Smokescreen

Chapter Fourteen

This had to be some ghastly practical joke. Evan, being malicious.

This had to be Clifford Wenkins thinking up some frightful publicity stunt.

This had to be anything but real.

But I knew, deep down in some deathly cold core, that this time there was no girl called Jill coming to set me free.

This time the dying was there to be done. Staring me in the face. Straining already across my shoulders and down my arms.

Danilo was playing for his gold mine.

I felt sick and ill. Whatever anaesthetic had been used on me had been given crudely. Probably far too much for the purpose. Not that that was likely to worry anyone but me.

For an age I could think no further. The dizziness kept coming back in clammy pea-green waves. My physical wretchedness blocked any other thought; took up all my attention. Bouts of semi-consciousness brought me each time to a fresh awakening, to renewed awareness of my plight, to malaise and misery.

The first objective observation which pierced the fog was that I had gone to bed wearing shorts, and now had clothes on. The trousers I had worn the day before, and the shirt. Also, upon investigation, socks and slip-on shoes.

The next discovery, which had been knocking at the door of consciousness for some time but had been shut out as unwelcome, was that the car’s seat belts were fastened. Across my chest and over my lap, just as in the Special.

They weren’t tightly fastened, but I couldn’t reach the clip.

I tried. The first of many tries at many things. The first of many frustrations.

I tried to slide my hands out of the handcuffs: but, as before, they were the regulation British police model, designed precisely not to let people slide their hands out. My bones, as before, were too big.

I tried with all my strength to break the steering wheel, but although this one looked flimsy compared with the one in the Special, I still couldn’t do it.

I could move a shade more than in the film. The straps were not so tight and there was more room round my legs. Apart from that, there was little in it.

For the first of many times I wondered how long it would be before anyone set out to look for me.

Evan and Conrad, when they found me missing, would surely start a search. Haagner, surely, would alert every ranger in the park. Someone would come along very soon. Of course they would. And set me free.

The day began to warm up, the sun in a cloudless sky shining brightly through the window on my right. The car was therefore facing north... and I groaned at the thought, because in the Southern Hemisphere the sun shone at midday from the north, and I should have its heat and light full in the face.

Perhaps someone would come before midday.

Perhaps.

The worst of the sickness passed in an hour or two, though the tides of unease ebbed and flowed for much longer. Gradually however I began to think again, and to lose the feeling that even if death were already perched on my elbow I was too bilious to care.

Clear thought number one was that Danilo had locked me in this car so that I should die and he would inherit Nerissa’s half share in the van Huren gold mine.

Nerissa was leaving her Rojedda holding to me in her will, and Danilo, having read the will, knew.

Danilo was to inherit the residue. Should I die before Nerissa, the Rojedda bequest would be void, and the holding would become part of his residue. Should I live, he stood to lose not only a share of the mine, but hundreds of thousands of pounds besides.

As the law stood then, and would still stand when Nerissa died, estate duty on everything she possessed would be paid out of the residue. Danilo personally stood to lose every penny of the estate duty paid on the inheritance which Nerissa was leaving to me.

If only, I thought uselessly, she had told me what she was doing: I could have explained why she shouldn’t. Perhaps she hadn’t realised how immensely valuable the Rojedda holding was: she had only recently received it from her sister. Perhaps she hadn’t understood how estate duty worked. Certainly, in view of the enjoyment she had found in her long-lost nephew, she had not intended me to prosper out of all proportion at Danilo’s expense.

Any accountant would have told her, but wills were usually drawn up by solicitors, not accountants, and solicitors didn’t give financial advice.

Danilo, with his mathematical mind, had read the will and seen the barbs in it, as I would have done. Danilo must have begun plotting my death from that very moment.

He had only had to tell me what she had written. But how could he know that? If he himself in reversed positions would have stuck two fingers up in my face, perhaps he thought that I, that anyone, would do that too.

Nerissa, I thought. Dear, dear Nerissa. Meaning good to everyone, and happily leaving them presents, and landing me in consequence in the most unholy bloody mess.

Danilo the gambler. Danilo the bright lad who knew that Hodgkin’s disease was fatal. Danilo the little schemer who started by lowering the value of a string of racehorses to pay less estate duty on them, and who, when he found that the real stakes were much higher, had the nerve to move at once into the senior league.

I remembered his fascination down the mine, his questions about quantities at lunch, and his tennis game with Sally. He was after the whole works, not just half. Inherit one half and marry the other. No matter that she was only fifteen: in two more years it would be a highly suitable alliance.

Danilo...

I tugged uselessly, in sudden shaking fury, at the obstinate steering wheel. Such cruelty was impossible. How could he... how could anyone... lock a man in a car and leave him to die of heat and thirst and exhaustion? It only happened in films... in one film... in Man in a Car.

Don’t get out of the car, Haagner had said. It is not safe to get out of the car. And a right bloody laugh that was. If I could get out of this car I would take my chance with the lions.

All that screaming and shouting I had done in the film. I remembered it coldly. The agony of spirit I had imagined and acted. The disintegration of a soul, a process I had dissected into a series of pictures to be presented one by one until the progression led inexorably to the empty shell of a man too far gone to recover his mind, even if his body were saved.

The man in the Special had been a fictional character. The man had been shown as reacting to every situation throughout the story with impulsive emotion, which was why his weeping fits in extremis had been valid. But I was not like the man: in many respects, diametrically opposite. I saw the present problem in mainly practical terms, and intended to go on doing so.

Someone, sometime, would find me. I would just have to try, in any way I could, to be alive — and sane — when they did so.

The sun rose high and the car grew hot; but this was only a secondary discomfort.

My bladder was full to bursting.

I could stretch my hands round the wheel to reach and undo the fly zip fastener, which I did. But I couldn’t move far on the seat and even if I managed to open the door with my elbow, there would be no chance of clearing the car. Although there was no sense in it, I postponed the inevitable moment until continence was nearer a pain than a nuisance. But reluctance had its limits. When in the end I had to let go, a lot went as far as the floor, but a lot of it didn’t, and I could feel the wetness soaking into my trousers from crutch to knee.

Sitting in a puddle made me extremely angry. Quite unreasonably, forcing me to mess myself seemed a more callous act than putting me in the car in the first place. In the film, we had glossed over this problem as being secondary to the mental state. We had been wrong. It was part of it.

The net result on me was to make me more resolved than ever not to be defeated. It made me mean and revengeful.

It made me hate Danilo.

The morning wore on. The heat became a trial and I got tired of sitting still. I had however, I told myself, spent three weeks in Spain in precisely this position. There, in fact, it had been much hotter. I wilfully ignored the thought that in Spain we had knocked off for lunch.

Lunchtime was pretty near, by my watch. Well... maybe someone would come...

And how would they get there, I wondered. Ahead of me there was no road, just small trees, dry grass and scrubby undergrowth. To each side, just the same. But the car must have been driven there, not dropped by passing eagle... Twisting my neck, and consulting the reflection in the mirror, I saw that the road, such as it was, lay directly at my back. It was an earth road showing no sign of upkeep and all too many of desertion, and it petered out completely twenty yards or so from where I sat. My car had been driven straight off the end of it into the bush.

In less than a month it would rain: the trees and the grass would grow thick and green, and the road turn to mud. No one would find the car, if it were still there when the rains came.

If I... were still there when the rains came.

I shook myself. That way led straight towards the mental state of the Man in the film, and of course I had decided to steer clear of it.

Of course.

Perhaps they would send a helicopter...

It was a grey car; nondescript. But surely any car would show up, from the air. There was a small aerodrome near Skukuza, I’d seen it marked on the map. Surely Evan would send a helicopter...

But where to? I was facing north, off the end of an abandoned track. I could be anywhere.

Maybe if I did after all make a noise, someone would hear... All those people driving along miles away in their safe little cars with the engines droning and the windows securely shut.

The car’s horn... Useless. It was one of those cars which had to have the ignition switched on before the horn would sound.

In the ignition... no keys.

Lunchtime came and went. I could have done with a nice cold beer.

A heavy swishing in the bush behind me sent my head twisting hopefully in its direction. Someone had come... Well, hadn’t I known they would?

No human voices, though, exclaimed over me, bringing freedom. My visitor, in fact, had no voice at all, as he was a giraffe.

The great fawn sky-scraper with paler patches rolled rhythmically past the car and began pulling at the sparse leaves scattering the top of the tree straight ahead. He was so close that his bulk shut out the sun, giving me a welcome oasis of shade. Huge and graceful, he stayed for a while, munching peacefully and pausing now and then to bend his great horned head towards the car, peering at it from eyes fringed by outrageously long lashes. The most seductive lady would be reduced to despair by a giraffe’s eyelashes.

I found myself talking to him aloud. ‘Just buzz off over to Skukuza, will you, and get our friend Haagner to come here in his Range Rover at the bloody double.’

The sound of my voice startled me, because in it I heard my own conviction. I might hope that Evan or Conrad or Haagner or the merest passing stranger would soon find me, but I didn’t believe it. Unconsciously, because of the film, I was already geared to a long wait.

But what I did believe was that in the end someone would come. The peasant would ride by on his donkey, and see the car, and rescue the man. That was the only tolerable ending. The one I had to cling to, and work for.

For in the end, people would search.

If I didn’t turn up at the premiere, there would be questions and checks, and finally a search.

The premiere was next Wednesday.

Today, I supposed, was Friday.

People could live only six or seven days without water.

I stared sombrely at the giraffe. He batted the fantastic eyelashes, shook his head gently as if in sorrow, and ambled elegantly away.

By Wednesday night I would have spent six whole days without water. No one would find me as soon as the Thursday.

Friday or Saturday, perhaps, if they were clever.

It couldn’t be done.

It had to be.

When the giraffe took away with him his patch of shade I realised how fierce the sun had grown. If I did nothing about it, I thought, I would have me a nasty case of sunburn.

The parts of me most relentlessly in the sun were oddly enough my hands. As in most hot-country cars, the top third of the windscreen was tinted green against glare, and if I rolled my head back I could get my face out of the direct rays; but they fell unimpeded on to my lap. I solved the worst of that by unbuttoning my shirt cuffs and tucking my hands in the opposite sleeves, like a muff.

After that I debated the wisdom of taking my shoes and socks off, and of opening a window to let in some fresh and cooler air. I could get my feet, one at a time, up to my hands to get my socks off. I could also swivel enough in my seat to wind the left-hand window handle with my toes.

It wasn’t the thought of invasion by animals that stopped me doing it at once, but the niggling subject of humidity.

The only water available to me for the whole of the time I sat there would be what was contained at that moment in my own body. With every movement and every breath I was depleting the stock, releasing water into the air about me in the form of invisible water vapour. If I kept the windows shut, the water vapour would mostly stay inside the car. If I opened them, it would instantly be lost.

The outside air, after all those rainless months, was as dry as Prohibition. It seemed to me that though I couldn’t stop my body losing a lot of moisture, I could to some extent re-use it. It would take longer, in damper air, for my skin to crack in dehydration. Re-breathing water vapour would go some small way to postponing the time when the mucous linings of nose and throat would dry raw.

So what with one thing and another, I didn’t open the window.

Like a man with an obsession I turned back again and again to the hope-despair see-saw of rescue, one minute convinced that Evan and Conrad would have sent out sorties the moment they found me gone, the next that they would simply have cursed my rudeness and set off by themselves towards the north, where Evan would become so engrossed with olifant that E. Lincoln would fade from his mind like yesterday’s news.

No one else would miss me. Everyone back in Johannesburg — the van Hurens, Roderick, Clifford Wenkins — knew I had gone down to the game reserve for the rest of the week. None of them would expect to hear from me. None of them would expect me back before Tuesday.

The only hope I had lay in Evan and Conrad... and the peasant passing by with his donkey.

At some point during the long afternoon I thought of seeing if I still had in my trouser pockets the things I had had there the day before. I hadn’t emptied the pockets when I undressed, I had just laid my clothes on the second bed.

Investigation showed that my wallet was still buttoned into my rear pocket, because I could feel its shape if I pushed back against the seat. But money, in these circumstances, was useless.

By twisting, lifting myself an inch off the seat, and tugging, I managed to get my right-hand pocket round to centre front, and, carefully exploring, brought forth a total prize of a packet of Iguana Rock book matches, with four matches left, a blue rubber band, and a three-inch stub of pencil with no point.

I put all these carefully back where they came from, and reversed the tugging until I could reach into the left-hand pocket.

Two things only in there. A handkerchief... and the forgotten screwed-up plastic bag from Evan’s sandwiches.

‘Don’t throw plastic bags out of car windows,’ Haagner had said. ‘They can kill the animals.’

And save the lives of men.

Precious, precious plastic bag.

Never cross a desert without one.

I knew how to get half a cup of water every twenty-four hours from a sheet of plastic in a hot climate, but it couldn’t be done by someone strapped into a sitting position inside a car. It needed a hole dug in the ground, a small weight, and something to catch the water in.

All the same, the principle was there, if I could make it work.

Condensation.

The hole in the ground method worked during the night. In the heat of the day one dug a hole, making it about eighteen inches deep, and in diameter slightly smaller than the available piece of plastic. One placed a cup in the hole, in the centre. One spread the sheet of plastic over the hole, and sealed it down round the edges with the dug out earth or sand. And finally one placed a small stone or some coins on the centre of the plastic, weighing it down at a spot directly over the cup.

After that, one waited.

Cooled by the night, the water vapour in the hot air trapped in the hole condensed into visible water droplets, which formed on the cold unporous plastic, trickled downhill to the weighted point, and dripped from there into the cup.

A plastic bagful of hot air should produce a teaspoonful of water by dawn.

It wasn’t much.

After a while I pulled one hand towards me as far as it would go, and leaned forward hard against the seat belt, and found I could reach far enough to blow into the bag if I held its gathered neck loosely with an O of forefinger and thumb.

For probably half an hour I breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth, into the plastic bag. At the end of that time there were hundreds of small water droplets sticking to the inside of the bag... the water vapour out of my lungs, trapped there instead of escaping into the air.

I turned the bag inside out and licked it. It was wet. When I’d sucked off as much as I could, I laid the cool damp surface against my face, and perhaps because of the paltriness of what I had achieved, felt the first deep stab of desolation.

I fished out the blue rubber band again, and while the sunlit air was still hot, filled the bag with it, twisting the neck tight and fastening it with the band to one side of the steering wheel. It hung there like a fool’s balloon, bobbing lightly away if I touched it.

I had been thirsty all day, but not unbearably.

After dark some hovering internal rumbles identified themselves as hunger. Again, not unbearably.

The bladder problem reappeared and was again a disaster. But. time, I supposed, would lessen the difficulty: no Input, less output.

Hope had to be filed under ‘Pending’, after dark. Twelve hours to be lived before one could climb on to the will-they-won’t-they treadmill again. I found them long, lonely, and dreadful.

The cramps which I had so imaginatively constructed for the film began to afflict my own body in earnest, once the heat of the day drained away and let my muscles grow stiff.

At first I warmed up by another dozen wrenching attempts to break the steering wheel off the control column, the net result of which was considerable wear and tear on me, and none on the car. After that I tried to plan a sensible series of isometric exercises which would keep everything warm and working, but I only got about half of them done.

Against all the odds, I went to sleep.

The nightmare was still there when I woke up.

I was shivering with cold, creakingly stiff, and perceptibly hungrier.

I had nothing to eat but four matches, a handkerchief, and a blunt pencil.

After a small amount of thought I dug out the pencil, and chewed that. Not exactly for the food value, but to bare the lead. With that pencil, I decided, I could bring Danilo down.

Before dawn the realisation crept slowly in that Danilo could not have abandoned me in the car without help. He would have needed someone to drive him away when he had finished locking me in. He wouldn’t have walked through the game reserve, not only because of the danger from animals, but because a man on foot would have been as conspicuous as gallantry.

So someone had helped him.

Who?

Arknold...

He had shut his eyes to Danilo’s fraud, when he had discovered it: had kept silent, because by not arranging better security he had put his licence at risk. But would he step deep into murder to save himself a suspension?

No. He wouldn’t.

Barty, for money?

I didn’t know.

One... any... of the van Hurens, for any reason at all?

No.

Roderick, for news? Or Katya, or Melanic?

No.

Clifford Wenkins, for publicity?

If it was him, I was safe, because he wouldn’t leave me there much longer. He wouldn’t dare. Worldic, for a start, wouldn’t want the merchandise turning up in a damaged state. I wished I believed it was Wenkins, but I didn’t.

Evan? Conrad?

I couldn’t face it.

They had both been there. On the spot. Sleeping next door. Handy for breaking in in the night and smothering me with ether.

One of them could have done it while the other slept. But which? And why?

If it were either Evan or Conrad I was going to die, because only they could save me.

The dawn came up on this bleakest of thoughts and showed me that my theories on water vapour were correct. I could see nothing of the Kruger National Park, because all the windows were fogged and beaded with condensation.

I could reach the glass beside me, and I licked it. It felt great. The dryness of my tongue and throat became instantly less aggravating, though I could still have done with a pint of draught.

I looked through the licked patch. Same old wilderness. Same old no one there.

My spoonful of water had formed all right inside the now cold plastic bag. Carefully I loosened its neck in the rubber band and squeezed the shrunken air out, to prevent it expanding again when the day grew hot, and re-absorbing the precious liquid. I wouldn’t drink it until later, I decided. Until things got worse.

With all the precious humidity clinging to the inside of the windows, it was safe to embark on a change of air. I took off my sock and turned the handle with my toes, and opened the left-hand window a scant inch. Couldn’t risk not being able to shut it again: but when the sun came up I got it shut without much trouble. When the growing heat cleared the windows by re-evaporating the water, at least I had such comfort as there was in knowing it was all still inside the car, doing its best.

The pencil I had chewed in the night (and stowed for safe storage under my watch strap) was showing signs of usefulness. One more session with the incisors, and it had enough bare lead at the tip to write with.

The only thing to write on that I had in my pockets was the inside of the book of matches, which was room enough for ‘Danilo did it’, but not for my whole purpose. There were maps and car documents, however, in the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat, and after a long struggle, tying my toes in knots and using up a great deal too much precious energy, I collected into my hands a large brown envelope, and a book of maps with nice blank end papers.

There was a lot to write.