Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  He cleaned one of his nails with the paper knife.

  “And that’s our case. After we have finished, Hilary will probably argue that we have no case, that all our evidence is circumstantial, Tudor will dismiss it, and then the fun will start, when Ndekei is called and starts to run his defense, that he was acting according to Maasai custom. How much rope Tudor gives him is anyone’s guess but I would expect very little indeed, so that either way the trial should be over by the afternoon of the second day, or the morning of the third.” He smiled at Natalie. “It might make sense for you to leave Nairobi before the end of the trial. There’s no need to expose yourself to any more unpleasantness than is absolutely necessary. And I suggest that, if you can bear it, you remain in your hotel room all day tomorrow, day one of the proceedings. Or just come down for meals. I think a low profile is called for—yes?”

  Natalie nodded. Her hands were tingling again. The tick typhus just wouldn’t go away.

  A thought struck her. Had Jonas got the diagnosis right? Or was she more ill than she knew, more ill than Jonas knew? She felt a flush to her face. That was a fresh worry. While she was here in Nairobi, waiting to give evidence, perhaps she should see a specialist in internal medicine. Jonas was from London, after all, and not an expert in tropical diseases. But who could she turn to? Maybe Jack could help.

  “I have one extra piece of information,” she said.

  “Oh, yes?” replied Sandys. “What is it?”

  She told him what Kees had said about Richard Sutton being homosexual and explained about the episode in the storeroom.

  He listened intently.

  “So you think Ndekei had a reason other than tribal custom to kill Richard?” Sandys had scribbled a few notes.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they had an argument, maybe sexual jealousy was involved. I’m guessing.”

  “Hmm,” said Sandys. “Interesting but I don’t see how we can substantiate any of it.”

  “We could cross-examine him on it,” said Natalie.

  “Yes, but think how that would raise the political temperature. Homosexuality is even more unpopular among blacks than it is among whites. And it would be a slur on Richard Sutton which he couldn’t defend himself against.”

  He put down his pen and shook his head. “I agree that your new information may throw a very different light on the proceedings, and it certainly vitiates the defense’s likely argument that you yourself were having an affair with Richard Sutton. But I don’t see how we can introduce it. This man, Kees van Schelde, is dead and without testimony directly from him, it’s all too nebulous.” He shook his head a second time. “I’m sorry but we simply can’t go down that route. Does that upset you?”

  Natalie bit her lip. “I’ve been in two minds over this whole thing since Kees first revealed to me that he thought Richard was homosexual. I was going to tell you a couple of weeks ago, when you might have had time to look into it, but I fell ill.”

  “I don’t think that would have made any difference,” said Sandys. “This Kees man was dead by then, Richard Sutton is dead, Ndekei is the defendant—where would our evidence have come from?” He shook his head. “It was always a nonstarter, I am afraid. I’m sorry.”

  Natalie shrugged. “What was also at the back of my mind, if you said that, was a deal. I realize that all I’ve told you is innuendo—of course I know that. But there may be some truth to it and, if there is, Ndekei may think we know more than we do. I therefore wondered that if the defense intend to allege that I was having an affair with Richard or Russell, then you could ask them not to go that way and, in return, we wouldn’t ask about Richard and Ndekei.”

  A wry smile unveiled itself across Sandys’s features. “I admire your cunning, Dr. Nelson, and if you ever get bored in the gorge, you will make an excellent lawyer, thinking like that. But I’m afraid the defense is allowed to fling mud, but not the prosecution. Hilary Hall simply wouldn’t do a deal of that kind.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, it was a valiant attempt but we can’t do as you suggest, as you hope. I don’t see that we can use this information in any way at all, I’m sorry.”

  He closed the file that was in front of him and stood up. “Having bravely come in the front way,” he murmured, “I think we’ll spirit you out the back.”

  • • •

  Natalie sipped her whiskey and looked at her watch. Seven thirty-eight. Maxwell Sandys had said he might be late, but how late was he going to be? She knew it was silly but she was uncomfortable, waiting in a bar, alone, even a bar in a hotel where she had her own room. People might get the wrong idea.

  Not that the bar was very full at this early hour, but even so.

  She was wearing her frock, the only one she had brought with her to Africa, and her wedge heels, her life-saving wedge heels that had enabled her to run away from those men outside the bar, when she had visited Nairobi earlier, with Jack. She and Jack were meeting up later, after his mysterious family meeting, and she was looking forward to their lovemaking in a proper hotel bedroom, where the beds were big and spongy and the walls were solid and soundproof.

  She blushed inwardly as she thought this. Jack might say, as he often did say, that children mattered to him, but sex mattered to her—oh, how it had come to matter. She had never thought … she had never thought she would become so … so, demanding, that was the word. But she couldn’t help it.

  She glanced at her watch again. Seven forty-one.

  She looked about her. There was another couple in the bar, and two women sitting together at the bar itself. They were all in dresses, one wore a hat, all were talking in low voices, so she couldn’t hear what was being said. Did these other women feel about sex the way she felt about it? Were they as demanding? Did they think about it as much as she did, did they make as much noise when …? She was making herself blush inwardly again.

  She looked at her watch. Seven forty-three. Maxwell Sandys was really late now, verging on rude—

  “Tally?”

  The skin on her throat was clammy. Had she heard right? That was the name … that was the nickname her father used—

  She turned and looked up at the man who was standing over her.

  “Father!” she whispered. “Oh, thank God!”

  She stood up. She couldn’t believe it.

  Her father, in a lightweight suit she hadn’t seen before. Her father, stooping over her as he had done all her life. Her father, with his beautiful hands, made for playing the organ. Her father, with the small piece of stubble in the cleft of his chin that he always missed when he was shaving.

  He held out his hand.

  She took it.

  He pulled her towards him and threw his arms around her.

  She buried her face in his chest, smelled his smell, the smell of the house in Gainsborough, floor polish, Noah the cat, woodsmoke from the fire in his study.

  They remained like that for a moment. With her head pressed sideways against his chest, she managed to murmur, “Why are you …? When did you …?”

  He took her by the shoulders, then put his hand over her mouth. “All in good time,” he said softly. “You wait here while I get a drink. I need a single malt.”

  She sat, smiling, as he went to the bar. She couldn’t believe it.

  But there he was, her lovely father, in a lightweight suit, looking thoroughly at home in these surroundings.

  She found it impossible to keep a smile off her face.

  Then he came and sat next to her so that their legs were touching, so they could maintain body contact.

  “I’m here partly because of your director, Eleanor Deacon—”

  “No! I don’t believe it! I told her not to interfere. This is—”

  “Hold on!” said Owen Nelson. “Hold on. Let me tell my story. It’s not easy.”

  He sipped his single malt.

  “That’s better, a lot better.” He took Natalie’s hand. “Yes, I was a very bitter man, Tally, as you may have realized. I
don’t know whether you knew this—maybe you did—but I blamed you for Violette’s death. Not completely, of course, but your … your affair with that cellist … it devastated your mother, a light went out inside her when you told her. You couldn’t know this but she cried herself to sleep and sometimes she woke me up in the middle of the night with her sobbing. She was so … disappointed, she felt so empty …”

  He sipped more whiskey.

  “Anyway, when she died, I too was devastated—anyone would be—but I couldn’t see straight. I blamed you, which is why I couldn’t face you, why I avoided you, snubbed you, spurned you, all those horrible nonfatherly things that I did.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I understand that, I lived through it and hated it, but what I don’t understand is what made you change your mind.”

  “I’m coming to that.” He took out a cigarette case and offered Natalie one. She refused. She wanted to keep her hands free to hold her father. “Three things. Three things changed my mind.” He lit his cigarette. “You remember when you called me from Nairobi, all those weeks ago, and Mrs. Bailey answered.”

  Natalie nodded. She still couldn’t stop smiling.

  “After the exchange was over, she came back into my study, where I was working, and told me I was being inhuman. That was bad enough but she added that unless I started building bridges … towards you, she meant… she would quit her job. She said she wouldn’t leave me in the lurch, she would wait until I found a replacement, but that she wanted to go, unless I made it up with you.”

  Two couples came into the bar and he looked up before going on.

  “By Christmastime, I had done nothing about anything. I have to admit that I didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Bailey giving me an ultimatum but then neither did I like the idea of her leaving. She and I are used to each other.” He chuckled. “And then came all the news reports about your press conference, the one where you announced your discoveries, but also where it was revealed that you, you personally, had become a witness in a murder trial and that the case was dividing all the people on your dig.”

  He smoked his cigarette for a moment. “That’s when I decided to write to you, to suggest that I come for the trial, to support you—”

  “I never got any letter!”

  “Because none was ever sent. While I was looking into the whole business, buying tickets, fixing a leave of absence with the bishop, making sure Mrs. Bailey would look after Noah, deciding how to say what I wanted to say in a letter, I had this phone call—from Eleanor Deacon.”

  “This is the part I don’t—”

  “No, Tally, no. Don’t go off the deep end. I know you think she interfered, meddled, in your private affairs. That’s what she said you’d say—”

  “Dad! That’s exactly what she did!”

  “But I’m here. It worked! She convinced me not to send you a letter, that what would have the most impact on you was if I behaved, acted, did something, and came here myself.” He crushed his cigarette out into the ashtray. “We must have had the most expensive phone call in history—thank God she was paying—because we talked for almost half an hour. The operator kept asking if she wanted three more minutes and she kept saying ‘Yes, yes, get off the line.’ She’s very … forceful, isn’t she?”

  Natalie nodded. She was angry with Eleanor for interfering but couldn’t stop smiling because her father was here.

  He lit another cigarette. “Anyway, we spent a lot of time just talking about what you are all doing in the gorge. She told me about her own father, who was a missionary and who had his faith crushed, she told me about the discoveries you have made personally, what their significance is, she told me that she has written to the head of your college about how good you are—”

  “She hasn’t told me—!”

  “No. I shouldn’t be telling you this, really. She says it’s better if these things are confidential, it’s the way things work in Britain, but she thinks you are professor material and she wants to prepare the ground.”

  Natalie was half flattered by this news, but still astounded by Eleanor’s interference.

  “Then we talked about the trial, what you saw, the threats to the gorge—which I knew about, briefly, from the reports of the press conference—and the fact that you are under a lot of pressure, from both sides, and that the trial may become a circus. She convinced me I should come for the trial, as I had been meaning to do anyway, and that to alert you in a letter would only add to the pressure. That to surprise you like this would be the best kind of support.”

  He sipped more whiskey. “So I took her advice—and here I am.”

  She was still holding his hand, so she raised it to her lips and kissed his fingers. “It’s lovely, lovely. Thank you for coming.”

  He disengaged his hands from Natalie’s, twisted in his seat, and picked up a package he had with him. “When I talked with Eleanor Deacon, she happened to say that one of her sons has a gramophone in that gorge, so I’ve bought you these.” He handed her three slim brown-paper packages and kissed her cheek. “Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, ‘In fernem Land’ from Wagner’s Lohengrin, and Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla.”

  Natalie took them. “Dad, that’s wonderful. Thank you.” She told him about Jack’s wind-up gramophone, how they sometimes played music after dinner, with the roars of the lions and the chatter of the baboons as a backdrop.

  “I’d like to hear that,” he said. “See if I can recruit any baritones.”

  She laughed out loud, leaned forward, and kissed him.

  How her fortunes had changed during the day.

  They had left the gorge early that morning—Jack doing the flying, with Eleanor, Daniel, Christopher, and Natalie and quite a few bags filling the plane. It had been a bumpy ride, there were plenty of short-rains storm clouds about, but they had flown at only two thousand feet, so there had been some good views of the wildlife.

  Christopher had been a bit distant with her in the plane, although they had sat side by side, behind Jack and Eleanor.

  “You seem to have recovered better than I did,” he had said.

  She had made a face. “I was up and about yesterday—only a day before you.”

  “Maybe I would have made a quicker recovery if Jack had brought me dinner every night.”

  She had ignored that. “I still haven’t got back my appetite properly, have you?”

  “Appetite for what?”

  What did he mean by that? Did he mean anything? What did he know? Something was rankling with him, that much was certain.

  “We can have some fish in Nairobi,” she had said, determined not to be drawn. “Maybe that will help full recovery.”

  In fact, she was less fully recovered than she let on. She felt a bit sick in the plane and her hands still tingled where the rash had been, though she hadn’t told Jonas because she didn’t want anything to interfere with the trial.

  Jack had again parked the Comanche in his favorite part of the airport, among the private jets. Natalie noticed that there were one or two more than before. The prospect of independence, she presumed, was attracting all sorts of businessmen to Kenya. Jack, she, and the others were staying in the Rhodes, save for Eleanor, who was lodging with Maxwell Sandys.

  Her father was sipping his whiskey again but looking at her more closely. “You look pale, Tally, and a bit thin. Does that gorge really agree with you, or are you as worried about the trial as Eleanor Deacon said?”

  She looked around the bar. All the customers were white, the barman black. Race in Kenya, like race everywhere, was a complicated business. The newspapers in the hotel shop were full of racial news of one kind or another. South Africa was going its own brutal way, outside the Commonwealth, and in the Deep South of the United States the desegregation of the universities was provoking riots and sit-ins. Adolf Eichmann was appealing against his death sentence after his trial in Israel for the murder of so many Jews.

  “I am worried about the trial, yes, and it’s wonderf
ul of you to have come, the best news I could possibly have—Eleanor is right there. But the reason I am pale and a bit thin is that I’m just getting over a bout of tick typhus—”

  “Typhus? What—?”

  “Don’t worry!” And she told him about the lion they had killed and what had happened afterwards.

  “So you see, Dad, I’m over the worst and should be as good as new very soon.”

  She finished her drink. “How long do you plan to stay?”

  He shrugged. “My ticket is for ten days, and I can’t change it. I’d like to see the gorge, if I’m allowed and welcome. Otherwise, I’ll go to the coast.”

  “Of course you can come to the gorge.” She held up her empty glass. “Shall we have dinner? Eleanor played a trick on me. She said she’d arranged for me to have dinner with the prosecuting lawyer, when in fact she planned this surprise. I should have guessed something was up when Maxwell Sandys—the lawyer—looked nonplussed for a moment when I saw him this afternoon and mentioned dinner tonight. But I would never have guessed you would be here. Let’s not lose a moment, and go and eat. You must be famished.”

  He nodded. “Yes, but look, I’m here to offer moral support. We’ll have dinner now but after that I’ll take a backseat until the trial is over. You’ll be busy and you’ll be on edge. I’m here if you need me, but I realize I may not see much of you until the proceedings have been and gone. How long is the trial expected to last, by the way?”

  Natalie sipped her drink. The short rains had clinched it, the night before. Rain, for her, had always been associated with her father and she couldn’t let him down, she decided. He would expect her to give evidence and she had let her parents down in so many ways already. In the rain at Kihara, naked, she had thought back to that day, years ago, when she and her father had swum, virtually naked, on the beach at Chapel St. Leonard’s, when everyone else was hurrying off the sands because of the weather. A feeling of overwhelming fondness for her father had swept along Natalie’s warm, wet skin and she had known what she must do.