Someone Else's Skin: (DI Marnie Rome)

by Hilary, Sarah

  ‘Together. Hope wanted the bathroom. Simone said she’d take her. They looked safe. Hope was in her robe.’ Ed shook his head, putting the robe and gown on the bed. ‘Simone must’ve had a set of clothes in her bag. I’m sorry—’

  Marnie cut him short, looking at Noah. ‘Speak to security. Tell them we need CCTV from the exits and entrances. And find Abby Pike.’

  Noah nodded, and went.

  Ed shook his head. ‘I should’ve stayed with them . . . Jesus, Rome, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I should’ve checked Simone’s bag. And I shouldn’t have told Abby Pike to take a break.’ Her palms pricked with sweat. Her armpits too. ‘I’m in charge here, not you.’ She crouched to check the cabinet next to Hope’s bed, needing to hide her face from Ed, just for a minute, until she had it together.

  ‘How’s Leo?’ Ed asked.

  ‘Awake. That’s what the doctor wanted to tell me.’

  ‘Do you think Hope guessed as much?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ The cabinet was empty. She straightened and turned to face him. ‘But it doesn’t explain why Simone brought clothes. Before she knew he was awake. She was planning this escape. She must’ve been.’

  Ed pushed his hands into his hair. ‘Damn,’ he said. Then again, with more feeling, ‘Damn.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she snapped. ‘I need your help here. Do the freaking-out on your own time.’

  His look of injury made her flinch, just as Noah’s disapproval had, in Leo Proctor’s room upstairs. She softened her voice: ‘I need your help. You need to tell me about Simone, the sort of person she is, where she might go.’

  Ed nodded. ‘I’ll give you whatever I can, but I can’t believe she’s done this. She’s the last person I’d have expected to do something crazy.’

  ‘Crazy would’ve been leaving on an impulse, with Hope in her hospital gown.’ Marnie pointed at the discarded gown and robe on the bed. ‘This was planned.’

  ‘Taking a sick woman out of hospital . . .’ Ed shook his head. ‘I thought Simone had more sense. She can be forceful, I knew that, but I never thought she’d take a risk with someone else’s health.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought she was doing the best thing for her friend.’

  ‘I should’ve stayed outside the bathroom door.’ Ed was still beating himself up. ‘But I didn’t want them to feel under armed guard.’

  Simone had counted on Ed’s chivalry and that angered Marnie, but she was the one who’d sent Abby Pike off duty. Abby would’ve gone into the bathroom with the women. Hope would’ve returned to bed. What had Simone said, to make Hope run? If Hope had confided in her, told Simone that she saw a chance to stop Leo’s abuse and took it . . .

  What then?

  ‘How’s Hope going to manage physically?’ Ed asked. ‘You said the medical exam made grim reading.’

  ‘No recent injuries, or nothing debilitating. The CT scan was clear. I’m more concerned about her mental state. Which bathroom did they use? Where did Hope get changed?’

  ‘The bathroom you fetched Simone from, when we first arrived.’

  ‘She was checking it out,’ Marnie realised. ‘I found her testing the locks on the doors, thought it was a privacy thing. Stupid.’

  She’d been stupid since Saturday. The visit to Sommerville had left her fretful, squeamish. She’d exorcised some of it upstairs, giving Leo Proctor a taste of his own medicine, but she was in danger of making more mistakes, worse ones. She was hitting out at random – to see what lit up and what broke.

  Ed was staying close. As if she might need him to catch her, in the event she tripped over her own feet. His vigilance made her want to shove him away. ‘You’re going to tell me everything you know about Simone Bissell. Forget about confidentiality, and the need to allow these women their secrets. I’d say Simone knew exactly how to exploit your respect for her privacy, wouldn’t you?’

  28

  ‘Anything?’

  Abby Pike was out of breath, her face flushed from running. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Let’s try the bus stop. Maybe someone saw them get on a bus.’ Noah wasn’t hopeful. He kept remembering what Marnie had said about the way these women lived without leaving a trace. It was as if Hope and Simone had vanished into the hospital’s sterile air. He remembered the intense way Hope had studied the doctor’s face when he was telling Marnie that Leo was awake. Could Hope lip-read? Perhaps she didn’t need to. She’d known the chances were in favour of her husband’s recovery. She’d known what that might mean.

  No one at the bus stop had seen an African woman with braided hair, or a blonde woman answering to Hope’s description.

  ‘We’d better check back in with the boss.’ Abby glanced at Noah. ‘Who’re you calling?’

  ‘Ron Carling, back at the station. He’s checking the CCTV from the refuge.’ Noah nodded at the street cameras. ‘He can check this lot, too.’

  When they returned to the ward, DI Rome was talking to a man in a cheap suit with a guarded expression. From the hospital’s administrative team, Noah guessed.

  ‘She wasn’t under arrest,’ Abby whispered to Noah. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The hospital hadn’t discharged her. They’ll implement their missing persons procedure. Effectively, she’s gone AWOL.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Abby said. ‘Why would Simone persuade her to run? She wasn’t in any fit state, for one thing.’

  ‘Her husband’s just woken up.’

  ‘Shit. Do you think she knew that?’

  ‘She knew there was a good chance of it.’

  Abby pulled her jacket on, buttoning its front. ‘She didn’t look well enough to walk out of here, let alone run. Wish I hadn’t taken that break. If I’d stayed here . . .’

  ‘The DI told you to take a break. Ed Belloc was with them.’

  ‘Poor bloke,’ Abby whispered. ‘Looks like she gave him a right bollocking.’

  Noah glanced at Ed. Abby was right; Marnie had chewed chunks out of him. It made Noah reluctant to share the news that no one had seen Simone or Hope leave the hospital. Unless the street CCTV yielded a clue, they were screwed.

  ‘AWOL means we can bring her back, right?’ Abby dusted lint from the front of her jacket. ‘Even though she wasn’t under arrest?’

  ‘If we can find her.’

  Marnie saw the pair of them and jerked her head for Noah. He walked over, with Abby following. The man in the cheap suit turned to look. They all did. Only Ed Belloc had any hope in his eyes. Noah shook his head. ‘The hospital’s CCTV shows them leaving by the front entrance at 11.37 a.m., towards Bull Lane. There’s a bus stop on Bridport Road, but no one remembers seeing them boarding a bus.’

  ‘That’s London for you. Everyone minding his own business.’ The hospital administrator sounded resigned, uninterested in the women’s fate. He’d tackled worse, in all likelihood. At least Hope Proctor wasn’t recovering from surgery, or psychotic.

  Noah said, ‘I’ve asked the station to start looking at street CCTV.’

  ‘Well, good luck.’ The hospital bureaucrat waited a moment, then took his leave.

  Marnie said, ‘I’m treating this as abduction.’

  ‘On what basis?’ Ed Belloc looked like someone had wrung him out. ‘Simone’s not an abductor.’

  ‘I don’t know what she is or isn’t. That’s what you’re going to tell us. Abduction will get us more manpower than missing persons. We don’t know that Hope went willingly. Abby, you’ve spent more time with her than any of us. What do you think?’

  ‘She stayed in her bed, sleeping mostly. I tried talking to her, but she wasn’t keen. Didn’t want to listen to music, or read. I offered to get her a magazine or a newspaper, but she said no thanks, she wasn’t interested.’

  ‘How was she with the staff?’

  ‘Very quiet and polite, did as she was told, said thanks a lot.’ Abby lowered her voice. ‘Some of the women make a fuss about food, or bed changes. Not Hope. I’d be surprised if she enjoyed the me
als, but she ate everything. Kept saying she didn’t want to be a trouble to anyone.’ It was easy to imagine, from the description she gave, that Hope Proctor would’ve gone with Simone Bissell just because Simone told her to.

  Marnie nodded at Abby. ‘Call it in, and get things started. We’d better check the refuge in case they went back there, but it’s a long shot.’ She looked at Ed. ‘Does Simone Bissell go by any other names?’

  It was a routine question; Noah doubted whether Marnie expected any answer other than no, but Ed Belloc said, ‘Nasiche Auma.’

  They all looked at him. Noah heard Marnie suppressing a sigh.

  Ed spelt the name out for Abby Pike, who wrote it down. ‘She was adopted by a British couple, who renamed her. She’s a British citizen. As far as I know, she only uses Simone Bissell.’

  Ed was reluctant even now to break confidence with the woman he’d been trying to help. ‘She was born in Uganda. Nasiche Auma is her birth name.’

  29

  ‘Nasiche Auma was born in the Apac district of northern Uganda in 1988. She doesn’t know exactly when, or exactly where. She believes the couple who adopted her altered her birth certificate. They were aid workers. Charles and Pauline Bissell.’

  Ed put his hands on the cafeteria table. ‘This is the story as she told it to me. I believed it at the time. I still do, but I’ve not had it independently verified.’ He looked at Marnie. ‘In case that’s important.’

  She nodded. ‘Go on.’

  Noah made notes as Ed continued with the story. He felt sorry for Ed. Marnie’s mood hadn’t improved, or not conspicuously.

  ‘Her village was a recruiting ground for the Lord’s Resistance Army, who took all Simone’s brothers before she was six years old. At the time of her birth, the LRA had taken around three thousand children. They trained the boys to fight. The girls they sold to arms dealers as sex slaves, or kept them for themselves.’ Ed paused. ‘This part is certainly true. There’s plenty of independent evidence about the LRA and its crimes against children in northern Uganda, the Congo and elsewhere. Although it’s reported to be getting better, in recent months.’ He drew a breath. ‘Pauline and Charles Bissell, a British couple, took Nasiche from her village to the Apac hospital, on the pretext that her eyesight was suffering because of poor nutrition. Really, they wanted to save her from the LRA’s recruiters. They flew her home to London, where they adopted her. She hasn’t been home, or seen her birth family since.’

  ‘How did she end up in the refuge?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘I’m getting to that. You need to know her story to understand how she ended up in the refuge.’ Ed straightened his spine in the chair. ‘She was ten when she came to London. The Bissells had money. They sent her to private school, paid for extra tuition to help her learn English quickly, took her to ballet classes at the weekends.’ He glanced at the window, a stitch of concentration between his eyes. ‘Nasiche means born in the locust season. She knew it was her name, although the Bissells never used it. They were worried the school wouldn’t be able to pronounce it properly, that it’d get in the way of her making friends. She was always Simone, in England.’ He waited while an elderly couple went slowly past the table, to find a seat beside the cafeteria window.

  Marnie had elected to remain in the hospital, chiefly to be close to Leo Proctor in order to get permission to search the Proctors’ house. A call to Jeanette Conway had confirmed that Hope and Simone hadn’t returned to the refuge. No one knew where to look for them. Marnie thought the Proctors’ house was a long shot, but she wanted to rule it out. Getting a warrant would take too long. Quicker to shame Leo into giving his permission, but they needed the cooperation of the medical staff, who weren’t too pleased with the state of their patient after the first round of police questions.

  ‘The Bissells wanted Simone to study medicine,’ Ed continued. ‘They dreamt of her returning to Uganda as a grown woman, a qualified doctor. They spent a lot of time educating her about the brutality of the LRA, the desperate state of affairs in Uganda. I think they spent a lot less time making Simone feel loved, or independent. She told me they were controlling, took all her decisions for her. I think she blamed them for what happened when she left them – they never encouraged her to develop her own judgement, or to make choices. It left her wide open to what happened next.

  ‘She dropped out of school when she was seventeen, started hanging around with a street gang, self-harming . . . She told me it was a way of connecting to the life she would’ve lived if she’d stayed in the village, in Uganda. The Bissells hit the roof. They fought with her. Simone accused them of being tyrants, said the LRA may as well have recruited her. I think if they’d said they loved her, or if they’d talked to her about how lonely she felt, things might’ve worked out differently. As it was, they fought. She packed a bag and left.’

  Ed broke off to drink from a bottle of mineral water. It was hot in the cafeteria, the air parched by central heating. ‘She lived rough for a while. Her survival instincts were rusty, after nine years of being mollycoddled, but she soon sharpened up. She didn’t get into any trouble, knew how to avoid danger. Instinctively, or so she thought. The way she described it to me . . . like a war zone under her skin . . . and shame. She talked about shame, before anything else happened. Survivor guilt. She’d escaped, that was how she saw it. The rest of her village, the kids she’d played with, they’d be soldiers now. She tried to feel like a soldier, to convince herself she could survive on the streets. Maybe she would’ve done, if she’d stayed on the streets.’ Ed turned the bottle of water between his hands. ‘She fell in with a boy.’ He stopped, looking at the notebook in which Noah was recording the conversation.

  ‘His name?’ Marnie prompted. ‘I’ll worry about protocol once we’ve found her.’

  ‘Lowell Paton,’ Ed said. ‘He’d run away from home, he said, because his parents were drinking, fighting all the time. Simone realised plenty of kids had it worse than she did, but she couldn’t face going home. “I was too proud”, that was how she put it. She and Lowell became friends. They looked out for each other, took it in turns to try to find work, because a couple always looks dodgy. Sometimes it’s better to be single.’

  Ed’s face shadowed. ‘One day Lowell came back with a big grin on his face, saying he’d found a security job in a block of flats. New-build, “proper posh”. He said they could doss down in one of the empty flats. Simone didn’t ask how a homeless teenager got a job involving keys, security. She went with him, moved into a studio in the basement, just a small place but with hot water, heating. It looked like heaven. They slept on the floor, on a mattress Lowell found in the lock-up next door. Simone went to investigate, came back with sticks of furniture, plates and cups, a kettle and toaster. At the end of the first week, she had the flat looking like a proper place. She had some of the savings she’d taken when she left the Bissells, and she bought food, cooked a chicken. Lowell said it was the best meal he’d eaten in ages. Simone joked that if he wanted to thank her, he could do the washing-up.’

  Ed rolled his neck as if it hurt. ‘That’s when he hit her the first time. Not a little slap, no build-up. He punched her, broke her nose. Then he made her go to the kitchen and wash the dishes with blood running down her face.’

  He was silent for a long minute. Neither Noah nor Marnie spoke. Eventually, Ed said, ‘It went on like that for over a year. She couldn’t get away. He had the keys to the apartment, kept her locked up. She finally figured out that he wasn’t a homeless kid. He wasn’t even a kid. He was twenty-one. His dad owned the company responsible for selling the flats in the new-build. Sales weren’t going well. It was company policy not to show the studio flat, because it was so small. Lowell had a set of keys, could come and go as he pleased. There were no neighbours to hear Simone if she screamed. She didn’t dare to, most of the time. He’d hit her without provocation – kept hitting her – and she began to believe he’d kill her. The longer he kept her in the flat, the more certain she be
came that he’d do it, because what other way out did he have?’

  ‘No one checked the flat in over a year?’ Noah was incredulous.

  ‘That’s what she said. She’d sometimes hear voices, or hammering. She found out later that the building regulators delayed the licences needed for the sale of residential premises. The materials hadn’t passed a safety inspection. Effectively, she was living in a condemned building.’

  ‘He was abusing her,’ Marnie said, ‘the whole time?’

  ‘He told her he loved her, bought her presents – jewellery and her favourite flowers – enough to make her doubt what was really happening. When he wasn’t doing that, he was beating her. Classic abuse.’

  ‘How did she get away?’

  ‘She stopped eating and lost a lot of weight, persuaded him she needed a doctor. She was afraid he’d panic and leave her there to die, but she didn’t know what else to try. She’d tried pleading, promising not to press charges, giving him what he wanted – “Sex, he always wanted sex” – but nothing worked. He didn’t get her a doctor, but he did get more relaxed about turning his back on her. He’d been very careful up to that point, never giving her the chance to run, or to attack him. When she’d lost a couple of stone, he still wanted sex, but he stopped hitting her. He started to say she disgusted him. He didn’t know why he bothered with her. She was bony, her breath stank . . .’

  Ed drew a short breath. ‘He’d liked raping her during her period, but her periods stopped because of the weight loss. This made him angry at first, then annoyed. He stopped caring whether she wept when he raped her. One night he drank himself to sleep and she was able to take the keys and leave.’

  ‘Why didn’t she go to the police?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘She did. They said she was too confused to give a proper account of what’d happened. She was hallucinating. They took her to hospital. She had a body-mass index of fifteen. The hospital diagnosed severe malnutrition and admitted her as an emergency. When the police went back to question her, she refused to talk to them. They decided she was too traumatised to cooperate. That’s when they called me. She wouldn’t speak to me either, not for a long time. I found her a place in the refuge. Eventually she started to feel safe, but it took a long time.’