Mosaic

by Jo Bannister

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Jo Bannister

  Epigraph

  Burning for Burning

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Wound for Wound

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Life for Life

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Jo Bannister

  Mosaic

  Jo Bannister

  Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.

  Epigraph

  And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for

  life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for

  foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, strife for

  strife.

  The Book of the Covenant, as told to Moses:

  Exodus 21 Mosaic law

  Burning for Burning

  Chapter One

  The big man with the white moustache like a Viking’s leaned in and out of Joel Grant’s field of vision. That field was narrowed by the restraints upon him and by his own weakness, but when the big man leaned close he said things and when he moved away he did things, and what he did made Grant scream and his exhausted body twist and writhe like a jerked marionette.

  This long after Grant could not remember what he had said, only what he had wanted; nor could he remember what the man had done to him that had hurt so much. Forgetting was necessary, Nature’s way of ensuring that he would not spend the rest of his life on the rack, remembering the experience all his waking hours and helplessly reliving it every night. But Grant resented the loss, even mourned it, feeling—though he could not have explained the feeling—that part of his being had been stolen from him. He knew that he had suffered, and survived, but having no cogent memory of the first he could not ever quite focus the second into reality. He dwelt in a kind of limbo, as if the big man had retained his soul.

  Nor did forgetting allow him a dreamless sleep. As the big man with the white moustache loomed in and out of his vision he screamed and writhed, and shouted obscenities until someone struck him in the face. The blow was not vicious, not painful, but it was repeated rhythmically and insistently until he began to emerge from the nightmare.

  He woke finally to a brilliance of electric light, the slick of sweat down his body, a tangle of sheets about his legs and a sound like the wind that was his own gasping, panting breath. A warm ache of terror lay upon his limbs and his cheek tingled.

  A woman knelt on the bed beside him. Her night attire consisted of a wristwatch, and she was mopping his face and throat and the hollows under his collarbones with a cold wet flannel. When she saw intelligence creeping into his staring, terrified eyes she put the flannel into his hand and looked at her watch.

  “You took your time coming out of that one.”

  From somewhere Grant managed to find a shaky grin. “Why leave when you’re enjoying yourself?”

  Liz Fallon smiled back. “You’re getting your sense of humour back.”

  “No. I’m just getting better at pretending I have one.”

  She shrugged. “Have it your own way.” She did a lot for him that most people would not consider part of a normal relationship, but she drew the line at coaxing him at four o’clock in the morning. There was a pocket diary on the table by the bed. She made a note in it.

  Weakness whining in his voice, Grant said petulantly, “I don’t see what good you think that does, either.”

  Liz thought about how he must feel, not only being nursed like a sick child but needing it, and hung onto her patience. “It proves you’re getting better. It used to be seven nights a week. Now it’s three. That’s a big improvement.”

  “It’s still seven,” growled Grant, wiping the flannel down his forearms with distaste and hands that were not steady. The sweat had poured from him like a river: even the sheets were damp. “I only wake you up three nights a week.”

  “You used to wake me up seven, so it’s still progress.”

  “Maybe it’s your insomnia that’s getting better,” Grant said snidely. “There’s nothing like good works for a clear conscience.”

  Liz put the diary back and regarded him calmly. “Joel, do we have to have this conversation now? It’s the middle of the night: I’m tired, I want to go back to bed. You should get some more sleep, too.”

  He mumbled something into the flannel.

  “What?”

  “I said, I daren’t,” he shouted. “I daren’t go to sleep, because when I do he does it to me again, what he did before, and I can’t even remember what it was.”

  It was not that her patience snapped, only that she recognized when it could do more harm than good. “It’s your dream, Joel,” she said sharply. “Fight him for it Hurt him. Maybe if you can beat him you’ll be free of it. You were a fighter: well, fight now.”

  She rose from the bed with serpentine grace, her long golden back smoothly straightening, and walked from his room without haste or hesitation, closing the door behind her with a crisp, quiet, very final snap.

  After she had gone Grant went on looking at the light bulb above him until the element printed tiny bright horseshoes all over his retinae. “Fight?” he mused bitterly. “Don’t you know, girl, that’s the first thing they do to you—knock all the fight out?”

  The big man with the white moustache made a small, deliberate gesture of his hand towards the door.

  The man on the kitchen chair could barely see the door—that also was deliberate—but the whites of his eyes showed as he tried automatically to follow the gesture. The man on the chair was afraid. He was also black, and here being a seated black man in the presence of a standing white man was enough to make anyone afraid. There was nothing he could do about it, however, except endure it as best he could and show it as little as possible.

  De Witte was speaking. He had an unusually deep voice, with a hint of bass music in the lower register which gave range to the customarily rather nasal accent. He also spoke slowly, but nothing about him suggested a correspondingly slow intellect. He might conceivably have got the job other than on merit—a donkey could get elected prime minister as long as it was white and brayed in a Boer accent—he might even have got the reputation some other way. But the hard bright diamonds that served De Witte as eyes could only have been acquired either by mining or by being a cold, clever, ruthless bastard. De Witte’s hands were too clean for a miner’s; though only in that one respect.

  He said, in his deep unhurried musical voice, “That’s the way out. You go out that door and you’re in a corridor; turn left, round the corner an
d there’s another door, and that one lets you onto the street It can’t be more than twenty strides—the sort of distance you could do in a few seconds from a standing start. But I’ve got to tell you, boy, you’d never make it. Three ways you can get out of here: dead, mad and co-operative. The last is not only the easiest, it’s the quickest.

  “Listen, you’re not a fool, I’m not a fool, so we won’t talk nonsense. I won’t tell you that every man who comes in here gives me what I want in the end, because that isn’t true and you know it. But you also know that those men who hold out, you don’t bump into them on street corners afterwards. You want any kind of life after this, you’ll co-operate. You’ve still got six, seven years on Robben Island, but in the end you’ll walk away. It sure beats twenty years in a padded cell or going out the door in a plastic bag. This is not a nice place, you don’t want to spend the rest of your life here.”

  The man on the chair made a tiny shuddering movement. It might have been a spasm of pure fear, except that De Witte, who had seen it before, knew otherwise. It was the fractional muscular tremor of action no sooner decided upon than abandoned. In his mind, and at the end of his nerves, the prisoner had made a desperate dive for the half-seen door behind him; but at the last moment his courage had failed him. Beneath the white moustache De Witte smiled to himself. The first battle was over and won. The man no longer saw himself as a fighter but as a captive. Now that was out of the way, real progress could begin.

  De Witte strolled over to the door and leaned against it, casually, letting the lesson sink in. He moved as he spoke: unhurriedly, but with the promise of speed and of strength. He went on: “I understand your position. You’ve got appearances to keep up. You can’t talk too soon. Some things you can’t tell me at all. You can’t talk until I hurt you some. Don’t worry, I know the routine—I’ve done this before. So what we do is, give you something to show for your visit—nothing too bad, it’ll look worse than it is—and then you can give me something to show for my time. It doesn’t have to be too important, just something for the files. Then we can call it a day.”

  Though there’s always tomorrow, thought De Witte, a shade bleakly, and the day after that, and the day after that, and pretty soon you’ll run out of trivial things to tell me to stop the hurting that will be anything but token, and you’ll tell me everything you know and some things you can only guess at before I decide I’ve had my money’s worth out of you. And when we haul in a couple of dozen of your comrades in consequence, they’ll come spitting fire and swearing vengeance on your poor tattered hide; but by the time they too have been through this room, and betrayed sorae friends of their own and learnt to spew up their own insides at the sound of a footstep outside the door, they won’t hate you any more. They won’t even hate me. They won’t have the guts.

  Not until late that evening did the side-door he had described open to allow De Witte onto the street. It was a back street, dark and quiet, linking nowhere with nowhere else, where no one came and no one passed, which was exactly how the men who had chosen the site and designed the building wanted it. It was made for secret arrivals and departures. De Witte did not care who saw him come or go, but at the end of a long day it was easier to have his car meet him here than go right through the building to the front steps and meet it there.

  Increasingly De Witte found the days long, the work tiring. He wondered sometimes, waiting wearily in the dark for his car, if age was finally catching up on him. He was fifty-nine, a strong and vigorous man, and his command of the business of counter-terrorism had never been fuller, defter or more effective. Only sometimes he wondered if the energy and enthusiasm he invested in the job were as great now as they had once been.

  It had to be age. Certainly he felt no less passionate a commitment to the defence of his country. He considered himself fortunate to have been able to serve that passion, in one capacity or another, all his adult life. He was proud of his contribution; not boastful, but quietly satisfied with his record of service to his people and his land. He knew, as no one else could, the number of times his instincts and his professionalism had averted disaster. It was a cause for pride. He also knew what the wider world thought of him: not only black Africa but the querulous white liberals of Europe and America. He could contemplate their self-righteous disapproval with absolute equanimity, even at the end of a long day. There were only four million people in all the world whose opinions he cared about, and all of them were South Africans and all of them were white.

  A small sound reached him from across the dark road. There were doorways there too, also belonging to government offices, though the doors were never used: De Witte could not remember when he last saw someone come or go through one. They were no more than black alcoves off the dark street, but in one of them tonight something was crying. It was a tiny sound, barely audible, and he could not be sure if it was a child or a woman, or even an animal in pain. He peered into the shadows. “Hey there: you got trouble?”

  The sound stopped abruptly. Then it began again: a faint keening. De Witte, frowning, looked up the street. His car was just nosing round the corner, fifty metres away. What he ought to do depended on who it could be. Not a ter—you couldn’t get that sort of sound out of them by nailing them to the wall—so although caution was a necessary part of his life-style De Witte did not feel threatened. He could call the police, in which case some hungry child or woman who’d got herself in trouble would find herself going through the official mill with very likely a charge at the end of it. He could wait for his driver; but he did not care to be dependent on a servant for any more than his contracted work. Or he could do nothing. But he was not an uncaring man. He did his job, and did it thoroughly, because he cared so much about certain tilings, not because he cared too little. While the car was still half a street away he crossed over, following the thin threads of sound until he found the huddled shape in one of the doorways from which they issued.

  It was a woman, swathed in a tattered dress whose print pattern grew clearer in the lights of the approaching car and a rag of a shawl. Her head was also swathed and he could not see her face. He touched her with his toe. “Hey, poppy, you wanting something?”

  The glint of eyes put her black face in perspective and she shuffled hurriedly to her feet. She did not look towards the car. She said, “I got what I want,” and both the words and the tone were so at variance with the abject manner of her that De Witte straightened, instantly on his guard. But as he stepped back she went with him, her step as elastic as a cat’s, and polished metal winked between them in the headlamps’gleam; for only a moment. Then the blade the woman had snatched from her ragged clothes was hilt-deep in De Witte’s chest, the woman was lithely running and De Witte was slowly, slowly railing.

  He was not aware of hitting the ground, but an incalculable time later he opened his eyes on an oblique view of the dark and dusty street punctuated, somewhat surrealistically, by the white-wall tyres of his car and the shiny boots of his chauffeur. Detachedly, he considered the possibility that Jacob made a better job of boots than any servant in Pretoria. As a kind of afterthought he wondered if a man with a knife stuck in his chest should be worrying about shoes. The knife did not actually hurt; or if it did, it hurt so much that shock was preventing him from registering it. He knew more about the relationship of shock to pain than most doctors, he thought sagely. It was part of his job.

  None of this showed in his face. Jacob Sithole, bending over the body of the man who was his employer and thought himself his master, saw only the large still body lying stiffly, almost primly, on its side, the slack face ashy-white in the wash of the head-lights, the brilliant-cut diamond eyes half open, vacant and fading. He had to bend close enough to hear the rattle of breath in De Witte’s throat to know that he was alive. He looked up the empty street after the vanished woman.

  “Oh you bad bastard man,” he murmured, more to himself than to De Witte. “So finally you hurt somebody who found a way of hurting you back. So
now I guess you think I’m going to bust my gut getting some kind of help for you. For why? So you can get well and hurt some more people? Man, man—you ask a lot.”

  He gazed down at the man on the ground, and up the street to where there were lights and people and telephones. He began, almost reluctantly to walk. After a pace or two he began to run.

  While the big man with the white moustache lay in a hospital room, battling with the pain of healing which seemed to him far worse than that of the injury itself, and wondering if he should tell Jacob that his soliloquy had been overheard, his doctor was serving coffee in his office to Elinor De Witte and trying to explain why, although the repair operation had been wholly successful and her husband appeared to be making a good recovery, there was in fact little doubt but that she would soon be his widow.

  “The knife wound is no longer the problem,” he said. “Though the point actually entered the heart, the damage really wasn’t that great: granted that we got to him before he bled to death. But while we were in there stitching him up, we found other problems. Elinor, I don’t know how he’s kept up the pace as long as he has. He should have been in here talking to me three years ago. Then I could have told him: slow down, take holidays, enjoy your life and your heart will do you till you’re eighty. Now? There’s nothing I can tell him, or you, except that he has the heart of a sick old man.

  “If he gets over this, as he should, and if he never does another day’s work, he could enjoy reasonable health for maybe ten years. But if he goes back to his job—any job, really, but his job in particular—Elinor, he’ll be dead in a matter of months. I’m sorry, there is no gentler way of putting it, we might as well have the cards face up from the start. He has to choose between being an old man twenty years before his time, or acting his age and dying.

  “If he’ll let us, we can give him a life worth looking forward to. But that’s the choice he’ll have to make, and you and I both know him too well, Elinor, to suppose he’ll choose as we’d wish him to.”