Far Horizon
Page 43
Nelson, the truck, was still plying the highways and dirt roads of southern Africa. According to Rian, the new driver, a young American guy called Sam, loved showing the female travellers where the bullet holes were patched. Rian had told him the rules when he took him on as a driver, but Mike had told him that some rules were made to be broken.
Sarah left for England the day after Mike was flown to Lusaka. Susie regularly pulled Sarah’s stories from The Times off the internet and sent hard copies to Mike in the post.
A raid by Russian police on Orlov’s mansion outside Moscow unearthed a huge pair of elephant tusks which, with the help of the South African authorities, were positively identified as having once belonged to Skukuza. There was no direct evidence linking Orlov to the killings in Mozambique, mainly because there were no witnesses. However, the South Africans had enough on him to extradite him from Zambia. Orlov hadn’t actually killed anyone in Zambia, except for an inflatable doll, of course. A string of firearms charges, while proved by a Zambian court, weren’t enough to keep him in jail in Zambia for very long; however, the South Africans took poaching seriously and it looked like Orlov would be in prison for a couple of years at least.
Susie had kept in touch with Sarah via e-mail and they had corresponded intermittently. She posted copies of the messages to Mike, but the mail took weeks to arrive. There was no phone at the fishing shack and the payphone in Chirundu rarely worked. He’d tried a few times to call Sarah, but on the one occasion he had been able to get through to her work, he was kept on hold so long waiting to talk to her that his money ran out.
Mike was grown up enough to realise that Sarah’s future was a world away in England in pursuit of her career, which seemed to have really taken off in a very short space of time. He was pleased for her.
The shack came with its own vehicle: a beat-up, roofless old Land Rover. Moses and Mike mainly used it to go shopping and to pick up the mail. This morning was Moses’s turn to pick up their beer, canned food and mail from the postbox at the general store.
‘Letter for you, bwana,’ said Moses.
Mike had given up telling Moses to stop calling him ‘bwana’.
‘Thanks, Moses.’
‘From the lady,’ he added.
Mike’s mail was almost always from Susie, and Moses could recognise her large, girlish handwriting. He looked at his watch and saw that it was after eleven, so he relieved Moses of one of the cold bottles of Castle beer in the carry bag and knocked the top off with the opener on his pocketknife.
‘Sundowner already, bwana?’ Moses cackled.
‘I’m on holiday.’
‘You been on holiday more than any man I know, bwana.’
Mike sat down in his favourite deck chair and slit the envelope with the blade of his pocketknife. Inside was a single sheet of paper and he saw it was a photocopy of a one-paragraph item from The Times.
The beer bottle slid from his fingers as he read the lines. Moses wore a disapproving scowl as he emerged from the kitchen and saw the broken glass and spilt beer.
Mike read the item again.
Times reporter Sarah Thatcher has been appointed as this newspaper’s new Africa correspondent. Ms Thatcher, who will be based in Johannesburg, won two major media awards for her first-hand coverage of an armed attack on a tour group in Zambia and the subsequent arrest of a Russian national on poaching charges.
At the bottom of the photocopied page was a handwritten message giving the date and time of arrival of a British Airways flight from London to Johannesburg. The aircraft was due in a few days’ time. After that she had written: ‘Do you know a good safari guide who could show me around and not get me killed? Love, Sarah.’
‘Moses,’ Mike said, ‘how much fuel’s in the Land Rover?’
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