Under My Skin (8 page)

“A week’s salary. Now get out of here before I change my mind. Carol, go with her, please. Type out a letter and check that she doesn’t leave any last-minute souvenirs behind.”

This time Lola went, turning on her heel like some eager cadet and walking straight out of the room, taking her powerful little force field of malevolence with her.

As Carol got up to follow, you could see that this was not quite what she’d had in mind for herself, that she had been more looking forward to a celebratory glass of champagne and a pat on the back. But it was clear that people generally did what Olivia Marchant asked, and so she went, too.

Which left me and her, alone at last. She sat for a moment looking at the desk, then leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath. “Well, I think I need a drink. How about you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “But I’ve had it with rose-hip tea.”

She smiled. “That’s not what I’m offering.”

She got up from the desk and went over to a cabinet under the window. She took out a full bottle of single malt and poured two generous hits into a couple of mugs usually reserved for herb infusions. You could almost feel the porcelain shudder at the violation.

We sat for a moment in silence, then she said, “You know, it wasn’t Carol’s fault. I told her to tell you I was still in London.”

I nodded. “I assumed so. Why?”

“Because I wanted to see how good you were.”

“And?”

“I’m impressed.”

“I wouldn’t be,” I said. “I couldn’t even get her to tell me why she did it.”

“You mean the job she didn’t get?” She shrugged. “To be honest I’m not sure it was the right reason, anyway. Lola came to me about eight weeks ago. She told me that she wanted to leave the health business for a job in London, working with my husband. There were no vacancies available, and even if there had been she wasn’t qualified. So I refused. She was upset. But it hardly seems enough to warrant her trying to wreck the place.”

“Maybe she just got fed up with not being a size ten.”
She looked at me, but let it pass. “What was the job, anyway?”

“Nurse/receptionist.”

“Nurse?” I frowned a question mark. She took a slug of her drink and put it down slowly in front of her, moving her tongue around the top of her lovely lips. What had Carol called him? A consultant? How come I had assumed business rather than medicine? “Your husband’s a doctor?”

“Yes,” she said, looking me straight in the face. “I thought Carol told you? He’s an aesthetic surgeon.”

Ah, ha. The night silence was temporarily disturbed by the sound of a satisfying number of pieces falling into place: the posters in the beauty salon, the emphasis on reconstruction, young Julie’s born-again enthusiasm. And something else. That uncomfortable fact I’d been trying so hard to remember as I studied those fabulous cheekbones. The answer was Marlene Dietrich. It must have been in the same magazine as Barbara Hershey’s lips—an exquisitely gruesome story of how on the cabaret circuit Dietrich later in life had taken to gluing up bits of her cheeks to her ears in a primitive attempt at a face-lift. I remember thinking at the time how it explained why she never seemed to open her mouth wide enough to get the words out properly. But times and technologies have changed. And now there are women who have face-lifts in the family.

So—was I looking at the results of one of Julie’s beloved chemical peels or something more drastic? Whichever it was, I found myself a little disappointed. Not to mention embarrassed. Olivia Marchant watched me thinking it through. Presumably people always wondered at this point. I have to say it didn’t particularly faze her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’d picked her rather than made her.

When you can’t ask one question, try another. “I’m interested to know why you didn’t call the police?”

She shrugged. “The police would mean charges, and charges would mean publicity. These are difficult enough times for the health business anyway without making it worse with rumors of sabotage. I couldn’t risk it.”

“You could just have let her go. You didn’t need to be so generous.”

She sighed. “I suppose I felt a little sorry for her. And a week’s salary is hardly generous. Anyway, I could say the same about you,” she said with a slight lift of the eyebrow.

I was absurdly grateful for the show of facial mobility. I frowned.

“Martha,” she continued softly. “You could easily have got her the sack. Carol’s terribly cross you wouldn’t tell her who it was.”

I shook my head. “If I’d given Carol Martha, then I wouldn’t have had any leverage to get her to talk to me. It was Martha who led me to Jennifer and from there to Lola. And, I presume, led you, too,” I said, thinking back to the figure on the lawn.

She shook her head. “No. Martha didn’t tell me anything. I just happened to see you go into the girls’ block. I never saw which room.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I believed her but I decided to let it go. “So how do
you
know about Martha?”

“Aah.” She paused and smiled. “Well, I’ve known about Martha for some time.” I waited. “Well, I’d hardly be a good owner if I didn’t, wouldn’t you say?”

And then I remembered the little note on her file in that delicate italic hand. What was the gist of it? Good rapport with the clients? “But you turn a blind eye because she’s good for business?”

She gave it some thought. “Something like that. Besides, Martha’s destined for higher things. She was up for Carol’s job, you know. In the circumstances I couldn’t really give it to her. But she’s almost certainly got an assistant manager’s
post in one of the London salons. I wrote her a reference the other day.”

“Which means that when she goes you’ve got a way of keeping her quiet, too.”

“Yes … Yes, you’re right, though I hadn’t thought of it until now. Thank you.”

I stifled a yawn. Not so much boredom as the lack of food beginning to bite. Much longer on this calorie intake and I’d be dead before I got thin. I looked at my watch. It was after midnight. Time for her to change into a mermaid and me from a wealthy health guest back into a regular private eye. Shame. I’d rather been hoping to see her in the daylight. See if I could spot the joins.

“Well, if that’s everything, I think I’ll be getting a little sleep and be on my way in the morning.”

“What about payment?” she said, not moving.

“Oh, the office will invoice you later.”

For “the office” read me struggling over a VAT form. She looked mildly surprised. They all do. Funny how people still think it ought to be cash in a plain envelope, just like in the movies. I tell you it’s hard for this profession to shake off its sleazy reputation.

“Perhaps I could give you a bonus.”

She picked up the envelope and tossed it across to me. I turned to greet it and in the glow of the desk lamp there was something so exquisitely old-fashioned about the whole scene: a beautiful dame, a wad of notes, and a definite sense of unfinished business. At that moment I didn’t even mind about her face-lift, or whatever it was. Truth is, I must like the sleaze after all.

A couple of fifties fell out as the envelope landed in front of me. Eight more inside. That made five hundred—a bonus more than the job was worth. Must be nice to have the money to be so flamboyant. But then of course it wasn’t hers.

“Well, what am
I
going to do with it?” she said as if in answer to my silent question. “Put an ad in the paper and try to give it back to them?” I smiled. “Unless, of course, you’d like to do that for me.”

“Mrs. Marchant,” I said. “Are you trying to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

W
e got through most of the bottle of malt that night. Which surprised me—partly because I didn’t think that I could handle so much booze on an empty stomach and stay upright, and partly because Olivia Marchant didn’t give the impression of being a drinker. But she was. She told a good story, too: a family saga about the Marchant couple and the possible enemies they might have made during their rise to wealth and success.

At fifty-one, Maurice Marchant was, apparently, one of the country’s leading aesthetic surgeons, working out of a private clinic in Harley Street and catering to large numbers of the rich, famous, and physically imperfect. I resisted the temptation to ask for names, and she was too discreet to offer them. I think she already knew I found the whole idea a little less than kosher. But then, as of midnight, I was either working for her or unemployed. Fortunately she needed me as much as I needed her. Because though the massage nails and the Nitromorse may have been the most dramatic statement of malice, they had not been the only one.

Mr. Marchant, it turned out, had also been having trouble; in the last month or so he had been receiving some anonymous notes, calling him all manner of nasty names and even threatening violence. Nothing else had happened, but it was only a few days after the last one that the sauna door had stuck and the Marks & Spencer’s lady had turned blue.

“How did they come?”

“Brown envelopes. Various postmarks, mostly central London.”

“Exactly like Lola’s.”

“Exactly like Lola’s. Except the notes inside weren’t printed. They were handwritten, but with the words all chopped about.”

“What did they say?”

“Oh, stuff about how if he hurt people he deserved to be hurt back, that kind of thing.” She gave a little shudder.

“Have you still got them?”

“Only one.” She shrugged. “I’m afraid I threw the others away. They were so unpleasant and I was sure they were written by a crank.”

“Can I see it?”

She dug something out of a desk drawer. She’d obviously been pretty sure I’d take the job.

It was a standard brown office envelope, badly crumpled at the edges. Inside was a folded sheet of regular A4 with nine little words glued onto it separately.

“You have damaged me so I will damage you,” it read. Hmmm. To the point and with a neat sense of chill. Quite an art, anonymous letters. Often the drama can overload the style. But not here, though it was a bit of a giveaway to use handwriting. Unless, of course, it wasn’t their own.

“What did you think?”

“Well, I thought it might be an ex-patient.”

“And now?”

“Now I don’t know. I mean it wouldn’t take much to find out about the health farm. In the business our partnership is quite well known. But it seems a bit extreme—to go for both of us.”

“Does your husband treat the kind of person who might resort to terrorism?”

She shrugged. “It’s a private practice. Maurice treats
anyone he thinks he can help, as long as they have the money. I doubt he checks their police records first.”

I had an instant vision of an East End villain whose wife now had one tit bigger than the other, offering to rearrange the surgeon’s face for him. Or worse—a Mafia informer waking up after the operation to find that he still looked like himself. The kind of case to die for. Literally.

“So, does he have any idea who it might be?”

There was a pause. “He doesn’t actually know about it.”

“Doesn’t know?”

She sighed. “The first one came while he was away at a conference and I was in the office. I asked his secretary to check for more and when she found the second she called me rather than him. Maurice works incredibly hard. He’s under a lot of stress. I thought—well, I didn’t want him disturbed unnecessarily by some lunatic.”

Absolutely. Making that much money a day must put one hell of a strain on a guy. And he had to keep that knife hand steady. Unlike me who was fast finding both of mine tied behind my back.

“In which case I presume you haven’t told the police about this either?”

She shook her head. “As I say, I thought it was a crank. We do get them sometimes.”

I took a slug of scotch. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t. Back to the coal face.

“So tell me what happens when a patient’s not satisfied.”

She sighed. “It all depends. How much do you know about aesthetic surgery?”

I made a face. “I thought it was still called cosmetic.”

“That’s what the cowboys do.”

“What’s the difference?”

“They’re the ones who work out of the clinics you see advertised at the back of women’s magazines. Most of
them haven’t even finished their basic surgical training. Someone like Maurice is not only fully trained, he’s got ten years of complex reconstructive surgical experience behind him.”

She made him sound like God’s gift to a Bosnian relief mission. Shame they wouldn’t be able to afford him.

“At his level the work is incredibly skilled. Aesthetic is the right word to describe it. There are acceptable standards, of course, as for any kind of surgery, but in the aesthetic area there’s a much larger margin for personal taste. And that means, sometimes, overexpectation.”

“Sows’ ears into silk purses, you mean?” Not like you, I thought but didn’t say.

“Most respectable surgeons will only operate if they think they can make a reasonable difference, and if they’re sure that the client understands what that difference will be.”

“But sometimes the patient still gets a shock when they look in the mirror?”

“Yes.”

“So then what?”

“Then they come back and complain about it. And you do what you can. No one wants a malpractice suit on their hands. So you try and placate them. And if you can’t do that and you think it’ll help, you try another operation or procedure.”

Maybe she wrote her husband’s lines for him. She’d certainly had her hands on some kind of script. “For free?”

“It depends. Sometimes. Although even if the surgeon doesn’t charge, there’ll still be hospital costs, and the anesthetist’s fees. But if you really think there’s nothing you can do, you stand firm, suggest they get a second opinion, and hope that will back you up.”

“You know a lot about it,” I said evenly.

“Yes,” she said, “I do.”

Mr. and Mrs. Health and Beauty. Partners in profit. Now. But what about then? Receptionist? Nurse? It seemed a little unfeminist to suggest such a Harlequin type of courtship. But what the hell. We were hardly sailing in ideologically sound waters anyway. So I did.