African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘Morning, sir,’ called a red-haired woman from the head of one of the trestle-table rows.

  ‘Morning, Susannah,’ Bryant said.

  Pip caught up with him. The woman he’d called Susannah was much taller than she was, with fair skin, green eyes and freckles. She was about Pip’s age and wore overalls with the sleeves rolled up high above the bicep. Pip thought her arms looked very toned, almost muscled, from the constant work of packing and folding parachutes.

  ‘Constable Lovejoy, this is Corporal Susannah Beattie. She’s the NCO in charge of today’s shift of parachute packers. Susannah, Miss Lovejoy . . .’

  The woman’s grip was firm, like a man’s. ‘It’s missus, actually, but constable’s just fine.’

  ‘Sorry, Constable Lovejoy wants to ask you and the other girls a few questions about Felicity Langham. I’m afraid it’s not good news.’

  ‘The rumour’s true then?’ She spoke with a trace of a Scottish accent.

  Pip saw the woman look back at the other girls, who had stopped working to listen in to the conversation. ‘I’m sorry, but Miss Langham has passed away,’ Pip said. ‘Squadron Leader, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind giving us a bit of time by ourselves?’

  ‘Of course,’ Bryant said.

  She sensed his reluctance to leave – he obviously wanted to listen in on the interview. He finally turned and walked outside the hangar and lit another cigarette. Pip led the red-haired corporal towards the tea table.

  ‘Do you mind if I call you Susannah?’ Pip asked, now that they were alone.

  ‘Of course not. You’re Pip, aren’t you? Charlie Lovejoy’s wife?’

  Pip was taken aback. She’d got used to the fact that people were often a little nervous or off-balance when she asked them questions in her capacity as a volunteer policewoman. Now the shoe was suddenly on the other foot. She hadn’t come out to the air force base to talk about her husband.

  ‘That’s right. You know him?’

  ‘He went to school with my brother. Our Johnny practically worshipped the ground Charlie walked on. Top rugby player, head boy. And, if you don’t mind me saying, very handsome. I remember hearing he got married. He’s overseas, isn’t he?’

  Pip was uncomfortable talking about Charlie with this woman, though everything she had said was true. He was popular, successful and as good-looking as any of the male film stars on the wall behind them. ‘Yes. He’s in the army. He was in North Africa with the Long Range Desert Group. He’s somewhere in Italy now,’ Pip said. She pointed at the photographs on the wall and asked: ‘Does one of these belong to you?’

  Susannah pointed out a picture of a man – little more than a boy really – with fair tousled hair, in RAF battledress with sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves. ‘That’s my boyfriend. He’s RAF, a wireless air gunner. Dean Geary. He’s in England.’

  Pip looked at the young man’s face, and at the others, all of a similar age, all smiling and keen. She wondered if it would ever end, the ceaseless flow of men from and through Rhodesia, if women would ever go back to being housewives.

  ‘Now, what happened to Flick?’

  Pip was annoyed that she had let herself lose track, and that it had been the other woman who had brought her back to the job at hand. She noticed that Susannah and the dead woman’s other coworkers showed little if any emotion at the news about Felicity Langham. ‘Her body was found in town last night, in an alleyway. Partially clothed.’

  Susannah frowned and sipped her tea.

  ‘Excuse me, but you don’t seem overly sad at the loss of a comrade.’

  ‘If it’s false sorrow you want, Pip, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. Flick worked with us, but she was never one of us. It wasn’t for lack of trying on our part, either, I might add. Me and the other girls went out of our way to make her part of the team, but Felicity Langham was only interested in one person in this life – Felicity Langham. She came from a good family, with plenty of money and thought she was above us. The stupid thing is that we’ve got farm girls and millionaires’ daughters working side by side on the rigging floor here. She could have fitted in if she’d wanted to.’

  Pip cast her eyes over the press cuttings and photographs behind the tea table. The first thing she’d noticed was the absence of anything to do with Felicity Langham, even though she knew the woman had appeared in the Bulawayo Chronicle on more than one occasion. She’d assumed there would have been some evidence of the parachute hangar’s star performer. Susannah’s words simply confirmed what Pip had initially deduced. ‘What can you tell me about her personal life?’

  ‘She liked a good time, did Flick. She was popular with the men, but never had a steady boyfriend, if you know what I mean. They weren’t all from the base, either, from what I gathered.’

  ‘What do you know about the men Felicity saw from town? Pip asked.

  ‘One of the lasses here went to school with Flick, before her parents sent her to finishing school in England. She reckons Felicity always had a thing for the wrong kind of men. Low-lifes, petty criminals. The kind of man who would treat her mean.’

  ‘Are there any women on base who might have had cause to wish Miss Langham harm?’

  Susannah raised her eyebrows. ‘Forgive me, Pip, but maybe you should have been taking notes. Just about every woman on base would have wanted to scratch her eyes out at some time or another. But no, to answer your question, no one here would have wanted her dead. Out of the way, out of the newspapers and out of the limelight, sure, but not dead.’

  ‘Squadron Leader Bryant mentioned that the instructors and the other permanent staff sometimes get together on an all-ranks basis, for a drink. He said that’s how he got to know Felicity.’

  Susannah drained her tea and turned to put her tin mug down on a table. ‘Hmm,’ she said, pursing her lips, ‘did he now?’

  ‘From what you told me, Felicity didn’t sound like the type to socialise with the other service people here.’

  ‘Not with the girls, if you know what I mean. I personally don’t recall ever seeing her at one of our nights out, but then again I can’t recall seeing Squadron Leader Bryant out on the tiles, either.’

  ‘You’re saying he couldn’t have got to know her at these social gatherings?’ Pip asked. She had her police notebook out now and was jotting down salient points.

  ‘I’m saying it’s not my place to comment on what the second most senior man on this base may have told you. He knew Felicity, that’s for sure, but where he got to know her, I haven’t a clue.’

  Pip pondered Susannah’s emphasis on the words ‘that’s for sure’. ‘Have you ever seen the two of them together, Felicity and Mr Bryant, I mean?’

  Susannah said: ‘You have to understand that Felicity was the type who would play up to men, especially men of senior rank, if she thought it would get her what she wanted.’

  ‘What did she want, do you think?’

  ‘I’d heard she fancied herself an actress, that she wanted to be in the films one day. Her parachuting stunts for the courses got her picture in the newspapers. Probably would have only been a matter of time before she ended up on a newsreel. Having the support of the base adjutant meant she could continue putting on her little two-woman shows for the troops.’

  ‘So she would sometimes meet with Squadron Leader Bryant?’

  ‘Aye, he came around here a couple of times in the last week or so, for a chat about something or other. But listen, Pip, don’t get the wrong idea about Bryant. He might look like he just got thrown out of the pub at closing time, but he’s a good man. Doesn’t treat us like dirt, like some of the men, and seems to appreciate the work we women do. I’m not suggesting that there was anything going on between him and Flick, rather that it’s not surprising that she was trying to keep in his favour.’

  ‘I understand,’ Pip said. ‘Sorry,’ she added, going back over her notes. ‘You just said something about a “two-woman show”?’

  Susannah explained that when Felici
ty did her parachute jumps it was always out of a civilian aircraft, a privately-owned Tiger Moth. Bryant, she said, was a stickler for the rules regarding aircraft flights. He wouldn’t let Felicity jump out of an air force aircraft for her demonstrations, so she had to organise a civilian aeroplane.

  ‘The pilot was one of Flick’s snooty well-to-do set, a woman called Catherine De Beers. Lives in a big country house in the middle of nowhere on the border of Wankie Game Reserve. Not one of the De Beers diamond family, but almost as rich, from what I hear.’

  Pip wrote the name of the woman in her notebook. She’d heard of the family and had, in fact, met the woman’s late husband. Hugo De Beers, a South African by birth, had been a professional hunter, a big name in the safari business up in Kenya and Tanganyika before the war. He’d also travelled the length and breadth of Rhodesia, hunting problem animals that threatened crops or humans. He’d shot a rogue lion on Pip’s family’s farm several years earlier. Trophy hunting hadn’t caught on in Rhodesia, unlike other parts of Africa, although the area where Hugo De Beers had lived, on the border of the game reserve, would have been a good place for safaris – had Hugo lived to pursue that option. Pip looked up in the metal rafters of the hangar, where a couple of cape doves roosted and cooed, and tried to recall when De Beers had died. It must have been a year or two ago – killed in a shooting accident on his own property.

  Pip could shoot, but she couldn’t see the attraction of hunting for sport. She’d killed a couple of cobras around the garden with a double-barrelled shotgun, earning the ululating praise of her servants and their children, and she’d dispatched a rabid dog that had strayed into the staff compound. Charlie was different. Their home was decorated with his trophies – the skins of a lion, leopard and cheetah, and the mounted heads of various buck and a big old male buffalo that he’d shot either on or near their farm. The dead creatures gave her the creeps.

  Susannah brought Pip back to the present. Anyway, Catherine would fly low and buzz the assembled students, climb to two thousand feet, and then ‘Flying Felicity’ would jump out and do her show for the boys. Afterwards, it would be drinks in the mess for Catherine and the officers.’

  Pip’s mind turned away from parachuting and back to Felicity’s friend the pilot. Old Hugo De Beers must have been near sixty when he’d died. ‘How old is Catherine De Beers, would you say?’

  ‘All of about twenty-four, I’d guess. Quite a bit younger than her late husband.’ Susannah raised an eyebrow as she sipped her tea. ‘Look, I’m happy to help some more if you need it, Pip, but we’ve got a new course starting soon and a load of parachutes to pack. They have a pack life and even if they’re not used we have to undo and rerig them.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, Susannah. You’ve been a big help. I shan’t need to talk to the other girls, unless you think they might have anything different to say.’

  ‘No, I doubt it.’

  Pip said her goodbyes and walked out of the cool, gloomy hangar, back into the sunshine.

  Paul Bryant stared out across the runway, but paid no attention to the three Airspeed Oxfords practising touch-and-go landings.

  The walk to the parachute hangar had resurrected his memories of Flick Langham. He closed his eyes and let the sun’s rays warm his face and bare arms. He had come here looking for her three days earlier. Susannah Beattie and some of the other girls had been chatting as their hands roamed expertly over billowing silk, folding the panels in a precise order, then stuffing the canopies into their canvas containers. Next came the suspension lines, gathered and folded and stowed. It must have been mind-numbing work, Paul thought, but the WAAFs always seemed to have something cheery to gossip about.

  He’d asked for Flick, but been told by Susannah Beattie, in an annoyed tone of voice, that the woman was on a break. Bryant had already gotten the impression Flick spent the bare minimum of time actually packing parachutes.

  He’d walked through the big cool building, parting a curtain of ghostly, suspended white canopies, and found his way to the back door. Flick was sitting on a stool outside, the back of her head resting against the corrugated-iron wall. A half-drunk cup of tea and a fashion magazine were beside her on the concrete footpath. Her eyes were closed.

  ‘Hello, Paul,’ she said.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I can smell you,’ she said, opening her lids to reveal Mediterranean blue eyes. ‘It’s a nice smell. Tobacco, shaving soap, booze. A man’s smell.’

  He tried to be serious with her, but she had an incredible knack of putting him off-balance, of leaving him feeling almost short of breath when he was around her. She had a scent of her own, too. And it was hypnotic.

  What had gone on between them had been complex, to say the least, and he’d visited the hangar to try to make sense of it all.

  ‘Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned . . .’ he tried.

  ‘You’re not the first, Paul.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine I was, but I’m not sure what’s going on here, Flick.’

  ‘It can be whatever you want it to be.’

  He struggled with his words. ‘It was . . .’

  She smiled, for the first time. ‘It was rather, wasn’t it.’

  How could he explain to her that, as much as he’d wanted her, there was the matter of their jobs, their difference in rank. But his confusion over what had happened and where things could possibly head from that point had less to do with the conventions of military life.

  ‘God, you’re so old-fashioned. I’d have thought after what you’d been through in Bomber Command, nothing would rattle you,’ Flick taunted.

  Too many things rattled him these days, too easily. The drink helped. The episode with Flick had helped at the time, but now it seemed to have complicated things.

  She stopped being coy. Forced the issue. ‘All right, Paul. What did you want to say? Do you want to pretend it didn’t happen? Do you want things to go back to the way they were before? Do you want it again? Do you want me now, Paul, is that why you came snooping around here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. And that was the truth. She was so incredibly beautiful. And that was the problem.

  ‘Squadron Leader?’

  Bryant opened his eyes and stubbed out his cigarette on the concrete. ‘How did it go?’ he asked Pip Lovejoy.

  Pip gave him a brief rundown of what Susannah Beattie had told her. She wondered what he had been thinking about when she had disturbed him. He looked relaxed, leaning against the wall, but also like he was lost in some thought or other.

  ‘You told me Felicity Langham was “well liked”,’ her tone accusatory.

  ‘I know this is going to sound boorish of me, Constable, but the parachute hangar’s an all-female show. Flick made a point of standing out and being different from the rest. It’s probably no secret she fancied herself a cut above them. Don’t tell me you’re surprised she ruffled a few feathers in there.’

  She wasn’t but neither was she going to let him steer the conversation his way from now on. ‘I’ve a few more questions for you, in fact, Squadron Leader. Tell me about Catherine De Beers.’

  Bryant nodded as though he were expecting the question and Pip wondered why he hadn’t told her about the other woman earlier. ‘She was Flick’s partner in crime, as it were, in the parachuting displays. Catherine’s a widow, quite wealthy. I would have thought you’d have recognised the name, as a local.’

  ‘I do.’ They walked as they talked. Two air force women in baggy peaked caps and overalls grimy with grease approached them. One raised a blackened hand in a salute, which Bryant returned. Pip noticed the women’s eyes lingering on her. The investigation would, no doubt, be the talk of the base by now. Pip was curious to know more about Catherine De Beers. If Felicity Langham had been as unpopular with the other women on base as Susannah had suggested, then it seemed important she speak to the one other person who seemed to have been close to her. ‘I want to know about her involvement here on the base.’ />
  Bryant explained that as the other half of the parachute display team, Catherine flew her own aircraft, a Tiger Moth, and Flick would jump out of it. It was good for morale, he said, a great instructional technique, and good public relations for the WAAFs, the training group and the air force. ‘I was happy for the show to go on, but only on the basis that Catherine used her own plane. The air force is a bit picky about civilians getting behind the controls of our aircraft.’

  ‘When was she due to jump again?’

  ‘She used to parachute once every couple of weeks. Sometimes they’d go to the other bases around the Bulawayo area to do the same display. However, it all ground to a halt the week before last.’

  ‘Why?’ Pip asked.

  ‘Catherine pranged her Tiger Moth on a landing at her property. She ruined the undercarriage and snapped the prop. She’ll be grounded for a while.’

  ‘Mrs De Beers lives on a ranch near Wankie, doesn’t she?’ Pip asked, even though she knew the answer to the question.

  ‘That’s right. I’m going up there myself tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you really? Why, may I ask?’

  ‘You’re the copper, Constable. I expect you can ask anything.’

  As he walked, she noticed he exuded a relaxed air, and an indefinable, scruffy type of charm. She sensed a restlessness in him. Perhaps that was how pilots with desk jobs acted. He seemed more at ease when he was on the move. In his office, he had seemed cornered, like a scrub hare caught in a spotlight, confused and unsure which way to run.

  ‘You’re quite right there, Squadron Leader,’ she smiled.

  ‘I have to supervise an aircraft crash investigation and recovery, as I told Sergeant Hayes before he left.’