Free Someone Else's Skin by Sarah Hilary

stronger?’
    Noah glanced up, seeing a stranger. Plaid shirt, eyebrow ring, right hand in the back pocket of his jeans.
    Noah shook his head. ‘Thanks.’
    ‘You sure?’ Plaid Shirt showed his palm, sweaty. Pills in a plastic bag.
    Dan flashed a warning with his eyes. ‘We’re sure.’
    Plaid strolled away.
    ‘Good job your boss wasn’t here to see that,’ Dan said.
    Noah rolled his neck, sticky from the lime.
    ‘Reckon she’s out on the razz?’ Dan sucked the zest from his thumb. ‘DI Rome.’
    Noah didn’t answer. He didn’t know how Marnie spent her Friday nights, or her weekends. None of his business.
    ‘Unless she’s happily married . . .’ Dan mused. ‘Maybe she’s got an ex. She looks the type. She’s a ball-breaker, DI Rome.’
    ‘I’m switching to Pepsi, you want one?’ Noah moved away in the direction of the bar, not wanting a conversation – the usual conversation – about work.
    Dan thought the police was a crazy career choice, for anyone. ‘Debased’ was the word he used. Also corrupt, ill-founded and run ineptly by people with rotten agendas. All this, and then Noah being half-Jamaican, to top it off. Had he made any friends during training? No, but he hadn’t become a detective to make friends. He’d done it to make a difference. To people like Ayana Mirza, who’d fought to save Leo Proctor’s life even though he was a stranger and possibly a wife-beater, someone who didn’t deserve to be saved.
    Across the room, Plaid Shirt was palming his pills off on another couple. Perhaps Noah should revise his definition of normal . . .
    They’d made a difference, Noah and Ayana, to Leo Proctor’s chances of survival. But what about the women in the refuge, what about Ayana herself?
    Had Noah made a difference to how safe she was in that place, with its new stain on the carpet and the hole in its roof? How safe did she feel, right this minute? While Noah was ordering Pepsi in a bar full of people for whom ‘stranger’ meant guilt-free sex, no strings attached . . .
    How safe was Ayana Mirza and the strangers she was living with, at that rain-ruined refuge in Finchley?

16
     
    The rain had left breath marks on the inside of the refuge windows. Simone stretched her arm between the curtains to place her palm on the glass. It was cold and hard, slippery. She spread her fingers flat to the wet, thinking how her hand must look from the street outside. A hand with no body attached, the curtains hiding the rest of her from view.
    Was the car still there, watching?
    She had seen it when the police took Hope away: a parked car with its wipers working, jerking rain from the windscreen.
    Someone was out there, watching. There was always someone. Simone was scared for Hope. It wasn’t safe to leave here, not on your own. Not ever.
    She drew her hand back through the curtains to study the spots of wet in her palm. She hadn’t washed yet. Hope’s blood had dried between her fingers. Unless it was Leo’s. She lifted her hand and sniffed at it. The rain had a metal smell, like buckets, or bullets. She touched the tip of her tongue to the skin between her fingers – just a touch, a taste – and knew it was Hope’s blood. It tasted too sweet to belong to a man. She turned away from the chill of the window, seeing the flat shape of the bed.
    Hope’s room was nearly empty. Simone had wanted to be the first in here after they’d taken Hope to the hospital. To protect Hope’s space, her few possessions. Instead, the policeman had been first, searching with his eyes and his hands – for what? Another knife?
    How did she get the knife, Simone?
    She had told DS Jake that it was a test. That Leo didn’t think Hope would dare . . .
    Leo had broken Hope into a thousand pieces, Simone knew. Hope had told her, not everything, but enough. Even if she had said nothing, Simone would have known. She had known the roof was leaking before the cracks came, and long before the rain tore a hole up