“You probably know about the Nigerian cutters, then. They’re hidden round London. If one of them—”
A knock sounded on the corridor’s door and the surgeon called entrance to Fawzia, the woman who’d been filling out the paperwork. Dr. Weatherall took the clipboard from her and said, “Just across is the exam room. Everything below the waist, remove. There’s a sheet to cover yourself. I’ll meet you in there in a few minutes.”
When the woman left them, Barbara said, “So when you examined Teo, you saw she could’ve been repaired, and you told her that, right?”
“Straightaway. As I’ve said. Directly we were finished with the exam.”
“Would you say the news made her happy?”
“I’m not very good at reading people. But I can tell you that, as a rule, most of my patients are relieved rather than outright happy with the news. And then they generally become thoughtful. It’s human nature, I think, not to want to get one’s hopes up.”
“Is that why you phoned her? We have her mobile.”
“I always ring a patient a day or so after the evaluation, to see if there are any questions.”
“The phone records show you made four calls to her.”
“Do they? Well, if that’s the case, I must have done, although I couldn’t have said it was four times that we spoke.” She paused and her gaze moved to the prints on the walls as she thought about this. “She would have had questions, I daresay. The women generally do.”
“Do you normally have more than one conversation with a patient?”
“Frequently. I have as many as it takes to make them comfortable.”
Barbara had been jotting all of this in her notebook, and she looked up to ask a final question. “Anything else you can tell me?”
Dr. Weatherall drew her eyebrows together. They were jet black and straight, like underscoring beneath a word. “Just that—and it came to me when I read her file—she seemed troubled.”
“D’you mean about the procedure you’d be going through, the steps of the process when she went under the knife?”
“Again, I can’t be entirely certain of the memory, but I’d say it was more about having it done at all. She seemed troubled from the moment I examined her, not just when I told her she was a good candidate for reconstruction.”
“Someone was pressuring her? To have the reconstruction done or not to have it done?”
“I couldn’t tell you, and she certainly didn’t say. But if she hadn’t told anyone about coming to see me, there might be a reason for her being troubled beyond not wanting to encourage a partner to hope for the impossible.” As she was speaking, the desk phone rang. It was a sudden, discordant, jarring sound. Barbara waited for the surgeon to answer it, but she instead let it go to message. Then she said, “You must be considering FGM as an element of why she died.”
“Just now we’re considering everything. Where did you leave things with her, then?”
“She made a decision to have the surgery.”
“Had you set a date for the procedure?”
“No. My notes tell me that, as soon as she had the appropriate amount of time off work, she intended to ring me.”
“At that point—I mean during the conversation when she told you she’d decided on the surgery—had she at that point told anyone else that she was about to undergo reconstruction?”
Dr. Weatherall shook her head and looked regretful. “I honestly don’t know. She may have done. That’s all I can say.”
BRIXTON
SOUTH LONDON
Monifa understood why the detective had arrested her. She’d told him what her intentions had been. She’d told him what her intentions still were: to have Simisola made pure so that she could proceed into her womanhood. Despite having found a location where Simi could be cut under medical conditions—with anaesthetic, with sterile surgical instruments used by someone trained, and with aftercare—it was still having her cut, and in this country, it was against the law. Monifa had no hope of making this police detective understand any part of what was meant to happen in Simisola’s life. He wasn’t of their culture, so there were things he would never be able to grasp. She and Simisola were, after all, females. The purpose in each of their lives was to serve the males to whom they were bound through marriage or tied to through birth. This was how it was. Her own mother was living this way, as was her mother-in-law, as had lived her grandmother, her great-grandmother, and the women who had come before them. To their people, this was all part of being a woman. Being cut meant being cleansed. Being cleansed meant being pure. Being pure meant being marriageable. Monifa could no more change this than could she change the order of the months of the year. But this man Nkata at the wheel of the car, he was English, after all, no matter the land from which his ancestors had come. So he would never—could never—understand.