Meanwhile, people crowded into Umtali. All morning they had been coming, in a steady stream of cars, double-parking at meter-bays without paying or caring, while the African traffic-wardens watched nervously from under the arcades, sheltering from the rain.
The first to arrive were local residents — retired farmers and tourists from the other outlying hotels who had heard the news from the first radio bulletins or from friends on the telephone and had hurried into town for further news, for reassurance, and, above all, for security. Later they began arriving from further afield, across the border and from the cities to the west: businessmen, tobacco planters, sightseers, relatives of the victims and reporters. And for once, in this suspicious suburban backwater, the international Press was not unwelcome. For these were the boys who could splash the full horror of Hillcrest on to the breakfast tables and TV screens of the world, and teach those complacent liberal critics outside what the struggle down here was all about.
And with the Press came the rumours. In the packed terrace-café of the Cecil Hotel no theory was too extravagant. The attack was the prelude to a mass uprising by Frelimo, the Mozambique ‘freedom fighters’; the massacre had been organized by the Chinese; the Chinese had crossed the Zambesi; there were African hordes mobilizing in Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi; while other OAU states were preparing to send volunteers.
The more sober citizens counselled against such alarmist talk; but as the rain fell, and gin and beer flowed, tempers in the hotel began to find expression in noisy opinions about the native population — opinions not usually voiced outside the privacy of one’s home. However, beneath the anger of this simple stoic community there was also fear. For the massacre had been executed with a thoroughness that was inconsistent with the sporadic, hit-and-run terrorist groups who occasionally struck across the border, and could usually be repelled by a resident’s rifle. In this case there was not only the efficiency of the attack, but the extraordinary delay in catching the killers.
Despite the strict secrecy of the operation, it was known that Colonel Alistair Monks, chief of the local Security forces, had taken charge of the hunt. At around mid-morning he was joined by Brigadier Erasmus de Witwe of BOSS, the South African Bureau of State Security, who was deposited by helicopter on the lawn behind Police Headquarters; and shortly afterwards a black sedan brought de Witwe’s Portuguese counterpart, Senhor Filipo-Munga, a fussy little man with a well-tailored paunch and green-tinted glasses who paused to be photographed before hurrying into the conference which had been going on since dawn.
By lunchtime there was still no official announcement, although General Monks’ adjutant, who was well known to the regulars in the Cecil Bar, called in several times for coffee and sandwiches, and dropped odd items of information. These were not encouraging. For some hours it had not been possible to identify all the victims, since the killers had not only stripped the bodies of all personal papers, but had torn the last two sheets out of the hotel registration book. However, from the adjutant’s latest call it was learnt that the killers had escaped in at least five stolen cars, three with Salisbury number-plates, one from Bulawayo, and one from Durban in the Republic.
The implications of this news were more ominous than at first appeared.
How could five carloads of armed African terrorists vanish during the night? Not only had normal police checks on all main roads been doubled, and the paths through the surrounding hills been scoured by dogs, scouts and helicopters since dawn, but the Portuguese authorities had mounted their own manhunt on their side of the border. It was some hours before anyone gave voice to the awful possibility which was later to emerge as the truth.
At four o’clock that afternoon Colonel Monks and his two companions held a Press conference in the hotel lounge, inviting for good measure a number of leading citizens and local residents, besides the newsmen. Monks’ statement was terse and full of false confidence; but after conceding that no trace had yet been found of either the killers, the murder weapons, or the five stolen cars, he announced that the victims of Hillcrest had all — with the exception of the Ross-Needhams — been shot with .30 calibre MI6s, the US Army light machine pistol. (He refrained from remarking that until now African terrorists had almost invariably used the Chinese or Russian equivalent, the AK47.) The Ross-Needhams, on the other hand, had been shot with .38s, the standard calibre of side-arm carried by the armies and police forces of White Africa.
On being questioned, Colonel Monks made another disturbing admission. Jack Ross-Needham had been a member of the local Umtali pistol-club, and had been a crack shot. Furthermore — one of his friends in the lounge pointed out — he had owned a revolver and a high-velocity rifle; and the revolver he always kept handy under the till in the bar. Yet he and his wife had both been shot in the bar — and in the stomach, not the back — without making any apparent effort to reach either the gun or the alarm system, which was wired up to a howler siren and Umtali Police Headquarters. The only precaution that the killers seemed to have taken was to cut the hotel’s telephone line.
Colonel Monks drew no conclusions himself, and his South African and Portuguese colleagues were silent. It was left to a senior British journalist to point out that police checks on main roads throughout the country were applied only perfunctorily to Europeans. He also reminded the audience that White Rhodesians, still subjected to petrol rationing under Sanctions, made a regular practice of driving over the border into Mozambique and filling up their cars at the nearest
