Smokescreen

by Dick Francis

  Investigation showed that my wallet was still buttoned into my rear pocket, because I could feel its shape if I pushed back against the seat. But money, in these circumstances, was useless.

  By twisting, lifting myself an inch off the seat, and tugging, I managed to get my right-hand pocket round to centre front, and, carefully exploring, brought forth a total prize of a packet of Iguana Rock book matches, with four matches left, a blue rubber band, and a three-inch stub of pencil with no point.

  I put all these carefully back where they came from, and reversed the tugging until I could reach into the left-hand pocket.

  Two things only in there. A handkerchief… and the forgotten screwed-up plastic bag from Evan’s sandwiches.

  ‘Don’t throw plastic bags out of car windows,’ Haagner had said. ‘They can kill the animals.’

  And save the lives of men.

  Precious, precious plastic bag.

  Never cross a desert without one.

  I knew how to get half a cup of water every twenty-four hours from a sheet of plastic in a hot climate, but it couldn’t be done by someone strapped into a sitting position inside a car. It needed a hole dug in the ground, a small weight, and something to catch the water in.

  All the same, the principle was there, if I could make it work.

  Condensation.

  The hole in the ground method worked during the night. In the heat of the day one dug a hole, making it about eighteen inches deep, and in diameter slightly smaller than the available piece of plastic. One placed a cup in the hole, in the centre. One spread the sheet of plastic over the hole, and sealed it down round the edges with the dug out earth or sand. And finally one placed a small stone or some coins on the centre of the plastic, weighing it down at a spot directly over the cup.

  After that, one waited.

  Cooled by the night, the water vapour in the hot air trapped in the hole condensed into visible water droplets, which formed on the cold unporous plastic, trickled downhill to the weighted point, and dripped from there into the cup.

  A plastic bagful of hot air should produce a teaspoonful of water by dawn.

  It wasn’t much.

  After a while I pulled one hand towards me as far as it would go, and leaned forward hard against the seat belt, and found I could reach far enough to blow into the bag if I held its gathered neck loosely with an O of forefinger and thumb.

  For probably half an hour I breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth, into the plastic bag. At the end of that time there were hundreds of small water droplets sticking to the inside of the bag… the water vapour out of my lungs, trapped there instead of escaping into the air.

  I turned the bag inside out and licked it. It was wet. When I’d sucked off as much as I could, I laid the cool damp surface against my face, and perhaps because of the paltriness of what I had achieved, felt the first deep stab of desolation.

  I fished out the blue rubber band again, and while the sunlit air was still hot, filled the bag with it, twisting the neck tight and fastening it with the band to one side of the steering wheel. It hung there like a fool’s balloon, bobbing lightly away if I touched it.

  I had been thirsty all day, but not unbearably.

  After dark some hovering internal rumbles identified themselves as hunger. Again, not unbearably.

  The bladder problem reappeared and was again a disaster. But. time, I supposed, would lessen the difficulty: no Input, less output.

  Hope had to be filed under ‘Pending’, after dark. Twelve hours to be lived before one could climb on to the will-they-won’t-they treadmill again. I found them long, lonely, and dreadful.

  The cramps which I had so imaginatively constructed for the film began to afflict my own body in earnest, once the heat of the day drained away and let my muscles grow stiff.

  At first I warmed up by another dozen wrenching attempts to break the steering wheel off the control column, the net result of which was considerable wear and tear on me, and none on the car. After that I tried to plan a sensible series of isometric exercises which would keep everything warm and working, but I only got about half of them done.

  Against all the odds, I went to sleep.

  The nightmare was still there when I woke up.

  I was shivering with cold, creakingly stiff, and perceptibly hungrier.

  I had nothing to eat but four matches, a handkerchief, and a blunt pencil.

  After a small amount of thought I dug out the pencil, and chewed that. Not exactly for the food value, but to bare the lead. With that pencil, I decided, I could bring Danilo down.

  Before dawn the realisation crept slowly in that Danilo could not have abandoned me in the car without help. He would have needed someone to drive him away when he had finished locking me in. He wouldn’t have walked through the game reserve, not only because of the danger from animals, but because a man on foot would have been as conspicuous as gallantry.

  So someone had helped him.

  Who?

  Arknold…

  He had shut his eyes to Danilo’s fraud, when he had discovered it: had kept silent, because by not arranging better security he had put his licence at risk. But would he step deep into murder to save himself a suspension?

  No. He wouldn’t.

  Barty, for money?

  I didn’t know.

  One… any… of the van Hurens, for any reason at all?

  No.

  Roderick, for news? Or Katya, or Melanic?

  No.

  Clifford Wenkins, for publicity?

  If it was him, I was safe, because he wouldn’t leave me there much longer. He wouldn’t dare. Worldic, for a start, wouldn’t want the merchandise turning up in a damaged state. I wished I believed it was Wenkins, but I didn’t.

  Evan? Conrad?

  I couldn’t face it.

  They had both been there. On the spot. Sleeping next door. Handy for breaking in in the night and smothering me with ether.

  One of them could have done it while the other slept. But which? And why?

  If it were either Evan or Conrad I was going to die, because only they could save me.

  The dawn came up on this bleakest of thoughts and showed me that my theories on water vapour were correct. I could see nothing of the Kruger National Park, because all the windows were fogged and beaded with condensation.

  I could reach the glass beside me, and I licked it. It felt great. The dryness of my tongue and throat became instantly less aggravating, though I could still have done with a pint of draught.

  I looked through the licked patch. Same old wilderness. Same old no one there.

  My spoonful of water had formed all right inside the now cold plastic bag. Carefully I loosened its neck in the rubber band and squeezed the shrunken air out, to prevent it expanding again when the day grew hot, and re-absorbing the precious liquid. I wouldn’t drink it until later, I decided. Until things got worse.

  With all the precious humidity clinging to the inside of the windows, it was safe to embark on a change of air. I took off my sock and turned the handle with my toes, and opened the left-hand window a scant inch. Couldn’t risk not being able to shut it again: but when the sun came up I got it shut without much trouble. When the growing heat cleared the windows by re-evaporating the water, at least I had such comfort as there was in knowing it was all still inside the car, doing its best.

  The pencil I had chewed in the night (and stowed for safe storage under my watch strap) was showing signs of usefulness. One more session with the incisors, and it had enough bare lead at the tip to write with.

  The only thing to write on that I had in my pockets was the inside of the book of matches, which was room enough for ‘Danilo did it’, but not for my whole purpose. There were maps and car documents, however, in the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat, and after a long struggle, tying my toes in knots and using up a great deal too much precious energy, I collected into my hands a large brown envelope, and a book of maps
with nice blank end papers.

  There was a lot to write.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Danilo had suggested to Nerissa that I go to South Africa because there, far from home, he could take or make any opportunity that offered to bring me to an accidental looking death. He had lured me to the killing ground with a bait he knew I would take—a near-dying request from a woman I liked and was grateful to.

  A death which was clearly a murder would have left him too dangerously exposed as a suspect. An obvious accident would be less suspiciously investigated… like a live microphone.

  Danilo hadn’t been there, in Randfontein House.

  Roderick had been there, and Clifford Wenkins, and Conrad. And fifty others besides. If Danilo had provided the live mike, someone at the press interview must have steered it into my hands. Luck alone had taken it out again.

  Down the mine, at the suddenly opportune moment… Bash.

  Except for the steadfastness of a checker called Nyembezi, that attempt would have come off.

  This wouldn’t look like a natural accident, though. The handcuffs couldn’t be called accidental.

  Perhaps Danilo intended to come back, after I was dead, and take them away. Perhaps people would believe then that I had lost my way in the park and had died in the car rather than risk walking.

  But the time span was tight. He couldn’t wait a week to make sure I was dead before coming back, because by then everyone would be searching for me, and someone might have reached me before he did.

  I sighed dispiritedly.

  None of it made any sense.

  The day proved an inferno compared with the one before. Much worse even than Spain. The scorching fury of the heat stunned me to the point where thought became impossible, and cramps wracked my shoulders, arms and stomach.

  I tucked my hands into my sleeves and rolled my head back out of the direct rays and just sat there enduring it, because there was nothing else to do.

  So much for my pathetic little attempts at water management. The brutal sun was shrivelling me minute by minute, and I knew that a week was wildly optimistic. In this heat, a day or two would be enough.

  My throat burned with thirst and saliva was a thing of the past.

  A gallon of water in the car’s radiator… as out of reach as a mirage.

  When I couldn’t swallow without wincing or breathe without feeling the intaken air cut like a knife, I untied the plastic bag and poured the contents into my mouth. I made the divine H2O last as long as possible; rolled it round my teeth and gums, and under my tongue. There was hardly enough left to swallow, and when it was gone I felt wretched. There was nothing, now, between me and nightfall.

  I turned the bag inside out and sucked it, and held it against my mouth until the heat had dried it entirely, and then I filled it again with hot air, and with trembling fingers fumbled it back into the rubber band on the steering wheel.

  I remembered that the boot of the car still held, as far as I knew, a lot of oddments of Conrad’s equipment. Surely he would need it, would come looking for that, if not for me.

  Evan, I thought, for God’s sake come and find me.

  But Evan had gone north in the park which stretched two hundred miles to the boundary on the great grey green greasy Limpopo river. Evan was searching there for his Elephant’s Child.

  And I… I was sitting in a car, dying for a gold mine I didn’t want.

  Night came, and hunger.

  People paid to be starved in Health Farms, and people went on hunger strikes to protest about this or that, so what was so special about hunger?

  Nothing. It was just a pain.

  The night was cool, was blessed. In the morning, when I had licked as much of the window as I could reach, I went on with the writing. I wrote every thing I could think of which would help an investigation into my death.

  The heat started up before I had finished. I wrote ‘give my love to Charlie’, and signed my name, because I wasn’t certain that by that evening I would be able to write any more. Then I slid the written papers under my left thigh so that they wouldn’t slip out of reach on the floor, and tucked the little pencil under my watch strap, and collapsed the air out of the plastic bag to keep the next teaspoonful safe, and wondered how long, how long I would last.

  By midday I didn’t want to last.

  I held out until then for my sip of water, but when it was gone I would have been happy to die. After the bag had dried against my face it took a very long time, and a great effort of will, for me to balloon it out and fix it again to the steering wheel. Tomorrow, I thought, the thimbleful would form again, but I would be past drinking it.

  We had been wrong in the film, I thought. We had focused on the mental state of the Man too much, to the neglect of the physical. We hadn’t known about legs like lead and ankles swollen to giant puffballs. I had long ago shed my socks, and would have had as much chance of forcing my shoes on again as of flying.

  We hadn’t known the abdomen would become agonisingly distended with gas or that the seat belts would strain across it like hawsers. We hadn’t guessed that the eyes would feel like sand paper when the lachrymal glands dried up. We had underestimated what dehydration did to the throat.

  The overwhelming heat battered all emotion into numbness. There was nothing anywhere but pain, and no prospect that it would stop.

  Except, of course, in death.

  In the late afternoon an elephant came and uprooted the tree the giraffe had browsed from.

  That should be allegorical enough for Evan, I thought confusedly. Elephants were the indestructible destroyers of the wilderness.

  But Evan was miles away.

  Evan, I thought, Evan… Oh God, Evan… come… and find me.

  The elephant ate a few succulent leaves off the tree and went away and left it with its roots in the air, dying for lack of water.

  Before dark I did write a few more sentences. My hands trembled continually, and folded into tight cramps, and were in the end too weak to hold the pencil.

  It fell down on the floor and rolled beneath my seat. I couldn’t see it, or pick it up with my swollen toes.

  Weeping would have been a waste of water.

  Night came again and time began to blur.

  I couldn’t remember how long I had been there, or how long it was until Wednesday.

  Wednesday was as far away as Charlie and I wouldn’t see either of them. I had a vision of the pool in the garden with the kids splashing in it, and it was the car that seemed unreal, not the pool.

  Tremors shook my limbs for hours on end.

  The night was cold. Muscles stiffened. Teeth chattered. Stomach shrieked to be fed.

  In the morning, the condensation on the windows was so heavy that water trickled in rivulets down the glass. I could only, as ever, reach the small area near my head. I licked it weakly. It wasn’t enough.

  I hadn’t the energy any more to open the window for a change of air: but cars were never entirely airtight, and it wouldn’t be asphyxiation which saw me off.

  The inevitable sun came back in an innocent rosy dawn, gentle prelude to the terrifying day ahead.

  I no longer believed that anyone would come.

  All that remained was to suffer into unconsciousness, because after that there would be peace. Even delirium would be a sort of peace, because the worst torment was to be aware, to understand. I would welcome a clouded mind, when it came. That, for me, would be the real death. The only one that mattered. I wouldn’t know or care when my heart finally stopped.

  Heat bullied into the car like a battering ram.

  I burned.

  I burned.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They did come.

  When the sun was high, Evan and Conrad came in the station wagon. Evan stampeding about in a frenzy of energy, waving his arms about, with his hair sticking out crazily and his eyes too hot for comfort. Conrad, puffing slightly under the droopy moustache, mopping his forehead with a handkerch
ief.

  They simply walked up to the car and opened the door. Then they stood still. And stared.

  I thought they were unreal; the onset of delusion. I stared back, waiting for them to vanish.

  Then Evan said, ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been searching the whole bloody park for you since yesterday morning.’

  I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t.

  Conrad was saying, ‘My God, my God, dear boy, my God…’ as if the needle had stuck.

  Evan went back to the station wagon, drove it across the grass, and parked it alongside the car I was in. Then he scrambled into the back and unclipped the red ice box.

  ‘Will beer do?’ he shouted. ‘We didn’t bring any water.’

  Beer would do.

  He poured it from the can into a plastic cup and held it to my mouth. It was cold; alive; incredible. I only drank half, because it hurt to swallow.

  Conrad opened the left-hand door and sat on the seat beside me.

  ‘We haven’t a key for the handcuffs,’ he said apologetically.

  A laugh twitched somewhere inside me, the first for a long time.

  ‘Phew,’ Evan said. ‘You do stink.’

  They saw I couldn’t talk. Evan poured more beer into the cup and held it for me, and Conrad got out of the car and rummaged about in the boot. He came back with four short lengths of strong wire and a roll of insulating tape, and with these he proceeded to set me free.

  He stuck the four wires into the barrel of the handcuff lock, bound the protruding ends tightly together to give a handle for leverage, and began to turn. The makeshift key did a grand job. With a lot of swearing and a couple of fresh starts when the wires slipped out, Conrad got the ratchet on my right wrist opened.

  And who cared about the other? Ii could wait.

  They unclipped the seat belts and tried to help me out of the car, but I had been sitting in the same restricted position for over eighty hours, and like concrete my body seemed to have set in the mould.

  Evan said doubtfully, ‘I think one of us should go and find a doctor.’