The Angels Weep (59 page)

‘I resigned,’ Craig denied.

‘You got fired.’

‘It was close,’ Craig admitted. ‘But I beat
them to it. I resigned.’

Craig was not really surprised that Jonathan already knew of
his latest misfortune. Nobody knew how old Jonathan Ballantyne
was for certain, the outside estimate was a hundred years, though
eighty-plus was Craig’s guess, but still nothing got by
him.

‘You can give me a lift up to the house.’ Jonathan
swung up easily onto the high passenger seat, and with relish
began pointing out the additions to the defence of the
homestead.

‘I have put in twenty more Claymores on the front
lawn.’ Jonathan’s Claymore mines were ten kilos of
plastic explosive packed inside a drum of scrap-iron suspended on
a pipe tripod. He could fire them electrically from his
bedroom.

Jonathan was a chronic insomniac, and Craig had a bizarre
mental picture of the old man spending every night sitting bolt
upright in his nightshirt with his finger on the button praying
for a terrorist to come within range. The war had added twenty
years to his life. Jonathan hadn’t had such a good time
since the first battle of the Somme, where he had won his MC one
lovely autumn morning by grenading three German machine-gun nests
in quick succession. Secretly Craig believed that the first thing
any ZIPRA
²
guerrilla recruit was
taught when he began his basic training was to give King’s
Lynn and the crazy old man who lived there the widest possible
berth.

As they drove up through the gates in the security fence and
were surrounded by a mixed pack of fearsome Rottweilers and
Dobermann pinschers, Jonathan explained the latest refinements to
his battle plan.

‘If they come from behind the kopje, I’ll let them
get into the minefield, then take them in
enfilade
—’

He was still explaining and gesticulating as they climbed the
steps to the wide veranda and he finished the briefing by adding
darkly and mysteriously:

‘I have just invented a secret weapon, I’m going
to test it tomorrow morning. You can watch.’

‘I’d enjoy that, Bawu,’ Craig thanked him
doubtfully. The last tests that Jonathan had conducted had blown
all the windows out of the kitchens and flesh-wounded the
Matabele cook.

Craig followed Jonathan down the wide shady veranda. The wall
was hung with hunting trophies, the horns of buffalo and kudu and
eland, and on each side of the double glass doors leading to the
old dining-room, now the library, stood a pair of enormous
elephant tusks, so long and curved that their tips almost met at
the level of the ceiling above the doorway.

As he went through the door, Jonathan absentmindedly stroked
one of them. There was a spot on the thick yellow curve that had
been polished shiny by the touch of his fingers over the
decades.

‘Pour us each a gin, my boy,’ he ordered. Jonathan
had stopped drinking whisky on the day that Harold Wilson’s
government had imposed sanctions on Rhodesia. It was
Jonathan’s single-handed retaliatory attempt at disrupting
the economy of the British Isles.

‘By God, you’ve drowned it,’ he complained,
as he tasted the concoction, and dutifully Craig took his glass
back to the imbuia cocktail cabinet and stiffened the gin
component.

‘That’s a little better.’ Jonathan settled
himself behind his desk and placed the Stuart crystal tumbler in
the centre of his leather and brass-bound blotter.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened this
time.’ And he fixed Craig with those bright green eyes.

‘Well, Bawu, it’s a long story. I don’t want
to bore you.’ Craig sank down into the deep leather
armchair and became intensely interested in the furnishings of
the room which he had known since childhood. He read the titles
on the spines of the morocco-bound books on the shelves, and
studied the massed display of blue silk rosettes which the prize
Afrikander bulls of King’s Lynn had won at every
agricultural show south of the Zambezi river.

‘Shall I tell you what I heard? I heard you refused to
obey the legitimate order of your superior, to wit the head game
warden, and that thereafter you perpetrated a violence upon that
worthy, or more specifically that you punched him in the head.
Giving him the excuse to dismiss you for which he had probably
been searching desperately since the first day you arrived in the
Park.’

‘The reports are exaggerated.’

‘Don’t give me that little-boy grin of yours,
young man. This is not a matter of levity,’ Jonathan told
him sternly. ‘Did you refuse to partake in the elephant
cull, or did you not?’

‘Have you ever been on a cull, Jon-Jon?’ Craig
asked softly. He only used his grandfather’s pet name in
moments of deep sincerity. ‘The spotter plane picks a
likely herd, say fifty animals, and radio talks us onto them. We
go in the last mile or so on foot at a dead run. We get in very
close, ten paces, so we are shooting uphill. We use the 458s to
cannon them. What we do is pick out the old queens of the herd,
because the younger animals love and respect them so much that
they won’t leave them. We hit the queens first, head shots,
of course, that gives us plenty of time to work on the others. We
are pretty good at it by now. We drop them so fast that the heaps
have to be pulled apart by tractors afterwards. That leaves the
calves. It’s interesting to watch a calf trying to lift its
dead mother back onto her feet again with its tiny
trunk.’

‘It has to be done, Craig,’ said Jonathan quietly.
‘The parks are overstocked by thousands of animals.’
But Craig seemed not to have heard.

‘If the orphan calves are too young to survive, we hit
them also, but if they are the right age, we round them up and
sell them to a nice old man who takes them away and resells them
to a zoo in Tokyo or Amsterdam, where they will stand behind bars
with a chain around the foot and eat the peanuts that the
tourists throw them.’

‘It has to be done,’ Jonathan repeated.

‘He was taking kickbacks from the animal-dealers,’
Craig said. ‘So that we were ordered to leave orphans that
were so young they only had a fifty-fifty chance of survival. So
that we looked for herds with high percentages of small calves.
He was taking bribes from the dealers.’

‘Who? Not Tomkins, the head warden?’ Jonathan
exclaimed.

‘Yes, Tomkins.’ Craig stood up and took both their
glasses to refill.

‘Have you got proof?’

‘No, of course I haven’t,’ Craig replied
irritably. ‘If I had I would have taken it straight to the
minister.’

‘So you just refused to cull.’

Craig flopped back in the chair, long bare legs sprawled and
hair hanging in his eyes.

‘That’s not all. They are stealing the ivory from
the cull. We are supposed to leave the big bulls, but Tomkins
ordered us to hit anything with good ivory, and the tusks
disappear.’

‘No proof on that either, I suppose?’ Jonathan
asked drily.

‘I saw the helicopter making the pick-up.’

‘And you got the registration letters?’

‘They were masked,’ Craig shook his head,
‘but it was a military machine. It’s
organized.’

‘So you punched Tomkins?’

‘It was beautiful,’ said Craig dreamily. ‘He
was on his hands and knees trying to pick up his teeth that were
scattered all over the floor of his office. I never worked out
what he was going to do with them.’

‘Craig, my boy, what did you hope to achieve? Do you
think it will stop them, even if your suspicions are
correct?’

‘No, but it made me feel a lot better. Those elephant
are almost human. I became pretty fond of them.’

They were both silent for a while and then Jonathan sighed.
‘How many jobs is that now, Craig?’

‘I wasn’t keeping score, Bawu.’

‘I can’t believe that anybody with Ballantyne
blood in his veins is totally lacking in either talent or
ambition. Christ, boy, we Ballantynes are winners, look at
Douglas, look at Roland—’

‘I’m a Mellow, only half a Ballantyne.’

‘Yes, I suppose that accounts for it. Your grandfather
frittered away his share in the Harkness Mine, so when your
father married my Jean he was almost a pauper. Good God, those
shares would be worth ten million pounds today.’

‘That was during the great depression of the Thirties
– a lot of people lost money then.’

‘We didn’t – the Ballantynes
didn’t.’

Craig shrugged. ‘No, the Ballantynes doubled up during
the depression.’

‘We are winners,’ Jonathan repeated. ‘But
what happens to you now? You know my rule, you don’t get a
penny more from me.’

‘Yes, I know that rule, Jon-Jon.’

‘You want to try working here again? It didn’t pan
out so well last time, did it?’

‘You are an impossible old bastard,’ said Craig
fondly. ‘I love you, but I’d rather work for Idi Amin
than for you again.’

Jonathan looked immensely pleased with himself. His image of
himself as tough, ruthless and ready to kill, was another of his
conceits. He would have been deeply insulted if anybody had
called him easy-going or generous. The large anonymous donations
he made to every charity, deserving or otherwise, were always
accompanied by blood-curdling threats to anybody revealing his
identity.

‘So what are you going to do with yourself this
time?’

‘Well, I was trained as an armourer when I did my
national service, and there is an armourer’s berth open in
the police. The way I see it, I’m going to be called up
again anyway, so I might as well beat them to it and
enlist.’

‘The police,’ Jonathan mused, ‘that does
have the virtue of being one of the few things you haven’t
tried yet. Get me another drink.’

While Craig poured gin and tonic, Jonathan put on his fiercest
expression to cover his embarrassment and growled, ‘Look
here, boy, if you are really short, I’ll bend the rule this
once, and lend you a few dollars to tide you over. Strictly a
loan though.’

‘That’s very decent of you, Bawu, but a rule is a
rule.’

‘I make ‘em, I break ‘em,’ Jonathan
glared at him. ‘How much do you need?’

‘You know those old books you wanted?’ Craig
murmured, as he put the old man’s glass back in front of
him, and an expression of intense cunning came into
Jonathan’s eyes which he tried in vain to conceal.

‘What books?’ His innocence was loaded.

‘Those old journals.’

‘Oh, those!’ And despite himself Jonathan glanced
at the bookshelves beside his desk upon which were displayed his
collection of family journals. They stretched back over a hundred
years, from the arrival of his grandfather, Zouga Ballantyne, in
Africa in 1860 up to the death of Jonathan’s father, Sir
Ralph Ballantyne, in 1929, but the sequence was broken by a few
missing years, three volumes which had come down on Craig’s
side of the family, through old Harry Mellow, who had been Sir
Ralph’s partner and dearest friend.

For some perverse reason that Craig could not even understand
himself, he had up until now resisted all the old man’s
blandishments and attempts to get his hands on them. It was
probably because they were the one small lever he had on Jonathan
that he had held out since they had come into his possession on
his twenty-first birthday, the only item of any value in the
inheritance from his long-dead father.

‘Yes, those,’ Craig nodded. ‘I thought I
might let you have them.’

‘You must be hard pressed.’ The old man tried not
to let his glee shine through.

‘Even more than usual,’ Craig admitted.

‘You waste—’

‘Okay, Bawu. We’ve been down that road
before,’ Craig stopped him hurriedly. ‘Do you want
them?’

‘How much?’ Jonathan demanded suspiciously.

‘Last time you offered me a thousand each.’

‘I must have been soft.’

‘Since then there has been a hundred per cent
inflation—’

Jonathan loved to haggle. It enhanced his image of himself as
hard and ruthless. Craig reckoned he was worth ten million. He
owned King’s Lynn and four other ranches. He owned the
Harkness Mine which after eighty years in production was still
producing 50,000 ounces of gold a year, and he had assets outside
this beleaguered country, prudently stashed away over the years
in Johannesburg, London and New York. Ten million was probably
conservative, Craig realized, and set himself to bargain as hard
as the old man.

At last they reached a figure with Jonathan grumbling,
‘They’re worth half of that.’

‘There are two other conditions, Bawu.’ And
immediately Jonathan was suspicious again.

‘Number one, you leave them to me in your will, the
whole set, Zouga Ballantyne’s and Sir Ralph’s
journals, all of them.’

‘Roland and Douglas—’

‘They are going to get King’s Lynn and the
Harkness and all the rest – that’s what you told
me.’

‘Damn right,’ he growled. ‘They won’t
blow it all out the window like you would.’

‘They can have it,’ Craig grinned easily.
‘They are Ballantynes as you say, but I want the
journals.’

‘What is your second condition?’ Jonathan
demanded.

‘I want access to them now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want to be able to read and study any of them
whenever I want to.’

‘What the hell, Craig, you have never given a damn about
them before. I doubt you have even read the three you
own.’

‘I’ve glanced through them,’ Craig admitted
shamefacedly.

‘And now?’

‘I was up at Khami Mission this morning, in the old
cemetery. There is a grave there, Victoria
Mellow—’

Jonathan nodded. ‘Aunty Vicky, Harry’s wife, go
on.’

‘I had this strange feeling as I was standing there.
Almost as though she was calling to me.’ Craig plucked at
the thick forelock over his eyes and could not look at his
grandfather. ‘And suddenly I wanted to find out more about
her, and the others.’