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.’
‘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.’