cheesecake and coffee, he declined another drink in Teddy's office and ran for a cab to take him to the Foundation for African Studies.
The Foundation was an elegant cream stucco building near Russell Square, with a pedimented doorway flanked by round windows, portholes of gleaming white plaster, and the air of a miniature country house. Lions the size of cats perched on the gateposts between black railings, and a man was clipping the lawns in front of the building with long-handled shears. Alan wondered vaguely if he could be a plain-clothes guard, then dismissed the idea as fanciful. Perhaps he could work it into a future book: he filed the image away in his mind.
The front door was open. The man, whose shears were almost as tall as himself, glanced up as Alan went in. Beyond the door was a foyer with a graceful staircase, at the foot of which a young woman with braided hair sat at a switchboard behind a desk. A small neat man with glossy black hair that almost hid his gleaming cranium scurried out of a room near the desk and frowning abstractedly at Alan, hurried upstairs. 'May I help you?' the young woman said.
'I'm supposed to see Dr Hetherington.'
'Why, there he is. Dr Hetherington!' she called – but already the small neat man had turned and was descending the stairs.
So much for Alan's image of a tall stooped white-haired professor. At least Hetherington seemed as fussy as he sounded on the phone. He gazed at Alan, then his frown cleared. 'Ah, yes, of course,' he said. 'You're bringing me the Leopard Men's claw.'
He led the way upstairs to his office, a sunny spacious room overlooking the lawns, and lined with books in glass-fronted bookcases, out of reach of the sunlight. Through the open window came the murmur of traffic, and from closer by, the sound of clipping. Flicking a switch on his intercom, Hetherington called for tea, while Alan sank into a leather chair that sighed. Now Alan could ask the question that had nagged him all the way upstairs. 'You said the Leopard Men. The Nigerian secret society, you mean?'
'Correct.' Hetherington was obviously glad of a chance to lecture. 'At least, they were last heard of in Nigeria,' he said. 'That was in the Forties, when they were simply killers, sometimes for hire. But the Leopard tradition was found across a wide belt of Africa, from Guinea through Sierra Leone and Liberia to Nigeria and Cameroon, on through Chad and the Sudan to Uganda and even Kenya – though there were only scattered reports there. Its influence was powerful while it lasted. One wonders if it has died out completely, even now.'
A secretary came in with a teapot, mugs and milk and sugar on a tray. Hetherington poured the tea himself, giving all his attention to the task. Alan felt that if he asked a question he wouldn't be heard. There was something he needed to know, but was afraid to ask. Hetherington brought him a mug at last – 'Do tell me if the tea isn't as you like it' – and Alan took it.
'They used to dress up in leopard skins and masks, didn't they?' he said. 'They lay in wait for people and killed them with the metal claws.'
'Yes, in some areas there was a ritual robing. There were many regional variations. In the Western Congo, for example, where the tradition came from Gabon, they would tear off their victim's thumbs with their bare hands, and all the flesh between the eyes.' Suddenly he had the look of a teenage girl squirming at her first horror film.
'The important element seems to have been to tear out the heart while the victim was still alive.'
Why did Alan feel nervous? 'You mean they were cannibals?'
'So we're led to believe. Only the Leopard societies, of course, not the cultures in which they occurred. Supposedly they devoured their victims as a way of achieving power. Some cannibalism appears to be based on the belief that by consuming the victim you take on his powers, but it seems the Leopard Men were trying to reach back to some older form of magic, one that demanded human sacrifice and cannibalism. I mean, of course,' he added primly, 'that is what they believed.'
Alan now realized why he was nervous: because he didn't know what he was afraid to hear. Outside, the sound of the clipping continued. The blast of a horn on the road seemed so loud that he jumped, almost spilling the tea.
'The tradition seems to be traceable back to the Ju-ju men of the nineteenth century,' Hetherington was saying. 'Before that, there is no documentation. That was David Marlowe's task, to trace it back to its origins. It seemed an impossible task to me, but he was a brilliant researcher. I wonder,' he said sadly, 'if the research affected his mind. The way he seems to have become obsessed with the claw that he gave you, for example. Heaven knows how many people it may have killed. Certainly I should never have given it house room.'
And yet he had expected Alan to do so. Still, it had been Alan's own decision to put it on display. Now, presumably, it was Hetherington's, whether he wanted it or not. Alan sipped his tea automatically, though it seemed to be making him hot and light-headed. The clipping of shears felt as if it was nipping at his brain.
'David set out to interview surviving Leopard Men, and I understand that he succeeded,' Hetherington said. 'We shan't know until we see his notes, and we'll have to wait until the Nigerian police have finished with them for that. Perhaps it was the interviews that caused his breakdown – the strain of having to be polite to such men. I could never have done it myself. I don't believe in treating murderers like normal human beings – and these men were worse than murderers. Presumably each one of them must have gone through his own disgusting initiation ritual.'
'What was that?' Alan said, though he wasn't sure by any means that he wanted to know.
'Why, the killing of the child. One can only hope that some of them refused when they found that was what they were required to do – even if refusing meant being killed in their turn. You'd have thought that a man who had the courage to face those who'd chosen him would also have the courage to make them remove the compulsion. But of course these were superstitious savages. They would have been too scared to refuse.'
Alan was gripping the mug so hard he thought it might shatter, thick as it was. 'What did you mean about killing a child?'
'Each man had to give his young daughter to the cult before he could be accepted – a girl child of his own or his wife's blood. They would send the child running down a path through the bush at night. When they caught her they would tear her to pieces and eat her.'
Alan managed to set down his mug on the carpet, though he could hardly see. He was blinded by a flood of memories – the dream of chasing Anna and bringing her down with the claw, his feelings about her since he'd brought the claw home, the dream which suddenly came flooding back to him – the chase dream he'd had on the plane out of Lagos. It must have started then, the influence on him. He groped for his briefcase, snarling under his breath. He had to control himself, or when he got hold of the claw he wouldn't be able to stop himself flinging it at Hetherington, this small intolerably smug man who had let the influence gain such a hold on him.
He shuddered as he groped in the briefcase, for the touch of cold leather made him feel for a moment as if he were groping inside a corpse. He must calm down, he must shake off his fears in order to be able to look. But he'd already felt the contents of the briefcase, and that was why his fears were worse. He wrenched the case wide open, thinking sickly of Joseph tearing open the goats, and peered in. He couldn't believe it, even when his vision cleared. He hadn't brought the claw with him at all.
Fourteen
He must have lost it somewhere between here and home: in the pizza parlour or in one of the taxis, perhaps. But that made no sense: he hadn't opened his briefcase since before he'd left the house – not even at lunch with Teddy, for he'd thought that there was nothing in the case except the claw. Could it have been stolen on the train while he was asleep? The possibility wasn't even worth considering. 'I haven't got it,' he muttered, hardly aware of Hethering-ton. 'It isn't here.'
'I don't understand,' Hetherington said, rather snappishly.
'Do you think I do?' He was trying desperately to recall when he'd put the claw in his briefcase. He'd been drunk last night when he'd left the hotel – he thought he'd drunk so much to celebrate being about to get rid of the claw -and Liz had had to drive. As soon as he'd reached home he'd taken the claw from the mantelpiece. No, that couldn't be right; he'd carried Anna to bed, managing to tuck her up without waking her, and then there was a vague memory of his drunken attempt to make love to Liz. Then he had stumbled downstairs, while Liz got into
