Nicci French - Killing Me Softly

‘I’ll think of something to tell Mike,’ she concluded.

‘Just remember to tell me what it is before I see him.’

From Oxford Street it was only a few minutes’ walk to Adam’s flat. When I reached the street door I realized that I had almost no idea of what I was going to say to him. I stood there for several minutes but nothing occurred. The door was unlocked so I walked up the stairs and knocked on the flat door. It opened. I stepped forward, starting to speak, and then stopped. The person in the doorway was a woman. She was alarmingly attractive. She had dark hair that was probably long but was now fastened up unfussily. She was dressed in jeans and a checked shirt over a black T-shirt. She looked tired and preoccupied.

‘Yes?’ she said.

I felt a sick lurch in my stomach and a flush of hot embarrassment. I had the feeling that I had fucked up my entire life simply to make a fool of myself.

‘Is Adam there?’ I asked numbly.

‘No,’ she said briskly. ‘He’s moved on.’

She was American.

‘Do you know where?’

‘God, there’s a question now. Come in.’ I followed her inside because I didn’t know what else to do. Just inside the door were a very large battered rucksack and an open suitcase. Clothes were tossed on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she said, gesturing at the mess. ‘I got in from Lima this morning. I feel like shit. I got some coffee in the pot.’ She held out her hand. ‘Deborah,’ she said.

‘Alice.’

I looked across at the bed. Deborah pulled out a familiar chair for me to sit on and poured coffee into a familiar mug for me and a familiar mug for herself. She offered me a cigarette. I refused it, and she lit it for herself.

‘You’re a friend of Adam’s,’ I ventured.

She blew out a thick cloud of smoke and shrugged. ‘I’ve climbed with him a couple of times. We’ve been on the same teams. Yeah, I’m a friend.’ She took another deep drag and grimaced. ‘Jesus. I’ve got jet-lag big league. And this air. I haven’t been below five thousand feet for a month and a half.

‘And you ’re a friend of Adam’s?’ she continued.

‘Only for a bit,’ I said. ‘We just met recently. But yes, I am his friend.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, with what I took to be a knowing smile that embarrassed me greatly but I held her gaze until her smile softened into something more friendly and less mocking.

‘Were you on Chunga-whatever-it’s-called with him?’ Or: have you had an affair with him? Are you his lover too?

‘Chungawat. You mean last year? God, no. I don’t do things like that.’

‘Why not?’

She laughed. ‘If God had meant us to go above eight thousand metres, he’d have made us differently.’

‘I know that Adam was involved in that awful expedition last year.’ I was trying to speak calmly, as if I had come knocking on her door just to have this coffee and friendly chat. Where is he? I was screaming inside my head. I must see him now – before it’s too late, although perhaps it is already too late.

‘Involved? Don’t you know what happened?’

‘I know that some people were killed.’

Deborah lit another cigarette. ‘Five people. The expedition’s medical officer who was, uh…’ She looked across at me. ‘A close friend of Adam’s. Four clients.’

‘How awful.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’ She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘You want to hear about it?’ I nodded. Where is he? She leaned back, all the time in the world. ‘When the storm broke, the leader, Greg McLaughlin, one of the top Himalayan guys in the world who thought he’d worked out a foolproof method for getting dorks up a mountain, was out of it. He was acutely hypoxic, whatever. Adam escorted him down and took over. The other professional guide, a French guy called Claude Bresson, a fantastic sport climber, he was fucked, hallucinating.’ Deborah rapped her chest. ‘He had a pulmonary oedema. Adam carried the bastard down to the camp. Then there were eleven clients out in the open. It was dark and over fifty below. Adam went back with oxygen, brought them down in groups. Kept going out. The man is a fucking bull. But one group got lost. He couldn’t find them. They didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Why do people do that?’

Deborah rubbed her eyes. She looked terribly tired. She gestured with her cigarette. ‘You mean why does Adam do it? I can tell you why I do it. When I was a med student, I had a boyfriend who was a climber. So I climbed with him. People want a doctor along. So I go every so often. Sometimes I hang around at base camp. Sometimes I go up.’

‘With your boyfriend?’

‘He died.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘It was years ago.’

There was a silence. I tried to think of something to say. ‘You’re American.’

‘Canadian. I’m from Winnipeg. You know Winnipeg?’

‘Sorry.’

‘They dig the graves for the winter in the autumn.’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘The ground freezes. They guess how many people they think will die during the winter and they dig that many holes. There are disadvantages to growing up in Winnipeg but it teaches you respect for cold.’ She put her cigarette in her mouth and held up her hands. ‘Look. What do you see?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ten fingers. Complete and unmutilated.’

‘Adam has toes missing,’ I said. Deborah gave an accusing smile and I smiled ruefully back. ‘He might have just told me about them.’

‘Yeah, right. That’s different. That was a decision. I’ll tell you, Alice, those people were lucky to have him out there. Have you ever been on a mountain in a storm?’

‘I’ve never been on a mountain.’

‘You can’t see, you can’t hear, you don’t know which way is up. You need equipment and experience but it’s not enough. I don’t know what it is. Some people stay calm and think rationally. That’s Adam.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and then left a pause so that I wouldn’t appear too eager. ‘Do you know where I can reach him?’

She thought for a moment. ‘He’s an elusive man. He was going to meet someone in a café over in Notting Hill Gate, I think. What was it called? Wait.’ She walked across the room and returned with a telephone directory. ‘Here.’ She wrote a name and address on a used envelope.

‘When will he be there?’

She looked at her watch. ‘Now, I guess.’

‘I’d better go.’

She led me to the door. ‘If he’s not there, I’ve got some people you might try. Let me give you my number.’ Then she grinned. ‘But you’ve got it already, right?’

All the way along Bayswater Road in the taxi I wondered if he would be there. I constructed different scenarios in my head. He isn’t there and I spend the next few days living in hotels and wandering the streets. He is there, but with a girl and I have to spy on them from a distance to work out what’s going on then follow him until I can get him alone. I guided the taxi just past the café in All Saints Road and walked cautiously back. I saw him straight away,sitting in the window. And he wasn’t with a girl. He was with a black man who had long dreadlocked hair tied back in a pony-tail. In the taxi I had also been considering ways of approaching Adam that wouldn’t make me look like a stalker but nothing had occurred. Possible strategies were rendered irrelevant in any case because, at the moment I caught sight of Adam, Adam caught sight of me and did a double-take like in the movies. Standing there with all my current worldly possessions – old knickers, old shirt, bits of newly acquired makeup – in a Gap bag, I felt like some pathetic Victorian-style waif. I saw him say something to the man with him and then get up and walk out. There was a strange ten seconds or so in which the man turned and looked at me, obviously wondering, Who the fuck is she?