Someone Else's Skin Read Online Free PDF

they?’ Scepticism soured Welland’s voice. ‘A knife in the lung sounds to me like attempted murder. I’m not saying she didn’t have a good reason to do it; I don’t suppose she was in that place from choice.’
    ‘You haven’t seen her, or heard her. She’s scared he’s going to live, but she’s not making excuses. And yes, she’s covered in bruises, of course she is.’
    When she’d taken the knife away, Hope’s hand had been shaking. Marnie had understood, for the first time, how frightening it was to use a knife as a weapon, deadly.
    ‘I’m going to take her to the hospital,’ she told Welland, ‘and get her checked over.’
    ‘How’s DS Jake bearing up?’
    ‘He’s good. I’ve told him to get clean. He’s got a change of clothes at the station . . .’
    ‘A mess, is he?’
    ‘Proctor leaked all over him, so yes.’
    Welland heard the cool edge in her voice. ‘Are you handling this all right?’
    She looked the length of the corridor, to the locked fire exit. ‘It’s a domestic with a knife. Half this job’s domestics with knives, but . . . Proctor’s stable. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t pull through. He’s a big bloke, lots of padding.’ Not a murder, in other words. ‘To be honest, I’m more worried about Hope. I want to know what happened before she came here, to make her come here.’ Answers. She wanted answers.
    ‘Have your plans changed?’ Welland asked abruptly.
    ‘For tomorrow?’ She shoved her hair from her face. ‘No. Of course if Proctor dies . . . then I’ll reschedule.’
    ‘Stay in touch,’ Welland said. ‘I need to know you’re on top of things.’
    ‘Of course.’ She pictured his open face, inviting confidences. Personally, she had no problem keeping secrets from Tim Welland. He knew too much about her already. She was glad of any secrets she could keep, insulation against his questions, his knowing.
    He knows how they died , she’d often think, how they looked when they were dead. How I looked, weeping in the street outside – but he doesn’t know that I like salted chocolate or dumb TV spy shows where the heroine wears a different wig every week and kicks the crap out of everyone. He doesn’t know – if all else failed – about the writing. The words on my skin.
    Secrets she’d kept from everyone. From Greg, her dad. From her mum, Lisa. From Lexie, the therapist they’d assigned her after the murders. Even from Ed Belloc, with whom she trusted most secrets, instinctively.
    The clichés of her skin, teenage rebellion writ large. Embarrassingly so, now she was into her third decade, regretting the bilious girl she’d been, with her mascara-laden eyes and her biker boots, her studied solitude and near-autistic silences. She’d stopped being that girl when she was Ayana’s age, nineteen; hormones shucking away like the bark on a plane tree losing London’s poisons in the shedding of its scales. Fired with purpose, she’d considered a career with the air force. All that speed and power, the endless sky and adrenalin rush. She’d settled impatiently on the police. Never intending the choice to stick, seeing it as a way to rid her feet and fingers of their itch to get away, escape . . .
    Afraid that if she took too long choosing a path, she’d become that girl again. The one who crept from her parents’ house while Greg and Lisa Rome were sleeping and caught the first bus into town, to a place where she could pay a man with the cleanest hands she’d ever seen to inscribe her teenage skin with black, stinging secrets.

8
     
    Not her in the ambulance. A stranger, big bloke with an oxygen bag over his face.
    No one he knew.
    He wiped the steam from the inside of the windscreen with the damp cuff of his overalls again. Under the peaked cap – I ♥ London – his mouth shifted to a smile.
    Not her.
    Then doors were opening and closing, police everywhere, and he had to start the car, pull away. He couldn’t risk them catching him. He