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.
'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.
