14

Richard read the message on the screen of his BlackBerry:

Richard,

A man with a gun tried to break into the place where I’m staying last night. I’m sure it’s related to the attacks on you and Liesl, and the death of my colleague Mike Ioannou. I’m flying to Rwanda to try to find out who the people in the photo are. I need to interview you both. You need to get to Arusha ASAP and report to the ICTR. They will take care of you until I can get to you and take your depositions.

Please take care.

Carmel.

Richard read the message again. He’d showered, put on the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before, and found his way from a guestroom through the labyrinthine maze of corridors to the kitchen. The cook was there early, and he’d asked her to make him coffee. He sipped it as he considered what he should do next.

‘Morning.’ Liesl wore a blue silk robe. ‘Please may I have some tea, Prudence?’

Richard looked up from his phone. ‘Someone tried to kill Carmel last night.’

‘Oh my God. Is she OK?’

‘She can still email,’ Richard said.

‘So it’s not just a coincidence.’

‘No.’ The night before, over drinks and then dinner, Richard had tried to convince Liesl, and himself, that as bizarre as it seemed, the attacks on them had been random and unrelated. He theorised that the man who had tried to kill him was a drug dealer and user who was trying to steal whatever was in his home. Even as he’d formulated the story he could see its holes. Why would a drug dealer risk entering the Kruger National Park, and how would he have known where the doctor lived?

‘Maybe it was a hitman hired by one of your ex-lovers’ husbands?’ Liesl had said, her mood brightening after her near meltdown in the wild dogs’ enclosure.

‘Now that does make sense.’

She had smiled, which pleased him. Her parents were good people and they’d fussed over him without making him feel uncomfortable, seemingly warming to him after Tokkie’s initial frosty reception. After Liesl had gone to bed her father had lingered, offering him a Scotch.

‘Like I said before, I knew soldiers who couldn’t handle what they’d seen, what they’d done in Angola. You’re a doctor – do you think Liesl is sick in that way?’

‘I myself was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder,’ Richard said, swirling the golden liquid around the glass, relishing the siren call of the ice and the cool on his fingertips. He craved the release, every day. It was just a matter of degrees. ‘I still don’t think I’m over it – and maybe I never will be. It’s very possible Liesl’s suffering from the same condition.’

Tokkie stood up from his chair and walked out of the room. Richard wondered if he was unable to deal with the fact that his daughter had PTSD, but he returned a couple of minutes later. In his hand was a pistol. ‘You were a doctor, but you were a paratrooper as well.’

‘Yes.’

Tokkie held out the pistol to him. It looked big, heavy and workmanlike. Maybe Russian, Richard thought. He took it, found the magazine release and thumbed it, and let the magazine fall into his left palm. He pocketed it, pulled back the slide, checked the chamber was empty, let the slide go, then fired the action with a click.

‘It’s a Makarov,’ Tokkie said. ‘I got it in Angola off a dead Cuban.’ Richard guessed from the coldness in the older man’s eyes how the Cuban had died. ‘I’ve got a .357 Magnum, Elize has a small .22 and there is a hunting rifle in the pantry. I don’t know how to heal my daughter’s mind and heart – I’ll want to talk to you more about this later – but for now I am worried about her life. We’re not going to let anyone hurt her, Richard.’

Richard had nodded and Tokkie had gone to bed. He had followed, but had not slept well with the lump of the pistol under his pillow.

Liesl sat down at the kitchen table and Prudence placed a tray with a small teapot, cup, saucer, milk jug and sugar in front of her. Richard read the message aloud as Liesl poured her tea.

‘She wants us to go to Arusha?’

‘So it seems,’ Richard said.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think the answer to all this is in Tanzania, or here.’

Liesl took a sip of tea. ‘I’m worried that us being here is putting my parents at risk. I want to hide, but I don’t know where. Should we go to the police?’

Richard shrugged. ‘I don’t know what the South African Police could do, but sure, yes, we should probably tell them what we know.’

‘Do you think it will do any good?’

‘No, not really. I think the only way we can sort this out is to find out who is in that photo, and why it’s important enough for someone to want to kill us for finding it.’

‘I wish I’d never kept those negatives,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be a part of this, Richard. This isn’t our war.’

He didn’t want it either. He was more angry than scared right now. He’d carved out a nice little nomadic life to help him escape the tragedies and fuck-ups of his past, and now someone was doing their best to bring that peaceful life to an end. Richard wouldn’t have been so angry if it was just him. He’d earned a bad death, several times over, and if someone put a bullet in his head in the middle of the night, not too many people would mourn him. But it angered him that Carmel and Liesl, two women he’d cared for in different ways, were also on the killers’ list, and Collette, the daughter of the dead man who had shown them the photo, might also be in danger.

Tokkie walked into the kitchen, dressed in his farmer’s uniform of shorts, short-sleeved shirt, boots and long socks. ‘I just overheard what you said.’

Richard sipped his coffee. ‘What do you think we should do?’

‘Leave.’

‘What?’ Liesl said.

‘It’s not safe for you to stay here,’ her father said.

Richard was surprised at the old man’s bluntness. ‘Why?’

Tokkie rubbed his eyes and Richard noticed now they were red, with dark bags underneath. He saw, too, that Tokkie’s boots were caked in mud and there were grass seeds and burrs in his socks. ‘I got a call last night from my head of security. There was someone in the game reserve.’

‘Poachers?’ Richard asked.

Tokkie poured himself a cup of coffee, black with no sugar. ‘That wouldn’t be unusual – we get them quite often, either setting or checking their bloody snares, or with their dogs. If we catch them, we arrest the poachers but shoot the dogs. This was different.’

‘How so, Poppa?’

Tokkie looked at Liesl. ‘My security guys are good. They woke Koos, the manager, when they found fresh tracks and they then started following whoever it was who broke in. It was only one person, a man wearing expensive boots with deep, new tread on them – unusual for one of our local tsotsis. They followed the tracks to a gap in the fence – the warthogs dig holes under the electric fences quicker than we can fill them in. Whoever was in slid back out again and then took off in a vehicle – a Land Cruiser by the look of the wheel tracks. They woke me at three this morning and I went out.’

Richard hadn’t heard anyone waking in the house, but given its size that wasn’t surprising.

‘We did a sweep along the fence line, and out the front of the house. The scouts found the same footprints coming right up to the house. When I questioned a few of the workers this morning a couple remembered seeing a Land Cruiser with Gauteng plates being driven by a white man slowly along the road late yesterday afternoon. No one drives slow on that road.’

‘Could have been someone from Johannesburg looking for someone’s place,’ Richard ventured hopefully.

‘I’ve got three neighbours in a ten-kilometre stretch and I already called all of them this morning. No one’s had any visitors from Joburg,’ Tokkie said.

‘But how could they – whoever they are – know that I’m at home, or that Richard is here too?’

Richard thought about it. Whoever was after them – if indeed someone was and this wasn’t all still a train of coincidences – might guess that he and Liesl would link up. He didn’t recall anyone tailing him from Skukuza, but then he hadn’t been looking.

‘I’m sure there was no one following me here,’ Liesl said. ‘I was the only car on the road from Gravelotte.’

Richard’s phone beeped. He was wondering if Carmel was going to send another message, telling them what they should do. He checked it, but annoyingly, the email read: Wayne Hamilton commented on your photo. Bloody Facebook. He wished he’d never signed up for the thing. He hadn’t updated his profile for months. He didn’t particularly want everyone who knew him knowing where he was all the time. The thought hit him. ‘Are you on Facebook, Liesl?’

‘Yes, isn’t everyone?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Tokkie asked.

‘When was the last time you updated your profile?’ Richard asked her.

‘Just yesterday, but . . . wait a minute. Do you think that’s how they’re tracking me – us?’

‘What did you say on Facebook?’

‘Nothing. Just something about having a bad night’s sleep.’ She got out her phone and scrolled to the app. ‘Kak. There’s a message on my wall from my friend Sannette, who I was staying with in Joburg. She’s asking if I got to my parents’ place safely. Hell.’

‘How many friends do you have and do you know them all personally?’

‘I’ve got more than two thousand. I get a lot of people I don’t know who like my photographs,’ she said defensively. ‘How many do you have?’

He said he didn’t know, although he did – eighteen.

‘Whoever was on the farm last night is the same person who was checking you on this Facebook thing, ja?’ Tokkie asked.

‘Yes, Poppa.’

‘Well, put something on there now. Tell Sannette you arrived safely and that you’re looking forward to spending a few days here. Say Mom’s putting on a big dinner for you tonight. We’ll invite some people around.’

‘But you want us to leave . . .’

‘I don’t want you to leave, my girl,’ Tokkie took his daughter’s hands in his. ‘But I don’t want them to get you, and it now seems like they know you are here and are watching you. If they’ve been watching our place they will know Richard is here too. I’m worried they’re going to try to kill you both here.’

Richard was still puzzled by one thing. ‘Why would this person go into the game farm? Wouldn’t they assume that Liesl and I were here in the house?’

Tokkie thought about the question. ‘We have a little lodge there – a kitchen and bar area with some small rondavels. We use it as a family retreat and we advertise it online as a camp for hunters. We do some bow hunting on the farm when we need to reduce our antelope numbers. Whoever is after you might have thought you were staying there.’

‘That shows they’ve done their homework,’ Richard said.

Tokkie nodded. ‘I don’t think you’re dealing with amateurs.’

*

Jan Venter raised the high-powered Swarovski binoculars as one the electronic doors of the multi-car garage next to the farmhouse opened. The Land Cruiser reversed and Jan focused and saw the farmer sitting behind the wheel.

He appeared to be alone. Nel had left early in the morning, just after six, and had returned two hours later. Jan guessed the old man had gone to check on the farms and his other businesses, which included a cardboard-packaging plant, a juice-making factory with sprawling packing sheds and the local bottle store and service station, which one of his sons owned and ran. The Nels seemed to own the town, and they obviously had eyes everywhere.

Jan had noticed the extra patrols by a local armed-response security company’s bakkies earlier that morning, roving up and down the road between the citrus farm and the game farm, following the pre-dawn commotion when they realised they’d had an intruder on the farm. He had to admit he was begrudgingly impressed at the tight ship they ran; the Nels were no fools. From his vantage point on a high hill on the Nel family’s game farm, located across the road from the farmhouse, he could watch all the comings and goings from the family home.

After checking the wild-dog enclosure and the safari camp on the game farm by foot in the early hours of the morning, he had left via the same crawl space that he’d entered, and driven his Land Cruiser, which he’d rented in Johannesburg with a fake ID, five kilometres from the Nel farm. When he’d come to a gum plantation he’d driven another kilometre in off the road and then bundu-bashed deep into the forest, where he’d left the vehicle. He didn’t care if someone found it and stole it – he would have other vehicles arriving in a couple of days’ time – and he knew his ride had been compromised. Jan had then trekked back from the forest and entered the game farm again via a different warthog scraping, a kilometre from the first, and had taken care to cover his tracks as he’d moved slowly to his observation point. When he’d seen old Tokkie Nel and his scouts checking the spot where he’d first entered, and inspecting the ground for tracks, he’d realised he had underestimated the farmer and his staff.

Jan had set up a hide, a green ground sheet strung between two trees to provide shelter from the sun and rain, and camouflaged it with branches. He made a note on his phone of the time Nel left home, and scanned the grounds of the farmhouse for signs of the doctor and the woman. The man’s Discovery and the woman’s BMW X5 were both still parked on the lawn outside the garage.

When the four-by-four was out of sight, headed in the direction of Letsitele, Jan scrolled through his contacts for Aston’s number and called him.

‘Yes?’ said the Inyanga.

‘They’re still in place. I checked the dogs last night, as well. I’ve confirmed their location and number. Security is not so tight in that part of the farm, not like the rhino and sable enclosures. Also, the dogs aren’t far from the main road. If you want to do it properly, there is an airstrip on the farm, so you could land an aircraft and fly them straight out.’

There was a brief pause. ‘I want to do it properly. I’ll organise the vet and a helicopter.’

Jan smiled. Proper meant costly. Costly meant more for him.

*

‘You can get up now,’ Tokkie said.

Thank God, Richard thought. He eased his cramped body up off the floor of the Land Cruiser, where he’d been sandwiched between the front and rear seats, hidden under a blanket. Behind him, Liesl was throwing off her cover from where she’d been curled up in the comparatively more comfortable flat cargo space of the vehicle.

Richard saw a big tin-roofed shed and heard the increasingly high-pitched whine of a turbo engine. He looked around. ‘Where are we?’

‘This is Dad’s packing shed,’ Liesl said. There was fast-paced activity all around. Trucks were coming and going, bringing grapefruit from the orchards and leaving with cartons full of the produce.

‘I spoke to the police on the phone before we left,’ Tokkie said. ‘They’re going to send out patrols to keep an eye on us and try to track down whoever was driving that Land Cruiser. It’s a long shot, but if I hear anything I’ll let you know.’

The vehicle rounded the end of the shed and Richard, now sitting upright, saw the blue Squirrel helicopter sitting on a concrete pad outside its purpose-built hangar. He shook his head in disbelief. Tokkie had told them he was going to fly them out of Letsitele, but Richard had assumed they would be going to an airstrip to get on a light aircraft. It seemed the farming business was going strong.

‘Who’s flying, Poppa?’

‘Marthinus.’

Richard looked at her. ‘He’s one of my brothers,’ she said, ‘the one who owns the local Spar supermarket in town.’

‘Is there anything your family doesn’t own around here?’

Liesl ignored Richard’s jibe as Tokkie stopped the car out of reach of the helicopter’s spinning blades. Its hot exhaust sent out a heat haze that whirled in the downwash. Richard smelled the burning fuel and it reminded him of helicopter rides in the army. He paused at the bumper and took Tokkie’s outstretched hand.

Tokkie leaned close to Richard as he crushed his fingers in his hand. ‘I’m putting my only daughter in your care,’ he yelled into Richard’s ear. ‘I would rather have her with me, but you two have to lose yourselves just now. If anything happens to her I’ll hold you personally responsible and me and my four sons will find you.’

Richard didn’t laugh. He knew it wasn’t a joke. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘My boy Marthinus will take you to Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria. We’ve got a house in the city, so you two can stay there until we get this thing sorted. Get her to put more stuff on that Facebook thing. I want whoever is after my daughter to try something so I can kill him.’

Richard nodded. He knew the old man was serious.

Tokkie said a few words into Liesl’s ear that Richard couldn’t hear, then the father and daughter hugged and kissed. Richard climbed into the back of the helicopter with Liesl, and Tokkie slammed the door shut behind them. Marthinus turned back to check on his passengers as Liesl handed Richard a headset. As they were buckling up, Marthinus lifted off.

Richard looked down and saw the sunburned, lined face of the old farmer. He waved but he wasn’t smiling. Richard turned from the perspex window and saw Liesl was staring at him. She had her hand resting palm down on the middle seat that separated them. Richard put his hand over hers and gave it a squeeze.

*

Carmel sat in the main lounge area of Henri’s house with her laptop on her knees, typing an email to her superior at the ICTR in Arusha, outlining what had happened to her, Liesl and Richard, and asking what protection the tribunal could offer.

Two detectives from Livingstone and a posse of uniformed Zambian police had been trampling around Henri’s place throughout the morning. Henri spoke with them now, in Lozi, on the verandah. It seemed to Carmel they were nearly done. An undertaker had already taken away the body of the gunman.

Henri shook the detectives’ hands and escorted them out to the gravel driveway. He came in as Carmel was hitting ‘Send’.

‘That didn’t go too badly,’ he said.

She closed the laptop. ‘You seemed to get on well with them.’

‘I know most of the local cops. They’re good men, and not as corrupt as people might think. Also, they know the dead guy.’

‘They do?’

‘He was a petty criminal and sometime poacher. He’d done a couple of stretches in prison. The police are convinced he was here to rob or assault you.’

‘But I told them about the Rwanda connection, and the attacks on my two witnesses,’ Carmel said.

Henri shrugged. ‘Like I said, they’re not bad guys, but neither do they want to increase their case load unnecessarily. It’s much easier for them to close the case off – one criminal caught in the act of breaking and entering, and killed. Nice and simple, n’est ce pas? They’ve offered, reluctantly, to put a man with an AK-47 out front for the next few nights while you’re still here, but that’s more a favour to me. I’ll end up having to transport him to and from town and feed him. I’m happy to do so, but . . .’

‘But you don’t think that’s enough?’

He shrugged again. ‘You tell me, Carmel. If you think there is a gang out there trying to assassinate you and your star witnesses because of a picture, and something you all may or may not know, then what do you think we need to do about it?’

She thought about his question. He didn’t really need to do anything at all about it – it wasn’t Henri’s problem, but he had already offered to assist her investigations in order to identify the men in the photograph. She wondered if he was looking for an excuse to get back to the country of his birth, and perhaps a bit of adventure.

‘I need to get back to work as soon as possible. I’m sorry, Henri, but I’m going to have to cut short my visit. I can’t be sightseeing while people are in danger. I need to work out a way to get to Richard and Liesl quickly, and I need to find out who is in the photo and why it’s so important.’

‘D’accord. Then I want to come with you, to Rwanda. Allow me to volunteer my services to your tribunal. It’s high time I did something to help my birth country. It would be my honour.’

Carmel was touched by his sense of chivalry, and she owed Henri her life, but the lawyer in her was already finding a hundred reasons to refuse his offer.

‘Whatever you say, Carmel,’ he said before she could reply, ‘I am going to Rwanda. I have business there, as of this morning.’

‘You do? What’s so important that you all of a sudden want to go back?’

‘I received an email from an animal welfare group we work with in Rwanda. Someone came across a baby chimp in a market in Gisokoro, near Nyungwe National Park. He’s been taken to a refuge in Ruhengeri, but he can’t stay there because they don’t have a large enough enclosure for him, and he can’t be returned to the wild. It appears the little fellow was stolen from his troop by a trader, who probably planned to sell him as a pet or, worse, for medical experiments.’

Carmel frowned. ‘And do you go and personally collect every rescued chimp that ends up in your rehabilitation centre?’

Henri spread his hands. ‘Ah, you are too good an investigator. You have caught me out. No, the truth is I usually just oversee the shipments and leave others to do the dirty work, but I do want to get back to Rwanda to meet the people from this rescue organisation. And I have, in the past, personally transported chimps. And I am concerned about your safety, and whether you think you need me or not, I know I can help you identify the people in the picture.’

Carmel let what Henri was proposing sink in. She was still shaky from the aftershock of what had nearly happened to her last night. She felt out of her depth with this investigation and she wished Mike Ioannou was still alive and that she was going about her normal business of prosecuting génocidaires who were already in prison. She was comfortably zealous dealing with crimes that happened seventeen and eighteen years earlier, but she had never had someone point a gun at her.

Despite her fear, she knew she could dig deep and see this investigation through, but right now, as she looked at the handsome Gallic bear of a man waiting for her to accept his offer of help and protection, she knew that she wanted him beside her.

‘Rwanda’s what passes for a free country in Africa these days. I can’t stop you from travelling there,’ Carmel said.

‘Then I’ll take that as a yes.’