Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  I hadn’t been swimming for months. My legs, corkscrewing with the breast-stroke or flailing with the crawl, felt heavy. My chest hurt. Water found its way under my goggles and stung my eyes. A man on his back, arms like rotating saws, hit me in my belly and shouted at me. I counted as I swam, staring through my goggles at the turquoise water. This was so boring; up and down, up and down. I remembered now why I had given up before. But after about twenty lengths, I started to find a rhythm that became almost calming, and, instead of puffing and counting, I started thinking. Not frantically any more, but slowly and calmly. I knew that I was in grave danger and I knew that no one was going to help me. Greg had been my last chance of that. I was on my own now. The muscles in my arms ached as I swam.

  It seemed absurd, and yet I was almost relieved. I was on my own and I felt that, for the first time in months, I was myself again. After all that passion, rage and terror, all that vertiginous loss of control, I was clear-headed, as if I’d emerged from a feverish dream. I was Alice Loudon. I had been lost and now I was found. Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four. I made a plan as I forged up and down the pool, avoiding all the men doing the crawl. The knots in my shoulders eased.

  In the changing room I towelled myself briskly, put on my clothes without getting them wet on the puddly floor, and then put on makeup in front of the mirror. There was a woman next to me, also applying eyeliner and mascara. We grinned at each other, two women arming themselves for the outside world. I blow-dried my hair, then tied it back so that no locks were escaping on to my face. Soon I was going to cut it off, a new-look Alice. Adam loved my hair: sometimes he would bury his face in it as if he were drowning. It seemed such a long time ago, that rapturous, obliterating darkness. I would get myself cropped at the hairdresser’s so that I wouldn’t have to carry all that voluptuous weight around.

  I didn’t go back to work at once. I went to an Italian restaurant down the road from the pool and ordered a glass of red wine, a bottle of fizzy water and a seafood salad with garlic bread. I pulled out the writing paper I had bought that morning, and a pen. At the head of the paper I wrote, in thick capital letters, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, and underlined it twice. My wine was put in front of me and I sipped it cautiously. I had to keep a clear head now. ‘If I am found dead,’ I wrote, ‘or if I disappear and cannot be traced, then I will have been murdered by my husband, Adam Tallis.’

  The seafood salad and garlic bread arrived, and the waiter ground black pepper liberally over it with an oversized pepper-mill. I speared a rubbery ring of squid and popped it into my mouth, chewed vigorously, washed it down with water.

  I wrote down everything I knew, in neat script and in as cogent a style as I could muster. I explained the death of Adele, and that her last letter to Adam, written just before she disappeared, was in my knicker drawer, under all of my underwear. I told them about Adele’s sister Tara, who had been harassing Adam, and had been fished out of a canal in East London. I even described the murder of Sherpa. Strangely, it was the cat rather than the women who made me realize my own peril most clearly. I remembered him, slashed open in the bath. For a minute I felt my gut clench. I crunched on crusty bread and drank a bit more wine to steady my nerves. Then I went through my analysis of exactly what had happened on the mountain with Françoise. I described Françoise’s rejection of Adam, Greg’s apparently foolproof system of ropes, the German man’s dying words. I drew a diagram as neatly as I could, reproducing it from the magazine article with satisfying arrows and dotted lines. I gave them Greg’s address and said they should confirm the accuracy of what I had written with him.

  On a separate piece of paper I wrote out a very basic will. I left all my money to my parents. I left my jewellery to Pauline’s baby if it was a girl, and to Pauline if it was a boy. I left Jake my two pictures and my brother my few books. That would do. I didn’thave much to leave anyway.

  I thought about my beneficiaries, but in a detached sort of way. When I remembered my life with Jake, I felt no stirrings of regret. It just seemed so very long ago, a different world and a different me. I didn’t want the old world back, not even now. I didn’t know what I wanted. I couldn’t look ahead like that, into the future, perhaps because I didn’t dare. I was locked into the disastrous present, and it was one step in front of the other now, edging my way through danger. I didn’t want to die.

  I folded the documents, sealed them in an envelope and put it into my bag. I finished my lunch, eating methodically, swilling back the last of the red wine. I ordered a slice of lemon tart for pudding, which was satisfyingly creamy and astringent, and a double espresso. After I had paid the bill I fished out my new mobile and called Claudia. I told her that I had been held up and wouldn’t be in the office for another hour. If Adam called, she should tell him I was at a lunch meeting. I left the restaurant and hailed a cab.

  Sylvie was in a meeting with a client, and her assistant told me that she was terribly busy for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘If you could tell her it’s Alice to see her on a matter of urgency, and that I’ll only need a few minutes of her time.’

  I waited in the lobby, reading last year’s copies of women’s magazines, learning how to lose weight and have multiple orgasms and cook carrot cake. After about twenty minutes a woman with red eyes came out of Sylvie’s office and I went in.

  ‘Alice.’ She hugged me and held me away from her. ‘You look fabulously skinny. Sorry you had to wait. I’ve been holed up since lunch with a hysterical divorcée.’

  ‘I’ll not keep you long,’ I said. ‘I know you’re very busy. I wanted to ask you a favour. It’s quite a simple one.’

  ‘Sure, ask away. How’s that gorgeous husband of yours?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ I said, and sat down opposite her, her large and chaotic desk between us.

  ‘Is something wrong with him?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘You don’t want a divorce, do you?’

  She looked curious in a rapacious sort of way.

  ‘It’s just a favour. I want you to keep something safe for me.’ I fished the sealed envelope out of the bag and pushed it across the desk. ‘Now, I know that this will sound ridiculously melodramatic, but if I am found dead or if I disappear I want you to give this to the police.’

  I felt embarrassed. There was an absolute silence. Sylvie’s mouth was open; she had a vacuous expression on her face. ‘Darling Alice, is this a joke?’

  ‘No. Is there a problem?’

  The phone on her desk rang, but she didn’t pick it up and we both waited until it stopped.

  ‘No,’ she said absently. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Good.’ I stood up and picked up my bag. ‘Give my love to the Crew. Say that I miss them. That I’ve always missed them, although I didn’t know it at first.’

  Sylvie stayed sitting in her chair, staring at me. When I reached the door, she leaped up and rushed after me. She put her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Alice, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Sorry, Sylvie.’ I kissed her on the cheek. ‘Some other time, perhaps. Take care of yourself. And thanks for being my friend. It helps.’

  ‘Alice,’ she said again, helplessly. But I was gone.

  I was back at work by four. I spent an hour briefing the marketing department, and half an hour with accounts, arguing over my future budget. In the end, they backed down because I obviously wasn’t going to. I swept through the paperwork on my desk, and left earlier than usual. Adam was waiting for me, as I had known he would be. He wasn’t reading a paper, or gazing around him or looking at his watch; he was standing quite still, as if to attention, with his patient gaze fixed on the revolving doors. He’d probably been like that for an hour.

  When he saw me he didn’t smile, but he took my bag from me and then put his arms round me and stared into my face. ‘You smell of chlorine.’

  ‘I went swimming.’

  ‘And perfume.’

  ‘You gave it to me.’

&
nbsp; ‘You look beautiful today, my love. So fresh and beautiful. I can’t believe you’re my wife.’

  He kissed me, hard and long, and I kissed him back and pressed against him. My body felt as if it was made of some inert heavy matter that would never again shudder with desire. I shut my eyes because I couldn’t bear to see his eyes staring into mine so intensely, never looking away from me. What could he see? What did he know?

  ‘I’m going to take you out for a meal tonight,’ he said. ‘But before that we’re going home so I can fuck you.’

  ‘You’ve got it all worked out,’ I said, acquiescent and smiling in the closed circle of his arms.

  ‘I have. Right down to the last detail, my Alice.’

  Thirty-seven

  I hadn’t protested when he took my foil card and popped the small yellow pills, one by one, down the lavatory. If anyone had told me, six months ago, that I would be allowing my lover – my husband – to flush away my contraceptives without my consent, I would have laughed in their face. He had shaken out the last pill and then taken me by the hand and led me, without a word, to the bedroom and made love to me very gently, making me look into his eyes. And I hadn’t protested. But all the time my mind was making furious calculations. Probably he didn’t know that the effect of the Pill lasts for a bit, and by that time I would be past this month’s window of opportunity. I wouldn’t, I guessed, get pregnant for the next couple of weeks at least. I had time. Yet I felt, nevertheless, as if he were planting a child in me and all I was doing was lying back and receiving it, and not protesting. It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives or the partners of alcoholics. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away. I suppose I had been unimaginative about a lot of things, though. I had spent most of my life untouched by tragedy, and not properly thinking about the way that other people lived and suffered.

  When I looked back over the past few months, I felt freshly ashamed of how very easily I had sloughed off an old and loved life: my family, friends, my interests, my sense of the world. Jake had accused me of burning bridges, which made my behaviour sound reckless and fine. But I had abandoned people as well. Now I needed to get my affairs in order, or at least make a gesture of reconciliation towards those I might have hurt. I wrote a letter to my parents, saying that I knew I hadn’t been in contact much but they should always remember that I loved them very much. I sent a postcard to my brother, whom I had lasted visited a year ago, in which I tried to be jaunty and affectionate. I rang Pauline, and left a message on the answering-machine asking after the pregnancy and saying that I would like to see her very soon and that I had been missing her. I posted a belated birthday card to Clive. And, taking a deep breath, I rang up Mike. He sounded subdued rather than bitter, and not displeased to hear from me. He was going on holiday with his wife and young son the next day, to a house in Brittany, his first holiday in months. I was saying goodbye to everyone, but they wouldn’t know it.

  I had wrecked my old world decisively, and now I was trying to figure out a way of bringing my new world crashing down too, so that I could escape from it. There were still times – fewer as each day passed – when it felt impossible to believe that I was actually living this. I was married to a murderer, a beautiful, blue-eyed murderer. If he ever found out that I knew, he would kill me too, I had no doubt about that. If I tried to leave, he would also kill me. He would find me and kill me.

  That evening I had arranged to go to a lecture examining new figures on the link between fertility treatments and ovarian cancer, partly because it was distantly connected to my work, partly because it was given by an acquaintance of mine, but mainly because it would be a way of spending time away from Adam. He would be waiting outside for me and, of course, I couldn’t stop him coming with me if he insisted. But we would be together in my world for once, a world of reassuring scientific inquiry, empiricism, and of temporary safety. I wouldn’t have to look at him, or talk to him, or be held down by him, moaning in pretended passion.

  Adam wasn’t waiting outside. The relief I felt was so intense it was like exhilaration. I was immediately lighter-footed, clearer-headed. Everything looked different without him standing there, watching for me as I came through the doors, staring at me with that persistent, brooding gaze that I could no longer decipher. Was it hate or love, passion or murderous intent? With Adam the two had always been too closely linked, and again I remembered – with a shudder of pure revulsion now, mixed with a tingling shame – the violence of our honeymoon night in the Lake District. I felt trapped in a long, grey morning-after.

  I walked to the lecture hall, which took about a quarter of an hour, and as I rounded the corner towards the building I saw him standing there, holding a bunch of yellow roses. Women looked longingly at him as they passed by, but he seemed not to notice. His eyes were for me only. He was waiting for me, although expecting me to come from another direction. I stopped and backed into the nearest doorway as a wave of nausea came over me. I would never get away from him: he was one step ahead of me, always waiting for me, always touching me and clasping me to him, never letting me go. He was too much for me. I waited until the panic subsided and then, careful not to be seen by him, I turned round and ran back down the road until I was round the corner. Then I hailed a cab.

  ‘Where to, love?’

  Where to? Where could I go to? I couldn’t run away from him because then he would know I knew. I shrugged in dispirited defeat and asked the driver to take me home. Prison. I knew that I couldn’t continue like this. The horror that had swamped me when I had seen Adam had felt utterly physical. How much longer could I pretend to love him, pretend to be in bliss when he stroked me, pretend that I didn’t feel very scared? My body was in revolt. But I didn’t know what else to do.

  As I came through the door, the phone was ringing.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Alice?’ It was Sylvie, and she sounded flustered. ‘I didn’t think you’d be there.’

  ‘So why ring?’

  ‘Actually I was wanting to speak to Adam. This is a bit awkward.’

  I suddenly felt cold and clammy, as if I were about to throw up. ‘Adam?’ I said. ‘Why were you wanting to speak to Adam, Sylvie?’

  There was a silence at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Sylvie?’

  ‘Yes. Look, I wasn’t going to tell you, I mean, he was going to speak to you, but since this has happened, well.’ I heard her take a drag on her cigarette. Then she said, ‘The fact is, and I know you’ll think this is a betrayal but one day you’ll realize it was an act of friendship, I looked at the letter. And then I showed it to Adam. I mean, he turned up at my house out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to do, but I showed it to him because I think you’re having a breakdown or something, Alice. What you wrote, it’s crazy, completely crazy, you’re deluded. You must see that, of course you must. So I didn’t know what to do, and I showed it to Adam. Hello, Alice, are you still there?’

  ‘To Adam.’ I didn’t recognize my own voice, it was so flat and expressionless. I was thinking hard: there was no time left any more. Time had gone.

  ‘Yes, he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. He was hurt, of course, God, he was hurt. He was crying when he read the letter and kept saying your name over and over again. But he doesn’t blame you, you must understand that, Alice. And he’s worried you might, you know, do something stupid. That was the last thing he said to me. He said that he was worried that in the state you are you might, you know, harm yourself.’

  ‘Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?’

  ‘Now, look, Alice…’

  I put the phone down on her pleading voice and stood for a few seconds, paralysed. The room seemed very cold and quiet. I could hear every little sound in it, the creak of a floorboard when I shifted my weight, a murmur in the water pipes, the tiny sigh of wind outside. That was it. Whe
n I was found dead, Adam had already expressed the fear that I might harm myself. I raced across to the bedroom and pulled open the drawer where I had hidden Adele’s letter and Adam’s forged note to himself. They were gone. I ran for the front door and then I heard his footsteps, distant still at the bottom of the long flight of stairs.

  There was no way out. Our flat was at the top of the stairs. I looked around, knowing there were no other exits, that there was nowhere to hide. I considered ringing the police, but I wouldn’t even have time to dial. I ran to the bathroom and turned the shower full on, so that it was splashing noisily on to the tiled floor. Then, tweaking shut the shower curtains and leaving the bathroom door very slightly open, I raced back into the living room, picked up my keys and ducked into the poky kitchen, where I stood behind its open door, barely out of sight. The copy of Guy magazine was there within reach on the worktop. I picked it up. That was something at least.

  He came in, and pulled the flat door shut behind him. My heart pounded in my chest, thundering away so that I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear it too. I suddenly remembered that he was carrying a bunch of flowers. He would come into the kitchen first to put them in water. Oh, God, please please please. My breath came in raggedy gasps, hurting my chest. I gave a little ratchety sob. I couldn’t stop it.

  But then, like a miracle, fear ebbed away and what was left was a kind of curiosity, as if I were a spectator at my own disaster. Drowning people are supposed to see their lives flash past them as they die. Now, in those few seconds as I waited, my mind reeled through the images of my time with Adam; such a brief time, really, although it had obliterated everything else that had gone before. I watched as if I were my own observer: our first glance, across a crowded street; our first sexual encounter, so feverish it seemed almost comic now; our wedding day, when I was so happy I wanted to die. Then I saw Adam with his hand upraised; Adam holding a buckled belt; Adam with his hands around my neck. The images all led to now: this moment ahead, when I would see Adam killing me. But I wasn’t scared any longer. I almost felt peaceful. It had been such a long time since I had felt peaceful.