by Tony Park
‘Your husband didn’t know?’ Sannie managed to make the question sound empathetic rather than accusatory.
Janet shook her head. ‘I doubt he would have cared. Probably would have been mad that it was Nick, but no, the fact that I was sleeping with another man wouldn’t have unduly concerned him. We had what you might call an unspoken arrangement.’
‘So if he was having an affair . . . ?’
Janet looked at Sannie and stopped. Tom stayed a pace behind them. ‘I’ve told you, as I’ve told the others, everything I know about my husband’s movements, publicly and privately for, oh, two weeks prior to his departure for Africa. In answer to your question, though, his schedule would not have allowed him fifteen minutes with anyone I was unaware of for at least a month prior to his death.’
‘But he’d slept with at least one other woman,’ Tom said. Sannie and Janet turned to face him, as if only now aware of his presence. ‘Have you ever heard of an African woman named Precious Tambo, who also went by the name of Ebony?’
A laugh escaped Janet’s mouth, then she seemed to make an effort to compose herself. ‘My husband would never have slept with a woman.’
‘You’re saying he was gay?’ Sannie asked.
Janet took a pace away from both of them and looked at Tom, then Sannie, spending a couple of seconds simply gazing at each of the detectives. Tom saw the faraway look in her eyes, as though her mind was processing some new information, and the hint of a smile flash across her face then disappear just as quickly.
‘You came here thinking he was having an affair, with a woman, didn’t you?’
Tom and Sannie glanced at each other, but said nothing.
‘What a stupid bloody berk I’ve just been! I’ve spilled my guts to you about Nick and me, thinking that somehow my being with him might have compromised him, might have kept him from doing his duty sometime, or distracted him from the job of looking after Robert. But that wasn’t it at all, was it? You came here to drag Robert’s name through the mud. Bloody hell.’
‘Mrs Greeves –’ Tom held up a hand, but she cut him short.
‘Get out. Get off my property right now.’
‘Janet . . .’
‘I’m calling my lawyer. I’d leave if I were you.’
‘How bad was it, Janet?’ Tom asked.
She paused, holding the phone up, showing him she was searching for the lawyer’s name in the memory. ‘What?’
‘How bad was what he did to you, to your family?’
‘Robert’s dead. It doesn’t matter.’ Janet sounded bitter rather than relieved. She let her hand drop, the phone hanging limp by her side as her anger abated. She looked away from them, back towards her home. ‘We have a fine son and a daughter who is finding her way. Robert never hurt either of them and they’ll have a hard enough time in life without a father. They need never know. It’s best for the Party and the government as well that Robert died a hero.’
‘Tell us, please,’ Sannie said. ‘They need never know what? It might be crucial to finding his killers.’
‘No, Inspector, it won’t make a jot of difference, and I have nothing more to say to either of you. Please go and leave me, my children and my late husband in peace. Believe me, it’s better this way.’
‘And if his killers go free?’ Sannie, Tom saw, was having a hard time maintaining her cool exterior.
Janet shrugged, lifted the phone and started to dial.
‘Come on,’ Tom whispered. ‘Let’s go.’
*
In the car, Sannie checked her watch for the third time in ten minutes as Tom hurtled back down the M40 towards London. ‘Relax, I’ll have you there in plenty of time.’
‘I’m regretting going to see that woman already.’
Tom shrugged. ‘Nothing we can do about it now. And it definitely helped, having you there. I don’t think she would have opened up quite as much to me if I was alone.’
‘So, was Greeves bisexual, or a closet gay? Was that his big secret?’
Tom indicated and overtook a lorry, turning on the windscreen wipers to clear the sooty, exhaust-coloured sleet from the hire car’s windscreen. ‘Well, he slept with a stripper, we know that much. It was odd, though, that Janet seemed so incredulous that he was having an affair with a woman.’
‘Does any of this – their personal life – have a connection to the abductions or the terrorists?’
Tom thought about the question. There were surprises at every turn in this investigation, not the least of which was the revelation that Nick Roberts had been having an affair with the wife of the man he was supposed to be protecting. ‘Nick was privy to all the family’s secrets, by the look of it. I reckon that as well as going to the newspapers, Precious Tambo probably contacted Greeves direct. Greeves might have sent Nick to negotiate with her, and maybe make her an offer bigger than anything Fisher or Carney could match.’
‘Well, they don’t look like they’re short of money.’
Tom nodded. ‘Interesting that she didn’t share her husband’s passion for Africa.’
‘Hmm. You picked up on that “he” spoke about buying property rather than “we”.’
‘Sounds like they would have been spending their retirements on different continents,’ Tom said.
Another thought came to the forefront of his mind. It was something he had been mulling over for the past two days. ‘Have your people done an analysis of the video tapes of Nick and Greeves being executed?’
‘No,’ Sannie said. ‘We’ve asked to see them, but so far your government won’t even send us a copy. We’ve seen tapes of Greeves’s appearance on the television, but that’s all. We’ve been told we’ll get the results once your security service people have gone over them.’
That in itself was interesting. The video stored on the hard drive of the portable playback unit hadn’t gone into police custody. Tom imagined that the SAS had handed it over to the Secret Intelligence Service, which would have had a representative present at the operations base in South Africa.
The traffic became thicker and slower as they closed in on London, joining the A40 when the M40 ended, stop-starting their way through the western outskirts of the capital. ‘Shepherd’s Bush – you’ll be right at home here. This is where all the japies hang out.’
She looked out the window at the rows of shops, terraces and tenement blocks. ‘I don’t know how so many people can cram into one city. I’m claustrophobic already.’
Tom gave a sparse sightseeing commentary as they crawled along. When she saw a sign telling them they were in Notting Hill, Sannie said, ‘I remember the movie. With Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Lovely.’
‘I remember the race riots here, in 1976. I was just a kid, but it was ugly.’
‘Same year as Soweto. I hope we’re learning, Tom.’
Talking of Africa, there was something else he remembered that he wanted to ask Sannie. ‘What do you know about monkeys?’
She looked at him askance. ‘A little. I grew up with them all around me on the farm, and I see them in the bush sometimes. Why?’
‘How would the terrorists have captured them?’
‘It wouldn’t be hard. If you park a car with some food in it – bananas, bread, marshmallows; anything, really – they’ll get into it. All you’d have to do is put some bait in the back of a bakkie and be quick enough to lock them in. You could dart them, too, I suppose.’
‘What about the one that was tied down to the bed? Are they easy to hold down?’
‘No ways, man,’ Sannie said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘They’d bite and scratch you nearly to death. That one would have been darted or doped somehow. What are you thinking, Tom?’
He ignored her question, pointing out Hyde Park on their right as they cruised past. They crossed the Thames on Vauxhall Bridge, and when they turned left onto the Albert Embankment, Tom pointed out the office block where SO1 Specialist Protection was housed, Tintagel House, and landmarks between it and the hotel where Sannie
was staying, a short walk away.
‘Here we are,’ he said, stopping the car outside the Thistle. ‘Let’s meet up after you’ve finished with Shuttleworth, but I don’t want to be seen too close to work, given that I’m not supposed to be working the case.’
‘What about near the Houses of Parliament somewhere – I’d like to take a look at the Palace of Westminster from the outside, before the inquiry, get my bearings,’ Sannie said.
‘Perfect,’ Tom said. ‘When you’re finished, walk back across the river on Lambeth Bridge. There’s a pub across the road from the palace, called St Stephen’s Tavern. I’ll be there in two hours, by which time you’ll hopefully be finished. I’m going to find an internet cafe in the meantime.’
Sannie paused before opening the car door. ‘Do you think Janet Greeves will have called your Chief Inspector Shuttleworth?’
‘I’m afraid so. Good luck.’
24
Back in her hotel room, Sannie brushed her hair, fixed her makeup and walked back out into the bitter London cold. She found her way to Waterloo station and bought a British Rail ticket for the one-stop ride to Vauxhall. Already she was confused. As well as the London Underground – the tube, which she had heard about – apparently there were other trains.
The station was overwhelming, with its throngs of people rushing past her. Everyone seemed to know where they were going. She stopped a young man to ask directions, but he only spoke Spanish. An elderly English woman was more helpful. The train was warm but crowded.
By the time she alighted at Vauxhall’s mainline station she wondered whether it would have been easier, in fact, to walk. Using the A-Z Tom had loaned her, Sannie found her way back to the Thames and the Albert Embankment.
She recognised the distinctive architecture of Vauxhall Cross, the home of Britain’s overseas intelligence organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service – SIS or MI6 – from a James Bond film she’d seen.
It had to be the most ostentatious secret building in the world. It looked like some futuristic temple, inspired, though, by the ancient Mayan or Mesopotamian stepped pyramids. Deep green shoots of glass, which looked to be thick enough to stop a rocket, sprouted from its angular beige terraces. Security men dressed all in black added to the Hollywood image of the spies’ nest, which was topped off by a pair of bizarre giant white springs, festooned in turn with satellite dishes and radio antennae.
If Vauxhall Cross was like something from a George Lucas movie, the Metropolitan Police’s old office building further down the Albert Embankment was straight out of the days of black and white television. It was an office block in the truest sense. No funky futuristic lines here – just an uninspiring, faintly depressing, sixties monolith of pale concrete and red brick that was grubby with age.
A bored-looking civilian security guard asked for her identity and pointed the way across the marbled floor, the only concession to flamboyance in the building, to the lift lobby. When she got out of the lift the stone was gone, replaced by dirty grey carpet tiles. She came to a wooden door with a glass panel and pushed a buzzer. It seemed she was expected, because when she said her name to a woman squirrelled away somewhere inside, the electronic lock clicked and Sannie pushed open the door.
Before her was mostly empty office space which could have been populated by any bunch of bureaucrats anywhere in the world. It was fitted out with computer workstations. Two men and a woman in plain clothes were tapping away on keyboards. A mousy woman with horn-rimmed glasses looked up and said, ‘Inspector Rensburg, is it?’ The woman spoke loud and slowly, in the way that ignorant tourists do when they think slowing their delivery and increasing their volume will somehow make a non-English speaker pick up a few words.
‘Van Rensburg.’
‘Chief Inspector Shuttleworth’s waiting for you. Corner office.’
‘Baie dankie.’ Sannie smiled to herself as she headed for the office, and casually wiped her right hand on the side of her black pants. With her other she brushed an imaginary stray hair from her forehead.
A man in his early fifties, with a thinning pate and the deep-etched lines of stress defining his gaunt face, opened the door before she reached it and said, ‘Hello, I’m David Shuttleworth. You must be Susan?’
It started cordially, with the pair of them making tea in the office kitchen before getting down to business. Outside, the sky was still a uniform grey and it seemed to match the skin tone of most of the people she’d so far seen in this cold, crowded city. She knew the politeness would soon disappear. Shuttleworth ushered her into his office, which was a fishbowl on one side of the floor. He lowered slimline blinds to stop the other detectives from peering in.
‘I’ve had a call from Robert Greeves’s widow,’ Shuttleworth began.
Sannie sighed. It had been too much to hope that the woman’s fear of some defamatory news about her husband leaking out might have led her to keep quiet about their unauthorised visit.
‘Inspector Van Rensburg.’ All trace of civility had fallen with the blinds. ‘I have no authority over you, but let me assure you that you most certainly do not have any jurisdiction here to be interviewing relatives of a deceased British politician.’
‘Of course not, Chief Inspector, and I’m –’
‘If it were up to me I’d have you on the next plane back to South Africa. Do you not think that we’ve looked into Robert Greeves’s home life already?’
Sannie knew that any response from her at this point would be the wrong one, so she kept her silence.
‘I know Furey’s looking for someone else to put the blame on, some slip-up by Greeves or Roberts that might have made it inevitable that the terrorists would kill them, and that there was nothing Tom could have done to prevent it. But that is not the case.’
Sannie wasn’t so sure about that, but again she held her tongue.
‘From what I heard about you while I was in South Africa you’re lucky to be still on the job. You let him lead you off on a wild-goose chase that –’
‘That very nearly caught the people responsible and freed the hostages.’
Shuttleworth was having none of it. He stood and put his hands on his desktop, then leaned forward, closing the distance between them. ‘Very nearly is not good enough. You two were playing catch-up all the time, and the villains outran you. Simple as that.’
‘Tom Furey was the only one on the trail of those men and it wasn’t his fault that they got away. Those are the facts of this case, and that’s what I’ll be telling your parliamentary inquiry, Chief Inspector.’
Shuttleworth sat down again and smoothed his tie. He looked, Sannie thought, like a man who did not raise his voice very often, especially not to women. She saw him struggling to retrieve his dour, unflustered demeanour. She also saw it as her opportunity to start questioning him. ‘When will the South African Police Service be given copies of the execution tapes?’
Shuttleworth frowned. ‘They’ll get our analysis of the tapes when I do.’
‘So you don’t have them?’
He sighed. ‘The SAS handed them over to the security service. They have their own state-of-the-art video analysis and forensics people. They’ll do as thorough a job as anyone else.’
Sannie could sense the man’s annoyance, not at her but, as she had guessed, at the fact that a government agency other than the police had grabbed such important evidence and was not sharing it; he had given her the company line and wasn’t happy about it. The police were spinning their wheels in this investigation, and it clearly rankled the Scotsman.
Shuttleworth lifted his chin. ‘How are your people doing with the burned-out vehicle and lists of people who entered the Kruger Park in the days before the abductions?’
Sannie explained that the licence plates on the torched Isuzu belonged to another vehicle. ‘It was a BMW sedan which was car-jacked two days before the abductions. However, the registration number didn’t show up on the lists of vehicles entering the park, which means the gang must ha
ve switched plates after entering. The chassis number was traced to the current owner, a Pakistani surgeon living in Pretoria.’
Shuttleworth’s eyes widened at her mention of the doctor’s heritage.
‘Doctor Pervez Khan hasn’t fit the profile of a terrorist suspect so far, though,’ she admitted. ‘We’ve checked him out. Wealthy, single – divorced, actually. A drinker and a bit of a midlife-crisis party boy, from what the detectives investigating him so far have learned.’
‘They’ve questioned him, then?’
‘No. He didn’t show up at his practice two days before Greeves and Joyce were taken. Our missing persons unit already had a file open on him. His business partner reported him gone. Best guess so far is that he was car-jacked and killed. We’ve circulated his photo and a description of the destroyed vehicle to the media, but had no witnesses come forward.’
‘Why would a doctor be driving an old pick-up truck?’
Sannie nodded. She had asked the investigating officers the same thing. Doctor Khan, she explained to Shuttleworth, owned a small holding in the Timbavati private nature reserve, on the border of Kruger, and used the four-wheel drive as a second vehicle for going to his bush retreat. ‘His late-model Mercedes was in for a service at the time he went missing, so he was using his bakkie as a temporary replacement.’
Shuttleworth asked if the police had checked out the doctor’s lodge for signs of recent occupation. ‘The detectives who visited his lodge said there was no sign of any recent vehicle movements, and the caretaker, an elderly African man who lived there with his wife, said the “boss” had not visited for weeks.’
‘Hmm. So we can add the good doctor to our list of victims, then?’
‘I suppose so. Even if he was involved with the gang, he’d be pretty stupid to use his own vehicle, changed plates or not. Also, his name doesn’t show up on the national park’s entry register. In fact, on that day there were no names recorded of people riding in or driving Isuzus that sounded remotely Pakistani.’