Something to Hide, page 22
So off they went. It was a silent journey.
His wife had gone through his iPhone while he slept, something which, as far as Mark knew, she’d never done before. She’d found the messages. She’d found and listened to the refrain from “their song,” after which she’d tracked down the song itself in its entirety and listened to it, hearing so much more than “No, I don’t wanna fall in love . . . with you.” From there, she’d found the relevant voicemails, which, stupidly, he’d not been able to bear deleting. So she’d heard her voice, and while she would not have recognised it, she did recognise the import behind Mark darling and I feel the same and I want to be with you as well. He’d kept all of it because he was so caught up in the rightness of what he’d felt, in the mad this-is-bigger-than-both-of-us, which was always the lie that one told oneself to justify surrendering to the libido. It could never just be a case of “I want what I want and I mean to have it,” which was, at least, an honest reaction to lust. Instead, it had to be written in the stars, an embracing of fate, a headlong rush into what seemed so extraordinary that it obliterated any memory of having been at this place once or twice or three times before. This was truly a case of I’ve-never-felt-like-this-before. Everything preceding it in one’s life had been mere dress rehearsal for This Big Moment. It was incontestably real. Because of that, one could not bear to eliminate a single item that, looked upon, fired up the senses once again, reassuring oneself that, yes, it was decidedly real this time, and one was finally alive in ways that all previous finally alives were rendered meaningless.
When confronted by Pete, he swore that he’d not broken his vows to her, and while this was technically true, he accepted the fact that in saying this, he placed himself among the rogue husbands who told themselves that being blown by a woman did not constitute having actual sex with her. For only actual sex equated to full-on infidelity, and actual sex comprised taking a position between the legs and pumping away. Anything short of that meant he could look Pete straight in the eye and say with impunity that “nothing” had happened between them. He’d wanted something to happen between them, true. He’d wanted the real something to happen, but as his wife did not ask him a question that would have required that admission, he was at least in the clear when it came to telling her an outright lie.
At first he felt lucky that there was nothing that would tell her who the other woman was. She was attached to a number on his smartphone, but the number had no attribution. This, however, had not presented a problem for Pietra. From his own smartphone, she texted the number with the message Ring me, it’s urgent, and when Teo had rung, her first words had been, “Darling, what’s wrong? Has something happened . . . ? Mark . . . ? Did you not just text me?”
So she’d heard the voice, and while at first she couldn’t attach that voice to a face, she did manage to attach the mobile’s number to a Teo Bontempi, with whom he worked. After that, finding her online had been child’s play. Nothing having to do with one’s identity was difficult in the age of social media.
“It was just that we were working so closely together,” was his lame excuse to his wife. “And then, there were times . . . There are times, Pete, when the loneliness . . .” But really, how could he finish up with that kind of reasoning, no matter its truth. Besides, she knew he had the occasional release—as he termed it—and she understood that “going out with Paulie” sometimes meant more than a few pints down the pub. Which, after all, she encouraged.
But this thing with Teo was different to paying for a massage’s happy ending. That, his wife could cope with. That, she could even encourage. That, indeed, was her salvation. “Going out with Paulie” relieved her of the double anxiety with which she lived: that Mark might one day leave her and Lilybet to fend on their own, that he might give her an ultimatum about making her body available to him, her husband, with a husband’s ostensible rights. “Going out with Paulie” obviated her need to worry, to think about, to plan, to . . . anything.
Still, her response to his excuse had astonished him. “You don’t need to pretend with me, Mark. I know how difficult all of this is, especially with me being like I am. And I want you to have a sexual life. I’m happy for you that you’ve found someone. I want you to have this.”
“This? What d’you mean?”
“The passion, Mark, the fulfillment, what you and I once had and have no longer. I don’t blame you for anything. This is helping you be good for Lilybet. And your being good for Lilybet is your being good for me.”
But now there was no Teo Bontempi. There was, instead, Teo’s death, and what it meant once “death by misadventure” had been altered to “homicide.”
Pete said suddenly and in a low voice, “I still can’t work out how it happened.”
For a moment, he thought she’d read his mind and was speaking of Teo’s death, something that he hadn’t yet shared with his wife. He didn’t reply.
She said, “Mark, are you listening? Did you hear what I said?”
“Sorry, love. No,” he told her. “I was in the clouds.”
“I said I can’t work out how it happened when the alarm went off. I left her for not even five minutes. She was perfectly fine. She’d been watching Beauty and the Beast again. You know how she loves it. I stepped out for—”
“Where was Robertson?”
“Just in the kitchen. He was making tea, getting juice for Lilybet. I stepped out of the room just to use the loo.”
“Did you not put the cannula in?”
“She’d been fine all morning. I was leaving her for a moment, only. The oxygen’s supposed to be supplemental anyway. As needed. I know it’s a safeguard as well, but that’s for the night, and I knew I’d be out of the room for less than five minutes. But then the alarm went off. Robertson reached her before I did. He put the full mask on her straightaway and started the oxygen. If he hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t got to her so quickly . . . One small mistake is all it takes and I’m the one who made it.”
“No harm done, Pete.” He turned in his seat to look at his wife, then at his daughter. Lilybet was watching what went for scenery in the busy London streets: buses, taxis, cars; women with pushchairs; boys wearing hoodies and baggy jeans; a crocodile of children heading somewhere; a woman in hot conversation with a lanky teenager while two toddlers clung to the woman’s hands and an electric scooter lay on the pavement. He said to Pete, “I think we can trust her specialist. If she says Lilybet’s not got worse, I think we can rely on that.”
“I’m so sorry. I feel like a criminal.”
“Don’t say that, Pete. These things happen.”
“But they shouldn’t happen,” she countered. “We both know that.”
TRINITY GREEN
WHITECHAPEL
EAST LONDON
Barbara Havers was drawing the conclusion that, whatever had happened to Teo Bontempi to prompt someone to kill her, it didn’t seem likely that its genesis was at Orchid House, unless the organisation was run by a first-class liar in the person of Zawadi. That was always a possibility, of course. But still . . .
As far as Barbara could discover from those she interviewed in the place, Teo-as-Adaku not only had been admired but she also had served as a source of solace to some of the girls, as inspiration to others, and as a role model to the rest of them. She’d volunteered extensively: leading group discussions; engaging in community activities; speaking to parents; devising projects to keep the girls coming back to Orchid House; being a resource for information about the long-term effects of FGM, physical, emotional, and psychological. She’d not told a soul that she was also a cop, which was perplexing at first, till Barbara understood how reluctant the girls would probably have been to leave their families in the first place and how frightened they would probably feel knowing that, should things go wonky, one or both of their parents could be arrested, put on trial, convicted of a crime, and sent to prison if they—the daughters—were not careful about what they revealed and to whom they revealed it. Out of all of this, it seemed to Barbara that only Teo Bontempi’s contact with the parents of girls who’d already been placed with sheltering families might have prompted someone to dig around a bit, discover she was not the Adaku who visited them but rather a Metropolitan Police detective, and as a consequence want to do away with her. But unless a parent had come upon her unexpectedly in her police persona, Barbara couldn’t see how anyone would have sussed out that she was a cop.
Barbara still wanted to have a word with the filmmaker, Narissa Cameron. She hadn’t intruded on the filming itself but instead waited till they had a gap in their work. Then she joined the three other women whom she’d met earlier. None of them seemed happy with how things had gone without Adaku there to offer the girls her supportive presence.
They’d heard her story firsthand, Narissa told Barbara, and that had opened them up to telling their own stories, especially since not one of them was as remotely horrifying as hers.
Barbara asked if Adaku’s story was still available on the digital camera. Narissa said that it was. Barbara made a request to see it. Narissa, not unreasonably, asked why.
Barbara opted for honesty. “I’m not sure. But there might be something in what she said on film . . . One never knows. That’s just the point. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be anything. But it sets us in a direction, which is how we got here, to Orchid House. We found Deborah St. James’s card in Teo Bontempi’s flat. My guv spoke to her—to Deborah St. James—she explained, and here I am. Your film may get me somewhere else. That’s all I can tell you.”
Glancing at the camera, Narissa said, “She wanted me to delete this, Adaku. But I was hoping that she’d change her mind and let me use it. I kept filming after she was finished speaking. She didn’t know that. But it illustrates this . . . I don’t know what to call it other than this power she had with people. It was like she knew she could make a difference while most people only hope they can.”
Narissa had a monitor, and she told Barbara it would be easier to view the film on that rather than on the camera’s much smaller screen. Barbara sat while Narissa got things rolling. Then the filmmaker joined her as, on the screen, the woman who’d been known at Orchid House as Adaku took her place on a stool and began to speak.
She began with her name, Adaku Obiaka, and the age at which she had been cut, less than three years. She said, “I learned later that the age I was at the time of the cutting is called prememory. What that means is that I was cut before I could form memories of the cutting while it happened, which is supposed to be merciful. But there have always been fleeting memories, even today.”
Barbara studied Adaku’s face. What she saw was infinite and abiding sorrow. Grief seemed to be deep in her bones, no transitory thing but something that was part of the fabric of who she was.
Adaku was African in many ways, but she was English in many ways as well. Perhaps that was part of what made her compelling. She told her story with marked dignity.
The worst that could be done to a female child had been done to her, she explained. “It’s called infibulation. But those who do this to girls—and those who did it to me—don’t call it that. They call it a rite of passage or female circumcision or making you a woman or cleansing you of the nasty bits or preparing you for eventual marriage or increasing your value to a man or increasing that man’s pleasure when he takes you, which is your duty as a woman. But it’s all the same at the end of the day. It’s being mutilated.”
Infibulation, she explained, consisted of the clitoris being removed, the vaginal opening narrowed, a covering seal created for that opening, the labia cut and repositioned. Everything then was either sewn up or sewn together, leaving a single small opening through which urine and menstrual blood were supposed to pass.
“Christ.” Barbara felt her palms begin to sweat.
Narissa said, “Should I stop the recording?”
“No,” Barbara said fiercely. She would not say she had heard enough. She owed it to the dead woman to hear it all.
Adaku was saying that, before she knew the facts of what had happened to her and because she’d never seen what uncut genitals looked like, she’d not realised what had been done to her. It was only when her period hadn’t begun by the time she was fifteen that her adoptive mum took her to the family’s GP for a check-up. It was during that check-up that she’d learned the truth. There was little to be done at that point, so many years after the fact.
She had reckoned this practise was something that went on only in the land of her birth. But then she’d learned that this vile procedure sometimes went on here, in the UK. So she did what she could do to stop it and she would continue to do so.
She said, “I’m Nigerian. We’re a very proud people. But there are times when—out of ignorance—we do to our girls what was done to me when I was so young, what was also done to my mother and to her mother. It once was merely the way of things amongst our people, and since my mum had also been cut, she knew no different than to pass along what she saw as a ‘tradition.’ But then she died in childbirth when I was seven, and I was sent to live with my aunt, my father’s sister. The baby that my mum died giving birth to went with me. Our father did not believe he could care for us, and as it turned out neither could our aunt. She had seven children already, so she delivered us to a Catholic orphanage. We were lucky. A husband and wife adopted us and brought us to the UK. Because I was eight years old at the time I arrived here to my new home, and because I was healthy, no one had any reason to inspect my genitals. Why would they? So no one knew, and it was only later when I was a teenager that the truth about me came to light. I don’t know who cut me. I only know that in places where FGM still occurs, it is something done almost always by women. Let me say this again: It is done by women to women. To ensure we’re chaste. To rid our bodies of the parts that were put on our bodies so we might know sexual pleasure. We are not meant to have that pleasure because, in the minds of many tribal men, a woman’s ability to have sexual pleasure increases the possibility that she will stray. But what I want you to know is this: much of my life has been made unbearable by what was done to me, and I often feel like half the person I ought to be.”
Narissa stopped the recording and the picture froze on Adaku’s face, Teo Bontempi’s face. Barbara found she couldn’t move her gaze as she tried to sort out what the woman must have felt at the time she was describing for the listening girls what had happened to her. Superficially, she seemed to feel nothing. When it came to anger, rage, despair, or whatever, she looked like a woman who’d worn out those passions long ago. If this was the case, then, perhaps what remained within her was only her willingness to speak to those who were also damaged, to those who ran the risk of damage, and to those who still insisted this mutilation had to be done because if it wasn’t, the child the girl the woman in question might actually have a life beyond whatever role her husband-to-be decreed she was to play.
“What happens to the girls who come here, then?” Barbara asked.
“If the girl is in danger, Zawadi puts her into hiding.”
“Where?”
“There’re homes spread across greater London. I don’t know them. It’s all kept secret. Families take the girls in and protect them till their parents can be dealt with.” She began to unhook each piece of equipment as she spoke.
Barbara focused on dealt with. She said, “What’s that mean, then? Who deals with the parents? And how?”
“Zawadi at first, usually with a social worker,” she said. “They visit the parents and try to reason with them; they warn them of the criminal nature of what they’re intending to do. It takes several visits, but if all goes well, the girl can return to her family, although she maintains her contact with Orchid House.”
“And if the family goes ahead with the plan anyway?”
“That’s the issue, isn’t it. It’s difficult to trust that a girl’s well-being has been absolutely secured. But the parents are put on a watch list. They agree to attend some meetings here. The girl attends activities as well and they agree to that.”
“Sounds like they lose control, eh?”
Narissa turned from her equipment box, where she’d just deposited the camera. Her assistants returned to the room, doing their part with the sound and lighting equipment. Narissa said, “You’re thinking this would give a parent a motive to kill, aren’t you?”
“What d’you think?”
“I think most people don’t want trouble with the police. The parents are caught, more or less. The rock and the hard place? If they harm their daughter, they go to prison. If they harm someone else, the result’s the same.”
RIDLEY ROAD MARKET
DALSTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
Tani had the rucksack he’d packed for his sister ready. He now needed Simisola herself. He returned to Bronte House to fetch both. His mum was on her knees in the kitchen, yellow Marigolds on her hands, a pink bucket at her side. She was wielding a large sponge, scrubbing away at the lino.
She didn’t notice Tani enter the flat, nor did she hear him, and he took care not to reveal he’d come home. He slipped into the bedroom he shared with his sister, but she wasn’t there. That meant she was in the market. With her friend Lim gone, she had no place else to go. He fetched the rucksack into which he’d already stowed some of Simi’s things. He wasn’t sure that he had everything that she would need, but he reckoned Sophie or her sister would fill in the gaps as and where they could.
