See No Evil

9

Calder hurried back to his sister’s house in Highgate to pick up his stuff. Anne had offered to give him a lift from there to Elstree Aerodrome. They climbed into Anne’s new luxurious black Mercedes 4×4 and set off on to the thoroughfares of north London.

Calder’s thoughts were fixed on the phone call he had received from Kim. He had been wrong not to take her suspicions seriously. Someone had tried to murder Todd and hadn’t cared that they might have killed him as well. He recalled those frantic couple of minutes when he had fought for control of the Yak and brought it down on to the sandbar. He remembered the explosion, Todd’s pale face, his head wound. They hadn’t been victims of bad luck or faulty workmanship, but of a cold-blooded killer. For the last few days he had experienced the intense relief of the survivor. The relief was turning to anger.

‘What’s wrong, Alex?’

Calder glanced at his sister and smiled. Anne was very small for such a big car. She had spiky black hair and was wearing a purple top and flower-patterned jeans. She and Calder had always been close, but since their mother’s death when he was fifteen and she twelve, they had become even closer. They looked after each other. ‘Oh, nothing. Just thinking about the flight back.’

‘Aren’t you nervous, getting into an aeroplane again after that dreadful crash?’

‘I was fine coming down from Norfolk,’ Calder said. ‘It won’t be a problem. It’s like riding a bicycle. You have to get back on.’

Anne looked at him doubtfully. ‘A bit worse than falling off a bicycle, don’t you think?’

Calder grinned. Although he had told her all about the Yak’s engine failure, he had no intention of telling her about the police’s discovery of sabotage. He knew from long experience that Anne would worry.

‘Heard anything from Father?’ he asked, to change the subject. Their father was a doctor in the town of Kelso in the Borders of Scotland.

‘Yeah. I phoned him last week. He sounded quite chirpy. They’re allowing him to stay on at the surgery for another year, part time. Apparently there’s a national shortage of GPs.’

‘That will keep him happy. The concept of Father in retirement worries me a little.’

‘Has he sent you any more cheques?’

‘I think so. I got an envelope in March in his handwriting. I returned it unopened.’

‘So you’ve no idea how much it was?’

‘No. Nor where he got the money from.’

Anne pulled out on to the A1 in front of an old lady in a small car. The old lady hooted. Anne ignored her. ‘I went up to Kelso with the kids three weeks ago. We had a nice weekend. Everything seemed OK.’

‘No sign he’d sold anything?’

‘Nothing I could see. I did look around. The furniture, the paintings, the silver: it was all still there as far as I could tell.’

‘And no copies of the Racing Post?’

‘Not lying around. I didn’t go through his drawers.’

‘No, of course not.’ Calder stared out of the window at the traffic.

‘How much was it?’ Anne asked. ‘That you bailed him out for?’

‘A lot.’ The year before Calder had discovered that his father had run up massive gambling debts. Calder had paid them off, £143,000 of them. But he had never told his sister the full amount. To discover that their father, an upright Calvinist who had always disapproved of his son’s speculative career in the City, gambled regularly on the horses had been quite a shock to both his children.

‘I’d be happy to pay my half,’ Anne said.

Calder smiled. ‘Thanks. But I’d rather that it was all forgotten. It’s not a debt that either you or he owes me.’

They drove on in silence.

‘How’s Sandy?’ Anne asked. ‘You haven’t mentioned her.’

‘Not good,’ Calder said. ‘We’ve only managed to see each other three or four times over the last year. When we do see each other, everything’s great, we get on really well. We had a wonderful week together in Italy last September. But it’s been impossible to pin her down.’

‘Because of her work?’

Calder nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s appalling the way these US law firms treat their staff. I mean, I went over to New York to see her last month, just for a long weekend. She wasn’t there when I arrived, she’d had to fly off to Dallas or somewhere. I only saw her for an hour before I got my own flight back on the Sunday night. I’m afraid I had a sense-of-humour failure. I said some pretty unpleasant things. We haven’t spoken since.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Anne said. ‘I know how much you like her. Is there any chance you can sort something out?’

‘I doubt it. She says she would have to change her job, and I don’t want to ask her to do that. I can’t help thinking it ought to be possible for her to manage things slightly better. I suppose it’s just not going to work.’

‘Shame.’

‘Yeah. Shame.’ Calder stared glumly out of the window. ‘Clever of you to find William.’ William was Anne’s husband of eight years. At first Calder had thought him a little stuffy and boring, but he had grown to appreciate the man’s consideration for his sister, and the way he put up with her chaotic existence.

There was no reply.

Calder glanced at Anne. She was biting her lip.

‘Are things OK with you two?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’ve grown apart these last few months. Like Sandy he works so hard. Never home before nine, often working over weekends. It’s a funny thing but when I was running around like a lunatic after the children all day, I didn’t mind. Oh, I complained, but I could put up with it. But since both the children are at school now, I get the odd minute to think about it and it rankles.’

William worked for a venture-capital company. Anne had been a barrister until a year after Phoebe was born, when she had given up. William’s firm had struck gold in the dot-com boom, and weathered the bust, and he had made some good money. But he was nowhere near as bright as Anne. This was something that was obvious to Calder, and presumably was to Anne herself. Calder had always suspected that this bothered his sister, but he had never seen any sign of it.

Anne glanced at her brother. ‘Don’t worry. It’s just a bad patch. All marriages have them, don’t they?’

‘I suppose they do,’ said Calder.

It was a pleasant flight back to Langthorpe from Elstree. Anne was right, Calder’s experience in the Yak was slightly more serious than falling off a bicycle, but he was pleased that he hadn’t found it difficult to climb back into an aeroplane. The cloud cover at 2,000 feet over Hertfordshire broke as he flew north and the Southern drawl of the USAF controller guided him through blue skies above the airbases of Lakenheath and Mildenhall. He descended to 1,500 feet over Thetford Forest and within a little over an hour from his departure from Elstree he spotted the familiar patch of green that was Langthorpe Aerodrome, with the poplars to the right, the village church with its round tower set on a small hill to the left, and the North Sea shimmering ahead. He joined the circuit a safe distance behind Jerry and an erratic student in a Piper Warrior and landed smoothly on the grass runway.

Kim was waiting for him outside the flying school, the wind blowing her dark curls into her face. She was dancing from foot to foot in her agitation. They moved into Calder’s tiny office and closed the door. Kim sat in the chair in front of Calder’s desk.

‘So it was sabotage?’ Calder said.

‘Definitely,’ Kim said. ‘They found fragments from some kind of bomb.’

‘And presumably they have no idea yet who planted it?’

‘No idea at all. Did you find out anything from Benton?’

‘Not really,’ Calder said. He described his breakfast at Claridge’s.

She listened to him with disappointment. ‘Do you believe that’s all there was to it?’

‘Don’t know. Tarek didn’t know either. Benton seemed to be telling the truth. But the cynic in me thinks that he lies for a living. There’s no doubt that Zyl News was right on the brink of bankruptcy back then, and I suspect that would have been a shock to Martha.’

‘Yes, but enough for her to insist that her mother fly to New York if she died? And why would that information scare her? Because she was scared. All that stuff about “if something happens to me”. There’s something else, there must be.’

Calder nodded. ‘You’re right. Maybe that’s only half the story. Maybe the diary holds the other half.’

‘Or perhaps Benton Davis is lying?’

‘Possibly. But I know for sure he won’t tell me more. Perhaps the police can get him to talk.’

‘That’s what I wanted to speak to you about,’ Kim said. ‘They’re going to want to interview you, I know they are. They asked me where you were, and I said you’d be flying back here this afternoon. They’ll be here any minute.’

‘Good,’ said Calder. ‘I’ll be happy to talk to them.’

Kim looked down at her hands. ‘Well...’

‘Kim?’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You don’t expect me not to tell them about seeing Benton?’

‘Er... I’d rather you didn’t. Or at least only if you have to. And if you do have to, don’t link it to the bomb in the Yak.’

‘But you said—’

‘I know what I said, but I can’t be sure,’ said Kim. She was staring hard at Calder now. ‘You see Todd and I talked about this a lot before the crash. He was adamant that he didn’t want to get the police involved in his family’s business. That’s why we came to see you.’

‘Yes, but things are different now, surely? He was nearly killed.’

‘I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to help the police find who planted the bomb; of course we should. But I don’t think we should encourage them to ask too many questions about Martha’s death.’

‘But we can’t hide it from them,’ Calder said. ‘That’s probably against the law. Conspiring to pervert the course of justice or something.’

‘Please,’ said Kim. She said it with her voice and she said it with her eyes. ‘If it was just me, I’d be happy to tell the police all they wanted to know. But I know that Todd would want us to keep them out of Zyl News. And with him lying in that bed in hospital in a coma, I’d feel terrible going against his wishes.’

‘So what do we do?’ Calder said. ‘Sit back and let the police faff around without telling them the most likely motive?’

‘We don’t sit back. We find out what Benton knows, what the Laagerbond is, why Martha went to that game reserve, who she was scared of, and then we find out who killed her and why. And then we tell the police.’

‘We?’

‘Me and you. Well, OK, mostly you. But please, Alex.’

Calder sat back and thought about it. Then he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, we have to tell them that Todd was asking awkward questions about Martha’s death. And I’ll have to mention the letter and my visit to Benton.’

Kim’s pale cheeks reddened. ‘Oh, Alex—’

Calder held up his hand. ‘Hold on. We’ll give them the bare minimum. We won’t tell them what you suspect or what Todd suspects. We let them investigate Cornelius and anyone else they want to investigate. Who knows? Maybe they’ll find the guy who planted the bomb. Maybe it had nothing to do with any of this. Maybe Todd had some enemies we know nothing about—’

‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘We don’t know, we can’t be sure. In the meantime I will help you try to find out what happened to Martha. And if we discover there is a direct link to the bomb in the Yak we tell the police. OK?’

Kim smiled. ‘OK.’ To Calder’s surprise she ran round the desk and kissed his cheek. ‘Uh-oh,’ she said looking out of the window. A man and a woman were making their way along the footpath to the entrance to the flying school. ‘That’s them.’

Two minutes later Kim was on her way back to the hospital and Calder was talking to two detectives. The woman was thin, with a pale face and short red hair. The man was slightly younger and much chubbier, with a brush of fair hair sticking straight up. The woman introduced herself as Detective Inspector Banks, and the man as Detective Constable Wardle.

They had lots of questions that Calder answered. He went over again how he had offered Todd a flight in the Yak and everything that had happened on the day of the crash. The police had already examined the ground around where the Yak was parked, and interviewed Angie, the radio operator, about the man walking on the footpath that ran along the boundary of the airfield the evening before the crash. Then Calder mentioned that Todd had some suspicions about his mother’s death and had wanted Calder to speak to Benton Davis.

Their interest was immediately piqued, and they asked lots more questions, during which Calder described the contents of Martha’s last letter to her parents. DI Banks was asking most of the questions, and watching Calder closely as he answered them. He was glad that he had decided not to lie.

‘Why do you think Mrs van Zyl didn’t tell us any of this?’ she asked.

‘I was talking to her just now about it,’ Calder said. ‘I don’t think she thought it was necessarily relevant.’

‘Oh, come on, Mr Calder,’ the inspector said.

‘The van Zyls are a private family, her instinct was to maintain that privacy,’ Calder said. ‘I did discuss it with her and I’m sure she’ll tell you anything you want to know. She has the letter, I’m sure she’ll let you see it.’

‘So am I. Has she gone back to the hospital?’

‘I think so,’ said Calder. The detectives stood up to leave. ‘Do you have any idea how the bomb was set off?’ Calder asked.

‘They recovered some fragments from part of an explosive device and what look like the remains of an altimeter.’

‘An altimeter?’ Calder thought it through. ‘I see. It detonates the bomb as soon as the aircraft reaches a certain altitude?’

‘That’s the idea. You told the accident investigators that the aeroplane was climbing when the bomb exploded?’

‘That’s right.’

‘They said that if it had been any other light aircraft the engine would have been blown right away from the fuselage. That Yak had such a big sturdy engine that it remained intact after the explosion. You were very lucky, Mr Calder.’

He returned home at about eight to find Kim already there cooking supper for the two of them.

‘How’s Todd?’ he asked, taking a bottle of wine from the fridge and pouring two glasses.

‘No change.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Kim gave the tiniest of shrugs as she stirred a sauce in the pan. ‘Cornelius called three times today. And Todd received some flowers from his sister, Zan.’

‘The one who lives in South Africa?’

‘That’s right. It was quite sweet of her. Edwin told her about the crash.’

‘What kind of name is Zan, anyway?’

‘Short for Xanthe. Her mother was a little on the pretentious side, apparently. She sounds a dreadful woman. She died ten years ago: her liver gave out.’

‘Didn’t you say Todd has a younger sister as well?’

‘Caroline, Martha’s daughter. Her husband is Herbert Hafer IV, of Hafer Beer. The Hafers are one of the wealthiest families in Pennsylvania. She’s the only one of the van Zyl children who married well; Jessica, Cornelius’s current wife, saw to that. Actually, he’s a pretty down-to-earth guy for a billionaire, calls himself “H” and invests the family fortune. They moved out to San Diego soon after they were married. It’s a long way from New Hampshire so we don’t see her much.’

‘That smells good,’ Calder said.

‘It should taste good. We’ll see. Fish is a bit tricky with a grill you don’t know.’ She checked the two fillets of plaice. ‘Looks OK so far.’ She stirred the mushroom sauce bubbling gently in the pan on the hob and took the glass of wine Calder handed to her. ‘I see you spoke to the police.’

‘Did they come and see you again?’

‘You bet they did. They weren’t very happy that I hadn’t told them about Martha’s murder and Todd’s suspicions. I showed them the letter.’

‘I’m sure it was the best thing to do.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Kim. ‘At least it means they’ll check Cornelius out pretty thoroughly, but I still feel bad about it. Like I’ve betrayed Todd.’

‘Someone tried to kill him!’ Calder said. ‘And me, for that matter.’

‘I know, I’m sorry.’ Kim touched Calder’s hand. ‘I do appreciate you going to see Benton Davis. Thank you.’

‘Oh, no, it’s... um... it’s the least I could do.’ Calder was disconcerted by Kim’s touch. ‘But we still have to figure out what happened to Martha.’

‘Now we’ve drawn a blank with Benton, I’m not sure what to do next.’ Kim checked the grill again. ‘It’s ready. Give me a hand, will you?’

They took their supper outside, to the small garden behind the cottage, where there was a teak table, chairs and a bench.

‘We need to get Cornelius to talk,’ Calder said.

‘Todd tried,’ Kim said. ‘And got nowhere.’

‘That’s true, but things are a little different now that we know someone tried to kill his son. Perhaps next time he comes up to see Todd you could try to speak to him. Be a bit more subtle about it than Todd was.’

‘He said he’s coming tomorrow afternoon. It’s difficult to talk when we’re all sitting around in Todd’s room staring at him. Perhaps I’ll suggest we go out for a meal.’

‘It’s worth a try,’ Calder said, biting into the plaice. ‘This is delicious.’

‘Thank you. My cooking has come on a bit since university.’ She took a bite herself. ‘Mm, not bad. Pretty garden,’ she said, surveying the apple tree, the small patch of lawn, the roses, the wisteria and the crowded border. ‘I would never have thought of you as a gardener.’

Calder grinned. ‘Neither would I. You should have seen this place when I bought it. It was beautiful. All I do is try to stop things dying. But I’m getting into it, it’s quite therapeutic. I don’t know what half the plants are called. As soon as I learn the name of something it dies.’

‘It’s peaceful here.’

‘It is.’ The garden was southerly facing, away from the sea and towards a wood rising up to a low ridge. To the right was a field of inquisitive bullocks, to the left, along the ridge, an old windmill, its sails fixed. Evening sunlight streamed into the garden from the west, although the sun itself had crept round behind the house.

‘I can’t imagine you in a place like this,’ said Kim.

‘And I can’t imagine you in a small town in New Hampshire.’

‘No.’

‘Do you like it there?’

Kim hesitated. ‘No. No, I don’t. I can admit that to you, but I could never admit it to Todd.’

‘Why not?’

‘He loves Somerford. He loves teaching. He teaches English and he’s very good at it — inspiring, or at least that’s what he tells me. He’s started up a rugby team at the school. But I think what really turns him on is the role of schoolboy hero. He’s very popular with the boys and the principal loves him. That kind of thing is important to Todd. I made such a big deal to him that he shouldn’t be ruled by his father, that he should do what he wants to do, so when he goes off and does it I can hardly complain, can I?’

‘Your life is important too, isn’t it?’

Kim looked at Calder. ‘Yes,’ she said, steel in her voice. ‘Yes.’ She took another bite of her fish. ‘Everyone always laughs at management consultants, but I was bloody good at it. I earned good money and if I’d stuck at it I would have been a partner pretty soon. I didn’t need to marry a rich man.’

‘What about the hospital? Aren’t you doing some good there?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m sorting that place out: they don’t know what’s hit them. Of course working in a hospital is a worthwhile thing to do and everyone’s so damned nice all the time. Sometimes I find it unbearable. I get gripped by these insane ideas, like firing everyone on their birthday, or making a charitable contribution to the Association of Tobacco Manufacturers. I don’t think they’d notice. It would still be a big smile and a “how are you today, Kimmy?” from everyone.’

Calder winced. ‘You sound dangerous.’

‘I’ve kept myself under control so far. But it is frustrating. We’ve been trying for a baby. He wants one, so I have to produce it.’

‘Don’t you want a child?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do. Especially if we’re going to be stuck in Somerford. But the point is I don’t think Todd even notices what I want. He’s a nice guy, a really kind man, but he’s used to everyone doing everything for him, to being the centre of attention. He just assumes that I will do what’s best for him, that our marriage is a partnership whose aim is to do what makes him happy.’

‘You’ve obviously been thinking about it a lot.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry to moan at you, and it’s terrible when he’s lying there unconscious, but yes, I have been stewing over it more than is healthy. Do you remember Dom?’

‘Your boyfriend at Cambridge? The cricketer?’ Calder could recall a tall, dashing cricket blue that Kim had gone out with for a couple of terms in their second year.

‘Yes. Todd’s a bit like him. Totally self-centred.’

‘Didn’t you catch him having it off with Emma?’ Emma was one of the three other students who had shared a place with Kim and Calder.

‘Yes,’ muttered Kim. ‘The bitch. In our house too! At least Todd doesn’t do that kind of thing.’

‘He seems like a pretty straight guy.’

‘Oh, he is. God, I’d forgotten how awful Dom was at the end. But I do remember how head-over-heels in love with him I was. I was young and innocent then.’

‘Well, young.’ Calder smiled. Kim had looked delectable at nineteen. She still looked pretty attractive fifteen years later, he couldn’t help noticing.

‘Yes, young. You were very good to me after all that.’

‘Probably just trying to get you into bed,’ Calder said.

‘Alex! And I thought you were such a kind, sympathetic man.’ Kim smiled that smile that Calder remembered so clearly from all those years ago.

‘And so I was. A kind, sympathetic man who wanted to get you into bed. Didn’t work, though, did it? Should have gone for the selfish bastard approach.’

‘Nah,’ said Kim. ‘You would have been really bad at that. Trust me. I know a lot about that technique.’

The level of the wine slipped down the bottle.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘When I asked you about the existence of a girlfriend you came over all grumpy. What’s up?’

Calder told her all about Sandy. Kim was generally sympathetic, although when Calder described the bust-up following his weekend alone in New York, she gently took Sandy’s side.

‘You know she probably felt just as badly about it as you did?’

‘If she did, she could have done something about it.’

‘Maybe she couldn’t.’

‘I know. But it’s still not going to work.’

‘What if you moved to New York?’

‘I’m not sure the relationship has progressed that far. Besides, the only job I could get over there would be in investment banking, and there’s no way I’m going back to that.’

‘Why not? I’d have thought you’d make a good trader. In fact I thought that was the perfect job for you after the RAF.’

‘I was a good trader,’ Calder admitted. ‘Very good. And I got a buzz out of it. But it’s not the real world. After a few years of flinging millions of dollars of other people’s money around you lose touch with reality. Everything has a monetary value. Your salary, obviously, your profit and loss, your bonus, your trading positions, your house, your car, before you know it, even your relationships. You begin to think that poor people are stupid people. Then you think that someone who won’t do what it takes to get a deal is a wimp. Not just a wimp, but a stupid wimp. It changes you.’

‘Oh, come on, Alex. Not everyone in investment banking is evil. There are plenty of ordinary decent people who work there.’

‘Yes, but there are fewer of them than there should be, and those few change. Look at Benton Davis! Martha said she trusted him: well maybe she could have done eighteen years ago, but she certainly wouldn’t now. The same thing was happening to me.

‘Remember I told you about my assistant, Jen, the one who everyone thought committed suicide? Her former boss had bullied her the whole time she was working for him, totally destroyed her self-esteem. That’s why she joined my group. Then in a bar after work one evening he suggested that she and I were sleeping together. Taken in isolation, that might not sound too bad, but for her it was the last straw. She decided to sue Bloomfield Weiss. Benton Davis and all the others made her life hell. And you know what I did? I tried to talk her out of it. I told her her career would benefit and she would make more money if she put up with those kinds of insults. Well, she was a brave woman, she stood up to them, stood up to them all. In the end she died. And only then did I really try to help her, when it was way to late.’

‘Wow,’ said Kim.

‘That’s why I’m here, tootling around with aeroplanes.’

‘Rather you than me,’ Kim said. She yawned. ‘It’s amazing how sitting around doing nothing all day can make you tired. I’m off to bed.’

‘Good night.’

As Kim disappeared inside, Calder sat alone in the garden, watching the night creep up around him.

Andries Visser pulled his Land Rover Discovery off the road and along the poplar-lined drive to his farm. The veld stretched brown and yellow in the distance to his left and right. He saw the large frame of his older brother Gideon sitting on an open tractor pulling winter feed for the cattle, a prize herd of Limousins. Gideon was a strong, hardworking, if unimaginative farmer. He lived in the cottage behind the main farmhouse, but he did most of the work. Andries and his family lived in the main house even though Andries’s physical contribution to the farm was negligible. He had provided the money to invest in the farm, and the ideas. If the place had been left to Gideon, the Vissers would still be scratching around in the dirt.

There was another reason Andries lived in the main house and his elder brother and his family in the cottage. Twenty years earlier, when their father was still alive and Gideon was in his late thirties, Gideon had got himself involved in a spot of legal trouble. Gideon and his wife and five children had gone to a braai at a neighbour’s farm. True to tradition it was an all-day affair, boerewors on the fire and Castle beer in the cool box. The weather was glorious, the kids were playing, the women were gossiping and Gideon and the neighbour were getting pleasantly drunk. Then there was a commotion from the sheds at the back. One of the farm hands had discovered a thief. He was a runt of a man, a black of course, and he had been caught stealing a can of red paint. Why he wanted to steal the paint wasn’t entirely clear, but Gideon and the neighbour were indignant, especially when Gideon, wrongly as it turned out, identified the man as a suspected thief of a cow from another neighbour’s farm the month before. The two Boers decided to teach the man a lesson, and in order not to scare the children they slung him in the rear of the bakkie and drove off. He was found the following day in a ditch, beaten to death.

The law took its course and several months later Gideon and the neighbour found themselves in the dock accused of murder. The thief, whose name was Moses Nkose, was incontrovertibly dead, but hard evidence of murder was difficult to pin down. Andries discussed the matter with his father and with Gideon, and the three of them came to an arrangement. Andries had a word with the right people and Gideon ended up with only two years for manslaughter. Andries, the son who was happiest wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, inherited the farm. Over time Gideon’s resentment had faded, and the arrangement worked well.

Andries could easily have arranged his brother’s acquittal, but he had chosen not to. After all, he still walked with a slight limp from where his big brother had belted him with the flat of a pick axe when he was twelve.

Andries drove up to the house itself, surrounded by an inner fence of twelve-foot-high barbed wire, topped off with three electrified strands. Yellow signs warned of an armed response to intruders. Cattle rustlers these days carried guns. Inside the fence, a modern-day kraal, was an oasis of green irrigated wealth. There were tall trees, poplar and cypress, there was a lush green lawn, there was a swimming pool, and the house itself, a simple low white one-storey affair to which Andries had added two extensions. To one side stood the water tower, a windmill, the labourers’ shacks and, most importantly, the cow sheds. The fences were there to protect the cattle as much as the humans.

Andries was no farmer, but he was immensely proud of his farm. It had been in the family for 160 years. The Visser family had set off from Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo on the Great Trek in the 1830s, had crossed the Drakensberg mountains into Zululand, and then a few years later been ejected by the British and re-crossed the mountains to this spot, forty kilometres from Pretoria. Here they had scratched a living, a God-fearing, hard-working, honest family, struggling against the depredations of poor weather, poor soil and vindictive British colonial administrators. A small, physically weak man with a limp, Andries had found his talents more suited to the needs of government administration in Pretoria, but he never forgot the physical labour and suffering of his ancestors, and now he had retired from government service he was proud to be occupying the same land they had farmed through the generations.

He parked next to a car he recognized, an unprepossessing blue Toyota Corolla. He stubbed out his cigarette in the pot by the stoep. His wife, Hannah, had banned him from smoking indoors a couple of years before. He swung open the security gate guarding the front door and entered the house.

His wife was in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee with a big, square man with a thick neck, a moustache and close-cropped hair.

‘Kobus! Good to see you,’ Visser said in Afrikaans with a thin smile. ‘Why don’t you bring that through to my study? We need to talk.’

Colonel Kobus Moolman sat stiffly in the chair next to Visser’s desk and sipped his coffee. He was now in his early sixties but he still looked hard. Rock hard. His reputation in the security police had as much to do with his cunning as his ruthlessness. He had served his country in South West Africa, and had been a senior member of the notorious death squad that had tortured and killed dozens if not hundreds of people at Vlakplaas. Visser had had serious doubts when Freddie Steenkamp had suggested him for the Laagerbond, but Freddie had been right. There were times when the bond needed a man like Moolman.

Once away from his wife, Visser’s smile disappeared. ‘What went wrong?’ he said.

‘I must be getting rusty,’ Moolman answered. ‘It was a simple question of not enough explosive. It must have been a stronger aeroplane than I gave it credit for. But the guy’s in a coma, isn’t he? He’s stopped asking questions.’

‘He could snap out of it at any time.’

‘Do you want me to finish him off?’ Moolman asked.

‘In the hospital?’

‘It would be tricky, but if it was necessary...’

Visser stared out of the window, over the veld towards the ravine where the Elands River, almost dry now, wound its way towards the Limpopo and the Indian Ocean 500 kilometres away. His chest was wracked by a cough, and he felt a pain in his shoulder. The cough was getting worse, he really ought to see a doctor about it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not while he’s still unconscious. It might just stir up more trouble. The British police know it wasn’t an accident and they have started an investigation. I hope they won’t turn up anything. But I would like you to fly back to London to be on hand in case we need you.’

Moolman nodded. The truth was he much preferred operating on his home turf, even if these days the number of old friends in authority he could rely upon to provide him with assistance was dwindling. But he prided himself on his abilities, he had always been a loyal member of the Laagerbond and he was not about to let them down now.

‘Very well, Andries. You can count on me.’