Free Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant Page A

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’spost 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?”

Chapter 6
    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