The Hunter (12 page)

No, I chastised myself. Then he would want a favour. I bunched my hands into fists by my side.

‘Sauvignon blanc?’ Lungile suggested.

I nodded. I should have been going cold turkey, but I couldn’t, not after the call from the safari guide cum private investigator. Lungile brought a glass from the kitchen and poured the pale golden liquid into it while I held it. I took a deep sip. It certainly didn’t hurt. I looked up at her. ‘Did you see
The Citizen
today?’

‘Glamour girls!’ Fortune started doing an impromptu dance on the marble. ‘Glam, glam, glam, glamour girls.’

‘Enough,’ said Lungile. ‘Yes, I saw it. Are you worried?’

I took another drink. ‘A little. You can’t really see our faces and I’m glad you told me to always wear those big Paris Hilton sunglasses, but it felt like everywhere I went today people were reading that bloody newspaper and looking at me.’

Lungile sat down beside me and put her hand on my knee. ‘Well,
no one
is going to be looking at you after the next job. Come try on your new outfit.’

As crazy as it sounds, I felt safe with Lungile. I knew, however, that what we were doing was wrong and the life I was leading was reprehensible. I wanted nothing more than to go straight, but I felt like I was trapped in a downward spiral. I’d been cursed, denied the innocence and freedom and choices that so many other people took for granted. When my money came through, I told myself for the thousandth time, I would make amends to the victims of my crimes and I would become a good person. For now, though, I let Lungile top up my empty glass and I silently prayed that I’d made the right decision not to meet with Hudson Brand and that my claim would be rubber-stamped once he found out that Kate’s death certificate and the reports of the accident were all legit.

8

T
he bull elephant trumpeted and shook his massive head, producing a dust cloud that enveloped him like a smoky aura.

Brand held his ground as the bull flapped his ears. The elephant took a couple of steps towards where Brand was parked in his Land Rover, by the Klopperfontein waterhole in the far north of the Kruger National Park. The front ranks of a phalanx of thirsty Cape buffalo were churning the already muddy waters into glutinous goo while the elephant turned his attention to the vehicle.

The early rain had come and gone and the temporary burst of green grass and leaves had dried to desiccated gold and brown once more. Early rain was an illusion, a promise of bounty, but Brand had long ago learned that if something seemed too good to be true, it usually was.

Finding out that Linley Brown had a South African mobile phone had also been a glimmer of false hope. In the two days he had spent winding his way leisurely from Skukuza to the north of the park he had called Linley’s number six times and SMSed it three. Still he had received no reply from her. This could mean a number of things, he thought as he watched the elephant barge his way back into the herd of buffalo. The bull thought this was his waterhole and he was determined to try and scare off anyone or anything that tried to suggest otherwise. Brand had seen the mock charge directed at his Land Rover for what it was, and so, too, did the buffalo, who gave some low bovine moos and shifted around a bit, but otherwise kept pressing their point men into the mud, ignoring the feisty young bull’s blustery rants.

Brand took a stick of chilli beef biltong and bit into it. He washed the heat from his mouth with a swig of Windhoek Lager while he watched the buffalo and the obstreperous young male elephant face each other down. Linley could be somewhere without mobile phone coverage. Such places were becoming fewer and farther between in South Africa, but they did exist. Alternatively, if she was using a pre-paid SIM card she could just be out of credit. It had happened to him often enough.

But it didn’t make sense. He was her lifeline to two hundred thousand pounds and all she had to do was call him. If she was suspicious of the creative semantics he’d used in his voicemail message, introducing himself as an assessor rather than an investigator, then that could mean she had something to hide.

Brand drained his beer, which was getting warm in any case, and tossed it with the other empties in the passenger footwell. If this was a scam it was more elaborate than the others he had investigated. There had been no sham funeral in the case of Tatenda Mbudzi, or the others, but according to Dani’s file Anna Cliff and her husband had flown from the UK to attend a cremation and had taken home Kate’s ashes – or someone’s ashes. That sort of shit, Brand told himself, was harder to fake, but not impossible. Could a crematorium be on the take? It was Africa, after all, and he imagined weirder things happened in the rest of the world when it came to the business of getting rid of bodies or making people disappear.

One thing that had definitely vanished without a trace was his bank balance. Brand had been counting on the walking safari and the tips he’d hoped to earn. In a way, Linley Brown’s refusal or inability to return his calls was good news for him. He had hoped, for expediency’s sake and the sake of Kate’s sister, Anna, that he could meet Linley and wrap this case up in South Africa without having to cross a border. However, if that happened he would only have been able to charge Dani for a day’s work, in all good conscience, but the longer Linley delayed him the greater the need for him to travel north into Zimbabwe. By doing so he would start racking up some hours and days that he could bill Dani for, and thus make up the shortfall in funds.

Brand disconnected his phone from its cigarette lighter charger and pressed the dial button to call the last number he had tried.

‘
Howzit, you’ve called Linley
. . .
’

He ended the call, not even bothering to leave another message. The hell with it, he thought, it was time for him to go to Zimbabwe and start earning some of Dani’s money.

*

‘Thanks, Dani, bye,’ Anna said. She re-tied her dressing-gown belt, which had come loose.

Peter looked up from his copy of
The Times
, folded beside his morning tea and toast. ‘Encouraging news?’

Anna sat down and picked up her cup of tea. It had gone cold. ‘I don’t know. She said her investigator, Brand, emailed her from South Africa to say he was about to cross the border into Zimbabwe and should be in Bulawayo late today or early tomorrow. She says his email access will be limited from there; I could have told her that.’

‘Don’t fret. There’s nothing we can do from over here. By the way, last night, after you went to bed, when I was up reading some papers online, I checked out your Hudson Brand. Seems he’s a safari guide as well as a private investigator.’

‘Really? Well, it would have been nice if he’d replied to my email. Perhaps he was too busy out in the bush telling tourists zebra jokes.’

Peter smiled and went back to his tea. ‘He made the news after killing a poacher.’

‘Good for him. I just wish there was more I could be doing. I suppose this Brand fellow doesn’t want to have much to do with us until he can find out through his own sources if we’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘Hmmm, perhaps.’ Peter sipped his tea. ‘You know, it was a shame we could only spend such a short time in Zimbabwe for the funeral.’

Peter had had a full surgical schedule at the time, and even with some re-jigging they had only managed to get away for four days, including travelling time. ‘You mean we could have done some checking of our own?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not saying that, but it was all so terrible; it must have been awful for you having to make such a rushed visit back to the place where you were born, and having no time to look around again.’

Peter was right. The trip was a blur in her memory. She had pictured herself going back to the bush to stay in a safari lodge or travel to some new, exotic destination if and when she returned to Africa. She had never dreamed she would have to go to cremate her sister.

It would be hot and dry there now. She closed her eyes and her ears to the drumming of rain on the conservatory’s glass roof, and tried to conjure the smells of her childhood: wild sage, dust and the musty scent of elephant borne on an open-furnace wind.

‘I wonder if it might help,’ said Peter, bringing her back to the reality of rain-swept London.

‘A trip back to Zimbabwe?’

He took off his reading glasses and put them in his top pocket, closed his paper and stood up from the table. ‘Maybe not just Zim. What about Botswana, South Africa? Wherever you want to go. A proper safari.’

She looked up at him. ‘There’s nothing like the bush soothing what pains you, my granny used to say.’

Peter took his suit jacket off the back of the chair and put it on.

‘Will you be home late this evening?’

‘I’ll try not to be,’ he said.

She waved goodbye to him and contemplated another day of waiting for news that would probably not come any time soon, thanks to the unreliable phone and internet connections in the country of her birth.

Her laptop was on the kitchen bench. Anna opened it and boiled the kettle to make herself a fresh cup of tea while the computer booted up. She poured the water and took the drink to the counter, where she perched on a stool and entered the words ‘hudson brand safari guide’ into Google.

Anna found the stories Peter had mentioned about Brand killing a poacher while on a walk, and read with more interest his success in proving a government minister’s son had faked his death in Zimbabwe; he seemed to know what he was doing as an investigator. Next she clicked on a hit from what looked like Brand’s own webpage, Brand Safaris.

It was slow to load, so Anna opened the bottom kitchen drawer and found her hidden pack of cigarettes and lighter under the tea towels – somewhere Peter would never, ever find them. She opened a window and felt a cold gust of damp air. He would probably still be able to smell it when he came home, but she didn’t care. She needed the nicotine hit. A picture of Brand, wearing khaki and standing with one foot up on the bumper of an open Land Rover came up on the screen. He had stubble on his chin and a pistol in a holster on the belt on his short shorts, which revealed dark brown legs.

She exhaled towards the window then waved at the smoke with her hand as the wind blew it back inside. Brand’s website advertised personalised escorted safaris throughout southern and East Africa, and day drives into the Kruger National Park from his base in the town of Hazyview. His biography said Brand had worked as a guide in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa, and by special arrangement in East Africa, in Kenya and Tanzania. There was nothing on the website about his work as a private investigator.

Anna thought about what Peter had suggested over breakfast. She did want to go back to Africa. She started to wonder what the mocha-skinned man with the crooked grin and blue eyes would think of her. Even if he did find that Kate had died in the car crash – the most likely outcome – she still wanted someone to find Linley Brown for her so that she could talk to Kate’s friend. Anna didn’t care about the money, but she wasn’t satisfied that any medical condition, short of the need for open heart surgery, could have kept a woman away from her best friend’s funeral. No. Something was up with Linley Brown and Anna wanted – needed – to confront her.

She went to the fridge and took their combined social calendar down from its magnetic hook, then opened her copy of Peter’s surgical schedule, which he kept updated for her remotely from his work laptop. In the unlikely event Kate was alive and in hiding, Anna wanted Brand to find her and, if she was dead, she needed Brand to find Linley. Brand was a safari guide, so whatever the fruits of his investigation he could probably put together a private tour for herself and Peter. With luck she and Peter might even be in Africa at the same time as Brand found something for them. She was paying the man, indirectly via Dani, and directly if he agreed to do the follow-up investigation for her, so she thought she may as well get her money’s worth out of him.

Anna finished her cigarette and her tea, put the cup in the sink and went to the bathroom. She turned the shower on to let the water warm up, then slipped out of her robe. Stepping in, she added some cold and tilted her face to the shower’s rose.

She squeezed shampoo from the bottle into her hand and as she massaged it into her hair she closed her eyes and thought about the plan for a safari. It would be fun, and whatever came of Brand’s sleuthing, Peter was probably right – it would also be good for her.

Through the foggy glass of the shower door Anna looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She kept herself in good shape, going to the gym three days a week and watching her weight, but for what? She and Peter had no sex life.

Anna washed her chest and under her arms, then felt her breasts, as she did regularly, for lumps. She found herself lingering, though, her fingers brushing a few more times than was necessary over her nipples. They responded to her touch and her thoughts, and started to harden.

Looking away from the mirror so she wouldn’t see the manifestation of the colour she felt in her cheeks, she turned her mind to exactly what it was she wanted.

She and Peter had been to a luxury safari camp on an island in Lake Kariba, in Zimbabwe, for their African honeymoon after their wedding in Bulawayo. Anna forced the memory of Kate as her teenage maid of honour from her mind and directed herself back to the hot, steamy October afternoons when she and Peter had used the outdoor shower, open to the elements, at the rear of their safari tent. It was like skinny-dipping behind closed doors – liberating and arousing, but with no risk of anyone seeing them. Peter had been as he always was, a considerate, adept lover who seemed to enjoy putting her pleasure before his. For a while, for the first time in her life, everything had been perfect. Then, one day, when she found out what he was really like, the intimacy between them had ended.

She imagined the setting now, the sounds and smells of the African bush enveloping her along with the water, and a man opening the door of the outdoor shower. Anna’s hands moved down over her belly to the tangle of hair at the apex of her legs, a finger pushing between the folds of skin, finding the other part of her that was hardening, for the first time in too long. She looked over her shoulder, eyes closed, and pictured the man there. Not her husband, but a tall man with skin the colour of the rich brown heart of mopane wood, undoing a bush shirt and unbuckling a gun belt, his shorts sliding to the stone floor.

Her back was to him, a false, futile show of modesty as his left arm snaked around her, drawing her forcefully to him, pressing her against his muscled belly and the hard shaft. His calloused finger replaced hers, readying her with one hand while he gathered her wet hair into a ponytail with his other and yanked it back, hard. He kissed her exposed neck, drawing the skin between his teeth, then whispered something filthy in her ear, what he was about to do to her.

Now, as in the vision played out behind her closed eyelids, she steadied herself against the wall of the shower with one hand. She felt his knee knocking her legs apart, sensed herself pushing her backside towards him, arching her back, displaying herself like some wild creature on heat, ready to be mounted.

Anna felt him enter her, one stroke, uncaring, commanding, taking possession of what was offered to him. She felt the coarse stubble burning her cheek as he talked dirty to her, all the way through to her climax.

She shuddered, suddenly unsteady from the waves of guilty pleasure that rolled through her body and the hot steam engulfing her, both robbing her of breath. The soap slipped from her free hand and she eased herself to her knees to retrieve it, and to let the shaking subside. At last, she opened her eyes to find the lost soap, but in doing so she caught sight of her pathetic reflection again. A lonely, rich housewife who had lost the little sister she never really knew well enough, the last blood member of her family. The tears pricked at her eyes and she coughed from the cigarette she should not have smoked.