Under My Skin

  “Jennifer Pincton,” I said, my mind racing through the files, putting facts to images. “Tall, dark-haired girl, quite big.” She was the one who had given me a hard time for being in the heat area yesterday afternoon. She’d also been in all the right places at the right times. “But this row with Mrs. Waverley. That’s not on her file.”

  “No, well, it wouldn’t be, would it? Not worthy of note, I expect.”

  “I still don’t see why you think it’s her.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Because she’s recently become very flush has our Jennifer, flashing around a lot of unexplained cash. I noticed it the night after the steam room incident, although I didn’t think about it much then. A few of us went out to the local that evening, had a game of darts and a few drinks. She didn’t usually join in that kind of thing. Too careful with her money, sending everything she had home to Mama. But not only did she come that night, she also bought a round, and paid for it with a fifty-pound note. I’d been to the loo and was coming back when I saw her at the bar.

  “A week later she had a new pair of trainers on. Label ones. Must have set her back fifty or sixty pounds. And on Saturday when one of the girls was going into Reading and she was on duty, she gave them a package to post for the baby. It was heavy. The postage alone came to seven quid.” She paused. “I was curious. So, last week I searched her room.”

  I must say her timing was immaculate. She left another pause, then glanced up and registered the amused admiration in my eyes.

  “You took a chance,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes, well, I do, don’t I? It wasn’t just the money. She’d been jumpy recently, not quite herself. I spend a lot of time watching people.” And she kept on looking at me. “After a while you get a nose for who’s giving off signals.”

  It was more a dig than a come-on, but a gentle one. I found myself wanting to smile. “Ever thought you were in the wrong profession, Martha?”

  “No. As a matter of fact I think I’m in absolutely the right one. Don’t you?”

  And despite myself I laughed. “So what did you find?”

  “Cash. Lots of it. Her room is on the ground floor. She shares it with Lola Marsh….”

  “Small, plump girl, quiet?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. Anyway, I picked a time when they were both on duty, went round by the garden and fiddled the window lock. I found the money in the bottom drawer of her chest under some uniforms, a big brown envelope with ten fifty-pound notes in it. Five hundred pounds. You tell me where a junior beautician gets that kind of extra cash?”

  Offering night massages to the right kind of guest, I thought but didn’ t say. I played Frank for a moment. It often helps. “It still doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Doesn’t it? The very next morning Kylie Chantner took a couple of lumps out of her legs testing the G-five machine. When I looked up the log, I found that Jennifer Pincton had been one of the last G-five operators the night before.”

  “So why didn’t you tell all this to Mrs. Waverley?”

  “Why should I? Seems to me a good manager should make it her business to check out those employees who might be tempted.”

  “You really don’t like her, do you?”

  She gave a little shrug. “She’s too interested in making it look good. Thinks that’s the way to keep it under control. She misses what’s underneath.”

  And it struck me that Martha probably would make a good manager. As long as she could keep her hands off the clients. Back to the couch.

  “So, tell me about last night.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How about starting with why you took the risk of the G-five room. You must have realized that security would have been tightened up.”

  She gave it a little thought before answering. “It was Katherine’s idea. I thought it was a risk, yes, but it wasn’t one I could really tell her about. I suppose you could say I’d just got used to it.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I’ve got my own key. Had it duplicated months ago before all the fuss started.”

  “So when you got down there last night, was it locked up?”

  “My section was.” She paused. “The beauty salon was open, though.”

  The beauty salon. Interesting. A lot of tender skin going through there every day, a ripe area for damage. “How do you know?”

  “Because I needed some body lotion. And I didn’t have to use my key to get it.”

  “Did you see anyone?” She shook her head. “Hear anything?” She gave me a funny look, maybe yes, maybe no. “Well?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you didn’t stop to look?”

  She shrugged. “Katherine was waiting. I had other things on my mind.”

  She was good at the insolence. No doubt there were those for whom it held its own attractions. But I could feel myself being pushed somewhere I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I dug my heels in. “So, how much did Katherine Cadwell pay you?”

  “That wasn’t how it was,” she said angrily, for the first time showing a glimmer of vulnerability. “Not at all.”

  And I thought of the number of other times she must have been on that couch. And how many others she would have shared it with. “But it is sometimes,” I said quietly. “‘Thanks for helping me relax’? ‘A week was not enough’? Come on, Martha, you’re not that good at your job.”

  She looked at me steadily. “Maybe not. But right now I’d say I’m better than you are at yours.”

  And in a way she was right, of course. It’s been a while since I’ve been professionally and sexually upstaged in the same encounter. It seemed only gracious to admit to at least one of them. “Very possibly,” I said, getting up. “Although it wouldn’t do either of us any good to go public about it.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “It wouldn’t.”

  I got up and went to the door. As I flicked the lock, I turned to her. “Well, thanks, Martha. You’ve saved me a lot of time and trouble. And don’t worry. My lips are sealed.”

  She nodded. “I know that.” She smoothed out the towel on the massage table. “You know, your hour isn’t over yet, Mrs. Wolfe. I could always do a bit of work on those shoulders for you. They look awfully tense.” She let the second linger. “Straight and narrow,” she added with a quiet seriousness.

  “Maybe at the end of the job,” I said, thinking about it. “Oh, and it’s ‘Ms.’”

  The beauty salon didn’t open till 10:15. Carol Waverley must have been pretty pissed off when I rang to tell her that on further consideration I thought I might have heard a noise in there, too, but she was worried enough not to make a thing about it.

  We went in through the back and worked fast. Hair, face, legs, hands, and feet. My, my, what a lot of bottles, creams, and ointments it takes to make a girl look lovely. Luckily, Carol Waverley hadn’t got to where she was today without knowing her way around a beauty parlor. She used her nose primarily, and when she wasn’t sure the back of her hand. So it was that when she came to a particular massage cream used for softening up the hands and wrists after a manicure bath, she inflicted a small but notable skin burn on herself.

  What exactly it had been doctored with neither of us knew, although there was a faint whiff of something do-it-yourself about it. As I watched her trying to make light of the pain caused by the angry red welt, the word acid sprang to mind. But whatever she felt, it didn’t stop her from checking everything else, just in case. What she lacked in intuition, Carol Waverley certainly made up for in dedication.

  While she was testing, I was thinking. There were four manicures booked in for that day. The girls in the beauty salon were Margaret on hair, Flosie on waxing and feet, and the born-again Julie on faces and hands. The jar in question was new and full, sitting next to an almost empty one on the trolley. At some point during the treatments the first one would certainly have been finished and the second one opened. All Jennifer Pincton had to do was to sit back and wait for th
e screams.

  What I had to do—if I was going to keep my promise to Martha and not expose her as my source—was to trap the culprit red-handed, if you’ll excuse the expression. Which meant finding a way to make her return to the salon to check the manicure jars.

  As plans go, it wasn’t a great one, but at least it convinced Carol. We pulled another full pot of cream down from the shelf and (after checking it) put it next to the doctored one, which we marked with a large black X on the bottom. Then Carol took the young Julie aside and, swearing her to secrecy on pain of instant dismissal, told her which cream to use and which one to avoid.

  I wish I could have been there to see Julie’s face, but I was already round the back of the girls’, sharpening my Abbey National cash card, ready for a little breaking and entering. With Jennifer supervising peat baths and Lola Marsh on slender tone for the rest of the morning, I had the place to myself.

  It went just like the movies. I didn’t even scratch the card. Inside, the room was warm and stuffy, the curtains closed. It was also a mess. Mind you, it wasn’t really big enough for two people to live in. The beds were pushed against opposite walls. They both had stuffed toys at their head, but there was no mistaking Jennifer’s: the wall next to it was covered with snapshots of a cute little baby; close enough to touch but not to hold. You know the problem with real life? The baddies are never quite the ones you want them to be.

  Come on, Hannah, leave the bleeding hearts to the social workers. Thank you, Frank. Always there when you need him. I looked around. Two beds meant two chests. I went for the one nearest to Jennifer’s. Bottom drawer. Just as promised, there it was, stashed in between white starched cotton, a bulky plain brown envelope with a wad of fifty-pound notes inside.

  The only thing different was that there were more of them now. Fourteen instead of ten. But then half a dozen carp, a pot of maggots, and a tub of hand cream separated Martha’s visit and mine.

  I stuffed the notes back in the envelope and went systematically through the other drawers. I had to really look this time, but it was worth the effort. At the back of the top one, wrapped in a couple of pairs of M and S bikini knickers, I found another free gift: a small tin bottle of Nitromorse. I undid the top and the concentrated smell that leapt out triggered an instant home movie: me in my newly acquired flat, slapping coats of the stuff onto a Victorian fireplace, waiting while it burned and blistered its way through a dozen layers of paint. Rather like it had burned its way into the skin of Carol Waverley’s hand. I thought of smelling the underwear for any lingering aroma of maggots but it seemed too crude even for me.

  I looked up at the window with its drawn curtains. Maybe Jennifer Pincton was worried that someone might peep in and catch her counting her money. I put my eye to the gap in between. At the end of the garden a woman stood staring in my direction. My instant thought was Jennifer Pincton. Equally instantly dismissed. She looked nothing like her. And, anyway, I already knew this woman. Although I was too far away to properly see her face, the body spoke for itself: long legs, small waist, good breasts. Not to mention a fabulous breaststroke. I twitched the curtains closed, then peeked again. She was still there, looking straight at my window.

  I slid the Nitromorse back where I had found it and was out of the door, down the corridor, and into the spring sunshine before you could say collagen implant. The garden was empty. Just like the atrium after the midnight swim. I was doing so well that I decided not to be bothered by the problems I couldn’t solve. I had a kind of feeling that this one would give itself up before too long, anyway.

  I spent the afternoon in the beauty salon, just in case. By five o’clock my hair was revitalized, my feet soaked and polished, and the hands that wash dishes were as soft as my face. I was Julie’s fifth manicure and she was already well into the new tub of cream. Loyal to the last, she didn’t say a thing, just gave me a number of helpful product hints on how to reconstruct my cuticles. The whole pleasure-dome experience added another seventy quid to my bill.

  If I had been Jennifer Pincton, by this time I would have been seriously wondering what had happened. Question is, would it be serious enough to come back and check? I was torn between watching now and watching later. It struck me that in her shoes I’d be getting pretty tired of all this middle-of-the-night lark, with no time to catch up on my sleep. So I took a chance and slipped back at 7:00 P.M. after the cleaners had finished and while the rest of the world was busy eating their greens. It was hardly a great sacrifice, despite what my stomach was telling me.

  I settled myself at the manicure table in the massage room with a good book, or at least it thought it was. It was one of those clever-clever modern thrillers about a serial killer in drag who only attacked women with the same names as Joan Crawford characters. The cover called it postmodern and witty. They weren’t quite the adjectives I would have used. The killer was just about to start dismembering number three with an ax (homage to Baby Jane?) when the light began to fade.

  I put the book aside. About half an hour later I heard a click and a scrape a little way off. I got up from the table and moved silently round to behind the door. The footsteps were soft, but easy to follow. She had come through the back from the poolside entrance and was evidently feeling her way along the corridor.

  The door handle shook, then opened. In the gloom a smallish figure worked its way across the room toward the manicure trolley and leaned over to the lamp.

  Its beam lit up the surface and bounced back onto her face. At the same moment I called out her name.

  Unfortunately it wasn’t the right one.

  Chapter 5

  There ’s a theory, of course, popular among devotees of whodunits, that it’s the person you least suspect who is the most guilty. And on a scale of one to ten, I suppose it would be true to say that Lola Marsh—she of the warm flannels and bad skin—had not been a chief suspect. Except, of course, for one blatantly obvious fact. The money had been found in her room, too, even if the chest of drawers hadn’t been by the right bed.

  Once I clocked that, it didn’t take much to put the rest together, though I didn’t get much help from her. Underneath that quiet exterior, it turned out, beat a heart of granite. You might have expected just a touch of shame, or at the least a frisson of terror, as I burst upon her like an avenging angel out of the darkness. But no, not her. She didn’t even bother to deny it. She just stood her ground, hands bunched into little fists by her side, and refused to say anything about anything, even after I’d done my bit about the legal definitions of malicious damage and intent to maim.

  In the end I just made it up as I went along and waited for her to betray the odd flicker of indignation when I strayed too far from the truth. At least it gave me a chance to look at her properly.

  If she hadn’t been so small, she probably wouldn’t have looked so lumpy. And to be fair, in any other working environment, you might even have found that pixie little face in its halo of bushy red hair quite attractive. But here all you could see were the spots. And the scowl. Put her against all the other eager little beavers with their perfect makeup and finely tuned bodies and you could see how she might become the kind to hold a grudge against the beauty industry in general. And Castle Dean in particular. But enough to sabotage the place? Well, money can make monsters of us all. Even the innocent ones.

  Since Jennifer had been richer by at least fifty quid the night after her peat bath shift, it seemed logical to assume that she must have done someone a favor. A last-minute swap with her roommate, perhaps? So last-minute, in fact, that neither of them had managed to tell the office about it. Which meant that when the sabotage occurred on that shift and Mrs. Waverley started to ask questions, it would have been easier to keep on pretending than expose themselves, particularly as Jennifer would have had to take the stick and she’d already had a run-in over trying to change her weekend breaks. As her roommate, Lola, of course, would have known all about that. She would also have known how important the job was to Jenni
fer, even if it didn’t pay quite enough money. So how better to say thank you than with a little monetary gift.

  “What I don’t understand is how you explained the money? And what about the trainers? Was that another ‘gift’from you or part of the same windfall?” I waited, but nothing came. “Of course by then Jennifer must have been pretty compromised, anyway. I mean, if you wanted to be mean about it, you might say she was acting like an accomplice. Unless of course she was one all along.”

  “No.” At last a response. The word came out like a bullet crack. “Jennifer had nothing to do with it.”

  “Good. So now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s move on to the money itself. And who sent it. Got anything to say about that? No? Seven hundred pounds in two weeks. Was that decided in advance, or did you get a bonus if you showed special imagination?”

  No speech this time, just a flash of a look and a twitch of the left hand. But I’m no good at sign language. “Oh, come on, Lola,” I said, losing my patience. “I’ve found the Nitromorse. I know about the maggots and the fish, the whole damn thing. You’re well and truly screwed. And if you don’t tell me, then you’re sure as hell going to have to tell the police. You might find it easier to get some practice.”

  I must have touched something in her, because now she talked. It still wasn’t a lot, but from the way she said it you sort of knew it was the truth.

  “I’m not sorry.” And for such a small frame it was a big voice. “This place is a shit heap. The business stinks, all of it. But I didn’t start it. I just did what I was told.”

  “By whom?”

  “I dunno. They didn’t give me a name.”

  “Just an envelope full of money?”

  And she had the grace to look surprised. “Yes,” she muttered.