A song in the morning

* *

He turned when he heard the voice. The voice spoke his name.

Jack saw the boy. He saw the shallow body and the thin face. He saw the way the shoulder drooped. He saw that the boy was crippled. The boy was behind the bench, trying to smile a greeting.

He looked the other way. The girl was standing back two more paces than the boy. A nice looking girl, and older than the boy, and she wore a summer skirt and a blouse buttoned to the throat. He could see the lines at her mouth, tension lines.

"I'm Jack Curwen."

"I was ordered to contact you. You followed the instructions, thank you."

They stared at each other. As if neither had quite believed the ordinariness of the other.

Jack smiled, the boy grinned. Jack wondered why the girl didn't smile.

"I'm Jan, this is my sister. You don't need any more names."

Strangely formal. Jack shook hands with them.

A shyness in Jan's voice. "What you did at John Vorster Square was incredible."

Again the silence. None of them knowing what to say.

Out of earshot the schoolchildren were spidering over the hulk of the museum's largest tank.

Jan drew the envelope from his pocket. He passed it to Jack. Jack ripped open the fold. He saw the diagrams. He leafed quickly through the sheets of paper, the frown settling sharp cut on his forehead. He knew the girl's eyes never left his. The school teacher's voice carried gently to him. She had raised her voice because she was describing to her class the cyclic rate of fire of a heavy machine gun from the Great War. He saw that the diagrams were detail of Pretoria Central. He saw the positioning of Beverly Hills, he understood why he had not seen the walls when he had walked on Potgieterstraat.

"What happens now?"

Jan said, "I have to take you into the north of the Transvaal. There is a rendezvous there for you, close to a town called Warmbaths. It is a spa town about a hundred kilometres from Pretoria. You should go back to your hotel, and you should check out of your hotel, then we drive to Warmbaths."

"Do you know why I have come to South Africa?"

"No."

Ros snapped, "And he doesn't need to know."

Jack saw the anger on the boy's face.

Jan said, "I'm just a courier. I am ordered to deliver you to a rendezvous. I do what I am told, just as I brought you the envelope today, just as I brought you the package of explosives."

"You don't know why we are hitting the gaol?"

"As he said, he's just a courier."

Ros twisted away, swirled her skirt. Jack stood up and walked behind her and Jan hobbled after them. Jack caught up with her.

"You're not a part of it," she said bitterly.

Her eyes were on her sandals, striding out.

Jack bored on. "I'm not a part of it, it's true. In England, my home, I'm not an activist, I'm not political. I don't give a damn for this war. I have to be here, probably like you have to be here."

She tossed her head back, rippled her hair, gestured at her brother behind her. She said, "It's lunatic for him to be involved."

"Lunatic for all of us."

"So why did you honour us with your presence?"

"A week today they're going to hang my father."

She looked away. He saw her close her eyes, squeeze them tight shut. They stood together and waited for Jan to catch them.

•**

There were eighteen detectives from the plain clothes branch of the security police who had taken the desks and tables in the large room set aside for the investigation. The detectives worked with their telephones and notebooks eight floors above the back hall of John Vorster Square.

Ten of the detectives worked on tracing the grip bag.

Eight worked on finding the source of the petrol can.

In front of each man was a commercial telephone directory of the greater Johannesburg area. By the middle of the morning it was believed that a manufacturer had been identified for the bag, a factory employing similar synthetic fibres to those retrieved by forensic. The detectives then took sections of the directories to ring each and every number where the bag could have been sold. The information given to the detectives pointed towards a White attacker. It was therefore probable that the bag and the petrol can, if bought in Johannesburg, had been bought either in the city centre or in a White suburb. The outlets through which the bag might have been sold were fewer than the outlets for petrol cans. It was thought that the bag, rather than the can, would prove decisive.

Twice that morning the colonel had come down the two flights of stairs to the incident room.

He was not directly involved, not yet. His involvement was two stages away in the process of the investigation.

First the source of the sales must be identified, second the purchaser must be described.

• •*

Jacob Thiroko and his group travelled apart, but on the same aircraft.

He carried a Tanzanian passport. He had never used that passport before. It described him as an engineer. He carried letters of introduction from the Botswana Enterprises Development Unit, and also from the Botswana Meat Corporation for whom, he could tell immigration, he was designing a new abattoir. The younger men were on a variety of Black African passports, and each was equipped with the cover to talk his way through immigration at the international airport at Gaberone.

With more time for planning and for taking advice, he might have attempted to travel overland from Angola, or overland from Mozambique, both difficult but both possible.

The fast way to South Africa was through Gaberone, not the safe way.

It was eighteen months since the Recce Commando squads had been helicoptered into Gaberone at night to kill twelve of Thiroko's comrades, to blow up their offices, to bring home what was described as a treasure trove of intelligence material. Since the raid, the Botswana government had ceded areas of their sovereign independence to permit covert members of the National Intelligence Service to operate in various guises from their territory.

Thiroko walked from the aircraft across the tarmac towards the single storey building housing lounges and offices. He walked almost in the shadow of the squat, square built, air traffic control tower. He was concerned with the immigration officers. He should have been concerned with a White air traffic control supervisor. His photograph was taken. It would not be a good likeness, but it would serve as confirmation of this supervisor's opinion, made instantly, that he had sighted Jacob Thiroko.

By the time that Thiroko and his four men had collected their baggage, queued for immigration, gathered together to be met by their contact driver, there were two vehicles waiting to follow them out of the airport car park. There was a land rover with the markings of a locally based safari holiday company driven by a White with a Black passenger, and there was a Peugeot 504 estate carrying three Blacks.

Inside the car, when it was speeding on the Palapye road, Thiroko told his companions that they would cross the border that night in the wide area between Martin's Drift and Oranjefontein, that they would be moved south by lorry, that they would meet with a sixth man at a place where weapons and explosives were stored. He saw they were cool to what he said. Not excited. They were all in their middle twenties. They had all left South Africa as children, they were coming home as men.

The Peugeot 504 was eight hundred metres behind. It did not have to be closer. If the car ahead turned off the metalled road it would have to give up tarmac for dirt. A billowing grit storm would telegraph a detour from the Palaype road.

Jack paid cash for the two lengths of steel tube.

Hell's expensive for just a metre in length apiece, but the steel was as thick as the width of nail on his little finger, and the diameter was nine inches. It was what he wanted.

A White in the front hall of the engineering works tried to strike up a conversation with Jack while a Black was sent to the rear yard to bring out the tubing. Jack didn't respond, gave no explanation for buying the tubing.

He refused the White's offer that the Black carry the tubing to his car. If he had been a South African, if he'd stopped to think, he would have allowed the Black to take it to the car. But he didn't want any one to be able to link him to Jan who sat in the back seat of the Beetle, nor to Ros who was behind the wheel.

Two blocks away, down on Anderson, Jack again paid cash for a set of heavy wire cutters.

The tubing was on the back seat of the car. Jack's case was in the boot.

They took the Pretoria road. They would by pass the capital on their way to Warmbaths.

•**

The chaplain could have sat on the lavatory seat, or on the bed beside Jeez, or on the table that might have come away from the wall under his sixteen stones. He said he spent too much time sitting, and he stood.

Jeez sat on the bed. The chaplain wore uniform, identical to the other officers' but for the purple shoulder flashes. A big man with a big gut and mane of white hair, and a voice that barked even when he tried to be kind.

"Are you a child of Christ, Carew?"

Jeez hardly knew the chaplain. He didn't go to the chaplain's Sunday services. Religion was not compulsory at Beverly Hills. When you were a condemn you could take God or you could leave Him. Religion, like work and exercise, was voluntary. Jeez took only exercise.

"I'm not a praying man, sir."

Many times the chaplain brought his chess set or his draughts board into a condemn's cell, and talked and whiled away afternoon hours. He had never played chess or draughts with Jeez. Duty had brought him that day to C section 2, and the prodding of the governor.

"You don't help yourself, Carew."

"My problem, sir."

"You should place yourself before God in a state of humble repentance."

In daylight hours there were fifteen prison officers ad-ministering the White condemns, all bored out of their skulls and reading picture magazines and polishing their kit, and kicking footballs in the exercise yard, and laughing too loud and joking too much. Jeez wondered if, for variety, they'd come on their toes to the door of his cell to listen to the chaplain.

"You know, Carew, many of the Blacks that go, they thank me just before. They thank me because they say they have found repentance, they say they are at peace with God.

They say I have guided them to God… "

Jeez said, "I reckon you enjoy working here."

"You're a hard man, Carew, without contrition."

"My life's going to end the hard way, sir."

The chaplain smiled, avuncular. "I'll be with you when you go."

"Wouldn't miss it, would you, sir?"

"To offer you comfort."

"Do you go and have your breakfast afterwards?"

"I don't get provoked that easily, Carew."

"We've not much to talk about, sir."

Jeez thought the chaplain loathed him. In the eyes of the man there was a watery gleam, as though the chaplain thought this man would crack at the last, cry for help. He thought the chaplain wanted nothing more in life than to walk the corridors of Beverly Hills with young Blacks on their way to their Maker with mission hymns in their throats.

"Do you want me to ask the surgeon to give you a sedative?"

"What for?"

"We sometimes give a White a sedative."

"I want nothing from you, sir."

"Others, they ask for a drink, a big whisky or a brandy."

"I want nothing, sir."

"Carew, the Blacks sing for each other, you know that.

When you go then you will have the men with you, those that were arrested with you, and they will be singing the penny rhymes of the African National Congress. I cannot believe you want that. I could get in a church choir to sing for you. It has been done before."

"Why should I want that?"

"Damn you, to give you comfort, man."

Jeez thought the man might have been organising a confirmation service. And did he want some flowers, and did he want his hair cut, and did he want a clean shirt? And if he said that he wanted a choir then they could settle down for a cosy chat to decide what the choir should sing, and then whether the choice would be suitable for bass voices as they might be a bit short on contralto and soprano.

"I'm not dragging anyone else in here. I'm not dirtying anyone else's day."

The chaplain sighed.

"You can always send for me. I am always available."

The Chaplain rapped on the closed door of the cell.

"Thank you, sir."

The door clattered shut on the chaplain's back. Jeez lay on his bed. He was dry eyed. For ten years in Spac he had believed, known, that the team was working for him. And after ten years in Spac there had been the feting and the restaurant meals and the debriefs for the Balkan desk and the weekends down at Colonel Basil's home. He had to believe in the team, or his cheeks would have been wetted.

Facing another shortening day.

•**

Jack talked softly.

Ros drove well. She kept her attention on the road, but she listened.

In the back, curled round the metal tubes, Jan was quiet.

"… Right through the time when I was a kid my father was held up to me as being just about the most rotten man that ever lived. Had to be rotten because he walked out on his wife and son, left them for dead with an impersonal financial arrangement to make sure they didn't starve. But I found out why he'd gone missing, and who was responsible for him, and how he'd been ditched, but that was only confirmation material for me. I'd have come here anyway, whatever he'd done when he left my mother. I have to see him and talk to him and bring him through, nothing else seems important. He's the fall guy, he's the expendable legman… You know what I want to do? More than anything else I just want to walk him through Whitehall, that's where all our government sits on its backsides, and I want to walk him into the fat cats' rooms, and I want to say that I did what none of them had the guts to do. And after that I'm not going to give a shit about their security and their Official Secrets Act. I'm going to blow it all open. I don't care who the bloody casualties are, and I don't care if I'm one of them. There are people in London who are going to pay a bloody great price for what's happened. They'll have to kill me to keep me quiet.

"You know, since I started out on this I've never even thought that it might not work. Right, there are times when I don't know what the next stage is, how we're going to crack the next barricade, but it's going to happen. When I went up to Pretoria, then it looked impossible, like everyone had told me it would be. After I'd seen Local and Defence H.Q. I could have packed it in, gone off for the airport. I sorted myself out. Doesn't matter how difficult it is, it has to be done. I mean, there isn't any way out of it, not for me.

My father's going to hang, that's the beginning and the middle and the end of it, and something has to be done…"

"Even if it is, actually, impossible?" Her gaze was straight ahead.

"Has to be tried, because he's my father."

Jan shouted. "Roadblock."

Jack hadn't seen it, nor Ros.

They were on the N I, a little past the turn off for Rand jies-fontein.

There were two police vans, primrose yellow, drawn across the road. There was a short queue of cars. Ros was going down through her gears. Jack winced. Only he knew of the explosives in his suitcase. Hadn't told Jan, nor his sister, that he had squirrelled away fifteen pounds of explosives. And the prison plans… The pain was immediate, and then gone. None of the cars was being searched. They were the seventh car in the line. A police sergeant came towards them, stopping by each driver. He wondered how Ros would be, couldn't tell. No-one spoke in the car as the sergeant approached. Beyond the vans was parked a high armoured personnel carrier, off the road. Jack saw policemen standing and sitting in the open top, displaying automatic shot guns and F.N. rifles.

"We're running escorted convoys down the next ten kilometres, Miss."

"What's happened?" Ros asked, small voice.

"A gang of Blacks stoned a car, a kilometre down. White woman, elderly. Car went off the road. The bastards got to her, dragged her out. They had rocks and knives, Miss.

They set light to her, she was an old lady. We've a big search op in there, but it's a wilderness. Supposed to be a helicopter coming. She wouldn't have had a chance."

Jack saw the pallor on Ros's face.

There was a klaxon blast from the A.P.C. and exhaust fumes fanned from its tail. More cars were behind them, the sergeant had moved on. The A.P.C. set off down the road, they followed in a twenty mile an hour crawl.

Ros didn't speak. Jack didn't have to scratch his mind to remember the crowd coming down the shabby street in Soweto, and the din of the stones on the coachwork and the rocking of the vehicle and the screaming of the woman from Washington state. Not hard to imagine the last moments in an elderly woman's life as the stones started to fly and the windows were caving in, and the mob was materialising out of the long grass that flanked the road. Not hard to see the fingers ripping at the doors of a crashed car, and the fists raised and the clawing nails and the knives and the sharp edged rocks. He shuddered. He prayed that she had been unconscious when they had poured the petrol on her, thrown the match. They passed the burned car. There were skid marks on the tarmac, then the wheel tracks through the grass and then the blackened surround where the earth had been scorched near the car and under the body of the woman.

Ros retched. Jack looked away. Jan was breathing hard.

She snarled, "Great bloody day for the freedom fighters."

Jan rose to her. "Of course they're brutalised. What else could they be given the regime they live under?"

"That's xhe work of the people you're so bloody fond of."

"I don't condone that, and the A.N.C. doesn't condone that, but when you treat people like filth then they'll behave like filth."

"Pathetic excuses."

"It's the price the Whites are going to have to pay for half a century of naked racism."

"Childish slogans."

"Think of all the Black children that have been shot by the police."

She let him have the last word. Ros drove on towards Pretoria. All her life she had let her brother have the last word. It was why she was driving her car north, it was why she had entered a state of madness. The tie of family had captured her. She understood the young man sitting bowed in the front seat beside her. She believed herself to be as captured by her brother as he was by his father.