The Lake of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

cameraman. They were not to be seriously considered. Accountancy had chosen him from the first, not he it. Sometimes he thought he had passively let himself be chosen because he couldn’t bear to disappoint his father.
    And the safety of it, the security, the respectability, satisfied him. He wouldn’t have cared for a job or a life style such as Tim’s. He was proud of the years of study that lay behind him, of the knowledge acquired, and was always determined not to let a lack of enthusiasm lead to omissions or oversights. And he liked the room he had here which looked out across the tree tops to Alexandra Park, the park and the trees which he had known as a child.
    Martin had no clients to see that morning and no phone calls to make or receive. He spent nearly three hours unravelling the zany and haphazard accounts of a builderwho had been in business for fifteen years without paying a penny of income tax. Walter looked in to beam on him. The news of the pools win was making him behave towards his son much the way he had done when Martin got his A-Levels and then his degree. After he had gone Martin asked Caroline, who was their receptionist and whom Gordon and he shared as secretary, to bring him Mr. Sage’s file.
    He opened it without really looking at the statements and notices of coding and Tim’s own accounts which lay inside. In just over two hours’ time Tim would be sitting there opposite him. And he hadn’t made up his mind what to do. That firm decision of last night had been-well, not reversed but certainly weakened by the sight of the
North London Post.
He had to decide, and within the next couple of hours.
    Martin usually had lunch in one of the local pubs or, once a week, at a Greek place in Muswell Hill with Gordon Tytherton. Today, however, he drove alone up to the Woodman. It seemed the right and appropriate place in which to be for the solving of this particular problem.
    It was far too cold, of course, and far too late in the year to take his sandwiches and lager out into the Woodman’s garden. There, in summer, one was made very aware, in spite of the thunderous proximity of the trunk road roaring northwards, of the two woods that nestled behind these divergent streets. To the north was Highgate Wood, to the east Queen’s Wood where, walking under the pale green beech leaves, he and Tim had encountered each other on a May morning. Now, in November, those groves appeared merely as throngs of innumerable grey boughs, dense, chill, and uninviting.
    But Tim … Was he going to tell Tim or was he not? Didn’t he have a duty to tell him, a moral obligation? For without Tim he certainly wouldn’t have won the hundred and four thousand pounds, he wouldn’t have done the pools at all.

III
    Martin had first known Tim Sage at the London School of Economics. They had been friendly acquaintances, no more, and Tim had left after a year. Martin hadn’t seen him again until that morning in Queen’s Wood, eight years later.
    It was the kind of morning, misty and blue and gold and promising heat to come, when the northern reaches of London look as if Turner had painted them. It was the kind of morning when one leaves the car at home. Martin had walked over Jackson’s Lane and into Shepherd’s Hill, entering the wood by the path from Priory Gardens. The wood was full of squirrels scampering, its green silence pierced occasionally by the cry of a jay. Underfoot were generations of brown beech leaves and above him the new ones, freshly unfolded, like pieces of crumpled green silk. It had been a strange experience, even rather dramatic, walking along the path and seeing Tim appear in the distance, over the brow of the hill, the idea that it might be Tim gradually deepening to certainty. When they were fifty yards apart Tim had run up to him, stopping sharply like a reined-in horse.
    “It has to be Dr. Livingstone!”
    Why not? Journalist meets explorer in a wood …
    It was odd the amount of emotion there