Catherine Narracott
The Wife
I tuck the pistol away. I’m a good shot; I was always excellent at biathlon at the Swiss school.
There was a strange sound afterwards: a small pop or snap.
The echo of the bullet, perhaps. For some reason, I think of the string breaking in The Cherry Orchard: everything different on the other side of it. A little like the change inside of me.
We resume our descent. We’re like two swallows, soaring in wide and graceful arcs down the broad white slopes, matching our flight, wingtips touching.
Then I think of everything we have done to get here.
Eagles, might be better: beautiful, merciless.
Taking what we need from the world. It’s a strange feeling, imagining myself as a powerful creature.
Before this I would have thought of myself as some fluffy ornamental pet – pretty enough but a little foolish, like a pink-headed cockatoo twittering away in its cage.
Who knew I had a dark power inside me? It turns out the line between good little wife and killer is cobweb thin.
It started in the plotting of the killing.
The moment, of suggesting, of deciding …
from then on we have been tied together in a way few humans ever are.
And once you have been responsible for one death you can never go back.
It becomes – ghastly as it is to say – easier after that.
There was a moment, however, when I thought we might not have to kill Bruno Crane after all.
That he’d be a useful scapegoat, a distraction.
Then he slipped his blackmail note under my door.
I suppose he must have seen the white winter ermine in the wardrobe when he crashed into my room and realised I had worn it for my disguise.
So he wasn’t quite as stupid as he seemed.
But stupid enough to try and threaten us.
The third killing, the so-called inspector, was perhaps the riskiest. But when I found that photograph in my husband’s wash-bag I knew it had to be done.
Sylvia and I met in the woods in the small hours the night before to plan it.
We couldn’t leave anything to chance. His questioning might have led him to us – and to the gold.
Just as I had to do something about that woman following us.
I glance back up the mountain to check: she is a crumpled dark shape now, lying completely still.
As I do I see what looks like billowing grey smoke, unfurling from somewhere a little way beneath her, like someone shaking out the train of a long silk gown.
I think I know what it is … but it is like trying to remember a word I’ve forgotten.
I think it might be something bad, but really, it’s hard to believe that because it looks so pretty …
And now there is a murmuring. Quite quiet and polite at first – the chatter of a ballroom heard from outside – but then swelling to something one can’t ignore.
And how strange … I seem to feel it, too, beneath my feet.
And now the sound is no longer a polite murmur; it is a frightful roar and the mountain itself seems to be crumbling—
I look to Sylvia. She knows mountains … and now I am afraid because she isn’t scared of anything, but she is scared now.
And she is mouthing, or shrieking, something that seems important.
But it is difficult to hear over the terrible rumbling roaring clamour that is now filling the air, shaking the ground beneath my skis, thundering towards us …
If this is the end – and I think it must be – then perhaps it doesn’t matter. Because in the last few hours, perhaps for the first time in my life, I have known true freedom, true happiness. If I had gone on as I was, I would never have known these. Perhaps that is enough.
I look towards her so that if this is the end, hers is the last face I ever see.