Annie and her party took a seat by the window. It had fake Christmassy shapes gummed onto it – snowflakes, stars and angels, hand-cut from crisp white paper. Outside, a busker played carols on an out-of-tune accordion. A burly red-haired man in a dark blue suit sat at a pavement table, smoking, folding open his copy of the Argus.
The aroma of roasted coffee beans and cigars was invigorating – a reminder of more carefree days back home; an antidote to the carbolic and disinfectant and damaged flesh and cloistered men of the Cape Town Military Hospital.
From the waiter, Annie ordered a medium-strength coffee – an “espresso” she was informed, to be delivered from the great steaming contraption behind the counter – with warm milk on the side. And, for the hell of it, and at random, a sugary almond pastry. It was Christmas Day, after all.
“Fatten you up, girl,” cackled Doris Hanwell, way too loudly, reaching over to pinch Annie’s hip. “A man likes something to grab hold of.”
The waiter, a skinny youth below military age, blushed visibly.
“Ain’t that right, sweetheart?” Hanwell added, throwing him a wink.
“Doris,” said Annie. “Leave the poor—”
“Aw, it’s all right, Jones,” she cut off. “This feller’s but one thought on his mind.”
There were six of them altogether, all nurses. Though the function of two of them – Chapel and ApThomas – seemed to be to act as a personal chorus to Hanwell’s bawdiness, tittering at every utterance.
They were doing so again. The waiter skittered off, nearly knocking over some potted pampas grass.
Sullivan rolled her eyes.
“Shut it, Hanwell.”
She nodded towards the overloaded pastry counter where the owner – a portly Italian man with pomaded hair and waxed moustache – appeared to be getting rather hot under his bow-tie and starched collar.
Hissed Hanwell: “It’s bloody Christmas, remember?”
The coffee and cake arrived. The waiter deposited the crockery and cutlery amid much clatter and scuttled away again as fast as he could.
“I hadn’t forgotten,” chimed in McGregor.
Petite, fragile McGregor, reached into the pocket of her skirts and, furtively, pulled out a silver hip flask.
“Rum,” she added, and proceeded to pour a generous tot into each of their drinks.
“You little beauty,” went Hanwell.
Chapel and ApThomas tittered some more.
Annie still couldn’t quite believe it. She was halfway round the world, sitting in a café in Cape Town. She felt a huge pang of guilt. Her absence would spell humiliation for Edward. It was a cruel thing for him to have had to suffer. Male pride was easily bruised, Edward’s more than most. Annie prayed that he did not still hold a candle for her – that he might misconstrue all this as her blowing off steam; some little adventure to get it all out of her system.
McGregor was shaking Annie’s shoulder.
“What?”
“Another tot?”
“Jesus, girl where were you?” asked Hanwell.
“Nowhere.”
“Dreaming about a bloke, more like.”
“Just leave it, Doris!” scolded McGregor, furtively pouring more rum.
Hanwell pulled a face. Her chorus tittered.
They were making a spectacle of themselves, knew Annie. Heads were turning. McGregor urged for hush. The acoustics were such that they were raising their voices unnaturally.
“C’mon, ladies. Sssshhhhhhh.”
The owner, all forced nervous grin, was flitting towards them now across the black and white tiles of the floor, weaving between the tables, light on his feet for someone so rotund.
“Good morning, signorine. Merry Christmas,” he fawned. “I’m so glad you are enjoying yourself. But please, if I may ask …”
He gestured towards the others in his establishment. He had fine, engraved silver clips around his shirtsleeves. His waistcoat was fashioned from gaily swirling crimson silk.
“… my customers.”
“All right. All right,” shrugged off Hanwell.
Annie shot her a look.
“We’re very sorry, sir” she cut in. “It’s our first day off for two months. Truthfully, half-day … It’s a lovely place you have here.”
The man nodded his thanks.
“And Merry Christmas to you too,” added Sullivan.
He retreated to the counter. More customers were entering.
Sullivan turned to Hanwell.
“Jesus, Doris. We’re not even meant to be out unchaperoned,”
The door jangled. An RAMC officer entered. A captain.
“Christ, that’s all we need.”
The man seemed lost in thought. He nodded his own half-hearted festive greeting at the beaming owner and limped over to take his place at a single table in the far corner. Annie watched as he removed a leather-bound notebook and fountain pen from his jacket pocket and tapped out a cigarette.
“Where the bloody hell is Irwin, that trollop?” snapped Hanwell, too loudly again.
The RAMC captain was alone with his musing, staring dolefully out of the window. Though others were casting black looks in their direction.
“Sit tight. She’ll be here,” assured McGregor.
“That lieutenant again?”
“Victoria Rifles,” said Chapel.
“I heard they’re engaged,” offered ApThomas.
“C’mon, let’s go for a stroll,” urged Hanwell.
“She said to wait,” said Sullivan. “She’ll be back.”
“She’d better be,” said Hanwell. “Or we’re royally fucked.”
“HANWELL!”
There was no tittering this time. The room fell deathly silent.
“A bit like she’s being right now, I imagine.”
This time the RAMC officer was glaring at them.
“Jesus, Hanwell,” said McGregor.
Muttered Sullivan: “You’ve gone and down it now, girl …”
The RAMC captain scraped his chair back across the tiles, made a great theatrical show of getting to his feet and limped over towards them. He was middle-age handsome, dark-haired, blue-eyed, slightly haggard.
He cleared his throat.
“Might I remind you, you are in the service of the Royal Army Medical Corps,” he began. “You are to conduct yourself as nurses … as ladies … at all times.”
Hanwell merely sneered up at him.
“Lighten up, mate,” she scoffed. “It’s Christmas for Chrissakes.”
That was it.
“STAND UP NOW! ALL OF YOU!”
The café’s patrons watched agog. Slowly the nurses got to their feet. Aware that he was the centre of attention, the captain strained to keep his voice down.
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve been doing here in the Cape,” he growled. “I do. But this reprimand is for your benefit. Drunk, disorderly and insubordinate? I could have you all up on a charge … And without a chaperone …?”
Annie uttered a private ‘Thank God’ as, at that very moment, the door jangled again and Irwin bustled in, blustering in their direction, scattering empty chairs, red-cheeked, hair dishevelled beneath her straw boater, red cape askew.
“Merry Christmas, Captain,” she said, all feigned doe-eyed innocence, as if butting in on a friendly tête-à-tête. “Staff Nurse Irwin, New South Wales Army Nursing Service Reserve. How can I help you?”
The captain dragged her aside for a quiet word out of their earshot. They remained standing.
He said nothing as he limped out, but Annie did, quietly.
“Bastard.”
Chapter Sixteen
Finch exited Bettega’s café and limped out through its doors. For one who’d never experienced Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere, a dishevelled street musician playing error-strewn carols on an accordion, and in glaring summer sunshine, seemed wildly out of place.
Everything at this present moment in time was topsy-turvy to Finc
h – Yuletide in summer; that he had gone from the carnage of the Front to genteel civility in the space of a train ride. Most of all, there was the fact that Cox was dead – murdered – and in what seemed the most bizarre of circumstances.
Those blasted colonial nurses hadn’t helped his mood. In their grey dresses and boaters they looked like school governesses. Though they weren’t behaving like them. He had been right to admonish them. He was saving their bloody bacon.
In private they could have done as they pleased. These were young women, thousands of miles from home. In the Cape Town Military Hospital they had already seen things no person, not even a nurse, should ever have to. If they got to the Front, they would face horrors to surpass even that. He, more than any, knew how hard nurses worked and how undervalued they were. Hal Lloyd was wrong. It wasn’t going to be the American Century, it was going to be the Female Century.
The streets were still. There was little traffic. No trams. Turning the corner off the main drag, the only other pedestrian about was the well-built man with the red hair who had sat at a pavement table of the café.
Finch rounded the corner onto Empire Street and made for the Belvedere before doubling back to the tobacconist’s to procure two new packets of Navy Cut. The old man behind the counter, with a face like leather and bushy white moustache tainted yellow, bade him Happy Christmas and told him that the British Army had nearly cleaned him out of supplies. This war was good for business.
When Finch stepped outside into the bright sun, the red-haired man, who was wearing a dark blue suit, was loitering on the street corner some 20 yards away, standing on the edge of the kerb as if to hail a cab. He would have little joy this morning.
Damn. Amid the chatter from the tobacconist, Finch had left his change on the counter. He turned on his heel and limped back to recover it. When he exited, the man was still there, this time staring into the window of an obviously closed haberdasher’s shop.
At distance and wearing a bowler, the man was not close enough for Finch to identify facially.
But was he seriously being followed?
When Finch tested his theory by ducking into an alleyway, only for three men of similar attire to pass over the ensuing five minutes, he scolded himself for his paranoia. He shouldn’t have allowed Brookman to get to him.
Back at the hotel, a maid was hauling a basket of sheets upstairs, about to make up his room, but he told her not to bother. Inside, he wrestled his boots off, rubbed his overheated feet, plumped his pillows and propped himself up on the bed. He pulled out the calfskin-bound notebook and his steel fountain pen, lit himself a cigarette – four smokes already today – and inhaled deeply.
Quite what he was going to write, he didn’t know. It was what he had been trying to do in the café. With all that had happened over the previous hours, he felt compelled to put his observations in writing. To which end, he simply wrote down a name, ’Major L Cox’ followed by a subtitle: ’Death Of …’
Finch did this not because of any attempt to solve the riddle of Cox’s death – there were professional law officers there to do that – but because he knew, once he returned to duty, he would be asked questions about what had happened.
His jotting did not amount to much – Cox had arrived in Cape Town on December 23rd and had checked in at his guest house. He had, one assumed – that word again – spent just one night there, for the next evening he went out never to return, at least not alive, his body being dumped on the stoep in the early hours of this morning, the 25th, discovered by the maid. His valuables were intact. It did not appear to be a robbery. Cox had, according to the deputy coroner, consumed a lot of alcohol, but had been killed by something toxic … poisoned … in conjunction with asphyxiation caused by an object forced into his throat.
Finch hadn’t liked the inspector’s playful suggestion that he himself might have been somehow involved. He knew why Brookman had said it. It was a clever way of announcing both his own powers of perception and his simultaneous power over Finch … should he choose to wield it.
He had been impressed with Brookman up till that point, but now wasn’t so sure that he liked him. Maybe it wasn’t his job to like him. Maybe it was Brookman signalling to Finch that he wasn’t there to be liked.
Soon a letter would be dispatched to India informing Cox’s next of kin of his unfortunate demise. All the more reason to get the details down while they were still fresh.
Having spent half an hour scrawling the basics, a muffled gong was sounded in the lobby. Finch had entirely forgotten his appointment for luncheon. Reluctantly, he hauled himself off his bed, wrestled his boots on, smartened himself and went downstairs.
In the dining room, a Christmas meal of roast beef had been prepared by the manageress, which would have been fine had Finch not been forced to share the repast with two other guests – an army chaplain and a sullen lieutenant commander of the Royal Navy, whose cruiser, HMS Sybille, had been performing picket duty off the Cape.
The latter was deeply sceptical of any military operation conducted on dry land and had a low opinion of the army in general, to which the chaplain, an army man himself, merely turned the other cheek, nodding along politely while the lieutenant commander unburdened himself.
Clearly, though both were in uniform, the naval officer took neither Finch nor the chaplain as soldiers. Finch’s days in service had inured him to pomposity. He allowed his thoughts to drift elsewhere – in this case a wistful reminiscence of Christmases of his childhood.
Overjoyed that her guests were fostering an illusion of social discourse, the manageress, a small bustling dynamo of a woman whose skirts swished furiously, uncorked an acidic but potent plum brandy that emboldened the chaplain to lead them all in an improvised and half-baked prayer, a natural conclusion to their festivities.
In the lobby, Finch grabbed yesterday’s Argus, retired to his room again and poured himself a generous measure from his dwindling whisky flask. He tried to keep his eyes open while he entertained the full scope of the British disaster that was unfolding in South Africa, more or less as the naval officer had outlined.
Finch could barely absorb the information, such was the heaviness of his eyelids. His body jerked in a reflexive spasm as his own snoring suddenly caught him unawares. Then he surrendered to it.
Some hours later, he did not know how many, he awoke with a start. It was daytime. He could see thin stripes of light through the shutters. But as he familiarised himself in the semi-darkness, his surroundings now included an additional item – a man standing over him.
Chapter Seventeen
The woman and child stood before the Nama men, the girl absolutely motionless, the woman’s whole body racked with tremors. They were not only grubby but thin, weak, their lips dry and encrusted, scabbed, split open in places. Their exposed skin peeled from sunburn.
It was the little girl who spoke, hesitantly, quietly, her eyes fixed on the ostrich egg slung from the shoulder of one of the Nama. She pointed at it then cupped her hands.
“Please … water.”
Hendrik nodded, the spears were lowered and the egg was passed forward. It was poured alternately between the mouths of the two females who drank as hard and as fast as their throats would allow, the liquid sloshing joyously over their faces.
“Not too much,” cautioned Hendrik. “Too much … not good.”
He patted his stomach to indicate pain.
The sated woman and child slumped to the ground. After her momentary rapture, the woman started shaking again. She began to cough, violently, squatting forward. The child rubbed her back.
There were furious clicks of discussion. Hendrik stood solemnly and listened. Mbutu, mindful of his own part in this drama, felt uncomfortable, standing apart.
Discussion turned to argument. The man Mbutu had pushed out of the way was the most animated, seemingly the spokesman for one of two opposing factions. He glowered at Mbutu between a babble of unintelligible invective. Eventually they ceased. H
endrik stepped forward.
“The men are div—?”
“Divided?”
“Yes, divided … Some want to take the woman, the girl, back, to look after them, care for them.”
Mbutu nodded approval.
“The others ….” Hendrik continued.
There was more clicking.
“… want to kill them.”
“Kill them?
“It is survival,” explained Hendrik, matter of fact. “These people … Others will come looking … Brown men, white women …”
He made a display of interlocking his fingers.
“… Not good.”
There was a warning shout from one of the men. They spun round. The woman had clearly heard, for she had grabbed the girl’s hand and started to run, stumbling over her skirts.
They had barely gone ten yards when their path was blocked by the spears of the effortlessly bounding Nama. They were swiftly encircled, like unbroken colts forced into a pen.
The spears. Stay back.
“Please!” urged Mbutu. “Can’t you see they’re scared?”
The woman looked to him. Her eyes pleaded.
“Let us at least find out who they are,” he added.
The Nama had been singing carols.
“Brothers. It is our Christian duty … Christelike plig!”
The men paused. Mbutu pushed his way into the circle. Hendrik translated for his men.
“You are mother and child?” he asked of the woman.
She nodded. She clutched her daughter to her. She began coughing again.
“White man come,” shouted Stefaan in rough English. “Devil soldiers.”
There were nods of agreement.
An eye for an eye. Your Christian Bible.
“Please,” said Mbutu, palms up. “Have mercy.”
He tried a new tack. He nodded to Hendrik to decode.
“Perhaps they have information … which can be of use to us.”
There were a few shrugs. Mbutu had at least made them think. Subtly, he had included himself in their number.
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