Someone Else's Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

convulsing. ‘Please. I’ll be sick.’ Her irises were slim rings around blown pupils. A frown emphasised the deep crease between her brows, suggesting this state of heightened anxiety was normal.
    ‘You don’t need to drink anything,’ Marnie said.
    Simone moved back to the sofa, opening the circle of her arms to hug Hope.
    Noah crossed to where Ayana was standing. ‘How are you?’
    ‘I’m fine.’ Her voice was very steady, her gaze unblinking. She had a south London accent, picked up at school, he guessed.
    ‘That was quick thinking, before. With the phone card.’
    ‘And the cling film.’ She gave a slight smile. ‘I saw it on television. A cop show. I watch a lot of television here. Soap operas. Phone-ins. Very bad for me. Everything here is a bad influence.’ She widened the smile, showing even teeth. ‘I like it very much. I read, too, and study. Criminal psychology.’
    ‘A distance-learning course?’
    She nodded. She couldn’t leave the refuge, Noah knew that much. She looked at the sofa where the three women sat in silence, Mab and the two dark-haired girls. ‘They offered me a place with other Asians. That is how they put it: other Asians . I knew someone in a place like that. The women working there gossiped at the mosque.’ She put her lips to the mug. ‘I prefer it here.’
    ‘Even now?’
    ‘I don’t know how he got in. It is safe . They are very strict. The doors stay locked unless we ask.’ She frowned at the room. ‘We like them locked.’
    Like a prison. A prison with television and books, and the chance to study, make friends. Noah wondered about the phone card, whose number she called when she needed to talk. Perhaps the card was for the television phone-in shows.
    Rain shook the window next to their heads. He could smell it, tinny and cold, through the heavy curtains. ‘Let me get you a new top-up card, for your phone. You have a mobile?’
    ‘Yes.’ She touched a woven purse at her waist. ‘Thank you. There wasn’t much on the card. Less than five pounds.’
    ‘I’ll get you a new one,’ Noah promised.
    They couldn’t quiz her about Nasif so soon after the stabbing. It would’ve been tough enough before, knowing what Nasif and the others did to her.
    Ayana’s brothers. In her own home. Two of them held her down while the third squirted heavy-duty bleach into her eyes. When they let her up, she managed to grope her way out of the house and into the street, screaming for help.
    Surgeons saved her right eye. They couldn’t save the left.
    Blind in one eye, she could still see. The CPS believed her witness statement would help to put Nasif behind bars, but so far she’d kept quiet about what her brothers had done. According to the notes that Noah and Marnie had inherited, in the hospital after the bleach attack, no one visited Ayana. Until the third day, when a woman arrived, alone, clutching a hooded anorak. ‘I have come to take my daughter home.’
    It was Mrs Mirza. Ayana’s mother.
    Ayana didn’t stop screaming until the woman went away.

7
     
    ‘A knife?’ OCU Commander Tim Welland echoed. ‘At a women’s refuge? I thought these places were meant to be secure?’
    ‘We’re working on that now.’ Marnie moved aside to let the family liaison officer go past her, in the direction of the dayroom. ‘We need to find out how Leo got in, and how he knew his wife was here. But first we need to make everyone feel safe again.’
    ‘After a stabbing?’ She could hear Welland grimacing at the other end of the phone: good luck with that . ‘How’s Ayana Mirza?’
    ‘She helped Noah save Leo Proctor’s life.’
    ‘ If they’ve saved it. From what you said . . .’
    ‘Proctor was stable when the ambulance took him.’
    ‘Do you think she meant to kill him?’
    Marnie rubbed at the ache in her neck, petting the pain the way she’d learnt to, as it strayed around her body. ‘It was self-defence, that’s what our witnesses are saying.’
    ‘Reliable, are