The Danger Within

Sixteen

Lilian got through to the emergency services almost instantly.

‘My husband is dead,’ she told the operator. ‘He attacked me. I... I’ve killed him.’

The woman’s voice, steady and professionally calm, did not alter one iota. Lilian was asked for her name, where her husband could be found, and where she was.

‘Are you hurt, Lilian? Do you have any injuries?’

Lilian heard herself reply in the negative. The throbbing in her ankle reminded her too late just how ridiculous her reply was.

The police came for her surprisingly quickly. She’d waited at the phone box as instructed. Indeed, she’d slumped to the floor as soon as she’d finished the 999 call. She remained in a crumpled heap, until a patrol car pulled up alongside.

Two officers stepped out of the car. The younger of the two, who looked barely out of his teens and had the acne to go with it, opened the door of the call box and looked down at her.

‘Lilian St John?’ he enquired.

Lilian nodded.

She struggled into a sitting position, still holding her torn shirt together with one hand. With the back of the other she dabbed ineffectually at the tears and the snot she knew must be all over her face, and glanced down at herself. For the first time she noticed that she was covered in blood.

The older officer reached out as if to help her stand up.

‘You’d better come with us, love,’ he said in a purposefully friendly tone of voice, his vowels distinctly Bristol. ‘We’ll take you back to the station. Get all this sorted out. Nothing to worry about.’

They drove her to Trinity Road police station where she was examined by a police doctor. Her clothes were removed from her and replaced with a white paper suit. Her fingerprints were taken, DNA extracted, and she was photographed. She had not been arrested, so she was asked for permission at every stage, which she gave at once. She didn’t see how she could refuse. She felt as if she were in a kind of trance, and all of this must surely be happening to someone else. Her ankle continued to throb so badly, it was mostly impossible for her to think beyond the pain. The doctor muttered something about arranging an X-Ray.

Meanwhile Lilian was given paracetamol, escorted to an interview room and asked to wait. Occasional razor-sharp pains shot up and down her injured leg, but eventually it did become more comfortable. In any case, Lilian was a lapsed Catholic. She did guilt well. She thought that she deserved to suffer, after what she had done.

A tall thin constable, stoically silent and impassive, stood at the door. The time passed slowly. It felt as if she were alone in the little room, except for her poker-faced guard, for hours. She couldn’t be sure, as she had no watch. She was brought food on a tray. But nobody spoke to her. At one point she asked to go to the toilet. A young woman constable was summoned to escort her. She waited right outside the cubicle.

Lilian felt like a criminal. She supposed she was a criminal. She had killed her husband. She wasn’t afraid of the process of the law. Not yet. She knew that she had acted in self-defence and she just assumed, with the track record of her time in hospital and the attack that had led to it, and with a warrant already out for Kurt’s arrest, that this would be accepted by the authorities.

She felt relief that she would never again be confronted by the man who had caused her so much pain, both physical and mental. But she already regretted that she had taken another human life.

Eventually two policemen, one in uniform and one wearing a dark grey suit and overly bright tie, arrived.

The suit, a small man with bloodshot eyes, introduced himself as Detective Sergeant McDermott and the uniformed officer as Constable Richardson. She recognized Richardson, overweight, his face more florid than was healthy, as the older of the two constables who had collected her from the phone box.

Richardson set the interview room’s recording apparatus in operation, and announced the names of those present, the date and the time as four fifteen p.m. It must have been around mid-morning when they’d brought her to the station, Lilian thought. She had indeed been waiting in the little interview room for several hours.

DS McDermott asked if she wished to have a lawyer present. She shook her head. No lawyer could alter what had happened, that was for sure. She had killed Kurt. She had to accept the consequences.

‘Right, Mrs St John, what I would like you to do first is to tell me in your own words exactly what happened today between you and your husband,’ began DS McDermott.

Lilian did her best to do so.

‘I had to get away from him, that’s why I came to Bristol,’ she began. ‘But he followed me. He put a tracker on my car. That’s how he found me so quickly. He said he wanted to rebuild our marriage. He made me go to the hotel with him. I was so afraid. He has always been violent. He attacked me in the hotel room, and I panicked. I was desperate to escape again. That’s when it happened... I didn’t know what I was doing.’

Lilian was all too aware that she was not telling her story well, but was somehow incapable of doing any better.

DS McDermott smiled thinly. ‘It’s all right, Mrs St John,’ he said, not unsympathetically. ‘Obviously this is very difficult for you. But we do need a little more detail here. You say Mr St John attacked you. What did he do exactly?’

Lilian tried to explain the sequence of events at the hotel, how she had attempted to leave, and Kurt had stopped her, grabbing hold of her. She admitted that she had smashed the vase over his head, nearly knocking him out.

‘But then he came at me, really came at me.’

‘Let’s be absolutely clear here,’ McDermott responded. ‘You appear to be admitting that it was actually you who was first violent to your husband earlier today. Is that so?’

‘Uh, no. Well. I’m not sure. He grabbed my arm. Pulled me back into the room...’

‘Right, so he grabbed your arm and pulled you back into the room. Then you smashed a heavy vase over his head with such force that he received a deep cut and was nearly rendered unconscious. That could be regarded as rather an extreme reaction, Mrs St John, don’t you think?’

Lilian hoped she was imagining things but the policeman’s voice seemed cooler, although his manner remained professional and unthreatening.

‘You didn’t know him, didn’t know what he was capable of...’

Lilian realized she was making a mess of things. She felt the room beginning to swim.

‘Are you all right, Mrs St John?’

Automatically Lilian nodded. She actually didn’t think she’d ever felt less all right in her entire life.

‘OK, so let’s continue, shall we? You say that after you’d smashed a vase over his head, your husband “came at me, really came at me”. Is that correct?’

‘Yes. He hit me in the face, and in the stomach.’

‘Again, we need to be very clear on this. You have been examined by our doctor who found no sign of any noticeable injury in your abdominal area. And your face is unmarked except for the shadow of some old bruising.’

McDermott looked down at what Lilian assumed to be the police doctor’s report on the table before him.

‘You know, Mrs St John,’ McDermott continued almost gently, ‘it could be regarded as understandable that your husband hit out at you in the circumstances you describe. After all by your own admission you had just very nearly rendered him unconscious—’

‘It wasn’t like that, I was so afraid of him,’ Lilian interrupted. ‘You don’t understand...’

‘And then you stabbed him,’ DS McDermott continued. ‘You have admitted that.’

‘Yes. Well, he sort of lunged at me. The knife went into him, I didn’t know quite how...’

‘But you were holding the knife at the time, were you not?’

‘Y... yes.’

‘So, you had already nearly knocked your husband out. He hit you. You stabbed him just below the heart. Is that the correct sequence of events?’

‘Yes, yes, and he bit my nipple,’ Lilian blurted out, feeling herself blush, thinking at the same time how lame she sounded. ‘He tore my shirt half off me and bit my nipple till it bled. Surely your doctor noticed that?’

McDermott shifted uncomfortably in his seat, as if the mention of a bitten nipple was far too much information. He glanced down again at the medical report.

‘Yes, that is mentioned here. However this kind of injury is also consistent with rough sex, of course...’

Where did that come from? What could DS McDermott possibly know about Kurt’s sexual preferences? Lilian simply stared at the policeman and said nothing more at all. Even facing the possibility of serious criminal charges, she could not bring herself to discuss the horrors of her sex life with Kurt.

Before she could dwell further on what had caused McDermott to make such a remark he had moved on.

‘Did you intend to kill your husband, Mrs St John? Did you plan it?’

Lilian gasped. ‘Of course not. I... uh, didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘Did you know what you were doing when you left your husband for dead and ran from the room?’

Lilian was aware of McDermott’s line of questioning becoming harder. But then, she was also aware of how badly she was telling her story.

‘I panicked. I told you. I was so afraid...’

‘You keep saying that, Mrs St John. But frightened of what exactly? You were quite sure that your husband was dead, so he was no longer someone to be afraid of, was he?’

‘I was confused. I just couldn’t stay in that room with him. You must realize what he’s done to me. Look at the state I’m in.’ She gestured to her leg in its plaster cast. ‘Contact the Charing Cross Hospital. And the Met. There’s a warrant out for Kurt’s arrest. They’ll tell you what he did to me when I tried to leave him before. I ended up in hospital for nearly three weeks. He fractured my skull, for God’s sake.’

McDermott and Richardson watched her impassively.

‘Look, he abused me throughout our marriage...’

‘Had you been hospitalized previously as a result of this abuse?’ asked PC Richardson.

‘No. Only the one time. He’d come back unexpectedly and found me packing a bag. That night he was punishing me. Usually...’

Lilian stopped abruptly. She just couldn’t tell them how it had usually been. How it was Kurt’s desperate need for sexual arousal which was the cause of his consistent abuse of her. She could not find the words. She never had been able to find the words.

‘Usually what?’ enquired PC Richardson.

Lilian shook her head and looked down at the table.

‘Let’s just concentrate on what happened in the hotel, shall we, Mrs St John,’ said DS McDermott. ‘You say you tried to escape from the hotel room because you were so frightened of Mr St John, and that you acted in self-defence. Is that the crux of it?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’ Lilian kept her eyes down.

She didn’t want to look at the policemen. Why did she still feel more shame at the sheer humiliation of what passed for her sex life with Kurt than she did at having killed a man? It was bizarre.

‘But wasn’t Mr St John merely trying to rescue his marriage? You admit, don’t you, that he told you that is what he wanted to do?’

‘Well, yes. But it wasn’t like that with Kurt. Everything he did was extreme. He was obsessed with me, you see...’

Her voice tailed off. McDermott and Richardson both looked as if they found that hard to believe.

‘Mrs St John, you left your husband for dead,’ McDermott persisted. ‘You weren’t just running away from the law, were you? It must have occurred to you that you could face a murder charge.’

Lilian shook her head. Bewildered, bemused.

‘No. I didn’t even think about that. Really I didn’t. And I phoned the police. I confessed.’

‘But hadn’t you realized by then that you couldn’t escape, that you’d left so much evidence behind, and indeed that you had nowhere to go?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. I’ve told you the truth about what happened...’

DS McDermott leaned back in his chair and his voice was quieter when he spoke again.

‘Well, Mrs St John, I have some news for you. You did not kill your husband. It was, however, a very close thing. Half an inch higher and that little knife you plunged into him would have entered his heart. As it was, you merely severely damaged an artery. The paramedics were able to revive him almost at once. I am told that if you had left it just a few minutes longer to call us they would not have been able to do so.’

Lilian was poleaxed. The first thing she felt was overwhelming relief that she was not a murderer. The second thing was a return of the dreadful all-encompassing fear which had been part of her life ever since her marriage. As long as Kurt St John was alive that fear would remain. He would never leave her alone. She would never get away from him.

Tears filled her eyes. The shock and the horror of it all overwhelmed her.

‘No, no, no.’

She shouted out the words, rocking forward over the table, holding her head in both hands.

The two policemen just watched and waited until she slumped back into her chair exhausted.

‘That’s a very revealing reaction, isn’t it?’ remarked DS McDermott, his voice soft.

‘What?’

‘I tell you that your husband is still alive, and you scream “no no no”. If you were me what would that indicate, Mrs St John?’

Lilian shook her head. It was all she had the strength for.

‘It rather indicates that you’re sorry he’s alive, doesn’t it?’ DS McDermott continued. ‘That you are sorry you didn’t succeed in killing your husband, isn’t that so?’

‘No. I’m afraid, don’t you understand, I’m afraid,’ Lilian managed to blurt out. ‘I’ve told you the truth. The absolute truth.’

‘All right, Mrs St John.’ McDermott stood up abruptly. ‘Your husband has regained consciousness and we’re hoping that he will soon have recovered enough to give us a full statement. So I’m going to suspend this interview until we have made further enquiries. I have no choice but to formally arrest you, at this stage on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm, and I am afraid you will have to be held in a police cell overnight. You still have the right to make a telephone call if you wish.’

Lilian nodded numbly. She didn’t know quite what she had expected to happen, but somehow, and probably extremely naively, she had not considered even the possibility of being locked in a police cell.