See No Evil

by Michael Ridpath

  Calder pulled back on the throttle a little. Maximum power meant maximum fuel usage. They could continue to follow Zan only if they had enough fuel to keep them up in the sky. Of course, Calder had no idea how much Zan had left.

  ‘You know, it’s a terrible day when you realize your daughter’s a monster,’ Cornelius said.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Calder said. Cornelius might not have been the perfect father, but he hadn’t deserved what his daughter had visited on him.

  ‘She had me completely fooled,’ Cornelius said bitterly. ‘I thought she loathed apartheid. I never realized she was manipulating me; they were manipulating me. And I thought all these years she was angry with me for not supporting the struggle.’

  ‘She was certainly angry,’ Calder said.

  ‘You know, I’m sure the Laagerbond did kill Hennie, despite what she says,’ Cornelius said. ‘They just didn’t tell her they’d done it because they knew she was so fond of him.’

  ‘Too many people have died, one way or another.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your sister, Alex. After all you have done for us.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Calder said through gritted teeth. ‘Zan will pay. I’ll make sure of that.’

  ‘I think she’s lost touch with reality,’ Cornelius said. ‘The way she was talking back there. The idea that I would go with her.’

  ‘You could have humoured her on that one.’

  ‘I didn’t think she was going to try to kill us!’

  ‘She’s desperate and she’s dangerous,’ said Calder. ‘At this stage I don’t think she cares who she kills.’

  They continued northwards, passing over a river, the Olifants according to Calder’s map. The landscape beneath them changed, the trees became sparser and their trunks became thicker, squat baobabs. Between them were the black specks of game: elephant, antelope, wildebeest and the odd giraffe, recognizable even from that height.

  Then Calder saw a shadow skimming the grass in the distance. Next to it was a white speck.

  ‘Lowveld Information, we have visual contact,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ replied the controller. ‘She’s flying too low; Hoedspruit are losing radar coverage. She’ll reach the Zimbabwe border in ten minutes. There is a police helicopter on its way to intercept her, but it won’t make it before then.’

  ‘Can you get us clearance to enter Zimbabwean airspace?’ Calder asked.

  ‘I can try, but I don’t hold out much hope. Stand by.’

  Minutes ticked by. The fuel gauges were low. The trouble with any light aircraft’s fuel tank is that there is no way of being sure exactly how much fuel is left in it. The gauges are only a rough indicator. The calculation is usually made by considering time flown and hourly rate of fuel consumption. But since Calder had no idea how long the Cessna had been in the air during its flight to Kupugani, that wasn’t a calculation he could do with any accuracy. He ran through some figures in his head. Assuming the aircraft was half full when they took off and assuming a high level of fuel consumption at maximum power for the flight so far, they might have a couple of hours’ flying time, give or take half an hour. They had been in the air for an hour and forty minutes.

  Calder thinned the fuel mixture some more. He did not want the engine to cut out here. He didn’t fancy a forced landing into a baobab, especially now the sun was plunging towards the western horizon.

  The radio crackled into life. ‘Tango Oscar, you have been refused permission to enter Zimbabwean airspace. Estimate the Zimbabwe border in three minutes. What are your intentions?’

  Calder glanced at Cornelius. Crossing international boundaries without a flight plan was a major sin as far as air-traffic controllers were concerned, however generally helpful they were. He decided it was best to be vague. ‘Lowveld Information, this is Tango Oscar leaving your frequency. Thanks for all your help.’ With that he turned the radio off.

  They were still at 2,000 feet. Zan remained at 300 and was pulling away. She was very hard to see. Calder checked his map. She was making a direct line for a small airport at a place called Chiredzi. That was where she probably hoped to refuel and stay the night. Calder did not warm to the prospect of chasing her over the African bush in the dark.

  Ahead, her plane skimmed across a lake, sending up a swarm of hundreds if not thousands of large white birds, cranes of some kind. Calder and Cornelius lost her. By the time the flock had peeled off to the west her aircraft was too low and too far away to be seen.

  Time passed. Two hours. Two hours five minutes. Two hours ten minutes. Any moment Calder expected to hear the cough of the engine cutting out. He kept his eye on the ground looking for clearings where he could make an emergency landing without doing too much damage. The sun was glowing red in the west and the light was going.

  Two hours fifteen minutes. On the horizon they spotted smoke, chimney stacks, some kind of large processing plant. Then they made out the shape of a runway in the twilight. Calder had no idea whether Zan was there or not, at this point he just wanted to get on to the ground before his fuel ran out. He decided not to call up the airfield on the radio, in case they refused him permission to land.

  Two hours twenty minutes. The fuel gauges of both tanks were on empty. The engine coughed. Calder switched the tank selector to the right and the engine restarted. The left tank was finished. It wouldn’t be long before the right failed too.

  They were nearing the runway. Ideally he should join the circuit overhead to inspect it first, but he had no time for that, and he lined up the aircraft for a straight-in approach, keeping high. The engine coughed again, sputtered and died.

  Everything went very quiet. Below him were fields of sugar cane, not comfortable if he landed short.

  He trimmed the aeroplane to its best rate of descent and glided towards the runway. The numbers on the threshold drifted up in the windshield, a sign that he was sinking. He resisted the temptation to raise the nose; that would just cause the aircraft to lose speed and sink even faster.

  They weren’t going to make the runway, but there was a stretch of brown grass a hundred yards before it. In front of that was the airfield perimeter and the sugar-cane field.

  ‘There she is,’ said Cornelius. Calder could just see the Warrior on a taxiway a few yards from the runway, but he was focusing on getting the aircraft down in one piece. They skimmed over the perimeter fence and he flared the aeroplane for a bumpy landing on rough grass. At least they were down. They rolled to a halt on the runway threshold.

  Silence from the aircraft, but they could hear excited chattering thirty yards to their left. Zan was standing by her aircraft in front of a group of three angry Africans, shadowy figures in the gathering darkness. She was screaming at them and waving her rifle. A uniformed policeman was marching towards her from the control tower, shouting. He seemed to be unarmed.

  Zan turned towards their Cessna and raised her rifle. Calder and Cornelius ducked. There was a crack followed by the explosion of the windshield shattering.

  ‘Jesus!’ muttered Cornelius. He reached behind him for the rifle which was lying on the back seat.

  They raised their heads gingerly over the coaming. The policeman had stopped, but he was still shouting at Zan. The other Africans, one in shirtsleeves and two in overalls, were backing off.

  Zan screamed something at the policeman and raised the rifle to her shoulder, pointing it directly at him. He shut up.

  She pressed the trigger. The round sent the policeman flying backwards.

  ‘Here!’ said Cornelius, handing the rifle to Calder. ‘You’ve got to stop her. I can’t.’

  Calder hesitated. He had never killed anyone before, let alone a woman.

  ‘Quick, man, before she shoots someone else!’ Cornelius’s eyes were full of pain – pain and desperation.

  Calder took the rifle, unlatched the aircraft door and pushed it open. On the taxiway the Africans were running away. Zan lifted the rifle to her shoulder again, aiming at their backs.
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  Calder chambered a round, flicked off the safety, threw himself on to the tarmac and rolled once. He stared down the sight of the rifle and moved it downwards and to the right, so that it covered Zan’s upper body. She had seen the movement from the aeroplane and was swinging her own weapon round towards him.

  He pressed the trigger. A gaping hole appeared in Zan’s chest as she staggered backwards, an expression of total surprise on her face.

  By the time Calder and Cornelius had run over to her felled body, she was dead.

  31

  Calder looked down on the familiar countryside to the west of Heathrow, landscape he had flown over many times at weekends when he was still working in the City. He recognized the airfields of White Waltham and Blackbushe and the scattering of wealthy towns and villages hugging the Thames. It was seven hours to New York. He had no idea what would happen in the next few days, but he was optimistic.

  He had received a short, simple e-mail from Sandy.

  Got three days off next week. Can you come? We can talk when you get here.

  Sandy

  PS – Tell Kim van Zyl I’m sorry I was so hard on her. She’s a good friend of yours and I admire her courage for talking to me.

  PPS – I promise I’ll be here when you arrive!

  PPPS – Please come.

  He had spoken to Kim, who admitted to her attempt to see Sandy on his behalf. She urged him to go, and he was surprised how much he wanted to. There were all kinds of difficulties and problems with the relationship, past and future, but at that moment he realized it was only the present he was interested in. So he had booked the flight.

  Kim and Todd had flown back to the US a couple of days before. Todd was still improving and was planning to return to his teaching job for the new school year, although the doctors thought that might be a little optimistic. Kim had told Calder she was pregnant. She was overjoyed, and to Calder’s immense relief, she was sure the baby was her husband’s, not his.

  Anne was due to leave hospital soon. She would be in a wheelchair at first, but she would be fitted up with a prosthetic leg in time. Against William’s strongly expressed wishes, Calder had visited her. She had been polite initially, asking what happened in South Africa in a dispassionate voice, but Calder could see she was hiding her anger with him. Then a tear had emerged in one eye and she had turned away from him. He tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t reply. He couldn’t blame her, but he could blame himself. He thought bleakly of her struggling to raise her children from a wheelchair, hobbling after them on a false leg in the school playground. His relationship with his sister had been perhaps the most stable thing in his life since his mother had died. As so often before he had put himself in danger, but this time it was she who had got hurt.

  His father was much more supportive, congratulating Calder on finding who had crippled his daughter. He didn’t actually say it, but he was clearly glad that Calder had shot Zan, and that Moolman was dead.

  Calder felt no such warm glow of revenge. He knew he had had no choice but to shoot Zan, otherwise yet another innocent man would have died. He also knew she was an evil woman. But he recognized that she was a product of a screwed-up family in a screwed-up country. It would take many years for the wounds of apartheid to heal; brutality like that couldn’t just be buried and forgotten, as Cornelius had discovered.

  It was fortunate Cornelius had been with him. The Zimbabweans were not sympathetic to strange white men arriving in their country and shooting people, but Zyl News, and in particular Cornelius’s wife Jessica, had swiftly brought the full force of his network of contacts and influence to bear on the Zimbabwean government. In the end, they had spent only two days in custody, although two days in a Zimbabwean jail was more than enough for Calder.

  The revelation of the Laagerbond’s connections with Sir Evelyn Gill had led to the collapse of his bid for The Times. Cornelius’s own bid had expired and he decided not to renew it, much to the relief of the Bloomfield Weiss Underwriting Committee. It looked highly likely that one of the original bidders, the Irish entrepreneur, would buy the newspaper at the lower price of eight hundred and twenty million pounds. Laxton Media jumped at it; their need for cash was becoming desperate.

  Benton’s arm was still in a sling, the bullet from Zan’s rifle had torn a nasty hole in his shoulder which was taking a while to heal. Tarek had told Calder that it was common knowledge within Bloomfield Weiss that Simon Bibby had his own sights firmly trained on Benton. The smart money was on head of Global Diversity or possibly head of the Moscow office, if Benton survived in the firm at all. Much to his surprise, Calder found himself hoping that he would.

  Cornelius had fired Edwin and announced that an up-and-coming American executive from the Philadelphia office would take over from him as CEO of Zyl News in six months. In the meantime he had already visited Cape Town to talk to George Field about funding the Rainbow. Just a minority stake, no editorial influence. At least that’s what he said his intention was.

  The details of the Laagerbond in Martha’s diary were passed to the authorities in South Africa and Britain. The big breakthrough was that Dirk du Toit and Daniel Havenga promised to cooperate. According to du Toit’s records the Laagerbond had investments valued at four billion dollars around the world, although a significant chunk of it comprised its stake in Evelyn Gill’s collapsing Beckwith Communications. Andries Visser was in hospital undergoing intensive chemotherapy. The doctors thought it unlikely that he would live to face his trial.

  The plane flew into cloud and Calder returned to the newspaper on his lap. He finished an article about more oil supplies coming on stream in Russia, which would help the spread bet he had hastily taken before he left England on a fall in oil prices. That was a relief; he had probably put too much on that one. Since he had returned from South Africa he had made a number of large financial spread bets, with mixed success. It distracted him from Kim and Anne and Zan, gave him something else to focus on.

  He shoved the paper into the pocket on the seat in front of him, and reached into his hand luggage for a folder containing a sheaf of A4. Martha’s original diary was in the South African authorities’ possession to be used as evidence, but Cornelius had given him a photocopy. Her handwriting was flowing, assured, easily legible. He began to read.

  It was an odd feeling. He had spent so much time thinking about her, trying to decipher her actions and motivations over a distance of eighteen years, it was strange to read her words, immediate, in the present tense. He liked her, he realized. She had not deserved to be forgotten by her family. He was glad that he had played a part in throwing some light on her death.

  The aeroplane was well to the west of the coast of Ireland when he turned to the last entry.

  August 28

  We’re here at Kupugani and it’s a fantastic place. Libby’s friend Phyllis was really friendly, not at all freaked out by Benton, and she’s put us in a cottage a ways away from the main camp. Yesterday evening we were sitting out on our porch and we saw a leopard walk along the stream bed right by us as cool as you please. And last night we were woken by the lions grunting and groaning. We didn’t make it up early enough this morning for the game drive. In fact, the way we are going we’ll be lucky if we ever leave this cottage at all!

  Benton’s in the shower now. I can see him as I write this. He’s heavenly. It’s wonderful to be with him. But time goes so fast! We only have twenty-four more hours together and then we go our separate ways.

  It’s good to be able to write this in front of him, without being worried about what he reads. It’s good to be able to trust someone at last. I haven’t spoken to him yet about Zan and the Laagerbond. I didn’t want to spoil our time together, but I’m going to have to.

  I’m trying not to think about that. Because when I do I’m really scared. Zan might have gone to London, but she’s left her nasty friends behind. She knows she can’t trust me to keep quiet, so what’s she going to do? What are her friends going to do
? Arresting me would be very messy: I’m an American citizen and Cornelius’s wife. But they could just kill me.

  If they’re going to kill me, they’ll do it soon. They might not know where I am here, but once I get back to Hondehoek I’ll be an easy target.

  If I died, what about the children? Who’d look after Caroline? Todd doesn’t need much looking after these days, but he’d miss me. I can’t stand the thought of not seeing him grow up to be a man. My mother’s a strong woman, but it will kill my father.

  If my life ends now, what will I have achieved? I’ve always felt American, but my life, certainly my adult life, has been all about South Africa. A country I hate and I guess I love at the same time. About South Africa and about Cornelius. Cornelius. He’s the man who has dominated my life. Until this past year I’ve loved him, respected him, admired him, believed in him. But if it all ended now …

  He’s as scared as I am. And we’ve both done the same thing. He’s run off to his beautiful blonde woman, me to my beautiful black man. But what is Benton? Oh, he’s more than just a good body. I like him, he’s intelligent, I like the way he’s so well read, but in ten years’ time, when I’m fifty-four, I can’t really kid myself that we will still be together.

  He’s shaving now. He just smiled at me. Oh, God, I hope he never reads this. So much for being able to write in front of him.

  There’s only one thing for me to do, I have to go see Cornelius. Grab Caroline and get on a plane to America before those evil bastards get me. Go to Philadelphia and talk to him about everything. If South Africa goes up in flames, if his business goes bust, we still have each other and Todd and Caroline. After all we’ve been through together, it would be wrong to die apart. So wrong.