Mosaic (5 page)

Talking about it resurrected the picture in her head of the damaged man Nathan Shola had brought to her. Skeletally gaunt, his angular limbs assuming defensive postures seemingly of an independent will, his skin bleached by months out of the sun, he looked younger than his twenty-three years; except for his eyes, which were dark coals burning fever-bright with bitterness and resentment in the deep pits above his prominent cheekbones. His eyes were old with horror and hatred. His hands shook slightly all the time. It was impossible to imagine how he had appeared before his three months in hospital.

Nathan Shola introduced them, then added quietly, “My friend needs some help.”

And she had helped him: partly because Nathan asked her to, partly because Grant was a casualty in a cause she respected, mostly because by the time she realized the scale of the task she had taken on Joel Grant was no longer a task but a person. She cared about him and what became of him. It was not love. She was not drawn to him in that way, although on occasions she had lain with him when his need was so great that only her close strength stopped the black heart of his mind from breaking out and engulfing him. It meant no more to him than it did to her; less, she believed, because she did not think he liked her as much as she liked him; or perhaps it was only that needing put a greater strain on a relationship than being needed.

The anger waxed in her. He needed her now. If he had regained consciousness, if he were still alive, wherever he was he would be needing her as urgently as he ever had. Caught up in the resurgent nightmare, he would grope for her in his personal darkness and she would not be there; scream for her, and she would not come. He was alone in his worst imaginings.

“Damn them,” she cried aloud, “haven't they done enough to him?”

She had already called Amsterdam. Nathan Shola would be on the first plane home. Now it occurred to her to wonder if that was what the Boer wanted. She said to Will Hamlin, “After all this time, what can they possibly want with him?” Hamlin shrugged wretchedly. Liz laid a hand on his arm as he sat hunched on the settee beside her. “No, listen, this could be important. Could it possibly be a trap for Nathan?”

Hamlin looked horrified but he thought about it. Then he shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

He mumbled into his chest, “Wrong bait.”

When she realized what he meant, Liz knew he was right. “Yes. It would have been as easy to take me as Joel. Then why?”

“Revenge? They were badly embarrassed by the Mpani raid.”

“If it was only that they could have killed him and left him here. It would have served the same purpose and been much safer. You don't need to kidnap a man to make an example of him.”

“Perhaps they still want information from him.”

“After two years? What could he possibly know that would still be relevant? Your paper's more up to date than that.”

Hamlin managed a rueful grin. “What did he say to you?”

“The Boer? Just that he wanted to talk to Joel.”

Hamlin was unconvinced. “You were unconscious for hours. He could have talked to him here. You can hurt someone a lot in quite a short time if there's nobody to interfere. Instead he ran the risk of being seen carrying or dragging Grant out of the house and presumably into a car. He must have had a good reason for that; a strong, important reason.”

A chill like fingers ran down Liz's spine. She felt herself pale. “You don't suppose for a minute they'd try to take him back to

Pretoria, to talk to him there?”

Danny Vanderbilt watched Joel Grant wake. He had been unconscious a long time, but then Vanderbilt had hit him hard and had made no subsequent efforts to coax him back into the land of the living. Contrary to what he had told the girl before hitting her—the white girl, not the dancer—he was not remotely interested in talking to Grant. As far as he was concerned, the later he slept the better. It was going to be a long day.

A roll of carpet underfelt against the bedroom wall made a tolerable seat. With his large square chin resting on his forearms across his knees, Vanderbilt watched his prisoner struggle towards the light and wondered what it was about him that seemed familiar.

Grant's head in the shaggy halo of a homespun haircut, moved restively between his pinioned arms. His breath came in small laboured grunts between parted teeth. A frown had grown between his brows that was screwing his eyes against the day. With his wrists lashed to the bedhead, the fingers laxly twitching and clenching, and one knee drawn up, he seemed to be giving birth to his own awareness.

When his head stopped rolling and his grunting breath softened to a shallow panting, Vanderbilt saw that his eyes had opened a crack and were sliding, vague and unfocused, across the spartan room. He stood up and moved closer to the bed. Grant's weightless skimming gaze touched on him and stopped. His eyes opened wide with shock before closing on a gathering despair. A faint moan whispered through his dry lips.

“That's right, sonny,” Vanderbilt said quietly. “You didn't dream me.”

From the capacious holdall he produced a carton of milk and a packet of biscuits. He freed Grant's left hand so that he could feed himself. “Behave yourself and I won't tie you down again.”

Grant weakly invited him to participate in an act of self-abuse as impractical as it was obscene. His eyes flinched with the expectation of pain, but Vanderbilt only grinned.

“That's all right. You don't have to like me. All you have to do is obey me, and you really can't do anything else.”

The knowledge that he was right soured the milk in Grant's belly; only an effort of will kept him from throwing up.

With his senses returning to him like a flight of weary pigeons, one at a time and in no particular order, Grant did not know where he was, how he had got there, how much time had passed or what was likely to happen next. But he always knew who was responsible: not Vanderbilt personally, but those behind him. He had known in the brief waking seconds before the Boer floored him back in his own room in Liz Fallon's house, and he had known with the first crack of awareness that stirred in his battered brain as he lay tied to a stripped bed in a grey and dusty room he had never seen before. He knew it was Pretoria; mainly because nobody else would be sufficiently interested to spit on him if he was burning, but also because of the craven twitching of all his nerve-endings. The people in Pretoria had put a lot of time and effort into teaching him to fear them, and now his body responded to their implicit presence like a trained dog. Deaf and blind he would know them, and shake like he was shaking now.

Vanderbilt saw him shivering and casually tossed him his coat. Grant fielded it with his free hand and hurled it back, fear and fury blazing in his eyes. Vanderbilt calmly moved his head out of the way and let the coat fall harmlessly to the boards. He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“Why don't you get on with it?” shouted Grant. His own accent, keener than always, scraped across his nerves like a rasp.

“With what?”

“What you came here for. You want something, don't you? From me. So get on with it. It's quiet enough for you here, isn't it? I can yell my bloody head off and nobody'll come running. Damn near as good as Pretoria, hey?” The words rushed from him like a torrent from a glacier, fast and urgent, frenetic, beyond control or containment. His face was white with shock, graven with deep lines and stained with black under both eyes and along the line of his left jaw. Gaunt, raging and wrapped in a blanket, he looked like a mad prophet. Vanderbilt thought he might have to hit him again to shut him up.

“Damn you,” shouted Joel Grant,
“listen
to me!”

Vanderbilt's gaze, which had wandered, came back to him with the force of a slap. “No, you listen to me, because already I can tell that quite a small amount of you is going to get right up my superior maxillary sinus. This may come as a disappointment, but I don't want anything from you. I'm not interested in anything you know: not enough to plug your fingers into the wall socket, not enough to feed lighted cigarettes to your bodily orifices, not even enough to ask nicely. That may be somebody's job, but it isn't mine. As far as you're concerned, sonny, what I am is a land of Universal Aunt. I'm here to make sure you get home safely.”

The wind poured off the Pennine fells. It soughed through the hedges and round the corners of the stone house, and its voice was the voice of bleak centuries. Half a world away the sun was warm, the autumn breeze laced with the garden scents of bougainvillea and frangipani, the equinox hanging in the heavy air like an electric promise. With the new rains the young land would spurt into growth; the whole lovely country would smell like a garden.

Except for the bits that smelled like a charnel house. Joel Grant stopped shivering long enough to meet Vanderbilt's eyes. The ghosts in his white face added up to a kind of resolve. He shook his head. “Only in a long box.”

Will Hamlin met the flight from Amsterdam. Even in the hurrying, shuffling crush of Customs he had no difficulty spotting Nathan Shola. The African was high, black and handsome, a slender two-metre warrior in a business suit. A handgrip was all his luggage, and he held it aloft and hip-swerved his way towards the exit like an attenuated rugby player heading for touch. He flashed brief brilliant smiles to smooth his passage, but his eyes and all his attention were on the barrier. He was looking for Liz; but Liz had wanted to stay by the phone. Hamlin's larger, solider figure caught his attention as he made a second scan.

“Will?”

“Nathan. This way, I've a car outside.” They shook hands without break in pace. “You made good time.”

“Over the Scheldt I got out and rushed. Will, what the hell is going on?”

Driving back to Sorley, Hamlin repeated all he knew, including everything Liz had told him and everything the police had said about Suzanne Lavalle.

Shola swore. His long tensile body carried about it, like a charge, an aura of latent, almost urbane, savagery that invested plain words with unexpected violence. In consequence he seldom spoke viciously: “damn” was about as rough as his language ever got. “Is she all right?”

“She will be. Though I gather it may be a while before anyone pays to see her with her clothes off.”

Shola's mobile, sculpted lip curled. He made a mental entry in his personal Book of the Dead. “And Liz?”

“Liz has a bump on the head, that's all. She's fine. No,” he corrected himself—he tended to sub-edit his conversation as he did his copy—“she's scared for him. And very angry.”

Shola grinned tightly. “That sounds like Liz.” The smile died. “But it was me he was looking for—me he asked Suzy about?”

“Probably only as a way of tracing Grant. He didn't know where to look for him, but he guessed Suzanne would know where to look for you. Presumably he thought he could get Grant's whereabouts out of you.” Hamlin shrugged apologetically. “Well, Suzanne didn't know where you were, but she knew you wrote for the
Democrat
and the name you write under. He knew I'd have an address for you. I imagine if I'd been working late last night I'd have been in for a hammering too. As it was he raided the files and came up with Liz's address. Then he went round to ask you where Grant was; only you weren't in the house and Grant was. He struck lucky.”

“He couldn't have taken Joel as a bargaining piece?”

Hamlin shook his head. His eyes never left the road, which in view of the speed at which he was driving was probably just as well. “He'd have taken Liz, Nathan. Besides, he never asked her about you. He wasn't interested in you. He'd got what he came for.”

Anger and frustration were mounting in Shola like a head of steam. His voice quivered with mayhem but did not rise. “But why? What can Joel tell them? Mpani's dead, our people scattered—anything he could tell them now would be two years out of date. Even if he talked.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Hamlin, “they don't need him to talk. Perhaps they only need him to be there.”

“Pretoria?”

“Yes. Suppose that what they want is to take him back and put him on trial. Nathan, he's a white South African who sided with black guerrillas against his own kind. He fought for the Nationalists, and when he got caught they fought for him. Maybe that makes him some kind of a symbol. Maybe it has become politically necessary for the government to get him back, break him and put him on show. Is that possible, do you think?”

“In my country anything is possible.” Nathan Shola let out a long breath like a sigh. “Poor Joel. My poor, poor friend.”

Liz was out of the door and down the steps before the car stopped, and before Shola was properly out she had flung herself at him, grafting herself to his long body like a liana embracing a forest tree. “Oh Christ, Nat,” she gasped breathlessly into his neck, “I'm glad you're here.”

Together they hurried inside.

Chief Inspector George Corner was not idle. By midmorning he had wired copies of Grant's photograph to ports and airports throughout the country, to mainline railway stations and to the Metropolitan Police; had circulated with it a good description of Vanderbilt and had arranged for a police artist to visit Liz Fallon's house; had been in touch with Special Branch, fully briefed his superiors and prepared preliminary reports for those government departments which would become involved if Joel Grant did not turn up safe and well in a very short space of time. Then he had a cup of tea and tried to remain civil in the face of a new station sergeant who had just now discovered the humourous potential of his chief inspecter's name and was wetting himself behind the filing cabinet.

Vanderbilt had achieved a modest comfort beside the bedroom window and was doing his job with such supreme efficiency that he did not appear to be doing it at all. Without moving his head, just by flicking his eyes, he could take in the track, or at least its course between the hedges, almost as far up as the road, or check his prisoner. Joel Grant, one wrist still shackled to the bedstead, was curled up foetally on the mattress as if wrapped round a hurt.