The Hunter (10 page)

Brand opened his laptop and tethered his phone to connect to the internet. The signal here at the camp was 3G, faster than at Hippo Rock where any attachments in Dani’s messages would have taken him too long to download. He took his reading glasses from the pocket of his bush shirt and sipped his Coke while he waited for the machine to boot up.

The buffalo looked at peace, in seventh heaven in fact. He was too old to run with the herd any more and had probably been left to his own devices in an enforced retirement. Often these old bulls roamed in packs, a handful of grumpy old men content to ruminate all day and gore to death anything or anyone that pissed them off. Brand liked them.

When the email program opened and finally finished downloading he saw that in addition to the usual spam there was the file Dani had promised, a separate email from her with an attached photograph, another that included a chain of correspondence between Linley and the insurance company, and messages from Anna and Peter Cliff, the sister and brother-in-law of the possibly late Kate Munns.

6

A
nna Cliff sipped her sauvignon blanc and looked up through the glass roof of the conservatory at the pale grey clouds. Another English summer that had not failed to disappoint had faded into a bleak autumn.

In Zimbabwe the long dry winter would be coming to an end, the days becoming hotter and heavier before delivering the gift of rain. Spring was a season in name only, merely a sweltering build-up to the wet season. Unseasonably, yet poignantly, it had rained prematurely for Kate’s cremation in Bulawayo.

Early spring rains, the old people said, were a portent of drought and death. Anna walked through the lounge room to the kitchen bench and pressed a key on the laptop’s keyboard, waking it up. Her email program refreshed but there were no new messages. She wondered if this waiting, this hoping, was any good for her.

Peter was supportive, but she wondered now if he was just being indulgent, and if he would eventually tell her to come to her senses and forget this business of investigating Kate’s death.

Their old family doctor, Geoffrey Fleming, had met Anna and Peter at the airport. She knew from the death certificate that Geoffrey had identified Kate’s body. Anna had been surprised when Geoffrey had called her, when she was still in London, to say that he was helping Linley Brown organise the funeral.

Geoffrey had taken her hand in both of his. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Anna.’

Fleming drove a rusting double-cab
bakkie
and had apologised for the state of his vehicle. ‘Everyone’s doing it pretty tough here these days. I have several patients, especially the elderly, who can’t pay me. An African lady gave me a chicken – still alive – the other day.’

‘Thanks for all you’ve done,’ Anna said. He had aged well, she thought, still handsome, with his thick hair now silver.

‘Linley made most of the arrangements, but it’s a shame she can’t be here for the service.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘She contacted me via email. I don’t really know her and didn’t know she and my sister were so close. I want to see her, doctor.’ She didn’t feel, even at her age, that she could call him by his Christian name. ‘Do you know where she is?’

He looked at her and shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Anna. All I can tell you is that she’s in South Africa.’

‘Is she a patient of yours?’

‘She was, but I have no idea where she’s living at the moment.’

‘Is there no way I can see my sister?’

Fleming swallowed and cast a glance at her as he drove. ‘I’m so sorry, Anna, but her body was . . . well, there’s no other way to say it, it was incinerated. It will have to be a closed casket service.’

Anna fell silent for a moment. ‘I just can’t understand why Linley couldn’t stay, at least for the funeral?’

Fleming returned his concentration to the road. ‘As she was a patient I can’t tell you too much about her, but she’s gone to South Africa for a type of treatment.’

Fleming braked and slowed for a donkey that had ambled onto the road. Anna had caught herself planting her foot on the floor of the pick-up’s cab, searching for a brake, not used to being back on an African road.

‘It couldn’t have waited?’

‘I’m hesitant to say “life and death”, but Linley was not well, emotionally, after the accident. An opening appeared and she had to fly to South Africa.’

The kindly doctor’s words had irked Anna. The woman had done a bunk, but was quite happy to take Kate’s insurance money.

‘How are you, Anna?’ Fleming had asked.

‘I’m perfectly fine. Why?’ She’d tried to keep her reply calm, matter-of-fact, but she could feel her hackles rise and perspiration prick at her underarms.

He’d looked at her again with those blue eyes, still as piercing and questioning as they had been when she and Kate were children. ‘Coming home, back to Zimbabwe I mean, must bring back some memories.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Well . . .’ He looked back to the safety of the road. ‘If you wanted to chat, some time, over a cup of tea, I’m a professional listener.’

‘As I said, doctor, I’m perfectly fine.’

She hadn’t spoken to Dr Fleming again that trip other than to exchange some small talk after the cremation. She’d spent the three days in Bulawayo in a daze, and then had flown back to London. She wondered in retrospect if she would have been capable of arranging anything.

She heard the growl of Peter’s Aston Martin as he pulled into the driveway.

‘Hello,’ he said a few moments later as he dropped his keys on the hall table.

He was ten years older than she, and greying now, but he was still the handsomest man who had ever looked at her more than twice. He came to her and she kissed him on the cheek. ‘How was work?’

‘All right, I suppose. I don’t know if she told you, but Sam brought Jessica in today and asked if I’d do a breast augmentation for her. Can you believe it?’

Anna shook her head. ‘Ridiculous.’ Samantha was a tennis friend, and Jessica, Sam’s daughter, was just sixteen. Anna and Peter had never had children; she had never felt the urge and now wondered if their marriage would have been different, better perhaps, if she had pushed to conceive when they were newlyweds.

Peter went to the drinks cabinet and fixed himself a Scotch. ‘Why the sad face?’

‘I was thinking about Kate again.’

‘Have you heard from the private eye that Dani put you on to?’

Anna shook her head. ‘Not yet. I’ve been checking the email all day.’

‘Anna . . .’

‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s all probably a waste of time, but it just doesn’t feel right.’

‘Of
course
it doesn’t feel right. Your baby sister died in a horrible accident; there’s nothing OK about that.’

He was being irritatingly rational, which annoyed her more than anger would have. If she were rational she would let it go, but instead she was becoming obsessed with Kate’s death. And she was drinking more. It was all Dani’s fault for going on at Sam’s birthday party about people from Zimbabwe faking their deaths.

No, Anna chided herself, it was not Dani’s fault. True, when she had heard Dani explain the way expatriate Zimbabweans were rorting their insurance policies she had reached for the idea like a failing alcoholic snatches back a bottle, but it was not Dani who had made her feel uneasy about her sister’s untimely death.

‘I could
feel
it, before Dani said anything. I know she’s alive, Peter.’

She braced herself for a dressing down, but the corners of his mouth drooped and he tilted his head a little. ‘I can tell you, as a doctor, that sometimes things happen in the operating theatre or in people’s cases that I can’t explain in scientific terms. I and other colleagues have seen patients pull through or go into remission when the odds and the science were against it, and I’ve heard of people dying from no other cause than a broken heart. I can’t tell you to stop being foolish if this is something you believe in.’

‘We’ve got to find out the truth, Peter.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, we do.’

*

Brand ordered another Coke from the waitress as he studied the electronic files Dani had emailed him. He shifted his chair to stay in the shade of the thatch-roofed
lapa
and saw as he did so that the buffalo was still wallowing in the shallows of the river.

Dani had made file notes of conversations she’d had with the insurance company, and with her friend, Anna Cliff. Dani had questioned Anna about her sister’s financial affairs. Her notes, spare and terse, just like Dani herself, read:
Kate had rented a flat in Islington. Until three months before her travelling to Zimbabwe she had held the same job for the previous ten years as a human resources manager with a brewing company. Accepted an offer of voluntary redundancy following merger with another company. Had plans to travel the world. No car loan or other outstanding debts that Anna was aware of
.

That, Brand figured, was a ‘no’ in answer to his mental question about whether the claim would have been treated as suspicious by the insurance company. Kate Munns didn’t owe anyone a huge amount of money – not anyone who’d left a paper trail at least – and she should have been looking forward to some extended travel. She did not seem like the sort of person who needed to disappear off the face of the earth, or who needed the two hundred thousand pounds her life was insured for.

Brand rubbed his chin. There were, he knew, other reasons why someone outwardly secure – financial and mentally – might need money to disappear. Problem gamblers and, to a lesser extent, drug addicts were good at keeping their vices hidden from family and friends and both could find themselves in need of sizeable amounts of cash. He turned back to Dani’s notes.

Anna Cliff said her sister appeared in ‘relatively good spirits’ the last time she saw her, before Kate’s trip to Zimbabwe. Kate had booked a return ticket to Zimbabwe, but had made no plans to go further.

So this was not the beginning of the round-the-world tour. Brand took out a bound notebook from the pocket of his bush shirt and, under the heading ‘Kate Munns’ made his first note, to ask how long Kate had planned on staying in Zimbabwe.

Dani’s file continued:
When quizzed what ‘relatively good spirits’
meant, Anna said Kate had appeared distracted and somewhat anxious at the airport, when her sister dropped her at Heathrow. Anna quizzed Kate about this and her sister replied that she was having second thoughts about her plans for travel, and even her trip to Zimbabwe. She said she was missing her job more than she expected and felt that in the current unsure economic times she should be trying to find another rather than going abroad and spending her redundancy payout.

Brand had spent his life drifting so couldn’t quite understand why someone who had been forced out of a desk job, and given money, would be so eager to find another one too soon, especially if the person involved was financially secure. But then, he had little experience of the corporate world, nor financial security for that matter.

He craved a cigarette while he read and reached instinctively for his other breast pocket before remembering there was nothing there, and that he was supposed to be giving up again.

The words didn’t tally – was it possible to be in good spirits while also distracted and nervous? Was Anna Cliff trying to read too much into her sister’s mood in order to reinforce her own suspicions that Kate wasn’t dead, but rather in hiding or running away from something? What did Kate have to run from?

Anna said her sister had had three short to medium term relationships, all with men. She said her sister was heterosexual and felt sure she would have known if there had been another side to her sex life
.

Typical Dani, Brand thought. Going straight for the jugular, but he didn’t completely trust the lawyer’s neat tying up of this aspect of her questioning; no one really knew all about anyone else’s sex life. He had done a little of this sort of investigation when he had lived in Harare, tailing spouses of clients who believed their other halves were cheating on them. It was dirty work, and not in a good way, and, to Brand’s mind, not worth the money. He wondered if Kate’s ‘short to medium term relationships’ meant she’d had trouble committing, or if she had just chosen the wrong men.

Brand wrote a second entry in his notebook:
Relationship with Linley Brown.
His initial gut instinct that there was more going on between Kate and Linley than Anna thought, or would admit, was still his strongest theory for why Kate would make her friend her beneficiary, if not for why she might want to disappear from her normal life in London.

He stretched, and his cracked ribs curtailed the movement. It still didn’t stack up. This was the twenty-first century. People didn’t fake their deaths to cover up their sexuality, and if Kate had wanted to run off with her boarding school lesbian lover she’d had the cash to do so, for a while at least, until her redundancy payout ran out.

Brand tapped his pen on the page of the notebook.

Attached to the email file was a scanned PDF of Linley Brown’s claim on Kate’s insurance policy, and a copy of Kate’s last will and testament, which named the same Linley as her executor. Brand read the will first. It seemed Kate had few possessions. There was no car – Brand assumed she might have had a company car until she lost her job – and her cat, Ingwe, which meant leopard in various African languages, was left to her sister, Anna. Linley inherited the proceeds of her cheque and savings accounts.
How much?
Brand wrote on the next line in his notebook.

Linley Brown’s address was a street in Burnside, Bulawayo. Brand knew the area vaguely; he’d lived in Zimbabwe in the early nineties working as a guide after the Angolan border war had died down and before he’d started as an investigator. Even though he had fought for the apartheid regime, he hadn’t wanted to live in South Africa under its racial laws. Until Mandela took power in 1994 Zimbabwe had been the hotspot in the southern African tourism market for overseas visitors. He’d had a girlfriend who lived in Hillside before emigrating to Australia. He used to visit her every few weeks when he had leave from his job at The Hide, a private game lodge on the edge of Hwange National Park. Hillside had once been full of young white families with old money, but now most of its inhabitants were white pensioners with little money. Linley Brown’s bank account details for transferal of the insurance payout were, however, in South Africa. Brand wrote down the account number, and Linley’s address and phone number in Zimbabwe.

He closed the scanned PDFs and opened the next file, a saved email chain from Linley Brown to and from the insurance company Kate had her policy with. Linley’s first email was asking why it was taking them so long to pay out the policy. A little cold, he thought, but perhaps two hundred thousand quid meant a lot more to a woman in Zimbabwe than to Kate’s stay-at-home sister and her rich doctor husband. The reply in the chain assured Linley her claim was still being processed, and was subject to normal due diligence and verification. The process, the sender explained, could take up to three months.