Again they stopped and looked at me. ‘Please,’ I said, and my voice came out hoarse. ‘Please dig a bit more.’ I turned to WDC Paget and put my hand on her sleeve. ‘Please,’ I said.
She frowned in deep thought before speaking. ‘We could spend a week up here digging. We’ve dug where you said and we’ve found nothing. It’s time to call a halt.’
‘Please,’ I said. My voice was cracked. ‘Please.’ I was begging for my life.
WDC Paget gave a deep sigh. ‘All right,’ she said. She looked at her watch. ‘Twenty minutes and that’s that.’
She made a gesture and the men moved across with an array of sarcastic grunts and expressions. I moved away and sat down. I looked into the valley. Grasses were rippling in the wind like the sea.
Suddenly, behind me, I heard a murmur. I ran across. The men had stopped digging and were on their knees by the hole, clearing earth with their hands. I crouched down beside them. The earth was suddenly darker here and I saw a hand, just its bones, protrude, as if it were beckoning us.
‘It’s her!’ I cried. ‘It’s Adele! Do you see? Oh, do you see?’ and I started scrabbling away myself, tearing at the soil, though I could hardly see myself. I wanted to hold the bones, cradle them, put my hands around the head, which was beginning to appear, a ghastly grinning skull, poke my fingers through the empty eyes.
‘Don’t touch,’ said WDC Paget, and hauled me back.
‘But I must!’ I howled. ‘It’s her. I was right. It’s her.’ It was going to be me, I wanted to say. If we hadn’t found her it would have been me.
‘It’s evidence, Mrs Tallis,’ she said sternly.
‘It’s Adele,’ I said again. ‘It’s Adele, and Adam murdered her.’
‘We have no idea who it is,’ she said. ‘Tests will have to be carried out, identifications.’
I looked down at the arm, hand, head poking out from the soil. All the tension went out of me and I felt utterly weary, utterly sad.
‘Poor thing,’ I said. ‘Poor woman. Oh dear. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ.’
WDC Paget handed me a large tissue, and I realized I was crying.
‘There’s something round the neck, Detective,’ said the thin digger.
I put my hand to my own neck.
He held up a blackened wire. ‘It’s a necklace, I think.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, he gave it to her.’
They all turned and looked at me, and this time they were looking at me attentively.
‘Here.’ I took off my necklace, silver and gleaming, and laid it by its blackened counterpart. ‘Adam gave me this, it was a token of his love for me, his undying love.’ I fingered the silver spiral. ‘This will be on hers too.’
‘She’s right,’ said WDC Paget. The other spiral was black and clotted with earth, but it was unmistakable. There was a long silence. They all looked at me and I looked at the hole where her body lay.
‘What did you say her name was?’ asked WDC Paget at last.
‘Adele Blanchard.’ I gulped. ‘She was Adam’s lover. And I think…’ I started to cry again, but this time I wasn’t crying for me, but for her and for Tara and for Françoise. ‘I think she was a very nice woman. A lovely young woman. Oh, sorry, I’m so, so sorry.’ I put my face into my muddy hands, blindfolding myself, and tears seeped through my fingers.
WPC Mayer put her arm around my shoulder. ‘We’ll take you home.’
But where was my home now?
Detective Inspector Byrne and one of his female officers insisted on accompanying me to the flat, although I told them Adam wouldn’t be there and I was only going to pick up my clothes and leave. They said that they had to check the flat anyway, although they had already tried to ring there. They had to try to find Mr Tallis.
I didn’t know where I was going to go, although I didn’t tell them that. Later there would be statements to make, forms to sign in triplicate, solicitors to see. Later, I would have to face up to my past and confront my future, try to climb out of the ghastly wreckage of my life. Not now, though. Now I was just inching along numbly, trying to put words in the right order until I was left on my own somewhere, to sleep. I was so tired I thought I could go to sleep standing up.
Detective Inspector Byrne steered me up the stairs to the flat. The door hung uselessly on its hinges, where Adam had broken it down. My knees buckled, but Byrne held my elbow and we walked in, followed by his officer.
‘I can’t,’ I said, stopping abruptly in the hall. ‘I can’t. I can’t go in here. I can’t. I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘You don’t have to,’ he said. He turned to the woman. ‘Pick up some clean clothes for her, will you?’
‘My bag,’ I said. ‘I only need my bag, really. My money’s in there. I don’t want anything else.’
‘And her bag.’
‘It’s in the living room,’ I said. I thought I was going to throw up.
‘Have you got family you can go to?’ he asked me, as we waited.
‘I don’t know,’ I said feebly.
‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’ It was the woman officer, with a grave face. Something had happened.
‘What… ?’
‘Sir.’
I knew then. It was knowledge that went through me like a ripple of pure sensation.
Before they could stop me I had run through into the living room. My beautiful Adam was there, turning ever so slowly on the rope. I saw that he had used a length of climbing rope. Yellow climbing rope. A chair lay on its side. His feet were bare. I touched the mutilated foot very gently, then I kissed it, as I had done that first time. He was quite cold. He was wearing his old jeans and a faded T-shirt. I looked up at his puffy, ruined face.
‘You would have killed me,’ I said, staring up at him.
‘Miss Loudon,’ said Byrne at my side.
‘He would have killed me,’ I said to him, without taking my gaze away from Adam, my dearest love. ‘He would have done.’
‘Miss Loudon, come away now. It’s over.’
Adam had left a note. It wasn’t a confession, really, nor a self-explanation. It was a love letter. ‘My Alice,’ he had written, ‘To see you was to adore you. You were my best and my last love. I am sorry it had to end. For ever would have been too short a time.’
Forty
In the middle of the evening a few weeks later, after the clamour, after the funeral, there was a knock at the door. I went down and there was Deborah, looking unusually smart in a skirt and dark jacket, tired-looking after a day at the hospital. We gazed at each other, unsmiling. ‘I should have got in touch earlier,’ she said at last.
I stepped aside and she walked past me up the stairs. ‘I’ve brought two things for you,’ she said. ‘This.’ She removed a bottle of Scotch from a plastic bag. ‘And this.’ She unfolded a page from a newspaper and handed it to me. It was an obituary of Adam. It was by Klaus, for a newspaper that I didn’t normally get. ‘I thought you might like to see it.’
‘Come through,’ I said.
I took the whisky, a couple of glasses and the newspaper cutting and went into the living room. I poured us each a drink. Like a good North American, Deborah went back into the kitchen in search of ice. I looked at the cutting.
Above the article itself, across four columns, was a picture of Adam I hadn’t seen before, sunburned, no hat, on a mountain somewhere, smiling at the camera. How rarely had I seen him smile or look carefree. In my mind he was always grave, intense. Behind him was a range of mountains like sea waves in a Japanese etching, caught at the moment of still perfection. That was what I had always found difficult to grasp. When you saw the photographs from high up, it was so clear and beautiful. But what they’d all told me – Deborah, Greg, Klaus, Adam, of course – was that the real experience of being up there was everything that couldn’t be captured in the photograph: the unbelievable cold, the struggle to breathe, the wind that threatened to pick you up and blow you away, the noise, the slowness and heaviness of the brain and body and, above all, the sense of hostility, the feeling that this was a non-human world you were ascending briefly in the hope that you could survive the assault of the elements and your own physiological and psychological degeneration. I stared at Adam’s face and wondered who he was smiling at. In the kitchen I heard the chink of ice.