I tested the little blowpipe upstairs in the morning before I went. At first I could make no progress with it. The darts simply fell on the floor at my feet. Then I found the technique: one had to compress a whole mouthful of air, with puffed cheeks, and then spit it all into the tube suddenly. This way, after a dozen experiments, I found I could hit the small window in the maid’s room, from the doorway on the other side, almost every time. I didn’t expect to use the pipe and I imagined the caked poison in the bottom of the horn was probably inactive now after sixty years in any case. All the same, if it was to be a real threat, or if I needed it in self-defence, I might as well avoid compromise: I stuck two of the darts deep into the inky substance in the goat’s horn, wrapped them carefully in a handkerchief and put them away, along with the blowpipe, into the inside pocket of Arthur’s smart business suit.
George Benson, I knew, had an office in the Natural History Museum off the Banbury road in Oxford, while he and Annabelle lived only half a mile away, in part of a large Victorian house they owned in Norham Gardens on the other side of the Parks from the museum buildings. Laura and I had once had dinner with them in their flat here. Filled with dreadful chrome furniture, the walls covered in monstrous abstract paintings, it had been an excessively clinical place, I remembered, with little evidence of natural man in it. But George, despite his vague academic airs, had always been something of a go-getter: anxious for every sort of advancement, ancient or modern.
I left the car by the park railings and walked back towards the museum. It was late afternoon, hot, early August, and I’d forgotten the awful swelter and crowds of a summer city. My head began to swim and I was sweating before I’d gone ten yards. The pavements and the grass square in front of the museum were filled with mindless tourists and continental students eating melting ice cream from some rogue vendor who had his van next the kerb; they let it fall in runny coloured blobs everywhere, like diseased spittle. I suddenly disliked people all over again.
But inside the great hall of the Pitt Rivers museum it was cooler; walking the old flagstones beneath the tracery of the graceful cast-iron arches overhead, it was much cooler. The gothic revival pillars that rose up past the first-floor balconies all round the hall were moulded at every curve and intersection in the shape of leaves and fruit, with animals’ heads and metal palm fronds, so that there was just the suspicion of moving along the floor of a pre-historic jungle as one walked beneath the towering skeleton casts of a brontosaurus or a sabre-toothed tiger.
Benson’s museum office, I discovered, was off the first-floor gallery, near the main lecture room. Indeed, as I’d seen from a notice by the main entrance, he was giving a lecture that very afternoon, part of some summer course: ‘The Hunter-Gatherers: Signs and Language in Man’s Pre-history.’ It had started at 3 o’clock. It was after 4.30 now. I waited for Benson, looking over a vast display-case of British Birds, some way down from the lecture room.
Five minutes later his audience streamed out and there was a crush of people, including a number of children, round the doorway, so that I couldn’t see George at first. Then I spotted him, the wedge-shaped face and the fan of unruly hair above — George, in his role of television star now, signing autographs for the children.
I hoped I could get him on his own. But as I waited not far from the doorway, I felt a sudden chill in the muggy heat and my spine tickled. As I had been on the look-out for George so, I saw now, a man in the crowd seemed to be watching me. Although this time he was dressed in a smart lightweight suit, he was readily identifiable; the scar on one side of his face gave him away at once. It was the tall African from the valley, seemingly quite recovered now from his ordeal by fire two weeks before.
He was some distance away, standing behind George, and trapped beyond his admirers, so that when George came towards me, breaking away from his fans, the African was left behind and I was able to collar George at once.
He recognised me immediately and for a second he tried fiercely to draw away from me, a reflex action of fear. But I had him by the arm and his fans were pressing in behind him.
‘Come quickly!’ I kept a firm grip on his coat. ‘I have to speak to you.’ The African was still there, behind the crowd, watching us.
‘What on earth’s up?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘Your office. Let’s go —’
‘It’s at the end of the gallery.’
I pulled George along with me, the African still caught in the crowd, but following us, I thought, as the audience dispersed. We got to George’s office and I nearly pushed him into the room before locking the door behind us. The place was empty, a high-ceilinged room, with tall arched Gothic windows, half-open, giving onto a balcony, with a view of the Parks beyond.
‘What’s the problem?’ George said calmly. ‘I certainly didn’t expect … well, after all this trouble.’
George was a deceptively mild-mannered man, I knew. Beneath the vague professorial air, the prematurely greying hair, there was a quick and decisive brain. And I could see he was thinking fast just then. But he did nothing. He just stood in the middle of the room, awkwardly rooted to the spot. There was no surprise or fear in his face, just in his stance. And it was here, in his bearing, like a badly carved statue, that I could sense his fright. And yet there was a vital interest in his eyes, I noticed, from the very beginning of our meeting: as well as the disguised alarm there was a professional interest fighting it, as though I was some dangerous, but equally rare, animal species which he wished to capture.
I took the key out of the lock and moved over to guard the telephone on the desk. ‘There’s a man out there,’ I said. ‘An African, with scars down one side of his face. That’s the most immediate problem. He’s been looking for Clare and me —’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s fine, in some ways. That’s what I wanted to talk about. But do you know that African?’
‘What African?’
‘A tall fellow out there with a scar. He was at your lecture. You must have noticed him.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ George said convincingly. ‘It was quite a large audience. But what are you doing? Where are you? What do you want?’ he went on in a concerned manner.
‘I want to know about Clare and about Willy and Laura, out in East Africa,’ I said. ‘Because what’s happened to all of us since then I think started out there; Willy’s death, Clare’s autism, Laura’s murder.’
‘But they say — everyone says — that you killed Laura?’
‘Of course I didn’t. You’d surely know that, George. I loved her.’
‘Yes. I had my doubts when I heard about it.’
‘Of course you did. I think it was that African out there who shot her. And I think he may have killed Willy, too, run him down in that hit-and-run accident. And he wants us now for some reason, Clare and me.’
Without identifying the place, I explained to George how the African had tracked us in the countryside. And he said. ‘I’ve really no idea who he is. I can’t think.’