Someone Else's Skin: (DI Marnie Rome)

by Hilary, Sarah

  Marnie waited in silence when Ed stopped speaking. Out of respect, Noah guessed, for the horror he had unfolded. ‘You said she had a particular reason to fear knives,’ she said then. ‘Did Lowell cut her? If he had a blood kink . . .’

  ‘No, it’s about the only thing he didn’t do.’ Ed gathered a fresh breath. The telling of Simone’s story was hurting him; deep lines scored either side of his mouth. ‘When she was eight, she was circumcised. By her mother and another woman.’

  Noah could hear an empty, outraged ringing in his head.

  ‘What happened to Lowell?’ Marnie asked in an unforgiving tone. ‘Was he arrested?’

  ‘And later released, without charge. The studio flat was empty, no trace that anyone had lived there. I’m guessing Lowell’s father helped to tidy up.’ Ed wrung a smile from his mouth. ‘Assuming, of course, that Simone’s story was true.’

  ‘What reason would she have for lying?’

  ‘None that I can see. A refuge is a last resort. No one would choose to go there unless they were desperate.’

  ‘She didn’t want to go home?’

  ‘To the Bissells? She didn’t think of it as home.’

  ‘They didn’t try and find her, when she first ran away?’

  ‘I think they must’ve done. Simone said they were afraid of the adoption being challenged, because it wasn’t legal. I looked into it, and as far as the law’s concerned, she’s a British citizen and their daughter. They notified the police when she left home. She was in the missing persons database for a year. The Bissells tried to visit her in the hospital, but she wouldn’t see them. She didn’t want them knowing the address of the refuge.’

  ‘Had they abused her?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘She wouldn’t say. I doubt there was physical abuse, but she was a traumatised ten-year-old when they took her from Uganda. From what she said, they started the school and ballet classes almost the second she arrived in London. They never spoke about her village, unless it was to say how she might return there when she was a doctor. They never spoke about the circumcision, although Mrs Bissell knew what Simone’s mother had done. They seemed to think it was politically incorrect to judge the customs of another country, even when those customs involved mutilating young girls.’ Ed moved his mouth tenderly, as if it hurt him. ‘Simone said she felt gagged, forbidden from being Nasiche, after ten years of being her. The Bissells didn’t seek help for her, to recover from the trauma of leaving her village, or for what happened when she was eight. That qualifies as neglect, in my book.’

  ‘Do you think the Bissells abducted her?’ Noah asked. ‘Or were the birth parents complicit?’

  ‘Hard to say. Simone doesn’t know. I’m not sure which would be worse.’

  ‘She didn’t feel that the Bissells were rescuing her?’ Marnie said. ‘After what happened with her birth mother?’

  ‘If she did, she never expressed it that way to me.’ Ed ghosted a smile. ‘You think that’s what was in her mind today. That she was rescuing Hope.’

  ‘Perhaps. What do you think?’

  ‘She’s been in the refuge for more than three years. Hope’s the first person she’s been close to and it happened in – what? Three weeks? You said Hope had only been there three weeks. That’s what I can’t believe.’

  ‘There’s been nothing like this before? In the three years you’ve known her.’

  Ed shook his head emphatically. ‘Nothing. She’s been reliable, helpful, loyal . . . And now I sound patronising, as well as gullible.’ It was going to take a long time for him to get over the shock of Simone repaying his trust with deceit.

  ‘We need to talk to Ayana and the others,’ Noah said, ‘about how close they really were. Hope and Simone.’

  ‘And if they were planning to run.’ Marnie got to her feet, touching a hand briefly to Ed’s shoulder. ‘You’d better get back to work. Can we give you a lift?’

  ‘I’d rather come with you to the refuge,’ Ed said. ‘Let me help you talk with the women. I can do that.’

  ‘Okay.’ Marnie nodded. ‘Let’s meet there. Noah, we should swing by the station. There’s something we need to do.’

  30

  That fucking sound, a thready mewling from the back seat.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled under his breath, then rapped the words aloud: ‘Shut up!’

  The mewling rose in pitch, clawing at the exposed nape of his neck. He tried counting to ten, getting as far as seven before the noise started up again.

  It was the soundtrack to his day: a constant nails-on-a-blackboard reminder of how she – they, the lot of them – had him by the balls.

  He punched a fist at the dashboard. ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’

  He punched until the plastic groaned and the skin split at his knuckles, blood springing up in a beaded line.

  ‘You little shits!’ He wrenched around, showing his spoiled fist, bunched and bleeding. ‘Look what you did!’

  The twins, strapped into matching child seats, stared back at him with round eyes and mouths, surprised into silence for a second until – in stereo – they began again, the same soundtrack as before, pulling air into their small lungs, expelling it in bellows.

  Their fault he’d lost the women. Lost her. He’d been right on her tail, not believing his luck when he saw her come out of the hospital, with her little friend.

  The friend was a problem, but not a major one. He wasn’t scared of that. They moved too fast, though, knew how to lose themselves in the crowd. Bitches. Then the twins had started up . . .

  He’d lost her. Because of the fucking twins. He could smell their sour-milk breath. Freya’s stink, second-hand, the ruined breasts she wouldn’t let him touch, always sore after the twins’ feasting. ‘Shut up, you greedy little bastards.’

  He’d watched them in the hospital, struggling to survive. Born too soon. In Perspex cradles, his heart bursting, willing them to fill their lungs, to live . . .

  Loving them past the point of bearing. Such a long time ago. A lifetime. He didn’t recognise these two squat monsters behind him, strapped into trendy car seats that cost more than he earned easily in a week – and he had earned money easily. Everything had been easy, once. Until the twins.

  ‘They’ll change your life.’ All his mates had said that.

  He hadn’t known it was a warning.

  If it weren’t for the twins, he’d never have gone to that nightclub six months ago, after a bit of peace and quiet. A change of scene, something to remind him how life had been, before. That fucking dump with its mirror-balled ceiling and its concrete walls, the promise of cheap cocktails and free sex, guilt-free. One Night Stan’s: that was where he met her. The bitch that took his life and turned it inside out.

  He balled his fist and licked at the split knuckles, feeling a sluggish tug in his crotch at the familiar taste.

  ‘Shut up,’ he muttered again, under his breath, but this time he wasn’t sure whether the threat was for the twins, or himself.

  31

  Six months ago

  Under the spinning strobe light in the club is where he first sees her. The light is punchy, blue. Strips the colour from her skin. She could be any age. Anyone.

  It isn’t his idea. He doesn’t make the first move. True, he’s in a bruising mood, slammed out of the house an hour earlier, sick to the pit with Freya and the twins. No one tells you the half of it, the new-father thing, afraid it’ll put paid to the human race, probably. The sleepless nights, sure, everyone has a sob story about that. But no one tells you about the fear, the gutting knife that gets you under the balls whenever they start up. No one tells you about that sound, like tearing tissue paper, when babies turn over in their cots and you hold your breath, begging for the screaming not to start, because if it does, it’ll never stop, it’ll last all night and longer.

  Six weeks in and it’s his turn to feed them, to get up and fumble in the fridge for the bottle she expressed before she went to bed. Last night he worked a double s
hift, was dog-tired. Groaned when they started up – groaned and turned away to bury his head in her breasts. Except that’s not allowed, he’s not allowed to be tired, or to groan when she’s been with them all bloody day. She shoved him off, too sore to be touched. The nails on her toes, uncut in eight months, scratched like razors at his shin.

  Tonight’s different. Tonight, he’s escaped for an hour, because if he stayed he’d break something and they can’t afford to replace anything; they’re saving up for a double buggy. Double everything.

  Under the strobe light in the club, her skin shows welted and purple. Just a glimpse, when she leans towards him and the neck of her T-shirt gapes open, showing thin stripes on the colourless skin across the top of her ribs.

  On either side of them, couples kiss and grope, noisily. The whole place stinks of pheromones; a man not much younger than him has both hands up the bandage skirt of a girl who can’t be more than eighteen. It’s obscene. Desperate.

  It turns him on.

  Not the groping. The disgust and shame: things he associates with sex, now. Since the twins, okay, he can’t get it up at home. First, Freya’s too sore – stitches, bleeding, the works – then, when she was ready, they’re both too bloody tired, and those tits – Christ. Leaking when the twins cry, stinking of milk, the same putrid-sweet smell as their puke. He can’t do it. Can’t get it up. Be a man.

  Under the strobe lights, her tits are small and hard. More like muscle than fat.

  She smells of clean sweat and money. Coins.

  It’s not until hours later, in the hotel room, that he discovers the coppery smell is blood.

  32

  Five years ago

  The therapist, Lexie, sits perched on a footstool, hugging her knees. Her hair is corn-coloured and cut in spikes around her small ears. She wears a green tunic with cropped leggings, flat leather sandals that show off painted toenails. She looks like a pixie, perched here. Nothing about her is real, but Marnie’s on her guard. She knows the tricks, how these professionals will wear you down with their chirpiness. She isn’t going to fall for Lexie the Pixie.

  ‘Where is the pain today?’ Lexie asks, cocking her head at Marnie.

  It’s their twelfth session. Twelve weeks and three days since the murders. They established at the eighth session that the pain – a physical thing – is sly and mobile, like a door-to-door salesman who finds you no matter how far or how often you move.

  Today, the pain is in Marnie’s neck. On the right side. A trapped nerve, jumpy.

  ‘In my neck.’

  A pain in the neck. She hopes Lexie doesn’t take it personally. Marnie stopped taking this personally – Lexie and her forest of pot plants, the grubby scent of patchouli – at their fourth session. It’s just paperwork, form-filling, something she must do to keep her job, stay with the Met. The proof of her sanity, apparently, lies in how often she can tell this stranger how badly she’s hurting. She resisted, at first, but she’s learnt to abase herself at Lexie’s sandalled feet, to offer up the sacrifice of her soreness.

  ‘In your neck,’ Lexie says, nodding sagely. Her earrings, miniature bluebirds, quiver and dip. ‘Can you describe the sort of pain it is today?’

  ‘Stabbing,’ Marnie says, almost without thinking. Almost.

  Lexie makes a note in a spiral pad. Has she worked it out? Does she know what Marnie’s known for weeks? That the pain moving around her body is – always – in one of two dozen places. In her head or neck or chest, or in her shoulders. Never any lower.

  You could map the places where the pain has crept, and if you did, you’d have a map that matched the pathologist’s reports on Greg and Lisa Rome. The stab wounds, fatal and otherwise. Twelve wounds apiece, shared out by the kitchen knife.

  Marnie didn’t realise it, at first. The pain felt indiscriminate and she blamed in on stress, on sleeping awkwardly or sitting hunched over her laptop, searching for Stephen’s name. She got into the habit of touching her hand to wherever the pain went, and finally the penny dropped.

  It’s their pain she’s feeling.

  Precise, nagging.

  In her head or chest, or in a dozen places in between.

  All the places he put the knife.

  33

  Now

  Marnie Rome sat in the small room at the rear of the police station. Alone, except for the thick polybag on the table in front of her. Behind her, a grimy stack of metal shelves housed what had been the contents of someone’s desk: a mug and an ancient bottle of contact lens cleaner; hand gel. A street map of Hendon.

  ‘Just you and me,’ Marnie said under her breath, to the polybag. She’d locked the door to the room. Strictly speaking, this was against the rules, but she didn’t want Tim Welland stumbling in to find her addressing rhetorical statements to an evidence bag. Shortest route to a psych assessment she could think of, and she didn’t have time for soul-searching, not with Hope gone and a hole through Leo Proctor’s lung. She’d put it off long enough. Should’ve done this days ago, while the blood was still fresh.

  The knife had sweated, leaving a red rash of condensation inside the evidence bag.

  She poked at it with the end of one finger, like a kid testing a hollow wasps’ nest.

  ‘You don’t scare me . . .’

  Not the first knife she’d sat with. Not the last, either.

  Just a knife. Another knife. She put her fingertips on the clean side of the stained polythene, to get used to the feel of it.

  ‘Fingertips are so important,’ a forensics expert had taught her, not long after she joined the Met. Like an extension of your five senses, you can touch something with your fingertips, even through latex, and know it’s vital. He’d told her how he’d spent one Sunday night searching for a knife thrown at high tide into the Thames. At low tide, when he was in the river, the search was hazardous with mud. Filthy, sucking mud, debilitating to wade through, impossible to see through. Relying on the blind ends of his fingers to find the weapon – and he did find it.

  Through the polythene, Marnie felt the blade of the knife Hope Proctor had used to perforate her husband’s lung. Just another knife.

  She shut her eyes, in self-defence. Smelling the bright zest of oranges – her father making Christmas punch. Another memory, green, of her mother making salad . . .

  Half an avocado nestling in her hand, olive meat around a chestnut pit. Thwacking a knife, the pit stopping the blade lengthways across the fruit. A twist of her wrist and the pit was out, dislodged from the blade when the knife tapped the lip of the bin. She’d watched her mum pitting avocados that way for years; always a second’s disquiet when it seemed she was about to lose her fingers to the knife.

  Orange and avocado. The colours of kitchen knives. Even now, Marnie smelt citrus, not blood. Memory was a brilliant liar.

  She forced herself to concentrate on the knife in the polybag. The knife Hope Proctor had turned on her husband. Why? How?

  Hope was five foot five, an inch below Marnie’s height. Nearly a foot shorter than her husband, and she weighed half as much as Leo did. She stuck this knife between his ribs, chipping one of them – it had shown on the X-ray. The impact must’ve jarred Hope’s wrist. Then the softer resistance of the blade entering flesh, sinking in deep enough to stain her fingers, and the handle of the knife.

  Marnie smoothed the polythene with her fingers. When the knife’s blade skims across the bone’s surface, it leaves little indentations, even if the knife is brand new. These are often clues.

  The knife her parents used to slice oranges and pit avocados . . .

  Later, the same knife was full of clues, rank with evidence. They wouldn’t let Marnie near enough to read the clues. Kept her in the cold, the way she’d kept the memories. Only the memories wouldn’t stay down, worrying at her like an excited puppy shut out for too long.

  Death casts the longest shadow. Who said that? Someone who didn’t know about death, not intimately. Shadows were cool places, hiding places. Death was direc
t sunlight, no shade. A place to burn. She shoved the polybag to arm’s length and stood, so suddenly her head spun. Pulling her phone from her pocket, she rang Noah Jake.

  ‘Come to the old interview room a minute, would you?’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’ He rang off.

  She unlocked the door, pulling it open. Noah wouldn’t waste any time, even if he hadn’t heard the urgency in her voice.

  Sure enough, he was in the room before she’d counted to thirty. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Stand under the light.’

  He moved to the far side of the table, doing as she said. He lacked Leo Proctor’s bulk – there was no fat on him anywhere – but he wasn’t far off the same height. She picked up the bagged blade, turning it so that the handle was snug in her palm. The polythene had a particular smell, like dirty skin. She stepped around the table, close to where Noah was waiting. ‘Keep still,’ she warned.

  Noah didn’t move. She bent her elbow at a right angle and thrust at his torso, stopping short when the bagged end of the blade touched his shirtfront. Too low.

  Too low to hit a lung.

  ‘Move back a pace.’

  Noah did as she said, keeping quiet. She liked that about him. She tucked her elbow tight to her waist. Thrust.

  This time the tip met the curve of his rib. Still too low for his lung.

  Noah asked a question with his eyes. She shook her head. ‘Keep still.’

  She tried the blow from eight different angles. With the knife horizontal. Vertical. With it pointing upwards, and downwards. Had Leo been dead, this would have been an easy task for a pathologist, instead of a tricky one for her.