African Sky (3 page)

Hayes bent forward at the waist, more interested now. ‘Let me see.'

A shiver passed down Pip's back as she felt his breath on her neck. Creep. She did as ordered and lowered the sheet further.

Pip caught the smell again. She turned her face away, closed her eyes and almost gagged as she swallowed the rising bile. I will not lose control in front of him, she thought. I can do this. She opened her eyes and coughed to clear her throat.

‘Get those bloody people back and out of sight!' Hayes bellowed at a young African policeman. The officer spread his arms wide and forced the onlookers back a few paces. ‘Shield the view with your body, Lovejoy. We don't want these bloody perverts starting a riot so's they can get a look at a dead
murungu
,' he added, using the common African term for a white person.

‘Her hands are tied, Sarge.' Pip wiped a bead of perspiration from her upper lip. She was glad she was kneeling, as she was sure her legs would have failed her if she stood.

Let's have a look. What's that, silk?'

‘Stocking, by the look of it. Her wrists have been bound with it. Her face looks familiar to me,' Pip said.

‘You know her?'

‘Not sure, Sarge. Hard to say when she's all dolled up like this.' Pip noted the heavy make-up, the ruby lipstick. ‘It's almost like, well, like she was trying to look like a tart.'

‘Watch your language, Lovejoy, and keep your voice down, for God's sake. Don't speak ill of the dead, either.'

Pip looked at him. Sweat was beading his forehead and he only glanced at the body for a second or two at a time. She noticed the way he stared at the woman's ample breasts and then averted his gaze, his cheeks reddened. She wondered if he had investigated many murders. As well as taking on women to fill the roles of men serving in the war, the BSAP had also promoted some male officers well beyond their capability to cover shortfalls in the senior ranks.

‘We should check to see if she has been . . . if she has been assaulted . . . in a sexual way. See to it, Lovejoy.'

‘You were told to get that bloody crowd back, man!' Pip shouted to the same constable Hayes had badgered. Unchecked, the young officer had allowed the crowd to close in on them again. ‘Now, damn it!'

Perhaps surprised by the anger in the small woman's voice, the constable redoubled his efforts and, aided by a second officer, the onlookers were forced back to the corner of a burned-out shop. Pip had seen the charred remains of the hovel and wondered if it wouldn't be better for every house in the township to be made of life-saving asbestos. There probably wasn't even running water to fight a fire in this place.

Pip lifted the sheet. The woman wore no brassiere or pants, but had on a pair of stockings and a suspender belt. Pip took a breath to steady herself and looked closer at the body. Her pubic hair had been shaved off. Odd, thought Pip. There were dark bruises on her inner thighs, small blotches, like fingerprints. ‘This really should be done by a doctor, don't you think, Sarge?'

Hayes coughed. ‘Well, what about it? Do you think she was . . . abused?'

‘I don't know. What do you class as abuse? She's tied up and she's dead in a laneway behind a shebeen.'

‘Don't give me lip, Lovejoy. You're of the fair sex, but you're still only an auxiliary constable. I can see the bleeding obvious, can't I?'

‘Sorry, Sarge,' Pip said, without feeling. She shuddered as she took the dead girl's cold right hand in hers and tried moving one of her fingers. The fingernail was painted a garish red. ‘Her fingers are a bit stiff, but still pliable. The joints haven't seized up yet. I think that means she's been dead for between two and four hours. I remember reading that muscles reach their stiffest between six and twelve. What do you think?'

‘Hmm, sounds about right to me.'

Pip realised that neither of them had much of a clue about murder investigations. The woman was on her back. Pip eased a hand under her and gently rolled her halfway over. ‘Bruising around her neck too.'

‘Bloody Kaffirs.'

‘You're sure an African did this?' Pip asked.

‘Look at the neighbourhood. Don't see too many whites around here at any hour of the day.'

‘Yes, of course, Sarge. But surely it's too obvious a place to leave a body. Why would an African killer dump her here in a laneway where she was bound to be discovered so quickly? Looks to me like someone was trying to make a statement, or maybe the murderer wanted it to look like an African did the deed.'

Hayes shook his head. ‘Mark my words, it's the black peril. There's no controlling the African once the drink gets to him.'

Pip held her tongue. The black peril was the common name given to the whites' fear of black men sexually assaulting their women but, from what she knew, cases of this nature were actually very rare. However, there were laws against African men consorting with European women, even if it were consensual. In Pip's opinion the government would be better off enforcing the laws of assault against white men who hurt their wives, a crime not spoken of in the ordered society in which she lived.

‘We'll talk to some of the bystanders. Find out if they saw anything unusual in the last few hours,' Hayes said.

Pip laid the woman back down in her original position and drew the sheet back up to her chin. She looked at the face again. The woman's hair was blonde, but cut short, in a bob. It was a fashion more suited to the twenties than the forties. Pip, like most women her age, had let her hair grow, although it was tied up in a bun now under the back of her police-issue hat. The hairstyle did remind her of something, though. ‘I do think I've seen her somewhere before.'

‘She could have been a film star with a face and a . . . well, a face like that,' Hayes said.

It was true, the girl had a beautiful face, even in death, and a body to match. ‘It is like she's famous, like I've seen her in a magazine or . . . Wait, that's it. I've seen her in the newspaper, in the
Chronicle!'

‘So, who is she? She's obviously not carrying identification.'

‘She's in the air force. She packs parachutes for the trainee pilots. She
actually jumps out of aeroplanes to show how they work. She's stationed at the air base at Kumalo.'

Ah, yes. Well done, Lovejoy. I read the same story. It's “Flying Felicity” we've got dead here in this shit hole.'

Pip and Hayes stood up from their uncomfortable metal chairs in the guardroom as the squadron leader walked in. She'd been staring up at a dozen photographs on the wall opposite her. Young, smiling men in air force khaki sitting and standing in front of military aircraft, shoulder to shoulder. She wondered where all the newly graduated pilots were now, and how many of them were still alive.

‘Welcome to Number Twenty-One Service Flying Training School, Kumalo. I'm Squadron Leader Paul Bryant.' He shook hands with Hayes and nodded to Pip.

‘Thank you for taking the time to meet with us, Squadron Leader,' Pip said. Rumpled was the word which first came to mind when she looked at him. His cap looked like someone had sat on it, and the wisps of hair that protruded out from under it needed trimming. The flight sergeant who had met them at the gate had so much starch in his uniform that Pip reckoned the fabric would snap if he bent over too far, but the squadron leader's uniform clearly hadn't seen an iron for a couple of days. Nevertheless, she thought the casual way he presented himself conveyed an air of relaxed, understated authority, as if he didn't need spit and polish to prove he was a military man. She didn't know what the medal ribbons below the embroidered pilot's wings on his chest were for, but she guessed by their number that he had already seen active service in the war, perhaps distinguishing himself in some way.

Hayes cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps we could talk in private somewhere, Squadron Leader. Your office? What we have to discuss is quite a sensitive matter.'

‘Of course, follow me,' Bryant said.

Pip stepped out her stride to keep pace with the men, and moved up
beside Bryant as they walked along the footpath. They passed new-looking red-brick buildings with tin roofs, offices and barracks surrounded by manicured lawns edged with white-painted rocks. She wondered if news of the purpose of their visit would have preceded them. Bryant had avoided asking them any questions so far and his brisk, formal civility seemed contrived, as if he were nervously waiting for them to drop the bombshell about Felicity Langham.

‘You're Australian,' she said to him.

‘Not much gets past you coppers, does it? There are quite a few of us over here, instructors and trainees. There are also British, Canadians, South Africans, local Rhodesians, of course, and a smattering of trainees from other far-flung parts of the British Empire. We've even got a few Greeks from the Royal Hellenic Air Force.'

‘I've met a few pilots and trainees in town, but never been onto one of the bases,' Pip said, eager to put the man at ease before they got down to business. Bulawayo was teeming with men in uniform these days.

‘Well, I'll give you the gen – the information – on the Empire Air Training Scheme while we walk.' A twin-engine aircraft passed low overhead, on a final approach to landing. ‘That's an Airspeed Oxford. The blokes learning to fly those will go on to bombers. The single-engine kites – aircraft – you'll see around here are American-designed AT-6 Harvards. The pilots on those will fly fighters, if they survive their training.'

‘Survive?' Hayes interjected.

‘Sergeant, here at Kumalo air base we've got a sewage farm at one end of the runway and a cemetery at the other. As some of the instructors like to say, and pardon my crudity, Constable, you've got a better than even chance of ending up in one of those places before your course is over.'

Hayes smiled and Pip grimaced. The man was adjutant of the camp. She'd expected something a bit more inspiring from him when addressing a couple of first-time visitors to the base. ‘You were saying, Squadron Leader, about the air training scheme?'

‘Call me Paul, if you like. The aim of the Empire Air Training Scheme is to produce about twenty thousand pilots and thirty thousand air gunners and observers a year, for service overseas.'

‘Gosh,' Pip said, ‘that's an awful lot of people.'

‘You wouldn't know it from the newspapers and the cinemas, but we're losing an awful lot of people in this war,' Bryant said, deadpan.

Pip felt her cheeks colour. All she knew of the war was what she read in the newspapers and saw on the newsreels at the cinema. She was smart enough, though, to realise that the government censors made sure the reports put a brave face on things.

‘Anyway,' Bryant continued, ‘there are bases like Kumalo also operating in Australia and Canada. Here in Southern Rhodesia we've got airfields operational around Bulawayo, at Gwelo, and at Cranborne, Norton and Belvedere near Salisbury, to name just a few. Over here the scheme is implemented for the Royal Air Force by the Rhodesian Air Training Group. It goes by other names in Canada and Australia, but the aim is the same. As well as pilot training there are other schools where aircrew are trained as gunners, wireless operators and bomb aimers. All up, there are about seventeen thousand people serving in the training group, including five thousand Africans who work as askaris – providing base security – and in general duties roles, such as the cooks, cleaners, groundsmen and maintenance staff.'

‘Seems a lot of effort, shipping people from as far away as England and Australia to do their training here,' Hayes said.

‘I'll agree with you about shipping Australians here, Sergeant,' Bryant conceded. ‘We could train our blokes just as easily back home. It's all about politics and the spirit of the Empire, I suppose. Above my level, anyway. But this is a good place to train Royal Air Force pilots and aircrew from Britain. For a start, you've got no shortage of sunshine and clear skies, and there are no German bombers to interrupt the training program.'

‘It must take quite a while, to get a pilot fully qualified,' Pip said.

‘Twenty-eight weeks for a pilot, twenty-one for a gunner or bomb aimer. This has been a big year for us and the pressure is always on to
train more and more people. We've got our biggest ever wings parade – pilot graduation – coming up in a few days' time.'

‘How many people?' Hayes asked.

‘A lot,' Bryant replied. ‘We don't like to talk about exact numbers. Loose lips and all that. I'm sure you understand. If the Germans could find a way to sabotage the training here in Rhodesia or inflict mass casualties on the pilot trainees, the RAF might simply run out of aircrew to man its bombers.'

‘Of course, but you said before, Southern Rhodesia was picked as a base because it's safe,' Hayes countered.

‘From what I read in the intelligence reports and the newspapers, there are more than a few people down in South Africa who wouldn't mind seeing Germany win this war,' Bryant said.

‘You're talking about the Ossewa Brandwag?'

Bryant nodded. He'd read with interest the reports of the far right-wing movement, whose name, translated into English, meant the ox-wagon sentinels. The Ossewa Brandwag – OB, for short – were self-styled guardians of the ideals espoused by the original
voortrekkers
, the Cape Dutch Afrikaner pioneers who had set off into the wilderness of what was now South Africa to carve out a white homeland.

The OB had evolved in the years following the Boer War, a manifestation of lingering Afrikaner resentment at the British victory and their ongoing rule of South Africa. They were anti-British, anti-Jewish, and anti-black. The party's paramilitary wing – the
stormjaers –
bore a chilling resemblance to Hitler's prewar Nazi storm troopers, and had already been responsible for acts of sabotage in South Africa, such as blowing up power lines and robbing banks to raise funds for their activities. Even the group's symbol betrayed its Nazi sympathies. The OB eagle, beak turned to the right and clutching a circle containing an image of a covered wagon, bore a striking resemblance to the bird on the breasts of uniforms worn by German soldiers, sailors and airmen.