by Joseph Hone
‘To blackmail?’
‘If you could call it that. Everyone was wild about the “Thomas” skeleton just then. Willy and George were top dogs in the bone business. They’d beaten all the field. Fame at last. There was a lot at stake. Because if the world heard how they’d shot up and burnt this tribe in the hills, it would have been the end for both of them, Rain Queen or no.’
‘But where was Clare?’
‘Laura had taken charge of her right from the start, and held on. You see, after the massacre in the hills it would have been too risky making any professional capital out of the girl. So we all kept quiet about Clare. But the Kindersleys had a big bungalow outside Nairobi. Servants, a big enclosed garden. It was ideal for Clare. They had several nannies, African women, though Laura looked after her mostly. She brought her up. She and Willy had never had any children … that was one reason.’
‘Yes, but what did she tell her friends out there? Her parents in Lisbon?’
‘Oh, that was easy enough. She told everyone that she’d legally adopted the child, in Kenya. That Clare was an orphan, a retarded child, the only daughter of a white couple, missionaries, killed up-country in Uganda by Amin’s rogue army. And at the time, since those people were killing white and black out there quite at random, it was a perfectly possible tale. Anyway, everyone believed her. And everything that had happened up in those mountains – well, all that had blown over, we thought. Until the African turned up.’
‘Willy paid him off?’
‘No. Just the opposite. Willy said he’d deny it all, everything that had happened, the shooting, the burning. He told us no one would believe the African anyway, in the present circumstances in Uganda. He said everyone would believe his version if the business ever came to light: that the tribe had been set upon by Idi Amin’s men. Soon after that we all came back to England.’
‘But even that wasn’t the end, was it?’
‘No. But you’ve been involved in most of the end, haven’t you?’
‘But how did the African get here, to your house?’
‘He caught up with us again. A few months ago, just after you’d left your cottage.’
‘I can see that. But how? And what the hell was George doing sheltering him? Why didn’t he tell the police?’
‘Yes. Well, George had a reputation now you see, as well.’
‘Yes, and I had a wife.’ I was furious.
‘I told George that … he’d probably killed Laura. But George said there was absolutely no proof. He came here several months ago. The Libyans helped him, that’s how. He’d told some of the newspaper people in Nairobi – that’s where the press rumours of what happened first started. They didn’t believe him, just as Willy thought. But the Libyans there did, or pretended to. He met them in the refugee camp. They were pro-Amin, of course, Moslems, revolutionaries trying to stir up trouble in Kenya by supporting these refugees. And what this African had to tell them was ideal: evidence that Amin hadn’t been behaving badly to the other Ugandan tribes, that it was white people who’d shot this tribe up. And, more than that, it had been the famous Willy Kindersley and George Benson who’d done the damage. If they could prove that they’d have some real publicity for Amin’s cause. So they brought the African to Libya first, then over here. They had to find the child, to have real proof of the whole thing – that was the point. It took them a long time to trace what had happened to Clare, where you were living in England. And when they found out, the African went off on his own after you. That’s my opinion. It was more personal revenge for him now. All right, he must have killed Laura. But he lost you and Clare. And that’s when he turned up here, looking for help. He wanted somewhere to live in this area. But above all he thought George might come to know where you two were hiding, that he could get to you both that way. And he was able to blackmail George then – about the shooting in the mountains. You see, when the British press got onto the whole thing a month ago – when they found out you’d worked for British Intelligence, when Willy’s East African business blew up all over again, the African thought people here would probably believe his story now. And they would have done, I think. So George agreed to put him up.
‘While he looked for us?’ I said, my anger rising bitterly again.
‘I told George that. But he said if half the police in the country couldn’t find you, the African wouldn’t be able to.’
‘So he was just going to let him live here indefinitely?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. George thought he could work the thing out … given time.’
‘He thought the police would get me for killing Laura. That’s what he thought. And that Clare would be locked up safely in an institution then or sent back to Lisbon. He thought he would get out of it all that way, didn’t he?’
‘Probably. But the African doesn’t know where you are now, does he?’
‘No. But he’s been close enough – a few weeks ago.’
‘He has a car. There’s been another man with him helping him. A Libyan, I think, from London.’
‘I don’t have to worry about him. But if the African is on the move again I think I know where he’s gone: back to where we are.’
And I was on my feet then, moving off, thinking of Alice and Clare alone in Beechwood Manor. ‘I’d better hurry,’ I said. ‘It’s not the end yet.’
‘No. I’m sorry it ever began.’ Annabelle called after me.
I turned, half-way across the patio. ‘Sorry? Is that all?’ I said bitterly. ‘I wish you’d told someone about all this before. What a lot of trouble you’d have saved everyone.’
‘Yes. But I thought Laura would have told you all about it, long ago.’ Annabelle looked at me sadly. She had a point there, I suppose. I turned and left.
Sixteen
On the drive back to Beechwood I wondered how I could have been so wrong about Willy Kindersley – and about his wife Laura. Though perhaps that was unfair. Clare’s abduction hadn’t been her fault. Rather the opposite: with her subsequent care she’d probably saved the child’s life. And yet she had never told me anything about it all. Had she intended to – one day? And I thought again of all the days we’d never had together. Or maybe, more likely, when she married me, she had wanted a clean slate over the whole thing, to start afresh, as if this frightening past had never happened. She had wanted to forget Africa, forget the African. And the tragedy lay in his wanting, so insistently, to remember her – and Willy and the other two, and Clare. His revenge had caught up with almost all of them. And the one thing I had to ensure now was that it didn’t catch up with Clare.
With his Libyan friend out of the way, I couldn’t see that the African had much chance of ever getting her back to his own country now. And so I could only assume that, at this point, driven by bitterness and anger in the whole matter, he simply wanted Clare dead, along with any of the white protectors or guardians he found with her. The African wanted his own simple revenge now on a white world that had dispossessed him of his home, extinguished his tribe and sent him into exile. That made sense. I could well understand that. But meanwhile the search for this natural justice had probably deranged him, which was why he’d been haunting our valley a few weeks before: not as rescuer but as killer.
There was also the matter of Ross to think about. Since it hadn’t been one of his hit-men, I realised now, who had killed Laura in mistake for me, Ross must simply have been pursuing me on his own account for any damning facts I might yet publish about my time in British Intelligence. Ross, as well as the African, was still to be accounted for.
Suddenly, as I drove along through the Oxfordshire lanes, I wanted to be out of England, away from the Cotswolds. I wanted another fresh start, just as Laura had, a year before. I wished I could have been in Lisbon again, on top of one of those windy hills, or in the old Avenida Palace Hotel, or out in Cascais – anywhere away from these threats, these imponderables.
But of course this was just what Laura must have felt, before
she met me, when she first came back from Africa. She had wanted to forget it all too. And yet the past had caught up with her and with Willy. And now with George Benson as well: the past in the shape of this canny, ever-persistent and now explosive African.
When I got back to Beechwood that evening Clare was asleep upstairs in the old nursery, safe and sound. After Alice had let me in through the back door we had gone up to her at once. I saw her sleeping then, just a sheet pulled half over her small body in the dry heat under the slates of the old house. She lay sprawled on her stomach, face down against the bed without a pillow, head sharply profiled, arms outstretched, with one leg raised like a hurdler about to jump.
I looked at her face as carefully as I’d ever done, remembering how often in the past I’d seen something of Laura’s expression there – a sudden narrowing at the corner of each round eye, the very slight, snub-like cast at the tip of her nose, the same fine, peach-coloured hair and skin. But I’d been wrong about all that, too. She wasn’t Laura’s child. And for the first time I realised I’d nothing left of Laura now – nothing of her flesh and blood, which I’d cherished in Clare in the months since Laura’s death. An inheritance, as I’d seen it – something of our love together commemorated in Clare – had been snatched from me. This child was a total stranger, reared in the African wilds, who had just happened to share some of Laura’s physical traits, that was all. And for a moment the realisation of this seemed to invalidate my life with Laura. It had been based on false premises. For Clare hadn’t been autistic either, but simply a child brought up without others of her kind who thus never received human affection or the language which comes to underwrite that. I had been wrong about everything, among them these things which Laura could so readily have explained to me. And again, I felt a sharp discontent – no, more a sense of exile: that Laura had kept me outside such vital places in her heart.
But watching Clare just then, lost so calmly and completely in sleep, I saw how vulnerable and thus how human she was. In such sleep, at least, she lost all her wild animal qualities: her speechlessness, her physical excesses, that worry in her eyes where she seemed to search for some ultimate horizon, a dream of a fair country where she could no longer live. In sleep now, she was an ordinary child in an old nursery, surrounded by animals as toys and not as sole companions and supporters. She was supported here by all the traditions of an essentially human childhood. And suddenly I saw another reason why Laura had kept me in the dark. She had wanted to give the child just such an ordinary background, a conventional future in a world which we had both hoped Clare would one day enter. And so she had kept Clare’s real past hidden from her as from me, so that the girl – with her disabilities or her wild gifts – could live a life in civilisation as easily as she might, and at least be unencumbered with African ghosts.
That made sense: Laura had been protecting Clare, as much as herself. She had been offering Clare a future by erasing her past as a happy savage. Yet had Clare really been happy in that wild valley, lying on the earth among the chickens? I remembered with what fear she had looked at the African, when she had first seen him again, in our own valley a few weeks before. But she had loved the African masks in the little museum along the landing. They had brought her to life again. There were contradictions here that I couldn’t follow. Though perhaps that was the whole point: they were exactly the contradictions inherent in Clare herself, part animal, part human, and she could not reconcile the two. Clare both loved and hated what she had lost, and Laura, from the very beginning, had sensed this: how much human hurt as wild happiness there was in the life of this child. In any case people have an enormous need to bury or deny such savage imponderables, the pain of such contradictions, and thus prevent their spread like a contagion among the human tribe. And this was surely what Laura had done.
But the disease, for so long dormant, had come to light again: with an African in the moonlight of an English valley, in a ceremonial mask, an empty basement flat in Norham Gardens. The wound of the past had opened again years later, like a dragon’s egg, offering a gaping vision of human folly and disruption. It was my job to close the wound now, if I could. That was all. Clare might no longer be Laura’s child. And yet exactly because of this, because she was so completely an orphan, I saw how much more she belonged not to one, but to both of us. And if before, by Laura’s deception, I had felt something vital in our marriage had been taken away from me – I realised now, watching Clare, how, in this new-found truth, I had been given the chance of properly commemorating my love for Laura, by ensuring that what she had wished for Clare would come to pass.
Later I told Alice all that had happened that day in Oxford, as we sat on chairs outside Clare’s partly open nursery doorway, on the top landing. Safe and sound, I thought … Yet now every creak and movement in the old wood of the Manor, as the fabric cooled after the long hot day, made me uneasy. The house was well locked, with the alarms set, and we had checked through all the rooms – the basement, the tower and all the other nooks and crannies – for signs of any intruder. But the African had been so like a ghost before, coming out from the Great Rift Valley to Norham Gardens, stalking through our woods by the lake as easily as he’d moved through the busy streets of Oxford, that I felt, with such apparent magic at his command, he might surprise us at any moment even in this stronghold – suddenly sweeping up on us, borne on some secret wind, through the walls or the roof of the house.
So we sat there, quietly, on the top landing – Alice with her small automatic and I with the old pump-action Winchester .22 across my knees. After what I’d experienced that afternoon, I wasn’t going to bother with Spinks’s bow, or the swords tick or the poisoned dart. Now, if it came to violence, I aimed to fire first. It was time to put away native things.
But it didn’t come to it. Nothing untoward happened that night. And the only news next morning was good news: along with an account of the Oxford fracas, there was an answer from Captain Warren at last in the personal column of The Times. Under the code name ‘St. George’ which I’d asked him to use, the message ran:
‘Assume you are still in central
England. Thus will wait for you, with
suitable transport, at Tewkesbury from
week beginning 1st September.’
‘That’s clever of him,’ I said to Alice. ‘Tewkesbury is way inland. Only about twenty miles or so south-west of here, on the river Avon, where it joins the Severn and runs out to sea at Gloucester. Obviously he knows he can get the ketch that far up-river. He won’t have to risk staying in any port, with police or customs about. And with all the summer boats around on the river and in the Bristol Channel, he won’t be noticed either.’
But Alice was not so enthusiastic. ‘It’s probably a trap. And how can he sail over here alone in any case, all that way? An old man? All the way from Lisbon and back?’
‘Why not? He has a man to help him, and he was a captain in the Navy himself. He did it before, too, when he first took the boat out there.’ I was elated. ‘The first of September,’ I said. ‘That’s in ten days time. We should be able to get to Tewkesbury from here easily enough.’
It all seemed suddenly possible just then – my escape, Clare’s escape. I’d forgotten the African. I’d very nearly forgotten Alice. We were sitting, the three of us, having breakfast up in the tower, with the windows open. Mary, the daily help, was downstairs doing the rooms. The Pringles were still away on holiday and the two gardeners were still clearing the wood, but round the lake now and the valley to the east where we had lived, cutting out the burnt trunks of beech. The weather was hot again. But it was a muggy, flyblown, mid-August heat, with low hung cloud overhead and little black thunderflies in the air even at that time in the morning.
Alice stood up and went over to the fridge. She was wearing a thin, short-sleeved cotton shirt and she reached round an arm now, trying to scratch the small of her back where something had bitten her. I got up myself, following her, and scratched her b
ack for her. Clare meanwhile had returned to the floor where some days before she had started trying to re-assemble the model of the old tea clipper she had destroyed a few weeks ago. It was as if, unconsciously, she already sensed a maritime departure in the air.
‘I’m sorry.’ I still had my arm on Alice’s back. ‘It’s just that yesterday left its mark. I was hoping I could be out of all this: the African. Not you.’
‘But why bother about him at all now? Why not tell the police yourself in any case? About everything, from the beginning?’
‘About that Libyan in the museum? And what about that Hell’s Angel I shot – apart from Laura, who they’ll still think I killed. There’s an awful lot of mayhem I still have to account for.’
‘Well, you can’t run forever. And you can certainly prove self-defence in the museum. And what you did in the woods could have been an accident. Besides, it was the African who pushed that lout onto the fire. And you didn’t kill Laura.’
‘Maybe. But while I was proving all that the police would be bound to hold me for quite a time. And what would Clare do meanwhile? No – I have to try and get her back to Portugal, where the Warrens can look after her. So I can’t tell the police now. Don’t you see?’
‘Perhaps.’
I could see how Alice clearly foresaw an end to things between us now; a possible future let go by default. She opened the fridge and bent down, and her shirt slipped up her back a few inches, showing her narrow, bronzed waist and the sharp bones in her vertebrae. A sense of other life – ordinary life, domestic life, loving life – suddenly moved in me.
‘What about your divorce?’ I asked.
Alice stood up, three yoghurt tubs in her hand. ‘September,’ she said. ‘The settlement is all but agreed in New York. Not that there was much to settle. The house here is mine, of course.’
