Beneath the Skin by Nicci French Page B

window. It had rained heavily in the night, and the downfall had cleaned the road; the leaves on the few plane trees looked less bleached and shriveled, and the sky was actually blue. I’d forgotten about blue.
     
SEVEN
     
    I got to see more important policemen this time, so that was something. If the officers in uniform who had called round at the flat looked like members of the school rugby team, then the detective who talked to me in the police station looked more a geography teacher. Perhaps a little more smartly dressed than any geography teacher I had had, in a navy blue suit and a sober tie. He was large, heavyset. I mean almost fat. His brown hair was cut short and precise. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Aldham.
    I wasn’t led to an interview room or anything formal like that. He met me at the reception area and then punched some numbers to open a door to let me through into the real police bit behind. He made a mistake the first time and had to punch in the numbers again, more slowly, with some cursing under his breath. He led me to his desk and sat me down by the side of it, which made me feel even more like an awkward pupil going to see her teacher after school. Or before school, in this case. I had had to phone Pauline to say I’d be in late and she wasn’t pleased about that. It was not a good time, she said to me.
    Aldham read the two letters very slowly with a frown of concentration. I spent five minutes fidgeting and staring around the room at people arriving, talking on the phone. A couple of officers were laughing about something I couldn’t hear at the far end of the open-plan office. Aldham looked up.
    “Would you like a cup of tea?”
    “No thanks.”
    “I’m getting one for myself.”
    “All right, then.”
    “Biscuit?”
    “No thanks.”
    “I’m having one.”
    “It’s a bit early in the morning.”
    It was quite a long time before he hustled awkwardly back, the plastic cups almost too hot to hold. He dipped a digestive biscuit into his tea and carefully bit the wet crescent of biscuit.
    “So what do you think?”
    “What do
I
think? Well, but I—that’s your job, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t know. What did the other letter say?”
    “It was horrible so I threw it away. It had some weird stuff about what I ate. And there was something about being afraid of dying. It sounded as if it was someone who had been spying on me.”
    “Or somebody who knows you?”
    “Knows me?”
    “It might be a joke. Don’t you think you might have some friend who’s doing this for a laugh?”
    I hardly knew what to say.
    “Someone’s threatening to kill me. I don’t see any joke.”
    Aldham shifted uneasily in his chair.
    “People have a funny sense of humor,” he said. There was a silence. I was thinking desperately: Could I just be wrong about this? Maybe it was nothing to make a fuss about. “Hang on a moment,” he said at last. “Let me have a word with someone.”
    He took a folder out of his desk and inserted the two letters. He took that and his tea and walked heavily across the room and out of my sight. I looked at my watch. How long was this going to take? Was it worth getting my own files out of my bag and doing some work on the corner of Aldham’s desk? I wasn’t quite in the mood. When Aldham finally returned, he was with another man in a suit. He was a smaller, slighter man, graying, who looked as if he was a bit farther up the food chain. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Carthy.
    “I’ve looked at your letters, Miss . . . er . . .” he mumbled something that was apparently an attempt at my name. “I’ve looked at the letters and DS Aldham has filled me in on the details of the case. These are certainly nasty pieces of work.” He looked around and pulled a chair over from an unattended desk. “The question is, What’s actually going on here?”
    “What’s going on is that somebody is threatening me and they’ve broken into my flat.”