Nicci French - Killing Me Softly

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.

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 nodded 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.’