The Prey

by Tony Park

  Chris took a deep breath. ‘No. I didn’t want to bring down the company. I just wanted to stop the mine going ahead at Lion Plains.’

  Coetzee whistled through his teeth. Casper balled his fists on the table and Roelf shook his head in disgust.

  Jan simply nodded, as though his words had confirmed what he thought. But how, Chris wondered, had he guessed? Perhaps someone had noticed the chemistry between him and Tertia. It had been her idea to submit the contaminated samples. After he was rescued she had asked him what he had done when he was underground with the zama zamas and he had told her about the air testing and the fact he had the samples with him.

  Jan put his elbows on the table and his fingertips together. He lowered his eyes, almost as if he was about to start praying. ‘Leave us, gentlemen. I want some time alone with Chris.’

  The other three stood, their chairs scraping on the floor in their haste to be gone from the poisoned atmosphere in the room. Coetzee shot Chris a look of pure loathing as he and the others filed out of the manager’s office.

  ‘How did you know it was me who switched the samples?’ Chris asked. He would keep Tertia out of this, at all costs.

  Jan reached into the top pocket of his shirt and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, printed, Australian-style, with a picture of a dead cancer sufferer. He offered the pack to Chris, who shook his head.

  ‘Smoking’s not allowed indoors.’

  ‘You’d do well in Australia.’ Jan shook a cigarette from the pack, put it in his mouth and lit it with a silver zippo and exhaled to the ceiling. ‘It’s good to be back here, despite all this kak. Life was simpler in the old days. Everyone smoked everywhere, we moered the blacks when they didn’t do what we told them, and if someone like you did what you’ve done, your body would have been dumped in a madala side.’

  Chris gulped. Jan blew his second stream of smoke in his direction and he coughed.

  ‘There’s nowhere in Eureka’s legal operations where the level of dust contaminants is above the legally mandated minimum, is there?’ Jan asked.

  Chris shook his head.

  ‘No, because Cameron ran this mine properly. So those samples had to come from somewhere else. It was ironic, but clever, for you to be involved, because you could have lost your job over this. If the independent review proved, as it would, that there were no unsafe areas underground, then the only person who would have done wrong in this whole fucked-up mess, apart from whoever it was at the lab who leaked the result, was you. You didn’t tell Cameron about the elevated findings. If you had, we could have gone proactive and launched our own investigation rather than have the government and the union shut us down.’

  ‘I thought I was doing the right thing. And it wasn’t the lab. I leaked the letter they sent to the mine.’

  Jan reached across the table with a speed that left Chris no chance to duck out of reach. He grabbed Chris’s shirt front and hauled him across the table until their faces were just inches apart. Smoke leaked from Jan’s mouth as he spoke, making Chris’s eyes water. ‘Don’t lie to me, boy. I’ve cut the throats of better men than you.’

  Chris tried to struggle free, but Jan held him, effortlessly, for a few more seconds, before letting him go. Chris slumped back into his chair. ‘You made no secret of the fact that you were not in favour of the Lion Plains mine, but like a good little drone you still filled in all the forms in the environmental impact assessment that said there was nothing inherently wrong with our application. I admired your work ethic – viewing the project objectively, and concluding that we met all the requirements, but I also thought you were a gutless moffie.’

  Chris shrank in his chair. He most certainly was not a homosexual. Indeed, it was his love of a woman that was partially responsible for his predicament.

  ‘If you were a real man you would have resigned in protest and fought the Lion Plains mine fair, but no, you decided to sabotage the company from the inside.’

  It was true. He knew that if he could release damning evidence of Global Resources flouting the government’s environmental standards the public outcry over mining on a game reserve – already strong and gaining momentum thanks to Tertia’s relentless PR campaign – would force the government to stall, if not cancel, approval for Lion Plains.

  Jan sat back in his chair and drew on his cigarette again. ‘So,’ he waved his free hand in the air, ‘what do I do with you now, you two-faced piece of shit?’

  Chris glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t think about making a run for the door. I’ll beat you to it.’

  Chris wanted to stand up to this bully, to call his bluff and assert that there was no way the CEO of a globally listed company would physically assault one of his staff members. But then, Chris reasoned, Global Resources was going down the toilet and it was possible the members of the board, not to mention the company’s many shareholders, might already be planning Jan’s retirement.

  ‘Yes, better you say nothing for now. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to go back down my mine, with a couple of armed security guys and the independent monitoring guys, and you’re going to make sure they take their samples in a clean area so that we come up smelling like roses. You’re then going to work with our resident spin doctor, Musa Mabunda, to come up with a little fairytale about how you inadvertently mixed up some samples. You can say you had monitoring pumps set up near the ore face to record contaminant levels at the time of blasting and you mistakenly sent these to the lab as samples recorded by workers. When the mistake was brought to your attention you covered it up to try to save your skin.’

  Chris shook his head. ‘Ag, no ways, man. No one will believe it. Why would I do such a thing if it was just an honest mistake?’

  ‘Because you’re a lying little snake. You’ll resign again, in public this time, and I’ll accept your resignation. But first you have to go down there and get the new samples.’

  Chris felt his lower lip start to tremble. ‘I … I can’t.’

  ‘You can, and you will. Looking at you I can’t believe how you had the balls to set this up in the first place. Cameron told me how scared you were every time you went underground. No, my boy, I think someone else was pulling your strings.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh, very forceful. Quite the tough man all of a sudden, aren’t we? Who was it? Some other tree-hugging greenie? Greenpeace? World Wildlife Fund? No, they wouldn’t be involved in something illegal. Who else wants my company bankrupted and the Lion Plains project cancelled?’

  Chris said nothing.

  ‘Who was in on it with you?’ Jan persisted. ‘Was it that crazy bunny-hugging bitch, Tertia Venter? Is that it? Is she pulling more than your strings, boy?’

  He looked up. ‘No! I acted alone. But, please –’

  Jan silenced him with a stare and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You’ll go down the mine. This little scheme, whoever cooked it up, has backfired. You can leave here quietly, after you’ve done the testing, or I’ll call in the cops. If they won’t charge you with anything, then the company lawyers will sue you for loss of production.’ He stood and leaned across the table. ‘I’ll fucking crush you, do you hear me, boy?’

  32

  ‘Yes, the body of a white male, aged fifty-four, was found at the scene of the shooting,’ Colonel Sindisiwe Radebe said into the telephone, ‘and it appeared this male had been killed several days ago. A note was found next to the body of the deceased gunman expressing remorse for two crimes he said he had committed.’

  ‘Thanks, Colonel,’ said the reporter from MPower FM. ‘That’s great, but can you give me a little more off the record? My sources told me the old dead white guy was the dominee who went missing the same time as Cameron McMurtrie’s daughter.’

  ‘Ah, there has been too much tragedy in this little town of ours,’ Sindisiwe said, not answering the question. She had been interviewed by the media many times in her rapidly advancing career. She knew how to avoid questions, and
she knew that nothing, truly, was ever off the record.

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘Off the record, yes, I saw the deceased male’s body and I am sure it is the missing dominee. The note left by the man, who was a worker in the office at Eureka, said he committed suicide over his remorse for killing the church man, and for raping and killing Jessica McMurtrie, whom he had admired from afar for a long time.’

  ‘Wow. I mean, thanks, Colonel. How much of that can I use?’

  ‘I will trust you to use this information in a way that does not compromise our ongoing working relationship,’ Sindisiwe said, then hung up. She smiled to herself and thought of the afternoon of lovemaking yesterday. Wellington was becoming too big for his boots, but if things could return to normal at Eureka, with the pirate miners earning just enough money to keep her in designer clothes and a new car every two years, without becoming so greedy that they sparked another underground war, then all would be well.

  Sindisiwe picked up the copy of Lowveld Living she had been reading when the reporter had called. It was the latest edition of the glossy lifestyle magazine, delivered to her straight from the presses. She had ten copies on her desk, waiting to be mailed to family and friends. She opened it again to the feature on ‘LOWVELD WOMEN CRASHING THROUGH THE GLASS CEILING’. There she was, in her field uniform, leaning on the bonnet of a police car, her right hand on her holstered Z88 pistol, giving the photographer her best Dirty Harry stare. On the next page she was in a figure-hugging black sequinned evening dress, in killer platform heels, leaning across the top of a piano in the casino next door to where she had met Wellington. ‘Just because I’m a cop doesn’t mean that I can’t be a sensitive and sensual woman’ she was quoted as saying under the second picture. She couldn’t wait to show Wellington. She wanted to remind him just how powerful she was.

  Her phone rang. ‘Colonel Radebe.’ She never tired of how fine that combination of words sounded.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Moses, the desk sergeant, ‘there are some guys here from the Hawks to see you. It’s about the dominee and the McMurtrie girl.’

  Sindisiwe dropped the magazine on the edge of the desk and it fell to the floor.

  *

  Jessica had experienced the total darkness of the world where her father worked twice before. Once she had gone down in the cage with him on a day when all of the kids in school had had to go to work with one of their parents. The other was as part of a school excursion to Eureka, and she had felt proud because when the other girls shrieked and the boys chattered nervously, she kept her cool because she was ready for the blackness when the miner switched off his lamp.

  It was black.

  More than that, it was impenetrable. When her dad had signalled the cage operator to stop it halfway down, and told her to switch off her miner’s lamp, she had been unprepared for the darkness. She hadn’t been able to see the fingers of her hand, no matter how close she held them to her face and how much she strained her eyes.

  But her father had been next to her, and although she couldn’t see him either, she could feel him, and that made everything fine. It had been kind of fun, as well.

  When they had switched their lamps back on and reached the level where the men were working, she had been amazed at how much was going on. Compressors hummed, an LHD – a low-slung load, haul, dumper – rumbled by, and sweating men leaned into screaming drills that probed the rock face.

  And she had loved it.

  Her mother had hated the mine and resented her father for working in it and making them stay in Barberton. When Jessica had announced, after attending a careers day, that she wanted to study engineering at university, her father had looked proud as a peacock. Her mother had suggested she study something less manly. Jessica had pointed out that there was a shortage of engineers in South Africa and that there were programs to encourage girls to study. Her father had said that she wouldn’t be restricted to working in the mines, but her mother had accused him of brainwashing her. ‘It’s no place for a girl,’ her mother had said.

  Jessica sniffed and coughed again. Her throat was raw from the dust she had inhaled. It was warm and it was pitch black, but it was not a nice place where she was.

  He had put her on a steel-framed bed that had squeaked when he had dropped her. The thin foam mattress smelled of the acrid sweat of miners who had slept there, and other odours that she didn’t want to try to place. Her tears had flown for a long time, soaking into the rancid sponge.

  Her hands were bound behind her back with a cable tie, but he had removed the gag. She had screamed until her throat hurt, but it was no good. If anyone could hear her in the darkness, none of them cared about her, or they were too scared of the man to come and save her. The blindfold was gone, but that meant nothing, because here she was again, in the impenetrable blackness. Instead of comforting her, the darkness had begun to freak her out. But she had calmed herself.

  She had wondered if he had left her here alone, thinking her a defenceless child; if she could free herself she could perhaps find a lamp of some kind and find her way out of the mine. More than most kids she had an idea of how a mine worked and where the tunnels might lead. Her need to find out who, if anyone, was beyond the door of this chamber had made her think about what to scream next. ‘I need to go to the toilet! I am going to piss all over this mattress!’

  She had waited and a key had scratched in the door lock a few minutes later. He had entered.

  He had stood, close to her, not speaking, for what seemed like an age. Her heart had thumped in her chest, the myriad imaginings of what he would do to her torturing her. When he had reached out in the dark and touched her thigh she had screamed and scrambled, as best as she could, away from him. The side walls, however, had blocked her. When she had felt his touch again she had kicked as hard as she could, but he had just laughed at her.

  ‘I’m going to take your pants off. So you can go to the toilet. No hands, though.’

  She had sobbed and kicked and writhed, but in the end she had succumbed to his touch. He hadn’t touched her, down there, but what made it almost as bad was that he had taken control over her. He knew she couldn’t bear to wet her pants, and he had helped her. She wanted to kill him.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he had said quietly as she’d scrunched herself up to try to protect herself from him, burrowing into the corner on the stinking foam. She had tried not to cry. ‘You’re going to help me, Jessica.’

  And then he had left her, in the all-encompassing, impenetrable darkness.

  33

  The next morning Colonel Sindisiwe Radebe drove to Eureka in her BMW, tailing the two know-it-all agents from the Hawks who had had the temerity to question her the day before about the killings of the dominee and the girl.

  The Hawks, an elite investigative unit, were the successors to the ill-fated Scorpions, who had been crushed like the insects they were when they had tried to smear the president with corruption allegations. Sindisiwe had been a member of the ANC all her adult life and had been active in student politics in the dying days of the apartheid regime. She thought the government was doing a good job, trying to right the many wrongs of the past and offering plenty of opportunities for bright, hard-working members like herself to rise through the ranks and to prosper on the way.

  There were two of them, both men in their thirties, one white and one black, although the latter was more coconut than a brother. He was brown on the outside but white on the inside. They may have fancied themselves the squeaky clean face of the new South Africa, but to her they were an oppressor and a sell-out. There was something repugnant, Sindisiwe thought, about law enforcement officers questioning other officers and insinuating they were corrupt. The white one, Pretorius, had asked her how it was that thirteen alleged zama zamas had managed to escape from the holding cells in the police station in one night.

  Sindisiwe had retorted that she was the station commander, not the policeman on duty. The man had been counselled against l
eaving his key in the lock of one of the cell doors, but he was an otherwise good police officer with a spotless record as, she reminded the smarmy agents, was she.

  They had probed her about her investigations into the death of the dominee and the disappearance of the McMurtrie girl and she had told them the case was all but solved. The mine’s driver, Timothy Nyati, had left a written confession.

  ‘Have you spoken to his wife?’ Pretorius had asked.

  The man was a fool. As if she, a colonel, would go to the home of a murderer to inform the man’s wife her criminal husband was dead. ‘One of my men did.’

  ‘Was she shown the alleged suicide note?’ the African sidekick asked.

  ‘You cannot come to Barberton and tell me how to run my investigations,’ Sindisiwe said.

  ‘Are there plans to search for the missing girl’s body?’ Pretorius asked.

  She snorted. ‘You really do not know where you are, do you? Men have been digging holes in these mountains for more than a hundred and thirty years. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of places to throw a body. We would never know where to start looking. The girl is gone, and her mother and father were both recently killed. It is a blessing, in a way.’

  Pretorius had squared up to her, as if he could intimidate her like some old-regime policeman. ‘We have information, Colonel, that the abduction and alleged killing of Jessica McMurtrie, and the death of her mother, may be the result of a payback operation by Wellington Shumba, the man who is believed to be the ringleader of the illegal miners at Eureka and was last seen in your custody, after being arrested on the edge of the Kruger Park.’

  She had wondered where his information had come from. ‘Unfortunately, Shumba escaped from custody before he could be charged. The same officer who allowed the others to get away on his watch has been counselled further.’