Murderous

by David Hickson

  That morning, when I awoke with her memory fleeing back into the shadows of my mind, I failed to think of a single reason for me to stay in England. My father had remarried and lost interest in me. The British army, which had substituted as a family, had also lost interest if I understood the long-winded sentences that described the situation in my discharge papers. That morning I recalled how Cape Town had felt like home, and how Robyn had been stone-faced and frail at Brian’s funeral. How she had asked me what my plans were and how I’d replied like a naïve fool that my plans were in the hands of the British army. And how she had lifted her dark glasses from her eyes to make certain that I received the full force of her scorn.

  I considered myself South African, even if other South Africans did not. And I felt the aftershocks of the Minhoop massacre as keenly as other South Africans. The first twenty-four hours after the massacre of those thirty-three worshippers, the country reeled from the shock. Headlines stated the facts: the number of victims, their ethnic provenance, their ages and their location. The next twenty-four hours were devoted to the international response. The shock, the bewilderment and the outrage. Questions were raised: Who had done this? Why had they done it? And why had the South African police service failed to find the person or persons who had wielded the gun?

  During this second day, the ‘white genocide’ theory was seized upon by the camp of journalists who liked to stoke the bellicose fires smoldering so near the surface. They were opposed by those who argued that the murder of thirty-three people was not genocide. Other conspiracy theorists called the massacre a false flag event. Fuel was added to the fire when the President of the United States called for more attention to the issue of white genocide. He was criticised in turn for speaking without checking the facts. And so the wheel turned.

  During the third day following the massacre, the media focused on individual stories: details of the four-year-old child who had been killed, and the tragedy of the sister who had been too ill to go into church with him that morning, and who was now the lone survivor of her family. Tributes were paid to the victims. An effort was made to find some sense in their lives, as none could be found in their deaths.

  I found what I needed on page three of the morning papers as I sat at the doors of the warehouse on one of the broken deckchairs. Robyn had left without a word to find alternative lodgings. The door onto the sea was open, and the rain had abated, although the sky wasn’t letting a lot of sunlight through, and the tips of the waves were foaming at the mouth, they were feeling so fed up.

  Piet van Rensburg was devastated, said the article on page three. His thoughts were with the families of the community of which he was considered a pillar. He urged moderation and calm. This was murder, not a political act. Nothing but further pain and suffering would result from making assumptions about the motivation of this horrific act. He asked the world to respect the privacy of the families of the victims, who were close friends of his. If it had not been for maintenance issues on his Cessna, he and his son would have been with them now, meeting their Lord and Maker.

  There were not many aviation companies in the region. On my third call, I struck gold in the form of a belligerent mechanic.

  “I said tomorrow morning,” said the man, who would rather have been speaking Afrikaans, but had switched language when he heard my accent. “I’m short a mechanic, had a cousin in the church, didn’t he? I should say next week, shouldn’t I? Tomorrow is the best I can do.”

  “No problem,” I said, trying to put as much as I could of my mother’s accent into it. “There’s no problem. Just wanted to tell you there’s a new process at the gate. I must meet you there.”

  “Meet me for what?” said the man.

  “Extra security. The boss has been tightening things up. You know what he’s like.”

  The man grunted. “You new?” he asked. “Come in with the extra security?”

  “Just a general dogsbody,” I said, and gave a ridiculous laugh, which I stifled.

  The man grunted again.

  “What time shall I meet you?” I asked.

  “Nine,” he said, then revised that to “half ten”. In Afrikaans the ‘half’ is half an hour before the hour.

  “Employing Brits now, old Piet, is he? Never thought I’d see that day.”

  “You know Mr Van Rensburg well?”

  “What’s well? Been fixing his planes for years, but I’m just the grease monkey, aren’t I?”

  “I’ll see you in the morning then. Which gate will you be coming in?”

  “Gate? What the fuck you mean, which gate?”

  “There are smaller gates,” I said quickly, “not sure if you maybe use one of those.”

  “I’m going to the strip, aren’t I? Not doing the hot wax with happy ending up at the lodge. I’ll be at the fucking airstrip gate.” He ended the call.

  The Van Rensburg farm was a four-hour drive from Cape Town. I left at oh four hundred hours, earlier than necessary, but Robyn had not returned the previous day and I was not sleeping. My rental made good time all the way up the coast, and up onto the plateau beneath which the beleaguered town of Minhoop nestled. As I gained the ridge of the plateau the troubled coastal weather dropped away, and clear skies greeted me, the sun low and weak. A little after oh eight hundred hours, I bumped down the dirt road that appeared on the map to come closest to the farm strip that served the Van Rensburgs’ personal aviation needs and provided trouble-free access for their luxury lodge guests.

  The gate here was not as impressive as the main gates I had passed half an hour before, but it warranted a sweeping section of stone wall, a security camera, electric fencing and two overweight but cheerful security personnel. They were contentedly engrossed in an early morning omnibus of their favourite soap opera, which was playing on a small black-and-white TV perched on the desk in front of an array of security camera feeds. The TV reception wasn’t working optimally, and drifts of snow rolled up the screen in waves but that did not seem to deter Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who were both transfixed, their bowls of half-eaten pap held in one hand each, with spoons of the porridge floating somewhere en route to their mouths, forgotten in the drama of the moment. It took a few moments for them to realise the reason their guard room had been plunged into shadow was because I was blocking the early morning light at their bulletproof window.

  They were all smiles and full of welcome when they had overcome the initial surprise and had reluctantly turned down the volume on their TV. I explained that I was new with Karoo-Air and was a little early. An apologetic newcomer’s smile. Would it be acceptable to them if I brought my car in and waited in the shade for my boss? I didn’t want to sit in the sun out on the dirt road, and I didn’t want to disturb them any longer than necessary. When my boss arrived, I would fill in the details of his car and travel with him. Impress my boss and reduce the inconvenience to them. A conspicuous glance at the soap opera. They understood, showed me lots of white teeth, and watched me with only half an eye between them as I made up a name and phone number to fill into their book.

  Petrus of Karoo-Air arrived at the gate in a cloud of dust because he saw no reason to decelerate before locking the wheels with a hard jab of the brakes. Before the dust had settled, I was at the bulletproof glass filling in the number plate. Tweedledum and Tweedledee managed between them to open the gates remotely and I stepped into the road to welcome Petrus, who drove at me for a few seconds but thought better of running me down at the last moment. I climbed into the passenger seat of his car, gave him a dogsbody smile and shook his hand. He was a grizzly man with a long thin face, grey stubble and receding hair that had once been black. He had intelligent eyes which narrowed in order to assess me; the corners creased on lines etched over years of squinting up into the bright sky. I passed his assessment, and he showed me a healthy set of teeth and laughed at the absurdity of my being employed by the Van Rensburgs.

  “You’re a sout piel,” he declared as his right foot crushed the ac
celerator pedal and we leapt away from the security gates, his pale eyes still on me.

  “I am,” I confessed and smiled to show that I didn’t mind being called a ‘salty penis’, an Afrikaans term used to describe someone with one leg in South Africa and the other in Europe.

  The Van Rensburg airstrip was a kilometre of dusty tar laid over the patchy, semi-desert scrubland. We were on the edge of the Karoo here, where the verdant coast shed its green cloak and adopted thorn bushes and dry grasses. A squat building with four glass walls served as terminal for the luxury guests, with air-conditioning and a convenient bar for bolstering their courage as they watched the aeroplanes being warmed up on the apron. The terminal was closed today and looked forlorn. Beside it was a prefabricated hangar in corrugated fawn that was large enough to hold a handful of the type of bush planes that abound on the game farms of South Africa. Today there were only two. A six-seater Cessna 210 Turbo and, keeping its distance from the Cessna, a sleek Learjet 24 crouched in the corner. The Learjet flashed its landing lights at us. A pilot with silver hair and a tie tucked into the front of his shirt to avoid having it sucked into the jets climbed out of the cockpit and waved his clipboard at Petrus.

  Petrus didn’t return the greeting. He was shaking his head in disbelief.

  “It’s that crazy son,” he said. “Look at it. How on God’s earth did he do that?” He was standing before the high wing of the Cessna 210, which was at the doors of the hangar, nose pointing optimistically at the runway. Petrus shook his head again and showed me what the problem was. A metal pipe beneath the wing was bent to the side, so it pointed at the pilot’s window instead of straight ahead.

  “Can’t fly her like that, with the pitot tube all bent,” said Petrus, in case I missed the point. “He’s a fucking cowboy, that one.”

  “Hendrik?” I said.

  “Not even got a licence, has he? Who needs a licence when you got a rich daddy?”

  He sighed heavily and took the pitot tube in his wiry hands and tried to bend it back. But the pitot tube is a solid chunk of metal. You don’t bend it by hand. It’s an L-shape that protrudes beneath the wing and points its hollow tube forwards in order to measure the air pressure, which is used to calculate air speed. Petrus explained that without a pitot tube, the plane effectively cannot fly. Guessing the speed at which you are moving through the air when hundreds of feet above ground is an impossible task.

  “Not like driving a car at ground level and seeing your surroundings rush past,” said Petrus. He gave up on twisting the pitot tube back into position. “Knew a pilot once, said he could fly without the airspeed indicator. He’d open the window flap and stick his hand out. Feel the speed for himself.”

  “Did he show you how that worked?”

  Petrus shook his head and sucked his teeth. “I’m not that fucking stupid. All you get through that window is the prop-wash.” He sighed. “Fucking cowboy.”

  “Hendrik often do this kind of damage?”

  “Hard landings, popped rivets, cracked engine heads, bent props, I’ve seen them all. But this one … What the hell did he do, crack his thick skull against it?”

  Indeed, it was hard to imagine how the pitot tube came to be facing the way it was. It protruded beneath the wing, but only a few inches. If it had struck something while taxiing there would have been some damage to the underside of the wing.

  Petrus shook his head again and sighed. “Have to replace it,” he said and turned back to his car to fetch the tools he would need.

  I walked over to the Learjet. The silver-haired pilot was crouched at the nose wheel with his clipboard, poking the tyre with a gold-plated pen.

  “She’s a beauty,” I said.

  He made a mark with the pen on his checklist, then swivelled about in the crouching position like he was doing a Russian dance. He considered me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles. Then he stood up, turned back to face the jet and nodded.

  “She is that,” he said, and I experienced a moment of dislocation. It was Brian’s voice, speaking from beyond the grave. The same broad Yorkshire accent.

  “Harrogate?” I said.

  “Near enough. Knaresborough. You could walk to Harrogate from Knaresborough if you needed to.” He regarded me with interest, trying to place my accent. He glanced back to the Cessna where Petrus was still busy, and I could see a question forming. I spoke before he had time to ask it.

  “You taking her out?”

  “I’ll flip a few circuits. That church business has delayed everything. Trip’s been pushed to next week, but we don’t want any surprises, do we?”

  “Long trip?”

  “Couple of hours out, then back again.”

  “She must cruise at four hundred knots.”

  “Four-twenty.”

  “You’d get to Jo’burg in a couple of hours.”

  “Or Nelspruit,” he said. Nelspruit was the closest thing to a city near the Kruger National Park.

  “The Van Rensburgs taking a holiday?”

  The pilot from Knaresborough smiled to show me how little I understood of the Van Rensburgs.

  “Quick in and out,” he said. “Big lunch. Bit of shopping. Why not? Then back home again.”

  “Shopping? In the Kruger?”

  “Probably not the kind of shopping you would do,” he said.

  “He must be relieved he didn’t take the jet into town on Sunday,” I said.

  The pilot shook his head and dismissed that idea with a wrinkling of his nose.

  “You’d hardly have the gear up, and you’d be calling downwind. That grass patch is no good for her, anyway. Too short, too bumpy, too many trees. ‘Side all that, Mr Van Rensburg isn’t jet rated.”

  “Bit of luck the Cessna was damaged then.”

  “Vandals,” said the pilot, “you don’t do that kind of damage by accident.”

  “You get a lot of that here?”

  He shook his head and crouched down again to check the brake fluid tubes.

  “Always a first time, isn’t there? They’ll have to start locking the doors. Never needed to before, but it’s the way this country is going all over, isn’t it? Lock the doors, put up the fences, build the walls, prepare for the war.”

  “A vandal would have to get through that game fence or come through the gates.”

  “Or be inside already,” he said.

  “You mean a farm worker?”

  He stood up again, moved around to the other side of the plane and started checking the leading edge of the starboard wing.

  “Those ‘bright future’ people are a twenty-minute walk from here. Only a small stretch of wild game area to get through. They pick up a stone to throw at anything that tries to eat them. Not that many of the animals would try. Mostly vegetarian, aren’t they?”

  “I would have thought they would be grateful, the future village people, not resentful. Not vandalising the Van Rensburg’s property.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read, laddie. One man’s generosity is another man’s condescension.”

  Satisfied with the state of the wing he walked around the tail, gave the jet engines an encouraging pat and came back to the entrance of the cockpit.

  “Is it big cats he’s buying?” I asked.

  He paused at the steps, one foot on the lower block, and he looked at me as if trying to remember what I had said about who I was and why I had the right to ask questions.

  “I read about that,” I said. “That Mr Van Rensburg wants to bring more of them down here.”

  “That might be,” he said. “I’m not what you might call inner circle. I just steer the boat.” He climbed up into the cockpit and assumed the look of a man who wanted to be alone with his flight instruments.

  Petrus had made good time on the pitot tube. He was tightening the last of the four countersunk screws when I joined him. The old tube was lying on the concrete floor trailing wires behind it like a body part ripped from a dying animal. I stooped to pick it up.

&
nbsp; “Think it was an accident?” I asked. “Or vandalism?”

  Petrus sucked his teeth and scowled. “What vandals d’you get out here in the bush? You think one of those wild animals came in and tried to chew it off?”

  “There’s no other damage to the wing?”

  “None.”

  “I need to account for it to the boss, you see. Explain what happened.”

  Petrus wiped his tools carefully with a cloth, then placed them reverently into his toolbox.

  “There’d be easier ways to damage a plane, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

  “But this was an effective way of stopping them from flying it?”

  “Sure, cannot fly without your airspeed.”

  He climbed into the cockpit of the Cessna and turned on the master switch.

  “Give that a feel would you? Is it heating up?”

  I touched the pitot tube. It was getting warm.

  “If you want to blame someone for it,” said Petrus as we made our way towards the hangar doors, “look for someone who knows what that piece of metal does. Most people would try to break a prop blade or slash the tyres before they thought of the pitot. They’d hang their jacket on the pitot while they got to work on something else. If it was a vandal, it would be someone who’d flown, or seen the old man doing his pre-flight maybe, someone close to the family.”

  As we arrived at the door, a tractor bumped across the apron towards us, driven by a jovial man with several bellies that bounced in time with the tractor engine. He called a greeting to Petrus.

  “Chief ready?” he asked. “Said he wants a tow, taking the big bird out.”

  “Looks like he’s just done polishing the hubcaps,” said Petrus with a look back to the Learjet. The Learjet lights flashed a goodbye.

  “Jet jockey jerk,” said Petrus under his breath.