by Sarah Hilary
Dan thought the police was a crazy career choice, for anyone. ‘Debased’ was the word he used. Also corrupt, ill-founded and run ineptly by people with rotten agendas. All this, and then Noah being half-Jamaican, to top it off. Had he made any friends during training? No, but he hadn’t become a detective to make friends. He’d done it to make a difference. To people like Ayana Mirza, who’d fought to save Leo Proctor’s life even though he was a stranger and possibly a wife-beater, someone who didn’t deserve to be saved.
Across the room, Plaid Shirt was palming his pills off on another couple. Perhaps Noah should revise his definition of normal . . .
They’d made a difference, Noah and Ayana, to Leo Proctor’s chances of survival. But what about the women in the refuge, what about Ayana herself?
Had Noah made a difference to how safe she was in that place, with its new stain on the carpet and the hole in its roof? How safe did she feel, right this minute? While Noah was ordering Pepsi in a bar full of people for whom ‘stranger’ meant guilt-free sex, no strings attached . . .
How safe was Ayana Mirza and the strangers she was living with, at that rain-ruined refuge in Finchley?
16
The rain had left breath marks on the inside of the refuge windows. Simone stretched her arm between the curtains to place her palm on the glass. It was cold and hard, slippery. She spread her fingers flat to the wet, thinking how her hand must look from the street outside. A hand with no body attached, the curtains hiding the rest of her from view.
Was the car still there, watching?
She had seen it when the police took Hope away: a parked car with its wipers working, jerking rain from the windscreen.
Someone was out there, watching. There was always someone. Simone was scared for Hope. It wasn’t safe to leave here, not on your own. Not ever.
She drew her hand back through the curtains to study the spots of wet in her palm. She hadn’t washed yet. Hope’s blood had dried between her fingers. Unless it was Leo’s. She lifted her hand and sniffed at it. The rain had a metal smell, like buckets, or bullets. She touched the tip of her tongue to the skin between her fingers – just a touch, a taste – and knew it was Hope’s blood. It tasted too sweet to belong to a man. She turned away from the chill of the window, seeing the flat shape of the bed.
Hope’s room was nearly empty. Simone had wanted to be the first in here after they’d taken Hope to the hospital. To protect Hope’s space, her few possessions. Instead, the policeman had been first, searching with his eyes and his hands – for what? Another knife?
How did she get the knife, Simone?
She had told DS Jake that it was a test. That Leo didn’t think Hope would dare . . .
Leo had broken Hope into a thousand pieces, Simone knew. Hope had told her, not everything, but enough. Even if she had said nothing, Simone would have known. She had known the roof was leaking before the cracks came, and long before the rain tore a hole up there.
Broken things were like bad mirrors; they gave out a peculiar light, like . . . catching sight of your face in a pail of milk spoiled by a thunderstorm.
Simone had known that Hope was in pieces before they ever said a word to one another. In the dark, in this room, she had given her hands for Hope to hold. In silence, sitting together, listening to the silence. Hers and Hope’s.
Everyone else asked questions. Simone was sick of questions. With Hope, it was different. It was as if, a long time ago, she had dropped a pebble into a well and now – soon – she would hear it hit the water down there. Deep down, in the dark. But not yet. Not until the silence was done with them.
There was healing in the silence. To sit like that, with your hands in another’s, not speaking but knowing . . . Simone could feel herself mending. And Hope, too.
She had told this to the policeman, DS Jake. Told him how Leo hurt Hope. How, when you were broken, you mended in a different way.
She folded her hand into a fist, slowly, hiding the wet from the window in the creases of her palm.
You mend hard.
17
Five years ago
The court is stiflingly hot. Every half-hour, a slice of cold makes it through the primitive air-conditioning unit to snap at her ankles, before the heat eats it up.
Stephen sits in the dock with his head bowed, a yoke of shadow on his shoulders. His defence team has coached him in how to sit. ‘Keep your eyes down,’ they’ve told him. ‘Look sorry.’ It’s what Marnie would’ve told him, if she’d been responsible for his defence. She isn’t, of course. She’s here, in the words of the prosecutor, to see justice done. Whatever that means. She knew once, or thought she did.
They want her to give an impact statement, to stand up and tell this room of strangers how it feels, what he did. She’s refused, because what could she say?
‘The pain’s in my head today, above my left ear. It’s possible to put a knife there, if you hit hard enough. He put a knife into my mother’s head there. I don’t know why.’
If she took the stand that’s all she’d say: ‘I don’t know why. I want to know why.’
They won’t let her ask this question. Instead, they expect her to strip naked and show her hurt from every angle. To weep. To tell how much her life is changed, how little she has left. She isn’t allowed to ask why.
Everything else – all the things allowed – it’s just another way of him hurting her. She’s damned if she’ll let him beat that bruise, without answers.
Day after day they sit here. In the jungle heat of the court. Like a lizard and a locust, or a snake and a mongoose. She won’t be cast as the victim, not even when they say it’ll help with his prosecution. ‘The jury needs to see what he’s done,’ they tell her. ‘Show them what he’s done.’
The jury have seen the photos, and the pathologist’s face. Marnie thought the man would be better at hiding his emotions. She’s seen the jury’s eyes, their winces and grimaces. You’re not giving them me, she thinks.
She won’t talk about how much she loved them, what a hole he carved in her life. If she gave him that, he’d take it back to his cell to feast on, or fret over. He’s had enough of their lives. She won’t give him any more.
The sentence, when it comes, is not a shock, or a relief. She doesn’t understand how it could be either of those things, although the court steps are always crowded with relatives – victims – who weep or rail, grateful or furious at the outcome. She can’t see that there is any outcome. No ‘finally’. Guilty doesn’t mean a thing, when his head’s bowed and no one’s seen his eyes properly, to know if he’s grateful, or furious.
When they take him away, that’s different. Then, she wants to jump up from the rock where she’s been watching and push through the steaming space that separates her and Stephen. To stop it happening: the taking away, the grilles and locks, all the barriers between her questions and his answers.
‘What did they do?’ she wants to know. ‘Did they do something – anything – or was it all you? Was it all just you, Stephen? With your snake’s eyes, your locust’s stare – Was it all just you?’
18
Now
Sommerville Secure Unit sat on the border of Bristol and the Mendips. Its exercise yard was twenty square feet of tarmac where scabby tape picked out the corpse of a football pitch. Elsewhere it was steel and glass, reflective surfaces shivering in the weak sunshine.
Saturday morning, ten o’clock. Marnie had left Ed in the car park, stretching his legs after the long drive. He had a flask of coffee, and the weekend papers.
Marnie had telephoned the hospital at 7 a.m., for news of Leo and Hope. There was nothing to report. Leo was still unconscious. They’d scheduled a CT scan for Hope. DC Abby Pike was with her, keeping vigil.
‘Just a minute.’ Marnie’s escort signalled her to a halt near the plate-glass entrance to Sommerville, bringing her up short before her reflection in the locked door. A strand of hair had worked loose from the knot at the nape of her neck. She shov
ed it back with two fingers. The glass served up her likeness without sympathy, showing every line and shadow. Coming here always made her feel ancient.
‘Okay, come on.’ Her escort dragged the door open and held it for the time it took Marnie to move inside the complex.
She was in a square room, its carpet a curdled sea of stains that sent up the smell of low tide, burning the back of her throat.
‘Marnie Rome,’ she said, in answer to the bored question put to her by the escort. ‘I’m here to see Stephen Keele.’
19
Only one inmate in the visitors’ room, sitting at a metal table under a ceiling strip of light. The light punched the colour out of everything.
Marnie sat in the chair on the other side of the table. Both chairs, like the table, were bolted to the floor; a contingency against furniture fights.
On the other side of the table . . .
Stephen Keele had a soap-and-water smell, with a hot metallic note underneath: prison cologne. From his pallor, it was tempting to think he’d spent the last five years in his room, without daylight, but he’d always been pale.
Marnie remembered meeting him for the first time, an oddly self-possessed eight-year-old, with an Old Testament angel’s face. Black curls, blue eyes, a mouth that curved ripely over small, even teeth. Incarceration hadn’t changed him, or not noticeably. He was nineteen, serving time for a double murder committed five years ago, when he was fourteen.
He sat upright in the chair, his shoulders bleached by the light. Marnie wondered what the grey tracksuit was hiding. Whether, like Hope Proctor, Stephen was disguising damage done to him. Or to others, by him. He kept his hands out of sight, under the lip of the table.
‘I brought you a book.’ She put it on the table. ‘Short stories, I hope that’s okay.’
He didn’t touch the book. She waited for him to look at her, but he kept his eyes on the wall behind her head. ‘Jeremy says you like reading.’ She touched a finger to the book. ‘These are some of my favourites.’
‘Jeremy,’ he echoed. His voice was the same. Precise, pitched low. Not the voice of a teenage kid. More like a thirty-year-old’s. He still didn’t look at her.
‘Jeremy Strickland. Your lawyer.’
Stephen tilted his head to the left, as if he had difficulty hearing her.
He didn’t have any difficulty that she was aware of.
He’d grown another inch. He’d been a skinny eight-year-old and would probably never be fat, unless he surrendered to the carb-rich diet here. As it stood, he was slim, angular at the hip and shoulders. Still with the angelic face, ripe lips.
She waited for him to take the book, or at least to acknowledge it. He did neither.
‘How are you?’ she asked, keeping the other questions at bay.
Somewhere in the secure unit someone was kicking a ball; an aimless repetitive sound like skin thumping on skin.
Marnie looked across the metal table at the boy who’d murdered her parents. ‘I asked Jeremy if there was anything I could bring you. He said he didn’t think so, that you seemed to have everything you needed.’
Slowly, very slowly, like a spider coming down from its web, Stephen’s eyes found her. He withdrew his hands from under the lip of the table and reached into his pocket.
Each movement was calculated, calibrated. From the pocket he brought out a pair of spectacles, slipping them on. Thin gold frames emphasised the fragile bridge of his nose. A smudge of white paint had dried at the corner of the right lens. He drew her book of stories towards him with the ball of his thumb, looking over the gold-rimmed lenses at the cover. Then back at her.
‘I had the whole sky in my eyes,’ he said, each word dropping like spiked honey from his tongue, ‘and it was blue and gold.’
She couldn’t breathe, all the heat shocked out of her. A world of loss in a single look and a handful of words he shouldn’t have known, he couldn’t have known, unless . . .
He’d seen her. Back then. Before he ripped her family apart.
He’d seen her. Naked.
20
Sunlight was a slap in the face.
Ed was standing by the side of the car, drinking coffee from his flask. Marnie went past him to the driver’s side, climbing in and firing the engine. He jumped in the passenger side. ‘Rome?’
She swung the car, its tyres spitting, headed for the exit. Sommerville was a lie. Everything about it – everyone in it – was a lie. She drove in furious silence, willing the adrenalin out of her fingertips, the steering wheel humming under her touch.
‘Rome?’ A fresh streak of coffee spoiled the sleeve of Ed’s shirt.
She slowed and watched her speed, pushing the anger back into its box.
She refused to admit it was a mistake, visiting Stephen Keele. If it was, then she’d been making the same mistake for three years. Too late to stop now.
When they reached the motorway, she chose the slow lane, tucking in behind a horsebox. The car’s vents drew in the autumn smell of the horses. She remembered a charm bracelet, a gift from her mother. One of the charms was a silver horseshoe. She’d kept it in a box in her bedroom. She had no idea where the bracelet was now, or the box.
‘Stephen never changed my room,’ she said. ‘Not a thing, not in six years. I was there after the arrest. My posters were still on the walls, my stuff in the cupboards. Some of his clothes were in the wardrobe, but apart from that? It was exactly the same. That freaked me out.’ She remembered the chill in her bones as she stood in the room that had been hers for eighteen years, expecting to find it changed beyond memory, beyond recognition. It was the room of a fourteen-year-old boy now. A fourteen-year-old murderer. Only it wasn’t. It was her room, exactly the way she’d left it when she moved out to go to college. ‘I thought they’d change it before he moved in. Not that it was ever pink or pretty. I was a tomboy. But I thought they’d clear it out, repaint. I remember Mum saying they were waiting for Stephen to choose the colours. I guess he never got around to it.’
‘How was he?’ Ed asked.
‘The same.’ She checked the car’s mirrors. ‘He was the same.’
Prison changed people. It was one of the tenets of her job. She had to believe that prison changed people. But not Stephen Keele.
‘He had Dad’s glasses.’ She jerked the wheel in response to a car trying to cut in ahead of her. ‘He must’ve had them all this time.’
‘Are you sure?’ Ed hesitated, picking his way through her mood. ‘A lot of glasses look the same . . .’
‘These were Dad’s. White paint on the frame, from when he touched up the enamel in the bath.’ She was strangling the steering wheel with her hands. ‘Stephen . . . put them on. Looked at me, the way Dad used to look, when he had something tough to say.’
She didn’t tell Ed what Stephen had said when he looked at her through her father’s glasses. Words that proved he’d seen her without clothes, without even knickers. He knew what she looked like. A secret she’d kept from everyone. She’d wanted to snatch the spectacles from his face and punch him to the floor. Scream and tear at him with her hands, wreck that angelic face, send him back to his cell – his private room – with blood in his eyes.
‘He knew what he was doing,’ she told Ed, ‘just now, in there. And back then, too. When he was fourteen. He knew. Some kids are born . . . old.’
Ed touched a hand to her elbow, as if to take the charge from her; unstick her lock on the wheel. ‘Service station up ahead. Let’s stop and get some lunch. My treat.’
‘A service-station lunch? That’s no one’s treat.’ But she took the exit, leaving the horsebox to continue its journey without an escort.
Lunch was burgers of some description, with fries and orange juice that at least looked drinkable. Marnie broke the seal on the bottle. A rank of arcade games blinked and belched in the corner. At a table by the window, a family of four was pushing food into their mouths with mechanical concentration, as if the food was a precaution against talking
to one another.
The low ceiling hummed with fluorescent light.
A memory came to her, stark and raw, of finding the book her father had been reading, on his chair in the empty house. She’d held it. Put her thumb in the place he’d reached until it grew warm with the beat of her blood.
Ed didn’t ask if she wanted to talk. He encouraged her to eat. He was right; she needed the calories. She watched him shake extra salt over his fries. It was amazing he managed to stay so skinny, and that his skin wasn’t the colour of an uncooked burger bun. She liked him, maybe more than a little. That didn’t stop her wondering if she’d picked him for a friend because of his job. Victim support. She hated to think of herself that way, as a victim. She’d seen what Stephen had done, as much of it as they’d let her see. The stains on the tiles and the floor, and the walls. She’d not tried to hide from any of it, convincing herself that it would get easier. Easier to see him, to spend time with him. Easier to get at the truth of what he’d done. Instead, it was getting harder. Maybe she needed Ed, not just as a colleague or a friend. As a professional. ‘I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’
‘Sommerville?’ Ed asked.
‘The house. My parents’ place. I couldn’t wait to get away, to do better than they’d done. I wasn’t just ambitious,’ she toyed with the juice bottle, ‘I was precocious, really believed I was worth more. When they told me about Stephen moving in . . . I felt sorry for him. Having to live in that dead-end village. That house.’
‘Every eighteen-year-old feels that way when they leave home.’
She pushed her hair from her eyes. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Ed. What am I doing?’
‘You’re . . . going through a process. Trying to find a way through.’
‘Am I? I used to think I was trying to come to terms with what he did, maybe enough to forgive him.’ She shook her head. ‘But that could be bullshit. Maybe all I really want is to see him in that place. To know he’s stuck there. Being punished.’
