Someone Else's Skin (14 page)

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 shift, 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 direct 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.

Eventually, she hit a spot between Noah’s fifth and sixth ribs. She froze, her arm outstretched, wrist flat. Noah stayed in place, waiting for her to take the stiff end of the polybag off his shirtfront. ‘That wasn’t easy,’ she said, laying the knife back down on the table.

‘No?’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I’d say you were a natural.’ He lost the smile in the same second. ‘Sorry. What d’you mean, not easy?’

‘Easy would’ve been stabbing you in the stomach. A worse way to die – slower. More time for someone to try and save your life.’ She walked away from the knife. ‘Not that anyone in Finchley was likely to do that. They were all too scared or too busy thinking you deserved what you got . . .’