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 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.