The Girl Who Passed for Normal by Hugh Fleetwood

excluded. She would have liked to enter by the front door, via Marcello,but knew it was impossible, so she was trying the back door, via Catherine. She couldn’t, as she walked down her stairs, make out where David had come into it — or came into it. His secret was, she guessed, that he could go in and out any door, front, back, or side, just as he pleased.
    Catherine and Marcello … yes. She would like them to meet. She wondered if they would recognize in each other a similarity; a mutual inability to fall from grace, as she put it to herself. They were both rich, too; she wondered if that had anything to do with it.
    The wind blew her hair back, and she felt the rain, cold on her face.
    *
    She was sitting in the peach-painted room. It was very hot, and she was drinking red wine. “But I believed her when she said it,” she remarked. “Everything’s so inexplicable, I believe everything. I believe David’s gone back to America when Catherine says so, to wait for Mary Emerson. Then I believe that Mary Emerson killed him. I believe that he just got fed up with everything. I’m sure he’s going to come back and I’m sure he’s not.”
    Marcello ran his hand through his hair; his fingers were dirty. “Don’t you know anyone from his work?”
    Barbara shrugged. “Don’t you?”
    Marcello shook his head, and Barbara felt annoyed. “Oh, yes, you don’t approve, do you.” She felt her lips tightening, then bowed her head. There was no point in getting angry. “I don’t know anything,” she said softly. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? David never ever spoke about it. Sometimes I thought he was making the whole thing up.”
    “Where did he have his meetings?”
    “I don’t even know that.”
    “Hasn’t David got any letters?”
    “No, I’ve looked. And the only papers he did have that might have been relevant were in his briefcase, which isn’t there.” She stopped, then added, “His passport was in his briefcase, too. He always kept it there.”
    “He was paid when he went to his meetings, wasn’t he?”
    “Yes. I suppose if he doesn’t go to his next meeting they’ll try and find him. But if he does —” she shrugged. “You don’t think it’s possible that all that computer stuff was a sort of front? Maybe he was really doing secret work for the American Air Force, or has defected or been abducted —”
    Marcello shook his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No, I’m afraid not. Didn’t you ever see those things he wrote for those magazines? They were quite genuine.”
    “Yes.” Barbara nodded. “It was only an idea. The thing is, as David never told me about anything — his family, upbringing — not even why he wanted me to live with him. Half the time I had the feeling that he wasn’t very firmly here. So now that he’s not, any explanation of his disappearance , however ridiculous, seems reasonable. That was why, when Catherine Emerson talked about her mother killing David, it seemed almost possible. And then David had said something in one of his letters —”
    “What did you say when she told you that?”
    “I told her she shouldn’t say things like that.”
    Marcello, who was sitting on the floor by her chair, took one of her hands for a second and looked at it. It was white against his darker skin, and the red varnish on the nails waschipped. He put it down again. “Barbara, I think that the most obvious explanation is the most likely.”
    “Which is?”
    “David was an intelligent person doing a job that he was good at — he must have been, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone on using him. And I’m sure — I know — that he thought that he was being misused, or he thought his work might be misused. He was teaching a machine to learn something that perhaps he didn’t really believe should be learned.”
    Barbara shook her head. “David didn’t share your political opinions.”
    “It isn’t a matter of political opinions.” He sounded as