Free Under Your Skin by Sabine Durrant Page A

with pointed ends.”
    “Okay . . .”
    “And although the killer seems to have sprayed her neck with bleach—”
    “So that was the smell?”
    He nods, and continues, “We found certain fibers, certain DNA on her collarbone, which . . . It would just be helpful if you could rack your brains. Now, I know you were traumatized, in need of victim support”—he gives me a gnomic jut of the chin—“but if you could just tell us everything that you remember, it would help us a great deal in our enquiries.”
    I look up. Nora has tiptoed into the kitchen with a bucket and mop. I didn’t hear her coming. She wears slippers when cleaning; her feet whisper as she walks. I get up from the table to rummage around in the hall for my purse and dig out her money. It occurs to me to postpone paying her until next week, but I hate to do that. She has a family back in the Philippines and sends most of her wages home.
    When I walk back into the kitchen, DI Perivale asks if Nora is local (maybe he wants to check her papers), and I realize I couldn’t tell him, even if I wanted to. She has cleaned for me—emptied my bins, scrubbed my loos—for years and I don’t know where she lives. I sit down. Is it my imagination or do PC Morrow and DI Perivale exchange a look?
    “So just to be clear,” PC Morrow says, “apart from the hair, nothing of you touched anything of Ania Dudek’s?”
    You know if you forget a word or a name, the worst thing can be to rack your brain; that often it is when you think of something completely different that it comes to you? Maybe it was the reflective diversion about Nora that prompts me. Or maybe I would have got to it anyway, in my own time.
    “I did touch her,” I say. My head has cleared. “I mended her bra strap. It was one of those bras that attaches at the front and the strap was dangling out; it had come unpinged. So I did touch her. I did it up. I don’t know why I didn’t mention this earlier. I think it was because you said ‘body’ and I know I was careful not to touch the actual body.” I’m shaking my head. I remember suddenly the stiffness of the hook at the top of her bra, the coldness of the fabric. “I can see myself doing it. I don’t know why I did it, but I did, she just looked so . . .”
    “Aha.” DI Perivale sounds as if he has just solved a clue in the Times crossword. He asks if I have suppressed taking the St. Christopher, too. I shake my head fiercely. “Okay.” He nods.
    I ask if they know what killed her, and he says, “Cardiac arrhythmia, caused by pressure on the carotid artery nerve ganglion. The superficially incised curvilinear abrasions: self-inflicted bruises as she struggled to remove the ligature from her neck.”
    I feel myself blanch. “And what about who ? Do you have any leads on that?”
    Perivale stares at me.
    “No boyfriend?” I say. “Aren’t they usually the first in the frame?”
    “A boyfriend.” He nods. “But not in the country at the time.”
    “And no obvious murder weapon,” PC Morrow adds.
    I am desperate for them to leave now. I don’t want to hear any more, but Perivale starts talking more about fibers—polyester threads, apparently, look like smooth, unwrinkled rods—and then he asks, for the sake of elimination, if he can take away the clothes I was wearing that morning. I fetch the jogging bottoms and the T-shirt and the gray running top as quickly as I can. And then, just when I think we must be done, he asks me where I was the night before the killing, between 4:00 PM and midnight. I don’t understand why he is asking this.
    “Well, I wasn’t on the common,” I say, “not then.”
    “She wasn’t killed on the common,” PC Morrow says chattily. “She was killed in her flat. We know that from the pooling of the blood in her body.”
    An exasperated frown knits DI Perivale’s brow. “When the heart stops,” he continues, in the dum-di-dum tone of someone repeating information for the umpteenth