Prey

by L. A. Larkin

  ‘How do big reserves like Kruger cope with poachers?’

  ‘They’re run by South African National Parks. They get government funding. Have an army of well-trained people patrolling fences and they’re doing a good job protecting their animals. But poaching isn’t their only problem. Border jumpers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique get into South Africa through the park.’

  Clarke points at a flat, rocky ridge below them. ‘We’ll land there. Near Hannah’s house.’

  A dazzle of zebras bolt, leaving dust clouds in their wake, as the chopper approaches the flat ridge. To their right is a single-storey house, surrounded by a chain wire fence topped with barbed wire. Two Jack Russells, their front paws on the gate, stare up at them, jaws opening and closing in rapid barks that Wolfe can’t hear. Behind the dogs, an ostrich parades up and down the small compound.

  Clarke skilfully touches down, the rotors whipping up a dust haze. They wait until the blades have slowed before getting out, keeping their heads low. The compound gate is padlocked.

  ‘Hannah?’ Clarke calls.

  Apart from the dogs and the ostrich, there’s no sign of life. No vehicle either. Clarke dials her number on his phone.

  ‘Not enough signal,’ he complains. ‘You have to find just the right spot. You got more than one bar?’ he asks.

  Wolfe checks her mobile. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Casburn.

  ‘Does she know we’re coming?’ Wolfe asks Clarke.

  ‘Ja. She said she’d meet us here.’

  57

  Nokuthula, South Africa

  Isolated. Lonely. The house exterior looks tired, much like the dogs panting at the gate. What must it be like here alone at night?

  A swirl of red dust follows a white vehicle heading their way. It sways from side to side, bouncing over the deeply potholed dirt track. The pick-up truck has tiered seating in the open tray at the back. It skids to a halt. The Jack Russells bark, stumpy tails wagging. Hannah Venter gets out of the vehicle; her expression is grim. She’s a tall woman in her thirties in head-to-toe khaki. Her walk, fast and urgent. Her tanned face bears the telltale lines of someone living an outdoor life.

  ‘Hannah? Has something happened?’ Clarke asks.

  Hannah shakes her head. ‘It’s too much, Henry. I can’t…’

  On her hands are brown stains. Blood stains. ‘Is somebody hurt?’ Wolfe asks.

  ‘How rude of me,’ Hannah says, giving Wolfe a pinched smile. ‘You must be Olivia Wolfe. Henry tells me you’re a journalist. Welcome.’ She shakes Wolfe’s hand. Her palms are calloused, her grip firm.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Detective Superintendent Casburn,’ Hannah shakes his hand. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am that somebody, finally, wants to find Dad.’

  Wolfe doesn’t envy Casburn the task of informing Hannah her father is dead.

  ‘Can we go inside?’ asks Casburn.

  ‘Of course,’ Hannah says, ‘but I can’t talk now. I have to deal with something urgent. I’ll show you around, then I may be gone a few hours. I’m sorry.’ Her voice is shaky.

  ‘Poachers?’ Clarke asks.

  Hannah nods. ‘Last night. They killed Lottie, and Mad Max…’ her voice cracks.

  ‘Oh no,’ says Clarke. ‘Who’s with them?’

  ‘Tumi and two rangers. He’s called the police, but they haven’t shown. We’ve been waiting all day.’

  ‘All day?’ asks Wolfe. ‘Poaching is a crime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Legally, yes. But poaching isn’t taken seriously. It’s going to be a battle to even get them here.’

  ‘I’d like to help. I’ll go with you,’ says Wolfe.

  ‘I’ll stay here.’ Casburn checks his phone. He has no signal. ‘I need to make some calls. Where can I get a signal?’

  ‘You have to find the right spot. The back porch is usually the best place. And I have internet access. Follow me.’

  Unlocking the compound’s padlock, she leads them through the dusty yard and into her house, the Jack Russells jumping up excitedly.

  ‘Don’t worry about the ostrich,’ says Hannah, as the six-foot-high bird comes up to Wolfe. ‘She’s just curious.’

  The small house is clean and simply furnished. Clearly running a wildlife reserve isn’t making Hannah rich, but the view from the back porch is spectacular. Raised up above the savannah, there are miles and miles of open plain and an uninterrupted view of South African wildlife. Wolfe spots giraffe, impala and zebra in the short time it takes Hannah to jot down some details on a writing pad and hand the note to Casburn.

  ‘My internet name and password, and my mobile number,’ Hannah says.

  ‘I’m heading to Rustenburg to refuel,’ says Clarke. ‘I’ll come back later.’

  ‘Stay the night, Henry. We can catch up on old times,’ Hannah says. ‘It’s rare I have company these days.’ She looks at Casburn and Wolfe. ‘Please, be my guests tonight.’

  Wolfe has no intention of leaving the reserve until she has answers, so the offer of a bed is most welcome. She gratefully accepts.

  Casburn wastes no time getting down to business. His laptop is out and switched on as he dials London on his phone. Wolfe guesses he’s hoping his team has information about Samuel. And also the identities of the other victims.

  Wolfe really should contact Cohen. But what is she going to tell him? That she’s given Casburn her word everything they discover is off the record until he says otherwise? That will really make Cohen’s day.

  To avoid his wrath, she shoots him a quick text message letting him know she is safe, that she is meeting with victim number four’s daughter, and she will call him soon.

  A few seconds later, Cohen replies.

  What are you playing at? We need to talk. Stop bloody texting me.

  Wolfe climbs into Hannah’s vehicle, her leg pressing against a South African R1 Battle Rifle lying against her seat, the muzzle facing up. ‘Is this safe?’ Wolfe asks.

  ‘Ja, safety’s on.’

  A male voice crackles over the two-way radio.

  Hannah responds, ‘Tumi, what’s happening? Over.’

  ‘We have a problem,’ Tumi replies.

  58

  When Wolfe was The Post’s Foreign Correspondent in Syria, she was embedded with a British Army unit. She vividly recalls sharing a joke with a soldier, moments before he was catapulted into the air by an IED, both legs blown off. Thrown to the ground and concussed, it took what seemed like an eternity for the ringing in her ears to subside. She will never forget the first thing she heard: the soldier’s screams.

  During the siege of Homs, she tried to rescue a mother and two children trapped beneath rubble. She found the youngest first, the little boy’s body crushed. None survived. In each case, Wolfe had reported what she saw, so the world would know how the innocent victims of war – the women and children – suffered. Over time she found a way to cope with seeing so much suffering, to distance herself so she could do her job. She had increasingly relied on alcohol to forget, on pills to control her tremors. The Yemeni Civil War was the last straw, with thousands of civilians bombed. After three years in war zones, she told Cohen enough was enough.

  Wolfe thought she’d seen the last of such slaughter.

  She was wrong.

  Tumi, a tall man in khaki, and a younger ranger next to him, have rifles raised and pointed at a cackle of hyenas, drawn by the scent of the carcasses.

  ‘I don’t want to shoot them,’ Tumi says, ‘but we can’t keep them away much longer.’

  ‘Call the police again,’ Hannah says, her R1 Battle Rifle slung over her shoulder by its strap. ‘They’re more likely to listen to you than me.’ Tumi flicks a questioning look at Wolfe. Hannah introduces her. ‘Tumi led an anti-poaching team in the Kruger for four years. Thank God, he’s with us now, although I wish we were as well-resourced. If we were, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘They will always find a way in, Hannah,’ says Tumi, who
lowers his rifle and uses his phone.

  Hannah leads Wolfe to a nine-foot-long female rhino lying on her side, her legs rigid.

  ‘This is Lottie. Twelve years old,’ says Hannah. ‘Her mother died soon after she was born. A poacher’s bullet. So I hand-reared Lottie. She was very special to me.’

  The rhinoceros’s grey hide is a myriad of crossing lines like chain mail, except nothing could protect her from the ferocity of the attack. Wolfe is at the rear of the animal. There’s a deep gash across her lower back. Blood has dried almost black on her skin, flies buzzing frantically in and around the wound.

  ‘They macheted her spine,’ says Hannah. ‘Severed the spinal cord so she couldn’t use her back legs. She was helpless.’ Hannah points to scuff marks in the dirt behind the animal. ‘Look there. She would have been terrified. Screaming in pain. She’d have no understanding as to why she was attacked. She tried to drag herself away, using her front legs, the back ones trailing behind her. The poachers would be shouting, dogs attacking her face, legs, biting, snarling.’

  Is it the needless brutality, or that the animal could never win against such odds that fires up Wolfe’s anger? She tries to put a lid on it, keeping her questions practical.

  ‘How did they find her?’ Wolfe asks.

  ‘They pay someone to watch the fence. If they see rhino, they tell the poachers. Sometimes they use helicopters to track them, sometimes drones.’

  ‘Drones?’

  ‘There’s big money behind poaching. Rhinos are easy targets. Especially white rhinos. They’re gentle, slow-moving grazers. You point a geweer at them,’ she shakes her head, ‘I mean gun, and they’ll just look at you.’

  Hannah leads Wolfe around to where Lottie’s head rests in a pool of blood. She swats away the flies.

  ‘They did this to her when she was conscious. She’d have felt every cut.’

  Wolfe winces at the sight of her. Part of Lottie’s face has been hacked away. Muscle, bone and brain had spilled into the dirt. Only her lower jaw, one ear, brow and eyes remain.

  ‘They used an axe, cutting into her skull, gouging out the base of each horn, first the big one at the front, then the smaller one. They wanted the whole horn, even what’s buried in her skull. The bigger the horn, the more money they get. Can you imagine the agony?’ Hannah asks, her voice breaking.

  Wolfe cannot even begin to imagine. Bile rises up her throat. She swallows.

  ‘Why take one ear?’

  ‘Proof to the buyer in Vietnam the horn was taken from a living animal.’

  ‘Isn’t the horn enough?’

  ‘Vietnamese men who want to show off their wealth and status pay for a rhino to be slaughtered. They want to brag that the animal was killed for them.’

  ‘And the feet?’ Wolfe asks.

  She points to where the rhino’s front feet have been chopped off, leaving bloody stumps, the bone protruding from jagged flesh.

  ‘Sold as paper weights.’

  ‘Tell me about the poachers.’

  ‘Gone are the days when poachers were villagers, just wanting to feed their family. These days, poachers are well-equipped, well-trained mercenaries. Armed with AK-47s, they have dogs, night-vision goggles, sometimes drones. They get paid well, but the real money is made by the criminal syndicates in Vietnam and China. They fund the poaching. They drive the illegal trade in horn. Middle Eastern countries such as Yemen and Oman buy intact horns for ceremonial daggers and jewellery, but it’s a much smaller market.’

  ‘Why didn’t they simply shoot her?’ Wolfe avoids looking at the mutilated rhino. ‘Put her out of her misery?’

  ‘Gunshots make too much noise, draw unwanted attention. So the animal suffers a slow death.’ Hannah kneels and points to shoe marks and paw prints in the sandy dirt. ‘You see these? Looks like there were four of them, plus maybe six or eight dogs. Probably Mozambique ex-soldiers. The border’s not far from here.’ Hannah points out tyre tracks. ‘Not made by our vehicles.’ Hannah looks in the direction of the perimeter fence. ‘Lottie has been dead for about twelve hours. The horn would have been in Mozambique within a few hours and then hidden inside a shipping container headed for Asia.’

  ‘Hidden inside what?’

  ‘Sugar cane, most likely. It’s easy to hide horn and tusks that way. Very difficult to search. Sharp and heavy.’

  ‘Does the name Terry Blunt mean anything, or the KwaZulu Natal Co-operative?’

  ‘No. Why?’ Hannah says.

  Tumi’s angry voice interrupts.

  ‘It’s been six hours, for God’s sake, man,’ Tumi says into his phone. ‘How much longer…?’

  Hannah shakes her head. ‘If they turn up at all, it’ll be a miracle.’

  She leads Wolfe to a second dead rhino. ‘Mad Max, female, she was two weeks to giving birth.’

  The same hacked head, the top of her face carved out like a new moon. One ear removed. But what causes Wolfe’s stomach to churn is what the poachers did to her next. Spilling out from Mad Max’s belly, her womb and intestines, pale and limp in the red dirt. Wolfe retches. Lying next to his mother is the body of a fully formed rhino calf.

  ‘When they tore him from his mother’s womb, he was alive.’

  Wolfe runs for some bushes and heaves up her guts, then wipes her mouth with a tissue. When she looks up, Hannah sits with her back to Lottie’s wide shoulders, the giant animal and the young woman connected for the last time. Hannah lowers her head so it rests on her arms. She’s talking to herself, or perhaps even to the dead rhino.

  ‘I will be your voice,’ Hannah says, ‘I won’t give up.’

  As Wolfe watches Hannah, she has a light-bulb moment. She can’t believe she hasn’t made the connection before.

  The four murder victims were mutilated in the same way as these rhinos: noses sliced off, ears removed. And the female victim, the woman Wolfe believes to be Russian, had her unborn child ripped from her belly, just as Mad Max’s calf was ripped from her womb.

  The serial killer is imitating rhino poachers. He collects macabre trophies. Not horns and animal feet, but human noses and hands. Why?

  59

  ‘Finally,’ says Tumi, pointing at the south-east gate.

  A white boxy van marked with yellow and blue chevrons is ushered in through the reserve’s main gate by a security guard. It moves slowly, veering off the dirt road at one point, then swerving back. The riot vehicle has seen better days. Even the bull bar at the front is dented and rusting, and the steel grilles over the windscreen look as if they’ve taken a hammering. The faint sound of dance music gets louder the closer the vehicle gets.

  Tumi shifts position so he stands next to Hannah. ‘Try not to get angry,’ he says to Hannah. ‘It won’t do any good.’

  Hannah nods.

  Three uniformed male officers. One white, two black. The driver slams on the brakes at the last minute, barely stopping in time, throwing grit and dust into the air. The doors are thrown open and the white officer waves at them, as if joining them for a picnic. He shakes Hannah’s hand. ‘Sergeant Du Preez,’ says Hannah. The officer’s eyes are bloodshot, and he reeks of beer.

  ‘Thank you for coming. Poachers got in last night, killed two of my…’

  The other officers head straight for the two dead rhinos, taking no care to avoid the footprints or tyre tracks in the dirt. Hannah explodes.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she shouts, running to block their path. ‘You’re contaminating a crime scene.’

  ‘They’re just animals,’ says one of the black officers, who introduces himself as Constable Commey. He tries to step around her.

  Tumi blocks Commey’s path. ‘Poaching is a crime, my friend. Be careful where you step, man. There are footprints, dog prints, cartridges. You see?’ He points.

  Commey moves his hand across his face as if swatting a fly. ‘They’re long gone.’

  Hannah directs her attention on the sergeant. ‘Is this a joke to you?’

  ‘Of course no
t. Now step aside. Let us do our job.’

  Du Preez orders his men to watch where they walk. ‘Those horns would be worth a bit, huh?’ Hannah bites her lip. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Twelve, thirteen hours ago.’

  ‘Nothing we can do. They’re in Mozambique by now.’

  ‘Can’t you identify them or something? Maybe they stopped for petrol. There must be a way.’

  Commey gives Lottie a kick in her rump. ‘We’ll start a fire.’

  Wolfe assumes he means to keep the men warm while they cordon off the scene.

  ‘You’re not eating my rhino,’ Hannah says. ‘Jesus Christ! You don’t give a shit, do you? And you’re bloody drunk.’

  Hannah yanks open the police vehicle’s passenger door. An empty beer can rolls out and lands in the dirt. The foot well is littered with them. There’s also an unopened six-pack waiting to be drunk. ‘This isn’t a bloody party!’ She’s close to tears.

  Commey sniggers.

  Wolfe takes photos of the beer cans and the officers with her iPhone. ‘Drunk on duty. Rustenburg police officers a disgrace. Find rhino poaching a joke. That’ll make a great news headline.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Du Preez asks.

  Wolfe introduces herself then adds, ‘I know journalists with the South African Herald, too.’

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ says Du Preez, ‘there’s no need for that.’

  ‘Are you going to take this crime seriously?’ Wolfe asks him.

  Du Preez gives her a venomous look, then directs his men to cordon off the area. They move with sullen slowness.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ Tumi says to Hannah. ‘You go home.’

  Hannah takes a long look at her dead rhinos. ‘Make sure they are gentle with them,’ she says to Tumi. ‘No fire. No meat. No drinking. When they’re done, I want them off my land.’

  60

  From Hannah’s back porch, the dusk sky is blood-orange. On the horizon, silhouetted spindly trees, the branches almost devoid of leaves, look like skeletons dancing a crazy dance. Hannah sits in a wicker swing chair, her Jack Russells lying either side of her. She leans forward, her body tense. She’d barely eaten the meal she’d prepared for them earlier.