An Absence of Natural Light by F. G. Cottam Page B

intake the following autumn. She had a reputation even before she arrived there for beauty, rebelliousness and getting what she wanted. As a precocious sixth-former she’d written to Sartre and Che Guevara and whatever she’d said to them in her letters had earned her written replies. She’d corresponded regularly with Timothy Leary and Martha Gellhorn and Philip K. Dick. She was interested in the occult philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and had got Miles Davis to personally autograph her copy of
Kind of Blue
, the jazz album Britain’s beatniks were all listening to at their parties and talking about and carrying around with them like some badge of credibility and cool.
    She drove a red Triumph Herald convertible and seemed to have plenty of money. Her family background was obscure because she’d been raised an orphan. In the long holiday she did what was described as clerical work for a Brussels-based company called Martens & Degrue. It struck Fleetwood that the paper shuffling she did for them over the summer seemed improbably well paid.
    A romance she had with a fellow student at the start of her second year ended abruptly at Christmas, when he’d suffered a nervous breakdown. Professor Fleetwood was charged, discreetly, with the mission of finding out more about the background and character of Rachel Gaunt. Her academic credentials were excellent and her coursework brilliant. But the mental state in which she’d left her suitor suggested some sort of moral corruption or malaise.
    He discovered that Martens & Degrue were a subsidiary company wholly owned and maintained by an organization called the Jericho Society. They had run the orphanage which had cared for Rachel from birth. She had grown up there bilingual in English and French. When she was eleven, she’d gained a scholarship to the Surrey boarding school where she’d stayed until passing her A Levels.
    Her summer job suggested she kept in close contact with the Jericho Society, which Fleetwood assumed was all she had in the way of kin. But they were an organization discreet to the point of secrecy and he could discover no more about them other than that they were obviously wealthy and completely independent.
    â€˜I suspect that they were probably what today we’d call a cult,’ he told Tom and Rebecca. ‘But Rachel never exhibited any signs of slavishness or manipulation, quite the opposite in fact. She was iconoclastic even by the standards of an age becoming by then quite militant in its defiance of convention.’
    â€˜Beatlemania,’ Tom said.
    Fleetwood chuckled. ‘That was just around the corner, Tom.’
    â€˜Ban the Bomb,’ Rebecca said.
    â€˜You look very like her,’ Fleetwood said, turning serious. ‘The resemblance quite startled me when I first saw you earlier. But there was no bomb banning where Rachel Gaunt was concerned. My intuition was that she was completely apolitical. She was drawn to Che Guevara not by the cause, but by the glamour. Marches to Aldermaston wearing a duffle coat under a soggy banner in the rain weren’t madam’s scene at all.’
    â€˜Do you remember the name of the boyfriend who had the breakdown?’
    â€˜I do, Tom. He was an Ethics postgrad from Stafford, Archie Simmonds.’
    Tragedy struck in the Easter holiday of Rachel’s second year, he told them. She was among a mixed party of seven LSE students who went on a ski trip to St. Moritz in Switzerland. Wandering off-piste was apparently Peter Hendry’s idea. Peter was studying Economics and Law. He was a boy from the Scottish Highlands who had learned to ski on barrel staves as little more than a toddler. He’d been selected for the British Winter Olympics Downhill Team. There had been heavy snowfalls for a week before their arrival.
    â€˜There were probably avalanche warnings, but communicating them would have been a word-of-mouth task back in those days,’ Fleetwood