passenger seat.
Sannie also took off her jacket and hung it over the back of her seat. As she got in she pulled a Z88 nine- millimetre pistol from the holster clipped to a narrow belt at the top of her tailored skirt. She smiled at him and placed the weapon in a slot in the centre console where most people would keep their sunglasses.
‘Right,’ Tom said. He’d thought it wasn’t necessary for him to bring his Glock on the recce — just more paperwork — but now he wasn’t so sure.
‘It’s loaded and racked, by the way. We in the police tell the general public not to try to fight back or use their weapon if they get car-jacked.’
Tom had read that armed car hijacking was a serious problem in Johannesburg and other parts of the country, with robbers often shooting their victims. In the UK the people with guns were usually underworld criminals who tended to use them on each other rather than innocents.
‘So what’s your plan if we get stopped by a thief?’
‘If the car-jacker shoots me before I get him, I want you to kill him, okay?’
‘You’re serious?’
She smiled as she indicated and accelerated into the traffic outside the terminal.
‘Is this a wind-up?’ he persisted.
Sannie looked across at him, unsmiling now, and said, ‘My husband was a police captain, also in protection. He had worked with Nick Roberts, protecting Greeves. I was still at home on leave, pregnant with my third child. He was off duty, on his way to pick up our son from a friend’s place. He was shot at a robot — traffic lights — before he had a chance to go for his gun. It was two years ago. I lost the baby.’
Tom nodded, staring out the windscreen. He was trying to find the right words to express sorrow for her loss, but he knew from his own experience that nothing anyone ever said was right — or made it easier. He looked across and caught her glancing at him before returning her piercing gaze to the road.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For not saying anything.’
It all looked so normal. The industrial suburbs on the border of the airport reminded him of Staines, near Heathrow. He saw as many white faces as black ones as Sannie took an on-ramp onto a six-lane freeway. Signs advertised mobile phones and department stores and a casino. Johannesburg — Africa — might look like other parts of the world, but the pistol lying between them spoke of the violent subtext of life in this part of Africa.
Sannie said nothing more and he watched the way she drove. Aggressively defensive, he would have described it. Watching her rear-view mirror, keeping her distance from the car in front. When the traffic lights — the robot, as she had called it — turned red she stopped five metres from the car in front, so she had room to manoeuvre if someone accosted them.
‘You said you had a son?’ he said.
‘ Ja, a son and daughter. My boy is nine and my girl is five. My mother lives with us and she looks after them when I’m away.’
Sannie changed lanes and accelerated, pushing the speedometer up to a hundred and twenty kilometres. ‘Are you divorced, or do you just take your wedding ring off when you travel, like…?’ She glanced across at him.
He looked down at his left index finger. He’d only taken it off six months ago. He’d figured it was time, but he, as had Sannie, noticed there was still a faint tan line and an indentation caused by fifteen years of wear.
‘Alex died a year ago. Breast cancer.’
‘Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I knew you’d lost someone, but I didn’t realise it was your wife.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Not talking when I told you what happened to my husband and baby. It’s the people who haven’t known real grief who think words can make it easier. It doesn’t really go away, does it?’
‘Not that I can tell.’ He wanted desperately to change the subject. ‘What you were saying before, about taking off a wedding ring when travelling, you said “like”. Whose name were you about to add?’
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘Like Nick?’
‘Look, if he’s a friend of yours, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry he’s missing.’
‘But?’
‘What?’
‘I sensed there was a “but” coming then. Our wives knew each other better than we did. Nick’s a colleague, Sannie. I do want to try to work out what happened to him, but I can’t say I know him well enough to guess why he went missing — if it was a voluntary thing.’
‘Okay, well, I first met Nick about four years ago, when my husband was still alive and when Nick was still married.’
‘And?’
‘And he tried to hit on me.’
‘Really?’
‘ Ja. First trip, in the car on the first drive, just like you and me now. I couldn’t believe it. He says to me, “What goes on tour stays on tour.” I can tell you, I gave it to him big time.’
‘Did he ever try again?’
‘Once more, last year, after his marriage is over and my husband’s dead and my miscarriage, and he thinks I’m now available. We were in a pub with some other police. My friends were at the bar and we were alone and he says, “Is the time right now, baby?”’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told him that the time wouldn’t be right if we were the only two people left in the world, and then I klapped him, good and hard across the face.’
Tom smiled, but he was learning more about Nick and it wasn’t good.
‘I’m so gatvol of men these days.’
‘ Gatvol? ’ he asked. She had pronounced the ‘g’ as though she was about to spit at him, so the word, whatever it meant, seemed to match her sentiment.
‘Like “I’ve had enough” in English. But no offence, hey?’
He laughed. ‘None taken.’
From a map he’d glanced at, he knew the airport was on the eastern fringe of Johannesburg, and the factories, warehouses, mine slag heaps and outlying gated communities of townhouses hiding behind high whitewashed walls soon gave way to open grasslands and farms. Sannie explained that Johannesburg was on the highveld — at a higher altitude than where they were headed. Kruger was in the lowveld. ‘Hotter there. Stickier. I hope you brought your mozzie muti with you.’
‘Insect repellent?’ he checked.
‘It’s malaria country where we’re going, and quite bad this time of year — it’s the wet season.’
When they neared the exit for a town called Wit-bank he noticed his first car-jacking sign. It said, Warning — hijacking hotspot. Do not stop beneath a huge exclamation mark.
‘What do you do if you break down?’ he asked.
‘Pray,’ said Sannie, ‘and aim for the centre body mass.’
In Tom’s experience, most people living in supposedly dangerous parts of the world tended to talk down the perceived threat, usually issuing a few common words of warning such as, ‘Avoid such-and-such an area at night and you’ll be okay,’ or, ‘It’s not as bad as the media makes out’. From what Sannie had told him so far, the reverse seemed to be true in South Africa. People here were under no illusion about their local crime problem.
‘A lot of it is organised crime here, and the whites aren’t blameless. Also, we have people from all over Africa living in this country. The Zimbabweans who cross the border are dirt poor and some of them turn to theft — same with the Mozambicans. The Nigerians are the worst — they control the drug scene. It was different in the old days, when I first joined the police — back then we had the death penalty.’
And riots in Soweto and police opening fire on civilians, Tom thought, but said nothing. It was her country and he wasn’t here to make judgments.
‘I know what you’re thinking. But we’re not all mad racists, you know. I didn’t agree with a lot of what happened under apartheid, but we did have the crime problem under control.’
