Something to Hide, page 40
“Possibly,” Lynley said.
“Sent by someone using Phinney’s phone?”
“There’s that as well.”
“Wife?” Nkata said.
“When I went to Lower Clapton to fetch the mobile, I showed Phinney the improved CCTV pictures. He claimed he didn’t recognise either woman, but I saw his wife while I was there speaking to him.”
“She’s one of the women went to see Teo?”
“One of the two she didn’t admit into the building. We’ll need to have a word with her. Phinney will be at work, so there’s a good chance we can get something out of her.”
“She seem the type to bash in a rival’s skull, guv?” Havers asked.
“That’s always the question, isn’t it,” he said. “Who knows what’s enough to drive people to take an action they otherwise wouldn’t consider? There’s also a message on the mobile left by a Dr. Weatherall, a woman’s voice. She asks Teo to ring her back. She phoned from a landline, though, not from a mobile. The landline’s attached to Women’s Wellness on the Harbour. Three other calls went from that landline to Teo as well.”
“D’we know what Women’s Wellness on the Harbour is?” Nkata asked.
“Could it be associated with evaluation in her engagement diary?” Havers said.
“We know where it is.” Lynley bent over Havers’s desk and sorted through some paperwork. He said, “Teo used her GPS to find it.” He brought out what he’d been looking for and said, “Inner Harbour Square.”
“Where’s that?” Havers asked.
“Isle of Dogs. You take that, Barbara. I’m going to have another word with Phinney.”
MAYVILLE ESTATE
DALSTON
NORTH-EAST LONDON
In the aftermath, she’d managed to go to her bedroom. Since she and Simisola had been sharing it, she’d assumed Simi would run there when Abeo demanded she do so. When Simi wasn’t there, she went to Tani’s room. But it, too, was empty. The window was open, though, and the obvious conclusion was that Simi had fled. As far as Monifa knew, there were only two places that she could go. She could cross the estate and hide herself in Hamilah’s flat. Or she could dash to Ridley Road Market and choose the relative safety of either Masha’s Cake Decorating or Xhosa’s Beauty.
Monifa knew that she would have to find her daughter and bring her back. But at that moment, she wasn’t. Beneath her breasts was pain so severe she could breathe only shallowly, and her jaw sent a searing pain to her head when she opened her mouth, while the rest of her face suggested heavy bruising. The one thing she could do was ring Hamilah. But Simisola, Hamilah said, was not with her. Nor had she been.
The only grace given was that Abeo was gone. He hadn’t bothered to seek Simisola after his punishment of Monifa was finished. His fury abated, he’d left. She assumed he had gone to his other family or he’d gone to work. It didn’t matter. The important bit was that he had not returned home.
Nor had Tani, which gave Monifa reassurance. She told herself that if Tani had spent the night elsewhere, Simi had found him and had told him the tale and now Tani was protecting her from Abeo.
Nothing about any of this had changed by the morning. When she slowly rose, Monifa crept to the bathroom through sheer nerve and by holding on to furniture and pressing against walls. Once there, she looked in the mirror and assessed the damage. She’d tasted blood after one of Abeo’s multitude of punches and now she could see that her lip had been split. The skin beneath her eyes looked raw, and it was sore to the lightest touch. Her eyes themselves were very swollen—one of them nearly shut—and her forehead bore a cut that had seeped blood during the night.
As she looked upon her image, Monifa knew she had only herself to blame. She’d gone to Leyton. She’d confronted Chinara Sani with words she’d thought were brave. Indeed, she’d felt quite courageous about what she was doing. She’d not understood that the doing itself was criminally stupid.
Although he did not speak, Abeo’s rage had been palpable all the way back to Mayville Estate, but she knew he wouldn’t show it in public, so she also knew that she was safe until they reached Bronte House. Once there and inside the flat, though, Abeo had let his fury loose. His cry of “Why do you not obey me?” gave way to the penalty she was meant to pay. At the end, when she was suitably cowed and crumpled, he’d stormed out of the flat, the door slamming shut behind him. Silence swept in, in his wake.
She’d laid there on the floor. Rest, she’d thought. For a moment. Just rest. She thought briefly about how odd it all was: She’d spent so much time trying to work out how to protect Simisola from her father’s plans, but she needn’t have done. For it was clear that Simi had already worked out how to protect herself.
Finally, when she was able, Monifa moved hesitantly to the kitchen. From the refrigerator, she brought out ice. She was wrapping a few cubes into a kitchen towel when the phone began to ring. She let it go to message and heard, then, her mother’s voice. “Abeg no vex me, Monifa. You must answer this phone. Abeo has rung me. I know what has happened. Pick up the phone.”
Monifa did, as always, what she was told to do. But she said, “What has Abeo told you?”
Her mother’s answer was, “You must not be a mumu wife, Monifa. You must not oppose Abeo in this. He will kill you, daughter. You must stop this at once.”
“I found someone to do it,” Monifa cried. “It was to be done in a way that Simisola would not suffer the way I suffered.”
“Monifa, listen well well. Let Abeo bring her to Nigeria. I will tell him he may stay with us so that Simisola can see her granny, yes? I will make the arrangements here. I will see it’s done proper way.”
“There is no ‘proper way’ in Nigeria, not where you live,” Monifa told her.
“I will see to it.”
“Like you saw to me?”
A silence before her mother said, “That was many, many years ago. It is different now.”
“How is it different? I won’t do it. No.”
Her mother’s sigh was perfectly audible, even at all this great distance from her. “Monifa, daina. I ask you this. What good are you to Simisola if you are dead, eh? What happens to her if you are gone? Abeg. Let him bring her to me and I will see she does not come to harm.”
Monifa didn’t reply. Tears seeped from her eyes, easing beneath the kitchen towels that held the ice and snaking down her cheeks.
“Monifa, are you there? You hear me? I can ring him now?”
Silently, Monifa replaced the phone. She lowered herself painfully to one of the chairs at the table. She returned the kitchen towel and the ice to her face and was sitting there when the door opened. She steeled herself to what would come next.
But it was Tani who spoke, “Mum! Fuck! What’d he do to you?”
Hastily she lowered the ice, but that act and what it revealed caused him to cry out, “I’m taking you to A and E. Let’s go.”
“No,” she said. “That will make things worse.”
“So what’s it going to be?” Tani demanded. “Are you just going to let him kill you? Then, what? I c’n take care of myself, Mum, but Simi can’t.”
“She managed . . . Yesterday, she went. She knew what to do. She will be—”
“Bloody goddamn hell, Mum. I was here. I was in the bedroom. She didn’t take herself anywhere. I took her.”
“Where?”
“Someplace safe.”
“Where? You must tell me.”
“Tha’s not on. No way am I letting him beat it out of you. You won’t find her. Neither will he.”
Tani had his rucksack with him, and he dropped this on the table where she sat. He opened it. He riffled through its contents and brought out a sheaf of papers. They appeared to be documents that had been filled out. “This’s called a protection order,” he told her. “It’s meant to keep Simi safe. It’s all filled out but you got to add information ’bout wha’s been going on round here. You got to write that Dad is planning to take her to Nigeria so she can be cut. An’ you got to sign it. ’F you do that, I mean if it comes from you direct, we c’n get an urgent order, and Pa doesn’t learn ’bout it till it’s all done. It means we don’t need to wait for papers to go through some government system. It gets done fast—like today, Mum—an’ only later is there a hearing.”
“A hearing? With a judge? A magistrate? I cannot—”
“Yes, you can. ’Specially if you ever want to see Simi again. An’ I mean that. Cos ’nless you fill out these parts of the order I lef’ blank, I’m not bringing her back. You got to write all of it out. You got to include the cutter here in London. You got to explain how Dad means to take Simi to Nigeria now, how he’s going to have her cut there, how he’s going to arrange for her marriage, and all the rest.”
He brought a biro from the back pocket of his jeans. He put the paperwork in front of her. He clasped her hand and folded her fingers round the biro. He said to her, “Once this’s filled out, you got to leave him. Please. You got to, Mum.”
Monifa bent her head. The paperwork shimmered in her vision. She’d tried. She’d failed. And this would be worse. She knew it because she knew her husband. He wouldn’t allow this to pass without his judgement falling upon her. She dropped the pen.
Tani said in a low voice, “Mum, look at what he’s done. Please. Think about what more he can do. This . . . this order here? It can protect Simi from him but it can’t do that now—straightaway like—unless you fill out your part of it.”
He picked up the biro once again. Once again he curved her fingers round it. This time, he guided them straight to the section that wanted filling out. This time, Monifa began to write.
She wrote all of it because she knew that Tani spoke the truth. Even if it meant that she, too, could not now see to Simisola’s cleansing—even in the way she’d planned it—she couldn’t risk Abeo’s taking her away.
When she was finished writing, she placed the biro next to the paperwork. Tani spoke again. “Mum, I got to say this. There’re places for women who have husbands like him, blokes who lay into their wives like he does. You don’t have to stay here. And you can’t stay here once I get this filed. You got to know that. Tell me you know that.”
But Monifa found she had no words. Her soul felt too heavy. Her body was wounded, true, but her psychic wounds ran deep and they felt permanent.
Tani was folding up the paperwork when the flat’s door opened. It was the wrong time of day. They should have been safe. But clearly, Abeo wasn’t finished with Monifa.
He looked from Monifa to Tani to the papers Tani was holding. He crossed the room in three steps, so quickly that Tani had no time to stuff the protection order into his rucksack. Abeo grabbed it. It didn’t take more than a glance at the bold printing at the top of the first page: Application for a Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Protection Order. Seeing this, Abeo ripped the papers into pieces, threw them at Tani, and launched himself upon the boy. No matter that Tani was inches taller and possessing the strength that came from Monifa’s family, Abeo’s momentum knocked him to the floor, with Abeo landing atop him.
“This would you do!” Abeo drew back his fist. He punched Tani’s face. Then again. And again. With every blow came another shouted word: “Defy. Disobey. Deny a father his rights.”
“Stop it!” Monifa cried.
Tani scrambled for purchase but there was none. He tried to heave his father away, but Abeo knelt upon his arms with his weight on Tani’s chest, pinning him to the floor. He raised Tani’s head and slammed it down. “You go to the market,” he grunted. “You go to Xhosa. You spread lies. You shame me. You shame our family.”
“We—”
“I will teach you.” Abeo drove his fists against Tani’s cheekbones, his ears, his eyes, his chin, his mouth, his neck.
“Stop it!” Monifa got to her feet. She stumbled to the kitchen. There had to be something.
“Fucking son of a whore,” Abeo grunted. “This time I will . . .”
Monifa grabbed the only weapon in sight, the iron with which she faithfully pressed the wrinkles from Abeo’s shirts and from the clothing of his other family. She took it to where he still straddled their son, Tani bleeding so badly that he looked like someone sure to die.
“You will not!” she screamed and the scream unleashed within her a force she didn’t know she had. She swung the iron into Abeo’s forehead.
TRINITY GREEN
WHITECHAPEL
EAST LONDON
Deborah had no real reason to be at Orchid House, so as she crossed the green and walked towards the old chapel, she decided that she would claim she was there to allow the girls she’d photographed to choose which of their portraits they would like to have as a thank-you for posing. But first she had to speak with Narissa, and she hoped Orchid House was where she would be able to find her.
restored! was what had greeted her on the front page of The Source as she descended into the kitchen in Cheyne Row that morning before her departure. The tabloid was being held up by one of the presenters on BBC Breakfast. Her dad was tuned in to the show and, when he saw her as he entered the room with a cantaloupe and a honeydew melon in each hand, he said, “They got that little girl back home, they do.”
This was an unnecessary explanation, for the next tabloid—with missing daughter returns! as its major headline clarified who had been restored! to whom. The accompanying photographs came onto the television’s screen: Bolu with her parents smiling broadly as they all stood together on the top steps of their home, then Charles Akin shaking the hand of one of the officers who had brought the girl home.
The presenters declaimed on the subject of how many column inches were devoted to the story in the day’s papers. Many, Deborah discovered. And she knew that while the stories in each would be the same, the approaches to the stories would be completely different: one emotionless, dispassionate, and fact-oriented and the other as sensational as possible. Someone would have used a thesaurus to locate supercharged verbs and adverbs.
Her father placed the melons on the chopping-block table and fetched a knife. He said, “At the end of the day, seems the best happened, Deb,” with a nod at the television.
“Why do you say that?”
“Tha’ woman got arrested yesterday.” He tilted his head towards the television.
“Who? Who was arrested?”
“Her who was interviewed on the telly saying she wouldn’t give the girl back till the parents did what she wanted.”
“Zawadi? But she had Bolu’s best interests at heart. All she wanted was to meet the parents with a social worker present. They were the ones who refused.”
“Well, I say she got bloody lucky, she did. Parents’ve said they’re not pressing charges. Said they un’erstand the work this Zawadi person is doing an’ they support it one hundred percent. Said they un’erstand young girls’re at risk. Said they don’ know why Bolu went to that place—”
“Orchid House?”
“—but when Bolu’s rested an’ happy an’ feeling secure, they’re talking to her about all of it, they said. All’s well that ends well, you ask me.”
But there was another consideration in all of this: Had anything happened to Narissa? Deborah had suggested that the filmmaker move the little girl to the home of her twelve-step sponsor, but either someone had seen Bolu during that move or Bolu had not been moved at all. So once in Whitechapel, she went first to the basement. She heard Zawadi speaking to someone. She approached the office door and listened.
“I spent the night in a custody suite!” Zawadi was exclaiming hotly. “D’you know what that’s like? And Ned had to stop with his father. He’s not even seen that bugger in three years.”
“I tried to explain it to you.” To Deborah’s relief, it was Narissa speaking. “The police had already been once when she fetched that kitten in from the garden. It was a miracle they didn’t find her. But my parents were upset, especially my dad, so I needed to move her. I rang Victoria—my twelve-step sponsor—but she couldn’t take her. I’d already asked Deborah—”
“No one places these girls with white people! You don’t know that?”
“—but she said Bolu wouldn’t be secure because her dad’s been following the story and he thinks the parents are in the right. So after Victoria, I had to keep her. Then my parents found out, and my dad rang the cops.”
“We see how that worked out, don’t we? There she is, back at home. And whatever happens next is going to be on you.”
“The parents won’t lay a hand on Bolu. She’s been on the front page of every newspaper, so who’d be willing to risk doing anything to her now?” Narissa asked.
“I’m not talking about that. Once that girl was returned, the credibility of Orchid House got flushed down the toilet. Who will ever believe me after this?”
“I didn’t want this to happen, but I tried to tell you what was going on, how dangerous it would be if I kept her. But you told me there was no place else available—”
“Who in the community d’you expect will ever be willing to take an endangered girl into their home on my word alone after all this? And now it’s known that all parents have to do to have a child returned is to hold out long enough to garner public sympathy. They do that and wait for pressure to build and wait for someone—someone like you, Narissa—to make it easy to tell the coppers where the child is. So what you’ve done is this: You’ve brought the work of Orchid House into disrepute. You’ve placed hundreds—p’rhaps thousands—of girls in danger.”
“I’ll come forward, then,” Narissa said. “I’ll say what’s true: that I had Bolu with me. I’ll say I’m the one who talked you into hiding her because I believed Bolu would be cut.”
“And what good is that? She came to Orchid House. She disappeared from Orchid House. I’m the face of Orchid House and I was the one giving the interviews. And what are we now, at Orchid House? We’re the ones who shouted wolf when there was no wolf. So the next girl who’s afraid she’s to be harmed in some way . . . ? Exactly where is she supposed to go now that Orchid House has been thoroughly tarnished?”
