Killer

She had expected it to rain the day Mother was buried, but it had been sunny and hot and she had been standing roasting in a heavy black coat by the graveside, feeling positively wretched, and wondering whether to cry, when her father had arrived. Although Aunt Jane was forever telling her that being fourteen meant that you were a grown-up and should act like one, she had torn away from the little congregation of mourners and run to him, throwing herself into his arms, crying at last. Even then, it seemed to her, he had been bald. The circle of hair, fluffy and white now, covering his ears, had been dark and slicked back. His face had been thinner too, and his glasses, the lenses hugely thick, had been those ghastly National Health type. Even at fourteen, she had been almost as tall as he was, though her slim figure had been completely lost against the breadth of his chest, the girth of his stomach. He had been wearing his baggy green Donegal-tweed jacket with leather elbows and cuffs. There had been a black band on his right arm. He had hesitated when he saw her coming towards him, and later realised he had not recognised her; but he hugged her and petted her, had tea with her – and tucked her up in bed before going away. She hadn’t seen him since.

Oh, there had been letters, birthday cards, an occasional present; but always only Aunt Jane at Parents’ Evenings and Prize-Givings, at the concerts and the plays. On her sixteenth birthday he had been in the Amazon studying fungi; he had sent her a letter from Rio full of words she hadn’t understood, names she couldn’t find even in her new botany book, and a piece of dried fern – which he wrote was very rare indeed – which had crumbled to dust as she took it out of the envelope. When she had played Cleopatra in the school play he had been in Italy studying lichens on volcanic rocks. She had sent him the review of her performance (really quite flattering) from the local paper – five column inches of it, and he had replied by sending her the whole of a five page article in the London Times devoted to his work. She already had a copy neatly folded in her scrap-book. When she was awarded her scholarship to Oxford, he was in the Antarctic. She had written and told him, of course, but he probably never received the letter, the post being what it is in the Antarctic – certainly he had never replied. When she had graduated with honours and marks rivalled only by his own marks twenty years earlier, he was in Iceland, and didn’t even realise his own daughter had learned his own subject in his old college every bit as well as he.

Now she was the most brilliant postgraduate student in the Faculty of Science, and the darling of the whole staff. The gawky, bony, ugly-duckling girl had become a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman who made nothing of her beauty – why should she? Her mother had been far more lovely and Father had still gone away – a student with a tireless thirst for knowledge, a true genius for assimilating facts about plants and structuring them into lucid, controlled arguments; always patient, unassuming, self-effacing in all but her work; ready to pitch in and help, able and more than willing to go on the most gruelling field trips, cheerful, steady, useful to have around. But she had always kept men at a distance. No, that wasn’t quite so. She always kept young men at a distance. She got on perfectly well with men of her father’s generation – Professor Brownlow, the head of the Faculty of Science at her college, who had in fact been an undergraduate there with her father; Jon Thompson, her tutor and friend, another lifelong friend of her father’s; others, senior men in half a dozen leading faculties of science all over the world, all known to her, all caring for her, all friends of her father’s. No friends of her own age – no husband-figures; only father-figures.

Kate shifted in her seat. The stewardess, passing again, paused and looked at her for a moment. The golden hair looked real enough, she thought enviously, although the brows and lashes were quite dark. The nose was quite long, as was the upper lip – an English beauty, though there was nothing of the horse about her face. A round chin, broad cheekbones, the corners of her wide mouth turning up. A complexion the stewardess would have given her eye-teeth for. A little pale though, some sign of strain around the eyes.

A light flashed commandingly. The stewardess hurried on, thinking, what would a girl who looked like that be going to Alaska for?

Kate was going to Alaska in answer to an advertisement in The Times. Her tutor, Jon Thompson, had seen it weeks ago, very plain and unassuming at the bottom of a compact column:

Wanted, assistant to botanist working in Arctic Alaska.

Suitable for post-grad. student. Reply as soon as possible

with curriculum vitae and references.

Box no . . .