‘To Adam.’ I didn’t recognize my own voice, it was so flat and expressionless. I was thinking hard: there was no time left any more. Time had gone.
‘Yes, he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. He was hurt, of course, God, he was hurt. He was crying when he read the letter and kept saying your name over and over again. But he doesn’t blame you, you must understand that, Alice. And he’s worried you might, you know, do something stupid. That was the last thing he said to me. He said that he was worried that in the state you are you might, you know, harm yourself.’
‘Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?’
‘Now, look, Alice…’
I put the phone down on her pleading voice and stood for a few seconds, paralysed. The room seemed very cold and quiet. I could hear every little sound in it, the creak of a floorboard when I shifted my weight, a murmur in the water pipes, the tiny sigh of wind outside. That was it. When I was found dead, Adam had already expressed the fear that I might harm myself. I raced across to the bedroom and pulled open the drawer where I had hidden Adele’s letter and Adam’s forged note to himself. They were gone. I ran for the front door and then I heard his footsteps, distant still at the bottom of the long flight of stairs.
There was no way out. Our flat was at the top of the stairs. I looked around, knowing there were no other exits, that there was nowhere to hide. I considered ringing the police, but I wouldn’t even have time to dial. I ran to the bathroom and turned the shower full on, so that it was splashing noisily on to the tiled floor. Then, tweaking shut the shower curtains and leaving the bathroom door very slightly open, I raced back into the living room, picked up my keys and ducked into the poky kitchen, where I stood behind its open door, barely out of sight. The copy of Guy magazine was there within reach on the worktop. I picked it up. That was something at least.
He came in, and pulled the flat door shut behind him. My heart pounded in my chest, thundering away so that I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear it too. I suddenly remembered that he was carrying a bunch of flowers. He would come into the kitchen first to put them in water. Oh, God, please please please. My breath came in raggedy gasps, hurting my chest. I gave a little ratchety sob. I couldn’t stop it.
But then, like a miracle, fear ebbed away and what was left was a kind of curiosity, as if I were a spectator at my own disaster. Drowning people are supposed to see their lives flash past them as they die. Now, in those few seconds as I waited, my mind reeled through the images of my time with Adam; such a brief time, really, although it had obliterated everything else that had gone before. I watched as if I were my own observer: our first glance, across a crowded street; our first sexual encounter, so feverish it seemed almost comic now; our wedding day, when I was so happy I wanted to die. Then I saw Adam with his hand upraised; Adam holding a buckled belt; Adam with his hands around my neck. The images all led to now: this moment ahead, when I would see Adam killing me. But I wasn’t scared any longer. I almost felt peaceful. It had been such a long time since I had felt peaceful.
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.