by Tony Park
Robert stayed crouched in the moon shadow of the tree for a few moments, listening. There would be a nightwatchman somewhere on the property, probably dozing near the expensive four-by-four the Frenchman drove. Robert stood, slipped the 9mm from his belt and crept towards the nearest bungalow. As he drew closer he heard the hum of an air conditioner and saw all the lights were out. It was three in the morning. She would be asleep.
*
Carmel’s mouth was dry when she awoke and in the near total darkness of the room she suffered a few seconds of disorientation as her sleep-deprived brain tried to work out where in the world she was.
Bloody jet lag.
She swivelled her head until she saw the luminous digits of the clock radio: 3:08. She groaned. Now that she knew where she was, the worries she’d taken to bed with her flooded her mind again. She groped on the bedside table for her iPhone and switched it on.
*
Robert Banda heard the ping of SMS messages arriving on a phone. His heart, already pounding with anticipation, lurched at the noise. His hand rested on the handle of the sliding door.
His confidence suddenly left him. What if the door was locked? What if she got up and switched the light on? What if she screamed? Could he get away in time? Was he stupid to think the Frenchman would not be woken by the gunshot and come running? The boat landing, he now realised, was at the other end of the property, nearly three hundred metres away. He would never make it – and he might cross paths with the white man as he came to investigate the noise.
Robert wanted to run, but then he thought of the money, and his mother, all alone since his father had died of the virus. Robert was the man of the family. He had to be strong. And he had used the muti prescribed by Aston.
Plus, if he failed, Aston would surely have him killed. Robert slid open the door.
*
Carmel looked up from the screen of her phone as she heard the shush of the door on its slide. The curtains twitched.
If it was Henri he would have knocked, surely.
She couldn’t remember locking the door.
Carmel saw an arm and made out the dark silhouette of the pistol. She rolled.
*
Henri Bousson had never shot anyone in his life, but he felt a strange sense of calm descend over him as he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around those of his right, which held the Colt .45 calibre pistol tight. The thing was American, a cannon, and he had bought it for its stopping power.
Henri was on the grass, feet planted firmly apart. The intruder was above him, about a metre off the ground, on the paved verandah. The man was silhouetted against the moonlit trees.
The man had his hand on the door to Carmel’s bungalow and started to slide it. He reached inside for the curtains.
Henri briefly thought about calling a warning, but he didn’t want to lose the advantage. He squeezed the trigger twice, quickly – the way they did it on the cop shows on DSTV. The pistol kicked in his hand, as he knew it would. Henri saw the man spin and drop, and then he was running up the stairs leading to the verandah as the body hit the ground.
Carmel screamed.
‘It’s me, Carmel!’ Henri kicked the man, a short, savage jab in the ribs. The intruder’s gun was on the tiles and the African reached in the air for invisible help as the life rattled from his body. Henri glanced at the spreading stains on the man’s shirt. One plumb in the heart and the other probably passed through both lungs. The air hissed from the body with frothy bubbles of blood as he died.
Henri stepped over the body, pistol held high. ‘Carmel? You’re safe now.’
He switched on the light and saw her, cowering by the side of the bed, half wrapped in the sheets and duvet she’d taken with her when she’d rolled. Clever girl, he thought. She peered up at him.
Henri strode across the polished concrete floor to her and held out his free hand. She took it and when he lifted her to her feet she threw herself against him. He wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t cry, but shivered in his arms.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, and breathed in the scent of the shampoo from her pre-bed shower. She was warm from the covers, but he saw the goose bumps on her arms beneath the sleeves of her T-shirt. She wore a checked pair of pyjama shorts. Henri freed an arm and pulled the duvet from the floor, then extricated himself from her and wrapped her. He sat her down on the bed. ‘Stay here. I’m going to check for others.’
‘No. Stay with me, please.’
He looked into her eyes. ‘I will. You’re safe now.’
14
Richard read the message on the screen of his BlackBerry:
Richard,
A man with a gun tried to break into the place where I’m staying last night. I’m sure it’s related to the attacks on you and Liesl, and the death of my colleague Mike Ioannou. I’m flying to Rwanda to try to find out who the people in the photo are. I need to interview you both. You need to get to Arusha ASAP and report to the ICTR. They will take care of you until I can get to you and take your depositions.
Please take care.
Carmel.
Richard read the message again. He’d showered, put on the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before, and found his way from a guestroom through the labyrinthine maze of corridors to the kitchen. The cook was there early, and he’d asked her to make him coffee. He sipped it as he considered what he should do next.
‘Morning.’ Liesl wore a blue silk robe. ‘Please may I have some tea, Prudence?’
Richard looked up from his phone. ‘Someone tried to kill Carmel last night.’
‘Oh my God. Is she OK?’
‘She can still email,’ Richard said.
‘So it’s not just a coincidence.’
‘No.’ The night before, over drinks and then dinner, Richard had tried to convince Liesl, and himself, that as bizarre as it seemed, the attacks on them had been random and unrelated. He theorised that the man who had tried to kill him was a drug dealer and user who was trying to steal whatever was in his home. Even as he’d formulated the story he could see its holes. Why would a drug dealer risk entering the Kruger National Park, and how would he have known where the doctor lived?
‘Maybe it was a hitman hired by one of your ex-lovers’ husbands?’ Liesl had said, her mood brightening after her near meltdown in the wild dogs’ enclosure.
‘Now that does make sense.’
She had smiled, which pleased him. Her parents were good people and they’d fussed over him without making him feel uncomfortable, seemingly warming to him after Tokkie’s initial frosty reception. After Liesl had gone to bed her father had lingered, offering him a Scotch.
‘Like I said before, I knew soldiers who couldn’t handle what they’d seen, what they’d done in Angola. You’re a doctor – do you think Liesl is sick in that way?’
‘I myself was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder,’ Richard said, swirling the golden liquid around the glass, relishing the siren call of the ice and the cool on his fingertips. He craved the release, every day. It was just a matter of degrees. ‘I still don’t think I’m over it – and maybe I never will be. It’s very possible Liesl’s suffering from the same condition.’
Tokkie stood up from his chair and walked out of the room. Richard wondered if he was unable to deal with the fact that his daughter had PTSD, but he returned a couple of minutes later. In his hand was a pistol. ‘You were a doctor, but you were a paratrooper as well.’
‘Yes.’
Tokkie held out the pistol to him. It looked big, heavy and workmanlike. Maybe Russian, Richard thought. He took it, found the magazine release and thumbed it, and let the magazine fall into his left palm. He pocketed it, pulled back the slide, checked the chamber was empty, let the slide go, then fired the action with a click.
‘It’s a Makarov,’ Tokkie said. ‘I got it in Angola off a dead Cuban.’ Richard guessed from the coldness in the older man’s eyes how the Cuban had died. ‘I’ve got a .357 Magnum, Elize has
a small .22 and there is a hunting rifle in the pantry. I don’t know how to heal my daughter’s mind and heart – I’ll want to talk to you more about this later – but for now I am worried about her life. We’re not going to let anyone hurt her, Richard.’
Richard had nodded and Tokkie had gone to bed. He had followed, but had not slept well with the lump of the pistol under his pillow.
Liesl sat down at the kitchen table and Prudence placed a tray with a small teapot, cup, saucer, milk jug and sugar in front of her. Richard read the message aloud as Liesl poured her tea.
‘She wants us to go to Arusha?’
‘So it seems,’ Richard said.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think the answer to all this is in Tanzania, or here.’
Liesl took a sip of tea. ‘I’m worried that us being here is putting my parents at risk. I want to hide, but I don’t know where. Should we go to the police?’
Richard shrugged. ‘I don’t know what the South African Police could do, but sure, yes, we should probably tell them what we know.’
‘Do you think it will do any good?’
‘No, not really. I think the only way we can sort this out is to find out who is in that photo, and why it’s important enough for someone to want to kill us for finding it.’
‘I wish I’d never kept those negatives,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be a part of this, Richard. This isn’t our war.’
He didn’t want it either. He was more angry than scared right now. He’d carved out a nice little nomadic life to help him escape the tragedies and fuck-ups of his past, and now someone was doing their best to bring that peaceful life to an end. Richard wouldn’t have been so angry if it was just him. He’d earned a bad death, several times over, and if someone put a bullet in his head in the middle of the night, not too many people would mourn him. But it angered him that Carmel and Liesl, two women he’d cared for in different ways, were also on the killers’ list, and Collette, the daughter of the dead man who had shown them the photo, might also be in danger.
Tokkie walked into the kitchen, dressed in his farmer’s uniform of shorts, short-sleeved shirt, boots and long socks. ‘I just overheard what you said.’
Richard sipped his coffee. ‘What do you think we should do?’
‘Leave.’
‘What?’ Liesl said.
‘It’s not safe for you to stay here,’ her father said.
Richard was surprised at the old man’s bluntness. ‘Why?’
Tokkie rubbed his eyes and Richard noticed now they were red, with dark bags underneath. He saw, too, that Tokkie’s boots were caked in mud and there were grass seeds and burrs in his socks. ‘I got a call last night from my head of security. There was someone in the game reserve.’
‘Poachers?’ Richard asked.
Tokkie poured himself a cup of coffee, black with no sugar. ‘That wouldn’t be unusual – we get them quite often, either setting or checking their bloody snares, or with their dogs. If we catch them, we arrest the poachers but shoot the dogs. This was different.’
‘How so, Poppa?’
Tokkie looked at Liesl. ‘My security guys are good. They woke Koos, the manager, when they found fresh tracks and they then started following whoever it was who broke in. It was only one person, a man wearing expensive boots with deep, new tread on them – unusual for one of our local tsotsis. They followed the tracks to a gap in the fence – the warthogs dig holes under the electric fences quicker than we can fill them in. Whoever was in slid back out again and then took off in a vehicle – a Land Cruiser by the look of the wheel tracks. They woke me at three this morning and I went out.’
Richard hadn’t heard anyone waking in the house, but given its size that wasn’t surprising.
‘We did a sweep along the fence line, and out the front of the house. The scouts found the same footprints coming right up to the house. When I questioned a few of the workers this morning a couple remembered seeing a Land Cruiser with Gauteng plates being driven by a white man slowly along the road late yesterday afternoon. No one drives slow on that road.’
‘Could have been someone from Johannesburg looking for someone’s place,’ Richard ventured hopefully.
‘I’ve got three neighbours in a ten-kilometre stretch and I already called all of them this morning. No one’s had any visitors from Joburg,’ Tokkie said.
‘But how could they – whoever they are – know that I’m at home, or that Richard is here too?’
Richard thought about it. Whoever was after them – if indeed someone was and this wasn’t all still a train of coincidences – might guess that he and Liesl would link up. He didn’t recall anyone tailing him from Skukuza, but then he hadn’t been looking.
‘I’m sure there was no one following me here,’ Liesl said. ‘I was the only car on the road from Gravelotte.’
Richard’s phone beeped. He was wondering if Carmel was going to send another message, telling them what they should do. He checked it, but annoyingly, the email read: Wayne Hamilton commented on your photo. Bloody Facebook. He wished he’d never signed up for the thing. He hadn’t updated his profile for months. He didn’t particularly want everyone who knew him knowing where he was all the time. The thought hit him. ‘Are you on Facebook, Liesl?’
‘Yes, isn’t everyone?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Tokkie asked.
‘When was the last time you updated your profile?’ Richard asked her.
‘Just yesterday, but . . . wait a minute. Do you think that’s how they’re tracking me – us?’
‘What did you say on Facebook?’
‘Nothing. Just something about having a bad night’s sleep.’ She got out her phone and scrolled to the app. ‘Kak. There’s a message on my wall from my friend Sannette, who I was staying with in Joburg. She’s asking if I got to my parents’ place safely. Hell.’
‘How many friends do you have and do you know them all personally?’
‘I’ve got more than two thousand. I get a lot of people I don’t know who like my photographs,’ she said defensively. ‘How many do you have?’
He said he didn’t know, although he did – eighteen.
‘Whoever was on the farm last night is the same person who was checking you on this Facebook thing, ja?’ Tokkie asked.
‘Yes, Poppa.’
‘Well, put something on there now. Tell Sannette you arrived safely and that you’re looking forward to spending a few days here. Say Mom’s putting on a big dinner for you tonight. We’ll invite some people around.’
‘But you want us to leave . . .’
‘I don’t want you to leave, my girl,’ Tokkie took his daughter’s hands in his. ‘But I don’t want them to get you, and it now seems like they know you are here and are watching you. If they’ve been watching our place they will know Richard is here too. I’m worried they’re going to try to kill you both here.’
Richard was still puzzled by one thing. ‘Why would this person go into the game farm? Wouldn’t they assume that Liesl and I were here in the house?’
Tokkie thought about the question. ‘We have a little lodge there – a kitchen and bar area with some small rondavels. We use it as a family retreat and we advertise it online as a camp for hunters. We do some bow hunting on the farm when we need to reduce our antelope numbers. Whoever is after you might have thought you were staying there.’
‘That shows they’ve done their homework,’ Richard said.
Tokkie nodded. ‘I don’t think you’re dealing with amateurs.’
*
Jan Venter raised the high-powered Swarovski binoculars as one the electronic doors of the multi-car garage next to the farmhouse opened. The Land Cruiser reversed and Jan focused and saw the farmer sitting behind the wheel.
He appeared to be alone. Nel had left early in the morning, just after six, and had returned two hours later. Jan guessed the old man had gone to check on the farms and his other businesses, which includ
ed a cardboard-packaging plant, a juice-making factory with sprawling packing sheds and the local bottle store and service station, which one of his sons owned and ran. The Nels seemed to own the town, and they obviously had eyes everywhere.
Jan had noticed the extra patrols by a local armed-response security company’s bakkies earlier that morning, roving up and down the road between the citrus farm and the game farm, following the pre-dawn commotion when they realised they’d had an intruder on the farm. He had to admit he was begrudgingly impressed at the tight ship they ran; the Nels were no fools. From his vantage point on a high hill on the Nel family’s game farm, located across the road from the farmhouse, he could watch all the comings and goings from the family home.
After checking the wild-dog enclosure and the safari camp on the game farm by foot in the early hours of the morning, he had left via the same crawl space that he’d entered, and driven his Land Cruiser, which he’d rented in Johannesburg with a fake ID, five kilometres from the Nel farm. When he’d come to a gum plantation he’d driven another kilometre in off the road and then bundu-bashed deep into the forest, where he’d left the vehicle. He didn’t care if someone found it and stole it – he would have other vehicles arriving in a couple of days’ time – and he knew his ride had been compromised. Jan had then trekked back from the forest and entered the game farm again via a different warthog scraping, a kilometre from the first, and had taken care to cover his tracks as he’d moved slowly to his observation point. When he’d seen old Tokkie Nel and his scouts checking the spot where he’d first entered, and inspecting the ground for tracks, he’d realised he had underestimated the farmer and his staff.
