Beneath the Skin

by Nicci French

Genres: Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Zoe. Jenny. Nadia. Three women of varying ages and backgrounds with little else in common but for one thing: Someone has sent them each a note informing them that they will be killed. A cruel joke? A hoax? The police don't seem to think so. Now, with no clear suspect and amid the growing threat of violence, the victims become the accused as authorities dig into their backgrounds for clues as to why they might have attracted the unrelenting attention of a killer. As Zoe, Jenny, and Nadia find themselves being victimized twiceover, once by the faceless stalker and again by the police, each must ultimately face the question of which is stronger: the instinct to survive, or the desire to destroy?

Release date: August 7, 2001

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 448

Sample

__________

“Stunning… French knows how to carry a chilling situation to frightening extremes.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Creepy… French ups the suspense to nail-biting effect.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“Genuine suspense keeps pages turning…. Don’t plan on doing much else once you start reading this one.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“So imaginative and well-executed that I can’t stop thinking about it.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Compelling… an absolutely first-rate thriller.”

—Booklist

“Stunning… elegantly conceived and executed…. Few writers command the virtuosity displayed here.”

—Star-Telegram(TX)


“Plenty of psychological suspense… a textured, elegant novel with writing and characterization that bind an atypical tripex
structure.”


—Baltimore Sun

“Strong… accomplished.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A beautifully written tale with a twist.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“Mesmerizing and disturbing… a novel that will definitely get beneath your skin… a fascinating, suspenseful scenario that
will hold you enthralled until the shocking outcome.”


—Romantic Times

“Its insinuating suspense doesn’t disappoint…. French makes the reader complicit, a voyeur getting a series of glimpses of
three women on a craggy path from denial to disintegration. The sensation is intimate and disquieting.”


—Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

“The summer thriller against which all this year’s entries must be compared…. BENEATH THE SKIN constructs a framework of terror
and dread that baffles police, the intended victims, and certainly the reader. A must-read!”


—BookPage

“An incredible psychological thriller that will be on everyone’s best list…. Fans will clamor for French’s other novels.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Masterful… superb…. BENEATH THE SKIN is the epitome of a suspense thriller. The tension builds to a level that is virtually
unbearable.”


—Mystery News

“A gripping whodunit.”

—Associated Press

MORE ACCLAIM FOR NICCI FRENCH’S PREVIOUS NOVEL KILLING ME SOFTLY

“A compulsive read… peak psychological suspense.”

—People

“First rate… Genuine chills run down the spine…. French can show John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell a thing about good writing.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“Undeniably fascinating…. You can’t stop reading this book once you’ve picked it up…. French whips up a perfect confection.”

—Washington Post Book World

“Elegantly chilling.”

—Philadelphia Enquirer

“A sleek, utterly gripping tale.”

—Mademoiselle

“French pulls off [sexual obsession] as well as anyone in recent memory.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Stunning…. every decade or so a psychological thriller appears that graphically recounts an intelligent woman’s willing sexual
subjugation; this gripping novel joins that group.”


—Publishers Weekly

“An elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In the summer, their bodies catch heat. Heat seeps in through the pores on their bare flesh; hot light enters their darkness;
I imagine it rippling round inside them, stirring them up. Dark shining liquid under the skin. They take off their clothes,
all the thick, closed layers that they wear in winter, and let the sun touch them: on the arms, on the back of the neck. It
pours down between their breasts, and they tip back their heads to catch it on their faces. They close their eyes, open their
mouths; painted mouths or naked ones. Heat throbs on the pavement where they walk, with bare legs opening, light skirts fluttering
to the rhythm of their stride. Women. In the summer I watch them, I smell them, and I remember them.

They look at their reflections in shop windows, sucking in their stomachs, standing straighter, and I look at them. I watch
them watching themselves. I see them when they think they are invisible.

The ginger one in an orange sundress. One of the straps is twisted on her shoulder. She has freckles on her nose; a large
freckle on her collarbone. No bra. When she walks, she swings her pale, downy arms, and her nipples show through the tightened
cotton of her dress. Shallow breasts. Sharp pelvic bones. She wears flat sandals. Her second toe is longer than the big one.
Muddy green eyes, like the bottom of a river. Pale eyelashes; blinking too much. Thin mouth; a trace of lipstick left at the
corners. She hunches under the heat; lifts up one arm to wipe the beads of moisture from her forehead, and there is a graze
of ginger stubble in the scoop of her armpit, maybe a few days old. Legs prickly too; they would feel like damp sandpaper.
Her skin is going blotchy; her hair is sticking to her brow. She hates the heat, this one; is defeated by it.

The one with big breasts, a squashy tummy, and masses of dark hair, you’d think that she’d suffer more—all that eight, that
flesh. But she lets the sun in; she doesn’t fight it. I see her, opening out her big soft body. Circles of sweat under her
arms, on her green T-shirt; sweat running down her neck, past the thick, straight braids of her hair. Sweat glistening in
the dark hairs on her arms, her strong legs in their high shoes. Her underarm hair is thick; I know the rest of her body when
I see it. She has dark hairs on her upper lip, a mouth that is red, wet, like a ripe plum. She eats a roll that is wrapped
in brown, waxy paper with grease spots on it, sinking white teeth into the pulp. A tomato pip is caught on her upper lip,
grease oozes down her chin and she doesn’t wipe it away. Her skirt catches in the crease between her buttocks; rides up a
bit.

The heat can make women disgusting. Some of them get all dried up, like insects in the desert. Dry lines on their face, stitching
their upper lips, crisscrossing under their eyes. The sun has sucked away all their moisture. Especially the older women,
who try to hide their crepey arms under long sleeves, their faces under hats. Other women get rank, rotten; their skin can
barely contain their disintegration. When they come near, I can smell them: Under the deodorant and soap and the perfume they’ve
dabbed on their wrists and behind their ears, I can smell the odor of ripeness and decay.

But some of them open like flowers in the sunlight; clean and fresh and smooth-skinned; hair like silk, pulled back or falling
round their faces. I sit on a bench in the park and look at them as they walk past, singly or in groups, pressing their hot
feet into the bleached grass. The light glistens on them. The black one in a yellow dress and the sun bouncing off the shining
planes of her skin; rich, greasy hair. I hear her laugh as she passes, a gravelly sound that seems to come from a secret place
deep inside her strong body. I look at what lies in the shadows; the crease in the armpit, the hollow behind the knee, the
dark place between their breasts. The hidden bits of them. They think no one is looking.

Sometimes I can see what they are wearing underneath. The woman with a sleeveless white shirt and the bra strap that keeps
slipping onto her shoulder. It is gray-colored, stained by wear. She put on a clean shirt but didn’t bother about her bra.
She thought no one would notice. I notice these things. The slip under the hem. The chipped nail varnish. The spot they try
to cover with makeup. The button that doesn’t match. The smudge of dirt, the grimy rim of the collar. The ring that’s got
too tight with years, so the finger swells around it.

They walk past me. I see them through a window, when they think they’re alone. The one that is sleeping, in the afternoon,
in her kitchen, in the house down the quiet street I sometimes visit. Her head hangs at an awkward angle— in a minute she
will jerk awake, wonder where she is—and her mouth is slack and open. There is a thin line of spittle on her cheek, like a
snail’s trail.

Getting in a car, the dress hitched up, a flash of underwear. Dimpled thighs.

The love bite under the carefully arranged scarf.

Pregnant, and I can see the tummy button through the thin material of the dress.

With a baby, and there are milk stains on the blouse, a tiny patch of vomit where the baby’s head lolls on her shoulder.

The smile that shows the swollen, receding gums; the chipped front tooth; the porcelain cap.

The track of brown down the parting in the blond hair, where the dye is growing out.

The thick, yellowing toenails that betray her age.

The first sign of varicose veins on the white leg, like a purple worm under the skin.

In the park, they are lying on the grass while the sun beats down on them. They sit outside pubs, froth from the head of beer
on their lips. Sometimes I stand among them in the underground; the press of hot flesh in the stale air. Sometimes I sit beside
them, my thigh just touching theirs. Sometimes I open a door for them, and follow them into the cool interior of a library,
a gallery, a shop, watching the way they walk, the way they turn their heads or push their hair behind their ears. The way
they smile and look away. Sometimes they do not look away.

For a few weeks more, it is summer in the city.



I wouldn’t have become famous if it hadn’t been for the watermelon. And I wouldn’t have been in possession of the watermelon
if it hadn’t been for the heat. So I’d better start with the heat.


It was hot. But that may give you the wrong impression. It may make you think of the Mediterranean and deserted beaches and
long drinks with colorful paper parasols dangling out of them. Nothing like that. The heat was like a big old fat smelly mangy
greasy farty dying dog that had settled down on London at the beginning of June and hadn’t moved for three horrible weeks.
It had got sweatier and slimier and the sky had changed day by day from blue to a sort of industrial mixture of yellow and
gray. Holloway Road now felt like a giant exhaust pipe, the car fumes held down at street level by a weight of even more harmful
pollutants somewhere above. We pedestrians would cough at each other like beagles released from a tobacco laboratory. At the
beginning of June it had felt good to put on a summer dress and feel it light against my skin. But my dresses were grimy and
stained by the end of each day and I had to wash my hair in the sink every morning.


Normally the choice of books that I read to my class is dictated according to fascist totalitarian principles imposed by the
government, but this morning I’d rebelled just for once and read them a Brer Rabbit story I’d found in a cardboard box of
battered childhood books when I’d cleared out my dad’s flat. I’d lingered over old school reports, letters written before
I’d been born, tacky china ornaments that brought with them a flood of sentimental memories. I kept all the books because
I thought one day I might have children myself, and then I could read them the books that Mum had read to me before she died
and left it to Dad to tuck me into bed each night, and reading aloud became just another of those things that were lost, and
so in my memory became something precious and wonderful. Whenever I read aloud to kids, there’s a bit of me that feels as
if I’ve turned into a soft, blurred version of my mother; that I’m reading to the child I once was.


I wish I could say that the class was held enthralled by this classic old-fashioned piece of storytelling. Maybe there was
just a bit less wailing, nose-picking, staring at the ceiling, or nudging than usual. But what mainly emerged as I asked them
about the story afterward was that nobody knew what a watermelon was. I drew one on the blackboard for them with red and green
chalk. A watermelon is so like a cartoon anyway that even I can draw them. A complete blank.


So I said that if they were good—and for the last hour of the afternoon they were alarmingly well behaved—I’d bring in a watermelon
for them the next day. On the way home I got off the bus a stop later than usual, after it had turned up Seven Sisters Road.
I walked back down the road past the greengrocers and stalls. In the very first one I bought a pound of golden nap cherries
and ate them greedily. They were tart, juicy, clean; they made me think of being in the countryside where I grew up, of sitting
under the green shade as the sun goes down. It was just after five o’clock, so the traffic was already starting to grind to
a halt. The fumes were hot against my face, but I was feeling almost cheerful. I was fighting my way through crowds of people
as usual, but many of them seemed in good spirits. They were wearing bright colors. My urban claustrophobia meter was down
from its usual eleven to a more manageable six or seven or so.


I bought a watermelon the size of a basketball and the weight of a bowling ball. The man needed four carrier bags one inside
the other, and there was virtually no practical way of carrying it. Very gingerly I swung the bag over my shoulder, almost
spinning myself into the traffic as I did so, and carried the melon like a man with a sack of coal on his back. It was only
about three hundred yards to the flat. I’d probably make it.


As I crossed Seven Sisters Road and turned into Holloway Road, people stared at me. God knows what they thought I was up to,
a skimpily dressed young blonde hunched over and carrying what must have looked like her own weight in iron ore in a shopping
bag.


Then it happened. What did it feel like at the time? It was a moment, an impulse, a blow, and then it was in the past. I only
really reconstructed what had taken place through the action replays in my mind, by telling people about it, by what people
told me about it. A bus was coming toward me on the inside lane of the road. It had almost reached me when a person jumped off the
platform at the back. The bus was going as close to full speed as anything ever gets on Holloway Road during rush hour. Normal
people don’t jump off buses like that, even Londoners, so at first I thought he may have been recklessly crossing the road
behind the bus. It was the speed at which he hit the pavement, almost losing his balance, that showed he must have come off
the bus.


Then I saw there were two of them, apparently joined together by straps. The one behind was a woman, older than him. But not
really old. She really did lose her footing, horribly, when she hit the ground, and rolled over. I saw her feet crazily high
in the air and she crashed against a bin. I saw her head hit the pavement; heard it. The man wrenched himself free. He was
holding a bag. Her bag. He held it in two hands, chest high. Somebody shouted. He ran away at full speed. He had a strange,
tight smile on his face and his eyes were glassy. He was running straight for me, so I had to step out of the way. But I didn’t
just step out of the way. I let the watermelon slip off my shoulder. I leaned back and swung it. I had to lean back or else
it would have fallen vertically, taking me down with it. If it had continued on its circular progress around me I would quickly
have lost control of it, but its progress was very suddenly halted as it hit the man full in the stomach.


They talk about the sweet spot. When I used to play rounders at primary school and I swung at the ball, mostly it would hit
the edge of the bat and dribble off pathetically to the side. But every so often, the ball would hit the right place and with
almost no effort, it would just fly. Cricket bats have sweet spots too, except that it’s called the “Meat.” And tennis rackets
have sweet spots. So do baseball bats. And this bag-snatcher caught my watermelon right in its sweet spot, right at the perfect
point of its arc. There was the most amazing thud as it struck him in the stomach. There was a whoosh of ejecting air and
he just went down as drastically as if there were no body inside his clothes and they were attempting to fold themselves up
on the pavement. He didn’t go down like a falling tree. He went like a tall building being demolished by explosives around
the base. One minute it’s there and then there’s just dust and rubble.


I hadn’t made any plan of what to do next if the man was going to get up and come at me. My watermelon was only good for one
shot. But he wasn’t able to get up. He clawed at the pavement a bit, and then we were all surrounded by a crowd. I couldn’t
see him any longer, and I remembered the woman. Some people got in my way, tried to talk to me, but I pushed my way past them.
I was light-headed, exhilarated. I felt like laughing or talking wildly. But there was nothing funny about the woman. She
was slumped and twisted on the pavement, her face down. There was quite a lot of blood on the stone, very dark and thick.
I thought she must be dead but there were odd twitches from her leg. She was smartly dressed, a business suit with quite a
short gray skirt. Suddenly I thought of her having breakfast this morning and going to work, and then heading home thinking
of what she was going to do this evening, making mundane and comforting plans for herself, and then this suddenly happening
and her life being changed. Why hadn’t she just let go of the stupid bag? Maybe it had been caught round her arm.


People were standing around her looking uncomfortable. We all wanted somebody official—a doctor or a policeman or anybody
in a uniform—to step forward and take charge and make this a regular event that was being dealt with through proper channels.
But there was nobody.


“Is there a doctor?” an old woman next to me said.

Oh fuck. I’d done a two-day first-aid course in the second term of my teacher-training. I stepped forward and knelt down next
to her. I could sense an air of reassurance around me. I knew about administering medicines to toddlers, but I couldn’t think
of anything relevant here except for one of the key maxims: “When in doubt, do nothing.” She was unconscious. There was lots
of blood around the face and mouth. Another phrase came into my mind: “the recovery position.” As gently as I could, I turned
her face toward me. There were gasps and expressions of disgust from behind me.


“Has anybody called an ambulance?” I said.

“I done it on my mobile,” a voice said.

I took a deep breath and pushed my fingers into the woman’s mouth. She had red hair and very pale skin. She was younger than
I’d thought at first, and probably rather beautiful. I wondered what color her eyes were, behind the closed lids. Perhaps
she had green eyes: red hair and green eyes. I scooped thick blood out of her mouth. I looked at my red hand and saw a tooth
or a bit of a tooth. A groan came from somewhere inside her. There was a cough. A good sign probably. Very loud and close
by I heard a siren. I looked up. I was pushed aside by a man in uniform. Fine by me.


With my left hand I found a tissue in my pocket and carefully wiped the blood and other stuff off my fingers. My melon. I
didn’t have my melon. I wandered back in search of it. The man was sitting up now, with two police officers, a man and a woman,
looking down at him. I saw my blue plastic bag.


“Mine,” I said, picking it up. “I dropped it.”

“She did it,” a voice said. “She stopped him.”

“Fucking KO’d him,” someone else said, and close by a woman laughed.

The man stared up at me. Maybe I expected him to look vengeful but he just seemed blankly puzzled.

“That right?” asked the female officer, looking a bit suspicious.

“Yeah,” I said warily. “But I’d better be getting on.”

The male police officer stepped forward.

“We’ll need some details, my darling.”

“What do you want to know?”

He took out a notebook.

“We’ll start with your name and address.”

That was another funny thing. I turned out to be more shocked than I realized. I could remember my name, though even that
was a bit of an effort. But I just couldn’t think of my address even though I own the bloody place and I’ve been living there
for eighteen months. I had to get my appointment book out of my pocket and read the address out to them, with my hand trembling
so much I could hardly make out the words. They must have thought I was mad.




I had reached “E” in the register; E for Damian Everatt, a skinny little boy with huge spectacles taped together at one hinge,
waxy ears, an anxious gappy mouth, and scabby knees from where the other boys pushed him over in the playground.


“Yes, miss,” he whispered, as Pauline Douglas pushed her head round the already open classroom door.

“Can I have a quick word, Zoe?” she said. I stood up, smoothing my dress anxiously, and joined her. There was a welcome through-breeze
in the corridor, though I noticed that a bead of sweat was trickling down Pauline’s carefully powdered face, and her normally
crisp graying hair was damp at her temples. “I’ve had a call from a journalist on the Gazette.”


“What’s that?”

“A local paper. They want to talk to you about your heroics.”

“What? Oh, that. It’s…”

“There was mention of a melon.”

“Ah yes, well you see…”

“They want to send a photographer, too. Quiet!” This last to the circle of children fidgeting on the floor behind us.

“I’m sorry they bothered you. Just tell them to go away.”

“Not at all,” Pauline said firmly. “I’ve arranged for them to come round at ten forty-five, during break time.”

“Are you sure?” I looked at her dubiously.

“It might be good publicity.” She looked over my shoulder. “Is that it?”

I looked round at the huge green-striped fruit, innocent on the shelf behind us.

“That’s the one.”

“You must be stronger than you look. All right, I’ll see you later.”

I sat down again, picked up the register.

“Where were we? Yes. Kadijah.”

“Yes, miss.”

The journalist was middle-aged and short and fat, with hairs growing out of his nostrils and sprouting up behind his shirt
collar. Never quite got the name, which was embarrassing as he was so aware of mine. Bob something, I think. His face was
a dark shade of red, and wide circles of sweat stained his armpits. When he wrote, little shreds of shorthand in a tatty notebook,
his plump fist kept slipping down the pen. The photographer who accompanied him looked about seventeen; cropped dark hair,
an earring in one ear, jeans so tight I kept thinking that when he squatted on the floor with his camera they would split.
All the time Bob was asking me questions, the photographer wandered round the classroom, staring at me from different angles
through the camera lens. I’d tidied my hair and put on a bit of makeup before they arrived. Louise had insisted on it, pushing
me into the staff cloakroom and coming after me with a brush in her hand. Now I wished I’d made a bit more effort. I sat there
in my old cream dress with its crooked hem. They made me uncomfortable.


“What thoughts went through your head before you decided to hit him?”

“I just did it. Without thinking.”

“So you didn’t feel scared?”

“No. I didn’t really have time.”

He was scribbling away in his notebook. I had a feeling that I should be making cleverer, more amusing comments about what
had happened.


“Where do you come from? Haratounian’s a strange name for a blond girl like you.”

“A village near Sheffield.”

“So you’re new to London.” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “And you teach nursery children, do you?”

“Reception, it’s called….”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Mmm.” He looked at me musingly, like someone assessing an unpromising item of stock at an agricultural auction. “How much
do you weigh?”


“What? About seven and a half stone, I think.”

“Seven stone,” he said, chuckling. “Fantastic. And he was a big chap, wasn’t he?” He sucked his pen. “Do you think society
would be a better place if everybody got involved the way you did?”


“Well, I don’t really know.” I fumbled for some sort of coherent statement. “I mean, what if the melon had missed? Or if it
had hit the wrong person?”


Zoe Haratounian, spokeswoman on behalf of inarticulate youth. He frowned and didn’t even make a pretense of writing down what
I’d said.


“How does it feel to be a heroine?”

Up to then it had been amusing in a way, but now I felt a little irritated. But of course I couldn’t put it into words that
made any sense.


“It just happened,” I said. “I don’t want to set myself up as anything. Do you know if the woman who was mugged is okay?”

“Fine, just a couple of cracked ribs and she’ll need some new teeth.”

“I think we’ll take her with the melon.” It was the boy-photographer.

Bob nodded.

“Yes, that’s the story.”

He pulled the fruit off the shelf and staggered across with it.

“Blimey,” he said, lowering it onto my lap. “No wonder you took him out. Now look at me, chin up a bit. Give us a smile, darling.
You won, didn’t you? Lovely.”


I smiled until the smile puckered on my face. Through the doorway I saw Louise staring in, grinning wildly. A giggle grew
in my chest.


Next he wanted the melon and me with the children. I did my impersonation of a prim Victorian schoolmarm but it turned out
that Pauline had already agreed. The photographer suggested cutting it up. It was a deep, luscious pink, paler at the rind,
with polished black pips and a smell of fibrous coolness. I cut it into thirty-two wedges; one for each child and one for
me. They stood round me on the sweltering concrete playground, holding their melon and smiling for the camera. All together
now. One, two, three, cheese.


The local paper came out on Friday and I was on the front page. The photograph of me was huge; I was surrounded by children
and slices of melon. MISS HEROINE AND THE MELON. Not very snappy. Daryl had a finger up his nose and Rose’s skirt was tucked into her knickers, but otherwise it was all right.
Pauline seemed pleased. She pinned the piece on the notice board by the foyer, where the children gradually defaced it, and
then she told me that a national paper had rung, interested in following up the story. She had provisionally set up an interview
and another photo opportunity for the lunch break. I could miss the staff meeting. If that was all right with me, of course.
She had asked the school secretary to buy another melon.


I thought that would be the end of it. I was bewildered by the way a story can gather its own momentum. I could hardly recognize
the woman on an inside page of the Daily Mail next day, weighed down by a vast watermelon, topped by a large headline. She didn’t look like me, with her cautious smile
and her fair hair tucked neatly behind her ears; and she certainly didn’t sound like me. Wasn’t there enough real news in
the world? On the page after there was a very small story at the bottom of the page in which a bus had fallen off a bridge
in Kashmir and killed a horribly large number of people. Maybe if a blond British twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher had
been on board they might have given it more space.


“Crap,” said Fred when I said as much to him later that day, eating soggy chips doused in vinegar after a film in which men
with bubbling biceps hit each other on the jaw with a cracking noise like a gun going off. “Don’t do yourself down. You did
what heroes do. You had a split second to decide and you did the right thing.” He cupped my chin in his slim, callused hand.
I had the impression that he was seeing not me, but the woman in the picture with the sticky little smile. He kissed me. “Some
people do it by throwing themselves on top of a grenade; you did it with a watermelon. That’s the only difference. Let’s go
back to your place, shall we? It’s still early.”


“I’ve got a stack of marking and forms that are about a yard high.”

“Just for a bit.”

He chucked the last of the chips in an overflowing bin, s