Steve panicked. He admitted that he should have called the police at once, but he also realized how things would look. So
far as he knew, nobody other than Nadia Shelley herself had been aware that he was going there. In what he described as the
worst decision of his life, certainly one that disgraced him as a lawyer and disqualified him from any claim to serve in a
responsible position in public life, he ran out of the building and drove off in his car.
It was another couple of hours before the police were called—by a neighbor angered by the nonstop deafening music thumping
through the walls of Nadia Shelley’s apartment. By midnight, the murder squad had collected enough evidence to want to interview
Steve. The most telling clue had been her phone records—the last call of her life made to him. In his panic he hadn’t even
thought of that. They claimed that he had ransacked the apartment in search of anything that might tie him to his victim.
There was no way of knowing, they said, how much he had taken away, though the few things he had missed were sufficient to
point the finger of suspicion firmly in his direction.
For example, there was a photograph at the back of one of her drawers of the two of them together. They were on a yacht belonging
to some friends of hers, Steve told the court. Soon after they first met. The start of their affair.
Then, caught behind some bookshelves, the police had found the cover page of a document that the prosecution said Steve had
taken away with him and presumably destroyed. He must have dropped this single page, they said, in his hurry to get away.
It referred to sums of money received from questionable sources. The suggestion, subtly planted by the prosecution and angrily
refuted by Steve’s defense team, was that Steve was in the pocket of organized crime, and that Nadia Shelley had in some way
been his conduit to them.
I didn’t believe any of it for a second. The idea of Steve being a murderer was ridiculous enough. But an associate of full-time
criminals as well? I could never accept that.
All the same, as the trial progressed I fell increasingly into a numbing, almost paralyzing depression. The proceedings were
not carried live on TV, but there was coverage from outside the court every day. And of course the newspapers carried the
story in every morbid detail. There was no way to escape it other than leaving the country, but not knowing what was going
on would have been worse than having to face it daily. Maybe it would have helped if I’d been able to go along and watch the
trial. But George was right, as Steve had been in his letter: It was wiser not.
In the end it was the forensic evidence that finished him. They found nylon fibers in the bruising and cuts around Nadia Shelley’s
neck, indicating that she had most likely been strangled by a pair of her own pantyhose after being knocked unconscious, or
semiconscious, by a blow to the head.
When they examined Steve’s car, they found shreds of the same fibers caught on the edge of his front fender. They had no explanation
of why he took the pantyhose with him instead of leaving them in the apartment, though they surmised that in his panic he
might have decided it was safer to dispose of the “murder weapon” elsewhere. He must have had the pantyhose still in his hands
when he left the building, not noticing in his haste to get away that he had snagged them on the fender.
George was with me when the verdict of guilty was announced. The whole nightmare ended, as it had begun for me, with the early
evening news. I had fantasized about this moment. What would I do if he was found guilty? What would I do if he was acquitted?
I had whole scenarios in my head for both possibilities.
In the event I just sat there, all emotion drained from me by the tensions of the previous months. I knew only that it was
over, and somewhere, somehow, I was inarticulately grateful for that fact.
It was a shock to find how disconnected I felt from the whole thing. There would be a delayed response, I supposed. But for
now I felt nothing. Just exhaustion and relief.
I felt George’s hand take mine and his arm slip around me, drawing me very gently to him. It was only then, as I turned my
face into his shoulder, that I felt the wetness of my own tears.
That was the first night George stayed at the apartment since our decision to separate. We slept together, though we didn’t
make love. Next day, however, and at my suggestion, he moved back permanently. Divorce was never mentioned again. Nor did
we talk about the past. By tacit agreement we looked only to the future, to the shared life we had to rebuild together out
of our two lives.
In my heart of hearts I knew now that George was the only man for me. It was the second time I had turned to him on the rebound
from Steve. I had always been told that passion never lasts. I hadn’t really believed it until that moment, when I realized
that the only things that really last are companionship, intelligence, and kindness.
I was very lucky to have George.
C
lifford was heavier than he’d looked, a difficulty compounded by the fact that he was now a deadweight. He had started to
regain consciousness before I got him to the edge, so I’d hit him again with the same stone, this time finishing the job.
My breath was coming in short, increasingly ragged gasps. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could do this. Part of it was nerves,
of course, as well as physical effort. It was only the second time I had taken a human life with my own hands, so the experience
was still an unfamiliar one. I hoped, on the whole, that it would remain so.
Nonetheless, a barrier had been crossed, a taboo broken. Such a flouting of convention meant a certain new freedom gained.
A demon had been at once both celebrated and defied.
The last few yards were the hardest because the land rose to a kind of lip over the howling, windblown emptiness beneath.
From far below came the sound of waves smashing against the rocks. It was a perfect place to miss one’s footing in the dark—especially
with the amount of alcohol they would find in his body—and die without a whisper of suspicion being raised.
I managed to line him up, feet and shoulders propped between thick clumps of coarse grass to stop him rolling back. Then,
with one final effort, I pushed him over the edge. His fall made no sound, and whether his body hit the rocks or disappeared
in the boiling waves I had no idea. He would be found no doubt the following day or soon after, by which time I would be back
in the States, with no evidence that I had ever been away.
By “I,” of course, I meant George Daly. The man who had flown into Heathrow the previous day, and would fly out the following
afternoon, was Larry Hart—the same Larry Hart who had made a brief trip back to Manhattan in the middle of George Daly’s recent
stay in London, a trip that had coincided with the death of Nadia Shelley and the arrest of Steve Coleman.
I picked up the stone with which I’d beaten out Cliffs brains and threw it after him: It wouldn’t do to have it found up on
top with traces of his blood on it. That done, I started the long hike back to the rented car I’d parked almost a mile away.
I looked at my watch and saw it was just after eleven. I would be back in London by one-thirty, tucked up in bed in my anonymous
hotel. I would be tired and would sleep soundly.
As I walked, I couldn’t suppress a smile when I thought of the irony in what had just happened. His surname had been Edge,
and his parents had chosen to christen him Clifford. His name had been the first thing he’d made a joke about when I’d met
him in a pub near my hotel in London’s Bayswater a few weeks earlier. Still, he said, it wasn’t as bad as the couple called
Balls who christened their daughter Ophelia. Clifford was a fund of such jokes, acquired during a lifetime in the used-car
trade. Pickings were currently a little thin, I had soon gathered from the morose, self-pitying tone his conversation took
on after a few large scotches. It came as no surprise that the offer of five thousand pounds in cash instantly commanded his
total and undivided attention.
He was exactly what I needed. Unmarried, unattached, a loser. Clifford was a gift from heaven. Or wherever.
I couldn’t help smiling as I thought of how he was now fated to win a certain kind of cheap immortality by being listed in
one or more of those anthologies of strange coincidences that George had been so fond of:
“Cliff Edge falls to death from cliff edge.”
Neither Cliff nor Nadia before him had seen their deaths coming. It wasn’t that either of them had been unusually naive or
stupid—certainly Nadia wasn’t—so I could only conclude that my own capacity for simulation and deception was as great as I’d
always believed.
Mind you, I myself hadn’t seen Nadia’s death coming at first. It was something that evolved over time—a matter of weeks. That
night in the Berkshires, when I’d first learned about the affair between Steve and Sara, nothing could have been further from
my mind than killing Nadia. It was Sara I’d been planning to get rid of. No doubt, if I’d succeeded, Nadia would have benefited
handsomely from the proceeds, at least for a time. I had never imagined our relationship would become permanent. It was a
carnal fling, a good time on both sides, but with no illusions. She would have taken her payoff when the time came and moved
on without complaint. Of that I was sure.
However, that was not to be the way things would turn out. Coincidence would intervene—as absurdly and improbably as anything
in those notebooks of George’s that I found myself occasionally dipping into. I confess that the subject was beginning to
exercise a certain fascination over me. For example, although I still resisted the whole notion of significant coincidences,
what is one to make of this kind of thing?
A Dublin man called Anthony Clancy was born on the seventh day of the week, in the seventh day of the month, in the seventh
month of the year, in the seventh year of the century. He was the seventh child of a seventh child, and had seven brothers.
Which makes seven coincidences involving the number seven.
On his twenty-seventh birthday he went to a race meeting and in the seventh race backed horse number seven, which was called
Seventh Heaven. It carried a handicap of seven, the odds were seven to one. He puts seven shillings on the horse. It came
in seventh.
Then there was a story told, apparently, by Jung himself:
As a small boy in New Orleans, a certain Monsieur Deschamps was once given a piece of plum pudding by a Monsieur Fortgibu.
Ten years later, in a Paris restaurant, he saw a plum pudding and ordered a slice, only to learn that the remaining piece
had already been ordered—by Monsieur Fortgibu.
Many years later, Monsieur Deschamps was invited to a dinner party where plum pudding was served. While eating it, he told
the story of the earlier coincidence involving Monsieur Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened, and the now elderly Monsieur
Fortgibu entered—having mistaken the address to which he’d been invited and burst in there by mistake.
And then there was the woman who lost her wedding ring in a field and forty years later found it in a potato she was peeling
in her kitchen sink.
What can anyone say about such things? Can you simply ignore them merely because they don’t make sense?
Because I was familiar, or at least becoming increasingly familiar, with the idea of these “synchronicitous events,” to use
the term George used in his notebooks, I was perhaps less staggered and astounded than I might have been when one such event
came out of nowhere and hit me squarely between the eyes.
Actually, it didn’t quite come out of nowhere. It came out of one of Nadia’s kitchen drawers. I was searching around for a
corkscrew one night when I came across, at the back of a jumble of matchboxes, balls of string, nail-clippers, Band-Aids,
and Aspirin, a curled and cracked Polaroid that sent my mind reeling.
My first thought was of something else I’d read in George’s notes—the theory that just by thinking about synchronicity you
can make strange things start happening around you. George had written that he didn’t believe that. Looking at the photograph
in my hand, I wondered briefly if I hadn’t become more of a believer than George.
I was looking at a picture of Nadia with her arms around none other than Steve Coleman—the very same Steve Coleman who, only
a few days earlier, had stood in the door of “my” house in the Berkshires and told me I was history.
In the picture they were on the deck of what looked like a luxury yacht. They wore casual clothes, and there was nothing improper
in the pose—except it shouldn’t have existed. They weren’t supposed to know each other. This, truly, was an impossible coincidence.
Yet there it was.
I took the photograph back into the bedroom, where Nadia lay propped against a bank of pillows, one wrist hooked lazily over
a raised knee.
“What have you got there?” she asked.
I showed her. She gave a dismissive little laugh.
“Where did you find that?”
“Kitchen drawer.”
“God—I thought I’d thrown everything out.”
“Tell me about him.”
She looked up at me with a hint of amusement. “What’s the matter? Jealous?”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
“His name was Steve.”
“And?”
“Why d’you want to know?”
“Just… interested.”
I leaned across and kissed her, then climbed back into bed with her. It took a while, but little by little I got the whole
story out of her. They had met eighteen months ago and their affair had lasted a year—until, obviously, Steve had become involved
with Sara. But she knew nothing of Sara. He had told Nadia he was going back to his wife, that he was trying to save his marriage—for
the sake of the children more than his political career. So far as she knew, that was what had happened. She accepted it,
but I sensed a lingering sadness in her, a regret for what might have been, though she wouldn’t admit it.