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 decided 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.
“I was very relieved when she made this comment, of course, because it showed she didn’t suspect the truth. But when you came on the scene I started to feel nervous about the blackmail all over again. I wasn’t too surprised that Sophie never suspected me of murdering him—she’d lived a sheltered life in that plush Surrey ghetto, and she wasn’t exactly streetwise. But
you
! You were never going to believe that a successful extortionist would vanish obligingly into the blue after striking gold! So I wasn’t just worried about Sophie giving you the true story about the blackmail and revealing my hobby; I was worried that you’d wonder what the hell had happened to the blackmailer. Even though the press coverage had been minimal I thought you might have a look at the newspapers for February 1988, the month I’d supposedly made the last payment and see what kind of murders had been going on in London and Surrey—and if you did that I was sure the item in the local paper about the murdered man on the railway line a couple of miles from Oakshott would hit you between the eyes.
“Well, now you can see how important it was that Elizabeth and I should destroy Sophie’s credibility and feed you the false story about the blackmail to pre-empt Sophie’s version. And in case you’re wondering all over again—no, neither of us killed Sophie. The very last thing I needed was an in-depth police investigation into my private life, and anyway by the time our attempt to destroy Sophie’s credibility failed I had a motive the size of a mountain. Of course I wasn’t going to kill her! I went to Oakshott to make one last all-out attempt to talk her into keeping silent, and I’d drummed up a new strategy, a strategy which I still think would have worked: I was going to grovel, beg for mercy and swear not only that I’d repented but that my repentance was all due to my new marriage. Then I was going to ask her if her attempts to break up that marriage could really be morally justified—and I think she’d have backed down at that point, I think she would, because breaking up marriages, let’s face it, isn’t a Christian occupation, particularly if one of the partners is trying to embark on a better life. I should have adopted this strategy long ago with Sophie, I can see that now, but the trouble was I just couldn’t bring myself to grovel, I was too bloody angry. However, since I had my back to the wall I had no choice but to abandon my pride and pull out all the stops . . . except that in the end I didn’t have to, did I, because she died.
But I didn’t kill her!
The situation was quite different from the one involving the blackmailer because Sophie was ultimately a moral woman amenable to reason, whereas the blackmailer . . . No, there’s no comparison.
“I’ve no regrets about killing that bastard, none whatsoever. He was truly the scum of the earth, and what does it matter anyway if there’s now one homosexual less in the world? You know, Carter, I’m the first to say Hitler was a villain, and of course I’ve always been totally opposed to his treatment of the Jews, who are human beings just like us; I would never normally defend him, but between you and me, in the privacy of these four walls, I think he had the correct idea about homosexuals. I think in future, when science is more advanced, they should be recognised as mutations and genetically engineered out of the human race . . . Ah, now I’ve offended your liberal principles! I’ve gone too far and need to be reined in—isn’t that what you’re thinking, sweetheart? Okay, I’ll backtrack! I know those sentiments are dead wrong and I promise you I’m really totally opposed to any form of eugenics, but that blackmailing bastard put me through such hell that it’s hardly surprising I sometimes wish all homosexuals could be eliminated.”
“Of course,” I replied at once, but found I could say no more.
I had suddenly received a horrible insight into why he was so obsessed with me.