by Joseph Hone
‘No. I don’t mean that. I meant we’d both been very unhappy until we met in Lisbon. But she and Willy had been happy, I think. No, I know: she told me. He was a small, rubicund little fellow. A droll academic. A surprising marriage. But it worked.’
‘You never actually met him of course.’
‘No. And I wasn’t out in East Africa with them either. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell anything about the man, or about their relationship.’
‘And his death. Wasn’t that rather strange? The hit-and-run accident you told me about, how he was run over by an African in Nairobi.’
‘Strange? Much more awful irony than strange. We never talked a lot about it.’
‘Why?’
‘Just because of the awful irony, I suppose. That’s why. And because of Clare.’ I glanced upwards to where she was still stuck in the treetop, like a weather-vane.
‘But why?’ I asked again. ‘Why all this sudden interest?’
Alice produced a cutting from the Sunday Times, published almost a week before, and handed it to me. It was a long, investigative article – prompted by Laura’s murder and Clare’s recent abduction – about Willy Kindersley, the ‘famous paleontologist and discoverer of the ultimate “missing link” in the ape-man chain’ – the part skull and skeleton of the four-million-year-old ‘Thomas’. But the most interesting thing about it was the unflattering picture it gave of Willy Kindersley himself who, the article went on to say, had been killed in what they described as a ‘mysterious accident’ in Nairobi two years before.
I read it quickly to this point, before commenting: ‘“Mysterious accident” indeed. He was just run down outside the Norfolk hotel by some drunk.’
Then I skimmed on through the article. There were some major paragraphs about me in it: ‘An unlikely figure in this palaeontological jig-saw puzzle … a reputed ex-member of the British Intelligence service’ and suspected killer of Laura. There was another considerable passage about Clare and her autism, citing Bettelheim among others, but finally suggesting its origins in something that might have happened to her in East Africa when she was very young – a ludicrous rumour of witchcraft here, even. It mentioned trouble during one of Kindersley’s latter safaris years before, just before the discovery of the famous ‘Thomas’ skeleton: arguments at a camp way out in the Turkana Province and a raid by local tribesmen during which several of the raiders had been killed, which had afterwards been hushed up. In all, the article, with no hard evidence whatsoever, built up a picture of mysterious, violent machinations in the professional and familial affairs of Willy Kindersley – and of subsequent mysteries in Laura’s death, in my involvement, and apparent ease of escape, and in Clare’s autism and abduction. Finally the writer spoke of an elaborate cover-up over the whole business by everyone involved.
I suppose, given these recent sensational events connected with Willy, this tone wasn’t so surprising. It made a good story, certainly, though little if any of it could have been true, or I should certainly have heard something of it from Laura. The only really hard material that was new to me, based as it was on recent interviews with old colleagues, was a detailed description of Willy’s ‘ruthless professional ambition’ during his many years looking for hominid fossils in East Africa; of how he had ‘trodden on any number of toes – and bodies as well – to achieve his ends’.
I took this to be simply professional jealousy on the part of Willy’s rivals. But I mentioned my surprise to Alice all the same.
‘Laura never spoke of him like that?’
‘No. Just the opposite. She talked of his jokes, his wit, good company. I told you.’
I looked at Alice, annoyed now. ‘You’re trying to tell me I’ve got it all wrong, aren’t you? About Willy and Laura: that I was fooled in some way about them. And about Clare’s autism, too. That it came because Laura rejected her. You’re telling me that the three of them were all part of a lot of dark secrets before I met them; out in Africa – and here as well. A mysterious accident, mysterious deaths everywhere: Laura’s too. You’re telling me that –’
‘No, Peter!’ she interrupted almost fiercely. ‘That’s what the article is telling you if you read it carefully, not me. That’s why I didn’t want to give it you. That’s all in the article! I didn’t invent it. Not me.’
I sighed. ‘It’s nonsense, Alice,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it surely because – because you want a future? All right, but you don’t have to destroy their past, my past with them, to have it. A future with us, if there is one, doesn’t depend on a lot of gossip like this.’ I handed her back the article.
‘Gossip?’
‘Yes. Or at best sheer conjecture,’ I went on. ‘There was nothing mysterious about Laura’s death, for example. I could tell them the truth about that. That would make a real story: it was my old colleagues who shot her, aiming for me. I know too much. They want me dead. That’s why I took to the woods here. And that’s why Ross keeps on tracking me. Why else should he bother so much? Because they want me out of the way: badly.’
Alice seemed to understand all this. Life in the valley reverted to its earlier ways after this intrusion and I forgot about the article very soon afterwards. There was so much to do. We had to have a future, not a past filled with either gossip or tragedy.
And it was immediately after this, seeing Clare’s rapid improvement, that I wrote my first letter to Laura’s father, Captain Warren, out in Portugal. I explained all that had happened: how Laura’s death, far from being at my hand, had been meant for me, a final present from my old colleagues in Whitehall; and how Clare was safe and well, with me again now. I told him I’d understand if he didn’t believe me about Laura, if he thought simply that I’d kidnapped Clare for my own selfish ends. But if he did trust my account, I told him, I planned to get Clare back to him in Cascais, when she was ready to travel, and if some means could be arranged for her to leave England with me unofficially.
I asked him, if he agreed to my proposals, to reply by way of a personal advertisement in The Times. Of course, he might send my letter straight to the police or, with them, set up some trap for me in subsequent travel arrangements. It was a risk. But given his long antipathy towards Britain in general, and his particular bitterness towards the secret men in Whitehall who had deprived him of his own house and lands forty years before, I thought he might well agree to any covert scheme I suggested, or even propose one of his own. His 50-foot ketch Clare, for example, struck me as a possible means of escape from England, and I said as much in a P.S. to the letter. I showed Alice what I’d written. She thought it a fair plan and posted if off some days later when she went up to London.
Meanwhile we extended the tree-house, bringing up more wooden beams from the old pumping-shed and making a lower floor to the house, connected by a ladder to what was now an open terrace on top of our accommodation. We made walls for this small lower room, with strips of polythene first covered by a cross-weave of small, leafy beech branches, so that in the end the breeze was kept out and the structure still maintained a perfect camouflage.
With the same broad wooden planks from the shed, and with the tools and other equipment we now had, I extended our reach over the line of trees that bordered the lake by building a series of aerial walkways with rope handrails through the upper branches, so that in the end it was possible to move right down to the beech tree above the stream at the foot of the lake without coming to ground, always hidden in the leaves. This gave us both another access to our tree house and another escape from it, if need be. We were no longer committed to a single front door.
And besides, we now had an aerial parkland to discover and explore along these wooden tracks. No longer confined to our own too familiar house and backyard, a whole new estate was opened up for us, new trees and leafy vistas, unfamiliar branches where the coppery summer light fell in different shades and patterns. Now we could move through the trees from one green country to another, almost as if the foliage was our permanent element
, like fish in a stream moving invisibly through the weeds and shadows.
With more rope I built Clare a swing from one of the lower branches beneath the tree-house, out over the lake, so that if she fell it would only be a dozen feet into the water. But she never looked like falling. Always adept physically, in every kind of acrobatics, this mild trapeze-work came to her quite naturally. And certainly she preferred it, by way of occupation, to speech, speech which was so much more dangerous for her, full of compromises, a blueprint of discipline, of a restrictive order which Clare must have believed she had now well lost. So she grabbed the swing from a higher branch where she kept it out of sight, and would throw herself out over the lake on it, skimming the water like a swallow in the evening.
With the tools from the Manor we built a rough table as well, and Alice brought us down two small Victorian chairs from the nursery, which we could eat from, both of us crouched over the wood like oversized dolls in a nook. We had a small pinewood cupboard as well to keep things in. Thus the little lower room which emerged in the tree-house, where we now slept and ate, became a cosy place. Cosy, but small. It was difficult for me to do more than stretch my legs in it, sitting on the minute chair, after supper, sipping a whisky from one of the red picnic tumblers, while Clare became involved in one of her meticulous, mysterious games on the tiny table next to me.
I watched her one evening here as a bright sunset faded slowly all about us, her golden hair reflecting a last radiance in the twilight like a halo, as she concentrated on her ritual with the hospital bricks, moving them round and about, up and down, in Stonehenge circles and pyramids.
She wasn’t my daughter, I thought. But I loved her as much as if she had been. Loved her in a different way, I suppose, as someone free of me, as one might love an older woman from afar, for a beauty and an independence of spirit, who yet, without her knowing it, relied on me for her very existence. There was an unusual and comforting, a completely unpossessive intimacy between Clare and me; that of complete strangers forced together, who yet miraculously find, without words, that they share the same temperament, assumptions, hopes.
And at such times in the evening, after all the energetic activities of the day, her speechlessness no longer seemed out of place. We might have been two friends, tired together, sitting in the hotel lounge after a long day out in the ordinary world. Friends: that was it. That was what was unusual. There was an adult relationship between us, which her lack of words accentuated. We seemed, as adults, as two old friends might, to understand each other without speaking.
Two friends camping in a cosy place … We even made a shelf for books and had a basin for washing things in. The rubbish we wrapped up carefully every few days and Alice took it away with her in a bag with her swimming things back to the house. For this swimming, of course, which she had done in any case most days down by the lake, now became her excuse for visiting us.
We swam ourselves, Clare and I, as I’d done myself to begin with, first or last thing in the day, in the natural pool hidden behind the fallen tree at the bottom of the lake. And it was here one day, just after first light, down from our tree and sliding through the undergrowth, that we suddenly came on one of the deer from the parkland, a big antlered buck, head high, alert, drawing breath, its nostrils steaming in the early morning air. It was right by the edge of the water, next the ruined pier of the old boat-house.
I think Clare saw it first. Certainly she thrust her arm up at me, holding me back in excitement. But the animal must have smelt or heard us, for it suddenly turned and looked straight at us.
And it was then that Clare first spoke.
‘Game!’ she said, quite clearly, her face alight. And then she lifted both arms suddenly and mimed the action of shooting the buck with a bow and arrow. She drew and released an imaginary arrow several times at the animal, before it trotted away down the edge of the water. But then, like an arrow herself, suddenly released and homing viciously, Clare ran after it, fleetfoot, with an extraordinary speed and vigour the like of which I’d never thought to see in a child, so that I was barely able to keep up with her.
The buck, which before had simply been trotting away from us, now took to its heels in alarm, disappearing into the undergrowth before I heard it crashing up the slope of the valley. But Clare ran with it, keeping pace with it, her gold mop of hair flattened in the wind all round her head, before she disappeared as well.
I found her on top of the valley, leaning on the fence beyond which she knew she mustn’t go, looking out over the parkland where there were only a few sleeping cows. The buck had quite disappeared. She had a pained, mystified look on her face, as if, I thought, having so obviously killed the buck with her initial flights of fancy, she could not now understand where the carcase was.
Then she turned and said to me very urgently, ‘You kill it. You kill it!’
She inverted the pronoun, of course, as she had before in her damaged speech: she meant ‘I’ when she said ‘you’. But now, so much more than a single word, she could put words together into an expressive sentence. She could speak. I was so pleased with this miracle that it was only afterwards that I reflected on the nature of what she had actually said that morning in the dew-drenched summer airs above the valley. ‘I kill the deer. I kill it!’ That was what she’d said. A strange, animal vehemence which had not been there before had suddenly entered Clare’s life.
Or was it so strange? Wasn’t this hunting fever, more simply, a quite natural extension to her present lifestyle? A form of life in which, identifying with it so completely, she came unconsciously to mime its original foundations, in killing and pain and the survival of the fittest?
Certainly as a result of nearly two months in the woods and this developing urge to track and kill, all Clare’s instincts and senses had become startlingly acute – to the point where I was disturbed by her animalism, seeing in it another and perhaps irrevocable move away from the real world I hoped she would one day occupy again.
*
And yet it was exactly this animalism, this heightened instinct for survival, which probably saved our lives a week later. I would never have noticed the ominous signs myself.
A footprint, a broken twig, a dead leaf where it shouldn’t be? A shadow moving when it shouldn’t move? Some slight noise at twilight that wasn’t a bird or an animal? What was it that first caught Clare’s attention? I don’t know. What I do know is that one evening, returning from a late swim, Clare stopped suddenly on our path through the undergrowth and quickly drew me aside into the heart of a bush. ‘Here,’ she whispered in my ear, for she could put whole coherent sentences together now. ‘Someone too is here.’ She pointed immediately ahead.
‘Alice?’ I whispered back to her, looking about me in the shadows. But it couldn’t be Alice, I thought. She had only left us a few hours before and she never came down late in the evening in any case.
Clare shook her head. ‘No. It has been here a days,’ she said in her disordered English.
‘But what? What is it? A he or a she?’
‘It,’ she said simply.
I looked around me in the gathering dusk, straining my ears and eyes. But there was no sound, nothing unusual. A bird suddenly twittered in the undergrowth ahead of us – a long trill of mild alarm, a blackbird running over last year’s dead leaves. There was a deep silence again. And then I heard another tread in the woods, not a dozen yards away, on the path we’d been on, coming towards us. It was no louder than the blackbird’s run, but it had quite a different pace, slow, infinitely careful: the paws of some animal, a fox perhaps, nosing through the twilight? But it wasn’t a fox, or a badger or mole, I thought then. The steps were more pronounced, and there were two of them, not four. They were surely human.
Then, in silhouette for a moment, I saw a figure pass between two trees against the flare of dying light on the lake: crouching, thin-shouldered, the skin there with an inky shine in the sunset. It was gone in an instant, flitting soundlessly away into
the shadows. I thought it might be Ross again. But Ross wouldn’t crouch like that, I thought, or pass so silently.
Above all, Ross would hardly be moving as the dark shadow had, naked into the night.
Twelve
There was someone else in the valley. They were sleeping rough, I assumed, and must have come from outside the estate, since they obviously weren’t down from the Manor. Was it somebody looking particularly for us? Or just some trespasser, a poacher, a lone camper? The following morning we set about finding out. I explained my plans to Clare, stringing the bow and getting the sharpened arrows together as we sat in the tree house. She didn’t say anything. But she was full of repressed excitement at what she obviously looked upon as a coming hunt.
We left the tree-house and, moving high up along the branches and walkways, made our way down towards the foot of the lake, leaving the trees here by the branch over the stream. My plan was to start at the bottom and work our way up to the head of the valley, carefully looking over the whole area in the half mile between.
It was very early dawn when we started, as I hoped we might surprise whoever it was, sleeping out in a tent or in the old pumping-shed perhaps. There was a ground mist in the valley again, lying in long, wispy streaks over the lake and forming heavier milky pools in the reeds by the shore. We stalked from bush to bush, keeping out of sight as much as possible. I remembered the time, two months before, when Ross and I had sought each other out in just the same circumstances. But now I had Clare and there was no vicious Alsatian. Clare, indeed, was my dog, crawling silently through holes in the undergrowth, places where I couldn’t go, a pointer herself, as I followed behind with the recurve bow and the old army binoculars.
We got above the pumping-shed, looking down on it from the side of the valley. Most of the roof was gone, the planks taken for our tree house, so that I could see inside it. There was no one there. I raised the binoculars, training them out over the lake, looking up to the head of the valley more than a hundred yards away, where the mist was clearing, dissolving, as the sun rose. Suddenly a pair of mallard got up as I watched, just where the stream entered the lake, and the air was briefly filled with their craking squawks.