The town of Minhoop was settling into a low-grade state of mourning. The shops on the high street were mostly closed, but the coffee shop where Fehrson had all the trouble with the waffles was open for business. Sara was pouring her poisonous coffee and gazing listlessly into the empty street. A few journalists were trying to connect to the Wi-Fi and two of them had allowed the atmosphere to get the better of their restraint and were talking too loudly and laughing inappropriately over their post-breakfast drinks.
I called Khanyi while Sara’s chemical experiment cooled on the table.
“Like pita bread?” she asked, when I’d explained about the pitot tube.
I spelt the word for her. “The last ‘T’ is silent.”
“Vandalised?”
“Looks like it.”
“And it prevented the Van Rensburgs from getting to church that morning?”
“It provides the link you were looking for. Between the church killings and the Van Rensburgs. Not the White Africans perhaps, but it could get your nice police captain looking in the right direction.”
“It’s better than nothing, I suppose.” Khanyi sighed.
“Shall I go to see the police captain, or would you like to?”
“What makes you think I want to?”
I took a sip of the disgusting coffee and let that question remain unanswered.
“You’d better go,” said Khanyi. “It cannot come directly from the Department, though. I’ll call him and say you came to us with information. And that he can do what he likes with it.”
The police captain who had given me the guided tour of the local graffiti looked up when I walked into the prefabricated room that had been set up outside the church. It looked as if he would have shown surprise at my presence in the town if he’d been able to get any sleep in the past seventy-two hours. His thin face was drawn and his cheeks had turned into dark purple smudges beneath his blood-stained eyes.
“Still raining?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. It hadn’t rained all morning, but he didn’t look as if he knew we were in a new day.
“You still got some of those foreign cigarettes?”
“Half a pack.”
He pulled his mouth down like a child showing the adults how unhappy he was.
“Seventy-two fucking hours,” he said. Then repeated the number in case I hadn’t caught it the first time. “If it was raining, I’d light up one of your foreign cigarettes right here. Fuck all the others.”
There were a handful of other police officers in the tin box of a room, all involved in a cameo of crisis management, two of them at a map of the area, another one sorting through a pile of photographs with yellow wax marks to show the bullet trajectories, two huddled over a computer which looked as if it was processing fingerprint files, an older man on the phone, and an obese woman who had fallen asleep at her desk, her head flung back, snoring loudly. We left them to it and stepped out into the cold.
“I’ve given up,” said the captain, when I’d lit his cigarette and he’d blown smoke at the church.
“On the case?” I said.
He shook his head and indicated the cigarette which he held in his closed fist, the burning end sticking out between his second and third fingers.
“Me too,” I said. “Gave up a while ago.”
The two of us stood there like naughty children smoking behind the school pavilion.
“Andile,” he said. “Andile Dlamini.”
“Freddy,” I said. “Freddy Moss.” Because you can never be too careful, and Chandler had insisted that my disappearance should be absolute. “You have a fingerprint?” I asked.
“Partial,” he said. “No match, though. Nothing yet. It takes time, too much time. We’ve got DNA from hair and blood found on a pew. Doesn’t belong to any of the victims. Different racial group. But there’s nothing on record that matches it. DNA’s no good unless you have something to match it to.”
“Do you know anything about the Van Rensburg farm? They call it Ukuthula.”
“Sure.” He nodded. “Big game farm. Luxury lodges. They have a development program there.”
“The Village of Future Hope?”
“That’s the one. Two of my men went round there yesterday. Troubled youngsters. Thought it was worth checking out. But it’s over an hour’s drive. The shooter couldn’t have come from there. Too far to walk, and if they came by car they’d have to get through all the game fences and gates. Someone would have noticed.” He sucked on his cigarette.
“Is that what they are? Troubled youngsters?”
“It’s how they start. It’s a development program, isn’t it? They get taught life skills, come out untroubled. Least, that’s what they say. My guys said it all looked kosher. Nicely made beds, clean faces, everyone looking untroubled. Why do you ask?”
I told Andile about the Van Rensburgs’ pitot tube. He listened in silence, then raised his cigarette to his face. When he drew on the cigarette, he held his entire hand against his face as if he was reacting to some terrible shock and trying not to cry out. But the tip of the cigarette glowed and crackled from the strength of his inhaling breath.
“Someone protecting the Van Rensburgs?” he said. Another pull on the cigarette. “Or just coincidence?”
“Perhaps someone grateful to the Van Rensburg family, who made sure they weren’t in the church when he went to kill all the others?”
“It seems unlikely.”
Andile flicked the butt of his cigarette onto the grass.
“I’ll need another of those,” he said, and cupped his hands around mine as I lit it. He looked up at me as I tried to get the lighter to catch. “Your fancy boss, that black beauty. The one who called to say you were coming in.”
“Khanyisile.”
“She’s sneaky, that one.”
“She is.”
“What are you? Secret service? She flashed her ID the other day, but I didn’t look too closely.”
“Government,” I said. “Civil service. Don’t feel bad about it. There aren’t many people who look at Khanyi’s ID too closely.”
Andile nodded as if that was an answer.
“She said this was unofficial. If it helps us find the killer, I’m to keep quiet about it. What does that mean?”
“It means she is feeling the pressure of those words on the wall. She is saying things she should be keeping quiet about.”
“She said you were a loose cannon.”
“I am. But she’s the one who keeps packing in the gunpowder and lighting the fuse.”
“She’s sneaky, but kind of interesting.”
“She’s not really my boss,” I said.
“She told me that too.” The lighter caught, and he gave the cigarette a desperate suck. “She also gave me a different name,” he said. “Not Freddy Moss. But I’ve learnt never to listen to the names you government people give.”
He held the cigarette up to his face, and his exhausted eyes twinkled through the smoke. I was getting to like Andile Dlamini.
Seven
Nelspruit thought of itself as a city, although many would have called it a town. To add further insult, Nelspruit’s airport had been moved when the local leaders realised that the world was a good deal more interested in the wild animals than they were in their town. The airport now provided easy access to the internationally renowned Kruger National Park and was where wealthy guests parked their private jets while they roughed it in the luxury bush camps.
The new Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport was a fitting gateway to the magnificent wonder of the natural world. The terminal building was like a fantasy tree house, built out of raw timber poles that reached up three storeys to the thatched roof to give one a taste of the genuine African hut experience. A series of award-winning photographs of roaring lions, charging elephants and menacing hyena lined the avenue where haute couture shops rubbed shoulders with adventure shops selling survival gear to the intrepid foreigners for whom the idea of sleepin
g under canvas, or relying upon paraffin lamps for lighting was something they updated their life insurance to accommodate.
Melissa van der Westhuizen was not a foreigner who was worried about surviving the bush experience. She was an Afrikaans girl who had the bush experience built into her DNA. Born and raised in Pretoria, she had accompanied her father on his hunting trips, had been trained to hold his Remington 12-gauge as soon as her arms had the reach, and by the time she was a teenager she was using her own knife to split the skin of wildebeests in such a way that the intestines could be removed and the skin could adorn the floor of her parents’ Waterkloof Ridge mansion.
But she had stopped all that when she had emerged from her teenage chrysalis and her mother no longer liked the enthusiasm with which her father’s hunting colleagues encouraged her to accompany them into the bush. The modelling agency said that blonde hair, blue eyes, a well-proportioned chest and narrow hips were all the rage in Paris, and so Melissa spent most of her time in Europe saying no to sugar and yes to all the non-fattening things that answered to the name of sugar. And when she was back in South Africa, her new boyfriend brought her back to the bush so she didn’t lose touch with who she really was. Sometimes their private jet was delayed on the return trip, and all she could do was wander around the terminal building, look at the glossy magazines, and gaze longingly at the shelves of candy in Sweets from Heaven.
On this occasion she did not have the necessary small change to pay for her Coke Zero, only the big notes that the shop assistant refused to accept. She fluttered many of them in the face of the shop assistant, adding insult to injury, and Melissa, who had probably never been particularly good at understanding why less fortunate women than her did not take to her, was building up to a tantrum by the time I arrived beside her at the checkout counter with a bar of dark chocolate, my Armani linen suit with silk tie, Giorgio dark glasses tucked into my hair, a little oil to tame it, and a range of notes, including the necessary small denomination ones.
“That is so kind of you,” she said, emphasising the word ‘so’ by dragging it out to an absurd length. Her baby-blue eyes were surprisingly pale and clear and didn’t so much look at me as reach out to caress me. She tossed her long blonde hair and gave me the under-the-eyebrow look the Parisian perfume manufacturers liked so much. “These people just don’t do customer service,” she said and looked sad because as well as criticising she could sympathise with them. She did not clarify what she meant by ‘these people’, but the unfortunate lady behind the till probably qualified in many ways. Unlike Melissa, she was not pretty, nor thin, wealthy or white.
Melissa insisted that Hendrik would want to pay me back. “My fiancé,” she said, placing a light hand with delicate fingers and an embarrassingly large diamond on my arm, “would be furious with me if I let a strange man buy me a drink. Just furious,” she repeated, and leaned in closer and stroked me with her eyes again.
“I’m not as strange as I look,” I said, but I didn’t complain. Chandler had been right to suggest that Melissa was the best way to make contact, and it was beginning to worry me how easy it had been.
Hendrik van Rensburg looked like a sulky five-year-old boy who had been inflated with a bicycle pump. He had the unfortunate build of the Afrikaans farmer who has eaten too much meat, has drunk too many beers, and who played rugby in his youth, but has allowed all the muscle to turn flabby. He had a mop of unruly but thinning blond hair above a swollen face with a squashed nose and ears that had taken more pressure than they should have in his rugby days; they now looked a little like cauliflowers shoved into each side of his head. His flushed complexion and furious mood did not improve his visual appeal. Melissa grasped his muscular arm and turned him towards me as if she was revealing something she was tremendously proud of. Hendrik wasn’t quite as pleased to be presented. He pulled his arm away from her angrily, but then presented a public face of decency and doused the irritation when he saw that she had brought a strange man back with her.
“Can’t take off,” he said in a brusque tone to me after we’d exchanged names and he’d squeezed my hand in a demonstration of his muscular superiority. Melissa pointed to their Learjet sitting on the apron so I could be impressed and tell her fiancé how impressed I was.
“It’s affected us too,” I said, and tried not to sound too English or too well spoken because I guessed that both would irritate him.
He flexed his jaw muscles and looked beyond me as an indication of how little he cared that others were suffering.
“Something with air traffic control,” I said. “Why don’t you join us upstairs? We’re done with our meeting, we have the private bar all to ourselves, Vusi mixes a mean rum and coke, and honestly you shouldn’t be expected to put up with this.”
I looked around the Fever Bar as if it was a thoroughly distasteful setting. The Fever Bar had a four-star rating and was highly praised for its decor and quality of service, but Hendrik van Rensburg needed five stars.
Hendrik shook his head.
“Nah,” he said, “we’ll be fine. Won’t be long now.”
Melissa made a pout and said: “Aw, skattie,” to Hendrik, as if he’d broken her favourite toy, then gave me a look that made me think she had seen through my ruse and was sympathising with its failure. But it was probably just the strain of being forced to mix with normal people that motivated her to join us in the private bar. The Fever Bar was filling up with passengers for the flight to Johannesburg, and a group of Japanese tourists were being herded like a flock of sheep by someone waving a red flag in the air. They had congregated near the Van Rensburg entourage, not realising that the Van Rensburgs considered themselves special, and required several metres of open space between them and the rest of humanity. And that was only if there wasn’t a wall available for the purpose.
“They don’t know how long it will be,” said Melissa, and her voice had developed a childlike nasal whine. “Oom Piet,” she called over her shoulder to Piet van Rensburg, who was standing on the other side of Hendrik with his back to us. “Let’s go to the private bar, Oom.” And she made her eyes big and more blue. Oom is the Afrikaans word for uncle, but it is also used as an address of familiar respect. “Please, Oom.”
Oom Piet turned to her, put an arm around her shoulders and surveyed me from sunglasses to leather brogues in a fleeting glance that took only a moment, but was thorough enough for him to determine that I was harmless. Six foot high and four foot wide, Piet van Rensburg seemed like the prototype for Hendrik, but Piet had been handmade, with more attention to the finer detail. The straw blond hair was more delicate and fading to an elegant grey. His face was a little over inflated, it was true, but his eyes sparkled with intelligence, and his features contrived to show an alacrity of mind, determination and a little compassion in contrast to Hendrik’s sulky pugnaciousness.
“What is it you want from your Oom?” he asked Melissa in Afrikaans.
“The private bar,” said Melissa. “We’ve been invited.” And she fluttered her eyelashes and added a little tear duct action so it looked as if she might cry if things did not turn out the way she wanted.
“Freddy,” I said. “Freddy Moss.” And held out my hand. Piet van Rensburg shook it firmly. None of the bravura of Hendrik, and he used his eyes to check mine for inconsistencies as he did it. “Our trip out of here has been delayed as well. They’re not letting anyone out. I was just saying to Hendrik we’ve finished with our meeting. It’s more relaxed there.” A glance at the swelling flock of Japanese who seemed to have arrived at a unanimous decision and were approaching the bar en masse.
“Say yes, Oom,” said Melissa.
“Ag, Pa,” said Hendrik, who probably didn’t care but liked to be obstructive.
“My boss wouldn’t mind at all,” I said. “We’ve wrapped for the day. Nothing to do but wait and enjoy the hospitality.”
“Roelof,” said Van Rensburg, his eyes still on me. The man beside him, who had his back to me, and was still en
gaged in the conversation we had interrupted, turned about in an instant at the sound of his employer’s voice, like he was made of cardboard and had only two sides.
“Roelof makes all the decisions,” said Van Rensburg, in the way a sociopath likes to trumpet the importance of their minions.
I played my lines again for Roelof, whose cold, grey eyes shone with intelligent suspicion from behind rimless circular spectacles. Not as tall as Van Rensburg, darker hair that was prematurely peppered grey at the temples, and fine features: a narrow mouth, thin and pointed nose. Roelof was the only member of the party wearing a full suit, and it was a herringbone grey, with a quiet blue tie, the middle button fastened. Van Rensburg looked as if he might have started the day in a suit, matching blue pants and jacket, but the jacket swung open giving us an occasional glimpse of the grip of his Beretta 9 mm in its leather shoulder harness, and in place of a tie we were treated to the sight of a heavy gold chain with crucifix dangling over the mat of grey chest hair. Hendrik had missed the wardrobe brief altogether and sported a Springbok rugby blazer over jeans. The blazer bulged ostentatiously over his own Beretta. But nobody would have noticed Hendrik’s poor taste because it was hard to see beyond Melissa, who draped her lissome body in its pale blue silk over Hendrik like an extra piece of clothing. And that was mostly what one saw of what Hendrik was wearing.
Chandler was on his cell phone when we arrived at the private executive meeting room on the second floor of the terminal building. His obsession with detail paid off as the Van Rensburg entourage paused at the door to take in the spectacle. The room was African chic, with wooden giraffes towering over the leather couches, hand-carved bowls for the peanuts, and a table that had been hewn from the trunk of a single Maringa tree. It could accommodate twenty, but the remains of our restrained meeting for three spoke of its exclusivity. An Arturo Fuente wrapper lay beside the smoldering remnants of a cigar that I happened to know was not a Fuente, but you would need to have a fine nose to realise that. Chandler was wearing his hand-stitched taupe Italian suit with waistcoat, and he was seated across from the cigar with an elbow on the table and his other arm gesticulating so we could see the Hublot Tourbillon watch, and platinum fountain pen. He had lowered the venetian blinds behind him so that shafts of weak winter sunlight shone through the cigar smoke and highlighted his close-cropped white hair. One set of blinds had not been lowered because he would need to make his exit and did not want the moment spoilt by fiddling with cords and technical details. Beneath the fountain pen were the documents he’d been working on, and the twisted rectangle of light from the section of glass wall without the blinds pointed to those documents and shone a spotlight onto them, so that all eyes were inevitably guided to them.
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