‘I thought you’d given up,’ I said, without really thinking.
The hand holding the cigarette paused in midair, before continuing on its path. After several more inhales he spoke again, without turning around.
‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. I could tell he was making an effort to keep his voice measured. ‘You’re claiming that Tess was involved with that nutter, she killed herself, and you – whoever you are – encouraged her to do it?’
‘I didn’t “encourage” her to do anything. It was her own decision,’ I said, and briefly explained how I’d met Adrian and my involvement with Tess had come about. I talked to his back, staring at the pinstripes of his jacket, willing him to turn around. ‘She was in sound mind,’ I added. ‘She knew what she wanted.’
Connor was silent for some seconds, then dropped the cigarette. He didn’t squash it out with his shoe and the smoke drifted in my direction. I didn’t mind, as I usually did; somehow it didn’t smell as nasty as other people’s. Then, at last, he turned to face me and said, as if it had only just dawned on him, ‘You mean, I’ve been writing to you all this time?’
I nodded, and smiled. It wasn’t surprising he had taken a while to digest the truth: there was a lot to take in. Now, I hoped, the implications were becoming clear. He thought the person he had fallen in love with was in Canada, out of reach, but actually, she was right here in front of him.
Connor was staring at me, but I couldn’t fully read his expression. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head, and it occurred to me that he didn’t know where he stood with me, Leila. He might think I was just doing my job when I wrote to him; that I couldn’t care less about him.
‘I meant it all, you know,’ I said. ‘Everything I wrote.’
He didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at me. I started to feel a little flustered, and found more words coming out of my mouth.
‘I’m – I’m not going out with anyone, you know. I’m single. And available.’
Finally, at this, his mouth curled into something like a smile, and he spoke, slowly and clearly.
‘Are you fucking insane?’
Now it was my turn to be lost for words. Connor looked me up and down in an exaggerated manner, still wearing that odd half-smile.
‘You really think I would go out with you?’ he said.
It felt as if a balloon had suddenly been inflated inside my chest. My breathing turned shallow, and for a few moments I could do nothing except stare at Connor. He looked steadily back at me; now he was ugly, his face a stranger’s. And then, just as suddenly, I was galvanized by fury.
‘Well, I suppose it would be hard for you to go out with anyone, wouldn’t it,’ I said, ‘since you’re already married!’
Connor flinched.
‘I saw you! You and Chrissie and the children, all cosy in the car. You said you’d split up ages ago! You said you were in love with me and wanted to be with me. Why did you say that? I …’
‘What the fuck?’ said Connor. ‘When did you see us? Are you stalking me?’
I shook my head, furious that he was trying to evade my point.
‘You said you were in love with me,’ I repeated, loudly and slowly, as if speaking to a child.
‘Ssssh,’ hissed Connor, before softening his expression for the benefit of someone behind me. I turned to see that a couple of his colleagues had emerged from the office for lunch, and were glancing at us with curiosity. Connor gave them a nod and a smile, which was wiped off his face the instant they passed out of sight.
‘You said you were in love with me …’ I began again.
‘Stop saying that,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know you.’
‘I’m Tess!’ I said, almost shouting. How could he still not get it? ‘Don’t you understand? I’m Tess.’
Connor gave a dry, horrible laugh.
‘I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but I’m sure of one thing, and that is that you are definitely not Tess.’
‘Of course I’m not actually Tess.’ By now I was waving my arms about, and anger and frustration meant my thoughts came tumbling out in no sensible order. ‘Those things you wrote – were they lies? I told you about the pig’s trotter! You said that you laughed in court out of happiness, just at the thought of me! Was that true?’
With each question my voice grew still louder, and I noticed passers-by were looking over at us. Connor had backed away and was staring at me.
‘Get away from me,’ he said.
The look he was giving me, a blend of disgust and fear, was too much to bear.
‘And you’re a …’ I paused because I couldn’t think of just the right word, and then I found it – one of Tess’s favourites, which I had never said out loud before – ‘a cunt.’
As I hoped, Connor looked taken aback; but the word also defused my anger. I suddenly felt exhausted, and when I spoke again, my voice had returned to normal volume.
‘Does Chrissie know?’ I said.
‘Of course not,’ he said.
‘Would she leave you if she found out?’
He looked at me sharply.
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, in answer to your question, I don’t know. I don’t know what Chrissie would do if she found out. I suppose she would leave me.’ He seemed far away, as if he was speaking to himself. ‘I can’t believe Tess is dead. I can’t believe you … I can’t believe any of this.’
‘I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘You’re the one who’s lied.’
Connor gave that cold, barking laugh.
‘You’re calling me deceitful?’
But I didn’t have the energy to reply and start arguing again and neither, it seemed, did he. His shoulders sagged.
‘Who are you?’ he said quietly, but it wasn’t a real question. And then, without saying goodbye, he turned and walked away, not stopping at his office but carrying on up toward the main road. I stood, watching, until he was out of sight.
I remained where I was standing for several minutes, before it occurred to me that Connor might return to work at any moment. I set off at a brisk walk which quickly morphed into a run, stumbling in my slippy shoes as I tried to escape from Temple. I lost my sense of direction, and what had once seemed a magical enclave now felt like a fortress, each of its cobbled streets confusingly similar and populated by men in suits who looked just like Connor.
Eventually I found an exit, and emerged with relief onto Victoria Embankment. Lanes of traffic lay between me and the river but I crossed the road without waiting for a sensible gap, dimly conscious of car horns and shouts in my wake. I leant against the wall above the water. Now supported, my body went limp. It was all I could do to keep my head upright.
I didn’t feel angry, or even disappointed, with myself. It was as if I had been emptied of feeling. The word ‘gutted’ entered my head – at school, people had thrown it around in reference to trivial events and I had dismissed it as a slangy figure of speech, but now it was the only word that fitted. I felt I had been completely gutted, and my body was now as useless as a banana skin.
The brown river glinted in the sun, the tide still low, and the breeze carried a dank tinge. On the opposite bank, I could see people leaning on the wall, as I was; unlike me, however, they all seemed to be in pairs, nestled close as they gazed out over the water. I turned my head east, towards Tower Bridge, and saw that the group of mudlarkers were still down on the river bed. The tiny, crouching figures in their luminous jackets might as well have been on a different planet. Tess used to say that adult life was just an exercise in filling in time: if so, I thought, then maybe these people had the right idea. Digging around in the mud was absurd, but at least it was harmless.
I closed my eyes, but attempting to process what had just happened with Connor made my head hurt with a physical pain. How could I have got the situation so terribly wrong? How could something that felt so real to me have actually meant nothi
ng?
I should go back to the flat, I thought, and pictured my laptop waiting for me on the desk, the tiny light on its power cord glowing in the shade of the restaurant sign. But the image no longer offered any comfort. What was the point, when there would never be any more emails from Connor? In fact, the thought of getting back to work, continuing to be Tess without him, now suddenly felt abhorrent.
What I did next was not due to anger or another form of high emotion. Rather, it was a rational decision; or so it felt at the time. On a practical level, I did not belong out here in society, and I could not bear the thought of the flat, with its associations. I needed somewhere else to go. Moreover, I could no longer trust my judgement, and, without that, what was I? I had to surrender, and let someone else step in and take control.
I took out my phone and Googled the closest police station.
It was near Fleet Street, and in five minutes I was there. I hadn’t been to a police station before, but it didn’t look like I had been missing much. Although the outside was quite old and grand, inside wasn’t more interesting than a bank foyer, with plastic chairs bolted to the floor and leaflet holders on the walls. There was a small queue at the front desk, and I waited impatiently behind a foreign couple as they falteringly explained that they needed to report the loss of their phone for insurance purposes, and then conferred at length on even the simplest questions they were asked.
After fifteen minutes, I felt compelled to take action.
‘Excuse me,’ I said loudly, to the man behind the window. ‘I’ve got something important to say.’
The policeman looked at me without expression. He had a tired, meaty face.
‘Don’t you all,’ he replied. ‘If you could just wait your turn.’
Eventually, the couple moved away, clutching their completed form, and I stepped forward to the glass. The policeman raised his brow in weary enquiry.
‘I wish to make a confession,’ I said.
‘About what, may I ask?’
‘My involvement with Adrian Dervish.’
‘And he might be … ?’
I sighed with impatience, and for the second time that morning, produced my copy of yesterday’s newspaper and held it up to the glass. The man glanced at it.
‘You know this man, do you?’
‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of. I mean, I don’t know where he is.’
He looked again at the paper.
‘Well, madam, if you care to take a seat, someone will come to take your statement in due course.’
I was, I admit, surprised and somewhat disappointed by the lack of urgency and excitement shown by the police, an attitude that continued when, after a further twenty-minute wait, I was called to give my statement. A young blonde policewoman showed me through a door and into a small room equipped with a table and four chairs. We sat opposite each other and she pressed play on an old-fashioned tape recorder with two cassettes. As I spoke she also took notes, holding her pen in the same way Rashida used to, with her hand curled over the top.
The woman was nicer than the man at the front desk and seemed to know something about the case, if not much more than could be gathered from the newspaper article. She started by asking a few questions – how I met Adrian, and so on – but when she realized I was going to give a thorough, chronological account of my dealings with him, she let me talk largely uninterrupted.
I had been nervous beforehand but, as I spoke, I found that the act of unburdening was quite enjoyable. It was also pleasing to have someone’s undivided attention. But then, about half an hour into the interview, things abruptly changed.
By then, I had reached the point where Tess and I formulated her post-check-out plans, and was describing the set-up in Sointula when the woman interrupted.
‘Did Adrian Dervish at any point put pressure on you to carry out the scheme?’
I was confused, and asked what she meant.
‘When it became apparent that you were not going to go through with the plan, did Adrian Dervish try and persuade you to do so?’
She thought I hadn’t actually done it. That I was just another Randall Howard.
It was like the moment earlier with Connor, when he asked when Tess had died – an opportunity to stop the full truth coming out, with all of its attendant complications. This time, however, I didn’t hesitate.
‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I did go through with it. Tess killed herself, and I impersonated her.’
There followed some seconds in which the sound of the whirring tapes seemed to have greatly increased in volume. Then the policewoman leaned toward the machine and announced that the interview was being suspended. She got up and left the room, returning a few minutes later. Then she sat down, turned the tape recorder back on and said, her voice more clear and formal than before:
‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of assisting or encouraging the suicide of Tess Williams.’
I said I didn’t need a lawyer, but they didn’t seem to believe me. Every half-hour, DCI Winder would pause the questioning to remind me that I had a right to legal representation and ask whether I wanted to exercise it. After the third time, I asked him why he was doing this when my answer was always the same.
‘We need to be sure that you’re sure, and that you understand the implications of your decision,’ he said. Besides, he added, the interview tapes only captured forty-five minutes of recording at a time, so this way the warning was included on each side.
This prompted me to ask something that I had been wondering about since coming into the station: why did they use old-fashioned tapes, and not digital recording?
‘Digital is easier to tamper with,’ he said.
This, of course, made me think about the software I had used to imitate Tess’s voice on the phone; however, I resisted mentioning it as, again, I was going over everything chronologically and had not yet reached that part in the story.
DCI Winder was the investigating officer for the case of Adrian Dervish, and had arrived at the Fleet Street station just over an hour after my arrest. During the wait, I had handed over the keys to my flat so they could search it, after using the phone call I was offered to call Jonty and make sure he was still at his parents’. I didn’t want him to be alarmed by the police coming in.
Jonty confirmed that he was still in Cardiff and wouldn’t be returning until the next day.
‘Everything OK?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking on my feet. ‘It’s just that I’m at a friend’s house all day and Amazon were going to deliver something to the flat.’ As I spoke, I was disconcerted to see that the young policewoman was writing down what I was saying.
‘What friend?’ said Jonty, sounding amused.
‘Must go,’ I said.
From then until DCI Winder arrived, I was largely left alone. At the beginning they offered me a cup of tea and I said yes, even though I don’t like tea. The polystyrene cup now sat on the table, its contents untouched and stone cold, and I gazed at it and thought about prison. I had seen pictures of cells on TV; they didn’t looked so bad. It might not actually be that different from being in my flat, I thought.
When DCI Winder entered, the atmosphere in the room seemed to change; I could sense the policewoman sitting up straighter. He was quite old, with mottled red skin and a bumpy nose and had lots of dark hair on the backs of his hands. He introduced himself, speaking with some sort of accent, and then sat down and the tapes went on again.
Unlike my previous interviewer, DCI Winder knew a lot about the case and asked detailed questions about how Red Pill worked and what Adrian had said to me on the Heath and the exact terms of the arrangement with Tess.
‘Did Tess pay Adrian?’ he asked.
I said I didn’t know, and admitted that the thought hadn’t occurred to me.
‘We have reason to believe that Tess might have given Adrian a large sum of money to facilitate the impersonation,’ he said, and explained that Randall Howar
d’s client, ‘Mark’, had told the police that he had given Adrian £15,000.
‘If that’s true,’ he added, ‘it means that Adrian was profiting from the death of others. Which would make this a very serious matter. Do you understand, Leila?’
I nodded.
‘Did Adrian pay you?’ he said.
I hesitated. ‘Not exactly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I think he actually posted me the money, but it came from Tess.’
‘How much was it?’
‘Eighty-eight pounds.’
‘A day?’
‘A week.’
He frowned. ‘That’s a funny amount.’
‘It’s just what I needed to live on,’ I said. ‘It was a fulltime job, you see.’
DCI Winder looked at me unblinking for a few moments.
‘Why did you do it, Leila?’
‘Tess wanted to die, and I believed in her right to do so, so I helped her.’
‘And if you hadn’t helped her, do you think she would have still done it? Or would she be alive today?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, finally.
Later, he asked about my own state of mind. Was I depressed? Had I ever considered suicide myself?
I answered firmly in the negative.
‘Yet you empathized so greatly with someone who wanted to end their life that you were willing to risk being arrested for them?’
I had never thought about it in those terms, but I nodded.
‘I suppose so.’
The two questions he asked again and again were the ones I had no answer to. Where was Adrian now? And where was Tess’s body?
After three hours of questioning, DCI Winder said that was enough for the day. It was 8 p.m. The moment he clicked off the tape, I realized that I was more tired than I could ever remember being before. I could have put my head down on the table and fallen asleep right there. Instead, they led me to a cell, and I curled up on a hard, narrow bed.
Then, what felt like mere minutes later, I was being shaken awake and told I was being released on police bail. It was the morning; DCI Winder had gone, and I was back in the charge of the young policewoman. I was not to leave London without informing them, she told me, and must report to the station each month.
Kiss Me First Page 24
