African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘Her neighbours and the girls she worked with at the air force base haven’t been able to come up with any names,’ Pip said, though there was one man she still had her suspicions about.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve got to look at that again.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. But now we’ve got a funeral to attend. Two funerals, in fact.’

  Pied crows, fat from the food scraps generated by a thousand airmen and women, wheeled over the base rubbish tip. A lone vulture circled in search of death. Other birds were sometimes struck by aircraft on take-off or landing and, every now and then, the cooks shot a baboon or monkey which had grown too bold. The spoil from two freshly dug graves insulted the neat, manicured lines of the military cemetery. Two African gravediggers, their blue overalls black with sweat, leaned on their shovels a discreet distance away from the air force plot, where only whites were buried.

  In the base chapel, a uniformed Rhodesian WAAF played ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ on the organ and the two hundred mourners sang or mouthed the words as best they could.

  ‘Squadron Leader Paul Bryant, our base adjutant, will now say a few words,’ the ageing air force chaplain said as the organ sighed to silence.

  There was only seating for half the crowd. The rest stood outside, watching through open doors. A public-address system had been rigged up so that those outside could hear the service.

  Bryant heard a faint echo outside from the speakers, washing over the still runway. Unusually for Kumalo, the hum of aero engines was missing today, all training having been suspended for the double funeral. His amplified scratchy voice rang out through the Tannoy. ‘We come together today to say goodbye to two members of our family,’ he began.

  Pip Lovejoy, standing at the back of the crowded chapel, looked at him and fancied she caught him searching the crowd for her. Most of the women were in air force uniforms, but Pip noticed a woman wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, trimmed with lace, sitting in one of the front pews. She couldn’t see the face, but imagined it would be Catherine De Beers – ostentatiously dressed for the occasion.

  ‘Sadly, many of us in this chapel, on this base, are not strangers to death. These will not be the last members of our family – our air force family – to whom we have to say farewell. The presence of so many of you here and outside is a testimony to the high regard in which both Leading Aircraftswoman Felicity Langham and Flight Sergeant James Smythe were held by all of you.’

  Pip looked around at the capacity crowd of mostly young men – little more than boys. She wondered how many of them had come to this noncompulsory church parade on a Saturday morning because of Felicity Langham and the morbidly fascinating circumstances of her death, as opposed to because of the hapless Sergeant Smythe.

  ‘Both were taken from us in their prime. This is the nature of war, ladies and gentleman, but the crime – for that’s what we’re talking about here – was that Felicity and James were killed not by an enemy bullet or shell, or even by an accident in training. They were killed by other people, for reasons still unknown.’

  There were murmurs from the congregation. Pip sensed they were still angry, and that it might not take much to stir them into misplaced action again. The last thing anyone needed at the moment was another race riot. She’d been toying with the idea of doing as Hayes had and leaking some information to the local newspaper, stating that they were still investigating Felicity’s murder and that the police were looking for a mystery white man. However, she had eventually thought better of the idea. Better the real killer – if the unknown man were now the prime suspect – thought he had got away with his crime. She looked back at the pulpit and noticed that Paul Bryant was staring directly at her.

  She lowered her eyes a fraction to avoid his gaze. In front of the pulpit hung a tapestry of the badge of the Rhodesian Air Training Group. In the centre of the crest was the famous stone eagle of Great Zimbabwe, discovered in the rock–walled ancient city near Fort Victoria, not far from where she’d grown up. The proud, erect bird of prey stared resolutely ahead, majestic, unshakeable. She looked up at Bryant again. His gaze mirrored that of the eagle in front of him.

  ‘As much as we might feel compelled to take action, or to help others find the killers of our brother and sister,’ Bryant continued, surveying the room before returning his stare to Pip Lovejoy, ‘we must put our faith in the local police. We can be secure in the knowledge that the perpetrators of these terrible crimes will be brought to justice.’

  She thought he was trying to emulate the sanctimonious tone and words of the chaplain. It was very unlike Bryant, from what she knew of him. He had obviously made an extra effort, dress-wise, for the funeral. The knife-edge creases in his tunic and trousers, the perfectly knotted tie and his newly trimmed hair were also very un-Bryant.

  ‘But I’ll tell you this, people,’ he said, leaning forward on his elbows to get closer into the audience, ‘nothing the coppers do, or the courts, will take away the bloody pain. Excuse me, Father,’ he added, turning to the chaplain, who replied with a little frown.

  Pip looked around and saw most of the uniformed people were sitting up straighter, on the edge of their pews. There was that commanding presence again – a quality he used sparingly, but effectively.

  ‘And you just have to learn to live with it.’

  There were a few murmurs and some head-shaking at the harshness of his stone-hearted comment.

  ‘That’s right, that’s what I said. You’ll see more death and injustice in the years to come than any of you had ever thought possible. Be angry about these deaths, but ask yourselves something, every hour of every day from here on in. Ask yourself, here at Kumalo, and overseas if you’re going to an operational squadron, if you have done everything, and I mean bloody everything, in your power, to ensure that each and every one of the men and women you serve with will still be alive at the end of that hour, that day.’

  There was silence in the chapel and outside now.

  ‘Was there something one of us could have done to make sure Felicity Langham did not end up in the clutches of a murderer, that she wasn’t alone, maybe friendless on the night she died?’

  Pip looked across at a pew near the front dominated by WAAFs and saw Corporal Susannah Beattie, the senior parachute packer and Felicity’s superior, hang her head.

  ‘I probably could have. I’m the adjutant. It’s my job to keep tabs on morale and make sure we all work together, as a team, as a family.’ He looked across at the two flag-draped coffins and said: ‘Forgive me, Felicity, if I could have.’

  Pip looked at him and saw him swallow hard, as if fighting back his surfacing emotions. It was a small mercy, she thought, that Felicity, an only child, had no family in Rhodesia to attend the funeral. They would have been confused by the veiled admonitions in Bryant’s eulogy – and perhaps their absence gave him a free rein. The girl’s mother had died in a riding accident several years earlier, while her father, a veteran of the first war, was serving in Italy as a major in the pioneer corps, a collection of ageing veterans who performed civil engineering works for the army. Pip had drafted the cable to send news of his daughter’s death to him, and she’d found it one of the saddest duties of her life.

  ‘To those of you who knew James Smythe, to those of you who instructed him, ask yourselves what you knew of him, if you can understand how he ended up miles off course, in another country, for Christ’s sake. Sorry for that one, too, Father. Forgive us, James, if we failed you.’

  He paused. ‘If we don’t look out for each other, if we don’t work with each other, despite our differences, our jealousies and our prejudices, more of us will die than survive this war.’

  ‘Volleys, load!’ barked Flight Sergeant Henderson. At his command the ten askaris worked the bolts of their .303 rifles, each chambering a blank cartridge. The funeral party’s drill was good, ebony hands moving perfectly in unison. Their dress was immaculate – starched high-collared tunics, shorts, puttees and spit-polished ankle boots. The brass
buckles on their First World War pattern webbing glinted in the morning sun. It was not the first, and would not be the last, burial they attended, though the cause of death was usually an aircraft crash rather than murder.

  Pip thought it a terrible irony that probably the only time these proud Ndebele warriors would fire their weapons during the war would be to mark the death of airmen and women who would never see action.

  ‘Present!’ The rifles were pointed across the two open graves and heavenwards into the cloudless African sky. ‘Fire!’

  Pip flinched as the first volley shattered the peace of the cemetery and sent half-a-dozen glossy starlings winging into the azure sky. Henderson gave the same commands twice more, then ordered the firing party to unload.

  The sun warmed her back but couldn’t stop the chill running down her spine as the two trumpeters sounded the mournful strains of the Last Post. She glanced across at Paul Bryant, standing smartly to attention and, like the other officers present, saluting. At the conclusion of the refrain, the trumpeters paused for a few seconds, then blew reveille. Catherine De Beers, she noticed, was dabbing at her eyes with a white handkerchief. Susannah Beattie had an arm around a crying WAAF. Pip wondered if the tears were for Felicity Langham, perhaps out of guilt, or if the young woman cried for the dead English pilot.

  Pip ran her eyes along the other wooden grave markers in the cemetery. There were at least a score of them and the names came from nearly every corner of the British Empire – Canadians, Australians, Britons and Rhodesians. There were even a couple of Greeks. Pip pondered the waste of it all. To survive the invasion of Greece, to escape to England and then be shipped to Africa, only to die in training. She’d learned, early on in the war, that men were buried in the country where they died, as it was impractical to ship so many bodies home. She wondered where Charlie was right now.

  Henderson ordered the firing party to fix bayonets and then slope arms. They turned and marched away from the graves, hobnailed boots crunching the gravel in perfect synchronisation. A procession of more than a hundred mourners fell in behind the Askaris and the Kumalo pipes and drums band. The bagpipes were from half a world away, but their keening lament seemed to fit the landscape, in an odd way, as naturally as the whine of a yellow-billed kite that climbed and dived like a fighter plane above the column.

  Pip mingled her way through the trailing crowd until she was beside Bryant. It wasn’t hard to get to him. For all the strength of his performance in the chapel, it was clear that in day-to-day life he was something of a loner. While other instructors and trainees huddled in preordained cliques, smoking cigarettes and chatting, Bryant remained at the edge of Felicity’s grave, staring down at the coffin.

  ‘That was a moving speech,’ Pip said as she came up beside him.

  He didn’t look around. ‘It’s an old one. I used to give it to my crew, and the others in my flight.’

  ‘It had an effect,’ she said.

  He laughed, short and sharp, finally turning to look at her. ‘Well, that’ll be the first time then. These stupid bastards will still fly off into the blue yonder chasing herds of bloody wildebeest and zebras across the veldt until they realise, too late, they’re lost, or they’ll fly too low trying to impress some pretty girl, or they’ll bloody crash-land on a farm where they’re hoping to bed the farmer’s daughter. Nothing I say sinks in.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself. That’s your problem,’ she said. ‘Fancy a drink?’

  ‘Too bloody right I do.’

  They followed the crowd, walking down the edge of the concrete runway away from the cemetery until they came to an open hangar. In front of a parked Harvard, trestle tables had been laid out and white-jacketed African mess stewards were having trouble flicking the caps off bottles of Lion lager fast enough to fill the outstretched hands of officers and airmen.

  ‘Any excuse for a piss-up,’ Bryant said.

  ‘A wake’s as good a way as any to say goodbye to a loved one,’ Pip said.

  ‘If I’d been to a wake for every bloke I’ve known who died in the last couple of years, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning by now,’ he said.

  She smiled. She knew that black humour was a way of coping with tragedy. Policemen, she’d noticed, were the same. The worse the accident or murder, the more coarse and inappropriate the jokes. ‘Did you mean that, about Felicity, I mean?’

  ‘What, that I wonder if I could have done more?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course I did. I knew she was being ostracised by Susannah and the other girls, that she was getting too big for her breeches and antagonising them with her fame. I could have reined her in a bit – maybe put an end to her circus antics with the parachute displays. Maybe then she would have decided to live on base, instead of off it, been one of the girls, so to speak.’

  She nodded, then casually said: ‘Funny, when I first asked you, you weren’t sure whether she lived on or off base.’

  He looked at her, then closed his eyes.

  She sensed he was fighting back other emotions this time.

  ‘Two beers,’ he said to the steward as they finally reached the tables, whose white draping was already stained with spilt beer and beginning to fill with empties. He took the bottles and a glass for her. ‘Come with me, away from this lot.’

  She followed in silence, looking over her shoulder, searching for Hayes. She couldn’t see him anywhere.

  ‘You want the truth?’ he said. They were outside the hangar now, the hot sun stinging the tops of their heads and shoulders. There were still airmen in sight, hanging around, smoking and drinking, though out of earshot.

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘I suppose it’s all right, since you’ve caught the bloke who killed her.’

  She had said nothing to him about Nkomo’s alibi, or her growing suspicion that the evidence had been planted in the petrol-seller’s car, probably by the real killer. She felt her pulse quicken with excitement.

  ‘We were . . . intimate, Felicity and I.’

  She knew it. She had so many more questions for him now, and her mind reeled with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ was all she could put into words, immediately regretting the tone she had used. It was as if she were offended, personally insulted that he had not trusted her enough to tell the truth. Damn, that had come out all wrong.

  ‘Why do you reckon? I could tell from your questioning that you thought whoever killed Flick must have known her. Why put myself in the box seat and end up being dragged down to the station by you and Sergeant No-Neck?’

  Despite herself, she smiled briefly at his succinct characterisation of her colleague. ‘You’ve been trying to cover up those first few lies ever since you told them.’

  ‘Guilty,’ he said.

  And you had no alibi for the night Felicity was killed – none we could check, anyway.’

  ‘Right again. I got drunk, as I do most nights, in my own room, on base, reading a book, then fell asleep, fully clothed, until I woke at dawn the next morning.’

  ‘Tell me about you and Felicity.’

  He took a long pull on his beer, then reached down and lifted his right trouser leg. Pip stepped back in alarm.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not a knife or a gun.’ He pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes from the inside of his khaki sock. ‘When you’re in parade dress you’re not supposed to have anything that shows through your pockets and ruins the line of the uniform. Bloody uncomfortable walking around with a pack of cigarettes on your ankle, though.’ He offered a cigarette, but she wrinkled her nose and shook her head. He lit his. ‘Things are going on in this war that are so unlike anything that’s ever happened before, you start to wonder whether they’re true or if they were a dream.’

  ‘It’s a different world today, that’s for sure,’ she agreed, wondering where he was heading.

  ‘That’s how it was with me and Felicity.’

  ‘Different?’

  ‘Unlike anything I’ve exper
ienced. Look, despite being Australian, I actually used to be something of a gentleman – before the war, at least. I’m not one to brag about my private life, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Nothing you can say will shock me, Paul,’ she said. She silently cursed herself again, this time for using his Christian name. It had been a slip. Despite her assertion about being unshockable, she suddenly thought that she did not want to hear what had gone on between him and another woman. Perhaps she should have involved Hayes.

  ‘It’s not my aim to shock you, but it’s complicated, what there was between me and Flick. It was . . . it wasn’t like a normal relationship.’

  ‘Complicated?’

  ‘Paul, dear Paul! There you are!’ gushed Catherine De Beers as she barged between Pip and Bryant and kissed him on the cheek.

  Pip took a step back. She noticed Bryant looking around, as though uncomfortable at the thought someone might think he and Catherine De Beers were anything other than professional acquaintances.

  ‘Hello,’ Catherine said. ‘Patricia, isn’t it?’

  ‘Philippa. Pip. How are you holding up, Mrs De Beers?’

  ‘Catherine, please. What can I say? My best friend in the whole world is now lying under six feet of dirt at the end of an airstrip. Would you like a drink? They’ve nothing but beer at the bar.’

  Pip smelled alcohol on the other woman’s breath. Catherine reached into a black shoulder bag and extracted a pewter hipflask. ‘Brandy,’ she said. ‘All that’s kept me going the last couple of days.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Pip said.

  ‘Paul, join me in a drink?’

  ‘I’ll stick with beer, thanks. You’re not driving home this evening?’

  ‘Not to the ranch, no. I’ll stay in town at –’

  ‘At the place where Felicity was living?’ Pip asked. ‘During our investigation we discovered that you own the house Miss Langham lived in.’

  ‘Discovered? All anyone had to do was ask. It was no great secret Flick and I were friends. Well, after tonight I won’t be needing that house at all. I’ll probably sell it.’