XI
“You’ll note I used the past tense,” he said at last, still not looking at me, still staring out over the garden. “All the sexual methods I was driven to use to try to integrate myself—to try to heal the split in my personality and make me feel less dislocated—that whole way of life became redundant when I met you. That’s why I’ll do anything to keep you, anything, even make this very painful and difficult confession.”
I answered: “I see.” But I barely knew what I was saying.
Rapidly he said: “What I used to do was this: I’d spend the evening in London, pick up someone in a gay bar and . . . well, it was nothing, just a brief anonymous episode. And let me make it clear that I’m not a homosexual. I like to live with women, I like to make love to women, I’ve never had any doubt about my sexual orientation. Screwing men was just something I did to jack up the adrenaline and blot out the dislocation— in fact I often felt the activity didn’t have much connection with sex. It wasn’t desire that switched on the adrenaline. It was rage.”
“Rage?”
“Yes, but that’s all gone now, along with the dislocation. Never mind that. Let’s focus on the blackmail.”
“The blackmail, yes—”
“What happened was this. Around two and a half years ago my luck ran out and I picked up a man who happened to be a very professional extortionist. I then compounded my bad luck by making a big mistake: I went back to his flat. Normally I always hired a room in a cheap hotel, but on that occasion I was at the other end of Soho, the man said his flat was in the next street and I just thought: why not. He did tell me he worked in the security business, but I assumed he meant he was some kind of guard. Bloody stupid of me. It turned out he had a shop which sold all kinds of surveillance equipment and his bedroom was stuffed with micro-cameras, the kind you can’t see unless you’re looking for them with a magnifying glass. I was using a false name and I thought I was carrying no identification, but as I said, this was a real professional.
“My clothes for the evening were off the peg—no Savile Row gear for that particular game—but I was still wearing my handmade shoes from Blaydon’s, and when I was in the lavatory the bastard checked all my clothes, realised he’d hit pay-dirt with the shoes and noted the maker’s name. Then the next day he went to Blaydon’s and spun some story about how he’d met me at a party and admired my shoes and I’d told him to visit their shop in St. James’s—he couldn’t quite remember my name, but . . . Of course Blaydon’s had no trouble identifying me from his description, and he had no trouble milking them of the information which enabled him to track me down. Three days later I received a letter which said . . . But you can guess the gist. God, I’ve got to have another drop of champagne even though I’ve now had my half of the bottle— I’m running out of courage. How about you?”
“No more at the moment, thanks.”
“I mean are you still there, still hanging in?”
“Apparently.” Making an enormous effort I tried to help him along by adding: “I’m grateful to you for being so honest. I really admire your guts.”
“You’re the one with guts, I think.” He attempted a smile before refocusing on the narrative. “Well, the next disaster was that Sophie found out. He sent her a couple of photographs to show me he meant business. His big threat was to fax the pictures to all the members of the board of my last company . . . I was scared shitless, demented with anxiety. Of course I paid up to keep the bastard at bay while I worked out what the hell I could do, but eventually I swallowed my pride and went to Mrs. Mayfield. That was more of an ordeal than you might think. She’d always condemned the hobby as too risky and I’d sworn to her that I’d given it up.”
“Was she angry?”
“Furious. But I knew she’d have a strong motive to help me out—I was too valuable to the society to be allowed to go down the tubes. When I asked her what the hell I was going to do she said straight away: ‘You’re going to get lucky again. I see him lying on a railway line.’ ”
“Are you trying to tell me—”
“The next day we went into action. I managed to find my way back to his flat. Then once we had his address Mrs. Mayfield made contact, put a curse on him, predicted his death on a railway line and finally called the society together to visualise and will the death into being.”
“You’re making this up.”
“I knew you’d say that, but all I can tell you is that influencing people by the power of the group-will is a psychic procedure which the society regularly practises—”
“As a matter of fact the St. Benet’s psychologist told me there are cases recorded of people being willed to die.”
“You can will people to do almost anything if you go about it in the right way.” Suddenly and most unexpectedly he shuddered. “It was bloody odd in the flat during that final scene,” he said. “I believe the reason I went to pieces as the scene progressed was because I felt Mrs. Mayfield was threatening me.”
“You? But it was me she was trying to drag onto the balcony!”
“That was what was ostensibly going on. But I began to feel she was saying to me: ‘I can break your wife in pieces and I can break you too!’ Remember what I said earlier? When I was telling you about my headaches I said I was worried that after this latest bout of trouble Mrs. Mayfield would decide I’d finally become more of a liability than an asset.”
“But at the end of that repulsive scene at the flat she made it clear to Nicholas that she wanted to keep you!”
“Well, of course she didn’t want me to fall into the hands of the enemy and spill my guts out about the society! But she was bargaining with Darrow as if I was just an object, wasn’t she? Somehow that seemed to reveal all her malevolence towards me—I
felt
all her malevolence, and then it was as if I really did become just an object, subhuman. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even put down that knife—and I certainly couldn’t react fast enough when Tucker cannoned into me . . . Carter, I know you must have wondered if I deliberately harmed that man, but believe me I didn’t want any more trouble at that stage. Supposing he too had died by accident—and so soon after Sophie? How would that have looked to the police? Anyway, I didn’t want to kill Tucker, I just wanted to take a swing at him. But that stabbing . . . it was really Elizabeth’s fault for mentally zapping me like that—and I know she did zap me, I know she did . . . And when I started getting these headaches I thought: bloody hell, she’s got the society exercising the group-will to make me think I have brain cancer, and then I’ll want to kill myself, I’ll want to go back to that flat and go out on that balcony and—”
“Kim—”
“Okay, okay, I’m being neurotic, I’ll stop. The doctors say I don’t have brain cancer. Fine. But if Elizabeth’s decided I’m expendable, she could still get to me. Why else should she have hammered away about the balcony if she hadn’t wanted to demonstrate—”
“Kim, it was me she wanted to wreck, not you! And besides, I don’t see why she should feel you’d become expendable. Surely—”
“She skewered that image of the balcony into my brain, I absolutely felt it going in—”
“No, I’m sure you’re imagining that. Listen, Lewis will help you, I know he will—he helped me live with that image of the balcony. I still can’t go to the flat, but at least I can sleep at night and I’m not afraid I’m going to hurl myself out of the nearest upstairs window.”
But he could only shudder. “How typical of Elizabeth,” he said, “to choose the image of the big fall to zap us. Every high flyer fears that.”
I realised that he had stopped calling her Mrs. Mayfield but I realised too this was a sign of his stress and I knew I had to steer us both away from the subject of the balcony. “I assume the blackmailer did die on a railway line,” I said, “but how did the information reach you?”
“The society has its contacts. We asked to be informed of all the fatalities on the Underground. The man was dead within two weeks of hearing Elizabeth’s curse and prediction.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he spoke and I knew we were still on shaky ground. I tried to move the narrative on.
“And this was two and a half years ago, you said. So you weren’t blackmailed for years and years.”
“No, I originally told Sophie that because I saw at once it was a good way to explain my lack of capital. I knew by that time the marriage was doomed and I’d have to declare all my assets when the divorce settlement came around. I could have blamed my loss on the crash of ’87, of course, but it might have seemed implausible as the market recovered so well.”
“Where did the money go if it didn’t go to the blackmailer?”
“Mrs. Mayfield and the society. I thought it was money well-spent. I would have done anything to ease that dislocation, but of course Sophie didn’t understand. When we had our big showdown after the blackmailer sent her the pictures I did try to explain how my hobby, my involvement with Elizabeth and my membership of the society were all part of my search for healing and integration, but she couldn’t cope, didn’t want to know. That was when I realised we’d reached the end of the road.”
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 blackmailer 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.