‘Isn’t it basically rejection though?’ Alice said quickly, as if the words would dissolve in her throat otherwise. ‘By the parents. By the mother. At some early stage?’
I still had no idea what Alice was pursuing at this point. ‘With Clare,’ I said, ‘I always thought it was leaving East Africa. But the medicos and child specialists said not. I don’t think I ever believed them.’
‘Was Laura a cold person?’ Alice asked decisively, as if she’d at last made her mind up on something.
I looked at her, surprised. ‘No. Of course not. Not with me. Least of all with Clare,’ I added equally decisively.
And yet, after I’d said this, I remembered Laura’s initial effect on me, when I’d first seen her in the church in Lisbon and met her afterwards at the sardine barbecue on the windy hilclass="underline" her apparent hauteur then, the distance she kept from people — like an insensitive Tory divorcee from the shires, I’d even thought. Yes, she could give, she had given a distinctly cold impression then. But I’d seen this frigidity as so obviously the result of Clare’s tragedy and her husband’s subsequent death.
It was these blows that had distanced her and nothing else. There was nothing basic in her character which would ever have made her reject Clare. Besides, I remembered the efforts she had afterwards made on Clare’s behalf, the endless care and attention … I told Alice this and she said simply, ‘People make up for things, don’t they?’
‘Laura never had to make up for anything. That’s nonsense.’
But again, I remembered how Laura had sometimes allowed Clare to do exactly what she wanted: how, in Cascais once, she let her drive a nail through her palm, telling me afterwards that it was the only thing to do sometimes with such children. I didn’t tell Alice, though.
Instead I said ‘But why do you ask about all this?’
‘You have a great tie with Laura still, don’t you?’
‘Of course. We were very happy. I’ve told you. It really worked for both of us, I think.’
‘It didn’t work with her first husband then? With Willy, the famous bone man you told me about. It didn’t work with him?’ she asked rhetorically.
‘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.