The Deadly Space Between (31 page)

Authors: Patricia Duncker

‘You could be killed. Easily,’ he said in English, ‘it is very irresponsible. Why do you think that you know this body in the ice?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘We recognized him,’ Iso gasped, tormented by hysterical anxiety at the way we were being treated, as if we were exhibitionists or lunatics.

‘And did you recognize him too?’ The inspector swivelled towards me.

‘Yes. Well, I thought so. But in fact . . .’ I hesitated, then came out with it anyway, ‘just before my mother cried out I saw him coming towards us. Over the ice.’

Georges Daubert stared at me. He was clearly wondering how altitude sickness could set in at less than two thousand metres.

‘I will arrange a taxi for you. I think that you had better go home. Please leave me a phone number where you can be contacted.’

As we climbed into the cab we saw the red helicopter descending towards the hospital.

_{* * *}

We were called back to the police station two days later, ‘just to clarify a few details’. We took the bus into town. Isobel was convinced that, at last, we would be taken into custody and locked up. She left a message for Françoise with the car keys. But when she declared that she was quite prepared to be arrested and would sign her confession at once Georges Daubert roared at her in irritation.

‘Arrest you? Whatever for?
Vous êtes cinglé ou quoi?

‘
Écoutez-moi bien
. We now have a positive identification. The body in the ice is that of Gustave Roehm, the Swiss alpinist. He was lost on the mountain in 1786 during the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc. It is a very significant, scientific discovery. The body is very well preserved, most of the fatty tissue has been converted into grave wax. Only the hands have been completely mummified. They are like leather, yellow and hard as a dried cod. He appears to have had enormous hands. We know who he was from the instruments he was carrying. Usually the ice tears corpses into pieces over time. The sheering action of the ice as it flows downhill will dismember them. We find buttons, boots, a jawbone. It is very rare, indeed it is almost miraculous, to find a body intact.

‘I don’t know what you thought you saw. The body we have recovered is almost unblemished. But we have identified him from his notebook and equipment, which you cannot possibly have seen.

‘
Madame, je suis desolé
, but neither you nor your son can have been his murderers. However convinced you are to the contrary. He has been dead for over two hundred years.

‘As you have been so distressed I have concealed your names from the journalists.

‘May I advise you to go home. Now go home!’

His voice rose to an angry bark.

We were whisked out of the pale cream rooms, past filing cabinets and photocopiers, and abandoned on the front steps.

‘What can we do? Where shall we go?’

I heard my mother’s shriek as if she were hailing me from a great distance.

I knew then that we would never escape from Roehm. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between’. And we had passed over that delicate snow bridge. He was in our blood, our bones. His hooded pale-grey gaze watched what we saw from behind our own eyes. Roehm had come back to us, brought us together in the hotel on the Bodensee, and withdrawn again. But his hand was stealthy at our backs. He was always there. We had become his creatures.

_{* * *}

He had been watching me as I turned on the gas. He had followed me across the crowded ramps of Waterloo Station. He had sat beside me, all the way south to Konstanz on the padded blue seats of the electric train. He had watched over me while I slept, lulled by the insistent hiss. He was there on the ferry across the dark water. He had touched the woman’s back with my hands. He was present in my body when I entered her, his lips and mine were clamped to her unresisting breasts like a succubus. We were consuming her, inexorably, with our perverted desire, breaking down her body from within. And when her beauty was exhausted, I was next.

The steep flight of steps sparkled with fresh snow. Someone had scraped a narrow path through the ice, which descended in a long curve, like a ballroom staircase on the set of an opera. The road before us was empty. On either side of the street, cars lay buried in the white drifts.

‘What can we do? Where shall we go?’

My mother’s empty questions meant nothing to me any more. We stood dazzled by great slabs of blue and white light, hesitant before the graceful curving stair. Far above us the needle peaks glittered in the clear air. I looked down. The light exploded at our feet.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following people and institutions for their help and support, financial and moral, while I was writing this novel. I worked at Ledig House in New York State and would like to thank David Knowles, the Executive Director, and the staff: Kathleen Triem, Peter Franck, Genevieve and Paris, Josie and Lauren, and all the other residents, who were there with me. Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh in Scotland provided the ideal, silent setting for concentrated work and I am grateful to the Director, the Administrator, the Trustees and the staff at the Castle itself for the productive time I spent there.

Thank you to my brother Richard Duncker, who was my guide in Chamonix, and to Alison Fell for her superb novel
Mer de Glace
, which I carried with me on the ice. Sheila Duncker is, as always, my first reader, but she is involved in every stage of my work and I am very grateful. Thank you to everyone at A. M. Heath and at Picador, especially Peter Straus, Nicholas Blake, Sara Fisher. Thank you, above all, to Victoria Hobbs.

There are several deliberate quotations in this text from the most famous passages in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and from her 1831 Preface. They are to be found in Chapter 5 and Chapter 9. The Saints are based on the Protestant sect described in Patricia Beer’s autobiography of her childhood,
Mrs Beer’s House
, and on one occasion I have quoted her words verbatim.

A Note on the Author

PATRICIA DUNCKER
is the author of five novels:
Hallucinating Foucault
(1996), winner of the McKitterick Prize and the Dillons First Fiction Award,
James Miranda Barry
(1999),
The Deadly Space Between
(2002),
Miss Webster and Chérif
(2006), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2007. Her fifth novel,
The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge
(Bloomsbury, 2010), was shortlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger award for the Best Crime Novel of the Year. She has published two collections of short fiction,
Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees
(1997), shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and
Seven Tales of Sex and Death
(2003), all of which have been widely translated. Her critical work includes a collection of essays on writing, theory and contemporary literature,
Writing on the Wall
(2002). She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.