African Sky (2 page)

‘Get back to work or I'll have you horse-whipped.'

Outside it was another perfect Rhodesian flying day. It wasn't hard to see why they had picked this country to train pilots. It was the same with Australia. The empire needed airmen at an ever-increasing rate to make up for the losses over Europe and, to train flyers, you needed open spaces, empty skies and, preferably, a lack of enemy fighters.

Two students in RAF tropical uniforms, khaki tunics and shorts hemmed above sunburned knees, saluted him as they passed. The trainees marched, their arms swinging to breast-pocket height. Bryant walked casually. He couldn't remember the last time he had marched anywhere. He took the cigarette packet from his shirt pocket and lit one on the move. Oh yes, he thought, the last time he marched would have been at a funeral. He couldn't remember whose. Slow march, carrying the coffin. Bryant checked his watch and hoped the police wouldn't delay his lunch. Lunchtime was a highlight of his dreary desk-bound day. A couple of bottles of Lion beer in the mess. Too many of his memories – all of them, it sometimes seemed – were linked to the death of someone or other.

He scanned the sky. An Oxford was on final approach to the main runway, its waggling wings betraying the trainee's nerves and inexperience. There was no sign of the eagle and he wondered if it had caught its prey
A ruddy dust plume from the dozer marked the site of the new taxiway. The twin-engine trainer bounced once then slewed down the runway. At least that one had landed safely.

‘Cheer up, you're alive,' he told himself again.

‘Squadron Leader Bryant,' a deep voice called behind him.

Bryant knew who it was and smiled at the man's formality. He turned and grinned. ‘Is it worth me telling you again, Kenneth, that you can call me by my first name? You're not in the air force, man.'

Kenneth Ngwenya gave a small, pained smile. He lowered his voice. And I could tell you, again, that in a country where black men have to get off the footpath when they see a white coming towards them, for me to call you by your first name when there are others nearby would be bad for me and worse for you.'

All right then, all right, get off the bloody pavement.'

Ngwenya laughed. ‘
Sawubona
, Paul,'

And I see you, too, my friend.'

‘Your Ndebele is getting better. Perhaps it's time you graduated beyond hello and goodbye.'

‘You're like every schoolteacher I ever met, Kenneth.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, a prick.' Bryant cut their laughter short with a glance at his watch. ‘Where have you been all week? I've missed you pestering me for building materials and medicines.'

‘The only reason I pester you is because you never say no. And the children appreciate it. I've been visiting my father; he has not been well.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that. I hope he gets better soon. I'd love to stay and chat, Kenneth, but I've got the police waiting for me at the front gate.'

Ah, I hope you enjoy your time in gaol. Is it about the woman who was killed last night?'

Bryant studied Kenneth's face. The man was as tall as he was, about six feet, with bright, alert eyes magnified by small rimless glasses that looked completely at odds with his powerful body Ngwenya always seem constrained by the dark suit, starched white shirt and black tie
that he wore every day, no matter what the weather. Bryant had written, in one of his infrequent letters to his father in Australia, that Kenneth had the brain of a university professor and the body of a rugby player, even though Africans were barred from playing the game.

‘What woman?'

Ngwenya's face was devoid of mirth. ‘I am sorry to bring the news. I thought you would have heard by now. She was from here, Paul. White. One of the air force women. Some of the askaris' wives were talking about it this morning. It will be bad for us.'

Bryant swallowed hard. ‘Us?'

‘She was found in the township, Paul. Mzilikazi.'

‘Who was it? Do you have her name?'

‘No, sorry. I am worried about this.'

‘So am I, mate. I have to go, Kenneth.'

‘Of course. I'd like to see you, later, though, about some more building materials for the school. It's why I was looking for you.'

‘I'll try to make time. Come look for me.' He clapped the African on one arm and nodded to him, then turned back to the guardroom. Bryant knew that Kenneth Ngwenya was a man driven by much more than his job as the sole teacher at the base's African school. He was committed – more than any teacher Bryant had ever met – to the education of his children, who were mostly the offspring of the askaris, Rhodesian Africans overseen by white officers and noncommissioned officers, and the labour brought in to construct the sprawling air base. But Ngwenya had confided to Bryant that he was also a member of the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress, a political group committed to improving the lot of the colony's black population, and other, loftier goals that went far beyond the bounds of reality, such as the right to vote and majority rule.

Bryant felt his heart beating faster as he approached the guardroom and the boom gate at the main entrance to the base. He wiped his hands on the side of his uniform trousers to dry them. At least he would have time to compose himself before he met the police.

‘Stand fast!' Flight Sergeant Henderson barked as Bryant approached
the gatehouse. Henderson ground his left boot into the pavement and snapped out a parade-ground salute. Two black African air askaris dressed in khaki uniforms, ankle boots, puttees and fezes also came stiffly to attention. The askaris provided base security.

Bryant returned the courtesy with a casual brush of the peak of his cap. He thought he read a flash of contempt at his sloppy drill in the flight sergeant's slate grey eyes. He didn't care.

‘Morning,
sah!'
Henderson boomed.

‘Morning, Henderson. As you were, men,' Bryant drawled.

The flight sergeant relaxed his ramrod-straight body ever so slightly. ‘Thank you, sir. A Sergeant Hayes and a Constable Lovejoy, a
female
, are waiting for you in the guardhouse, sir.'

‘Thanks. Leave them with me.'

‘Begging your pardon, sir?'

‘Yes, what is it?' Bryant asked Henderson.

‘That African, sir. Ngwenya. The schoolteacher.'

‘What about him?'

‘Well, he's a civilian, sir. Shouldn't be wandering about the base willy-nilly. I can have a word with him if you like, sir. Tell him to stop bothering you.'

Bryant looked at the smile and wondered if Henderson were actually being sincere, or if he were being baited. ‘
Mister
Ngwenya is welcome on the base anytime, Flight. Perhaps you'd like to volunteer for one of the work parties doing some construction work at the school?'

‘Very busy man, I am, sir.'

Bryant opened the door of the guardroom. Henderson would keep. If the man had been operational, on a squadron serving as a wireless air gunner or a bomb aimer instead of a glorified gate guard, he would have seen plenty of black faces serving at the same rank as him. The Royal Air Force was happy enough to have Jamaicans and Nigerians flying and dying alongside Englishmen, even if Flight Sergeant Henderson had a problem with an educated Rhodesian walking around the base.

Bryant didn't consider himself a bleeding heart, but he did pride
himself on judging a man by the way he acted, not by the colour of his skin. He'd grown up in Dubbo in the far west of New South Wales, the son of a sheep shearer who roamed the plains from farm to farm. His mother had died during his birth and Bryant had been raised by an Aboriginal nanny and his father's sister and her husband. His childhood friend had been the nanny's boy, Alf. The pair had grown up as close as brothers. By the time his uncle, a wizened blacksmith his aunt said had been angry at the world since a horse had smashed his jaw, had sat him down at the age of ten and tried to tell him he should spend less time with Alf and more time with boys his own colour, it was too late. His uncle had knocked him to the ground when Paul had tried to object – confirmation, if it were needed, that the world consisted of only two types of people. Good blokes and bastards.

P
ip Lovejoy loved her job. Unlike her other life on the dairy farm, being a policewoman was interesting, exciting, rewarding, and comparatively safe. But it could also be tiring. She'd been up all night. She put a hand over her mouth to conceal a yawn as she peered out the window of the Kumalo air base guardhouse, and thought back over the preceding hours.

‘It's a murder. Grab your hat and jacket and put down that sandwich, Philippa. I don't want you throwing up when we get to the body. Sometimes they stink so much you swear you'll never get the stench off you,' Sergeant Hayes had said as he burst into the criminal investigation division office at Stops Camp, Bulawayo's main police station, a little after three that morning.

Sergeant Harold Hayes didn't like her – Pip was sure of it. Certainly he made it abundantly clear he hated the fact that women had been enlisted into the British South Africa Police in the newly created Southern Rhodesian Women's Auxiliary Police Service to cover for the large number of young white men who had volunteered for service in the air force and army. Hayes was old enough to have served in the first war, but had joined the police instead. Pip thought her presence at Stops Camp, and the fact that many more women were joining the
SRWAPS
as the war dragged on, were constant reminders to Hayes of his lack of war service. He was arrogant and foul-mouthed and he hated blacks and women. But he couldn't stop her from loving the job.

‘A murder?' she'd repeated, wide-eyed. Up until now the closest she'd come to death as a volunteer policewoman had been keeping onlookers away from a fatal car crash, and typing up scene-of-crime reports for the Criminal Investigation Division detectives. ‘What about CID?'

‘Suicide down at Esigodini, and a drunk driver's wrapped himself and his family around a tree. We're it, Lovejoy, and even though I've got to take you with me, I'm not letting them take this case away from me!'

Pip had ignored the insult – she, too, was excited about getting a murder case. She wolfed down the last of her boiled egg sandwich, put on her grey cap and jacket, and brushed the breadcrumbs from her uniform shirt and navy blue tie. The tie matched the cuffs and epaulettes of her uniform. She was a messy eater, always had been, but she made sure she looked her best when she was in public in her uniform.

‘No, you don't have time to do your bloody lipstick, Lovejoy!' Hayes had barked at her as she glanced in the mirror behind the door.

She had pulled a face at his back and followed him outside to the car park. It was warm out. The rains would arrive in a month or so and the days were getting hotter, the nights balmier.

‘Where are we going, Sergeant?' Pip had asked, unable to mask her excitement, as they climbed into the Dodge.

‘You'll find out soon enough, young lady. Nowhere you've ever been before in your protected little upbringing, I'll wager.'

She'd let the condescension wash over her. The fat red-necked pig knew nothing of her life. At twenty-two years of age she did not consider herself young and neither had she been shielded from much during her life. Pip Lovejoy's parents had been farmers, and not very lucky ones at that. Her father had had an incredible knack for planting the wrong crops at the wrong time. He'd gone into cattle when the price of beef plummeted. Her mother was smart, smarter than her father, but
too deferential to the old man to give advice. As things got worse, her father's drinking and gambling increased. Her mother had started to argue with her father, growing bolder as the old man slid deeper into a hole of his own digging. One day, Pip woke to find her with a purple bruise on one side of her face and a cut cheek. Shortly after, her father had wagered away the last savings they'd had and blown his brains out with a shotgun. That was when Pip was fourteen, at the height of the Depression. Her mother had started growing vegetables in the backyard of the rented property they'd moved to, in Fort Victoria, in the eastern part of the country, and managed to eke out a paltry living for herself, Pip and Pip's two younger sisters.

Pip was the smartest of the three girls and had won a scholarship to a good boarding school in Salisbury. She'd excelled and loved her time there. Surrounded by the wealthy daughters of Rhodesia's elite, she had been able to forget the traumas and privations of home. She'd won another scholarship, to university, where she had been accepted to study law.

‘Keep a watch out, Lovejoy,' Hayes had said to her, breaking her train of thought as they drove through the darkened streets.

It was just as well. One, she certainly needed to be alert when they were out after dark, and two, she didn't need to rekindle any more memories of her time at varsity. ‘Yes, Sarge.'

‘It's sergeant, Lovejoy, not
sarge
. We're not in some second-rate American film.'

She stared out into the gloom of the resting town and felt her excitement mount as Hayes drove along the Sixth Avenue extension, out of downtown Bulawayo. It seemed they were heading into Mzilikazi, one of the African townships on the outskirts of the city. Hayes had been right about one thing – although she'd been born in Africa, she'd spent most of her life on farms or in school dorms, so she'd never really had a close look inside one of the chaotic, crowded communities in which much of Rhodesia's black population lived. It was one of the things she loved, though, discovering new places and seeing people through new eyes as a policewoman. She'd only lived on this side of the country, on
the dairy farm, since her wedding a little over two years ago, so she didn't know Bulawayo or the region as well as her bellicose partner did.

The wide tree-lined stately streets of downtown Bulawayo narrowed to dusty dirt hemmed in by older, rundown masonry buildings, which, as the car lurched on, its wheels dipping in and out of potholes, turned to structures of tin, then asbestos sheet and then a mishmash of every building material available in the colony.

Even at this late hour there was light. Weak yellow beams from blackened paraffin lamps slicing out through cracks in shanty walls. And music. How incongruous, Pip thought, that a place that reeked of decay and human waste, and must look even worse in daylight, seemed to pulse with a chirpy, lively brand of music. Or was it so surprising? Was the lot of the people who lived here so bad that music was their only happiness? She hadn't ever given much thought to the plight of the blacks who worked on her farm. They always seemed genuinely happy to see her when they greeted her in the morning, when she had a
mombe
slaughtered for a special occasion, when they herded the milk cows past the house to the dairy. Who were the Africans who lived in the township of Mzilikazi? What were their lives like inside those crumbling asbestos homes with their bare earthen floors?

Unconsciously she started tapping her foot on the firewall of the police car, picking up the lilting rhythm of the penny whistle and the guitar. It reminded her a little of American jazz, or swing, perhaps a mix of both.
Kwela
, she had a feeling it was called. Township music. Black music. She had picked up enough Ndebele to know the word meant ‘to lift' or ‘to raise'. Maybe it raised their hopes, their hearts. Whatever its name, this was not the sort of music Charlie, her husband, would ever play at the farm on the gramophone – he preferred classical pieces. His choices reminded her of funerals. Pip strummed her fingers on the side of the police car's door, out of sight of Hayes. She liked the rhythm and decided she would seek out some jazz records on her next shopping trip in town. She'd been reading the local newspaper, the
Bulawayo Chronicle
, during the night shift, and it was full of news about the fighting in Italy, and the Italian government's
surrender. However, the Germans and Japs were still very much in the war, so there was no risk of Charlie coming home any time soon. She'd have plenty of time to destroy the records before his return.

Hayes stared across at her and even in the gloomy car she could see his disapproval. She stopped tapping her foot and strumming her fingers. She had a job to do.

People ducked down alleyways and closed doors at the sight of the police vehicle as it cruised along. It was getting less and less like the white part of town the deeper they pushed into Mzilikazi. The township was named after the warrior king of the local Matabele people, who had been defeated by the whites after an uprising at the end of the last century, but there was nothing proud or regal about where the blacks lived now.

Ahead she saw a crowd of fifty to a hundred people, mostly males, all Africans, thronging the entrance to a narrow alleyway.

This'll be the spot,' Hayes said. ‘Bloody Kaffirs can't resist congregating at the scene of a crime. One of them will have done it, Lovejoy mark my words. Take note of their faces. Get the names of the ones closest to the body, the ones gawking at her.'

She swallowed the saliva that had suddenly filled her mouth, and wiped moist palms on her uniform skirt. Hayes had told her nothing of the victim. Now, at least, Pip knew the dead person was a woman. She wondered about the circumstances. The music was louder now, so they were probably near a shebeen. The bar was trading illegally, if it was open this late. He stopped the car.

Hayes smiled. ‘Come on, Lovejoy. Let's get it done. Try not to faint on me. Remember, right or wrong, you're a member of the British South Africa Police, so try to act like one.'

‘Yes, Sergeant.' She stepped out of the car, into a puddle. It hadn't rained for months. She shivered and recoiled at the smell of raw alcohol, vomit, cooking-fire smoke. She looked straight ahead and strode after Hayes. There were African women hovering on the fringe of the cluster of men. Garish floral-printed frocks. Empty eyes. She knew prostitutes were as much a part of a shebeen as the dark native beer, but she'd never seen one; at least, not that she knew of.

‘Step aside,' Hayes ordered, and used his shoulder to push between two young African men in suits who blocked the footpath.

Pip slowed and watched the way the two men reacted to Hayes. The first touched his head, ducked to one side and began an apology that Hayes ignored. The second's eyes lingered resentfully on the policeman's broad back. The man was well-dressed, better than most in the crowd, in a dark blue suit, a wide tie of a matching hue, a white shirt and a black fedora. He picked his teeth with a toothpick. Pip felt the man had a learned or innate dislike of the police; that he knew his rights and resented the simple, yet arrogant act of being physically brushed aside, like an annoying branch of a tree on a walk in the bush. He looked like a spiv to her.

‘What's your name?' Pip asked him, her voice little more than a croak at first. His eye line was about a foot above hers when he turned. The man smirked. She took a breath and bellowed: ‘I said, what's your bloody name, man!'

He took a step back, the smile gone from his face as he removed the toothpick. ‘Innocent. Innocent Nkomo, madam.'

‘How long have you been here, Innocent?' Pip asked more softly craning her head back and fishing in her tunic pocket for her notebook and pencil.

‘For one hour, madam. Since they find her.'

The penny whistle played on in another building down a street littered with broken beer bottles. An old man sat with his back against a tin wall. A dog sniffed him. Life carried on, even at a murder scene. ‘What were you doing in the neighbourhood?'

‘Drinking, madam. And dancing,' he said. She couldn't smell beer on his breath, though, and he seemed perfectly lucid. The whites of his eyes were clear and bright, not the hazy yellow that reflected a heavy night on the native beer. She wondered if he'd been up to something he didn't want her to know about.

‘Was the victim in the pub, where you were drinking and dancing?'

The African smiled again and shook his head. ‘She was not from around here.'

‘Lovejoy!' Hayes barked.

Pip was annoyed that the man had smirked at her while she was interviewing him, and wondered what she had said to cause him to do so. ‘Don't leave. I'll be back soon. I've got your name, Nkomo,' she said with as much menace as she could muster. Pip elbowed her way through the crowd of thirty or forty onlookers. Most were men, but here and there a woman with heavy make-up in a bright dress also barred her way. At only a shade over five foot three, she was aware that most of the Africans on the street towered over her.

‘Here, Sarge, er, Sergeant,' she said to Hayes' back.

The policeman turned and, as he did so, his sombre face was lit up by a blast of white light. ‘The forensic photographer's here already, getting some shots of the body in situ. Take a look. She's about your age.'

Pip manoeuvred around Hayes' bulky body. She knew a few African women of her age, but none of them, not the young mothers on the farm, or the few shopgirls she encountered in town, would be out at night in an area like this.

‘Oh my God,' Pip hissed, then drew her hand to her mouth. ‘She's . . .'

‘White. Surprised, Lovejoy?'

‘Um . . .'

‘Nothing surprises me after twenty-seven years in this job,' Hayes said. ‘Control yourself, woman. Get a bloody grip. Well, go on, examine the body before the bloody coroner comes and carts her away'.

Pip was shocked. The woman was about her age, maybe a year or two older, and most definitely Caucasian. A sheet covered most of her prone body – the police photographer had left her face visible, though, to take his last close-up shot. Pip swallowed hard. There was a smell about the body she found hard to place. Maybe faeces. The girl's skin was a strange purplish colour, but there didn't appear to be any decomposition.

‘Check her fingers, her joints, for signs of rigor mortis,' Hayes said.

She looked up, praying it was one of his tasteless jokes, but he stood impassively above her, arms folded. She took hold of the end of the white sheet and slowly drew it back. She caught her breath. ‘She's virtually naked.'