Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant

Author:Sarah Dunant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1995-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

For this journey I put on the blue flashing light inside my skull. It was so bright, it wiped out most of the other activity in there. I would have exceeded the speed limit if I could, but then central London during rush hour has no speed to exceed.

The address Carol Waverley had given me was a posh one, an apartment just off Wigmore Street. Olivia Marchant had been picked up by the police from Castle Dean just after 7:00 A.M. and driven to London to make a formal identification of her husband’s body in the morgue at Westminster. The list of what I didn’t know was so long there seemed no point in trying to invent things. No doubt the police would tell me as little as they could get away with, and I would find out as much as I dared.

I played safe with the parking. The police, of course, just flaunted it, their go-faster stripes sitting proud on a double yellow outside the apartment block. I resisted the temptation to break in and use their car radio.

It was the kind of place that had its own full-time receptionist. I didn’t need him. Carol Waverley was waiting for me in the entrance hall. She greeted me in a way that made me feel we’d been best friends for years and hurried me up in the lift. As we rose, I got what I could. Apparently he’d been found by a cleaner in the early hours of the morning in the Harley Street consulting room. The weapon had been a knife. More than that she didn’t know.

They lived on the fourth floor. Big, very nice. But no one was talking interior design right now. The sitting room door was closed. In the kitchen a uniformed police woman was on the phone. I nodded to her and moved toward the door.

“Hang on a minute, Alan.” She put her hand over the receiver. “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

But I already had. Start as you mean to go on, that was today’s motto.

The room was in semi-gloom, a set of fabulous French windows partially obscured by curtains drawn against the sun. She was sitting on the sofa, in a pair of jeans and a soft white polo-neck T-shirt, her legs tucked up under her, her body still and taut, the half-light falling softly on that designer face. But this time she didn’t so much look beautiful as unreal. You see more than your fair share of distress in this job—well, people don’t usually come to private eyes when they’ve got something to celebrate—but in my experience you can always tell the grief that comes with death. There’s a particular quality of blankness to the eyes, as if they have emptied in sympathy with the dead. It might also explain the sense of rigor mortis in her face. Though in this case that might have had more to do with Maurice Marchant alive than dead.

She looked up and saw me just as the two plainclothes officers in the room turned to give me trouble.

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