Someone Else's Skin

by Sarah Hilary

  Kenneth Reece batted this away with the back of his hand. ‘Hope never had a problem,’ he said, ‘with anything I did.’

  14

  Light bulleted off the tiles and chrome in the bathroom. Hope had gone back to the kitchen, leaving Noah alone in here. He worked his hands mechanically, trying to get the blood back into his fingers.

  Where was Marnie Rome? Why hadn’t she warned him, given him a clue to Hope’s psychosis, when she first started to suspect it? She’d known something when she asked him to crawl into that space under the stairs at the Proctors’ house. The questions she’d asked, about the phone call Hope made from the hospital . . . She’d suspected Hope, he realised that now. She’d suspected Hope, and she’d said nothing.

  Noah had no weapons, no words, to use here. All he could do was hope for a rescue.

  Wrong choice of word. Hope’ll kill you. Wasn’t that the saying?

  Hope will kill you. Not a lot of doubt about that. She’d stuck a knife in Leo Proctor, puncturing his lung. What had she done with the Bissells? This was their house, but Noah hadn’t seen or heard any proof that they were alive.

  He yelled, because it helped with the fear. Yelled for Simone, for Hope. Kicked his bound feet on the floor and against the side of the bath.

  The sound bounced like a ball in the tiled room.

  He curled his fingers round the steel pipe where she’d tied off the rope. Hauled, willing the sink unit to come away from the wall. Hauled until his shoulders screamed at him to stop, by which time he was panting.

  All right, calm down.

  Stop it. Stop.

  He could see little balls of dust under the sink, and dark hairs, white at the root. Pauline Bissell’s hair? He looked up at the cabinets on the wall, imagining all manner of weaponry, out of reach. Razor blades and improvised Mace in the form of aerosol sprays. All too far away. He needed something nearby.

  The brown suitcase, but it was at the foot of the bath and he still wasn’t keen to discover what was inside. He squinted at it, seeing a dull red dot on the front of his T-shirt, like a sniper’s spot.

  Blood. She’d nicked him with the knife. It was nothing, in the scheme of things, but he wished she had a steadier hand.

  How long did it take to eat fried fucking fish?

  He kicked at the bath again, raising the same hollow ball of sound.

  ‘Hey! Hope. Simone!’

  Anything was better than waiting. That’s what he was thinking. Anything was better than waiting.

  Wrong.

  Waiting was a killer, but Hope was worse.

  She pushed open the bathroom door with the head of the hammer. She didn’t look at him. She swung the hammer in her hand, its shadow stretching and shrinking under the light. Fear shut the back of Noah’s throat. ‘Hope . . .’

  She went to the brown suitcase. He couldn’t see her except in profile, the childish curve of her cheek. She propped the hammer at the end of the bath – away from his feet – and reached into the suitcase. Got hold of something and lifted it out.

  Solid. Black. She set it on the floor.

  A Russian kettlebell, pot-bellied.

  A rock with a handle.

  15

  The smell of gin was overpowering, oily, as if Kenneth Reece had bathed in it. It was his sweat, Marnie realised, coming out through his pores.

  ‘You used to lift weights,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’

  Hope’s father smiled, a mouthful of fake modesty marked by rotting teeth. ‘You’re not in bad shape yourself, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘What sort of weights? Dumbbells?’

  ‘Kettlebells.’ Kenneth Reece held his drink at arm’s length, so that the light fell into the glass and swam, whitely. ‘Russian.’

  ‘How much could you lift?’

  ‘Forty, fifty pounds.’ He shot Ed an idle look, laced with contempt.

  ‘That’s more than a hobby,’ Marnie said.

  ‘Hobbies are for children.’ Reece adjusted his robe. It was hard to imagine him with body mass, proper muscles. Hard, but not impossible.

  ‘Did Hope have any hobbies, as a child?’

  ‘She liked to watch me work.’ He shaped his mouth to the glass again. ‘But she wasn’t a frivolous child, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘I was wondering if she was any kind of child. If she had anything I’d recognise as a childhood.’

  Reece gave an elaborate shrug, as if physically dislodging her objection. ‘Just because she wasn’t spoiled, or indulged . . .’

  ‘She liked to watch you work. Do you mean work out, with the kettlebells?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sipped at the drink.

  Sipped. Such self-restraint.

  Marnie remembered the reluctance with which Leo Proctor had divulged the contents of the suitcase his wife had taken from their house. No such reluctance on the part of Kenneth Reece, who named his weapon of choice with candour, even conceit.

  ‘You let Hope keep one of the bells, when she left home. That’s what her husband told me. Is it true?’

  ‘She asked for it,’ Reece said. ‘So, yes. I let her have it.’

  ‘Why do you think she wanted it?’

  He curled his lip to the glass. ‘They make good doorstops.’

  ‘Is that what you used them for? As doorstops?’

  ‘I lifted them. As I said.’ Reece put his arm out again, finding something to admire, apparently, in its etiolated wrist, bony elbow. ‘Sixty, seventy pounds. That’s professional standard.’

  Too bad wife-beating wasn’t an Olympic sport; this psychopath would’ve won enough medals to put Lowell Paton’s gold chains in the shade. She wondered, briefly, if she could have Reece arrested for inciting violence, providing Hope with a weapon, and intent. ‘Is that all you did with the kettlebells? Lift them?’

  ‘What else would I have done with them?’

  Gee, Mr Reece, I don’t know. Broken your wife’s bones? Pinned her to the ground, cracked her ribs or her skull. Whatever took your sick, twisted fancy.

  ‘Do you know what Hope did with the kettlebell you gave her?’

  Kenneth Reece reached to refresh his drink. The snapping sound of the metal cap set Marnie’s teeth on edge. ‘Specifically, what she did to her husband, Leo. The man you warned her would need knocking into shape.’

  ‘I stopped being responsible for my child,’ Reece said piously, ‘when she turned eighteen.’

  ‘Still, you’d like to know, I’m sure. I’m guessing it would make you proud. Like father, like daughter.’

  ‘I’m flattered by your concern for my paternal instinct, Detective Inspector, but—’

  ‘Paternal instinct?’ Marnie echoed. ‘You mean the way you showed your child what damage could be done with twenty kilograms of Russian cast iron?’

  16

  Noah tried to guess at the weight of the kettlebell Hope had taken from the brown suitcase and placed on the bathroom tiles. From the effort she put into lifting it, the bell was twenty kilograms. He hadn’t lifted anything heavier than eight.

  Simone had carried the suitcase from the Proctors’ house. She was stronger than she looked. So was Hope, if she was about to do what Noah feared she was.

  ‘Hope. You don’t need to do this. I just – I was worried about you and Simone . . .’

  She bent, both hands gripping the kettlebell’s stout handle. It was an old-fashioned bell. Not the glossy kind you saw in modern gyms. This one belonged to her dad’s generation of weight-trainers. The bell was important; she’d risked returning to the house for it. Why? What did it represent?

  Symbol of machismo. Strength. Or something more . . .

  Look at the way it was anchoring her to the ground.

  Okay, enough thinking. Try talking.

  ‘Hope. Please think about this. Please. Stop, and think. You don’t want to do this.’

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘have no idea what I want.’

  True, but he could hazard a guess. Leo Proctor had broken rib
s, and a broken hand. Like someone else he’d seen recently . . . His mind veered at an angle, chasing after the memory, smelling soiled nappies, soured milk. Like . . .

  Henry Stuke.

  Oh, fuck. Stuke. Stuke was watching the refuge. The smashed hand he’d explained away as a work accident – was that Hope?

  Noah curled his own hands into fists, shielding his face with his forearms, aware of the vulnerable bones in his elbows, and his wrists. Over two hundred bones in the human body. She could break him in over two hundred places. He drew his knees to his chest and twisted on to his hip. The foetal position made him feel even more exposed to her attack. From under the shelter of his arm, he saw her lift the bell, muscles roping the backs of her hands. She swung her arms and straddled his waist with her feet.

  ‘On your back,’ she warned. ‘I don’t want to call Simone in here to help.’

  Noah cursed in his head. He didn’t want Simone in here either, not like this, made to play helpmate in Hope’s sick game. He had to force down his defences, one by one. Knees first, straightening his legs before he gathered a breath and rolled on to his back, his chest exposed to the kettlebell. He couldn’t uncover his face, or unfist his hands. He tried, but he couldn’t, his body in lockdown.

  It didn’t matter to Hope. She had what she wanted. His chest, exposed. She positioned the squat base of the bell over his heart and lowered it.

  Let go.

  The sudden impact was horrific, solid weight crushing him into the tiles. Pain bolted up his ribs to stuff his throat with a scream. He fought for air, trying to dislodge the weight by twisting back on to his side, wanting it off him. Needing to breathe. Animal instinct, no real thought involved. Get it . . . off me . . .

  The kettlebell swayed and toppled. Fell. Rolled three feet and thundered into the side of the bath. Hope bent. Heaved it back over him. Screamed, ‘Simone!’

  Noah couldn’t make Simone part of this. He couldn’t. ‘Don’t . . .’

  Hope’s eyes slitted. She hissed, ‘On your fucking back.’

  He did as she said, and she dropped the kettlebell again, over his heart.

  His teeth shredded the scream, but not by much.

  He was still screaming when her shadow lengthened, reaching away from him, then back, a bigger shadow now, knuckled at its end.

  That was when she used the hammer, for the first time.

  17

  Someone was pacing in the flat above Kenneth Reece’s. Across the floor and back again. Across and back. Like a caged animal. Marnie blocked it out, focusing her attention on Hope’s father. ‘Hope never had a problem with you beating her mother in front of her.’

  ‘I never laid a finger on Hope, if that’s where this is headed.’ Reece eyed the armchair where Ed was perched. ‘Not even to discipline her. I didn’t need to.’

  ‘You were torturing her mother. It’s hardly surprising Hope didn’t put a foot wrong. Let’s be clear, however. What you did – to Hope as well as her mother – was abuse.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He patronised her with a smile. ‘A marriage is a private affair. You’d never hear my wife complain. As for Hope, she didn’t have a problem with anything I did.’ He raised the glass as if in a toast. ‘She refused to let her mother ruin her with weakness, although God knows Gayle tried. She suffered all her life with emotions. Anything and everything made her cry. The television, kiddies in the street, books . . . She had no control over it, more’s the pity.’

  Pity. Nice choice of word for a serial torturer.

  ‘But you did,’ Marnie said. ‘You had control. Hope told her husband all about it.’

  Reece reached for a fresh bottle, pouring a precise measure into the glass. Only the very tips of his fingers trembled, and his top lip as it waited for the drink.

  ‘What did you and Hope talk about, when she was last here?’

  ‘Heaven knows. Her mother, I imagine, since Gayle had just died.’

  ‘You hadn’t been living together, during the last year of her life.’

  ‘She was in a hospice, so no.’

  ‘She was in a hospice for the last four months of her life. Before that, she was in a women’s refuge. Isn’t that the case?’

  ‘If you say so.’ Reece closed his eyes as he drank. She noticed for the first time that he had no eyelashes. ‘We’d lost touch.’

  ‘Had Hope been in contact with her mother, after her diagnosis?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Hope. Personally I can’t see her setting foot in a place like that, a breeding ground for neurosis.’

  ‘This is the women’s refuge where Gayle went, to get away from you.’

  Reece ignored her. ‘Hope never mentioned seeing her, when we met.’

  ‘At Gayle’s funeral. Is that the meeting we’re talking about?’

  ‘I thought that was clear. I last saw my daughter at her mother’s funeral. Very nice she looked too, in her black suit. The builder hadn’t bothered. He wore boots. Can you believe that? Workman’s boots. I never knew what Hope saw in him.’

  ‘You don’t think she loved him?’

  Reece snorted. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then why marry him?’

  ‘I suppose she thought she could make something of him.’

  Marnie waited for more, but Reece was silent. ‘You said she wasn’t upset, at the funeral. Her mother had died. How could she not be upset?’

  ‘She didn’t show it, if she was. The opposite of her mother’s amateur dramatics.’ Reece looked up at Ed and Marnie, pride shining in his eyes. ‘I never once saw Hope cry. Never once.’

  ‘You don’t think she should’ve cried at her mother’s funeral?’

  You didn’t, Marnie’s conscience pricked her. She’d been in a state of shock at her parents’ funeral, numb in her extremities and everywhere else. Was that how Hope felt, at her mother’s funeral? Numb. Too much violence could do that, like too much wine. Take the edge off everything, even the things that mattered. Sometimes pain was a blessing. It woke you up, helped you to feel.

  ‘Did you know that your daughter seeks out violent men? Men who hurt her, physically.’

  Hope’s father self-administered another mouthful of anaesthetic in silence.

  ‘A doctor said Hope had the sort of injuries seen on working girls. Prostitutes who service sadistic clients.’

  And another mouthful. Hollow legs. To go with his hollow heart.

  ‘Leo wouldn’t hurt her,’ Marnie said. ‘He hated it. When he refused, she picked up strangers in bars and went back with them, to be beaten. It’s lucky she’s still alive.’

  Unlucky for Simone Bissell.

  Reece cradled his glass like an infant to his chest.

  ‘Your daughter needs to be beaten. Do you think that makes her a survivor?’ Marnie wanted to see his hand shake, even if it was just tremors from the gin. She wanted to see some sign that he understood what he’d done. ‘I think it makes her a sad, damaged woman. And dangerous. To herself and others.’

  ‘I stopped being responsible,’ Reece repeated, ‘when she reached eighteen.’

  ‘You’re responsible. You’ll always be responsible. If you can’t see that, I pity you. It’s pathetic. Leo Proctor’s five times the man you’ll ever be.’

  Kenneth Reece looked across the rim of his glass at her, his eyes dulled by drink.

  He was too far away for her to touch him. Right out of reach.

  Just like his daughter.

  18

  In the Bissells’ kitchen, the dishes sat in the sink, unwashed. Simone had scraped her portion of fish into the pedal bin. The mouthful she’d eaten was full of bones, spines sticking in the tender roof of her mouth.

  It was quiet in the house, no noise from the bathroom. Simone was afraid to look in that direction, in case it prompted Hope to go back there. She’d left the policeman screaming. Brought the hammer and kettlebell into the kitchen and propped them at the side of her chair as she sat and ate. He was quiet now, DS J
ake. Simone had no proof that he was still alive. She was afraid to ask, in case the answer was bad.

  After they’d eaten, Hope sat on the floor by the bell and hammer, nodding for Simone to join her. She did what Hope wanted. It was cold on the floor. Simone’s legs felt stiff, like an old woman’s.

  ‘Daddy’s kettlebell was warm,’ Hope said. She touched the black iron bell, as if it was a crucifix, or a pet. ‘The handle smelt of his skin. I’d watch him with it. Bending and stretching, lifting it from the floor to his waist then up – high – over his head.’

  Simone wanted to cover her ears, but she didn’t. She sat and listened, and tried hard not to weep. Hope had stopped asking questions about her childhood, and for that, Simone was grateful. Hope wanted her to listen now. It was hard to listen when Simone was so scared, so cold. It was almost worse than talking. She didn’t know what Hope was going to say. She only knew something terrible must have happened, to make her like this. Simone was afraid to hear the terrible thing, afraid of the pictures it would put in her head.

  ‘He lifted the weight over his head, too high for me to reach,’ Hope’s eyes misted as she remembered, ‘even though I stood on tiptoe and stretched the ends of my fingers. Trying to reach, trying to touch.’ She caught Simone’s hand and held it. She didn’t seem to notice how cold Simone’s fingers were, or how badly they shook. ‘He screwed his eyes shut as he worked.’ Hope mimicked the expression, and Simone swallowed a gasp, from the relief of being free just for a second from the woman’s searing stare. ‘His muscles . . . looked like mice moving under his skin.’

  Hope opened her eyes again. ‘He didn’t look at me. I wished he would. I wished and wished he’d lift me like that, to his waist and then up. High, high over his head.’

  She twisted her fingers through Simone’s, guiding their twinned hands to the kettlebell. It was so solid and hard.