African Sky (28 page)

He lowered his pistol and laughed as a large baboon scuttled out of the darkness and sprinted past him into the light. He holstered the weapon and took a look around.

The hangar was empty. At least, it did not contain an aircraft. There was a workbench and a cupboard along one wall, presumably full of tools. There were three forty-four gallon petrol drums on the floor, but when he kicked each of them they echoed emptily. Catherine had told him the truth about her desperate fuel shortage. There were no fresh oil stains on the concrete floor, nothing to indicate an aircraft had been parked there for some time. At the rear of the building he found a hole where the baboon had presumably entered. The lower sections of a few timber planks had succumbed to termites, and the primate had been able to snap off sections of wood. There was nothing more for him to see here.

Bryant holstered his pistol and walked back out into the sunshine. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he should do next.

Reitz had been surprised and alarmed to see the aeroplane circling the ranch. Pleased with himself that he had decided to take the long route, around the airstrip, rather than crossing it, he had nonetheless had a few anxious moments when the noise of the low-level pass over the landing ground had startled his horses.

Now he lay at the base of a stout marula tree and watched the aviator through the Mauser's telescopic sight. He could kill the man easily from this range. No more than two hundred metres, and the fool was standing still, in the open. So easy, but that seemingly simple solution would create many more problems than it would solve. He would have to dispose of the body and he was unsure how soon it would be before the man's colleagues mounted a search. He couldn't fly, and the aircraft was too heavy for one man to push into the hangar in order to hide it.
As much as he longed to shoot this flyer – who represented everything Reitz hated about the British in this war – he would not pull the trigger.

The man looked thoughtful as he smoked his cigarette. Reitz hoped he would get in his aircraft and fly away. He wondered what the pilot had been searching for in the hangar.

Reitz tracked the uniformed man with the barrel of the Mauser. He was not walking to his aircraft. Instead, he turned and walked purposefully away from the hangar and onto the dirt road that led from the airstrip back to the main house. Reitz had seen the road from his earlier vantage point. From his own careful study of the lodge and its servants' quarters from the hilltop, he had deduced that all of the buildings were empty. He wondered why the pilot was heading that way. Perhaps he was lost, or short of fuel, and was looking for help, or to telephone his base. It didn't matter. What was important was that disaster had been averted and now, again with a little luck and God's grace, he might be able to take one more Englishman out of the war.

He guessed it was about a kilometre from the landing ground to the homestead. It would take the man at least twenty minutes to walk there and back. It would also take some time for the pilot to realise that there was no one home, so Reitz figured he had maybe a half-hour all up. Plenty of time. The pilot was out of sight now.

Reitz checked the horses' tethers and then darted across the grassy runway. He stopped at the aircraft and crouched in the shade of a wing. He scanned the bush around him and satisfied himself again he was alone.

Putting a bullet in the pilot's brain would have been the quickest way to take him out of the war, but what Reitz had in mind was to put an end to both man and machine. He walked around the Harvard. He climbed up on a wing and looked into the cockpit. He noticed that the pilot's seat was actually an open-topped squarish metal box. Instead of a cushion, the man flying it sat on his parachute, which he presumably buckled to himself once he took his position. Reitz wondered if he shouldn't also doctor the man's chute, just to make sure he killed himself. As a paratrooper, parachutes were no mystery to him. However, if
the man did manage to land his aircraft safely, and survive, such tampering might be discovered. He did not want to arouse the suspicion of the air force on the eve of the completion of his mission.

He considered puncturing the fuel tanks, which he guessed would be in the wings, but this would take time, and there was the problem of finding a container big enough to drain the gas into. Besides, the pilot would presumably check his fuel gauges before take-off.

He stepped down off the wing and started another circuit around the aircraft, stopping at the engine. He looked up at it. How to stop the engine in such a way that the man would crash soon after flight? A breeze behind him chilled the sweat on his back and that gave him an idea. Beneath the engine cowling was a large oval-shaped vent. He reached up and put his hand inside, and felt around. The intake turned upwards, at ninety degrees, towards the lower cylinders. He knew enough about engines to know they got hot and therefore needed to be cooled. If he could find something to block this air inlet, he could push it up the vertical shaft and out of sight to anyone standing on the ground.

Reitz jogged into the hangar and fetched a wooden box and an old rag spattered with paint. He stood on the box, to give himself extra height, and reached inside the air vent again, stuffing the rag as deep inside as he could reach. The aircraft's power plant would get very hot soon after take-off. How soon, though, he had no way of knowing.

There were no smoky lunchtime cooking fires outside the basic whitewashed mud and thatch staff huts behind the big house. No half-naked African children played in the fenced dirt compound, no dogs yapped at him. The house looked similarly bereft of life.

The front door was unlocked. ‘Hello!' Bryant called. Anyone home?' His voice echoed through the empty homestead. The heels of his boots squeaked on the polished floorboards in the hallway.

In the dining room the long table was covered in a white sheet, likewise the chairs. It was the same in the drawing room. The cream walls were checked with rectangles of bright white here and there where oil
paintings and family photographs had been removed. Dust particles danced in a stray ray of sunlight that stabbed the gloom through a gap in the drawn curtains.

In the kitchen and bedroom he found half-packed tea-chests and the floors littered with strands of dry straw. Evidently there was still some more packing to be done, or perhaps Catherine had simply abandoned some things to the mothballed home. In the bedroom he stooped and looked inside one of the boxes, brushing aside some straw with his hand.

There was a gleaming copper chamber pot. He smiled. Very rustic, but probably not at home in a swanky town house in Salisbury. Under the vessel was a stack of old newspapers and magazines. He moved the pot and pulled out a handful of newsprint. One of the pages of a yellowing copy of the
Chronicle
newspaper, dated 8 July 1938, was dog-eared at a top corner. He flicked it open. It was an article about Catherine's late husband, the wealthy professional hunter Hugo De Beers. A slightly blurry photograph showed the thin, silver-maned man standing beside a dead elephant. Hugo had one foot resting on a massive tusk, almost as long as the hunter was tall. The headline read: ‘LOCAL HUNTER SLAYS CROP RAIDER'. Bryant tossed the paper back in the box. The other newspaper editions and journals were similarly flagged and all had stories about De Beers.

He was going to put them back, but then he came across a story not from the news or finance pages – there seemed to be almost as much coverage about De Beers' business investments as there was about his hunts. This page showed a collection of wedding photographs from the social pages. The picture, taken in early 1940, showed a radiant, smiling Catherine clinging to the arm of the old man. She looked the picture of virginal innocence. Bryant smiled again and shook his head.

He lifted the chamber pot to replace it and the newspapers, but another clipping, now on the top of the stack, caught his eye.

‘BIG GAME HUNTER SHOT DEAD!' screamed the bold headline. He picked it up and replaced the others in the box. He heard a cough behind him and turned in surprise.

‘Ah, good morning, sah,' an elderly African man in blue overalls said.

‘Oh, hello, how are you?' Bryant asked. He held the newspaper by his side and slightly behind him.

‘I am fine, sah. Can I help you?'

Bryant had met the man before. ‘You're Kenneth's father.'

‘Yes, Enoch, sah. Enoch Ngwenya. I am the head of security for Isilwane.'

It was a lofty title for the nightwatchman. ‘Ah, right. Enoch. How is your sickness, Enoch?'

‘The medicine is helping, sah. The madam has left-i,' Enoch said, waving his hand around the empty room.

‘Ah, right. Yes, so I see. She told me she was going to Salisbury, but I thought I might catch her at home today. I landed my aeroplane at the airstrip.'

‘Yes, sah,' Enoch said, narrowing his eyes.

Bryant noticed the man had a black eye and a long scabby cut above his right eye. The skin around the gash and his cheek was puffy and swollen. ‘Kenneth told me you had been hurt, Enoch. How did that happen?'

‘Sah?'

‘Your eye.'

‘Oh,' the man said, looking at the floor for a moment. ‘I was kicked by one of the horses, sah. It was an accident.'

‘Kenneth told me that another man had done this to you. Was he a friend of Mrs De Beers?'

‘The madam has left-i, sah,' Enoch said again.

Bryant wasn't sure whether the old man's grasp of English was lacking, or whether he was too embarrassed – or scared – to answer the question. ‘I'm a friend of Kenneth's, Enoch. If someone has hurt you, we can tell the police.'

The old man's eyes widened. ‘No, sah. It is fine. I just-i bumped my head.' He rubbed his temple and forced a smile.

‘Was there a man here, with Mrs De Beers?'

‘The madam has left-i, sah,' Enoch said.

Bryant gave up. It was up to Kenneth now to see how he could help his father. ‘Where are the rest of the staff, Enoch?'

‘Mrs De Beers has dismissed them, sah. I am the only one left here. It is my job now to protect the empty lodge, but the madam has told me to take two weeks' leave first.'

Bryant saw the mix of regret and relief in the man's eyes. He still had a job, albeit a boring one. ‘Were the other staff disappointed?'

The old man shrugged. ‘Everyone needs to work, sah.'

Bryant had little to gauge Catherine's behaviour by, but he had been surprised at just how rude and condescending she had often been to her domestic workers. She had a variety of distasteful terms for Africans, and tried to use as many different ones as possible in his presence. As an outsider, a foreigner, he was a little shocked, but he'd said nothing.

‘When did she leave, Enoch?'

‘Very early this morning, sah. I was told to burn those newspapers, sah,' he said, gesturing to the box. ‘The madam gave me the pot-i as a gift, sah,' he added proudly.

‘Good for you, mate.' Bryant could imagine Catherine laughing at the back-handed compliment paid to the security guard by such a gift.

‘I am sure the madam would not mind if you wanted to take a newspaper to read, sah,' Enoch said, nodding down at Bryant's half-concealed hand.

He suddenly felt guilty, like a thief caught red-handed. He wanted to be out of the house quickly now. He'd have to try to contact her by telephone. She'd told him she was staying at the Meikles Hotel in Salisbury while her new house was being sorted out. ‘Thanks, mate,' he said to Enoch, and stuffed the newspaper into his trouser pocket at he walked out.

He trudged back down the dirt road towards the airstrip. ‘Bugger,' he said aloud to himself. He looked at his watch. It was after midday now. There would be a stack of minor but nonetheless necessary tasks for him to attend to, in preparation for tomorrow's big parade. He'd end up working late into the night. What he really wanted now was a cold beer.

He began his pre-flight inspection of the Harvard. The kite had
handled beautifully over Bechuanaland and there was no evidence of any oil leaks around the engine. He looked along the fuselage, checked the tail wheel and ran his hands over the elevators, rudder and trim tabs. He checked the wings, then the landing gear underneath, for hydraulic leaks. As he'd been away from the aircraft for a while he turned the propeller, as the mechanic at Kumalo had done before he left, in order to redistribute the engine oil.

He climbed quickly into the cockpit and ran through the remaining checks rapidly. The sooner he started up, the sooner he could get up amongst some cool air. The engine coughed to life. The oil temperature had climbed to forty degrees, so he opened the air intake again. Everything looked fine.

He brought the undercarriage up as soon as the wheels had cleared the grass. Ahead of him was a clear sky and typically perfect flying weather.

‘Christ, I could do this for a living,' he said to himself. The irony made him smile.

‘Constable Lovejoy,' Flight Sergeant Henderson said as he leaned into the window of the police car which was stopped at the red-and-white-striped boom gate at the front of Kumalo air base, ‘to what do we owe the inestimable pleasure of your company this time?'

Pip tried her hardest to smile. Something she did not feel like doing. She recognised the air force policeman from the riot in town, and detested the way he was staring at her breasts. ‘I need to talk to you and whoever was on guard duty on the night of Felicity Langham's death.'

‘Me?'

Henderson's smarmy self-confidence evaporated and a look of panic crossed his face. Despite the turmoil that raged within her she was able to crack a genuine smile now. The job did have its perks. ‘Don't worry, Flight Sergeant. I'm not here to arrest
you
.'

Henderson snorted and nodded to the askari to lift the boom. ‘Park over there,' he ordered.

Pip drove while Hayes fidgeted with his belt buckle in the seat next to her. ‘Is there something going on between you and Bryant? You need to tell me now, you know, if there is,' he said.