Echo of an Angry God

by Beverley Harper

  There was a sudden flurry of activity at the front of the aircraft and a large windswept man appeared, rumbling an apology. The stewardess took his coat, nodded and smiled that it didn’t matter, although the fixed quality of her smile said otherwise. Lana, diverted from her thoughts, watched the man make his way down the aisle and realised, just as he reached her, that he was looking for the empty seat beside her. He sat down with a grunt, strapped himself in, then glanced at her. ‘Sorry. The delay is my fault. The London flight was late.’

  Lana, who had herself landed in Johannesburg on the only London flight that morning, nodded briefly and turned away. She’d had plenty of time to make the connecting flight to Malawi. The pilot of the 737, either under instructions from the control tower to hurry up, or irritated by the delay, taxied across the endless aprons and onto the runway well over the legal speed limit. He turned at the end and, with no further ado, slammed the throttles forward surprising most of the passengers, who were expecting the usual few seconds slowdown, thrusting everybody back into their seats as the big plane leapt forward like a thoroughbred and raced eagerly down the runway.

  This was the part of flying Lana didn’t like. She remembered watching Spike Milligan on television once saying that people who were scared of flying had got it wrong. Flying wasn’t dangerous. It was crashing that was dangerous. Lana didn’t mind flying, she just wasn’t overly fond of taking off. Her analytical mind accepted airflow and lift. However, the self-preservation gene within questioned how something so obviously earthbound could leap into the air and stay there. That first minute was, to her, critical. She shut her eyes and tried to think of something else. When she opened them they were several thousand feet into the air. Relaxing, she busied herself counting the number of Johannesburg homes with swimming pools. Finally she concluded that about two in ten did not have one.

  ‘All that water,’ she reflected. ‘I wonder if South Africa can spare it?’

  She let her mind drift. She was going to Malawi; a strange-sounding land, about which most of her friends had never even heard. ‘And why would they?’ she asked herself. A country 900 kilometres long, on average less than 100 kilometres wide with one-fifth of its surface area covered by water, and surrounded as it was by Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania, Malawi would need to turn itself inside-out before it made world headlines.

  ‘The bottom of the Rift,’ Bernard had told her. The way he said it made it sound like the arse end of the world. As a geologist Lana knew about Africa’s Rift Valley. A 9600 kilometre fissure in the earth’s crust in which, for the past twenty-five million years, volcanoes and earthquakes had seethed and pushed, creating huge valleys – some as wide as fifty kilometres – between parallel fault lines and forming high mountain plateaux on either side. At university, she had studied the immense series of cracks which ran from the Red Sea all the way south to Mozambique. She had learned that thirty still-active volcanoes continued the rifting process and that many scientists believed the north-east corner of Africa, the Somali plate, would ultimately drift away as a new ocean sliced through the continent. She knew too that Lake Malawi was considered to be the youngest of the Great Rift lakes and yet Lake Tanganyika, the south end of which was a scant 250 kilometres west of the northern tip of Lake Malawi, was supposed to be the oldest in Africa’s chain of deep, freshwater inland lakes.

  Lana shifted in her seat and sighed. Interesting as the Rift Valley may be, it was not its geological features that drew her to central Africa. When her father disappeared in Malawi fifteen years earlier, all she could think about was that, one day, she would go there and try to find out for herself what had happened to him. She swallowed, and the bitter bile of grief rose in her throat. It had never gone away, not in all these years, and sometimes, like now, it would engulf her with such intensity that she found herself defenceless against the feeling of despair that followed. A sudden, heart-thudding sense of hopelessness which, even at the age of twenty-seven, would bring back the fear, disbelief, pain and anger of that day, nearly fifteen years ago, when her world was shattered into tiny fragments of memories leaving only a yearning for the picture to be whole again.

  She remembered the day clearly. A still and beautiful day, late in May. Britain was enjoying an early start to summer that year, the air had a soft clarity that her mother called ‘champagne’. It was a champagne kind of a day and Lana had been upstairs doing her homework, wishing she could go outside and play with the dog. Staring through the window of her bedroom she gazed wistfully at the sweep of gravel drive with bright green lawns on either side. Encouraged by the warm weather, the flowerbeds were already a riot of pinks, reds, yellows, blues and white. The oaks framing the garden, and the birch lining the drive had lost their spring green and had turned darker, providing deep shade.

  Portia, Lana’s wet-nosed, soulful-eyed Labrador, was sitting in the middle of the front lawn looking hopefully up at Lana’s bedroom window, a tennis ball at her feet. Lana smiled and waved and the dog bounded in a circle before sitting down again. Lana giggled, remembering her father’s comment, ‘I swear, poppet, that damned dog believes she should be sitting cross-legged on the sofa watching television, with a gin ’n’ tonic clasped firmly in one paw.’

  The dog was spoiled, pampered, thoroughly loved by the family and she could practically speak. She obeyed commands – when the mood took her – in English and French, even responding to Lana’s mother’s occasional outburst of ‘voetsak’, which Karen solemnly promised was Afrikaans for ‘get out of the way, darling’ but which caused Lana’s father to grin in such a way that Lana knew it meant something a little more basic.

  On special occasions, like when Lana had been sick with flu, her mother allowed Portia to sleep in her bedroom. It was such a treat that Lana never once mentioned that the dog kept her awake with loud snores, yelps as she dreamed of chasing rabbits and regular dispensations of gas which had Lana wondering what on earth her mother fed her.

  Lana had just decided that the day was simply too good to waste on homework and had rebelliously snapped her English exercise book shut when she heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel and looked up to see a long black car ease to a stop outside. She watched, intrigued, as a driver emerged briskly and snapped open a rear door, executing a brief salute to a small, dapper man in a charcoal grey suit who emerged from the back, tugged down his jacket and brushed at something on his lapel before turning to look sombrely at the Devereaux house. Portia, as intrigued as Lana, trotted over and sniffed the man’s legs before losing interest and finding shade under some rhododendrons. Lana had never seen the man before. Her mother was, she knew, in the back garden. The housekeeper would not be back until later. So Lana ran lightly down the stairs and had the front door open before the man could ring the doorbell.

  ‘Hello.’

  He seemed surprised to see her. This annoyed Lana since she believed, and occasionally voiced the opinion to her friends, that children lived in houses and had as many rights to be there as their parents, whether adults liked it or not. ‘Well hello, young lady.’

  Lana immediately didn’t take to him. He was the hearty type, that curious breed of adult who could hold the floor at parties, speak in public, and yet found themselves completely tongue-tied in the company of children. Good manners, and an innate politeness, prevailed. ‘Do you want to see Mummy?’

  ‘Yes please, if it’s no bother.’

  She led him into the lounge. Never let a strange man into the house. Lana knew the rules but reasoned that someone with evil intent would hardly arrive with a chauffeur. She could see he was impatient and ill at ease. Inside Lana resided what her father called the mischief monkey. This often stubborn, contrary, questioning and perverse little creature offered the stranger tea, made certain he was comfortably seated and brought an ashtray before letting him off the hook and going in search of her mother. She found her in the greenhouse, thinning seedlings ready for planting into the vegetable garden. ‘Hi, poppet. Finished your homework?’<
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  Lana shook her head. ‘There’s a man inside who wants to see you.’

  ‘Who?’ Karen Devereaux looked surprised. Lana knew most of their friends and would have named the man if he had been one of them.

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’ Lana took a deep breath. ‘Mummy, if I promise to finish my homework later can I please, please go outside and play with Portia?’

  Karen smiled at her daughter fondly. Headstrong and independent she might have been but she had a highly developed sense of fair play and could always be trusted to honour a deal with no complaints. ‘No television if you do.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Okay then, off you go.’ Karen wiped her hands on a cloth and made her way towards the kitchen door.

  Lana ran around the side of the house calling to Portia. Five minutes later, as the dog trotted back over the lawn, tennis ball in her mouth, something made Lana turn and stare at the house. It was nothing tangible, no noise, nothing she could identify that suddenly drew her gaze. In fact, it was almost an absence of sound, rather like the house and garden had become frozen at a moment in time when nothing moved or breathed. Something creepy ran up her spine and settled on the back of her neck. Portia nudged her leg with a wet nose. Lana took the ball absently and threw it but whatever was bothering Lana appeared to have suddenly affected the dog as well because Portia sat down and, like her mistress, stared at the house.

  An inner force compelled Lana to walk towards the front door. She went reluctantly, her heart hammering. Her twelve-year-old mind was trying to tell her not to be foolish but her heart knew. Something was badly amiss. As she opened the front door and heard her mother’s soft sobbing, Lana went cold. The sympathetic murmurings of the stranger screamed a warning. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, Lana willed herself to walk towards the lounge. She did not want to know why her mother was crying but she was helplessly in the grip of fatalistic curiosity. A terrible trembling started suddenly and she shook uncontrollably.

  The man saw her standing by the door of the lounge. ‘Oh, my dear. You run along.’

  ‘No!’ It was wrung from Karen. She held out her arms to Lana. ‘Come here, darling.’

  On leaden feet, Lana moved to where her mother sat. ‘What’s wrong, Mummy? What is it?’

  But she knew before her mother told her. She knew it was dreadful, she knew it had to do with her father and she knew, as her heart broke, that things would never be the same again.

  Terence Parker-Brown waited with embarrassed impatience as Karen and Lana Devereaux faced the first few awful minutes of despair. He had never broken this kind of news to anyone in his life and was ill-prepared and unqualified for the task. A telephone call from the Home Office at eight the previous evening had sent him reluctantly to the Devereaux residence near Sevenoaks. Terence had answered the persistent ringing, hating whoever it was for interrupting an extremely good wildlife program.

  ‘Taylor here.’

  Terence had groaned inwardly. Taylor – Terence probably knew his first name but could never be bothered to think of it – was too fond of getting mixed up with international politics. Privately, Terence referred to him as 006½. The man only ever phoned him at home, always spoke as though he were fearful of being overheard, usually sent Terence, or one of his overworked operatives, on a wild goose chase, inevitably avoided responsibility when something went wrong but, on those few occasions where congratulations were called for, was there with his hand out. He had absolutely no business interfering in African affairs, a fact he studiously ignored. Unfortunately, he was also the nephew of Terence’s boss.

  ‘Oh yes, good evening,’ Terence said without enthusiasm.

  ‘Not interrupting you am I?’

  ‘It’s our bridge night,’ Terence lied.

  No apology. The man never apologised. ‘Bit worrying this Malawi thing.’

  ‘Only for Malawians,’ Terence answered sourly.

  ‘My dear chap! What about the missing Englishman?’

  ‘He was half French,’ Terence growled. He had spent some time after Martin Flower’s call finding out what he could about John Devereaux. It hadn’t been much. Terence waited. Taylor didn’t disappoint him.

  ‘Er . . . yes, quite, dear boy, but the FCO will need to know . . . I mean, after all, you don’t want a scandal. Could prove very embarrassing for someone, don’t you think?’

  ‘Typical!’ Terence thought, irritated. Taylor never mentioned his uncle. He just made sure that you knew he had personal reasons for interfering.

  Taylor was still whittering on. ‘. . . can’t be too careful, old man. Who knows what these chappies get up to once they’re out of England.’

  Terence had had enough. Taylor was a blithering halfwit but he was like a terrier with a grip on a bull’s nose. He had to be shaken off. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  The man huffed happily. ‘Well, dear boy, far be it for me to tell you how to run your office.’

  But you will, you half-arsed, moronic buffoon! With that uncharacteristic but thoroughly satisfying thought behind him, Terence’s voice went silky. He knew from experience that the only way to get Taylor off his back was to pretend to be interested in what he had to say. ‘Not at all, old man, two heads and all that.’

  Taylor did what Terence expected. With his voice lowered to nearly a whisper, he rattled off a series of suggestions which sounded to Terence as if he were reading from a list. ‘The family don’t know yet. Get someone out to Sevenoaks to tell them.’ A pause.

  ‘Lost your place?’ Terence thought nastily.

  But the man was only pausing for breath. ‘No, better still, go yourself. Have a snoop – the man must have a study – check it out, his wife won’t mind, she’ll be too upset to stop you. Grab that opportunity, Terence, grab that opportunity.’

  Terence Parker-Brown gritted his teeth.

  ‘Phone bills, locked drawers, invoices, go through the lot. You know the drill, I’m sure.’

  Terence let that go.

  ‘Devereaux was working for a company called PAGET. You’ll have to let them know of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Terence said faintly.

  ‘Yes, yes, quite. I’m sure you were planning to.’

  ‘In the morning?’ Terence asked timidly.

  The sarcasm was lost on Taylor. ‘Stall that. We don’t want his wife surrounded by well-meaning friends; they’ll get in the way. I want his study turned over. A man like Devereaux would be meticulous. Bring out anything that looks even remotely contentious. We’re up a blind alley here.’

  ‘The family should be told immediately.’

  ‘Tell them yourself. Half a day won’t hurt. You can always say you were trying to verify it.’

  It crossed Terence’s mind that Taylor was being unusually forceful. Taylor usually distanced himself from personal involvement. Terence wanted to know why. ‘Who told you about Devereaux?’

  ‘My dear chap, do you mind?’

  Parker-Brown grinned. The way to Taylor’s mouth was to first ask a question you knew he wouldn’t answer, then hit him with the one you wanted. The man’s mind was usually so busy wondering if he’d done the right thing refusing to answer the first question that he invariably blabbed more than you needed with the second. ‘Well then, what’s your interest?’

  Taylor obliged him immediately. ‘We don’t want the press on it. Banda’s visiting Britain next month and is scheduled to meet Her Majesty and the PM. The visit will be difficult enough as it is. Britain has billions tied up in joint ventures in Malawi and Banda’s well behind with royalty and dividend payments. He knows he’ll be under pressure. If he gets bad press he’ll use it as an excuse, you know what these people are like.’

  ‘Money,’ Terence thought. ‘It’s always down to money.’ He knew he could simply ignore Taylor’s phone call and go ahead as planned – inform PAGET in the morning and leave them to deal with the family, forget Devereaux, who had clearly fallen foul of something other than politics, and le
ave the entire Malawi issue in Martin Flower’s capable hands. He sighed. Taylor, he knew, would not let it go, especially since the Home Office had, on this occasion, a vested interest in containing any possible media circus.

  ‘Are you still there, old boy?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Terence wasn’t. ‘Just wool gathering. I’ll get onto it, leave it with me.’

  He had meetings he couldn’t put off in the morning and early afternoon. In truth, he knew he was stalling. Impartial as his profession required him to be, he did not relish the task of shattering the lives of Devereaux’s family. Now, as he stared down at the two distraught people on the sofa, he was wondering how long it would be before he could decently request a look in the missing geologist’s study.

  Karen raised her tear-stained face. ‘Thank you, Mr Parker-Brown,’ she said quietly, earning his respect with her dignity. ‘I’m sure you’re a busy man. We’ll be fine on our own.’

  Terence cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to ask this now but do you mind if I have a look in your husband’s study?’

  ‘Why?’ She was surprised and it showed. ‘Why are you here at all?’

  Parker-Brown wondered how much to tell her. ‘We don’t normally get involved,’ he said gently. ‘To tell the truth, we’d rather not.’ He glanced at the child who was observing him with wide and solemn eyes. A pretty child, about twelve he guessed, a girl who would one day grow into a beautiful young woman. Her scrutiny disturbed him. He took a deep breath and sought refuge in professional misinformation. ‘There’s been an attempted coup in Malawi. Under the circumstances, anyone unaccounted for must be investigated by us.’

  ‘Surely you don’t think that John . . .’ Karen’s voice broke.

  ‘Daddy was working out there,’ the child said stonily, surprising Terence with her grasp of the situation. ‘You won’t find anything in his study.’