by Holly Watt
‘The Black Heart Fund.’ Casey was searching on her laptop. ‘It’s registered as a charity in the UK, but I can’t find out much about it. It’s run from a lawyer’s office in Somerset, of all places. The trustees all look like reputable citizens. I could try ringing a few of them?’
‘Where is this guy taking the samples?’ asked Zac, not expecting the question to be answered.
There was a silence.
‘We could follow him,’ said Casey eventually.
‘We could wait in St Agnes’s car park,’ Zac agreed. ‘See where he goes.’
‘But you have to be careful,’ Kizzie warned. ‘Really careful. For weeks now, that man has been building a collection of some of the worst bugs I have ever come across. That man could be doing anything.’
39
Casey hired an old jeep with dark-tinted windows and one of Kizzie’s friends managed to track down a few jerrycans of diesel for it.
Kizzie went back to work, late into the night every evening.
‘I’ll call you as soon as he turns up,’ she promised.
The hours drifted past slowly in the heat of the car park. ‘Who’s looking after Dodo?’ asked Casey.
‘My neighbour,’ said Zac. ‘He’s a mad Italian. He rang up yesterday to say that Dodo was going through his bins every night and eating all his cushions.’
‘Old habits die hard.’
Sitting in the back of the car, legs stretched out, Casey rang round the trustees of the Black Heart Fund, eventually getting through to a spry retiree in Taunton. ‘We don’t do anything in Zimbabwe.’ Mrs Winnett sounded bewildered, ‘We give books to local schools. We do fundraising for libraries, that sort of thing. In Bridgwater, though, mainly. Not Harare.’
‘They must have hijacked the name,’ Casey said, after she’d said goodbye to Mrs Winnett. ‘They can’t have expected anyone ever to check.’
A text arrived from Miranda. Is everything OK?
Fine, Casey tapped out.
And a message from Noah Hart, a flood of foreboding as his number flashed up. Flora is really starting to fade, Casey. The abscessus is out of control. Have you found out anything more about Corax? We are getting desperate.
And she found that she couldn’t answer.
The hours crept by. Zac moved the jeep with the shade, like the yachts in Grand Baie bobbing in half circles with the tide. They played cards, talked, gamed out the possibilities.
As she ate some crisps, Casey thought of all the times she had waited. A van parked in a dreary back alley in Poznań. A car, its motor turning over quietly, somewhere in Pristina. Long hours outside a chief executive’s townhouse halfway down Pont Street.
Patience is a virtue.
And slow days in a dusty hotel in a scruffy town somewhere in southern Algeria, once. Strong Arabic coffee and shisha smoke drifting, and Ed laughing as the pink bougainvillea petals swirled in the breeze.
Don’t.
A message from Miranda interrupted her thoughts. Dash is telling Hessa to front up Ambrose Drummond. I suppose we might as well crack on with that story.
Do we have to? Why now?
Hasn’t got a decent splash for Saturday, I guess.
They threw people to the wolves on a strict schedule.
Casey stared at the dusty rows of cars. She couldn’t think of any more reasons to delay the Drummond story. And it wasn’t fair on Hessa. Fine.
‘Is it always like this?’ Zac asked, as she put down the phone. ‘Hours of invisible work.’
‘Often, yes,’ she said. ‘And then this tidy little story appears, all the loose ends tucked in. Black and white and easy to read. We even clip out all the long words so it fits neatly on the page.’
‘You only ever see the top of the iceberg with the media, I suppose.’
It was more like looking at a dark pool of fish, thought Casey. Fish in a feeding frenzy, a maddened swirl of black, glistening scales breaking the surface for a second.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit like that.’
When she looked up next, Zac was reading something on his phone.
‘What are you reading about?’ she asked, bored.
‘Cupid and Psyche.’
‘What?’ Bemusement.
‘Psyche was so beautiful that even Venus became jealous of her, and sent Cupid to make her fall in love with an ugly monster. But Cupid accidentally scratched himself with his own arrow, and fell in love with Psyche. He became her secret husband, a mysterious figure visiting her only under the cover of darkness. Until one night, Psyche lights her lamp and steals a glimpse of him, and he flees, abandoning her.’
‘OK.’
‘It’s about how we punish female curiosity.’
Casey was watching a car edge into a tight space. Distractedly, fretfully: ‘What do you mean?’
‘Eve tastes the apple, and is banished from paradise. Lot’s wife glances back, and is turned to a pillar of salt.’
‘Pandora opens the box, and unleashes the deadly sins.’ Casey picked up the baton. ‘Bluebeard’s pretty new wife finds only the bloody corpses of his wives, dangling from hooks on the wall.’
‘And then there’s Psyche and her lamp,’ said Zac. ‘Sneaking a look at Cupid. Love cannot dwell with suspicion.’
‘How cheering it all is.’
‘But it is fascinating, isn’t it? For millennia, women have been punished for curiosity. For investigating. For sticking their noses in.’
Casey peered moodily through the smeary windscreen, and then gave Zac a sideways glance. ‘Historically, curiosity’s been pretty mediocre for cats, too.’
Suddenly, they were both laughing, overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the situation. Casey doubled over, cackling until her stomach hurt.
‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ Zac’s face was creased with laughter. ‘A few days ago, I was on my beautiful yacht in Mauritius.’
‘I don’t bloody know.’ Casey wiped away a tear. ‘A few months ago, I was … ’
Just then, a navy blue Hilux appeared on the road leading past the hospital. It was moving fast, but took a sharp right into the hospital car park, skimming to a halt close to the hospital entrance.
‘Look,’ Zac murmured, hilarity vaporising immediately. ‘What do you make of that, Psyche?’
A man climbed out and walked round to the back of the pickup. He pulled out a cool box and disappeared towards the hospital.
‘Now what,’ Casey muttered, ‘the hell are you up to?’
They waited, and a few minutes later, Kizzie rang Casey. ‘The Black Heart guy’s got the samples. He’s heading back out.’
Face blank, Zac started the jeep. He headed towards the exit of the hospital, turned left, drove a hundred yards and pulled into a small street leading off the main road. They waited. A few minutes later, the Hilux emerged from the hospital, indicated left and accelerated down the road, past the small street.
Zac followed.
The man headed west through the city. He drove patiently, skirting the northern suburbs before taking one of the roads west again out of Harare. Casey and Zac trailed behind, just a few cars back.
Now they were driving through the countryside, through the millions of acres of Zimbabwe’s abandoned farmland. After the rains, everything was green, lush, glorious. Bright pink flowers billowed on both sides of the potholed road, and flame lilies dotted the grass. As they got further from the city, the scenery became wilder. Scrappy miombo trees spiked the blue sky, the grasses and shrubs sprawling as far as the eye could see. The earth here was red, scorching in the sun. As they reached the hills, the kopjes – vast granite boulders – began to dominate the landscape, a giant’s full stop on the skyline.
All along this dusty road, there were collections of little shacks: just mud and thatch patted together. The women walked in groups, large sacks balanced on their heads. Men crouched by stalls, selling a few vegetables. Poverty lined the roads, so it was as if the beauty of the country was stitched together by lon
g seams of hardship.
Here and there were the big tobacco barns, ugly brick buildings where the leaves were cured for weeks on end. Tobacco: almost the only thing to escape Zimbabwe into the big hungry world beyond.
Zac drove for almost two hours. Occasionally, they passed opulent gates or a long avenue of jacarandas or flamboyants that looked as if they might lead to some magnificent farm or some proud, elegant house. But there was nothing in the distance. The avenues never led to anything but a bleakness, an emptiness, a burned-out memory.
The traffic thinned out gradually until Casey started to get nervous. ‘He’ll see us if he looks back,’ she murmured. ‘We’ve been following him for too long.’
‘Do you want me to stop?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then.’
A few minutes later, they passed a grand old country club, the squash-court roof gaping to the open air. Ornate gateposts had been pulled down and the guards’ hut torched. A cheery red sign, ‘Members Only’, sagged to the ground.
And just as Casey was going to ask Zac to stop, be careful, we’ve gone too far, the Hilux pulled over on to a narrow gravel track a few hundred yards ahead of their car. There was nothing to do except drive on, cruising past the Hilux as slowly as they dared.
Glancing across as they drove by, Casey caught a glimpse of big red gates – not burned these gates, not damaged in any way – and a guard in a navy blue uniform hastening to raise a car barrier. The guard had his arm lifted, his hand in a near salute. Behind him, the red gates were tall, with a starburst design. They made up a formidable obstacle. As they watched, the first gates were opening to reveal a second set just behind.
‘And what,’ Zac drove on smoothly, ‘do we think is going on in there?’
‘So where were you exactly?’
Kizzie was standing behind Casey as she opened up a map on her laptop. Zac and Casey had driven back to Kewlake, and Kizzie was just home from a long shift at the hospital.
‘Here.’ Casey pointed to a spot over a hundred miles west of the capital. ‘There were big red gates,’ she said. ‘And a guard.’
Kizzie stared at the screen, eyebrows drawn together.
‘Are you sure that is where you were?’
Casey glanced at Zac for confirmation, and he nodded.
‘Huh,’ Kizzie said slowly, ‘I think that is the entrance to the Njana reserve. I believe that is the massive game reserve that belongs to Elias Bailey.’
40
‘The Njana ranch used to belong to an old arms dealer called Jacques van de Berg,’ Kizzie explained. ‘Back in the seventies, van de Berg managed to sell guns to not one, but both sides of the Bush War, which required a certain dispassion.
‘Then he got out of the country altogether for a few years when things got too lively. He managed to hang on to Njana for all that time though, God knows how. He used to do business all over Africa, and eventually he came back to Zimbabwe. I don’t know when, but things didn’t go so well for him after that. He was too old school. Couldn’t keep up when the world went electronic and no bad thing, as far as I am concerned.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘The van de Bergs ran out of money pretty fast,’ said Kizzie. ‘Jacques van de Berg held on to the ranch until he died, but only just. The son sold it as soon as the old man journeyed on. Maybe five, six years ago? Not for much, although Bailey probably paid a bit more into some overseas account that the Zim authorities couldn’t track. It’s meant to be beautiful, Njana. All the land up there is stunning, hey?’
‘Do you know how much time Bailey spends at the reserve?’
‘No idea,’ said Kizzie. ‘Van de Berg was certainly a big deal in Harare for a long time. I think Oscar knew his son. Not especially well, but Harare is not a large place, as you may have noticed, so they would have crossed paths a lot as they were growing up. I could ask Oscar if he knows anything?’
‘But Bailey isn’t the same presence locally as the van de Bergs?’
‘Not at all. Bailey’s ex-wife is South African, lives down in Cape Town, and even when they were married, she had zero interest in Njana, by all accounts. Presumably he must spend a lot of time in Europe and the US too?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Casey. ‘Being the boss of Adsero can’t leave much spare time on his hands.’
‘Sure.’
‘What’s he doing up there?’ Casey was almost speaking to herself. ‘He’s having lots of samples taken there. He could be testing them … ’
‘There might be some sort of facility,’ Kizzie murmured.
The thought hung menacingly in the air.
‘What’s it like,’ Casey asked. ‘The Njana ranch?’
‘I’ll call Oscar.’
A few minutes later, Oscar was on speakerphone. He sounded as if he had just woken up, but glided easily into memories of the old game reserve. His voice was deep and slow, the strong Zimbabwean accent never far from a laugh. Casey could see how he and Kizzie made a good team.
‘The van de Bergs used to have parties,’ Oscar said. ‘Such parties, my friend. They were held in the main house, right at the top of a hill, looking straight across at the sunset. Then in the daytime, we’d go on game drives, and they were just amazing. Old man van de Berg used to collect black rhino, as well as giraffe, sable, eland, zebra, so it was incredible. And then in the evening—’
‘OK, OK,’ interrupted Kizzie.
‘Did you all stay in the main house?’ asked Casey.
‘No, there were smaller lodges all over the reserve,’ said Oscar. ‘Off down little tracks. Beautiful places too, hey? The drivers would pick us up, and take us to the main house for lunch, dinner, whatever. There’s a big reservoir at the bottom of the hill in front of the main house. One night, we all got steaming drunk and went for a swim. The next morning van de Berg absolutely bollocked his son. Arno had forgotten that there were crocodiles in the river above the dam.’
‘So how would we go about getting on to the ranch?’ asked Casey.
‘I would not recommend it,’ Oscar said with heavy emphasis. ‘Njana is not the Masai Mara, sure, but there are lions on that reserve. Van de Berg collected black rhino too – about the only good thing that man ever did – so the guards will be properly armed. Poachers are a real problem in Zimbabwe. They gun down the animals and take the horns. There are very few black rhino left now, hey?’
‘But we have to get in,’ Casey fretted. ‘We need to find out what that man is doing with those samples.’
‘I will have a think,’ promised Oscar. ‘But that reserve is a big one, hey? It must be a hundred thousand acres, at least, and it is wild country up there. Blundering around on the Njana ranch would be pretty close to suicide.’
Zac’s eyes met Casey’s. ‘I see,’ said Casey. ‘Thank you, Oscar.’
And Kizzie shook her head.
Early the next morning, there was a bang on Kewlake’s dilapidated front door.
‘Henke.’ The voice was gruff. ‘Oscar called me.’
As the man held out a huge hand, Casey’s phone bleeped.
Don’t ask me how I know Henke, Casey read Oscar’s message. But he should be able to get you into Njana.
Still half asleep, Casey stared at the man. He was about 6'5", she guessed, with a mop of shaggy red-gold hair. She couldn’t make out much of his appearance, but guessed that the African sun had been brutalising his skin for fortyish years. A huge beard covered the lower half of his face, and reflective sunglasses his eyes. He was the sort of man who still called the country Rhodesia, Casey thought, and the capital Salisbury. Behind him sat a battered Mitsubishi pickup, one silver wing stoved in.
‘Casey?’
‘Hello.’ She shook his hand automatically. ‘How do you know the Njana ranch, Henke?’
‘Well … ’
A poacher, she thought. Thanks very much, Oscar.
Her phone beeped again. I can’t think of a single other way of getting you in (and out, crucially) of Njana. Good l
uck! O.
Casey looked up at the stony-faced giant. ‘It would be great to have your help, Henke.’
41
They left Harare just after darkness fell.
‘You don’t have to come,’ Casey had said to Zac again, as they waited for Henke’s pickup outside Kewlake.
‘But you don’t know what you’re looking for,’ Zac answered, and it was true.
Car headlights bounced down the road towards Kewlake, and the battered Mitsubishi ground to a halt beside them. Henke was smoking. He waited impassively as they climbed into the car, then accelerated hard.
‘It’ll be cold up in Njana, hey?’
Both Zac and Casey wore warm coats, long trousers. Even at this time of year, Harare – right up on the Highveld plateau and 5,000 feet above sea level – got chilly as night fell.
‘We’re not sure what we’re looking for in Njana,’ Casey admitted, as they raced down the empty roads. ‘It could be something in the main house. It could be somewhere else.’
Henke nodded, but didn’t speak. Without the sunglasses, Casey could see his eyes, pale brown and bloodshot.
‘I don’t think Elias Bailey is staying on the estate at the moment,’ said Casey. She had looked up the Adsero private jet on one of the flight tracker sites that afternoon. The day before the plane had flown from Cincinnati to Frankfurt and it was still parked up in Germany. ‘But presumably, he leaves some of his team behind in Zimbabwe when he travels?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Bailey just flies in and out of Njana, doesn’t he?’ said Zac. ‘He doesn’t come into Harare at all.’
‘Ja.’ Henke sat in silence for a moment. ‘It was van de Berg put in an airstrip, not far from the reservoir. It’s about the only bit of flat land in Njana. The rest is all hills.’
It was very dark on the road west of Harare. Few of the shacks had electricity at night, and most of the roads were empty. A half moon rose slowly.