The Hunter (33 page)

Anna seemed not to hear or register his words as she pushed herself forward from the bench, closing the gap between them. Brand knew he should step back, turn away, but his feet felt rooted to the floor. The accommodation units were close enough for him to hear the water running in the shower next door. Anna was just a few centimetres from him now.

‘I’d like to come back to Africa.’ Anna blinked a couple of times and he saw the wetness glistening in her eyes. ‘England’s so cold. I miss the heat and I miss the bush.’

‘I’m not your ticket home.’ He clenched his fists by his side, trying to stay strong.

‘Sometimes I just want to run away, to disappear, like my sister tried to, before . . .’ Her body started to shake as the sobs took hold of her.

It was instinctive for him to put his hands on her arms, to draw her to him and try to comfort her. He felt her tears soaking into the dusty fabric of his bush shirt as he breathed in the scent of her shampoo. He could feel her heart beating against his chest and while he told himself he was simply comforting a lost and lonely soul his body betrayed his baser feelings and instincts. Next door the hiss of the shower stopped and he heard coughing.

‘Hold me.’

He drew her to him and kissed the wet hair on the top of her head. She looked up at him, silently beseeching him. Brand felt his heart turn to jelly. He was a sucker for a pretty girl, always had been, and the tears melted his resolve.

Brand held her at arm’s length. ‘You’ve got to go back to him now.’ She shook her head and lowered her eyes. ‘Yes.’ He crooked a finger under her chin and tilted her face up. ‘He doesn’t hurt you, does he, Anna?’

‘He doesn’t show rage, or happiness, or love, or laughter. Nothing. It’s like living with a robot. I can’t take it any more. He’d rather sleep with whores and strangers than me.’

This was messed up
, Brand thought. He’d had clients’ wives proposition him in the past, but he’d always been able to bat away their advances; he’d certainly never ended up embracing one and kissing one, nor allowed one to get as close to him as Anna had in the truck. He’d let her draw him in to her risk-taking behaviour and it was dangerous. He still didn’t particularly like Peter Cliff, though the man had possibly saved his bacon today, and he didn’t want to be a party to breaking up his marriage. He tried to look away from her eyes, but he couldn’t.

‘Goddamit.’

‘It’s not your fault, Hudson,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m irresistible.’

He laughed, and she smiled. Brand released his grip on her and she walked to the door and let herself out.

27

S
annie van Rensburg ended the call to Zimbabwe and swivelled in her chair to face Mavis.

‘What did Sergeant Goodness have to say for herself?’

Sannie put her hands together, as if in prayer, and touched her fingers to her chin. ‘Very interesting. Our Hudson Brand’s now wanted for murder in Victoria Falls. He seems to have escaped the country; some tourists he was escorting crossed into Botswana at a small border crossing, Pandamatenga, but there was no record of Brand leaving Zimbabwe. He’s either in hiding or he slipped across the border undetected.’

‘The actions of a guilty man?’

Sannie rocked her head from side to side. ‘Or an innocent one. If I was wrongly accused of a crime I wouldn’t like to spend time in a Zimbabwean prison hoping to clear my name. But the worrying thing is that the MO is exactly the same as in the two murders we’re looking at him for in South Africa.’

‘Strangled prostitute, with those terrible stab wounds?’ Mavis said.

‘Exactly. The Zimbabweans do have someone else they’re questioning – another of our locals, Patrick de Villiers.’

‘The same guy we questioned about the incident with the poachers in Kruger?’ Mavis asked.

‘The very same man. He and his brother, who’s a farmer, have both seen the inside of the Hazyview cells a few times,’ Sannie said.

‘We need to check if he was in Nelspruit and Cape Town at the same time as the other murders,’ Mavis said.

‘That’s going to be our next job. It seems De Villiers got into a punch-up with Brand and the prostitute the night she was killed.’

‘Convenient for Brand,’ Mavis said.

Sannie nodded. ‘My thoughts exactly. I don’t know what was going on between Goodness Khumalo and Brand, but he SMSed her the tip-off on De Villiers. It’s quite possible he was looking to set up the other man as a scapegoat.’

‘And we still need Brand to help us find . . .’ Sannie’s mobile phone began to ring and she answered it. ‘Hello? Hudson Brand; we were just talking about you.’ Sannie smiled at Mavis as she listened.

‘Thursday, Mr Brand? Yes, I’ll check those coordinates, but I know the area you mean, on the R536 on the road to the Paul Kruger Gate, just by the turnoff to Shaw’s Gate in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve. Are you in Zimbabwe, Mr Brand?’ She winked at Mavis.

‘Why wouldn’t you want to tell me where you are?’

Mavis wrote a note on a piece of paper and slid it in front of Sannie.
Because he’s guilty?
Sannie shrugged. ‘All right, Mr Brand, we’ll see you by the entrance to the Sabiepark Private Nature Reserve, near the Paul Kruger Gate, at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

*

Tom Furey dropped his three children at their school on the outskirts of Hazyview the following morning. Open game-viewing vehicles were common on the streets of the small town, which made its living largely out of the safari industry, but nonetheless the fact that Tom was driving one drew a crowd of admiring kids at the school gate.

His own three had been chatting excitedly through the drive from the farm to the school and Tom enjoyed the feel of the wind in his hair on the warm spring morning. He kissed little Tommy and Ilana goodbye and ruffled Christo’s hair. His oldest, who was Sannie’s son by her first husband, had made it clear he was getting too old to be kissed by his parents in public. He was growing into a fine young man, and his birth father would have been proud of him, Tom thought as he watched the kids join their friends in the playground. Tom waved to the principal.

Tom wore a khaki baseball cap, green shorts and a shirt embroidered with the logo of a local tour company above his left breast pocket, but he was no safari guide. He often wondered if he might have become a guide if he’d been born in South Africa instead of England; or perhaps he would have been drawn into the police service here as he had in his home country. He’d met Sannie six years earlier when they were both working as protection officers for politicians from the UK and South Africa. He told himself almost on a daily basis how much he didn’t miss the English winters or his job as a policeman, but there was no denying he felt a small thrill to be helping his wife out today, by going undercover.

In truth he wasn’t actually going undercover, but rather transporting a plain clothes surveillance team. He’d borrowed the green Land Rover game viewer from Greg Mahoney, who’d had no bookings that day. Sannie was short of manpower but rather than using a real guide and his vehicle she’d told Tom she wanted someone who could drive defensively in the event that their suspect tried to escape in a vehicle, or, worst case scenario, the bullets started flying.

Tom worried about Sannie every single day that she went to work. He worried about her weaving her way in and out among the interminable convoys of mining trucks on the R40, through the hills on her way to and from her work at Nelspruit, and he worried about the number of police officers killed – about one a day on average – in the line of duty in South Africa. Sannie’s first husband, Christo and Ilana’s father, had been shot by a hijacker in a crime related to his job, and Tom breathed a silent, secret sigh of relief every day when he saw Sannie’s car drive up the red dirt access road to their house on the banana farm.

If anyone in town, or his old colleagues back in the UK ever asked, he told them he loved the farming life. The truth was that it was hard work and the returns were diminishing as other suppliers in South Africa and around the world worked hard to undercut each other. Also, there was a fresh land claim on the farm and their lawyer could not assure them that it would be safe this time around. They were already talking about where they might buy a house if the government purchased the farm from them and gave it to some African people. Sannie was resigned to, though bitter about, their likely fate. Her parents had bought the farm from another family back in the sixties and had stolen it from no one. They had put their life’s work into it, and while Sannie had been keen to leave it in her teens and had lived in Johannesburg while working for the Police Protection Unit in Pretoria, she had been happy to get back to the farm after she’d married Tom.

And then Sannie had drifted back to police work. As much as he worried, Tom was proud of his wife; proud that she was giving her expertise back to her country and to the service she still loved.

And Tom realised, despite his protestations to the contrary, that he was secretly jealous of her. He loved his kids – Sannie’s two and their own son, little Tommy – and knew that he was far more fortunate than most fathers to see so much of them and to be involved so closely in their schooling. He knew all their teachers’ names and sometimes helped out around the school, doing handyman projects or sitting in as a teacher’s aide when he wasn’t busy with planting or harvesting. But this morning, as he’d looped the pancake holster onto his buffalo-hide belt for the first time in a very long time, and checked the action of his SIG Sauer nine-millimetre pistol before sliding in a magazine of freshly loaded bullets, he’d felt the short, sharp burst of adrenaline that had been missing from his life for as long as he’d been unarmed. When Sannie had let him see the case dockets on the murder cases it had taken him back to his days as a police officer and, despite the shocking nature of the crimes his wife was investigating, it had brought them closer again.

‘You won’t need that,’ Sannie had told him as they dressed in the pre-dawn darkness. She had left early to go to Nelspruit to rendezvous with her partner Mavis and the rest of their team.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you’re right, but you think this Brown woman might be armed, and if Brand’s guilty of the murders you’re looking at him for then he might try and run. I’m a civilian but I’m licensed to carry, and if I see you’re in trouble then I want to be armed.’

‘
Liefie
, I’m not asking you to help us because I need your protection. I need a good driver and, just between us, you’re better trained and more experienced than anyone the station will give me.’

‘Why else?’ he’d asked her as he loaded the pistol.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m just the driver, moving the surveillance team. We both know that the likelihood of me even getting close to either suspect is very remote.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘I know, baby. I also thought, well, maybe you might need something like this.’

‘Need?’

He thought about her statement and his question now as he drove past Perry’s Bridge and the Simunye Centre, and waited at the robot to turn left into the R536, towards the Paul Kruger Gate entrance to the national park, and Sabiepark, where he’d meet his wife again.
Need.

She’d brushed it off, saying she thought every man, every person, needed a bit of excitement in their life. That implied she thought he was bored, and he’d told her he was happy with their life on the farm. He waited for the coal truck in front of him to creep forward slowly as the light changed, and ignored the minibus taxi that shot up the gravel verge beside him on his left.

‘Have you seen it in me? Have I acted like I’m bored?’

‘No, no, no,’ she’d assured him. ‘But I wondered if you missed it, the job. The excitement.’

‘Did you show me the case docket because you felt sorry for me?’ he’d asked her.

‘No, because I needed a fresh set of eyes on them, and I value your opinion and experience. Do you miss the job?’

‘No,’ he’d lied to his wife, ‘but I’ll do this to help you.’

‘Then thank you.’ She’d kissed him. For some reason he had been annoyed, but now he knew she was right, and that she’d read him better than he had himself. He looked forward to seeing her, even more than he usually did when she arrived home and kissed the kids; now he looked forward to seeing her as an equal rather than as a stay-at-home house husband. She knew him so well and that was one of the many reasons he loved her so much.

Tom slowed for a herd of cows crossing the road in the middle of the sprawling township of Mkhulu, then again for the police speed trap he knew would be around the bend ahead. The last thing he needed was to be delayed by a bribe-seeking traffic cop when he was on his way to help with a police investigation. He waved to the traffic officer as he passed the speed camera, and accelerated to eighty kilometres per hour as he left the houses and roadside stalls behind and started seeing bush again.

He passed Elephant Point and Hippo Rock, other estates similar to Sabiepark, where locals and foreigners kept holiday homes in the bush on the verge of the Kruger Park. He thought it might be nice for he and Sannie to buy a house in one of these places, maybe, if they lost the farm. On some of these bushveld estates owners were limited to spending six months or less in their houses, so that the estates could be kept as peaceful bushveld retreats. Maybe they could spend the balance of the year in a townhouse in one of the newer developments in White River or, once the kids were older, travelling the world.

He remembered Sannie in a bikini on their honeymoon, on the beach in Pomene in Mozambique, the kids staying at her mother’s house in Johannesburg. He pictured them on a Greek island, just the two of them. It had been a few weeks since they’d had sex; he wondered if it was the stress of the parallel investigations Sannie had been working, the unsolved murder and the women who had been robbing houses. He hadn’t pushed the issue or tried to initiate it, but maybe she’d been waiting for him to make the first move? When they’d married they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other, both starved for physical intimacy since their respective partners had died. Tom’s wife had passed away from cancer about a year before he’d met Sannie. Well, he was dressed as a safari guide and had his own open Land Rover – if he couldn’t get himself a hot chick tonight then he was a disgrace to the khaki-clad species. He smiled, his mood lightening again. The sky was a perfect, clear blue, and the dry bush was thin enough for him to see the Sabie River and the Kruger Park beyond, off to his right.

Tom approached the access road turnoff on the left that led to the Shaw’s Gate entrance to the Sabi Sand Game Reserve. He searched the bush; there was no one loitering in the area and no parked vehicles that he could see. It was still half an hour until the agreed rendezvous between Hudson Brand and Linley Brown, which would take place on the corner he had just glimpsed.

Other than a harem of a dozen or more female impala and their chaperoning ram there were no animals to be seen in the game reserve. On Tom’s right he could see the thatch-roofed houses of Sabiepark. Two kilometres on he turned right into the driveway of the estate. Sannie was standing by the reception buildings, her white Mercedes sedan and a police
bakkie
parked to one side.

As Tom turned into the estate he saw in his rear-view mirror a tan Land Cruiser with Zimbabwean plates pulling up behind him. Sannie was surrounded by a semicircle of people, including Mavis, a white couple dressed in khaki and green safari wear, and two police officers in blue-grey uniforms. A couple of security officers in green looked on from the estate’s boom gate.

Sannie looked over at the sound of his arrival. Tom switched off the engine and climbed down. She smiled at him. She was wearing jeans, flat-soled brown leather boots that came to her knees and a long-sleeved T-shirt. It had to be pushing twenty-eight degrees Celsius, but Tom knew that Lowveld people considered anything under thirty to be the dead of winter. Despite the heat she looked cool and sexy.

‘Everyone, for those who don’t know him, this is my husband, Tom Furey. Tom worked as a detective in the UK and he’s going to be driving Jaapie and Elmarie today.’ Tom shook hands with Sergeant Jaapie de Beer, and said hi to Warrant Officer Elmarie de Bruin, who he’d met a couple of times before socially. Sannie introduced him to sergeants Ngwenya and Valoyi from Skukuza police station, who had been brought in to transport the suspects to Nelspruit in their
bakkie
once the arrests were made.

A tall, dark man dressed similarly to Tom in shorts and bush shirt came up to them from the parked Land Cruiser behind.