by Jo Bannister
But now after two years it was his again, and he jacked himself up the bed to cower against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. If any lingering rationality was aware that the fresh stripes over his knees, the cool of cotton sheets and the sophisticated geometric wallpaper half seen by moonshine failed to support his perception of events, the discrepancy did not penetrate sufficiently far into his fear to make him question. Yet some detached portion of his mind, or perhaps only a reflex of his body, knew where he was because while he crouched against the wall one hand was scrabbling wildly for the light switch.
When he found it the room sprang into bright relief. Grant still did not know where he was: the room was not his old cell and the big man looming over him had no moustache, but that was the only difference—he was the same sort of man, his eyes held the same sort of promise, and Grant knew that when he spoke the same Boer accent would lance through his nerves. He did not think he could bear for it to start again.
Vanderbilt had thought he was groping for a weapon. He dived at the crouching man, one big hand pinning Grant’s arm to the wall, the other clamping across his mouth. His bones were not much bigger than a girl’s, though squarer. When the light came on, almost simultaneously, Vanderbilt realized there was no weapon and allowed himself a pause—kneeling on the bed, the smaller man immobile in his broad hands—to assess the situation. Had they made enough noise to waken the girl? He thought back and decided they had not—a decision in which he was more misled than mistaken. He had still to get Grant out of the house and away without arousing pursuit. For that he had to take the girl out of the equation, at least temporarily. He could gag her while she slept and then tie her without causing her harm, he thought What he had had to do to the Kop girl still rankled with him. He regarded Grant pensively. He was light enough to carry without inconvenience as far as the car he had left in deep shadow in an adjacent side-street. This late no one should see them, but if Vanderbilt took his time he could anyway make it look as if he was helping a drunk. Vanderbilt often took risks, but none he did not have to.
Grant’s eyes, wide with terror, gazed whitely back over the silencing hand. Vanderbilt made up his mind. He jerked Grant’s head forward and then back against the wall, hard, and when his eyes rolled up he tugged him forward onto the bony prominence of a waiting knee which met his jaw with a dull sound like rocks and stopped him dead. Grant’s spare body went as limp as rags. Vanderbilt spilled him onto the floor, rubbing ruefully at his knee.
The door opened and a tall naked girl stood golden against the darkness. She looked at Grant’s sprawled body. She did not scream or try to run. She said, quite calmly, “Have you killed him?” She was English.
Vanderbilt said, “No.”
Even in the one word she caught his accent. She nodded to herself, as if it proved something. “Are you going to?”
“No. I just want to talk to him.”
“You could have talked to him on the telephone.”
“I don’t somehow think he’d have talked back.”
Liz looked at him, insensible on the carpet. His head had tipped back and his throat looked exposed and vulnerable. The marks of his captivity were prominent in the electric light. “You had him for two months in Pretoria and he didn’t talk then. What makes you think hell talk to you now?”
Vanderbilt looked curiously from one to the other, the naked young woman to the unconscious young man. “Did he tell you he didn’t talk?”
Liz shook her head. “He can’t remember. Others were there. They knew.”
Vanderbilt shrugged. “They all say that afterwards. To cover for one another. But most of them co-operate in the end. He did.”
Liz Fallon did not care, one way or the other. And because she did not care she knew that he was lying. She smiled. She knelt by Grant’s head and fingered the hair out of his eyes. He did not stir. She said to Vanderbilt, “Sure. And some of De Witte’s best friends are black communist homosexuals.”
She woke five hours later, to the sound of policemen breaking in her door, and she was alone in the house.
Chapter Three
The Lancashire town of Sorley, where Liz Fallon lived with her lover when he was at home and her good cause whether or not, was undergoing one of its periodic wet spells. This was real northern rain: not Irish “softness” or the dreary grey drizzle that passes for rain in London and those parts. When it rained in Sorley it hit the corrugated tin roofs of a thousand-outhouses with a batter like concentrated machinegun fire; it ricocheted up off the worn and settled flagstones so that a black umbrella was only half the answer. It yammered at the windows and pooled on the sandstone doorsteps, in the dips left by generations of cold stamping feet. And when it rained in Sorley, it kept it up for days.
The Western Democrat was not a Sorley newspaper for Sorley people. That function was filled by the much larger Sorley Chronicle, which carried photographs of local weddings on the front page and blow-by-blow accounts of local council meetings and football matches inside. The Democrat, with its ancient Cossar press and grainy cliché-block pictures, was specifically the organ of the immigrant communities of the north-west, so that while its circulation was a fraction that of the Chronicle its reach was rather broader: as far as Liverpool in the west and Bradford in the east.
Many of its readers would have been surprised, and some horrified, to learn that the Western Democrat was not the product of an immigrant staff but the conception, creation and favoured first child of a young white Englishman with a degree in political science and a bequest from his grandmother. Will Hamlin was not twenty-seven, still owner and editor of the Western Democrat, still a champion of immigrants’ rights and concerns, reluctant but resigned host to a small well-behaved ulcer, and employer of one journalist, three printers and Nancy Prescott, the jewel in his crown.
Nancy was engaged as a secretary, paid as a personal assistant and mostly occupied in riding shotgun on a stable of contributors whose articles were invariably pertinent, controversial, committed and late. Nancy Prescott was also white, but never more so than this morning when she opened up the office and found what had happened to it in the few short hours she had borrowed to go home and sleep in.
Ten minutes after Nancy opened the door on mayhem, Will Hamlin came clattering up the uncarpeted wooden stairs behind her. He had left the place even later than Nancy the previous night, and it showed. He stood dripping amid the debris of emptied drawers and scattered papers, his shoulders slumped. Under his sodden hair his face was set and grim, but his eyes were hollow with shock and a kind of grief. Nancy did not know how to console him. She said, “The police are coming.”
Hamlin nodded, absently. He was an intelligent, articulate man, capable of great eloquence and argument that was both impassioned and of impeccable reasoning, and all he could think to say of the rape of his enterprise was, “Why?”
The detective who arrived not long after was able to provide answers of a sort. “Well, it wasn’t vandalism. Someone may have it in for you but not in that way.”
Hamlin spread a hand helplessly at the mess. “But—what good—?”
“He was looking for something. It may look random; actually it’s anything but He’s emptied every drawer, every file, every cupboard in the minimum time possible. Whatever he was looking for, either he found it or it wasn’t here.”
“There’s nothing—valuable—here.”
The pohceman shrugged. “That may depend on how you define valuable. Mr. Hamlin, this was a professional search. There was nothing casual about it. He knew what he was looking for, and he knew how to look, and I’m inclined to believe he also knew where to look. All these papers—presumably they? tell you something?”
“Records,” said Hamlin, bewildered. “Mostly records—advertising accounts, correspondence, VAT. Last week’s copy. Some back material I haven’t found slots for yet. Nothing.”
“Something,” the pohceman demurred, “we just don’t know what yet. How long before you can say i
f there’s anything missing?”
Hamlin looked at the paper mountain in the middle of his floor. He looked at Nancy, at his watch, at the ceiling, finally at the detective. “When is it you retire?” he asked gently.
The police had done almost all they usefully could and were preparing to leave when the telephone rang. Hamlin answered it. He listened, almost in silence, for a long time. Then he lowered the handset, offering it rather vaguely to the CID sergeant “It’s the Metropolitan Police.” He looked appalled.
Amazement sent the sergeant’s eyebrows and the pitch of his voice soaring. “For me?”
“Not exactly. But I think you’d better hear what they have to say.”
Behind Vanderbilt as he drove Grant lay unconscious on the floor of the hired car. Had he been going further he would have stopped somewhere dark and lonely enough to transfer his passenger to the boot: it was a big car with a capacious boot, Vanderbilt had had this contingency in mind when he chose it. But he wanted to be off the road by dawn, and judging by past experience he did not expect Grant to be up to causing problems before then. He drove, fast but carefully, away from Sorley and towards the naked backbone of England. Where the road crossed into Yorkshire it began to climb in earnest and the succession of small towns gave way first to villages, then to isolated farms on windy hills, finally to the expansive moors of the Pennines themselves. There was no traffic, either on the main road or when Vanderbilt veered off onto the B-routes, and only the occasional glimmer of a distant light where a farmer was calving a cow or burning some other agricultural midnight oil.
When the shapes of trees began to show up against the lightening sky, Vanderbilt began looking for somewhere to hole up. It was not the work of moments because his requirements were precise. He wanted an empty building—vacant house would be ideal, a disused barn would do—where he could secure his prisoner and stay out of sight until he could arrange their passage home. The route had already been prepared and primed: one phone call and within a few hours he would be on his way.
Three times he investigated apparently disused laneways only to be turned back by eventual signs of continuing occupation. Once a dog rushed at the car, barking, but no lights sprang up in the dark house it guarded; still, Vanderbilt drove a long way before he tried again.
The fourth cart-track he essayed crept between overgrown hedges and plunged down a steep hill before washing up against the stony outcrop of a labourer’s cottage. It was long and low, built like the rock of ages, and weeds and brambles pressed silently at the door, craving an admittance that would not be denied much longer. In the laneway tall grasses bowed gracefully to the bumper of the car.
Vanderbilt turned off the engine and sat for a moment with the window down, listening and watching the house by the beam of his headlamps. There was no sound, no movement: everything about the look and feel of the place suggested it was abandoned. At the end of a minute he got out and went to the front door and knocked. When there was still no response he walked round, wading in places through growth thigh-high, until he found the side-door, which he broke down with a bull-buffalo shove of his shoulder. He went inside quickly then, moving from room to room. The house was empty.
He moved the car round the back, out of sight from the laneway—not because he expected anyone to come calling but because he had reached the upper echelons of a perilous profession by being very, very careful—and carried inside his holdall and the body of Joel Grant. Grant was still deeply unconscious: his hands danced slackly on limp wrists in time with Vanderbilt’s stride and tapped against the backs of his legs when he stepped over the threshold.
The house appeared less neglected from the inside than the outside. The roof was sound, there was no damp; there was a smell of must but not of mould; the glazing was intact. There was no electricity, but after a reluctant movement and with a tinny shudder of protest cold water ran from the taps. The rooms were sparsely furnished: a dining-table but no chairs, a settee and an oak dresser downstairs, beds and big solid wardrobes in the upstairs rooms. Almost nothing was left that could have been removed easily: no cutlery, no pots, no bedding, no curtains. Someone had died here, Vanderbilt surmised, and after the relieved relatives had taken everything they conveniently could the house was closed up to await a purchaser who never came. Vanderbilt looked out from the dusty window at the grim hills pressing round, shading lighter now from black to battleship grey, and knew that he had come to the right place. This cottage had served as a prison before.
He carried Grant upstairs, bothered more by the narrowness of the stair than by the weight, and deposited him on one of the beds—that in the main bedroom, which was the most solidly framed. There was no point tying him down to something that a couple of good shakes would pull apart.
The holdall contained items he had bought in London before proceeding to Soho. They were things he had not wanted to bring through British Customs, things the average tourist or businessman would have had difficulty explaining away: not so much the torch, the comprehensive maps, even the commando knife, which might be justified by a somewhat unseasonal camping expedition, as the bottle of sedative and the hypodermic syringes, the spare passports, the electronic gismo that was a radio beacon and the large quantities of sterling. He hoped not to need the passports, however, and whatever money he spent would have to be fully accounted for to Botha.
There were handcuffs, too, which he used to secure Grant to the iron bedstead, and a blanket with which he covered him. Vanderbilt had not taken the time to dress him before leaving the house in Sorley, so he was still in his pyjama trousers and the raincoat Vanderbilt had bundled round him to make him less conspicuous for the short walk to the car. The pale sun was barely proud of the hill and the house had been cold for a long time, and Vanderbilt assumed that if Botha did not want Joel Grant harmed he probably did not want him with double pneumonia either.
Before leaving—he hoped and expected this would be the only time he would have to leave Grant until after they arrived in Pretoria—he thumbed Grant’s eyes open and shone the torch in each of them in turn. Nothing moved there, and Vanderbilt saw no prospect of him waking in the half-hour he would be gone. He frowned over a quick mental sum. Grant had been unconscious two hours already and showed no signs of returning yet. Vanderbilt suspected he may have hit him too hard. Even with experience, it was difficult to assess the degree of force which would render an opponent incapable of slogging back without putting him on the critical list. Vanderbilt was not really worried; but if there was no change when he got back, he would begin to worry.
He drove back to the last village they had come through which had a public telephone.
Despite the dull ringing in her head, Liz Fallon began making sense before either the pohce or Will Hamlin did. To be fair, the investigating officer, whose name was George Corner and who would have been a hairdresser instead had he anticipated the juvenile glee with which successive colleagues would dub him Corner of the Yard, was probably more concerned at this stage with being reassuring rather than honest; but Hamlin, who had spent most of his adult life writing about the rape of human freedom, was genuinely shocked numb by this unexpected personal attack.
After the had gone, and the doctor summoned by the police had gone, and the ambulance summoned by the doctor had been turned away by Liz who was recovering quickly enough to be getting angry, she sat Hamlin down with a mug of coffee heavily laced with whisky. He murmured something about the milk being off. She smiled and nodded and topped up his mug, and at length he looked at her rather more intelligently and said, “I don’t actually know you, do I?”
“You were here for Nathan’s party. Eighteen months ago, when he got back from Africa. I was the one passing the biscuits.”
Hamlin nodded but vaguely; clearly he did not remember her. A thought crossed his open face. “Was Grant here then?”
Liz shook her head. The thick rope of her corncoloured hair danced on the collar of her towellingrobe. By her standards she was
prudishly dressed. “Joel was still in hospital in Zimbabwe. Then we had to get his immigration approved. He got here last February. After three weeks of Lancashire winter he was about ready to go back.”
Talking about it resurrected the picture in her head of the damaged man Nathan Shola had brought to her. Skeletally gaunt, his angular limbs assuming defensive postures seemingly of an independent will, his skin bleached by months out of the sun, he looked younger than his twenty-three years; except for his eyes, which were dark coals burning fever-bright with bitterness and resentment in the deep pits above his prominent cheekbones. His eyes were old with horror and hatred. His hands shook slightly all the time. It was impossible to imagine how he had appeared before his three months in hospital.
Nathan Shola introduced them, then added quietly, “My friend needs some help.”
And she had helped him: partly because Nathan asked her to, partly because Grant was a casualty in a cause she respected, mostly because by the time she realized the scale of the task she had taken on Joel Grant was no longer a task but a person. She cared about him and what became of him. It was not love. She was not drawn to him in that way, although on occasions she had lain with him when his need was so great that only her close strength stopped the black heart of his mind from breaking out and engulfing him. It meant no more to him than it did to her; less, she believed, because she did not think he liked her as much as she liked him; or perhaps it was only that needing put a greater strain on a relationship than being needed.
