by Jo Bannister
The anger waxed in her. He needed her now. If he had regained consciousness, if he were still alive, wherever he was he would be needing her as urgently as he ever had. Caught up in the resurgent nightmare, he would grope for her in his personal darkness and she would not be there; scream for her, and she would not come. He was alone in his worst imaginings.
“Damn them,” she cried aloud, “haven’t they done enough to him?”
She had already called Amsterdam. Nathan Shola would be on the first plane home. Now it occurred to her to wonder if that was what the Boer wanted. She said to Will Hamlin, “After all this time, what can they possibly want with him?” Hamlin shrugged wretchedly. Liz laid a hand on his arm as he sat hunched on the settee beside her. “No, listen, this could be important. Could it possibly be a trap for Nathan?”
Hamlin looked horrified but he thought about it. Then he shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
He mumbled into his chest, “Wrong bait.”
When she realized what he meant, Liz knew he was right. “Yes. It would have been as easy to take me as Joel. Then why?”
“Revenge? They were badly embarrassed by the Mpani raid.”
“If it was only that they could have killed him and left him here. It would have served the same purpose and been much safer. You don’t need to kidnap a man to make an example of him.”
“Perhaps they still want information from him.”
“After two years? What could he possibly know that would still be relevant? Your paper’s more up to date than that.”
Hamlin managed a rueful grin. “What did he say to you?”
“The Boer? Just that he wanted to talk to Joel.”
Hamlin was unconvinced. “You were unconscious for hours. He could have talked to him here. You can hurt someone a lot in quite a short time if there’s nobody to interfere. Instead he ran the risk of being seen carrying or dragging Grant out of the house and presumably into a car. He must have had a good reason for that; a strong, important reason.”
A chill like fingers ran down Liz’s spine. She felt herself pale. “You don’t suppose for a minute they’d try to take him back to
Pretoria, to talk to him there?”
Danny Vanderbilt watched Joel Grant wake. He had been unconscious a long time, but then Vanderbilt had hit him hard and had made no subsequent efforts to coax him back into the land of the living. Contrary to what he had told the girl before hitting her—the white girl, not the dancer—he was not remotely interested in talking to Grant. As far as he was concerned, the later he slept the better. It was going to be a long day.
A roll of carpet underfelt against the bedroom wall made a tolerable seat. With his large square chin resting on his forearms across his knees, Vanderbilt watched his prisoner struggle towards the light and wondered what it was about him that seemed familiar.
Grant’s head in the shaggy halo of a homespun haircut, moved restively between his pinioned arms. His breath came in small laboured grunts between parted teeth. A frown had grown between his brows that was screwing his eyes against the day. With his wrists lashed to the bedhead, the fingers laxly twitching and clenching, and one knee drawn up, he seemed to be giving birth to his own awareness.
When his head stopped rolling and his grunting breath softened to a shallow panting, Vanderbilt saw that his eyes had opened a crack and were sliding, vague and unfocused, across the spartan room. He stood up and moved closer to the bed. Grant’s weightless skimming gaze touched on him and stopped. His eyes opened wide with shock before closing on a gathering despair. A faint moan whispered through his dry lips.
“That’s right, sonny,” Vanderbilt said quietly. “You didn’t dream me.”
From the capacious holdall he produced a carton of milk and a packet of biscuits. He freed Grant’s left hand so that he could feed himself. “Behave yourself and I won’t tie you down again.”
Grant weakly invited him to participate in an act of self-abuse as impractical as it was obscene. His eyes flinched with the expectation of pain, but Vanderbilt only grinned.
“That’s all right. You don’t have to like me. All you have to do is obey me, and you really can’t do anything else.”
The knowledge that he was right soured the milk in Grant’s belly; only an effort of will kept him from throwing up.
With his senses returning to him like a flight of weary pigeons, one at a time and in no particular order, Grant did not know where he was, how he had got there, how much time had passed or what was likely to happen next. But he always knew who was responsible: not Vanderbilt personally, but those behind him. He had known in the brief waking seconds before the Boer floored him back in his own room in Liz Fallon’s house, and he had known with the first crack of awareness that stirred in his battered brain as he lay tied to a stripped bed in a grey and dusty room he had never seen before. He knew it was Pretoria; mainly because nobody else would be sufficiently interested to spit on him if he was burning, but also because of the craven twitching of all his nerve-endings. The people in Pretoria had put a lot of time and effort into teaching him to fear them, and now his body responded to their implicit presence like a trained dog. Deaf and blind he would know them, and shake like he was shaking now.
Vanderbilt saw him shivering and casually tossed him his coat. Grant fielded it with his free hand and hurled it back, fear and fury blazing in his eyes. Vanderbilt calmly moved his head out of the way and let the coat fall harmlessly to the boards. He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Why don’t you get on with it?” shouted Grant. His own accent, keener than always, scraped across his nerves like a rasp.
“With what?”
“What you came here for. You want something, don’t you? From me. So get on with it. It’s quiet enough for you here, isn’t it? I can yell my bloody head off and nobody’ll come running. Damn near as good as Pretoria, hey?” The words rushed from him like a torrent from a glacier, fast and urgent, frenetic, beyond control or containment. His face was white with shock, graven with deep lines and stained with black under both eyes and along the line of his left jaw. Gaunt, raging and wrapped in a blanket, he looked like a mad prophet. Vanderbilt thought he might have to hit him again to shut him up.
“Damn you,” shouted Joel Grant, “listen to me!”
Vanderbilt’s gaze, which had wandered, came back to him with the force of a slap. “No, you listen to me, because already I can tell that quite a small amount of you is going to get right up my superior maxillary sinus. This may come as a disappointment, but I don’t want anything from you. I’m not interested in anything you know: not enough to plug your fingers into the wall socket, not enough to feed lighted cigarettes to your bodily orifices, not even enough to ask nicely. That may be somebody’s job, but it isn’t mine. As far as you’re concerned, sonny, what I am is a land of Universal Aunt. I’m here to make sure you get home safely.”
The wind poured off the Pennine fells. It soughed through the hedges and round the corners of the stone house, and its voice was the voice of bleak centuries. Half a world away the sun was warm, the autumn breeze laced with the garden scents of bougainvillea and frangipani, the equinox hanging in the heavy air like an electric promise. With the new rains the young land would spurt into growth; the whole lovely country would smell like a garden.
Except for the bits that smelled like a charnel house. Joel Grant stopped shivering long enough to meet Vanderbilt’s eyes. The ghosts in his white face added up to a kind of resolve. He shook his head. “Only in a long box.”
Chapter Four
Will Hamlin met the flight from Amsterdam. Even in the hurrying, shuffling crush of Customs he had no difficulty spotting Nathan Shola. The African was high, black and handsome, a slender two-metre warrior in a business suit. A handgrip was all his luggage, and he held it aloft and hip-swerved his way towards the exit like an attenuated rugby player heading for touch. He flashed brief brilliant smiles to smooth his passage, but his eyes and all
his attention were on the barrier. He was looking for Liz; but Liz had wanted to stay by the phone. Hamlin’s larger, solider figure caught his attention as he made a second scan.
“Will?”
“Nathan. This way, I’ve a car outside.” They shook hands without break in pace. “You made good time.”
“Over the Scheldt I got out and rushed. Will, what the hell is going on?”
Driving back to Sorley, Hamlin repeated all he knew, including everything Liz had told him and everything the police had said about Suzanne Lavalle.
Shola swore. His long tensile body carried about it, like a charge, an aura of latent, almost urbane, savagery that invested plain words with unexpected violence. In consequence he seldom spoke viciously: “damn” was about as rough as his language ever got. “Is she all right?”
“She will be. Though I gather it may be a while before anyone pays to see her with her clothes off.”
Shola’s mobile, sculpted lip curled. He made a mental entry in his personal Book of the Dead. “And Liz?”
“Liz has a bump on the head, that’s all. She’s fine. No,” he corrected himself—he tended to sub-edit his conversation as he did his copy—“she’s scared for him. And very angry.”
Shola grinned tightly. “That sounds like Liz.” The smile died. “But it was me he was looking for—me he asked Suzy about?”
“Probably only as a way of tracing Grant. He didn’t know where to look for him, but he guessed Suzanne would know where to look for you. Presumably he thought he could get Grant’s whereabouts out of you.” Hamlin shrugged apologetically. “Well, Suzanne didn’t know where you were, but she knew you wrote for the Democrat and the name you write under. He knew I’d have an address for you. I imagine if I’d been working late last night I’d have been in for a hammering too. As it was he raided the files and came up with Liz’s address. Then he went round to ask you where Grant was; only you weren’t in the house and Grant was. He struck lucky.”
“He couldn’t have taken Joel as a bargaining piece?”
Hamlin shook his head. His eyes never left the road, which in view of the speed at which he was driving was probably just as well. “He’d have taken Liz, Nathan. Besides, he never asked her about you. He wasn’t interested in you. He’d got what he came for.”
Anger and frustration were mounting in Shola like a head of steam. His voice quivered with mayhem but did not rise. “But why? What can Joel tell them? Mpani’s dead, our people scattered—anything he could tell them now would be two years out of date. Even if he talked.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Hamlin, “they don’t need him to talk. Perhaps they only need him to be there.”
“Pretoria?”
“Yes. Suppose that what they want is to take him back and put him on trial. Nathan, he’s a white South African who sided with black guerrillas against his own kind. He fought for the Nationalists, and when he got caught they fought for him. Maybe that makes him some kind of a symbol. Maybe it has become politically necessary for the government to get him back, break him and put him on show. Is that possible, do you think?”
“In my country anything is possible.” Nathan Shola let out a long breath like a sigh. “Poor Joel. My poor, poor friend.”
Liz was out of the door and down the steps before the car stopped, and before Shola was properly out she had flung herself at him, grafting herself to his long body like a liana embracing a forest tree. “Oh Christ, Nat,” she gasped breathlessly into his neck, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Together they hurried inside.
Chief Inspector George Corner was not idle. By midmorning he had wired copies of Grant’s photograph to ports and airports throughout the country, to mainline railway stations and to the Metropolitan Police; had circulated with it a good description of Vanderbilt and had arranged for a police artist to visit Liz Fallon’s house; had been in touch with Special Branch, fully briefed his superiors and prepared preliminary reports for those government departments which would become involved if Joel Grant did not turn up safe and well in a very short space of time. Then he had a cup of tea and tried to remain civil in the face of a new station sergeant who had just now discovered the humourous potential of his chief inspecter’s name and was wetting himself behind the filing cabinet.
Vanderbilt had achieved a modest comfort beside the bedroom window and was doing his job with such supreme efficiency that he did not appear to be doing it at all. Without moving his head, just by flicking his eyes, he could take in the track, or at least its course between the hedges, almost as far up as the road, or check his prisoner. Joel Grant, one wrist still shackled to the bedstead, was curled up foetally on the mattress as if wrapped round a hurt.
Vanderbilt was confident that no one would approach the cottage by the natural route without giving him time to act. At the first sign of movement in the lane he would drug Grant and release him; if the owners of the cottage turned up to evict him he would go, taking his junkie friend with him, and no one would take them for other than social outcasts using a squat. Only if a serious attempt was made to detain them, which probably meant a policeman, did Vanderbilt intend using violence.
But he anticipated no such problems, any more than he expected the cottage to be rushed from the back. In all likelihood he would leave here with Grant towards the end of this same day without anyone being any the wiser; but even if someone saw them there was nothing to connect them with the incident in Sorley. Possibly three days from now, when some bright policeman had all the pieces on his desk, he might put them together—the kidnapping, the cottage that was used as a refuge, the helicopter that landed briefly on the fell at dusk and the abandoned hire car found by a shepherd next morning—but by then Vanderbilt would be safely back in his own country, and Grant … well, whatever.
Vanderbilt was a professional, which meant that by and large he concerned himself with the hows and left the whys to other people. He did not know why Pretoria wanted Grant back now, after so long, and he did not very much care. He knew the order came from higher up than Botha so he was fairly confident that there was a good reason: his government did not risk confrontation with those few other governments that were less than overtly hostile merely on a whim.
He would have been happier still if the job had been handed down by De Witte, in whom he and his colleagues had an unshakable faith, but he knew that De Witte was, for the present at least, sidelined. There was even talk that the old bastard was dying. Vanderbilt, who had seen him in the hospital after the knifing, remained to be convinced. He did not think that the colonel was anything like ready to swap certain power in the here-and-now for doubtful authority in the hereafter; but perhaps he would not be offered the choice. It was like a man saying that if there were blacks in heaven he would not go. If it turned out there were blacks in heaven, neither De Witte nor Vanderbilt nor most of their compatriots would be invited.
Vanderbilt shrugged inside. He had long ago come to the conclusion that if God was capable of knowing everything a man had done, He should also be able to divine his motives. He did not consider himself, or any of them, evil men, only men charged with the almost superhuman task of keeping entropy at bay and given only flawed tools to work with. There were aspects of South African affairs he was not overly fond of himself, but he did not see anything demonstrably finer or fairer when he looked to the governments of his country’s black neighbours. There seemed to be something in the African soil that begot violence and butchery: that beautiful, vibrant, bloody land. The only choice for white South Africans was between riding the tiger and dismounting.
Outside the cobweb-curtained window the fell was grey and brown, the wind was cold, the sky was low and heavy with the threat of more rain. The only sign of life as far as the eye could see was a sprinkle of white on the far hillside, and Vanderbilt knew that no matter how long he watched no sudden explosion of tawny power, no fleet and spotted courser with the long legs and serpentine body of a greyhound, no tireless pace of pied n
omads would come to set the sheep in dizzy motion. Danny Vanderbilt suffered a sharp pang of homesickness. He did not want to be here; and if he thought about it, though it was generally wiser not to, he did not much want to be doing what he was doing here—dragging a bound and frightened boy back to one kind of death or another in a Pretoria basement.
Grant was shivering more violently than before. When the links chaining him were just barely touching they rang out tinily, like a miniature tattoo or a distant tambourine, the meter of his tremors. Vanderbilt wondered if he was really sick—wondered, indeed, how anyone stayed healthy in such a climate—and why Botha had put that unusual emphasis on preserving his prisoner’s well-being. He left the window and quietly walked over to the bed, picking up the flung coat as he passed.
Grant appeared to be sleeping. His sunk eyes were all but closed, only a thin white line showing under each lid, and his breathing was ragged but unchanging. His skin was cold and damp to the touch, his face waxy. Vanderbilt spread the coat over him.
The gentle touch, the weight of the coat, or perhaps only the proximity of the big man wakened him. He woke with a wordless cry woven of sounds of anger and despair, his unfettered arm flailing. Metal clashed as he snatched repeatedly at the short chain. The wildness of his struggle, like a man trapped in madness or epilepsy, startled Vanderbilt who pressed the writhing man firmly back against the bed, the coat tucked under his chin. Suppressed by hands like sandbags his struggles grew weaker. At length the only movement under the coat was the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
Bending over him, pinning him still, Vanderbilt said grimly, “Sonny, I told you, if I have to I’ll tie you down good. This is bloody cold country, you got to keep covered up.”
Something odd happened. Vanderbilt was bending over Joel Grant, looking into his face from a range of inches, and then—without warning and just for a moment—it was not Grant he was seeing at all but someone else, someone else’s eyes and expression, someone he knew. He snatched a startled breath, his senses groping, but the illusion was already gone, dissolved as quickly as it had formed, leaving the cognitive portion of his brain dry-spinning and his eyes searching Grant’s eyes with an intensity that did not reflect what had actually passed between them.
