‘Those eyes measured me again.
‘“Do you know why I’m here? In Loxton?”
‘“No.”
‘“Sex.”
‘“Here?”
‘“No, you idiot. Not here.” Then she told me how she grew up in Bethlehem in the Free State in a typical conservative Afrikaans home, how her talent for music quickly outgrew the coaching available in that town. She was sent to the Oranje Meisieskool in Bloemfontein so she could take cello lessons at the university. At seventeen she won an international bursary and studied in Vienna. At twenty she married an Austrian, at twenty-eight an Italian, at thirty-six a German, but concert tours were no good for marriage.
‘“Men liked me too much, and I liked men too much.”
‘At fifty-five she had had enough. Enough money, enough memories, enough strange cities and hotel rooms and fair-weather friends. So she came back to the Free State and bought herself a house in Rosendal near Bethlehem.
‘“Then I met Willem of Wonderkop. A farmer. Sixty years old, married, but a Man with a capital ‘M’. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. One Wednesday evening he told his wife he had to go to a church council meeting, but instead he came to me and we made love like a pair of twenty-year-olds, wild and abandoned. We fell off the bed and I broke my arm and he broke his hip and there we lay, naked, guilty and in big trouble.
‘“What could I do? I couldn’t carry him and he couldn’t stand up. I had to get help. I had to choose between the preacher and the two gays who ran the coffee shop. Either way we were done for because nobody gossips like gays and ministers. So I chose the gays, to save him his place on the church council.
‘“When my arm came out of plaster, I got in my car and went looking for a place where the people wouldn’t know the story. That’s how I ended up in Loxton.”
‘She never asked me about my past. I told her I had been a bodyguard for the government. When I had to be away for two or three weeks I would tell her where I would be. Of course, then the whole town knew. They never say so, but there is some pride that someone from Loxton was guarding important and famous people from the evils of this world.
‘But I am not yet truly one of them. There is hope. At Easter this year I was having tea with Oom Joe and all his children and grandchildren were there when Antjie came in. Oom Joe introduced her to his children, “And this is our Antjie Barnard.”
‘Maybe, in four or five years, if nobody finds out why I went to prison, they will introduce me as “our Lemmer”.’
27
After four, when they came to collect Emma for the scan, I fetched the keys of the Audi and went out to find the car.
The car park was chock-a-block full, but I found the car near the entrance, as Maggie T. had promised. It was a two-litre manual sedan, silver, with satellite navigation. Jeanette was not stingy. I got in and drove to Klaserie.
I took the byroads, turned off unexpectedly, accelerated, memorising every vehicle in front and behind, but nobody followed me.
The BMW was no longer beside the R40. Only the deep ruts remained in the long grass, muddy now after the rain. I locked the Audi and walked the four hundred metres back to the T-junction. I felt the aches in my body. From the stop street I walked west to the flyover where the R351 went over the railway line. If I were to set up an ambush, how would I do it?
The two tar roads made a triangle with the railway line. In the middle of the triangle was a rise with rocks and trees. That is where I would position my sniper, because he could see the junction at the stop street. I climbed the wire fence and walked through the veld and up the slope.
How had they known we would come this way?
How had they known we were going to Mohlolobe – and not Hoedspruit? Was it because we drove this route every day? Because the western route to Hoedspruit was just about as far?
Or had they covered both alternatives?
I stood on the rise and looked down. Perfect panorama. You could see the traffic for two kilometres on the R351. Plus at least a kilometre on the R41 north. It was two hundred and fifty metres from the T-junction, equidistant from both roads. A manageable distance for a sniper, wind wouldn’t be a great factor, gradient perhaps twenty degrees.
Still, he would have to know his job. On a moving vehicle, a tyre is not a big target.
Trouble is, there are hundreds of them here. Men who can shoot, who can drop a strolling steenbok at three hundred metres with a telescope – place trophy shots where they will.
But how did they know we would turn left at the stop, to the north? How had they known we were going to Mohlolobe – and not to Nelspruit? If I had turned right, he wouldn’t have got in the second and third shots.
Too many questions. Too many variables. Not enough information.
Where would he have lain in wait? I searched between the trees and rocks for the best spot – room to stretch out on your belly, unhampered vision, scope to swing the rifle through ninety degrees. Enough cover.
I had seen something flash in the seconds before he fired. I drew a line from approximately where we had been on the R351, searching for the logical spot.
There. I jumped down from a rock into a hollow he might have used. No tracks, the rain had seen to that. Grass stems were bent, a couple broken. I lay down, holding an imaginary rifle in my hands. This spot would work – shoot him there, keep an eye on him, see that he isn’t stopping, follow him with the scope, around the corner, wait until the BMW stabilises, fire another shot, another one, see the BMW leave the road. Once we had exited the car he hadn’t been able to shoot at us because there were trees interfering with his line of sight, and long grass. He would have followed our progress here and there. If he had a radio with him, the others could have given him directions, but he wouldn’t have been able to shoot. Would have had to stand up, because this rock directly to his left would have blocked his field of vision.
He had stood up and watched us with naked eyes. Saw us running; saw Emma fall, there, saw the other two running toward us. He would have had to get moving too. Radio in one hand, rifle in the other?
He had only the rifle in his hands when I saw him.
Had he picked up the casings? Was there time?
The bullet casings would have shot out to the right. That way. Rocks and grass. He would have had to look quickly. Three tyres. But there had been more than three shots. One had hit the car. At least four. Could there have been more? Four casings that he had to find, but he was in a hurry, he had to keep an eye on us, he had to shoot us, it was his job, his assignment.
I divided the potential five square metres into quadrants and searched through the grass centimetre by centimetre, between the rust-brown stones, starting with the most likely quadrant. Nothing. None in the second and the third.
The last quadrant, to the right and slightly behind the sniper. Nothing.
Then I saw it, just outside the imaginary line I had drawn. The casing lay deep in the cleft between two rocks, half hidden by grass.
I broke a twig off a tree and poked it into the cleft, lifted out the casing, letting the stick slide into the open end.
Bright and new, 7.62, the longer NATO calibre, standard bullet, mass-manufactured locally.
I rotated the stick so the casing dropped into my shirt pocket.
What had been so odd about the rifle?
I had seen it only for a moment, that awful second or two, behind Emma. He had been lying in the veld on his belly, a big man with a baseball cap and the rifle and tripod and telescope.
It wasn’t big. Was that what was strange? A smallish sniper rifle.
