Someone Else's Skin by Sarah Hilary Page A

Scratch and you end up pulling the ink right out of the skin, so the whole thing’ll have been for nothing. Religiously, she scooped soft water over the tattoos, day and night, patting them dry with more tenderness than she’d shown her body before or since, lavishing lotion, blowing cool air like kisses.
    Of course, it was about punishment. She’d never bothered denying that. Except for that first time. At eighteen, it’d been about rebellion, a shocking secret she was keeping from Greg and Lisa Rome, the hidden skin she brought to the family dinner table, under layers of dark clothes. She liked the ritual of it. The lesson in accepting – relishing – small amounts of pain. An exercise in self-control. More than that, it was her insurance against intimacy. No casual sex, unless she wanted to explain the tattoos. She tried to imagine Ed’s reaction to the neat lines of ink that ran coyly across her hips, emphasising their narrowness, her lack of curves. She couldn’t come close to imagining his reaction, drawing a blank that matched the pale spaces between the lines of text.
    How did Hope Proctor feel, facing her skin each morning? The tattoo which matched Leo’s, embellished by the bruises he’d branded on her with his fists.
    Marnie turned from the mirror and switched off the light, finding the bed, its pillows unnervingly soft under her head. She didn’t set the alarm clock, not wanting the sudden noise snapping at her in the morning. Instead she told herself, ‘You need to wake early. Six o’clock.’ Her subconscious, more reliable than any alarm, took custody of the instruction.
    I had the whole sky in my eyes, and it was blue and gold.
    She’d been twenty-six. He was twelve. Stephen Keele. Watching her undress, in that house, on a rare visit home to her parents and their new foster son. Two years before the murders.
    She shivered at the thought of Stephen’s eyes reading her skin. She was afraid to dream, in case he was waiting for her. She could feel his stare, crouching in the corner of the room. Watching.
     
    Her phone woke her from semi-sleep, red whorls in the blackness, at 5.25 a.m.
    ‘You asked for news of Leo Proctor’s progress.’ It was the doctor from the North Middlesex. ‘He’s conscious. By the time you’re at work, he should be fit to answer questions about what happened.’
    ‘How’s Hope?’
    ‘Comfortable. We haven’t told her the news about her husband. Hard to say how she’ll take it. I thought you might like to be the one to break the news.’

23
     
    Row after row of windows, scalded by pollution, stared out from the brick facade of the North Middlesex hospital.
    Noah Jake climbed from the Mondeo with Ed Belloc and Simone Bissell while Marnie Rome drove away from the main entrance, in search of parking. A thin rain was spitting, cold and spiky. Simone didn’t have a coat, just a shoulder bag, soft cloth printed with sunflowers. Ed took her inside. Noah followed.
    A sleek desk formed the front line for the hospital’s Information Centre. Severe strip-lighting, the visual equivalent of nails across a blackboard, cross-hatched the ceiling. Simone pushed her hands into the sleeves of her jumper. ‘I need the bathroom.’
    The woman at the desk pointed her to the left.
    Ed Belloc touched a hand to Noah’s elbow. ‘You okay?’
    Noah glanced at him in surprise. ‘I’m fine.’ He realised he was squaring his shoulders, and that his nose was pinched shut. He relaxed. Smiled. ‘I was thinking about Ayana. This business with her brothers . . .’
    ‘You’re asking her to give up her hiding place,’ Ed said. ‘The first place she’s felt safe. That’s not going to be easy for her.’
    ‘I understand that, but I want them punished for what they did. Nasif and the others.’
    ‘It’s a natural reaction.’ Ed hadn’t stopped watching the bathroom door, on the lookout for Simone’s return.
    ‘I could go and see if she’s okay,’ Noah offered.
    Ed’s eyes