by Sarah Hilary
‘Great.’ Ed pulled up a chair next to hers.
Marnie was tired of studying the CCTV’s tide of people going in and out, London’s streets rendered in lurid video-game Technicolor that made everyone look like a suspect. She was going blind, searching through the pictures. Except for the images of Hope and Simone at the tube station. She couldn’t stop looking at those. She and Ed watched the footage three times.
‘It looks like Simone’s in charge,’ Marnie said. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
Marnie touched her thumb to the picture. ‘Simone doesn’t know. Yet. She thinks she’s helping Hope. She thinks she’s in control of the situation.’ Her neck prickled at the thought of Hope shattering that illusion, once the women reached whichever hiding place Hope had chosen for them. She picked up her coffee, holding the hot mug against her face, hoping the flare of pain in her cheek didn’t signal the onset of a migraine.
‘Woodside Park . . .’ Ed was still studying the image. ‘You said Hope’s dad’s in sheltered housing, in Dulwich, was it? Woodside Park’s in the right direction.’ He’d drawn the same conclusion as Abby Pike.
‘Yes. I should have an address for her dad very soon. Kenneth Reece.’ She checked her watch. ‘Can I ask a favour?’
Ed said, ‘Sure. If I can ask one.’
She knew what he wanted. ‘We’re looking for Ayana. I promise you that.’
‘The Mirzas’ house is on the way to Dulwich,’ he pointed out.
‘Okay. Let’s do things in that order.’
Ayana’s parents lived in a terraced house that opened directly on to the pavement. The street was a mess of roadworks, abandoned for the night. A deep trench ran up one side, exposing pipework so corroded it looked like the trunk of a tree growing horizontally under the tarmac.
The Mirzas’ house had thick net curtains at the windows and a pane of frosted glass in the front door, impossible to see through. Marnie rang the bell and stood back so that Ed would be the first person the Mirzas saw when they came to the door.
No one answered until the third ring, and only then with the chain on. A young man in a newly ironed shirt peered through the gap. He looked like an office intern, very smart and groomed. ‘Yes?’
‘Hatim?’ Ed smiled. ‘Can we come in?’
‘Sir,’ he wrinkled his brow, ‘I don’t know you.’
‘I’m Ed Belloc, from the Victim Support Unit. This is Detective Inspector Rome.’
Hatim’s eyes scared to Marnie. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Ayana’s little brother. What part did he play in the bleach attack that blinded his sister? Marnie could smell garam masala; saw in her mind’s eye the cloth purse Noah said Ayana wore at her waist, memory and warning in one.
‘Sir,’ Hatim deferred to Ed, keeping the door chained, ‘what is this, please?’
‘I spoke with Turhan earlier. Didn’t he mention it?’
‘Sir, no, he didn’t.’
‘Are your mum and dad in?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nasif, maybe? Turhan? He was here earlier.’
Hatim shook his head at each name. It was Marnie’s guess that his brothers had briefed him for this task, leaving him home in case of a visit by the police.
‘Can we come in, please, Hatim?’ she asked.
He paused, then nodded, sliding the chain free and opening the door, standing like a sentry as they stepped into the square sitting room. Everywhere was tidy, a whiff of room spray under the cold scent of cooking. School textbooks on the table, patterned throws pulled neat on the sofa. Photos on the walls, all boys. None of Ayana. Marnie knew straight away that they wouldn’t find Ayana here.
‘We’re wondering where we can find your sister.’
Hatim stayed by the door, his shoulders pulled back. ‘I haven’t seen my sister in a long time,’ he said.
It was what they’d told him to say, she guessed, but it sounded like the truth. Hatim was slight, with an adolescent’s awkward, outsized hands and feet. She had the sudden, horrible suspicion that he’d poured the bleach into his sister’s eyes. He didn’t have the weight to hold anyone down. The older brothers would have done that, delegating what they saw as the easy task to Hatim.
She picked up one of the textbooks from the table. ‘We’re worried about Ayana. We think she might be in danger.’
Hatim looked possessively at the book in her hands. ‘She should have stayed here. We would have kept her safe.’
‘I don’t think she knew that.’ Marnie opened the book, riffling the pages. ‘I think she was scared to be here.’
He bit his lips together. ‘She wasn’t scared. She found it difficult, that’s all.’
‘What did she find difficult?’
‘School. Home.’ He pulled a face. ‘Boys. It isn’t pleasant to be a girl here.’
‘Here?’ Marnie gestured around the tidied room.
He lifted his chin. ‘In England,’ he corrected her. ‘London.’
‘Hatim . . . where do you think Ayana is?’ Ed asked the question, drawing the boy’s gaze away from Marnie and the book she was holding.
‘In a hostel,’ he said quickly. Too quickly. ‘A shelter.’ He tidied his hair with one hand. ‘You know, sir, what I mean.’
‘A women’s shelter.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where, do you know?’
Hatim shrugged, glancing towards the table. A good student, eager to learn. He didn’t like Marnie handling his books. He wanted to get back to work. It was nearly nine o’clock at night. He was studying late, especially for a teenager home alone.
‘Finchley,’ Marnie said.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ He was angry at the way it had slipped out, his stare accusing her of tricking him.
‘You knew she was in Finchley.’ Marnie closed the book and put it down on the table. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I didn’t. I told you, sir,’ appealing to Ed, ‘I don’t know where she is.’
Ed nodded. ‘Where’s your mum, Hatim? Isn’t she usually at home?’
‘She’s gone to my auntie’s. My auntie is ill.’ He was back on-script. ‘My mum’s looking after her.’
‘That’s nice of her. Where does your aunt live?’
‘Auntie Nada is in Leicester.’
‘Could you write down her address and phone number?’
Hatim hesitated, then came to the table where Marnie was standing. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached past her for a pen and pad, writing in a rounded hand before tearing off the page and passing it to Ed.
‘Thank you.’ Ed read the page, then folded it and put it into his pocket.
‘May I see Ayana’s room?’ Marnie asked.
Hatim nodded; this was in the script. ‘Upstairs. The room next to the bathroom.’ His eyes filled with ghosts.
Marnie’s stomach flipped over. The bathroom where the bleach attack happened. It was right there, in Hatim’s face. Not just the appalling injury done to Ayana. The damage done to Hatim, to the whole family.
Ayana’s bedroom was as tidy as the room downstairs. Books on a shelf, a table with a jewellery box. School books, nothing too challenging, intellectually or politically. Pretty, modest clothes in the wardrobe. Half a dozen scarves, some in brilliant silks sewn with sequins and stars.
‘Follow the left-hand wall.’ She remembered her training officer telling her this, about crime scenes. ‘Follow the left-hand wall of a room. Like you’re going through a maze, to find the middle.’
She stooped and picked a gold sequin from the carpet, holding it on the tip of her finger. She wanted to believe that if she searched the room, if she followed the left-hand wall, she’d find a clue to Ayana’s whereabouts. A secret compartment in the jewellery box, say, which her clever detective’s fingers would unlock.
Ayana hadn’t hidden any secrets here. This room had never been hers, not in any real sense. You had to feel safe in a place before you could start trusting your secrets to it. This had never been
a place of safety for Ayana.
Marnie found empty hangers in the wardrobe, a handful of underwear dug from the neat piles in the chest of drawers. Someone had taken a week’s worth of Ayana’s clothes, and recently, judging by the dust dislodged from the empty hangers. Wherever she was, they’d dressed her again as their daughter. No more red dresses for Ayana.
Hatim hung back as she searched his sister’s room, guarding the bathroom the way he’d guarded the front door.
‘Excuse me.’ Marnie sidestepped past him, into the bathroom.
A bath, sink, toilet. Bath mat, striped jute, spread on the slice of floor by the side of the bath. Just enough space for three people to hold down a fourth, assuming the fourth was slim and prevented from struggling. On a low shelf by the toilet: a bottle of bleach.
Black plastic as thick as a forearm. Red cap, childproof.
Marnie shut her eyes, seeing Ayana’s feet, kicking. Hearing her screams echoing round the cramped space. The men passing the black bottle from hand to hand. Two of them kneeling, panting, on her chest and knees. The boy, Hatim, fumbling with the childproof cap. Was he screaming too? She was sure she could hear it, a chorus of shrieks. The family flaying itself apart. It came close to numbing her. Too much outrage, too much agony to process. She didn’t have the frame of reference to make sense of what had taken place here.
She refused to be numb. She refused. Anger was the only proper response. She dug her nails into her palms, making them sting.
She should make Hatim tell the truth. Give up his brothers’ hiding place, the address where they’d taken Ayana. She could do it. If she dragged Hatim in here, the way Ayana was dragged, and pushed him down, called to Ed for his help . . .
A flash – too fast for her to censor it – of Hatim on the floor, her knees pinning his shoulders, Ed’s capable hands working the bleach bottle’s cap, the threat of it sufficient to get what they needed, an address for Ayana’s rescue. It would be easy. Hatim was already afraid. If he felt that thick plastic against his cheek . . .
The image was so vivid she could feel his sweat branding her skin.
She couldn’t have done it. And Ed . . .
Never in a lifetime would he let himself cross that line. Just asking him to do it would ruin everything between them. They weren’t those people, Ed and Marnie.
Ed wasn’t that person.
Hatim was waiting outside the bathroom, his eyes full of the ghosts she’d just seen.
‘Why did you do it?’ she asked him.
He knew what she was asking. There was no misunderstanding. ‘She looked . . .’ He stopped and tried again. ‘She looked . . .’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t understand why they’d done it.
Marnie turned away from him. Hatim followed her back down the stairs to where Ed was waiting. As they were leaving, she stopped and looked straight into the boy’s eyes.
‘If you know where she is, Hatim, you can pay your debt by telling us. We won’t use your name. You would know that you’d done the right thing, this time.’
He shook his head blindly, speaking across her, to Ed. ‘Goodbye, sir.’
‘It’s true, Hatim.’ Ed touched a hand to the boy’s elbow. ‘This is your chance to put things right. You’re the one with the power to do that. And the courage.’
Hatim’s eyes clouded with tears. He drew back from Ed’s touch. ‘Goodbye, sir.’
Ed took a card from his wallet and put it with the books on the table. ‘Take care, Hatim.’
‘Well, we know she’s not in Leicester.’ It was dark outside, the street lighting buzzing on and off, a faulty connection somewhere.
‘Maybe Hatim will call.’ Ed didn’t sound hopeful. ‘You should contact the airports. Put an alert on Ayana’s passport. If they take her out of the country . . .’
‘Abby Pike’s doing that. I asked her as soon as we knew Ayana was missing.’
Marnie pulled out her phone, checking for messages from Abby, or Tim Welland.
A missed call from Noah an hour ago, when he was home, so it couldn’t be news from the station. ‘They took a week’s worth of clothes,’ she told Ed. ‘That’s something.’
Her pulse was racing from the images she’d summoned inside the house. How close had she been, really, to threatening violence against Hatim Mirza? Her palms were clammy. She was sure she could smell bleach in her clothes. Could she have asked Ed to do that, to help her hold down a schoolboy and terrify him into speaking? Ed would have stopped it – stopped her – but he’d never have looked at her the same way again. Not if she’d let him see the species of anger that lived under her skin.
‘I wish I could go and look for her. Ayana. But without any real leads . . .’
Ed nodded. ‘I understand. You need to get back to looking for Hope.’
‘That, too.’ She dug out the list Abby had given her. ‘Time to try her dad, in Dulwich.’ She sidestepped the potholed trench in the road. ‘Don’t say I never take you anywhere nice.’
8
From the outside, it was just a house in a nice white middle-class part of town, miles from the nearest council estate. Detached, walled in by a well-tended garden, flowers flanking the driveway to the front door. Light from the storm porch planted pale roses in the beds. Inside the porch, wellington boots and gardening gloves conjured the ghosts of the householders.
Noah Jake knocked at the porch door, wondering if he was wasting his time here.
After the house call with Ron Carling, he’d gone home, changed into sweats and taken his foul mood for a five-mile run. He hated doing nothing, couldn’t shake the idea that he might’ve led Ayana’s brothers to her hiding place. He wanted to be working, following up the leads he and Marnie had abandoned earlier when she returned to the hospital to quiz Leo Proctor. The trip to West Brompton with Carling had sealed Noah’s bad mood; Carling winking at Henry Stuke, joking about Noah’s sexuality, all blokes together. He’d taken his usual route but failed to outrun either his temper or his guilt, which burned like battery acid in his bloodstream.
Tomato plants inside the storm porch. Exotic-looking seed pods stood along a narrow shelf. The pods weren’t from any plant that grew in this part of London’s leafy suburbs. He tried the handle, and discovered the storm porch was unlocked. Going inside, he knocked again, this time on the door leading into the house.
‘Hello? It’s DS Jake. If I could have a moment of your time . . .’
Footfall in the house. He stepped away from the door, embarrassed to be in the porch, among the flowerpots and boots. He wiped perspiration from his face, regretting the marathon. More sweat, in a deep V, stained the front of his shirt and the thighs of his sweatpants. He hoped he didn’t stink.
Hope Proctor answered the door, wild-eyed with terror.
Noah stared. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that she might be here. ‘Hope? Is Simone with you?’
She stared back at him. Then put out a hand and pulled at his sleeve. ‘Help. Please.’
‘What’s happened?’
She didn’t answer, just pulled at him.
He went with her, inside the house.
The house felt empty. Lived in, unlike the Proctors’ show home, but empty.
Hope led him through a sitting room – tapestry sofas, rugs on the stone floor, a round mahogany table with a clock that showed the late hour, after ten now – to a big kitchen at the back of the house.
Simone Bissell was standing behind a central island topped with polished stone, under a hanging rack of kitchen utensils. Like Hope, she had blank terror in her eyes.
Was someone else here, with them? Not in the kitchen, but this was a big house, and it didn’t belong to Hope, or Simone. Noah looked from one woman to the other, wondering what was scaring the pair of them so badly.
‘Hope?’ he asked, feeling his way.
She shook her head at him, mutely. He looked at Simone. She stared back, her eyes glossy, reflecting the bright surface of the island, the steel overhang of saucepans
and pots. She looked drugged. Behind her, a door led into a glass-roofed conservatory, its windows packed with night. Was someone in there, hiding from the police?
‘What’s going on?’ Noah asked. ‘Are you okay?’
Hope kept hold of his sleeve, watching Simone. ‘She’s crazy.’ It was a whisper, fierce. She clutched at his arm.
Simone held her head high, her shoulders back, standing to attention as if she was in ballet class. The island hid her body below the waist.
Noah couldn’t see her hands. Something in those shining eyes went beyond fear, to a place he didn’t know.
He looked down at Hope’s hand, small on his sleeve, its fingernails varnished pink and perfectly shaped.
Perfectly shaped.
It wasn’t her, he realised with a shock. It wasn’t Hope who’d scratched at the floor and walls under the stairs in the Proctors’ house, trying to get free.
If it wasn’t Hope, there was only one other person it could have been. He couldn’t keep the knowledge from his face. Hope saw it, her pupils contracting, free hand reaching to the island for a weapon.
If it’d been just Hope, he might have been able to stop her.
But it wasn’t just Hope.
It was Simone.
It was Simone, coming at him fast, with a hammer.
She swung at his left leg, low down.
Knocked him from his feet, pain punching the breath from his lungs. Knocked him to the floor.
9
Excalibur House in East Dulwich was a Victorian villa dressed in so much concrete it was hard to see the once-grand facade under the brutal add-ons: pigmented cement render, storm windows and a crop of satellite dishes. Floodlighting illuminated the entrance, motion-activated, clicking on when Ed and Marnie approached the main door.
Southwark Council had divided the villa into a dozen self-contained flats for people over sixty, or those with special needs. Hope Proctor’s father was fifty-seven, below the age threshold. Marnie wondered what argument he’d used to secure a flat here. She stopped wondering when he opened the door.
