46

As Sarah and Steve drew into Primrose Hill, Sarah had the familiar police sensation – the feeling of moving through a different element to the people around her. Even at this late hour people were milling around and the metal tables of the cafés were filled with late-night coffee drinkers.

The lights were on behind the glass pane of the hardwood door of Abigail Levy’s house. She came to the door in a red beaded evening dress and frowned at the sight of Sarah and Steve, warrant cards in hands.

‘It’s ten o’clock at night! I’ve got friends here. Can’t you come back later?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. We can’t. We need to come in. You’ll have to explain that something’s cropped up and your friends need to leave.’

Abigail looked beyond Sarah to Steve and smiled with the charm of someone who had once been attractive. ‘And if I don’t want to do that?’

Sarah thought the sympathy in Steve’s smile might be real this time. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Levy. There is no “I don’t want to” right now.’

The electric lights were off and candles were burning on the table and the mantelpiece. On the white tablecloth were empty coffee cups, a fancy-looking chocolate box with quite a few chocolates missing, a bottle of Sauternes, wine glasses. The guests – three men and two women – looked confused but quickly gathered themselves together, located handbags, pulled on jackets. One of the women draped a pashmina around her shoulders.

‘Bye then, Abigail.’

There was a general kissing of cheeks but still the odd ungoverned glance at the two people who had arrived in suits and who were waiting patiently, never leaving Abigail alone for a second.

‘Lovely to see you.’

‘The risotto was delicious.’

When the front door finally shut, Steve made the arrest.

Abigail, running her index finger up and down the middle finger of the other hand, said, ‘What happens now?’

Sarah said, ‘We’ll take you to custody where you’ll be interviewed. We can get you a lawyer or, if you already have a lawyer, we can ring them for you. I’ll have to put you in handcuffs, I’m afraid. Just for the journey. Just to keep everyone safe. We’ll bring the car right to your door. No one need see.’ She paused, considered the red dress. ‘Would you like to change before we take you to the station?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been to . . .’ Abigail hesitated. ‘To custody before. What do you recommend?’

Recommend! As if it were a skiing trip or a day’s hill walking.

‘I’d put on something practical. I’ll have to be in the room with you, but I’ll turn my back while you change.’

Abigail stood five foot two at the height measure. For the custody images she sat nervously on the high chair, her slim ankles crossed and her knees to the side, turning her head obediently when she was told and offering a placatory smile to the camera as though these were studio shots. She had changed into blue pedal pushers, a grey T-shirt and a blue boxy jacket. She looked as if she was ready for a long day on her feet, perhaps volunteering in an organizing capacity for the National Trust. She stood, slightly on tiptoe, at the live-scan machine while the detention officer, a burly white man with a shaved head, rolled her fingers on the screen and clicked the foot pedal with practised ease. She was silent, studying the fingerprints emerging against the red light.

‘So you don’t use ink any more then?’ she asked, and the detention officer said, ‘No, love. This is much better. Computerized.’

She nodded as if she was on a tour of the facilities. ‘Yes, that makes sense.’

Afterwards she sat in the consulting room with her lawyer. Sarah had drafted a summary of the evidence against her but still she beckoned her in.

‘Before we begin, can I ask something?’

‘If your lawyer’s happy, then of course.’

‘Has he said I did it?’

‘He has. He says he came home and found Tania dead. She was blocking the doorway. Your downstairs neighbour corroborates his account to some extent.’

There was a pause.

‘And I can sit now and talk to my lawyer for a bit?’

‘You can, yes.’

Sarah went out into the yard to have a smoke with Steve. There was the usual ebb and flow of police cars and vans. Two armed-response vehicles pulled in and their occupants parked up and shot the breeze, standing together in the warm night. Car headlights flashed from beyond the gate and one of the AFOs walked over and let the car in. It was Elaine. She spotted Sarah and Steve and gave a little wave. Then there was a lot of sorting things out, reaching into the passenger seat, getting her capacious bag out of the back of the car.

Steve said, ‘I can stay on and interview, if you’d like.’

Elaine was walking over, a bag of chips resting in her upturned right hand.

Sarah said, ‘No. But thanks all the same.’ She felt a moment’s regret at sending Steve away. ‘I think Abigail would be better interviewed by two women.’

Steve threw his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his foot. ‘You’re probably right.’

‘Thanks for your help with Stephenson.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Elaine offered the chips. ‘Anyone want one?’ she said. ‘They’re nice and hot. I drove like the clappers. Lots of salt. There’s a good place on Lisson Grove.’

Steve said, ‘No thanks. I’m off home.’

Sarah helped herself.

Elaine lifted her right foot and scratched her ankle. ‘I’ve been bitten all over by mosquitoes, bloody things.’

Steve offered his hand. ‘I’m Steve, by the way.’

There was a moment where Elaine wondered whether to offer her greasy hand. They both laughed and decided against.

‘I’m Elaine,’ she said, taking another chip. ‘Fat Elaine, that is. You may have heard of me.’

He nodded and smiled. ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of you.’ He palmed his car keys. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ There was a pause. ‘Good to work with you again, Sarah.’

She nodded. ‘Yes. You too.’

Abigail sat neatly in the interview room. A plastic cup of water was on the table in front of her and she took regular sips. Her nails were perfectly manicured with grey polish. Everything about her was neat, and her lawyer, the duty brief, looked like he’d been provided as contrast – he was a young man with day-old stubble, wearing jeans and trainers.

Elaine was leading the interview. After the preliminaries, she said, ‘Abigail, your lawyer has told us you want to tell us what happened.’

Abigail looked around the small room as though she wondered who Elaine was talking to, but then, as if finding no one else with the same name, she smiled emptily and said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’

Elaine placed one palm on top of the other hand and gave an encouraging smile. No one spoke, and after a little silence Abigail began.

‘It was afternoon.’

She hesitated and looked across at her lawyer. He said quietly, ‘I think you should continue. Like we discussed.’

She put her hand flat on her breastbone and made a little hum as if there was a pain there that she couldn’t quite place. She looked up, took another sip of water.

‘So. I lived in the top floor of a subdivided Victorian cottage with the man who was then my husband, Richard Stephenson. We’d only just got married and I’d moved down from Manchester – the first time I’d been away from home. I didn’t know many people. I was pregnant.’

She stopped speaking and looked around at the other three people at the table, who all waited attentively. She resumed, almost as if she was telling a little anecdote that she was surprised to see held so much interest for everyone.

‘The school where Richard worked had telephoned that morning to say they were closing for the day. Richard had told me he still needed to go out. There were things he had to do. I knew better than to ask. It just made him impatient. How things were was becoming plainer.’

Another pause, a self-deprecatory little smile that seemed to suggest the anecdote was perhaps tedious.

‘I’d been watching daytime TV and I’d opened a bottle of wine. I’d started to do that. I’d found that a couple of glasses helped get me through the day. I was quite unhappy, to be honest. There was a Hollywood film on. Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. I was enjoying it, actually. There was a knock. I switched the television off, put the glass in the kitchen. I went down to the front door and opened it and, well, there she was.’

Elaine prompted gently. ‘Tania?’

Abigail nodded. ‘Well, yes, I assume so, although she never told me her name.’

‘How did she look?’

‘She had a short skirt on, long frizzy hair, dark kohl eyeliner, big colourful glass earrings. She was carrying a violin case and a bag.

‘I knew immediately who she was. I don’t mean her name, of course, but one look and I knew everything else about her. She asked me if Mr Stephenson was in and I said no, and she was about to go away – how I wish I’d let her. But I asked her in. I don’t know why I did that. It was . . .’

She faltered and Elaine prompted. ‘Yes?’

‘It was like I wanted company! Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

Her face suddenly had a crumpled look about it, but she put her hand on her breastbone again, patted it a couple of times as if in encouragement and moved on briskly, her neat surface restored.

‘They’d made an entrance to the flat from the ground floor, but it was a bad conversion and we had to climb steep, narrow stairs to get to the living area. Upstairs it was different.’ She smiled as though she was saying something funny. ‘It was a kind of Tardis. As soon as you stepped into the living room it was as if we lived in a big house, not a tiny one-bedroom flat. Richard always made a big show. In the front room we had a baby grand. We’d had to take the window out to get it in. Richard’s violin was on top of it. There were flowers too, lilies. Richard always insisted on flowers.’

She stopped as though that was the end of the story.

Elaine said, ‘So Tania was in your living room. Then what happened?’

‘Well, nothing! Absolutely nothing. She just stood there! Looked around her like she was in a stately home or something.

‘I wanted her to say what she was there for, but she didn’t speak. I thought, Well, say it then. Say what you’ve come to say. It was one thing to come to my house and another to then just stand there and say nothing. I was kind of furious . . .’

‘You were furious?’

‘And upset too, of course. And also, well, ashamed.’ She laughed as though she had said something a bit silly. ‘All of that at the same time! Is that possible?’ She looked directly at Elaine. ‘I had had quite a lot to drink, you see.’ She moved on briskly. ‘Anyway, whatever was going on, however miserable it all was, I thought, I’m still the wife and she shouldn’t have come to my home.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? As if her coming to my home really mattered! That was the least of my problems.’ She looked at them all then with a suddenly amazed expression, as if surprising even herself. ‘Until it wasn’t, that is.’

She nodded as if expecting some sort of assent from the three people gathered around the table, and then, when the only reaction she got was a kind of desperate listening, she flicked her hands quickly as if embarrassed. She resumed, speaking quickly, as though she just needed to get to the end of the story.

‘The girl didn’t say anything, so in the end I spoke. I said, “Richard’s your teacher?” and she nodded and I said, “Would you like to play for me?”

‘She hesitated about playing. I remember that. Then she went to get her violin out of its case and I said, “Play his. It’s a Joseph Rocca.”’

Abigail looked at her lawyer and rubbed the knuckle of her ring finger compulsively. ‘That was a kind of joke, do you see, because he loved that violin and he would never have let her play it.’

She looked around with a disappointed expression, as if no one had understood the joke.

‘So she picked up his violin and tuned it against the piano. Then she started to play. It was a cantabile by Paganini. Richard had insisted I learn it too. The first three bars are easy, but pretty soon there’s a tricky bit – sudden awkward fingerings and accidentals. Tania’s fingers didn’t move quickly enough or with sufficient confidence. You could feel her working, and that was counter to the whole point of the composition. It’s a virtuoso piece, you see. It’s supposed to feel effortless, but her fingers were like a stiff clockwork mechanism. I thought, Poor thing. She isn’t even very good.

‘She stopped playing, rested the violin on her knee. She said, “I can’t really play it.”

‘I did feel sorry for her but I also wanted to slap her. I didn’t know what to do. I was still waiting for her to say why she was here. And then, in a way, I couldn’t be bothered. I just wanted her to go so I could catch the end of the film.

‘I said, “Perhaps you’d better go now.”

‘She said, “Yes, I’d better,” and she put the violin back in its case on the piano. Then she said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.” That made me absolutely furious again! She was so pathetic and vulnerable. She’d been so used. She moved towards the stairs and I got up and followed her, as if I was showing her the way out, but then an impulse seized me. A moment of pure rage. I pushed her hard, very hard, in the back between the shoulder blades. It took her completely by surprise. She had her violin case in her hand and she fell headlong, couldn’t catch herself. The stairs were very steep, remember. I could see straight away from the angle of her head that it was all wrong. And she made this sort of gasping sound. I ran down to her.

‘There was a smell of shit: that absolutely horrified me. Why had that happened? This was all out of control. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening. I didn’t even know her name to call to her, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t seem conscious at all. She was floppy and her eyes were rolling back. Her lips had gone blue. There was a horrible sound, a kind of gasp. It seemed that almost immediately she had stopped breathing.

‘I didn’t know what to do. I was in a complete panic. I think I shouted, “Help! Help!” But no one came. I ran outside and knocked on the downstairs neighbour’s door. There was no reply. I went back in, felt for a pulse, put my face against her mouth. There was nothing. I went upstairs and sat on the sofa. I thought of calling an ambulance, but what was the point? She was clearly dead.

‘I went into the kitchen. I filled my glass again, downed it, filled it. I took another bottle through to the sitting room and watched the end of the film, kind of stared at it. All the time I was thinking, It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!

‘I went downstairs and looked at her again. I locked the front door and I locked the door to the fire escape. I kept drinking and I took some sleeping pills too. I got so pissed that I had to lie down. By the time Richard came back, I was asleep. I didn’t even hear him come in. It was dark and he was shaking me awake. He was saying, “How many have you taken?” I said, “I don’t know.” And he sort of dragged me to the toilet and stuck his fingers down my throat. I was throwing up repeatedly. He didn’t say anything, not a thing. I remember that really well. I remember being afraid of him and then just not caring about anything. I thought, he’s really angry with me but I don’t care what happens. He put me back to bed.

‘In the morning he woke me and told me to have a bath and sort myself out. He made me coffee.

‘That’s when I asked him where she was, but he said, “Don’t ask me anything.”

‘I said, “I’d better call the police.”

‘And he said, “We’re not calling the police.”’

Abigail stopped talking. She stared ahead of her as if no one else was there. Then she said, ‘I want to say that I’m very sorry. Very sorry.’

After a pause, Elaine said, ‘When you pushed her, did you mean to harm her?’

‘I don’t know what I meant. I was angry. I just pushed her.’

‘Do you know what happened to her body?’

‘I think Richard put her in the shed in the back garden to begin with. I must have been asleep when he did it. But where else could she have been? We had the back garden and the neighbour had the front. You could drive down a little alley and park the car there. No one else had a reason to go round there. After that, I don’t know. He called a decorating company and I heard him saying how he had always hated the carpet and how there was a fine old floor underneath, just needed polishing up, and could they come and quote.’

‘And you, what were you doing?’

‘I let him take charge. There were all these appeals for Tania. It got harder and harder to tell. I felt I was in more and more serious trouble. The only thing I knew clearly was that I had to leave him. On the Monday morning he was back at work. I went to the doctor and arranged to have an abortion. I didn’t tell Richard. Then, after I’d had the termination, I rang my dad and said things weren’t working out, Richard had hit me and I had to come home. He picked me up when Richard was at work. I said I’d lost the baby and I didn’t want to talk about it and he called me his little girl. Richard called me and told me to come home, and I said, “If you try to make me, I’ll tell.”’

There was the hand on the breastbone again, moving from side to side as if to ease some pain.

‘You see that was the dreadful thing: Tania helped me get rid of him.’

There was silence.

The lawyer raised his hand slightly from the table as if asking permission to speak, and Elaine said, ‘Yes?’

The lawyer said, ‘Abigail, you need to tell the officers about how you were at that point. Mentally, I mean.’

She nodded as if she’d forgotten some minor detail. ‘Oh yes. About three months later, I tried to kill myself.’

Elaine said, ‘You tried to kill yourself? How did you do that?’

She pulled up the sleeves of her jacket and showed two deep white scars running along the length of her left wrist. ‘And I took pills too, of course.’

Elaine said, ‘And then?’

Abigail shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was in hospital for a while. Then I decided to live.’

There was a long silence.

Sarah said, ‘I don’t understand why you asked her to play the violin.’

‘I can’t really explain it . . . It was sort of like I needed to hurt myself.’ Abigail frowned and meshed her hands in a kind of cat’s cradle. ‘I’d really loved the violin, you see.’

Sarah scanned her notes thoughtfully. ‘Tania said she was sorry, and that made you really angry because she looked . . .’ She placed her finger beneath each adjective as she spoke it. ‘Pathetic. Vulnerable. Used.’ She looked up ‘Why did those things make you so angry? Why didn’t you just feel sorry for her?’

Abigail said something inaudible.

Sarah prompted gently. ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

Abigail looked up, stared Sarah full in the face, spoke loudly. ‘I said, because she was me.’

‘She was you?’

‘Yes, she was me! And so I hated her.’

Sarah tried to make sense of what she felt as she sat looking at Abigail in her too neat little outfit and her too precise little body. Abigail was speaking about how she had loved to play the violin and Sarah saw her: at fourteen someone completely different. A pretty girl in a pretty dress who’d liked to amaze the adults by her ability to play Ysaÿe. She’d been proud, a bit of a show-off – she admitted that – and very good indeed at the violin. She had been the girl all the other girls wanted to be. She was going to have a musical career and marry well. And she’d been in awe of her teacher, who already knew famous people.

Stephenson had known his prey very well, known how to use her weaknesses. He’d flattered her, made promises, told her how impressed he was.

To really play, he’d told her, she needed to become a woman. And that was how he had started, first by putting his hands on her breasts and then between her legs and then finally pushing her down to her knees in front of him.

She hadn’t even known this was rape. She had thought, as he had told her, that she had wanted it, needed it even. At just fourteen she had felt as if she’d rowed herself out far away from the land with its glittering shore lights into a dark ocean from which there was no return. How could she tell people the dirty things she’d done? How could she explain that she was no longer the precocious girl in the pretty dress but had become instead someone who was now secretly washing herself so much that her skin was red raw? Who could she possibly tell? Who could she admit this to?

She was approaching her seventeenth birthday and he was beginning to tire of her. He’d already moved away to take up his new teaching post. But he popped up just once to collect his stuff and he said he had to see her, one last time. ‘Bored probably,’ she said, both aghast and disconnected, as though she was talking about someone else. And he’d raped her, pushing her face into the carpet with the heel of his hand, and the condom had broken and that was that. She was pregnant.

That was the first time, she said, that she considered suicide. For what other options were there? At first Richard was angry, but then he’d suddenly got all enthusiastic. ‘We’ll get married then!’ Her father had agreed. He’d been surprised, yes, angry even, but these things happened and Richard had wanted to do the right thing. His daughter was seventeen by then, so it wasn’t such a shocking thing and Richard wasn’t such a bad match. It was a low-key affair at a registry office. She’d worn a little pink suit and within a week she was watching daytime television in his flat in London.

Seventeen, Abigail said, was already too old for Richard, of course.

‘I was – what do homosexuals call it? – I was his beard. With his young, pregnant wife he was beyond reproach. I’d moved into that house but he didn’t even touch me any more. I hated music now. It gave me a headache. I was pregnant with his baby and I couldn’t see my life at all. How was I ever going to escape and begin again?

‘And then on the sixteenth of October there was this girl suddenly standing in my sitting room and I did that thing. I pushed her. And then I drank and I took pills but I was no good at it. And it wouldn’t have suited Richard, you see, me dying, because he was doing so well and he was getting away with so much. He wasn’t going to let this interfere with his wonderful life. It was my mistake, after all, not his. Why should he pay for these messy, irritating females? A girl going to the headmaster; that didn’t happen much, and when it did, it was never really much of a problem. Perhaps there was a chat in a nice office, uncomfortable for everyone, admittedly. Used to put him in a bad mood. Perhaps he lost a pupil, had to move schools. But Tania dying, or me dying, that would have been too much, even for him, do you see that? Even Richard could never have recovered from that.

‘I should have told and I should have paid but instead he took charge of everything and I moved out, and then, eventually, I decided to live. The only way I could do that was by never contacting Richard again, never thinking about the news I’d hear about him from time to time. I knew what opportunities he was making for himself – working on musicals and classical pop, involving himself in charities that encouraged disadvantaged young people to play an instrument. He had his own Wiki page. There was a piece in the paper about his MBE. And I knew I should tell so that he would be made to stop, but I didn’t.’