by Joseph Hone
I struggled but it was little use: the cord knifed hard round my throat and the best I could do was to get my feet, sliding up the totem pole, while the African held me tight against it now, my head forced back against the wood.
‘The girl,’ the man behind me said, ‘where is she?’
I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t see his face. And the blowpipe had dropped to the floor. But I still had the second dart in my hand.
‘Where have you her? The child?’ The accent was more Arab than African, and the cord came tighter then. The searing pain was worse than the lack of breath, though soon there would be no breath and that would be worse still.
Using the bamboo dart as a dagger I struck out blindly behind me again and again, stabbing the empty air as the noose contracted, the man trying to restrain me while moving back from me at the same time. But at last the sharp point found a home. It struck the man’s clothing first – I could hear something rip. But then it went further on: I felt the dart sink into some part of his flesh, like a skewer into a leg of mutton.
The man shouted then, a scream of agony, and he pulled the cord again viciously so that I thought I was done for. But it was his last effort against me. The cord dropped away and when I turned the African was stumbling about on one leg, trying desperately to extract the dart which the barbs held firm, deep in his thigh. There was little I could do, I thought, except run. But I stood there instead – amazed: first by the fact that this was quite a different African, a younger, much lighter-skinned man without any scars on his face, and then when I saw how quickly he subsided, his struggles dying away in a minute or so as paralysis overcame him. His leg seized up first and soon he was slumped on the floor, unable to move at all. Finally he just lay there, stretched out full length beneath the totem pole. But the strange thing was that, though he was now quite immobile, and obviously couldn’t speak, the man looked completely fit. He was entirely conscious, his eyes watching me, perfectly clearly, as I moved about him – vicious, frustrated eyes, like those of a wild beast alive in a trap, still confronting its hunter. And I saw then that the old Somali poison still worked. And I wondered if this must have been exactly its intended effect: to paralyse its victim, rather than to kill.
I went quickly through the man’s pockets while he lay there inertly, with a frozen gaze of fury. He had a lot of money on him, including some Libyan money, and a London–Oxford train timetable. But there was nothing else to identify him. I left him where he was. The police would find him soon enough. Indeed I was surprised they hadn’t arrived at the Museum already, since George had escaped a good twenty minutes before and I thought he would surely have contacted them by now. But perhaps he hadn’t phoned them. Perhaps he wanted to protect me from them, or rather to protect himself from guilt by association with me. I escaped from the museum a few minutes later myself, when I finally found an exit through a door to the side of the museum’s main hall which led into a small library. And from here I was able to walk through another door, just opening the Yale lock into the street.
Then I was striding quickly off across the parks into the evening light. I was sure that George had more to offer. True, his initial explanations had been convincing enough in his office. But why had he run away? And what of the African? And now this Libyan? How on earth did he fit in? I wondered, if George hadn’t phoned the police, if I might find him at home now, since his house was only just across the park. Indeed its back garden, though hidden by a line of great chestnuts, gave directly out onto the park. I could come at it that way, use the cover in the big trees first, scout the land out before approaching the house.
I crossed the big park and went into the belt of trees at the back of Norham Gardens, where I soon found George’s house. I knew it was his since the detached Victorian rectory style of the building, with its fretted gable ends, tall chimneys and haphazardly placed windows made it easily recognisable out of the line of other slightly less eccentric redbrick mansions on the road. And I recognised the ugly new sliding aluminium-framed windows giving out onto the garden, which George had added, upsetting the whole mood of the place. Crouched in the bushes at the end of his garden, I watched their ground-floor flat.
The big window was partly open. But there was no human sign or sound from anywhere in the house. I moved very. carefully over the fence and then across the lawn. There was another flat in the basement, I knew, and one of the top floor. But there was no sound from these either.
I waited a few more minutes just outside the sliding aluminium window, then pushed it open and walked into the Bensons’ drawing-room. It was empty. The room faced south-west, so that the summer light flooded into it from over the trees, lighting up a shiny modern chesterfield against one wall and an appalling abstract painting above it. A big pot-pourri bowl lay on a table to one side of the sofa with a video machine on the other. There was a sickly, over-sweet scent in the warm air. I went out into the hall and then into all the other rooms. But the whole place was deserted.
Then I saw a half-open door leading down to the basement flat from the hall. I went over to it and listened, looking through the gap for a minute. There was no sound from beneath. I walked slowly down the stairs. The flat was empty, but in considerable disarray. It might have been a student’s pad, except there were no books or papers lying about. There was a half-finished tin of baked beans and a glass of milky tea on the dirty, sugar-encrusted kitchen table. In the bedroom clothes were scattered about everywhere, expensive clothes, lightweight summer suits, fine shirts. But there were old clothes as well: grubby garden wear, a donkey-jacket, a torn pullover, a dirty pork-pie hat, an old Army camouflage jacket lying on the unmade bed.
And then it came to me. The pork-pie hat and the camouflage jacket. The African in the valley had worn just such a jacket, and so had the man who’d killed Laura. And months before, in the early spring out on the land beyond our cottage, we’d seen someone running away, his face hidden, with just the same kind of jacket, and the same pork-pie hat. It all added up: the man who’d killed Laura, who’d pursued us through the valley, was the same man I’d just seen outside George Benson’s office at the museum. The only mystery now was why this African had obviously been living here all the time: in George Benson’s basement flat.
I went back upstairs. There was a small room just off the hall, a study where George Benson worked, obviously, for it was filled with the books of his trade, with a typewriter and papers covering most of a large table set against a window looking out on the street.
I knew I mightn’t have much time since, if George had phoned the police, he or they or both might turn up here at any moment. All the same, looking for some explanation of the African’s presence downstairs, I thought I might find a clue here. I sifted quickly through the papers on the table, and I was lucky. Halfway down, hidden beneath a copy of the National Geographic magazine with an article by George in it, I found a letter, with the Bensons’ own address die-stamped in red on top of it. It had been hurriedly scrawled, on a single side of the paper, with just the letter ‘A’ at the end. A letter without love or any other good wishes. It was from Annabelle, George’s wife. I skipped through it quickly.
… and I certainly can’t stay in the house any longer. The situation you have contrived here is quite impossible – and has been between us, in any case, for quite some time. Since you refuse to take any advice from me, or contact the police, you’ll have to sort matters out yourself. I don’t intend ‘betraying’ you now – though I should have done that long ago. It’s your life – and the decisions you made in it over the years, and with Willy in the past, are your decisions, and you must live with them and resolve them in your own way. But until you settle things up I can’t live with you.
The Kasters have gone on holiday. They’ve offered me their house and I’ll be out there for the time being. But please – until you have made some effective decisions – leave me alone.
A.
The Kasters? There was an Oxford directory by a tel
ephone on the table. I looked them up. There was only one Kaster in the book – a Mr and Mrs David Kaster. They lived just outside Oxford: Sandpit Farm House, near Farmoor. Annabelle had left George because of the African, obviously, among other reasons: because of ‘decisions’ George had made over the years, decisions made with ‘Willy in the past’ … Africa loomed up for me again. Something had happened out there, with all of them. I was sure of that now. Something unpleasant, to say the least of it. But what was it? The answer, I thought, might lie somewhere out along the Eynsham road, in Sandpit Farm House.
Fifteen
There was a sign on the roadside, several miles outside Oxford, at the head of a rough track just beyond the village of Farmoor, giving direction to Sandpit Farm House. The house itself was some distance away, isolated among fields, with the Thames just visible behind a line of poplars beyond. If she was in, and there were no other guests with her, Annabelle couldn’t have chosen a better bolt-hole from my point of view.
I parked the car at the head of the drive and walked down towards the house in the hot evening light, a small, converted farmhouse, I saw, when I came nearer to it, with a pretty garden in front and a big Cotswold stone wall to one side, running away to the back, with an arched doorway in the middle. Avoiding the front of the house and reaching this entrance, I looked through into a deserted patio, with an empty swimming-pool in the middle. But there was someone or something in the pool, invisible to me below the level of the sides, for I could hear the sound of water, under pressure from a hose, being sluiced against the concrete.
I tiptoed through the archway and came to the edge of the deep end. Annabelle was standing right beneath me, in a bikini, her back towards me, with a hose in her hand, cleaning the sides of the pool. Tall, angular, straw-haired Annabelle, the plain, flat-chested woman. I had seen her before as a distant and perhaps troubled person, yet someone essentially hard-headed, I thought, and never vulnerable as she was now. She turned with the hose, moving to another part of the pool, and when she saw me she literally jumped in the air with fright.
‘God!’ she exclaimed, gasping.
‘It’s all right. It’s only me.’
‘Only you?’
She paused, shaking, regaining her breath. She tried to look over the edge of the pool, as if for help, but even she wasn’t tall enough. There was a ladder to one side of the deep end. But there was no other exit from the walled patio itself other than by the doorway I’d come through. She saw she was trapped, and I helped her in this feeling by standing coldly above her, an ogre in the evening sunlight. I had no time to waste and I knew, if she hadn’t been prepared to ‘betray’ her husband, that I might well have to threaten her in any way I could for the information I wanted. And I saw a means then, readily to hand: there was a barbecue barrow parked by the diving board, with its various cooking implements laid out on the tray. I picked up a long metal kebab skewer casually and toyed with it.
‘How did you know I was here? George?’ Annabelle didn’t seem frightened, just very angry.
‘No. I found the letter you wrote him. And I saw the flat downstairs. Where you have that African,’ I added pointedly.
Annabelle looked up fiercely. ‘Why can’t you mind your own bloody business?’
I hadn’t thought her capable of this sort of coarse talk; there had always been something refined, even old-maidish about Annabelle in the past.
‘It is my business,’ I said. ‘You forget: I was married to Laura, who was married to Willy, when you were all out in East Africa together. And now I’m having to pick up the pieces of whatever it was you all got up to out there. And that’s what I’m here to find out.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking –’
‘Oh yes you do,’ I broke in viciously. ‘I’ve read your letter about not “betraying” George. And seen that African’s clothes down in your basement flat. Well, that African killed Laura and now he’s after us, Clare and me. So, you see, I know, and I want to know the rest.’
‘But … you killed Laura?’ Annabelle looked up at me, prevaricating, I thought. And I was very angry now.
‘Did I? You really think that?’ I said fiercely. ‘Then hadn’t you better tell me?’
I sat down on the edge of the diving-board, fondling the skewer. Annabelle sensed the violence in me, saw the violence in the skewer, too, and I could see she was more frightened now than angry.
‘Where’s George?’ she asked, a placatory tone in her voice.
‘George has run away. I shouldn’t be surprised but the African is after him now. And you next. So what’s this all about, Annabelle? Are you going to tell me?’
I gazed down at her intently. The sloping bottom of the pool was already several feet deep in dirty water and the powerful hose, which she’d dropped, was thrashing around like a snake. It would fill the pool eventually.
‘You can stay down there and drown,’ I said. ‘If you don’t tell me.’
‘But surely you know,’ Annabelle said. ‘Surely Laura told you? We always assumed she would.’
‘No, she didn’t tell me. But tell me what?’
Again Annabelle was silent. And I felt a sudden stab of loss at this intimation of some vast deceit on Laura’s part – Laura with whom I thought I’d shared every secret. And this made me all the more angry. I stood up.
‘You better start explaining. It’s too late for any more lies. Don’t you see?’ I shouted at her now, brandishing the skewer right above her head, so that she stepped back quickly.
‘All right – all right.’ Annabelle held her hands up, surrendering. ‘I’ll tell you.’
I let her climb up the ladder and we sat down on opposite sides of a wooden picnic table in the shade at the far end of the pool.
‘The men lied,’ Annabelle said at last. ‘George and Willy. But we all had to lie in the end.’ She scowled fiercely, like a caged animal, looking over at the arched doorway on the other side of the patio. She might have been expecting, daring George to enter through it, at any moment, so that he could share and suffer equally the horror and indignity of this tale she had embarked on.
‘Go on,’ I said. I still had the skewer with me. ‘You all lied?’
‘Yes. Even Laura. Though it was hardly her fault. We both had to cover up for them … their mania for discovery, disruption,’ she added viciously.
‘But what about Laura? What did you expect her to have told me?’
‘About Clare. That she wasn’t their child. That’s where it all began.’
I thought I’d misheard Annabelle. Then, realising that I hadn’t and assuming some ancient infidelity out in East Africa, I said wildly, ‘She was George’s child, you mean? Or yours?’
‘No. She was nothing to do with any of us.’ Annabelle looked away, distracted, gathering her unpleasant memories together.
‘What do you mean? That Clare is an orphan?’
‘Yes. But more than that.’
‘But that’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘She even looks like Laura.’
‘She does, a little. We noticed that from the start. Same fair hair, blue eyes. It made the deception that much easier. But she wasn’t their child. I can promise you that …’
Annabelle’s voice had that pregnant tone now, that real weight which comes with truth, the truth long withheld. ‘And of course she wasn’t autistic either,’ she went on.
‘Well that can’t be true,’ I said, satisfied that I knew more than Annabelle about something at least. ‘Of course she’s autistic.’
‘The same symptoms – yes. They’re very similar, or at least insofar as we have any direct experience now of such wild children. But it wasn’t autism.’ Annabelle was calmer, taking a precise, scientific approach to things, the ethnologist rising in her, all her old vagueness gone – seen now for the front it was. Then she added – almost, it seemed, as an afterthought: ‘Clare was wild, you see.’
‘Well, I knew that. She lived in the wilds, for a few years, out in Africa …’
‘No. I mean she was actually reared in the wild. They found her, you see, the tribesmen in the hills, quite a long time after her parents had died. They trapped her, on her own apparently. Completely wild. But she’d survived somehow, in the hills above the valley, suckled by some animal, maybe. Who knows?’
I thought I must have misheard, or misunderstood Annabelle this time. ‘You mean some kind of wolf child?’
Annabelle nodded.
‘Look, this is nonsense,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to begin at the beginning, won’t you?’
‘Clare must be about ten or eleven now, I suppose. One can’t tell exactly. But it was nearly four years ago, I know that.’ She gazed out towards the trees by the river, remembering. ‘After the big rains, in Nairobi. The fossil expedition left for the Turkana province then, four hundred miles north, making for Lake Rudolf where we had our camp that year, a place way off the beaten track, sixty miles from the last town up there, a place called Lodwar. And then we came to a village, beyond Lodwar, just a few old tin shacks in the middle of the desert.’ She paused, as if suddenly unsure of her mental directions.
‘Yes. It’s wild up there. I know that,’ I said, anxious that she should get on with it.
‘It’s hot. Just hot,’ Annabelle corrected me sharply, remembering the heat. ‘Just the long red floor of the valley. I remember coming down the one main track in the village late that afternoon: it looked like a dead dog run over in the camel-dung at the side of the road. But when we got nearer to it in the convoy we saw it was a child, mostly decomposed. The place was practically empty. There’s been trouble up there for several years, warring tribes, cattle raids, border disputes. But I remember the dead child because of Clare, later: one child making up for the other in a way.’
