The Hunter (11 page)

Linley’s second email was even terser and pointed out that she was experiencing extreme financial difficulties. She also advised the insurance company that her contact number had changed. The new number started with +27, which Brand knew was South African. Brand copied the new number into his notebook then tapped the end of his pen against his chin.

He was about to head north into Zimbabwe to try to prove or disprove Kate’s death. It was unusual, but not unheard of, for him to have to interview the beneficiary of an insurance claim; more often than not they were living in the UK, where the policy had been taken out. The document trail would probably prove whether Kate had faked her own death or not – it usually did – but the additional factor in this case was that whether Miss Munns was dead or alive, it seemed the family would most likely want to contact Linley Brown.

Brand disconnected his phone from the laptop and punched in the number from the email. It rang then went straight through to message bank:

‘
Howzit, you’ve called Linley. Sorry, I can’t take your call, but please leave your number and I’ll get back to you just now.
’

‘Ma’am, good morning, my name is Hudson Brand, I’m the local South African assessor for the company holding Kate Munns’s life insurance policy. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend, but I have some papers for you to sign so we can expedite your claim and I’d be much obliged if you could call me back.’

Brand left his number and ended the call. Calling himself an assessor was being a little liberal with the truth, but he would draft and print out an affidavit for Linley to sign to cover the other lies he had just left in the voicemail message.

He returned his attention to the remaining emails and attachments, which had downloaded in full before he had disconnected. The other documents included a death certificate, which Brand noted was signed by a Dr Geoffrey Fleming of Bulawayo, and a police report of the fatal accident that had claimed the life of Kate Munns. It had been filled in by a Sergeant G. Khumalo of Bulawayo police’s traffic department, who was the investigator.

Brand read the scanned handwriting, which was neat and slightly girlish. He wondered if G. Khumalo was male or female; there was no way of telling.

I arrived at the scene of the accident, 23.5 kilometres from Dete Crossing on the road towards Binga at 1143 hours. A lorry carrying maize meal was parked on one side of the road, heading west, and the burning wreckage of a 1956 Austin A40 was in the riverbed on the north side of the bridge in the gorge. A white female, who I subsequently identified as Miss Linley Louise Brown, was sitting in the grass with her head in her hands, crying. Miss Brown, as I now know her, said to me, ‘My friend is dead – she is in the car.’ The driver of the lorry, whom I identified as Mr Goodluck Nyati, was sitting beside his truck, smoking a cigarette. I walked along the bridge and down the embankment to the still smoking car and confirmed there was the badly burnt body of a person in the driver’s seat. The person was clearly dead. The ambulance was in attendance and I told the driver to recover the body. I went to interview Miss Brown. She was distraught.

Brand pictured the scene. In his years of living in Africa he had formed the opinion that the most dangerous activity a person could embark on in this continent was not to fight in one of her perennial wars or to walk on foot among big game, or even to go out at night in Johannesburg; it was simply to get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and turn the ignition key. While South Africa and other African countries made the world news now and again because of crime and conflict, the hidden killer in Africa – aside from malaria, the number one cause of fatalities – was bad driving. He’d seen old cars still on the road in Zimbabwe, including diminutive Austins with their rounded bodies, and the chance of surviving a crash in one of these was less than in a modern vehicle.

Goodluck Nyati, the police officer’s report outlined, had not been the cause of the accident, though he had come close to becoming the second fatality. Rounding a bend as he came down the hill from the direction of Binga he had been confronted with the sight of the Austin bursting into flames below him. He had swerved, instinctively, as a fireball washed up and over his cab, and then had overcorrected.

Mr Nyati recovered his wits and ran to the guard railing, part of which was missing where the other car had gone over the edge. The railing on most of the northern side was washed away in a flood earlier this year. He saw Miss Brown, dazed but alive, screaming and waving for help in the riverbed. He went down to the river, but the force of the heat and flames made it impossible for Mr Nyati or Miss Brown to free Miss Munns.

Linley Brown had told Sergeant Khumalo that her friend, Kate, had lost control of the car when she’d swerved to miss a warthog that had wandered onto the bridge.

Miss Brown said that she had been in the backseat of the car, retrieving drinks from a cooler box. Her friend, Miss Munns, had not been restrained as given the age of the vehicle it was not required by law to have seatbelts or airbags.

The report noted that Linley Brown had suffered some abrasions and minor bleeding to her head, where it had connected with the interior of the car.

Brand closed the police report – he would re-read it later – and went back to his inbox. He opened the next message, which was from Anna Cliff.

Dear Mr Brand,

My friend, Dani Russo, who I believe you know, has told me you will be investigating the insurance claim lodged by Linley Brown, a friend of my late sister, Kate Munns. I have read a good deal online lately about people faking their deaths in Zimbabwe and making fake insurance claims. I have no idea why my sister would want to fake her own death, or why she would want to leave the proceeds of an insurance policy to her school friend. I know by now you will probably think I am mad, or just a grieving person who refuses to accept the death of her sister, and there is probably little I can say here that will convince you otherwise. However, I don’t believe I can put this matter to rest until I make sense of what happened in the accident that allegedly killed my sister. Linley Brown was not at my sister’s funeral so I never got to meet her. I do live in the hope (however ridiculous) that my sister’s body was not in the coffin that was cremated in Bulawayo and that she is alive, somewhere, guarding her privacy with a new identity for some reason. I have read how doctors and police can be bribed to say anything in Zimbabwe and I am aware from Dani that this is the line your investigation may take. If you do find that my sister is alive then naturally I would want to find her – I would want you to find her – and if she is, indeed, dead, then I would also like to discuss with you the possibility of you tracking down Linley Brown for me so that I can at least speak with the last person who saw my sister alive. I know you may think I’m crazy, but I need your help, Mr Brand, and you come highly recommended.

Yours sincerely,

Anna Cliff

Brand did not think she was crazy. He understood the pain of loss, the unwillingness to believe. He had seen the bodies of most of his friends who had been killed in action and, in a way, that made it easier to accept the loss. His mother, however, had died while he was in Africa. She had been one of the reasons he had volunteered for Angola, and it pained him to learn that she had passed and been buried while he was there, in the country of her birth.

Linley Brown should not be hard to find, he thought. If her emails were a true indication, she was in desperate need of the payout. He would find her and he would tell her how much Anna Cliff needed to talk to her.

Linley’s absence from the funeral didn’t ring true, Brand thought. There would have to be powerful reasons why a friend close enough to benefit from another’s death would not even attend the service. Linley would be nursing the survivor’s particularly painful wound to the heart of living when a friend had died. Brand knew that pain, and it was one he had run from, seeking refuge in drink and women. Nothing helped, he had learned, except the sort of confrontation and forgiveness that Anna Cliff was searching for.

He would hold off replying to Anna, he decided. He would wait until Linley Brown called him back, and there was no better place to while away a few hours or days than the African bush.

There was one more email from Dani to open, which said, simply,
Picture
in the subject line. When he opened it he saw it was a forwarded message sent from Peter Cliff to Dani. Cliff’s brief text informed Dani that he had found the attached photo at Kate’s home on her refrigerator door. It was a print from
perhaps a few years ago
according to the sender; he had scanned the image in order to email it.
Linley is on the left
, the message concluded.

Brand looked at the two women. Both were blonde, attractive and smiling, but that was where the resemblance ended.

He closed out of the email and the mail program, shut down his laptop and touched his finger to the brim of his Texas Longhorns cap in a salute to the old buffalo wallowing in the mud. He pictured, briefly, Kate Munns’s body blazing in the wrecked car as her best friend looked on, helpless.

Brand hoped that when his end came it would be quick, and that there would be no friends around to see it. It was time for him to hit the road again, if only until Linley Brown called.

7

W
hen I switched on the phone again, to see if Lungile had had any luck buying the dresses, it beeped to tell me I had a message. I ordered another latte from the Shona waitress in the Mugg & Bean at the Broadacres shopping centre, next to the Cedar Lakes walled housing estate where Lungile and her brother rented a house.

I didn’t recognise the number of the missed call, but it was South African.

‘
Ma’am, good morning, my name is Hudson Brand
,’ it began, the man’s accent a mix of South African and American English. I listened to the rest of it and when I saw there was nothing from Lungile I switched the phone off again. Cops track people by their mobile phones and while I had no reason to suspect they had my number, I played it as safe as I could. If Lungile had been arrested for something stupid she might have given it to the murder and robbery squad.

‘
Tatenda
,
sisi
,’ I said to the waitress, and she smiled wide. It was nice seeing someone from my country – someone I wasn’t robbing – even if I couldn’t be there right now. I wondered if Beauty, as her nametag read, was as desperate to get home and start a new life as I was.

I thought about the message on the phone, the accent of Mr Hudson Brand. His name sounded like a cross between a fighter plane and a washing machine.

‘Are you still OK?’ Beauty asked, checking on me not a minute after she had delivered my coffee.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I folded the copy of
The Citizen
in half so that the grainy security camera picture on the front was no longer visible, and so it wasn’t obvious to the waitress that I had been reading and re-reading it several times since I had arrived in the cafe.

Glamour girls strike again
, screamed the tabloid’s headline. The theft of the widow’s jewellery was only our third job in Johannesburg, but already the police and the media had discerned a pattern. It was why Lungile was out shopping, and why we were going to have to change our modus operandi. The story on the front page told of the ‘attractive and well-dressed’ women who had talked their way into another Joburg mansion on the pretext of wanting to buy it, and fleeced the owner. The lady whose ring I had popped back into the letterbox was pictured, holding a photo of her recently deceased husband, next to the shot of Lungile and me making for the car – eyes deliberately downcast in case of this sort of thing. The article didn’t say anything about my good deed, returning the wedding ring.

Turning my mind back to Hudson Brand and his raspy accent that reminded me a little of Denzel Washington, I opened my netbook, connected to the free wi-fi, and googled him.

The only Hudson Brand I could find seemed to be a safari guide, not an insurance assessor, and he had his own collection of press clippings, beginning with:
Safari guide kills rhino poacher
. There were several versions of the same story, from just a few days ago. One of the articles noted that Brand was born in America, and that tallied with the drawl, possibly southern, that I’d heard on my voicemail, but the job description was all wrong. There was a picture of him, dressed in bushveld khaki and a sweat-stained cap. He had a nice smile and the perfect, even teeth of an American. He was either deeply tanned or there was some African somewhere in his background. He was old, but still good looking, for sure.

I hit the back arrow and scrolled down past the stories. There was another entry that made more sense.
Minister’s son faked his death – insurance company decides not to press charges
.

‘Aha,’ I said out load.

Beauty looked over at me.

‘I’m fine,’ I said to her.

In the body of the news article, from the
Daily News
in Zimbabwe, I read that a man called Tatenda Mbudzi had faked his death and been exposed by a private investigator, Hudson Brand, who had been wounded in an attempted car hijacking. There couldn’t be two men in Africa with a name that preposterous. Hijackings were very rare in Zimbabwe, so I wondered if Mbudzi had been trying to run interference with Brand’s investigation. There was another article from a newspaper in South Africa dating from 2010 which said police had interviewed
local safari guide and private investigator Hudson Brand
in relation to the rape and murder of a woman near the Kruger Park.

So, Brand was an investigator, not an assessor, and possible murder suspect. But I had nothing to fear from Brand – Kate Munns was dead and cremated. I still cried, at night, when I thought about how bad it was that I couldn’t be there to say goodbye to a woman I loved. I wondered if Anna was behind this apparent investigation, if she could not accept that Kate was gone. All of the paperwork for the claim was perfectly in order.

My coffee was getting cold as I sat there thinking about what to do next. I didn’t want to see Brand, or to answer his questions, and nor should I have to. I was entitled to the money and I did not want to go through the ordeal of telling someone else again how I burned my hands banging on the closed window as I watched a human being go up in flames like a Roman candle, or how the smells of cooked flesh would stay with me forever.

I resented Anna’s interference, if it was her, or her domineering husband, Peter, if it was he who was questioning the claim. I decided I would email the insurance company, saying I had heard from their investigator, Brand, but advising them to email me any additional papers they had for me to sign.

Beauty came and took the cup and asked if I wanted anything else. ‘Just the bill, please,’ I said.

The Mugg & Bean was filling with the lunchtime crowd and the owner would be grateful for my table. I decided to take the copy of the newspaper with me, in case Beauty took another look at the blonde on the front page I had been staring at before she brought me my drink.

My phone beeped and vibrated with a message.

Hi girlfriend. Have found the most FABULOUS outfits for us in the Oriental Plaza. See you at home.
I fixed up the bill and, before leaving, decided to make one more call. I dialled a number in Zimbabwe.

‘Dr Fleming’s surgery, good morning,’ a woman said on the end of the static-plagued line.

‘
Howzit
, it’s Linley Brown here, one of Dr Fleming’s patients, how are you?’

‘Fine, and you?’ she said.

‘Fine. Please can I speak to the doctor?’

‘Ah, but he is on his way out just now.’

I heard a soft voice in the background asking who it was. The receptionist, not doing a good job of muffling the mouthpiece, said, ‘Linley Brown.’

‘Linley,’ said Geoffrey Fleming a second later. ‘You just caught me – I’m here at reception on my way out to a house call. How are you, my dear?’

He was so old-fashioned, addressing me that way, but I liked him and he’d been good to me. He’d cared for me when others hadn’t. ‘Fine, doc, fine. Well, a bit worried in fact.’

‘Really?’ I pictured his kind, lined face, the still-thick silver hair, and his outdated horn-rimmed glasses. As bad as things got with me, as low as I went, I always felt better just seeing him. ‘Did you go to the program I referred you to?’

‘I did.’ I felt a little swell of pride as I said it, hearing the conviction in my voice. ‘And,’ speaking more softly so the businessmen and housewives sitting around me couldn’t hear, ‘I’ve been going to the Nar-anon meetings, like you suggested.’

‘Good, good. But what’s wrong?’

‘Doc, have you been contacted by an investigator about the insurance claim?’

He coughed, clearing his throat. ‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘There’s a man here in South Africa, an American by the name of Brand, Hudson Brand, who says he’s an assessor for the insurance company. He wants to meet with me and for me to fill out some papers. Does that sound normal?’

Again, the pause, as he processed the information and my question. ‘I don’t know. To tell you the truth I haven’t had a lot to do with overseas insurance companies, but you’d be aware of these scams with people faking their own deaths, Linley.’

‘Doc, I don’t want to go through what happened again, not with anybody. I don’t know if I can take it. I need the money – I have to tell you, I need it desperately – but I just want this to all be over.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ he said. ‘If he calls me I will tell him what happened, and the truth: that the last time I spoke to you, you were in South Africa. He obviously has your number, so it really is up to you whether you meet him or not. I’m sorry, but I do have to go now. I’m glad you finished your program, and do please stay with the meetings – they may seem awkward at first, but they will help you.’

I wasn’t as sure as he was, but he had confided in me that he had been through Alcoholics Anonymous twenty-something years ago and hadn’t touched a drop of booze since. That was some feat in Zimbabwe, where alcohol was cheaper than bottled water and the tap water was usually undrinkable.

When Doc Fleming ended the call I felt as though I had been cast adrift. I still had Lungile, though, who had always been like the third sister in our gang at school. I loved her to bits, although I wasn’t sure Doc Fleming or my sponsor at Nar-anon, Mark, would approve of me keeping company with her or her sleazy brother. I left the restaurant, stopped in at Woolworths to buy some pasta for dinner, then walked out of Broadacres onto the busy Cedar Road.

A car hooted and some guy called something unintelligible but no doubt filthy at me as I walked the short distance to the entrance of the housing complex.

‘Afternoon, madam,’ said the Malawian security guard. He recognised me by sight now and knew I was staying with Lungile and her brother. ‘You know, madam, it is not always safe to walk around here, even in the daylight.’

I shrugged and pushed my sunglasses up on top of my head. ‘What am I going to do? The Porsche is in for a service.’

‘Madam?’

‘Never mind, Benjamin, but thanks for the advice.’

I could have asked Lungile to come fetch me from the Mugg & Bean, but the walk, as short as it was, had given me time to collect my thoughts. I’d walked everywhere in Bulawayo, even as a kid, and the heightened sense of security in Johannesburg, whether misplaced or not, was one more thing I didn’t like about the city.

Once through the gates I was struck, again, by how orderly and calm the estate was. The houses were arrayed in cul-de-sacs and avenues around wide expanses of manicured grassland with water features and a clubhouse. The dwellings were mostly mock Tuscan, or mock Balinese, or mock something else. A woman in shorts and T-shirt pushing a pram said hello to me in Afrikaans as I passed her. I could have walked or run around the estate, but on the couple of times I had tried it I had felt like a caged animal, or an inmate in a prison, albeit a nice Tuscan prison. The whole place reminded me of a model railway set village, with walls topped with razor wire and an electric fence. Lungile had told me the security was good here; there were no break-ins and the only crime on the estate was neighbourhood teenagers stealing from houses for fun or to score some cash for weed or booze.

Crime was everywhere, and it didn’t matter if you were in Johannesburg, Harare or London. I thought that if I felt uneasy running around inside the walls at Cedar Lakes, then how would I handle prison? I needed to get myself straight, in every sense of the word, but I also needed to eat.

The deep thump of a slow bass line reached out through the rendered mustard walls of Lungile and Fortune’s
rented
house as I walked up the drive. Lungile must have been watching for me, as she opened the door to greet me.

‘Check!’ she screeched, holding up a long black dress.

‘I love it. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, girlfriend, fine, fine, fine.’

The cloying odour of marijuana followed her out onto the
stoep
. I had never acquired a liking for the stuff. I grew up in a conservative house and even when Lungile smuggled some into school I found it didn’t really do a lot for me, other than make me feel paranoid. That was an unwelcome side effect, and I enjoyed the high I got from my prescription pills much more.

Lungile wiggled her ass as she sashayed into the marble-tiled reception area, still holding the dress in front of her. Her brother, Fortune, appeared from the kitchen in a shiny tracksuit and bling, a packet of Salticrax crackers in one hand and a
zol
in his mouth.

‘
Kanjane
, sister,’ he mumbled through the dope smoke.

‘Fine.’ I wasn’t his sister and I didn’t like the way he looked at me sometimes, like he was now, as though appraising me from head to toe. He was several years older than Lungile and still single, a would-be gangster and a player. I hadn’t known him when we were at school and had only met him when I came to Johannesburg.

While Lungile had been out hunting for dresses I had been for a job interview, for a post as a secretary to a real estate agent in the shopping centre next door. It would have been perfect for me, as I could have walked to the shop. Even if Benjamin the guard didn’t approve, the commute was still safer than my current line of employment.

Lungile set the garment down on the purple leather couch, which her brother had bought and I hated. The backs of my knees stuck to the cushion as I flopped down on the monstrosity and sighed.

‘How did the interview go, or need I ask?’ Lungile asked.

She wasn’t being smart; I could hear the sympathy in her voice already. ‘My Afrikaans is not so
lekker
, it seems.’

‘There should be a law against that – not being able to get a job because you can’t speak the no-longer official language of this country.’

I shrugged. ‘Babe, I just don’t know what to do.’

Fortune leaned over the back of the couch and waved the joint he’d been smoking in front of me. ‘How about a little of this to help ease the pain of rejection?’

I coughed. ‘No thanks.’ His cologne smelled even worse than the weed. What I wanted came in a little plastic bottle with a childproof lid. Fortune
would probably know a doctor who could be bribed to write me a script and he wouldn’t tell his sister if I asked him not to.