Invitation to Die

by Barbara Cleverly

  “You must have been thankful for the qualities of Private Sexton?”

  “Some of them,” came the lugubrious answer.

  “The cabin, when we came across it, was small, but from a distance, at least, seemed intact. The roof was sound, all the walls standing. These were of light stone dug out of the surrounding kopjies and blended with the surroundings. It had been difficult to spot, hidden away as it was on the shaded side of a spreading jackalberry tree. The river was a few yards to the south of it, and the railway line running north to Kimberley and south to Cape Town was right there where it was shown on the hand-drawn map we’d been given, two minutes’ stroll from the cabin. We could see from a distance that it was, strategically, a good spot to occupy. Any trains running would slow to a crawl to get over the flimsy-looking metal strutted-erection that passed for a railway bridge over the Modder. It was the obvious place from which to plan a bit of sabotage or to leap aboard a carriage going in the direction of your choice or simply to keep an eye out for troop or civilian movements out of Kimberley or up to Kimberley. We had a pair of binoculars with us, and I gave the whole scene a careful raking before we decided what to do. I noticed that the telegraph wires that ran along with the railway had been shredded every hundred yards and were hanging in ragged swags from the posts that had not been blown in two. Culverts had been dynamited, rails were missing. No chance of communicating with the rest of the world, then.

  “There was no sign of life, apart from the three horses and a pack mule that stood quietly whisking their tails, sharing the shade of the tree with the cabin. Two of the horses were small, wiry Boer nags; the other was a big rangy black. A good horse. As good as you’d find on an English hunting field.”

  “Three men inside?”

  “Is what I reckoned. Well, two Boers and whoever had been riding the black. We took our time. Made our plans. Circled the cabin and kept our heads down. We’d gotten very good at moving stealthily. Men whose feet have tramped miles avoiding anthills, snakes, scorpions, decaying corpses and entrenched Boer and lived to tell the tale, have learned where to place those feet.”

  “The horses didn’t detect you?”

  “Of course they detected us!” He grinned. “But a carefully calculated—by us!—five minutes after they’d made a hullabaloo when a pack of jackals decided to come into the reserve on the scrounge. We timed it well! An elderly Boer with a beard down to his chest and hair to his shoulders had come out shouting at them. He’d run off the jackals, quietened the horses and gone back inside to resume his quarrel with his mates. We’d heard raised voices, vicious voices, made out the occasional Boer word, even a laugh or two but the structure of the little building was pretty stout and not much of use had filtered through the walls. Chasing the jackals was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in the old feller’s day. He must have been just picking up his argument when the horses caught a whiff of us. He came out again with an even shorter fuse, assuming the jackals had sneaked back, and gave the nags a telling off. They settled down. And we settled down and waited for teatime.”

  “Teatime?”

  “Their teatime, not ours. In fact, they brewed up coffee for themselves. They always waited for the sun to lower before they got busy. We’d counted on them putting the kettle on and coming down to the river for a wash or a swim before dressing for dinner.

  “The old feller came out first. He had a pee into the river, then started to take his shirt off. The moment it was up over his eyes, a khaki-camouflaged shape whipped out of the bush where he’d been going to hang it; thumbs found his neck and squeezed the life out of him in ten seconds. Our instructor would have been proud of the technique! The bloke never caught sight of his assailant: Lieutenant Abel Hardy at his most efficient. Abel pushed the body into the river and it swirled away.

  “Five minutes later, a large, strong-looking Boer came out, towel round his neck, suspenders hanging over his hips. He called for his friend and, receiving no answer, strolled down to the river to see if he’d gone for a swim. He sank to his knees, rinsed his face and looked again. ‘Piet! Where’ve you gone? Where’s the coffee?’ or some such. We’ll never know. They were his last words. A naked man rose up from the reeds inches away in the river, grabbed him by his dangling suspenders, whipped them round his throat and pulled tight. When he’d finished gargling, his body joined the first, bobbing downstream with the strong current. Private Sexton doing his duty.

  “At the same moment, Ratty and the Fox were under the tree securing the horses, making sure no one attempted to get away. I’d positioned Corporal Jessup fifty yards distant on a round-topped knoll with a rifle and a good view of both approaches to the cabin and orders to shoot dead on sight anyone who wasn’t one of us.”

  “The third man?”

  “I had no idea whether he was still in the cabin. My first thought was that the horse belonged to a messenger out from beleaguered Kimberley. A section of the Kimberley Light Horse had been caught up in the siege and were still quartered in the town. It wasn’t a watertight situation. Troopers did occasionally get through with news and orders to get a move on. Ravings from Rhodes. As head of De Beers, he had a business to run. His gold mines and his diamond mines were inoperable when they were being fired at by the cannon the Boers had hauled up on the railroad. Long Tom! It had a range of four miles and had brought the city to a standstill.”

  “He had a point!” Redfyre said. “Wasn’t that what the war was mostly about? Owning, controlling and making money out of the richest mineral finds since the gold rush? That’s why you’d been shipped over there. To tell a race of Dutch farmers they did not have the rights or the expertise to operate the mines. That they should just get on peaceably with their farming and cattle raising and leave the engineering and mineral exploitation to those with the knowledge and resources to do it—the Uitlanders. The foreigners. The British, the Americans, the Canadians . . . but above all, Cecil Rhodes.”

  “A simple résumé, but it’ll do. Though I wish the British who’ve loved their pastoral heroes since Cincinnatus hadn’t stuck that label on the Boers! ‘Plucky little countryfolk, defending their homeland in arms against our own mighty empire . . . We should teach them their place, but understand and be generous in victory!’ Huh. I blame the foreign correspondents working for the press at home for encouraging that attitude. They were there for the story, the blood, the high drama. They were never there with their notebooks when we relieved farm after farm, settlement after settlement, town after town and set free the thousands of starving native Africans the bloody Boers kept as slaves.”

  “I believe most gentlemen of the press were even-handed, considering the intricacies. They reported from the battlefields but also from the field hospitals, both Boer and British. They told the unvarnished truth about Kimberley when they were at last able to enter the city. Some had survived well, their complaints largely about the lack of choice on the lunch menu at the Ritz; others had not. No African babies survived. You can’t feed babies on horsemeat, and Africans were at the end of the queue for provisions. The misdeeds and inhumanity were not glossed over. People back here at home were aware—and deeply concerned.”

  The prisoner had heard all this before. His eyes narrowed and he sighed with affected boredom. “There you go! Armchair generals, armchair editors and now armchair policemen. The people didn’t know the half of it! Their views were formed by heavily edited accounts from newspapers with axes to grind, financial backers to keep sweet and papers to sell. Thank God for people like Emily Hobhouse and Churchill’s aunt Sarah, who were on the spot, saw things they weren’t supposed to see and had the courage and tenacity to stand up and shout it from the rooftops! The rooftops of Fleet Street! I salute those ladies!” He collected himself. “I see. You’ve just winkled out another bit of information about Richard Dunne. Socialist? Tick. Bleeding-heart liberal? Tick. Suffragist? Tick. Activist? Tick—”

  “Le
ader of men? Tick. Storyteller? Oh yes. I want to hear how your merry band extricated itself from the problem of the third man! You were telling me how it could happen that a rider from Kimberley managed to get out of town and make it the many miles down to your bend in the Old Muddy.”

  The captain grunted. “Storytelling? Well, at least it’s not a chargeable offence yet, as long as it’s the truth, I suppose. And—hear this, Inspector—I’m one for telling the truth.”

  “And I’m one for knowing it when I hear it,” Redfyre said.

  “I’d noticed. Many miles, you say? In truth, it was a mere twenty. A half day’s ride, though over difficult terrain. Anyone attempting it would be hoping to spend the night under secure cover. In a land crawling with Boer, wild animals and thugs like me. The cabin was still in good condition because it was essential to many people on many sides of the conflict. It’s a vast country, and the besieging forces around Kimberley were spread out over many miles. They had been much reduced by the calling up of troops to support the confrontation of the Ninth Regiment. Our lot.”

  He shrugged. “I guessed some unlucky messenger who thought he could outrun the Boer had been detained, captured . . . killed, most likely. If he was a member of the Kimberley Light Horse, he was an enemy of the Dutchmen. It seemed reasonable. Apart, that is, from the puzzle of the horse. The Light Horse used scrawny but deep-chested native-bred horses not dissimilar to the Boers’ own mounts. Sure-footed, fast and made of whipcord. This black was a pedigree beauty. Wouldn’t have survived a day as a dispatch nag. It was a rich lady’s riding-out-on-a-Sunday-morning horse. So the rider was an unknown quantity. I took it on myself to deal with him, whoever he was.

  “I gave the horse a closer inspection while I was waiting for Abel and Herbert to get themselves up from the river. It was restive. A lot of eye rolling and prancing about, and Ratty and Syd were finding it hard to control. Herbert took one look and murmured something soft to it. And it calmed down. Using sign language—he always had more words for the horses than humans—he drew my attention to the condition of the saddle which it was still bearing. I nodded to say I’d noticed. Someone had slashed it up with a sharp knife, poked out the padding, slit seams.

  “Corporal Jessup was in position on the knoll. Ratty, the Fox and Herbert had dealt with the horses and were standing about, pistols at the ready. I signalled to them to hold back—I was going in with Lieutenant Hardy. We paused outside the door, listening and sniffing. Hearing nothing, smelling something foul.

  “We went into a perfect routine for entering an enemy-held premises. In a second we were inside and covering every inch of the room with our pistols. After the brilliant sunlight, it was cripplingly dark and it was some time before we could make out what had been going on. The first thing that struck me was the stench. If you could blend fury, fear and pain into one hellish cocktail and release it into the atmosphere you’d have something approaching the stink.

  “Along the two long walls were two unmade beds—lairs, more like—where the belongings of the two dead Boers were still scattered about. Beds? They were piles of brushwood tamped down and covered with sheep fleeces. Crawling with lice. Along the northern short wall was a built-in dresser stocked with pots and pans and—an odd nod to civilisation—a Delft-patterned tea set. Chipped and dirty. The second-best set, donated by some Dutch farmer’s wife? In the centre of the room was a large table of scrubbed wood with a strange collection of objects laid out on it. At first glance, I wondered at the startling sight of a Bible sitting next to a bloodstained huntsman’s knife. But my interest in the bad housekeeping faded when, through the shadows, I saw the livid gleam of a dead face. A young man tied to a chair. The eyes in his battered face were still open; he had died in agony. Naked to the waist, his chest was scarred and burned. We’d been on watch outside, overhearing not a quarrel between Boers, but an interrogation session. The two torturers had done their frightful work and left the man for dead, going to the river not to brew a reviving pot of coffee, but to wash the blood and vomit off their clothes and limbs.

  “Abel tactfully closed the door behind us. ‘No need for young Syd to see this,’ he murmured.

  “‘No. Let’s see if we can work out what was going on in here,’ I told him. I advanced on the corpse to see if there were any clues to his identity.

  “The eyes in the battered face followed my movement.

  “After a second’s paralysis, I was by his side, babbling reassurances. ‘Captain Dunne, Her Britannic Majesty’s Yorkshire Light Infantry, sir,’ was the best I could come up with in my state of startled horror. “We’re with the Relief Force. Hang on, we’ll get you out of this. Water, Lieutenant! There’s a jug on the table.’

  “We poured the cool water over his head and eased some between his lips. He told me with his eyes he wanted to speak. As gently as I could, I poked the loose and broken teeth from his mouth, and he nodded his thanks.”

  The captain fell silent, and Redfyre left him by himself for as long as it took, adrift a quarter of a century in the past in that grim place. Finally, he said simply, “His last word on this earth was: ‘boot.’ Then his head drooped sideways and he died. Of his injuries, mainly loss of blood assisted by sustained shock to the system. Oh, how often I’ve wished he’d not had the strength to utter that! If he’d just kept his poor wounded mouth shut, none of this . . .”

  He collected himself and pressed on. “By this time, our eyes had begun to work better, and Abel had found and lit an oil lamp. They’d left their tools of torment lying about. Two knives, a knuckleduster, ropes, cigarette ends . . . we scooped them up and stuffed them into a greasy pillowcase. The bloodstained Bible went in for good measure. It was printed in Afrikaans, and for strong reason the object drew my scorn and hatred. Next we took stock of the table and realised that amongst the clutter of dirty enamel mugs, plates full of chicken bones and a tray laid with coffee things, there were one or two very interesting items.

  “Have you ever seen the glow of gold ingots by the light of an oil lamp?” he asked abruptly.

  “Never even clapped eyes on a gold ingot, chum!” Redfyre said, surprised.

  “You wouldn’t forget. Gold needs a subtle light to bring out its nature. In sunshine it flares and flashes and dings the brain. That’s why a woman or a man of taste will never wear gold until after twilight. There were six bars, less than the normal size. Heavy stuff, gold. These had been specially moulded, I’d say, to fit inside the saddle. No foundry marks or other official markings. Lined up like dominoes. Abel raised his eyebrows and gestured with his thumb at the door. I read his thoughts and nodded.

  “He went over and gave a crisp message to Corporal Merriman. ‘All’s well. Danger over, Ratty. Get the Corporal down from that kopje. Then all of you—go and get buckets of water from the river, some brooms . . . whatever you can find. There’s cleaning up to be done before we can bed down. Messy buggers, the Boers! Wait here until we tell you to come in.’

  “He came back inside looking less dazed, back on track.

  “‘Did you make out: ‘boot’? If he was speaking in English, I’m sure the poor bloke said: ‘boot.’ Abel, we’d better investigate. There may be a paper, a vital signal for the army tucked away in there. It’s a favourite if obvious spot. We’ll take a foot each. I’ll handle the right one. Ready?’

  “The riding boots were, you’d have said, almost new. And they were not produced in some backstreet saddlery in Cape Town! They were superbly crafted of the best leather and bearing the stamp of a London bootmaker. This would have been their first—and last—outing. It was Abel’s strong, quick fingers that found it. The foppishly high heel of the left unscrewed, revealing a sizeable cavity. I thought wheezes like that had died out with Francis Walsingham and the Elizabethan spy rings! But in the Transvaal it was easy to slip back a century or two.

  “Abel poked out a thin silk bag tied up tightly at the neck.

  �
�‘Hang on!’ I told him, guessing what it contained. ‘Best decant it carefully.’ I went to the dresser and found a Delft-patterned blue-and-white sugar basin. I dislodged a crust of dead flies and emptied the stained and caked sugar lurking in the bottom into a bucket. I gave the basin a wipe with the flap of my jacket, there being nothing cleaner in the room. Abel cut the fastening of the bag with his pocketknife and with a very steady hand poured the contents into the basin. You have never seen anything less impressive than the gunge that slithered out!

  “Abel was certainly not impressed! ‘What the hell’s this?’ he asked. ‘Could it be opium? This is what it’s supposed to look like in its raw state, isn’t it? I’m not going to volunteer to try it!’

  “‘It looks to me more like a scoopful of muck from the veldt. A pile of dark, gingery earth interspersed with bits of what looks very like gravel.’

  “‘Bloody hell! No! Oh! Argh! This is someone’s ashes! Have you ever seen ashes? I saw my aunty Mavis’s when they scattered them on the rosebushes at the crematorium. They looked pretty much like this. Is someone smuggling Cecil the Almighty’s ashes out of town for burial? Hadn’t heard he was dead, had we?’