The Hunter (18 page)

He wasn’t naïve. They had got along well over dinner, relating stories of their shared time in Angola, serving on different sides of the war, and on three or four occasions she had leaned across the table and again punctuated a point by placing her hand on his and touching his leg with the pointed toe of her boot.

She had played with her hair and some of her jokes and stories of her work had been unashamedly sexual. He liked her laugh, and he had flirted back at her. By the end of the main course the calf of her left leg was resting against his right and he was being drawn into those dark, sad eyes across the candlelight.

They had left the dining room and walked up the sweeping staircase past paintings of long-ago members of the Rhodesian colonial gentry. He loved the high ceilings, the airy rooms, the polished floors of this anachronistic man cave, but right then he was fixated on Elena as she walked up the stairs in front of him, her bottom at his eye level. On the first landing he had, on impulse, reached up and taken her black ponytail in one hand, checking her pace. Elena had thrown back her head, groaned, then turned. Brand kissed her, hungry, hard and deep. Breathless, she had broken the kiss and led him up the stairs. ‘Which room?’

‘Four.’

‘Hurry,’ she had whispered hoarsely in his ear.

She was clawing at his back, kissing his neck as he fumbled with the key in the lock. Inside he had pinned her against the wall and lowered his mouth to the small breast she freed for him from her cocktail dress. His hand had gone between her thighs, pulling aside her pants as he ran his finger across her hard little nub, parting the slippery, puffy flesh. Elena had bitten his shoulder. He rubbed the skin now as he opened his eyes in the room, and, looking down, saw the red marks her teeth had left.

Brand found a pair of shorts in his duffel bag and hopped, one-legged, into them. He needed to be out of the room by ten. On the wall he noticed a smudge of makeup, where Elena had turned her face, her cheek brushing the white plaster as he kissed her throat, lifted her, and entered her. He’d taken a free packet of condoms from the box in the men’s room of the club, during dinner. The first time had been fast, almost brutal, as she wrapped her legs around him and reached under his untucked shirt to rake his back with her red nails. As he turned he caught sight of the scratch marks in the mirror.

As she came she had bitten the inside of his lip, drawing blood, and he had let out an animal groan as he tasted it and lifted her higher up the wall. She reminded him of a lioness, hissing and fighting as he took her, then sashaying past him, lifting her dress over her head as she walked to the bed, enticing the male into the act once more. As he had leaned against the door, catching his breath, she had bent over in front of him and wiggled out of her pants, then planted her booted feet apart, hands resting on the mattress, and looked back over her shoulder at him. ‘Again,’ she’d said.

She had ridden him, still dressed only in her boots, and after that he had finally dozed. Elena had woken him, though, lapping at him, coaxing back his arousal, and he had looked down and wrapped his hands in her dark hair.

Their bodies had been slick as he rolled her over and entered her, slower this time, kissing her as he rested at the end of each stroke, deep inside her. She had scratched him some more, urging him to move faster, and he had surrendered to her seemingly insatiable passion.

She had lain beside him, nuzzling against his chest as he had fallen asleep, exhausted from their exertions and his travels and still sore from his beating at the hands of the De Villiers boys. He remembered now that she had got up when it was still dark. Just a chink of pale pre-dawn light had shone through the curtains. She was standing in front of the mirror, zipping up her dress. He’d looked at her and she at him, saying nothing as she sat on the bed and pulled on her boots, which she’d discarded after their second round. She had let herself out of the room and he’d fallen back to sleep.

Brand opened the curtains to let in more light, buttoned his shirt and took his phone from the breast pocket. He dialled Elena’s surgery and greeted the receptionist. ‘Is Dr Rodriguez free, please? I’m a friend of hers.’

He heard voices in the background, an overflowing waiting room, he guessed. A child was crying. ‘I am sorry, but Dr Rodriguez did not come to work today and I have many people waiting to see her.’

‘Thank you.’ Brand ended the call.

She would be across the border by now. Perhaps she didn’t have enough money or guile to bribe the police in Zimbabwe, or maybe she, like the late Kate Munns, just wanted to disappear from her miserable life.

He had let himself be taken for a ride; not a bad ride, but a ride nonetheless. He picked up his phone again and scrolled through the numbers until he found Sergeant Goodness Khumalo’s. He dialled it.

‘It’s Hudson Brand here, sergeant, how are you this fine morning?’ He coughed.

‘Fine. Better than you, I think?’

‘All good here.’ He coughed into his hand again and saw Elena’s empty cigarette pack by the bed. He had caved in and smoked a few with her between bouts of lovemaking, and that accounted for the rasp in his voice and the foul taste in his mouth. The remains of one of hers sat in the ashtray, the red ring of her lips still visible.

‘How can I help you, Mr Brand? Do you have some information for me?’

‘I’ve confirmed Kate Munns really is dead, but you might want to go to the records office and pull the death certificates issued by a Dr Elena Rodriguez.’

‘That name is familiar.’

‘Let’s just say that the good doctor has come to the attention of the Bulawayo police in the past. She sells fraudulent death certificates.’

‘But you said Kate is really dead?’

‘I did, but she bought a fake certificate three days before she unexpectedly had the need for a real one.’

Goodness paused for a second. ‘The woman faked her death and then died in the accident. Serious?’

‘I think if you pull some other death certificates Dr Rodriguez signed you’ll find some interesting claims. If you do turn up some irregularities I’d appreciate a return favour as I might be able to follow up with the insurance companies abroad.’

‘I think we may be working together in the future, Mr Brand,’ Sergeant Khumalo said. ‘I look forward to talking to the doctor.’

‘OK, bye.’ Brand didn’t want the policewoman to know Elena had most likely crossed the border by now, and he didn’t want to explain how she’d had the time to make good her escape. But it was probably a leg-up onto the first rung of the promotional ladder for Khumalo.

Brand brushed his teeth, packed his bag and left the room. He went to the club’s office, on the ground floor, to pay his bill.

Brand needed something greasy to take the edge off his hangover. He turned into the car park of the Holiday Inn, left the Land Rover and walked into the Spur steakhouse. The familiarity of the Wild West-themed chain restaurant and the knowledge that the menu was the same wherever he went in Africa was a welcome break from the chaos of the real world outside.

He ordered a cheeseburger from the waitress and checked his emails while he waited. The first was from his UK travel contact, Wayne Hamilton. Peter and Anna Cliff were on their way to Zimbabwe.

13

I
t was a nice house, Captain Sannie van Rensburg thought, the kind of place she would like to live in, if she and Tom ever decided to sell the farm, or if the government bought it off them.

Sannie looked out the plate glass windows of the house in Steiltes, a suburb perched in the hills high above Nelspruit, and took a moment more to admire the view over the city and the valley below.

‘Nice place,’ said Mavis.

‘
Ja
. And nicely dressed ladies who robbed it.’

‘You think it’s the same pair who were doing the thefts around Sandton and Houghton? The Glamour Girls? Salt and Pepper?’

Sannie didn’t like the media’s habit of giving criminals nicknames; Salt and Pepper was the latest. She felt it trivialised and even glamorised crime in the eyes of impressionable young people. But Mavis had matured into an experienced detective and she read the newspapers and checked internet news sites every day, keeping abreast of crime not only in the local area but also nationally. Sannie had the same thoughts about the well-dressed female bandits.

‘Could be. Or maybe a copycat,’ Sannie said. ‘Robbing houses that are open for viewing is hardly a new type of crime, but the MO is similar to the others, and the perpetrators are two women.’ In the kitchen the owner of the home, a matronly woman with permed hair, a white pants suit and gold sandals, was giving the estate agent hell for not keeping an eye on the people who came to inspect the house, which was for sale.

‘Did you get the full list of what’s missing?’ Sannie asked her partner.

Mavis opened her notebook. ‘Two laptops, a cell phone, some cash from a bedside table drawer, and a Rolex watch.’

‘Not a bad haul. If it is the same pair they might have simply shifted their operation from Joburg to the Lowveld because the police were closing in on them.’

Both Sannie and Mavis had read the
Sunday Times
story the previous weekend about a couple of women in burqas who had attempted to rob a house in Houghton. The journalist had inside information that the police had mounted a sting operation, but the women escaped after showing a stolen ID.

‘Mavis, you need to track down whoever was handling the earlier cases when we get back to the office. See what we can get on these two; descriptions, security camera footage and the like.’

Mavis’s eyes widened. ‘Maybe we can mount our own sting?’

‘Maybe.’ Sannie thought that if it was the same two women they wouldn’t be fooled easily. The owner of this house had told them that she had made a point of telling her husband and sons to hide all their valuables. The agent said the white woman of the pair had engaged him in a detailed conversation about the house and he assumed her partner had then done the searching and the stealing. As in the other cases she had read about, one of the pair did the distracting and the other the thieving. Sannie had asked the agent if the woman had flirted with him, and he had blushed, giving her a truer indication of the nature of their ‘detailed conversation’. He was able to give them a good description of her; a very good description. ‘But for now we must issue a warning to all the local real estate agents in Nelspruit, today.’

‘
Yebo
,’ Mavis said.

Sannie’s BlackBerry buzzed and she checked her emails. ‘Interesting.’

‘What is it?’ Mavis asked.

‘You know I contacted the Investigative Psychology Unit, about the woman who was murdered during the World Cup?’

‘Yes; our first case together. I’ll never forget it, and I think it’s great you won’t let it go.’

Sannie did not think it was great that they had been unable to catch the killer. ‘They found another female prostitute dead, identical MO, in Cape Town six months ago.’

‘Wow. That kind of rules out your chief suspect, though, doesn’t it?’

Sannie looked out over the valley towards White River and the haze-covered hills beyond. ‘I don’t know. That depends on whether or not Hudson Brand was in Cape Town last February at the time of the woman’s death.’

*

Mavis and Sannie worked on a flyer containing an artist’s impression of the two women who had robbed the houses in Johannesburg, and whom they suspected may have been responsible for the theft in Steiltes, and Mavis emailed it to all of the agents in Nelspruit.

At five o’clock Sannie left the office and Mavis went for a drink with one of the uniformed sergeants, Vusi Baloyi. Sannie didn’t know how serious it was between them, but Vusi was single, and a good-looking guy, and as far as Sannie knew he was a good cop. She just hoped Mavis, who had become a friend as well as a partner, would find someone who was her intellectual equal.

Sannie drove out of Nelspruit on the R40, climbing to White River and the forest-covered hills beyond. The gum and pine trees gave way to bananas and it was with a mix of guilt and excitement that she drove past her home. She should be on the
stoep
of the farmhouse with Tom and the three kids now, having a Savanna cider and listening to how their day had been. Instead, she pushed on towards the town of Hazyview. She wasn’t deliberately excluding Mavis from the investigation of the dead prostitute, but as the person she needed to talk to was so close to her own home she had decided to make the unannounced drop-in by herself.

She wondered where Hudson Brand was now; she hadn’t heard if his suspension from guiding had been lifted following the shooting of the poacher. Tracey Mahoney would know; she used him often as a freelance guide in her local safari business, and had employed him during the 2010 FIFA soccer World Cup.

Sannie slowed behind a mine truck and waited at the three-way stop at the intersection of the R40 and the R538, then turned left. She passed the Rendezvous shopping centre and waited at the robot to turn right onto Portia Shabangu, at the Blue Haze shopping mall. Minibus taxis taking workers back to the townships and informal settlements beeped and cut in and out around her. Hazyview had been a one-store town with hippos roaming the streets at night when she was growing up, but now it was a bustling, congested hub for the safari and farming industries.

Sannie turned into the R536. She stopped at another four-way, by the man selling metal warthogs and a menagerie of other hand-crafted souvenir animals, and glanced past
Oom
Kallie’s butchery to the pub where Brand’s former girlfriend worked. She would pay Hannah van Wyk a visit if she couldn’t find out where the guide was staying at the moment. She had heard around town that even though the pair had broken up after the murder investigation Brand was still a regular at the Pepper Vine, which Van Wyk managed. Sannie wondered again if it was worth grilling the woman once more about the alibi she had provided for Brand.

Sannie turned left before the bridge then right into Tarental Street and left into Goshawk Ridge. Outside a black steel gate she hooted her horn and heard dogs barking from the other side. A gardener slid open the gate and Sannie, seeing that the small yard in front of the house was crammed with safari game-viewing vehicles and people movers, switched off her engine in the driveway, locked her car, and walked in.

Tracey Mahoney came to the barred security door. ‘Captain Van Rensburg? Hello, can I help you?’ she said in the London accent she hadn’t lost in twenty years of living in South Africa.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Mahoney. How are you?’ Sannie said.

‘Fine.’

Sannie remembered that Tracey had been very protective of Brand in her earlier investigation. She didn’t know if Tracey had a genuine regard for the American, or if she resented one of her stable of guides being involved in a murder investigation. Publicity over the case would not have helped her business. ‘Perhaps I could come in.’

Tracey didn’t move, at first. A Jack Russell stood protectively by her feet growling, while a large black dog of indeterminate parentage barked behind her.

‘Dufus, shut up!’ The black dog turned and walked away. ‘Oh, very well. Come in. But I have to go pick the kids up from their friends’ place in fifteen minutes.’

‘I’m sure it won’t take that long,’ Sannie said. She followed Tracey inside, to a room off to the right of the front door that had been converted into an office.

Tracey sat down in her office chair behind a computer desk. ‘This is about Brand, again, I assume?’

‘Yes,’ Sannie said. ‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘Zimbabwe. The parks board’s still investigating the shooting of the poacher. You must have seen it in the
Lowvelder
.’

Sannie nodded. ‘I interviewed him.’ She remembered seeing his picture on the front page. One of the many things that disturbed her about the American was how handsome she found him. She was utterly devoted to Tom, but there was something about Brand that made women stop and talk to him. Perhaps it was the very arrogance and self-assuredness of the man that she found so irritating that was also, subconsciously, part of his charm. ‘I saw it. What’s he doing in Zim?’

‘I’m not his keeper and, at the moment, not his employer,’ Tracey said.

‘No, but he was working for you six months ago, wasn’t he?’

Tracey looked at her computer, ostensibly checking an email that announced its arrival with a ping. ‘Was he?’

‘That’s what I’m here to ask.’

Tracey picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, took a drag and blew the smoke not directly at Sannie, but not away from her, either. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Can you check where he would have been working on 12 February?’

Tracey sighed and swivelled in her chair so she was facing the computer again. ‘I keep all my bookings on a diary on here.’ Her fingers moved across the keyboard and Sannie leaned forward to see the screen as Tracey clicked on February’s bookings.

‘Well, he wasn’t here, if that’s what you want to know, in case you’re trying to pin another murder on him. Have a look.’ Tracey moved the flat screen so Sannie could get a better look. ‘There, see, he was on a tour. He took a family of Germans through the Kruger on the fourth; they drove down the Zulu War battlefields and stayed at Fugitives’ Drift on the sixth, then did Durban on the eighth, the garden route for a few days, then Cape Town.’

‘So he was in Cape Town on the night of the twelfth?’

‘That’s what it says here. Hope you’re satisfied.’

Sannie felt her heart rate increase and a jolt of adrenaline shoot out to her nerve endings as she jotted the details of the itinerary in her notebook. The truth was she had hoped she would find that Hudson Brand had been on safari in the Kruger Park, not in Cape Town, on the night another prostitute had been raped and murdered.

*

Brand watched the herd of elephants break into a trot as they smelled the water. A cloud of white dust rose behind them as they headed through the shimmering heat haze towards him.

The thatched roof over the viewing platform at Nyamandlovu waterhole protected him and the three other visitors from the sun, and the fact that the hide was raised on stilts, a few metres off the ground, allowed them to make the most of the breeze, although that, like the rest of Hwange National Park, was hot and dry.

‘Lion,’ Brand said.

‘Where?’ said the man seated in the rickety wooden chair next to him.

They were Australians, two young men and a woman. Brand thought they might be from an NGO, or the embassy in Harare; they had that earnest, clean-cut look about them. Brand gave them a reference, off the big acacia on the far side of the pan that had somehow survived decades of ravaging by elephants to grow to maturity. Sometimes life held on, even in this harsh, thirsty Kalahari sandveld.

The Australians finally found the lion. Brand raised his binoculars and studied him again. He was a fine specimen, a male in his late prime, about ten years old, he thought. The elephant herd’s matriarch raised her trunk as she caught the lion’s scent, but even his presence was not enough to deter her and her family from their desperate mission to reach the water.

The pan, or waterhole, was a greasy grey colour, a slurry of water and mud churned together by countless elephant feet and the hooves and paws of myriad other creatures. Some nervous zebra, their legs dirtied by the sludge, took fright and galloped away. The lion padded on, ignoring the herbivores and the elephants.

This was what Brand lived for, not the paying tourists or the occasional thrill and spill of an investigation. This, for him, was peace and paradise; sitting in the shade watching Africa’s wildlife play out their daily drama of life and death. It was better than television or a movie, and the ending was never as predictable as a book’s.

Brand had emailed Dani from Bulawayo, telling her that according to the police and her doctor, Kate Munns was definitely deceased. He had a day before the Cliffs were arriving, and his Land Rover was slow and noisy to travel in, so he had decided to break his journey to Victoria Falls and camp in Hwange National Park for a night. He had arrived in the park in the afternoon, checked in, and then driven the ten kilometres to Nymandlovu platform.

As the sun entered the belt of dust above the horizon the landscape was bathed in an unearthly, eerie pink gold.

The lion was at the waterhole, gingerly moving close to the edge of the pool, clearly not liking the feeling of getting his dessert plate-sized paws wet. He looked almost comical as he shook each front foot before eventually crouching, his tail curled, to lap at the water.

The elephants had made straight for the source of the water, which was a pipe through which water trickled into a concrete trough that would have then spilled over into the wider pan if the pachyderms weren’t so intent on sucking it straight from the outlet. Somewhere nearby an ageing Lister diesel engine
tucker-tucker
ed away, sucking the life-giving liquid up from the depths of the dry sandy earth.

Brand opened the cheap plastic cooler box beside him and took out another Zambezi Lager. The ice had long since melted, but the water gave a semblance of coolness to the beer. He popped it and took a long draught, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.