Someone Else's Skin (13 page)

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 became 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.’

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.