The Hunter (7 page)

When they reached the house Hannah got out of her vehicle before Brand could ease himself free. He leaned on her bony shoulder as she walked him to the door. ‘Want me to come in?’ she asked.

‘I’m,’ he coughed, ‘fine. But since you’ve come all this way at least let me get you coffee or a beer.’

‘Precious can look after the bar for a little while longer.’ Hannah helped him along the stone-flagged hallway to the master bedroom. He lay down on his back and closed his eyes. Hannah fetched a bowl from the kitchen and returned to the bedroom’s en suite. She filled it with hot water and brought soap and a facecloth.

Hannah set the bowl down on the bedside table and paused to open the curtains. Across the timbered verandah was the view of the Sabie River Brand cherished and coveted. The waterway was shrunken by the long dry winter, but was still beautiful, gurgling its way around pink granite boulders. An elephant snorted trunks full of water from the edge of the far bank and the sight of him did nothing to harm Brand’s recovery. Gingerly he undid the buttons of his bloodied bush shirt and winced as he tried to remove it.

‘Here, let me.’ Hannah moved to the bed, eased off the shirt and tut-tutted at the patchwork of bruises underneath. When even her gentle fingers made him nearly cry out he knew there were some cracked ribs. ‘You’ll have to go to the doctor. But I’ll clean you up a bit.’

She dabbed at the cuts on his cheek and his lip and each touch seemed to hurt more than the last. ‘You men are such pussies when it comes to pain.’

Brand regretted his attempted laugh. ‘What would you know?’

‘You should try childbirth.’

There was so much, he realised, that he didn’t know about her, and they hadn’t been together long enough for him to find out. ‘You never told me.’

‘Whenever I asked you if what people said was true, you always said you didn’t want to talk about your past, that you had come to South Africa to fight in the border war, so I thought you wouldn’t want to know about my previous lives.’

Lives
. He nodded. She rummaged in his bathroom again for some sticky plasters and Betadine and then continued to torture him as she returned to her nursing duties. In a brief moment of respite she got up again and sifted through some of Brand’s dirty bush clothes until she found a bottle of Scotch, the cheap kind. Hannah poured two generous glasses.

‘Thanks.’ He clinked glasses with her. The liquid warmed him as it washed over his ragged nerve endings.

She sipped her drink. ‘I should have killed Koos. He tried it on with me one night, after closing. I kneed him in the balls.’

‘That was my plan.’

Hannah looked away from him.

‘Did you go to the police?’ Brand asked her.

She laughed. ‘Here? He would have bought them off. Besides, the cops are too busy with rapes and murders. They don’t care about some farmer backhanding a barmaid.’

Any thoughts Brand might have had about getting some payback on Koos de Villiers for how he and Patrick had ambushed him were now overwhelmed with his desire to hurt him, badly, for what he had done to Hannah. ‘Well, thanks again for saving my ass.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

Brand shrugged, and it hurt. ‘I can’t work until the parks board investigation clears me for shooting the poacher.’

Hannah nodded. ‘Watch out for Koos and Patrick. They’re not finished with you yet. I know them. They’re bad.’

‘So I gather. I did get an offer of some work in Zimbabwe. I turned it down because what I really wanted to do was go on that walking safari.’

She tutted again. ‘Zimbabwe. Isn’t it dangerous up there, man?’

He braced himself for the pain as it was his turn to laugh. ‘Not like Hazyview.’

She smiled and he thought he saw her obsidian eyes soften just a little. ‘I do need to get back to work. Precious is a good girl, but she’ll be busy robbing me blind while I’m here.’

Brand reached out and put his hand on hers. Hannah leaned closer to him and kissed him on the cheek. That also hurt, but he manned up and didn’t wince.

She pulled back from him, as if having second thoughts about what she had just done. ‘Is it guiding work you’re going to do in Zimbabwe?’ she asked quickly.

‘No. Hunting.’

‘Ugh, I hate hunting.’

‘People, not animals.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then.’ Hannah stood and smoothed her short denim skirt. ‘I must go. Be careful if you go to Zimbabwe, Hudson. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.’ She went to the bedroom door and walked out without looking back.

Brand found his phone in the pocket of his discarded shirt. Miraculously, it had survived the beating and kicking of the brothers De Villiers. He scrolled through the recent numbers and found Dani’s in London. He pressed the call button. Brand let the phone ring a few times then hung up.

Gently, he eased himself back onto the bed, the phone by his side. Afternoon sunlight slanted in through the sliding glass doors that led to the deck outside. He should have been walking in the bush in this golden hour of the day, not lying here, feeling like shit.

Brand didn’t have long to wait. The phone gave its kingfisher call and vibrated on the bed. He picked it up and held it to his ear, too tired and sore to even say hello.

‘I take it you don’t have enough funds to call the UK?’ Dani said by way of greeting.

Poor Dani
, Brand thought. She was so wrapped up in her work that she would call him straight back on a Saturday. She should have been out in the beer garden of a sunny pub or strolling in a London park, or whatever it was people in England did for fun.

‘How did you guess?’ The truth was, he didn’t have enough credit on his phone to speak to her from his end, and his current bank balance would barely cover the cost of a call if he drew the cash out.

‘I know you’re not a big believer in the internet, but you’re currently trending.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ Brand croaked.

‘I’d tell you to google yourself, but you’d probably think that was a euphemism of some sort.’

‘I like it when you talk dirty to me. It’s your accent.’ Brand thought he heard a titter.

‘Seriously, Hudson, you’ve made the news on several continents in the last few days. I read all about the poacher, and the lion, and that poor American woman who was nearly killed twice. She looked like your type.’

Brand groaned, inwardly and outwardly. Just three nights earlier Darlene had been slipping between crisply ironed sheets to act as his personal hot water bottle. ‘I had to kill the poacher.’

‘Whatever. I take it you are now in a position to accept the assignment we discussed.’

‘I am,’ he said.

‘You’re assuming I haven’t found someone else.’

‘I’m assuming it would take you longer than three days to find someone who can investigate a possible fake death certificate in Zimbabwe. I’m also assuming that you knew I would relent, one way or another, and end up taking this case, and that you probably guessed I didn’t really have back-to-back safari bookings coming up.’

The suppressed titter again. ‘We know each other well, Hudson, but now, down to business. I’ll email you the file, but the basics are you’re looking for a Zimbabwean female, Katherine “Kate” Elizabeth Munns, born 14 May 1980.’

There was a Windhoek Lager coaster on the bedside table. Brand slid it from under the empty bottle of the same brand and took a pen, which Koos’s toecap had cracked but still worked if he held it carefully, and wrote down the name. ‘White?’

‘Yes. Don’t sound so surprised,’ Dani said. ‘Crime knows no colour bar.’

Brand knew that, but this was a first in the niche business Dani and he had carved out. Several million Zimbabweans, black and white, had left their country since the country’s economy had begun to spiral out of control in 1998. President Robert Mugabe’s bid to cling to power by sanctioning the invasion and confiscation of white-owned commercial farms had tipped Zimbabwe’s economy from the relatively prosperous and self-sufficient end of the scales to the wheelbarrow-loads-of-cash-needed-to-pay-for-a-loaf-of-bread end. In fact, for a few years there had been no bread. Although the situation had stabilised with the entry of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, into the government, and a switch from the valueless Zimbabwe dollar to the greenback, the fact was that Zimbabwe was being kept afloat largely by remittances sent from expatriate Zimbabweans to their relatives still living in the country.

And crime. Zimbabweans, Brand had found, were a practical people who could turn their hand to pretty well anything, including theft and fraud. Crime in Zimbabwe generally didn’t include the senseless violence that characterised the farm murders and carjackings of South Africa, but was rather more creative and bloodless.

‘I guess it was only a matter of time before the whites cottoned on to the idea of faking their own deaths to claim their insurance payouts,’ Brand said.

‘Exactly.’ And that was the scam that had brought Dani and he together and made them both some tidy fees, mainly from two insurance companies in the UK that now used the services of her law firm to investigate suspect claims. So far the eight cases he had investigated had been claims lodged by the beneficiaries of policies taken out by black Zimbabweans living in Britain. Typically, the policyholder, with premiums fully paid up, would take a ‘holiday’ back home to Zimbabwe and meet with a tragic end – on paper. The seven fraudsters Brand had uncovered (one of the claims had been genuine) had paid two different crooked doctors for faked death certificates, as well as other bribes to obtain false police reports.

The causes of death were varied; Brand had encountered a drowning, three motor vehicle accidents, all with the same police officer investigating, as well as the same doctor pronouncing death, and a very imaginative head-kicking by a donkey. The beneficiaries tended to be spouses or other close relatives. The final case had involved a person dying of malaria three days after entering Zimbabwe. It didn’t take a medical doctor or a genius to label that one as suspect. Unless the woman in question had picked up malaria somewhere in the UK, it should have taken at least a week for the disease to incubate and manifest itself.

‘How did Miss Munns allegedly meet her end? Or was it missus?’ Brand asked Dani.

‘Miss. Car accident – again – on the way to somewhere called Binga.’

‘That’s on Lake Kariba, the western end. What made the insurance company suspicious?’ Despite what Dani had just said about the colour bar, the fact was that Kate Munns did not fit the racial profile for Zimbabweans faking their own deaths.

‘Her sister. That’s the personal involvement I have in this one. Anna Cliff, Kate’s sister, is a chum of mine.’

Chum. That was why he liked talking to Dani. Half a world away she was witty and charming; in the flesh she was beautiful, but very high maintenance. ‘Did you declare your interest to the insurers?’

‘Of course. But as I’m not undertaking the investigation itself they don’t mind.’

‘Who was the beneficiary of Kate’s policy? I’m guessing it wasn’t her sister,’ Brand asked.

‘Correct.’

‘Parents?’

‘No, they’re both dead. If the claim is paid an old school friend of Kate’s, Linley Brown, who is still living in Zimbabwe, will get the money.’

Brand thought about that for a moment. There must be a stronger connection than ‘old school friend’. Kate Munns was thirty-four and single. Who in that demographic took out a life insurance policy and – potentially – faked their death so their pal would get rich? ‘I’m trying to follow this, but my head is hurting.’

‘Spend the afternoon in the pub, did we?’ Dani sounded like a disapproving schoolmarm.

‘Yes, but I didn’t get much drinking done. OK, so, the sister . . .’

‘Anna. Do try and keep up, Hudson.’

‘Right, Anna, is pissed that Kate leaves the money to her lesbian lover from her school days instead of to her.’

‘I had similar thoughts.’ Dani paused, and Brand thought he heard her sipping something. Tea, he imagined. He remembered her lips; thin and soft. ‘But Anna and her husband are very well off. The insurance payout is two hundred thousand pounds, not, as you Americans would say, chickenfeed, but Anna’s husband, Peter, is a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon; she doesn’t need to work and they pay more than that every year for a new car each. No, Anna thinks Kate was running away from something, or someone, and faked her death more to disappear than for the money. And, for the record, Anna says Kate was as straight as they come.’

Brand ached everywhere, and needed beer, painkillers and sleep, but his mind was ticking over. He didn’t know these people, but Dani knew some of the cast of characters in this twisting tale. ‘Does Anna know the friend, Linley?’

‘Only vaguely. There’s a six-year age difference between the sisters; Anna left for the UK while Kate was still at boarding school back in Zimbabwe. She remembers meeting Linley once, when she was home on holiday, but that’s it. She didn’t even know Kate had stayed in touch with the girl, though we do have a picture of the two of them together, perhaps from a few years ago.’

In one sense, it was a straightforward case. Brand knew the system well enough now in Zimbabwe that he could check out the bona fides of the death certificate and police reports within a couple of days. With luck he might even find that one of the same crooked cops or doctors he had come across in the past was involved. The insurance companies he and Dani worked for invariably did not prosecute fraud, although they refused payment when it was proved. They didn’t want publicity about scams reaching the UK press in case they damaged the company’s reputation. Brand thought it might be good for investors and policyholders to see that a company didn’t tolerate fraud, but the corporate spin doctors in London were uniformly of a view that some publicity was bad publicity. Brand had hoped that the local police and medical boards in Zimbabwe might take action in the wake of his investigations, but he knew at least one of the doctors who’d faked certificates was still practising and a couple of the cops were still on the job. Zimbabwe’s justice system was the best money could buy.