Killing Me Softly

by Nicci French

  She frowned in deep thought before speaking. ‘We could spend a week up here digging. We’ve dug where you said and we’ve found nothing. It’s time to call a halt.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. My voice was cracked. ‘Please.’ I was begging for my life.

  WDC Paget gave a deep sigh. ‘All right,’ she said. She looked at her watch. ‘Twenty minutes and that’s that.’

  She made a gesture and the men moved across with an array of sarcastic grunts and expressions. I moved away and sat down. I looked into the valley. Grasses were rippling in the wind like the sea.

  Suddenly, behind me, I heard a murmur. I ran across. The men had stopped digging and were on their knees by the hole, clearing earth with their hands. I crouched down beside them. The earth was suddenly darker here and I saw a hand, just its bones, protrude, as if it were beckoning us.

  ‘It’s her!’ I cried. ‘It’s Adele! Do you see? Oh, do you see?’ and I started scrabbling away myself, tearing at the soil, though I could hardly see myself. I wanted to hold the bones, cradle them, put my hands around the head, which was beginning to appear, a ghastly grinning skull, poke my fingers through the empty eyes.

  ‘Don’t touch,’ said WDC Paget, and hauled me back.

  ‘But I must!’ I howled. ‘It’s her. I was right. It’s her.’ It was going to be me, I wanted to say. If we hadn’t found her it would have been me.

  ‘It’s evidence, Mrs Tallis,’ she said sternly.

  ‘It’s Adele,’ I said again. ‘It’s Adele, and Adam murdered her.’

  ‘We have no idea who it is,’ she said. ‘Tests will have to be carried out, identifications.’

  I looked down at the arm, hand, head poking out from the soil. All the tension went out of me and I felt utterly weary, utterly sad.

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said. ‘Poor woman. Oh dear. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ.’

  WDC Paget handed me a large tissue, and I realized I was crying.

  ‘There’s something round the neck, Detective,’ said the thin digger.

  I put my hand to my own neck.

  He held up a blackened wire. ‘It’s a necklace, I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, he gave it to her.’

  They all turned and looked at me, and this time they were looking at me attentively.

  ‘Here.’ I took off my necklace, silver and gleaming, and laid it by its blackened counterpart. ‘Adam gave me this, it was a token of his love for me, his undying love.’ I fingered the silver spiral. ‘This will be on hers too.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said WDC Paget. The other spiral was black and clotted with earth, but it was unmistakable. There was a long silence. They all looked at me and I looked at the hole where her body lay.

  ‘What did you say her name was?’ asked WDC Paget at last.

  ‘Adele Blanchard.’ I gulped. ‘She was Adam’s lover. And I think…’ I started to cry again, but this time I wasn’t crying for me, but for her and for Tara and for Françoise. ‘I think she was a very nice woman. A lovely young woman. Oh, sorry, I’m so, so sorry.’ I put my face into my muddy hands, blindfolding myself, and tears seeped through my fingers.

  WPC Mayer put her arm around my shoulder. ‘We’ll take you home.’

  But where was my home now?

  Detective Inspector Byrne and one of his female officers insisted on accompanying me to the flat, although I told them Adam wouldn’t be there and I was only going to pick up my clothes and leave. They said that they had to check the flat anyway, although they had already tried to ring there. They had to try to find Mr Tallis.

  I didn’t know where I was going to go, although I didn’t tell them that. Later there would be statements to make, forms to sign in triplicate, solicitors to see. Later, I would have to face up to my past and confront my future, try to climb out of the ghastly wreckage of my life. Not now, though. Now I was just inching along numbly, trying to put words in the right order until I was left on my own somewhere, to sleep. I was so tired I thought I could go to sleep standing up.

  Detective Inspector Byrne steered me up the stairs to the flat. The door hung uselessly on its hinges, where Adam had broken it down. My knees buckled, but Byrne held my elbow and we walked in, followed by his officer.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, stopping abruptly in the hall. ‘I can’t. I can’t go in here. I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. He turned to the woman. ‘Pick up some clean clothes for her, will you?’

  ‘My bag,’ I said. ‘I only need my bag, really. My money’s in there. I don’t want anything else.’

  ‘And her bag.’

  ‘It’s in the living room,’ I said. I thought I was going to throw up.

  ‘Have you got family you can go to?’ he asked me, as we waited.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said feebly.

  ‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’ It was the woman officer, with a grave face. Something had happened.

  ‘What… ?’

  ‘Sir.’

  I knew then. It was knowledge that went through me like a ripple of pure sensation.

  Before they could stop me I had run through into the living room. My beautiful Adam was there, turning ever so slowly on the rope. I saw that he had used a length of climbing rope. Yellow climbing rope. A chair lay on its side. His feet were bare. I touched the mutilated foot very gently, then I kissed it, as I had done that first time. He was quite cold. He was wearing his old jeans and a faded T-shirt. I looked up at his puffy, ruined face.

  ‘You would have killed me,’ I said, staring up at him.

  ‘Miss Loudon,’ said Byrne at my side.

  ‘He would have killed me,’ I said to him, without taking my gaze away from Adam, my dearest love. ‘He would have done.’

  ‘Miss Loudon, come away now. It’s over.’

  Adam had left a note. It wasn’t a confession, really, nor a self-explanation. It was a love letter. ‘My Alice,’ he had written, ‘To see you was to adore you. You were my best and my last love. I am sorry it had to end. For ever would have been too short a time.’

  Forty

  In the middle of the evening a few weeks later, after the clamour, after the funeral, there was a knock at the door. I went down and there was Deborah, looking unusually smart in a skirt and dark jacket, tired-looking after a day at the hospital. We gazed at each other, unsmiling. ‘I should have got in touch earlier,’ she said at last.

  I stepped aside and she walked past me up the stairs. ‘I’ve brought two things for you,’ she said. ‘This.’ She removed a bottle of Scotch from a plastic bag. ‘And this.’ She unfolded a page from a newspaper and handed it to me. It was an obituary of Adam. It was by Klaus, for a newspaper that I didn’t normally get. ‘I thought you might like to see it.’

  ‘Come through,’ I said.

  I took the whisky, a couple of glasses and the newspaper cutting and went into the living room. I poured us each a drink. Like a good North American, Deborah went back into the kitchen in search of ice. I looked at the cutting.

  Above the article itself, across four columns, was a picture of Adam I hadn’t seen before, sunburned, no hat, on a mountain somewhere, smiling at the camera. How rarely had I seen him smile or look carefree. In my mind he was always grave, intense. Behind him was a range of mountains like sea waves in a Japanese etching, caught at the moment of still perfection. That was what I had always found difficult to grasp. When you saw the photographs from high up, it was so clear and beautiful. But what they’d all told me – Deborah, Greg, Klaus, Adam, of course – was that the real experience of being up there was everything that couldn’t be captured in the photograph: the unbelievable cold, the struggle to breathe, the wind that threatened to pick you up and blow you away, the noise, the slowness and heaviness of the brain and body and, above all, the sense of hostility, the feeling that this was a non-human world you were ascending briefly in the hope that you could survive the assault of the elements and your own physiological a
nd psychological degeneration. I stared at Adam’s face and wondered who he was smiling at. In the kitchen I heard the chink of ice.

  Klaus’s text made me wince at first, as I glanced through it. He was partly writing a personal memorial to his friend and also trying to fulfil the professional obligation of the obituarist. Then I read it through word by word:

  The mountaineer, Adam Tallis, who died recently by his own hand, achieved fame through his heroic actions during the disastrous storm last year on the Himalayan mountain of Chungawat. It was a fame he had not looked for, and he was uncomfortable in the spotlight – but he was as graceful and charismatic as ever.

  Adam was the product of a military family, which he rebelled against (his father participated in the first day of the Normandy landings in 1944). He was born in 1964 and educated at Eton but was unhappy at school and indeed was never willing to submit himself to any form of authority or institution that he considered undeserving. He left school for good when he was sixteen and literally set off alone across Europe, travelling overland.

  Klaus then gave a précis of the account in his book of Adam’s early mountaineering career and of the events on Chungawat. He had taken note of the correction in Guy magazine. It was now Tomas Benn who was poignantly calling for help before he sank into a coma. This led to the climax of Klaus’s article:

  In asking for help, too late, Benn was speaking for a form of humanity that Adam Tallis embodied. There have, especially in recent years, been those who have claimed that normal morality ceases to operate as we approach the summits of the highest mountains. This brutal approach may have been encouraged by the new trend in commercial expeditions in which the leader’s obligation is to the client who has paid him and the client depends on the expert guides to keep him or her alive. Adam himself had strongly voiced reservations about these ‘yak trails’ by which unqualified but prosperous adventurers were ushered up climbs which had previously been the province of teams of élite climbers.

  Yet, and here I speak as a man whose life was saved by Adam Tallis, in the middle of that terrible storm he lived up to the greatest traditions of Alpine and Himalayan fellowship. It seemed that the pressures of the market place had taken over even in that rarefied world above 8,000 metres. But somebody had forgotten to tell the mountain god of Chungawat. It was Adam Tallis who showed that, in extremis, there are deeper passions, more basic values.

  On his return from Chungawat, Adam was far from idle. Always a man of strong impulses, he met and married a beautiful and spirited woman, Alice Loudon,

  Deborah was back in the room. She sat down beside me and sipped at her whisky, studying my face as I read on:

  a scientist with no background in mountaineering at all. The couple were passionately in love, and Adam’s friends thought he had found the stable centre of his life that this troubled rover had always been searching for. It was, perhaps, significant that his planned expedition to Everest next year was not to summit but to clean the mountain, perhaps his own form of reparation to deities that had been defied and insulted for too long.

  Yet it was not to be. Who can speak of an individual’s inner torments? Who knows what drives the men and women who seek their fulfilment at the top of the world? It may be that the events on Chungawat had taken more out of him than even his friends realized. To us, he had seemed happier and steadier than at any time in his life, yet in his final weeks he became edgy, prickly, uncommunicative. I cannot help feeling that we were not there for him in the way that he had been there for us. Perhaps when the strongest men break they break terribly and irreversibly. I have lost a friend. Alice has lost a husband. The world has lost a rare kind of heroism.

  I laid the paper down beside me, photograph turned away so I wouldn’t see his face, and blew my nose on a tissue. Then I gulped some of my drink, which burned my aching throat as it went down. I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. Deborah laid her hand tentatively on my shoulder and I smiled slightly at her. ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘Does it bother you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you want everybody to know?’ The question seemed to come from a long way off.

  ‘Not everybody,’ I said at last. ‘There are a couple of people I’ve got to go and see, people I lied to and tricked. They deserve to know the truth. It’s probably for my benefit as much as for theirs. For the rest, it doesn’t matter now. It really doesn’t matter.’

  Deborah leaned forward and clinked her glass against mine. ‘Dear Alice,’ she said, in a strained and formal voice. ‘I’m saying that in that way because I’m quoting from the letter I kept trying to write to you and then throwing away. Dear Alice, if I hadn’t been saved from myself, I would have been responsible for kidnapping you and God knows what else. I’m so, so sorry. Can I buy you dinner?’

  I nodded at her, answering the unasked question as well as the asked one. ‘I’d better change,’ I said. ‘To compete with you. I’ve had a sweaty day at work.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve heard. Congratulations.’

  A quarter of an hour later we were walking along the road arm in arm. It was a warm evening and I felt I could really believe that there would be a summer at last, with heat and long evenings and fresh dawns. Still we didn’t talk. I felt that there were no words left in me, no thoughts. We walked smoothly, in rhythm. Deborah led me into a new Italian restaurant she had read about, ordered pasta and salad and a bottle of expensive red wine. To assuage her guilt, she said. The waiters were dark and handsome and very attentive to us. When Deborah took a cigarette from its packet two of them sprang forward with lighters. Then Deborah looked me in the eye. ‘What are the police doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I spent a day last week with detectives from different forces. I told them roughly the same story I told just before you and Adam arrived.’ Deborah winced. ‘But this time they were paying attention and asking questions. They were pretty cheerful about it. "No further suspects are currently being sought" was the expression, I think. Detective Inspector Byrne, the one you met, was being very nice to me. I think he felt a bit guilty.’

  A waiter bustled forward with an ice-bucket. There was a soft pop of a cork held inside a napkin. ‘With the compliments of the gentlemen.’

  We looked round. Two young men in suits were raising their glasses to us, grinning.

  ‘What kind of place is this?’ said Deborah loudly. ‘Who are those assholes? I should go and pour this over their heads. God, I’m sorry, Alice. This is the last thing you need.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not important.’ I poured the smoking champagne into our glasses and waited for the froth to subside. ‘Nothing like that is important now, Deborah. Stupid men buzzing around like gnats, stupid battles, little rages, it’s not worth it. Life’s too short. Don’t you see?’ I clinked my glass against hers. ‘To friendship,’ I said.

  And she said, ‘To coming through.’

  Deborah walked me home afterwards. I didn’t ask her up and we kissed goodbye at the door. I climbed upstairs, to the flat I was going to move out of next week. This weekend I would have to pack my few possessions and decide what to do with Adam’s. They still lay all round the rooms: his faded jeans; his T-shirts, and rough jerseys that smelt of him so that if I closed my eyes I could believe he was still there in the room, watching me; his leather jacket that seemed to hold the shape of him still; his backpack stuffed with climbing gear; the photographs he had taken of me with his Polaroid. Only his precious scuffed climbing boots were gone: Klaus – dear Klaus with his face swollen by weeping – had laid them on his coffin. Boots instead of flowers. So he didn’t leave very much at all. He had always travelled light.

  I had thought, immediately afterwards, that I wouldn’t be able to stay in this flat for an hour, for a single minute. Actually, I had found it perversely hard to leave. But on Monday I would close the brand new door, double lock it, and hand the keys to the agent. I would take my bags and bits and get a taxi to my new home, a comfortable one-bedroom apartment very near work, with a s
mall patio, a washing-machine, a microwave, central heating and thick carpets. Pauline had once said to me, after she was through the worst of her stunned unhappiness, that if you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive. Water finds its way into the ditches you have dug for it. So I would buy a car. Maybe I would get a cat. I would start learning French again and buying clothes. I would arrive at work early each morning and I knew I could do my new job well. I would see all my old friends. A kind of life could flow into these prepared spaces; not a bad life, really. People looking at me would never guess that these things meant little; that I felt as deep and empty and sad as the sky.

  I could never slide back into my old self. My self before him. Most people would never know. Jake, happy with his new girlfriend, wouldn’t know. He would look back on the end of our affair and remember the pain and the mess and embarrassment, but it would be a dim memory and would lose all power to hurt him, if it hadn’t already. Pauline, heavily pregnant, wouldn’t know either. She had asked me, very shyly, if I would consider being her child’s godmother and I had kissed her on both cheeks and said that I didn’t believe in God but, yes, I would be very proud. Clive, ricocheting from attachment to attachment, would think of me as the woman who had known true romantic love; he would ask me for advice every time he wanted to go out with a woman or wanted to leave her. And I could never tell my family, or his, or Klaus and the community of climbers, or anyone at work.

  To all of them, I was the tragic widow of the hero who had died too young, by his own hand. They spoke to me and probably of me with a hushed kind of respect and sorrow. Sylvie knew, of course, but I couldn’t speak to her about it. Poor Sylvie, who had thought she was acting for the best. She had come to the funeral and afterwards, in a frantic whisper, had begged my forgiveness. I said that I forgave – what else could I say? – and then turned and continued speaking to someone else.