Free Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant Page B

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 treatsanyone 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 ofthem 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