Free Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry Page B

rid France of the baneful influence of Islam. Michael would be midway across the Atlantic by now. It was very likely that a mile from here the Filchings were awake too, sitting up thinking, trying to discern a way that they could accept the rest of their lives after what had happened to Peter and his friend Jimmy. Tomorrow the telephone would ring and one of them would tell her what they knew. She would have to feign—what?—surprise, shock, horror … No, the horror was real enough. She had no choice about that. What she wasn’t prepared for was lying to those poor, sad people.
    She put on her robe and walked along the hallway to the back stairs, then down to the library, closed the door behind her and looked around at the familiar place. She wished her father were still alive, sneaking in late at night and sitting down at the old desk to pursue some perfectly dotty arcane study. He had been completely mad, of course. Even as a child she had known it, although her mother had behaved as though it were the furthest thing from her mind until she had known she was dying. Then she had sat Meg down and told her simply, “Take care of your father, if you can.” There had been no moment of doubt in either woman’s mind that Meg could. He had been beatific and peaceful much of the time, the way she imagined idiot savants must be.
    She remembered the day he had let her have the run of this place. She was ten, and she had been at a birthday party for Gwendolyn Ap-Witting. She had told one of her stories to Gwendolyn, a scary story with ghosts that came up out of the ancient mounds between their estates. Gwendolyn had told a duller, less-sophisticated abridged version to her aunt Clara while she was upstairs fixing her hair. The aunt had come downstairs and made a public announcement that the other children were to believe nothing that Meg said, and followed it with a lecture about Jesus sending angels to make indelible black marks in their books whenever little girls told lies. The children had been more terrified by this than by the ghosts, and they had spent the rest of the long afternoon maintaining a distance of twelve feet from Meg. Their rudimentary religious training had convinced them that God had a history of striking down sinners in groups rather than singly. The criteria were vague; usually just falling into some broadly defined category like “the wicked” seemed to be enough, so self-preservation dictated that their status be unambiguous. Whenever she came near any of them, they would recoil and move away. As Gwendolyn opened her gifts in the drawing room surrounded by all the other children, Meg had hovered in the doorway, looking at all of them from an immense distance, as though she were one of the ghosts in her story, caught alone on the earth in daytime. When the driver had pulled up in front of the big manor house at four, little Margaret had appeared suddenly from behind a thick yew tree and clambered into the back seat as though the Rolls were the last steamer out of Krakatoa.
    At home she had sat alone in the garden contemplating the wreckage of her life when she had noticed her father standing nearby, staring at her. Probably he could see she had been crying, although she had taken pains to hide the signs because they were not only a consequence but also evidence of her guilt. It was unusual that he paid any attention to her, and often she suspected that he was unaware of her existence for long periods. But now he was absorbed in his study of her, looking down at her with the same benevolent curiosity that he was devoting that year to his list of medicinal herbs mentioned in ancient texts but not identifiable among modern flora.
    Finally he had said, “Come with me,” and walked through the French doors into the library without looking back to see if she had heard him. When they were in the secret little room behind the walls of books where nobody would ever disturb them, he had spoken to her as he