“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?”
“Neither. Do you think that’s why she was attacked?”
“Could be. The team’s approach is through community outreach and education, generally, that sort of thing, which doesn’t much sound like something a copper would be attacked for doing. But from what we’ve been able to suss out about her, Teo took it further than trying to end it through education and all that. She managed to uncover a cutting place in north London, and she got it closed down. We reckon someone could’ve gone after her for that.”