The High Flyer (16 page)

III

I felt butchered. Indeed I felt so beaten up that I could barely believe my clothes remained untorn and my body unmarked. My entire personality felt as if it had been slashed to ribbons and spat upon—and not just my everyday personality which I had become so accustomed to projecting but also the secret self which I kept safe, tucked away behind hard-hitting Carter who could wipe floors with whippets and dynamite every dinosaur in sight. Dimly I understood what had happened. Carter had been shredded, and now, with my prime line of defence destroyed, I was exposed, fragility personified, on the edge of a cliff overlooking a bottomless void. And who was this mysterious “I” who could look at the ruins of Carter and experience unprecedented terror? I knew it was me, but it was not an “I” who could survive except behind the walls of a heavily defended fortress.

I set to work to rebuild Carter. What would she do next? I thought she would say: “Shit!” in fury or: “Screw the bitch!” in order to generate the adrenaline necessary for survival, but although I gave the words a try they merely sounded pathetic. Apparently Carter was still out to lunch. I found myself crying. This was pathetic too—pathetic, shaming and horrifying. I was going to pieces, fulfilling the woman’s vile predictions . . . Terror overwhelmed me again. I pictured myself plummeting from the balcony and being smashed to death, but before I could pass out at the thought of how I had been programmed to self-destruct, Carter’s voice said shakily: “Get lost, nutter-person!” and I knew she was announcing her return.

I wiped the tears away and when I opened my eyes again I was Carter. I clenched my fists to test the power of my will and at once a vital sentence surfaced in my mangled brain to give me additional hope that I was on the road to recovery. I said aloud to myself: “That was the Mayfield story. But I don’t have to be stuck with it.”

My thoughts became more organised. I staunched the wounds which had been bleeding from the devastating knowledge that Kim’s deception had extended much further than I had ever suspected; I taped up the deep gash I had sustained on learning that he had discussed with Mrs. Mayfield even the most transient of my sexual shortcomings; I dug out the shards of shock which had speared me after I had learned that Mrs. Mayfield’s group was sexual in nature and purpose; I wiped from my mind the consequent possibility that Kim had been unfaithful to me last night, perhaps after toking up on drugs. The healing words: “That was the Mayfield story. But I don’t have to be stuck with it” gave me the strength to put the worst of her allegations on hold. There were only two facts, it seemed to me, that I had to face in order to avoid sliding into a state of denial. The first was that Mrs. Mayfield was determined to destroy Kim’s second marriage as ably as she had destroyed his first, and the other was that I had severely underestimated the lethal nature of the corrupt mess from which Kim was now trying to extricate himself.

Or from which I hoped Kim was trying to extricate himself. I thought Mrs. Mayfield had probably been lying out of spite when she claimed to have no knowledge of his intention to part from the group, but of course I only had Kim’s word that a parting had ever figured on his agenda.

I decided that in order to keep sane I had to operate on the assumption that Kim really did want to extract himself both from the group and, ultimately, from Mrs. Mayfield. Kim had revealed some unpalatable facts about himself the previous evening, but as the result of the pressure I had put on him I thought he had been telling the truth about his activities: he had said goodbye to the group, and although he had wanted to give up Mrs. Mayfield he did not yet feel strong enough to do so.

A number of observations then became clear, and I was relieved to find that they were a lawyer’s observations, cool and rational. The first was that as a healer she had committed an appalling breach of confidence by talking of a patient’s case-history; even if she had invented the story about Kim’s impotence in order to undermine me, she had gone through the motions of violating confidentiality. The second observation was that by attempting to plant a compulsion to self-destruct in my mind Mrs. Mayfield had committed an act of psychological warfare which any right-thinking person would consider deeply malign. And the third observation was that it was now more important than ever that I should find out the true facts from Sophie.

Having repaired my make-up I struggled to my feet. By this time I was remembering Kim’s talk about “wrestling with the Powers,” and it occurred to me that he had made a fundamental mistake. He had said Mrs. Mayfield had the power to control the Powers, as if she were no more than a magician using secret knowledge, but Mrs. Mayfield was the face of that Primeval Power which generated the Powers, I knew that now. In her that Primeval Power was embodied. In her it lived and moved and had its being.

This sounded like metaphysical nutterguff, but I had to believe my own experience and these were the only words I could find which described it. I had to face the fact that I had been mentally brutalised, battered, humiliated, trounced and trashed by a force far beyond anything which normally emanated from middle-aged suburban bitches who wore cardigans. I had wrestled with the Primeval Power and been decked, that was the truth of it. But I was not about to quit the ring.

I decided that my next task, before phoning Sophie, was to prove that Mrs. Mayfield could have slithered into my flat before delivering Kim’s organiser.

Taking a deep breath I headed back at last across the podium to the lobby of Harvey Tower.

IV

“Yes, that’s quite correct, Mrs. Betz,” said the porter on duty. “Your husband called earlier to say a lady would be delivering a package for him, so when she arrived in the car park I gave the okay for her to come up to podium level.”

“And did she reach you straight away?”

“I think so . . . more or less. I was dealing with some removal men at the time and as one of the lifts had to be set aside for them she might have had to wait for a couple of minutes in the basement, but I remember her coming into the lobby. She wore a royal-blue coat, which made me do a double take as Mr. Betz had warned us all to be on the look-out for ladies in royal blue, but obviously that was just a coincidence.”

“Did she go back down to the car park after she’d left the package with you?”

“No, she went straight out onto the podium.”

This was not the clear-cut evidence I had hoped to hear, but I still thought it probable that Mrs. Mayfield had gone straight from the car park to the thirty-fifth floor and taken a couple of minutes to mess up the flat before riding down to the lobby to deliver the organiser. I was now sure she had come to Harvey Tower expressly for the trashing because otherwise her appearance there made no sense. If Kim had really left his organiser behind at her house he would have sent a messenger to Fulham on a retrieval mission as soon as he had arrived at Graf-Rosen that morning. He would not have wanted to be deprived of his organiser for a moment longer than was necessary.

I speculated that the Jiffy bag contained not the organiser at all but paper wadding tucked around Kim’s key to the flat, the key he would have left with her the previous evening. On arriving home he would have let himself into the flat by borrowing the spare set of keys, and on leaving for work early that morning he would have returned those keys to the porters’ desk. There was no way I could check this theory yet, since the porter now on duty was not the one who would have been on duty early in the morning, but it seemed a plausible hypothesis, as plausible as the hypothesis that Mrs. Mayfield had used his key to enter the flat that afternoon and afterwards popped the key in the Jiffy bag for him to collect later.

At that point I cast a sharper eye over the conspiracy between Kim and Mrs. Mayfield, the conspiracy to destroy Sophie’s credibility by making it seem as if she were unbalanced enough to blitz around my flat. If I had not met Mrs. Mayfield on the podium, what deductions would I have drawn from today’s disturbances? I would have heard from the porter that a woman in a royal-blue coat had been to the building after a man claiming to be Kim and speaking with a slight American accent had phoned to ensure her admittance; Kim would have denied it was him and told me the package contained nothing but paper wadding; and I would have jumped to the conclusion that Ms. Fruity-Loops had been hard at work again, this time assisted by her friendly PI.

I had been riding up in the lift while these thoughts flickered through my brain, but as soon as I reached the thirty-fifth floor it dawned on me that I had to go down again.

It was essential that I intercepted that Jiffy bag to confirm my suspicions.

V

The only reason why I had not demanded the Jiffy bag immediately was that I was unsure how willing the porter would be to relinquish it. I thought there would probably be some rule about never handing over a package to anyone except the addressee or an authorised agent, but I had now psyched myself up to play my least favourite role: the blonde fluffette.

“Hi, it’s me again!” I said winningly, slinking out of the lift-lobby and draping myself against the porters’ desk. “Oh, I do hope you can help me! It’s about that package the lady in blue delivered. My husband called as soon as I got to the flat just now and—oh wow!—he says the bag contains his Psion organiser and he wants me to phone through some information logged there for a meeting he has in ten minutes’ time! Isn’t it awful how much people depend on technology these days? One really does wonder where it will all end . . .” The porter, who was over sixty and hated technology almost as much as he loved fluffy little wide-eyed blondes, immediately became voluble and I spared a full minute to listen enrapt to his reminiscences about the good old days before I escaped to the lift, the Jiffy bag tucked beneath my arm.

I experienced a shudder of fear when I finally entered the flat and thought of the balcony, but fortunately I was so keen to open the bag that I was able to wipe the image of a smashed corpse the instant it flashed into my brain. I was diverted further by the discovery that the bag really did contain the organiser. I stared at it, wondering if my conspiracy theory was adrift, but almost at once I realised that the presence of the organiser proved nothing; it could just mean that Kim had genuinely forgotten it and decided he could wait to get it back. I also realised that the only question which truly mattered was whether the bag contained Kim’s key to the flat. If it did, then Mrs. Mayfield had had the means to enter the flat that afternoon.

I upended the bag and shook it.

Out dropped the key.

VI

I opened my mouth to utter a string of expletives but not one word came out because I was so shocked. It is one thing to devise a thoroughly upsetting theory. It is quite another to see that theory proved true.

I realised I had to have a drink and that the drink had to be a double vodka martini on the rocks. I went into the kitchen. The small pool of milk was still lying on the floor but I was in such a state that I made no attempt to wipe it up. I just grabbed the ice-tray from the fridge and got on with the job of mixing my tranquilliser. With the glass in my hand I returned to the living-room, but the large windows there were so numerous and the wraparound balcony so extensive that I knew at once that this was not a place where I could focus on regaining my nerve. I withdrew to the bedroom. The wraparound balcony extended there too, but the room had fewer windows and at least I could bolt out of the nearby front door into the windowless lift-lobby if Mrs. Mayfield’s predictions became too insistent.

I knocked back my drink in less than two minutes. However, I felt that after being beaten up by Mrs. Mayfield a rapid infusion of alcohol was the least I deserved. I decided to have another. After all, these were exceptional circumstances.

When I returned to the bedroom with my refilled glass I found not only that I was thinking clearly again but that I had reached the point where I was wondering afresh what Sophie knew that Kim was still so anxious to conceal. The impotence seemed at first to fit the bill; if I were to believe Mrs. Mayfield, Kim had lied to me about Sophie’s sterility, Sophie had wanted children which she was perfectly capable of having, and Kim had been so unwilling to father them that he had been smitten by an impotence which Mrs. Mayfield had cured by introducing him to other women and the joys of group sex. But, as I now saw, there was a hole in this story. Kim might well have consulted Mrs. Mayfield if he had been suffering from impotence, but he had told me he had met Mrs. Mayfield only three years ago and by then he and Sophie had been living separate lives for a long time. If he really had suffered from impotence at that point it could have had nothing to do with Sophie’s desire for children, a topic which would have surfaced much earlier in the marriage.

On the other hand I only had Kim’s word that he had met Mrs. Mayfield three years ago.

And on yet another hand, how far could I believe Mrs. Mayfield anyway?

As I gulped down my drink I began to feel as if I were drowning in lies and that if I did not take active steps to uncover the truth without delay I was going to go under. I seemed to be encountering the lie as a killer—not just a harmless fib which could be shrugged off but a towering edifice of deceit which could result in derangement and destruction.

By the time I had finished my drink my mind was made up. My first task was to phone Kim to say I would be out for the evening and my second task was to see Sophie.

I set down my glass and reached for the bedside phone.

VII

It was now after six, a time when most of the office-drones were on their way home and the big cats were calculating how much longer they needed to stay at their desks in order to stop their power-bases being cracked by any charge of lack of commitment. When I dialled Kim on his private line he picked up the receiver halfway through the first ring.

My heart queasily skipped a beat. “Hi,” I said, making a huge effort to sound normal. “How are you doing?”

“That’s exactly the question I’ve been wanting to ask you!” he said concerned. “I called Curtis, Towers and found you’d gone home early with a migraine.”

“I’m better now. Look, I’m calling to say I’ll be out tonight. Sarah’s just phoned in tears so I said I’d take her out to dinner and help her drown her sorrows.” Sarah was a solicitor who had worked at my last firm.

“Sacked?” he said sympathetically.

“Dumped. The lover’s gone back to his wife, just as I always thought he would . . . Why were you trying to get in touch with me?” I was sure it was because he had heard from Mrs. Mayfield of my encounter with her, but all he said in reply was: “Warren Schaeffer’s in town unexpectedly and as he wants to discuss strategy with me before he flies on to Tokyo tomorrow morning I said I’d meet him at the Savoy tonight, but God knows when I’ll be back. You know how peppy people are when they arrive after a west-east flight across the Atlantic—he’ll probably still be going strong at midnight.”

“Dope his Perrier water at dinner!” I said, wondering if Mrs. Mayfield had failed to get through to him; he sounded so natural that I was tempted to believe he really was going to meet that American colleague at the Savoy. “Okay, darling, tell Warren hullo from me—”

“I sure will—and give my best to Sarah—” He told me he loved me, and hung up.

Instantly I dragged the telephone directory from the hall closet and looked up the number of the Savoy.

“Mr. Warren Schaeffer, please,” I said when the operator answered, but although she rang the room for some time no one took the call.

I consoled myself with the thought that at least Kim had told the truth when he had said Warren was in town. Then I dialled directory enquiries to track down Sophie’s number.