Land of the Living

by Nicci French

  "DI Cross is at the Castle Road station."

  "Why?"

  There was no answer.

  Castle Road was a shiny new police station with lots of plate glass and coloured tubular steel. We drove round to the back and then I was led in quickly through a small door by the car park and up some stairs. Cross was in a small office with another detective, a middle-aged, balding man who offered me his hand and introduced himself as Jim Burrows.

  "Thanks for coming," said Cross. "How are you doing?"

  "Is this about Jo?"

  "What?"

  "Because I drove down to Dorset and she isn't at the cottage where she normally stays. Also, I've talked to this man who knows her and he's rung other people who know her and nobody knows where she is."

  "Right," said Cross, looking at Burrows uneasily. It was a see-what-I've-been-talking-about kind of look. "But there's something else I wanted to ask you. Please sit down." He gestured me to a chair in front of the desk. "Do you know a woman called Sally

  Adamson?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Who is she?"

  "Have you been in touch with Terry Wilmott?"

  I suddenly felt a current of cold nausea run through my whole body. It started at the top of my head and ran down to the tips of my toes. Something bad had happened.

  "I went round to collect some mail a couple of times." A thought occurred to me. "Sally. Is that his girlfriend?"

  "His girlfriend?"

  "I don't know exactly what the situation is. I've run into her a couple of times. She was arriving as I left. I don't know her second name. I don't know if they're actually together. But I think Terry is one of those people who is psychologically incapable of not being in a relationship. I mean, when we first met.. ." And then I stopped. "Has something happened?"

  The two men looked at each other and Burrows stepped forward. "She's died," he said. "Sally Adamson. She was found dead last night."

  I looked from one man to the other. I had about fifty questions to ask, so I started with the stupidest one. "Dead?"

  "That's right," said Cross. "And there's something else. Her body was found under a hedge just inside the front garden of number fifty-four Westcott Street. Strangled, by the way. This wasn't natural causes."

  I shivered. Suddenly I felt cold. "Terry lives at number sixty-two," I said.

  "Yes," said Cross.

  "Oh, God," I said. "Oh, my God."

  "Can we get you something?" Cross said. "Some coffee?"

  I shook my head. "It's a nightmare," I muttered. "It keeps on getting worse. Dear God. Oh, poor Sally. But what do you want me for?" Cross didn't answer. He just looked at me and then more realization battered its way into my tired brain.

  "No," I said. "No and no and no. There's lots of crime around there. A woman on her own, at night, leaving the flat. She could easily be mugged."

  Cross walked across the office to a table in the corner. He returned carrying something in a clear plastic bag. He laid it down on Burrows's desk. "Sally Adamson's purse," he said. "Which we found in Sally Adamson's shoulder-bag, lying next to her body. It contains forty-five pounds in cash. Two credit cards. Several store-cards. It was untouched."

  "No," I said, more to myself than to the two officers. "No. It doesn't make any sense. Does Terry know?"

  "Terence Wilmott is downstairs," said Jim Burrows. "My colleagues are talking to him at the moment."

  "What's he saying?"

  "Not much. He has his lawyer with him."

  "You don't seriously think .. . ? You can't .. ." I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes. Perhaps I could go to sleep and when I woke up this would all have faded away, like a dream breaks up into vague, half-remembered images.

  Burrows cleared his throat and I lifted my head and looked at him. He picked up a typed piece of paper from his desk and looked at it. "On at least three occasions in November and December last year, you phoned the police about your boyfriend."

  "That's right," I said. "And they didn't do anything about it. They didn't believe me."

  "What did he do?"

  "There was nothing complicated about it. Terry gets depressed. He gets angry. He gets drunk. Sometimes he lashes out."

  "He hit you?"

  "Look, if you think for a single minute that Terry would murder a woman'

  "Please, Miss Devereaux, we can talk about your opinions later but first can you answer our questions?"

  I shut my mouth in what was meant to be an eloquently contemptuous way. "All right," I said.

  "He hit you?"

  "Yes. But-'

  "Slapped you?"

  "Yes."

  "Did he strike you with a closed hand?"

  "You mean a fist? Once or twice."

  "Do you mean just once or twice or that there were one or two occasions on which he used his fists against you?"

  I took a deep breath. "The second. It happened a couple of times."

  "Did he ever use a weapon of any kind?"

  I threw up my arms in a wild sort of gesticulation. "This is all wrong," I said. "These yes and no questions aren't right. It was all messier than that."

  Burrows moved closer to me, spoke quietly. "Did he ever threaten you with anything? Such as a knife?"

  "I guess so, yes."

  "You guess so?"

  "Yes. He did, I mean."

  "Did he ever hold you around your neck, with his hands or his arm?"

  And then I took myself by surprise. I started to cry and cry, helplessly. I fumbled for a tissue but my hands didn't seem to be working properly. I didn't even know why I was crying. I didn't know whether it was because of the wreckage of my life with Terry. Or whether it was because of the fears I had for myself. And then there was Sally. Sally whose second name I hadn't known. I tried to picture her face and couldn't. She was a woman I had probably wished ill towards, if I had thought anything about her at all, and now she had had ill done to her. Did that make me in a small but definite way responsible?

  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 tho
ught 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