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!