Land of the Living (21 page)

When I came round from my fit of howling, I saw that Cross was standing there holding a paper cup in each hand. He handed me one. It was water and I drank it down in a gulp. The other was coffee, hot and strong, and I sipped at it.

‘I want you to make a statement,’ he said. ‘If you feel able.’ I nodded. ‘Good. We’ll bring in an officer and we’ll go through it.’

So, for the next two and a half hours, I drank cup after paper cup of coffee and I talked about all the things in my relationship with Terry that I had wanted to forget. People say that to talk about your bad experiences is therapeutic. For me it was the opposite. I’m a person with good friends, but I’d never talked to them about Terry, not about the worst of it. I’d never spoken the things, never named them. Somehow when I said them aloud, they came alive there in Jim Burrows’s office, and they frightened me.

For many months I’d simply thought of myself as being in a relationship with problems, where every so often things got out of control, where we had difficulty communicating. It sounded quite different when I put it into words. The woman typing out what I said was a young uniformed officer. But when I described the evening when Terry, drunk out of his skull, picked up a kitchen knife and waved it at me and then pushed it against my throat, she stopped typing and looked up at me, her eyes wide. He didn’t mean it, I said. He would never have done anything to hurt me. WPC Hawkins and Burrows and Cross looked at me and at each other and they didn’t bother to say the obvious, which was that he
had
hurt me and who was I trying to fool? Did I have a problem? Was I a natural victim? As I told the story, I began to wonder about the woman who had put up with this for so long. And I thought about the woman I couldn’t remember, the woman who had said enough was enough and walked out.

I tried to imagine Sally Adamson, the woman who had told me that we weren’t alike, lying cold in a cold front garden. And then I thought of her lying there dead, with Terry’s semen inside her, and then I felt so ashamed that my cheeks burned and I thought that Cross would know the terrible thing that had been passing through my mind. I asked who had found her. It was the postman. I thought of her being found by a stranger while the people who knew her and loved her didn’t know she was dead. I also started to think: Could Terry really have done this? And if he had, oh, God, if he had, what did that mean about me and my story? No one else had believed me, but until now, I had believed myself. It was all that I’d had to stop me going insane.

Seventeen

When I had finished my statement, I felt as if I had been flayed. The story I’d told was true in all its details, and yet, in a confused way, I felt it wasn’t the story I had meant to tell. I felt I needed to add something important to it but I was just too tired. Cross looked through it with occasional nods, like a teacher marking some homework and finding it barely adequate. I signed the statement three times and then WPC Hawkins took the small bundle away. I was thinking about what I was going to do when Cross said he would drive me home. I protested that he didn’t have to bother but he said he was going in that direction anyway and I couldn’t muster the energy to protest.

For the first part of the drive, through high streets I didn’t recognize, I just stared ahead of me and tried to think of nothing. But it was no good. I started to go over it in my mind and in a short time it was there inescapably in front of me.

‘Stop,’ I said.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said, looking around desperately. ‘Hang on, we’re in a red zone. Wait, I’ll find somewhere.’

‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you?’

‘Wait, wait, if you’re going to throw up, do it out of the window.’

He turned off the main road into a side-street and pulled up at the kerb. I opened the door and ran out. There was a tall brick wall. It must have been the side of a factory or a warehouse. I put my hands on the rough surface, which was wonderfully cold to the touch. I leant forward and rested my forehead on it. I felt a hand on my back.

‘Are you all right?’

A warm sour liquid rose in my throat but I swallowed it and took several deep breaths.

‘It’s been a difficult day,’ Cross said.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Well, it has, but that’s not it.’

‘What do you mean?’

I took a few steps along the pavement, rubbing my arms in an attempt to warm myself. It was dark and my breath was a vapour in front of my face. We were on the edge of an industrial estate. Behind barbed wire there were modern buildings that were already going grimy. Frazer Glass and Glazing Co. Leather Industries Centre. Tippin Memorial Masons.

‘This is all wrong,’ I said.

‘Get back into the car.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You know that I haven’t got particularly warm feelings towards Terry at the moment.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘He’s a man with real problems and he probably needs all kinds of help but he didn’t do this.’

‘Miss Devereaux, Abbie, get back into the car. I’m freezing out here.’

‘If we get back into the car, will you answer some questions?’

‘Anything. So long as we get out of this.’

We sat in the car in silence for a time.

‘Am I keeping you from anything?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘I just have these questions that come into my mind and I can’t stop them. I know that you’re the expert and I’m just somebody who advises companies about where to put the photocopier and the coffee machine. But it doesn’t make sense. For a start, Terry isn’t a murderer. And if he was, I don’t think he’d pick on a woman he’d just started seeing. And if he had decided to kill her, it would happen in his own flat or her flat. If he was going to go to the trouble of hiding her body, he wouldn’t do it three doors down from where he lived.’

Jack Cross’s first response, if it can be called a response, was to start the car and drive off.

‘I think I can manage this while driving,’ he said. ‘For a start I should say that Terence Wilmott has not been charged with the murder of Sally Adamson. But he is the obvious suspect and I’m afraid that the obvious suspect usually turns out to be the person who committed the crime. I take your points about Terry—’

‘Which means you don’t,’ I interrupted.

‘But the fact is that most people are not killed by strangers who attack them in a dark alley. They are killed by people they know. Women are most at risk from their sexual partners. Terry’s history of violence towards his partners — i.e., you — is just further evidence. Compelling evidence, I’d say. As for where he did it, and why, and where he disposed of the body — if he did — all I can say is that there are no rules. People plan murders and they do them on the spur of the moment. Sometimes they don’t conceal the body, sometimes they conceal it so perfectly that it’s never found, sometimes they half conceal it. He might have killed her, then dumped the body along the road in an attempt to make it look as if she had been mugged while leaving the flat.’

‘If he was doing that, why would he leave the purse? And it would be ridiculously risky to carry the body along the street.’

‘Have you ever committed a murder, Abbie?’

‘No. Have you?’

‘No,’ he said, forcing a smile. ‘But I know people who have. Imagine the greatest stress you’ve ever experienced and multiply it by a hundred. You can’t breathe, you can’t think. People do the strangest things. They make the weirdest mistakes.’

‘There’s another possibility.’

‘There are lots of other possibilities.’

‘No. This is really what happened.’

‘And what’s that?’ he asked, with exaggerated patience.

I didn’t even want to say this aloud. I had to force myself. ‘You know that I’ve changed my appearance since it all happened.’

‘I have noticed.’

‘Since you turned me loose and left me without any protection, I’ve been taking huge precautions not to be followed. And almost nobody knows where I’m staying. I think that one of the only things that that man — the man who grabbed me — knows about me is where I worked and where I lived. I talked about things like that to him. I told him Terry’s name. I remember.’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever noticed that when a couple splits up and one of them gets together with somebody else almost straight away, the new partner often looks like a clone of the old one?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘It’s true. I was struck by it immediately when I bumped into Sally. Ask Terry. I actually mentioned it to them when I met her.’

‘Tactful.’

‘She didn’t agree. Well, she wouldn’t want to, I suppose. But, anyway, she wouldn’t have been able to tell. I’d already changed my appearance so much that we looked completely different. The point I’m trying to make is that the man who kidnapped me knows that I’m out there. Obviously he hasn’t been arrested straight away, but still, he doesn’t know what I know about him. I’m a risk for him. If he could kill me, he would be safer. One of the only ways he could find me would be to hang around Terry’s flat. If he saw Sally coming out in the middle of the night he would obviously have assumed it was me.’

‘Go on.’

‘He strangled her, thinking she was me. He thought it was my neck. It’s the only explanation that really makes sense.’

I looked at Cross. He didn’t reply. Suddenly he seemed to be concentrating hard on his driving. And then an idea came to me. ‘He thinks he’s killed me.’

‘What?’

‘That man. He thinks I’m dead. He thinks he’s safe. He probably didn’t realize he had made a mistake. If you could delay announcing the murder, or at least delay revealing the identity of the victim, then that would give me a few days to do something.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Cross said. ‘Unfortunately there’s one drawback with it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s that I’m living in the real world. We’re stuck with a few boring procedural rules. When people are murdered, we’re not really supposed to keep it secret. We have to tell their family. And then we’re meant to find out who did it.’

We sat in silence for several minutes as we approached Jo’s flat. The car pulled up.

‘You know what’s really funny,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You don’t believe me. You think I’m a fantasist or maybe a chronic liar. You’re quite nice and I know you felt a bit worse than the others about cutting me loose, but there we are. But if it had been me lying in that front garden instead of Sally, you would have been sure it was Terry and that man would have got away with it.’

Cross leant over and put his hand on my forearm. ‘Abbie, as I have said before, if there is any new evidence, we will open up your case. Of course. And if your friend…’

‘Jo.’

‘If Jo hasn’t turned up in the next few days, you should tell me. You know that. I am not dismissing you. We did not cut you loose, as you put it, we had absolutely no evidence of any kind — except that your boyfriend, Terry Wilmott, had beaten you up in the past and had done so just before you lost consciousness. That was all we had to go on. If it had been you we found last night, God forbid, then maybe it would have been Terry who did it. Hasn’t that occurred to you? It’s my opinion that you were lucky to get away from him.’

‘But what about my disappearance? Do you want to blame him for that? He has an alibi, remember?’

Cross’s expression hardened. ‘He has a story that stands up, that’s all. That’s all we’ve got here, lots of stories. Except now we have a dead woman, lying a few yards from the front door of the man who beat you up.’

I opened the door and got out. I bent down and looked at his face, faint in the glow of the street lights. ‘Tomorrow Sally’s name will be in the papers and he’ll know and he’ll be after me again. But in the end you’ll know I was telling the truth. I’ve got a way of proving it to you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll know when you find me dead. I’ll be strangled in a ditch somewhere and you’ll still have Terry locked up and you’ll be sorry.’

‘You’re right,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I would be sorry.’

I slammed the door so hard that the car shook.

Eighteen

I looked up at Jo’s windows. There were no lights on, and the place seemed very empty and dark. I put the key into the lock. I imagined myself up there, sitting alone through the evening and the long night, picturing Sally’s dead body and waiting for the morning to come. Perhaps I should go to Sadie’s again, or Sam’s, or Sheila’s. But the thought of it filled me with despair. I would have to tell them everything that had happened since they’d seen me last, and too much had happened. Though I’d seen them all just a few days ago, they felt too far away. I had fallen out of their world and had become a stranger, and who would know me now?

I couldn’t just stand there on the street, an unmoving target. I turned the key and pushed open the door. I looked at the stairs, climbing up to the unlit rooms, and fear rose up in me. I pulled the door shut again and stood for a moment, leaning against it and trying to breathe calmly. A part of me wanted to slide down the door and collapse on the path. I could curl up in a ball, with my arms wrapped around my head, and lie there like a dying animal. Someone else could come and deal with everything. They’d lift me up and carry me somewhere safe and warm and I wouldn’t have to go on like this, day after day.

I didn’t curl up on the path. I turned back towards the high street, where I flagged down a taxi and asked them to take me to Belsize Park. I didn’t know the number of the house but I thought I would remember it once I got there. He probably wouldn’t be there, and if he was I didn’t know what I would say to him.

I found the house easily. I remembered the tree on the pavement outside, and I somehow knew that it had a wrought-iron fence. There were lights on both downstairs and upstairs. I gave the cab driver a ten-pound note and told him to keep the change. I walked towards the door and my legs felt like jelly and my breath kept catching in my throat. He would probably be in the middle of a dinner party. He’d probably be in bed with someone. I rapped the knocker loudly and stood back. I heard him coming and a little sob escaped me.

‘Abbie?’

‘Is someone here? Are you in the middle of something?’

He shook his head.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry to bother you like this, but I didn’t know what else to do. You’re the only person I know who knows everything. If you see what I mean. Sorry.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Come inside. You must be freezing.’ He opened the door and I stepped into the wide hall.

‘Sorry.’

‘Stop saying sorry, for God’s sake. Come on, come into the kitchen, get warm. Here, give me your coat.’

‘Thanks.’

He led me into a small kitchen. There were pot plants all along the window-sill and daffodils on the table. I could smell glue, sawdust, varnish.

‘Here. Sit down, move that junk. Let me get us something to drink. Tea? Or how about hot chocolate?’

‘Lovely.’

He poured milk into a pan and set it on the hob.

‘What about food? When did you last eat?’

‘This morning, a fry-up. Remember?’

‘Was that only this morning? God.’

‘Did your meeting go all right?’

‘It went, at least. Shall I make you something?’

‘Just hot chocolate. That would be very comforting.’

‘Comforting,’ he said, with a smile.

He spooned chocolate granules into the boiling milk and stirred vigorously, then poured it into a large green mug. ‘Drink that, Abbie, and tell me what’s happened.’

‘Sally died,’ I said.

‘Sally? Who’s Sally?’

‘Terry’s new girlfriend.’ I waited for him to ask who Terry was but he didn’t, just nodded and frowned.

‘I’m sorry about that, but did you know her well? Was she a friend?’

‘I hardly knew her at all. But she was killed.’

‘Killed? Someone killed her?’

‘Outside Terry’s flat. The police are convinced it was Terry.’

‘I see,’ he said slowly.

‘It wasn’t. I know it wasn’t. But, of course, they just think I’m trapped in some paranoid fantasy. For them, this proves it: Terry bashed me around and I turn it from a squalid tale of domestic abuse into a heroic story of a kidnap. Then he continues the pattern and murders his next girlfriend.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No. Terry wouldn’t murder anyone.’

‘Lots of people who wouldn’t murder anyone go and murder someone.’

‘That’s what the police keep saying. But I know him. Anyway, if he did kill her he would have collapsed with guilt and phoned 999. He certainly wouldn’t have dragged her body outside and put it a few doors up. And if he wanted to hide it, which he wouldn’t have done, because anyway he wouldn’t have done it in the first place, then he would have…’

‘I’m not the police, you know.’

‘No. Sorry. It’s just… everything. I keep thinking about poor, stupid Terry. And Sally, of course. But there’s something more. Sally looked like me. I mean, like I used to look before I got my haircut and stuff.’ I watched his face change. ‘I just have this horrible feeling that it should have been me.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’

‘He’s out there, looking for me. He’ll find me. I know it.’

‘And the police don’t take you seriously?’

‘No. I don’t really blame them. If I wasn’t me, I don’t know if I would take me seriously. If you see what I mean.’

‘I do see what you mean.’

‘Do you believe me?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘In a big way, I mean? About everything.’

‘Yes.’

‘Really? You’re not just saying that?’

‘I’m not just saying it.’

I looked at him. He didn’t flinch or look away. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I picked up my mug of hot chocolate and finished it. I felt better, all of a sudden. ‘Can I use your bathroom? Then I’ll go home. I shouldn’t have come barging in like this, it was stupid of me.’

‘Up the stairs, the first room you come to.’

I stood up. My legs felt wobbly as I climbed the stairs. I used the toilet then splashed my blotchy face. I looked like a washed-out schoolgirl. I came out and headed back down the stairs again. It was a nice house; I wondered if a woman lived there. There were pictures on the walls and books in piles. There was a large plant in the alcove where the staircase turned. I stopped dead and looked at it, its old, gnarled trunk and its dark green leaves. I crouched down and pressed a finger against its mossy soil. I sat down beside it and put my head in my hands. I didn’t know whether to cry or giggle or scream. I didn’t do any of them. I just stood up and went down the rest of the stairs, very slowly. I walked into the kitchen. Ben was still sitting at the table. He wasn’t doing anything, just staring into space. He looked tired, as well. Tired and a bit low, perhaps.

Like a person in a dream — my dream, the dream of a life I’d once inhabited, a dream I couldn’t remember — I walked round the table and laid one hand against his face. I watched his expression soften. ‘Was it like this?’ I said. I bent over him and kissed him on the side of his mouth. He closed his eyes and I kissed his eyelids. I kissed him on his mouth until it parted. I felt soft and new. ‘Was it?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘So what was it like?’

‘You said to me that you felt ugly. You’d been talking about Terry. So I took you by the hand.’ He took me by the hand and led me across the room to where there was a full-length mirror hanging on the wall. He placed me in front of it so that I was looking at myself, ragged, blotchy, pale, straggly, worn-out Abigail. He stood behind me and we caught each other’s gaze in the mirror. ‘I brought you over here and I made you look at yourself. I said that you were beautiful.’

‘I look like something you found on a skip.’

‘Shut up, Abbie. I’m talking. You were beautiful then and you’re beautiful now. I told you that you were lovely and then I couldn’t stop myself. I kissed you like this, on your soft neck. Yes, you leant your head just like that.’

‘What then?’ I said. I felt faint.

‘I kissed you like this and rubbed my hands over you, your face and neck. Then I carried on like this.’

He was kissing my neck and at the same time he undid the buttons on the front of my shirt until it opened.

‘That right?’ I murmured, not very coherently.

He reached under my shirt and unfastened my bra at the back and pulled it up at the front and then his hands were on my breasts. His soft lips were still on my neck, not so much kissing my skin as stroking it.

‘Like this,’ he said.

I was going to say something but I couldn’t speak. His right hand stroked my stomach gently, moving downwards. He deftly snapped open the button at the top of my trousers and opened the zip. He knelt down behind me, kissing his way down my spine as he did so. He put his hands inside the waistband and pulled my trousers and knickers down around my ankles. He stood up again. He was behind me, his arms around me.

‘Look at that,’ he said, and I looked at my body and in the mirror I looked at him, looking at my body and I looked at my body with his gaze. And I looked into the mirror and thought of my naked body in that mirror, when was it? Two weeks ago?

When I spoke to him my voice was drowsy with arousal. ‘I look undignified,’ I said.

‘You look wonderful.’

‘And I can’t run away.’

‘You can’t run away.’

‘What did I do after that?’

And then he showed me. I had to hobble, ridiculously, towards his bedroom and I fell over on the bed. I kicked off my shoes and shook off my clothes. They were virtually off anyway. Then he took off his own clothes, taking his time. He reached over to a drawer and took out a condom, opening the packet with his teeth. I helped him put it on. ‘I know about this,’ I said. ‘I found the morning-after pill among my stuff.’

‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t have time.’

‘I’m sure I was to blame as well.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, gasping now. ‘You were.’

We looked at each other. He put up one hand and touched my face, my neck, my breasts. ‘I thought I’d never touch you again,’ he said.

‘Was it like this?’

‘Yes.’

‘This?’

‘Yes. Don’t stop.’

We didn’t stop. We looked at each other the whole time, sometimes smiling at each other. When he came, he cried out like a man in pain. I gathered him to me and held him close. I kissed his damp hair.

‘It can’t have been better than that,’ I said.

He put his lips against the pulse in my throat and then he groaned something into my neck.

‘What was that?’

‘I said, not an hour’s gone by without me missing you.’

‘Perhaps I’ve been missing you, too, but I didn’t know it.’

‘How did you know?’

‘The bonsai tree.’ I drew back and glared at him. ‘So why the fuck didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted you to feel something, not be told you had felt it. If that makes sense.’

‘I don’t know. There’s a bit of me waiting to be furious with you. Really furious. That’s not a joke. I’ve been searching and searching for bits of the me that I lost, blundering around like a terrified blind woman, and you knew that, and you could have helped me all along. But you didn’t. You chose not to. You knew things about me that I didn’t know about me. You still do. You can remember fucking me and I’ve got no memory at all. You know the other me, the me I keep hidden, and I don’t know the other you, do I? What other things do you know about me? How will I know that you’ve told me everything? I won’t. You’ve got bits of my life. That’s not right. Is it?’

‘No.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do,’ he said helplessly. ‘I wanted to tell you but what would I have said?’

‘The truth,’ I said. ‘That would have been a good place to start.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

I stroked his chest softly. Before I had been grabbed and shut up in a cellar, I had been happy. Everyone had said so. I’d been happy because I’d left a man who beat me up, left a job I disliked, and met Ben. Since coming out of hospital, I had been haunted by the fact that the days I had lost were ones full of lovely memories. I had lost the bits I wanted to keep; I had kept the bits I wanted to let go. Thoughts flitted through my head, or fragments of thoughts. Something about saying yes to life, something about not spending the rest of my life being scared.

Later, we had a bath together. Then he went downstairs and made us both sandwiches, which he brought up on a tray, with a bottle of red wine. I sat against the pillows.

‘You’re always making me meals,’ I said.

‘We had oysters before.’

‘Did we? I love oysters.’

‘I know. That’s why we had them. We’ll have them again.’

I picked up his hand and kissed it, then bit into the sandwich. ‘So it was a Wednesday evening, right?’

‘Monday.’

‘Monday! You’re sure? Straight after we first met?’

‘Sure.’

I frowned.

‘But you didn’t wear a condom?’

‘I did.’

‘I don’t get it. You said earlier…’

‘You came back.’

‘On Wednesday?’

‘Yes.’

‘You should have fucking well told me that.’

‘I know.’

‘And you didn’t…’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘You came on an impulse. With the tree. We’d arranged to meet the next evening — Thursday — because I had several people round on the Wednesday. Clients. They were there already and you knocked on the door and handed me the tree. I kissed you.’

‘Yes?’

‘And then I kissed you some more.’

‘Go on.’

‘You undid the buttons on my shirt. We could hear my guests talking to each other in the next-door room.’

‘And?’

‘We went to the bathroom and locked the door and we fucked.’

‘Standing up?’

‘Yes. It took about thirty seconds.’

‘Show me,’ I said.

I stayed the night with Ben. In spite of everything, I slept heavily and when I woke in the morning, I could smell coffee and toast. Through the curtains, the sky looked blue. I was frightened by my sudden happiness. It was like the coming of spring.