‘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
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.
