Mosaic

by Jo Bannister

  The pilot died where he had fallen, cartwheeled by the spinning blade; not then but soon, before Vanderbilt had to consider his obligations to a man whose life might possibly be saved.

  After he was dead Vanderbilt, feeling ten years older and twenty pounds heavier, rose stiffly from where he had been kneeling at his friend’s head, helpless to comfort in the face of appalling injury, and walked towards Grant. Grant had rolled onto his side in order to watch. Vanderbilt walked slowly, giving himself time to refine a response. He felt an urgent, almost rapine desire to lay into Grant—bound and downed as he was—with his boots and his fists and anything he could lay his hands on, and reduce him to a bloody pulp. But Pretoria wanted him unharmed. He had thought that odd at the time: in the light of subsequent events it seemed insane. Pretoria’s demands—together, Vanderbilt was willing to admit, for he was no more blind to his faults than to those of other people, with his own mistakes—had cost a good and useful man his life.

  Towering silently over the man on the ground, quaking gently with quiet rage, Vanderbilt watched the fear in Grant’s eyes. Apart from the time he had been unconscious, it had been there all the fourteen hours they had known each other. It was still there, but changed—hysterical terror transmuted into a wholly rational fear of likely and imminent assault. Beside that there was a kind of grim satisfaction. He was breathing fast but mostly with exertion.

  Vanderbilt said woodenly, “You aren’t going to tell me that was an accident.”

  “Damn sure it was no accident.”

  “Then why?”

  “You’re kidding. That bastard was going to get me killed. I got him first.”

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Vanderbilt. “He was a pilot. I can get you killed; he could only get you delivered.”

  “You can only get me killed here. He’d have got me killed in Pretoria. That’s two separate propositions. I told you—I’m not going back.”

  Vanderbilt passed a hand across his face. It shook very slightly, but neither Grant nor anyone else would have mistaken the tremor for weakness. “Sonny, I could get very tired of hearing what you are and are not going to do.”

  “Then cut me loose and I won’t bother you again.”

  Vanderbilt regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said, “Can you get up?”

  “Yes.” He had managed when it mattered. Grant began the clumsy caterpillar manoeuvre that would bring him to his feet.

  Vanderbilt let him get halfway before launching a vicious, measured kick that took him in the side of the knee. Grant’s head snapped back and pain whistled through his teeth. He crashed on his side on the ground, rolling, lacking the hands to comfort himself.

  Vanderbilt nodded slowly. “That should keep you in one place for a while.” He turned his back on Grant and bent over the sprawled body of the pilot, and began the horrid task of stripping it.

  Chapter Two

  Nathan Shola spent most of the night on the phone. At first he was calling his people, members of his army in exile, semi-retired warriors, some of whom were bus-drivers and some of whom were surgeons, and then they were calling him back with what they had been able to discover. By dawn he had compiled a list of people in the UK—South Africans, South African sympathizers, people with business interests in the country—to whom Vanderbilt could turn for assistance. It was not a fully comprehensive list, but it did include all the most likely names, especially those with access to air transport. The bus-men called in sick and the surgeons rescheduled their operations, and by breakfast time each of the people on the list was under surveillance.

  Except a company pilot named Jan-Pieter van Dam, who was already being sought by his employers on the grounds that not only was he inexplicably absent but so was his machine.

  Shola was about to telephone chief Inspector Corner with a description of the helicopter when Chief Inspector Corner rang him to say a police car was on its way round to him. Something had turned up on which he would like Mr. Shola’s opinion.

  “Not Joel?”

  “Not as far as we can make out,” the policeman replied ominously.

  The car climbed quickly onto the backbone of England, moorland filling in behind it like a rising tide. The driver knew no more than that he had been given directions he had grave doubts about being able to follow.

  Shola presumed they had arrived when the car left the rutted road to drive across two fields, and in the third were several vehicles and a helicopter. A number of men were scattered about the field; Shola recognized the chief inspector in a small knot clustered around a tartan rug on the grass close by the helicopter. The car stopped nearby and he walked over to join them.

  The thing under the rug was evidently a body. Shola tried to estimate its proportions. He decided it was too short to be Grant, but that could have been how it was lying. Or, if he had interpreted Chief Inspector Corner’s remark correctly, how much of it was left.

  When they peeled the rug stickily back he knew it was not Grant, although he could not have said why he was so sure. It was not the face: there was not enough of it to judge.

  The chief inspector indicated the battered rotor. “He seems to have walked into that.”

  “Did he walk, or was he pushed?”

  “Ah. Well, if he isn’t Grant he’s probably the pilot, and if he’s the pilot he almost certainly didn’t walk.”

  Shola said, with conviction and surprise and quite a lot of pride, “Then Joel did this.”

  Corner had also reached that conclusion. “What makes you think so?”

  “Joel didn’t bring that helicopter here, the Boer did. Vanderbilt. It was his ride out. By the same token, Joel needs desperately to stay in this country. Killing the pilot and bending the machine bought him time. As long as it takes Vanderbilt to set up another meet, that’s how long we have to find him. This”—he indicated the mess on the grass—”won’t happen again. If Joel is fighting, he’ll get no more chances. By now he’ll be trussed up hand and foot, blindfolded, gagged and probably with a couple of ribs stove in for good measure.”

  “But not dead?”

  “There’s only one body here, Mr. Corner. If Vanderbilt had killed Joel it would have been here, while he was angry; and he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of stripping a corpse for his benefit.”

  Chief Inspector Corner gave him a wan smile. “You aren’t exactly new to the business of deduction, are you, Mr. Shola?”

  The black man smiled back. “Terrorism is a hard school. An ability to draw inferences accurately is essential. Without it one would be wiser to stick to clerking.”

  They moved away from the tartan rug. Two men with a stretcher took their places. The policeman said, “Is that what you did, before?”

  “Before I became a terrorist, you mean?”

  Corner permitted himself a weary sigh. “Mr. Shola, if you think I am unaware of your background, and that of Joel Grant, your logic is serving you less well than you believe. I think we might make better progress if you stop trying to shock me.”

  Shola accepted the rebuke gracefully. “I was a legal clerk in Port Elizabeth. One day my principal asked why I was depressed: wasn’t the money good enough or what? The money was pretty good, for a black clerk, but we weren’t winning many cases—not the cases I was interested in. He agreed. But he couldn’t think what more he could do: the system was loaded against what he and I, and you, would call justice for blacks. He had already tried everything short of blowing things up. If I had any suggestions he would be interested to hear them. I gave a lot of thought to what he had said. Then I gave him my resignation and started blowing things up.” He watched the policeman with a quizzical half-smile.

  Corner said gently, “If you’re waiting for a round of applause we could be here some time.”

  Shola laughed aloud, drawing curious glances. “Don’t worry, Chief Inspector, I know better than to expect you to condone armed struggle. But things are different in my country. Here my friend is abducted in v
iolent and mysterious circumstances and the police search for him. In South Africa it would be the police who had him.”

  Corner sniffed. “I’m so glad you’re happy with our work,” he said dryly. “If you were happy enough to leave it to us I’d be ecstatic.”

  Shola feigned incomprehension. “I’m sorry?”

  Corner breathed heavily. “For the last four hours, every line of enquiry my men have tried to follow up they have had an audience. Dusky gentlemen of non-indigenous antecedents have watched them go in and watched them come out. Once or twice could be a coincidence, but it’s getting ridiculous.”

  Shola grinned. “We’re only trying to be helpful.”

  “I dare say,” said Corner. “But another of our national characteristics, besides not liking our policemen abducting political embarrassments, is this general aversion to private armies.”

  “A double handful of ex-patriot Africans hardly amounts to a private army. We’re just trying to give you an edge. We all have experience of these people, and for Joel’s sake we want you to have the benefit of it. For instance, I may be able to tell you two things you don’t yet know about the man under that rug. One is his name.”

  “I know his name,” Corner growled.

  “I knew his name before I knew you’d found him. The other thing is that that helicopter is a short-range job—four hundred odd miles. Nobody would set off across two continents in it. Nor does the company which owns it and employed the pilot have a long-haul aircraft.”

  It was true that Chief Inspector Corner had not yet received that information. No doubt somebody was getting it together for him now, but he was too good a policeman to stick to channels when a short cut could get him to the same place quicker. He latched onto Shola’s train of thought without missing a beat. “So our macerated friend wasn’t flying them out of the country, or at least not this trip. He was taking them to a rendezvous—with a bigger plane, or maybe a ship. My God, we’d have to freeze up every airfield and harbour in the land to be sure of stopping them.”

  “Theoretically. But it would be logical”—Shola smiled very faintly—“to start with airports close to London and the south coast ports. Anywhere north of Birmingham and Vanderbilt would have driven there: it wouldn’t have been worth his while waiting for the helicopter. Also, until he found Suzanne he didn’t even know where I was, let alone where Joel was; but his escape route would have been set up before he left Pretoria. They would work on the statistical probability of finding us in the largest centre of population: whatever plans they laid were based on London. But they knew they could be unlucky, so the helicopter was laid on in case it was needed. Look south, Mr. Corner.”

  “Heathrow,” mused Corner. “Gatwick, Stanstead. Tilbury,

  Southampton, Dover—Bristol? Oh yes, that narrows it down nicely.”

  Liz ached to sleep off the jetlag but could not afford the time. She showered at her hotel, changed into a dress that shouted London and a picture hat, and carefully (for she did not practise all that often) applied make-up. She wanted people to spot her for an English tourist, and to take her for the kind of visitor they could tell a thing or two about this land.

  Pretoria was not London; it was not even Manchester. The number of places where a woman could go in search of plausibly casual conversation with Afrikaner men was limited. She asked the desk clerk to direct her to the city’s art galleries, museums, exhibitions of any sort. She spent the afternoon in a cultural daze, smiling a lot and chatting to everyone she could. Twelve times she was welcomed to South Africa, two or three times she received distinctly funny looks and once she was propositioned.

  Finally, in an art gallery, she realized that the young man discoursing so knowledgeably on Rubens was a member of the security police. He was using his day off as he apparently used most of them, indulging a passion for European Old Masters. Liz was not naive enough to find that paradoxical, but she was a little surprised to find herself liking him.

  He persuaded her to have a drink with him, in much the same way that an impala persuades a cheetah, and she persuaded him to take just a little more wine than he was used to. By late afternoon, when they parted with an almost archaic politeness and a firm date for the museum on his next day off, Liz knew—almost without probing, certainly he would never know he had been grilled—that De Witte was still in hospital awaiting major heart surgery; that despite this and despite his desk being occupied by a man who had every right to call and consider himself acting chief, De Witte himself still ran his department as far as anything important was concerned; and that something very important and top echelon was going on which had upset the most inquisitive members of that highly inquisitive establishment by proving utterly impervious to even professional snooping.

  Liz did not know if the repatriation of a former terrorist could possibly be a part of such high-level intrigue, but she left the art-lover knowing where she had to go to pursue her enquiries. She had to take them to De Witte.

  That which was fancifully described as his luncheon consumed, Joachim De Witte settled reluctantly into the long grey afternoon that yawned, a vacancy, before him. Afternoon was when he was supposed to rest. Strictly speaking he was supposed to rest all the time, but the hospital had had to make concessions to his commitments. That morning he had seen Botha for an hour—to bring him up to date on the activities of the department he was ostensibly running: poor Walter Botha had been considerably put out on his first visit to find its purpose the precise opposite of what he had supposed—and his secretary for ninety minutes, and this evening Elinor would be here, talking and knitting and generally replenishing his flask of human contentment.

  He knew of no way in which she was a remarkable woman, but missing her was an ache: when he woke alone in the night, when she was not there come dawn; not so much during his busy morning but all through the grey tunnel of the afternoon until they brought what was fancifully described as his tea and he could start listening for her footsteps.

  The distinctive tap of a woman’s shoes, but not nurses’shoes, drew his attention now. The tattoo stopped outside his door. Presently he heard voices, low at first, then louder. Then the woman said, very clearly, “I have never heard anything so witless in my life.”

  De Witte could contain his curiosity no longer. He filled his lungs and bellowed, “What the hell is going on out there?”

  One of the men watching his door opened it a few inches to show an apologetic, well-scrubbed face. “Sorry, sir. It’s a young lady—”

  “It’s nothing of the sort,” Liz said briskly, elbowing past him. “It’s Elizabeth—Hettie’s daughter from England.” She stopped at the foot of the bed, smiling at him; gradually the smile faded and the eyes became puzzled. “Uncle Paul?”

  De Witte had never been called Paul, did not have a sister by Hettie or any other name, and knew of no relatives in England. But the long afternoons were very boring, and he was considerably in the mood for illicit conversation with a tall, green-eyed girl he had never seen before. His circle of acquaintance had narrowed claustrophobically in hospital. He had taken to thinking of it as Robben Island with enemas. He waved a calming hand at the worried guard and said solemnly, “And how is your mother?”

  The girl smiled again, though still a shade uncertainly. “She’s fine—up to her blue rinse in other people’s business, you know mother, this month it’s the turn of the Comforts Fund for Parish Pensioners, even the scarecrow in the turnip field has lost his muffler, and who she imagines is going to benefit from my last year’s swimsuit I hate to think.”

  De Witte grinned, enjoying himself. “Sit down, girl, make yourself at home. I reckon Hettie hasn’t changed too much, then. It’s a long time, mind, must be—”

  “Ages,” Liz supplied emphatically. “You know, I hardly recognized you, but then I could only have been—”

  “Oh—like so, only,” said De Witte, waving a hand vaguely over the bedspread at an indeterminate infant height.

  “Well, m
aybe a bit more,” said Liz, and they both laughed.

  It was clear to Liz that De Witte was playing a game; probably quite an innocuous one, certainly he had no reason to suspect her of anything more sinister than mistaking the identity of a long-lost relative. She presumed he was teasing her for his own amusement. She could live with that: his sport served her ends well enough. She had managed to meet him, was already laying the foundations for a kind of friendship, and would soon divert the discourse along more profitable routes. First it was necessary to protect herself.

  “You gave me the devil of a turn,” she said, “when I finally found your address only to have your housekeeper say you’d been taken to hospital bleeding like a stuck pig. For heaven’s sake, Uncle Paul, how long have you been using a chainsaw?—and you still can’t do it right. I didn’t know whether I’d find you in stitches in casualty or in pieces in the morgue. And then when I asked for you at the desk it was as if I’d discovered the secret hideaway of Joseph Mengele. Whatever have you been doing to deserve all”—she helplessly indicated the door, now closed—“this?”

  “I’m an important man,” De Witte said modestly. His voice was deep and musical, rich with subtle modulation.

  “An important carpenter? Well, all right,” agreed Liz, “I suppose you wouldn’t be the first, but what are they guarding you against? How many enemies does a cabinet-maker make?”

  Not without some regret, De Witte decided it was time to come clean. He ran up the flagpole his most charming smile. “I’m afraid, my dear Elizabeth, you’ve been misled. I’m not a carpenter.”

  Liz feigned surprise. “You’re not? But mother said—”

  “Nor,” he continued solemnly, “am I related to nor so far as I know acquainted with your mother. I am an impostor. My name is Joachim De Witte and I work for the government. I’m sorry, I have been enjoying your company under false pretences.”