Someone Else's Skin (17 page)

‘Take off your shoes.’

Noah glanced at Marnie. She was looking at the smug pillows. ‘I want you on the bed.’

‘You want . . .?’

‘You’re six foot. That’s about Leo’s height. This bed looks small . . . Better take your shoes off before you test it.’

Noah toed off his shoes and lay down with his head on the pillow nearest the door. The bed was at least ten inches too short, his feet dangling past the silver throw. He eyed the chandelier. ‘Maybe Leo sleeps in the other room?’

‘Comfy? The bed.’

Noah shifted, testing both sides of the mattress. ‘It doesn’t feel slept on.’

The second bedroom was the same: an undersized bed in a neutrally decorated room. Marnie ran her finger along the shutter’s wooden slats, inspecting for dust. She didn’t ask Noah to lie on the bed; it was obviously the same model as the first one.

‘Show-house furniture,’ she said. ‘They make it small, so the rooms look larger.’

The bathroom was spotless, all surfaces gleaming. No hair in the plugholes. Black and white towels, fluffy enough to be new, folded in stacks on a pair of white wicker laundry baskets. Showroom toiletries, in ceramic dispensers. Marnie opened the wall-mounted cabinet, exposing an impressive collection of pill bottles and plasters, antiseptic creams, Vaseline. She checked the labels on the prescription bottles. ‘Hope’s antidepressants . . . She stopped taking them because they made her clumsy. She broke a mirror.’ She ran a finger around the cabinet’s mirrored doors. ‘Not this one.’

Noah inspected the date on the pill bottle, and its contents. ‘It doesn’t look like she took many.’

‘No. I don’t suppose Leo liked the clumsiness.’

They went downstairs to the sitting room. Marnie sat on the sofa, inviting Noah to join her. The sofa was big enough for two, assuming intimacy was on the agenda. They disengaged their elbows and stood, looking around the room a second time.

‘Do they really live here?’ Noah wondered. ‘Or is the whole thing just for show?’

‘A marriage is private.’ Marnie walked to the bookcase. ‘That was Hope’s line when we spoke at the hospital.’ She opened DVD cases, looking inside each one before sliding it back on to the shelf.

‘Private would be . . . dirty towels in the bath,’ Noah said, ‘a porn stash under the bed. There’s nothing here that needs to be behind closed doors.’

‘So where do they keep their secrets? They did a good job of covering up the abuse, until now. What was the neighbour’s line? A nice enough couple . . . And Leo was holding down a job. Hope wasn’t saying anything, to anyone, about what was going on here, before the stabbing. I thought we’d find . . . something.’

She looked around the room, shaking her head. ‘Behind closed doors . . . These secrets are buried deeper than that.’ She looked at the wooden shutters. ‘Someone’s cleaned here recently, but not in the last couple of days.’

‘Hope’s been in the refuge longer than that. So unless Leo does the cleaning . . .’

‘He gets someone in. Or he
got
someone in. To clean up before he went to the refuge, to deal with Hope.’

‘So maybe someone else knows what he was hiding.’

‘Maybe.’ Marnie walked to the rooms at the back of the house.

Noah followed. The kitchen was fitted, and showroom-clean. Slick surfaces, granite. No cups on the draining board. Polished fruit in a bowl on the table. No magnets on the fridge door. No evidence of living. The space smelt of carpenter’s glue, like a stage set.

A knife rack stood by the window above the sink. Noah wondered if the knives were real; everything in the kitchen had the air of a prop, unused. But they were real, he knew that. One was missing from the rack. The knife Hope Proctor had used to stab her husband. ‘What happened to Simone,’ he started to say, ‘in Uganda . . .’

‘It happens here.’ Marnie opened the fridge.

Noah saw cans of beer and a couple of bottles of wine, not much food. ‘Here?’

‘In the UK. In London.’ The fridge gave out a pulse of cold. ‘In the last four years, we’ve had – God knows – well over a hundred calls from girls and women at risk from FGM. Female Genital Mutilation. Last estimate said over a hundred thousand operations had been carried out in the UK.’

‘But . . . it’s illegal.’

‘Illegal to operate. Illegal to arrange to operate.’ Marnie shut the fridge. ‘A hundred thousand operations. Zero convictions. You can imagine how Ed feels about that.’

They shared a bleak look; sometimes this job felt like throwing rice at a house fire. Marnie’s voice had softened when she mentioned Ed. It made Noah wonder if they were sleeping together. He’d been wondering it on and off since Friday. Ed wasn’t just cute; he was smart and serious, and warm and funny. Noah knew what Dan would say: ‘Stop pairing. Not everyone needs a soulmate. Casual sex works for the vast majority of the population.’ When Noah challenged him on this statistic, Dan prevaricated.

‘Come on,’ Marnie said.

They went into the hall. The cupboard under the stairs had a latch on it, locking from the outside. She slid the latch and opened the door.

It was just a cupboard under the stairs, the place people stored their vacuum cleaner, not much room for more than that. Raw stone floor and walls. A smell of damp. And worse.

Noah set his teeth.

Marnie wrapped her arms around her chest. ‘Can you smell it?’

He could: the ammonia stink of a scared animal.

‘Classic abuser’s technique,’ Marnie murmured. ‘Isolate your victim, narrow their field of reference.
She doesn’t say hello, keeps her head down
. . .’ She looked again at the cramped space. ‘He kept her in here.’

They could both see it. The squeezed shape of Hope Proctor huddled under the stairs, her body folded to fit inside. Door locked from the outside, nothing but her panicked breath for company, and the bruises he’d planted on her.

‘We need to ask Leo some more questions,’ Marnie said inflexibly. She made no reference to her earlier interrogation, or Noah’s criticism of it.

Seeing the hole under the stairs – smelling it – Noah was forced to side with her. He might not like Marnie’s methods, but he couldn’t ignore the implications of the cramped space he was seeing. ‘How’d you think he’ll react to the news that she’s gone?’

‘Last time, he took a knife to her hiding place. That gives us a fair idea . . .’ Her phone buzzed. She checked the display and turned away before taking the call. ‘Marnie Rome.’ She listened in silence, her shoulders up, tension in the nape of her neck.

‘Where is he now?’ Her voice was clipped. ‘Is he still in hospital?’

Noah shut the cupboard door, sliding the latch as quietly as he could.

‘Understood. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Thanks.’ She shut the phone in her fist and shoved it into her pocket.

‘Leo?’ Noah feared the worst. That Hope’s husband had heard of her escape and somehow gone after her, or made an escape of his own.

‘Not Leo.’ Marnie swung round to face him. She was pale, blue shadows under her eyes. ‘I need the car. You’ll have to take the tube back. Check in with Abby. See how she’s getting on. Call me if there’s any news. I’ll be gone the rest of the day.’

‘Is everything okay?’

She didn’t answer, going across the hall to the front door.

Felix Gill was watching the Proctors’ house from his window. He saw Marnie walk to the car, get in and drive off. Noah made sure the front door was secure before pausing on the pavement to check his pockets for his Oyster card. His phone buzzed against his hip and he pulled it out, checked the display: Ron Carling, from the station.

‘I’ve got something,’ Carling said, ‘from the CCTV. A Prius. It was outside the hospital this morning, about the time you said, but get this. The
same
car was outside the refuge in Finchley the day Leo Proctor got stabbed.’

‘The same car. You’re sure?’

‘It was at the refuge. In the same street, then parked up two roads away, round about the time they took Proctor in. CCTV’s like a fucking rash round that part of town.’

‘You have a registration?’

‘Yep, running it now. Prick in a Prius,’ Carling said, contempt and triumph slugging it out in his tone. ‘He’s been watching the women.’

37

Six months ago

Under the tight clothes from the nightclub, she’s a mess. The coppery smell is blood, recent, on the tops of her thighs. It’s shocking, brutal, but it turns him on. He knows it shouldn’t, he knows that. Except all the lines are blurred, and if he’s taken this step . . .

It
helps
. It helps that it’s more than just a quick shag. He doesn’t have a name for what it is, but it’s something more than shameful, or dirty. It’s . . .

Evil. Out of his control. Not something he can ever confess to Freya, in a pang of guilt or panic. He can’t ever confess to this. That makes him feel safe. Hidden.

In the hotel room, on the cheap slippery surface of the bed, she straddles him. Knees knotting in his armpits, pain pinning him in place.

‘Shit . . .’ he hisses. ‘Don’t . . .’

She leans low over his chest, those tight tits pressed tighter, nipples like hot nail-heads. Her thumbs find the tendons in his neck, easily. This isn’t her first time at this game. That’s all it takes – knees, thumbs, her splayed heat in a straight line up his stomach – for his balls to shrivel, trying to crawl back up into his body.

‘You’re hurting . . .’

‘You’re kidding.’ These are the first words she’s spoken. Her voice is sing-song, sweet. Her teeth grin against the side of his neck. ‘I haven’t even started yet.’

Freya and the twins are sleeping when he gets home.

He creeps into the bathroom and washes the smell away, shamed and grateful in equal measure, like a dog allowed to drink after a long car journey. The house is so quiet; he can’t believe it. He sits on the side of the bath and listens to the quiet. Not just in the house. In him. It’s as if she reached in and switched off the noise, the bellowing.

He already knows he’ll go back.

38

Now

Thunder from a flight path hit the secure unit’s steep roof before rolling to the ground, where it gathered pitch, a snowball of sound. Marnie hunched her shoulders, keeping close to the wall, feeling as if she was under the stairs in the Proctors’ house.

Sommerville Secure Unit had never called before. She’d given her number for emergencies but contact, when there was any, came through Jeremy Strickland, Stephen’s solicitor. Not this time. This time Sommerville’s Head of Secure Services had called her. As soon as she’d seen the caller display on her phone, she’d known this was seriously bad news.

Paul Bruton greeted her on the other side of the door. ‘Thanks for coming so quickly. Let’s go to my office. I’ll get you some coffee.’

‘How is he?’ Marnie asked.

‘Back in his room.’ Bruton checked his watch. He kept to the left-hand wall of the corridor, as if this was a rule he had to follow. ‘The hospital discharged him earlier.’

‘Why didn’t you call me when it happened?’

‘He didn’t want us to. We had to respect that.’

‘Why?’ His sanctimonious tone exasperated her. ‘He’s an inmate, not a guest.’

Bruton gave an ingratiating smile. ‘You’re here as a relative, not a detective inspector. Inmates have the right to refuse visitors.’

She nearly snapped back:
I’m not a relative. He has no relatives, and neither do I. He killed them
.

Instead, she said, ‘But he wants to see me now. What changed his mind?’

‘I’m not sure. He isn’t communicative at the best of times.’ Bruton held open the door to his office. ‘Shall we?’

She took a seat, turned down the offer of tea or coffee, asking for a glass of water.

Bruton delegated this chore to someone on the end of a phone, plucking at the knees of his trousers as he sat behind his desk. His face was as bland as a balloon, nearly featureless at first glance. Over the suit trousers he wore a green Plain Lazy sweatshirt. He was a man in two parts: the top half chosen to appeal to the kids incarcerated here, the bottom half representative of his usual wardrobe. He had too much hair, starting too far back on his head. At intervals when he spoke, he gathered the hair in his hands and flung it back from his face, imagining, no doubt, that he looked like Hugh Grant. Smiling family photos littered the surface of his desk.

A girl in black leggings and a white hoodie brought the glass of water. She avoided Bruton and Marnie, concentrating on her task with the air of someone trying to earn privileges. She’d chewed her nails to the quick, the cuticles ragged and bloody.

‘Thanks, Lynne, that’s great.’ After she’d gone, Bruton said, ‘I’d better tell you what happened. I’m afraid it’s not a nice story.’

‘I guessed as much from the fact that he spent the night in hospital.’ Marnie drank a mouthful of tepid water. ‘But they discharged him, so I’m assuming it’s not as bad as it might’ve been.’

‘He’d been in the hospital since Saturday. It was . . . a very nasty assault.’ He took his hair in his hands, grimacing. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been clearer on the phone.’

‘Yes, you should.’ She set the glass down, the ends of her fingers slippy with sweat. ‘So how bad was it?’

Stephen’s room was at the end of a corridor that stretched the length of the secure unit’s main building. The red eye of a security camera watched Marnie as she walked. Weird acoustics; too many echoes in here, three for every footfall. When she cleared her throat, the ceiling took the sound and threw it back to her as growling.

Each of the kids detained here had a separate room with en suite facilities. The website boasted of comfortable and cheerful rooms, ‘carpeted’, as if this was an indulgence beyond the imagination of most. Sommerville, the website enthused, encouraged its detainees to personalise their rooms with posters and photographs.

Stephen’s room had no posters. Marnie had known it wouldn’t have photos. The carpet was the colour and texture of porridge, hard-wearing
faux
wool that hid the dirt in its tightly knotted ply. The walls were papered in orange. Limp curtains at the window let in lymph-coloured light.