The Prey (38 page)

The colours of his homeland were richer than the dull tones of South Africa. Here the sun burned brighter, the sea shone bluer and the fronds were the green of precious stones. After the months he had spent underground he still found it hard to be in the harsh light of day. He closed his eyes as the minibus resumed its journey, but sleep would not come to him.

The driver slowed once again, signifying they were approaching a village.

Luis looked out the window and saw the bare branches of dead trees festooned with plastic bags full of cashew nuts. This told him they were coming into Macia, a town famed for its cashew plantations. Luis focused his mind on Wellington, and how he would pay for the murder of Miriam. In the early afternoon the bus crossed the wide verdant floodplain of the Limpopo River on a raised bund and the bridge that led into the coastal town of Xai Xai.

The driver crawled through the crowded main street and turned into the bus station near the markets. Luis had further to go, to reach his son, but he had other business to deal with first. He left the
chapa
and walked to the police station.

Xai Xai was busier and more prosperous than he remembered. Indeed, the whole country seemed to be booming compared to his last visit five years earlier. When he’d held a legitimate job in the mines he would come and go to Mozambique every Christmas holiday, but when he had lost his job and his work permit and joined the ranks of the illegal miners he could no longer cross the border legally at will.

The old colonial buildings were freshly whitewashed and the streets swept. There were more stores than he remembered and people sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes outside sidewalk cafes. The cars that hooted and stopped and started were newer and the people looked better fed than they had in the years of privation during and after the civil war. A first-time visitor to this bustling town would have to search hard to find a bullet pockmark in one of the few unpainted buildings to prove there had ever been a war here, or that close to a million people had died.

Luis found the police station and walked in. A female officer sat behind the charge counter, reading a Portuguese gossip magazine. If she heard him enter, she didn’t look up.

‘
Bom dia
,’ he said. She looked at him over the top of the page she was reading. ‘I am looking for
Capitao
Alfredo Simango,’ he continued in Portuguese.

‘What business do you have with the
capitao
?’

‘I am his cousin. It is family business.’ He was pleased – at least Alfredo was here. In a letter, Miriam had mentioned that she had seen his cousin in their home town, Inhambane, when he was investigating a case. She had mentioned that Alfredo had told her that he was being moved from Vilanculos to Xai Xai, though he had given no dates.

The officer raised her eyebrows, asked him his name and picked up a telephone handset that might have weighed fifteen kilograms given the effort she exerted to call her superior. ‘Sit,’ she said to him after she finished the call, and pointed to a wooden bench by the wall.

Luis saw the grubby marks of sweaty heads on the fly-specked wall and kept his back straight. Alfredo emerged from a doorway down the corridor a few minutes later wiping greasy fingers on a paper serviette. The two cousins greeted each other, shook hands, and Alfredo invited him into his office.

‘My cousin, I thought you were in South Africa working in the mines. The last time I saw your wife she told me how successful you were.’

Just the mention of Miriam brought back the pain. ‘I was. But my wife, that is why I am here to see you, Alfredo. She is dead.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. Killed by a man in South Africa. I want this man.’

Alfredo rocked back in his chair and folded his hands across his policeman’s belly. ‘What do the South African police say of this matter?’

Luis thought his cousin was basically a good man, although Miriam had mentioned in her letter Alfredo was driving a new Land Cruiser and Luis knew such a vehicle would be beyond a police captain’s honest wage. It had been said, when he had worked in Vilanculos, that he had turned a blind eye, if not actually participated in, the smuggling of goods into Mozambique that had been seized by pirates in the Indian Ocean. ‘What do the South Africans care of the death of a poor woman from Mozambique?’

Alfredo nodded his understanding at the flimsy excuse.

‘Besides,’ Luis continued, ‘I am sure the murderer is in Mozambique.’

‘He is one of us?’

Luis shook his head. ‘Zimbabwean.’

‘Criminals, all of them.’

‘I have a cellphone number for him, Alfredo. I was hoping you would have the resources to find the name and address of the owner. The government requires everyone who buys a phone or sim card to register their name and address.’

Alfredo nodded. Luis slid across a grubby corner of a piece of paper, with the number written on it. Alfredo studied it. ‘It is irregular, if it is not part of a formal investigation, but it can be done. There will be costs – not for me, cousin, but for the people who will find this information for me. I hope you understand.’

Luis reached into his pocket and pulled out ten hundred-rand notes. He placed his palm down flat on the scratched desktop and Alfredo covered his hand. ‘I am sorry for your loss, Luis. I will find the owner of this phone for you, but then what do you want me to do?’

Luis freed his hand from under his cousin’s, but held his gaze. ‘Nothing. I will do the rest.’

*

Wellington could have, at a pinch, contacted some people he knew in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, who, in turn, could have found someone local in Livingstone to do the job, but it was not in his nature to trust people he did not know, or to miss out on the chance of a kill.

He could not take the same flight as Hamilton and McMurtrie in case they recognised him. Instead, as he lay in the grass behind a granite boulder on the slope above Cameron McMurtrie’s home, he used his iPhone to book a flight from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, on South African Airways for later that day.

The wonders of modern communication, he mused. Next, he placed a call to his cousin, who had a farm south of Victoria Falls, on the edge of the Matetsi Safari Area, but lived in town. He hoped the man would answer his phone, as without him he would have to find the materials he needed from someone else. Not impossible, but he was working to a tight timeline.

‘Hello?’

‘
Kanjane
, cousin,’ Wellington said down the line.

‘Morrison, is that you?’ the voice said.

‘Please, no names, cousin. It’s not businesslike.’ Wellington didn’t like his real name, Morrison, and hated others using it.

His cousin, Albert, laughed and asked after his health. Wellington raced through the required formalities and asked what he needed to know. ‘Are you still fishing on that white settler’s farm the way you told me you were last year, when we last met?’

It took a couple of seconds for Albert, who, Wellington recalled, was not the brightest member of the family, to see through the veiled speech. ‘Ah, yes. I am, although the parks and wildlife dogs have tried to stop me, I move too fast for them, and I have a supply of
fishing
equipment from another friend who has been mining on his farm.’

Albert had, with the support of the local ZANU-PF chairman, occupied and subsequently been given a prospering cattle ranch during the farm invasions in 2002. The white farmer and his family had been hounded off by Albert and his mob of young supporters. Although they called themselves war veterans, not even Albert, the eldest of the occupiers, had been old enough to bear arms during the liberation struggle, which had ended with Robert Mugabe being elected to power in 1980.

Wellington was bitter about what had happened to his country. He felt no sympathy for the cattle rancher who had seen the family’s dogs and his prize bull slaughtered and his children’s lives threatened, but he resented the fact uneducated no-hopers like his cousin had become the beneficiaries of huge windfalls, while he had been forced across the border in search of work in the mining industry
because of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. Albert had taken over a working farm with a big house and a workforce of fifty men and their families, and now he resorted to feeding himself and his wife and four whelps by fishing illegally in the rivers of the nearby safari area and Hwange National Park. He had tried to bully the farm labour into working for him, but the herd boys had left when he’d failed to pay them; he had stripped the grand farmhouse of its contents, including the copper water pipes and electrical wiring from the walls, and sold it all. When the money he made had run out he had lived off the white man’s cattle until most of them perished in a foot-and-mouth outbreak. Those mangy beasts that had survived he had also sold. Albert was left with hundreds of acres of thorny bush and no means of income. So now he fished with dynamite.

‘Good, good,’ said Wellington to the dim-witted failure. ‘I will be in the Falls this evening. We must drink some beer together and you must sell me some of your bait.’

‘It will be a pleasure, cousin,’ Albert replied. ‘Times are very tough here in Zimbabwe and my family are hungry. It will be good to see you again, Morris – I mean, cousin.’

Wellington ended the call and rolled back onto his belly and picked up his small binoculars. There was movement at McMurtrie’s house. The door opened and the man’s thin white wife came out. She was wearing the dressing-gown she had been in when she had greeted McMurtrie earlier, but Wellington’s keen eyes noted she had shed the high heels and stockings that had poked from beneath the gown. Her hair, coiffed before, was now in disarray. The mascara at her eyes was smudged. She looked like the whore that mine gossip said she was.

McMurtrie was a weak man who had let a woman make a mockery of him. Such a thing would never happen in Wellington’s world. A wife who declared she wanted to leave for another man would not make it as far as the front door, let alone to another country, where this one had apparently gone, before slinking back with her tail between her soiled legs. Wellington was alternately repulsed and aroused by
the thought of what McMurtrie’s wife had done. McMurtrie was Wellington’s enemy, yet he felt a strange kind of kinship with the man. Both he and his nemesis were warriors, now sworn to destroy each other. While Wellington would never have let a woman treat him the way McMurtrie’s wife had, Wellington pitied his foe. This woman was an unwanted distraction for the mine manager.

Wellington watched the woman feed the dogs. Her moves were jerky, resentful, as she dropped the bowls of food in front of the hounds. She raised the back of her hand to a smudged eye.

‘She is not good enough for you, Cameron, my friend,’ Wellington whispered as he watched her through the binoculars.

McMurtrie and the Hamilton woman were on their way to Livingstone, as per the original plan, and Wellington would follow them there, via the twin town of Victoria Falls, just across the cascading Zambezi, and launch the final battle of this war between the empire below and Global Resources above.

The woman bent over to shift a bowl of food so a small dog could get its share. The satin of the gown slid up, revealing a long thigh. Wellington felt himself swell against the damp grass and cool earth beneath his loins.

This unfaithful whore needed to be taught a lesson. He wanted to move down the hillside, darting from cover to cover with the practised ease he’d learnt during the bush war. He had served in the struggle and had become disenchanted by the government’s failure to deliver on the riches it had promised those who had sacrificed so much for Zimbabwe. He had been slaving in South Africa, for the whites, when the farms in Zimbabwe had been doled out to the well-connected and the party’s thugs, such as Albert. He had turned to crime, and had made himself more money than his cousin’s stupid ilk, but still he wanted more. It was not enough simply to win.

He rolled to one side and moved his hand to his belt. He wanted McMurtrie’s wife, as well as his scalp, but if he took her now, used her and killed her, then word might reach McMurtrie before he boarded
his connecting flight for the wilds of Zambia. He needed McMurtrie to get on the flight to the copper belt for his plan to succeed.

He closed his eyes and imagined her, screaming, fighting, yielding. He let his imagination fulfil him as he bucked against the grass. The wife would die, soon enough, but it would appear an accident.

That would just leave McMurtrie’s daughter.

D
espite the best efforts of Kylie’s personal assistant, Sandy, back in Australia, there was no way they could have connected to the charter flight in Livingstone in time to reach the remote Global Resources mine north of Kitwe in the copper belt on the same day they flew from Nelspruit.

Instead, they had to stay the night at Livingstone and Kylie had been happy to let their boss, Jan, recommend a hotel, which Sandy had booked. Kylie had not even bothered googling the hotel.

‘I’ve heard it’s a
lekker
place,’ Cameron said as they exited customs from the small terminal and walked past the touts to the driver who held a sign saying,
Global Resource, Mr Cameron and Mrs Kylie
. ‘That would be us.’

Kylie was glad they hadn’t been able to make the connection. She wasn’t here to sightsee, but after the horrendous few days they had endured she was looking forward to a quiet night.

The drive took them through the suburbs of Livingstone, mostly single-storey colonial-era houses with tin roofs, and then into the edge of the town, which seemed to be bustling with tourists and locals alike.

‘Have you been here before?’ she asked him. Cameron had slept through most of the flight.

‘We drove up here on a family holiday a few years ago. Jess loved it. Tania hated it.’

‘I didn’t ask when you boarded – is your daughter all right?’

He nodded. ‘She’s staying with friends. I saw my wife this morning again.’

Kylie raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to supply more details, but he clammed up.