Free Someone Else's Skin by Sarah Hilary Page B

grilles and locks, all the barriers between her questions and his answers.
    ‘What did they do?’ she wants to know. ‘Did they do something – anything – or was it all you? Was it all just you , Stephen? With your snake’s eyes, your locust’s stare – Was it all just you?’

18
     
    Now
     
    Sommerville Secure Unit sat on the border of Bristol and the Mendips. Its exercise yard was twenty square feet of tarmac where scabby tape picked out the corpse of a football pitch. Elsewhere it was steel and glass, reflective surfaces shivering in the weak sunshine.
    Saturday morning, ten o’clock. Marnie had left Ed in the car park, stretching his legs after the long drive. He had a flask of coffee, and the weekend papers.
    Marnie had telephoned the hospital at 7 a.m., for news of Leo and Hope. There was nothing to report. Leo was still unconscious. They’d scheduled a CT scan for Hope. DC Abby Pike was with her, keeping vigil.
    ‘Just a minute.’ Marnie’s escort signalled her to a halt near the plate-glass entrance to Sommerville, bringing her up short before her reflection in the locked door. A strand of hair had worked loose from the knot at the nape of her neck. She shoved it back with two fingers. The glass served up her likeness without sympathy, showing every line and shadow. Coming here always made her feel ancient.
    ‘Okay, come on.’ Her escort dragged the door open and held it for the time it took Marnie to move inside the complex.
    She was in a square room, its carpet a curdled sea of stains that sent up the smell of low tide, burning the back of her throat.
    ‘Marnie Rome,’ she said, in answer to the bored question put to her by the escort. ‘I’m here to see Stephen Keele.’

19
     
    Only one inmate in the visitors’ room, sitting at a metal table under a ceiling strip of light. The light punched the colour out of everything.
    Marnie sat in the chair on the other side of the table. Both chairs, like the table, were bolted to the floor; a contingency against furniture fights.
    On the other side of the table . . .
    Stephen Keele had a soap-and-water smell, with a hot metallic note underneath: prison cologne. From his pallor, it was tempting to think he’d spent the last five years in his room, without daylight, but he’d always been pale.
    Marnie remembered meeting him for the first time, an oddly self-possessed eight-year-old, with an Old Testament angel’s face. Black curls, blue eyes, a mouth that curved ripely over small, even teeth. Incarceration hadn’t changed him, or not noticeably. He was nineteen, serving time for a double murder committed five years ago, when he was fourteen.
    He sat upright in the chair, his shoulders bleached by the light. Marnie wondered what the grey tracksuit was hiding. Whether, like Hope Proctor, Stephen was disguising damage done to him. Or to others, by him. He kept his hands out of sight, under the lip of the table.
    ‘I brought you a book.’ She put it on the table. ‘Short stories, I hope that’s okay.’
    He didn’t touch the book. She waited for him to look at her, but he kept his eyes on the wall behind her head. ‘Jeremy says you like reading.’ She touched a finger to the book. ‘These are some of my favourites.’
    ‘Jeremy,’ he echoed. His voice was the same. Precise, pitched low. Not the voice of a teenage kid. More like a thirty-year-old’s. He still didn’t look at her.
    ‘Jeremy Strickland. Your lawyer.’
    Stephen tilted his head to the left, as if he had difficulty hearing her.
    He didn’t have any difficulty that she was aware of.
    He’d grown another inch. He’d been a skinny eight-year-old and would probably never be fat, unless he surrendered to the carb-rich diet here. As it stood, he was slim, angular at the hip and shoulders. Still with the angelic face, ripe lips.
    She waited for him to take the book, or at least to acknowledge it. He did neither.
    ‘How are you?’ she asked, keeping the other questions at