Sandham had started him on his road. Jack wanted to meet him for a drink, to listen to his quiet control.
'Could I speak to Mr Sandham, please – a personal call.'
A woman's voice, 'Not here I'm afraid.'
'Will I get him later, this afternoon?'
'He's taken a few days' leave.'
'Since when?'
'He left yesterday.'
''How long is he away?'
' Who is it asking for him, please?' lack put the phone down. He tried the home number. No reply.
He rang George Hawkins and invited himself over. He rang D amp; C and said he wouldn't be back that day.
It hit him. He had forgotten Duggie Arkwright. After leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, he had walked into the West End, and then he had spent another ten minutes looking for a phone that wasn't broken or occupied. Duggie had sat down at the entrance to the square when Jack had gone forward to meet Thiroko. He hadn't been there when Jack had left. Duggie had done the introduction and had himself a tail, and Jack had put him out of his mind. He'd ring him when he could. He'd ring him when he came back.
He looked into a shop window. There were three layers of television sets: cash, sale, and credit. They all carried the same picture. Of high armoured personnel carriers driving through a South African township of tin roofs and brick walls, and of gas plumes, and of the blue uniforms blasting with their shot guns, of running crowds, of police chasing with the long whips held back to strike in anger. The caption said they were old pictures, had to be because the camera crews were banned from the riot areas.
He wasn't going there to take a side in a civil war. He was going there to bring his father home. And it wasn't real. It was only old pictures on a bank of television screens. He knew what was bloody real. It was that his father was going to hang in three weeks, that Duggie had a tail that morning, that a woman had said Sandham had gone on leave.
He went to find his car, then to George's to talk about explosives.
He was the moth, the file was the lamp.
The Director General had read, word by word, every page in the Curwen/Carew file. He had started to imagine that he knew the man.
There was a photograph in uniform, early twenties from its date. There was a portrait shot before the fiasco in Albania. There was another shot taken during the debrief and after the hospital check-up. There was a blow-up of a Johannesburg newspaper photograph of Carew being brought out of court. The change was Albania. The flesh had been stripped off the man. But he couldn't mistake the defiance in the features, especially in those taken after the decade in Spac.
He had read Carew's South African reports. They were poorly written, but they were dense with names and gossip.
There was no analysis, no interpretation, all as raw as sewage in a down flow. It crossed his mind to wonder whether the security police in Pretoria often had access to such quality information.
In the Alexandra township, three doors down Fifteenth Avenue from the north side junction with Hofmeyer there were stored under the back room floor boards, two R.P.G.-7 anti-tank rocket launchers, and eight missiles for the launchers were in waste ground beside the church wall on Second Avenue.
A 49-year-old street cleaner, who lived on Key in the Jabulani district of Soweto, had for two years been Umkonto we Sizwe commander of the whole township.
Seven Kalashnikov rifles were buried in protective grease wrapping in Dobsonville in the park that was bordered by Mahlangati and Matomela.
At a house, number given, on Mhlaba in the Chiawelo district, military planning meetings were held, when security conditions allowed movement in the night of the first Tuesday of each month. The fall back rendezvous was on Pilane in the Molapo district.
There was the house number in the Mamelodi township of Pretoria where a press printed A.N.C. literature. There was the name of the school from which that literature was dispersed, the identity of the schoolmaster who wrote the broadsheets.
Lists of officials in South African Laundry, Dry Cleaning and Dyeing Workers Union, and in Textile Workers Union (Transvaal), and in South African Chemical Workers Union, who were either politically or militarily active in A.N.C.
The names of couriers, African names, who carried low-level messages around the townships. One White named.
| van Niekerk, aged 19, disabled, student. And a White girl, named. Both addresses.
Careful maps showing infiltration routes into South Africa from Botswana.
The numbers of bank accounts, and the addresses of those hanks. Accounts and banks where the A.N. C's money was lodged.
The Director General read through lists of intended targets. Police stations, power lines, railway track, a sewage filtration plant, a military recruiting office. A long list • • • There was a sketch plan of the approach route to be used for the rocket attack on the Sasolburg fuel storage tanks. There were the operational orders for the strike on the Voortrekkerhoogte army base. There were verbatim arguments between cadre cells on the priorities of attacks. Damned hard material to come by, no mistake.
The reports from years back had been worked over, he could see the pencil and ink ticks and underlinings that showed him that once these reports had been valued. Not the reports of the year before Carew's arrest. They were unmarked, and he thought they had gone unread into the file.
He was fitting together his picture of his man. He read that the S.I.S. officer attached to the British embassy in Pretoria used to come once a month to Johannesburg and go to a certain taxi rank at the South African Airways terminal and take a certain licensed taxi and pay for his fare and receive the latest Carew report with his change. All as amateurish as if his service had been playing boy scout pranks.
Carew had never come home. An addendum note stated
'Gone native'. A note in Fordham's handwriting to the effect that Curwen wouldn't trust himself too close to his former wife and his grown-up son should he ever return to London.
All the time the poor devil was being paid. Last Friday of every month a pay cheque rolling into a bank account in Liechtenstein. Signatories to the account: James Curwen, Col. B. Fordham. Statements from accounts at Century concerning the amounts deducted from his salary to make allowance for monies earned from his taxi driving.
He had misjudged his man, but he still believed he was past saving. He rose from his desk.
Silently he paced his carpet.
Past saving?
He pondered the options.
He extended the forefinger of his right hand. They could come clean to the South African government and make an apology and plead for clemency. Second finger. They could scuffle around for sufficient leverage to ensure that Pretoria would respond to negotiation and spare his man and hold silence. Third finger. They could break the legman out from the hanging gaol.
He snapped his fist shut. Absolutely not on. Inconceivable in the time, and fantasy.
Past saving.
He had a meeting scheduled with the Permanent Under Secretary for the late afternoon. The P.U.S. outranked the Director General for all that the Director General was in a position to control the flow of information available to the P.U.S. In the matter of James Sandham, the flow would be dammed at once. He had set aside 45 minutes directly after lunch, for himself and his principal officials to discuss the Carew case. It was a gesture, the setting aside of senior men's time, and unless someone came up with something right out of the ordinary it was the last gesture the Service would and could make.
•* •
