Tom pretended to write. ‘You’re coming with me, to the police station in Acornhoek, and you’re going to explain to the headman there why you’re not cooperating with this important investigation.’ The man looked worried and Tom felt sorry for him. He had no right — legal or otherwise — to threaten the caretaker. ‘Unless, of course, you just give me the bloody guest book. Now!’
Amos seemed to cringe at the barked command. He ducked behind the bar and withdrew a large leather- bound volume. Tom simply nodded as the older man slid the document across the bar. He stood there, though, watching Tom as he opened the book.
Tom started at the front, which dated back three years. Only about a third of the book was full, he noted. Obviously the doctor didn’t entertain too many guests. On the fourth page he found the two names he was looking for. One above the other. His face showed no recognition, but in his mind he was punching the air. He felt his heart beat faster as he moved through the following pages. Three more entries — the same two names on each occasion. It was all he needed, though he also committed three other regularly appearing names to memory. Two listed Pretoria as their home address, while the third was from Russia, which was interesting. He would have to check them all out. There were no entries for the past four weeks.
‘When was the doctor here last, Amos?’ Tom closed the book.
Amos retrieved the book and placed it carefully under the bar. ‘Other police asked that, sir.’
Tom knew he was on shaky ground. The longer he lingered, the more suspicious the old caretaker would become. ‘I know you told them, Amos, but we’re cross-checking his last movements. It’s important that you tell me.’
Amos looked skywards, as though he was calculating the date. ‘One month ago, sir.’
‘And he came in his Isuzu. His bakkie?’
‘Yes, sir. I still have the telephone number of the police who came, sir. Can we call them now?’
Tom ignored him and pointed to the beachside sunset picture. ‘Where was that taken?’
Amos was surprised by the question, the reaction Tom had hoped for. He wanted to get the old man’s mind off calling the police. ‘Malawi, sir.’
‘The doctor’s beach house?’
Amos nodded.
‘At Cape Maclear, right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The other police didn’t ask about Malawi, did they?’
‘No, sir. Perhaps we call them now.’
Tom put his notebook and pen away, and turned and walked back into the sunshine. ‘That won’t be necessary. Thanks for your help, Amos,’ he said, as he strode across to the Land Rover. He was in business.
Back inside the Kruger National Park, Tom made it as far north as Shingwedzi camp just before the gates closed at six-thirty. The sun melted behind the thorny bushveld outside the perimeter fence as he unfolded the tent and lit a fire. He turned on his mobile phone and called Sannie at home.
‘Tom! Where are you?’
He told her, then started recounting the morning’s trip out to Doctor Khan’s private game lodge in the Timbavati.
Sannie cut him off. ‘Tom, you’re crazy. If the local cops find out what you’re up to, you’ll be arrested. You didn’t tell me you were sticking your nose into our investigations over here. When I told you about Khan being the owner of the bakkie the terrorists used, I didn’t expect you to go investigating him!’
‘Sannie, listen to me. Robert Greeves, with Nick Roberts as his protection officer, visited Khan’s lodge on at least three occasions in the last two years.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
‘Sannie? Presumably you guys ran a criminal check on Khan.’ It was all too much of a coincidence — Khan having a property on the border of Kruger, not far from Tinga, and disappearing just before the abduction. He wanted to check out the doctor’s life for himself, and his first cursory look had revealed a solid connection to Greeves that the South African police had missed. That was sloppy detective work, if not something worse, on their part.
‘Of course. It came up clean — I double-checked.’
‘What about ongoing criminal investigations?’
Sannie paused again. ‘I don’t know. I’ll check tomorrow, but what am I to tell my people — that you’re freelancing on this?’
‘No. Tell them you’re acting on a hunch. Ask the detectives who went out to Khan’s place if they checked his guest book. They obviously didn’t. They were probably looking for bomb-making kits or AK 47s, but Khan was no terrorist.’
‘Then what do you suspect them of, Tom?’
‘Try your sex crimes unit. We know Khan was a bachelor who liked to party — but how and with whom? You’ve got to dig deep on this guy. He’s got a connection with Greeves and I don’t believe in coincidences.’
‘No cop does. Are you all right, Tom?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. You?’
‘I miss you.’
‘Me too.’
‘Are you coming back?’
It was his turn to pause. ‘Once all this is finished. I’ve got to bring your truck back, remember?’
‘Don’t joke. What is “all this”?’
‘I’ll let you know when I find out, Sannie. I promise. I’ll call you back when I can.’
He hung up and put some lamb chops on the braai. He ate and drank alone, save for a hyena which paused outside the camp fence and looked at him with mournful eyes. It was amazing, Tom thought, how quickly he’d become used to the presence of predators around him. He spoke to the hyena as though it was a pet, gently telling it he had no food to spare. There were plenty of signs on the fence and in the toilet blocks warning campers of the perils of feeding wildlife.
Tom opened another beer and thought about the road ahead of him.
Africa continued to reveal herself to him, at her own languid, alluring pace.
He packed in the pre-dawn cool and left for the Pafuri Gate in the far north. He stopped on the bridge over the Luvuvhu River to take in the view. Below him, browsing in some bushes on the bank of the fast-flowing river, were some antelope he hadn’t so far encountered. The map book Sannie had given him had pictures of animals as well. The chocolate brown creature with fine white stripes and dots and a long shaggy beardlike mane was a nyala. If the animal knew he was there, it ignored him. He envied its peaceful, simple existence. It still had to beware of lurking predators, though. In Africa, death could be as close as the next tree. He got back in the Land Rover and drove off.
Tom left behind the increasingly empty and restful national park, and was thrust back into the conflicts of modern-day Africa as he drove through the lands of the Venda people. Here, traditional reed and mud huts with bright geometric designs painted on the walls and pointed roofs stood side by side with new, utilitarian brick houses, funded by government construction programs. It looked to Tom as though the authorities were trying to skip the twentieth century altogether, to catapult people whose living standards had not changed much since the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. There was still a long way to go, from what he could see.
The Land Rover’s windscreen wipers worked overtime, trying to give him enough visibility to see through a sudden downpour, which drummed hard and loud on the vehicle’s aluminium roof. A trickle of water ran down the inside of the windscreen and door pillar, behind the dashboard, down the accelerator and over his sandalled foot. Some things were common to Land Rovers around the world, no matter the model or age.
He stopped in the hot, sticky border town of Musina, where the sun broke through the clouds and sucked the moisture back into the heavens, to top up on food and fuel, and headed west for another ninety-odd kilometres. There he drove across the dry bed of the Limpopo River, which marked the border between South Africa and Botswana at an out-of-the-way crossing called Pont Drift.
It would have been quicker for him to reach his destination by driving through Zimbabwe, but Sannie had warned him that the country’s perennial fuel shortages were a problem. Botswana, he soon discovered, consisted of miles and miles of empty countryside. He crossed more sandy riverbeds and skirted a herd of skittish elephants
