Coincidence

by David Ambrose

  He insisted he would cut short his trip and take the next plane back. I protested, but I wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all myself. I knew I couldn’t handle what was happening on my own. And I knew George was still the one person above any other who I could totally depend on and trust. He made me promise I would do nothing till he got there next day.

  It was late morning when he rang from a cab on his way into Manhattan. He’d taken Concorde—an expense for which I later offered to reimburse him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  The first thing he did when he got to the apartment was sit down with me and go over everything I knew about what had happened so far. All I could tell him was what we’d both heard on television, plus the few additional details there had been in the New York Times that morning—including the fact that the victim had lived in the East Village and had worked, apparently, for a detective agency.

  George suddenly became very still and the color drained from his face. “What is it?” I said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Did you say a detective agency?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Nothing,” he said, unconvincingly.

  “Come on, George, I know you better than that. Why did you react when I said ‘detective agency’?”

  He continued to look worried for a moment, then said, “Don’t you see? Maybe they’d been hired by Steve’s wife. Maybe they know all about you and Steve.”

  I did see. And I was disturbed by what I saw.

  “You mean they’re taking that as a motive, saying that’s why he killed this woman?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what anybody’s saying. I suppose it’s possible.” I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “I don’t believe it. There has to be more to it than that.”

  “Yes,” he said, rubbing his chin and looking out over the park, thoughtful, “I’m sure you’re right. There has to be more to it than that.”

  Chapter 23

  My Darling,

  I hope this reaches you. I’ve arranged to have it mailed outside the prison so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. It’s important, for reasons I’m sure you will understand, that nobody knows about us. That would only make things look worse for me, and it would complicate your life in ways you would be a whole lot better off without.

  Much of what you hear about me in the coming weeks is going to cause you pain and disappointment. It’s true, I lied to you. I was involved with this woman when we met—more seriously than I wanted you to know. Looking back now, I can see I was a fool not to have told you the truth from the start, but I was trying to protect you. I wanted you and only you. Breaking up with Nadia was difficult, but it was done and it was over.

  I didn’t kill her. Please believe that. I would have done anything in my power to spare you what you’re going through now—except murder. I beg you to believe that I am innocent

  All the same, even if I’m acquitted, which I pray I will be, I accept that things can never be the same between us. That is what I most regret.

  Please remember that I love you, and always have. But don’t write to me, or make any attempt to contact me. It won’t help either of us.

  Steve.

  The letter arrived by regular mail six days after Steve was charged. It confirmed what George had said about Steve’s position only being worsened if our affair came out into the open. I accepted the logic of that now, but it took all the self-discipline I possessed to do so. I wanted to move heaven and earth to help him, but I knew it was useless. I could only wait and let things take their course.

  Once again, I have to say, it was a time I could never have gotten through without George. He continued living in the apartment he’d found, and as far as all our friends were concerned we were separated. Nobody knew the reasons why, and nobody asked—at least not in any detail. The breakdown of a marriage nowadays is such a commonplace event that it’s worse than ill-mannered to pry into the reasons: It’s naive.

  All the same, we put the question of divorce on the back burner for the time being. I don’t think either of us had any doubt that we’d go through with it, but it was no longer a matter of urgency. There were other things on my mind as the case against Steve got under way.

  Gossip was rife, which was hardly surprising given Steve’s relative prominence in the community. Talk was widespread that his marriage had been a sham for many years. Nadia Shelley, I heard repeatedly, was only one of many affairs he’d had—with, most people assumed, his wife’s approval, or at least in the shadow of her indifference.

  There was also, I was shocked to find, a widespread assumption that Steve was guilty of the murder with which he was charged. This was on the “no smoke without fire” theory, I supposed. I had to admit, when I looked at things from an outsider’s point of view, that all the elements fell into place with an awful persuasiveness: Spitfire mistress threatens trouble, leaving compromised married lover with political ambitions with only one solution—murder.

  What was unnerving, and what I had not been prepared for, was the sheer weight of the evidence against Steve when the case eventually came to court. Not only were there photographs and letters proving his relationship with the Shelley woman—which Steve admitted to anyway—but the evidence for his actually having killed her was going to take a lot of contradicting.

  His story was that he’d received a phone call from Nadia Shelley just after six in the evening. She was hysterical, he said, and insisted that he come over to her apartment right away. When he refused, reminding her that everything was over between them, he said she threatened to ruin him. At first he laughed, not believing she had any way of doing that. But then she began talking in a confused and excited way about campaign finance, how he’d broken the law and she could prove it. He didn’t know what she meant, but in the end, to calm her down, he gave in and agreed to go over.

  She told him to let himself in using the key she’d given him when they were lovers, and which I was frankly a little surprised to learn that he’d kept, though he said in court that he had forgotten he still had it till she mentioned it. He entered her apartment, he said, shortly after seven-thirty. All the lights were on and there was music playing loudly on the radio. The place had been ransacked, as though there had been a burglary. Nadia Shelley, he said, lay in the middle of her living room floor. It looked like there had been a struggle. She had a cut over one eye and her clothing was torn, but not in a way that suggested sexual assault. There was bruising around her neck as though she’d been strangled, though there was no sign of what she had been strangled with.

  Steve panicked. He admitted that he should have called the police at once, but he also realized how things would look. So far as he knew, nobody other than Nadia Shelley herself had been aware that he was going there. In what he described as the worst decision of his life, certainly one that disgraced him as a lawyer and disqualified him from any claim to serve in a responsible position in public life, he ran out of the building and drove off in his car.

  It was another couple of hours before the police were called—by a neighbor angered by the nonstop deafening music thumping through the walls of Nadia Shelley’s apartment. By midnight, the murder squad had collected enough evidence to want to interview Steve. The most telling clue had been her phone records—the last call of her life made to him. In his panic he hadn’t even thought of that. They claimed that he had ransacked the apartment in search of anything that might tie him to his victim. There was no way of knowing, they said, how much he had taken away, though the few things he had missed were sufficient to point the finger of suspicion firmly in his direction.

  For example, there was a photograph at the back of one of her drawers of the two of them together. They were on a yacht belonging to some friends of hers, Steve told the court. Soon after they first met. The start of their affair.

  Then, caught behind some bookshelves, the police had found the cover page of a document that the prosecution said Steve had taken away with him and pr
esumably destroyed. He must have dropped this single page, they said, in his hurry to get away. It referred to sums of money received from questionable sources. The suggestion, subtly planted by the prosecution and angrily refuted by Steve’s defense team, was that Steve was in the pocket of organized crime, and that Nadia Shelley had in some way been his conduit to them.

  I didn’t believe any of it for a second. The idea of Steve being a murderer was ridiculous enough. But an associate of full-time criminals as well? I could never accept that.

  All the same, as the trial progressed I fell increasingly into a numbing, almost paralyzing depression. The proceedings were not carried live on TV, but there was coverage from outside the court every day. And of course the newspapers carried the story in every morbid detail. There was no way to escape it other than leaving the country, but not knowing what was going on would have been worse than having to face it daily. Maybe it would have helped if I’d been able to go along and watch the trial. But George was right, as Steve had been in his letter: It was wiser not.

  In the end it was the forensic evidence that finished him. They found nylon fibers in the bruising and cuts around Nadia Shelley’s neck, indicating that she had most likely been strangled by a pair of her own pantyhose after being knocked unconscious, or semiconscious, by a blow to the head.

  When they examined Steve’s car, they found shreds of the same fibers caught on the edge of his front fender. They had no explanation of why he took the pantyhose with him instead of leaving them in the apartment, though they surmised that in his panic he might have decided it was safer to dispose of the “murder weapon” elsewhere. He must have had the pantyhose still in his hands when he left the building, not noticing in his haste to get away that he had snagged them on the fender.

  George was with me when the verdict of guilty was announced. The whole nightmare ended, as it had begun for me, with the early evening news. I had fantasized about this moment. What would I do if he was found guilty? What would I do if he was acquitted? I had whole scenarios in my head for both possibilities.

  In the event I just sat there, all emotion drained from me by the tensions of the previous months. I knew only that it was over, and somewhere, somehow, I was inarticulately grateful for that fact.

  It was a shock to find how disconnected I felt from the whole thing. There would be a delayed response, I supposed. But for now I felt nothing. Just exhaustion and relief.

  I felt George’s hand take mine and his arm slip around me, drawing me very gently to him. It was only then, as I turned my face into his shoulder, that I felt the wetness of my own tears.

  That was the first night George stayed at the apartment since our decision to separate. We slept together, though we didn’t make love. Next day, however, and at my suggestion, he moved back permanently. Divorce was never mentioned again. Nor did we talk about the past. By tacit agreement we looked only to the future, to the shared life we had to rebuild together out of our two lives.

  In my heart of hearts I knew now that George was the only man for me. It was the second time I had turned to him on the rebound from Steve. I had always been told that passion never lasts. I hadn’t really believed it until that moment, when I realized that the only things that really last are companionship, intelligence, and kindness.

  I was very lucky to have George.

  “LARRY“

  Chapter 24

  Clifford was heavier than he’d looked, a difficulty compounded by the fact that he was now a deadweight. He had started to regain consciousness before I got him to the edge, so I’d hit him again with the same stone, this time finishing the job.

  My breath was coming in short, increasingly ragged gasps. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could do this. Part of it was nerves, of course, as well as physical effort. It was only the second time I had taken a human life with my own hands, so the experience was still an unfamiliar one. I hoped, on the whole, that it would remain so.

  Nonetheless, a barrier had been crossed, a taboo broken. Such a flouting of convention meant a certain new freedom gained. A demon had been at once both celebrated and defied.

  The last few yards were the hardest because the land rose to a kind of lip over the howling, windblown emptiness beneath. From far below came the sound of waves smashing against the rocks. It was a perfect place to miss one’s footing in the dark—especially with the amount of alcohol they would find in his body—and die without a whisper of suspicion being raised.

  I managed to line him up, feet and shoulders propped between thick clumps of coarse grass to stop him rolling back. Then, with one final effort, I pushed him over the edge. His fall made no sound, and whether his body hit the rocks or disappeared in the boiling waves I had no idea. He would be found no doubt the following day or soon after, by which time I would be back in the States, with no evidence that I had ever been away.

  By “I,” of course, I meant George Daly. The man who had flown into Heathrow the previous day, and would fly out the following afternoon, was Larry Hart—the same Larry Hart who had made a brief trip back to Manhattan in the middle of George Daly’s recent stay in London, a trip that had coincided with the death of Nadia Shelley and the arrest of Steve Coleman.

  I picked up the stone with which I’d beaten out Cliffs brains and threw it after him: It wouldn’t do to have it found up on top with traces of his blood on it. That done, I started the long hike back to the rented car I’d parked almost a mile away. I looked at my watch and saw it was just after eleven. I would be back in London by one-thirty, tucked up in bed in my anonymous hotel. I would be tired and would sleep soundly.

  As I walked, I couldn’t suppress a smile when I thought of the irony in what had just happened. His surname had been Edge, and his parents had chosen to christen him Clifford. His name had been the first thing he’d made a joke about when I’d met him in a pub near my hotel in London’s Bayswater a few weeks earlier. Still, he said, it wasn’t as bad as the couple called Balls who christened their daughter Ophelia. Clifford was a fund of such jokes, acquired during a lifetime in the used-car trade. Pickings were currently a little thin, I had soon gathered from the morose, self-pitying tone his conversation took on after a few large scotches. It came as no surprise that the offer of five thousand pounds in cash instantly commanded his total and undivided attention.

  He was exactly what I needed. Unmarried, unattached, a loser. Clifford was a gift from heaven. Or wherever.

  I couldn’t help smiling as I thought of how he was now fated to win a certain kind of cheap immortality by being listed in one or more of those anthologies of strange coincidences that George had been so fond of:

  “Cliff Edge falls to death from cliff edge.”

  Neither Cliff nor Nadia before him had seen their deaths coming. It wasn’t that either of them had been unusually naive or stupid—certainly Nadia wasn’t—so I could only conclude that my own capacity for simulation and deception was as great as I’d always believed.

  Mind you, I myself hadn’t seen Nadia’s death coming at first. It was something that evolved over time—a matter of weeks. That night in the Berkshires, when I’d first learned about the affair between Steve and Sara, nothing could have been further from my mind than killing Nadia. It was Sara I’d been planning to get rid of. No doubt, if I’d succeeded, Nadia would have benefited handsomely from the proceeds, at least for a time. I had never imagined our relationship would become permanent. It was a carnal fling, a good time on both sides, but with no illusions. She would have taken her payoff when the time came and moved on without complaint. Of that I was sure.

  However, that was not to be the way things would turn out. Coincidence would intervene—as absurdly and improbably as anything in those notebooks of George’s that I found myself occasionally dipping into. I confess that the subject was beginning to exercise a certain fascination over me. For example, although I still resisted the whole notion of significant coincidences, what is one to make of this kind of thing?

  A
Dublin man called Anthony Clancy was born on the seventh day of the week, in the seventh day of the month, in the seventh month of the year, in the seventh year of the century. He was the seventh child of a seventh child, and had seven brothers. Which makes seven coincidences involving the number seven.

  On his twenty-seventh birthday he went to a race meeting and in the seventh race backed horse number seven, which was called Seventh Heaven. It carried a handicap of seven, the odds were seven to one. He puts seven shillings on the horse. It came in seventh.

  Then there was a story told, apparently, by Jung himself:

  As a small boy in New Orleans, a certain Monsieur Deschamps was once given a piece of plum pudding by a Monsieur Fortgibu. Ten years later, in a Paris restaurant, he saw a plum pudding and ordered a slice, only to learn that the remaining piece had already been ordered—by Monsieur Fortgibu.

  Many years later, Monsieur Deschamps was invited to a dinner party where plum pudding was served. While eating it, he told the story of the earlier coincidence involving Monsieur Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened, and the now elderly Monsieur Fortgibu entered—having mistaken the address to which he’d been invited and burst in there by mistake.

  And then there was the woman who lost her wedding ring in a field and forty years later found it in a potato she was peeling in her kitchen sink.

  What can anyone say about such things? Can you simply ignore them merely because they don’t make sense?

  Because I was familiar, or at least becoming increasingly familiar, with the idea of these “synchronicitous events,” to use the term George used in his notebooks, I was perhaps less staggered and astounded than I might have been when one such event came out of nowhere and hit me squarely between the eyes.