Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked Adam, who was refilling his glass.

  ‘Anthony Kaplan.’

  Adam took one sip and then another. He flinched slightly. ‘The guy was a jerk,’ he said.

  I felt cheated. It was common enough to know the trivial, mundane details about the life of a friend or colleague, but nothing of their passionate inner life. With Adam that was all I knew. His imagination, his fantasy life, his dreams, but only accidental fragments of what he actually did during his days. So I was hungry for anything about Adam, about his capacity to carry other people’s equipment when they were slowed to a crawl by altitude sickness. Everybody talked about his carefulness, his prudence, his clear-headedness.

  There was one new detail concerning Adam. Another expedition member, an interior designer called Laura Tipler, had told Kaplan that she had shared a tent for a few days with Adam on the way up to base camp. That was what Greg must have been referring to when he’d said Adam hadn’t been celibate after Françoise. Then, without any ado, Adam had moved out. To husband his resources, no doubt. I didn’t mind very much. It was all very adult and consensual, with no hard feelings on either side. Tipler told Kaplan that Adam’s mind was evidently elsewhere, on the arrangements for the move up the mountain, the assessment of various risks and the ability of the different expedition members to manage them, but his body had been enough for her. The bitch. She described the episode almost casually to Kaplan, as if it were an optional extra selected from the brochure. But had he slept with absolutely every woman he had ever met? I wondered what he would have thought if I had led a sex life like that.

  ‘Twenty questions,’ I said. ‘Who’s Laura Tipler?’

  Adam thought for a moment then laughed harshly. ‘A bloody liability is what she was.’

  ‘You shared a tent with her. She says.’

  ‘What are you saying, Alice? What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that I keep learning things about you from magazines.’

  ‘You won’t learn anything about me from that crap.’ He looked cross. ‘Why do you bother with it? Why are you poking around?’

  ‘I’m not poking around,’ I said warily. ‘I’m interested in your life.’

  Adam took another drink. ‘I don’t want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in me.’

  I looked sharply round. Did he know anything? But his attention was back on the television, moving from channel to channel, flick, flick, flick.

  I carried on reading. I had hoped, or feared, that there would be some more detail about Adam’s break-up with Françoise and about the tensions there may have been between them on the mountain. But Kaplan only mentioned briefly that they had been a couple and apart from that she barely featured in the article at all until near the end when she had disappeared. The thought had been running in my mind that the two women who had rejected Adam had died. Could it be that he hadn’t made as much effort to rescue Françoise’s group as he had with the others? But it was speedily contradicted by Kaplan’s evocation of what it had been like on the mountain in the storm. Both Greg and Claude Bresson had been out of action. The remarkable thing was not that five of the party died but that anybody at all had survived and that was almost entirely down to the efforts of Adam, going out again and again into the storm. But it nagged away at me and I wondered if that accounted for the composure with which he had recalled that nightmare.

  Adam hadn’t said very much, as usual, but at one point Kaplan had asked him if he was driven by the great romantic tradition of British explorers like Captain Scott: ‘Scott died,’ was Adam’s response. ‘And his men with him. My hero is Amundsen. He approached the South Pole as if he were a lawyer drawing up a legal document. It’s easy to gloriously kill the people in your charge. The difficult thing is to make sure the knots are tied properly and bring the people back.’

  Kaplan went from that quotation to the problem of the knots that hadn’t stayed tied. As he pointed out, the cruel paradox of the disaster was that, through Greg McLaughlin’s own innovation, there had been no way of dodging responsibility in the aftermath of the expedition. Claude Bresson had been in charge of the red line, Adam had been in charge of the yellow line and Greg had given himself the ultimate responsibility of securing his blue line, the line that would take the expedition up the Gemini Ridge to the col just below the summit.

  It was so horribly simple, but just to make it simpler still, a detailed diagram showed the disposition of the blue line on the west ridge and where it had gone astray at the apex so that one group of climbers had missed the line and blundered down the east ridge to their deaths. Poor Greg. I wondered if he had heard of this latest eruption of publicity.

  ‘Poor Greg,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I said, "Poor Greg." Back in the spotlight again.’

  ‘Vultures,’ said Adam bitterly.

  There was virtually nothing in Kaplan’s article that differed even in emphasis from what I had read in Joanna’s article and, from a more personal perspective, in Klaus’s book. I read through the article a second time looking for anything at all that was different. All I could find was a trivial correction. In Klaus’s book, the climber found barely alive the following morning, mumbling, ‘Help,’ had been Pete Papworth. Kaplan had collated the accounts of everybody involved and had established, for what it was worth, that Papworth had died overnight and it was the German, Tomas Benn, who had been found dying. Big deal. Apart from that, the accounts agreed completely.

  I went over and sat on the arm of Adam’s chair, ruffled his hair. He passed his drink to me and I took a sip, passed it back.

  ‘Do you dwell on it, Adam?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chungawat. Do you go over and over it in your mind? Think how it might have worked out differently, how the dead people might have been saved or that you might have died?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  Adam leaned forward and snapped off the television. The room was suddenly very quiet and I could hear noises from the street, a plane going over. ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘The woman you loved died on the mountain. It haunts me.’

  Adam’s eyes narrowed. He put his glass down. He raised himself up and took my face in his hands. They were big, very strong. I felt he could snap my head off, if he wanted to. He was looking hard into my eyes. Was he trying to see in?

  ‘You’re the woman I love,’ he said, without taking his eyes off me. ‘You’re the woman I trust.’

  Thirty-four

  ‘It’s Bill Levenson for you.’ Claudia held out the phone with a sympathetic look on her face, as if she were handing me over to a hangman.

  I took the phone from her with a grimace. ‘Hello, Alice here.’

  ‘Okay, Alice.’ He sounded jovial for a man who was about to downsize me. ‘You’re on.’

  ‘What?’ I raised my eyebrows to Claudia who was hovering by the door, waiting to see my face collapse.

  ‘You’re on,’ he repeated. ‘Do it. Drakloop mark IV, she’s your baby.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘You haven’t had second thoughts, have you, Alice?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  I hadn’t had any thoughts at all. Drakloop had been the last thing on my mind in the previous couple of days. Even now, I could barely summon up the energy to sound interested.

  ‘Then you can do whatever you have to do. Make a list of your requirements and your schedule and e-mail them to me. I’ve banged heads together, and they’re ready. Now, I’ve given you the ball, Alice. Run with it.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. If he wanted me to sound excited or grateful, he was going to be disappointed. ‘What’s happening to Mike and Giovanna and the others?’

  ‘Leave the fun stuff to me.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well done, Alice. I’m sure you are going to make a great success of Drakloop IV.’

  I left work later than
usual, so that I didn’t have to meet Mike. Later, I told myself, I would take him out and we would get drunk together and curse the senior management and their grubby machinations, as if we were both quite untainted by their ways. But not now. I had other things to worry about, and I could only care about Mike in a provisional sort of way. That side of my life was in abeyance. I brushed my hair and tied it in a knot at the back of my head, then I picked up my overflowing in-tray and dumped all of its contents in the bin.

  Klaus was waiting by the revolving doors, eating a doughnut and reading yesterday’s paper, which he folded away when he saw me.

  ‘Alice!’ He kissed me on both cheeks, then looked at me searchingly. ‘You’re looking a bit tired. Are you all right?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  To his credit, he looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Adam asked me if I would see you home. He was worried about you.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s a waste of your time.’

  He tucked my arm through his. ‘It’s a pleasure. I wasn’t doing anything anyway. You can give me a cup of tea at your flat.’

  I hesitated, showing my obvious reluctance.

  ‘I promised Adam,’ said Klaus, and started to tow me towards the underground station.

  ‘I want to walk.’

  ‘Walk? From here?’

  This was gelling irritating. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, and I’m walking home. Coming?’

  ‘Adam always says that you’re stubborn.’

  ‘It’s spring. Look at the sky. We can walk through the West End and Hyde Park. Or you can fuck off and I can go alone.’

  ‘You win, as always.’

  ‘So what’s Adam doing that he couldn’t come himself to accompany me?’ I asked, after we had crossed the road, the very place I had first set eyes on Adam, and he on me.

  ‘I think he was going to meet up with some cameraman or other who might climb on the expedition.’

  ‘Have you seen the piece on Chungawat in Guy magazine?’

  ‘I talked to Kaplan on the phone. He sounded like a pro.’

  ‘He doesn’t say anything much new.’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Except for one thing. You said the man who survived overnight and was found dying and calling out for help was Pete Papworth, and Kaplan says it was actually Tomas Benn.’

  ‘The German guy?’ Klaus was frowning, as if trying to remember, then he smiled. ‘Kaplan must have got it right. I wasn’t exactly compos mentis at the time.’

  ‘And you didn’t mention Laura Tipler sharing Adam’s tent.’

  He looked at me strangely, without breaking his stride. ‘It seemed like a violation of privacy.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Klaus’s expression became faintly disapproving, as if I were breaking some kind of unspoken rule. Then he said, ‘It was before he met you, Alice.’

  ‘I know. So I’m not allowed to know anything about her?’ He didn’t reply. ‘Or about Françoise? Or any of them?’ I stopped myself. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on about it like this.’

  ‘Debbie said you were dwelling on things a bit.’

  ‘Did she? She had a fling with him once, too.’ My voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched. I was beginning to alarm myself.

  ‘God, Alice.’

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t walk. Maybe I’ll get a taxi home. I feel a bit tired.’

  Without a word, Klaus stepped out into the road and hailed a passing black cab. He handed me in, then stepped in after me in spite of my protestations.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

  We sat in uncomfortable silence for a while, as the cab edged its way through the evening traffic.

  ‘You have no reason to be jealous,’ he said at last.

  ‘I’m not jealous. I’m sick and tired of secrets and mysteries, and finding out about Adam from articles I read in papers, or from little things people let slip when they’re not thinking. It’s like being ambushed all the time. I never know which direction the surprise is going to come from.’

  ‘From what I hear,’ said Klaus, ‘the surprises aren’t exactly springing out at you. It’s more like you are rooting around trying to find them.’ He laid a warm, callused hand over mine. ‘Trust him,’ he said. ‘Stop tormenting yourself.’

  I laughed, and then the laugh turned into a hiccuping sob. ‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’m not usually like this.’

  ‘Perhaps you should get some help,’ said Klaus.

  I was aghast. ‘You think I’m going mad? Is that what you think?’

  ‘No, Alice, just that it might help to talk to an outsider about all of this. Look. Adam’s a buddy, but I know what a stubborn bastard he can be. If you’re having problems, get help to sort them out.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ I sat back in the taxi and closed my stinging eyes. I felt bone-tired and horribly dreary. ‘Maybe I’ve been a fool.’

  ‘We’re all fools sometimes,’ he said. He looked relieved at my sudden acquiescence.

  When the taxi stopped, I didn’t ask him in for the cup of tea he had promised himself, and I don’t think he minded at all. He hugged me at the front door and strode rapidly down the road, coat flapping. I trudged up the stairs, dispirited and somewhat ashamed of myself. I went to the bathroom, stared into the mirror and didn’t like what I saw there. Then I gazed around the flat, which was as I had left it that morning. There were dishes that had been in the sink for several days, drawers left open, jars of honey and jam with their lids off, bread going stale on the cutting board, a couple of filled bin-bags stacked by the door, crumbs and dirt on the linoleum floor. In the living room, there were old mugs everywhere, newspapers and magazines on the floor together with emptied bottles of whisky and wine. A bunch of daffodils were shrivelled and brown in a jam jar. The carpet looked as if it had not been vacuumed for weeks. Come to think of it, we hadn’t changed the sheets or done the laundry for weeks either.

  ‘Shit,’ I said in disgust. ‘I look like shit and this place looks like shit. Right.’

  I rolled up my sleeves and started in the kitchen. I was going to get my life under control. With every surface I cleaned, I felt better. I washed the dishes, threw away all the stale or rotting food, all the candle stubs, all the junk mail, and I scrubbed the floor with hot soapy water. I gathered all the bottles and the old papers and threw them away, not even stopping to read last week’s news. I threw away Sherpa’s bowl, trying not to remember the last sight I had had of him. I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the corner of the room, ready to go to the laundry. I put shoes into pairs, books into neat piles. I cleaned the tidemark from the bath and the limescale from the shower. I added the towels to the laundry pile.

  Then I made myself a cup of tea and started on the cardboard boxes under our high bed, where Adam and I had got into the habit of tossing anything we weren’t actually going to deal with but didn’t want to throw away just yet. For a second, I considered simply putting them outside by the dustbins without even going through them. But then I saw a scrap of paper with Pauline’s work number scribbled on it. I mustn’t throw that away. I started to plough through the old bills, the new bills, the postcards, the scientific journals I hadn’t yet read, the photostats of Drakloop material, the scraps of paper with messages I had left for Adam, or Adam had left for me. ‘Back at midnight; don’t go to sleep,’ I read, and tears pricked my eyelids again. Empty envelopes. Unopened envelopes addressed to the owner of the flat. I took them over to the writing desk in the corner of the bedroom and began to sort them into three piles. One to discard, one to deal with at once, and one to put back in the box. One of the piles slipped over and several of the papers fell down behind the desk. I tried to reach down after them but the gap was too narrow. I was tempted to leave them there but, no, I was going to clear up everything in the flat. Even the invisible bits. So, with an immense effort, I pulled the desk out from the wall. I retrieved the papers and, of course, there was th
e other stuff that gets stuck behind desks: a shrivelled apple-core, a paper clip, a pen top, an old scrap of envelope. I looked at the envelope to see if it could just be thrown away. It was addressed to Adam. Then I turned it round and all at once I felt I had been punched so hard in the stomach that I could only breathe with difficulty.

  ‘Had a bad day?’ I read. It was Adam’s scrawl, in thick black ink. Then, again, on the next line down, ‘Had a hard day, Adam?’ Then: ‘Hard day, Adam? Take a bath.’ Finally, underneath was written in familiar capital letters:

  HARD DAY.

  The words were written repeatedly like an infant’s writing exercise: HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY HARD DAY

  Then: ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM ADAM

  And then, finally: HARD DAY ADAM? TAKE A BATH.

  I mustn’t be mad. I mustn’t be obsessive. I tried and tried to think of the sensible, reassuring explanation. Adam might have been doodling, thinking about the note, writing its words over and over. But that wasn’t what was on the paper. This wasn’t doodling. It was Adam imitating the handwriting of the previous notes – of Tara’s notes – until he got it right, so that the link between Tara and the harassment would be broken. Now I knew. I knew about Sherpa and I knew about everything. I knew what I had known for a long time. The one truth I couldn’t stand.

  I picked up the envelope. My hands were steady. I hid it in my knicker drawer, with the letter from Adele, and then went back to the bedside and put everything I had taken out and sorted back into the boxes. I pushed the boxes back under the bed, and even rubbed away the depressions they had made on the carpet.

  I heard the footsteps coming up the stairs and went, unhurriedly, into the kitchen. He came in and stood over me. I kissed him on the lips and put my arms tightly around him. ‘I’ve spring-cleaned,’ I said, and my voice sounded perfectly ordinary.

  He kissed me back and looked into my eyes and I didn’t flinch or turn away.

  Thirty-five

  Adam knew. Or he knew something. Because he was always around, always had his eye on me. A detached observer might have thought it the same as the beginning of our relationship when neither of us could physically bear to be apart from the other. Now it was more like a very conscientious doctor who couldn’t let an unstable patient out of his sight for a moment because of the suspicion that she might do herself harm.