Someone Else's Skin

by Sarah Hilary

  ‘Where is he now?’ Her voice was clipped. ‘Is he still in hospital?’

  Noah shut the cupboard door, sliding the latch as quietly as he could.

  ‘Understood. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Thanks.’ She shut the phone in her fist and shoved it into her pocket.

  ‘Leo?’ Noah feared the worst. That Hope’s husband had heard of her escape and somehow gone after her, or made an escape of his own.

  ‘Not Leo.’ Marnie swung round to face him. She was pale, blue shadows under her eyes. ‘I need the car. You’ll have to take the tube back. Check in with Abby. See how she’s getting on. Call me if there’s any news. I’ll be gone the rest of the day.’

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  She didn’t answer, going across the hall to the front door.

  Felix Gill was watching the Proctors’ house from his window. He saw Marnie walk to the car, get in and drive off. Noah made sure the front door was secure before pausing on the pavement to check his pockets for his Oyster card. His phone buzzed against his hip and he pulled it out, checked the display: Ron Carling, from the station.

  ‘I’ve got something,’ Carling said, ‘from the CCTV. A Prius. It was outside the hospital this morning, about the time you said, but get this. The same car was outside the refuge in Finchley the day Leo Proctor got stabbed.’

  ‘The same car. You’re sure?’

  ‘It was at the refuge. In the same street, then parked up two roads away, round about the time they took Proctor in. CCTV’s like a fucking rash round that part of town.’

  ‘You have a registration?’

  ‘Yep, running it now. Prick in a Prius,’ Carling said, contempt and triumph slugging it out in his tone. ‘He’s been watching the women.’

  37

  Six months ago

  Under the tight clothes from the nightclub, she’s a mess. The coppery smell is blood, recent, on the tops of her thighs. It’s shocking, brutal, but it turns him on. He knows it shouldn’t, he knows that. Except all the lines are blurred, and if he’s taken this step . . .

  It helps. It helps that it’s more than just a quick shag. He doesn’t have a name for what it is, but it’s something more than shameful, or dirty. It’s . . .

  Evil. Out of his control. Not something he can ever confess to Freya, in a pang of guilt or panic. He can’t ever confess to this. That makes him feel safe. Hidden.

  In the hotel room, on the cheap slippery surface of the bed, she straddles him. Knees knotting in his armpits, pain pinning him in place.

  ‘Shit . . .’ he hisses. ‘Don’t . . .’

  She leans low over his chest, those tight tits pressed tighter, nipples like hot nail-heads. Her thumbs find the tendons in his neck, easily. This isn’t her first time at this game. That’s all it takes – knees, thumbs, her splayed heat in a straight line up his stomach – for his balls to shrivel, trying to crawl back up into his body.

  ‘You’re hurting . . .’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ These are the first words she’s spoken. Her voice is sing-song, sweet. Her teeth grin against the side of his neck. ‘I haven’t even started yet.’

  Freya and the twins are sleeping when he gets home.

  He creeps into the bathroom and washes the smell away, shamed and grateful in equal measure, like a dog allowed to drink after a long car journey. The house is so quiet; he can’t believe it. He sits on the side of the bath and listens to the quiet. Not just in the house. In him. It’s as if she reached in and switched off the noise, the bellowing.

  He already knows he’ll go back.

  38

  Now

  Thunder from a flight path hit the secure unit’s steep roof before rolling to the ground, where it gathered pitch, a snowball of sound. Marnie hunched her shoulders, keeping close to the wall, feeling as if she was under the stairs in the Proctors’ house.

  Sommerville Secure Unit had never called before. She’d given her number for emergencies but contact, when there was any, came through Jeremy Strickland, Stephen’s solicitor. Not this time. This time Sommerville’s Head of Secure Services had called her. As soon as she’d seen the caller display on her phone, she’d known this was seriously bad news.

  Paul Bruton greeted her on the other side of the door. ‘Thanks for coming so quickly. Let’s go to my office. I’ll get you some coffee.’

  ‘How is he?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘Back in his room.’ Bruton checked his watch. He kept to the left-hand wall of the corridor, as if this was a rule he had to follow. ‘The hospital discharged him earlier.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me when it happened?’

  ‘He didn’t want us to. We had to respect that.’

  ‘Why?’ His sanctimonious tone exasperated her. ‘He’s an inmate, not a guest.’

  Bruton gave an ingratiating smile. ‘You’re here as a relative, not a detective inspector. Inmates have the right to refuse visitors.’

  She nearly snapped back: I’m not a relative. He has no relatives, and neither do I. He killed them.

  Instead, she said, ‘But he wants to see me now. What changed his mind?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He isn’t communicative at the best of times.’ Bruton held open the door to his office. ‘Shall we?’

  She took a seat, turned down the offer of tea or coffee, asking for a glass of water.

  Bruton delegated this chore to someone on the end of a phone, plucking at the knees of his trousers as he sat behind his desk. His face was as bland as a balloon, nearly featureless at first glance. Over the suit trousers he wore a green Plain Lazy sweatshirt. He was a man in two parts: the top half chosen to appeal to the kids incarcerated here, the bottom half representative of his usual wardrobe. He had too much hair, starting too far back on his head. At intervals when he spoke, he gathered the hair in his hands and flung it back from his face, imagining, no doubt, that he looked like Hugh Grant. Smiling family photos littered the surface of his desk.

  A girl in black leggings and a white hoodie brought the glass of water. She avoided Bruton and Marnie, concentrating on her task with the air of someone trying to earn privileges. She’d chewed her nails to the quick, the cuticles ragged and bloody.

  ‘Thanks, Lynne, that’s great.’ After she’d gone, Bruton said, ‘I’d better tell you what happened. I’m afraid it’s not a nice story.’

  ‘I guessed as much from the fact that he spent the night in hospital.’ Marnie drank a mouthful of tepid water. ‘But they discharged him, so I’m assuming it’s not as bad as it might’ve been.’

  ‘He’d been in the hospital since Saturday. It was . . . a very nasty assault.’ He took his hair in his hands, grimacing. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been clearer on the phone.’

  ‘Yes, you should.’ She set the glass down, the ends of her fingers slippy with sweat. ‘So how bad was it?’

  Stephen’s room was at the end of a corridor that stretched the length of the secure unit’s main building. The red eye of a security camera watched Marnie as she walked. Weird acoustics; too many echoes in here, three for every footfall. When she cleared her throat, the ceiling took the sound and threw it back to her as growling.

  Each of the kids detained here had a separate room with en suite facilities. The website boasted of comfortable and cheerful rooms, ‘carpeted’, as if this was an indulgence beyond the imagination of most. Sommerville, the website enthused, encouraged its detainees to personalise their rooms with posters and photographs.

  Stephen’s room had no posters. Marnie had known it wouldn’t have photos. The carpet was the colour and texture of porridge, hard-wearing faux wool that hid the dirt in its tightly knotted ply. The walls were papered in orange. Limp curtains at the window let in lymph-coloured light.

  Stephen was lying on his back on the bed. One arm blocked the light from his eyes. He was wearing a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants. Dark marks above his elbows, where two sets of hands had held him down. Red scratches on his jaw and under his chin, scabbed indents where fingern
ails had broken the surface of his skin.

  None of the worst damage was visible.

  It was hard to look at him, knowing what’d been done. Marnie rested her eyes on the window, then looked around the room. She hadn’t been in here before.

  A shallow desk held a handful of books, one of which was the short-story collection she’d brought at the weekend. The room had an astringent smell, like ointment for bruises. The hospital had prescribed tramadol. He looked as if the pills had knocked him out. She pulled a chair from under the desk and sat next to the bed. ‘Bruton said you asked to see me.’

  Stephen kept his arm across his eyes. ‘I changed my mind.’ He folded his hand into a fist. His elbow was sharp, bony. She had a flash of memory: reaching him down from a new climbing frame in her parents’ garden when he was eight, his body lighter than she’d expected, with small, jutting bones.

  ‘It took me three hours to get here,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay for a bit if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk.’ His voice was hollow, scooped out.

  ‘Okay.’ She reached for a book. ‘Mind if I read?’

  He didn’t answer. She sat and turned the pages, unable to make out the words. She was still seeing the pictures Paul Bruton had put in her head of Saturday night, Stephen being held down, fingernails sinking into his face . . .

  ‘Don’t you have police stuff to do?’ he demanded.

  She waited a beat. ‘Bruton says you won’t speak with the police about what happened. You should at least tell him who did it. They deserve to be punished.’

  Stephen said, ‘You’d know all about that.’

  ‘Less than you might think. I know that you have the right to feel safe here.’

  He murmured something like, ‘I waived that right.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Can’t you piss off?’ Her pity was the last thing he wanted.

  ‘The hospital took swabs. We could find out who was responsible from those.’

  ‘Good luck with that. They used a bottle.’

  ‘What?’

  He raised his voice. ‘I said they used a bottle, not their dicks.’

  The assault had lasted twenty minutes, maybe more, based on the schedule of checks by staff. They’d found Stephen in the bathroom, naked and bleeding, incoherent with shock. He’d needed stitches, fluids for the blood loss.

  She put the book back on the desk. ‘They took swabs from your face, where the skin was broken. We could match DNA from that.’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Where’s your guarantee they won’t do it again?’

  ‘Talking to you’d be begging for it.’

  This was more than fear. It was shame. The way he kept his face covered; the beaten note in his voice – it reminded her of Leo Proctor.

  ‘How many of them were involved? Bruton thinks at least three.’

  ‘Bruton doesn’t have the first fucking clue about anything,’ he said savagely.

  ‘So how many? Four, five? No one could have fought those odds.’

  He clenched his fist. ‘You don’t have a clue, any more than he does.’

  Marnie looked at the fingernail scratches on his jaw. Neat half-moons cut into his skin. Slowly, on a note of disbelief, she said, ‘It was girls, wasn’t it? Girls did this.’

  His throat convulsed. ‘Piss off . . .’

  She could see the girl’s hand-span at his jaw, too small for a boy’s, and a boy wouldn’t have nails that could gouge skin. They held him down and raped him, brutally, with a glass bottle. Teenage girls had done this. ‘Stephen . . .’

  He lifted his arm, tears scalding his eyes. ‘I said piss off! I don’t want you here. You’re the last person I want here.’

  She held his stare. ‘Why? I’m the last person likely to feel sorry for you. Unless you want people to feel sorry for you.’

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, pain stripping the colour from his face. She knew what he was going to say before he said it; read his need to pass the pain, like a baton, from him to her. ‘I stabbed your fucking parents, bitch. I’ll stab you.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ She stood, staying beside the bed, looking down at him. ‘You haven’t got a knife, for one thing.’

  ‘I can find one.’ He lifted his chin, pointing at the scabbed wound on the underside of his jaw. ‘How’d you think those cunts kept me still?’

  ‘Which cunts? Give me names.’

  He made a hard sound, like coughing. ‘You think you’re so brave, coming here every month . . . Finally paid off, hasn’t it? That’s why I asked to see you. So you’d get what you want and leave me the fuck alone.’

  ‘What is it you think I want?’

  ‘Me.’ He spat the word. ‘Like this.’

  ‘That’s why I’ve been coming here? In the hope of seeing you in pain, beaten up.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. If you weren’t such a hypocritical bitch, you’d own it.’

  ‘You don’t think it was enough, seeing my parents like that? I see that stuff every day. Police stuff. I don’t need to come here to see a nineteen-year-old kid who’s too ashamed to name his rapists. It’s on my doorstep.’

  ‘So piss off then!’ His anger was like a wall. Every word she gave him was another brick to build it higher, deeper.

  ‘One thing, before I go.’ She held out her right hand. ‘I’d like my dad’s glasses.’

  His shoulders shook, his eyes blown into a wild black stare.

  Marnie waited with her hand out, her face schooled to indifference. Stephen collapsed back on the bed, blocking her out with his arm, the lymph-coloured light lying up the side of his face. ‘In the desk.’ He hiccuped. ‘In the drawer.’

  She crossed the room to the desk. The drawer was hard to open, full of paper and card – and her father’s glasses case. She took it out, laid it aside so she could search the rest of the drawer’s contents. Under the glasses case, a wallet she’d made at school, as a present for her dad, two squares of brown leather stitched roughly together.

  Her mother’s seagull brooch.

  Marnie had searched for it, back at her parents’ house. A little enamel seagull with a white wing, a blunt chip of blue glass for its eye. The pin had been snapped from its back, by Bruton’s team probably. She put the brooch next to her father’s glasses.

  Also in the drawer: a page torn from the Guardian, the Quick Crossword completed in her mother’s handwriting, with her workings-out in the margin. Envelopes with Christmas stamps, addressed to Greg and Lisa Rome in Marnie’s handwriting: the cards she’d sent them each year. The last three envelopes she’d addressed to ‘Greg, Lisa and Stephen’. Family photographs, one of her when she was eight, in jeans and a green T-shirt, a band of shadow blanking her eyes. She was wearing the new charm bracelet with the silver horseshoe, for good luck . . .

  She swept the rest of the drawer with the flat of her hand, searching for the charm bracelet, but it wasn’t here. Just more photos, of her as a child, with her parents, on her own. In her school uniform, in her new police uniform, appallingly proud. She was afraid she’d find another photo, of the writing on her skin. The sort of photo you could probably trade for cigarettes in a place like Sommerville.

  Stephen’s chest wasn’t moving. He was holding his breath. He’d wanted her to see inside the drawer, to know he still had the power to hurt her. To show her that nothing had changed between them.

  No naked photos. She resisted the urge to pull the drawer out and search for anything taped to the wooden back, but it was pointless; Bruton and his team probably stripped these rooms down at least once a week.

  She touched the tips of her fingers to the seagull brooch, its enamel smooth and cool as glass. She could smell her mother’s scent, green. The edges of the home-made wallet were rough, badly finished; she remembered her struggle with the school’s thick needle, her fingers pricked red. Her father kept a key in the wallet’s pocket, for the carriage clock in the sitting room. Those clocks . . . She remembered
watching him wind each one in turn. She remembered the feel of her father’s hand on her shoulder, the sense of safety it gave her, of weight and substance. At school, when they taught her about the laws of gravity, it was her father’s face she saw.

  Stephen made no sound, so still it was hard to believe he was in the same room.

  Marnie stood by the open drawer, touching her hands to its contents, cautiously, tenderly. A cool, dim spot had cleared in her chest. Perhaps she should thank him, for keeping her loss alive. She’d spent so many hours – months, years – holding it at bay. Stephen had brought it close and it felt like a kindness even when she knew it was not. She’d crept around the memories, as a child creeps in a dark house, afraid of disturbing shadows. Stephen . . .

  Stephen forced her to look, and touch, and smell her past. He made it real again.

  She sucked a breath and held it in her mouth until it soured, wondering if the boy on the bed felt it too. The static charge between them. It pulled at her skin. Something more than silence, more than the secrets Stephen was keeping, about how he’d killed her parents, and why. It was deeper, more dangerous than that. Not a threat, not quite, but . . .

  The rubble around them had shifted. The mess and pain of the past. If Marnie didn’t take care, she’d bring the whole thing down, burying the pair of them a second time.

  Very softly, she shut the drawer, leaving her father’s spectacles inside. The seagull brooch she took, holding it in the cup of her hand.

  Without looking at the bed, she walked out of the room and back down the long corridor to Paul Bruton’s office.

  ‘It was girls.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  She shut the door and crossed the room to Bruton’s desk. ‘He wouldn’t give me names, but it was girls.’

  A flicker in Bruton’s eyes gave him away. ‘You know who it was.’