Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, as if he was talking about our whole relationship. I sat on the arm of his chair, and rested my hand on his tangled hair. He stared assessingly at Joanna for a moment. ‘What the fuck do you think?’ he answered at last. He stood up. ‘I think that’s enough, don’t you?’

  Joanna didn’t move, except to check that the spools of the taperecorder were still turning.

  ‘Have you got over it?’ she asked. I leaned over and turned off her taperecorder and she looked up at me. Our eyes met and she nodded at me, approvingly, I thought.

  ‘Got over.’ His tone was withering. Then he said, in an altogether different tone, ‘Shall I tell you my secret, Joanna?’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  I’d bet she would.

  ‘I’ve got Alice,’ he said. ‘Alice will save me.’ And he gave a rather cracked laugh.

  Now Joanna did stand up.

  ‘One last question,’ she said, as she put on her coat. ‘Will you go on climbing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m a climber. That’s who I am.’ His voice was slightly blurred with the whisky. ‘I love Alice and I climb mountains.’ He leaned against me. ‘That is where I find grace.’

  ∗

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ said Pauline. We were walking in St James’s Park, arm in arm but awkward together still. It had been her idea to meet, and I had been half unwilling. All my old life seemed far off, almost unreal, as if it had happened to someone different. In that life, I had loved Pauline and depended on her; in this life, I had no room for such an intense friendship. I realized, walking to meet Pauline on that frosty Saturday afternoon in March, that I had put our friendship by for a rainy day. I assumed that I would be able to return to it, but not just yet. We had walked through the park together until it started to get dark, gingerly feeling our way round subjects where once we had been able to say more or less anything to each other. ‘How’s Jake?’ I had asked, and she, wincing slightly, had said he was all right.

  ‘How’s your new life?’ she’d said, not really wanting to know, and I hadn’t really told her.

  Now I stopped and took her thin shoulders. ‘That is wonderful news,’ I said. ‘How pregnant?’

  ‘Eight or nine weeks. Enough to feel sick most of the time.’

  ‘I’m very happy for you, Pauline,’ I said. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘Of course I told you,’ she replied formally. ‘You’re my friend.’

  We came to the road. ‘I go this way,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting Adam just up there.’

  We kissed each other on both cheeks, relieved, and I turned away, into the unlit street. As I did so a tall young man stepped in front of me and, before I had time to register much except his dead white face and his garish mop of ginger hair, yanked my bag off my shoulder.

  ‘Oil’ I yelled, and lunged at him as he ducked away from me. I got hold of the bag, although there was almost nothing in it of any value, and pulled it from him. He whipped round to face me. There was a spider-web tattoo on his left cheek, and a line round his throat read ‘CUT HERE’. I kicked at his shin but missed, so I kicked again. There, that must have hurt.

  ‘Leggo, you cunt,’ he snarled at me. The straps of my bag cut into my fingers then slipped from me. ‘You stupid fucking cunt.’ He lifted his hand and struck me across the face, and I staggered and put a hand up to my cheek. Blood was running down my neck. His mouth was open and I saw that his tongue was fat and purple. He lifted his hand again. Oh, God, he was a madman. I remember thinking that he must be the man who was sending us those notes; our stalker. Then I closed my eyes: better get it over with. No blow came.

  I opened them again and saw, as if in a dream, that he had a knife in his hand. It was not pointed towards me, but at Adam. Then I saw Adam slamming his fist into the man’s face. He cried out in pain, and dropped the knife. Adam hit him again, a cracking blow into his neck. Then into his stomach. The tattooed man was buckled over; blood was streaming down from his left eye. I saw Adam’s face: it was stony, quite without expression. He hit the man again and stepped back to let him fall to the ground, where he lay at my feet, whimpering and holding on to his stomach.

  ‘Stop!’ I gasped. A small crowd had gathered. Pauline was there; her mouth was an O of horror.

  Adam kicked him in the stomach.

  ‘Adam.’ I grabbed hold of his arm and clung on. ‘For Chrissakes, stop, will you? That’s enough.’

  Adam looked down at the body writhing on the pavement. ‘Alice wants me to stop,’ he said. ‘So that’s why I am stopping. Otherwise I’d murder you for daring to touch her.’ He picked up my bag from the ground, and then turned to me and took my face in both his hands. ‘You’re bleeding,’ he said. He licked some of the blood away. ‘Darling Alice, he made you bleed.’

  I saw dimly that people were gathering, talking, asking each other what had happened. Adam held me. ‘Does it hurt much? Are you all right? Look at your beautiful face.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I don’t know. I think so. Is he all right? What’s he… ?’

  I looked at the man on the ground. He was moving, but not much. Adam paid no attention. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, licked it and started to wipe the cut on my cheek. A siren wailed close by us and over Adam’s shoulder I could see a police car followed by an ambulance.

  ‘Nice one, mate.’ A hefty man in a long overcoat came up and held out his hand to grip Adam’s. ‘Put it there.’ I looked at them, appalled, as they shook hands. This was a nightmare, a farce.

  ‘Alice, are you all right?’ It was Pauline.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Policemen were here now. There was a car. It was an official incident, which somehow made it seem manageable. They leaned over the man and pulled him to his feet. He was led away out of my sight.

  Adam took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. He smoothed back my hair.

  ‘I’m going to get us a cab,’ he said. ‘The police can wait. Don’t move.’ He turned to Pauline. ‘Look after her,’ he said, and sprinted off.

  ‘He could have killed him,’ I said to Pauline.

  She looked at me oddly. ‘He really adores you, doesn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘But if he had…’

  ‘He saved you, Alice.’

  The next day the journalist, Joanna, rang up again. She had read about the fight in the evening paper and it was going to make all the difference to her interview, all the difference. She just wanted both of us to comment about it.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Adam mildly, and handed me the phone.

  ‘How does it feel,’ she asked me, ‘to be married to a man like Adam?’

  ‘What kind of man is that?’

  ‘A hero,’ she said.

  ‘Great,’ I said, but I wasn’t exactly sure how it felt.

  We lay opposite each other in the half-dark. My cheek stung. My heart was hammering. Would I never get used to him?

  ‘Why are you scared?’

  ‘Please touch me.’

  The orange street lamps were shining in through the bedroom window’s thin curtains. I could see his face, his beautiful face. I wanted him to hold me so hard and so close that I would disappear into him.

  ‘Tell me first why you are scared.’

  ‘Scared of losing you. There, put your hand there.’

  ‘Turn over, like that. Everything will be fine. I will never leave you and you will never leave me. Don’t close your eyes. Look.’

  Later, we were hungry, for we hadn’t eaten that evening. I slid out of the high bed on to the cold floorboards, and put on Adam’s shirt. In the fridge I found some Parma ham, some ancient button mushrooms and a small wedge of hard cheese. I fed Sherpa, who was twisting his small body round my bare legs, and then I made us a giant sandwich with some slightly stale, thin Italian bread. There was a bottle of red wine in our inadequate box of groceries by the door, which I opened. We ate in bed, propped up on pillows and
scattering crumbs.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, between bites, ‘I’m not used to people behaving like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Beating someone up for me.’

  ‘He was hitting you.’

  ‘I thought you were going to kill him.’

  He poured me another glass of wine. ‘I was angry.’

  ‘You don’t say. He had a knife, Adam, didn’t you consider that?’

  ‘No.’ He frowned. ‘Would you prefer me to be the kind of person who asked him politely to stop? Or ran to get the police?’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’

  I sighed and settled back against the pillows, drowsy with sex and wine. ‘Will you tell me something?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did something happen in the mountains… ? I mean, are you protecting someone?’

  Adam didn’t seem startled by my question, or cross about it. He didn’t even look round. ‘Of course I am,’ he said.

  ‘Will you ever tell me about it?’

  ‘Nobody needs to know,’ he said.

  Eighteen

  A few days later I went down to get the post and found another brown envelope. It had no stamp but on it was written: TO MRS ADAM TALLIS.

  I opened it immediately, down there in the common passage, feeling the doormat prickle the soles of my feet. The paper was the same, the writing was the same, though a bit smaller because the message was longer:

  CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WEDDING MRS TALLIS.

  WATCH YOUR BACK

  P.S. WHY DON’T YOU MAKE YOUR HUSBAND

  SOME TEA IN BED?

  I took the note up to Adam and put it on the bed by his face. He read it with a sombre expression.

  ‘Our correspondent doesn’t know that I’ve kept my own name,’ I said, with an attempt at a light tone.

  ‘Knows I’m in bed, though,’ said Adam.

  ‘What does that mean? Tea?’

  I went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard. There were only two packets of tea-bags, Kenyan for Adam, poncy lapsang souchong for me. I tipped them out on to the counter. They looked normal enough. I noticed that Adam was behind me.

  ‘Why should I make you tea in bed, Adam? Could it be something about the bed? Or the sugar?’

  Adam opened the fridge. There were two milk bottles in the door, one half full, one unopened. He took them both out. I looked in the cupboard under the sink and found a large red plastic bowl. I took the bottles from Adam.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  I emptied the first bottle into the bowl.

  ‘Looks like milk to me,’ I said. I opened the other bottle and started to pour.

  ‘This is… oh, Jesus.’

  There were little shadows in the milk and they bobbed to the surface of the bowl. Insects, flies, spiders, lots of them. I very carefully put the bottle down and then emptied the milk down the sink. I had to concentrate very hard in order to stop myself vomiting. First I was frightened, then I was angry. ‘Somebody’s been in here,’ I shouted. ‘They’ve fucking been in this flat.’

  ‘Hmm?’ said Adam absently, as if he had been thinking hard about something else.

  ‘Somebody broke in.’

  ‘No, they didn’t. It’s the milk. They put that bottle on the step after the milk was delivered.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ I asked.

  ‘Mrs Tallis,’ said Adam thoughtfully. ‘It’s aimed at you. Shall we call the police?’

  ‘No,’ I said aloud. ‘Not yet.’

  I accosted him as he came out of the front door, briefcase in hand.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why?’

  He stepped back from me as if I were a mugger. ‘What on earth are –?’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap, Jake. I know it’s you now. For ages I tried to pretend it was someone else, but I know it was you. Who else knows I’m scared of insects?’

  ‘Alice.’ He tried to put a hand on my shoulder but I shook him off. ‘Calm down, people will think you’re mad.’

  ‘Just tell me why the fuck you put spiders in my milk, dammit. Revenge?’

  ‘Now I think you’re mad.’

  ‘Come on, tell me. What else have you got up your sleeve? Are you trying to send me slowly off my head?’

  He looked at me and that stony look made me feel ill. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘you’re already off your head.’ And he turned on his heel and walked steadily up the road, away from me.

  Adam showed no interest at all, but over the next few days whenever I passed a newsagent I checked to see if they had printed the story. On the next Saturday it was there. I saw it straight away, a little photograph of a mountain in a box on the front page: ‘Social Climbing: Mountains and Money. See Section Two.’ I quickly pulled the other bit of the paper out to see what Joanna had written. There seemed to be pages of the story, too much to read in the shop. I bought it and took it back home.

  Adam had already gone out. I was pleased, for once. I made myself a pot of coffee. I wanted to settle down and give this the time it deserved. The cover of the second section of the Participant consisted of a sublime photograph of Chungawat in bright sunshine across a blue sky. Beneath it was a caption as if it was being displayed in an estate agent’s window: ‘One Himalayan peak for rent, £30,000. No previous experience required.’ I was captivated once more by the lonely beauty of the mountain. Had Adam been to the top of that? Well, not quite to the top. I opened the paper and checked. Four pages. There were photographs: Greg, Klaus, Françoise, beautiful in big boots, I noted with a stab of jealousy. There were a couple of the other climbers who had died. Adam, of course, but I was used to seeing pictures of him by now. There was a map, a couple of diagrams. I took a sip of coffee and started to read.

  In fact, at first I didn’t exactly read it. I just flicked my eyes over the text seeing which names were mentioned and how often. Adam came mainly at the end. I read that to see that there was nothing startlingly new. There wasn’t. Reassured, I went back to the beginning and read carefully. Joanna had told the story I already knew from Klaus’s book, but from a different perspective. Klaus’s version of the Chungawat disaster was complicated by his own feelings of excitement, failure, admiration, disillusion, fear, all mixed together. I respected him because he had owned up to all the confusion of what it had been like to be there in the storm with people dying and to his own inability to behave as he would have liked.

  Joanna saw it as a morality tale about the corrupting effects of money and a cult of heroism. On the one hand there were heroic characters who needed money; on the other hand there were rich people who wanted to climb difficult mountains, or, rather, wanted to say that they had climbed difficult mountains, since it was a matter of debate whether in a strict sense they had actually climbed them. None of this was big news to me. The tragic victim in all of this, needless to say, was Greg, whom she had not managed to talk to. After beginning her article with the terrible events on Chungawat, which still made me shiver however melodramatically they were described, Joanna went back to talk about Greg’s earlier career. His achievements really were startling. It wasn’t just the peaks he had climbed – Everest, K2, McKinley, Annapurna – but the way he had climbed them: in winter, without oxygen, blasting for the summit with a minimum of equipment.

  Joanna had obviously been through the press cuttings. In the eighties Greg had been a climbing mystic. A major peak was a privilege to be earned through years of apprenticeship. By the early nineties he had apparently been converted: ‘I used to be a mountaineering élitist,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Now I’m a democrat. Climbing is a great experience. I want to make it available to everybody.’ Everybody, Joanna commented drily, who could stump up $50,000. Greg had met an entrepreneur called Paul Molinson and together they had set up their company, Peak Experiences. For three years they had been taking doctors, lawyers, arbitrageurs, heiresses up to peaks that, until recently, had been beyond all but a select group of advanced climb
ers.

  Joanna focused on one of the Chungawat party who had died, Alexis Hartounian, a Wall Street broker. A scornful (and anonymous) climber was quoted as saying: ‘This man achieved some of the world’s great climbs. By no stretch of the imagination was he a climber yet he was telling people that he’d done Everest as if it were a bus stop. Well, he learned the hard way.’

  Joanna’s account of what had happened on the mountain was simply a distilled version of Klaus’s narrative accompanied by a diagram showing the fixed rope up the west side of the ridge. She portrayed a chaotic situation with incompetent climbers, people who were ill, one of them not able to speak a word of English. She quoted anonymous climbing experts, who said that the conditions above eight thousand metres were just too extreme for climbers who couldn’t take care of themselves. It wasn’t just that they were risking their own lives but those of everybody with them. Klaus had told her that he agreed with some of that, but a couple of the anonymous commentators went further. A peak like Chungawat requires absolute commitment and concentration, especially if the weather turns. They suggested that Greg had been so preoccupied with business complications and the special requirements of his unqualified clients that it had affected his judgement and, worst of all, his performance. ‘When you’ve expended your energy on all the wrong things,’ one person said, ‘then things go wrong at the wrong time, fixed lines come loose, people go in wrong directions.’

  It was a cynical story of corruption and disillusion, and Adam appeared towards the end as the symbol of lost idealism. He was known for having been critical of the expedition, not least of his own participation in it, but when it came down to it, he was the man who had gone up and down the mountain saving people who couldn’t save themselves. Joanna had managed to contact a couple of survivors who said that they owed their lives to him. Obviously he appeared all the more attractive for his refusal to blame anybody – indeed, his reluctance to make any comment at all. There was also the pathos of his own girlfriend having been among the fatalities. Adam had said little about this to her but she had found somebody else who described him as going out again and again in search of her before collapsing unconscious in his tent.