Silent Predator (7 page)

‘We don’t want to break down here,’ she said. They passed a turnoff to the Kruger Park’s Numbi Gate, but Sannie said they were headed further north, to an entrance closer to the park’s internal police station. ‘I just wanted to show you how some people live, so you can maybe understand the crime problem a little better.’

Tom nodded. Something Sannie had said before, about African women, reminded him of his brief informal investigation into Nick’s disappearance. ‘Did you ever notice Nick taking an interest in black African women?’

Sannie sniffed. ‘That man would take an interest in a cobra if you held its head. Why do you ask?’

‘I think one of the last people to have seen him was a South African woman.’

‘A hooker?’

‘You really don’t like him, do you?’

‘How can you guess?’ Sannie asked, giving him a deadpan look.

‘Actually, she was what we might in polite circles call an exotic dancer.’

‘A stripper? Sounds like him. He and a couple of the male cops went to a table-dancing club in Pretoria one time. My colleagues told me Nick was particularly interested in the one girl, and she was black.’

‘I wonder if it could be the same one,’ Tom said, thinking out loud.

‘Could just be that he was into any girl who would
talk to him – even if he had to stick money in her garter, you know.’

They had passed back into rural countryside, lush farms which covered the mountains in different shades of emerald in the afternoon sun. Tom noted banana farms and tropical fruits such as avocados and mangoes for sale on the side of the road. Fertile country. ‘I grew up near here, on a banana farm,’ Sannie said as they passed through a small but chaotic town – a ‘
dorp
’ she called it – named Hazyview. ‘I was a real bush baby. My family took my brothers and me into the Kruger Park every school holiday and many weekends. But I never got sick of it.’

Workers heading home thronged the sidewalks, and pick-ups laden with farm produce and fertilizer queued at the robots in a mini peak-hour traffic jam. Loud hip-hop blared from giant ghetto-blasters parked outside an electrical goods store. A gaggle of school-girls in starched uniforms giggled at something.

‘Did you stay at a lodge like the one we’re heading for? From what I’ve read it’s very expensive.’

She chuckled. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, my friend. Kruger gets about three million visitors a year, and most of those are local families. You can stay in national parks rest camps which have camping sites and self-contained rondavels – huts. You don’t need to stay at one of the
larney
places. There’s something for everyone, although when I was a little kid the park was for whites only. It’s good now, though, to see more black families visiting. I take my kids camping there a few times a year.’

*

They continued driving and Sannie checked her watch. The kids would be out of school soon, and when she could she would call her mother to make sure they had got to her place safely and talk to them for a bit. Tom appeared deep in thought, and she guessed he was still mulling over what had happened to his police colleague. As much as she disliked Nick, a tiny part of her still felt bad that a detective who, despite all his faults, was always punctual and professional – at least around the man he was protecting – had suddenly disappeared. She felt a pang of guilt that she had secretly wished him ill. She hoped he would turn up drunk or stoned in the bed of some African stripper. The bol-locking – to borrow an English word – that he would receive would be long overdue and might teach him a lesson. She had never seen Nick use drugs, though when they were off duty she had noticed him easily matching Pol and Kobus, the other members of her team, drink for drink, and they were major soaks.

She had been mildly offended the night in Pretoria that the three of them had announced in the pub that they were going to the strip club. Not because they were leaving her, but because they hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to go too. She’d never been to such a place, not even as part of her job, and she was curious to see what went on.

Sannie took the turning to the Paul Kruger Gate, a major entrance point to the national park. She really did love coming to this place. Whether in the old South Africa or the new, the park was a Garden of Eden, a natural oasis where one could forget the day-to-day problems and challenges of life and immerse oneself
in the restful, inspiring tranquillity of the bush. Even though she was here on a work assignment, she felt the stress melt from her body and her grip on the steering wheel relax as she crossed the Sabie River. She pulled up a hundred metres short of the thatched gatehouse and unloaded and cleared her Z88. She noticed Tom watching her out of the corner of his eye. She handled her weapon confidently and safely and was an expert shot, regularly outshooting all of her male colleagues on the firing range. She put the pistol back in its holster and smiled at him.

‘Won’t you need that for lions and tigers?’

‘No tigers in Africa, I’m afraid. No, this place is about as safe as it gets in South Africa – as long as you stay in your car.’

Tom grimaced and she laughed at him. He was a good-looking guy. Solidly built. He had a full head of hair and blue eyes, which she liked the look of, and a strong jaw. Unlike some of the other detectives she worked with, this one obviously kept himself fit. There was no sign of a beer belly hanging over his trouser belt.

Sannie had only come close to sleeping with one man since Christo’s death, and that had been one time only. It was a disaster. She had been drinking at the squad’s Christmas party – in fact, she had been so drunk that she had decided not to drive home. She was about to call her mother when her boss, Captain Henk Wessels, had offered to give her a lift. He lived not far from her home in suburban Kempton Park – only a couple of streets away.

At the time it had been a little more than a year
since Christo had been shot and she had been so preoccupied with the kids – helping them to stay focused at school and to deal with their grief – that she hadn’t even thought about having another relationship. When Wessels stopped outside her home he had leaned over from the driver’s seat to give her a goodnight kiss.

It was not entirely appropriate for a senior officer to do something like that to a subordinate but, what the hell, she had thought, it was Christmas and it had been a damned good party, and he had taken her home. As she leaned over to offer her cheek he struck, fast and predatory, like a mamba, and planted a kiss on her lips. She leaned back, surprised, and not sure if it had been a mistake of timing or positioning. Henk was not an unattractive man. He had left his wife and four children for a girl of twenty-five, who was only a little more than half his age. It had been a bad situation, made worse for the captain when the younger girl ditched him after seven months. Sannie thought he was seeing a nurse these days, though the two were not living together. He smiled at her. He was a bad man.

And that, she had realised, was exactly what she needed right then. The thought came to her with the clarity that only seven brandy and Cokes could bring. They kissed and clawed at each other like a pair of teenagers after the matric dance. ‘Not here,’ she whispered.

‘My place,’ Wessels panted.

Sannie felt lascivious, wanton, desperate for the feel of a man again. She had her hand in the captain’s
pants as he drove, dangerously fast, back to his empty house.

The drive there should have been enough to warn her that the night was not going to improve. Henk had been unable to rise to the occasion, and no amount of her ministrations had helped, not in the car, or in his shabbily furnished, untidy house. He had eventually admitted defeat and dropped her home. Exhausted, drunk, frustrated, embarrassed and dreadfully sad, she had cried herself to sleep. Mixed with her hangover the next morning was a crushing feeling that she had been unfaithful to Christo. She tried, in vain, to tell herself she should get on with her life, perhaps even go looking for another husband, but her feelings of guilt won out. She wondered later if she would have felt differently if they’d had sex.

‘Is that the welcoming committee?’ Tom Furey asked.

‘What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking of something I need to tell my mom about the kids. Yes, that’s Captain Tshabalala from Skukuza. That’s the park’s main camp and there’s a police post there. He’ll escort us in so we don’t need to worry about entrance fees and park permits and whatnot.’

The captain was a rotund, smiling man in his mid-forties with whom Sannie had worked often over the years. She liked him, even though he was exactly the sort of person she would have been trying to arrest pre-1994 when Nelson Mandela had led the country to majority rule. Isaac Tshabalala had trained in the former Soviet Union as a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe – the spear of the nation – the military arm
of the African National Congress. Thankfully, South Africa had made the transition to true democracy without Isaac’s training in explosives and sabotage needing to be put to the test.

‘Welcome to the Kruger National Park,’ Isaac said to Tom as he shook hands. ‘
Kunjani
, Sannie. How are you?’

‘Fine, sir, and you?’

Isaac ushered them into the gate office and spoke rapidly, in the language of the Shangaan people, to the young woman behind the desk. Sannie understood every word. She had learned it from her nanny as a child and practised with the children of the farm labourers. Her mother had not approved and had smacked her bottom on more than one occasion for talking in the language of the majority of inhabitants of their part of the old Eastern Transvaal. Her father had winked at her whenever the punishment was delivered, which took some sting out of the blows. Isaac was now telling the woman they were all police officers, even the pretty but too skinny blonde one. The receptionist put a hand to her mouth to cover her laugh. Sannie had never let on to the captain that she spoke his language and she kept a straight face, knowing an African language was a handy card to have up one’s sleeve and one to be played judiciously.

Captain Tshabalala drove ahead in his ageing Toyota Venture people-mover. ‘Look, on the right … some giraffe,’ Sannie said to Tom matter-of-factly.

‘Where? Boy, you’ve got good eyesight. Blimey, that’s incredible. Look at them just wandering around without a care. That’s just …’

He was lost for words, literally, and she smiled as she noticed him craning his head back to continue staring at the animals as she drove on behind their escort. She wished she could remember the first time she had seen a giraffe. The awesome, addictive terror of her first close-up sighting of a lion, when she was five, was something which would stay with her forever. It was one of her earliest childhood memories. The Africa bug had just bitten Tom Furey for the first time. The more incredible things one saw – lion kills, a leopard stalking an impala, bull elephants fighting – the more one needed to keep coming back. Tom’s new principal, Robert Greeves, was clearly a hopeless addict. She remembered him saying once that he had been to Africa, either on business or pleasure or both, annually for the past fifteen years.

‘Damn, my camera’s in my bag.’ Tom sounded disappointed.

‘Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty more giraffe for you to see later – and everything else.’

Tshabalala led them to the Skukuza police post where, over coffee, he explained for Tom’s benefit the local chain of command and areas of responsibility. Basically he and his officers, who were limited in numbers and resources, would be available to provide initial uniformed back-up if any incident during the visit required it. Political relations between South Africa and the UK were good, so there was no threat of any demonstration or protest – not that such actions would even be feasible within the confines of a national park where, for the most part, animals rather than people held sway. Isaac explained that should
Greeves be taken ill, or injured in any way, there was a doctor on call twenty-four hours a day at Skukuza, and Nelspruit hospital was forty-five minutes away.

‘Really, I can’t think of anything that could go wrong, other than the minister falling ill, or being eaten by a lion on a game drive.’ The burly captain’s whole body shook and Sannie swore she felt the floor vibrating under her high heels as he laughed at his own joke.

Tom, she saw, smiled politely, then asked questions about police radio communications, emergency frequencies, phone numbers, and crime figures for the national park and its surrounds. He was very professional, but Sannie expected nothing less of the Englishman. As she had reflected earlier, even that sleaze Nick Roberts was good at his job. Being a protection officer – dropping in and out of other people’s turf – required diplomacy, and Tom had it.

Their briefing session over, Sannie and Tom left the captain and went back to her car. ‘The lodge is only about ten minutes from here.’

‘Do you share his confidence about the risk assessment here in the park?’ Tom asked as she unlocked the Mercedes by remote. The horn gave a little beep and the hazard lights flashed as the alarm was disabled.

‘I lock my car, even when I know there’s about a one in a million chance of it being broken into or stolen outside a police post in the middle of a national park.’

Tom opened the car door. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

‘Mr Speaker, will the Minister for Defence Procurement elaborate on remarks he made to defence contractors recently in which he indicated the government in fact has no real intention to further scale back troop numbers in Iraq? Further, will the minister come clean on the government’s timetable for withdrawal?’ The opposition backbencher grinned, and sat as the guffaws rose from his side of the House of Commons in the Palace of Westminster just as the groans and jeers from the government benches mocked him.

Robert Greeves buttoned his suit jacket as he stood and approached the despatch box and coldly eyed the members of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, though how loyal this cretinous mob of political featherweights were was debatable. ‘Mr Speaker, once more for the slow learners …’