A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (12 page)

15

CLAIRE

Every time Claire visited her family’s farm it filled her with nostalgia
and a sense of loss.

She had
believed that after her father’s fatal heart attack five years ago, her mother would sell the farm and move somewhere more appropriate for a lady of advancing years. But Natalie Holland was made of stern substance and was adamant that she would stay in her home until it was her turn to ‘go underground’. She had hired the necessary additional labour and soldiered on.

W
hile on the outside Natalie presented a cheerful face to the world, Claire was aware of how deeply her husband’s death had affected her. Their marriage had sometimes resembled a comedy double act, with Frank playing the straight guy to Natalie’s hippy butterfly. Like all couples, they had rowed, but the disagreements had never lasted long. They were too committed to each other and shared too much love for that.

Claire knew her mother would have liked
more grandchildren, but her daughters’ marriage choices and other happenings had denied her the consolations of an extended family. Consequently, Natalie Holland focused her considerable affections on Katie.

Claire looked around the dining table in the Holland’s large farmhouse kitchen.
It was, as always, piled high with more food than could be eaten at a single sitting. Katie and her grandmother were in deep conversation about university matters. The lunch was a delayed celebration to commemorate the end of Katy’s exams. School was over. Adulthood beckoned. The nest would soon be empty.

Anna was chatting to David about some manuscript she was reading.
Anna’s husband Max had not turned up, detained by some unavoidable business matter. Claire doubted that was the real explanation, but the subject of her sister’s marriage was no longer something to be discussed over a meal, or indeed anywhere. Anna refused to talk about it.

A
gap had opened up between the sisters recently that was only in part to do with Anna’s domestic situation. Claire suspected the rest was to do with her and Jack – that seeing him had in some way changed all her relationships. None of them knew about Jack, of course, but
she
did.

A subtle alchemy had begun to erect a barrier between her and her loved ones, and was inexorably altering the way they saw each other, like a slow onset of blindness.

It brought to Claire’s mind the anecdote about the frog in the saucepan of water. Bit by bit the water heats and the frog doesn’t move until it is too late and it is boiled to death.

It was the m
inute changes that cumulated and destroyed. The little things you didn’t notice until the day you woke up and everything was strange – even yourself.

If only she were stronger…
but she was not.

Claire sat eating
robotically. She felt isolated. Around her on the walls were framed photographs of what seemed like a distant past. Her father was dead. One of her bulwarks against mortality had been removed. What would her father have thought of the woman she was today? She felt vulnerable and alien. Above all, she felt ashamed.

“Are you all right, Claire?” It was David’s voice.

Four anxious faces turned towards her and she blushed.

“Mum?” said Kat
ie. “You look a bit odd.”

“I’m – um – feeling
a bit dizzy. I think I need some fresh air.”

“Well, luckily we have plenty of that here, dear,” said her mother.

“I’ll take her outside,” announced David, rising from his chair.

Claire
held David’s arm and they walked out into the yard where one of the farm workers was bent over a piece of machinery.

“Working on a Sunday?” asked David.

The man wiped the sweat from his face with a crumpled handkerchief. “It’s either that or go with the missus to church,” he replied. “This is the lesser of the two evils.”

Claire tried a smile.

They rounded the corner of the buildings and leaned against a wooden fence. The landscape looked peaceful. A lazy tractor moved across a distant hillside, and the white smoke of a bonfire rose upwards. Two ramblers disappeared into a wood, their laughter floating in the still air. High above their heads the vapour trails of aircraft cut gashes in the blue sky.

Claire took a few deep breaths and squeezed her husband’s arm.

“Is that better?”

“Yes. Sorry. I was just a bit light-headed.”

“It’s OK. I’m quite glad to get away from the food for a few minutes.”

“And from Anna’s talking about books, eh?” She nudged him with an elbow.

“I quite enjoy talking about books.” There was a slight edge to his voice. He turned his face away from her to gaze across the fields.

“Maybe you married the wrong sister.”

“I don’t think so,” he muttered.

“I’m just kidding. No need to be so grumpy.” She could hear her own forced cheerfulness.

“I’m over-full with Yorkshire pudding and meat. Your mother put half a cow on my plate.”

He seemed
at once wistful and self-absorbed, quite different from how he appeared while talking to Anna only a few minutes earlier.

“Sorry, if I’ve been on edge lately,” he said. “I feel a bit burned-out, work-wise. But our holiday in Bali will fix that, I’m sure.”
He took a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and lit one. “Just the one, OK?”

“OK.”

I need to cancel the trip to London. I’m hurting this man. He doesn’t know it, but I am.

But even as the
idea formed, she knew she wouldn’t.

She couldn’t.

She hugged David and kissed his cheek.

Life is always telling lies
to us
.

Katie appeared and threw her arms around them both. “You feeling better now,
Mum? Gran is worried she might have poisoned you.”

“I’m fine, sweetheart.”

“Gran also thinks you should buy me a car for university.”

“In your dreams,” said David Braddock.
“In. Your. Dreams.”

16

JAMES

Jim Fosse slid back the glass door of his room and stepped out onto the veranda. He was wearing nothing but his underpants, but he was not concerned about being seen.

The sky was just beginning to lighten and the dawn chorus was in fine voice. From his vantage point he could see miles and miles of tropical greenery, punctuated by the occasional corrugated
iron roof.  Morning mist floated between the trees.

He was glad to have escaped from Manila for a
couple of nights. When his business associate had offered him the use of his palatial house on the hillside, Jim had not needed to be asked twice. The American appreciated the finer things in life, and Lopez had an impressive wine cellar he had put at Jim’s disposal, along with the expensive escort still sleeping in the bedroom behind him.

Maybe my next wife will be Asian.
I think I’m ready for a change.

He replayed in his head the tasks that needed to be achieved over the next few months, mind-mapping the
intertwining branches of possibility and contingency to check whether he had overlooked anything.

“I need to buy a new black tie,” he said to nobody in particular.

The girl on the bed stirred.

But not today
.

He
slapped at an insect on his arm and went back inside.

17

DAVID

Dotted along Monkey Forest Road in Ubud, Bali, are Internet cafés. They are frequented for the most part by backpackers trying to organise transport or accommodation. Sometimes these low-budget tourists are there to check in with the folks back home to give reassurance that they have not been kidnapped  and are not out of their head on drugs or
arak
. Money, or the lack of it, usually features in this category of emails and messages. All around the world some parent somewhere is sighing at the fecklessness of their offspring.

Claire and I collected Katie from
Funky Monkey Internet. It was her favourite hangout that served fruit shakes ‘to die for, and so cheap’, as my daughter informed me.

“Come on, pumpkin, time to go,” I said.

She settled up with the pretty Balinese girl at the desk.

“Anyway,
Dad, good news,” she announced as we started walking up the road.

“Good. I could do with some of that.”

“I’ve just had an email from a Nigerian prince who wants to share two million dollars with me. I only have to send him my bank account details. It looks like you won’t have to buy me a car.”

“Are there people so stupid as to fall for these scams?” said Claire.

“Wherever there is a credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill,” Katie replied. “Anyway, there was a great scam our business studies teacher told us about.

“Imagine you receive an email from an unknown person representing a financial advisory company that specialises in currency movements. He doesn’t ask you to invest anything he just gives you their company’s prediction that, say, the dollar will strengthen against the pound by the end of the month. Are you with me so far?”

“Yes. But is this going to be a complicated story?”

Katie sighed. “Just pay attention,
Dad, OK? Anyway, it gets to the end of the month and you see the dollar did indeed strengthen against the pound – in fact, you get another email pointing it out, and telling you that, say, by the end of the next month the dollar will weaken against the pound.

“This goes on
in total for three months and each time the prediction is right. Then you get an invitation to invest in that month’s movement – but they don’t tell you in advance this time which way the exchange rate will move.  If you saw they had a
pukka
website, and based on their track record, you might be tempted, right?”

“If they’d got
all three months’ predictions correct, I guess you might be,” responded Claire. “But only if they got them
all
right.”

“Well, at that point you could kiss goodbye to all the money you invested with them. And by the way, they didn’t get
any
predictions right, for the simple reason that they didn’t make any.”

“I thought you said –”

“No, wait. Here’s the beauty of it. A few months before, a group of scammers set up a good-looking website for a bogus investment company. Then they searched the Internet – using sophisticated software – to find the email addresses of a half a million possible investors.

“To half of these they sent the email predicting the dollar would strengthen and to the other half they sent an email predicting it would weaken. It’s a fifty-fifty bet, right?

“The next month, they only email the people they had told the dollar would strengthen – since with the others they will have no credibility. That’s a quarter of a million people. They divide these into two again and tell half the dollar will strengthen and half it will weaken.

“They repeat this process
once more in the next month, and by that stage the ‘lucky’ ones have received three correct predictions. They now number one hundred and twenty-five thousand.

“If the scammers can only get
five per cent
of those people to invest twenty thousand dollars, that’s over a one hundred and twenty thousand dollar profit, give or take. For no outlay. Then they vanish. Portfolio theory for the criminal mind.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“And do you know what makes it work? It’s that you
assume
you’re looking at a prediction. It’s never going to occur to you that the same person would also make exactly the opposite prediction too. Or that he’s not even making a prediction at all. Your brain tells you – like in the
Highlander
films – ‘There can be only one’. And even though we
know
it’s a random mailshot, we still think it’s aimed uniquely at us.”

I scratched my head.
“Shouldn’t you be, like, interested in boys by now, Katie? Or girls, I don’t mind. Why aren’t you out getting drunk like normal people of your age?”

Katie sighed
again. “I’m going to be a lawyer, Dad.  Lawyers are not normal. That’s why they make so much money. If I was a high-functioning sociopath, I could be a millionaire by the time I hit thirty. But, hey ho. You have to play with the cards you’re dealt. I’m not responsible for my genetics.”

We arrived at the Royal Palace and took our seats for the
Ramayana Ballet. We sat together under the stars while the gamelan orchestra played, and the brightly-costumed dancers reminded us there was yet grace and beauty in the world.

Bali has always cast a spell on me.

In spite of the
melancholy about Claire that sucked at my insides, the island exerted a healing effect on me. Not for nothing does the word ‘Ubud’ come from the old Balinese term for medicine. At home, pretending that everything was as before came hard. I had had the odd outburst of temper, which was so unusual for me, that it resulted in shocked looks from those around me. I always cited work stress, and even my father declared I needed a vacation
. That
was a first.

An informed and impartial observer might have questioned why I did not
just raise the issue with my wife, get it into the open to stop the wound from festering. The more cynical members of humanity would applaud my silence. They would whisper that knowledge was power and that by keeping quiet I was preserving my alternative courses of action without alerting anyone beforehand. But what alternative courses of action? It wasn’t as though I was going to kill my wife, was it? It’s not like I was Jim Fosse.

And even Jim Fosse wasn’t
really
going to kill his wife. That was just his strange idea of humour.

The unvarnished truth was that, despite my earlier reflections on the subject, I was reluctant to let a dream die
. I clung to the hope that the private detective would furnish me with a rational explanation for Claire’s behaviour. One that did not involve disloyalty.

So for the duration of our time on Bali, I sought to keep these thoughts at a distance, and instead to reflect in the quiet moments on who had made the anonymous phone calls and sent me the toxic letter.

The most likely candidate was Mark Standish. Embittered by his failure at our company and with a collapsed marriage, he fitted the profile of someone who would be tempted into malice.

Then again, perhaps it wasn’t the case that I had an enemy
. It could be someone bent on stirring up trouble for Claire. Like Jack’s wife, Eleanor, for instance.

I knew Eleanor slightly. Although I had put her into the ‘god
botherer’ box, she struck me as a cold woman who might well be given to spiteful actions if provoked.

But could a voice synthesiser disguise a woman’s voice to sound like a man’s? Maybe
, although I was sure my mysterious caller was a man. Did Eleanor have a brother who might do the dirty work for her? I knew she didn’t have a son, only a daughter, Ruth, who was about Katie’s age.

Also
, the lack of contact in recent weeks was puzzling. The unknown caller had just stopped, and no more letters had arrived.

Maybe like the scammers in Katie’s story, the poison pen had moved on to his next mark.

Since we’d already visited Bali several times before, we felt no need to rush around doing touristy things
. So aside from a trip to the waters at Danau Bratan in the great volcanic crater to the north, and a tramp through some lime green rice terraces outside Ubud, we spent our time pottering around. We watched the ladies in their traditional dress, making offerings to the gods by the roadside, swam in the hotel swimming pool, and enjoyed the various organic dishes served at our favourite restaurants.

Every day I went to the same spa for a massage with
Wayan, the gentle, pretty and inexplicably-unmarried Balinese woman whom we’d befriended many years before.

“If anything ever happens to me,” said Claire, after
Wayan had given her a pedicure and manicure, “you have my permission to let Wayan take care of you. She is just the type of woman you’d need.”

“
Don’t you ever say that sort of thing in front of Wayan,” I chided. “It will embarrass her. Anyway,” I added, “Nothing is going to happen to you. We’re going to grow old and crabby together.”

Claire put her arms around me.
“You just don’t know. I’ve never thought I’ll make old bones. And if you do take up with Wayan, I promise I won’t haunt you.”

“How about if I take up with a
young Thai woman instead?”

“Then I
will
haunt you.”

“Racist.”

Towards the end of the holiday, Katie found me alone in the hotel gardens. I was puffing on a Marlboro and reading a paperback.

“What’s the book, Dad?”

“It’s called
The Kommandant’s Mistress
. Auntie Anna recommended it to me.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a novel about how a Jewish girl was enslaved and made into a sex toy of the Kommandant of one of the Nazi death camps during World War Two.”

“And you read this for fun?”

Katie sat down beside me. “I have weird parents,” she said, “and on that basis, a weird aunt too. I hope it’s not going to affect my legal career.”

“Oh, shut up, you.” I put my arm around her and tickled her ribs
.

After a pause, she said, “You seem much happier than you
’ve been recently.”

“I’m always happy when I’m in Bali,” I replied
, in a non-committal fashion.

“I was a bit worried. I’ve
detected some tension between you and Mum.”

“That’s just teenage over-sensitivity. Your mum and I are fine.
We’re always fine.” I put down my cigarette so I could hug her. “We’re in this for the long term, sweetheart. We’ll be together until the Grim Reaper comes calling. And even then, I’ll make a fight of it. I promise.”

“OK,” she said, reassured. “I’ll let you get back to your
romance.”

“You’re a little smart-arse, do you know that
, Katie Braddock? You’ll no doubt make a fine lawyer. And for your information,” I said, waving the book, “this is
literature
.”