Beneath The Skin

“Where’s Clive?”

“He saw you during the night. It’s Tuesday. He had to go to work but I’ll ring him in a minute and tell him how you are.”

“You must be pretty sick of me,” I said to Dr. Schilling.

“That’s fu

“I bet you have,” I said.

“Not in a bad way, I hope. One of the things we’ve been arguing about. Or, rather, talking about.” She gave a glance across at Stadler as she said this, but he was fiddling with the knot in his tie and didn’t seem to be paying any attention. “I feel, we feel, that we may not have been open enough with you and I want to do something to correct that. Je

I gave her a sort of sarcastic frown, if such a thing is possible. I suddenly had this image of the two of them deciding to come in and treat me delicately and “sensitively.” That fu

“I suppose you’ve discovered that I’m completely batty,” I said. This was pla

“You mean yesterday?” she said. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t going to talk about anything that had happened with her. “You’re under a great deal of pressure. We’re all here. We’re trying to do something to help. But the pressure is on you. You’re the one it’s hard for. I want you to know that we appreciate that.”

I held up my bandaged hand and looked at it. Maybe it was just my silly imagination, but it seemed to hurt more when I looked at it.

“You feel my pain, do you?” I said with some bitterness. “I don’t want you to be sympathetic with me,” I added quietly. “I want you to make all this go away.”

I expected Dr. Schilling to get cross or flustered, but she hardly reacted at all.

“I know,” she said. “Detective Inspector Stadler is going to talk to you about that.”

She moved her chair to the side, but still close to me. Stadler shuffled forward. He had the expression of a kindly local constable who had come to a primary school to give the little tots some road-safety advice. It looked very odd on his libertine’s face. He pulled up a chair.

“All right, Je

I was slightly shocked by his using my name just like that, but I just nodded. He was very close. I saw for the first time that he had one of those dimples in his chin. They almost tempt you to put your finger into them.

“You’re wondering why we can’t just catch this man, and I know what you mean. It’s supposed to be our job, isn’t it? I’m not going to give you the standard lecture, but the fact is that most crimes are bloody easy to solve. Because most people don’t put much effort into their crimes. They hit somebody or steal something and somebody sees them do it and that’s it. We just pick them up. But the sort of person who does this is different. He’s not a genius but this is his hobby, and he puts a lot of effort into it. He could just as well have been wearing an anorak and spotting trains. But he’s picked on you instead.”

“Are you saying you can’t catch him?”

“He’s difficult to catch in the normal way.”

“He’s come to the house. Under your noses.”

“Give us a break,” Stadler said with an embarrassed smile.

“But that’s crucial,” Dr. Schilling interrupted. “He could just attack women if he wanted. But for him the point is to demonstrate his power and control.”

“I don’t care about his psychology,” I said irritably.

“I do,” said Dr. Schilling. “His psychology is one of our main ways of catching him. We can use it. And one of the main ways of doing that is to see you the way he does. That’s not nice for you, I’m afraid.”

“We’re depending on you,” Stadler said. “It puts even more pressure on you, but we’d like you to think about your own life and to let us know if there is anything out of the ordinary.”

“This isn’t just an ordinary Peeping Tom,” said Dr. Schilling. “It could be somebody you bump into in the High Street more often than you expect. It could be a friend who’s suddenly a bit more attentive to you, or a bit less attentive. He wants to show his power, so the main thing is to be aware of your surroundings, for anything new or out of place. He wants to show he can get things to you.”

I gave a snort.

“It’s not so much a matter of new things arriving,” I said. “It’s more the old things disappearing.”

Stadler looked up sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing that will be of any help to you. Have you never moved house? It took two moving vans to shift us and I’m convinced that there is a small van somewhere going round the M25 with all the objects that didn’t make it. Shoes, bits of food mixers, my favorite blouse-you name it.”

“This was all during the move?” asked Stadler.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “This man couldn’t have stolen all of that unless he’d pulled up with a van and four helpers. Even you would have noticed that.”

“Still…” said Stadler, looking lost in thought. He leaned over to Dr. Schilling and whispered to her, as if anything they were saying could be interesting enough to be secret. Then he looked up. “Je

It looked like a rummage sale organized by a blind madman. After phoning ahead, the two of them had taken me to the police station and to a special room where, Stadler told me, there would be objects on display. In the car, Dr. Schilling put her hand on mine in a gesture that gave me the creeps and said that I should just look at the objects and say whatever came into my mind. The only thing that came into my mind was what a wretched lot of hocus-pocus it all sounded.

The stuff itself almost made me laugh. A comb, some rather tacky pink knickers, a fluffy teddy, a stone, a whistle, some definitely pornographic playing cards.

“Honestly,” I said. “I can’t see what you expect-”

And at that very moment I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach and given an electric shock all at the same time. There it was. The fu

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Stadler.

“It’s mine,” I said.

The most idiotic expression came over his face. It was almost comic.

“What?” he said, almost in a gasp.

“Clive gave it to me,” I said, as if in a dream. “It was lost.”