were in Notting Hill, Sannie said, ‘I remember the movie. With Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Lovely.’
‘I remember the race riots here, in 1976. I was just a kid, but it was ugly.’
‘Same year as Soweto. I hope we’re learning, Tom.’
Talking of Africa, there was something else he remembered that he wanted to ask Sannie. ‘What do you know about monkeys?’
She looked at him askance. ‘A little. I grew up with them all around me on the farm, and I see them in the bush sometimes. Why?’
‘How would the terrorists have captured them?’
‘It wouldn’t be hard. If you park a car with some food in it — bananas, bread, marshmallows; anything, really — they’ll get into it. All you’d have to do is put some bait in the back of a bakkie and be quick enough to lock them in. You could dart them, too, I suppose.’
‘What about the one that was tied down to the bed? Are they easy to hold down?’
‘No ways, man,’ Sannie said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘They’d bite and scratch you nearly to death. That one would have been darted or doped somehow. What are you thinking, Tom?’
He ignored her question, pointing out Hyde Park on their right as they cruised past. They crossed the Thames on Vauxhall Bridge, and when they turned left onto the Albert Embankment, Tom pointed out the office block where SO1 Specialist Protection was housed, Tintagel House, and landmarks between it and the hotel where Sannie was staying, a short walk away.
‘Here we are,’ he said, stopping the car outside the Thistle. ‘Let’s meet up after you’ve finished with Shut- tleworth, but I don’t want to be seen too close to work, given that I’m not supposed to be working the case.’
‘What about near the Houses of Parliament somewhere — I’d like to take a look at the Palace of Westminster from the outside, before the inquiry, get my bearings,’ Sannie said.
‘Perfect,’ Tom said. ‘When you’re finished, walk back across the river on Lambeth Bridge. There’s a pub across the road from the palace, called St Stephen’s Tavern. I’ll be there in two hours, by which time you’ll hopefully be finished. I’m going to find an internet cafe in the meantime.’
Sannie paused before opening the car door. ‘Do you think Janet Greeves will have called your Chief Inspector Shuttleworth?’
‘I’m afraid so. Good luck.’
24
Back in her hotel room, Sannie brushed her hair, fixed her makeup and walked back out into the bitter London cold. She found her way to Waterloo station and bought a British Rail ticket for the one-stop ride to Vauxhall. Already she was confused. As well as the London Underground — the tube, which she had heard about — apparently there were other trains.
The station was overwhelming, with its throngs of people rushing past her. Everyone seemed to know where they were going. She stopped a young man to ask directions, but he only spoke Spanish. An elderly English woman was more helpful. The train was warm but crowded.
By the time she alighted at Vauxhall’s mainline station she wondered whether it would have been easier, in fact, to walk. Using the A-Z Tom had loaned her, Sannie found her way back to the Thames and the Albert Embankment.
She recognised the distinctive architecture of Vauxhall Cross, the home of Britain’s overseas intelligence organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service — SIS or MI6 — from a James Bond film she’d seen.
It had to be the most ostentatious secret building in the world. It looked like some futuristic temple, inspired, though, by the ancient Mayan or Mesopotamian stepped pyramids. Deep green shoots of glass, which looked to be thick enough to stop a rocket, sprouted from its angular beige terraces. Security men dressed all in black added to the Hollywood image of the spies’ nest, which was topped off by a pair of bizarre giant white springs, festooned in turn with satellite dishes and radio antennae.
If Vauxhall Cross was like something from a George Lucas movie, the Metropolitan Police’s old office building further down the Albert Embankment was straight out of the days of black and white television. It was an office block in the truest sense. No funky futuristic lines here — just an uninspiring, faintly depressing, sixties monolith of pale concrete and red brick that was grubby with age.
A bored-looking civilian security guard asked for her identity and pointed the way across the marbled floor, the only concession to flamboyance in the building, to the lift lobby. When she got out of the lift the stone was gone, replaced by dirty grey carpet tiles. She came to a wooden door with a glass panel and pushed a buzzer. It seemed she was expected, because when she said her name to a woman squirrelled away somewhere inside, the electronic lock clicked and Sannie pushed open the door.
Before her was mostly empty office space which could have been populated by any bunch of bureaucrats anywhere in the world. It was fitted out with computer workstations. Two men and a woman in plain clothes were tapping away on keyboards. A mousy woman with horn-rimmed glasses looked up and said, ‘Inspector Rensburg, is it?’ The woman spoke loud and slowly, in the way that ignorant tourists do when they think slowing their delivery and increasing their volume will somehow make a non-English speaker pick up a few words.
‘Van Rensburg.’
‘Chief Inspector Shuttleworth’s waiting for you. Corner office.’
‘ Baie dankie. ’ Sannie smiled to herself as she headed for the office, and casually wiped her right hand on the side of her black pants. With her other she brushed an imaginary stray hair from her forehead.
A man in his early fifties, with a thinning pate and the deep-etched lines of stress defining his gaunt face, opened the door before she reached it and said, ‘Hello, I’m David Shuttleworth. You must be Susan?’
It started cordially, with the pair of them making tea in the office kitchen before getting down to business. Outside, the sky was still a uniform grey and it seemed to match the skin tone of most of the people she’d so far seen in this cold, crowded city. She knew the politeness would soon disappear. Shuttleworth ushered her into his office, which was a fishbowl on one side of the floor. He lowered slimline blinds to stop the other detectives from peering in.
‘I’ve had a call from Robert Greeves’s widow,’ Shuttleworth began.
Sannie sighed. It had been too much to hope that the woman’s fear of some defamatory news about her husband leaking out might have led her to keep quiet about their unauthorised visit.
‘Inspector Van Rensburg.’ All trace of civility had fallen with the blinds. ‘I have no authority over you, but let me assure you that you most certainly do not have any jurisdiction here to be interviewing relatives of a deceased British politician.’
‘Of course not, Chief Inspector, and I’m — ’
‘If it were up to me I’d have you on the next plane back to South Africa. Do you not think that we’ve looked into Robert Greeves’s home life already?’
Sannie knew that any response from her at this point would be the wrong one, so she kept her silence.
‘I know Furey’s looking for someone else to put the blame on, some slip-up by Greeves or Roberts that might have made it inevitable that the terrorists would kill them, and that there was nothing Tom could have done to prevent it. But that is not the case.’
Sannie wasn’t so sure about that, but again she held her tongue.
‘From what I heard about you while I was in South Africa you’re lucky to be still on the job. You let him lead you off on a wild-goose chase that — ’
‘That very nearly caught the people responsible and freed the hostages.’
Shuttleworth was having none of it. He stood and put his hands on his desktop, then leaned forward, closing the distance between them. ‘Very nearly is not good enough. You two were playing catch-up all the time, and the villains outran you. Simple as that.’
‘Tom Furey was the only one on the trail of those men and it wasn’t his fault that they got away. Those are the facts of this case, and that’s what I’ll be telling your parliamentary inquiry, Chief Inspector.’
Shuttleworth sat down again and smoothed his tie. He looked, Sannie thought, like a man who did not raise his voice very often, especially not to women. She saw him struggling to retrieve his dour, unflustered demeanour.
