Chapter 012

Chapter 12: Letting Go

Henry knew who it was as soon as he saw the little figure in the distance between the slender boughs of the palm trees that leaned lazily across his field of view. He watched him as he turned off the dirt-track that twisted its way across the dry cactus-sprinkled scrub-land to walk up the rocky path towards his house. It was the way the man walked that gave him away: the purposefulness, the tightness of the gait, the disregard for the hazards of the bleached dusty stones that made up the path's surface. Henry had always imagined that he would be younger, somehow. An earnest young academic from some Polish university, dripping with anger and self-righteousness. This man wasn't all that much younger than himself - twenty years his junior, perhaps, a pale-skinned European in his mid-sixties, perversely dressed for the merciless heat of Thailand in a neat dark grey business suit, his figure long and gaunt, his silvering black hair thinning to near baldness beneath t