The other side of his face was brutally disfigured. There were angry scars all down one side, the whole cheek risen unnaturally, the rolls of scar-tissue like a growth leading to a half-closed, leering eye and the wreckage of an ear. There was just a hole in the side of the man’s head. Here he had been hideously burnt, I thought, and the damage badly repaired. It was an unnerving vision: on one side the haunted, saint-like profile; on the other, a dark ogre from a nightmare.
I noticed Clare’s face then: she had seen the man properly for the first time. Instead of expressing any hope, as I had expected, at the successful outcome to this hunt, she was plainly terrified by what she saw, her eyes staring, frozen. She was shaking with fear. She wanted to run away there and then, and I had to hold her down.
The man on the other hand was calm to a degree. He just stood there, right by the side of the shed, without moving for a minute; a calm, camouflaged, black statue. He was only a few yards from the transistor. He was bound to make another step towards it, I thought. I prayed that he would. But he didn’t. He was too wary, too suspicious. He must have sensed something was wrong. He didn’t even move forward a pace, where he might have slipped into the man-trap from the side. Instead he glanced at the radio once more and then retreated the way he’d come, disappearing quickly, silently into the bushes.
Fifteen minutes later Clare and I were safely back in the tree-house. And how I wished Clare had had more speech in her. For of course, in the meantime I’d been thinking; I’d had to face the fact much more clearly: what was an African doing in the middle of England? Could he be one of Ross’s men? An African, certainly, I thought. But would Ross employ hit-men from such parts? Of course not.
At the same time as I wondered about this, another explanation for his presence emerged at the edges of my mind. Was this killer in some way connected with Willy Kindersley? — with his long fossil safaris in East Africa: a friend of his, or an enemy? I thought of Willy’s death, the hit-and-run accident in Nairobi: a coloured man had been seen driving the car. An African? This African? This thin man who had gone on to kill Laura, and who now, for some unfathomable reason, was pursuing his revenge with us, Clare and me? It seemed preposterous.
But then I remembered the long article that Alice had shown me a few weeks before from the Sunday paper, with its gossipy intimations of evil in Willy’s life, some violent unscrupulousness there, murky depths in his East African past. Could this be true? Was the African here evidence of this? I wished that Clare could have spoken more, from her memory of her life out there.
But she couldn’t: or wouldn’t.
‘Fire,’ was all she said, when I asked her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He must have been burnt. But did you ever see the man before? Did you know him? Or did Mummy? Did your father? Do you remember?’ But there was no coherent reply, except the repetition now and then of the word ‘fire’, and a look on her face when she said it of confusion and fear. And this surprised me, for Clare, more and more in touch with life now, had become so fearless recently. But here was a memory, I felt, evoked again by this man’s burnt face, that brought back an old trauma in her, a fever from her past which affected her now as it had then by closing her up like a clam. And so I wondered again if this African had anything to do with Ross at all — Ross who remained the one person I really had to fear. The African, I thought, must have had some business simply with the Kindersley family, with events that I knew nothing of that had occurred among them all out in East Africa years before.
And if this was so there was a further unpleasant corollary: one person at least would have known about any such unhappy events — Laura, who had never even hinted at them to me. Why not? Because, as the newspaper article had hinted, everyone had covered their tracks, including Laura? And perhaps Clare was now the only silent witness to whatever had happened in the past — along with the African stalking the valley somewhere beneath us. But wait, I thought — there were two others who had been with Willy in those African years: the Bensons. Of course, George and Annabelle Benson, old friends and colleagues of Willy’s, whom I’d seen only three months before at the cottage. The Bensons. They might well know something of all this. But they were in Oxford. And in any case, if Laura had felt the need to cover up on this, the Bensons would surely feel the same urge. But why? What had happened, if anything, in Africa then? Or was it all a ridiculous theory of mine? And was there some perfectly sensible reason for this burnt man lurking somewhere in the woods beneath us? And was Clare’s fear, for example, simply that of any child faced with such disfigurement, seeing a nightmare in the scarred face?
I spent most of the rest of the morning wondering about this uneasily, searching through my past with Laura for any incident that might explain this man’s presence in the valley. But soon other events took over that day, wiping out for the time being any further thoughts.
I had dozed off later that afternoon, tired out in the heat that had come back, when Clare had woken me, shaking me, agitated. She pointed back down towards the south end of the lake.
‘People!’ she said urgently. ‘Come. Now people are. People are!’
Her sentences were incomplete and her voice was a high and unreal falsetto, as it often was now. This was another means she cultivated of avoiding the reality of herself: she spoke as a deaf person might, not hearing herself, so the better to avoid any responsibility for what she said. But I was surprised she spoke at all, given her fears that morning.
‘People? Where?’ I said. ‘The dark man?’
‘No. No. Look. Come!’
I got the arrows and recurve bow out again and followed her silently along the aerial walkways, through the trees down to the big beech at the bottom of the lake. Until at last, twenty feet up, we were able to look down through gaps in the leaves to the ground below where the stream left the lake at its southern end near the road.
A group of campers had somehow broken into the estate through the fence, and had set up rough tents in the glade beneath us. We could only see half a dozen or so of them at that point, leather-jacketed youths and their girls, with several great motorcycles just visible to one side. But from the shouts and squeals coming from outside this space it was obvious that there were a dozen or more in the party altogether.
It was equally clear that they were no ordinary campers, but a trespassing band of Hell’s Angels in their dark tasselled jackets covered with Nazi insignia. There seemed to be two rival groups of them, a second out of sight across the stream, for the youths that we could see beneath us, finishing cans of beer, would throw the empty missiles at their invisible neighbours, shouting threats and imprecations at them.
We watched their antics in silence for some time, looking down through the deep well of leaves, before Clare, sitting on the branch next me, lifted her arms and mimed an arrow shot at them. I shook my head. That was the last thing we wanted — that they should have any notion of our presence. And it was too late in the day, and too risky, to move anywhere on the ground of the valley now. We would simply stay put, on high, and ignore them. They would probably move on tomorrow.
I whispered and gestured, explaining these prohibitions to Clare, and saw the look of disappointment, even anger, cloud her face. For her, I sensed, these strangers were much more than unwelcome trespassers. They were rivals, an inferior species contesting space, and thus natural enemies. They were savages in her child’s adventure-book mind, silently arrived from beyond the coral reef and camping now outside our desert-island stockade: a deadly threat to her territory, to her security, to this whole new way of life I had given her, which had released her from a clouded, nightmare anonymity.