Something to Hide, page 42
Monifa said nothing, directing her gaze once more to her lap.
Nkata watched her, knowing that she was probably their last hope for verification of what had been going on in the clinic above Kingsland Toys, Games, and Books. Not one of the other women in the appointment diary would give them the information they needed: that FGM was being performed there. Whoever had been operating the establishment was not likely ever to return, but London was vast and it would be a matter of a few months only—perhaps even less—before the clinic was up and running again someplace else.
He said to Monifa Bankole, “You’re hopin’ for a phone call from this Easter Lange—Mercy Hart, like I told you b’fore—from the clinic on Kingsland High Street. But you got to know that no matter who does it to Simisola, what you got in mind for her is against the law and if you do it—no matter where you do it—it ends with you in prison. Or your husband in prison. Or both ’f you, working off prison sentences. See, you’re in the spotlight now. And the rozzers? We know ’xactly where to find you. You make any sort ’f dodgy move to hurt your daughter, what happens next is you get arrested and she goes into Care. So what I’m sayin’s this: I reckon you want the best for Simisola. But this i’n’t the way to go about it. An’ ‘the best’ for Simisola has sod all to do with cutting her up, by th’ way.”
Monifa looked at him again. It seemed that she was trying to read him. Then her gaze went to the window, still covered by the curtains. She studied this, as if she could see the treetops, their leaves dropping early this year because of the heat and the drought. She spoke so quietly, it was difficult for Nkata to hear at first. He moved closer to her and sat in the armchair in front of which the ottoman stood, with Monifa on its edge, knees drawn up and her breasts resting on them.
“Once I made the appointment, I paid a part of the cost,” she said quietly. “I used the family money. I had to have it to secure the appointment and the appointment was the only way to make certain Simi did not suffer. But only Abeo is meant to touch family money, and he found that I’d taken some. So he sent me to the clinic to fetch it back. I was there for that when the police arrived and we were both arrested, Easter Lange and me. I was not able to recover the money.”
“Where’s she now, Simisola?”
“Tani took her away. He will not say where. He will not return her until a protection order is put in place. That is why he came to Bronte House today: for me to fill out part of the protection order, so that he could make it an urgent request. But Abeo came home. He was already angry, and when he saw Tani, he saw the protection order. He ripped it up. He attacked Tani then. It was not the opposite.”
She went on to explain what her husband’s plan had been: to have Simisola cut by a Nigerian cutter in London, at much less cost than the clinic would have charged. But as it was the same cutter who’d ruined Halimah’s daughter, Lim, Monifa was able to get her address. That in hand, she went to the cutter herself with a threat of phoning the police should she lay a hand on Simisola.
“Chinara Sani will not cut our daughter now, but Abeo knows this so he will take Simisola to Nigeria to be cut. The protection order was meant to stop him doing that. There is no order now and if he finds her, he will take her at once because it is the only way Simisola will be able to fetch a large bride price. Abeo means to get a husband for her in Nigeria.”
“How old is she, Missus Bankole?”
“She is eight years.”
Nkata took this in fully before he replied. “An’ you were okay with that, eh? An eight-year-old gettin set up with a husband?”
“It would be an arrangement only, made formal with the payment of a bride price. But the arrangement could not happen if Simisola was not first cleansed.”
“So you want that ’s well, eh? Simisola being cleansed, I mean. Which I’m thinking means Simisola being cut up.”
She was quiet. She wore a long wrapper in a complicated style, and she began twisting its ends in her hands. Nkata could hear her breathing and it sounded to him like the sound of someone trying not to weep. “I no longer know,” she finally said. “It was what I was trying to prevent when I took her to the clinic.”
“Well, I got to say it, Missus Bankole: you got me flummoxed,” Nkata said. “You took her to an FGM clinic in order to protect her from FGM? Tha’ doesn’t track.”
“Her father would have her mutilated. Like I was mutilated. He would have her damaged. It wouldn’t matter as long as it was done. This—what I was trying to do—it was meant to avoid that. It would be done properly, and she would feel nothing. And when it was finished, she would properly heal. But Abeo wasn’t going to allow that because it was too costly, and it defied his plans. Twice now he has been defied. There will not be a third time if he can help it. He will take her to Nigeria as soon as he finds her.”
“He got a passport? Simisola got one?” And when she nodded, he rose and said, “You come with me, then.”
“Please. No. I cannot. I must stop him.”
“Tha’s something you’re not going to be able to do.”
“I must.”
“I think you might be misun’erstanding wha’s happenin here,” Nkata said. “You c’n come with me cooperatively, Missus Bankole, or I c’n arrest you. The choice is yours.”
ISLE OF DOGS
EAST LONDON
Barbara Havers had rung Dr. Philippa Weatherall in advance as there was no sense in making the lengthy journey to the Isle of Dogs from Westminster if the surgeon would not be in. But she was there for the entire day, Dr. Weatherall had confirmed. She was happy to meet with DS Havers between patients. She had a rather full schedule so she couldn’t spare a lot of time. “If you could tell me what this is about . . . ?” she’d said.
A deceased woman called Teo Bontempi, Havers told her. “I c’n tell you more when we meet,” Barbara said.
After negotiating the drive across central London, she dropped down to the river in the vicinity of Limehouse and made her way from there to Westferry Road, the main route onto the west side of the Isle of Dogs. This was in no way even a remote part of Barbara’s regular stamping ground, so from Westferry Road she was forced to use her mobile’s GPS. This took her to Millwall Inner Dock, and from there it was a search for parking, followed by a hike to Inner Harbour Square where, she’d been told, she would find Dr. Weatherall’s surgery above a takeaway sandwich shop called Our Daily Bread.
That was fortuitous, she thought. She made a brief stop inside the takeaway to purchase a prawn and coleslaw sandwich on brown bread, a bag of salt and vinegar crisps, a snack-size packet of custard creams, and a blackcurrant Ribena. Out in the square she made short work of sandwich, crisps, and Ribena, managing in the midst of this repast to drip coleslaw down the front of her T-shirt. Seeing what she’d done to herself, she cursed and created from the coleslaw drip a very large and—she liked to think—rather artful stain by smearing the mess with a greasy paper napkin. She consoled herself with one of the custard creams and followed this with a deeply satisfying fag.
Thus fortified, she made her way to Dr. Weatherall’s surgery. She found the surgeon between patients, in the process of ushering one out while another worked on filling in what looked like a closely printed questionnaire fastened to a clipboard. Barbara would have assumed the woman doing the ushering was an assistant, but she said, “You must be DS Havers?” and when Barbara nodded, she continued with, “I’m Dr. Weatherall. Do come in.” She gestured back the way she’d come after saying to the woman with the clipboard, “Fawzia, just knock on the door when you’ve finished, please.”
Barbara waited for her to close the door to the narrow corridor. Three rooms opened off it, one of them the surgeon’s office, which was where Dr. Weatherall took her. It was as sparsely decorated as was the physician herself. Office and woman were no nonsense: the walls of the room were hung with her diplomas as well as a few inoffensive prints that one might find on an internet website, and the doctor herself was in a sleeveless black blouse and trousers of black linen—the material a bow to the heat, no doubt, a scarf folded into a headband to hold back her salt-and-pepper hair. Her arms were tanned. They were also toned in a depressingly spectacular fashion, Barbara noted, as were her shoulders. Clearly, she took regular and probably vigorous exercise. She probably watched her diet as well. With this in mind, Barbara nearly felt guilty for her crisps and her custard creams, but as it was only nearly, she reckoned she’d get over the feeling quickly enough. She usually did.
Dr. Weatherall sat in one of the chairs in front of her desk rather than behind it, and she indicated that Barbara should sit in the other. Barbara explained to her the death of Teo Bontempi, not how it came about but merely the coma and the hospitalisation, as well as the fact of the police looking into it and the fact of the investigating team’s having in their possession the victim’s appointment diary.
She said, “Teo wrote evaluation on July twenty-fourth, which wasn’t helpful. But when we finally got our hands on her mobile and got into its contents, we saw she’d put the address for this clinic into her GPS. She was an FGM victim, and her husband—well, her almost ex-husband—says he banged on a lot about possible reconstructive surgery. We’re wondering if that’s what you do here.”
“That’s exactly what I do here,” Dr. Weatherall said.
“Did you examine her?”
“I did. It’s the first step.”
“So you remember her.”
“I didn’t at first. After you rang me, I looked through my files. I see any number of women in a week, so while I often remember their names, it’s difficult to keep straight all the details of an appointment.”
“C’n I reckon you’ve got files for all your patients?”
“Yes. For all of them.”
“So you have a file for Teo as well? C’n I get a copy off you?”
Dr. Weatherall steepled her fingers together and looked down at them, as if considering the request. After a few moments, she said, “I don’t see why not. But if I may ask . . . If Teo Bontempi has died and if you’re the Metropolitan Police, and, as you told me on the phone, there’s an investigation . . . with DS in front of your name signifying you’re a detective . . . ?”
“Right . . . She’s been murdered.”
Dr. Weatherall let out a long breath. She said, “I’m very sorry to hear that. How was she . . . Never mind. I suppose you can’t tell me.” She rose and went to the chair behind her desk. She sat and typed upon the keyboard of her computer. She accessed what she wanted and said, “This will take just a few moments. The printer’s . . .” and she indicated the doorway as a way of explaining that the printer was elsewhere. She added, “Shall I fetch everything for you now?”
Barbara told her that could wait till she was leaving, and she asked the surgeon what the result of Teo’s examination had been.
Dr. Weatherall gazed at the file she’d brought up on her computer screen. She read a bit, as if to make sure she had the details straight and said, “My notes say she seemed a good candidate for reconstruction. She’d been badly handled by whoever cut her originally, and although she’d been opened as an adolescent there was a great deal of scar tissue. That—the scar tissue—would need to be removed before anything else could be done. It’s not difficult, that part of the procedure. It is a bit iffy, however.”
“Because . . . ?”
“The file I’ve printed for you includes photos. You’ll see the extent to which she’d been disfigured. When the damage is as bad as hers, the first issue is whether she has any nerve endings left beneath the scar tissue. If there are, then I can rebuild a clitoris.”
“And if there aren’t any nerve endings left?”
“That doesn’t make the surgery more difficult. It alters the outcome, though. Whilst I can rebuild what’s been removed from a woman’s body in that situation, I can’t alter her experience of sex other than to eliminate the pain of it.”
“Why would a woman go forward with reconstruction if you find that there aren’t any nerves left?”
The surgeon pushed back from her desk, resting her hands on the arms of her chair. She said, “For several reasons. Normalcy or at least the degree of normalcy that I can give her. An end to infections as well and, as I said, an end to pain during intercourse. But the woman would, in effect, remain anorgasmic. So: no pleasure for her save the pleasure of being physically close to a sexual partner.”
“What was the case for Teo?”
Dr. Weatherall gestured at the computer’s screen. “You’ll see it in my notes: From examining her, I confirmed that I could definitely do a reconstruction. But in her case, as in everyone else’s, it would be only once I’d removed the scar tissue that I could offer a hopeful outcome as to sensation.”
“Did you explain all this to her?”
“Oh yes. I always do that, directly after the exam.”
“How did you leave things, then?”
“Regarding the reconstructive surgery, my notes in her file indicate that at first she wanted to think things over.”
“That’s it, is it?”
“In the notes, yes. But I wouldn’t have written down the rest as it’s what I always say: that should she decide to have the surgery, she would need to find someone willing to accompany her. And if she did want to go forward with the procedure, she was to ring me and let me know.”
“Did she?”
“Not at first. I thought she’d decided against it, which certainly happens. Sometimes a woman’s fear overtakes all other considerations. Sometimes a husband finds out what a wife wishes to do and he won’t allow it because he fears that being made whole will lead her into promiscuity. And sometimes a father becomes involved and he won’t allow it. A mother as well, for that matter.”
“And sometimes they die,” Barbara noted.
“I’ve never lost a patient during surgery, Sergeant.”
“Sorry. I was thinking of Teo Bontempi dying before she could arrange anything.”
“When exactly did she die?”
Barbara gave her the date—July 31—and decided to add, “She was clubbed in the head. She fell into a coma and never came out of it.”
“Are you thinking there’s someone who didn’t want her to have this surgery, someone she told, someone who . . . I don’t know . . . couldn’t bear the news that she might be made whole again?”
“Just now we’re looking at every possibility we can come up with,” Barbara told her. “Did she give you any idea who it was who might accompany her here if she wanted to go forward with the surgery?”
“No. But that wouldn’t be unusual. She was here merely to be evaluated.”
“D’you think it’s likely she told anyone about her appointment with you? Did she mention anyone?”
“I certainly don’t recall her telling me. She might have kept the information about the appointment to herself. That wouldn’t have been the first time.”
“Why?”
“Consider what it’s like for these women. They’re almost always married. They come to me because they’ve heard about my work. When they come, they’re holding on to hope for an improvement in their lives with their husbands.”
“Sounds natural to me, that.”
“It is. But think about what’s going on within them when they make the journey here: First, they nurse a hope, then I examine them, then they learn that, whilst I can repair them and put an end to the physical pain, to chronic infections, and to other troubles, the procedure may not alter their experience. It may not give them sensation.”
“I’m still not sure why they wouldn’t want their husbands or partners to know.”
“I think it’s one thing for only the woman to have a hope of improvement and for only the woman to end up being crushed by disappointment, but it’s quite another to share that hope with a partner and then have to cope with the partner’s disappointment as well.”
Barbara considered this. She also considered that Teo Bontempi, being separated from her husband, had a good reason for saying nothing to him, especially since by his own account he’d spent so much time trying to heal her spirit as well as her body. How would he have reacted to the knowledge that hers was a hopeless case? Or, for that matter, how would he have reacted knowing about the surgery at all? “I suppose that makes sense,” she told the surgeon.
“It’s asking a lot of them to talk openly to anyone about what’s happened to them, Sergeant. Often, they don’t even want to talk to me about it. They just want to be whole again, or at least as whole as I can make them. But as to how it happened and when it happened, they rarely wish to speak of it. For some, it’s because they were too young to remember. For others, the humiliation is too great. Some of them were tricked into it. Some of them were caught by surprise. Some of them were taught to believe it’s a procedure that every girl has done to her. This entire business of FGM is a tightly kept secret in families. Mothers don’t pass along to their daughters the truth of it: the crippling consequence of such mutilation, how it will rob them of something that a completely ignorant tradition has dictated they are not going to be allowed to feel. Imagine, if you can, what something like this does to their lives, what it does to their futures, how it reduces them as individuals, how it turns them into saleable property.” The surgeon’s eyes had filled as she spoke, and she grabbed a tissue from a box on her desk. She said, “Sorry. Sorry.” She used the tissue beneath her eyes. “I get too wound up.”
“No worries,” Barbara said. “It’s something to be wound up about. Did Teo Bontempi tell you she was on a police team, working to root out and end FGM?”
“She didn’t.”
“That she was on a police team or that she was a cop?”
