‘Tea, sir?’
Tom blinked and shook his head to clear his senses. The flight attendant was giving him a smile that almost passed for sincere as she hovered waiting for him to answer.
‘Please,’ he replied, pulling himself up from the flat business-class bed to a semi-sitting position. Someone had opened the shutter beside him and golden sunlight flooded the cabin of the British Airways 747.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked as she placed the cup on his side table.
‘Like the dead,’ he said. The late night at the club and early start had been a blessing in disguise, as he had fallen asleep soon after the meal. He’d long gotten over the novelty of travelling business or first class on long-haul flights. He did, however, appreciate the advent of fully flat beds in business.
A short time later the aircraft captain announced the cabin crew would be preparing the cabin for landing. By the time Tom returned from the toilet, where he had run a battery-powered shaver over his chin and combed his tousled grey-flecked hair, his bed had been transformed back to a seat. He leaned over and stared out the window at Africa.
The countryside was greener than he had expected, though the captain announced that rain was forecast at their destination. As well as open grasslands below there were circular farmed fields of some irrigated crop or other. What Tom knew about farming would fit on the back of a London Transport travel card. He knew even less about big game and wildlife. In the parts of Africa he had visited the populace were more at risk from AK 47s than from lions or leopards.
Tom had read his internet print-outs — some general information on South Africa, Tinga Legends Lodge and the Kruger National Park — before falling asleep on the flight. He had a lot to learn about the country he was about to set foot in, but in some respects that didn’t matter.
There would be a South African Police Service inspector at the airport to meet and accompany him out to the safari lodge, which he had read was about four hours’ drive away. Robert Greeves would actually fly to the park on his visit, but in the meantime SO1 could spend their money better elsewhere than on an internal flight for Tom on this advance visit. He didn’t care, as a road trip would give him a better chance to get a feel for what people referred to as the ‘new’ South Africa.
However, there were things about this job that were already starting to concern him. For a start, he shouldn’t have been on his own. A protection team was normally made up of a bare minimum of two members. Another Met policeman, Detective Constable Charlie Sheather, was already in South Africa, but he had leapfrogged ahead to check out the Radisson Hotel in Cape Town, where Greeves would stay after his visit to Tinga. Charlie would do the advance for that leg of the trip, but he and Tom would not be working together until Tom flew to the Cape. It was against standard operating procedures, but the existing staff shortages had suddenly been made worse by Nick’s disappearance. Also, Greeves was a junior minister — defence procurement was important but didn’t keep the politician in the headlines, unlike the Defence Secretary, who still rated a full team.
There was a distant clunk somewhere back beneath economy class as the wheels were lowered and the flaps extended. Out the window he glimpsed rows of detached houses on small plots of land, some with swimming pools — suburbia. No elephants or zebra. He smiled to himself. Hot air rising from the sun-warmed African landscape produced some ‘bumps’, as the pilot referred to them, and Tom peered out the window as Africa rose up to greet him.
Tom registered little about Johannesburg International Airport, other than that the terminal was bigger, busier, more modern and more efficient than he had imagined it would be. The few South Africans he had met in London seemed to like nothing better than to berate the new rulers of their former homeland about corruption, increasing crime and a deterioration in services since the advent of majority rule in 1994. Tom wasn’t naive enough to judge a country by its arrivals hall, but it was a reminder that he should leave his prejudices at the entry gate. He was a man who dealt with facts, not anecdotes or rumours. He doubted he would have a chance to form deep or lasting impressions of African and South African democracy from one recce, but he would keep his eyes and ears open.
‘Detective Sergeant Furey?’
‘That’s me.’ Tom had looked past the blonde-haired woman in a smart business suit, with nipped-in jacket and skirt. She was about five-nine, four inches shorter than he, though her heels made up most of the difference. Her hair was cut short in a bob but the first thing he really noticed about her, other than her height, was her blue eyes. He knew he was staring at her, but couldn’t help it. He forced himself to blink.
She smiled away his awkwardness politely. ‘I’m Inspector Susan van Rensburg. People call me Sannie.’
When she extended her hand her grip was firm, the polished bronze skin soft and cool. He detected the Afrikaans accent before she got to her surname. She looked in her midthirties. No wedding band, though there were two rings on her right ring finger, one studded with diamonds. Where he came from, not many female coppers wore lip gloss on the job. ‘Tom. Nice to meet you. You got the email about Nick Roberts, then?’
‘Yes. Any word of his whereabouts?’
‘Nothing yet. You worked with him before?’ She led him to the terminal doors, ignoring an African man in a bomber jacket who asked them if they wanted a car. Tom had his travel bag over one shoulder, and he said, ‘No thanks,’ when a porter offered to carry it for him.
‘Yes, I’ve worked with Nick,’ she said, not volunteering any more information, no expression of concern that Tom could trace.
‘Are you usually assigned as liaison when Mr Greeves visits?’ Tom asked.
‘Yes. He’s a nice guy. Have you worked with him before?’
Tom shook his head. Interesting that she would volunteer a personal opinion about the minister but not the man she had worked most closely with, and who was now missing.
‘Well, I’m ready to go if you are.’ Tom carried a second Rohan travel suit, two short-sleeve business shirts, underwear and his toiletries in a carry-on bag, along with a pair of jeans, loafers and shorts and a casual shirt. He followed Sannie out through the arrivals hall. It was warm, though not unpleasantly hot, and shards of blue sky were opening cracks in grey clouds still heavy with rain.
‘Here we are,’ Sannie said, pressing the button on the key-chain remote. The lights flashed on a Mercedes. Not the latest model, but far from old. She popped the boot and he tossed his bag in and closed it.
‘It’s just the two of us,’ she said. ‘We’re short-staffed and there’s an Organisation of the African Union meeting on in Cape Town today and tomorrow. Still, we don’t need anyone else here for the recce as your Mr Greeves has been to Tinga and Kruger many times.’
‘I know what you mean about being short-handed. We’re running a bare-bones operation on this trip. I contacted the British Embassy’s security officer and even he’s too busy to come out to meet us today.’
Sannie shrugged. ‘I’ve met Giles a few times, but there’s nothing a security officer will be able to tell you that I can’t. Have you ever been to South Africa?’
‘Never. Is the crime problem as bad as the media makes out?’ Tom slipped off his coat and climbed into the passenger seat.
Sannie also took off her jacket and hung it over the back of her seat. As she got in she pulled a Z88 nine-millimetre pistol from the holster clipped to a narrow belt at the top of her tailored skirt. She smiled at him and placed the weapon in a slot in the centre console where most people would keep their sunglasses.
‘Right,’ Tom said. He’d thought it wasn’t necessary for him to bring his Glock on the recce — just more paperwork — but now he wasn’t so sure.
‘It’s loaded and racked, by the way. We in the police tell the general public not to try to fight back or use their weapon if they get car-jacked.’
Tom had read that armed car hijacking was a serious problem in Johannesburg and other parts of the country, with robbers often shooting their victims. In the UK the people with guns were usually underworld criminals who tended to use them on each other rather than innocents.
‘So what’s your plan if we get stopped by a thief?’
‘If the car-jacker shoots me before I get him, I want you to kill him, okay?’
‘You’re serious?’
She smiled as she indicated and accelerated into the traffic outside the terminal.
‘Is this a wind-up?’ he persisted.
Sannie looked across at him, unsmiling now, and said, ‘My husband was a police captain, also in protection. He had worked with Nick Roberts, protecting Greeves. I was still at home on leave, pregnant with my third child. He was off duty, on his way to pick up our son from a friend’s place. He was shot at a robot — traffic lights — before he had a chance to go for his gun. It was two years ago. I lost the baby.’
Tom nodded, staring out the windscreen. He was trying to find the right words to express sorrow for her loss, but he knew from his own experience that nothing anyone ever said was right — or made it easier. He looked across and caught her glancing at him before returning her piercing gaze to the road.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For not saying anything.’
It all looked so normal. The industrial suburbs on the border of the airport reminded him of Staines, near Heathrow. He saw as many white faces as black ones as Sannie took an on-ramp onto a six-lane freeway. Signs advertised mobile phones and department stores and a casino. Johannesburg — Africa — might look like other parts of the world, but the pistol lying between them spoke of the violent subtext of life in this part of Africa.
Sannie said nothing more and he watched the way she drove. Aggressively defensive, he would have described it. Watching her rear-view mirror, keeping her distance from the car in front. When the traffic lights — the robot, as she had called it — turned red she stopped five metres from the car in front, so she had room to manoeuvre if someone accosted them.
‘You said you had a son?’ he said.
‘ Ja, a son and daughter. My boy is nine and my girl is five. My mother lives with us and she looks after them when I’m away.’
Sannie changed lanes and accelerated, pushing the speedometer up to a hundred and twenty kilometres. ‘Are you divorced, or do you just take your wedding ring off when you travel, like…?’ She glanced across at him.
He looked down at his left index finger. He’d only taken it off six months ago. He’d figured it was time, but he, as had Sannie, noticed there was still a faint tan line and an indentation caused by fifteen years of wear.
‘Alex died a year ago. Breast cancer.’
‘Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I knew you’d lost someone, but I didn’t realise it was your wife.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Not talking when I told you what happened to my husband and baby. It’s the people who haven’t known real grief who think words can make it easier. It doesn’t really go away, does it?’
‘Not that I can tell.’ He wanted desperately to change the subject. ‘What you were saying before, about taking off a wedding ring when travelling, you said “like”. Whose name were you about to add?’
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘Like Nick?’
‘Look, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry he’s missing.’
‘But?’
‘What?’
‘I sensed there was a “but” coming then. Our wives knew each other better than we did. Nick’s a colleague, Sannie. I do want to try to work out what happened to him, but I can’t say I know him well enough to guess why he went missing — if it was a voluntary thing.’
‘Okay, well, I first met Nick about four years ago, when my husband was still alive and when Nick was still married.’
‘And?’
‘And he tried to hit on me.’
‘Really?’
‘ Ja. First trip, in the car on the first drive, just like you and me now. I couldn’t believe it. He says to me, “What goes on tour stays on tour.” I can tell you, I gave it to him big time.’
‘Did he ever try again?’
‘Once more, last year, after his marriage is over and my husband’s dead and my miscarriage, and he thinks I’m now available. We were in a pub with some other police. My friends were at the bar and we were alone and he says, “Is the time right now, baby?”’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him that the time wouldn’t be right if we were the only two people left in the world, and then I klapped him, good and hard across the face.’
Tom smiled, but he was learning more about Nick and it wasn’t good.
‘I’m so gatvol of men these days.’
‘ Gatvol? ’ he asked. She had pronounced the ‘g’ as though she was about to spit at him, so the word, whatever it meant, seemed to match her sentiment.
‘Like “I’ve had enough” in English. But no offence, hey?’
He laughed. ‘None taken.’
From a map he’d glanced at, he knew the airport was on the eastern fringe of Johannesburg, and the factories, warehouses, mine slag heaps and outlying gated communities of townhouses hiding behind high whitewashed walls soon gave way to open grasslands and farms. Sannie explained that Johannesburg was on the highveld — at a higher altitude than where they were headed. Kruger was in the lowveld. ‘Hotter there. Stickier. I hope you brought your mozzie muti with you.’
‘Insect repellent?’ he checked.
‘It’s malaria country where we’re going, and quite bad this time of year — it’s the wet season.’
When they neared the exit for a town called Wit-bank he noticed his first car-jacking sign. It said, Warning — hijacking hotspot. Do not stop beneath a huge exclamation mark.
‘What do you do if you break down?’ he asked.
‘Pray,’ said Sannie, ‘and aim for the centre body mass.’
In Tom’s experience, most people living in supposedly dangerous parts of the world tended to talk down the perceived threat, usually issuing a few common words of warning such as, ‘Avoid such-and-such an area at night and you’ll be okay,’ or, ‘It’s not as bad as the media makes out’. From what Sannie had told him so far, the reverse seemed to be true in South Africa. People here were under no illusion about their local crime problem.
‘A lot of it is organised crime here, and the whites aren’t blameless. Also, we have people from all over Africa living in this country. The Zimbabweans who cross the border are dirt poor and some of them turn to theft — same with the Mozambicans. The Nigerians are the worst — they control the drug scene. It was different in the old days, when I first joined the police — back then we had the death penalty.’
And riots in Soweto and police opening fire on civilians, Tom thought, but said nothing. It was her country and he wasn’t here to make judgments.
‘I know what you’re thinking. But we’re not all mad racists, you know. I didn’t agree with a lot of what happened under apartheid, but we did have the crime problem under control.’
‘Depends on who you classed as the criminals.’
She smiled.
Sannie stopped for fuel at a service station just past the Middelburg toll plaza. It was exactly like one of the large complexes he would have encountered on a British motorway. Tom got out to stretch his legs. He yawned, but was feeling okay. There was little time difference between the UK and South Africa and he had slept well on the aircraft. It was good to feel sunshine on his face. Sannie returned with a couple of Cokes and some crisps. ‘How far?’ he asked.
‘ Ag, shame, man, you sound like my kids. It’s about another three hours if we drive fast.’
And drive fast they did. Tom glanced over and saw that the speedometer rarely dipped below a hundred and ten kilometres per hour. The locals had an interesting form of traffic etiquette, where slow vehicles pulled to the left — South Africans drove on the same side of the road as he did in England — to let faster cars pass them. The overtaking vehicle — Sannie in every case — put on its hazard lights as a way of saying thank you, while the car which had just been passed flashed its headlights as if to say, ‘You’re welcome’. It was like a parallel universe, Tom thought. Similar to England in some ways, but so completely different in others.
The road they were on — the N4 — took them eastwards, towards the border with Mozambique, according to the signs to that country’s capital, Maputo. Tom knew Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony, had suffered a long civil war and supposedly had good beaches. Beyond that it was just a name on a map. He thought he would find some books on Africa before he returned with Robert Greeves.
Sannie had the radio tuned to a station called Jacaranda FM, which played easy-listening music, mostly from the eighties and nineties. The announcers and newsreaders switched from English to Afrikaans, sometimes midsentence. ‘Do you and your kids speak Afrikaans at home?’
‘ Ja, and English. There are about a dozen official languages in the new South Africa. My kids are learning Xhosa at school. I figure it’s good for them to be able to speak the language of the ones who are in charge now.’
‘I suppose it’s been tough on… on people like you, since the Africans took over the country.’
She shrugged. ‘First of all, I am an African. I just happen to be a white one. Sure, there was a lot of affirmative action after the ANC took over. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m a woman.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Tom asked. Traffic had slowed marginally as the road started to descend through a series of sweeping bends.
‘In the new South Africa it’s all about empowerment. Black women have had a hard time, so they’re now at the top of the list for good jobs or promotions, followed by black men. Then it’s coloureds and Indians and then us white women, followed by white men, who are now at the bottom. It used to be the other way around.’
She didn’t seem bitter, he thought, just resigned to making the most of her life. If he was going to judge her, it would be on how she did her job as a police officer, not what she thought of life under black majority rule.
A blurred movement of greyish-green in the grass to the left caught his eye. ‘Bloody hell! What was that?’
Sannie glanced over. ‘Oh, bobos. Baboons — we call them bobbejaans in Afrikaans.’
Tom watched the troops of a dozen or so primates. A large one stared back at him and snarled with long yellowed teeth from its dog-like snout. ‘But we’re not in a national park, are we?’
‘No. You’ll see bobos and monkeys wherever there is still some bush or trees left for them. A lot of this country is taken up with farming, but there are still some wilderness areas.’ The toll road split and Sannie explained that while they could go either way to get to Kruger, the right-hand fork would take them via Waterval Boven, down a steep pass where the high-veld ended. ‘The countryside’s more scenic than on the road via Lydenburg.’
The drive took them along the course of a river which had cut through the rock, forming the pass. Plantation gum trees met their end in a smoking paper mill. Tom saw skinny black workers in baggy overalls, and wondered if the men were ill with HIV-AIDS.
He started feeling drowsy after more than three hours on the road, and Sannie stopped at another garage to buy more Cokes and chips for the two of them. Tom again got out of the car for a stretch and was struck immediately by the change in climate. It was much hotter than Johannesburg and the air felt heavy with moisture. Sannie told him they were approaching Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga province, once known as the Eastern Transvaal. ‘The lowveld. We’re getting close to the bush now.’ She said it with fondness, almost reverence. ‘Some people call it the slowveld, because nothing much happens in a hurry. It’s the heat.’
In the distance Tom could see a few tall office buildings, but Sannie turned left before they reached the town proper. They began climbing into some hills.
When they reached the town of White River, all the traffic signals were out. A black policeman was directing traffic with the exaggerated movements of someone doing a robot dance. ‘He seems to be enjoying his job,’ Tom said.
‘ Ja, but it’s no laughing matter. The electricity is out — again. Our power company, Eskom, calls it “load shedding”. They switch off entire districts so the whole system doesn’t collapse. Supply can’t keep up with demand in South Africa, and not enough money’s been spent on infrastructure in the last decade.’
Leaving the town they wound through hills forested with plantation trees — pines and Australian blue gums. They crested a high peak and, looking ahead, the forests vanished, replaced by a vista of red dirt and mud-brick shacks of the same hue. There wasn’t a tree in sight. ‘Townships like this are where a lot of our people still live. The government is building new homes through the regional development program but they can’t keep pace with demand. On one hand they’re spending tens of thousands of rand to change the names of towns from Afrikaans to African names, and Jan Smuts Airport to OR Tambo, but they can’t put a decent roof over their own people’s heads or keep the country’s electricity supply working.’
Tom heard the bitterness in her voice. Most of the houses had rusting tin roofs. Some looked as though they were made entirely of homemade mud bricks and old packing crates. He smelled wood smoke through the aircon’s inlet and guessed it was the trees which had once stood on these hills. Toddlers walked barefoot, their lower legs spattered with red mud. A skeletal woman carried a baby on her back, wrapped in a piece of stained cloth tied around her midriff. Sannie kept her speed up and ignored the malevolent stares of a group of teenage boys dressed like American ghetto dwellers, brightly coloured boxer shorts protruding above low-slung jeans. Plenty of bling. Would-be gangsters.
‘We don’t want to break down here,’ she said. They passed a turnoff to the Kruger Park’s Numbi Gate, but Sannie said they were headed further north, to an entrance closer to the park’s internal police station. ‘I just wanted to show you how some people live, so you can maybe understand the crime problem a little better.’
Tom nodded. Something Sannie had said before, about African women, reminded him of his brief informal investigation into Nick’s disappearance. ‘Did you ever notice Nick taking an interest in black African women?’
Sannie sniffed. ‘That man would take an interest in a cobra if you held its head. Why do you ask?’
‘I think one of the last people to have seen him was a South African woman.’
‘A hooker?’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘How can you guess?’ Sannie asked, giving him a deadpan look.
‘Actually, she was what we might in polite circles call an exotic dancer.’
‘A stripper? Sounds like him. He and a couple of the male cops went to a table-dancing club in Pretoria one time. My colleagues told me Nick was particularly interested in the one girl, and she was black.’
‘I wonder if it could be the same one,’ Tom said, thinking out loud.
‘Could just be that he was into any girl who would talk to him — even if he had to stick money in her garter, you know.’
They had passed back into rural countryside, lush farms which covered the mountains in different shades of emerald in the afternoon sun. Tom noted banana farms and tropical fruits such as avocados and mangoes for sale on the side of the road. Fertile country. ‘I grew up near here, on a banana farm,’ Sannie said as they passed through a small but chaotic town — a ‘ dorp ’ she called it — named Hazyview. ‘I was a real bush baby. My family took my brothers and me into the Kruger Park every school holiday and many weekends. But I never got sick of it.’
Workers heading home thronged the sidewalks, and pick-ups laden with farm produce and fertilizer queued at the robots in a mini peak-hour traffic jam. Loud hip-hop blared from giant ghetto-blasters parked outside an electrical goods store. A gaggle of school-girls in starched uniforms giggled at something.
‘Did you stay at a lodge like the one we’re heading for? From what I’ve read it’s very expensive.’
She chuckled. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, my friend. Kruger gets about three million visitors a year, and most of those are local families. You can stay in national parks rest camps which have camping sites and self-contained rondavels — huts. You don’t need to stay at one of the larney places. There’s something for everyone, although when I was a little kid the park was for whites only. It’s good now, though, to see more black families visiting. I take my kids camping there a few times a year.’
They continued driving and Sannie checked her watch. The kids would be out of school soon, and when she could she would call her mother to make sure they had got to her place safely and talk to them for a bit. Tom appeared deep in thought, and she guessed he was still mulling over what had happened to his police colleague. As much as she disliked Nick, a tiny part of her still felt bad that a detective who, despite all his faults, was always punctual and professional — at least around the man he was protecting — had suddenly disappeared. She felt a pang of guilt that she had secretly wished him ill. She hoped he would turn up drunk or stoned in the bed of some African stripper. The bol-locking — to borrow an English word — that he would receive would be long overdue and might teach him a lesson. She had never seen Nick use drugs, though when they were off duty she had noticed him easily matching Pol and Kobus, the other members of her team, drink for drink, and they were major soaks.
She had been mildly offended the night in Pretoria that the three of them had announced in the pub that they were going to the strip club. Not because they were leaving her, but because they hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to go too. She’d never been to such a place, not even as part of her job, and she was curious to see what went on.
Sannie took the turning to the Paul Kruger Gate, a major entrance point to the national park. She really did love coming to this place. Whether in the old South Africa or the new, the park was a Garden of Eden, a natural oasis where one could forget the day-to-day problems and challenges of life and immerse oneself in the restful, inspiring tranquillity of the bush. Even though she was here on a work assignment, she felt the stress melt from her body and her grip on the steering wheel relax as she crossed the Sabie River. She pulled up a hundred metres short of the thatched gatehouse and unloaded and cleared her Z88. She noticed Tom watching her out of the corner of his eye. She handled her weapon confidently and safely and was an expert shot, regularly outshooting all of her male colleagues on the firing range. She put the pistol back in its holster and smiled at him.
‘Won’t you need that for lions and tigers?’
‘No tigers in Africa, I’m afraid. No, this place is about as safe as it gets in South Africa — as long as you stay in your car.’
Tom grimaced and she laughed at him. He was a good-looking guy. Solidly built. He had a full head of hair and blue eyes, which she liked the look of, and a strong jaw. Unlike some of the other detectives she worked with, this one obviously kept himself fit. There was no sign of a beer belly hanging over his trouser belt.
Sannie had only come close to sleeping with one man since Christo’s death, and that had been one time only. It was a disaster. She had been drinking at the squad’s Christmas party — in fact, she had been so drunk that she had decided not to drive home. She was about to call her mother when her boss, Captain Henk Wessels, had offered to give her a lift. He lived not far from her home in suburban Kempton Park — only a couple of streets away.
At the time it had been a little more than a year since Christo had been shot and she had been so preoccupied with the kids — helping them to stay focused at school and to deal with their grief — that she hadn’t even thought about having another relationship. When Wessels stopped outside her home he had leaned over from the driver’s seat to give her a goodnight kiss.
It was not entirely appropriate for a senior officer to do something like that to a subordinate but, what the hell, she had thought, it was Christmas and it had been a damned good party, and he had taken her home. As she leaned over to offer her cheek he struck, fast and predatory, like a mamba, and planted a kiss on her lips. She leaned back, surprised, and not sure if it had been a mistake of timing or positioning. Henk was not an unattractive man. He had left his wife and four children for a girl of twenty-five, who was only a little more than half his age. It had been a bad situation, made worse for the captain when the younger girl ditched him after seven months. Sannie thought he was seeing a nurse these days, though the two were not living together. He smiled at her. He was a bad man.
And that, she had realised, was exactly what she needed right then. The thought came to her with the clarity that only seven brandy and Cokes could bring. They kissed and clawed at each other like a pair of teenagers after the matric dance. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.
‘My place,’ Wessels panted.
Sannie felt lascivious, wanton, desperate for the feel of a man again. She had her hand in the captain’s pants as he drove, dangerously fast, back to his empty house.
The drive there should have been enough to warn her that the night was not going to improve. Henk had been unable to rise to the occasion, and no amount of her ministrations had helped, not in the car, or in his shabbily furnished, untidy house. He had eventually admitted defeat and dropped her home. Exhausted, drunk, frustrated, embarrassed and dreadfully sad, she had cried herself to sleep. Mixed with her hangover the next morning was a crushing feeling that she had been unfaithful to Christo. She tried, in vain, to tell herself she should get on with her life, perhaps even go looking for another husband, but her feelings of guilt won out. She wondered later if she would have felt differently if they’d had sex.
‘Is that the welcoming committee?’ Tom Furey asked.
‘What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking of something I need to tell my mom about the kids. Yes, that’s Captain Tshabalala from Skukuza. That’s the park’s main camp and there’s a police post there. He’ll escort us in so we don’t need to worry about entrance fees and park permits and whatnot.’
The captain was a rotund, smiling man in his mid-forties with whom Sannie had worked often over the years. She liked him, even though he was exactly the sort of person she would have been trying to arrest pre-1994 when Nelson Mandela had led the country to majority rule. Isaac Tshabalala had trained in the former Soviet Union as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe — the spear of the nation — the military arm of the African National Congress. Thankfully, South Africa had made the transition to true democracy without Isaac’s training in explosives and sabotage needing to be put to the test.
‘Welcome to the Kruger National Park,’ Isaac said to Tom as he shook hands. ‘ Kunjani, Sannie. How are you?’
‘Fine, sir, and you?’
Isaac ushered them into the gate office and spoke rapidly, in the language of the Shangaan people, to the young woman behind the desk. Sannie understood every word. She had learned it from her nanny as a child and practised with the children of the farm labourers. Her mother had not approved and had smacked her bottom on more than one occasion for talking in the language of the majority of inhabitants of their part of the old Eastern Transvaal. Her father had winked at her whenever the punishment was delivered, which took some sting out of the blows. Isaac was now telling the woman they were all police officers, even the pretty but too skinny blonde one. The receptionist put a hand to her mouth to cover her laugh. Sannie had never let on to the captain that she spoke his language and she kept a straight face, knowing an African language was a handy card to have up one’s sleeve and one to be played judiciously.
Captain Tshabalala drove ahead in his ageing Toyota Venture people-mover. ‘Look, on the right… some giraffe,’ Sannie said to Tom matter-of-factly.
‘Where? Boy, you’ve got good eyesight. Blimey, that’s incredible. Look at them just wandering around without a care. That’s just…’
He was lost for words, literally, and she smiled as she noticed him craning his head back to continue staring at the animals as she drove on behind their escort. She wished she could remember the first time she had seen a giraffe. The awesome, addictive terror of her first close-up sighting of a lion, when she was five, was something which would stay with her forever. It was one of her earliest childhood memories. The Africa bug had just bitten Tom Furey for the first time. The more incredible things one saw — lion kills, a leopard stalking an impala, bull elephants fighting — the more one needed to keep coming back. Tom’s new principal, Robert Greeves, was clearly a hopeless addict. She remembered him saying once that he had been to Africa, either on business or pleasure or both, annually for the past fifteen years.
‘Damn, my camera’s in my bag.’ Tom sounded disappointed.
‘Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty more giraffe for you to see later — and everything else.’
Tshabalala led them to the Skukuza police post where, over coffee, he explained for Tom’s benefit the local chain of command and areas of responsibility. Basically he and his officers, who were limited in numbers and resources, would be available to provide initial uniformed back-up if any incident during the visit required it. Political relations between South Africa and the UK were good, so there was no threat of any demonstration or protest — not that such actions would even be feasible within the confines of a national park where, for the most part, animals rather than people held sway. Isaac explained that should Greeves be taken ill, or injured in any way, there was a doctor on call twenty-four hours a day at Skukuza, and Nelspruit hospital was forty-five minutes away.
‘Really, I can’t think of anything that could go wrong, other than the minister falling ill, or being eaten by a lion on a game drive.’ The burly captain’s whole body shook and Sannie swore she felt the floor vibrating under her high heels as he laughed at his own joke.
Tom, she saw, smiled politely, then asked questions about police radio communications, emergency frequencies, phone numbers, and crime figures for the national park and its surrounds. He was very professional, but Sannie expected nothing less of the Englishman. As she had reflected earlier, even that sleaze Nick Roberts was good at his job. Being a protection officer — dropping in and out of other people’s turf — required diplomacy, and Tom had it.
Their briefing session over, Sannie and Tom left the captain and went back to her car. ‘The lodge is only about ten minutes from here.’
‘Do you share his confidence about the risk assessment here in the park?’ Tom asked as she unlocked the Mercedes by remote. The horn gave a little beep and the hazard lights flashed as the alarm was disabled.
‘I lock my car, even when I know there’s about a one in a million chance of it being broken into or stolen outside a police post in the middle of a national park.’
Tom opened the car door. ‘That’s why we’re here.’