The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  Enlightenment hit me so hard that I never stopped to censor myself. I said: “She junked you, didn’t she? It wasn’t you who decided you’d had enough of the marriage—it was quite the other way around!”

  Sweat broke out on his forehead again. I watched him wipe it away, and as I watched, I wished, too late, that I had been less blunt, less ready to hit him with an unpalatable reality.

  “Elizabeth said it was all for the best,” he answered levelly at last. “That was when she advised me to marry a woman she would choose for me, and to indulge my hobby only within one of the groups, in a controlled setting, with people she’d personally vetted. But the trouble was I wasn’t interested in pursuing my hobby in a tame setting where I couldn’t get a charge out of being a loner on the prowl. To appease Elizabeth I did agree to attend the Wapping group, but I kept the connections there heterosexual, wasn’t interested in doing anything else, so the group didn’t actually solve anything.”

  “What about the society?”

  “I certainly couldn’t be a loner on the prowl there and the sex was all ritualised anyway . . . Well, as I said, I did try to explain it all to Sophie— I really didn’t want to lose her even then . . . and I hated the thought of losing my home . . . I just loved my home . . . But Sophie drew the line. She said I deserved to lose everything I had. She said I’d destroyed her love, her trust, her respect. She said I was—” He broke off and covered his face with his hands. I heard him whisper: “But of course I couldn’t tell you all that.”

  “Of course not.” I was sweating myself now. My tank-top was clinging wetly to my back.

  “Then at the end of that disastrous year I met you. Salvation had finally arrived, I saw that at once, but as soon as Sophie heard I wanted to remarry she hit the roof. ‘You’re not fit to marry anyone,’ she said. ‘No woman should be allowed to risk being deceived as systematically as you’ve always deceived me. I’ll continue with the divorce,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to spin it out for as long as possible in the hope that the girl comes to her senses and realises just what kind of a man you really are.’ She was absolutely implacable. I was appalled. Then just as I was thinking the situation couldn’t get any worse—”

  “—she started trying to communicate with me.”

  “Can you wonder that in the end I turned back to Elizabeth, who hadn’t been speaking to me since I’d become involved with you? I was at my wits’ end, so terrified of losing you—”

  “You must have felt very tempted to kill Sophie.”

  “Yes, but listen, Carter. I know I had a huge motive, but I didn’t do it. If I’d killed her . . . well, for a start, I wouldn’t have left the body lying around. I’d have buried it in the Oakshott woods or dumped it in the River Mole so that no one would have been able to tell later exactly when she’d died.”

  “I know. I finally figured that out. But aren’t you going to tell me Mrs. Mayfield rang her up, predicted her death and ordered your occult pals to will Sophie to fall down the staircase?”

  He somehow managed to smile. I suspected this was because he was relieved beyond measure to learn I did not suspect him of killing Sophie. “It’s a natural conclusion for you to jump to,” he said, “but there wasn’t time. It was only on that final afternoon that we realised you’d be determined to see Sophie, and she was dead that same evening. To have any psychic success with a group-will coupled with the power of suggestion, you need at least a week and probably longer.”

  “So Sophie died by accident?”

  “I’m now sure she did, yes, because Lewis tells me the police have uncovered no evidence of foul play and I think a stray nutter would have left some evidence behind . . . But you can see, can’t you, how horrified Elizabeth must be by this latest fiasco of mine? The last thing she ever wants is trouble with the police.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before saying in an abrupt change of subject: “Damn it, I thought the drink would stave off the headache by relaxing me, but I’m in such a state that the alcohol’s having next to no effect.”

  “Do you have any special painkillers?”

  “One of the doctors gave me a prescription this morning but I was so excited by the thought of seeing you that I decided not to delay my departure by going to the hospital pharmacy . . . I’d better get some painkillers from upstairs. Sophie always kept Anadin in her bathroom cabinet.” He moved as far as the door before turning to look back at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yep. More or less. Still hanging in.”

  “You’re not going to run away, are you?”

  “Not yet. There are a couple more questions I want to ask.”

  “About what?”

  “About the blackmail.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine what else there is to say, but . . . okay, wait, just let me dose myself with Anadin.” He disappeared.

  Immediately I reached for my glass and wondered how I could have absorbed so much horror yet still be conscious.

  XII

  I was aware of the urge to bolt, but the compulsion to complete my quest for the truth was now far stronger than my fear. Every word he had uttered implied how desperate he was to win me back, and so long as he believed I was open to the possibility of a reconciliation, I was sure he would not harm me.

  As I took another gulp of champagne I tried to focus on the unsolved mystery of why I represented salvation to him—such salvation that he was even prepared to embark on a high-risk confession to save the marriage. But I not only failed to understand why I solved all his problems; I failed to understand exactly what these problems were. I had ample evidence of warped behaviour, but what was generating it? All I could tell myself was that only someone profoundly unintegrated could have wound up leading such a distorted and bizarre private life. “Distorted” and “bizarre,” of course, were in this context euphemisms for “obscene” and “revolting.” I tried to beat back my repulsion in the name of detachment, but that proved impossible. I was this man’s wife. I was standing in Sophie’s shoes.

  I suddenly thought: how I wish she were here to help me! And when I began to think of her with all my familiar guilt and grief, I found myself empathising with her more vividly than ever. I was now shaking with the shock she must have experienced when she had seen those photographs of Kim with his blackmailer—and as the word “blackmailer” reverberated sickeningly in my mind, I suddenly heard Tucker say: “Do I think he killed the blackmailer? You bet. If anyone asks to be liquidated it’s a blackmailer who gets in Kim Betz’s way.”

  As the memory drove through my brain like a clenched fist I realised that Tucker’s hunch about the brevity of the blackmail episode had been correct. My memory blazed on. It was unstoppable. “Boardroom barracudas don’t behave like doormats. They sharpen their teeth and move in straight away for the big bite,” I heard Tucker say, and suddenly I found I understood why Mrs. Mayfield could have come to see Kim as expendable. The double disaster of Sophie’s death and Tucker’s stabbing had drawn too much attention to him, and the police might easily become too interested in his past.

  I now realised I had been so traumatised by Kim’s revelations, so intent on responding in a manner which concealed the full extent of my horror, that I had ceased to listen with an ear fine-tuned to distinguish truth from falsehood. Automatically I refocused on the story he had told me about the blackmailer. Did I believe the man had fallen accidentally under a train? No. Did I believe the man had committed suicide? No. Could I really brainwash myself into believing that Mrs. Mayfield and her occult gang had willed him to death after softening him up with the power of suggestion? Well, possibly, since Robin had assured me there was scientific evidence that such things had happened, but the trouble was that I could also remember Lewis saying that in nine out of ten allegedly paranormal cases the normal explanation was the correct one. I could also remember Nicholas talking of Occam’s razor: the theory which is most likely to be true is the one which has been stripped of all its fancy trimmings.

  If a blackm
ailer died much too conveniently what was the most likely explanation? And when a blackmailer was murdered, who was most likely to be the killer?

  I did not bother to answer that last question. I merely gulped down the last of my champagne and decided that this was neither the time nor the place to complete my quest for the truth. I also decided that I should leave before I lost my nerve entirely and betrayed that the marriage had no future.

  At that point it occurred to me that he had been gone for rather longer than I had anticipated.

  “Kim?” I called, moving into the hall. “Kim, are you all right up there?”

  There was no reply.

  I paused, forcing myself to review the state of play, but I could see no reason why his attitude towards me should have undergone any dangerous change.

  “Kim?” I called again, but still there was no response. I went on standing at the foot of the staircase—until it dawned on me that I was standing where Sophie’s corpse had lain. I jumped violently. Then, still convinced that Kim could have no idea of the emotions which were now boiling away behind my rigorously composed façade, I slowly began to mount the stairs.

  XIII

  I reached the landing. At the top of the stairs a gallery flanked by banisters skirted the drop into the double-decker hall and passed various closed doors. At the end of the gallery one of the doors stood open, and as I drew cautiously nearer I saw beyond the threshold the thin glare of strip-lighting streaming from a place which I deduced to be an interior bathroom. Memories of modern hotels provided me with an instant picture of the layout: one entered the bedroom, one found the interior bathroom immediately on the left or right, and one walked past the row of closets opposite into a large sleeping area. In a house of this vintage the bathroom would have been a later addition, carved out of the master bedroom.

  I paused on the threshold, but as the insertion of the bathroom had made the room L-shaped I could not see all of the sleeping area.

  “Kim?” I said again. “Are you all right?”

  No answer came. Maybe, having lost his tolerance for alcohol, he had passed out. It seemed a plausible explanation, so plausible that I decided to risk inching forward so that I could see the part of the room which was hidden from me.

  I inched. Sweat was gluing my tank-top to my back again. My mouth was quite dry.

  The moment I was far enough into the room to see that the sleeping area was empty, he slipped out of his hiding-place in the closet and slammed the door.

  The key turned in the lock.

  Then he leaned back against the panels and looked at me with unnaturally expressionless blue eyes.

  NINETEEN

  Anyone who does anything bad or criminal will of course want to conceal the fact, and secrecy is essential to deception, hypocrisy and other ways of misleading people.

  DAVID F. FORD

  The Shape of Living

  I

  I knew at once I must show no fear of any kind. As the experts on big fish say, blood in the water can trigger a feeding frenzy.

  In a split second I had my reactions ordered: a sharp exclamation of justifiable shock, an exasperated reproof and a crisp return to the matter in hand. In another split second the scene was launched.

  “Damn it, Betz!” I said crossly. “What the hell are you playing at? You nearly gave me a coronary!” Turning my back on him I tramped furiously across to the window and glared out over the garden as I tried to control my breathing. A pant or two after an unpleasant shock was excusable; continued panting had to be eliminated. Spinning to face him again I demanded: “Did you find the Anadin?”

  He did not answer. He had removed the key from the door and was tossing it lightly as if it were a coin.

  I knew this tactic. It was the silence-blanket. Silence can be unnerving, particularly at a business meeting where talking is always expected. The antidote, naturally, is noise. Talking must at once ensue. The topic is unimportant. What matters is to show indifference to the intimidating behaviour.

  “Oh, do stop playing with that key!” I snapped irritably. “Either put it back in the lock, for God’s sake, or put it in your pocket. If you want to talk up here behind a locked door, that’s fine, I don’t care, I suppose you’re afraid I might run away, but as I told you quite truthfully downstairs, I’ve no intention of disappearing (a) because I haven’t yet had my share of the smoked salmon sandwiches, and (b) because I’m expecting a lift to the station in the Mercedes when the time comes for me to go. So forget all thought of me scurrying away through those godawful woods and let’s get down to planning our future together—or are you feeling too knackered for that at present? If you want to have a nap I can easily wait, finish the sandwiches, make myself some coffee—”

  “No, I’ll keep going,” he said, deciding it was time to grab control of the conversation. “I took the Anadin and I’ll be better in a minute.”

  “Then I don’t understand what we’re doing up here. Can we go back downstairs?”

  “Not just yet.” He pocketed the key and moved into the bathroom. I heard a tap running and when he emerged he was sipping a glass of water. I recognised this tactic too. It usually appears at a business dinner when one’s rivals are half-dead with tension and swilling alcohol as if it were lemonade. One then appears with a glass of water to signal not only that one’s in total control of the situation but that one’s will-power is sufficient to make every other person in the room look like a broken reed.

  “Water!” I exclaimed. “Just what I need! Is there a second glass?”

  Suddenly he laughed. “My God, you’re a cool customer!” he exclaimed, relaxing as he leaned back against the bathroom door frame. “I couldn’t have handled that rough ride better myself!”

  “Well, now that we’ve got that little game over and you’ve had the pleasure of seeing me ‘act tough,’ as you always put it, can we talk about the future?”

  “I didn’t think we were quite through with talking about the past. What were those questions you said you wanted to ask me?”

  “Questions. Ah yes,” I said, heart lurching as I scrabbled around in my mind for a subject unconnected with the blackmail, “I was so busy recovering from my near-coronary that I quite forgot I was going to ask you about the stuff Mrs. Mayfield ended up by swiping. Was the divorce file as innocuous as you said it was, and what was really in that brown envelope?”

  He answered willingly enough: “As far as I could gather from my quick skim, the divorce file really did seem to be bland—I told you the truth about that at the Rectory. Either Sophie didn’t tell her lawyers the worst stuff or else she told them off the record at a meeting.”

  “And the brown envelope?”

  “That was the dynamite. It contained copies she had taken of her letters to you, but the crowning irony was that I never stopped to read them. As soon as I saw the first letter saying ‘Dear Miss Graham’ I knew all the contents of the envelope had to be destroyed so I pressed on right away back to London.”

  “So when Mrs. Mayfield swiped both the envelope and the file—”

  “It was an essential safety measure. She knew I’d told Sophie I was a member of an occult society, and she knew Sophie could connect me with the real blackmailer.” He started to wander around the king-size bed to put down his water on the bedside table. “And that reminds me,” I heard him say. “Talking of the blackmail—”

  “Yes, a terrible subject,” I said rapidly. “Let’s draw a veil over the whole damn nightmare.”

  “But when you said downstairs just now that you had a couple more questions to ask, you weren’t thinking of the missing files, were you, sweetheart? It was the blackmail you had in mind,” he said, and when he turned abruptly to face me I knew my careless disclosure that I still had questions to ask even after he had completed his story had been a very big mistake. I now realised he had lured me upstairs and applied the searing psychological pressure because he had felt driven to find out how far I believed him.

  “
So,” he said, taking care to give me an agreeable smile, “what exactly were the questions you wanted to ask?”

  I had wanted to know where the blackmailer had been killed and how the fall onto the line had occurred, but there was no way I was going to ask either question when he and I were alone together in an isolated house behind a locked door. “Well, on reflection,” I said in my most matter-of-fact voice, “they’re not so important as the questions about the files. I was only going to ask”—there was a horrible moment when my powers of invention deserted me, but two harmless questions popped into my mind in the nick of time—“about Sophie,” I said briskly. “When she received the blackmailer’s photographs, was that the first time she knew of your ‘hobby’?”

  “Yes, I’d never discussed it with her. Of course she accepted I’d have a sex life elsewhere after we stopped sleeping together, but she would have visualised it in terms of a few occasional utterly monogamous relationships.”

  “With women?”

  “Of course. The idea that I would have connections with men would never have occurred to her. Did you have another question?”

  “Only about the VD. Did you get it from a woman or—”

  “From a woman, yes, but you can be sure that after that episode I always used condoms, so you needn’t start worrying about your health. I’ve been practising self-preservation since long before the age of AIDS.”

  I fell silent. A wave of empathy for Sophie was washing over me again and bringing a tightness to my throat. I thought of how much she must have loved Kim to stay with him after he had destroyed her hope of having children; I thought of how hard she must have worked to sustain the marriage by blotting out all thought of his inevitable infidelity. I thought of how her love had enabled her to forgive him—until she was finally blasted and brutalised by the truth which emerged from the blackmail. I knew one could argue that she was a masochist with low self-esteem who had been mad not to cut her losses and leave a dead-end, pain-streaked relationship; that would have been the tough-minded feminist position. But I was standing now in Sophie’s shoes and I knew life was neither so simple nor so clear-cut as the activists needed to believe. When you love someone you long to trust them. When you love someone you yearn for the relationship to come right. When you love someone forgiveness is easy, patience is natural and hope becomes a way of life. How easy it is to endure too much suffering and lose sight of the place where the line against abuse has to be drawn! And as these truths swept through my mind I felt outraged by how this man had used and abused his trophy wife year after year so that he could have the marriage which would jack up his image, enhance his career prospects and guarantee the upmarket home which he felt was owing to him.