Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [95]
His next visitor didn’t fall into either of these categories.
So Pangbourne picked up the heavy glass ash-tray from his desk and emptied it into his waste-paper basket. The ash-tray gleamed in the afternoon sunlight, its sharp angles transformed into prisms. It had been a gift from his third wife, a Swedish academic who had bought it for him from a glassworks near the small town where she’d grown up.
He emptied the ash-tray, taking care that the weightless flakes of ash wouldn’t float back up into the room, and he thought about his third wife. Like a lot of Swedes she loved to smoke and it had been cigarettes that had first brought them together. They’d met in the darkness, two tiny bobbing orange flames, as they smoked outside a mutual friend’s house during a faculty party. Cigarettes had united them in a world of non-smokers.
The marriage had been long and happy; despite their heavy consumption of tobacco they’d both remained healthy.
Pangbourne had fallen into a pattern of believing that if he never worried about their health nothing bad could happen to either of them.
But then a routine scan had shown a dark patch on his wife’s lung. The doctor wanted to talk to her about it and she’d raced over to his office in her car. Halfway there some maniac overshot a red light and hit her sideways, spinning her into the path of a big truck. They later told Pangbourne that the first impact would not have been fatal but after the second one there was no chance. She’d died on the way to hospital without recovering consciousness.
The dark patch on the lung scan had turned out to be a false alarm. A software error caused by an inexperienced technician.
In a sense, thought Pangbourne, you could argue that smoking had in fact killed her. If your taste ran to that kind of elaborate, convoluted logic. Pangbourne’s taste didn’t. For him the whole matter was considerably simpler: she was gone and he still felt a blunt pain every time he thought of her.
He sighed and looked at the heavy ash-tray in his hand.
The weight of it seemed to him, for a moment, like the weight of memory. Best to let go of it.
He was putting it back on his desk when the door clicked open and Miss Marcroft’s fat face looked into his office.
‘He’s here,’ she said. Her voice had that pinched nasal tone which was a result of trying to speak and hold her breath at the same time. Miss Marcroft didn’t want to inhale any of his poisoned carcinogenic air.
Pangbourne found himself smiling as she withdrew and closed the door. He sat down at his desk and glanced at the screen of his computer before switching it off. It wouldn’t do to let his visitor see the information about himself that was displayed there.
Francis Anthony Leemark was Wolf Leemark’s father. He was, in many ways, a similar man to Pangbourne; a widower, ex-soldier, ex-farmer who had grown up in a primitive agricultural backwater of America. But there all resemblances ended.
Francis Leemark was a religious fanatic of the kind who absorbed the dogma of Christianity without ever learning anything of kindness or forgiveness. He and his wife had beaten and mistreated Wolf on a regular basis until the boy was big enough to fight back.
Pangbourne felt a flicker of distaste which he repressed as the door opened again and his visitor came in. He wanted to maintain an open mind if that was possible. Nothing good would come of meeting this man if he couldn’t see out over the parapet of his own prejudices.
But instead of the frail, wizened bigot he was expecting, the man who stepped into Pangbourne’s office was young and strong. Far too young to be Wolf Leemark’s father.
Pangbourne frowned as he recognized his visitor.
‘Mr Retour,’ he said.
‘Mr Pangbourne,’ said the visitor, settling into a chair without being invited.
‘This isn’t an ideal time. I have an appointment with a parent.’
‘I know. I saw him waiting outside.’
Pangbourne felt a flush of anger. ‘And you got by my secretary?’
Retour shrugged. ‘She just let me in. Perhaps we should attribute it to great personal charm.