take charge of Alice Loudon. After discussion with her husband, Mr Tallis here, I am convinced that she urgently needs hospital admission and assessment for her own safety.’
‘Are you sectioning me?’ I asked.
Deborah looked down, almost shiftily, at a notebook she held in her hand. ‘It’s not really that. You mustn’t think of it like that. We only want what’s best.’
I looked at Adam. He had a soft, almost loving expression. ‘My darling Alice,’ was all he said.
Byrne looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s all a bit far-fetched but…’ he said.
‘It’s a medical call,’ said Deborah firmly. ‘In any case, that’s for the psychiatric assessment. Meanwhile, I ask for Alice Loudon to be released into the care of her husband.’
Adam put out his hand and touched my cheek, so tenderly. ‘Sweetest love,’ he said. I looked up at him. His blue eyes shone down at me, like the sky. His long hair looked windswept. His mouth was slightly open, as if he were about to speak or to kiss me. I put my hand up and touched the necklace he had given me, long ago in the first days of our love. It was as if there was nobody in the room except me and him, everything else was just blur and noise. Maybe I had been wrong about it all. Suddenly the temptation seemed irresistible just to give myself up to these people and be cared for, people who really loved me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I heard myself say, in a feeble voice.
Adam bent down and took me in his arms. I smelt his sweat, felt the roughness of his cheek against mine.
‘Love’s a funny business,’ I said. ‘How can you kill someone you love?’
‘Alice, my darling,’ he said, soft against my ear, hand on my hair, ‘didn’t I promise that I would always look after you? For ever and ever.’
He held me close and it felt wonderful. For ever and ever. That was the way I had thought it was going to be. Maybe it could still be like that. Maybe we could turn the clock back, pretend he had never killed people and I had never known. I felt tears running down my face. A promise to look after me for ever and ever. A moment and a promise. Where had I heard those words? There was something in my mind, blurred and indistinct, and then it took shape and I saw it. I stepped back, out of Adam’s arms, and I looked clearly at Adam’s face.
‘I know,’ I said.
I looked round. Byrne, Deborah and Adam were looking puzzled. Did they think now that I had really and finally gone over the edge? I didn’t mind. I was in control again, my mind clear. It wasn’t me that was mad.
‘I know where Adam put her. I know where Adam buried Adele Blanchard.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Byrne.
I looked at Adam and he looked back steadily, unwavering. Then I fumbled in my coat and found my purse. I opened it and pulled out a season ticket, receipts, some foreign currency, and there it was: me, photographed by Adam at the moment he asked me to marry him. I handed the photograph to Byrne, who took it and looked at it with a puzzled expression.
‘Careful with that,’ I said. ‘It’s the only copy. Adele’s buried there.’
I looked round at Adam. He didn’t look away, even then, but I knew he was thinking. This was his genius, making calculations in a crisis. What was he planning inside that beautiful head?
Byrne turned away from me and showed the photograph to Adam. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
Adam gave a baffled, sympathetic smile. ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘It was just on a walk somewhere.’ He turned his gaze back to me.
At that moment I knew that I was right.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t just a walk somewhere. Adam took me there to this special spot. He had been let down before, he told me. But now in that special place he wanted to ask me to marry him. A moment and a promise. We vowed to be faithful to each other over the dead body of Adele Blanchard.’
‘Adele Blanchard?’ said Adam. ‘Who’s she?’ He looked at me very closely. I could feel his eyes on mine trying to assess what I knew. ‘This is crazy. I don’t remember where we were on that walk. And you. You don’t remember either, do you, darling? You slept all the way up in the car. You don’t know where it is.’
I looked at the photograph with a sudden lurch of horror. He was right. I didn’t. I looked at the grass, so green, tantalizingly graspable and so far away. Adele, where are you? Where is your betrayed, broken, lost body? And then I had it. Here I am. Here I am.
‘St Eadmund’s,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Byrne and Adam, at the same time.
‘St Eadmund’s with an A. Adele Blanchard taught at St Eadmund’s primary school near Corrick, and the church of St Eadmund’s is there as well. Take me to the church of St Eadmund’s and I’ll take you to this spot.’
Byrne looked from me to Adam and then back again. He didn’t know what to do but he was wavering. I took a step closer to Adam so that our faces were almost touching. I looked into his clear, blue eyes. There wasn’t the smallest flicker of disquiet. He was magnificent. Perhaps for the first moment I had a clear sense of this man on a mountain, saving a life or taking it away. I raised my right hand and touched his cheek as he had touched mine. He flinched very slightly. I had to say something to him. Whatever happened, I would never have another chance.
‘I understand that you killed Adele and Francoise because, in some terrible way, you loved them. And I suppose that Tara was threatening you. Had her sister told her something? Did she know? Or suspect? But what about the others? Pete. Carrie. Tomas. Alexis. When you went back up the mountain, did you actually push Francoise over the edge? Did somebody see you? Was it just
‘This is ridiculous,’ Adam said. ‘Alice needs help. I can legally take custody of her.’
‘You’ve got to take note of this,’ I said to Byrne. ‘I’ve reported the existence of a murdered body. I’ve identified the location. You are obliged to investigate.’
Byrne looked between us. Then his face relaxed into a sardonic smile. He sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. Then he looked over at Adam. ‘Don’t worry, sir. We’ll take good care of your wife.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said to Adam. ‘Goodbye, Adam.’
He smiled at me, a smile of such sweetness that he looked like a little boy, full of terrifying hope. But he didn’t say anything, just looked at me as I walked away, and I didn’t look back.
Thirty-nine
WPC Mayer looked about sixteen. She had bobbed brown hair and a round, slightly spotty face. I sat in the back of the car – a plain blue one, not the police car I’d been expecting – and looked at the back of her plump neck above her crisp white collar. It looked stiff to me, disapproving, and her listless handshake and brief, shallow glance had seemed indifferent.
She made no effort to talk to me, except to tell me at the start of the journey to fasten my seat-belt, please, and I was grateful for that. I leaned against the cool plastic and stared at the London traffic outside, seeing almost nothing. It was a bright morning, and the light gave me a headache, but when I closed my eyes it was no better, for then images chased across the lids. Particularly Adam’s face, my last sight of him. My whole body felt sore and hollow. It was as if I could feel all the different bits of me: my heart, my guts, my lungs, my aching kidneys, the blood coursing round me, my ringing head.
Every so often, WPC Mayer’s radio would crackle into life and she would speak into the car, a strange formulaic kind of language about rendezvous and times of arrival. Outside this car was ordinary real life – people going about their daily business, irritated, bored, contented, indifferent, excited, tired. Thinking about their work, or what to cook for supper, or what their daughter had said at breakfast that morning, or thinking of the boy they fancied, or how their hair needed cutting or how their back ached. It was hard to imagine I had ever been there, in
