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Girl with the Golden Voice

Page 17

by Carl Hancock


  ‘What’s this dezzy view?’

  ‘Didn’t you go to school, Drongo?’

  ‘Yeah, but …’

  ‘You didn’t learn anything?’

  ‘I learned how to use my fists, how to roll a nice sniff of bhang, and not to trust guys who think they’re educated. But this dezzy thing …’

  Uchombe interrupted.

  ‘Drongo, remember yesterday we thought we would finish this job? Well, maybe that’s going to happen today, too.’

  ‘And that’s dezzy?’ Drongo’s expression was puzzled.

  Francis Baringo took a moment to take in what Uchombe meant.

  ‘Hey, Boss, what’s going on here? You mean we got to spend another night in that dump?’

  ‘No, but we don’t get to finish him off, yet. We’ll take him up to the forest, truss him up and … leave him. Check up on him in the morning.’

  He raised his hand to prevent Baringo coming back at him.

  ‘Got a message a couple of hours ago. He’s never been like this before. Something bugging him. But the money’s gone up, so. Well, let’s go.’

  It was dark which meant less traffic. The two cars rejoined the 104 and headed north.

  Chapter Eleven

  or Tom the claustrophobic blackness of the car boot, the drone of the powerful engine, the constant bumping and jerking had become his universe. He passed into a middle world between life and death. He inched his way to a corner where he had some control over his movements. He was beyond the stabbing agonies of pain in particular parts of his body. A dull numbness had taken over his whole body. He guessed that he must be into the second day with his new friends. And Lucy, please God, she should be back in Londiani now. The alternative was too horrendous to contemplate. These people were pros and they usually stuck to the one job. It was him they were after. Surely she was safe! Perhaps it was afternoon when the light streamed into the veranda. Would he see it again? More than anything he longed to fill his lungs with cool, sweet air.

  He was both puzzled and pleased that he felt no fear. He had no illusions about what these people intended for him. He had seen them. That was proof enough. They would take no risks with their own self-preservation. His badly beaten body would not be able to put up much resistance. So his defence would be simple and seemingly feeble. While they were travelling he would fill his mind with nothing but pleasant and positive thoughts and when they stopped he would try to look dozy but underneath be alert to the smallest chance of getting away.

  The car slowed and seconds later he was being jolted and rolled around the boot. They were on a dirt road or possibly a track. The physical agonies were back, redoubled. His involuntary cries were inaudible outside his hot, black cell. The rough stuff went on and on and suddenly stopped when the car jerked to a halt.

  There was loud talk and a lot of laughter. Tom wondered where he was. The boot lid creaked open. Beyond the two black faces that peered down at him he could see a starlit sky through branches of tall trees. One of the faces reached down towards him and in the very second that Tom saw the gleam of the steel in his hand, a voice called out, ‘Cut the rope around his ankles. Make the dung-head walk. And don’t be fussy.’

  The blade touched his skin and he felt a wetness trickle into his boot. Four arms hauled him out, a hand pushed him hard in the back and he tumbled onto the damp grass of a forest track. His fingers grasped the wet earth as he tensed his whole body. A bullet in the back of the head would mean the briefest of pains. But he was dragged into a moonlit clearing and, looking up, he saw the beam of a torch playing up and down the door of a wooden shack. The dragging continued through the open door and he was flung down onto a dusty floor. Uchome barked out more orders. ‘Tie his legs again. Cut the gag.’

  Tom smelled the stench of sweat and stale beer as a hand grasped the gag and cut it with a single swift movement.

  ‘Mister, you are one lucky bastard. One more nick and I could send you on to glory.’

  ‘Leave him, Drongo. Let’s get out of here! This place gives me the creeps. Make sure there are two locks on the door chain.’ And last words from Uchome, ‘Bwana, you can shout all you like. Only the animals will be listening. Enjoy the company. Come on, Drongo. Everyone, the drinks are on the boss. Let’s relax. Finish the job later.’

  Car doors banged. Engines were revved.Tom was alone. Darkness within darkness as he sat up and tried to get rid of the numbness and stiffness in his body. He recognised that his chance had come, the only one he could hope for. Would his captors be back soon to finish him off? He remembered the sight of two crumpled young bodies in the hut in the Shimba Hills, but this place was too cold for the coast. To hell with it! He’d think about where he was when he got out. ‘Finish the job later.’ When was later? Get on with it.

  He knew he was opposite the door. He was facing it. With his hands pinned behind his back and ankles tied fast, he rocked and wriggled up close to it and kicked hard with his heels. Useless. He continued his wriggle until he had completed a full circuit of his cell, testing the wall every yard or so. Not much hope of a hasty exit there.

  Time for a breather. What was that noise? That was no human sound. As far as he could judge, there were half a dozen little animals skittering across the dead leaves out there. He listened hard. There was something familiar yet sinister about that frantic activity. He remembered where he’d heard it before, too often. The barn at Londiani, and they still hadn’t got rid of them. Bloody rats! He hated them, was terrified of them. He held his breath. God, no, one of them was in there with him! With a massive effort he twisted up onto his knees and, with his back against the wall, pushed and pushed until he was upright. More skittering inside. There were two, perhaps three of them. They had no trouble getting in. What had he missed on his tour of the wall?

  A few moments silence, inside and out. What were they up to? He visualised those mean eyes, that malevolent brain sizing up a gigantic side of raw meat. Perhaps there had been others before him.

  They were on the move again. One was standing on his boot. He could feel the pressure of two tiny feet. When this one moved to lick the dried blood on the bottom of his leg, he tried to leap away but instead he tumbled and ended up on his back on the dusty floor. His bound hands dug into the small of his back like a hard fist and took his breath away. Another big effort and he was lying on his side close to the wall and gathering himself.

  He pictured himself, cold, trussed like a chicken, holed up in a cell with rats for company, a lesser being than the rats who could come and go at will. But he was smiling, smiling at the absurdity of his situation. In an hour, two hours or ten he could be, probably would be dead, gone to be with Julius Caesar, Napoleon. ‘And I’m scared of a few rats!’

  As he rolled away from the wall his forehead brushed something cold and hard. He moved the object back against the wall with his nose and painstakingly investigated, using his face as hands and eyes. Hard, smooth, quite rounded, with holes …

  ‘A bloody skull!’

  ‘Enjoy the company.’ He remembered the words. Then came a shaft of revelation. ‘They’re going to let me starve to death!’

  The realisation energised him. In spite of the darkness all around him, Tom closed his eyes and waited. The thoughts came. Every one of them offered some unlikely possibility and every one led him back to the idea of the skull. He quickly saw that it was his one ally, but only if he could use his hands.

  So began the hard work that had him perspiring in seconds. His first success came when he managed to manipulate a sharp edge of the skull against the cords binding his wrists. He sawed with slow, tiny movements. He ignored the pain even when the ache spread down to his thighs and behind his ears. He had never realised before that there were muscles up there. His first success gave him a surprise, a slight give that told him that one strand had been cut. Euphoria! More quickly a second break came and a third until the binding unravelled. For several seconds he could not pull his hands and wrists apart for the agony in
volved, but when he finally slid the one from the other he guided his improvised saw towards his ankles. He worked feverishly, frightened that at any minute he would hear the sound of a car approaching the hut. All the while he was thinking of his next step and as soon as he was free he took his new friend on a second tour around the wall.

  His fingers probed the place where the wall and the ground met, but still there was no sign of where the rats came and went. As he drew his hand along it hit against something soft and warm and small. It squealed and ran off. Mice! Mice! Not rats at all!

  He took another short breather and relaxed for a few moments. He was dragging his bony mattock as he crawled and when he felt sure that he had completed a full circuit, he began to attack the pounded earth. His first attempt at digging was more of a scrape than a scoop. He dreaded hitting rocks or tree roots. What he would have given for a cheap, sharp-bladed shovel! If only old Prince were with him for the company and for his big ridgeback feet. Those powerful claws would soon have dug out a deep hole.

  The skull was too fragile for this work. He must try something else. The best he could do was to lean back on his elbows, plant his heels into the earth, press down hard and pump them back and forth, and, when his legs tired, scoop up his little pile of dust and throw it behind him. Even with this minimum amount of work to do, the skull began to shed shards of bone. In his panicky frame of mind these beginnings of disintegration upset him, distressed Tom unreasonably. He had no right to destroy these last remains of a fellow human being. He had no right and nothing good would come of it.

  And there were signs of progress, a hole a foot deep and just as wide. From now on he would use his hands for scoops.

  There was a price to pay for the relentless pumping. So much lactic acid had built up in his leg muscles that they had turned to jelly. He was forced to waste precious minutes to wait for them to recover. He sat up and reached for the skull and couched it in the crook of his arm. Perhaps this piece of crumbling bone would be his last human contact. Tom caressed the smooth, hard cranium and sighed. A delicious weariness gradually came over him. And something else, something he would normally have described as weird. The disturbing sense of aloneness had left him to be replaced by an equally disturbing sense of a kind of presence. He soon became certain that this spirit, or whatever it was, meant him no harm. He had not felt so relaxed in a long while. His failing sense of hope that things would turn out well became strong again. He was ready to return to work.

  There was one last piece of weirdness. As he carefully placed the skull behind him, his hand dipped down into the hole to check if there was any dirt to remove. As he touched bottom his fingers penetrated the soil, only it was not soil that he touched but sand. The feel was unmistakable. Where could it have come from? He moved quickly to a kneeling position and thrust both hands down. His lips mouthed the single word, ‘miracle’.

  He soon developed a rhythm, hands paddling shoulders rolling to the beat of disco music that he played in his mind. He ignored the sweat that coursed in rivulets down his face and body until a light, chill breeze breathed on his chest. Air was coming in from outside! He could not see any opening, nor did he lean forward to check this wonderful truth. He simply increased the pace of his work until it became obvious that he had opened a sizeable hole. Tom paused then and moved right up to the wall. He could see the shadowy outline of trees but knew that there was more to be done before he could squeeze his body back out into the world. And what if, in the next few minutes, the beam of headlights appeared along the track? He would surely have a heart attack.

  At last came the blissful, ecstatic moment when he knew that he could slide through. He grasped the skull and looked back into the blackness of the interior for one final glance, and said in low and solemn voice, ‘Thanks. I’ll make sure I do the right thing.’

  In seconds he was standing outside, unsteadily. Ignoring the pain and stiffness he was moving away, staggering rather than walking, content for the moment to follow the rough vehicle track.

  * * *

  Adil Patel, the night editor of The Daily Nation, changed his headline half an hour before the first editions began to roll off. For the first time ever the big boss had phoned in after midnight and dictated the lead article and editorial comment.

  ‘Brutal Kidnap at Lakeside.’

  The story spread far beyond the borders of Kenya. The Wajiru family was renting a ranch complex in the hills inland from San Francisco. The whole band and their families had their space out there. It was good to be back in California, away from that snow on the east coast. At breakfast time it became a habit for them to sit around and read the Internet edition of The Nation. Rebecca was late in that morning and the print-off had been hidden away. Rebecca was not put out when Mary told her that something had gone wrong with the machine that day. Mary had asked her father to let her tell Rebecca the news. A hastily gathered family conference had decided they would wait. Better to give her a complete story even if the news was the worst she could receive.

  On the day the story broke, Julius Rubai was on the road early with his mother and father. It was still dark when they began the descent off the dual carriageway. They arrived at Londiani just as Alex and Stephen were completing the day’s roster.

  Chapter Twelve

  om had little idea of where he was. Perhaps they had taken him across the border. There had been time for that, perhaps. He was in a forest somewhere. If he was still in Kenya, he knew several where it was cold in the night. For now he was thrilled to be peering into the thick woodland and looking up at the dusty brightness of the Milky Way. His sweat had already dried to a crusty saltiness.

  He stood still and listened. He detected no sound except for a light breath of wind. There was danger for him so close to the hut, but choosing the safest route out would be a matter of guesswork. For all he knew they could be out there close by, watching and waiting for their moment. Another unpleasant thought struck hard. Had they brought him to the Aberdares? That national park was home to thousands of animals, none of them friendly and many of them dangerous. Big cats roamed at night and he was easy meat if one happened by. They had given him the choice of death by starvation or by an invisible martyrdom in the jaws of a family of big cats. But, apart from the mice, he had not heard a single sign of any animal.

  He looked back towards the hut for the last time and pointed the eyes of his companion in the same direction. They must move away and quickly. He must find a road, if there was any close by. The track he was following crossed a well-worn, dusty path which he took believing that there would be less chance of carelessly stepping on twigs or clumps of dead leaves. Soon he learned two solid facts. A faint pink light in the sky behind him told him that he was travelling westwards and that a new day was coming. He celebrated by rubbing his companion skull gently and sharing the good news.

  ‘Billy, we’re getting there, boy. We’re getting there!’

  And there was more, a new sound on the breeze that had been with him since he started his march to freedom. He stopped to listen. Surely that was the noise of an engine. Instinctively he dropped to his knees, half expecting to see headlights probing the gloaming up ahead, but the sound weakened and faded to nothing.

  He began a hobbling run, happy that the path was taking him towards where the sound had been. There was another sound, louder, closer. It was the drone of the engine of a truck or a coach labouring up a steep hill. A beam of headlights was pointing upwards.

  Through the last thin screen of trees he saw it, not a truck, not a common bus but a coach, the coach, the gleaming blue and gold of The Eldoret Express, lit up and gathering speed after cresting the hill.

  By the time Tom reached the grey of the tarmac, the coach had disappeared. He now knew, almost for sure, where he was. He was standing on the road that bisected the Kakamega Forest and somewhere down to his left was Nakuru and all points south. The sun was about to rise and for the first time he could take a close look at his companion of th
e night. The skull was smaller than it had seemed, shiny and almost bleached but hardly damaged by his attempt to use it as a tool.

  ‘Sorry about that, truly sorry. I was desperate. I’m sure you know all about how that feels.’

  He began to wonder if there was some way in which he could discover an identity. He would think about that one later. For now it was enough to work on the best way for him to cover the two hundred kilometres or so that separated him from Londiani.

  He would travel by coach. With luck the next Eldoret Express along would be heading south for Nairobi and would pass through Naivasha, hopefully with him on board. He had no money for the fare, but when the time came he would get over that. A bigger problem was making sure the bus would stop for a casual pick-up, especially a dirty and unkempt one. The drivers were on a tight schedule.

  He started walking south hoping to come to a bus stop but ready to slip into the cover of the forest if he heard a vehicle approaching. The sound of an express would be unmistakable. He had heard it a thousand times.

  * * *

  Abel Rubai was a troubled man. He roused his wife and eldest from sleep at four am. He needed their support. For a second night he had not slept, only dozed fitfully in front of his screens. The volatility of the Far East markets challenged him and by smart thinking he had come away each night with satisfactory profits, very. But the old kick that he used to feel when outsmarting the opposition was no longer there. Worse, for the first time he was suffering doubts about his judgement. Three times he had phoned his men with changes of plan.

  McCall. How he had come to hate that name! He wanted the eldest son out of the way but had choked on the idea of dealing the final blow. He sensed danger to himself in wiping out this nuisance, an irrational fear that in some mysterious way, with this one trivial act, he would set in motion his own downfall. Perhaps he would get rid of these troublesome demons if he did the job himself.

 

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