Someone Else's Skin (18 page)

Stephen was lying on his back on the bed. One arm blocked the light from his eyes. He was wearing a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants. Dark marks above his elbows, where two sets of hands had held him down. Red scratches on his jaw and under his chin, scabbed indents where fingernails had broken the surface of his skin.

None of the worst damage was visible.

It was hard to look at him, knowing what’d been done. Marnie rested her eyes on the window, then looked around the room. She hadn’t been in here before.

A shallow desk held a handful of books, one of which was the short-story collection she’d brought at the weekend. The room had an astringent smell, like ointment for bruises. The hospital had prescribed tramadol. He looked as if the pills had knocked him out. She pulled a chair from under the desk and sat next to the bed. ‘Bruton said you asked to see me.’

Stephen kept his arm across his eyes. ‘I changed my mind.’ He folded his hand into a fist. His elbow was sharp, bony. She had a flash of memory: reaching him down from a new climbing frame in her parents’ garden when he was eight, his body lighter than she’d expected, with small, jutting bones.

‘It took me three hours to get here,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay for a bit if you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t want to talk.’ His voice was hollow, scooped out.

‘Okay.’ She reached for a book. ‘Mind if I read?’

He didn’t answer. She sat and turned the pages, unable to make out the words. She was still seeing the pictures Paul Bruton had put in her head of Saturday night, Stephen being held down, fingernails sinking into his face . . .

‘Don’t you have police stuff to do?’ he demanded.

She waited a beat. ‘Bruton says you won’t speak with the police about what happened. You should at least tell him who did it. They deserve to be punished.’

Stephen said, ‘You’d know all about that.’

‘Less than you might think. I know that you have the right to feel safe here.’

He murmured something like, ‘I waived that right.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Can’t you piss off?’ Her pity was the last thing he wanted.

‘The hospital took swabs. We could find out who was responsible from those.’

‘Good luck with that. They used a bottle.’

‘What?’

He raised his voice. ‘I said they used a bottle, not their dicks.’

The assault had lasted twenty minutes, maybe more, based on the schedule of checks by staff. They’d found Stephen in the bathroom, naked and bleeding, incoherent with shock. He’d needed stitches, fluids for the blood loss.

She put the book back on the desk. ‘They took swabs from your face, where the skin was broken. We could match DNA from that.’

He didn’t respond.

‘Where’s your guarantee they won’t do it again?’

‘Talking to you’d be begging for it.’

This was more than fear. It was shame. The way he kept his face covered; the beaten note in his voice – it reminded her of Leo Proctor.

‘How many of them were involved? Bruton thinks at least three.’

‘Bruton doesn’t have the first fucking clue about anything,’ he said savagely.

‘So how many? Four, five? No one could have fought those odds.’

He clenched his fist. ‘You don’t have a
clue
, any more than he does.’

Marnie looked at the fingernail scratches on his jaw. Neat half-moons cut into his skin. Slowly, on a note of disbelief, she said, ‘It was girls, wasn’t it? Girls did this.’

His throat convulsed. ‘Piss off . . .’

She could see the girl’s hand-span at his jaw, too small for a boy’s, and a boy wouldn’t have nails that could gouge skin. They held him down and raped him, brutally, with a glass bottle. Teenage girls had done this. ‘Stephen . . .’

He lifted his arm, tears scalding his eyes. ‘I said piss off! I don’t want you here. You’re the last person I want here.’

She held his stare. ‘Why? I’m the last person likely to feel sorry for you. Unless you
want
people to feel sorry for you.’

He pushed himself up on his elbows, pain stripping the colour from his face. She knew what he was going to say before he said it; read his need to pass the pain, like a baton, from him to her. ‘I stabbed your fucking parents, bitch. I’ll stab you.’

‘No you won’t.’ She stood, staying beside the bed, looking down at him. ‘You haven’t got a knife, for one thing.’

‘I can find one.’ He lifted his chin, pointing at the scabbed wound on the underside of his jaw. ‘How’d you think those cunts kept me still?’

‘Which cunts? Give me names.’

He made a hard sound, like coughing. ‘You think you’re so brave, coming here every month . . . Finally paid off, hasn’t it? That’s why I asked to see you. So you’d get what you want and leave me the fuck alone.’

‘What is it you think I want?’

‘Me.’ He spat the word. ‘Like this.’

‘That’s why I’ve been coming here? In the hope of seeing you in pain, beaten up.’

‘Yeah.
Yeah
. If you weren’t such a hypocritical bitch, you’d own it.’

‘You don’t think it was enough, seeing my parents like that? I see that stuff every day.
Police stuff.
I don’t need to come here to see a nineteen-year-old kid who’s too ashamed to name his rapists. It’s on my doorstep.’

‘So piss off then!’ His anger was like a wall. Every word she gave him was another brick to build it higher, deeper.

‘One thing, before I go.’ She held out her right hand. ‘I’d like my dad’s glasses.’

His shoulders shook, his eyes blown into a wild black stare.

Marnie waited with her hand out, her face schooled to indifference. Stephen collapsed back on the bed, blocking her out with his arm, the lymph-coloured light lying up the side of his face. ‘In the desk.’ He hiccuped. ‘In the drawer.’

She crossed the room to the desk. The drawer was hard to open, full of paper and card – and her father’s glasses case. She took it out, laid it aside so she could search the rest of the drawer’s contents. Under the glasses case, a wallet she’d made at school, as a present for her dad, two squares of brown leather stitched roughly together.

Her mother’s seagull brooch.

Marnie had searched for it, back at her parents’ house. A little enamel seagull with a white wing, a blunt chip of blue glass for its eye. The pin had been snapped from its back, by Bruton’s team probably. She put the brooch next to her father’s glasses.

Also in the drawer: a page torn from the
Guardian
, the Quick Crossword completed in her mother’s handwriting, with her workings-out in the margin. Envelopes with Christmas stamps, addressed to Greg and Lisa Rome in Marnie’s handwriting: the cards she’d sent them each year. The last three envelopes she’d addressed to ‘Greg, Lisa and Stephen’. Family photographs, one of her when she was eight, in jeans and a green T-shirt, a band of shadow blanking her eyes. She was wearing the new charm bracelet with the silver horseshoe, for good luck . . .

She swept the rest of the drawer with the flat of her hand, searching for the charm bracelet, but it wasn’t here. Just more photos, of her as a child, with her parents, on her own. In her school uniform, in her new police uniform, appallingly proud. She was afraid she’d find another photo, of the writing on her skin. The sort of photo you could probably trade for cigarettes in a place like Sommerville.

Stephen’s chest wasn’t moving. He was holding his breath. He’d wanted her to see inside the drawer, to know he still had the power to hurt her. To show her that nothing had changed between them.

No naked photos. She resisted the urge to pull the drawer out and search for anything taped to the wooden back, but it was pointless; Bruton and his team probably stripped these rooms down at least once a week.

She touched the tips of her fingers to the seagull brooch, its enamel smooth and cool as glass. She could smell her mother’s scent, green. The edges of the home-made wallet were rough, badly finished; she remembered her struggle with the school’s thick needle, her fingers pricked red. Her father kept a key in the wallet’s pocket, for the carriage clock in the sitting room. Those clocks . . . She remembered watching him wind each one in turn. She remembered the feel of her father’s hand on her shoulder, the sense of safety it gave her, of weight and substance. At school, when they taught her about the laws of gravity, it was her father’s face she saw.

Stephen made no sound, so still it was hard to believe he was in the same room.

Marnie stood by the open drawer, touching her hands to its contents, cautiously, tenderly. A cool, dim spot had cleared in her chest. Perhaps she should thank him, for keeping her loss alive. She’d spent so many hours – months, years – holding it at bay. Stephen had brought it close and it felt like a kindness even when she knew it was not. She’d crept around the memories, as a child creeps in a dark house, afraid of disturbing shadows. Stephen . . .

Stephen forced her to look, and touch, and smell her past. He made it real again.

She sucked a breath and held it in her mouth until it soured, wondering if the boy on the bed felt it too. The static charge between them. It pulled at her skin. Something more than silence, more than the secrets Stephen was keeping, about how he’d killed her parents, and why. It was deeper, more dangerous than that. Not a threat, not quite, but . . .

The rubble around them had shifted. The mess and pain of the past. If Marnie didn’t take care, she’d bring the whole thing down, burying the pair of them a second time.

Very softly, she shut the drawer, leaving her father’s spectacles inside. The seagull brooch she took, holding it in the cup of her hand.

Without looking at the bed, she walked out of the room and back down the long corridor to Paul Bruton’s office.

‘It was girls.’

‘Excuse me?’

She shut the door and crossed the room to Bruton’s desk. ‘He wouldn’t give me names, but it was girls.’

A flicker in Bruton’s eyes gave him away. ‘You know who it was.’

‘No, no. I suspected boys, of course I did, but with Stephen so uncooperative . . .’

‘He was raped. That’s bad enough. The fact that it was girls . . .’

‘He’s humiliated. I do understand that. The psychiatrist—’

‘Forget about the psychiatrist for a minute. I want to know how you’re going to find out who was responsible.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the police can start an investigation with or without Stephen’s cooperation.’

Bruton sucked air between his teeth, tapping the desk with his thumb. ‘One of the girls . . . Julie. She’s nineteen. She’s in here because she . . . lured a fifteen-year-old boy with the promise of sex, got him drunk and held him down while her sixteen-year-old boyfriend raped him. The boyfriend got five years. Julie was identified as the ringleader and sentenced to seven.’

‘How long has she been here?’

‘Eight months.’

Marnie looked at the happy family photos on Bruton’s desk, the upbeat posters on his walls reminding inmates of their right to rehabilitation. He’d filled the room with false promises, as slickly smiling and wolfish as anything the Grimm brothers had dreamt up. The family photos were a cruel, teasing touch – rubbing the offenders’ faces in what they’d lost, or never known.

‘She’s locked up with teenage boys.’

‘Sommerville takes offenders of both sexes. We segregate where appropriate, but . . .’ Bruton rearranged his hair with his hands. ‘I’ll question her, and the other girls. We’ll follow the necessary procedures, you can be sure of that.’

‘You were following them before,’ she said, ‘weren’t you? It didn’t stop this happening.’

39

Six months ago

The second time, it’s different. Not like the nightclub, the cheap hotel. She’s a mess, but she’s not bleeding, not to begin with, anyway.

It’s different because he’s expecting it, knows exactly what he’s getting into, and
fuck,
he thinks,
this isn’t what I wanted
. It’s out of his control. Another thing out of his control. When what he wanted was a chance to even the odds. Leave Freya and the twins behind for a couple of hours and be someone else, someone they wouldn’t recognise. A stranger.

He wanted to hide from the three of them, Freya and the twins, inside someone else’s skin. Deep, deep down. Except the second time, it’s different. The second time, she really hurts him. Uses her teeth and nails, and her fists.

This wasn’t what I wanted,
he thinks.
I wanted to be the one in control.

Then he thinks,
I’ll have to explain the bruises to Freya
.

That – the thought of Freya’s shock, and her questions – turns him on. The thought of something on his skin that isn’t dried formula milk, or baby puke, or stinking sweat from sleepless nights . . . It turns him on, and so he lets her do it. Hurt him. And when it’s his turn, he knows exactly what she wants.

She wants him to mark her, make her different. A stranger – a shock – to whoever she goes home to, when he goes home to Freya and the twins. If there is anyone.

Perhaps – and this is what he really thinks – there’s no one.

She goes home to an empty house. Mirrors in the house, but no people.

That’s where she looks.

In the mirrors.

That’s where she wants to be unrecognisable.

A stranger, to herself.

40

Now

‘The prick in the Prius,’ Noah Jake said. ‘Where’re we up to with that?’

Ron Carling looked up from his mug of tea, sporting a Danish pastry moustache. ‘Got a name and address. No criminal record. Just a couple of points on his licence.’ He looked disgusted. ‘Might turn out to be nothing.’

‘Might not.’ Noah walked to his desk, asking over his shoulder, ‘What’s the name?’

‘Henry Stuke.’ Carling stood up, handed Noah a sheet of paper. ‘Current MOT. Full service history. The points were for speeding, but something pathetic like thirty-two in a thirty-mile zone. Hardly Jenson effing Button.’