African Sky (17 page)

They had all confessed to being with him. She thought it a credit to them. Even though they had engaged in criminal activity, none of them would lie if it meant the death of an innocent man – even one not so innocent as, well, Innocent.

‘I can't see the judge, the headmistress, the banker or the doctor as being involved in Felicity's death. They all live in far-flung parts of town, and there's nothing to connect her to any of them,' Pip said as they got back into their car.

‘So that means if Nkomo's telling the truth, and someone planted Felicity Langham's stuff in the boot of his car, it must have been one of the two mystery clients we can't account for.'

‘Exactly,' Pip said. ‘So we're almost back to square one.'

Innocent Nkomo had told them that in addition to his regular customers, the only people who had been anywhere near his car on the morning after Felicity had been murdered were two new, unannounced customers. They were both white – one male and one female. He had given a rough description of both of them, and told the police where he had met them, but it wasn't much to go on.

As Hayes skirted the southern part of Bulwayo, Pip reviewed the notes she had taken during Nkomo's interrogation, and the man's own statement. ‘So, we're looking for a blonde woman aged in her mid-twenties to early thirties, and a dark-haired man in his early thirties. He said he'd stopped to see what the fuss was about in Mzilikazi, when we found him at the crime scene, after picking up some more cans of fuel for his next delivery. Nkomo met the woman in town, at five in the
morning in a lane near the Empire Club. He sold our mystery man four gallons behind the Catholic Church at seven o'clock. Nkomo said both customers telephoned him at home, asking if he had some timber for sale.' It was a primitive code, but told the black marketeer that the new clients had both been referred to him by someone who had used his services before.

‘We'll get some officers to ask around both neighbourhoods to see if there were any witnesses to the meetings. Might get better descriptions, or maybe someone will have recognised the customers,' Hayes said as he turned right onto the Salisbury Road.

A church early on a weekday morning and a lane behind a closed club? Not much chance there'd be too many people walking past. Nkomo's not dumb – that's why he does his work either at night, at his regular customers' homes, or in places where no one's milling about. A black man selling stuff out of the back of a car in the neighbourhoods where his customers live would draw too much attention during the day.'

‘What choice have we got?' Hayes asked.

She was stumped. ‘We've got to concentrate on the mystery man.'

‘I agree with you there,' Hayes said.

‘Yes. We should get out the photo files of men with prior convictions for sexual assault and show them to Nkomo. He might recognise one of them as his mystery customer.'

‘It's a long shot,' Hayes said. ‘And we've still got Nkomo's full list of clients to go through. There might be a cross-match somewhere.'

Pip nodded. Nkomo, at their instruction, had been left in his cell to write down the names of all of his petrol clients. The man had admitted to them that he sold to dozens of people, and that he did not know them all by name.

‘If we resurrect your theory that Felicity was killed by someone who knew her, we could have another look at the men she's been with.'

‘Her neighbours and the girls she worked with at the air force base haven't been able to come up with any names,' Pip said, though there was one man she still had her suspicions about.

‘Perhaps we've got to look at that again.'

‘Yes, perhaps. But now we've got a funeral to attend. Two funerals, in fact.'

Pied crows, fat from the food scraps generated by a thousand airmen and women, wheeled over the base rubbish tip. A lone vulture circled in search of death. Other birds were sometimes struck by aircraft on take-off or landing and, every now and then, the cooks shot a baboon or monkey which had grown too bold. The spoil from two freshly dug graves insulted the neat, manicured lines of the military cemetery. Two African gravediggers, their blue overalls black with sweat, leaned on their shovels a discreet distance away from the air force plot, where only whites were buried.

In the base chapel, a uniformed Rhodesian WAAF played ‘Nearer My God To Thee' on the organ and the two hundred mourners sang or mouthed the words as best they could.

‘Squadron Leader Paul Bryant, our base adjutant, will now say a few words,' the ageing air force chaplain said as the organ sighed to silence.

There was only seating for half the crowd. The rest stood outside, watching through open doors. A public-address system had been rigged up so that those outside could hear the service.

Bryant heard a faint echo outside from the speakers, washing over the still runway. Unusually for Kumalo, the hum of aero engines was missing today, all training having been suspended for the double funeral. His amplified scratchy voice rang out through the Tannoy. ‘We come together today to say goodbye to two members of our family,' he began.

Pip Lovejoy, standing at the back of the crowded chapel, looked at him and fancied she caught him searching the crowd for her. Most of the women were in air force uniforms, but Pip noticed a woman wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, trimmed with lace, sitting in one of the front pews. She couldn't see the face, but imagined it would be Catherine De Beers – ostentatiously dressed for the occasion.

‘Sadly, many of us in this chapel, on this base, are not strangers to
death. These will not be the last members of our family – our air force family – to whom we have to say farewell. The presence of so many of you here and outside is a testimony to the high regard in which both Leading Aircraftswoman Felicity Langham and Flight Sergeant James Smythe were held by all of you.'

Pip looked around at the capacity crowd of mostly young men – little more than boys. She wondered how many of them had come to this noncompulsory church parade on a Saturday morning because of Felicity Langham and the morbidly fascinating circumstances of her death, as opposed to because of the hapless Sergeant Smythe.

‘Both were taken from us in their prime. This is the nature of war, ladies and gentleman, but the crime – for that's what we're talking about here – was that Felicity and James were killed not by an enemy bullet or shell, or even by an accident in training. They were killed by other people, for reasons still unknown.'

There were murmurs from the congregation. Pip sensed they were still angry, and that it might not take much to stir them into misplaced action again. The last thing anyone needed at the moment was another race riot. She'd been toying with the idea of doing as Hayes had and leaking some information to the local newspaper, stating that they were still investigating Felicity's murder and that the police were looking for a mystery white man. However, she had eventually thought better of the idea. Better the real killer – if the unknown man were now the prime suspect – thought he had got away with his crime. She looked back at the pulpit and noticed that Paul Bryant was staring directly at her.

She lowered her eyes a fraction to avoid his gaze. In front of the pulpit hung a tapestry of the badge of the Rhodesian Air Training Group. In the centre of the crest was the famous stone eagle of Great Zimbabwe, discovered in the rock–walled ancient city near Fort Victoria, not far from where she'd grown up. The proud, erect bird of prey stared resolutely ahead, majestic, unshakeable. She looked up at Bryant again. His gaze mirrored that of the eagle in front of him.

‘As much as we might feel compelled to take action, or to help
others find the killers of our brother and sister,' Bryant continued, surveying the room before returning his stare to Pip Lovejoy, ‘we must put our faith in the local police. We can be secure in the knowledge that the perpetrators of these terrible crimes will be brought to justice.'

She thought he was trying to emulate the sanctimonious tone and words of the chaplain. It was very unlike Bryant, from what she knew of him. He had obviously made an extra effort, dress-wise, for the funeral. The knife-edge creases in his tunic and trousers, the perfectly knotted tie and his newly trimmed hair were also very un-Bryant.

‘But I'll tell you this, people,' he said, leaning forward on his elbows to get closer into the audience, ‘nothing the coppers do, or the courts, will take away the bloody pain. Excuse me, Father,' he added, turning to the chaplain, who replied with a little frown.

Pip looked around and saw most of the uniformed people were sitting up straighter, on the edge of their pews. There was that commanding presence again – a quality he used sparingly, but effectively.

‘And you just have to learn to live with it.'

There were a few murmurs and some head-shaking at the harshness of his stone-hearted comment.

‘That's right, that's what I said. You'll see more death and injustice in the years to come than any of you had ever thought possible. Be angry about these deaths, but ask yourselves something, every hour of every day from here on in. Ask yourself, here at Kumalo, and overseas if you're going to an operational squadron, if you have done everything, and I
mean
bloody everything, in your power, to ensure that each and every one of the men and women you serve with will still be alive at the end of that hour, that day.'

There was silence in the chapel and outside now.

‘Was there something one of us could have done to make sure Felicity Langham did not end up in the clutches of a murderer, that she wasn't alone, maybe friendless on the night she died?'

Pip looked across at a pew near the front dominated by WAAFs and saw Corporal Susannah Beattie, the senior parachute packer and Felicity's superior, hang her head.

‘I probably could have. I'm the adjutant. It's my job to keep tabs on morale and make sure we all work together, as a team, as a family.' He looked across at the two flag-draped coffins and said: ‘Forgive me, Felicity, if I could have.'

Pip looked at him and saw him swallow hard, as if fighting back his surfacing emotions. It was a small mercy, she thought, that Felicity, an only child, had no family in Rhodesia to attend the funeral. They would have been confused by the veiled admonitions in Bryant's eulogy – and perhaps their absence gave him a free rein. The girl's mother had died in a riding accident several years earlier, while her father, a veteran of the first war, was serving in Italy as a major in the pioneer corps, a collection of ageing veterans who performed civil engineering works for the army. Pip had drafted the cable to send news of his daughter's death to him, and she'd found it one of the saddest duties of her life.

‘To those of you who knew James Smythe, to those of you who instructed him, ask yourselves what you knew of him, if you can understand how he ended up miles off course, in another country, for Christ's sake. Sorry for that one, too, Father. Forgive us, James, if we failed you.'

He paused. ‘If we don't look out for each other, if we don't work with each other, despite our differences, our jealousies and our prejudices, more of us will die than survive this war.'

‘Volleys, load!' barked Flight Sergeant Henderson. At his command the ten askaris worked the bolts of their .303 rifles, each chambering a blank cartridge. The funeral party's drill was good, ebony hands moving perfectly in unison. Their dress was immaculate – starched high-collared tunics, shorts, puttees and spit-polished ankle boots. The brass buckles on their First World War pattern webbing glinted in the morning sun. It was not the first, and would not be the last, burial they attended, though the cause of death was usually an aircraft crash rather than murder.

Pip thought it a terrible irony that probably the only time these proud Ndebele warriors would fire their weapons during the war would be to mark the death of airmen and women who would never see action.

‘Present!' The rifles were pointed across the two open graves and heavenwards into the cloudless African sky. ‘Fire!'

Pip flinched as the first volley shattered the peace of the cemetery and sent half-a-dozen glossy starlings winging into the azure sky. Henderson gave the same commands twice more, then ordered the firing party to unload.

The sun warmed her back but couldn't stop the chill running down her spine as the two trumpeters sounded the mournful strains of the Last Post. She glanced across at Paul Bryant, standing smartly to attention and, like the other officers present, saluting. At the conclusion of the refrain, the trumpeters paused for a few seconds, then blew reveille. Catherine De Beers, she noticed, was dabbing at her eyes with a white handkerchief. Susannah Beattie had an arm around a crying WAAF. Pip wondered if the tears were for Felicity Langham, perhaps out of guilt, or if the young woman cried for the dead English pilot.

Pip ran her eyes along the other wooden grave markers in the cemetery. There were at least a score of them and the names came from nearly every corner of the British Empire – Canadians, Australians, Britons and Rhodesians. There were even a couple of Greeks. Pip pondered the waste of it all. To survive the invasion of Greece, to escape to England and then be shipped to Africa, only to die in training. She'd learned, early on in the war, that men were buried in the country where they died, as it was impractical to ship so many bodies home. She wondered where Charlie was right now.

Henderson ordered the firing party to fix bayonets and then slope arms. They turned and marched away from the graves, hobnailed boots crunching the gravel in perfect synchronisation. A procession of more than a hundred mourners fell in behind the Askaris and the Kumalo pipes and drums band. The bagpipes were from half a world away, but their keening lament seemed to fit the landscape, in an odd way, as
naturally as the whine of a yellow-billed kite that climbed and dived like a fighter plane above the column.