Someone Else's Skin (2 page)

‘Not yet. Not – yet.’

He holds her in place with his bear’s paw, but he can’t stop her seeing past his shoulder to where a SOCO is coming out, bloody knees to his white overalls and a polybag held in front of him, at arm’s length.

A knife. Mum’s bread knife, its steel teeth full of tattered red skin.

There’s a low noise of protest, like an animal in chronic pain, before a dry barking sob. Marnie can’t stand it, wants to block her ears, but it’s her mouth she needs to block; the sound’s coming out of her.

Welland lowers her to the kerb. She fights him. She’s not this person. She won’t
be
this person – the one who collapses and weeps at the roadside, who can’t take the knock on the door, who falls and never gets back up again.

The
victim
. She won’t be the victim.

‘Take a minute, Detective.’ Welland’s hand is heavy on the back of her neck. She has no choice but to put her forehead on her knees. ‘Just . . . take a minute.’

PART 1

1

Now

From the road, DI Marnie Rome’s flat was stucco-fronted, very neat and narrow. Noah Jake imagined she’d furnished it plainly, with an eye for functional style. Wooden shutters at the windows, a stone-coloured vase filled with upright orange flowers. A hall-floor flat, two bedrooms, Noah guessed. He was curious to see inside, but not enough to make a nuisance of himself, resting his hands on the steering wheel instead and waiting, seeing the light lift from the stucco as the sun broke through London’s cloud cover.

Some days it was easy to remember the city was built on plague pits. Nothing stood still, not even the road, throbbing with traffic from the main drag into the West End. He’d read somewhere – probably in one of Dan’s exhibition guides – that Primrose Hill had narrowly missed being a mass graveyard; nineteenth-century plans were drawn up for a multi-storey pyramid taller than St Paul’s, to house five million of the city’s dead. This was back when the town planners were obsessed with Egyptology, hurling hieroglyphs at everything, on the advice of returning tomb-raiders. Now it was the all-seeing London Eye that dominated the city’s skyline, its spindle like a church spire, turning.

Noah checked his watch, and then the flat.

DI Rome’s front door was dark blue, glossy. Like her eyes. The kind of door with deadlocks. In another minute, she’d be running late. He’d never known her run late. Should he knock on the door? No, that’d be intrusive. He hadn’t learned much about Marnie Rome in the five months he’d been working with her, but he’d learned that she was an intensely private person.

The blue door opened in any case, before her minute was up. She came down the steps to the car, wearing a dark trouser suit over a white shirt, a tooled leather bag at one shoulder. Everything about her was neat, from her short red curls to her low heels.

Noah checked the passenger seat of the car, even though he knew it was clean, dusting the sleeves of his suit in the hope it would pass muster. He reached across to push open the door for her. ‘Morning.’

‘Good morning.’ She slipped into the car, dropping her bag on the floor. ‘You were lucky with the parking.’

‘I got here early, thought we’d better not be late.’

‘You thought right.’

Noah started the engine, waiting for Marnie to put on her seat belt.

She saw him waiting and smiled, fastening the belt with extravagant care. ‘Safety first, Detective.’

Safe was the last thing Noah Jake felt, half an hour later, looking at the photographs on OCU Commander Tim Welland’s desk.

‘Nasif Mirza.’ Welland tossed down the photos, one after another, as if he was dealing a pack of cards. ‘A person of interest in a serious assault. Involving a scimitar, in case that wasn’t clear yet.’ The photos made his desk look like the storyboard for a horror film. A glossy 18-certificate horror film with DVD-extra deleted scenes.

Marnie Rome picked up a photo and studied it before putting it back down. Noah kept his hands out of sight, under the lip of the desk.

Welland said, ‘You’re looking at what’s left of Lee Hurran’s right arm.’

What was left was yellow, knuckled by fat, frilled by torn flesh. The scimitar had severed Hurran’s hand at the wrist. Not a clean amputation; it had taken two or three blows to get the hand off, the raw stump of wrist bone splintered by the impact.

Noah’s palms prickled with sweat. It was stiflingly hot in this office; Tim Welland was in remission from skin cancer and kept the heating turned up all year round. Immune to the heat, Welland never broke a sweat. Nor did Marnie Rome. Noah glanced in her direction, seeing the crisp edge of her shirt, the cool skin of her neck. A bead of perspiration inched its way between his shoulder blades, itching.

‘Hurran won’t give evidence. Popular theory is that he’s scared of losing his other hand, or possibly his balls.’ Welland nodded at the photos. ‘Nasif isn’t fussy when it comes to butchery.’

‘Hurran’s still in hospital.’ Marnie’s eyes flicked across the litter of photos. ‘They’re monitoring for infection. There was a lot of dirt in the wound . . . Maybe he’ll feel safer when he’s back home.’

‘Home being the shithole estate where they found him? I tend to doubt that.’

‘We have the scimitar. With Mirza’s prints on it. That’s no good?’

‘Not even close. The Crown Prosecution Service,’ Welland served each syllable as if it was an individually foul taste in his mouth, ‘need more evidence before they’ll make a move against Nasif. Apparently this . . . dog’s dinner isn’t enough.’

Marnie picked up the worst of the photos for a closer look. Noah wished he had her backbone for this part of the job. He was too easily disgusted, needed to toughen up, get used to seeing things like this. Things like . . .

Lee Hurran’s hand, half eaten. By rats, or a feral cat. The hand wasn’t found in the warehouse where the attack happened. Nasif Mirza, or someone, had tossed it over a wall, into a fly-tipped piece of scrubland.

‘Ayana Mirza . . .’ Marnie started to say.

‘CPS wants a statement from her,’ Welland said, ‘about her brother’s violent temperament. Better still, they’d like her to press charges for what was done to her.’

‘We can arrest Nasif without her testimony.’

‘For this?’ Welland pointed at the photographs. ‘Or the other thing?’

Noah didn’t want to think about the other thing – what Nasif Mirza had done to his sister, in their family home. The pictures of Hurran’s half-eaten hand were bad enough.

Neither he nor Marnie had met Ayana Mirza. They’d inherited the case from another department, a casualty of the recent public-sector cuts.

‘CPS is cagey about the chances of bringing Nasif to trial,’ Welland said. ‘Other prints on the scimitar, the chance it was stolen, blah-blah. They think Ayana’s evidence might swing it. She’s a walking testament to Nasif’s worst tendencies. No denying she’d look good in court.’

‘And they don’t see this as victim harassment?’

‘They’re cagey, Detective. You and I know what happens when the CPS gets cagey.’

‘I know what happened to Ayana.’ Marnie’s eyes were dark. ‘It wasn’t just Nasif, either. It was three of them – her brothers.’

‘The crap that happens in families . . .’ Welland winced, as if he’d said something tactless, cutting his eyes away from Marnie.

She shrugged. ‘It’s a good living, if you’re a psychiatrist.’

Noah felt he’d missed a beat, tuned out for a vital second. The heat was boiling his brain in his skull. How could Welland work like this?

‘You’ll want to tread carefully. She’s terrified of her brothers tracing her. She’s hiding . . .’ Welland consulted a notepad.

‘In a women’s refuge in Finchley,’ Marnie supplied. ‘I spoke with Ed Belloc.’

‘Finchley.’ Welland nodded. ‘What’s Ed got to say about her?’

Ed Belloc worked in Victim Support. Noah hadn’t met him, but from what Marnie said, he was a good man doing a difficult job. He’d helped the police to trace Ayana Mirza after she escaped her family.

‘She won’t risk upsetting the refuge,’ Marnie said, ‘or losing her place there. She doesn’t have many options, can’t afford rent. If she gets a job or starts claiming benefits, there’s the danger her brothers can trace her through her National Insurance number. So . . . she’s trying to stay missing.’

Welland nodded. He climbed to his feet. ‘DS Jake, you’ll want to check your emails. DI Rome, a word?’

Marnie waited while Noah left the office, knowing what was coming. She folded her hands in her lap as a contingency against fidgeting. The ends of her fingers were sticky from touching the photos; she wanted to wash. It didn’t help that Tim Welland kept this place heated like a sauna. She’d bet Noah Jake was running a cold shower in the station’s washroom.

When they were alone, Welland leaned back, steepling his thumbs under his chin. ‘How’re you doing?’

Under the hot light, the dome of his head was glassy and freckled. His face, with no eyelashes or brows, looked naked. Open. Good for drawing confidences, or confessions. He’d come close to losing an eye to the cancer. Even now, in remission for two years, the shadow of the disease tugged at the skin there, keeping the eye bleakly peeled so that those who didn’t know about his operations – his battle – joked that Tim Welland slept with one eye open.

‘I’m fine.’ She smiled across the desk at him. The heat shone on the photos scattered between them. Teeth marks on Lee Hurran’s dead hand. Had he asked to see it? she wondered. Hurran. Had he asked to see his hand, even though there was no hope of surgeons reattaching it? By the time they found it, it was long dead.

‘I’m fine,’ she repeated.

Welland searched her face for another answer. Some of this, she suspected, was box-ticking. Management 101:
Show concern for those under your command, especially at times of stress
. He wasn’t enjoying it. ‘I may do a terrific impersonation of an insensitive shit, but I know what day it is.’

‘It’s Friday,’ she deflected, still smiling.

He nodded at the wall calendar. Pictures of bridges. Welland loved bridges. March’s picture was the rolling bridge in Paddington Basin. It looked like a giant hamster wheel.

‘Tomorrow . . . it’ll be five years to the day. How’re you coping?’

‘By not counting,’ Marnie said.

Not counting, not remembering. Not sharing.

‘But you’re still seeing him.’

‘Yes.’ She’d never made a secret of her visits, knowing Welland would find out anyway; murder detectives didn’t go into secure units without lighting flags on the system. ‘Tomorrow, in fact.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Welland repeated. ‘On the anniversary.’

‘It was booked ages ago. I’m not taking balloons.’ The smile hurt her face but she stuck with it. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Of course I’m not thinking of bloody balloons. I’m thinking of what he did, five years ago . . .’

‘A long time, five years.’ She picked up a photo of Lee Hurran’s hand, pretending to study it again. It meant she could lose the smile, for one thing. ‘For him. Five years is a long time, for Stephen.’

‘Not long enough,’ Welland growled. He cleared his throat. ‘Detective Inspector . . . Marnie.’ He grimaced. First names weren’t his thing. It’d been hard on him five years ago, outside her parents’ house, calling her Marnie, holding her in his arms.

She decided to spare him any further discomfort. ‘I’ve got a job to do.’ She stood up. ‘Clearing the way for the CPS, right?’

Welland looked relieved, hunching back in his chair, freeing his fingers to wash at his face, where the skin was taut from repeated surgery. ‘Right.’

2

In Finchley, the clouds had beaten the sun into submission.

The women’s refuge was brown concrete, built low to the ground, its flat roof swollen with too many coats of tar. Scaffolding cross-hatched the facade, red and white tape making barber’s poles of the metal struts. A shallow wall of rain-welted polythene ran around the lip of the roof. With every window blacked out, it would’ve been easy to mistake the place for a condemned building, derelict.

‘First impressions?’ Marnie asked, as she cut the car’s engine. ‘I can’t say I’m digging the prefab chic.’

‘It’s a serious contender for the most depressing place I’ve ever seen.’ Noah peered through the windscreen. ‘Maybe it’s better inside . . .’

‘That’s what Ed says. About the average refuge, anyway.’ Marnie climbed from the car. ‘Not sure about this one.’

Noah followed her. Passing traffic shifted the polythene sheeting, the sound like sand under shoes. From the scaffolding, a seared metal smell. Holes pitted the path to the main entrance, where a dodgy tarmac job hadn’t taken. The place was a dump.

‘What’re they doing to the roof?’ Noah asked.

‘No idea. Maybe it’s leaking.’ Marnie stood looking at the blind windows of the refuge. ‘Imagine living like this, without trace. I don’t think I could do it. Could you?’

Noah said, ‘If I was desperate, maybe. If there was no other choice.’

‘Sure, if you were desperate.’ She put a hand to the side of her neck. ‘If this is where Ayana Mirza feels safe, we need to respect that. If we can persuade her to give evidence against her brothers, that’s a bonus. But let’s tread gently.’

Noah nodded. Above them, the clouds were gleaming, grey. ‘It’s going to rain,’ he said. ‘I hope they’ve got the roof properly sealed.’

‘That’s not rain.’ Marnie glanced at the sky. ‘It’s a storm. Can’t you smell it?’

Inside, the air felt stripped dry, charged with static. Now Noah could smell the storm. The silence in the refuge was artificial. Untrustworthy. Marnie tensed, turning back to consider the door as it swung shut behind them. ‘What happened to the security?’

The Cyclops lens of a CCTV camera, mounted on the wall outside, gave back their faces in miniature. Marnie had her ID in her hand, but no one was asking to see it.

‘The door was on the latch,’ Noah said. ‘Was it?’

‘Yes.’ Marnie stood taking stock of the silence.