Hot Ice (25 page)

‘Are you one of them, Jim?’

Jim’s eyes are so expressive. He can switch off his warm, concerned expression like switching off a light, which shows how false it is. Right now he looks as cold and hard as steel.

‘I’ve given you good advice. And take it from me, your old man is involved. You’re the last person who should be on this investigation when Kelly is in it up to his eyeballs.’

‘He certainly isn’t. Go to hell, Jim. No one wants you here. You weren’t invited. I wish you’d leave.’

‘I’m staying because I’m hungry and I promised to get the fire going. Besides, I want to hear his silly excuses.’

Chris is furious and hurt and just a little worried about Kelly. Of course he’s not involved, how could he be? He’s her father, after all. Jim goes round the back to light the fire while Chris sits around feeling gloomy. After a while she goes inside and pokes around her father’s rondavel, which shows no sign of being lived in. She feels so tired. She curls up on a camp bed on the balcony and falls asleep.

Chris wakes to the sound of someone calling her name. When she opens her eyes she finds it is dark, but there is a security light fixed in a tree outside and she can hear the throb of a generator coming from the hangar.

A delicious smell is coming from round the back and she can hear voices. She follows the scent to a
braai
set up in the middle of a grassy patch, surrounded with sliced-off tree trunks for seats. Jim is laughing. He has a glass of wine in one hand and a long pair of tongs in the other. He’s pulling off pieces of venison and setting them on a large grid perched on bricks with a few embers beneath.

Kelly is opening another bottle of red wine. So they’ve got through one already.

‘Oh, hi, Chris.’ Jim looks round and grins at her. ‘Feeling better? Kelly’s a very good shot.’ Perhaps this explains their sudden camaraderie. ‘Straight
through the brain, in the dark. The buck didn’t know what hit him. I don’t know how he does it.’ He gazes admiringly at Kelly.

‘You can’t beat Africa,’ Jim goes on. ‘Just look at the sky. You don’t get a sky like this anywhere else in the world.’

‘Alaska’s pretty good,’ Kelly says quietly. ‘But I agree with you. The African bush has always been home for me.’

Chris feels a twinge of envy at their instant rapport. How dare Jim tell her Kelly’s a crook and then treat him like a buddy.

‘Dad,’ she says, feeling mean. ‘Jim thinks you’re one of the gang I’m investigating.’

‘Hon, I keep telling you that you’re not investigating this dangerous gang, merely their methods of laundering diamonds.’

‘Are you hearing me?’ she demands, her voice rising ominously.

‘Yes. Jim said something of the sort to me, but things are not always what they seem. I’ve told Jim more or less what I told you about the run-up to the court case. I’ll tell you about Visser when we’ve finished eating. Let’s not spoil this superb venison.’

How matter-of-fact they both are, for all the world as if eating and drinking are all-important and her father’s guilt or innocence is of little consequence.

‘Tuck in. Plates and cutlery over there.’ He gestures towards one of the tree stumps. ‘Jim, how
about unravelling a potato for Chris or she’ll burn her fingers on the foil.’

‘Talk about an over-protective parent,’ Chris mutters. Just what has she let herself in for?

‘Well,’ Kelly says half an hour later, thrusting his paper plate into the bin. ‘We’re all tired. We don’t have all night so here goes…’

Just make it good, Dad, Chris prays silently.

‘I came to Africa in the late Sixties with a yen to make my fortune. A few miners were dredging
off-shore
with huge boats. Due to my financial circumstances, I was forced to pioneer a much smaller dredger, which was little more than a fishing boat and only suitable for summer conditions. In winter, I prospected all over Northern Botswana and Namibia.’

Chris grieves for her father. What a life! He’s still trying to make his fortune and he hasn’t got far yet. Her father’s such a tough man, but now he’s over sixty, how will he cope?

‘As you’ve both heard, I struck lucky early on by discovering one of the richest diamond pipes I’d ever come across on a karakul farm in northern Namibia. You also know how I lost it. It was my own damn fault. But I always felt bad about Visser. I was responsible for his loss.’

You didn’t force him to turn to crime, Chris thinks sullenly. All this guilt is an indulgence.

‘He took it badly…went off the rails with one
illegal scheme after the next. When he landed up in prison, I knew it was my fault. If he hadn’t met me, he’d have succeeded somewhere else. He had a good business brain. Then came the shipwreck. I never thought Visser had died. He’s an excellent swimmer and a skilled scuba diver, but I couldn’t believe he would kill the skipper.’

‘Even if the skipper died accidentally, Visser is still responsible, since he deliberately wrecked the dredger,’ Chris points out, sounding aggressive, even to herself.

‘As I’m sure he did, Chris. The fact is, prior to the shipwreck it was known that several valuable diamonds had been recovered from another dredger belonging to the company. Once a week, all the diamonds were transferred to
Rainbow’s End
to be shipped to Walvis Bay. This time, it was rumoured, she was carrying over ten million pounds of roughs. It was winter, a time of treacherous seas and thick fog with visibility down to fifty metres most mornings. As you know, the dredger capsized and although the skipper was lost, the rest of the crew managed to reach the shore.’

‘They must be damn good swimmers. The cold water nearly killed me and it was summertime.’ Chris shudders. The memory is still too real to bear.

‘Yes, strangely they all made it. Even young Dirk Vorster, who couldn’t swim. I wouldn’t have him on my boat for that very reason. Clearly, Visser had brought the boat in to shore and they’d waded to
the beach. Then he took it out alone and wrecked it on the rocks. At least, that’s my guess.

‘A lot of cash changed hands, but not right then. They were smart about it, but within five years every member of the crew had come into a sizeable cash sum and they all had a viable reason for it. The skipper’s body was found, but not Visser’s.’

‘It sounds as if the skipper was the sacrificial lamb. They needed at least one corpse to convince the authorities,’ Jim says.

‘True. Perhaps the skipper didn’t want to join their conspiracy. He might have threatened them with the police. At the inquest, Visser was presumed dead mainly because of Skoog’s evidence. Skoog got his so-called inheritance about three years later, but I’d like to know who left him the cash. Ulf never knew his Swedish father, least of all the uncle who was supposed to have left him the money. His mother worked in a local fish canning factory.’

‘And you kept quiet,’ Chris accuses Kelly.

‘Yes. I wasn’t aiming at ruining Visser twice over. He never blamed me, but it was my fault he’d lost his considerable birthright. It was years before I heard from him again.’

Chris shivers. Visser is out there somewhere…a clever, ruthless man, backed by unscrupulous government ministers. But ruthlessness can’t give him the diamond certification he needs. How does he do it?

‘Five years later,’ Kelly is saying, ‘a lawyer purporting to be the nominee of an old friend of mine, called on me and asked me to sell my marginal diamond claims to him.’

‘What claims are these?’ Chris asks.

‘Mines that aren’t viable at current prices. When I find a likely deposit, I register the claim in my name and put it up for sale. If the mine isn’t viable I can’t sell it, but I hang on to it. This costs me nothing. At the time I had quite a few. Anyway, I refused. I didn’t know the guy and I didn’t like him.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

‘I could never forget it. It was the same as Marie’s… Schalkwyk.

‘Then I got a call from Visser. I had no doubt at all that it was him. He went on about old times, romancing a bit, and he told me that Schalkwyk was his lawyer. He wanted the claims, so I said he could have them for nothing.’ Kelly looks around apologetically. ‘Put yourselves in my shoes. Try to imagine losing a fortune for someone.’

‘He took a legitimate business risk, just as you did,’ Jim says. Chris blesses him silently as she drains her glass.

‘Strangely, he didn’t want them for nothing, he wanted to buy them. Finally Schalkwyk drew up some documents which stated that all my claims were part of our original partnership, which we had never actually terminated. Visser bought me out of
the partnership for a trifling sum which I didn’t want and never received.’

‘But Dad…why did you go ahead?’ Chris scowls at him. ‘You knew it was a scam.’

‘Not necessarily. Thousands of abandoned claims are being mined nowadays simply because modern mining methods make them viable and prices have risen dramatically. Visser convinced me that he could make a small profit, so I gave them to him. I didn’t want to mine them. I was glad to have something to give him.’

‘But that wasn’t the end of it, was it, sir?’ Jim, who had been lying on the grass as if asleep, is wide awake all of a sudden.

‘Far from it. I was coming to that. A year later I found a pretty good diamond pipe in Northern Namibia on a barren karakul ranch. They are the worst kind. They need five square miles to support one sheep in that kind of territory. I signed up the mineral rights and offered it to Visser for next to nothing.’

Chris frowns. ‘This is looking bad.’

‘I can see you don’t understand, Chris. But look at it from my point of view. I’d ruined Visser and set him on a path that led to prison. Now he was trying to make a new, legitimate start by mining a dozen sub-economic claims. I wanted to improve his chances, so I gave him this one, which I’d registered under the name of
Shimpuru-64
. I felt I’d gone a small way towards repaying him. The claim
was worth about half a million, but in time and with care I felt he could retrieve his loss. It was the best I could do to clear my conscience.’

‘I do understand. Truly I do…’ Impulsively Chris hugs her father. ‘Payback time is over, Dad. You’ve paid everyone. Now it’s time to look after yourself.’

Jim walks around filling their glasses. There’s a great atmosphere. The sensuous moon breaks from behind the trees. An owl shrieks overhead and small birds sheltering in the trees twitter uneasily.

Kelly breaks the spell. ‘Now Jim, it’s your turn to do some explaining. You’re James Stark from the Starkwell Tyre family. Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ Jim says uneasily. ‘How do you know that, sir?’

‘I studied with your uncle and he married a friend of mine, Julia, your Aunt.’

‘Good heavens! That’s amazing.’ Jim is looking increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I used to be very fond of Julia and we kept in touch once a year…a Christmas card with scribbled note…that sort of thing. When you were imprisoned in the West African Republic five years ago, I made it my business to find out if you were Julia’s nephew, or another James Stark.’

‘Sir, this is classified.’

‘But James, I already know and my daughter should know, because she has been sleeping with
you for the past week to find out what your angle is, no doubt convincing herself she’s a regular
Mata Hari
.’

Chris gave an agonised gasp. ‘Dad. Stop it.’

‘It’s not like that at all, sir,’ Jim says aggressively. ‘Your daughter and I…’

‘Nevermind that.’ Kelly waves his hand. ‘As a matter of fact, Julia asked me to get up there and try to see you. That’s what I was doing when I received a visit from a US Embassy official. It was all very hush-hush. He told me that I must not interfere under any circumstances. Your task, he said, was to get yourself into prison by any means, locate the leader of the opposition, a possible future democrat who had been there for a couple of years, change his views about the US and organise your escape with him, which you did. After that, you hung around long enough to help organise his coup and you were shot in the ankle. I notice you still have a slight limp.’

‘Sir, I strongly protest…’

‘Don’t worry.’ Kelly interrupted him. ‘It won’t go further than Chris and me. After that episode, they made you a major. You have always been, and you remain in, one or other of America’s intelligence services.’

Chris frowns and tries to sort out her confused reactions.

‘Is this true? So what about that Christian NGO?’ Chris feels hot with anger.

‘It’s real, but it’s a part of something bigger,’ Jim mutters.

‘Well, my boy, here’s to a job well done. But what on earth do you have to do with my daughter and her investigation?’

‘That, too, is classified, sir,’ Jim says, suddenly very sober and very annoyed. ‘I can tell you a little. Your daughter’s job and mine overlap slightly. I didn’t know what it was Ben Searle was investigating prior to his death, but I could see he’d attracted the attention of Islamic fundamentalists. Our US office was keeping an eye on him. Unfortunately we failed to save his life. It’s not public knowledge yet, but we know that he had met with Lebanese diamond traders, domiciled in Liberia, who were funding Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East. Ben leaned on them. I think he was looking for Freeman. The Feds know who murdered him, but they haven’t caught them yet.’

‘And you, my boy?’ Kelly’s tone of voice demands an answer.

‘Currently I’m assessing Africa’s strategic mineral deposits, including oil and diamonds, that are in foreign, that is non-Western, hands. I wanted to know what Chris had to do with all this, and to be honest, I didn’t want her hurt, for purely personal reasons.’

‘So that’s why…’ Chris closes her mouth firmly. Why ask when everything is crystal clear.

There isn’t much left to say. Everyone is tired.
The party breaks up and they go to bed: Kelly on his futon up in the loft, Jim on a campbed, on the balcony behind the mosquito wiring, and Chris on a convertible couch in the living room.

She wakes with a sense of being watched. She sees Jim staring down at her, his face lit by moonlight…a sullen stare.

‘How long have you been there?’

He shrugs. ‘It’s never long enough…’

‘What?’ She’s drowsy with sleep.

‘It’s hard to find the words…I’ve never doubted my vocation…never longed for something other than my work…until now. I have a feeling that it will never again be enough…that I’ll spend my life wondering if I should have quit now.’

‘Don’t talk. Talking won’t help.’

‘We have a few hours before morning. Let’s go outside.’

There’s only one embrace. It lasts until the first light of dawn shines through the trees.

‘I love the part of you I know, Jim, but I could never be part of your world.’ She breaks off. Words are unnecessary. They both know the score.

‘There’s one thing you can be sure of…I love you,’ Jim whispers. ‘I tried not to let this happen. I’m no good for you. I chose this life and there’s no room for anyone else. Particularly now…I’m being transferred to Chechnya.’

She longs to punish him with her tears, but that
would be cruel. Instead she props herself on one elbow and, bending over him, kisses him on the mouth. His compelling eyes are gazing up at her, willing her to let go.