Nicci French - Killing Me Softly

‘So why did they report hearing that?’

‘They reported it because that’s what they expected him to say. But I don’t think it’s what he said.’

‘What do you think he said?’

I looked around. Adam was still safely inside. I waved at him cheerily.

‘I think he said "gelb".’

‘ “Gelb” ? What the fuck is that?’

‘It’s German for yellow.’

‘Yellow? Why the fuck would he gave gone on about yellow while he was dying? Was he hallucinating?’

‘No. I think he was pondering on the problem that had killed him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The colour of the line that the party had followed down Gemini Ridge. Down the wrong side of Gemini Ridge. A yellow line.’

Greg started to speak, then stopped. I watched him think slowly about what I’d said.

‘But the line down Gemini Ridge was blue. My line. They went down the wrong side of the ridge because the line came out. Because I hadn’t secured it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think the top two pegs of your line came out because they were pulled out. And I think that Françoise, Peter, Carrie, Tomas and the other one – what was he called?’

‘Alexis,’ muttered Greg.

‘They went down the wrong ridge because a line led them there. A yellow line.’

Greg looked baffled, in pain.

‘How could a yellow line get there?’

‘Because it was put there to lead them in the wrong direction.’

‘But who by?’

I turned and looked up at the window once more. Adam glanced down at us then looked back at the woman he was talking to.

‘It could have been a mistake,’ said Greg.

‘It couldn’t have been a mistake,’ I said slowly.

There was a long, long silence. Several times Greg caught my eye, then looked away. Suddenly he sat down, on the wet soil, against a bush, which sprang back and flicked water over both of us. He was shaking in spasms and sobbing hopelessly.

‘Greg,’ I hissed urgently, ‘pull yourself together.’

He was crying and crying. ‘I can’t. I can’t.’

I bent down and grabbed him firmly, shook him. ‘Greg, Greg.’ I made him get up. His face was red, tear-stained. ‘You’ve got to help me, Greg. I’ve got nobody. I’m alone.’

‘I can’t. I can’t. The fucking fucker. I can’t. Where’s my drink?’

‘You dropped it.’

‘I need a drink.’

‘No.’

‘I need a drink.’

Greg staggered back down the garden and into the house. I waited for a moment, breathing heavily, calming myself. I was hyperventilating. It took a few minutes. Now I must go back inside and be normal. At the moment I stepped into the basement kitchen I heard a terrible crash and then shouting from upstairs, breaking glass. I ran up the stone steps. In the front room there was a mêlée, a scrum on the floor. Furniture had been knocked over, a curtain had been pulled down. There were shouts and screams. At first I couldn’t even make out who was involved, and then I saw Greg being pulled off somebody. It was Adam, clutching his face. I ran forward to him.

‘You fucking fucker,’ Greg was shouting. ‘You fucking fucker.’ He ran out of the room like a madman. The front door slammed. He was gone.

There were expressions of incredulity around the room. I looked at Adam. He had a bad scratch down one cheek. His eye was already swelling. He was looking at me. ‘Oh, Adam,’ I said, and ran forward.

‘What was that all about?’ somebody asked. It was Deborah. ‘Alice, you were talking to him. What got into him?’

I looked around the room at Adam’s friends, colleagues, comrades, all expectant, baffled, enraged by the sudden attack. I shrugged. ‘He was drunk,’ I said. ‘He must have cracked. It all finally got to him.’ I turned back to Adam. ‘Let me clean that up for you, my love.’

It was a swimming-pool like the ones I’d gone to as a child – dank cubicles with green tiles, a straight up-and-down pool with old plasters and small hairballs drifting near the bottom, signs telling you not to run, not to dive, not to smoke and not to pet, tired buntings hanging beneath the unsteady strip-lighting. In the communal changing room, women came in all shapes and sizes. It was like a drawing from a children’s book illustrating human difference: dimpled bottoms and veined, pendulous breasts; gaunt ribcages and bony shoulders. I looked at myself in the tarnished mirror before pulling on my costume, and was again alarmed by how unhealthy I looked. Why hadn’t I noticed before? Then I tugged on my swimming cap and my goggles, tight enough to make my eyeballs bulge. I marched into the pool area. Fifty lengths: that’s what I was going to do.

I hadn’t been swimming for months. My legs, corkscrewing with the breast-stroke or flailing with the crawl, felt heavy. My chest hurt. Water found its way under my goggles and stung my eyes. A man on his back, arms like rotating saws, hit me in my belly and shouted at me. I counted as I swam, staring through my goggles at the turquoise water. This was so boring; up and down, up and down. I remembered now why I had given up before. But after about twenty lengths, I started to find a rhythm that became almost calming, and, instead of puffing and counting, I started thinking. Not frantically any more, but slowly and calmly. I knew that I was in grave danger and I knew that no one was going to help me. Greg had been my last chance of that. I was on my own now. The muscles in my arms ached as I swam.

It seemed absurd, and yet I was almost relieved. I was on my own and I felt that, for the first time in months, I was myself again. After all that passion, rage and terror, all that vertiginous loss of control, I was clear-headed, as if I’d emerged from a feverish dream. I was Alice Loudon. I had been lost and now I was found. Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four. I made a plan as I forged up and down the pool, avoiding all the men doing the crawl. The knots in my shoulders eased.

In the changing room I towelled myself briskly, put on my clothes without getting them wet on the puddly floor, and then put on makeup in front of the mirror. There was a woman next to me, also applying eyeliner and mascara. We grinned at each other, two women arming themselves for the outside world. I blow-dried my hair, then tied it back so that no locks were escaping on to my face. Soon I was going to cut it off, a new-look Alice. Adam loved my hair: sometimes he would bury his face in it as if he were drowning. It seemed such a long time ago, that rapturous, obliterating darkness. I would get myself cropped at the hairdresser’s so that I wouldn’t have to carry all that voluptuous weight around.

I didn’t go back to work at once. I went to an Italian restaurant down the road from the pool and ordered a glass of red wine, a bottle of fizzy water and a seafood salad with garlic bread. I pulled out the writing paper I had bought that morning, and a pen. At the head of the paper I wrote, in thick capital letters, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, and underlined it twice. My wine was put in front of me and I sipped it cautiously. I had to keep a clear head now. ‘If I am found dead,’ I wrote, ‘or if I disappear and cannot be traced, then I will have been murdered by my husband, Adam Tallis.’

The seafood salad and garlic bread arrived, and the waiter ground black pepper liberally over it with an oversized pepper-mill. I speared a rubbery ring of squid and popped it into my mouth, chewed vigorously, washed it down with water.

I wrote down everything I knew, in neat script and in as cogent a style as I could muster. I explained the death of Adele, and that her last letter to Adam, written just before she disappeared, was in my knicker drawer, under all of my underwear. I told them about Adele’s sister Tara, who had been harassing Adam, and had been fished out of a canal in East London. I even described the murder of Sherpa. Strangely, it was the cat rather than the women who made me realize my own peril most clearly. I remembered him, slashed open in the bath. For a minute I felt my gut clench. I crunched on crusty bread and drank a bit more wine to steady my nerves. Then I went through my analysis of exactly what had happened on the mountain with Françoise. I described Françoise’s rejection of Adam, Greg’s apparently foolproof system of ropes, the German man’s dying words. I drew a diagram as neatly as I could, reproducing it from the magazine article with satisfying arrows and dotted lines. I gave them Greg’s address and said they should confirm the accuracy of what I had written with him.