audience gasping, willing him to go faster. Stood to reason that fives and sixes couldn't be as fast as hanging one man alone. Frikkie de Kok, as he always said to his assistant, would never hurry.
To hurry was the fastest way to a fiasco. So, they had stayed at the gaol all day, and they had made their preparations, and because he had a combined condemns weight of 325 kilos on the trap he had gone down underneath and checked each single bolt and screw of the trap. It paid to be careful in Frikkie de Kok's job. A good day's work, and after his tea his assistant was coming back to collect him, and there would be a good evening's entertainment at the Harlequins, a floodlit Cup match. He was thinking of his shower, and of getting out of his suit, as he pushed open his front garden gate. He was thinking of the match as he came up the path, and how the second team flank forward would cope, because he was replacing the injured first choice.
He opened his front door. He could see into the living room. His two boys, singlets and shorts, red cheeks and sweat, pumping iron on his living room carpet. So they shared the weights. Beautiful to Frikkie de Kok to see his boys working on the weights. And beautiful for him to hear that his Hermione was in the kitchen making his tea.
Beautiful also to be going to the Harlequins for a match.
And beautiful to know that he had a quiet day to follow before his waking before dawn on Thursday.
He thought he could smell a meat pie from the kitchen, and he thought the Harlequins would beat Defence, and he thought he would make a hell of a fine job of dropping five on Thursday morning.
The colonel listened intently.
Sometimes it was a good line from London. That evening it was a poor line. He was listening on an open line to the brigadier who headed security police operations throughout Western Europe. Major Hannes Swart enjoyed a particular autonomy in London, but nominally he reported to the brigadier.
He had forgotten the funeral, slipped it from his mind.
Aunt Annie was dead, buried, gone. He had forgotten the minister's rallying words and the repetitive threat of the Afrikaners' vengeance. He had forgotten them because they were meaningless, they were rhetoric when set against the real warfare of his own battlefield.
'They would have been carrying their IDs, so it cannot be a hospital situation. If they had been in any form of accident then we would have heard from the police or from a hospital. I have checked back over the instructions that were sent to Hannes yesterday morning. I have had a man go down to this Churchill Close address. Not easy, there is a police car parked outside the house. So, I have a problem.
What sort of inquiry am I to make? Delicate, eh, you understand me? This afternoon I have been to the Foreign Office and I have reported that Hannes and his two colleagues are missing. Perhaps the man I meet is lying, perhaps he is in ignorance. He tells me that he has no knowledge of the whereabouts of these three members of our staff. I cannot ask him if they are in police custody, because he will ask me why I should suppose that. I'm at a halt.'
The telephone purred in the colonel's ear. He thought the brigadier didn't give a shit for the John Vorster Square bomb. The bastard was swanning in Paris and London and Amsterdam and Bonn, the bastard was freeloading in Europe.
He rang through to the library. He requested all communications over the previous month from Major Swart of the London Embassy. He was told such records were classified.
He said he knew they were classified. He was told that for access to classified communications he needed the counter-signature of the head of library on the docket. He shouted into the telephone that he knew access to classified communications required the counter-signature of the head of library. He was told the head of library was at supper, had left the building, would be back in 40 minutes.
What a fucking way to run a fucking intelligence gathering operation.
He telephoned his wife. He told her he would not be home until late. He said he thought the funeral had gone well.
She told him that the immersion heater had broken, the thermostat had failed, that there was no hot water in the house. He asked her what she wanted. Did she want South Africa sleeping safe, or did she want her husband as a plumber, for God's sake.
* * *
They moved all of their possessions to the corridor leading to the front door, their bags and the explosives and the firearms.
Each of them held a handkerchief underneath the kitchen tap and then set to work methodically to clean the rooms of finger prints. Jack took the bedroom, Jan the living room, and Ros did the kitchen. Not for the sake of Jack's prints, but for the brother's and the sister's.
When they had finished they carried the bags and the explosives and the firearms down the back fire escape to the car park, to Ros's Beetle, and to the car she and Jan had stolen.
Jeez sat on his bed.
Sergeant Oosthuizen had moved his chair from the end of the C section 2 corridor, by the locked doorway, to outside Jeez's cell. He allowed Jeez's door to be three, four inches open.
It was in direct contradiction of regulations. At this time in the evening, with the lights dimmed, Jeez should have been locked into his cell.
He was like a terrier with a rabbit, with conversation. If Jeez didn't respond to him then Sergeant Oosthuizen asked a question that demanded an answer. As though good Sergeant Oosthuizen had determined that a man who was to hang in less than a day and a half was best served by making conversation.
Jeez didn't know his mind, didn't know whether he wanted to hear the retirement plans over again, didn't know whether he was better with the silence and the worm of his own thoughts. A new worm crawling. The worm was money.
Money in the bank. Earning interest, accumulating. He had the account number and Century had the account number.
Who would tell Hilda the number? The guy who used to know him in accounts, old Threlfall, bloody long time retired. Worry worming as a cash register, and trying to hold the thread against Oosthuizen's battering. He understood why Sergeant Oosthuizen talked about his retirement and about his kids. It was all Oosthuizen could talk about that did not drive coaches through the already broken regulations. He couldn't talk about the State President's plans for reform, because Jeez wouldn't be there to see them. He couldn't talk about the unrest, because Jeez to him was a part of that unrest. He couldn't talk about Jeez, about Jeez being the centre of whispering interest through the gaol, because it was Tuesday night and Jeez was to hang at dawn on Thursday. Good Sergeant Oosthuizen ploughed on from his exhausted retirement plans into the difficulties at his son's liquor store in Louis Trichardt.
The murmur sounds of singing.
Jeez heard them.
Not the great choir of that dawn when a single man had gone to his death, when the whole company of Blacks had sung the hymn to strengthen him as he walked the corridor to the shed of execution. A fist of voices only.
Oosthuizen heard the singing, and the slam of a door that cut into the singing, and he was off his chair and straightening his tunic and heaving his chair away from Jeez's door and back to the proper place beside the exit door from the corridor of C section 2.
Firm, bold singing. More of an anthem than a hymn.
'I'm sorry, Carew, believe me. I have to lock you up…'
The singing was approaching. A few voices, along with the stamp of boots, and the shouts in Afrikaans for doors ahead to be opened.
'What's happening?'
'They're bringing the others down. The other four.
They're going to double them up in two cells in here.'
