Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  It sounded barbaric to Blake, but Morengo was now playing to a wider audience – his senior men had gathered around him, drawn to the charismatic leader’s raised voice. Part of war was about demonising the enemy, but Blake knew from his own experience that things were never black and white in war, and that the other side was not always as evil as the politicians would have them believe. ‘So what will the Germans do now?’

  ‘They are coming, as I predicted when I saw you at Upington. Two columns, one from the north, the other from the south. They are bringing mountain guns – light artillery – and Maxim machine guns. You know yourself that you don’t fight lightly armed mounted men with artillery and heavy machine guns; we move too fast, and I for one have no intention of throwing my men at some fixed position the Germans may take up.’

  Blake looked around the plateau at the makeshift shelters, a woman breastfeeding a baby, two small boys with sticks chasing each other, a young girl stirring a pot of porridge. ‘They’re coming for your people.’

  ‘Yes. To teach us a lesson.’ Jakob looked around and waved his other men closer. ‘Gather round, let us plan.’

  Blake had seen some bad things during his war against the Boers. There had been individual instances of savagery and the business of burning farms and imprisoning civilians had turned his stomach, but he’d never heard of British forces shelling or machine-gunning innocents. If what Jakob was saying was right then the Germans were taking this fight to new depths.

  Liesl caught his eye and glared at him, hands on hips, as if to say, ‘I told you so’.

  Jakob called to one of the young boys who Blake had been watching, and when the lad came to him the leader took the boy’s stick. When the child pulled a face Jakob wagged it at him in mock anger. ‘Go to your mother. Stop playing at war.’

  Jakob walked around his tent; Blake and the others followed him. Morengo indicated with his stick for them to form a semicircle around a dozen or more piles of rocks that had been stacked on a piece of bare flat ground. Blake noted that several stacks formed a horseshoe and he realised he was looking at a three-dimensional map of where they were in the mountains.

  ‘You approve, I see,’ Jakob said.

  Blake nodded.

  ‘The Germans will need many wagons for their arms and ammunition and other supplies. Their most likely routes of approach are here, and here.’ Jakob pointed to valleys leading into the Karasberge from the north and west respectively. ‘They will make for the high ground on two sides of where we are and open fire on our people with the mountain guns.’

  Blake pinched his chin between two fingers then raised his eyes to Morengo. ‘Too late to head for the border with South Africa?’

  Jakob met his stare. ‘If I’d wanted to run we would have done so months ago. Some of our people have crossed into the Cape Colony and are now in British refugee camps. They struggle to survive on the food the English can spare for them. We have been pushed off our grazing land into these hills. We will not be pushed further.’

  So that was it, Blake realised. Morengo wanted this battle as much as the Germans did. ‘You’ve got what, a hundred, hundred and fifty men?’

  Jakob rested his hands on this stick. ‘One hundred and thirty-three.’

  ‘The Germans won’t come with less than a company from each direction; they’ll need that many men to protect the guns. You’ll be outnumbered at least two to one, probably more like three.’

  ‘Precisely. So what would you do, Blake? Where would you try and stop their advance?’

  Blake was not a general, not even an officer, but he’d led countless patrols where the tactics had been left to him. There were a few truisms a soldier learned the hard way – stick to the high ground, don’t attack a defended position with less than a three-to-one advantage in numbers, and never volunteer for anything. He shook his head. ‘You don’t have the firepower to stop them, not even one of their columns.’

  ‘So what would you have me do, run away?’

  It was Blake’s turn to smile. ‘Yes.’

  Chapter 36

  Grünau, Namibia, the present day

  Nick checked into a B&B called the Withuis, white house in English, outside of the small town of Grünau.

  He stayed in the eponymous building, an old farmhouse on a larger working farm. It had been built in 1912, but walking on the creaking wooden floorboards, running a finger along the cast-iron wood-burning stove and looking out over the wide empty spaces of Namibia, he wondered if this was the paradise that Claire Martin had envisaged when she’d reinvented herself from German spy to respectable landowner and doctor’s wife.

  Nick settled into a leather armchair, and while he waited for dinner, which the owners had arranged to deliver to him at seven, he used the house’s wifi to search for more information about Scott Dillon, real-estate mogul and former lover of the woman he thought he had loved.

  He found and read a couple more articles online about the divorce of Scott and Joanne Dillon. It had been acrimonious, to say the least, with Joanne alleging multiple infidelities on Scott’s part. Joanne, according to one story, owned an art gallery in Cape Town’s Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, which is where Nick had parked his rental car while meeting with Ian Heraud. Nick googled it and found a generic email for Joanne Dillon Fine Art.

  It was after hours, so there was no point calling the gallery, and he doubted Joanne sat in the premises selling paintings to tourists even if it was still open, but he clicked on the email address and composed a new message.

  Dear Ms Dillon,

  My name is Nick Eatwell. I am an Australian journalist currently visiting southern Africa. I’m interested in some information about your ex-husband Scott’s business interests and was wondering if you would be willing to talk to me, either on or off the record.

  Yours sincerely, Nick Eatwell

  What the hell, he thought, she would probably ignore the email, but if she was still mad at Scott then maybe she would get in touch. It certainly seemed she had been more than ready to dish the dirt on him in the media during their divorce. He added a ‘PS’ saying that he was in Namibia at the moment and giving his local mobile phone number.

  There was a knock on the door and the farm owner brought in dinner on a tray wrapped in a blanket to insulate it from the cold night air. Nick thanked him and polished off the venison pie quickly. He was halfway through his malva pudding when his phone rang. When he looked at the screen he saw it was from a South African number.

  ‘Hello, Nick speaking.’

  ‘Mr Eatwell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Howzit. It’s Joanne Dillon here. You emailed.’

  He was surprised she had replied, and so quickly. ‘Yes, I did. How are you?’

  ‘Half drunk as it happens, how are you?’

  Nick smiled. ‘On my second beer. I was wondering –’

  ‘You want to know about that bastard ex-husband of mine. Are you writing about the golf estate that’s failing in Australia, or the one he’s trying to inflict on the people of Windhoek?’

  Nick didn’t know anything about a development back in his home country, but he knew not to blow a lead when it was handed to him on a platter. ‘Among other things. It seems he’s in trouble.’

  ‘For years now.’ He heard a slurp on the other end of the call. ‘He’s been sailing close to the wind for a long time, since before we were married. I bailed him out, which is one of the reasons I needed him to pay up – I barely managed to hang on to our home in Constantia – but he still owes me money from the settlement, so I don’t want to ruin him, just make him pay.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? You probably see the smooth businessman, the philanthropist giving money to save-the-rhino charities and buying sanitary pads for disadvantaged schoolgirls so they can stay in class, not the crooked businessman.’

  ‘Crooke
d?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say Scott bends the rules until they almost snap, and he has curried favour with more than one town planner here in South Africa. I imagine there’s less tolerance for that sort of corruption in Australia?’

  ‘We like to think so,’ Nick said, ‘but it doesn’t stop dodgy developers and councillors and local government staff trying to get into bed with each other.’

  ‘Sounds like my ex; he’d try to get between the sheets with a black mamba if he thought it would get him off, or get him off the hook.’

  Hell hath no fury, Nick thought, though he was still surprised by how candidly Joanne was talking about her ex to a stranger, let alone a journalist. ‘I saw that he was recently auctioning off some of his historical memorabilia.’

  Joanne snorted. ‘Fancies himself something of an expert on Paul Kruger and the Anglo-Boer War. The fact is, he’s more interested in money than anything else.’

  ‘Is it very valuable, that stuff?’

  ‘Kruger’s diary and the papers he was auctioning?’ Joanne asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To diehard collectors, yes, reasonably valuable, but the papers were of no use to Scott. He was less interested in history and more in Kruger’s missing millions. Have you heard of Kruger’s gold?’

  ‘I have,’ Nick said, ‘just recently. So, your ex-husband is a treasure hunter?’

  ‘A wannabe, yes. He was obsessed with it. He used to keep files on all the spurious reports of finds of the gold that have come up over the years. He dragged me along on holidays in the lowveld and anywhere else the gold might have been hidden. He was desperate to find it, and now he’s desperate for money.’

  ‘How desperate?’

  Nick heard her take another drink. ‘If Scott thought he had a genuine line on the gold, something hard, or even something new, he would do anything to get hold of the information and to keep it from anyone else.’

  ‘Anything? Like what? Would he resort to the use of violence, theft maybe?’

  There was a pause. ‘Be careful, Mr Eatwell.’

  ‘Nick. Why? I’m just researching a story.’

  ‘So you say. Tell me precisely what your story is about.’

  He had to think fast. ‘Susan Vidler.’

  She let the name hang there, between them, for a few long seconds. ‘What about her?’

  ‘She was Scott’s PR woman. You heard she died.’

  ‘Shot in a hijacking, yes.’

  ‘Yes . . . it was tragic. I met her, in Australia.’

  ‘Did you now? Pretty woman.’

  He didn’t bite. ‘She asked a lot of questions.’

  ‘She was a freelance journalist as well as a public relations consultant, and though I hate to speak ill of the dead, she was a whore as well. You’re a journalist, so you know your people ask lots of questions for a living. Who did you say you write for?’

  Nick bridled, but kept his anger in check. ‘I didn’t. I’m also freelance. I got a sense Susan was after more than just some background for a feature story she was working on.’

  ‘Scott was probably paying her to put a positive spin on his failing golf estate in Sydney. He thought all the South Africans living in Australia would miss their gated complexes and golf courses, but most of them, it seems, were trying to get away from those sorts of developments in the first place. The project was going down the toilet, and your environmentalists – greenies I think you call them – didn’t like the idea of bulldozing bush on the New South Wales north coast to put in putting greens.’

  ‘Susan didn’t say anything about that development to me. She was interested in history, in the Boer War in fact.’

  ‘Maybe Scott was on to a new lead. Why did Susan contact you about that stuff?’

  ‘I’ve got my own interest in the period,’ Nick extemporised. ‘Would Scott pay someone to hurt or rob a person to get hold of information he wanted?’

  Another pause. ‘Do you know how cheap it is to hire a hit man in this country, Nick? Do you remember the case of the guy from the UK who had his new bride killed on their honeymoon?’

  He did, vaguely. ‘Are you saying your husband would hire a hit man?’

  ‘I’m saying, Nick, that he would do whatever it took to get what he wanted. You need to be careful.’

  ‘You’re not the first person to tell me that.’

  ‘Who was the first?’

  Nick didn’t want to say. ‘I’m a big boy, I can look after myself.’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On how much you know and how much my ex-husband wanted whatever you have, or are chasing. There was a journalist investigating him in Cape Town. He ended up dying in a home invasion robbery.’

  ‘Are you saying . . . ?’ He was shocked that she might be hinting that Scott had something do with a killing, but he cautioned himself that it might just be the alcohol talking.

  ‘Just be careful, Nick. Get back to me if you learn something new. And if you’re talking to Scott, tell him I’m sorry about Susan. I hated her, but no one deserves to go like that. Funny . . .’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘She drove like a maniac, like a Formula One driver. She’d taken defensive driving classes, as well as self-defence and advanced shooting classes. She always carried a gun, at least she did in South Africa. Of all the people I knew, she would have been the least likely to get taken without a fight.’

  Nick’s mind whirred. ‘Did she do more for your ex-husband than PR?’

  ‘Apart from fucking him, you mean?’

  He grimaced. ‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

  ‘You know she had her PI’s licence?’ Joanne said.

  ‘She was a private investigator?’ Nick couldn’t hide his shock.

  ‘Ja, she did all the kung-fu and driving training stuff when she was doing PI work, in between journalism jobs. As you know a good journalist has to be able to dig, maybe even go undercover sometimes.’

  The revelation had left him speechless. Had Susan been working not as a reporter but as a private investigator when she’d tracked him down in Australia? Journalists in the UK had a reputation for either engaging or acting like undercover investigators, or resorting to phone hacking, but he’d never resorted to such tactics. Was it really Scott Dillon who wanted information about Blake?

  ‘Nick? You still there?’ Joanne slurred.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. Go on.’

  ‘I had my suspicions, when we were married, that as well as sleeping with Scott, Susan might have been in on some of his shady deals. I know she was involved in meetings with politicians and bureaucrats in South Africa over some of Nick’s property deals. I think she might have been the, what do you call it, bagman, or rather bag woman, in a few of those projects.’

  Nick didn’t like what he was hearing and still couldn’t or didn’t want to believe it. Was she investigating me?

  ‘Still there, Nick? Or have I frightened you off this time?’

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘Did you try to contact Scott direct?’

  ‘I might have,’ he said.

  ‘No need to be coy, boy. That was a mistake. Scott despises journalists, except those who work for glossy property magazines. If he took your call or got back to you then that means he’s worried about something. Normally he would have avoided you like the plague and wouldn’t have been seen anywhere near you unless he was courting you. Plenty of people have tried to expose his shady deals and failed.’

  Nick wished, now, that he had contacted Joanne before calling her ex-husband, but it was too late. ‘Any more advice?’

  ‘Same as before. Be careful.’

  Joanne ended the call before he could ask another question.

  Nick checked his emails. There was one from Anja, telling him she had to take a break from t
ranslating because she’d had an eventful evening. He called her.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Anja, it’s Nick.’

  ‘Oh, hello. I’m out in the desert, studying the wild horses. I saw the most amazing thing, a near-miss attack by a hyena on a foal.’

  She sounded breathless, girlish in her excitement, quite different from the reserved manner of her emails and the formal English of his other calls to her. ‘Interesting. Look, I think we should meet up sooner rather than later. I’m near Grünau, at a place called the White House. Do you know it?’

  ‘Of course. You are not far from me.’

  ‘I want to go back into the Karas Mountains again, first thing tomorrow, to find the place where the big battle between Morengo and the Germans took place.’

  ‘Narudas. It’s on the eastern side of the Karasberge. I’ve got a rough idea where it is. I’ll check with my contact at Klein-Aus Vista Lodge and SMS you some GPS coordinates for your satnav.’

  ‘OK, thanks.’

  *

  Anja was tired, coming down from the adrenaline rush of seeing the hyena stalking the horses. She walked out of the hide and set a camera trap on a pole near the waterhole then went back to the shelter, got into her sleeping bag and curled up on the hard floor.

  She woke with the sun, after just a few hours of sleep, got out of the bag, stretched and went and checked her infra-red camera. She was actually relieved that there were no pictures, which meant she had missed no more action.