Or she can go alone. Pleading sickness, giving sickness as her excuse, she can apply for an exit visa, and see what happens; see if anyone cares enough to try to stop her. If she has the knowledge, she should bear the consequences of it; but the world does not work like that. Consequences are random here, no more discriminating than a burst of automatic fire; and yet they cut down the future. Consequences are what you get, not what you deserve.
And now the plane is taxiing down the runway. She enters into Mr. Smith’s feelings; he is happy and relieved. “The passengers fasten their seat belts. Their journey will last five hours.”
She heard Andrew’s key in the door. Something was wrong; he never came home so early.
She threw the book aside and went to meet him. He stood in the doorway as Fairfax had done, a few hours earlier; his face was gray. “Fairfax,” he said. “Dead. There’s been an accident.”
Hours passed. She made them some food: “Because,” she said, “we must eat something.” She was not sure which meal of the day it was supposed to be. It was almost dark; soon, perhaps, they would be calling evening prayers. Their mouths were dry; they pushed the food around their plates. Their eyes met, and she gathered the dishes toward her, and took them away into the kitchen without a word.
“What was he saying?” she asked: out loud for the third time. The conversation had a dazed, hypnotized quality, as if they were compelled to repeat the same formula again and again until it lost all meaning. “What was he trying to say?” She looked up. “Andrew, is there anything you are keeping from me?”
He shook his head slowly. He did not ask her the same question. He had not told her about the telephone message.
“Because you mustn’t have any idea that you can spare me.”
“I can’t spare you, Fran, or I would have spared you this.”
“Tell me everything again. Tell me where it happened.”
“It was on the ring road. It was between the Petrola plant and the airport. You must know it, you must remember, where you see the petrol storage tanks … the road crosses the wadi. There’s an embankment, and it falls away ten or fifteen feet. The body was down there on the sand. The car had plowed through the fence. It’s only chicken wire. People have made holes in it, anyway, cutting through to get on to the freeway, trying to save a bit of time. It’s a shocking stretch of road. Everybody says so. There’s no center divide. There aren’t any lights …”
“But he didn’t go at night, did he? Last night he was here, with us. What time was the body found?”
“I don’t know, Fran. Nobody can get the story straight. I’m only telling you what the police told Eric Parsons, and God knows that was little enough. They reckon the car came off the road at speed, he was thrown out, his skull was fractured … I don’t know. If there was another car involved they aren’t prepared to say. It was just after one o’clock that Eric got a call.”
“So they’re saying it happened sometime during the morning, in broad daylight? He lay there on the sand ten feet down from the road and died of a fractured skull and nobody helped him and nobody stopped?”
“They won’t. They won’t stop. You know that.”
“He must have been making for the airport. Mustn’t he?”
“Eric wants to know why. He was supposed to be here for another three days.”
“So what did you tell Eric? Did you tell him about last night?”
Andrew shook his head. “How could I? I can’t make sense of what happened last night.”
“I don’t know if it makes any better sense to you now. I mean I don’t know whether … I’m not sure how to say this … whether you think that there is any chance at all that it wasn’t an accident?”
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Frances said, “No one saw him. We don’t know what time he left here. I said that he was here with us last night, but he could have gone before dawn, for all we know. We don’t know if he made it back to his hotel, do we? Someone could have stopped him as he left here, before he got around the corner.”
“Someone …” Andrew said. “The elusive someone. Who are these people?”
People who lurk on the street corner with a rifle. People who walk overhead, who go up and down, veiled, armed. People who lay claim to packing cases. Who knows what people? Who presumes to inquire? It’s their country, isn’t it?
“They could have killed him,” she said, “and dumped him from one car and run his own car off the road. It could have happened at any time. Think about it. No one saw him or heard from him after we went back to bed at four o’clock this morning.”
Andrew looked up at her, cornered, in pain. “Actually they did. I mean, it can’t be what you say, because he rang in to the office.”
“When? What time?”
“Sometime during the morning. Early, I think.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing really. It’s not what he said. It’s just the fact that he rang.”
“Who took the message? Can’t you find out what he said?”
“Not really. It was very garbled.”
“Who did he speak to?”
“Just the tea boy.”
Frances telephoned the Sarabia Hotel. It was the same desk clerk: or another with the same voice. “What time did Mr. Fairfax check out?” she asked.
The receiver was laid aside; she heard muttering in the background. The voice came back, wearily polite: “One moment, madam.” A minute passed; he was back. “Mr. Fairfax did not check out, madam.”
