unravelled; Joseph helpless on the ground with the policeman on top of him, himself carrying Anna asleep in his arms, out of the hotel to the car. Why did all these memories make him feel uneasy?
He slept at last, and woke late, feeling as if he'd run for miles. By the time he'd rushed through washing, shaving and dressing, Anna was sitting by Liz on the bed, and Liz was blinking herself awake. He kissed them both, then grabbed his briefcase and hurried out to the car. As he passed the living-room he glimpsed the empty space on the mantelpiece where the claw had been before he had packed it in his briefcase, and felt intensely relieved.
He backed his dented car out of the garage and drove to Norwich. Soon the sea fell behind. Golfers and hikers wandered over the green landscape, barges roamed the waterways. Luckily there wasn't much traffic on the roads – for he was driving before he was fully awake – and he drove through the villages without mishap. A postman cycled from house to house, women with wicker baskets chatted outside shops – but Alan barely noticed them, intent on his driving.
He reached Norwich earlier than he had expected. The train reminded him of the railway museum, for his carriage was faded and empty. Why did these musty old carriages always seem so dim, even on sunny days like this? He sat and gazed along the ranks of deserted seats, settees crammed together. His briefcase was on the floor beside him. He pushed it away a little with one foot, so that it wouldn't be quite so near him.
The carriage was still empty when the train jerked forward. The jerk felt like an awakening – except that he was still trying to struggle awake five minutes later. The landscape was rushing past faster now, but it hardly changed at all and wasn't enough to distract him from the contents of his briefcase, nor from the muttering of his thoughts. He wasn't sure if he believed his intuition of yesterday. Hadn't he been thinking too much like a writer, trying to make everything fit together too neatly? Could such an insignificant object really have influenced Joseph so profoundly? But if not, why had the anthropologist been so anxious to get rid of it? It didn't matter what Alan thought; whatever his reasons he had to deliver it to the Foundation.
That relieved his anxiety, a little. The train was rocking him back to sleep, and there was nothing in the landscape that his mind could seize upon to stay awake. He moved over on the seat and placed the briefcase between himself and the window. In a few moments he was nodding. There was something he had to do. His head was nodding, it seemed to agree. His body knew what he had to do; why couldn't it let him into the secret? One more nod that he was distantly aware of, and then he was lost in a dream.
Perhaps it was the answer, for he was close to home. He had to find Anna. There she was, running through the murky fields ahead. He didn't know exactly where he was, but he could hear the sea, though it sounded as he thought a rainstorm in a jungle might sound. He had to catch up with Anna, for a shape was running beside him on all fours, a naked shape with a human face, a shape that glistened red all over, even in the dark,. Now he had outdistanced the shape and was running effortlessly, his feet hardly touching the ground. In a moment he would catch Anna. That was when she looked back, and he saw the terror in her eyes. He felt as if the ground beneath his feet had fallen away. She knew that he hadn't been chasing her to save her. He sprang at her, raising the claw that had been in his hand all the time.
Had he closed his eyes so that he couldn't see what he'd done? Certainly he'd had a blackout of some kind, because now he was somewhere in the jungle, stumbling through the greenish light beneath enormous dripping trees. Now he knew: the scene with Anna hadn't happened yet, and he was here to prevent it from ever happening. Here was a clearing with a few conical huts, a pot steaming over a fire, a thin leathery man with small blank eyes like a spider's, squatting with his back to a tree. Alan stumbled toward the man with the spidery eyes, for he was Alan's one chance to stop what was going to happen. Then, for a moment too brief to grasp, he realized what he would have to do in order to make sure of that chance, and it was so dreadful that he woke shrieking.
The carriage was still deserted. He wished there were someone there, even though it might have been embarrassing. Beyond the window at the end of the carriage, more seats lurched back and forth; beside him a blur of hedges raced by. He'd already forgotten what he had to do in the clearing in the jungle, and he was trying to forget his dream about Anna too, but there was one thought he couldn't avoid: the dream hadn't been entirely false to his feelings about her. He had to admit that he was relieved to get away from her.
At least, in a sense he was… But being away from her also allowed him to consider his feelings about her. He'd been uneasy whenever they were alone together, ever since he'd come back from Nigeria. All of a sudden she was getting on his nerves. Couldn't that be because his work was giving him trouble? Yes – but that wasn't the whole of it. Whenever he was alone with her, he felt that there was something he had to do, if only he could think of it. Perhaps he didn't need to think of it, just let his body act it out for him. For some reason he was remembering their last day on the beach, when he'd chased her and caught her, more and more roughly…
He found he couldn't think of that for too long. It made him feel guilty and nervous, exactly as the dream had made him feel. If only he could wake fully he might be able to deal with it, but his thoughts were blurred, like something left in an attic for years. Most frustrating was the notion that the dream should have made clear to him what the claw was.
He was still trying to grasp the impression, when the train pulled in at Liverpool Street. What was wrong with him, letting a dream bother him so much? God knows, he needed a clear mind for his meeting with Teddy, especially if he was going to break the news that the book might be late. He grabbed his briefcase and made for the taxi-rank.
By the time he arrived on Queensway it was almost lunchtime. London was crowded with tourists, and half the shoppers in Oxford Street had been wearing robes -it was almost like a continuation of one of his dreams of Africa. Yesterday he'd been fairly sure he'd know what to say to Teddy when the time came, but now he felt sure of nothing, except that he wanted to deliver the contents of his briefcase as soon as he could. He wished he'd arranged to go to the Foundation first.
Teddy was 'in a meeting'. Editors always seemed to be 'in a meeting' – when they weren't out to lunch. Alan sat on a leather sofa in the foyer, a high-ceilinged room elaborately decorated with plaster vegetation, and leafed through Publishers Weekly, glancing at a full-page advertisement for himself – 'Britain's leading thriller writer up there with Deighton and Le Carri.' A few years ago he'd never have dared dream that a publisher would spend that kind of money to advertise his books. He should have felt more pleased, but the sense of something to be done was still nagging at him.
Soon Teddy came up from the basement. He was a tall Canadian with a youthful face that always looked scrubbed as a schoolboy's at a prize-giving. Though he was thirty-two, Alan had seen barmen refuse to serve him because he looked under age. Today he wore jeans and a T-shirt printed with a marihuana leaf. 'I hope you're starving,' he said.
That and the T-shirt meant they'd be lunching at the pizza parlour. 'Pretty much,' Alan said. At least a leisurely meal might help him relax and choose his words.
Small chance. The moment they sat down at their table, decorated with a large American flag, the waitress bobbed over to them, a pert girl with a stars-and-stripes apron and a Cockney accent. She brought them a carafe of white wine as soon as she saw Teddy.
Alan had just ordered his pizza and taken a mouthful of wine when Teddy said, 'How's Out of the Past coming?'
'Not too well,' Alan said, bracing himself for the worst.
'Yes, I had that impression last time we spoke. You don't think you can deliver on time, am I right?'
'Not without rushing it.' Alan wished he knew what Teddy thought of him, but the editor's face was bright and blank as a poster. 'I'm sorry,' Alan said. 'I don't want to seem temperamental.'
'Nobody thinks that. You're one of our most professional writers. You take it at whatever pace feels right to you. It shouldn't take you more than a couple of months past the deadline, should it?'
Just now Alan didn't know, and wondered if Teddy was flattering him in order to make him commit himself. 'I hope not,' he said.
'Well, keep me up to date on how it's going. Just don't feel too pressured, that's the main thing. Anyway, I wanted to tell you, we're giving you an excuse for deliv- ering it late. You'll recall we're doing the first paperback of Spy on Fire in September, and we very much hope you'll agree to a signing tour.'
Alan should have been delighted. At the start of his writing career he'd often dreamed of one day being important enough to tour the country at his publisher's expense, signing his books. But now he felt he was agreeing only because he could think of no reason to refuse. As soon as they'd finished their pizzas and
