When they rested in the middle of the day, Jill made a point of speaking with each of them in turn, trying to assess their condition. In a way it seemed pointless. There wasn´t anything she could do for any of them whatever difficulties they had; and however bad they were feeling each of them would have to keep walking or die. Maybe they’d die anyway, but while they kept walking there was hope. They must keep hoping even though they had barely seen a living thing since starting out that morning. Their situation was becoming more simple with every hour that passed, but not in a good way.
***
Jill had decided that the afternoons were worse than the mornings. In the morning, the air was cooler and you could somehow believe that this day was going to different. In the afternoons, they barely looked around them, convinced that their surroundings would not change and that this day would be like the last and that their only future would be to continue in this same way until they could go on no further.
The area they were passing through was just like what they had seen before. The sun continued to burn them. The weight of the packs bit into their shoulders and made their backs even hotter than the rest of their bodies; a reminder to Jill that they were still trying to carry more than they needed; or at least more than they could bear. They would have to lose some of that burden at the next stop, because not one of them now had the strength that they’d set out with.
Simon was in the lead, as usual: Andrew Parker following behind him. Suddenly, Parker dropped to the ground. He didn’t so much fall as subside; as if the frame of bones and tissue that had been holding him up had suddenly gone soft. When they gathered round him he was laying face down, mouth open in the dirt; his breathing shallow and rapid.
They slipped the pack off his shoulders and turned him onto his back. Parker didn’t react either to help or resist them. The skin of his forehead was burning to the touch even through the head bandage that he still wore.
Give him some water, Simon suggested.
Jill took Parker’s canteen: it was a metal one in the old-fashioned army style. It felt heavy when she shook it and then unscrewed the cap.
It’s almost full, she told them. Has anyone seen him drinking anything at all?
It was unbelievable: Parker was the one who’d warned them all not to ration their water, but he’d barely touched his own. Had he been saving it; or was he just unaware of the time passing since he’d last taken a sip – too preoccupied to notice that he was dying of thirst?
Jill held the canteen to his lips as George supported Parker’s head.
Not too much, George warned her. He won’t be able to take it. A little at a time.
Jill washed a tiny amount into the slack, open mouth, but it was difficult to see if Parker was making any effort to swallow. He tried to cough and started to choke a little.
The Johnsons had caught up with them by now; and Mr. Johnson came to the side of the stricken man.
We have to get him out of the sun, Johnson said. He needs shade and rest and to get some water inside him. His temperature has to come down.
It was clear that they would travel no further that day. They started to set up camp where they were. It gave everyone something to do and less time to worry about whether this was the end that they were all going to come to before much longer. The shelter was put up easily enough this time; and they moved Parker under the shade of it. Emma took his canteen and stationed herself by him. Every few minutes she tried to get a little water over his lips and into his parched throat. Parker didn’t even try to say anything. It was doubtful he had any voice left.
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were sitting on the ground. They looked completely exhausted; the wife in particular. Those two would be next, Jill supposed.
She noticed Simon standing very still at the edge of the camp, looking away. She went to him, quietly.
What is it?
Look
Jill saw that he was watching a bird that was sitting perched on a branch about twenty metres away from them: its feet and beak were of a matching bright red and its body was a light creamy olive colour, shading to green at the head. The wings were bright green.
Beautiful, Jill agreed, but you see them all over Africa.
It’s a green pigeon.
I know.
It means water nearby.
Jill cursed herself for stupidity yet again. She had too many things to think about and she needed to keep them all in the front of her mind at the same time; but water was the most important. And where there were doves and pigeons there was water.
Don’t say anything to the others, she said to Simon. Keep it in sight.
The two of them followed the bird at a careful distance. It travelled in a flurry of short winged hops from one dried up dead looking bush to another; but after not many minutes, when they were still quite close to the camp, it brought them to a tree that had leaves on it. Jill wondered whether they would have noticed the tree had they not been following the bird.
That’s a fig of some kind, Simon told her. They produce fruit all year round.
It was true. They could see the little dark bunches of figs nestling between the leaves. There was buzzing too, from some kind of insect. She saw wasps. They must have a nest nearby.
When they found the spring, it wasn’t much, but enough that they could fill their own canteens and bring the others back to do the same. There was genuine cool shade under the tree and they could just about reach up and grab a handful of figs without needing to climb.
Are they safe to eat? Jill asked.
Simon shrugged.
The monkeys eat them, and there’s moisture in them too. We shouldn’t take too many I suppose.
What about the water?
Do you mean, is it safe to drink?
I hardly care about that. The birds must drink it and they’re not dead. It’s safer to drink it than not to, I’m sure of that. No, I mean, how could it be here?
There’s lots of water under the surface. You know this is the country where the main river never reaches the sea. It all just disappears under the ground. The water table must be close to the surface here and it just pops up in this one place. We’ve just got lucky I suppose.
If Jill shut her eyes for a moment, she found that bird calls and the buzzing of wasps made it possible to imagine that she was in a completely different place. We may have walked past other spots just like this, she thought. We never really stopped just to see what was around. There could have been other birds like these and we probably just scared them off; marching along with our heads down. There was a lesson in it somewhere.
We should get back to the others, she told Simon. We’ll move the camp here if Andrew can travel. At least we’ll have some proper shade.
Chapter thirteen - Day Twelve
Stephen Green hated to waste time, but the job he did had taught him patience if nothing else. The network of roads that he had to negotiate now could not be hurried. Once he’d passed the end of what could be called a highway, the miles settled into a pattern. The trail demanded that he devote enough attention to driving to address the real danger that at any point he might snap some vital part of the vehicle, or beach it up to the axles in sand. On the other hand, the driving wasn`t so demanding, at least not all the time, as to keep his thoughts entirely focused on the task in hand. He made steady progress; and even for a man so indifferent to landscape and fauna as Green, the journey was not disagreeable.
The tour route marked out on his map followed a meandering course, taking in the places of interest and allowing plenty of time for sightseeing. Unless travelling through this country became even slower than it had been for the last two days, Green was confident that he would intercept the party before they got much further.
Lately, whenever he had these unlooked for moments of reflection, he found that his thoughts kept returning to the subject of the work he did and why he was still doing it. Not what it was for, or whether it was right or wrong. Green didn�
�t have any doubts on that score and he wasn’t getting soft or sentimental about it at this late stage.
You could ask the same question, right or wrong, about almost any field of human endeavour and in most cases it wouldn´t be easy to answer honestly. It seemed to Green that most people did work that was essentially useless. Their jobs only involved writing things down for other, more important, people to ignore at their leisure. Even the records they made were impersonal. They didn’t leave so much as a trace of handwriting behind.
On the other hand, in every place where humans tried to live together, they needed to find some way to make sure that people did what they promised they would do. Take that away and everything fell to pieces. Sometimes it was lawyers and courts that the people turned to in order to enforce promises when trust broke down. In Green´s opinion, the courts didn’t seem to do such a good job of making things right. So far as he was concerned, he was in the same business as the courts, just using different methods; and he liked to think that he got results.
It was necessary work and he was good at it, he knew that much. He liked to think that what made him effective was a sense of impartial justice. He didn’t get personally involved and he took no pleasure in the infliction of pain, even though he’d turned out to have a talent for violence when it was called for. It had been deeply distasteful to him when from time to time he´d needed to associate with fellow practitioners who had to work themselves up into a rage against the transgressors to justify themselves, or to show how tough they were, or just because they enjoyed it. The motivation of these men was flawed and illogical. You might even say that it was impure. They had to put themselves at the centre of the action before they could act, and that led them into making decisions for the wrong reasons, which was when the trouble usually started.
Like when he’d been paired up against his will with that idiot Smith. He’d told Smith the same thing he always told the young men; that it’s dangerous to get angry with the target. Don’t blame the man; it’s not his fault we have to kill or hurt him. But Smith needed an emotional crutch to make the work easier for him. He had to make out like the target deserved it; working himself up into a fury with a man he’d never even met before. And after what had happened, Green knew that he wouldn’t be prepared to work with Smith again, whatever the job.
The truth of it was that you could take a man’s life, when it was necessary to do so, but you shouldn’t believe that gave you the right to judge him. Only god had that right.
Green’s own intentions were pure and his approach was simple. If someone made a deal with his employer and was stupid enough to welch on it, the natural order of things was disturbed. In order that harmony should be restored, it was necessary, not only that the transgressor should be made to see the error of his ways, but also that society in general should be left in no doubt that transgression was not a profitable or viable option. In this case, society in general meant any other schmuck who might get to hear about the guy who thought he was too smart to play by the rules and start to wonder if maybe he could do the same. Criminologists might argue between themselves, but Green had no doubts about the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent.
This view of life meant that Green experienced no doubts about whether his profession was useful or necessary. Rat catchers would be needed as long as there were still rats. The system wasn’t in doubt, but Green’s place in it was potentially up for change. For example, as he got older he was more reluctant to drop everything and leave home behind on a trip like this. He had other interests that he’d actively cultivated over the years, knowing that he couldn’t do this sort of thing forever. His passions were small and circumspect perhaps, compared to the kind of ambition that makes a man feel capable of such feats as raising a family, or becoming president of his local golf club. But even these small personal interests, that could be indulged just because he was able to set them aside whenever the next call came in, had finally started to exert some gravitational sway. There were things he wanted to do that he’d been putting off for too long. And of course he wasn’t getting any younger.
It’s not in doubt that the work need to be done, was his line of thought, but that’s not enough. There has to be something in it for you, beyond the temporary gratification of a job well done. It hadn’t always been that way. At the start, like any young man, he’d been satisfied and maybe relieved to find the one thing that he seemed to have the natural talent for; but those days seemed very far away at this stage in his life.
On the other hand he still had that talent and right now he needed to use it to find Jonathan Bloom, wherever he was, and then do whatever was necessary to recover the funds that Bloom had stolen. Besides that he must be able to reply honestly, when the Fat Man should ask, that he had left Jonathan Bloom in a place where he would be unable to steal from anyone ever again.
Right now he was in a place that was a long way from anywhere, but even then it was necessary to stay alert. You never knew when something was going to happen.
And then, up ahead, he saw a truck that had almost run off the road. It looked like some kind of wreck: like there’d been a fire. He slowed his own vehicle to a crawl as he came nearer the spot, all the time looking around for signs that there might still be someone around watching his approach.
Green didn’t believe in coincidences any more than he believed that the guilty went unpunished, but in any case the scorched number plate on the back of the wreck confirmed to him that the most recent clients of Wilderness Tours had met an unscheduled halt in their trip at this point.
There were no people, but there was enough dried blood on and around the driver’s seat to suggest that at least one of the party had met a violent end here. There was no note on the dashboard or anywhere else to indicate where the survivors might be, but Green quickly decided that there must have been survivors. The burn damage was from the spare tyre and it hadn’t been caused by the crash that had disabled the Cruiser. There was only one reason to burn tyres out here – to make black smoke and send up a signal. And the signal hadn’t been seen, because this was an accident site still, not the scene of a rescue. There was a jackknifed trailer still hitched to the back of the cruiser that had been ransacked for its contents. Discarded bits and pieces were scattered around in a manner that Green couldn’t imagine animals could have caused. Someone had been making a selection of things that might be useful enough to be worth carrying before setting out from this place.
Walking the perimeter of the crash scene, he wasn’t surprised to see what were still recognizable as footprints, heading off to the east. Green was no expert tracker but anyone could see there had been more than one person and that the tracks were not fresh. They weren’t so clear as the imprints from paws and hooves of animals that had been drawn to inspect the abandoned vehicle.
Then a little way off from the vehicle, he came across what he assumed must be a grave. The space where the ground had been dug out and filled in and the mound of earth that had been displaced by a body didn’t suggest any other explanation. In any case, there was no reason why anyone unfortunate enough to be marooned out here would waste energy burying anything other than a body. Also there was all that blood in the driver’s cab to be considered.
The grave presented a puzzle. Until he saw it, Green had never seriously considered the possibility that the tour group might have met with a genuine accident or that they could now be trying to reach civilization. His first hypothesis had been that Bloom was out here to meet with some associates, for reasons best known to themselves, and that the associates would have set off from this place in some other form of transport. Somewhere not far off he’d expected to pick up the tracks of another vehicle. He’d also assumed that somewhere near he was likely to discover the remains of those of the party who hadn’t been in on the arrangement: they would have been led away from the scene and then executed as potential witnesses.
So far as Green could see, the only flaw with his theo
ry was that there hadn’t been enough money involved in the original crime to make such drastic behaviour worthwhile: but then came the interesting reflection that there might be a lot more money involved than what he knew about. After all, employees as smart as Jonathan Bloom was supposed to be didn’t double cross bosses like the Fat Man for a few hundred thousand. It was an interesting thought, although where it might lead him on from here, it was too soon to guess.
The single grave put a dent in the theory. It was only big enough for one person, and if there had been a conspiracy of bad people, they would have needed to get rid of more than one body, so there should be a big hole, or none. And why would killers trouble to dig a grave near the scene of the crime when so many wild animals were around to dispose of any evidential meat that was lying around?
One grave, dug where it was sure to be found eventually, suggested some sort of tragedy that survivors had marked by doing the decent thing. Which wasn’t to say that Bloom and whoever was with him were not the instigators of whatever had happened; because looking at the way that the Land Cruiser had come to rest, there was no obvious reason why the vehicle should suddenly have veered into the only tree of any size that was even close to the road; and at the sort of speeds that would be possible here it was difficult to imagine that a crash would prove fatal to anyone. Perhaps the driver had been shot by someone waiting in ambush.
Thinking like this was causing Green to regret that he’d not made time to get hold of some kind of weapon. He felt exposed, standing looking at the scene, even though it was clear that all the players must have left long ago. In this territory it was just too easy to be caught off guard. At least he knew which way he had to go now. He could forget about the rest of the tour itinerary. The only tracks made by anyone who had left this place alive headed east; so that was his direction too.
***
By the time Jill and Simon had returned to the camp with good news about the water, it was obvious that Andrew Parker’s condition had deteriorated more quickly than they could have expected. It seemed that his brain had completely lost the ability to control body temperature. One minute he was too hot and the next he was shivering. He’d be sweating too, Jill supposed, if there was any moisture left inside to come out through his pores.
the Disappearance of Jonathan Bloom Page 14