When she was dressed she went into the living room.
Sitting on the floor with the street map of Pretoria spread out in front of him, Jan looked up at her. He was grinning, amused. She blushed.
"Bit bourgeois, Ros, handing out home comforts to the troops before the battle."
She ignored her brother. "Can I do anything, Jack?"
"Have you a nail file, metal?"
"Yes."
"Please, would you take the serial number off the shotgun."
"Aren't you going to take it with you, to the border?"
"Just in case I get separated from it," Jack said easily.
"You'll need it all the way to the border."
"Wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands, come back to you."
It was insane to be thinking about the border. Jack passed her up the shotgun, and he pointed to the serial number.
She took it into the bedroom where she had left her handbag.
She would remember him for ever, as she had seen him in her bed, because she would never see him again.
* * *
The assistant dropped Frikkie de Kok off home.
Pretty damned stupid when he thought about it, that he should have an armed escort every time he went to Pretoria Central and an armed escort back from Pretoria Central, but nothing when he took Hermione shopping nor when he took his boys to the Loftus Versfeld for rugby.
It had gone pretty well, a pretty damned good day's work.
The assistant had done him proud. Right from the start in the morning, right from the time his assistant had picked him up, he had told him to take his time, not to get himself rushed, just to go through the procedure the way he had seen Frikkie do it. It had been fine because it was only one man. The assistant had executed his first man. Not that he had officially executed the man, not that it went into the paperwork that he had done it, but the arrangement had been made with the governor. The governor could not really have put the spoke in, because the governor had to accept that if a man was booked for hanging on a Tuesday or a Thursday and Frikkie de Kok happened to have the influenza or he had ricked his back in the garden, then the man still had to go. Frikkie de Kok with influenza or a bad back shouldn't be a reason for a stay of execution. And the time came when an assistant had to prove himself, show that he could manage the work himself, and pretty damn well he'd done for a first time. Frikkie had been behind him, ready to lend a hand if he was needed, and he hadn't been.
All right, his assistant had been a little clumsy when they brought the fellow into preparation, but who wouldn't have been, on his first time with the responsibility. A little aggressive with the pinions, a little rough moving the fellow onto the centre of the trap, a little hard when he had hooded him, a very little bit fierce when he had ringed the fellow's neck with the noose. Little things, not grounds for complaint. Little things to be pointed out over a beer. No trouble with the drop. The assistant had made his calculations to the inch and to the pound, just right the drop had been.
Frikkie de Kok had shaken his assistant's hand while the rope still shivered, while a young creep on compulsory attendance was in the corner throwing up over his uniform
… Just Frikkie de Kok's view, and privately held, but it wasn't right to have youngsters in the hanging gaol, not the youngsters who had joined the prison service as an alternative to conscription into the army and service in the "operational area". The hanging gaol should be for professionals, not for shirkers. Just his opinion.
Afterwards he and his assistant had stayed all day in Maximum Security, because Thursday was a multiple, five on the trap. Thursday took preparation. Six was the most he could do, but that was a hell of a business even with a good assistant. Two and three and four at a time were pretty much all right, but fives and sixes were hard on everyone present. When he was busy round the trap he never looked at the spectators. Too much on his mind with the pinions and the hoods and the feet being right and the noose, but he could hear them. He could hear his audience gasping, willing him to go faster. Stood to reason that fives and sixes couldn't be as fast as hanging one man alone. Frikkie de Kok, as he always said to his assistant, would never hurry.
To hurry was the fastest way to a fiasco. So, they had stayed at the gaol all day, and they had made their preparations, and because he had a combined condemns weight of 325 kilos on the trap he had gone down underneath and checked each single bolt and screw of the trap. It paid to be careful in Frikkie de Kok's job. A good day's work, and after his tea his assistant was coming back to collect him, and there would be a good evening's entertainment at the Harlequins, a floodlit Cup match. He was thinking of his shower, and of getting out of his suit, as he pushed open his front garden gate. He was thinking of the match as he came up the path, and how the second team flank forward would cope, because he was replacing the injured first choice.
He opened his front door. He could see into the living room. His two boys, singlets and shorts, red cheeks and sweat, pumping iron on his living room carpet. So they shared the weights. Beautiful to Frikkie de Kok to see his boys working on the weights. And beautiful for him to hear that his Hermione was in the kitchen making his tea.
Beautiful also to be going to the Harlequins for a match.
And beautiful to know that he had a quiet day to follow before his waking before dawn on Thursday.
He thought he could smell a meat pie from the kitchen, and he thought the Harlequins would beat Defence, and he thought he would make a hell of a fine job of dropping five on Thursday morning.
The colonel listened intently.
Sometimes it was a good line from London. That evening it was a poor line. He was listening on an open line to the brigadier who headed security police operations throughout Western Europe. Major Hannes Swart enjoyed a particular autonomy in London, but nominally he reported to the brigadier.
He had forgotten the funeral, slipped it from his mind.
Aunt Annie was dead, buried, gone. He had forgotten the minister's rallying words and the repetitive threat of the Afrikaners' vengeance. He had forgotten them because they were meaningless, they were rhetoric when set against the real warfare of his own battlefield.
"They would have been carrying their IDs, so it cannot be a hospital situation. If they had been in any form of accident then we would have heard from the police or from a hospital. I have checked back over the instructions that were sent to Hannes yesterday morning. I have had a man go down to this Churchill Close address. Not easy, there is a police car parked outside the house. So, I have a problem.
What sort of inquiry am I to make? Delicate, eh, you understand me? This afternoon I have been to the Foreign Office and I have reported that Hannes and his two colleagues are missing. Perhaps the man I meet is lying, perhaps he is in ignorance. He tells me that he has no knowledge of the whereabouts of these three members of our staff. I cannot ask him if they are in police custody, because he will ask me why I should suppose that. I'm at a halt."
The telephone purred in the colonel's ear. He thought the brigadier didn't give a shit for the John Vorster Square bomb. The bastard was swanning in Paris and London and Amsterdam and Bonn, the bastard was freeloading in Europe.