They were back in the interview room. They had more tea and Havers had decamped briefly to Peeler’s, where she also purchased two bowls of cut-up fruit, four bananas, and four sealed packages of cheese and biscuits. The surgeon was delineating the why of how she’d been making herself “useful” to the mothers who continued to believe and to insist that their daughters would be able to marry only if they were clean and pure, with their virginity not only guaranteed but forcibly maintained.
A great deal of what she’d said so far had made perfect sense, at least to her. The hideous practice of mutilating girls was not going to end simply because there were people who wanted it to end. She’d learned as much after she’d begun to study with the French surgeon who’d developed a way to restructure the genitals of FGM’s victims. She learned his technique and brought it to London, but she’d soon realised she could do more than merely reconstruct what had been badly, incompetently, and gruesomely damaged. She could prevent irreparable harm in the first place, by circumcising the girls herself so if, in the future, they wanted the surgery to reverse what had been done to them, the work involved would not deprive them of a sexual life that offered them more than pain.
The word went out once she opened Women’s Health of Hackney. She performed hundreds of procedures in its tiny operating theatre. Not a single girl among those she circumcised died, and she appeared quite proud of that statistic. That it was grisly and disfiguring—no matter how nicely she did it—didn’t seem to occur to her.
Everything went well, she said. Mercy Hart’s part was to promote what the clinic had to offer, to encourage word-of-mouth among mothers of daughters, and to hand out cards—with only a phone number on them—wherever she could. Mercy handled the clinic’s day-to-day business and Dr. Weatherall had taught her how to conduct an initial exam. When there was an appointment set up, the surgeon would spend the necessary time in Kingsland High Street. Patients and their mothers did not see her face. She was masked and gowned on the day of surgery when she met them, and she stayed that way until she left the premises.
Then, Teo Bontempi.
“She put it together: the clinic and my unexpected presence in Kingsland High Street on the morning the police showed up. She wanted to know what I was doing there, of course. I talked about being a volunteer. She asked me how I could possibly be a volunteer without knowing what was going on in the place. She accused me of being involved in cutting girls. I denied it, of course. Outrageous and ridiculous, I said. She had no real evidence that FGM was being provided at the clinic at all. But she was committed to getting the evidence—I could see that—and I realised that eventually someone was going to tell her the truth. Someone always tells the truth, she said. It would only be a matter of time. And if everything came together as she wanted, I would be struck off.”
“You had to stop her,” Lynley said quietly.
“I phoned her that very night. And then again and then again.”
“Were you not worried that Mercy would confess as to what was going on in the clinic?”
She shook her head. “Mercy believes in the work we’re doing.”
“Cutting babies?” Havers asked. “Cutting little girls?” She looked disgusted.
“Safeguarding their lives, Sergeant. Do either of you have any idea how many native cutters there are in London? No? Neither do I. But I’ve seen enough of the harm they’ve done, with their razor blades and their kitchen knives and their box cutters and whatever else they use, to know that, until immigrant women have enough education-based facts to put a stop to this, it’s going to continue. It continues because they allow it to continue. It will stop when they refuse to carry it on.”
“Teo didn’t see it that way,” Lynley said.
“She saw black and white, cause and effect, right and wrong.”
“So you went to Streatham and you killed her.”
“No. No. That was never my intention. We talked, but I couldn’t make her see . . . She said I’d had her final word on the subject and she began to walk to the door of her flat and there was this moment—this one single blinding moment because I couldn’t make her understand. I hit her with the sculpture. I didn’t even think about it first. It was a blind reaction. That’s all it was, and once I’d done it and she’d fallen and she wasn’t moving . . .” Dr. Weatherall had been gazing from one of them to another. Her solicitor sat quietly, letting her talk as she wished. Lynley wondered what advice Vivienne Yang had given the surgeon while he and Havers had been out of the room. No sooner had he entertained that thought, the potential answer came with what she said next. “I was going to help her at once. I was horrified at what I’d done. I dropped the sculpture and knelt by her side. But then I heard several knocks on the door and the door started to open and I . . . I . . . hid.”