A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

life?”
    “Apart from running a hospital in the slums of Calcutta, you mean?”
    “I’m serious.” She pulled a grape from the picnic basket and threw it at me.
    “Find a good woman and settle down, I suppose.” I sipped at my wine . “And you?”
    “Find a bad man and do the same.”
    I squeezed her hand, and she rested her head on my shoulder. We sat together a while against the tree, and watched in the distance the slow grind of overheated traffic through the valley. After a while she fell asleep, and a little later so did I.
     
    Claire arrived back in the country towards the end of September, shortly before Anna was to resume her studies.
    She had tak en a year out after her A-levels, to travel around Australia. I recollect being in awe of someone who, at eighteen, had packed a bag and, with only a few hundred pounds in her pocket, and a promise of initial lodgings with an émigré uncle, had jumped on a plane heading east.
    I can still remember my first sight of Claire.
    She was sitting at the kitchen table of the Hollands’ farmhouse. It was early evening and I had called round to see Anna on some errand or other. The easy familiarity I had attained over that summer, and the Hollands’ welcoming generosity of spirit had accustomed me to wandering around the farm like one of the family. And so it was that I blundered in, without knocking, on Claire’s homecoming.
    The sunlight was slanting through the window behind her, giving her hair a luminescence like fire. Her full lips were slightly parted in mid-sentence, and her green eyes looked up in surprise at my entrance. Natalie, Frank, Anna and the two Labradors also turned to stare at me. Seeing my face beginning to redden with embarrassment, Natalie leapt in and made the introductions.
    Smiling with mischief at my discomfort – as her mother had before on several occasions – Claire extended her right hand while her left hand swept back her long hair that had fallen across her face.
    “Pleased to meet you, David,” she parted those feminine lips revealing even, white teeth . “Anna has told me so much about you.”
    “Nothing good, I hope.”
    “Oh, no. Nothing good.”
    I joined them at the table while Claire recounted some of her adventures.
    I hardly listened. I was too captivated by the physical aspects of the woman to concentrate on her words, try as I might.
    Superficially, she was not dissimilar in appearance to Anna, although her figure and limbs were more willowy. Her face was somewhat longer than Anna’s, and she had Natalie’s high cheekbones. The greenness of her eyes had a penetrating quality, and they sparkled with that sense of assurance her elder sister lacked.
    Chemistry, I thought. There is some chemistry at work here.
     
    Claire had flown out to Melbourne the previous autumn – she recapped for me at a later date – to stay with one of Natalie’s brothers. Then, buying a Greyhound bus pass, she had visited Adelaide, Ayers Rock, Cairns, then went on to Sydney via Brisbane. In Sydney she had washed up in a youth hostel in the Kings Cross area. By this stage her money was fast running out, and she took a job house-sitting in Rose Bay. When that ended, she worked for a month in a sandwich bar before the agency she had registered with placed her as a nanny to a wealthy solicitor’s three children in a large house on the North Shore. There, she had had a basement flat that she shared with a few lizards. After six months as a nanny, she had flown home via Singapore, where she stayed for a week and blew what small savings she had accumulated during her time with the lizards. She arrived back in England broke, breezy and ready for whatever life next threw at her.
    It turned out to be me.
     
    With Claire’s homecoming, I felt Anna begin to fade into the background. It was as if, in some strange way, the whole family had been marking time, doing their best to fill some void in the house. Now that Claire was back, everyone could resume