by Tim Willocks
He decided to abandon the rucksack. He took his gun and clipped the holster on his hip. He clipped the Gerber knife to his belt. He put his badge in his pocket, with some paper money and a credit card. He kept his hat on. He put the monocular to his eye. The tyre tracks were still there. Navigation at least was no real problem. On the rocky ground any one track was inconstant, disappearing for tens of metres at a stretch, but there were four of them. The black and green image always revealed some unnatural imperfection in the dust or the scrub. He would pick a mark fifty metres away and lower the monocular and walk blind towards it, then he would spot the next.
Turner dropped the rucksack and walked on.
His destination at any given moment shrank to the next mark. He didn’t think about the road. He didn’t think about kilometres. Keep the target small and slow, grind it down, turn the mountain into dust, the sea into sand. He felt more vulnerable without the rucksack, more naked, but that was just his mind. His body felt more free. Walk, spot, walk, spot. Do it again. The tedium was immense but he set it as his purpose. If he let the tedium chafe him it would burn him out. Resentment, boredom, impatience, desire, hope, all these would sap him, one molecule at a time. He surrendered his spirit to bleak and mindless repetition. He embraced the nature of slow.
He didn’t think. Thinking used energy, psychological and real. Beyond the next step, the next mark, there was nothing to usefully think about. The only subjects he might consider were grim: the blood and death that lay behind him, the blood and death that lay ahead. He did not conjure memories or fantasies; whether they evoked pleasure or regret, anger or sadness, they too would weaken him, because they were not of this slow dry world, this world that had destroyed everything upon it except dust and rock and the barest of skeletal plants, a world that had defined itself by killing anything that moved. He found no beauty here. He did not look for it. Beauty too could only weaken him.
It was Tuesday. Five hours until daylight, when conditions could only get worse. Don’t think about it. Don’t think at all. He stopped and raised the monocular and scanned the ugly green blur for the tracks and his next mark. There it was.
Turner lowered the monocular and walked on.
Part Three: Tuesday
Ride it Till it Crashes
35
They awoke just after six and before their dreams had faded they made love again with the same primal appetite that had consumed them the night before. Afterwards, Iminathi sat up and hugged her knees, hid her face between her arms. She was afraid. For a few hours she felt she had had everything she wanted or needed. Now, in the daylight, she was going to lose it all.
‘I’m going to Pretoria tomorrow,’ said Dirk. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘I’d love to.’ She didn’t raise her head.
‘Imi, what’s wrong?’
She got up and went to the bathroom and locked the door. She showered quickly and wrapped herself in a towel. She looked at herself in the mirror. Dirk had changed since she’d last seen him. Not in any radical sense; yet he seemed stronger, more comfortable with himself. Maybe because he was now an advocate. If she kept the secret she held – if she joined with Margot in protecting Dirk from the truth – there was a chance they could be together again, out of Margot’s reach. She would not let Margot intimidate and manipulate her again. She would call her bluff. But then the secret and all it represented – cowardice, greed, and murder for greed and more – would sooner or later poison the love she felt. She felt that poison already. But if she told Dirk that he was a killer, that his mother was a killer, she took the risk of losing Dirk forever right there and then.
She went back into the bedroom.
‘Let me take a leak,’ said Dirk.
While he was in the bathroom Imi dug the micro SD card and adapter from her jeans. Dirk’s laptop sat on the sofa, its screen dark. She hit the space key and it asked for a password. Dirk reappeared with a towel wrapped round his waist.
‘What’s your password?’
‘I haven’t changed it,’ said Dirk.
She typed it in. It pleased him that she remembered. She inserted the data card. She stood up to face him.
‘I didn’t come here last night to fall in love again.’
‘I never stopped being in love with you.’
‘Neither did I.’
He blinked, puzzled, and started to form a question. ‘Then why –’
‘That story can wait. I’ve something else to tell you. Something I have to show you. It’s difficult and painful and shocking. It may change the way you feel about me. But you have the right to know. I believe you would want to know. Others have kept it from you. People have died to keep it from you. But I can’t, because I love you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
She crouched before the computer and opened the file and clicked play. Dirk watched over her shoulder. The first few seconds of an unsteady shot of Jason’s farmyard and house appeared. She paused the film. She didn’t have the courage to look at Dirk. She didn’t know what she would see.
‘That’s Jason’s farm,’ he said. He noted the time and date frozen on the image. ‘Yesterday morning?’ There was a sudden authority in his voice. His lawyer’s voice. ‘This is a dash-cam video. How did you get it?’
‘It’s brutal. It’s sad. It’s horrifying, even for me. I can’t watch it with you. You need to watch it alone.’
Dirk’s face filled with questions and forebodings.
Imi knew that he knew that Jason was dead. Violently, unnaturally, unexpectedly and needlessly dead. She knew – she had known, she had felt; she had embraced, in the hope of healing with love the wound – that Dirk’s grief had been an element in the intensity of the sexual passion into which he and she had plunged. She had shared, to heal herself too, in that element. When death is shoved into your face – with killings and terror and shotgun blasts – the only intelligent response, primitive though it may be, is the fundamental affirmation of life.
She saw Dirk’s confusion, his dread. What he was about to discover was worse than anything he could imagine. The remorse-less logic of reality could not be refuted. His best friend was dead and the nameless girl was dead, because Dirk had drunk too much peach brandy, in the wrong place by metres and at the wrong time by seconds.
Her heart clenched. She was inflicting this torment on him; no one else. She suddenly understood why Margot would go so far to spare him. She was afraid of the guilt and rage to which he was entitled. She was even more afraid that he would see, and take, the way out that Margot had created. How could he not see it?
Dirk was the key, the centre. He always had been, even if he hadn’t known it. Dirk and the nameless girl. They had all realised that long before Imi had. Jason, Hennie, Winston, Margot, Simon, Rudy; Venter. And most of all Turner, who had chosen the risk of death over profit. Now six men had died. The Britzes, who had worked this land for 130 years, had been eradicated. Turner himself was dying.
Now it was out their hands, all of them. Hers too. It was in Dirk’s hands, where it had always belonged. She had put it there. Nothing more she could do or say.
‘I’ll wait for you on the balcony.’
Imi slid the glass door open and stepped outside and closed the door again. She sat with her back to the room. She looked out over the grounds and tried not to think. The grounds were beautiful, a miracle in a land without water. With that she thought of Turner.
She believed he was still alive. There was still time if Dirk would help her. Even so, she was ashamed she had lacked the courage to show the film to him last night as she’d planned. She was still stunned inside by the intensity of what had occurred between them. That she hadn’t planned, or expected. It had rolled over her in a tide of pure compulsion that emanated from all she was, body and soul. She had felt the same from Dirk. But civilisation was the history of successfully quelling such moments.
She had quelled them herself, betrayed herself for the cheap little company hou
se with which Margot had bought her off. She had never given Dirk the chance to stand up to Margot. She’d ended the relationship as Margot wanted without telling Dirk why. She had had more faith in the mother than she’d had in the son. The man she loved.
Perhaps, if she had believed in him, in his love, in her own right to be so loved, in her own worth, then the unknown girl would still be alive, and Turner would never have come here. She had gone down on her knees before the power and locked the collar round her neck with her own hands. She could have left this town any time. That had been obvious to Turner. She had heard his advice as something like a fantasy. She had been as wrong as anyone else. If Dirk wouldn’t now join her to save Turner’s life, her heart would break. But she would have no right to judge him.
She tried to wipe her mind clear. In a few minutes she would need to be clear. She focused on the landscape, as perfectly demarcated from the world around it as the Garden of Eden. The flower beds and lawns, the arboretum and pools, represented an extravagant feat of engineering; and more than that, a not entirely balanced mind.
The thing that had always fascinated her about Margot’s glorious compound was that no one would ever want to buy it for more than a fraction of what it had cost. No one with that kind of money would dream of relocating to a shabby little sheep and mining town, two hours by plane from the nearest decent restaurant and where even thorn trees struggled to grow. That must have been obvious from the moment this folly was conceived, even to Margot. Above all to Margot. But she hadn’t built it to sell it. She had built it to live in, here, on her land. The land where she had struggled to grow and had flourished beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings except, perhaps, her own. Better to reign in Hell than go to cocktail parties in Heaven.
Many times before, Iminathi had felt these contradictory feelings for this strange, tormented and extraordinary woman who had built this absurd, heroic garden, along with so much else, in the middle of a wasteland. Imi feared her and hated her; she pitied her; she admired her. She was inspired by her. What would Imi have built with the tools Margot had started with? In a culture as brutalising to a sheep farmer’s wife as it was to almost everyone else?
Imi shivered as she realised, for the first time, that she loved Margot. Why couldn’t Margot love her? Why couldn’t they – why shouldn’t they – build a beautiful and remarkable and inspiring family together? Here, in the heart of the Thirstland. Who else could? The Duchess of Cambridge? Some pretty young thing from Pretoria? Imi knew how to live and love and be in this land. She ran in the desert. She had educated her mind. She had observed the workings of its people from Winston’s innermost cave. Her father, as he had told her, had dug a shaft inside it so deep it would bury the tallest building in Africa. She and Dirk and Margot could build that family, and all the others would follow them.
Imi held her breath, captivated by her vision. Then she saw Margot’s face in her mind, her tragic and human limitations, the crippling emotional blocks that life had installed within her as deeply as she and Imi’s father had dug their great shaft into the Thirstland. The vision vanished like a half-remembered dream.
Dirk slid the glass door open.
His face was drawn and pale. Grief and horror and guilt competed with his need to think. He had just learned that he had killed a young woman, on the word of his best friend. Imi had never warmed to Jason; he was pathetic and racist, stranded and alone; but she had respected Dirk’s easy – natural, inevitable – affection and loyalty towards him. Jason was dirt. The same dirt Margot was risen from, which was why Margot had despised him. Dirk could easily have abandoned him, but he never did. He had followed his heart. And he had just watched that friend die, his enormous, muscle-armoured body reduced to meat by the man she wanted Dirk to save.
‘How long have you known that I killed the girl?’
‘Since Sunday night, when Turner explained it to Winston.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘It was police business –’
‘It was my business, Imi.’ His muscles were tight with contained anger. His eyes were cold. ‘I had a right to know.’
‘I tried to call you yesterday when I realised what was going on. Your phone wasn’t working.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not blaming you. I’m not angry with you.’ He turned away. ‘Everyone knew about this but me.’
It seemed like a question. ‘Yes.’
‘They kept me cooped up like a chicken and fed me a pack of lies. The Wi-Fi, my phone, the farm attack. All the people I trusted most.’ He turned back. ‘That’s how much they respect me.’
‘I don’t think that’s the way your mother sees it.’
‘Oh please. There is no other way to see it. I can’t blame them, either. If that’s the way they see me, whose fault can it be but mine?’ His mouth twisted. ‘“If Margot told him to cut his own ears off, he’d ask her to pass him a knife.” Jesus. A stranger comes to town and within hours he’s learned that that’s my reputation.’ He swallowed the sour taste in his mouth. ‘Well, that’s going to change.’
He walked back into the bedroom towards the enormous walk-in wardrobe. Iminathi followed him.
‘I want to see Warrant Officer Turner right now. Then I’ll deal with the others.’
‘Turner’s stranded in the desert.’
Dirk stopped. ‘What?’
‘Hennie and Simon captured him yesterday, I saw it. They drove him into the desert in his own car and faked a breakdown. He’s going to die there, unless someone gets him out.’
‘They must be out of their minds.’
‘No, the opposite,’ said Imi. ‘This has escalated far beyond you and the girl. Rudy Britz is dead –’
‘How?’
‘Winston said Turner killed him, but it sounded like it wasn’t true. They plan to finish Turner off today and blame it all on Rudy. They’ve already got a captain here from Cape Town, Eric Venter, to oversee the cover-up. Winston said it fits together like a watch.’
‘And I was supposed to leave tomorrow without knowing a thing.’
‘You could still leave tomorrow.’
‘Imi, I can’t stand by while a man is murdered in my name. I’ve already got two deaths on my conscience, and one was my friend. If I let them get away with it they’ll have their fingers around my throat for the rest of my life. I’ll be one of them. The gates of this prison will never open again. How long has Turner been out there?’
‘Since early yesterday afternoon.’
‘Then he should be alive, unless he’s walked himself to death. If he survives, Hennie and Simon are looking at life sentences, so they’re not going to let us drive out of the gate, not until they’ve done what they need to do.’
‘Can they stop you?’
‘Of course they can stop me. All they have to do is take the car keys. The reckoning with my mother will come but I don’t want that now. By the time it was over Simon would be shoving Turner’s face into the sand. And once Turner’s dead, there’s only your word against theirs. With two police captains on board, they’re not going to be too worried about that.’
‘Winston wouldn’t let them harm me.’
‘They wouldn’t have to. If Mokoena says the plan’s built like a watch then all the evidence will be in their favour. No one will corroborate your testimony and many will contradict it. There’ll just be you, sitting in the witness box, face-to-face with the best lawyers Margot’s money can buy, while you try to impugn two veteran officers. It’s a fantasy. No prosecutor is going to waste millions on a case she can’t win based entirely on your word, and without the support of her own police. Your evidence is worthless.’
‘OK, I get it.’
‘But if Turner survives, they’re doomed.’
‘So how can we help him?’ She watched him thinking.
Dirk went into the wardrobe and came out with a sports bag and two rackets.
‘We’re going to play tennis.’
36
Turner�
��s right heel landed on a stone no bigger than a matchbox and before he knew it his face had raised a small cloud of sun-bleached dust as he hit the ground.
He had negotiated thousands of such stones. He had corrected a hundred such stumbles. Each had taken something out of him that could not be replaced; not here. Again his ankle tipped over and his body lurched and he tried to lower and centre his weight to correct his balance. This time his muscles failed him, along with his nerves, his joints, his eyesight, his strength. He didn’t even manage to throw out a hand or roll to land on his shoulder. He just went down. He lay there and searched for the will to seek the energy that would get him back up.
Some detached pocket of his mind, his last reserve of Zen, observed with fascination. His will had vanished, all of it: conscious, unconscious, instinctive, reflexive. If he had fallen over a day ago, he would have been back on his feet before he’d decided to do it. No input from his mind would have been necessary; his body would have taken care of it. Now he couldn’t feel a single cell that was willing to make the effort to stay alive. They were all of them, in their billions, content to ebb away into the void. And his mind was content to join them. An immense sense of relief filled his awareness. A sense of pure freedom. The crippling burden of existence was about to be lifted from his back.
He didn’t know what time it was. He had thrown his watch away, along with the monocular, to save the weight. If he could have looked at it, whatever it would have told him would have had no meaning. Desert time had absorbed him. Slowness had absorbed his vain and grandiose odyssey as easily as the sand a drop of rain. He had been walking in sunlight for an eternity that might have translated, in the illusion of his former world, into two or three hours. He was long past the sensation of thirst; his system had burned out the means to register it. While it had lasted, while it had risen and spread and intensified, thirst had gnawed its way from the familiar – tongue gritty, lips dry; a cold beer would be nice; it’s getting difficult to swallow on nothing – to the inmost core of his sanity.