Rupert picked up his clothes and left the room. For what seemed like hours he lay staring through the window at the black and troubled sky. He imagined he heard voices, but whether in reality or in a dream he did not know. He remembered waking to see a sliver of light appearing in the clouds, and hearing the buzz of a mosquito, reminding him that he had not lowered his net.
Richard swept up in his jeep while they were having breakfast on the veranda. He seemed pleased to see Rupert, who was at first relieved that his erstwhile affair with Catherine seemed to have remained undiscovered.
‘So has Catherine been looking after you?’
‘Very well.’
‘As only she can.’ He poured himself a coffee, as if giving Rupert time to dwell on what he had said. ‘These attacks – it’s a bloody puzzle. Till now there’s been no pattern. I mean, all the victims were mutilated, sure, but there was no common motive. The first could have been theft, the next sexual, but last night’s…’
‘Last night’s?’
‘Next village. Just come from there, actually. Hut entered, youth disfigured, for no reason. A sighting of sorts, but in that downpour no-one was sure what they saw. Anyway, let’s take a look at the railway shed. You coming, Catherine?
‘What do you think?’ she replied facetiously.
The railway shed turned out to be a substantial brick building beside a single length of track. Richard explained that it had once been a store, which accounted for the bars at each of the windows. The doors could be closed by a stout pole between the handles. It was this simple device that had allowed the villagers to imprison whatever they had believed to be inside. But it had proved insufficient, as the small knot of disgruntled figures standing outside the now open doors testified.
Inside the shed one of the men Rupert had seen the night before pointed to a skylight high above, its broken glass jagged and sparkling in the bright morning sunlight. There were drops of blood, still fresh, on the pile of boxes and abandoned furniture that seemed to have had aided the creature’s ascent. Richard was relieved. ‘That can only be a baboon,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to look elsewhere for our assailant.’
On the pretext of retrieving his hat Rupert re-entered the shed and studied the route of escape. The more he looked the more convinced he became that the items in the pile had been placed deliberately to aid the creature’s flight. No baboon could have managed that. Nor for that matter, could a chimpanzee, even if there had been any around. That left only one other possibility. He climbed up the first few feet. Then he saw it, a tiny fragment like a piece of sackcloth adhering to a wooden beam. But, coming closer, he saw it was a mass of dense hair matted with congealed blood. Carefully he prised it from the protruding nail. Jumping down, he wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
And with the raw blow of the sun against his eyes he was gripped by a feeling of desperation. Ask them again, he implored Richard, what they saw. No, Bwana, it was not an animal they had seen before. Then was it a man? But this was a superfluous question, because Rupert the zoologist knew that no ordinary man could have accomplished such an ascent.
As they bumped back along the track to the house Rupert said nothing, realising the magnitude of the lost opportunity.
‘Could it really be,’ he asked Catherine when Richard had left the room, ‘that there is a creature out there in the forest still unknown to science?’ Then he grew angry. ‘Why did you make me stay?’
‘Your choice,’ she said, ‘not mine.’
‘But why?’
‘It gave me satisfaction. That’s why.’
‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’
‘Frankly, Rupert, I do not care.’
They were the words that had dismissed him all those years before.
Richard drove him to the station where the liberated train stood waiting. He looked around for Jackson, but he was not there.
‘On the train… someone lent me a bible,’ Rupert said. ‘I have it here,’
‘Hair the colour of the book?’
‘Jackson, yes.’
‘Our local boy made good. Give it here, I’ll return it to him.’ He paused. ‘On second thoughts I’ll give it to Catherine. She’s something of an admirer of his. He’s often at the house, you know.’
‘She said she knew him.’
‘Yes.’
As far as he could recall it was the first time Rupert felt pity for Catherine’s long suffering husband.
Two days later, under a cloudless sky, the same little train steamed back from the lake. As it sped through the township Rupert recognised the railway shed and the platform, now deserted, and the piles of logs from the tree that had blocked the line. He looked for the gap in the forest edge where Jackson had taken him but saw only an impenetrable green wall. He checked in his bag for the fragment of skin in its bottle of fixative, thought once about Catherine and in a terrible mood of despondency searched for a pen with which to finish the report to his sponsors in London.
The squeal of car brakes on Cromwell Road jolted him back to the present. He rose from the bench and looked for one last time at the building that had been his temple, trying in vain to fight off whatever it was forcing him not to go back. In a dream he wandered towards the subway leading to the underground.
A party of Japanese tourists – probably ones he had passed on the stairs of the museum – looked down upon him from the pavement above. He could feel their eyes following him down the steps into the tunnel which once, with the naivety of youth, he’d likened to a sewer carrying human effluent. Yet, over the years, he’d come to relish its shrill echoes because the unintelligible snatches of human voice reminded him of the forlorn cries of the animals that were the subject of his trade.
It is curious how the memory plays tricks, drawing upon past experiences and playing them back in distorted but recognisable forms. As he walked through the tunnel those piercing utterances diminished until all that remained were barely audible threads of sound, then… nothing. He stopped still, fearful of the silence. He looked down, half expecting to see at his feet the decaying vegetation of the forest floor. And with that came the recollection that told him what he must do.
He continued to walk slowly to the point where the tunnel turned abruptly towards the station. Then, supposing himself out of sight, he broke into a run. When he paused again, breathless, the hubbub within the concourse of the station was as it had always been. ‘You are getting old, ex-curator Rupert,’ he said to himself between gasps, ‘to believe such nonsense.’
Yet he had not escaped. He stood on the platform where the carriage doors would open, knowing that their closing would mark both the end and a new beginning. But until that moment came the platform edge was as finite as the bars of a cage. His fingers closed over the vial in his pocket.
The voice at his elbow was not unexpected, nor even unwelcome.
‘Dr Murchison, I believe you have something that belongs to me.’
The hair was white now, but the face was little changed. The benevolence was still there, the quiet assurance as forceful. Against his will Rupert was withdrawing his closed fist, knowing what the loss would mean.
‘Reverend Jackson.’
‘Indeed. How could you forget? Dr Murchison, I once thought you a fortunate man, but you did not grasp the opportunity that was offered. As a result I was – how shall I put it? – condemned, for my cross – if you will forgive the euphemism – I have continued to bear. But that is my problem, not yours. Before we finally part I want to show you this. It should at least lay some doubts to rest.’
In one swift decisive movement he pulled up his sleeve almost to the elbow, and Rupert saw there on his forearm the pallor against the blackness of the skin that was the scar.