Blood Safari (24 page)

Had he picked up the casings? Was there time?

The bullet casings would have shot out to the right. That way. Rocks and grass. He would have had to look quickly. Three tyres. But there had been more than three shots. One had hit the car. At least four. Could there have been more? Four casings that he had to find, but he was in a hurry, he had to keep an eye on us, he had to shoot us, it was his job, his assignment.

I divided the potential five square metres into quadrants and searched through the grass centimetre by centimetre, between the rust-brown stones, starting with the most likely quadrant. Nothing. None in the second and the third.

The last quadrant, to the right and slightly behind the sniper. Nothing.

Then I saw it, just outside the imaginary line I had drawn. The casing lay deep in the cleft between two rocks, half hidden by grass.

I broke a twig off a tree and poked it into the cleft, lifted out the casing, letting the stick slide into the open end.

Bright and new, 7.62, the longer NATO calibre, standard bullet, mass-manufactured locally.

I rotated the stick so the casing dropped into my shirt pocket.

What had been so odd about the rifle?

I had seen it only for a moment, that awful second or two, behind Emma. He had been lying in the veld on his belly, a big man with a baseball cap and the rifle and tripod and telescope.

It wasn’t big. Was that what was strange? A smallish sniper rifle.

Could be. But there was something else. It wouldn’t come to mind. He had been too far away.

A tripod meant it wasn’t a hunting rifle.

Firearms had been recently removed from the safe that Donnie Branca opened. Was there a connection?

I would have to find out.

I walked down the slope to the place where the BMW had stopped in the grass. The fence was still broken. Traffic drove past
on both tar roads. The sun was setting on the Mariepskop side. My shadow stretched long across the green sweetveld.

I tried to follow the route Emma and I had run. I found the antbear hole where she had fallen. Then we turned towards the railway tracks. I scanned the grass for my cell phone. The chances of finding it were slim.

This was where I helped her over the wire just before the railway tracks. Stood here, looked up, saw the two balaclavas waving their arms at the sharpshooter. He dropped to the ground.

So he could take aim at us? In this long grass? Couldn’t be.

Why had he dropped flat? Fallen, tripped perhaps? No, it wasn’t like that, it was deliberate. What for?

This time I climbed through the fence. We had run south beside the train. Emma’s handbag must have dropped here. Right here.

It was lying in the grass, not obvious, but easy enough to see. If Phatudi’s men had been here they would have found it. They couldn’t have been here at the railway track, then.

I picked up her bag and opened it.

It smelled of Emma.

All her things seemed to be there. Cell phone too.

I closed the handbag and walked back to the Audi.

‘There doesn’t seem to be haemorrhage,’ said Dr Eleanor Taljaard in her office. ‘And there’s no indication that the skull fracture has damaged the brain tissue directly. I’m optimistic.’

I couldn’t hide my relief.

‘But we’re not home free, Lemmer, you must understand that.’

‘I know.’

She wanted to say more. I saw her hesitate, reconsider. ‘What is it, Eleanor?’

‘You must be realistic, Lemmer. With coma patients, survival is always our first priority, and her prognosis looks good.’

‘But?’ I said because I knew what was coming.

‘Yes. There is always the “but”. She could survive, but remain in a coma, for an indefinite period. Months. Years. Or she could wake up tomorrow and …’

‘And what?’

‘She might not be the same.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t want to give you false hope.’

‘I understand.’

‘You can talk to her again, this evening. If you want to.’

‘I will.’

Then I went up to my VIP suite and sat on the bed with Emma’s handbag. I needed her notes, which she had been making sporadically since we arrived.

I unzipped the bag. The scent of Emma le Roux. She might never wake up. Or be the same. The scent when I carried her into the suite, her warm body, her face in my neck. ‘The other room,’ she had whispered. That smile after I had laid her down, the one that said, ‘Look what I made silent, stupid Lemmer do.’

It had been ten months since I held a woman against me.

Let me concentrate on the handbag.

I looked inside it, couldn’t immediately see the notepaper. I would have to unpack the bag.

It wasn’t a big handbag, but the contents were impressive.

A small black zip-up bag. I opened it up. Cosmetics. I zipped it shut.

Was there something else in the dark depths of the handbag that could help me?

One shouldn’t go through a woman’s handbag, but what if…

That was the sum total. I replaced everything except the notes, the photograph and the cell phone. I pressed the cell phone button. The screen lit up.
YOU HAVE FOUR MISSED CALLS.

I manipulated the keys,
MISSED CALLS, CAREL
(3).
UNKNOWN
(1)

YOU HAVE I NEW VOICE MESSAGE. PLEASE DIAL 121.

I dialled.

‘Emma, this is Carel. Just wanted to know how it’s going. Call me when you can.’

I saved the message, turned the cell phone off and put it back in the handbag.

Should I phone Carel? Tell him what had happened? I knew what his reaction would be. ‘Weren’t you supposed to protect her?’

No. Let Jeanette do it.

I picked up the sheet of paper with notes on it. There were fewer than I expected. Just single notations in Emma’s small precise handwriting.

Five days after Cobie de Villiers disappeared, Jacobus le Roux’s parents died in a car accident.

Five days.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But Emma hadn’t thought so. She had underlined this entry twice. My belief in coincidence had been severely dented in the last two days.

If it hadn’t been coincidence, what had Cobie’s disappearance to do with the accident?

Where was he going when he left Heuningklip? What had Melanie Posthumus said? Before we got married there was something he had to do. He said he would be away for two weeks and then he would bring me a ring. Something like that. When she asked him what he was going to do, he wouldn’t say. Except that it was the right thing to do and one day he would tell her.

The right thing.

What did it all mean? What had Emma thought?

Not enough information. Not enough to jump to wild conclusions and improbable theories.

I had an idea. I found the pen in Emma’s handbag, picked up the sheet of paper and drew up a table of all the dates and incidents I could remember.

Eight years between the disappearance of Jacobus le Roux and Cobie de Villiers’ appointment at Heuningklip. Let us assume it is the same man. Even though Phatudi, Wolhuter, Moller and Melanie all say the photo of Jacobus does not look like Cobie. Could someone change so much in eight years? I looked at the photo again. Jacobus was more of a boy than a man. Does someone really change that much between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven? Hard to believe. Yet Emma had seen similarities.

Eight years after he went missing after a shoot-out with poachers in Kruger Park, he reappears. And only two hundred kilometres from where he disappeared. He told Melanie he had grown up in Swaziland. Kruger was not far from Swaziland. Less than a hundred kilometres away. Did that mean anything?

Eight years.

Why eight years? Why 1994? The Year of the New South Africa. He works for Moller for three years and then he is gone again, invisible, for another three years, nearly, appearing again at Mogale. Why? Why not in Namibia or Durban or Zanzibar? If Jacobus and Cobie were the same person and he had reason to disappear, why did he keep coming back to this area? What kept him here?

Six years at the rehabilitation centre and then the incident with the vultures. Was there significance in these time gaps? Three years at Heuningklip, three years missing, six years at Mogale. Coincidence?

Poachers. Twice he disappears because poachers are shot at. In 1986 he shoots at ivory poachers, in 2006 he is suspected of shooting vulture poachers. Twenty years between the two incidents, but the similarities remain.

What the fuck did it all mean?

I had no idea.

I removed the book from Emma’s bag and took it to read to her.

The bandages on her head and shoulder were fresh and less bulky than the previous ones. Yet she seemed just as vulnerable.

‘Hello, Emma.’

‘I found your handbag. Everything is still in there. Your phone and purse too. I looked at your notes. I think I understand better now. But there’s nothing … Nothing makes sense. What bothers me most, Emma, is why he looks so different. Why would his face change so much between eighty-six and ninety-four? It’s the one thing that still makes me doubt that he’s the same man. I know you thought differently. You believed. Maybe it was that phone call you received. And then you realised that he left Heuningklip just before your parents died. Maybe there was something else, something you didn’t tell me.’

She just lay there, the woman whose naked body I had seen two days before in the reflection from the glass of a picture, so perfect, so alive.

I looked down at the book in my hands. It had a green cover, a close-up photograph of a leaf. There was a bookmark in it. I opened it at that page.

‘I thought I might read to you, Emma.’

And so I began. It was a description of a unicorn hunt. And the hunter becomes the hunted.

Jeanette Louw had spent the greater part of her adult life in uniform. I suspect she couldn’t do without it. She had developed a type of uniform for her new role as owner and managing director of Body Armour. It consisted of men’s suits, expensive designer wear from some or other shop on the Cape Town Waterfront, with demure shirts and multicoloured ties. In office hours the big blonde hair would be tied back with something to match the tie.

Through the glass of the hospital main entrance, I saw her approaching. Today’s suit was black, the shirt cream and the tie yellow with a blue dot pattern. She had the remains of a white Gauloise between her fingers which she flicked into some shrubs, creating an arc of sparks, before entering the building. A few steps behind came B. J. (BeeJay) Fikter and Barry Minnaar, grey, lean men, unobtrusive, as they should be, each with a black sports bag in his hand.

I rose to meet them.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ she said, perspiring.

‘You should see the wounds when I’m naked.’

‘God forbid. How is she?’

‘Stable.’

I shook hands with Fikter and Minnaar.

‘Where can we talk?’

‘In my VIP suite.’

‘It’s our VIP suite now,’ said B. J.

‘But you aren’t VIPs like me.’

‘Of course not. It stands for Very Insane Person.’

‘Very Important Peasant,’ said Barry Minnaar.

‘Jealousy,’ I said. ‘It’s an ugly thing.’

B. J. got carried away. ‘Very Insecure Piss …’

‘OK!’ said Jeanette Louw. She shook her head, ‘Fucking men,’ and we went into the hospital.

I told them everything. When I had finished, Jeanette asked, ‘How are we going to handle her protection?’

‘I will do night shift,’ said B. J. Fikter. ‘Barry can do days.’

‘Do you have firearms?’ I asked.

They nodded.

‘Do the police still have people at her door?’ Jeanette asked.

‘Yes. They aren’t going to like our presence.’