by Peter Corris
'I had been well paid and I had saved some money. I got to a hospital and received treatment for my wound but it had become infected and was very slow to heal. The sight of my eye was threatened. My hair had turned from blonde to grey in a few days. I had become an old woman. I was no longer strong, but weak and afraid. I thought I would lose the child. The doctors thought so too, but I did not. My daughter was born in Basle. I was afraid that the child would be deformed, a freak. But she was perfect.
'Some time before Yvette was born, I received a letter. It was undated and unsigned but I knew it came from him. He said that he had learned I was alive and still to be a mother. He said that if I ever spoke to anyone about what had happened at the clinic, if I ever breathed his name aloud, he would destroy me and the child. No, that Horatio would destroy us and employ great cruelty in so doing. He said that Selim was dead. I understood. I have lived with this knowledge ever since.'
'Basil and Richard Craft have been dead for thirty years, Madame,' Marsha said.
'So you tell me. But Basil Craft said that he would never die.'
'You can't believe that.'
'I do not know. Who knows what experiments he may have been performing. He was capable of anything, that devil. Can you tell me that Horatio is dead, too?'
Marsha shook her head. 'I had never heard of him before.'
The old woman shuddered. 'He would not be old. Younger than his father was when . . .'
Marsha said, 'Why did you decide to talk to me now?'
'I have wanted to tell someone for so long. But I was afraid and no-one ever sought me out. Somehow Basil Craft expunged all knowledge about his work here. I have told you he blackmailed his patients. He may have killed others who knew . . . I hope he killed Pamela Marchant. I was astonished when you made your enquiry. Astonished that some record remained to connect me to him, after all this time. I took it as a sign. I do not have long to live. My daughter's husband is a policeman in Paris. Perhaps he can protect her. I will speak to him as I have spoken to you. I do not want to die with this fear in my heart.'
The old woman began to sob quietly and after several seconds Marsha's hand moved across the lens and the camera was switched off.
26
Andy McKinnon said, 'Have you got the letter, Marty?'
Marsha shook her head. 'No, she burnt it.'
The producer stretched his long legs towards the electric fire. 'That's a pity. The photograph?'
'She wouldn't part with it for any money. As she says, it's the only thing she has to remind her of the children. Also that it stopped her from going insane at times when she wondered if she'd imagined the whole thing. I believe every word she told me, Andy.'
'Aye. With reason. It's also obvious that there's not a scrap of evidence.'
'We can do something with the shot of the photograph,' Vic said. 'Improve the resolution. . .'
The producer shook his head. 'It'd come up very fuzzy. Who's to say it was the Craft kiddies?'
'Me,' Marsha said. 'I recognised Richard Craft and the boy John looked something like Randolph.'
'Of whom, what do we know?' Bright said. He wanted to deflect McKinnon from his negative path.
'Not much,' McKinnon said. 'A brief reply to one of my many telegrams. Enigmatic, you could call it.'
'I have confidence in him,' Marsha said. 'He's on his own turf. Have you kept track of all the background we have here? Vic's flat and the office being searched, Randolph being deported, Madame Benoit's fears . . .'
'My hotel room in Los Dados was searched too,' Bright said. 'Although that might have been Frank Button's work.'
'Which brings us to you and your newspaper clipping,' McKinnon said.
Bright's patience ran out. He slammed his glass, in which there was still some whisky, down on the nearest flat surface, a pile of magazines. The glass slipped from his hand and the whisky spilled on the floor, sending up fumes. He ignored the accident. 'What do you want, Andy? You want to drop the whole thing? Fine. We'll take it somewhere else.'
'You've spent a good deal of my money.'
'That could be negotiated with a new backer,' Bright said.
McKinnon stared at the illuminated plastic logs. 'You mistake my meaning, both of you. I'm playing devil's advocate here again. The Craft project keeps changing in its very nature. I have to keep that in focus. We started with an adventure story—men against the elements, throwbacks to an earlier age. But it's becoming alarmingly contemporary, almost a criminal investigation, a conspiracy story.'
'And a psychological case study,' Marsha said. 'And a bizarre experiment in . . . human engineering.'
McKinnon nodded. 'Exactly. We've lost touch with the original plan. We had a handle on the last of the eccentric explorers—mountains and deserts, no forces involved except human and animal muscle. A grand tale, that. And very filmable. What've we got now?'
'Human interest,' Marsha said.
McKinnon got up and went to the kitchenette. He returned with a cloth and wiped the spilt whisky from the top magazine and the carpet. 'Who's interested?' he said.
Marsha exploded 'Who's interested? Think of those poor children. Laboratory specimens, possibly put down like animals if the results didn't turn out.'
'Immortality,' Bright mused. 'Craft said he'd never die. What d'you suppose he meant? There was something more in what he was doing than just breeding kids and putting them through their paces.'
'What?' McKinnon said.
'I don't know.'
Marsha stared at the two men. 'I can't believe this. You're talking so clinically.'
McKinnon folded the damp cloth in his huge hands. 'Vic is talking commercially, unless I miss my guess. And he's right. Immortality. Everyone's interested in that.'
'I'm not,' Marsha said. 'I'm interested in human beings as we are. Three score years and ten and the pursuit of happiness within them.'
'Dull,' McKinnon said.
Marsha grabbed her bag from the floor beside her chair. 'Jesus. I'm going!'
'Wait,' Bright said. He pulled his chair across and sat closer to Marsha, repressing the impulse to touch her, a move she was sure to interpret as condescension. 'There're so many angles to this. It's reasonable that we should each be interested in different aspects of it. Doesn't mean we can't work together.'
Marsha sat very straight, still holding the strap of her bag. 'I get it. I can cover the kiddy angle.'
'No,' Vic said. 'I was going to suggest that you could talk to some shrinks about Richard Craft's sexual hang-up. That's interesting.'
Marsha nodded. 'Mm, it is. I like talking to psychiatrists.'
'I know you do,' Bright said.
'They're so crazy.'
Bright produced a thick sheaf of photocopies—batches of pages stapled and paper-clipped together. He detached a thin wad and handed it to Marsha.
'What's this?'
'I've been combing through Craft's book. These are references the shrink might be interested in—to his father and brother, bits about physical perfection, medical opinions, remarks about women.'
Marsha flicked through the pages. 'Good,' she said. 'What's the rest of it? Boys' stuff?'
Bright shuffled the papers. 'Come on, Marsha . . .'
'Come on, be buggered. You're still sidelining me, Vic.'
'For your own protection. This could be dangerous. There are hints in the book about Craft's backers, employers, sponsors, whatever you might want to call them.'
Marsha frowned. 'I didn't notice that.'
'It's very vague,' Bright said. 'Things gain in significance.' He selected a sheet and read: '"No explorer can succeed without an organisation behind him. The monarchies of Spain and Portugal, the Greenwich Observatory, the Royal Geographical Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Bankers' Guild of Kowloon, all served the same mundane but essential purpose—to put resources in the way of men with the vision and courage to use them."'
'Columbus and Magellan,' Marsha said. 'Burton and Speke and I su
ppose Stanley and Livingstone, but what the hell's the Bankers' Guild of Kowloon?'
'Andy?' Bright said.
McKinnon shook his head. Bright handed him another couple of sheets. McKinnon read an underlined passage and passed the papers to Marsha.
'"Not all significant expeditions are conducted in a blaze of publicity," she read. "The Hudson Bay Company sponsored many attempts to locate the Nothwest Passage which have not been recorded in the history books. The details are only to be found in the company archives. Similarly with the North American Fruit Company and explorations in South America and the Louvigni Drug Corporation. Only accountants, those most unadventurous of men, have any knowledge of mountains, rivers and deserts crossed."'
'That's the sort of thing,' Bright said. 'Elusive—just names buried in with other names. Quite a few passages like that.'
'And you propose to investigate all this yourself,' Marsha snapped. 'I suppose he mentions publishers, and you've got a handle on how and why the book was suppressed.'
'No,' Bright said. 'Nothing that solid.'
McKinnon took the papers from Marsha and Bright, left the room and returned with a bottle of Glenlivet and three glasses. 'I confess I was needling you a little, children. I wanted to see how the teamwork was after your separation. There appear to be tensions.'
Vic put his hand on Marsha's shoulder. 'What separation?'
McKinnon poured. 'That won't wash, old son. Marsha's got a point. You're giving her the easy stuff.'
Bright pointed to the papers McKinnon had anchored with the Scotch bottle. 'That could lead in some very dicey directions.'
'Or just be more Basil Craft fantasy,' Marsha said.
McKinnon nodded. 'Just so. A possible waste of time. That's why I'm taking over this part of the exercise. Have I ever told you where I worked before I got into the benighted film business?'
'No,' Marsha said.
'In a merchant bank, God help me. I know a bit about the corporate world. I'll scratch around. See what I can come up with.'
Bright took a gulp of whisky. 'No, Andy. I should . . .'
McKinnon gestured angrily. 'I told you I was a problem-solver. Now we have a problem here. Rivalry between you and your co-worker. I'm solving it. Do you understand?'
Bright muttered something about the purse strings.
'Bloody right!' McKinnon said. 'He who pulls the purse strings decides on the division of labour. That's good economics.'
Marsha laughed. 'That's bullshit.'
'I'll drink to that,' Bright said.
McKinnon grinned. 'We're all drinking to bullshit, all the time. That's the film business. Fine, that's fine. Now, moving along. My thinking is, correct me if I'm wrong, that we don't need to film in Mongolia and America now. We can tell that part of the story another way.'
Bright said. 'There's nothing much to shoot in Los Dados. Getting a bit of footage on Frank Button and Hunter Burnett'll be no problem. They'd probably pay us.'
Marsha sipped her scotch. 'We can film a bit in Zurich. I went out to look at where the clinic used to be. There's nothing there now. They decided that buildings so close to the lake aren't a good idea. There's a few broken-down walls and a lot of new trees among the old ones. It's pretty eerie.'
'Good,' McKinnon said. 'Very good.'
'But we have to face the fact that there's some sort of opposition,' Bright said. 'Some organisation, corporation, force—whatever.'
'The thing to do, laddie, is to move too fast for it. In my experience, such forces are slow.'
'It hasn't been slow so far,' Marsha said. 'It seems to have known exactly what we were doing.'
'We're speeding up,' McKinnon said. 'And playing it closer to our chests. Maybe Randolph wasn't what he seemed. Who knows? Now we've got clear directions and we can pull out all the stops in Australia. I've already made a lot of the preparations. Very cooperative lot, your countrymen, Vic. Remarkably so. Hungry for our attention.'
McKinnon paused and then went on. 'Well, it's always just a matter of getting through to the right people, isn't it? We're going to search in the Gibson Desert for the last resting place of the brothers Craft.'
Bright raised his glass in a silent toast.
Marsha looked from one man to the other. 'What about all the loose ends, all the questions?'
'Maybe we'll find the answers to them, too,' Bright said.
There followed two weeks of hectic activity in which McKinnon made arrangements by telephone to Australia, Bright communicated with Randolph Craft, checked on the progress of the translation of the Mongolian manuscript and probed in various directions for information on Basil and Richard Craft. He read newspapers at the Hendon annex of the Public Records Office covering the period from the arrival of the brothers in Western Australia to the reports on their disappearance and the subsequent search. The scantiness of the coverage puzzled him.
'It's as if there was a cover-up from the word go,' he said to Marsha one night as they shared a frozen lasagna and a bottle of Algerian red. McKinnon's funds had unaccountably dried up and Vic's attempts to reach the producer by phone had failed for the past three days.
'I don't think they had cover-ups in the 1960s,' Marsha said. 'Journalists just didn't tackle things that were hard unless the proprietors pushed them. What was happening in Australia in 1960? Maybe no-one was interested in a couple of Pommy explorers.'
Bright chewed on the tasteless food and swallowed it because it was less trouble than to spit it out. He laid down his fork and poured more of the gritty wine. 'Nothing was happening in Australia in 1960. You can bet on it. We'd had the Olympics four years before. Too soon for Lionel Rose and Johnny Famechon.'
'Who?'
'Boxers. They won world titles.'
'Oh.'
'Menzies was still in charge. His motto was lick England's bum and suck America's cock.'
'Charming.'
'I'm trying to give you the flavour of the period.'
Marsha put down her fork with the pale, sticky mess still on it. 'I get the point. You think there was some kind of D-notice, something like that? Official interference.'
'Yep. Plus some deliberate downplaying by Richard Craft. I read an account of a press conference he gave at Roebuck before they set off. Talk about boring. You'd've thought they were out for a picnic and they'd come straight home if it rained.'
'Did it?'
'What?'
'Rain. I'd have thought the weather over the next few months would be important. Was it especially dry or wet or what?'
Bright drank some wine. 'I didn't think to check. Good point.'
Marsha poked her tongue out at him. 'Don't sulk. I finally got to see Dr Black today. Want to hear what he said?'
Bright nodded. Junius Black was a psychiatrist who specialised in treating sexual dysfunction. His appointment book was full and Marsha had had to wait ten days to be squeezed into a cancellation slot.
'He's heard of the condition,' Marsha said. 'It's very rare and there's no real name for it. Essentially it happens when a brother is a bit confused about his sexual orientation and becomes fixated on his brother's sexuality. There's a hell of a lot of guilt and confusion. This provides the context for the aberration of the fixated brother being potent with his brother's lovers and not otherwise.'
'Does he really want to fuck his brother?'
'That's crude. It's more complicated than that.'
'What about the other stuff—not being interested in the brother's women once they got pregnant and so on?'
'I tried that on him. He said he hadn't struck it but in this sort of condition almost any variation was possible. He was very interested, even asked me a few questions.'
'What did you say?'
'Nothing. I was paying him £200. I thought that meant I didn't have to answer any questions.'
'Two hundred! Christ, what'll Andy say about that?'
'What'll he say about anything? When did we last hear from him?'
Bright scratched his chin. '
I haven't heard from him for days. I thought you'd been in touch.'
Marsha shook her head. 'Not for at least a week.'
'That's too bloody long. I need some money. Randolph's been in touch. He wants a few quid. He thinks he's on to who nobbled him with the immigration people, but he needs some juice. We need our leader.'
'You've tried the flat?'
'Yep, and the Dorset cottage, though he'd scarcely go there with all this on.'
Marsha stared at Vic. 'D'you think something could have happened to him?'
Bright put down his glass. 'I've been so wrapped up in this thing I haven't thought along those lines. Christ, it's possible.'
'There's a key to his flat at the office,' Marsha said.
They drove to South Kensington via Hammersmith, where Marsha collected the key. They let themselves in and immediately experienced the scent of emptiness. A layer of dust covered the polished surfaces and the air was stale and musty. Bright glanced into the bedroom before joining Marsha in the study.
'I'd say some of his clothes are missing. He's taken off somewhere.'
The telephone rang. Bright snatched the instrument from the bedside table. 'Yes?'
'Mr Bright,' a voice said. 'Why don't you direct Miss Prentiss to pick up another receiver so you can both participate in this conversation?'
'Who is this?'
'Do as I say, please.'
Vic gestured for Marsha to use the telephone in the living room. When she had picked up the voice purred, 'Excellent. Now I have a message from Mr McKinnon for you.'
'This is Andy.' The voice was unmistakeable.
Bright swore. 'Andy, what . . . ?'
McKinnon's voice continued over the interruption. 'I'm recording this, children. I've been taken out of the game, as it were. I'm being well treated and don't feel in any immediate danger, but I have certain instructions for you. First, don't call the police. Second, proceed as planned. Third, ample funds have been made available in the project account. You are to use them as you see fit. That's all I am permitted to say except to repeat that I have been assured that no harm is intended towards any of us. I don't understand . . . '
'Andy!' Marsha said.
