And Then There Was No One (19 page)

Then the bombshell dropped. (Cue a heavily ironic sigh of relief from Evie.) First, without a word to me – to be fair, our relationship by then
was
fast deteriorating and I already suspected him of several infidelities, although none that couldn’t have been forgiven in the fullness of time – without a word to me, he packed his things and moved out. Next, I read – I read, Reader, in the
Times Literary Supplement
! – a review of his first novel, a novel about whose existence, about the very fact that he had written a novel at all, I knew nothing, nothing! (In the one conversation we had had, on the telephone, in the immediate aftermath of his departure,
he let slip that he had taken three proof copies of the new novel to distribute to his wealthy Bulgarian relatives, to earn himself some moral air miles, as he put it, there being an inheritance in the offing, so he could surely have laid hands on a fourth to give to me.) I knew absolutely nothing of a 244-page work of fiction most of which he must have been writing during those sixteen months. But where? In the University Library? On the never too busy first floor of the Arts Café? In our own flat when I was asleep?

If that weren’t evidence enough that this high-falutin’ first novel of his,
Dark Jade
– a copy of which I had to buy for myself in Waterstones – had been deliberately written behind my back, there was also the fact that it was
undisguisedly
autobiographical and that the character of Robert, the hero’s clingy, shabby, talentless lover, was just as undisguisedly based – rather, debased – on me. Added to which, there’s not a single mention of my name, not one, in the index of
A Biography of Myself
!

‘So,’ said Evie, ‘my hunch was right. Revenge for a sexual humiliation.
Adair or Ardor
…’

A faint odour of goat droppings emanated from deep in the bracken.

‘No, you’re wrong,’ I answered. ‘It wasn’t sexual humiliation. A long time ago I learned how to put that kind of setback behind me. The book itself was the humiliation, the book and his having written it and published it without warning me, exposing to the world my private little squalors
and meannesses, causing me to look an ass before I’d had the time to launch my own career as a writer.

‘Oh, Evie,’ I cried, and I could hear myself grinding my teeth, ‘how often I prayed that he would die of Aids, that he would pass away alone, incontinent, disfigured, a wrinkly sleeping-bag of piss and shit! Well, it didn’t happen like that – the creep was always lucky in love – at cards, too. He broke my heart and now at long last, thirty years later, I’ve broken his, literally. But
basta.
We’ve talked enough.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Evie went unflappably on, curse her, ‘that his humiliation of you may actually have been responsible for your own literary success, such as it is?’

‘What’s this you’re saying now?’

‘That perhaps you became a writer yourself out of your need to compete with him.’

‘More dollar-book Freud. I tell you, nothing, neither forevisions nor extenuations, nothing can erode the craving for vengeance and the bliss of having at last exacted it. What joy it was actually to
watch
that arrow pierce his chest. So much more gratifying, now I think of it, than if he really had died of Aids at a stranger’s hand. A stranger’s cock.’

‘There you go again. Can’t resist it, can you, the verbal quip? Even in circumstances as extreme as these.’

‘I’m glad you realise they
are
extreme,’ I answered drily. ‘And yes, you
are
right, Evie. I did bring you here to kill you. And it’s your own advice I’m going to follow, the advice I attributed to you in
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd.
Remember?
In the book’s penultimate chapter I had you hold forth on how to commit a successful murder. Since you patently don’t remember, let me quote you, so to speak: “If you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.”

‘Evie, I’m going to take a leaf out of your own book. My own book, I should say. I’m going to take that excellent advice of yours and eschew the fancy stuff. I’m even going to adopt the first of those two specific options you offer – pushing the victim off a cliff. The Falls are a bonus.’

‘Hold it there!’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you can see how wrong that would be?’

‘Of course I can see it’s “wrong”! I’m not an idiot.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What, then?’

‘Don’t you realise you simply cannot kill a fictional character? When Conan Doyle attempted to do away with Sherlock Holmes, his readers were so incensed he was forced to bring him back to life.’

‘Neat, Evie,’ I said, ‘very neat. As you would say. But please don’t get it into those little grey cells of yours that I too may later change my mind. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, when you go over, you stay over.’

That truly was enough talk. A tremor of excitement tickling my spine, I started to advance towards her. From the look on her face, a look conventionally expressive of not much more than mild bemusement, I deduced that, despite her having voluntarily introduced the subject herself, and despite everything we had both said since, she still found it hard to credit that I was actually prepared to murder her. It was only when I had got close enough to catch a whiff of her halitosis that she took a first – if not at all panicky – backward glance as though trusting that there might even then be a way out of the situation she had got herself into. Whatever was its cause, her serenity suited me fine. Yet I really couldn’t afford to give her the time to come up with a last-minute escape-route, if such existed, the more so as I wasn’t about to begin grappling with her
à la
Holmes and Moriarty. If it was going to be done, it had to be done at one go.

My heartbeats drowning out the roar of the Falls, thunderous as those were, lowering my forehead like a bull squaring up to a matador, I abruptly charged at her and butted her hard between her Alpine breasts. She shrieked. She started waving her arms as if in preparation for flight. Then she fell straight back, head first, over the edge of the cliff.

I myself at once peered over. I watched her drift down, down, down, as if in soundless, weightless slow motion, circling about herself like an overweight ballerina on points or like the Falling Man in his heartbreakingly nonchalant drop from whichever one it was of the Twin Towers. It felt as though an eternity elapsed before she disappeared beneath the torrent.

I stood for a few minutes, breathing thickly, a stitch in my chest such as I hadn’t known since my adolescence. Trembling, I drew out my pack of Dunhills. But in my haste, before I had succeeded in removing one, I caused a half-dozen more to spill out onto the grass, one after the other, like tiny white bombs from an aircraft’s belly-button, as seen in so much grainy newsreel footage. That wouldn’t do. What had Evie, my Evie, said? ‘Be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you.’ I hurriedly picked them up and stuffed them back any old how into the pack. Except for the last one, which I lit and inhaled so deeply I thought I would faint. Slowly, slowly, my heart stopped racing. I’d done it.

Unusually, I lit and smoked a second cigarette, if this time only halfway along. As with the first, I squashed underfoot what was left of it and popped the butt into my trouser pocket. I glanced at my watch. Seven-twenty. The whole beastly business had taken only forty minutes, twenty for the stroll from the hotel, twenty more for the deed to be done. Where would Evie’s corpse eventually wash up? And
when? Or would it have become so mangled on the river’s bouldery bed that the only part of her to survive the fall, and the Falls, would be her shattered pince-nez, dangling bathetically from some muddy bouquet of reeds? That wasn’t my concern, frankly. Wherever and whenever the old bat’s body surfaced, I would be far away, probably back in Notting Hill, as surprised as the rest of the world to read of her disappearance. And if some newspaper solicited an interview with me, a not unlikely eventuality considering how our names had been conjoined by my pair of whodunits (but were they and she and I that famous?), then why not? I’ll do anything to sell a book.

It was time I hastened back to the hotel and discreetly rejoined my fellow guests. Would it be politic, I wondered, if I myself were to raise the alarm – after, oh, an hour or so – by alerting the company to Evie’s absence? Or should I entrust that duty to Düttmann, say, and confine myself to subtly prompting him if need be? Or else simply say nothing? Better play that one by ear.

And it was when I was just on the point of retracing my steps through the forest, but hadn’t yet backed off from the Falls, that to my horror I saw a hand worming its way up over the edge of the abyss. It crept forward finger by finger like some unnameable spidery thing, but it was a hand nevertheless, an elderly person’s liver-spotted hand, knuckles slimy with moss, declivities between the fingers crusted with wet gravel. Paralysed, I felt my face go grey and, if I hadn’t
clapped my two hands over my mouth, I would have thrown up on the spot.

Drawing support from a clump of bracken it had blindly caught hold of, the thing, the hand, was now joined by its twin. I wanted to die. I wanted to run away, back, forward, right, left, it didn’t matter, just away – but I couldn’t. I could only mutely look on as the two hands were followed by a head – Evie’s head! It was like the climax to one of those splatter movies when, after being pummelled, garrotted, filleted, set alight and blown to invisible smithereens, the terminally mangled villain succeeds yet again in pulling himself together and running ever more amok. Her hair dishevelled, her eyes blinking convulsively behind her clouded-over pince-nez – yes, she was still wearing them! – Evie laboriously dragged her fat, sodden body onto the path and lay there for a few minutes, belly up, puffing and panting like a giant beached sea-cow. Then she slowly got to her feet and stood facing me.

I recovered at last a semblance of my voice.

‘This can’t be happening!’ I spluttered. ‘You’re dead!’

‘Oh no, I’m not,’ she replied, extracting a sliver of wet fern from between the two most prominent of her false front teeth.

‘But you must be!’

‘I tell you I’m not.’

‘But how could you have survived that fall? How could you not have drowned?’

She looked at me with more contempt on her face than I
have ever seen on any set of human features, then let loose a bitter, hoarse, peculiarly horrid laugh.

‘Because I’m a cardboard character!’ she cried. ‘I’m made of cardboard –
and cardboard floats
!’

‘What?!’

‘How does it feel to be hoist on your own petard, Gilbert? For all your much-vaunted, much-flaunted “affection” for the genre, you’ve remained such an elitist that you simply cannot help patronising not just whodunits themselves but those who write them and those who read them. You used me as your protagonist, not once but twice, yet instead of taking the trouble to flesh me out, physically and psychologically, you allowed yourself to fall back, again and again, on the crudest of stereotypes. Even my so-called trademark tricorne hat you pinched from Marianne Moore! And if any critic picked up on that crudeness, why, you would airily retort that it was all part and parcel of your postmodern pastiche of Agatha Christie!

‘You made yourself absolutely critic-proof, didn’t you? If the writing was brilliant, it was yours; if it was bad, it was poor old Agatha’s. Neat, very neat. Except that, in your case, it wasn’t out of postmodern playfulness so much as laziness and sheer downright incompetence that you fabricated a character as shallow and two-dimensional as I am. You may have described me as plump, even just a few sentences ago as
fat
, but we both know that I’m as thin and flimsy as the paper I’m printed on.

‘And that was also your undoing. Poetic justice, Gilbert. When I landed at the foot of the Falls, I merely bobbed along on the surface of the current like the page of a book – like this page, if you will, of this very book – until I got ensnarled in a conveniently overhanging branch. Disentangling myself, I crept and crawled and clawed my way back up the cliff. Oh, I won’t deny it was frightening at times, but there wasn’t a chance of its ever proving fatal. You can’t drown paper. Or cardboard. Or me.’

‘You’re not just a witch,’ I screamed at her, ‘you’re a bitch! A real f**king c**t! Eeyow!’

Blood started spurting from my martyred mouth. It felt as though I had just stuffed a thicket of nettles down my throat and it took me a moment to understand that what had shredded it could only have been – I repeat, this cannot be happening! – it could only have been that mouthful of asterisks! Asterisks that belonged to Evie’s style, not mine!

‘That’ll teach you to be foul-mouthed in the presence of a lady,’ she crowed at me. ‘And what it also proves is that I’m now by far the stronger of us two. It’s only by exploiting me as your heroine that you’ve enjoyed any real public success. Gilbert Adair the postmodernist? What a joke! What a farce! What you don’t seem to realise, Gilbert, is that this is 2011. Postmodernism is dead, it’s so last century, it’s as hopelessly passé as Agatha Christie herself. Nobody gives two hoots about self-referentiality any longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a single hoot, about you.
Your books are out of sight, out of sound, out of fashion and out of print, but you just won’t let go, will you? You just won’t give up. Even now, even in this very chapter, even with this very conceit – the author failing to kill off his own best-loved character – you’re hoping to seem more postmodern than Borges or Burgess, Barth, Barthes or Barthelme. Botheration, now you’ve got me doing it! But it won’t work, Gilbert. Nothing, I repeat, nothing will ever again work for you without me. Your need of me is a lot greater than my need of you.’