The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “Over there—walking to the exit.” He shot away, weaving in and out of the crowds, and left me standing paralysed by the shopping cart. By this time I had spotted the royal-blue coat, but a second later more departing shoppers had blocked my view. The far doors opened. When they closed again the blue coat had disappeared.

  Seconds later Kim dodged the last person in his way and plunged outside in pursuit.

  I was so rattled that I failed to pack the bags quickly as each item was charged, and I was just scrabbling to find my cheque card even though half the shopping remained unpacked, when Kim returned to my side.

  “Did you catch her?”

  “No, I can’t think how she got away.”

  “Those shops which front the street and back onto the mall have two exits. If she went in from the mall and exited into the street—and if her car was nearby—”

  “Get a move on, ducky!” said the woman behind me in the queue. “I ain’t got all day.”

  Kim started shovelling the remaining items into bags. I found the cheque card and peeled off a cheque. A minute later we had succeeded in extricating ourselves from the chaos.

  “Damn the woman!” I still felt shaken. “She was obviously going to accost me again before she saw you and fled!”

  Kim promised to threaten her with an injunction, but later he told me Sophie had refused to talk to him when he had called.

  VI

  The next development in the Sophie saga came—after an unexpectedly quiet weekend—on Monday. The quiet was unexpected because I had thought Kim would be keen for more high-octane sex, but either he himself was temporarily satiated or he thought I was, and neither of us made any attempt to seduce the other. Perhaps he sensed I was feeling uneasy as the result of our explicit conversation about matters which are, I believe, better not discussed. I say this not to be Victorian, not to be prudish, not to be hung up but merely to be practical. Sexual blips—I refuse to call them problems and thus give them an importance they should never possess—are always tiresome but it’s no good whingeing about them or getting in a panic. In the past I had always kept calm and waited for them to go away; I always told myself I never had a sexual problem which a vodka martini was unable to solve. The idea of talking about such matters has always struck me as being a very risky, ill-judged, self-indulgent way of carrying on and not at all consonant with being a female high flyer who has to be one hundred per cent perfect in every venture she undertakes. I knew I was good at sex. I had researched it, studied it and regularly practised it, so nobody was now going to tell me I was ever less than competent at it, least of all an old bat who made wild guesses while trying to pass herself off as a psychic. As for Kim I had to admit I was nervous in case he dragged up the subject again, but if he did I was more than ready to swear I had enjoyed the torrid scenes of Friday night immensely and that no one, not even my husband, had the right to tell me otherwise.

  I had just finished mentally making speeches to myself in this fashion when Sophie reappeared in my life for another stalking session.

  I left the office on Monday at my usual time, around half-past six, and following my long-established custom I walked home to the Barbican. I worked in a street called Bevis Marks on the eastern side of the City’s Square Mile, and I found it soothing always to follow the same route home to Harvey Tower which, like all the Barbican tower blocks, knifes the sky on the north of the estate where the City borders Islington and Clerkenwell.

  Leaving the office I walked up St. Mary Axe into Houndsditch, crossed the noisy thoroughfare of Bishopsgate and hurried out of the diesel fumes into the extensive gardens surrounding St. Botolph’s church. The church reminded me of Tucker. I found I was noticing all the churches in the City now, all those mementos of its long history, and on the previous day when sitting at my telescope I had stared not at the skyscrapers but at the spires sown among the jumbled streets as if scattered by a careless, profligate hand.

  Beyond the churchyard I headed for Finsbury Circus, a green area where in summer games of bowls were played on the immaculate lawn, and office workers wandered in the lunch-hour past huge trees and borders bright with flowers. Beyond the Circus lay another roaring main road, Moorgate, where Kim worked, and at the tube station nearby in Moorfields I took the escalator up to the Barbican podium, that vast maze of walkways and terraces which connected all the different areas of the thirty-eight-acre Barbican estate. There were twelve entrances, called “gates,” up onto the podium, and the Moorfields escalator was known as Gate Three.

  Along the podium I padded, under the pillars which supported one of the low-rise apartment blocks, Willoughby House, past the palm trees which lined the rooftops of Brandon Mews—the slim terrace houses which faced the waterfalls and lakes below the podium—and finally into the Speed Highwalk which overlooked Silk Street on the northern edge of the estate. As I turned the corner into the Highwalk I could see, many yards ahead of me, the steps which led up to another level of the podium, the level which passed the main entrance of Harvey Tower. The evening breeze blew coolly on my face, and I was just lifting a hand to tuck a stray strand of hair back into position when I saw a woman pausing at the foot of the distant steps. She was too far away for me to see her clearly, but I recognised the royal blue of her coat.

  I was wearing the flat shoes I always wore for the walk to and from the office, but they were hardly designed for sprinting and anyway for a long moment I was unable to do more than stare. When I did rush forward I stopped almost at once. I found I was recoiling from the prospect of another confrontation with Sophie, and meanwhile Sophie herself was hurrying away down the covered walkway which led to the Arts Centre. I watched her until she disappeared into the gloom at the far end. Then I ran down the Highwalk, raced up the steps and rushed across the podium to the lobby of Harvey Tower.

  VII

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I reached the flat. The bedroom door, which I had left ajar, was wide open.

  “Kim?” I called, thinking that his late meeting had been cancelled, but there was no reply.

  Cautiously I moved into the living-room. On the floor with its frame broken was another picture, a modern oil-painting called Paradox in Aquamarine which Kim had given me for my birthday. In utter silence I knelt down to inspect the damage. By some miracle the canvas had survived intact but the frame was clearly beyond repair.

  I sucked in some air, clambered to my feet and went into the kitchen to get some ice for my evening drink, but as soon as I reached the threshold I stopped dead. Kim’s cereal bowl was lying smashed on the floor. The garbage bag, which should have been put out for collection, had fallen on its side and most of the contents had spewed out across the floor.

  I suddenly found I had to sit down.

  I had left earlier than Kim that morning in order to review some papers for a meeting at eight. Kim did occasionally abandon his cereal bowl on the counter instead of slotting it into the dishwasher, and he might have forgotten to put out the garbage, but he would not have left the cereal bowl so near the edge of the counter that it fell off, and if he had accidentally kicked over the garbage bag he would not have left its contents strewn over the floor.

  Standing up again I took a wary look around the flat but there was no other sign of disorder. Having swept up the fragments of the cereal bowl I rebagged the garbage, but long before I had finished I was again trying to work out how Sophie had gained access to the flat.

  VIII

  “It’s impossible,” said Kim when he returned home.

  “But somebody was in this flat! And since I saw Sophie on the podium—”

  “How sure are you that it was her?”

  “Well, I admit I was a long way away, but since we know she was flitting around this area in a royal-blue coat on Saturday—”

  “If she came here to trash the flat, why not do it earlier when there was no risk of being seen by either one of us on the podium?”

  “She probably figured it would be easiest
to slip unaccosted through the lobby at a time when people were returning to the Tower from work,” I said promptly. I had already worked this out. “The porter wouldn’t pay her the same attention then as he would have done if she’d turned up earlier.”

  “True. Okay, she swans into the lobby, she jingles her own house-keys to give the impression she’s either a resident or staying with a resident—”

  “And she gets past the porter into the lift-lobby. Up she goes to the thirty-fifth floor, and—”

  “—waves a magic wand to unlock the front door. Back we come to that same big question: how did she get the key? And please, sweetheart—no scenarios involving my loyal PA!”

  I emitted that sound which resembles “Arrrgh!” and ran my fingers through my hair.

  “Let’s tackle the problem systematically,” said Kim, deciding at last to take it seriously. “There are three sets of keys. You have a set, I have a set and the porters have a set which they’re forbidden to dole out without our permission. No one currently has our permission, not even the window-cleaners—who don’t need the keys anyway as they can access our balconies via the fire-escape staircase.”

  “And the access door’s always kept locked, isn’t it? Besides, even if Sophie got through that, she couldn’t unlock the balcony doors of the flat, so—”

  “—so the most likely explanation is that she has a copy of the front door key.”

  “If only I’d had an extra lock put on!” I exclaimed futilely. “But when one lives thirty-five floors up in a building with twenty-four-hour porterage, a building in a part of London where the crime rate is low—”

  “Where do you keep your keys when you’re at the office?”

  “In my bag which I lock in my desk. What about you?”

  “I keep my keys on my person, and I assure you Mary never gets close enough to steal them. But wait a moment . . . yes, I’ve got an idea! There was a time, wasn’t there, when we were having an affair and Sophie had learned of your existence but I still wasn’t living at Harvey Tower.”

  Instantly I grasped his line of thought. “You were still living at your old pied-à-terre in Clifford’s Inn. Did Sophie—”

  “Yes, as my wife she had access to the spare keys at the porters’ desk there—I never got around to cancelling my permission because after we separated I couldn’t imagine her ever wanting to come to the flat. So that means she and her PI could have searched the place for information about you, found the Barbican keys and then copied and returned them all on one day so that I’d have been none the wiser. I never kept the Barbican keys on my person until we started living together, but you did give me a set earlier in order to cover those times when—”

  “—when we agreed to meet here after work and I wasn’t sure exactly when I’d be back,” I concluded in triumph, delighted that the mystery had been finally solved. “Congratulations! Well, at least there’s no problem figuring out the remedy. I’ll arrange for the lock to be changed first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “No, wait—let’s first give her enough rope to hang herself. Remember, nothing’s proven. Defending counsel could argue that a mouse did the damage.”

  I snorted in disgust. “Now, that is far-fetched! How does a mouse climb up thirty-five floors without being spotted?”

  “They can travel up the ducts. A mouse could have tipped the bowl off the counter and upended the garbage.”

  “Well, if it lifted Paradox in Aquamarine off the wall, it must have been genetically engineered.”

  We finally managed to laugh. Rising to his feet Kim examined the wall and although the screw which had supported the picture was still in position, I heard myself say: “This incident has to be connected to the other smashed picture, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But you’ve got to admit it’s quite a coincidence!”

  “Life’s littered with coincidences.” He started to examine the damaged frame of Paradox in Aquamarine. “The best way forward,” he said, “is to warn the porters and car park attendants to watch out for a woman in a royal-blue coat and make a note of the times she enters and leaves the building. Then if she creates more havoc we’ll have witnesses to prove that she was on the site, and we’ll be able to back up our testimonies by the evidence of the video cameras in the car park or the lobby. I’ll check with Milton but I’m sure that’ll give us the means to slap an injunction on her.”

  “Oughtn’t we to instal a video camera in the flat to catch her in the act of trashing?”

  “Sure, if we’re looking for proof to convict her of a criminal offence, but I don’t want that kind of scandal. Let’s go for the injunction—I’m sure it requires a lesser burden of proof, and it would be a much more civilised way of restraining her.”

  “Well, one thing at least is proved beyond doubt,” I commented, relaxing at last. “She’s totally loony-tunes. A fruity-loop basket-case. Very sad.”

  He made no attempt to argue with me.

  IX

  I hoped he might initiate sex that night, but when the ITV News finished at ten-thirty he made no secret of the fact that he was tired. I lay awake for a while, trying not to worry about sexual blips which always passed so long as one did not lie awake worrying about them, and was relieved when I started to feel drowsy, but sleep that night brought no peace and I awoke with a gasp at two. My heart was pounding and my body was sweating with fear. Forcing myself to breathe evenly, I was unable to stop recalling the dream scene for scene.

  Actual past events had been bizarrely mingled with fantasy. The bailiffs had arrived to take away the furniture and one of them had dropped my mother’s best teapot so that it smashed to pieces on the floor; that was an actual past event. Then the bailiffs had produced clubs and instead of taking the furniture away they had smashed it to pieces; that was fantasy. I was running around trying to find my cat, known by me as Hamish and by everyone else as Wee Hamish, and had found him hiding under the sink; that was an actual event. Then Hamish shrank in my arms to the size of a matchbox; that was fantasy. The next moment I was making my father promise to look after Hamish; that was an actual event. But then the bailiffs were smashing my father to pieces and preparing to blow up the house; that, of course, was fantasy, and I awoke at the moment when the largest of the bailiffs was on the point of decapitating me. No wonder my awakening was violent.

  Moving carefully so as not to wake Kim, I slid out of bed, grabbed my robe and slipped down the corridor to the living-room. By the time I had managed to calm down I was wide awake so I decided to make myself some hot milk, but as soon as I entered the kitchen the memory returned of the smashed cereal bowl and the scattered garbage. The violation of my home, that tower-fortress which no bailiff would ever invade, suddenly seemed unbearable. Taking the bucket from the cupboard below the sink I began to perform a ritual cleansing by washing the kitchen floor.

  Then I realised this was just the beginning of the task. I had to wash the surfaces of the cabinets and counters. I had to clean the electric rings of the hob. I even had to clean the oven. I cleaned and cleaned, every atom of my being focused on wiping out the memory of the disorder, but when the kitchen was pristine I still could not rest. The vacuum cleaner was too noisy to use at that hour but I dusted all the surfaces in the living-room and polished the brass trim on my telescope. Only when this last chore was accomplished did I sit down and have a drink. But it was Scotch I drank, not milk.

  I knew by this time that I was deeply disturbed and I knew too that I was disturbed because something had threatened my security; I never dreamed of the bailiffs unless I was fearful of being overwhelmed by some force beyond my control. At first I blamed Sophie’s stalking, but gradually it dawned on me that this obvious explanation of my anxiety could not be correct. After all, Kim had proposed a feasible plan of action for bringing Sophie under control. So if I was now cleaning my flat in the early hours of the morning like some obsessive-compulsive drone-ette, I needed to identify some other threat
to my security, a threat which I unconsciously sensed would be far more difficult to defuse.

  As I tried in vain to make sense of this mystery I found myself staring at the fallen picture propped against the wall nearby. Not for the first time I wished Kim had bought me a different present. He had paid a great deal of money for the painting so it had to be good, but the fact that it had been expensive did not make me like it any better. Against an aquamarine background three parallel white tubes, like cricket stumps, occupied the centre of the canvas. That was it. That was Paradox in Aquamarine. I failed to see the point of it, but how little I knew about art! There had never been time to learn because at school I had had to concentrate solely on mastering the academic subjects which would take me to Oxford and at Oxford I had chosen to concentrate solely on getting the best possible law degree. Art was just one of many subjects I had ignored in order to fulfil my life-plan. My knowledge of English literature was confined to the set books I had been obliged to study at school—and what could Tucker have thought of my failure to recognise that line of poetry by Tennyson? He must have judged me to be as ignorant as a computer nerd.

  As I finished the Scotch it occurred to me that I needed to reduce my alcoholic intake if I wanted to avoid the disaster of weight gain. Perhaps too I needed to evolve a longer route to and from work in order to provide myself with more daily exercise—and the next moment, as I remembered my journey home that night, I started thinking of Sophie again.

  But this time my thoughts were travelling along a different track. I was realising that if I were Sophie, wanting to sneak into Harvey Tower, I would hardly wear a smart royal-blue coat which would make me stand out from the crowd. And if I were Sophie, wanting to trash the flat in an orgy of revenge, I would hardly just smash a bowl, upend a garbage bag and crack a picture-frame. I would rampage through the whole flat and wind up slashing the suits in Kim’s half of the bedroom closet.