As a secondary precaution, I made sure that my passport in the name of George Daly remained in the hotel’s main safe, along with two or three other valuables and my travelers’ checks, throughout the whole period I was away. Then, using my Larry Hart passport, I took a TWA flight back to New York.
Nadia knew all about my trip to London, but not all the details or the real reason for it. I told her I had to set up an account into which my wife would pay the money that Steve would get out of her to buy Nadia’s silence. Naturally, I said, I would be back for D-Day, though I had little doubt that she could perfectly well take care of herself when Steve came over. One of the things I admired about her was that she didn’t know the meaning of fear—any more than she did of guilt, shame, or moral repugnance. But I promised her I would be there—not actually in the room, of course, but somewhere in the apartment, and with a gun in case of trouble.
Steve behaved exactly as predicted when she called him at his office. She was put through right away, but he sounded guarded. She told him she had to see him urgently.
“I’m tied up right now, Nadia. Can’t you tell me on the phone what this is about?”
“I think you’d rather I didn’t do that, Steve.”
“What d’you mean?”
“For one thing, we don’t know who could be listening in, do we?”
She shot a big wink to where I sat with an extension to my ear and my hand over the mouthpiece. I winked back.
He gave a practiced laugh, though I could detect an underlying unease in it. “If it’s all that important, come to the office.”
“No. You come here, to the apartment.”
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Steve, I’m not arguing with you. I’m telling you what you’re going to do.”
“Nadia, what is this… ?
She began subtly turning the thumbscrews with talk of campaign funds, coupled with the use of the term “avoidable scandal.”
His voice took on a harder edge as anger took over from uncertainty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nadia—and neither do you. Whatever your game is, I’m not playing. If you want to see me, come to the office. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to hang up now.”
“How’s Sara?”
A fatal pause. She waved her fist in triumph; she knew she had him.
“Sara?”
“Not on the phone, Steve—right? Let’s say seven-thirty at the apartment. Come alone, drive yourself. You know where you can park.”
He protested some more, but he knew he had no choice. She managed to imply that this was a once and for all deal, some kind of compensation for the fact that he’d lied when he left her, and that he had not in fact been planning to save his marriage but had taken up with a new mistress. She refused to tell him how she knew this, but hinted she might reveal her sources once the business between them was over.
I watched his arrival from the corner of Nadia’s building where I had a clear view of the whole street. I was satisfied that he was alone. No other cars cruised suspiciously by or parked at around the same time. I saw him walk toward the building, coat collar turned up and hands deep in his pockets. There was no doorman, so visitors either had to use a key or be buzzed in. Nadia had established on the phone that Steve still had the set of keys she’d given him, which made my job easier. Otherwise, I would have had to wait in the apartment to buzz him in, then leave the door on the latch and make my getaway down the back stairs before he stepped out of the elevator.
As it was, I already stood across from where he’d parked his car. In my hand I had the pair of pantyhose with which, ten minutes earlier, I had strangled Nadia. I let enough time pass, a minute maybe, until Steve would be in the elevator on his way up to her floor. Then, checking there was no casual pedestrian close enough to see what I was doing, I crossed over and carefully snagged the pantyhose on the edge of his front fender. I paused only to ensure that enough fibers were torn and caught where they would readily be found later, then continued innocently on my way, slipping the pantyhose into a plastic bag in my pocket. It was possible I might need to plant them somewhere later in order to make the case against Steve conclusive, though I thought probably not. All the same, I meant to leave as little as possible to chance.
Two hours later, Larry Hart boarded his return flight to London, where Clifford was paid off. Everything had gone perfectly to plan. When the news of Steve’s arrest was piped by satellite to the TV set in my hotel room, I picked up the phone and called Sara. Then I called Heathrow, upgraded my return BA flight (in the name of George Daly) to Concorde, and set off once more across the Atlantic.
On the way I thought through for the thousandth time everything that had happened, looking for the flaws that might conceivably still show up. Although I knew now that Steve had panicked and run when he had found Nadia’s body, even if he’d done the decent thing and called the cops, he would still have emerged as the prime suspect. The whole backstory of his affair with her, the carefully planted clues I’d left around the apartment, the nylon fibers on his fender—all these things would have made a very hard case for him to answer. The best perception of him would have been as a man who committed murder in a moment of panic, then tried to remove all the evidence implicating himself, but crucially missing some, then finally attempting the classic trick where the killer tries to establish his innocence by calling the police and pretending to have discovered the body. It wouldn’t have worked. Whether he ran or stayed put, his goose was cooked.
All the same, it wasn’t over yet. So far as Sara was concerned, everything went as I’d foreseen. But I knew there would be inquiries about me by lawyers working for Steve’s defense. I was as ready for them as I could be. I had calculated—rightly as it turned out—that a lawyer with political ambitions would have many potential enemies. I was far from being the only suspect. The biggest risk I ran was that somehow my relationship with Nadia would become known. If that happened, I could find myself in big trouble. Should that become a risk, then Larry Hart was poised to fly to some unextraditable territory in South America or one of several other continents that I had on my list of emergency hideouts.
A secondary risk was that the connection between myself and the detective agency that Nadia had worked for might be discovered. It was no more than a remote risk so long as nothing about Steve’s affair with Sara came out into the open. But if the liaison between Steve Coleman and Sara Daly became known, then George Daly’s connection with the firm for which Nadia had worked would surely surface. However, I was as prepared as I could be for that. Sara had seen my “shock” when I had read in the paper that Steve’s victim had worked for a detective agency. I would explain that I hadn’t told her about my own connection with that agency because it had struck me as yet another “weird coincidence.” A man with something to hide would have suppressed even that little show of surprise I had so carefully put on for her to see. In retrospect, it would have tended to suggest my innocence.
Investigators called on me, of course, as I had foreseen. Not cops: men working for Steve’s defense. They were polite and careful in their approach. It was clear that Steve had told them about Sara, but with the injunction that the matter was not to be brought into the open unless absolutely necessary. The fact that I could prove I’d been in London when Nadia was murdered effectively took me out of the frame of suspicion, as I had intended it should. Everything was just fine—until Clifford Edge called me.
Clifford had gotten my address and phone number from someone at my hotel in London—some grasping palm greased by a fifty, I imagine. His sleazy loser’s instincts were perhaps sharper than I had anticipated. I wasn’t clear what he suspected, but it was obviously something more than my story about a suspicious wife and a dirty weekend in Paris. Whatever I was up to, Clifford thought there should be more money in it for him than he’d been paid so far.
I acquiesced with grace, and even, I must say, proud of my presence of mind, som
e humor. “Cliff,” I said, “you’re as smart as a whip and a credit to my choice of you as a partner. I think I may have a big opportunity for a man like you. I’m going to be over in a couple of days, and you and I are going to talk some serious business.”
So it was that Larry Hart made one final trip to England. Cliff and I met in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. I had rented a car and told him that I needed him to drive down with me to the coast. I hinted at import-export deals, with a knowing wink that spoke of contraband and easy money. I told him I had friends from overseas I wanted him to meet; he would be my man in the United Kingdom. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
I had a bottle of scotch in the car, and it wasn’t hard persuading him to drink most of it. If they autopsied him, they would find enough alcohol in his system to make a verdict of accidental death a certainty. Nobody was going to make waves about the loss of a sad case like Cliff Edge, just jokes about his name and the circumstances of his departure from this life.
As I said, another coincidence.
Once they start, for whatever reason, they come thick and fast.
Chapter 28
The first thing I did when I got back to New York was destroy my passport—the one in the name of Larry Hart. I also had to get rid of all the other evidence that George had unearthed of my existence, including the childhood photographs and everything connected with my adoptive parents. As long as that stuff was still around, I was potentially at risk. I burned everything in a steel wastebasket, then flushed the ashes down the toilet. It was the only way. Because you can hide things, put them in safe places, forget about them—but there’s always a lingering risk that ten years on somebody will tear up the cellar where you buried the body. Or you’ll forget you hid a secret copy of some crucial letter in your desk—until after you’ve sent it to the sale room. People make dumb mistakes, and people includes yourself. That’s something I never forget.
I had very nearly made a couple of seriously dumb mistakes with Sara earlier. The worst had been that night in the Berkshires when I was planning to kill her, the night when she’d arrived and told me she was in love with somebody else and was leaving me. I’d almost lost it then. I grabbed her by the wrist and began dragging her toward the stairs, and only stopped when Steve Coleman appeared in the door. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him. It just made me ask myself what I thought I was doing. The plan had been to push her off the tower quietly and with no fuss, because she would be unconscious already. I would merely have to ensure that she was dead after the fall, and rectify the situation if she wasn’t, then call for help. I would have said she went up to the tower alone, and since I had not been responsible for the building work up there I could hardly be accused of setting a trap for her. Which of course I hadn’t. That much would be plain.
As for proving I had pushed her, there was no way. It was my word that I was downstairs the whole time against the word of anyone who chose to challenge me. Unprovable.
So what was I doing trying to drag her to her death in full view of Steve Coleman? It meant I would have to kill him too. And that would be hard to explain.
I pulled myself together and did what I could to salvage the situation. I’ve always suspected I had something of the actor in me, and at that moment I proved it. I went straight into humble, unselfish George mode. I’d picked up enough of what people thought about him by then. I knew how humble, unselfish, dick-brain George would have behaved. I went on behaving like that for the following days and weeks.
The performance stood me in good stead. When everything collapsed under her, I was the only person Sara could turn to. I’d been in on her secret, and I’d kept it. Good old humble, unselfish George. Loyal as a favorite dog. Trustworthiness itself. The whole thing had played like a dream.
Throughout it all—the setting up of Nadia’s murder, Steve’s arrest, Sara’s trauma—I had continued reading George’s notebooks. I found they gave me a more useful insight into who he was than anything else could have. He had a weird kind of mind, somehow turned in on itself, forever looking for “the still point of the turning world,” as he put it—whatever he meant by that. He said he’d touched it sometimes in meditation.
Sounded more like vegetation in my opinion. Mental masturbation posing as philosophy. Still, that’s who he was, so that was who I had to be—to all intents and purposes.
He was more interesting on the subject he’d been working on just before his death, though maybe I felt that because the subject of coincidence had begun to interest me for my own personal reasons. Without coincidence, in fact quite a few coincidences, I wouldn’t have been where I was by then, sitting very pretty, comfortably ensconced in my new—and George’s old—life.
All the same, I still couldn’t bring myself to believe that a coincidence was anything more than just a coincidence, no matter how amazing. There was no more to it than that. There couldn’t be. No more than met the eye.
Not to George, though. Back to his notebooks:
What is this thing “synchronicity”? What does it mean? Jung tells a story that suggests an answer.
“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the windowpane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”
Up till that time, Jung writes, the woman had refused to believe that her dreams could be important in resolving her psychological problems. She could not see the connection. Now she understood how all kinds of connections might exist, and how they would explain a great many things if they did. She recovered quickly.
But what does synchronicity itself explain? Koestler writes in Janus:
“An essential feature of modern physics is its increasingly holistic trend, based on the insight that the whole is as necessary for the understanding of its parts as the parts are necessary for understanding the whole. An early expression of this trend, dating from the turn of the century, was ‘Mach’s Principle,’ endorsed by Einstein. It states that the inertial properties of terrestrial matter are determined by the total mass of the universe around us.”
Like the Chinese proverb: “If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the universe.”
But what is this shakeable universe and the blade of grass made of? What is the stuff of reality? On the cutting edge of theoretical physics now we have String Theory, which suggests that the ultimate building block of everything, including space, is a kind of minute string or loop that vibrates at different speeds according to whether it’s going to become part of an oxygen molecule, a rose petal, Einstein’s brain—or whatever. These so far purely theoretical strings are supposed to be so small as to be not only undetectable but virtually unimaginable. I read somewhere that if you blew up a single atom to the size of the known universe, one of these superstrings that made it up would still be only the size of a tree. In the end, this sort of thing strikes me as being uncomfortably close to the farcical notion of medieval scholars arguing in all seriousness about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
The point is, every time you get “reality” down to one thing, it has a habit of turning into something else.
Physicist F. David Peat writes: “Science may, in the end, have to look in new directions if its understanding of nature is to continue. Already many scientists are dissatisfied by the ‘reductionist’ nature of some branches of science and with the claim that an ultimate level of reality is shortly to be reached as a result of research on elementary particles.… The idea that reality may unfold into a complex, and potentially endless, series of levels changes the whol
e meaning of reductionism.… Any level of scientific explanation depends on, and is conditioned by, concepts and meanings that arise in other levels.”
Jung wrote: “We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a ‘metaphysical’ mind or spirit, and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind.“
In other words, mind and matter are one. Back in the twenties and thirties, when the quantum revolution was getting under way, mathematicians and cosmologists like Jeans and Eddington were saying things like, “The stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and, “The universe looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought.”
It is a fact that the deeper you look into matter, the less “material” it becomes. Cells are made of atoms and atoms are mostly space, then down below that we’re into quantum indeterminacy, “quarks” and “gluons” and now these damn “strings.” Matter has no more physical substance than a thought.
How much substance has a thought?
The absence of anything—no life, no universe, nothing—is unthinkable. Try it. You cannot imagine that nothing exists. But if, as seems increasingly likely, all that exists is a thought, whose thought is it?
And why does it seem to take two forms, matter and mind? Is that just a misperception on our part, whatever we are, and however we fit in?
Or is all this speculation simply missing the point? Is something quite different going on?
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