Smokescreen

by Dick Francis

  ‘Because when Nerissa told him she was worried about the way they were running, and wished she could find out what was wrong, it was Danilo himself who came up with the idea of sending you.’

  ‘It can’t have been,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘It definitely was,’ Charlie said. ‘She was positive about it. It was Danilo’s own suggestion.’

  ‘Blast,’ I said.

  ‘He wouldn’t have suggested she send someone to investigate, if he’d been nobbling them himself.’

  ‘No… I suppose not.’

  ‘You sound depressed,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t any other answers for Nerissa.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You weren’t anyway going to tell her her nephew was up to no good.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I agreed.

  ‘And it wasn’t difficult for Danilo to read her will. She leaves it lying around all the time on that marquetry table in the corner of the sitting-room. She showed it to me immediately, as soon as I mentioned it, because it interests her a lot. And I saw what keepsakes she is leaving us, if you’re interested.’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked idly, thinking about Danilo.

  ‘She’s leaving you her holding in something called Rojedda, and she’s leaving me a diamond pendant and some earrings. She showed them to me… they are absolutely beautiful and I told her they were far too much, but she made me try them on so she would see how I looked. She seemed to be so pleased… so happy… isn’t she incredible? I can hardly bear… oh… oh dear…’

  ‘Don’t cry, darling,’ I said.

  There were some swallowing noises.

  ‘I… can’t… help it. She is already much worse than when we saw her before, and she’s very uncomfortable. One of her swollen glands is pressing on things in her chest.’

  ‘We’ll go and see her as soon as I get back.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sniffed away the tears. ‘God, I do miss you.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Only one more week. I’ll be home a week today, and we’ll take the kids down to Cornwall.’

  After the call I went outside and walked slowly past our rondavels and out on to the rough grassy area beyond. The African night was very quiet. No roar of traffic from any distant city, just the faint steady hum of the generator supplying Skukuza with electricity, and the energetic music of cicadas.

  Nerissa had given me my answers.

  I saw what they meant, and I didn’t want to believe it.

  A gamble. No more, no less.

  With my life as the stake.

  I went back to the telephone and made one more call. Van Huren’s manservant said he would see, and Quentin came on the line. I said I knew it was an odd thing to ask, and I would explain why when next I saw him, but could he possibly tell me what size Nerissa’s holding in Rojedda was likely to be.

  ‘The same as my own,’ he said without hesitation. ‘She has my brother’s holding, passed to her by Portia.’

  I thanked him numbly.

  ‘See you at the premiere,’ he said. ‘We are looking forward to it very much.’

  For hours, I couldn’t go to sleep. Yet where could I be safer than inside a guarded camp, with Evan and Conrad snoring their heads off in the huts next door?

  But when I woke up, I was no longer in bed.

  I was in the car I had hired in Johannesburg.

  The car was surrounded by early daylight in the Kruger National Park. Trees, scrub, and dry grass. Not a rondavel in sight.

  Remnants of an ether smell blurred my senses, but one fact was sharp and self-evident.

  One of my arms lay through the steering wheel, and my wrists were locked together in a pair of handcuffs.

  Chapter Fourteen

  This had to be some ghastly practical joke. Evan, being malicious.

  This had to be Clifford Wenkins thinking up some frightful publicity stunt.

  This had to be anything but real.

  But I knew, deep down in some deathly cold core, that this time there was no girl called Jill coming to set me free.

  This time the dying was there to be done. Staring me in the face. Straining already across my shoulders and down my arms.

  Danilo was playing for his gold mine.

  I felt sick and ill. Whatever anaesthetic had been used on me had been given crudely. Probably far too much for the purpose. Not that that was likely to worry anyone but me.

  For an age I could think no further. The dizziness kept coming back in clammy pea-green waves. My physical wretchedness blocked any other thought; took up all my attention. Bouts of semi-consciousness brought me each time to a fresh awakening, to renewed awareness of my plight, to malaise and misery.

  The first objective observation which pierced the fog was that I had gone to bed wearing shorts, and now had clothes on. The trousers I had worn the day before, and the shirt. Also, upon investigation, socks and slip-on shoes.

  The next discovery, which had been knocking at the door of consciousness for some time but had been shut out as unwelcome, was that the car’s seat belts were fastened. Across my chest and over my lap, just as in the Special.

  They weren’t tightly fastened, but I couldn’t reach the clip.

  I tried. The first of many tries at many things. The first of many frustrations.

  I tried to slide my hands out of the handcuffs: but, as before, they were the regulation British police model, designed precisely not to let people slide their hands out. My bones, as before, were too big.

  I tried with all my strength to break the steering wheel, but although this one looked flimsy compared with the one in the Special, I still couldn’t do it.

  I could move a shade more than in the film. The straps were not so tight and there was more room round my legs. Apart from that, there was little in it.

  For the first of many times I wondered how long it would be before anyone set out to look for me.

  Evan and Conrad, when they found me missing, would surely start a search. Haagner, surely, would alert every ranger in the park. Someone would come along very soon. Of course they would. And set me free.

  The day began to warm up, the sun in a cloudless sky shining brightly through the window on my right. The car was therefore facing north… and I groaned at the thought, because in the Southern Hemisphere the sun shone at midday from the north, and I should have its heat and light full in the face.

  Perhaps someone would come before midday.

  Perhaps.

  The worst of the sickness passed in an hour or two, though the tides of unease ebbed and flowed for much longer. Gradually however I began to think again, and to lose the feeling that even if death were already perched on my elbow I was too bilious to care.

  Clear thought number one was that Danilo had locked me in this car so that I should die and he would inherit Nerissa’s half share in the van Huren gold mine.

  Nerissa was leaving her Rojedda holding to me in her will, and Danilo, having read the will, knew.

  Danilo was to inherit the residue. Should I die before Nerissa, the Rojedda bequest would be void, and the holding would become part of his residue. Should I live, he stood to lose not only a share of the mine, but hundreds of thousands of pounds besides.

  As the law stood then, and would still stand when Nerissa died, estate duty on everything she possessed would be paid out of the residue. Danilo personally stood to lose every penny of the estate duty paid on the inheritance which Nerissa was leaving to me.

  If only, I thought uselessly, she had told me what she was doing: I could have explained why she shouldn’t. Perhaps she hadn’t realised how immensely valuable the Rojedda holding was: she had only recently received it from her sister. Perhaps she hadn’t understood how estate duty worked. Certainly, in view of the enjoyment she had found in her long-lost nephew, she had not intended me to prosper out of all proportion at Danilo’s expense.

  Any accountant would have told her, but wills were usually drawn up by solicitors, not accountants, and solicitors didn’t
give financial advice.

  Danilo, with his mathematical mind, had read the will and seen the barbs in it, as I would have done. Danilo must have begun plotting my death from that very moment.

  He had only had to tell me what she had written. But how could he know that? If he himself in reversed positions would have stuck two fingers up in my face, perhaps he thought that I, that anyone, would do that too.

  Nerissa, I thought. Dear, dear Nerissa. Meaning good to everyone, and happily leaving them presents, and landing me in consequence in the most unholy bloody mess.

  Danilo the gambler. Danilo the bright lad who knew that Hodgkin’s disease was fatal. Danilo the little schemer who started by lowering the value of a string of racehorses to pay less estate duty on them, and who, when he found that the real stakes were much higher, had the nerve to move at once into the senior league.

  I remembered his fascination down the mine, his questions about quantities at lunch, and his tennis game with Sally. He was after the whole works, not just half. Inherit one half and marry the other. No matter that she was only fifteen: in two more years it would be a highly suitable alliance.

  Danilo…

  I tugged uselessly, in sudden shaking fury, at the obstinate steering wheel. Such cruelty was impossible. How could he… how could anyone… lock a man in a car and leave him to die of heat and thirst and exhaustion? It only happened in films… in one film… in Man in a Car.

  Don’t get out of the car, Haagner had said. It is not safe to get out of the car. And a right bloody laugh that was. If I could get out of this car I would take my chance with the lions.

  All that screaming and shouting I had done in the film. I remembered it coldly. The agony of spirit I had imagined and acted. The disintegration of a soul, a process I had dissected into a series of pictures to be presented one by one until the progression led inexorably to the empty shell of a man too far gone to recover his mind, even if his body were saved.

  The man in the Special had been a fictional character. The man had been shown as reacting to every situation throughout the story with impulsive emotion, which was why his weeping fits in extremis had been valid. But I was not like the man: in many respects, diametrically opposite. I saw the present problem in mainly practical terms, and intended to go on doing so.

  Someone, sometime, would find me. I would just have to try, in any way I could, to be alive—and sane—when they did so.

  The sun rose high and the car grew hot; but this was only a secondary discomfort.

  My bladder was full to bursting.

  I could stretch my hands round the wheel to reach and undo the fly zip fastener, which I did. But I couldn’t move far on the seat and even if I managed to open the door with my elbow, there would be no chance of clearing the car. Although there was no sense in it, I postponed the inevitable moment until continence was nearer a pain than a nuisance. But reluctance had its limits. When in the end I had to let go, a lot went as far as the floor, but a lot of it didn’t, and I could feel the wetness soaking into my trousers from crutch to knee.

  Sitting in a puddle made me extremely angry. Quite unreasonably, forcing me to mess myself seemed a more callous act than putting me in the car in the first place. In the film, we had glossed over this problem as being secondary to the mental state. We had been wrong. It was part of it.

  The net result on me was to make me more resolved than ever not to be defeated. It made me mean and revengeful.

  It made me hate Danilo.

  The morning wore on. The heat became a trial and I got tired of sitting still. I had however, I told myself, spent three weeks in Spain in precisely this position. There, in fact, it had been much hotter. I wilfully ignored the thought that in Spain we had knocked off for lunch.

  Lunchtime was pretty near, by my watch. Well… maybe someone would come…

  And how would they get there, I wondered. Ahead of me there was no road, just small trees, dry grass and scrubby undergrowth. To each side, just the same. But the car must have been driven there, not dropped by passing eagle… Twisting my neck, and consulting the reflection in the mirror, I saw that the road, such as it was, lay directly at my back. It was an earth road showing no sign of upkeep and all too many of desertion, and it petered out completely twenty yards or so from where I sat. My car had been driven straight off the end of it into the bush.

  In less than a month it would rain: the trees and the grass would grow thick and green, and the road turn to mud. No one would find the car, if it were still there when the rains came.

  If I… were still there when the rains came.

  I shook myself. That way led straight towards the mental state of the Man in the film, and of course I had decided to steer clear of it.

  Of course.

  Perhaps they would send a helicopter…

  It was a grey car; nondescript. But surely any car would show up, from the air. There was a small aerodrome near Skukuza, I’d seen it marked on the map. Surely Evan would send a helicopter…

  But where to? I was facing north, off the end of an abandoned track. I could be anywhere.

  Maybe if I did after all make a noise, someone would hear… All those people driving along miles away in their safe little cars with the engines droning and the windows securely shut.

  The car’s horn… Useless. It was one of those cars which had to have the ignition switched on before the horn would sound.

  In the ignition… no keys.

  Lunchtime came and went. I could have done with a nice cold beer.

  A heavy swishing in the bush behind me sent my head twisting hopefully in its direction. Someone had come… Well, hadn’t I known they would?

  No human voices, though, exclaimed over me, bringing freedom. My visitor, in fact, had no voice at all, as he was a giraffe.

  The great fawn sky-scraper with paler patches rolled rhythmically past the car and began pulling at the sparse leaves scattering the top of the tree straight ahead. He was so close that his bulk shut out the sun, giving me a welcome oasis of shade. Huge and graceful, he stayed for a while, munching peacefully and pausing now and then to bend his great horned head towards the car, peering at it from eyes fringed by outrageously long lashes. The most seductive lady would be reduced to despair by a giraffe’s eyelashes.

  I found myself talking to him aloud. ‘Just buzz off over to Skukuza, will you, and get our friend Haagner to come here in his Range Rover at the bloody double.’

  The sound of my voice startled me, because in it I heard my own conviction. I might hope that Evan or Conrad or Haagner or the merest passing stranger would soon find me, but I didn’t believe it. Unconsciously, because of the film, I was already geared to a long wait.

  But what I did believe was that in the end someone would come. The peasant would ride by on his donkey, and see the car, and rescue the man. That was the only tolerable ending. The one I had to cling to, and work for.

  For in the end, people would search.

  If I didn’t turn up at the premiere, there would be questions and checks, and finally a search.

  The premiere was next Wednesday.

  Today, I supposed, was Friday.

  People could live only six or seven days without water.

  I stared sombrely at the giraffe. He batted the fantastic eyelashes, shook his head gently as if in sorrow, and ambled elegantly away.

  By Wednesday night I would have spent six whole days without water. No one would find me as soon as the Thursday.

  Friday or Saturday, perhaps, if they were clever.

  It couldn’t be done.

  It had to be.

  When the giraffe took away with him his patch of shade I realised how fierce the sun had grown. If I did nothing about it, I thought, I would have me a nasty case of sunburn.

  The parts of me most relentlessly in the sun were oddly enough my hands. As in most hot-country cars, the top third of the windscreen was tinted green against glare, and if I rolled my head back I could get my face out of t
he direct rays; but they fell unimpeded on to my lap. I solved the worst of that by unbuttoning my shirt cuffs and tucking my hands in the opposite sleeves, like a muff.

  After that I debated the wisdom of taking my shoes and socks off, and of opening a window to let in some fresh and cooler air. I could get my feet, one at a time, up to my hands to get my socks off. I could also swivel enough in my seat to wind the left-hand window handle with my toes.

  It wasn’t the thought of invasion by animals that stopped me doing it at once, but the niggling subject of humidity.

  The only water available to me for the whole of the time I sat there would be what was contained at that moment in my own body. With every movement and every breath I was depleting the stock, releasing water into the air about me in the form of invisible water vapour. If I kept the windows shut, the water vapour would mostly stay inside the car. If I opened them, it would instantly be lost.

  The outside air, after all those rainless months, was as dry as Prohibition. It seemed to me that though I couldn’t stop my body losing a lot of moisture, I could to some extent re-use it. It would take longer, in damper air, for my skin to crack in dehydration. Re-breathing water vapour would go some small way to postponing the time when the mucous linings of nose and throat would dry raw.

  So what with one thing and another, I didn’t open the window.

  Like a man with an obsession I turned back again and again to the hope-despair see-saw of rescue, one minute convinced that Evan and Conrad would have sent out sorties the moment they found me gone, the next that they would simply have cursed my rudeness and set off by themselves towards the north, where Evan would become so engrossed with olifant that E. Lincoln would fade from his mind like yesterday’s news.

  No one else would miss me. Everyone back in Johannesburg—the van Hurens, Roderick, Clifford Wenkins—knew I had gone down to the game reserve for the rest of the week. None of them would expect to hear from me. None of them would expect me back before Tuesday.

  The only hope I had lay in Evan and Conrad… and the peasant passing by with his donkey.

  At some point during the long afternoon I thought of seeing if I still had in my trouser pockets the things I had had there the day before. I hadn’t emptied the pockets when I undressed, I had just laid my clothes on the second bed.