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

friends at university was coloured.”
    “ Was . You mean he isn’t now?”
    “All right, then. Is coloured.”
    “Right.”
    The meal arrived, and we sat in silence for a moment while the waiter topped up our wine glasses.
    “So what happened to him?” I asked eventually . “Robert Redford?”
    “I don’t know. He and his girlfriend didn’t stay long in Sydney.”
    “Oh, right,” I said, attempting to sound casual.
    She put her hand on to my forearm and squeezed it . “You’re so sweet, David. Anna was right.”
    “Does she think I’m sweet, then?”
    “No. She just thought I’d find you sweet. And she was right.”
    I took her hand .
    “And,” she went on, “I hope you’re not going off to the slums of Calcutta for a while yet.”
    “Anna told you that!” I laughed.
    “But of course. We’re sisters. We tell each other everything.”
    “Now I do feel uncomfortable.”
    “Don’t. There’s no need. You haven’t done anything you shouldn’t have. Everything’s fine.”
    “Good. I’m relieved about that.”
     
    Autumn slid into winter. Grey short days replaced grey longer days. The wet leaves fell and turned to mulch, and the Leicestershire countryside absorbed the chilling rain like a sponge.
    Claire and I had some outings, on those rare dry occasions in among the days of dampness. We drove over to Warwick Castle and to Stratford. We visited the ten locks at Foxton, that marvel of nineteenth century engineering, which links the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal with the Old Grand Union Canal. It was there that I took that first photograph of her which was to sit in my wallet for twenty years.
     
     
    I do not know exactly when it was that I fell in love with her. The chronology has since perplexed me. Is there a moment, a second of refulgent time when you cross over to an altogether different existence; when something of strangeness and beauty enters your soul? I suppose there must be such an instant. Extraordinary then, that I did not mark it with some substantial entry in the diary of my life.
    Perhaps I did not because my mind was distracted by an even greater enigma: Claire’s affection for me. If loving was, for me, a blessing, then being loved was by degrees miraculous.
    It may be, I muse now as I reflected then, the guilty secret of humankind is not that the heart hides so much darkness, but that it conceals so much light.
     
    My old battered MG was parked in a country lay-by. I had badly miscalculated the weather, believing the early clouds would disperse. They had not. We sat listening to the machine-gun noises of torrential rain on the soft roof, and watched the deluge spattering and pouring down the windscreen in endless procession. It was too dangerous to drive. The wipers could not keep up with the cascade.
    “I don’t understand,” I had said.
    “What is there to understand?”
    “You.”
    “Oh, I’m very simple to understand. What you see is what you get.”
    “Why me?”
    “You just want me to tell you how wonderful you are, right?”
    “I’m serious.”
    “Yes,” her voice took on an earnest quality. “I can see that you are.”
    She looked away from me, into the rain- drenched middle distance and her eyes became unfocused.
    “You could have a more exciting life than the one I’m offering you ,” I ventured.
    “Are you offering me a life with you? You’ve known me less than three months,” she said softly.
    “You know I am.”
    “We haven’t even made love yet.”
    “Bless you for that yet .”
    “I’m not a virgin, David.”
    “Thank goodness for that. I wouldn’t want the responsibility.”
    She giggled, “Of breaking me in, you mean?”
    “Exactly. And by the way I’m not either.”
    “You seem to think it’s important to me that life is full of thrills and spills, that my chosen partner should be big, bad and dangerous to know. Why, David?”
    I made a vague gesture.
    “Why wouldn’t I want a kind man who loves me, and