “The First Cuts Are the Cheapest,” with a price list for the varying ways you could rearrange yourself and the pros and cons of silicone implants after their withdrawal in America; and an article about how London was becoming a holiday center for wealthy women who arrived with one shape and left with another. Then came the ads for the clinics: little boxes full of hope and phone numbers for those with hippo hips and eagles’ noses, made user-friendly by glowing testaments from Mrs. A. of Brighton and Carol Smith from Middlesex. If Olivia Marchant was to be believed, they were probably the cowboys’ wives, sacrificing their flesh for their husbands’ good name.
The only dissenting voice was an opinion piece by a woman journalist on how age was still the greatest ism of the twentieth century, for which the answer was surely to stop trying to make ourselves continually younger. Compared to the other articles, it seemed almost as brave as a Vaclav Havel play in 1970s Czechoslovakia. I was surprised Marchant’s assistant hadn’t acted as official censor and cut it out.
I stopped reading and went instead for the pictures. No words needed here to get the message across. Maybe cosmetic surgery was like a visit to the hairdresser’s. You sat browsing until you found something you liked, then took it in and asked them to do the same for you. I came across a particularly striking spread of a barely pubescent Chinese girl in varying designer dungarees. The waif as fashion accessory. Now she would be a challenge.
The oak-veneered door to my right opened and a well-groomed woman of about fifty came out. “Before” or “after”? I thought, desperately checking the ears, but she was off down the corridor before I could get a proper look. Now, Hannah, give the guy a break. If you couldn’t bring yourself to hate his wife, you might even be surprised by him.
The door opened again and a man in a suit appeared. “Miss Lansdowne?” he said, holding out a hand. “I thought you might not be coming.”
“Yes, well, I’m already half an hour older than I intended to be,” I said, then felt something kick me in my mental shin. I was obviously going to have a little trouble with my subconscious on this one. I gave him a big smile to compensate.
First impressions? Well, even without the white coat he looked like a doctor. To begin with he had that “Trust me, I’ve been trained for years” smile. You know the kind of thing—not too insistent or pushy, just radiating quiet confidence. We pumped hands. Nice grip. Not too hard, not too weak. By the time we got into the room I already felt like a supplicant.
He beckoned me to sit down and arranged himself behind the desk. We both looked at each other. Even sitting he was a big man. His hair was already gray around the ears and the forehead furrowed by some fairly prominent frown lines. Evidently not a man interested in tasting his own medicine. But then why should he? In place of the word aging, read distinguished. Let us count the ways in which life is not fair.
He let the silence run, then sat a little forward in his chair. “Well, Miss Lansdowne. I gather you come to us through Castle Dean. I hope you had a pleasant stay. You certainly look well enough on it.”
“Pure relaxation,” I said. “I’m grateful you could fit me in so quickly.”
He made a “think nothing of it” gesture. He took down a few details, just so we could get used to each other’s voice and then he sat back and smiled. “Right, so what can I do for you?”
“Well, I’ve heard some things about liposuction. That it’s good for taking excess fat off certain places.”
“Yes, it is.”
“How does it work exactly?” I asked, playing dumber than his waiting room’s magazines allowed.
“Well, basically you make a small incision through the skin into the subcutaneous layer of fat and suction out the excess. It’s quite a simple procedure.”
“And is the result immediate?”
“Pretty nearly.
You usually get some bruising around the area. But that passes within a couple of days.”
“What do you do with the fat?” I said, because this might be my only chance to find out, and it’s the kind of thing we women need to know.
“Er … Well, we can freeze it and keep it for use on other parts of the body—around the face, maybe under the eyes, to give a fuller shape. What we don’t need we discard.”
Ooh. Remind me not to go through your rubbish bins for clues. How would you feel, I thought, walking round with bits of your bottom under your eyes? I suppose it isn’t any weirder then having someone else’s heart beating inside your breast. Life versus vanity. Maybe there’s no difference anymore.
“So which part of the body were you thinking of?”
“Oh, er, the bit around my waist and thighs,” I said, and behind me I saw the Castle Dean nurse waving her slender tone leaflets about like a cheerleader’s pom-poms.
He looked at me for a moment without speaking, then nodded slowly. “Right. Well, I think probably the thing to do is for me to have a look at you and then we’ll talk about it. If you’d like to get yourself undressed and slip onto the couch.”
I was mildly surprised that he didn’t get the nurse in at this point. Instead, he just drew the curtains around me and waited. The etiquette of undressing was a little beyond me. How much did I have to take off? I settled for the trousers but left on the panties. After all, this guy was my client’s husband. You couldn’t be too careful. I looked down at my legs. And I can’t tell you how glad I was about Julie’s waxing. I bet he doesn’t get to see much new forest growth on this couch.
His chair scraped and the curtains opened. He came and stood beside me. We nodded at each other, just to make it feel more normal. He put his hands on my stomach then ran them down onto my upper thighs. He poked around a bit. I watched his face. He caught me looking at him and smiled slightly, then went back to my flesh. He said to turn over. I did. He prodded a bit more, then said, “OK. If you’d like to pop your clothes on, Miss Lansdowne, we’ll have a talk.”
Back at the desk he was busy making a few notes. He was using a sleek black fountain pen. Expensive by the look of it. You could tell that from the flow of the marks on the paper. I had, of course, seen those marks before—little amendments on the files. He and his wife. No doubt both of them Mont Blanc people. He looked up. “So, would you like the good news or the bad?”
“Both.”
“Miss Lansdowne, there’s nothing I can do about your thighs. Because, quite frankly, there’s nothing that needs doing. You have a perfectly acceptable shape already, and the amount of extra fat you’re carrying is really minimal. You could probably shift it better by cutting down on carbohydrates and taking a little more exercise.”
He paused. Oh, give me a break, I thought. An honest cosmetic surgeon. What’s a girl got left if you strip away all her prejudices? “I see. Well … I had hoped … I mean … don’t mind if the result isn’t that dramatic.”
He sighed. “What I could do would make so little difference that you’d probably be banging on my door next day asking for your money back.”
“Does that happen often?” I asked lightly.
He stared at me for a moment. “No, not often.”
I paused. “I … I’ve also been thinking about maybe having some work done on my breasts.” He dropped his eyes quickly to my chest and then back up to me. And was it my imagination or did he not look quite so benign anymore?
“What exactly did you have in mind?”
“Enlargement …? You still use silicone, I gather?”
“Yes.”
“Is that OK? I mean I’ve heard it’s had some problems in America.”
“Yes. It’s still OK. But the FDA—the American drug agency—has always been a very conservative body. Here we have a very high success and safety rate with silicone.”
Just so long as you don’t overfill the waterbed, I thought. I was on my way to the next question when he said suddenly, “You work in television, Miss Lansdowne?”
“Yes.”
“Does that put you under a lot of pressure to look a certain way?”
God, what do I know? A bevy of weathergirls rushed across my screen, each one cuter than the last. And then I remembered his angry star patient, the TV presenter of the diminishing age and rictus lips. “Er. No, I work behind the camera.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of programs do you make?”
“Oh … documentaries, that kind of thing.”
“Would I have seen any?”
“No, I doubt it.”
“Tell me about a few.”
Hey. What’s going on here? In order to think, I had to make the answer easy. I plundered my résumé for something that might fit the bill. “Well, I made a film about factory farming. Animal rights, that kind of thing. And before that one on surrogacy.”
“Investigative journalism,” he said quietly. And not quite as politely as before.
“Yes.” And there was a small but nevertheless potent silence in the room. Oh dear. A little late I arrived at the same place as he was. “But my being here has nothing to do with that,” I said firmly.
“No, of course not,” he said, still looking. He made another little note. Then: “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Where did you get the scar above your right eye?”
Of course. How did I ever think I’d get away with it. “Er … I was in a car accident.”
“You hit the windscreen?”
“Yeah.”
“You were lucky. I’ve seen a great deal worse. You must have been wearing your seat belt.”
“I was.”
Obviously that’s what he’d been expecting—a woman who couldn’t bear to look into her makeup mirror. With this little beauty on show, my thighs must have insulted his professional intelligence. Me and my scar. Seems like recently I’m the only one who doesn’t mind it being there. But then there are some things you have to learn to feel OK about.
“Why? Could you do anything about it?” Now excuse me, I thought, who gave you permission to say that? Well, why not? You know you’ve thought about it, you just won’t admit it. Oh, my God, at this rate something ugly and vicious would start exploding out of my stomach.
“Yes, I should think so. Do you want me to look at it?”
He got up and came over to where I was sitting, pulling the desk lamp with him so it threw more light on my face. “Close your eyelid for a moment.”
He ran his fingertip along the line. I swear I hadn’t thought about it till the touch connected—about what had happened to the last man who’d fingered me there. But then he’d been one of the bad guys. And as of now I had nothing on Maurice but a few dodgy alterations.
“Is that painful?”
“No. I’m just a little sensitive.”
“I’m not surprised. Nasty thing to have happen. Was anyone else hurt?”
“Yes, the man who caused the accident.”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead.”
And there was something in the way I said it that made him pause. He removed his finger and sat back against the desk.
“Well, a small skin graft would improve it no end. You’d hardly notice it.”
“I see. And how much would that cost?”
He pursed his lips. “Oooh, at a rough estimate somewhere I would say in the region of a thousand pounds.”
Oh fine, I thought. I’ll just slip back to the Majestic and he’ll have it on his desk at sundown. Listen, said someone else. You should think about this. Add the bonus to the winnings and you’ve got it. Hey, sleazebag, that’s the windscreen cleaner’s money you’re talking about.
Aloud I said, “Thank you. I’ll give it some thought.”
“Why don’t you do that?” he said, and this time his tone definitely wasn’t that friendly.
I got up and held out my hand. The good-byes were short. I got as
far as the door when he said, “By the way. Did you meet my wife at Castle Dean?”
I turned. “Your wife?”
“Yes. Olivia Marchant. Tall, good-looking woman. I think she mentioned you.”
And I think she didn’t. “No. No, I’m afraid not.”
“Ah, well, good luck with your films, Miss Lansdowne. And let me know about that eye.”
Chapter 13
As double whammies go it was a good one. The consultation fee came to one hundred and twenty pounds. The extra thirty was the time I had been late. When I queried it, the girl at the desk downstairs said she’d only just been told about it. Which meant that he’d only just decided. But then why not? He knew I wasn’t coming back and presumably he still thought I was on expenses.
Which of course I would have been if I hadn’t been disobeying orders. I plucked three fifties from my wallet. “No, don’t go,” shouted the others. “We’re getting to like how snug it is in here.” Christ, I thought. Three hours’ sleep and I’m disintegrating.
I walked back to the car trying to make sense of it all. Either Mr. Marchant had good reason to fear what a journalist might discover (in which case the chances were that I was on the right track), or he knew something about me that he shouldn’t. Maybe he had found the Castle Dean notes on Miss Lansdowne glaringly inaccurate. Certainly there would have been no mention of the scar. And when you think about it, of course, who in that profession would have dared to omit it?
Oh well, so my cover was blown. Just as long as he didn’t make it part of his dinner conversation with his wife tonight. Had I been a real professional, the danger would have been an incentive to wrap up the case that afternoon. But no private eye can work without wheels, and although technically I still had mine, they had someone else’s bloody great yellow clamp on them. Fantastic. I ripped the letter off the windscreen. Not even so much as a reply. Some people are so unfeeling.