‘Yes. That is where his office is. Violent Crimes.’
‘Oh …’
‘But he will come tomorrow. Early. Eight o’clock.’
‘Thank you,’ said Emma, but the constable was busy with the two men again, talking to them as if they were boys who had been up to no good.
She navigated the way to the Mohlolobe Private Game Reserve with a printout of their web page in her hand. ‘There are so many places here,’ she said as we passed the dramatic entrance gates of the Kapama Game Reserve, the Mtuma Sands Wildlife Lodge and the Cheetah Inn, each a variation on the postmodern Lowveld theme of rough stone, thatched roof, animal motif and fancy lettering. I suspected that the room rates were directly proportional to the subtlety of these portals to Eden.
Mohlolobe’s unique selling point was a pair of slender, tasteful elephant tusks moulded from concrete to guard the entrance. There was a gate guard wearing a uniform of khaki and olive green. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that was marginally too big for him and carried a clipboard with a couple of sheets of paper. On his chest was a metal name tag. It read Edwin. Security Official. ‘Welcome to Mohlolobe,’ he said on my side of the BMW with a glittering white smile. ‘Do you have a reservation?’
‘Good afternoon,’ Emma answered. ‘It’s in the name of Le Roux.’
‘Le Roux?’ He consulted his list, eyebrows raised hopefully. His face brightened. ‘Indeed, indeed, Mr and Mrs Le Roux, you are most welcome. It is seven kilometres to the main camp, just follow the signs, and please do not leave the vehicle under any circumstances.’ He swung open the big gate and waved us through with a flourish of his arm.
The dirt road twisted through thick mopane forest, here and there a piece of open grassveld. A herd of impala trotted into the undergrowth in annoyance. ‘Look,’ said Emma. And then she inexplicably pressed her hand over her mouth, and stared, entranced. Hornbills swooped from tree to tree. A herd of buffalo chewed the cud and stared in boredom. Emma was silent. Even when I pointed at the heaps of digested grass and said, ‘Elephant dung.’
Mohlolobe Main Camp smelt of big money. The thatched roofs of the guest units were disguised along the banks of the Mohlolobe river, paved roads, hidden lighting, forced joviality from the staff in their khaki and olive uniforms. This was Africa for the rich American tourist, eco-friendly five-star luxury, an oasis of civilisation in the wild, cruel bush. I followed the signs to reception and we got out into a wall of heat, but inside the building it was suddenly cool. We walked down the passage to the reception desk. There was an Internet room on the left. They called it ‘The Bush Telegraph’. An expensive curio shop on the right was ‘The Trading Post’.
A pretty blonde waited at reception. On the olive green of her shirt was a name tag. Susan. Hospitality Official. ‘Hi. I’m Susan. Welcome to Mohlolobe,’ with a big smile and a well-concealed Afrikaans accent. Sue-zin, not Soe-sun as it would have been pronounced in Afrikaans.
‘Hi. I’m Emma le Roux and this is Mr Lemmer,’ she said, equally friendly, to Sue-zin.
‘You wanted a two-bedroom suite?’ the blonde enquired discreetly.
‘That’s right.’
‘We’re going to give you the Bateleur,’ as if she were doing us a big favour. ‘It’s right in front of the waterhole.’
‘That would be lovely,’ said Emma, and I wondered why she didn’t speak to the woman in Afrikaans.
‘Now, I just need a credit card, please,’ she said, looking at me. When Emma took out her purse there was a little moment when Sue-zin looked at me in a new light.
The Bateleur suite was understated luxury, but all Emma did was nod in satisfaction as if it more or less lived up to her standards. The black porter (Benjamin. Hospitality Assistant) carried in our travel bags. Emma pushed a green banknote into his hand and said, ‘That’s fine, just leave them here.’
He showed us the secrets of the air conditioning and the minibar. When he left Emma said, ‘Shall I take this one?’ and pointed at the bedroom to the left of the sitting room. It was furnished with a double bed.
‘That’s fine.’
I took my bag to the other room, on the right, two single beds with the same creamy white linen as Emma’s. Then I took stock. The wood frame windows could be opened, but were kept closed because of the whispering air conditioning. Every bedroom and the sitting-cum-bar-room in the centre had a sliding door on to the veranda at the front. The locking mechanism was unsophisticated, not good security. I opened it and walked out on to the veranda. It had a polished stone floor, two couches and chairs in ostrich leather, two mounted binoculars and a view of the waterhole, now deserted apart from a flock of pigeons that drank restlessly.
I walked around the building. Three metres of lawn, then the bush. Designed and situated for privacy. Not a single other unit, each named for some kind of eagle, was visible. Bad news from a bodyguard’s perspective.
In theory, however, if anyone wanted to get at Emma, they would have to avoid the main gate, scale two metres of game fence and walk seven kilometres through the veld in lion and elephant country. Not much ground for worry.
I went back in; the cool was refreshing. Emma’s door was shut; I could hear the whisper of a shower. For a brief moment, I visualised her body under the stream of water, then went to seek out the cold water in my own bathroom.
7
We walked in twilight to the Mohlolobe’s Honey Buzzard Restaurant. Emma seemed a little down. She had been quiet at dinner the previous night in Hermanus. Maybe she wasn’t a night person, or perhaps it was the heat.
While we sat in candlelight at the table she said, ‘You must be very hungry, Lemmer.’
‘I could eat’
A waiter brought menus and the wine list. ‘Sometimes I forget about food,’ she said.
She passed me the wine list. ‘You’re welcome to have wine.’
‘No, thanks.’
She studied the menu for a long time and without enthusiasm. ‘Just a salad, a Greek salad,’ she told the waiter. I ordered a bottle of mineral water for the price of a small car – and the beef fillet with green pepper sauce and mashed potato. We looked around at the other people in the room, middle-aged foreigners in groups of two or four. Emma tugged the white linen serviette out of its imitation ivory ring. She twirled the ring round and round in her delicate fingers, examining the fine leaf pattern engraved on it.
‘I’m sorry about earlier …’ she said, looking up. ‘When I saw the impala …’
I remembered the moment when she had put her hand over her mouth.
She turned her attention back to the ring in her hand. ‘We had a game farm in the Waterberg. My dad …’
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to gain control over the emotion behind the words.
‘Not a big farm, only three thousand hectares, just a piece of land with some buck so we could go there on weekends. My dad said it was for us, for his children, so we wouldn’t be total city kids. So we would know what klits grass is. Jacobus was never in the house when we were on the farm. He would sleep outdoors and walk and just live outside … He always had two or three friends there, but in the late afternoon when the sun went down he would come and fetch me. I must have been nine or ten; he was nearly out of school. He would go walking with his little sister. He knew where to find the buck. All the little herds. He would ask me, what do you want to see, sis, what buck? Then he would teach me about them, what their habits were, what they did. And the birds, I had to learn all their names. It was fun, but I always felt a little bit guilty because I wasn’t like him. It was like he only came alive when he was on the farm. I didn’t always feel like going to the farm, not every weekend and every holiday …’
She went quiet again until our food came. I tackled the steak with a passion. She pushed her lettuce around restlessly with her fork, and then put it down.
‘My dad … for him the worst thing was that they never found Jacobus. Maybe it would have been better for him if there had been a … a body. Something …’
