Free The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James

longer believed, with all the desperate urgency, all the artless importunity of a child.
    “Please let the weekend be a success. Don’t let me make a fool of myself. Please don’t let the girl despise me. Please let Clarissa be in a good mood. Please don’t let Clarissa throw me out. Oh God, please don’t let anything terrible happen on Courcy Island.”

7
    It was ten o’clock on Thursday night and in her top-floor flat off Thames Street in the City Cordelia was completing her preparations for the weekend ahead. The long, uncurtained windows were fitted with wooden-slatted blinds but these were still up and as she moved from the single large sitting room to her bedroom she could see spread below her the glittering streets, the dark alleyways, the towers and steeples of the city, could glimpse beyond them the necklace of light slung along the Embankment and the smooth, light-dazzled curve of the river. The view, in daylight or after dark, was a continual marvel to her, the flat itself a source of astonished delight.
    It had only been after Bernie’s death and at the end of her own first traumatic case that she had learned that her father’s small estate had at last been wound up. She had expected nothing but debts and it had been a surprise to discover that he had owned a small house in Paris. It had, she imagined, been purchased years before when he had been comparatively well-off to provide a safe house and occasional refuge for the comrades and himself; such a dedicated revolutionary wouldsurely otherwise have despised the acquisition of even so dilapidated and insalubrious a piece of real estate. But the area had been zoned for development and it had sold surprisingly well. There had been enough money, when the debts were paid, for her to finance the Agency for another six months and to begin her search for a London flat cheap enough to buy. No building society had been interested in a sixth-floor apartment at the top of a Victorian warehouse with no lift and the barest amenities, nor in an applicant with an income as uncertain as it was erratic. But her bank manager, apparently to his surprise as much as hers, had been sympathetic and had authorized a five-year loan.
    She had paid for the installation of a shower and for the fitting out of the small kitchen, narrow as a galley. She had done the rest of the work herself and had furnished the flat from junk shops and suburban auctions. The immense sitting room was in white with one wall covered by a bookcase made from painted planks resting on columns of bricks. The dining and working table was scrubbed oak and the heating was provided by an ornate wrought-iron stove. Only the bedroom was luxurious, an intriguing contrast to the spartan bareness of the sitting room. As it was only eight feet by five Cordelia had felt justified in extravagance and had chosen an expensive and exotic handprinted paper with which she had covered the ceiling and cupboard door as well as the walls. At night, with the window which occupied almost one wall wide open to the sky she would lie, warmly cocooned in eccentric luxury, feeling that she was drawn up in her bright capsule to float under the stars.
    She guarded her privacy. None of her friends and no one from the Agency had ever been in the flat. Adventures occurred elsewhere. She knew that if any man shared that narrow bed for her it would mean commitment. There was only one manshe ever pictured there and he was a Commander of New Scotland Yard. She knew that he, too, lived in the City; they shared the same river. But she told herself that the brief madness was over, that at a time of stress and frightening insecurity she had only been seeking for her lost father-figure. There was this to be said for a smattering of amateur psychology: it enabled one to exorcise memories which might otherwise be embarrassing.
    A narrow ledge with a parapet ran outside all the windows, wide enough for rows of pots of herbs and geraniums and for a