by Jo Bannister
He met her gaze, ready for anger, embarrassment, rebuke. He was not prepared for, though delighted by, the laughter that welled from her, deep in her throat and brilliant in her eyes. Her eyes were as green as only a cat’s had any right to be.
“You mean I’ve got the wrong De Witte?” She chuckled. “Oh, for pity’s sake. And you!—you might have told me. But listen, you must be related, you two—how many De Wittes are there in this town?”
“A few,” he allowed with a smile. “As far as I know I have no woodworking relative called Paul.”
Liz was still grinning. “Well I have, and thanks to your rather juvenile sense of humour he’s been suffering in neglect while I’ve been exchanging family gossip with a total stranger. I have to find out what’s happened to him.”
“Of course; I’m sorry.” He was more sorry to see her going. “Do you want to use the phone?”
She thought quickly. “Yes, thanks—it might save me another wasted journey.” Her boy’s grin took the sting out of the comment. “How do I get reception?” He gave her the number and she carefully dialled another, screening the dial casually with her handbag.
She got the laundry. She spoke quickly, making the most of a pause while the supervisor went to close a door between herself and her machines in the obvious hope that this might help her make sense of the conversation.
Liz said, “I was with you a few minutes ago, looking for a De Witte. Well, I’ve found one but he isn’t mine. This one’s clearly in for psychiatric treatment whereas mine has a cut foot.” She smiled disarmingly at the subject of her insult. “She’s checking.”
The woman in the laundry said, rather kindly, “Look, I don’t know—maybe you have the wrong extension?”
“Hello, yes,” said Liz inexplicably. “He is? Oh, that’s good. We must have passed on the road. I’ll call the house then. I’m sorry to have given you so much trouble.”
“Er—no trouble,” said the laundry supervisor, replacing her receiver with the care she customarily reserved for items fresh from the autoclave.
“Well,” said Liz, “the riddle of the missing uncle appears to be solved. He was never admitted: they fired a couple of stitches into him and sent him home. Have you a phonebook?”
“Underneath.”
“You don’t mind?”
“The least I can do.”
She chose a number at random. A man answered in Afrikaans. He did not sound happy to be disturbed. “Uncle Paul? At last! It’s Liz—I’m at the hospital, I’ve been trailing you half-way round this damn town. Are you all right?”
The man at the other end said irritably, “What? Who is that? Ruthie, is this one of your jokes?”
“Thank God,” said Liz with feeling. “I thought I’d arrived just in time for your funeral. Stay put, I’ll be right round.”
“Ruthie? I’m telling you, I’ve had enough of your funny sense of humour.”
“Oh,” said Liz, taken aback. “Oh, well in that case I suppose you’d better go straight to bed. Never mind, I’ll come round in the morning, we can talk then.”
“Ruthie, you’re going to make me angry. I mean it—”
“Sleep tight, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She put down the phone. “The painkillers they gave him are putting him to sleep. I’ll go see him in the morning.”
“His foot’s all right then?” De Witte enquired politely.
“Just sore enough to make him more careful in future.” She picked up her bag and started to leave. “Well, thank you for the use of the phone—and the conversation, it was most interesting.”
De Witte let her get to the door. She tasted failure. Then he said, “Do you have to go?”
Chapter Three
Vanderbilt allowed himself the luxury of sleep. He slept with his clothes on, with his shoes on, with one ear tuned for trouble. He first took pains to secure his prisoner against the triple temptations of escape, assault and self-destruction, and then he slept: for six glorious, uninterrupted hours. It was enough, if need be, to see him through the next two days, and if by then he was not in the pipeline back to Pretoria it would be time to start thinking of cutting himself loose from his burden and making his way home alone. But no dark thoughts of defeat came to disturb his rest. He slept without dreaming.
He woke before dawn, as he had intended to, without haste or alarm but immediately and wholly and without wondering where he was. He knew where he was: curled, not altogether comfortably, across the front seats of the big maroon car with the steering wheel pressing into his thigh and his feet hanging out of the open door. His left arm, pillowed double under his head, had gone numb.
Stretching carefully in the absolute dark, he sat up. He scratched his head and shook life back into his arm. Then he felt for the door light and screwed the bulb back. The pale luminosity that sprang up seemed briefly to fill the barn until his eyes, adjusting, put its power into perspective.
He had found the barn in the same way he had found the stone house the night before. It was almost empty: only a few rows of mouldering hay and the musky scent of departed cattle remained to tell its function. Towards the end of summer the hay would be replenished, ready for the cattle to return with the winter, but until then the barn had no role except as a refuge. Owls used it, and martins, and Vanderbilt had driven the car inside and closed the big wooden doors as confident of privacy as they. There was no other building in sight. Vanderbilt and the martins slept while the owls hunted.
Grant got no sleep, which was also as Vanderbilt had intended. Crucified against the front bumper he could neither sit up nor lie down; the muscles of his shoulders and arms, unnaturally stretched along the chrome tree, bore half his weight and six hours of it reduced his body to a rigid, throbbing crucible of agony that he could not ease. Any attempt at movement brought the tears pricking to his eyes in the dark.
Vanderbilt, strolling round the bonnet with torch in hand, greeted him amiably. Grant replied with the grossest Afrikaans obscenity he could think of. Vanderbilt smiled. He noted with satisfaction the tracks of tears through the dirt on Grant’s thin cheeks, the red-raw bracelets of skin where his wrists were roped to the car, the knotted muscles of his shoulders inside the bloody borrowed shirt, and the way his belly heaved to draw enough air into his lungs to swear by. The big man catalogued the hurts with professional detachment. Then he indulged in a lazy grin. “You want to try for the hundred yards’dash again, boy?”
Grant’s eyes burned with red-rimmed hatred. “Against you, fat man? Any time. You’re slow—even downhill you’re slow.”
The grin died on Vanderbilt’s lips. He said quietly, “You’ll be wiser not reminding me of that.”
“Why, what’ll you do—kill me?”
Vanderbilt backed away thoughtfully. He shared with other bulky men an almost balletic grace of movement. “Of course not.” He sauntered to the car door, reached inside for his coat, and then slammed it very hard. In the confined space and the quiet it sounded like a gunshot.
The explosive tremor ran through Grant’s racked body like nails, forcing from him a thin cry. Pain, rage and humiliation warred in him. Light chiselled at his clenched eyes: through the distorting film of saline he saw the Boer squatting before him.
“But I can do a lot to you short of killing you,” Vanderbilt confided seriously. “And just because I can see that, from your point of view, the murder of my friend was something of a necessity, you mustn’t get the idea that I forgive you.”
He produced a knife and laid the blade of it chill on Grant’s cheek, the diamond tip just puckering the outer canthus of his eye. Grant breathed shallowly through his mouth. After a moment Vanderbilt took the knife away and cut the rope from his wrists.
There was nothing to eat, but a tap beside the door delivered rusty water from a raintap. Vanderbilt drank and washed, then let Grant drink, awkwardly one-handed, the other coupled by the handcuffs to a convenient manger. By the light of the torch resting on the car roof Vanderbilt watched him: speculat
ively, aware that when he worked off the kinks of his wretched night it would be necessary to handicap him in some other way, but also curiously. Joel Grant was as much an enigma to him now as when he first leafed through his file in Botha’s office: a white man who not only ran with black terrorists but was sufficiently valued by them that they risked, and ultimately lost, their entire organization on his account.
Why? Friendship, possibly—he might once, in another time and place, have been capable of commanding that kind of loyalty, before De Witte took him apart and well-meaning experts cobbled him together with sentimentality like well-chewed string when the decent thing would have been to put him out of his misery. Vanderbilt had seen enough interrogations, and the human consequences of them, to hope that if his turn ever came someone would be sufficiently careless to let him die. Grant clearly felt the same, but Vanderbilt had not done this job so well so long without learning how to separate duty from inclination and which to put first.
Or if not friendship, perhaps because he had represented some kind of symbol to them. The political potential of a white South African supporting Mpani, not only with noble sentiments but with body and finally soul, would have been considerable, but only while Mpani lived and his group survived. A crippled ex-member of a defunct organization living in obscure and sour exile half-way across the world could be of little worth to the black African cause and consequently of no interest to white Africa. So why was Pretoria so determined to recover him? No information he had clung to could be of any relevance now.
So why was Joel Grant important enough to risk an international incident in a country whose support was craved by South Africa?—not to mention the loss (Vanderbilt entertained no false modesty about his own usefulness) of a valuable agent. And why had Botha not explained, at least in broad terms? It was true that the task could be performed in ignorance, and that needless secrecy might be no more than the vanity of a rather small man placed unexpectedly in a rather large job. But Vanderbilt was uneasy. He was accustomed to the machinations of those who opposed him in the countries where he operated: he did not expect to find himself working in the dark against a backdrop of intrigue at home.
More than half to himself, and therefore surprised when he received an answer, Vanderbilt murmured, “What do they want you for really?”
Grant looked up, animal furtive, from his drinking and peered at the bulky shadow which was all he could pick out by the backwash of the torch. “You mean you don’t know?”
Vanderbilt shrugged. “I don’t need to know. It makes no difference. I’m curious, is all, as to what could possibly make you worth all this trouble.”
Grant was at a loss to know how to reply. Incredibly, his pride was involved: he could not bring himself to accede to Vanderbilt’s overt opinion that he was a military and political has been. He fabricated a sardonic sneer with which to turn back to the tap. “Unfinished business.”
Vanderbilt nodded understanding. “So you don’t know either.”
Grant glowered at him. By degrees, however, the anger turned to a kind of bitter humour in his torchlit face. “Hey, you think maybe you’ve got the wrong man?”
Vanderbilt grinned back. “Like maybe it’s actually your twin brother we should be after?”
“The one I don’t know about, since we were separated at birth.”
“I believe that’s traditional,” agreed Vanderbilt.
“So is everyone living happily ever after.”
“Maybe De Witte will turn out to be your fairy godmother.”
Grant winced. “For five months after I got out of Pretoria I couldn’t hear his name without throwing up. Wherever I was, however inconvenient. I once did a comprehensive redecoration of some woman at a party. She only wanted to talk about the weather, but the Swedish accent had me fooled.”
Vanderbilt laughed out loud. “You know Gilbert and Sullivan? You know the one about the boy who’s supposed to be a pilot, only his nurse mishears and gets him apprenticed to a pirate? You ever wonder if maybe something similar happened to you?”
Again, Grant’s pride was touched. His jaw came up. “I took you, at the house, and your friend with the helicopter, with both hands tied behind my back. If I’m inept, what does that make you?” He straightened as much as the short chain and his own cramped muscles would permit, waiting to be hit.
Vanderbilt’s grin died away entirely but he made no move towards the tied man. His voice was quiet and level. “It makes me careless, both times. I underestimated you. I’m doing it again. The reminder is timely. But Piet did his job well enough. I told you, he wasn’t like me, he was—”
“I know: a pilot. So how good was his nurse’s hearing?”
After a longish pause Vanderbilt said softly, “You really are a little shit, aren’t you?”
“Not at all,” said Joel Grant, “I’m five foot eight and a half.”
The boot of the car, though capacious, measured only four feet and change. Having already spent some time in it Grant was reluctant to submit to the experience again, but a judicious fist to the belly doubled him over and then he fitted easily. With his hands behind him once more, his feet lashed to the spare wheel and the handkerchief gag—Vanderbilt at least had the grace to rinse it through under the tap first—back in his mouth, he was as incapable of communicating his situation as a sardine in a can. Vanderbilt could with absolute confidence have parked on a police forecourt.
“I have a phone call to make,” he said. “After that, hopefully, we’ll have some idea what we’re doing. Don’t you worry about a thing—I’ll get you home, see if I don’t.” He closed the boot, shutting Grant—again like a sardine—into a tin tomb smelling of oil.
Vanderbilt found a telephone kiosk and a pillar-box at a crossroads midway between two minuscule hamlets neither of which was big enough to command a sub-post office. He dialled from memory and the call was answered on the first ring. Vanderbilt and his controller exchanged identification codes and moved immediately into Afrikaans.
“Where the hell are you?”
“North Yorkshire moors, so far as I can make out.”
“You’ve still got Grant?”
“Oh yes. But Piet’s dead.”
“Christ! How?”
Vanderbilt explained tersely, then asked, “Have they found the helicopter yet?”
“If they have they’re keeping it under their hats.”
“So maybe they haven’t. Anyway, I’m well clear of the area now. Listen, I’m going to keep travelling north. Scrub Gatwick: have a plane meet me at Glasgow.”
“Glasgow? For Christ’s sake, Danny, what do we know about Glasgow? We always use the southern airports, we have friends there, we know our way around.”
“Exactly. And we’re known, and useful as that may have been in the past, this time it could get me nailed. This isn’t the usual thing: in, hit and out before anybody’s sure what’s happened. This time we’ve been unlucky—or careless, or something. They know something is happening, they probably have a fair idea what and they damn sure know who. They know where we operate: they’ll be watching Gatwick like hawks, and the rest of the south for good measure.
“But Glasgow? They think like you, nobody chooses to go north of Birmingham and nobody even considers going north of Carlisle. Special Branch thinks the world ends abruptly on the banks of the Trent. Well, I’m not embarking on a seven-hour drive into a noose that will draw tighter with every mile. The plane at Gatwick—leave it there, it’ll give them something to watch. But find me another and have it meet me at Glasgow. I’m maybe five, six hours away: we can be out of the country by tonight if you can fix the plane. I’ll check back with you later.”
The controller remained deeply uneasy. For one thing he was more used to delivering instructions than taking them. “Danny, I don’t think Botha’s going to like—”
“Sod Botha. When I get home I shall take a lot of convincing that Botha actually knew what he was doing with this. De Witte will back me. Now for pi
ty’s sake stop arguing and get that aeroplane organized. And do it properly: I don’t want to pull off my end of it only to have us boarded because somebody tried to shortcut the paperwork.”
He banged the receiver down, then paused for a moment in the shabby kiosk, listening to the echo of his anger. He did not know the reason for it. No one had let him down; he had been, as he had said, unlucky or careless, but nobody was to blame, probably not even himself. He was not particularly deep in the mire; at any event, he had successfully extricated himself from deeper. But he could not rid himself of the feeling that the enterprise was in some obscure way ill-starred. He returned to the car and let in the clutch with a bad-tempered bang lest his passenger should escape the effects of his mood. He drove north-west. Chief Inspector Corner’s gentle reprimand notwithstanding, the dusky gentlemen of non-indigenous antecedents—to whom Shola had once unforgivably and unforgettably referred as the Kaffia—continued to use whatever position, influence and talents they could command to pry wherever experience told them they would be least warmly welcomed. In the course of a few hours they compiled a short-list of aircraft which would have surprised no one by suddenly taking off for South Africa, and of those one was generally seen as odds-on favourite.
The Britannia had been on the ground at Gatwick for two days, although its cargo of lead crystal, china dinner services and agricultural spares had been loaded and ready to leave within hours of its arrival. It was owned by an Anglo-French concern and its declared destination was North-West Africa. Casual enquiries about the delay met with the reply that there was some doubt about the consignee’s creditworthiness and that a guarantor was being sought. The pilot was an Englishman: however, research revealed family connections with the old Rhodesia. It was all highly speculative: it was the best they could come up with. Shola contacted Chief Inspector Corner: Corner made pointed remarks and then arranged for a discreet watch to be kept on the suspect aeroplane.
But Shola had his doubts. “If she’s been there for two days she was laid on before the business with the helicopter.”