Smokescreen

by Dick Francis

  I shook my head decidedly. There were things I wanted to tell them before the outside world broke in. I felt jerkily under my thigh for the papers I had written, and made writing motions with my hands. Conrad silently produced the gold ballpoint he always carried, and I shakily wrote on an unused corner of brown envelope, ‘If you do not tell anyone you have found me, we can catch the man who put me here.’ And as an afterthought, I added, ‘I want to do that.’

  They read the uneven words and stood wondering, almost literally scratching their heads.

  I wrote a bit more. ‘Please put something over the wind-screen.’

  That at least made sense to them. Conrad draped the front of the car with a heavy groundsheet which effectively brought the temperature down by ten degrees.

  Evan saw the plastic bag hanging from the steering wheel and pulled it off its rubber band.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ he said.

  I pointed to the still undrunk mouthful of water lurking in one corner. Evan understood, and looked completely appalled.

  He took the written pages out of my hand, and read them. I drank some more beer, holding the cup with trembly fingers but feeling life flowing back through all the dying channels with every difficult swallow.

  He read right to the end and handed the pages to Conrad. He stared at me with stunned speechlessness. An unaccustomed state for Evan. After a long time he said slowly, ‘Did you really think Conrad or I had helped to leave you here?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And you can cross off poor old Clifford Wenkins, too, because he’s dead. They fished him out of the Wemmer Pan on Saturday afternoon. He went boating, and drowned.’

  The news took a while to percolate. I thought, no more stuttering, no more damp palms, no more nervous little man… poor little nervous man…

  I lifted Conrad’s golden pen, and Evan gave me one of his ubiquitous notebooks to write on.

  ‘I’d like to lie dozen. In the station wagon?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, seeming to be glad of an excuse for activity. ‘We’ll make you a bed.’

  He hopped into the estate car again and hauled all their equipment to one side. In the cleared space he constructed a mattress from the back seats of both cars, and made a thick pillow out of coats and sweaters.

  ‘The Ritz,’ he said, ‘is at your service.’

  I tried a smile and caught sight of it in the driving mirror.

  Ghastly. I had a four day beard and sunken pinkish eyes and looked as grey and red as a sunburned ghost.

  With more gentleness than I would have thought either of them had in their natures, they helped me out of the car and carried more than supported me over to the station wagon. Bent double, creaking in every muscle, and feeling that my lumbar vertebrae were breaking, I completed the journey, and once lying on the makeshift bed began the luxuriously painful process of straightening myself out. Evan took the groundsheet off my car and spread it over the roof of the station wagon, as much to shut out the heat as for shade.

  I wrote again. ‘Stay here, Evan’, because I thought they might start my car with a jump lead, and drive off for help. He looked doubtful, so I added with a fair amount of desperation, ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said, when he read that. ‘Christ, mate, we won’t leave you.’ He was clearly emotionally upset, which surprised me. He didn’t even like me, and in the Special had heaped on the discomfort without mercy.

  I drank some more beer, mouthful by separate mouthful. My throat still beat a raging case of tonsilitis out of sight, but the lubrication was slowly taking effect. I could move my tongue better, and it was beginning to feel less like a swollen lump of liver.

  Evan and Conrad sat in the front seats of the estate car and began discussing where to go. They had no accommodation reserved at Skukuza, which it appeared was still the nearest camp, and it was two hours drive to the beds booked at Satara.

  Satara and the beds won, which seemed good enough for me.

  Evan said, ‘We might as well get going, then. It’s too bloody hot here. I’ve had enough of it. We’ll find a patch of decent shade along the road, and stop for lunch. It’s after two, already, and I’m hungry.’

  That was a lot more like the Evan I knew and detested. With an inward smile I had another go with the pen.

  ‘Remember how to get back here.’

  ‘Someone else can fetch the car,’ said Evan impatiently. ‘Later.’

  I shook my head. ‘We must come back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To catch Danilo Cavesey.’

  They looked from the pad to my face. Then Evan merely said, ‘How?’

  I wrote down how. They read it. The air of excited intensity reawoke in Evan, and rapid professional calculations furrowed Conrad’s forehead, for what I was asking them to do was much to their liking. Then a separate, secondary thought struck both of them, and they looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘You can’t mean it, dear boy,’ Conrad said.

  I nodded.

  ‘What about the person who helped him?’ Evan asked. ‘What are you going to do about him?’

  ‘He’s dead, now.’

  ‘Dead?’ He looked incredulous. ‘You don’t mean… Clifford Wenkins?’

  I nodded. I was tired. I wrote ‘Tell you when I can talk.’

  They agreed to that. They shut the doors of my car, climbed into the front seats of the station wagon, turned it, and set off along the dirt road which had for so long for me been just a reflection in a three-by-six inch looking glass.

  Conrad drove, and Evan made a map. They seemed to have found me by the merest chance, as I had been a mile up a side branch of an equally unkempt road leading to a now dry water hole. The water hole road joined into another, which led finally back to the roads used by visitors. Evan said he could find the way straight back to my car: it was easy. They had searched, he added, every side road they could find between Skukuza and Numbi, and that had been yesterday. Today, they had tried the dry sparse land to the south of the Sabie river, and they had found me on the fifth no-entry they had explored.

  After five or six miles we came to a small group of trees throwing some dappled shade: Conrad at once pulled in and stopped the car, and Evan without more ado started burrowing into the red box. They had brought more sandwiches, more fruit, more beer.

  I thought I would postpone sandwiches and fruit. Beer was doing wonders. I drank some more.

  The other two munched away as if the whole picnic were routine. They opened the windows wide, reckoning that any sensible animal would be sleeping in this heat, not looking out for unwary humans.

  No cars passed. Every sensible human, too, was busy at siesta in the air-conditioned camps. Evan, of course, was impervious to heat, and Conrad had to lump it.

  I wrote again. ‘What made you start looking for me?’

  Evan spoke round bits of ham sandwich. ‘We kept wanting the things of Conrad’s which were in your car. It became most annoying not to have them. So yesterday morning we telephoned the Iguana to tell you how selfish you had been to take them away with you.’

  ‘They said you weren’t there,’ Conrad said. ‘They said they understood you were going to the Kruger Park for several days.’

  ‘We couldn’t understand it,’ Evan nodded. ‘In view of your note.’

  ‘What note?’ I tried automatically to say the words, but my throat still wouldn’t have it. I wrote them instead.

  ‘The note you left,’ Evan said impatiently. ‘Saying you had gone back to Johannesburg.’

  ‘ I left no note.’

  He stopped chewing and sat with his mouth full as if in suspended animation. Then he took up chewing again, and said, ‘No. That’s right. You couldn’t have.’

  ‘We thought you had, anyway,’ Conrad said. ‘It was just a piece of paper, written in capital letters, saying, “Gone back to Johannesburg. Link.” Bloody rude and ungrateful, dear boy, we thought it. Packing all your gear and buzzing off at t
he crack of dawn without even bothering to say good-bye.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Conrad laughed. ‘After that we tried to reach Clifford Wenkins, because we thought he might know where you were, but all we got at his number was some hysterical woman saying he’d been drowned in the Wemmer Pan.’

  ‘We tried one or two other people,’ Evan went on. ‘The van Hurens, and so on.’

  ‘Danilo?’ I wrote.

  ‘No.’ Evan shook his head. ‘Didn’t think of him. Wouldn’t know where he’s staying, for a start.’ He ate a mouthful, reflecting. ‘We thought it a bit unhelpful of you to go off without letting anyone know where you could be found, and then we thought perhaps you’d been damn bloody careless and got lost in the park, and never got back to Johannesburg at all. So after a bit of argy-bargy we persuaded the reception office at Satara to check what time you went out of the Numbi gate on Friday morning, and the gate keeper said that according to their records you hadn’t gone out at all.’

  ‘We telephoned Haagner, dear boy,’ Conrad said, ‘and explained the situation, but he didn’t seem to be much worried. He said people often talked their way out of Numbi without papers, even though one was supposed to produce receipts to show one had paid for staying in camps. Mr Lincoln would only have to say, Haagner said, that Evan and Conrad were still in the park, and had paid for him. The Numbi men would check with Skukuza, and then let Mr Lincoln go. He also said you couldn’t be lost in the park. You were too sensible, he said, and only fools got lost. People who drove miles down no-entry roads and then had their cars break down.’

  And that, I presumed, was what they thought had happened. But I wouldn’t grumble.

  They opened cans of beer and gulped. I went on sipping.

  ‘We had sure enough paid for you at Skukuza,’ Evan said accusingly. ‘Including the window you broke.’

  I only had to pick up the pen.

  ‘My God.’ Evan said, before I got it to the paper. ‘Danilo Cavesey broke the window… to get into your rondavel.’

  I supposed so. He had got past the locked door without waking me.

  ‘You’re a fairly valuable property, dear boy,’ Conrad said, finishing the saga. ‘So we decided we ought perhaps to spend a day or so looking for you.’

  ‘We saw a splendid herd of elephants yesterday afternoon,’ said Evan, pointing out that the delay to their original plans had not been an entire waste. ‘And we might see some more today,’ he said.

  They helped me into the rondavel in Satara and I asked them to turn the air-conditioning off, as to me the hut felt cold. If I got cold again I would get stiff again, which would only add to my aches… I lay on one of the beds with three blankets over me and felt lousy.

  Conrad fetched a glass of water and he and Evan stood around looking helpless.

  Evan said, ‘Let’s take your stinking clothes off. You’d embarrass a pig, as you are.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘If we bring you some water, would you like to wash?’

  No, again.

  Evan wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, you won’t mind if neither of us sleeps in here with you?’

  I shook my head. My smell was offensive to myself as well, now that I’d breathed so much clean fresh air.

  Conrad went off to the camp shop to find something I could swallow and presently came back with a pint of milk and a tin of chicken soup. The only opener they had was the beer can opener, but they got the soup out into a jug in the end. There was nothing to heat the soup with, so they tipped in half the milk and stirred it around until it was runny. Then they poured out a glassful, and, grateful for their clumsy care, I drank it bit by bit.

  ‘Now,’ said Evan briskly, satisfied that they had done the best possible for me, ‘let’s get on with planning the trap.’

  This time, when I tried, some semblance of speech came out.

  ‘Danilo is staying at the Vaal Majestic,’ I said.

  ‘What did you say?’ Evan demanded. ‘Thank God you can talk again, but I couldn’t understand a word of it.’

  I wrote it down.

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  I said, ‘Telephone in the morning, and tell him…’ It was a croak, rough and cracked.

  ‘Look,’ Evan interrupted. ‘We’ll get along quicker if you write it.’

  I nodded. Much easier on my throat, if he preferred it that way.

  ‘At breakfast time, tell Danilo you are trying to find out where I am, because I have Conrad’s equipment in my car. Tell him I also have Conrad’s gold pencil in my pocket, and he especially wants it back. Tell him I also have one of your notebooks, and you need your notes. Tell him you are worried because I had some theory that someone I knew had been trying to kill me.’

  Evan read, and looked dubious. ‘Are you sure that will bring him?’

  I wrote: ‘Would you risk my being able to write down that theory, if you knew I had pencil and paper within reach?’

  He considered. He said, ‘No. I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I did do it.’

  ‘So you did.’

  Conrad sat heavily down in the armchair, nodding.

  ‘What next, dear boy?’

  I wrote: ‘This evening, telephone Quentin van Huren. Tell him where and in what state you found me. Say I wrote some notes. Read them to him. Tell him about the trap for Danilo. Ask him to tell the police. With his authority, he can arrange it properly.’

  ‘Sure. Sure.’ Evan with undaunted wiry energy collected up my writings from the car and his notebook with all our plans, and strode off at once to the telephone in the main buildings.

  Conrad stayed behind and lit a cigar, no doubt to fend off evil odours.

  ‘It was Evan who insisted on looking for you, dear boy,’ he said. ‘Absolutely fanatical, he was. You know how he never lets up when he gets an idea. We went up every unlikely track… bloody silly, I thought… until we found you.’

  ‘Who,’ I said slowly, trying to speak clearly, ‘told Danilo about the film…Man in the Car?’

  He shrugged a little uncomfortably. ‘Maybe I did. At Germiston. They were all asking about your latest work… the van Hurens, Clifford Wenkins, Danilo… everybody.’

  It didn’t matter. Wenkins could have got hold of the film’s plot easily enough, through Worldic.

  ‘Dear boy,’ Conrad said thoughtfully. ‘The make-up is all wrong in the film.’ He puffed the cigar. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘what you actually look like would be pretty poor box-office.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He smiled. ‘Have some more soup?’

  Evan was gone a long time and came back looking earnest and intense.

  ‘He wants me to ring back later. He was pretty incoherent when I’d finished.’ Evan raised his eyebrows, surprised that anyone should need time to assimilate so many unwelcome facts. ‘He said he would think over what ought to be done. And oh yes, he said to ask you why you now thought it was Clifford Wenkins who helped Danilo.’

  I said, ‘Clifford Wenkins would have helped…’

  ‘Write it down,’ said Evan impatiently. ‘You sound like a crow with laryngitis.’

  I wrote: ‘Clifford Wenkins would do anything for publicity stunts. He would exchange recording gear and microphones, for instance. I do not believe he thought anyone would be killed, but if I got an electric shock at a press conference, it would put my name and the purpose of my visit in the papers. I believe Danilo put it all into his head, and gave him the live equipment. Wenkins was terrified when Katya was so badly shocked, and afterwards I saw him telephoning, looking very worried. I thought he was calling Worldic, but he might have been telling Danilo that the stunt had gone wrong.’

  ‘It went better, dear boy, from Worldic’s point of view,’ Conrad commented.

  ‘Worldic drove Clifford Wenkins unmercifully to arrange publicity stunts… so if Danilo suggested to him that they should kidnap me and lock me in a car, just like in my new film, he would have been foolish enough to agree.

  ‘When I
’d been in the car for three days, I did not think it could be Wenkins who’d been helping Danilo, because I knew Wenkins would not leave me there very long. But once Wenkins was dead, no one but Danilo knew where I was. He had only to leave me there…

  ‘After my body was discovered, people would work out that it had been a publicity stunt planned by Wenkins and myself, which went wrong because he drowned and could not set in motion the necessary search.

  ‘I expect it was in Wenkins’s car that he and Danilo drove into the park, so that the Numbi gate office would have it on record that he had been there.’

  Evan practically tore the notebook out of my hands, as he had been striding around with impatience while I wrote. He read to the end and handed the notebook to Conrad.

  ‘Do you realise,’ he demanded, ‘that you are practically accusing Danilo of killing Clifford Wenkins, so that you shouldn’t be found?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think he did,’ I croaked. ‘For a gold mine.’

  They left me with water and soup to hand and went off to dinner in the restaurant. When they came back, Evan had telephoned again to van Huren.

  ‘He’d grasped everything a bit better,’ Evan allowed condescendingly. ‘I read him what you wrote about Wenkins, and he said he thought you could be right. He said he was upset about Danilo, because he had liked him, but he would do as you asked. He said that he himself would come down here… he’s flying down to the Skukuza airstrip first thing in the morning. The police will be properly genned up. Conrad and I will meet them and van Huren at Skukuza, and go on from there, if it looks likely that Danilo has taken the bait.’

  We were going to call Danilo in the morning. Even if he, too, flew down as fast as possible, everyone should be in position before he came.

  The night was paradise compared with its predecessors, but still far short of heaven. In the morning I felt a good deal stronger; there were no more cramps and the fire in my throat would no longer frighten Celsius. I got myself to the bathroom looking as bent as old Adam the gardener, but I got there; and I ate the banana which Conrad brought me for breakfast.

  Evan had gone to telephone Danilo, Conrad said, and Evan came later with a satisfied smile.