The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (28 page)

Even when Craig rebuilt the house and restocked the pastures, that vital element had been lacking still. Now at last love burgeoned on King’s Lynn, and their joy in each other seemed to
radiate out from the homestead on the hill and permeate the entire estate, breathing life and the fecund promise of more life into the land.

The Matabele recognized it immediately. When Craig and Sally-Anne in the battered Land-Rover rode the red dust tracks that linked the huge paddocks, the Matabele women straightened up from the
wooden mortars in which they were pounding maize, or turned stiff-necked under the enormous burden of firewood balanced upon their heads to call a greeting and watch them with a fond and knowing
gaze. Old Joseph said nothing, but made up the bed in Craig’s room with four pillows, put flowers on the table at the side of the bed that Sally-Anne had chosen, and placed four of his
special biscuits on the early morning tea-tray when he brought it in to them each dawn.

For three days Sally-Anne restrained herself, and then one morning sitting up in bed, sipping tea, she told Craig, ‘As curtains, those make fine dish rags.’ She pointed a half-eaten
biscuit at the cheap unbleached calico that he had tacked over the windows.

‘Can you do better?’ Craig asked with concealed cunning, and she walked straight into the trap. Once she was involved in choosing curtains, she was immediately involved in everything
else. From designing furniture for Joseph’s relative, the celebrated carpenter, to build, to laying out the new vegetable garden and replanting the rose bushes and shrubs that had died of
neglect.

Then Joseph entered the conspiracy by bringing her the proposed dinner menu for the evening. ‘Should it be roast tonight, Nkosazana, or chicken curry?’

‘Nkosi Craig likes tripe,’ Sally-Anne had made this discovery during casual discussion. ‘Can you do tripe and onions?’

Joseph beamed. ‘The old governor-general before the war, whenever he come to Kingi Lingi I make him tripe and onions, Nkosazana. He tell me “Very good, Joseph, best in
world!”’

‘Okay, Joseph, tonight we’ll have your “best-in-world tripe and onions”,’ she laughed, and only when Joseph formally handed over to her the pantry keys did she
realize what a serious pronouncement that had been.

She was there at midnight when the first new calf was born on King’s Lynn, a difficult birthing with the calf’s head twisted back so that Craig had to soap his arm and thrust it up
into the mother to free it while Shadrach and Hans Groenewald held the head and Sally-Anne held the lantern high to light the work.

When at last it came in a slippery rush, it was a heifer, pale beige and wobbly on its long ungainly legs. As soon as it began to nurse from its mother’s udder, they could leave it to
Shadrach and go home to bed.

‘That was one of the most marvellous experiences of my life, darling. Who taught you to do that?’

‘Bawu, my grandfather.’ He held her close to him in the dark bedroom. ‘You didn’t feel sick?’

‘I loved it, birth fascinates me.’

‘Like Henry the Eighth, I prefer it in the abstract,’ he chuckled.

‘You rude boy,’ she whispered. ‘But aren’t you too tired?’

‘Are you?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t truthfully say that I am.’

She made one or two half-hearted attempts to break out and leave.

‘I had a telegram today, the “C. of A.” on the Cessna is complete, and I should go down to Johannesburg to collect her.’

‘If you can wait two or three weeks or so, I’ll come down with you. They are having a terrible drought in the south and stock prices are rock bottom. We could fly around the big
ranches together and pick up a few bargains.’

So she let it pass, and the days telescoped into each other, filled for both of them with love and work – work on the photographic book, on the new novel, on collating her field research
material for the Wildlife Trust, on the final preparations for the opening of Zambezi Waters, and on the daily running and embellishing of King’s Lynn.

With each week that passed, her will to resist the spell that Craig and King’s Lynn were weaving about her weakened, the exigencies of her previous life faded, until one day she caught
herself referring to the house on the hill as ‘home’ and was only slightly shocked at herself.

A week later a registered letter was forwarded from her address in Harare. It was a formal application form for the renewal of her research grant from the Wildlife Trust. Instead of filling it
in and returning it immediately, she slipped it into her camera bag.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ she promised herself, but deep in herself realized she had reached a crossroads in her life. The prospect of flying about Africa alone with her only
possessions a change of clothes and a camera, sleeping where she lay down and bathing when she could, was no longer as attractive as it had always been to her.

That night at dinner she looked around the huge almost bare dining-room, the new curtains its only glory, and touched the refectory table of Rhodesian teak that, under her guidance,
Joseph’s relative had fashioned and she anticipated the patina of use and care it would soon acquire. Then she looked past the burning candles to the man who sat opposite her and she was
afraid and strangely elated. She knew she had made the decision.

They took their coffee onto the veranda and listened to the cicadas’ whining in the jacaranda trees, and the squeak of the flying bats hunting below a yellow moon.

She snuggled against his shoulder and said, ‘Craig, darling, it’s time to tell you. I do love you – so very dearly.’

C
raig wanted to rush into Bulawayo and take the magistrate’s court by storm, but she restrained him laughingly.

‘My God, you crazy man, it isn’t like buying a pound of cheese. You can’t just up and get married, just like that.’

‘Why not? Lots of people do.’

‘I don’t,’ she said firmly. ‘I want it to be done properly.’ She did some counting on her fingers and pencilling on the calendar at the back of her notebook, and
then decided, ‘February 16th.’

‘That’s four months away,’ Craig groaned, but his protests were ridden down ruthlessly.

Joseph, on the other hand, was in full accord with Sally-Anne’s plans for a formal wedding.

‘You get married on Kingi Lingi, Nkosikazi.’

It was a statement rather than a question, and Sally-Anne’s Sindebele was now good enough to recognize that she had been promoted from ‘little mistress’ to ‘great
lady’.

‘How many people?’ Joseph demanded. ‘Two hundred, three hundred?’

‘I doubt we can raise that many,’ Sally-Anne demurred.

‘When Nkosana Roly get married Kingi Lingi, we have four hundred, even Nkosi Smithy he come!’

‘Joseph,’ she scolded him, ‘you really are a frightful old snob, you know!’

F
or Craig the pervading unhappiness that he had felt at Tungata’s sentence slowly dissipated, swamped by all the excitement and activity at
King’s Lynn. In a few months he had all but put it from his mind, only at odd and unexpected moments his memory of his one-time friend barbed him. To the rest of the world, Tungata Zebiwe
might have never existed. After the extravagant coverage by press and television of his trial, it seemed that a curtain of silence was drawn over him like a shroud.

Then abruptly, once again the name Tungata Zebiwe was blazed from every television screen and bannered on every front page across the entire continent.

Craig and Sally-Anne sat in front of the television set, appalled and disbelieving, as they listened to the first reports. When they ended, and the programme changed to a weather report, Craig
stood up and crossed to the set. He switched it off and came back to her side, moving like a man who was still in deep shock from some terrible accident.

The two of them sat in silence in the darkened room, until Sally-Anne reached for his hand. She squeezed it hard, but her shudder was involuntary, it racked her whole body.

‘Those poor little girls – they were babies. Can you imagine their terror?’

‘I knew the Goodwins. They were fine people. They always treated their black people well,’ Craig muttered.

‘This proves – as nothing else possibly could – that they were right to lock him away like a dangerous animal.’ Her horror was beginning to turn to anger.

‘I can’t see what they could possibly hope to gain by this—’ Craig was still shaking his head incredulously, and Sally-Anne burst out.

‘The whole country, the whole world must see them for what they are. Bloodthirsty, inhuman—’ her voice cracked and became a sob. ‘Those babies – oh Christ in
heaven, I hate him. I wish him dead.’

‘They used his name – that doesn’t mean Tungata ordered it, condoned it, or even knew about it.’ Craig tried to sound convincing.

‘I hate him,’ she whispered. ‘I hate him for it.’

‘It’s madness. All they can possibly achieve is to bring Shona troops sweeping through Matabeleland like the wrath of all the gods.’

‘The little one was only five years old.’ In her outrage and sorrow, Sally-Anne was repeating herself.

‘Nigel Goodwin was a good man – I knew him quite well, we were in the same special police unit during the war, I liked him.’ Craig went to the drinks table and poured two
whiskies. ‘Please God, don’t let it all start again. All the awfulness and cruelty and horror – please God, spare us that.’

A
lthough Nigel Goodwin was almost forty years of age, he had one of those beefy pink faces unaffected by the African sun that made him look like a
lad. His wife, Helen, was a thin, dark-haired girl, her plainness alleviated by her patent good nature and her sparkly, toffee-brown eyes.

The two girls were weekly boarders at the convent in Bulawayo. At eight years, Alice Goodwin had ginger hair and gingery freckles and, like her father, she was plump and pink. Stephanie, the
baby, was five, really too young for boarding-school. However, because she had an elder sister at the convent, the Reverend Mother made an exception in her case. She was the pretty one, small and
dark and chirpy as a little bird with her mother’s bright eyes.

Each Friday morning, Nigel and Helen Goodwin drove in seventy-eight miles from the ranch to town. At one o’clock they picked up the girls from the convent, had lunch at the Selbourne
Hotel, sharing a bottle of wine, and then spent the afternoon shopping. Helen restocked her groceries, chose material to make into dresses for herself and the girls, and then, while the girls went
to watch a matinée at the local cinema, had her hair washed, cut and set, the one extravagance of her simple existence.

Nigel was on the committee of the Matabele Farmers’ Union, and spent an hour or two at the Union’s offices in leisurely discussion with the secretary and those other members who were
in town for the day. Then he strolled down the wide sun-scorched streets, his slouch hat pushed back on his head, hands in pockets, puffing happily on a black briar, greeting friends and
acquaintances both white and black, stopping every few yards for a word or a chat.

When he arrived back where he had left the Toyota truck outside the Farmers’ Co-operative, his Matabele headman, Josiah, and two labourers were waiting for him. They loaded the purchases
of fencing and tools and spare parts and cattle medicines and other odds and ends into the truck, and as they finished, Helen and the girls arrived for the journey home.

‘Excuse me, Miss,’ Nigel accosted his wife, ‘have you seen Mrs Goodwin anywhere?’ It was his little weekly joke, and Helen giggled delightedly and preened her new
hairdo.

For the girls he had a bag of liquorice allsorts. His wife protested, ‘Sweets are so bad for their teeth, dear,’ and Nigel winked at the girls and agreed, ‘I know, but just
this once won’t kill them.’

Stephanie, because she was the baby, rode in the truck cab between her parents, while Alice went in the back with Josiah and the other Matabele.

‘Wrap up, dear, it will be dark before we get home,’ Helen cautioned her.

The first sixty-two miles were on the main road, and then they turned off on the farm track, and Josiah jumped down to open the wire gate and let them through.

‘Home again,’ said Nigel contentedly, as he drove onto his own land. He always said that and Helen smiled and reached across to lay her hand on his leg.

‘It’s nice to be home, dear,’ she agreed.

The abrupt African night fell over them, and Nigel switched on the headlights. They picked up the eyes of the cattle in little bright points of light, fat contented beasts, the smell of their
dung sharp and ammoniacal on the cool night air.

‘Getting dry,’ Nigel grunted. ‘Need some rain.’

‘Yes, dear.’ Helen picked little Stephanie onto her lap, and the child cuddled sleepily against her shoulder.

‘There we are,’ Nigel murmured. ‘Cooky has lit the lamps.’

He had been promising himself an electric generator for the last ten years, but there was always something else more important, so they were still on gas and paraffin. The lights of the
homestead flickered a welcome at them between the stems of the acacia trees.

Nigel parked the truck beside the back veranda and cut the engine and headlights. Helen climbed down carrying Stephanie. The child was asleep now with her thumb in her mouth, and her skinny bare
legs dangling.

Nigel went to the back of the truck and lifted Alice down.

‘
Longile
, Josiah, you can go off now. We will unload the truck tomorrow morning,’ he told his men. ‘Sleep well!’

Holding Alice’s hand, he followed his wife to the veranda, but before they reached it the dazzling beam of a powerful flashlight struck them and the family stopped in a small compact
group.

‘Who is it?’ Nigel demanded irritably, shielding his eyes from the beam with one hand, still holding Alice’s hand with the other.

His eyes adjusted and he could see beyond the flashlight, and suddenly he felt sick with fear for his wife and his babies. There were three black men, dressed in blue denim jeans and jackets.
Each of them carried an AK 47 rifle. The rifles were pointed at the family group. Nigel glanced behind him quickly. There were other strangers, he was not sure how many. They had come out of the
night, and under their guns Josiah and his two labourers were huddled fearfully.