Murder, London--South Africa Read online

  “The aircraft is waiting,” announced Lukas. “It is an old converted Dakota, larger than we require, but the only one available. The pilot and co-pilot have been given their instructions, and the engines are already warming up.”

  Roger said, “That’s fine.”

  He stepped out of the shade of the building, and the sun struck very hot on his head again as he walked with Lukas to the aircraft, which was farther away than the jet airliner. That was already being refuelled and made ready for its homeward flight. By the time they reached the old-fashioned-looking Dakota, Roger was sheltering the back of his head with his hand, but once they were in the shade of the aircraft’s cabin, he forgot the heat. He felt the aircraft quivering as he stepped inside, and saw that there were only ten seats; the rest of the space had been cleared for freight. The pilot was an unexpectedly plump and elderly man, probably in his sixties, the co-pilot looked hardly old enough to have his licence, but they did everything with a brisk efficiency and the take-off could not have been smoother.

  “Visibility and conditions perfect,” the co-pilot announced. “Ever flown here before, Superintendent?”

  “Never been to Africa before.”

  “I can’t speak for all of it, but South Africa’s a beautiful country,” the youngster said. He reminded Roger of Richard, clean-cut and nice-looking, with bright eyes and rather curly, dark hair, but above all he had something of Richard’s enthusiasm. “One of the most beautiful on earth.”

  Roger wondered if he had seen many other countries: could he be more than twenty-one or two?

  “Like me to point a few things out, sir?” He pointed them out regardless. “You can see Pretoria from here. Ought to see it at jacaranda time, it’s magnificent. Magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it. See the Union Buildings? . . . The Voortrekker Monument? . . . now over there you can really see what Johannesburg looks like from the air. Bit of a laugh to say that it’s like New York – they say that about Sydney, too – but all the same those tall buildings are pretty impressive. The zoo and the park are a damned sight safer than Central Park in New York by night, even though Jo’burg’s supposed to be such a deadly place . . . that’s the new Johannesburg Hotel – they certainly needed a new one. American money, you can bet . . . see the slag heaps over there, and the mine workings? They say the rand is nearly played out, but you ought to see the new mines down at Welkom, fantastic place, as new in planning as anything they have in the United States. I must say that for them.”

  The slag heaps and the city were already falling behind them. The river Vaal looked dark, almost black, with the mud which rains had washed along a thousand tiny tributaries. The sky was a metallic blue, and the sun looked like a ball of fire, but it was pleasantly cool in the cabin.

  “Do you know the United States well?” asked Roger.

  “It depends what you call well,” said the co-pilot, with a broad grin. “I’ve worked for three of the major airlines over there, had a few years with Cunard Airlines in little old England first. Absolutely love flying. Love it. Best way to see the world, too, but I’ve got a feeling that when I’ve got tired of travelling I’ll come back here. Here, or the West Coast of America – they’re the two places for my money. Now you won’t see very much for a while, but before long you’ll see the Drakenbergs rising up into the sky – fantastic sight when you approach them from a reasonable height. We’ll go in at about three thousand. Have to fly down in the valleys if you’re going into any of the mountain cities. Why don’t I show you some maps and pictures, and leave you alone for a bit?”

  The pilot called, “Good idea, you son of a cackler.”

  Roger found himself smiling. He relaxed as he looked through the coloured illustrations of the Drakenberg Mountains and of Basutoland.

  “Boy, is that rugged country up in Basutoland. Take it from me it’s wild and woolly . . . I went up there once, and nearly got lost. If it hadn’t been for a little Basuto belle I probably would have been! She’d got lost, too, and all her family were out looking for her. Grandma to grandpa down to baby sister. Dozens of them. Nearly got myself in trouble that time, because she was as naked as the day and I was pretty hot and stripped down to jockey shorts. Or do you call them Y-pants? . . . I want Tubby up there to start a new tourist service, kind of airborne safari; the only way to get to some of these inaccessible places. You could ‘do’ Africa damned well in four weeks, and with a crate like this we could carry plenty of freight, too. Make a fortune.”

  “Make a fool of yourself,” called out the pilot. “Hey, Lieutenant, we were asked to look out for a fire.”

  Roger felt tension coming back.

  “Yes,” called Lukas.

  “How would that do?”

  The pilot pointed to his right, towards the south, and they moved towards the windows and looked out. A faint haze of grey smoke was coming from the rocky country below, not far from the ribbon-like twisting road.

  “Looks like a car gone over the edge to me,” the pilot continued. “Wouldn’t be much chance for the poor devils if that happened.”

  Roger, peering intently, thought he saw the movement of men. As the aircraft turned in a half circle, and veered over steeply, they could see the other side of the ravine, the sun glinting on three cars, and men on the rocky slopes between the road and the ravine.

  “Looks to me as if they’re coming up,” the pilot said. “Would you like to borrow my glasses?”

  They were a huge pair of field-glasses, which looked as if they were antiques from the First World War, but as Roger focused them, he saw the tangled wreckage of the car clear through a thin haze of blue-grey smoke. There was a kind of track leading away from this and he raised the glasses until he could see the men. There were eight of them altogether, and they seemed to be climbing upwards, away from the wreckage.

  Nearer the mountains and towards the Indian Ocean was a tiny white speck, and very near it a big slag heap, pale-grey in colour, and the wheel of a mine.

  “Van der Lunn’s home and Van der Lunn’s diamond mine,” the pilot said. “One of the oldest families in South Africa, the Van der Lunns. He’s the last. His wife died years ago and he’s got no children. But he always comes back there – got luxury flats in Johannesburg and Sea Point in the Cape, travels round the world – but this is home. Hardly has time to take any personal interest in the mine these days – it’s run by a manager. Well – we’d better get down.”

  Fifteen minutes later they landed at the Ladysmith airfield, little more than a landing strip. Half a dozen brightly coloured private aircraft were clustered near the small office building, as well as a helicopter and several cars, two of them with a police sign up.

  Two policemen, one a white lieutenant, one a Bantu sergeant, came smartly towards them. Roger forced himself to wait until Lukas asked, “Have you a report on that burned out car?”

  “Yes, we have,” said the lieutenant promptly. “There was no one in it. It was pushed over the edge. The passengers must have gone off in another car, and we don’t know what it was like. We’re making inquiries.”

  24

  VAN DER LUNN’S HOUSE

  So Faith Soames hadn’t perished in that fire, Roger thought with deep relief.

  He felt the heat of the sun strike at him again as he studied the lieutenant who had brought the news, a rocklike-looking individual who might almost have been carved out of the stone of the great range of mountains. There they were in the distance, towering into the sky, massive and forbidding despite the fierce sunlight.

  The pilot and co-pilot were unloading wooden boxes of freight. Roger, Lukas, and the lieutenant walked towards the shade of some small trees, and Lukas asked, “Is there any news of Nightingale?”

  “No,” the lieutenant answered. “We’ve a lookout post up near the fork in the road, and two-way radio contact. We would have heard if there was any
word.”

  “He wouldn’t have had time to get here,” Roger said.

  “He could have, if he travelled fast enough,” said Lukas. “How soon can we be at the lookout post, Lieutenant?”

  “In an hour,” the local man answered. “Will you start right away?”

  “We can’t start too soon for Superintendent West,” said Lukas earnestly. They moved off towards one of the police cars. This time the lieutenant took the wheel and they did not have a Bantu with them. Roger sat in front with him, Lukas in the back. It was no more eventful to them than it would have been to Roger had he stepped into a Divisional car in a London suburb, but here he felt the strangeness of Africa, a sense of being somewhere remote and close to the primeval. As the car turned out of the airfield, two native women, arms and ankles covered in beads, great necklaces of tiny beads draped round their necks, walked along the dusty road without taking any notice of the car. Their smooth brown skin seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, the fine full breasts seemed to sway in a solemn dance as they walked along. Not far away, they turned off the main road on to a narrow dirt one which led towards the mountains, and in the distance Roger saw the round native huts, the kraal, from some of which he could see smoke rising. A big truck with a skinny Bantu driver and a dozen Bantus standing in the back came tearing past, ignoring them, but covering them with a great cloud of dust. The two policemen seemed to take it for granted.

  The road became steeper. There were rocky slopes on either side, and they seemed to be climbing all the time. Now and again the powerful engine of the car appeared to stutter in protest, but it always picked up. Soon, they were buried in the foothills of the mountains. Here and there they passed the mouth of a small mine, long since deserted, but apart from that there was rock and scrub and little else, until they came to a sign which read, ‘Main Road’ in both English and in Afrikaans. They crawled up a sharp rise on to the main road, and immediately swung off it again up a narrow trail which seemed impossibly steep. The engine seemed to groan, but at last the terrain flattened out, and Roger realised that they had drawn in behind a huge rock which seemed to be of solid granite. A police car was standing in the shadow, close to the rock, hidden from the road. A small tent was near the car, there was a wooden picnic-table, some tins of food and an ice-box, as there might be for any party camping out. On one side there were magnificent views of the mountains, rising in spiked pinnacles into the sky; behind them was the massive rock with some natural holes, like caves, created over the centuries by the erosion of wind and rain and cold.

  A European police sergeant was climbing down from one of these holes. Behind him, still in the hole, were two Bantus, another European sergeant and a European constable, who took no notice of the newcomers.

  “I am very glad to meet you, sir,” the first sergeant said as he shook hands with Roger. “And very proud if I can be of help. No car has passed since we came, but I am informed that a car with two Europeans and one European woman passed on the way to Mr Van der Lunn’s house earlier this morning.”

  “Now we know what happened,” Lukas said confidently. “This car was waiting for them when they reached a certain spot. They pushed the Ford over, and finished the journey in a Volkswagen. Looks to me as if someone left it off the road for them. There’s one good thing: the woman is alive.”

  He turned to Roger. “Would you like to see where we watch the road from?”

  “Very much.”

  “Just follow me,” said the sergeant, and as they moved up to one of the spy-holes, he went on, “Will you speak with Sergeant Hombi? He is most excited at the prospect of working with you; he knows of your fame in England.”

  “Of course,” Roger said.

  Hombi was lying flat on his stomach and watching the distant road through binoculars. There was room for all of them to lie side by side, and the constable took the glasses as the sergeant said, “Hombi, this is Superintendent West.”

  Hombi might almost have been Jameson’s twin brother, Roger thought; he had the same good looks, the same kind of reserved and almost diffident smile, and at the same time a self-confidence which gave a good impression.

  “Would you like to look through the glasses, sir?”

  “Very much,” said Roger.

  Hombi tapped the constable on the shoulder, took the glasses, then stretched out on his stomach again, with Roger beside him. The far end of the cave seemed to make a kind of telescope in itself; in the distance they could see the road winding through the mountains, a tiny ribbon crossing savage stretches of rock and winding round jagged slopes in a series of hairpin bends. With the glasses, everything was so much nearer; it was like looking out on to a mountain wilderness.

  “You see any movement, sir?”

  “No,” Roger said. He held the glasses to his eyes for another minute, hopefully, then wriggled out of position and handed them over. As he stood up near Lukas and the other European officers, it seemed much warmer, even in the shade of the rock, than in the hole itself. The sun was moving round slowly, and there was a bright stretch of sunlight only a yard or two away; heat seemed to creep from it. But it was not the brightness of the sun nor the desolation of the scene which worried him. He could not repress his anxiety any longer; his problem was to explain it in words which would cause no offence.

  “Lieutenant,” he said to Lukas, “what will happen if Nightingale and Bradshaw pass along here?”

  “We shall move in,” Lukas answered, simply.

  “But won’t they be a long way ahead of us?”

  Lukas frowned. “I do not understand you.”

  It was easy to imagine from his expression that he had sensed criticism, and was ready to react against it.

  “If they are not at the house or the mine, how can we move against them? It was you yourself who said that until we know where they are going and what they are planning to do, there is nothing we can do.”

  Roger said gruffly, “Yes, I did. But there’s only the one road to Van der Lunn’s house and the mine. They could block it.”

  To his surprise and great relief, Lukas grinned broadly; he was really little more than a boy. The two other Europeans were equally amused, the block of a man turning a laugh into a snort. Roger waited.

  “Let me show you,” Lukas said. He took another set of binoculars from the table near the tent, and put a hand on Roger’s shoulder, then led him farther along the rock table. The sun struck fiercely at Roger’s head, but soon they were in shade again; sunlight, shade, heat, and coolness, and all the time uncertainty about Lukas and the others. They reached a ledge a hundred yards away from the camp. The remarkable thing was that the whole panorama changed; now they were looking in the other direction, at the sun-bleached rocks and scrub, and the distant house seemed as if it were made of marble, it was so white. Less than a mile away, Roger judged, were the workings of the mine.

  Lukas was studying this through the glasses.

  Suddenly he handed them to Roger, and said, “Look straight at the house, then swing slowly towards the mine . . . you see the slag heap? . . . yes, good . . . move your glasses downwards very slightly . . . yes?”

  Roger moved them. The house seemed to stand on one ledge of rock, and the mine and slag heap on another; a deep valley lay beyond these. In fact, the whole property seemed to stand on a stretch of table-land rather like this one, approached only by the one winding road.

  “Yes,” Roger said.

  “Now, slowly to the right . . . you see the men?”

  Roger thought, ‘Men?’ He forced himself to hold the glasses very steady as he lowered them, and then saw a line of men, tiny even in the binoculars, climbing up the rocky slopes leading to the flat summit. He moved the glasses again and saw another line moving in the same direction, but from another spot. The scene reminded him of the men that he had seen climbing up from the wreckage of the car.
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  “Who are they?” His voice was tense with excitement, for he believed he knew the answer, and why Lukas and the others had been so amused.

  “They are our men, Mr West,” Lukas announced. “There are two patrols, each with a sergeant and six constables, climbing up. When we give the signal for them to move in, they will move at once. They are local Bantus who know the terrain well. There is no one to match them in the mountains. They are natural guerilla fighters, too, and we have trained them to get the best out of them. You understand we always have to be prepared for trouble in South Africa, and to have a well-trained police force is essential. Have no fear, Superintendent. If Nightingale and Bradshaw go up there, they will be caught very quickly.”

  Roger found himself chuckling.

  They turned back towards the camp, and as Roger screwed up his eyes against the sun in one of the clear patches, Hombie called out, “A car is coming!”

  Lukas and Roger ran forward, and scrambled into the larger hole. In the distance a black dot seemed to be moving. In five minutes it had become a blue Humber, moving very fast, throwing up a thick trail of dust. Soon, it passed them. Roger put a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and saw there was only one man at the wheel: Nightingale, driving as if he had not a second to spare.

  An hour and a quarter afterwards, Joshua Bradshaw drove past in a black Chrysler, the car which he had driven from the airport.

  It was like moving forward in a military expedition, a sortie against rebels, perhaps, in the mountains of the Yemen or the hills of Cyprus. The police drove from the lookout camp in two cars, keeping radio contact with the two patrols who had signalled that they were close to the house and the mine, and could move in whenever directed. Roger felt a sense of anti-climax and yet of anxiety. There were murderers in that house. Faith Soames was in their hands, and Nightingale, too. Nightingale must surely believe that he could bring the others to terms, but it might be only a forlorn hope.