Under My Skin Read Free Page B

reduced-calorie diet. She made it sound like a penance.
    Back in my room I used up my first day’s quota of calories on a hefty slug of scotch from my hip flask—that’s the great thing about Catholicism, after penance come more sins—and hit the staff records. I looked at Mrs. Waverley’s first. It made aspirational reading. Carol Waverley, née Clacton and born just outside Rugby, had left school early and gone into the beauty business. Four years later she went to college to do a business diploma, and Castle Dean was her first big break after qualifying. En route somewhere she had acquired and then lost Mr. Waverley. There had been no children.
    No one else on the team quite came up to her aspirational or academic standards. The average age was around twenty-two, and their track records painted a picture of casual labor, six months here, six months there, with the odd stint on cruise ships or in the big stores. Most of their references were good. All of them had been checked out by either Carol or the owner herself (the odd signed comment in a fine italic hand).
    A little time-and-motion study successfully narrowed the field. Out of the twenty-four of them, eight had been off duty (although that didn’t necessarily mean off the premises) during the key times. I put them to the bottom of the pile and went through the remaining sixteen again. There still wasn’t an obvious suspect among them. But then if there had been, they’d hardly be wasting a hundred and fifty quid a day on yours truly. Thinking about the money, I decided to do a little research among the guests.
    Downstairs dinner was in full swing. Nothing so crude as a gong to summon the faithful, more a communal rumbling in the stomach of a hundred underfed souls. Let’s hope they didn’t smell the scotch on my breath. Luckily the paneled dining room already had its own aroma—that of low-cal salad dressing. It reminded me of the lunch I’d missed.
    At candlelit tables, each with its own bowl of flowers, sat little groups of women, heads bowed over plates of green beans and glasses of iced water. A soundtrack of low chatter echoed to the ceiling. The effect was almost devotional. “For these and all the calorie-controlled food of our lives may the Lord make us truly grateful.”
    I picked a table with four others. In beauty terms they ranged from beyond hope to the “who needs a health farm anyway?” I have to admit I was ready to dislike them, ready to find them too rich or too idle, or just too self-obsessed. But it wasn’t like that. Whoever they might have been with their makeup and clothes on, without them they were pleasantly ordinary, there as much for the rest as for any miraculous transformation, and with few illusions about the state of their bodies.
    My favorite was the most recalcitrant image-wise, a lady whom I recognized from the sauna. She must have been in her fifties. Her long black hair, streaked with gray, was held up in an untidy bun and she wore the kind of housecoat that one sees only at jumble sales. I got the impression she knew that and didn’t give a damn. Her stay at Castle Dean was a thirtieth wedding anniversary present from her daughter, an attractive TV producer sitting next to her. The family that slims together gyms together. As mother-daughter relationships go, they were doing better than I ever knew.
    To the mother’s left was a woman who owned her own travel agency, in for a “retread” (her words not mine), and next to her a well-preserved woman called Katherine whoworked in the city and advised people with too much money what to do with it. In spite of my prejudices even she seemed OK. Maybe it was the diet, the absence of artificial additives. Theirs and mine.
    I used my newcomer status to ask some dumb questions, but got little back. Carol Waverley had done her job well. Neither the nails nor the blue Marks & Spencer’s buyer had entered Castle Dean folklore. After a while the conversation reverted