Later I was also accused of manslaughter — the African in the old laundry; of causing grievous bodily harm to a Libyan in the Oxford Natural History Museum and of killing a youth with a stolen bow and aluminium arrow …
Ross must be pleased. I’m not likely to betray his department with my ‘memoirs’ now. Or not yet, at least. No: I’ve written all this instead. This will be my defence. My lawyer thinks that with any luck, when all the contrary evidence comes to light, I’m likely to be cleared of all or most of the charges. With any luck? I don’t believe much in that now.
On the other hand I’ve had so much luck already. In meeting Laura and Alice, in loving them. And I don’t doubt it now, as I did when I was first living up in the trees like a savage in the hidden valley, that quality, not duration, is the significant thing in love. Or do I believe this now simply because I have to? The women dead, myself incarcerated in a prison cell. A gloomy thought. There is the bright side, however. I’m bound to be freed sooner or later, proved as innocent as Alice was: and Laura, all of us victims of a vicious, mendacious world.
But then comes the awful doubt: will I ever be released by such a world? In prison one’s thoughts swing wildly between extremes of hope and fear. Only one thing is certain. Clare, I’ve heard, is alive and well, living again by the long Atlantic rollers with her grandparents in Cascais. She has certainly escaped all the lies and every other mean human scheme, escaped back into her own wild landscapes. And I can see her now, as she was when she rushed up to the top of the cork tree that evening in the overblown summer garden by the sea — when she perched in the topmost branches there, against the blue Atlantic sky, gazing like a look-out towards another world — a girl in the crow’s nest of a ship, blonde hair running in the wind, absorbed in some secret voyage.
She’s free. She’s going somewhere. I’m certain of that, at least.
By Joseph Hone in Faber Finds
The Private Sector
The Sixth Directorate
The Flowers of the Forest
The Valley of the Fox
The Paris Trap