"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?"