by Sarah Hilary
‘That doesn’t sound like you, Rome.’ Ed ate another chip. ‘But okay, what if that is what you want? What’s wrong with that?’
‘I’ll never get past this. If that’s what I want . . . I may as well be in prison with him, in the next cell.’
Ed sucked salt from his fingers, concentrating on this task. It helped, the way he continued as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. It grounded her.
‘You should charge for this,’ she said.
He eyed her plate, pretending she meant the food. ‘My treat, remember?’
‘I meant the therapy. Unpaid overtime.’
‘Hey.’ He smiled at her. ‘We do what we can, okay?’
She finished her juice, fitting the cap back on the empty bottle. ‘Tell me about the women at the refuge. Tell me about . . . Mab. When did you first meet her?’
‘Right back when I was a rookie. She was in the first refuge they sent me to.’ Ed crooked his mouth into a smile. ‘She made me a cup of tea, in her best china, and talked for hours about the Blitz, the people she met in London when she was living rough . . . Eventually she told me about the man she married. An American evangelist. GI Joe with God-knobs on.’ He lost the smile. ‘He beat her, as penance for his sins. They had a son, a chip off the block. When he was thirteen, he started hitting her too. She came to believe she deserved it, or . . . Not that she deserved it, but that it was inevitable. She told me once that she could hear herself ticking inside. Danger: UXB. The violence is in her, that’s what she believes. There’s no escape from it.’
He rubbed the sad expression from his mouth. ‘She tried to do everything expected of her. Marriage, religion, raising a family. It all led to the same place: violence. There were lots of things she wouldn’t tell me. Mab needs . . . she needs her secrets. Some corner of her life that’s just hers. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes.’ It made perfect sense, and not just for Mab.
‘She showed me a few of the things she saved from the bombing raids. Just little things like expired coupons, broken bits of jewellery. Nothing valuable, except to her.’
Marnie watched his face as he spoke, the fond light in his eyes, the tender shape of his mouth. ‘What about Simone? Did you talk to her about the threatening letter?’
‘Not about that, no. She was upset about Hope. I’m glad she’s made a friend . . . I’ve learnt to be patient with them. Mab and the others. They return to abusive husbands, or withdraw complaints. Refuse to press charges. They fail, in other words. You can’t lose your temper with them. Everyone else does that.’
‘The cycle of abuse. Isn’t that what they teach? Abuse, forgiveness, more abuse . . .’
‘That can be how it goes, yes.’
It was how it was going with Stephen Keele. All right, he wasn’t beating her up, but Marnie felt bruised every time she left the secure unit, emotionally sore; he rubbed her nose repeatedly in what he’d done, and she kept going back for more. Not forgiving him, not that, but returning. Why? Why was it so hard to leave him there to rot?
‘I made a promise,’ she told Ed, ‘to look out for him.’
‘A promise . . . to your parents?’
She nodded. ‘We talked about their age, and his. Mum couldn’t face the thought of him not having anyone if they got sick, or when they were too old to look after him.’
‘They wouldn’t have expected you to honour that, under the circumstances.’
‘Probably not. But who knows? If there’s one thing he’s taught me, it’s that I didn’t really know them. I’d no idea that they needed to foster someone, in order to feel worthwhile.’ It was the hardest thing to forgive: the fact that he’d made strangers of her parents. All her happy memories destroyed, because who were they? The couple who’d taken in a damaged boy, lavished love on him? She didn’t know them. He’d wiped out her entire childhood. She turned the empty juice bottle on the greasy table. ‘You know, I was a great judge of character, as a kid.’
‘You still are,’ Ed said.
‘At work maybe, on a good day. Back then, though . . . I was suspicious of people, always knew when I was being taken for a ride, or patronised.’ She rubbed, without thinking, at her ribs. ‘But him . . . I just didn’t see it coming. Not even an argument, let alone . . . that.’ It made her furious, even now. Her blindness.
‘No one did,’ Ed said. ‘No one could’ve done.’
‘What you said about losing my patience, with Mab and the others . . . Did you think I’d do that?’
Ed moved his hand in protest, then stilled it. ‘Maybe.’ He drew a careful breath. ‘They’re not . . . your kind of victims. They didn’t fight back. They’re keeping their heads down, staying in the shadows.’
‘Not my kind of victims?’ That stung. He was too close to naming her worst fear: the stigma of victimhood. ‘You think I’m not in the shadows?’ She dropped her voice to a whisper, shaking. ‘I’ve spent the last five years living under a shadow so long it’s . . . I know all about shadows. About keeping my head down and hiding.’
Ed waited, without flinching, until she was done. Then he said, very quietly, ‘You took back control. You toughened up, and you stopped being a victim. That’s what I meant.’ The colour had gone from his face.
‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘On the surface.’ Not under the skin, though. You could’ve X-rayed me and seen the shadows inside. ‘I coped, at the time. Even after seeing the house, identifying the bodies . . . I got on with it. Made DI by the time I was thirty-three.’
She’d worked late, and hard. The longest hours, toughest cases she could get. A world of reassurance in those folders; she didn’t even mind the paper cuts.
At least I’ve got my work. A job to do. That’d been her mantra. It had suited Tim Welland. And it had suited her, or so she’d thought. Distance. Numbness. Other people’s problems. ‘I was a career bitch. A ball-breaker. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that. I was Welland’s golden girl. His dragon-slayer.’
‘It’s amazing what we can cope with, when we have to.’
‘Catches up with us, though. With a vengeance.’
‘Nearly always,’ Ed agreed. He moved his tray a fraction to the right, as if he was clearing the space between them, making room for her confession.
‘If I told you I was terrified . . .’ She stopped, waiting for a man in a car-creased business suit to walk past their table. ‘Back then, I mean. Every day. Terrified.’
‘I’d believe you.’
‘Could you see it? I thought my disguise was pretty good.’
‘It was.’ Ed traced a pattern on the table with the pad of his thumb. ‘But . . . I knew you before.’
Before.
She hardly ever thought about her life before Stephen Keele. She’d spent the best part of the last five years refusing to look in that direction. Moving forward, as if the route behind was cut off by heavy rockfall. Just a long, tortuous tunnel ahead, and her on her stomach, or that was how it felt, crawling on her stomach with a flashlight clenched between her teeth.
‘I made it, though.’ She spun the empty juice bottle on the table. ‘I did make it.’
‘You did.’ Ed, tuned to the irony, didn’t miss a beat.
It was the first time she’d done this, talked with Ed about how she really felt. ‘I have his notebooks, from school. I suppose you’d call them a diary. I thought they’d have clues of some kind – answers. I asked Kate Larbie to take a look. I met her on a self-defence course, but she’s a documents examiner. I thought there’d be something. If I could just decipher it . . .’
‘Could you?’ Ed asked. ‘Could Kate?’
‘Nope.’ Behind her, a coach party jockeyed for position in the queue for coffee.
Ed hesitated. ‘You know you can talk to me, any time.’
She lifted the corners of her mouth, economic with the smile. ‘I missed my window for counselling. Actually, not true. I got counselling, twice a week for six months.’ Six wasted months; she didn’t start getting be
tter until the self-defence course. Someone should tell the Met’s psychologists to fund kick-boxing classes.
‘I didn’t mean you could talk to me as a counsellor,’ Ed said. ‘As a friend. I hope.’
Marnie stole one of his chips. ‘You’re the only one I’ve talked to about this. My boss thinks I’m sticking my hand in a fire just by visiting Stephen.’
Ed lightened his tone, to match her new mood. ‘Interesting metaphor. I’m guessing Welland’s the type that complains about family Christmases.’
‘He likes bridges and vintage cars. He’s an Alvis man.’
‘Huh.’ Ed looked bemused. ‘I don’t get cars. Never learnt to drive.’
‘There’s time. You’re what – thirty-four?’
‘Is that a good guess, or have you been checking up on me?’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I’m a Sagittarius, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Ayana says it means I’m an extrovert. As evidenced by my tendency to spend the weekend eating Kettle Chips and watching Buffy reruns.’
‘You’re here now.’
‘Yep.’
‘Damn, Belloc. You’re good at this.’
‘At what?’
‘Holding hands without creeping people out.’ Marnie looked him over. ‘Must be the bedhead.’ She reached to pick a piece of lettuce from his fringe. ‘Or the takeaway chic.’
Ed ducked his head over his plate. Was he blushing? ‘Any time,’ he said.
Strangers on a Train was the book her father never finished.
Upstairs, in their bedroom, she’d found a scarf her mother had been knitting, in shades of green, half-done. Feather-soft wool. Sea green and moss, and ivy.
Marnie didn’t know whether the scarf was meant for her, or Stephen. She only knew that her foster-brother, the boy her parents had loved after she’d left home, took a bread knife from a butcher’s block in the kitchen five years ago and stabbed Greg and Lisa Rome twelve times, before sitting on the bottom step of the stairs soaked to the skin in their blood, waiting for the police to arrive.
21
‘You all right?’ Tessa Stebbins wore her hair in a tight ponytail at the back of her head, her arms wrapped round her chest.
Ayana said, ‘I need the lavatory.’
Tessa looked past her, at the open door of the refuge bathroom. ‘It’s not bloody blocked again, is it?’ She made a snorting noise like Shelley Coates; she was always copying the other girl. ‘You should use the other one. It was working five minutes ago.’
Ayana didn’t know how to explain, so she nodded, and watched Tessa walk away.
Neither lavatory was blocked. Both bathrooms had just been cleaned, and the kitchen too. The bathrooms, the whole refuge, reeked of bleach.
Ayana couldn’t get away from the smell.
The memory burned her face and hands, and her throat. It was like fire but worse, white-hot, eating into her skin.
She couldn’t go outside – she couldn’t – but she wished she could, even if it meant hunkering down in a gutter or behind a bush, like an animal.
Instead, she went to the utility room at the far end of the corridor, the only room they never cleaned. She closed its door behind her, heaving up the heavy lid of the chest freezer so she could cool her face on its fumes.
Her bladder ached so badly she was afraid she would wet herself. She had done that before, more than once. Always when her mother was there to make her kneel and scrub at the stains on the floor.
She wondered which of her brothers had been made to scrub the bathroom floor after the bleach attack. Hatim, most probably. Poor petrified Hatim.
The freezer lid was heavy. She propped it with her shoulder, taking its weight. The smell was slightly less strong in here.
There had been too many strangers yesterday. Hope Proctor’s husband, the police, paramedics. All the women were upset, even Shelley Coates. Ayana had seen Simone at the window, watching the street. She never did that – none of them did – but she’d seen something out there. Ayana recognised the fear in the other girl’s face. It didn’t feel safe here any longer, and now this – this smell.
She moaned in pain, looking around her for something to use. A bucket or a bottle. It was humiliating, but she couldn’t hold on any longer. By morning, the smell of the cleaning fluids would have faded and she would be able to use the bathrooms again.
She wanted to go back to her room, her books.
What would DS Jake think if he could see her like this, weeping for the want of a bucket, after she’d helped him to save that man’s life? Or DI Rome with her smooth skin and her clear eyes, seeing everything? Had DI Rome ever looked afraid, really, truly afraid, the way Simone Bissell did when she watched the street? Did DI Rome even know how it felt to be that scared? Of cars and cats, and dry leaves coming down from the trees and – and taps dripping into sinks and postmen delivering junk mail and the smell of someone else’s borrowed clothes or—
A car backfired in the street and she jumped, the lid of the freezer shutting with a thud, her fingers scrabbling at its rubber seal. Her heart staggered and stuttered in her chest, like a rat caught in the cage of her ribs.
She leaned into the hard lip of the freezer, trying to get her breath back, lungs labouring like Leo Proctor’s.
The tops of her thighs burned, as if someone had taken a belt to her there.
She looked down, at the stone floor of the utility room. A dark shadow spread under her feet from the wetness running down her legs. She sobbed, seeing her mother’s face, her mouth stretched with shouting. This rage she has, which sometimes sounds like fear. It cracks her voice and the palms of her hands, cracks her knees when she bends to work. Ayana must kneel next to her and scrub and scrub and never raise her eyes or voice. It is the only way she can be close to her mother and so she kneels, again and again, watching their hands move together across the floor, scrubbing at the dirt that is never gone for long. If she slows, her mother raps her knuckles in warning. Later, in front of her sons, she strikes Ayana for failing to finish in time. The next day they are down again, side by side, scrubbing at the floor.
The morning she lost her eye, Ayana and her mother cleaned the bathroom floor. Her brothers’ hairs were everywhere, black commas and question marks on the white tiles. Her mother breathes heavily as she works; there is still so much to do. Ayana, thinking of a book she is reading, does not move fast enough. Her mother shakes a fist in her face and warns her what will happen if she does not pay attention to her family, her duty.
‘You want a real mess to clear up in here? Huh? You want to be that mess?’
Her mother is not in the house when it happens. But Ayana knows: she gave her permission, to Nasif and Turhan, and poor scared Hatim. It was done with her mother’s permission.
She can never go home.
22
It was chilly by the time Marnie reached home. She’d dropped Ed at his place, turning down his offer of coffee, kissing the corner of his mouth. ‘Thanks, for today.’
Her flat had the sterile chill of a meat locker. Her back ached after the long drive. She stretched it, wincing. The spine stores the memory of pain. She’d read that somewhere. They’d found the protein responsible for managing the body’s response to central neuropathic pain syndrome. Whatever that meant. She was grateful for anywhere the pain strayed that wasn’t a reminder of the bloodless wounds on their bodies.
Her mother had wanted Stephen to choose the colours for his room. Marnie’s old room. He hadn’t. He’d left the room alone, as if he’d expected Marnie to come back.
No, as if he knew he wouldn’t be staying.
Memories bluntly crowded her chest.
Marn, we’ve got some exciting news.
They’d been so happy to have a child in the house again. Marnie hadn’t been a child since she was eleven, and not much of one then, independent even at that age, happiest in her own company. Solitary, the way she’d thought Stephen was when they first met.
Marn, this is Stephen.
&nbs
p; She’d held out her hand for his, because it seemed to be what he wanted, what he was. His hand had been cold, and soft. His eyes were cold too, but there’d been nothing soft about his stare, like the diamond head of a drill.
He’s such a little boy, Marn, and he’s had such a hell of a life. We’d like to make it up to him, just a little.
Great, that’s great.
Had she been jealous? She was twenty-two when Stephen moved into her parents’ house. She’d been living in London for three years, priding herself on having made a clean break. Not like her friends or flatmates, who went home every reading week and for the holidays, coming back with gifts of food, meals for the freezer, home-made cake, like children from a party. Not Marnie Rome. She was done with all that. Put childish things away. A card at Christmas, a present of books, proof of her taste and intelligence. On her way to being a detective, single-minded, not missing a trick. Free from all the mess and fuss of family life, from the ties that bind.
Until the phone call in the middle of the morning. The afternoon at the house, stretching into evening, night. She’d begun to think – for the second time in her life – that she’d never get out. Away.
Remembering that night was like turning the pages in a flicker book, its details blurred and jerky. She remembered the smell, and the way her shoes stuck to the floor in the kitchen . . .
Heat shivered behind her eyes. She lifted her arm, sniffing at her sleeve.
The smell of the secure unit was in her clothes and hair. She’d be carrying it on her skin for days, like prison ink. No escape.
Her phone buzzed at her hip. She pulled it from her pocket and peered at the display.
A text, from Ed: Here if you need me.
She bent her forehead, pressing it to the phone’s small screen. She’d made a promise to herself five years ago that she wouldn’t reach for Ed until she was sure it wasn’t panic or despair making her reach. More than once she’d come close to inviting him in, for more than coffee. He liked her; she knew that. It wasn’t ego on her part, and anyway it was mutual. She was attracted to him. Right now, if she made a move, it would be a smash-and-grab one-night stand. It wasn’t worth ruining their friendship, to satisfy her skin’s aching for someone else’s touch.