by Nicci French
I heard him walk across the room. Past the kitchen. Towards the bathroom, and the gushing shower. I took the new Chubb lock between my thumb and forefinger, ready for use, and tensed my body to run.
‘Alice,’ he called. ‘Alice.’
Now. I sprinted out of the kitchen, into the hall, and wrenched open the front door.
‘Alice!’
He was there, striding towards me, yellow flowers crushed against his chest. I saw his face, his gorgeous murderer’s face.
I pulled shut the door and thrust the heavy key into the lock and twisted it frantically. Come on, please, come on. It turned in the lock, and I pulled it free and ran blindly towards the stairs. As I did so I heard him hammering on the door. He was strong, oh, God, he was strong enough to break it. He’d done it easily enough before, when he’d broken into our own flat to kill Sherpa.
I kept on running down the stairs, taking them two at a time. At one point, my knees buckled under me and I twisted my ankle. But he wasn’t coming. The hammering grew fainter. The new lock was holding. If I came through this I would gain a bitter kind of satisfaction from the fact that he had trapped himself when he had broken the door to murder our cat.
Now I was on the pavement. I sprinted up the road towards the high street and only when I was at the top did I turn my head quickly to see if I could see him. Was that him, that figure running towards me in the distance? I hurtled across the main road, between cars, dodging a bicycle. I saw the rider’s angry face as he swerved to avoid me. I had a sharp pain in my side but I didn’t slow down. If he caught up with me I would yell and howl, but people would just think I was a madwoman. Nobody ever interferes in domestic quarrels anyway. I thought I heard someone shout my name, but maybe it was just my screaming imagination.
I knew where I was headed. It was near here. Only a few more yards. If I could only make it in time. I saw the blue light, a numbered van parked outside. I summoned up my last energy and sprang in through the doors, coming to an abrupt, undignified stop at the front desk, where a policeman’s bored face was staring up at me.
‘Yes?’ he said, picking up his pen, and I started to laugh.
Thirty-eight
I sat in a corridor and waited and watched. I saw everything as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. People in and out of uniform bustled up and down, phones rang. I’m not sure whether I had an over-dramatic sense of what I’d find in a central London police station, whether I had expected to see pimps and prostitutes and lowlifes being hustled through and booked, whether I’d expected that I myself would be led into an interview room with a false mirror where I’d be alternately grilled by a nice and a nasty cop. But I hadn’t expected to sit aimlessly on a moulded plastic chair getting in the way in a corridor, as if I had shown up in a casualty department with an injury that was insufficiently serious to merit speedy treatment.
In normal circumstances I would have been intrigued by these glimpses of other people’s dramas but now I was quite lost to such things. I was wondering what Adam was thinking and doing outside. I had to make a plan. It was almost certain that whoever talked to me would consider that I was mad and usher me back out into the frightening world behind the Plexiglas at the front desk and all that was waiting for me there. I had an uncomfortable feeling that accusing my husband of seven murders was seven times as unconvincing as accusing him of just one, which in itself would have been implausible enough.
What I wanted more than anything else in the world was for a paternal, or maternal, figure to tell me that they believed me, that they would deal with it from here on in and that my troubles were over. There was no chance of that happening. I had to take control. I remembered once when I was a teenager coming back drunk from a party and forcing myself to do an imitation of the way a sober person behaved. But I took such immense pains to walk around the sofa and the chairs so that I wouldn’t stumble over them, I was so extremely sober, that my mother instantly asked me what I’d been up to. I probably reeked of Babycham as well. I needed to do better than that today. I needed to convince them. After all, I had convinced Greg, for all the good that had done me. It wasn’t essential to convince them entirely. It was just a matter of keeping them intrigued enough so that they might think there was something to investigate. I mustn’t go back out there – into the world where Adam was waiting for me.
For the first time in years, I badly wanted my mother and father; not as they were now, though, ageing and uncertain, fixed in their disapproval and determinedly blind to the bitterness and terror of the world. No, I wanted them as they had seemed to me as a little girl, before I had learned to distrust them: tall, solid figures telling me what was right and what was wrong, protecting me from hurt, guiding me. I remembered my mother sewing buttons back on to shirts, sitting in the bulky armchair under the window, and how she had seemed so entirely competent and reassuring to me. My father carving the joint on a Sunday afternoon, very particular as he shaved off thin pink slices of beef. I could see myself sitting between them, growing in their shelter. How had that sensible little girl, with braces and ankle socks, turned into me, here in this police station, scared for my life? I wanted to be that little girl again, and rescuable.
The female police officer who had brought me through came back with a middle-aged man in a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. She looked like a schoolgirl returning with an exasperated senior teacher. I guessed that she had gone around the office looking for somebody who wasn’t on the phone or deep in filling out forms and this man had agreed to come into the corridor for a second, preferably to make me go away. He looked down at me. I wondered if I should stand up. He looked a bit like my father, and that resemblance made my eyes fill with tears. I blinked them back, fiercely. I must seem calm.
‘Miss… ?’
‘Loudon,’ I said. ‘Alice Loudon.’
‘I understand you have some information you want to report,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well?’
I looked around. ‘Are we going to talk out here?’
The man frowned. ‘I’m sorry, love, but we’re pressed for space at the moment. If you could bear with us.’
‘All right,’ I said. I clenched my fists in my lap so he wouldn’t see them trembling, cleared my throat and tried to keep my voice steady. ‘A woman called Tara Blanchard was found murdered in a canal a few weeks ago. Have you heard about it?’ The detective shook his head. People kept pushing past but I continued, ‘I know who killed her.’
The detective held up a hand to stop me. ‘Hang on, my dear. The best thing is if I go off and find the station that’s dealing with the case and then I’ll give them a ring and you can pop over and have a chat with them. All right?’
‘No, it isn’t. I came here because I was in danger. The person who killed Tara Blanchard is my husband.’
I expected some reaction to this statement, if only a laugh of disbelief, but there was nothing.
‘Your husband?’ said the detective, catching the eye of the WPC. ‘And why do you think that?’
‘I think that Tara Blanchard was blackmailing, or at least harassing, my husband so he killed her.’
‘Harassing him?’
‘We were getting phone calls constantly, late at night, early in the morning. And there were threatening notes.’
He looked blank. Was he going to have to start trying to make sense of what I was saying? The prospect can’t have been appealing. I looked around. I couldn’t continue in this setting. What I was going to say might seem more convincing if it were conducted in a more formal style.
‘I’m sorry, Mr… I don’t know your name.’
‘Byrne. Detective Inspector Byrne.’
‘Well, can’t we talk somewhere a bit more private? It feels strange talking in a corridor.’
He gave a weary sigh to show his impatience. ‘There are no rooms free,’ he said. ‘You can come through and sit by my desk, if that’s any better.’
I nod
ded and Byrne led me through. On the way he got me a coffee. I accepted it though I didn’t feel like it. Anything that would make us seem as if we had a trusting relationship.
‘Now, where were we, can you remember?’ he asked, as he sat down by his desk with me on the other side.
‘We were getting these threatening notes.’
‘From the murdered woman?’
‘Yes, Tara Blanchard.’
‘Did she sign them?’
‘No, but after her death I went to her flat and found newspaper articles about my husband among her rubbish.’
Byrne looked surprised, not to say alarmed. ‘You searched her rubbish?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were these newspaper articles?’
‘My husband – his name is Adam Tallis – is a well-known mountaineer. He was involved in a terrible disaster on a Himalayan mountain last year in which five people died. He’s a sort of hero. Anyway, there was the problem that we received another of those notes after Tara Blanchard had died. Not only that. The note was connected to a break-in at our flat. Our cat was killed.’
‘Did you report the break-in?’
‘Yes. Two officers from this police station came round.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ Byrne said wearily, and then, as if it were almost too much effort to be worth pointing out, ‘but if this happened after this woman apparently died…’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘It was impossible. But a few days ago I was clearing out the flat and under a desk I found a scrunched-up envelope. On the paper Adam had clearly been practising writing the note that was left that last time.’
‘So?’
‘So Adam had been trying to break any possible connection between the notes and this woman.’
‘Can I see this note?’
I had been dreading this moment. ‘Adam found out about what I suspect him of. When I got back to the flat today, the paper was gone.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘I wrote everything down and put it in an envelope and gave it to a friend of mine, in case anything should happen to me. But she read it. And she gave it to Adam.’
Byrne gave a half-smile then quickly suppressed it. ‘Maybe she had your best interests at heart,’ he said. ‘Maybe she wanted to help.’
‘I’m sure she wanted to help. But she didn’t help. She put me in danger.’
‘The problem is, er, Mrs…’
‘Alice Loudon.’
‘The problem is that murder is a very serious offence.’ He was talking to me as if he were instructing a primary-school child about road safety. ‘And because it’s such a serious offence, we need evidence, not just suspicion. People quite often feel suspicious about people they know. They suspect them of crimes when they’ve had arguments. The best thing is to sort out those differences of opinion.’
I could feel him slipping away from me. I had to continue.
‘You haven’t let me finish. The reason Tara was harassing Adam was that, I believe, she suspected that he had killed her sister, Adele.’
‘Killed her sister?’
Byrne raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Worse and worse. I pressed my hands against the desk, to stop the sense that the ground was tilting beneath me; tried not to think of Adam waiting outside the police station for me. He would be standing there, quite still, blue eyes fixed on the door, which I would come out of. I knew what he looked like when he was waiting for something that he wanted: patient, absolutely focused.
‘Adele Blanchard was married and lived in Corrick. It’s a village in the Midlands, fairly near Birmingham. She and her husband were trekkers, climbers, and were part of a group of friends that included Adam. She had an affair with Adam and broke it off in January nineteen ninety. A couple of weeks later she disappeared.’
‘And you think your husband killed her?’
‘He wasn’t my husband then. We only met this year.’
‘Is there any reason for thinking he killed this other woman?’
‘Adele Blanchard rejected Adam and she died. He had one other long-term girlfriend. She was a doctor and a mountaineer called Françoise Colet.’
‘And where is she?’ asked Byrne, with a slightly sarcastic expression.
‘She died on the mountain in Nepal last year.’
‘And I suppose your husband killed her as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘Just wait, let me take you through it properly.’ Now he thought I was insane.
‘Mrs, er, I’m very busy. I’ve got…’ He pointed vaguely at the piles of paper on his desk.
‘Look, I know this is difficult,’ I said, trying to suppress a feeling of panic that was rising in me, like a flood about to engulf me entirely. My voice came out in a gasp. ‘I really appreciate you listening to me. If you could just give me a few more minutes and I can take you through it. After that, if you want me to, I’ll just go away and forget about the whole thing.’
There was a visible expression of relief on his face. That was evidently the most hopeful news he had heard since I had arrived.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But briefly.’
‘I promise,’ I said, but of course I wasn’t brief. I had the magazine with me and with all the questions and repetitions and explanations the account lasted almost an hour. I took him through the details of the expedition, the arrangements involving the coloured lines, the non-English-speaking Tomas Benn, the chaos of the storm, the repeated descents and ascents made by Adam while Greg and Claude were disabled. I talked and talked, gabbling against my death sentence. As long as he was listening, I would be alive. As I told him the final details, fading away into unwilling silence, a slow smile spread across Byrne’s face. I had his attention at last. ‘So,’ I said at the end, ‘the only possible explanation is that Adam deliberately arranged for the group with Françoise in it to go down the wrong side of the Gemini Ridge.’
Byrne gave a broad grin. ‘Gelb?’ he said. ‘That’s German for yellow, you say?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to give you credit. It’s good.’
‘So you believe me.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. It’s possible. But, then, maybe they misheard him. Or maybe he really did shout, "Help."’
‘But I’ve explained why that’s impossible.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a matter for the authorities in Nepal or wherever that mountain was.’
‘But that’s not my point. I’ve established a psychological pattern. Can’t you see that, on the basis of what I’ve told you, it’s worth investigating the other two murders?’
Byrne had a hunted, cornered look by this time and there was now a long silence as he considered what I’d said and how to answer me. I clung to the desk as if I were about to fall.
‘No,’ he said finally. I started to protest but he continued, ‘Miss Loudon, you must agree that I’ve done you the politeness of listening to what you had to say. The only thing I can recommend to you is that if you wish to take these matters further you should talk to the police forces concerned. But unless you have anything concrete to offer them, I don’t believe there’s anything they can do.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. My voice sounded flat, drained of all expression. And, indeed, it didn’t matter any more. There was nothing left to do.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Adam knows about it all now. This was my only chance. You’re right, of course. I’ve got no evidence. I just know. I just know Adam.’ I was going to stand up, say goodbye, leave, but on an impulse I leaned across the desk and took Byrne’s hand. He looked startled. ‘What’s your first name?’
‘Bob,’ he said uneasily.
‘If, in the next few weeks, you hear that I’ve killed myself or fallen under a train or drowned, there’ll be lots of evidence that I’ve behaved madly over the last few weeks so it will be easy to conclude
that I killed myself while the balance of my mind was disturbed or that I was having a breakdown and was an accident waiting to happen. But it won’t be true. I want to stay alive. All right?’
He delicately removed my hand from his. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Talk it over with your husband. You can sort it out.’
‘But…’
Then we were interrupted. A uniformed officer beckoned Byrne away and they talked in low voices, occasionally looking across at me. Byrne nodded at the man, who went back the way he had come. He sat down at his desk once more and looked at me with an expression of great solemnity.
‘Your husband is at the front desk.’
‘Of course,’ I said bitterly.
‘No,’ said Byrne gently. ‘It’s not like that. He’s here with a doctor. He wants to help you.’
‘A doctor?’
‘I understand that you have been under pressure lately. You’ve been acting irrationally. I gather there’s some suggestion of pretending to be a journalist, that sort of thing. Can we bring them through?’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. I had lost. What was the point of fighting it? Byrne picked up the phone.
The doctor was Deborah. The two of them looked almost glorious as they walked across the seedy office, tall and tanned, among the pale, sallow detectives and secretaries. Deborah gave a tentative smile as she caught my eye. I didn’t smile back.