The Valley of the Fox

Fourteen

I took Alice’s car to Oxford to try and talk to George Benson the following afternoon — disguised in one of Arthur’s most distinguished Savile Row suits and with another £100 of Alice’s money in my pocket, in case I was delayed overnight. I had asked Alice to keep Clare inside the house meanwhile, under her eye all the time, with the doors locked and the alarms on, until I got back. She had offered me her small automatic again, but I told her to keep it on her herself now. And I left the swordstick behind as well. The police would be on the lookout for just such an object. Yet I felt I needed something in the way of a weapon. And then I had it, a possible answer: the little horn of Somali arrow-poison in the glass case, together with the flute-like blowpipe from New Guinea and the bamboo dart. This would form a useful threat: indeed, if the poison was still active, it could form a lethal combination which Benson, given his vast anthropological knowledge, would surely appreciate.

And certainly I might have to threaten him. If Laura, my own wife, had felt unable to tell me something murky from their African past, why should Benson, if he shared this knowledge, be any more willing? Indeed, with his professional eminence as a Professor of Anthropology at Oxford University and his latter reputation on television as an African pre-history Guru, he might be extremely unwilling indeed to disclose anything improper which had occurred on those fossil treks which he had organised for Willy. All the same, I knew I wouldn’t hesitate to force or frighten him into any useful admission, if he didn’t offer the same willingly. Laura — and Willy too — might have died as a result of something Benson could explain. Clare might have lost her mind in the same cause, and there was a half-burnt African still lurking somewhere in the middle of England. I wanted to know about him as well.

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.’

‘Well, let’s go back to the beginning then.’ I said. And I told George of Clare’s strange behaviour with the ceremonial masks. Then I went on: ‘You’ve seen these recent articles, obviously. About Willy’s fossil hunts: how there was something — something underhand about them.’

‘Yes.’ Benson looked up at me. He was smaller than I remembered: smaller and much more intense and in command now, as though he was on camera explaining something in one of his television series. ‘All nonsense,’ he said decisively. ‘The idea that we were involved in some kind of gun-running: sheer malicious invention.’

‘Yes.’ I agreed. ‘That oil company financed him. But what if we look at something else? At Willy’s “professional ruthlessness” for example, which all the articles mention. I never heard about that — not a hint, not even from Laura.’

‘Ruthless?’ George considered the idea dispassionately. ‘Yes. He was a bit. But then you see you have to be on expeditions of that sort, way out in the field, with a lot of other fossickers looking out for exactly the same sort of things. That’s not all surprising. Once Willy came home he was a different man: his real self. Anyway, I don’t suppose Laura knew much about his work out there. Different worlds, you know. She wasn’t …’ He paused, a low note in his voice, a touch of sadness. ‘She wasn’t in the same business after all,’ he added.

‘All right. But all these newspaper reports I’ve read, they all suggest that something strange, something violent, happened out there at some point: a raid, trouble of some sort, with some tribe way out in the wilds: bloodshed. Now come on, George: no smoke without a fire. What happened?’

George said calmly. ‘Nothing happened. Don’t you think the press have been onto me about just the same thing? They’ve turned over all the same imaginary stones, asked all the same questions. What sort of raid, for example? Who’s supposed to have raided who?’

‘You attacked someone? Or more likely they attacked you people.’

‘Listen,’ George said very sensibly, sitting on the edge of his desk and wiping his brow in the sticky afternoon heat. ‘If you knew anything about this fossil business, you’d understand: the local tribes, the very few of them left intact, well, yes, of course: some of them objected to our picking over their territory. But that’s natural. There was no real “trouble” though. Besides, you’ve got to remember, we had Kenyans with us, museum and government officials, guides, all the time. We had all the permissions, from the authorities in Nairobi —’

‘That’s just it,’ I interrupted. ‘The papers say you were out on your own, on several occasions, away from the main camp, you and Willy and Laura — and Annabelle.’

‘Well, yes, we were. And, as you say, more than once. We used to go in a Land-Rover, or the spotter plane, to look out for other likely fossil sites. No, you’ve got it all wrong, Peter. You don’t really think we went round the place as an armed gang beating up the locals? That’s complete nonsense. And you know it.’

‘All right,’ I agreed once more. ‘But if everything was so straightforward, why did the press start all this … this muckraking?’

‘That’s easy: through the jealousy of some of our professional rivals in the same line. But equally through the press’s need for a good story. And there was a good story in it, I’m bound to say: once Laura was dead and they found out you’d worked for British Intelligence, Peter.’

Benson looked at me sadly, doubtfully. ‘That may be the real problem, don’t you think?’ he went on. ‘I never knew that you had those connections. Don’t you think perhaps that’s why Laura may have been killed, because of something murky from your past, not ours? Shouldn’t we be talking about that, about you, and not about something that didn’t happen to us out in East Africa?’

‘Yes, I thought exactly like that to begin with, too: that it was my old department gunning for me. But now I’m not half so sure. There’s this African. And I don’t understand Clare’s African obsessions either, with those masks I told you about: low she absolutely lights up, seems to recover herself completely, when she’s playing with them as if she was nvolved in some secret ceremony.’

‘Yes, that is interesting,’ George admitted. And I could see he meant it. ‘But isn’t that just a reflection, some memory coming back, of her years out there? Remember, she was with Willy and Laura, with her parents all the time out there then, in the bush, in the desert. But how is she? Can you really look after her? Wherever you are?’

George was fishing. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I can look after —’ But that was all I said. I heard a sound behind me. Looking round, I saw the handle in the arched oak door turning slowly: someone was trying to open it.

‘Just a minute!’ George shouted across the room. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ Then he turned to me. ‘One of the cleaners probably.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s after five. The Museum’s closed now, you know. Don’t you — don’t you think we ought to be getting along?’

‘I don’t know, George,’ I said. ‘I’m still not happy — I’m not convinced. And I don’t think that’s a cleaner. It’s probably that African out there.’

George smiled reasonably. ‘Peter, you’re dreaming! Just like the press. It’s all fantasy: an African with a scar out to get you and Clare. Gun-running in the bush, tribal battles, midnight raids, these secret ceremonies with masks you say Clare’s involved in now. It’s all like some old Boys Own Paper yarn. Don’t you see?’ George shook his head. ‘It’s all something you’ve built up in your mind, Peter. You’ve been hidden away somewhere too long, alone too —’

But George suddenly stopped speaking. The handle of the door was turning again. He watched it with affronted surprise. And someone was pushing hard against it this time. I could see the lock straining against the jamb. And I felt a spasm of fear then, burning up my gut like a hurriedly swallowed mouthful of raw alcohol.

There was another movement, on the far side of the room beyond the desk. And when I turned I saw that George was already halfway out of the open window that led to the balcony. I ran towards him. But I was too late. He slammed the old sash window shut just as I got to it. And it wouldn’t open again, hard as I tried. George had pulled it down so firmly that it had stuck tight, and he was off now, down a fire-escape ladder. I could have broken the glass. But there were iron bars attached to the outside of the window. It was burglar-proof. The only way out for me now was through the door behind me.

Of course, it could have been a cleaner at the door. But I wasn’t going to risk that safe assumption. I got the little blowpipe out and fitted one of the darts. Then I turned the lock, pulled the door open suddenly and stood back quickly, the pipe at my mouth.

The doorway was empty, and so was the first-floor gallery beyond and the great hall beneath. The skeleton head and neck of the brontosaurus loomed up in front of me, its great snout spotlit in a shimmer of slanting, dusty light from the glass above. Perhaps it had just been a cleaner at the door after all. I knew I wouldn’t get out by the main entrance to the museum which would be closed by now. But there might be a lavatory window open, or some emergency exit I could force, at the rear of the building. So I turned and made off in that direction, moving quickly along the gallery.

Halfway round I heard the running footsteps — forceful, decisive, with nothing covert about them. The sounds were coming from somewhere behind the display cases on the far side of the gallery. But I couldn’t tell from which direction — whether the footsteps were approaching me or following me. There was a confusing echo now in the empty hall. I looked ahead, then back. There was nothing. I turned back towards Benson’s office, then hesitated. Then I moved forward again. The footsteps seemed to be coming from all sides of the hall now and I couldn’t move. I was rooted to the spot. But I was suddenly running, for I’d seen the man, the dark shape coming from behind a case and sprinting towards me past the lecture-room.

I ran down the back stairs from the gallery into the main hall just ahead of him. And now it was a matter of hide-and-seek around the exhibits in the great hall and beneath the vast skeletal shapes of prehistoric animals: hide-and-seek with violence at the end of it, I thought, for one or both of us. For when I saw the African, just for an instant at the bottom of the stairs, I saw the piece of cord in his hand, knotted cord with stones or leaded weights tied to each end, some kind of bolas. My only chance was to lie low, and hope to surprise the man in some way — with a crack over the head or with the blow pipe.

So I stayed where I was, hidden behind the brontosaurus skeleton, down on my haunches, where I could see through the bones of the animal over to the corner of the building. The African was there: I saw his legs beneath a display case, moving out slowly into the hall. Then he disappeared, going towards the main entrance, and I took the chance of going in the opposite direction, back into another part of the museum, the ethnological section, down some steps and into another smaller, darker hall.

Here the exhibits were more numerous and the display cases packed closely together, so that the cover was far better. On the other hand I couldn’t find any exit here among the Indian totem poles, South-Sea-island war canoes, and every other conceivable tribal relic and knick-knack. Indeed, when I got right to the back of the room, I found the only exit there securely locked. I was trapped. I would either have to stay where I was and try and hide, or make my way forward to the main hall again. In the event I didn’t have time to make the choice.

Not finding me in the front of the museum, the African must have doubled back, and the first I knew of his presence again was a sudden sliding sound, as if some big marbles were being thrown along the floor somewhere ahead of me in the gloom. I was down on my knees, looking along beneath the display cases. And I saw what the noise was: the bolas with its round stone weights was sliding to a halt only a few feet ahead of me. Was the African unarmed now, with this attempt to set a decoy, to tempt me from my cover?

A minute later I knew he wasn’t. Something — I couldn’t see it in the half-light — flew through the air towards me from my left with a quick swishing sound and smashed into the exhibition case immediately behind me, breaking the glass in great fragments all about my ears. Looking up, just a foot above my head, I saw the tufted throwing-spear, an assegai taken from the wall or some case ahead of me, embedded in the war feathers of an Indian headdress, the ebony-dark shaft still quivering. But I couldn’t see anybody. The African had moved away. And I ran myself then, looking upwards now. There were two galleries, one above the other, round this smaller hall, as well. But the stairway up to them must have been at the front, and I was at the back. There was no escape that way. Indeed, my pursuer could use one of the galleries, I realised, to look down and attack me from above. So I moved further back into the shadows, tiptoeing past a huge basketwork prayer-wheel, seeking cover.

There was complete silence. And so I hardly dared move. All the same, though I couldn’t be seen from overhead, I was clearly visible, dark on white, against a great snow-filled Eskimo display case where I was standing.

To one side and slightly ahead was a huge, multi-coloured Indian totem pole, rising thirty feet up into the roof of the hall. There was some cover there, I saw, at its base. I crouched down and inched towards it, finally tucking myself in to one side of the pole where I had a view once more along the floor beneath the display cases. I got the blow pipe out again and was just fitting a dart into it when the dark hand emerged from behind the pole quick as a snake’s head and the cord — an ordinary piece of thick string this time — circled my neck.

I struggled but it was little use: the cord knifed hard round my throat and the best I could do was to get my feet, sliding up the totem pole, while the African held me tight against it now, my head forced back against the wood.

‘The girl,’ the man behind me said, ‘where is she?’

I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t see his face. And the blowpipe had dropped to the floor. But I still had the second dart in my hand.

‘Where have you her? The child?’ The accent was more Arab than African, and the cord came tighter then. The searing pain was worse than the lack of breath, though soon there would be no breath and that would be worse still.

Using the bamboo dart as a dagger I struck out blindly behind me again and again, stabbing the empty air as the noose contracted, the man trying to restrain me while moving back from me at the same time. But at last the sharp point found a home. It struck the man’s clothing first — I could hear something rip. But then it went further on: I felt the dart sink into some part of his flesh, like a skewer into a leg of mutton.

The man shouted then, a scream of agony, and he pulled the cord again viciously so that I thought I was done for. But it was his last effort against me. The cord dropped away and when I turned the African was stumbling about on one leg, trying desperately to extract the dart which the barbs held firm, deep in his thigh. There was little I could do, I thought, except run. But I stood there instead — amazed: first by the fact that this was quite a different African, a younger, much lighter-skinned man without any scars on his face, and then when I saw how quickly he subsided, his struggles dying away in a minute or so as paralysis overcame him. His leg seized up first and soon he was slumped on the floor, unable to move at all. Finally he just lay there, stretched out full length beneath the totem pole. But the strange thing was that, though he was now quite immobile, and obviously couldn’t speak, the man looked completely fit. He was entirely conscious, his eyes watching me, perfectly clearly, as I moved about him — vicious, frustrated eyes, like those of a wild beast alive in a trap, still confronting its hunter. And I saw then that the old Somali poison still worked. And I wondered if this must have been exactly its intended effect: to paralyse its victim, rather than to kill.

I went quickly through the man’s pockets while he lay there inertly, with a frozen gaze of fury. He had a lot of money on him, including some Libyan money, and a London — Oxford train timetable. But there was nothing else to identify him. I left him where he was. The police would find him soon enough. Indeed I was surprised they hadn’t arrived at the Museum already, since George had escaped a good twenty minutes before and I thought he would surely have contacted them by now. But perhaps he hadn’t phoned them. Perhaps he wanted to protect me from them, or rather to protect himself from guilt by association with me. I escaped from the museum a few minutes later myself, when I finally found an exit through a door to the side of the museum’s main hall which led into a small library. And from here I was able to walk through another door, just opening the Yale lock into the street.

Then I was striding quickly off across the parks into the evening light. I was sure that George had more to offer. True, his initial explanations had been convincing enough in his office. But why had he run away? And what of the African? And now this Libyan? How on earth did he fit in? I wondered, if George hadn’t phoned the police, if I might find him at home now, since his house was only just across the park. Indeed its back garden, though hidden by a line of great chestnuts, gave directly out onto the park. I could come at it that way, use the cover in the big trees first, scout the land out before approaching the house.

I crossed the big park and went into the belt of trees at the back of Norham Gardens, where I soon found George’s house. I knew it was his since the detached Victorian rectory style of the building, with its fretted gable ends, tall chimneys and haphazardly placed windows made it easily recognisable out of the line of other slightly less eccentric redbrick mansions on the road. And I recognised the ugly new sliding aluminium-framed windows giving out onto the garden, which George had added, upsetting the whole mood of the place. Crouched in the bushes at the end of his garden, I watched their ground-floor flat.

The big window was partly open. But there was no human sign or sound from anywhere in the house. I moved very. carefully over the fence and then across the lawn. There was another flat in the basement, I knew, and one of the top floor. But there was no sound from these either.

I waited a few more minutes just outside the sliding aluminium window, then pushed it open and walked into the Bensons’ drawing-room. It was empty. The room faced south-west, so that the summer light flooded into it from over the trees, lighting up a shiny modern chesterfield against one wall and an appalling abstract painting above it. A big pot-pourri bowl lay on a table to one side of the sofa with a video machine on the other. There was a sickly, over-sweet scent in the warm air. I went out into the hall and then into all the other rooms. But the whole place was deserted.

Then I saw a half-open door leading down to the basement flat from the hall. I went over to it and listened, looking through the gap for a minute. There was no sound from beneath. I walked slowly down the stairs. The flat was empty, but in considerable disarray. It might have been a student’s pad, except there were no books or papers lying about. There was a half-finished tin of baked beans and a glass of milky tea on the dirty, sugar-encrusted kitchen table. In the bedroom clothes were scattered about everywhere, expensive clothes, lightweight summer suits, fine shirts. But there were old clothes as well: grubby garden wear, a donkey-jacket, a torn pullover, a dirty pork-pie hat, an old Army camouflage jacket lying on the unmade bed.

And then it came to me. The pork-pie hat and the camouflage jacket. The African in the valley had worn just such a jacket, and so had the man who’d killed Laura. And months before, in the early spring out on the land beyond our cottage, we’d seen someone running away, his face hidden, with just the same kind of jacket, and the same pork-pie hat. It all added up: the man who’d killed Laura, who’d pursued us through the valley, was the same man I’d just seen outside George Benson’s office at the museum. The only mystery now was why this African had obviously been living here all the time: in George Benson’s basement flat.

I went back upstairs. There was a small room just off the hall, a study where George Benson worked, obviously, for it was filled with the books of his trade, with a typewriter and papers covering most of a large table set against a window looking out on the street.

I knew I mightn’t have much time since, if George had phoned the police, he or they or both might turn up here at any moment. All the same, looking for some explanation of the African’s presence downstairs, I thought I might find a clue here. I sifted quickly through the papers on the table, and I was lucky. Halfway down, hidden beneath a copy of the National Geographic magazine with an article by George in it, I found a letter, with the Bensons’ own address die-stamped in red on top of it. It had been hurriedly scrawled, on a single side of the paper, with just the letter ‘A’ at the end. A letter without love or any other good wishes. It was from Annabelle, George’s wife. I skipped through it quickly.

… and I certainly can’t stay in the house any longer. The situation you have contrived here is quite impossible — and has been between us, in any case, for quite some time. Since you refuse to take any advice from me, or contact the police, you’ll have to sort matters out yourself. I don’t intend ‘betraying’ you now — though I should have done that long ago. It’s your life — and the decisions you made in it over the years, and with Willy in the past, are your decisions, and you must live with them and resolve them in your own way. But until you settle things up I can’t live with you.

The Kasters have gone on holiday. They’ve offered me their house and I’ll be out there for the time being. But please — until you have made some effective decisions — leave me alone.

A.

The Kasters? There was an Oxford directory by a telephone on the table. I looked them up. There was only one Kaster in the book — a Mr and Mrs David Kaster. They lived just outside Oxford: Sandpit Farm House, near Farmoor. Annabelle had left George because of the African, obviously, among other reasons: because of ‘decisions’ George had made over the years, decisions made with ‘Willy in the past’ … Africa loomed up for me again. Something had happened out there, with all of them. I was sure of that now. Something unpleasant, to say the least of it. But what was it? The answer, I thought, might lie somewhere out along the Eynsham road, in Sandpit Farm House.