Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  The woman cringed away from her and cast a terrified glance at the overseer, whose snarl kept her silent.

  ‘Don’t look at him. I am asking you a question,’ Claire said.

  The woman backed away.

  ‘Lift this bloody piece of steel,’ Peter said to them.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Doctor,’ the overseer said. ‘I’ve seen injuries like this. She’ll lose the leg and die soon enough.’

  Claire pushed her way between the women and bent to try and lift the piece of track. It was far too heavy for her to even budge it. Reluctantly, and keeping a wary eye on their guard, the women came to her, in ones and twos. Eventually twenty of them were kneeling, getting a grip on the piece of track.

  The injured woman screamed even louder as the steel was lifted from her. Peter had tied his belt as a makeshift tourniquet around her thigh and he put his hands under her armpits and dragged her from under the track. Panting, he fell backwards on the sand. He got up and went back to his medical bag.

  As Peter was taking out his supplies the overseer went to the woman, drew his pistol, aimed between her staring, pleading eyes, and shot her.

  The other women winced and one cried out.

  ‘You bastard!’

  Claire went for the guard, who held up his arm, but did not point the pistol at her. Claire slapped at him.

  Peter was fuming, but he took hold of Claire and dragged her away.

  ‘Sir, take control of your woman,’ the overseer said.

  ‘Where is your commanding officer?’ Peter said, not trying to disguise his disgust.

  The man looked lazily over his shoulder. ‘Coming, now.’

  Peter and Claire saw a young lieutenant striding towards them.

  ‘What’s all this . . . ?’ The man stopped, clicked his heels together and saluted when he saw Peter. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Your man . . . just shot this woman in cold blood.’

  The officer looked from Peter to the overseer, who shrugged. ‘She would have died anyway.’

  ‘I would have been the judge of that,’ Peter said. ‘And in any case, what right does this underling have to become judge, jury and executioner? What have these women done wrong?’

  The lieutenant’s face was red with acne, but his eyes were those of an old man, not a teenager. ‘They are sympathisers of the Herero and Nama rebels. Our job is to get this railway line built, on time, at any cost. We are a long way from the nearest town, and we cannot waste resources, sir, on transporting prisoners to a clinic when they would surely die on the way.’

  ‘How many have you lost, so far?’ Peter asked, his fists clenched in barely contained fury.

  The young officer scratched his head under his peaked cap. ‘Hard to say, sir, maybe five or six hundred. There are plenty more where these came from, in Lüderitz on the Todesinsel, so there is no risk that we will not make our target. Trust me, sir, these women are happier out here in the desert than back in the camp at Shark Island – they say some Herero kill themselves when they learn they are to be sent there.’

  Peter’s jaw dropped. He looked to Claire who just gave a small shake of her head, as if to tell him to drop it. She had reined in her anger, for now at least.

  ‘Have you seen a shipment of prisoners head through here in the last day or so, Leutnant?’ Claire asked.

  The man nodded, as if relieved to be asked a civil, easily answered question. ‘Yes, madam, yesterday, from Keetmanshoop. The escort said they were taken during the fighting against the Nama rebel Morengo.’

  ‘I will make a formal report of what I have seen here today,’ Peter said to the young officer.

  He nodded and saluted, but the overseer just gave a half-grin.

  Claire looked at the cowering women and her stomach churned. She remembered the squalor of the South African concentration camp she had passed through. At the time she had thought it terrifying and brutal, but here, in her own homeland, it seemed these innocent victims of war faced not only the prospect of life in a camp, but also being worked to death on the railway line. She found it hard to imagine how life on Shark Island could be worse than this. Two women were ordered to drag the dead woman away, where she was dumped a few metres from the railway line. The overseer barked at the women to get back to work.

  Claire and Peter mounted up and as the three of them moved out of earshot Blake brought his horse next to hers.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  She explained, still using the word the officer had used to describe the camp.

  ‘What does Todesinsel mean?’ Blake asked.

  ‘Island of death.’

  Chapter 44

  Aus, Namibia, the present

  Nick and Anja had stayed up late the evening before in her chalet at the Desert Horse Inn, where she had continued to read and translate for him.

  They met again, as planned, at seven in the morning in the main building for breakfast.

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you up last night,’ Nick said as he came to her table. By habit she had arrived five minutes early.

  He had a sad face, she decided. He could become animated at times, such as when she came to a particularly interesting part of Dr Kohl’s story, but he was troubled, mostly. All the same, she found she enjoyed his company. ‘No problem.’

  He took a seat and they both ordered coffee from a waiter.

  ‘Can I ask you a question, please, Nick?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘You and Susan Vidler . . . ?’ she said, leaving the question open.

  ‘It was terrible, what happened to her.’

  He was not giving much away. ‘Yes, I agree. As much as she could be annoyingly persistent, I would not wish what happened to her on anyone. Nick . . . ?’

  ‘Yes?’ He looked at her.

  ‘Were you and Susan . . . close?’

  He looked away and she had her answer. ‘I’d only known her a very short time, but yes, we were close.’

  Now she felt embarrassed and she was sure it showed on her face. Anja knew what had interested her in the story – some possible supporting evidence for her theory of the origins of the desert horses – but she wondered what had motivated Nick to come all this way. ‘What are you looking for?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know. I mean, this is important to me because Blake was a relative, but I can’t really convince myself that there is a fortune in gold buried somewhere here in Namibia, no matter what Scott Dillon thinks.’

  ‘So you’re not in this for the money?’

  He gave a small smile. ‘I didn’t even realise there was money involved when I decided to come. Plus, I gave up thinking that I would die a rich man a long time ago. I liked writing for newspapers, but I guess I didn’t have drive, you know?’

  She regarded him. ‘I don’t think you lack drive – you are here pursuing a story more than a hundred years old, and possibly on the trail of a man who will rob and kill to get what he wants. No, I think if you have lacked anything it was maybe a purpose.’

  He seemed to think about that. She hoped she hadn’t offended him; Anja was nothing if not direct, which was a polite way of saying she was bossy and intolerant of other people’s flaws. An ex-boyfriend had called her arrogant, which had hurt her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it. ‘I have put my foot in it, again.’

  Nick poured coffee into both their cups. He was quiet for a few seconds, and the longer the silence drew out the harder her heart beat. He smiled. ‘You may be right.’

  ‘Phew.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘my work was everything to me when I was young, working in journalism, and I thought I was the king of the heap, even though I was a very ordinary reporter. I was never going to be a big name on a major daily newspaper or on TV. I didn’t like getting in peo
ple’s faces.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with that, some reporters can be very rude.’

  ‘Rudeness, determination, call it what you want, I didn’t have it. I think if I had my time over again I’d write a novel, maybe.’

  ‘And why do you have to have your time again? Why not start now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Bills to pay, my age.’

  ‘Now you are sounding defeatist. You will have a story to tell when we get to the end of this – we both will.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He smiled. ‘When I first contacted you, you didn’t want to know me.’

  Anja felt embarrassed. ‘I was foolish, jealous, overprotective of my work, and maybe of myself.’

  ‘What about you? Is there someone waiting somewhere for you?’

  She felt herself blushing. ‘No, just my research. And the desert horses.’

  ‘As awful as it is, what happened to Susan and Lili and you, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . alive? Is that terrible?’

  ‘No. I’m excited as well, and I want to know how the horses fit into all this,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ he said slowly.

  Anja could see that Nick was not surprised by her comment. His question had been, she thought, more one of admiration, or respect. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That shows incredible dedication, Anja.’

  ‘Thank you. Some gold would be nice, as well.’

  He laughed.

  ‘We have to do this, Nick,’ Anja said, serious again. ‘This Dillon man needs to be shown he cannot treat people the way he did, and if he killed Susan, or had her killed, then he must be brought to justice.’

  ‘I agree. We go to the cops as soon as we confirm our suspicions, yes?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. We are not investigators, or vigilantes. As much as I hate what those men did to me I will not take the law into my own hands.’

  ‘I wonder how Blake and Claire Martin would have handled someone like Dillon,’ Nick said.

  ‘With Mauser rifles, I imagine.’

  They set off straight after breakfast and when they hit a straight, smooth road she did nothing to discourage him from sitting on the maximum speed limit. He slowed as they passed the desert horse waterhole at Garub and even after years of research Anja still pressed a hand to the window, lovingly, as they passed a mare with a young foal. He drove on.

  The road followed the course of the railway line.

  ‘It’s terrible to think of the people who died building this,’ Nick said, ‘and that poor woman who was shot after the piece of track fell on her.’

  Anja contemplated the cost in silence. She had read about the concentration camps and the work parties. ‘It’s said that of the two thousand Herero and Nama who worked on the line about thirteen hundred of them died during construction.’

  Nick shook his head.

  The countryside became even more foreboding, if that was possible. The stubbly grass the horses fed on gave way to a wide valley amid sand dunes. As they come closer to Lüderitz a billowing curtain of sand was being blown across the road.

  ‘No point trying to speed through the sand,’ Anja said. ‘If you go faster, trying to outrun a sandstorm, you just make the abrasiveness of the grains worse.’

  Nick nodded and kept his speed steady. After an hour and twenty minutes, most of it spent in silence, they saw old buildings coming up on the left.

  ‘That’s Kolmanskop,’ Anja said. ‘It was a diamond mining town, from the boom after the First World War. It was said that champagne was more plentiful and cheaper than water there during the town’s heyday. Now it’s a ghost town that’s been reclaimed by the desert.’

  Nick looked over at the grand mansions and mining buildings where wind and sand had broken down doors and windows and half filled the interiors. It was a bizarre sight. ‘If the desert can swallow a town, someone like Dillon might never find a stash of buried gold, even if he knew where to look. This place is so desolate, it’s a wonder anyone ever bothered to settle here.’

  ‘The British claimed the best port on the Atlantic coast, at Walvis Bay, and kept it to themselves as a separate enclave for decades,’ Anja explained. ‘The Germans had to make do with Lüderitz, even though it had no fresh water. They used condensers to desalinate sea water.’

  Their first views of Lüderitz revealed it for what it still was, a small town clinging to the edge of the desert, with its back to the Atlantic and Europe beyond. Even from their first glance they could tell that in many ways not much had changed since the early 1900s.

  ‘It looks like a German village that’s been prefabricated and dropped into Africa,’ Nick said.

  ‘That’s exactly what it was.’

  Anja directed him through the compact coastal town. Normally a trip to Lüderitz was either a pleasant diversion from life in the desert, or a necessary chore, depending on how she was feeling. In either case she rarely thought about the seaside village’s sinister past.

  On Hafen Street she pointed to a shopping complex on the right and the restaurant where Joanne Dillon had suggested they meet, Essenzeit. ‘That’s the old waterfront area.’ On the left, across the road, was an historic building perched high on a bluff, now a cafe but once the headquarters of the Woermann shipping line, she explained to Nick.

  ‘Let’s go to Dillon’s hotel,’ Nick said.

  Anja shook her head and took a deep breath. ‘Maybe let me handle this, Nick?’ Anja said. ‘I did meet Dillon in Windhoek and maybe he doesn’t know that you and I are working together. If he’s the one who ended up with all my stolen data then he would have seen that I didn’t have a copy of Peter Kohl’s manuscript at that time. He might be more willing to meet me.’ She nervously took out her phone and a beer coaster and started composing an SMS.

  ‘What are you writing?’ Nick asked.

  Anja showed him the coaster. ‘Scott gave me his number in Windhoek and he knew that I was going to be in this part of the country. I’ll send him an innocent message asking if he wants to catch up. I’ll tell him I’m going to Shark Island; we can finish reading the manuscript while we wait for him.’

  Chapter 45

  The desert east of Lüderitz, German South West Africa, 1906

  Blake, Claire and Peter had to wrap their faces and keep their eyes screwed to slits to keep out the worst of the sand as their horses trekked wearily through the desert.

  Blake drew alongside Peter. ‘And you and Claire paid money to buy a piece of this bloody place?’

  Peter laughed. He was that sort of bloke, Blake had learned, someone who could manage to keep his spirits high and a smile on his face most of the time. Having said that, Blake knew the battles at and around Narudas had affected the doctor.

  Blake had come to like the affable German in the days since the incident at the railway line. Peter had been shaken by the killing of the woman and they had talked about it, around the fire, as well as about some of the things Blake had seen in his time in Africa.

  ‘In Australia you have the desert as well, yes?’ Peter said.

  ‘Yes, mate, but you won’t catch me going there, especially after this. I’ve seen enough sand to last me a lifetime.’

  ‘Yet still you stay, Blake. Will you ever leave Africa?’

  ‘Might have to, the way I’m going now. I’d like to find a beach again. The water’s probably the only thing I miss about Australia.’

  Peter gestured ahead. ‘Where we are going there is nothing but beach! However, the water is so cold that you will freeze to death, and if you don’t, the lions that roam the coastline feeding on dead whales and seals and shipwrecked sailors will kill you.’

  Claire looked over and managed a smile for both of them. She was beautiful, but that simple smile hurt Blake. He had a terrible sense of foreboding. There was something about this journey to rescue Liesl, the helplessness of it, that made it feel, mo
re than any other mission he’d been on during the war, like a one-way trip.

  They hadn’t formulated a plan and Blake had seen there was no need to restrain or intimidate Peter. Blake sensed Peter was on this journey to learn for himself what was happening with the Nama and Herero prisoners, not because he was being coerced. The fact was that he could have easily slipped away in the night and ridden back to Aus and raised the alarm, but somehow Blake knew that he wouldn’t.

  Early the next morning Blake saw a cliff face of fog hanging on the horizon, beyond the dunes.

  ‘That is the Atlantic,’ Peter said. ‘We are nearly there.’

  He almost sounded sad, Blake thought, as if he were sorry they were approaching their destination.

  They had found signs of the Nama prisoners and their escorts: still-warm embers from campfires, wagon ruts in the sand and, worst of all, as they neared the coast, the body of a young woman who had been mauled by hyenas in the night.

  Blake and Peter had scooped out a hollow in the sand and buried the girl.

  They stood next to the grave in silence for a minute and Claire said a Hail Mary softly. Blake saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. Peter nodded to him and Blake went to her and put an arm around her. She buried her face in his chest.

  Peter went to his horse and, without looking back at them, mounted and rode off slowly. They caught up with him soon enough, but Blake sensed they had crossed yet another invisible line. They said nothing as they approached the town, which was close enough now to detect the fresh tang of sea salt and the stench of human waste, and walked their tired horses up the final rise.

  ‘My God, it’s grown,’ Claire said, as they paused atop the dune and took in the sight below.

  ‘The war,’ Peter said.

  Blake could see Peter was right. It seemed every second person they saw on the street below them was in the uniform of the Schutztruppe. A platoon of soldiers was marching in step down the road while others lounged outside a line of stores. There was the sound of orders barked, a donkey braying and the shriek of a woman from somewhere.