After he’d ordered, he said, ‘So why the secrecy? Why didn’t you want to come into the office to meet?’
‘It’s not secrecy, really. I just didn’t want to bump into everyone at the firm. I wouldn’t know what to say.’
‘I’m sorry. How crass of me. I wasn’t thinking. You must still be feeling dreadful about your father.’
‘It’s not that. It’s that … Well, Adam, I don’t think I’ll be coming back.’
He gulped and stared at her.
‘Can I ask why?’
‘Of course, I’ll come back and work out my notice if you really need me to, but you said to take a few weeks off, so I figured that could be my notice period.’
The coffee arrived, and he stared at it, shaking his head.
‘But why, Laura? Just tell me why.’
‘I’ve done a lot of thinking since Dad died. You know, Adam, I’ve never really felt this job was right for me.’
‘But you have such a promising career ahead of you. You are so committed.’
‘Not really. I was there for someone else.’
‘Someone else?’
‘Yes. My father. I was trying to please him.’
He stared at her. Poor Adam. He was so straightforward. He would never understand.
‘You’ve changed, Laura.’
‘Maybe. Losing someone you love does that to people sometimes.’
‘And what about us?’
She looked him in the eye and said gently, ‘There was no us, really, was there? Just a fumble at an office party. I’m really sorry if I led you to think otherwise. I shouldn’t have done that.’
He blushed. ‘I thought there was something between us. We always got on really well. But I suppose you were always hooked on that down-and-out you used to hang about with.’
‘Luke? Not anymore. We split up in Thailand.’
Adam was silent while he digested the news. Then he looked up at her and said, ‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Not sure yet. I’m going to think about it for a bit. Go back to the drawing board. I thought I might like to work in a law centre. But that’s just one of the options.’
He blinked. ‘You’re joking! After what you’ve been used to?’ She thought about the plush office, the smooth running machinery of the administration, the chrome and modern art pieces, the potted palms.
‘Some of us have a social conscience, believe it or not.’
‘Touché,’ he said. ‘What else? What else do you think you might do?’
‘It sounds mad, but I might go back to the Far East.’
‘That does sound mad.’
The girl at the museum desk looked up and smiled as Laura approached.
‘How did you get on last week? Did you meet Arthur Stone?’
‘Yes, he was really helpful. He couldn’t remember my dad, but he got his daughter to dig up the records he kept.’
‘Did she find anything?’
‘She called me this morning. She’d managed to find the pseudonym listed beside Dad’s name. A partial anagram, apparently: Sam Lisle. She thought that whatever he wrote for Dr. Stone would be filed here in the museum under that name. Would you be able to look for me and see if it’s there?’
Laura watched, her stomach tightening as the girl quickly selected a drawer in the chest behind her and thumbed through an index. She was frowning with concentration. At last she pulled out a typewritten card. She looked up and smiled.
‘You’re in luck. There is something here under that name.’
She went to a box file on a shelf. Laura watched again as she took out a pile of brown files and examined each one.
Why was she taking so long? Laura could hardly breathe with anticipation. Let it be here, she prayed.
At last, the girl looked up and held out a battered folder.
‘Here you are. It’s quite bulky.’
Laura took it from her, her hands shaking. From the weight of it, it felt as though it was several pages thick.
She held the folder carefully as she crossed the room and sat down at one of the reading tables. ‘Memoirs of Sam Lisle. Far East Prisoner of War. 1946,’ was typed on a faded label on its front cover. Her heart was beating fast. She put it on the table and stared at it for a few moments. Then she took a deep breath and opened it.
Her father’s account had been typed on paper as thin as tracing paper, using an old fashioned typewriter in courier font. She began to read:
‘My name is Sam Lisle. I am thirty-three years of age. In the autumn of 1945 I returned from the Far East where I spent over three years as a prisoner of war in Japanese hands. I am going to write about my treatment as a prisoner for several reasons. First, because I would like the world to know what happened to us prisoners, for it never to be forgotten, and in the hope that it may never happen again. Second, because I would like to preserve these memories while they are still fresh in my mind. I am also doing this for a selfish reason. Because I hope that in setting down my memories on paper it will help to free my mind from the nightmare that I live with every day, so that perhaps I can begin to live something approaching a normal life.
On February 15, 1942, I watched as every other man in my division of the Straits Settlements Volunteers was mown down by the guns of Japanese tanks that entered the city of Singapore. I walked alone through a rubber plantation and through deserted city streets until I found another group of soldiers. They were the Northumberland Fusiliers, and their colonel told me to lay down my rifle because the British had surrendered.
We were marched out of the city at gunpoint, past jeering crowds of locals waving Japanese flags. We marched fifteen miles with our packs in the sweltering heat of the day, through the rubber plantations and farmlands to the other side of the island.
