A SONG IN THE MORNING (2 page)

All four would dearly have loved to have seen the explosion. Only the country boy had an exact idea of the scale of the flame blown outwards in a blazing spray. They would dearly have loved to have seen the warrant officer disintegrate when he was a yard from the door, when he was at the moment of throwing the bomb away from him and onto the grass. In the few seconds that the warrant officer had screamed of the danger of the bomb he had attracted enough attention for there to be seven civilians and two policemen in the court lobby. They would dearly have loved to see those nine persons bowled over by the blast and the smoke cloud and the fire draught. They saw nothing of the devastation, and nothing of the policeman chasing after them, the radio in one hand and a revolver in the other.

They reached the Combi van.

They flung open the door and scrambled inside in a confusion of knees and elbows and shouts, and the van was accelerating into the wide spaces of Pritchard before they'd managed to close the doors. The last thing the country boy saw before the doors were shut was the policeman on the pavement, panting, heaving, yelling into his radio.

Jeez drove like he hadn't a tomorrow.

And he didn't reckon he had, a tomorrow.

Shit, and he'd heard the explosion. Couldn't have missed it. Half choked on his cigarette, and the windows around him had rattled fit to break and he'd seen the heads on the pavement spinning to stare up the street. He'd been facing away from the explosion, he'd had only the shock wave, none of the sights . . . left into End, up past the Kerk junction, left onto Jeppe . . . Jeez going hard, and with the frown slashed on the old weather-stained skin of his forehead. He was going hard because he'd heard the bang and a bang like that at mid-day in central Jo'burg meant a bloody big show.

Nobody had said anything other than that he was to be parked in a Combi van on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers, north side, looking east, back doors unfastened.

Done as he was told, because that's what they all did in the Movement, Blacks and Whites. Shit, nobody had said it was a bloody headline grabber they'd be running from . . . Right off Jeppe and into Rissik. He was burning the tyres, hitting the turns. Way ahead, up Rissik, was the railway station, that's where he'd been told he had to get. Four kids to catch a train that's all. He had been told that if there was a police block then a White in a commercial van would sail through.

But this was an arsehole.

Because of his initials James Carew had always been Jeez.

He rather fancied it. He used that name on the telephone, used it to anyone who knew him marginally. He'd had the name since the time he left school, since he was in the army.

The name was his possession, his style, like kids who had a ring in their ear, or a tattoo. He was Jeez, had been for more than years.

He heard the siren.

Shit . . . Jeez saw the traffic in front of him swerving for the slow lane, and that told him that the bells and the whining were behind, and his ears told him the bastards were closing.

Nobody had told him who he would be driving. Hadn't said it was a getaway. Just that four kids who were a bit hot needed picking up on the corner of Pritchard and Delvers and needed dropping off at the station. When he'd seen them earlier, he'd thought: bright lads, these, not piling into the van straight off. They'd have been checking for a tail.

Well, now they had a tail all right.

He'd been on the road of bells and sirens before, more than twenty years before, but the memory was still sharp, not the sort of sound that any bugger ever forgets. What was sharpest was the same dingy old thought, that when he heard the sirens and saw the uniforms then there wasn't a hell of a lot of point in beating your guts out and running faster.

A bloody shambles the clowns had dropped him in. Shit up to his nose.

In the back was a babble of screaming for more speed.

He looked into the side mirror. The unmarked car had the bell going, and the yellow police wagon had the blue light going and the siren . . . right up to his bloody nose and down his bloody nostrils. When he looked again through his front windscreen he saw the police jeep that was slewed across the road a bit over a hundred yards ahead. There were no side turnings between him and the police jeep. Back to the mirror. The car and the wagon weren't trying to get past him, didn't have to, were sitting on his arse, shepherding him.

The poor bastards were frantic in the back, spittle on his neck the way they were shouting through the close mesh grille.

You win some and most often you lose, that's what Jeez reckoned.

He eased his foot onto the brake pedal. He changed down.

He could see that there were pistols aimed at him from behind the cover of the police jeep. Down again to second, and his foot harder onto the brake and stamping.

"Sorry, boys," Jeez said softly.

If they hadn't been making such a hell of a rumpus they might have heard the genuine sadness in his voice. He brought the Combi to a halt. He took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them out of the window, onto the roadway. He looked into the side mirror. The policemen were spilling out of the unmarked car and out of the wagon, crouching and kneeling and all aiming their hand guns at the Combi. Nobody had told Jeez what the hell he was into.

Silence in the van.

"Let's have a bit of dignity, boys." An English accent.

"Let's not give the bastards the pleasure of our fear."

Jeez opened his door. He stepped down onto the street.

He clasped his hands over the top of his head.

In front of him and behind him the policemen began to run warily forward.

Johannesburg is a hard city. It is a city where the Whites carry guns and the Blacks carry knives. Not a city where the pedestrians and shoppers cower on their faces because the police have drawn revolvers and have blocked off a Combi and are handcuffing four kaffirs and a kaffir lover. A crowd had gathered inside the minute that it took the police to hustle their five prisoners towards the wagon and to kick them up and slam the doors on them. There was something to see. The White guy was the something to see. Must have been more than forty, could have been more than fifty, and wearing decent slacks and a decent shirt. The crowd wondered what the White guy was doing with those Black bastards, what the hell he was at.

Four long blocks away a cloud of slow moving smoke was settling above Pritchard Street.

* * •

Mr Justice Andries van Zyl had passed the sentence of the supreme penalty on 186 men, of whom his clerk had told him recently 142 had been executed. It would have been beyond him to believe that an innocent man had ever been convicted in a court over which he had presided. He attended church every Sunday morning and sometimes went back in the evening. When he retired in two years' time he would devote his energies to a charitable society supporting children afflicted by the spina bifida disease. Privately, in his room, after passing the death sentence, he would say a prayer for the condemned man; not a prayer that the man should be reprieved, but that he might go to his Maker with true repentance in his heart.

On that late afternoon in the Palace of Justice on the north side of Pretoria's Church Square he dealt first with the four Blacks deemed guilty by himself and his two lay assessors of murder. There was no theatricality. The black cap had long before been dispensed with in the Republic's courts, and his sentencing voice was a racing monotone, that of a bowls club secretary getting through the minutes of a previous meeting.

As Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom stared back at him from the dock, expressionless, exhausted of hope, he shuffled his papers, then pressed his metal-rimmed half moon spectacles tight onto the bridge of his nose. He allowed the murmurs to subside in the public gallery.

He looked up at Jeez Carew.

Mr Justice van Zyl saw a man only a few years younger than himself, and well dressed in a dark grey suit and a white shirt and a silk tie. He saw a face which seemed to say that there was nothing new to be learned. He saw the way that the shoulders were pulled back, and the way that the man's arms were held straight down to his sides. He saw that the prisoner's bearing was more militarily correct than that of the prison service guards at attention behind him.

Mr Justice van Zyl had watched this White accused through seventeen days of court room business. He thought he had detected an arrogance. He disliked arrogance. The previous day he had decided that when he passed sentence on the White he would make a fuller statement than was usual for him. He would break that arrogance.

"James Carew, you have been found guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances. There is only one sentence that I may pass upon you. It was your own decision that during your time in custody you refused to co-operate with the officers who have diligently investigated a quite appalling criminal act. You chose to remain silent. You have also rebuffed the efforts of a very able and conscientious counsel to present a defence on your behalf. I understand that you chose not to brief him, and also that you refused the opportunity offered you of going into the witness stand to give the court your own version of events on that horrific day in Johannesburg. By these actions I am forced to the conclusion that in your case extenuating circumstances do not exist which would mitigate your guilt.

"I have heard in police evidence that you came from the United Kingdom to the Republic of South Africa twelve years ago. In the time you have resided here perhaps you have acquired the belief that different standards of justice obtain for our varied ethnic groups. You may have believed that the colour of your skin offers you some protection from the consequences of your actions. You would have deluded yourself, Mr Carew, if you believed that.

The crime of which you have been found guilty involved a quite dastardly act. You acted together with terrorists of the outlawed African National Congress, one of whom had been trained in sabotage and murder in a communist state, to set off a bomb inside the Rand Supreme Court in Johannesburg. The bomb consisted of explosives and petrol to which had been added a quantity of household liquid detergent, the effect of the latter being that the flaming petrol would fasten itself to any clothes or flesh it came into contact with. The casualties would have been even more severe but for the devotion to duty and the personal sacrifice of warrant officer Prinsloo. In taking much of the blast of the bomb the warrant officer without doubt saved many others from the savagery that you intended. As the driver of the getaway vehicle your guilt is equal to that of the man who made the bomb and the men who delivered it. You were an essential member of a murderous conspiracy.

"We live in a time when it is more than ever important that in our beloved country God-fearing men and women should support the legitimate forces of law and of order. No benefit to any person in the Republic, whatever his colour, can come from an outrage such as you helped to perpetrate.

I truly hope that the sentence that I am about to pass on you will deter other foreigners from coming to our country, taking our hospitality, and repaying us with murder.

"I believe, Mr Carew, in the efficacy of the deterrent. A lew years ago a distinguished colleague of mine said, 'The death penalty is like a warning, just like a lighthouse throwing its beams out to sea. We hear about shipwrecks, but we do not hear about the ships the lighthouse guides safely on its way. We do not have proof of the number of ships it saves, but we do not tear the lighthouse down.' Mr Carew, we will not permit our country to be used as a playground of mayhem by foreigners who conspire with such hate-consumed organisations as the African National Congress.

"James Carew, the sentence of the court is that you be taken from here to a lawful place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead."

There was no entreaty for the Lord to have mercy on James Carew's soul.

Had Jeez slumped or even dropped his eyes from the Judge's face, then there would have been. Mr Justice van Zyl was vexed by the prisoner's composure. He thrust his papers together, propelled himself from his chair.

"All rise," the clerk intoned.

Mr Justice van Zyl stamped out of his court room, his assessors after him.

A guard tapped Jeez on the shoulder. Jeez turned smartly and down the steps from the dock to the court room cells, followed by Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom.

In prison lore they were the "condemns". While they were driven under heavy escort to that part of Pretoria Central prison a mile and a half away that was reserved for these men who were condemned, a police major sat in the emptied courtroom filling in with a ball point pen the specific details of the printed form that was the death warrant. The form would go later to the sheriff of the capital city for his signature and in due course to the hangman as authority for his work.

* * *

An age later Jeez sat on the end of his bed and stared down at the sheet of writing paper, blank as yet, that lay on the table that was fastened into the cell wall.

An endless time later. Countless days, more than a year.

Long enough for the Rand Supreme Court and the ride up Rissik Street to be just a hated memory, a smell that was everywhere in the mind but couldn't be located.

It was the first time that he had asked for writing paper and a pen.

What to write? What to say? . . . He could hear the singing,. Many, many voices in a slow dirge. Couldn't escape from the bastard singing. Shit, when it was his turn, who'd be singing for bloody Jeez?

On the top right hand corner of the sheet of paper he wrote the date.

2

He let himself in through the front door and the atmosphere hit him.

Before Jack had his key out of the lock and the door closed behind him, he could sense catastrophe.

The vacuum cleaner was in the middle of the hall rug.

His mother always did the carpets straight after Sam and Jack had gone to work and little Will to school. There were dirty clothes at the foot of the stairs. She would have put'