The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  I said suddenly: “You didn’t treat Sophie as a person.” I was quite unable to stop myself saying this. Nor was I able to stop myself saying: “You treated her as an object in the most self-centred way imaginable, and in doing so you demeaned and degraded her. If that’s the road to self-realisation as defined by Mrs. Mayfield and the members of your occult society, then they’re as evil as the Nazis who destroyed the innocent people who got in their way.”

  His eyes widened.

  Instantly I guillotined the rush of revulsion and backtracked. “Sorry,” I said, “I got carried away there for a moment, but I’m not blaming the man you are now, the man you’ve become, the man you are with me. I’m blaming Mrs. Mayfield’s influence on the man you used to be before you decided to break with her and get out of her world.”

  He did not answer immediately. He just stood looking at me with those cool, expressionless blue eyes while my heart banged with fear, but at last he said neutrally enough: “Sophie was all right. She could have walked out at any time. She had her own money.” His glance shifted to the cross at my throat. “I wish you’d take that thing off,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  “I thought Lewis had made you sympathetic towards Christianity!” I said lightly, trying to ease the tension, but he merely answered: “I don’t like you wearing something which reminds me of Sophie and I particularly don’t like you making offensive remarks about the way I treated her. I was always courteous, generous, kind and considerate. It wasn’t my fault that the blackmailer destroyed the marriage by dumping those photographs on her.”

  I saw at once that he had parted company with reality. With nausea I remembered my father, refusing in the past to accept responsibility for his actions and blaming all his failures on Lady Luck. “You’re absolutely right,” said my voice without a second’s hesitation, “and I apologise for being so stupid. I suppose I was just having a moment’s emotional reaction from all the revelations, but darling, don’t let’s talk any more about the past! All my questions have been answered now and I have nothing else to say—except, of course, that I truly admire your courage in confessing everything. You’ve really restored my love and respect, I can tell you!”

  “Great!” he said at once, the barracuda finally moving in for the big bite. “Let’s celebrate! Why don’t you take off rather more than just that cross?”

  I took a step backwards and found myself pressed against the wall.

  II

  I had given myself away. That single reflex, born of revulsion, had betrayed me. Desperately I willed myself to cover up the error by another casual remark, but I was too frightened now to dissimulate. No words came.

  He said with that same empty look in his eyes: “You’re not coming back to me, are you?”

  My voice said: “Jesus Christ.” But the name was not being used as an expletive. I was silently screaming for help. “Jesus Christ,” I said again, my fingers clutching the little cross, and suddenly I saw that these words could be interpreted as yet another display of exasperation. The next moment I was demanding ferociously: “Look, buster, are you out of your mind? Do you honestly, seriously believe I’d go to bed with you here, not just in Sophie’s home but in Sophie’s bedroom? God, I can’t believe I’m hearing this!”

  “All right, all right!” His expression changed. The emptiness vanished. It was as if he were slipping in and out of two different personalities, and as I saw again how unintegrated he was, I realised how much damage remained to be healed despite his weeks in hospital. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, and to my huge relief I saw he even looked shamefaced. “That was very insensitive of me, but I just feel so strung up over this whole business. I’m not myself at all.”

  I had a brainwave. “Is now the time, perhaps, to take that medication you passed up this morning?”

  “So long as you’re here I’m not taking anything which affects performance. Carter, what I really want now is—”

  “I don’t blame you. And talking of sex, darling, I was very touched when you said you didn’t want our relationship to be tainted with all that other stuff, but you needn’t be afraid our last session was too much for me—I really was telling you the truth afterwards when I said I thought it was a great expression of our love for each other, so obviously we’re all set for the best of bedroom futures—and talking of the future, do let’s discuss what we’re going to do once you’re fully recovered . . .” I was frantically trying to keep him talking while I worked out how I could escape, but no plan sprang to mind. My despair increased. I had to struggle hard to listen to him.

  “Well, I thought a lot about this in hospital,” he was saying, obviously reassured by my vision of an adventurous sex life in a future where we were still married, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that our best bet is to relocate to the States. Despite all that’s happened I’m sure I can still get a job there—you can always make it in New York if you’ve got what it takes, and my American friends are influential enough to fix the visa problem so that we can get our green cards. I was thinking we could fly over, make a reconnaissance, look at top-grade apartments—”

  “Won’t that kind of relocation cost rather a lot of money?” I said, spotting a topic which was certain to prolong the conversation— although how I was managing to sustain any conversation at all I hardly knew. “I concede we’re not on the breadline, but aren’t you talking megabucks here?”

  He just smiled at me. He had the intensely self-satisfied air of someone who has just pulled off a first-class con-trick. I had seen my father look like that on those rare occasions when he had backed a horse which had won against long odds. “I can see the time’s come to tell you something I’ve never told a soul,” he said, by this time almost vibrating with delight. “Now I’m really coming clean with you, sweetheart! I’ve got a secret stash in a numbered bank account in Switzerland, and I assure you we’re currently in a position to relocate anywhere we damn well please . . .”

  III

  “Ah!” I said. No acting skill was required to sound stunned. Once again I was gripped by the memory of Tucker’s chilling speculations.

  “If there was one thing I learned from my father,” said Kim, still deep in self-satisfaction, “it was the importance of having a secret stash so that if and when disaster struck one had the means to start again.”

  “Ah,” I repeated, and somehow managed to pull myself together sufficiently to add: “Very wise.”

  “I wasn’t entirely truthful earlier when I said the missing money went to Mrs. Mayfield and the society. I did make regular payments to Mrs. Mayfield, but I paid no money to the society. I gave them my professional expertise without charge instead and brought in some moneyed new members, so—”

  “—so they gave you a free ride. I see. And since you weren’t paying a blackmailer for years—”

  “—I was able to salt away a good portion of my salary. As Sophie had her own money we never needed to work closely together on our financial affairs, so she never knew what was going on.”

  “Neat.”

  “Yes, but just as I was patting myself on the back for having my financial affairs in ideal order, the blackmailer turned up and wreaked havoc. You can see clearly now, can’t you, why Mrs. Mayfield became so disenchanted with me? I’d passed up her advice to abandon my hobby— with the result that I’d involved her in a serious mess. I then refused to marry the woman she wanted me to marry and rejected her advice again when I took up with you. Taking up with you led to Sophie going on the rampage—which in turn led to not just one but two brushes with the police. In other words I became a walking disaster—and it all began with the blackmail.”

  “Yes, I do see—”

  “And can you also see more clearly now why I kept going with the society? It was because I thought that so long as I was useful to it neither Elizabeth nor anyone else would take action against me. But of course that was before Sophie’s death involved me with the police. I suspect now that Elizabeth decid
ed I was expendable when I turned up on her doorstep on the night Sophie died. That was why she was so malevolent to me next morning at the flat—that was why she took such care to skewer the image of the balcony into my brain—”

  “But I’m still sure it was only me she was gunning for!”

  “Well, I’ll certainly be in her sights now! For God’s sake, she’s gone on red alert, ditched the Fulham identity—”

  “Have you really no idea where she’s gone?”

  “That’s what the police asked when they were finally allowed to ask me a few soft questions, but all I could tell them was that although the house in Fulham was used for her activities as a healer, I always suspected it was more of an office than a home. The only reason she was there on the night Sophie died was because I’d left a series of desperate messages on her answering machine.”

  “It’s weird how she’s managed to disappear—”

  “She may have disappeared but she could still be willing me to self-destruct —and that’s why I want to go to America as soon as possible. If I do there’s a chance Elizabeth will just write me off; there’s no fun in terrorising people if you can’t see the results.”

  “But how can you inform her you’ve gone abroad if you don’t know where she is?”

  “The society’s chief executive would know.”

  “Did you tell the police about him?”

  “God, I don’t want to give those people an extra reason to liquidate me! Isn’t it enough that Elizabeth’s worried about me shopping her to the police?”

  “But I can’t quite see why she’s getting her knickers in such a twist,” I said, my brain finally going fuzzy after all the brain-battering stress. “If Sophie died by accident and Mrs. Mayfield had no part in the events at Oakshott that night—” I broke off, remembering—too late—that Mrs. Mayfield had been helping Kim conceal a lethal truth long before Sophie died. Panic swept through me as I realised I had taken the path which led straight to the abyss. “Well, never mind all that,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “The only important thing from my point of view is that you want to get right away from that woman. Now, darling, let’s turn to the future again, let’s—”

  “You know,” he said, “don’t you.”

  My scalp crawled. “Know?”

  “About the blackmailer. You’ve guessed the real reason why Elizabeth’s afraid of me spilling my guts out to the police.”

  “Obviously she wants to protect the society.”

  “I’m not talking about the society.”

  My heart gave an extra thud. “Kim, let’s just forget the blackmail, put it right behind us—”

  “No, it’s got to come out into the open now that you’ve guessed.”

  “But all I want, I promise you, is to draw a line under the past and focus on the future! So far as the blackmailer’s concerned—”

  “I killed him,” he said.

  IV

  I was so frightened now that I could hardly breathe. How I managed to respond in less than five seconds I have no idea but I heard myself say: “I don’t blame you. I’d have done the same thing myself in those circumstances.”

  “So I was right!” he exclaimed, and suddenly his eyes were moist with adoration. “I thought you’d take that line but I had to wait till I was sure. You’re just like me, aren’t you, sweetheart? So I’m not just telling you because I have to—I’m telling you because I want to. After all, if you’re still committed to the marriage even though you’ve guessed what really happened to the blackmailer—”

  Without hesitation I said: “Of course I am.”

  “Then I can trust you completely, can’t I?” He was so relieved he even laughed before adding: “I was always so worried that the truth would undermine your feelings for me.”

  “No way! So what did happen to the blackmailer?”

  Swiftly he said: “Elizabeth and I worked out a plan. She did offer to psych him into falling under a train, but of course I said I couldn’t risk failure; psychic powers are a long way from being reliable, and she knew that as well as I did.”

  Futilely I wished I was wired for sound. “You’re saying she was an accessory before the fact.”

  “Right.”

  “So much for her desire to operate within the law!”

  “The blackmailer created a major emergency—she knew I was determined to get rid of him so she decided she had to get involved to make sure I got away with it. Quite apart from the fact that I was too valuable to the society to be cut loose, the last thing she wanted was the police arresting me for murder, putting my life under scrutiny and uncovering my occult connections.”

  “That makes sense, particularly if some of the occult activities were illegal.”

  But he chose to gloss over this comment. “It took us a while to work out the right plan,” he said, “but we agreed from the start that I would kill him here in this house; all those micro-cameras made it too dangerous to kill him at his flat. Sophie had gone away to recover from the shock of finding out the truth, so we didn’t have to worry about her. The real problem was what to do with the body. Unfortunately it was winter—the February of ’88, a few months before you and I met—and although I wanted to bury him in the woods, there was no way I could have dug a grave in the frozen ground without a pneumatic drill. I did wonder if I could just leave him in the woods but Elizabeth said no, it would be better if we could cover up the fact that he’d been murdered because the police never close their files on a murder case and we both wanted to put the disaster behind us.”

  “But what on earth did you do?”

  “I invited him down here. I promised I’d pay him an enormous sum if only he would hand over all the other photographs and the negatives—I even said, oozing desperation and appeasement, that if he agreed to end the blackmail I was willing to celebrate by partying with him afterwards. I knew he’d never be able to resist that, and I was right. He was so vain he thought I still fancied him and so hooked on the menu I was offering that he had to come back for more.

  “I killed him in the shower in the end. It seemed best to do it in a place where any mess could be sluiced away and there were no clothes to be stained. I slammed his head against the wall and while he was still semi-stunned I strangled him. Then I put his clothes back on, wrapped him in a blanket to lock in any tell-tale fibres and stowed him in the trunk of my car.

  “By that time it was eight o’clock. Sophie hadn’t taken her car with her—she’d gone by plane to her friends in Scotland—so I left my car at the house and took her car to London. When I reached Soho it was crowded and I felt sure no one would notice me. I let myself into his flat with his keys, went through his files and removed the evidence which related to my case. (Of course he’d retained a set of negatives, the bastard!) All the files of his victims’ photographs were arranged in a very businesslike way, and he even had the accounts stored on his personal computer. Blackmail in the age of technology! Disgusting.

  “When I was sure there was nothing left in the flat to connect me with him I drove back to Surrey. By then it was very late. There’s a valley near Oakshott, the Mole valley, and Sophie and I had often walked there on weekends in the early days of our marriage, so I knew it well. I’d remembered there was a cart-track leading up to a bridge over the railway which runs through that cutting, and I knew there would be nothing around, least of all a cart, at that time of night. I drove up the track, reached the bridge and heaved him onto the line—fulfilling Elizabeth’s prophecy, of course, but it was the prophecy which had given me the idea.

  “I knew the train might not destroy the physical evidence that he’d been murdered, but I figured that once the body was smashed up, some overworked pathologist would write the death off as a suicide and not bother to waste more time on the case. Elizabeth was prepared to give me an alibi for the night in question, but it was never needed because the police never found anything to connect me with him. I burned the evidence I’d recovered from the flat,
I burned the blanket I’d used to wrap the body, and as a safety precaution I even traded in my car. I was safe— but we didn’t get that closure of the file we’d been hoping for. The train failed to crush the appropriate parts, the pathologist did his work properly and the inquest produced a murder verdict.

  “Was this just bad luck for us? No, we should have foreseen what happened. The trouble was that as we wanted to create the possibility of suicide I didn’t remove the evidence of his identity, and as soon as the police went to his flat and found evidence of the thriving extortion racket, they were never going to believe he wasn’t murdered.

  “At that point the big problem for us was Sophie. Fortunately she never knew the blackmailer’s name so she had no way of connecting me with the story in the local paper about the murdered man found on the railway line, and as the police kept the lid on his activities while they were pursuing their enquiries the word ‘blackmail’ didn’t come up at the inquest. But of course Sophie, not knowing the man was dead, was still very worried about what he was going to do next. In the end I told her that I’d taken steps to give him a final pay-off, that I’d found out he had other victims and that with luck he’d now leave me alone and move on. Sophie seemed to accept this; we were living apart by that time, going for the two-year separation, and she said it was just as well we had to wait for a divorce because otherwise the blackmailer might see it as a fresh chance to pressure us and renew his demands.