Tom heard the bitterness in her voice. Most of the houses had rusting tin roofs. Some looked as though they were made entirely of homemade mud bricks and old packing crates. He smelled wood smoke through the aircon’s inlet and guessed it was the trees which had once stood on these hills. Toddlers walked barefoot, their lower legs spattered with red mud. A skeletal woman carried a baby on her back, wrapped in a piece of stained cloth tied around her midriff. Sannie kept her speed up and ignored the malevolent stares of a group of teenage boys dressed like American ghetto dwellers, brightly coloured boxer shorts protruding above low-slung jeans. Plenty of bling. Would-be gangsters.
‘We don’t want to break down here,’ she said. They passed a turnoff to the Kruger Park’s Numbi Gate, but Sannie said they were headed further north, to an entrance closer to the park’s internal police station. ‘I just wanted to show you how some people live, so you can maybe understand the crime problem a little better.’
Tom nodded. Something Sannie had said before, about African women, reminded him of his brief informal investigation into Nick’s disappearance. ‘Did you ever notice Nick taking an interest in black African women?’
Sannie sniffed. ‘That man would take an interest in a cobra if you held its head. Why do you ask?’
‘I think one of the last people to have seen him was a South African woman.’
‘A hooker?’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘How can you guess?’ Sannie asked, giving him a deadpan look.
‘Actually, she was what we might in polite circles call an exotic dancer.’
‘A stripper? Sounds like him. He and a couple of the male cops went to a table-dancing club in Pretoria one time. My colleagues told me Nick was particularly interested in the one girl, and she was black.’
‘I wonder if it could be the same one,’ Tom said, thinking out loud.
‘Could just be that he was into any girl who would talk to him — even if he had to stick money in her garter, you know.’
They had passed back into rural countryside, lush farms which covered the mountains in different shades of emerald in the afternoon sun. Tom noted banana farms and tropical fruits such as avocados and mangoes for sale on the side of the road. Fertile country. ‘I grew up near here, on a banana farm,’ Sannie said as they passed through a small but chaotic town — a ‘ dorp ’ she called it — named Hazyview. ‘I was a real bush baby. My family took my brothers and me into the Kruger Park every school holiday and many weekends. But I never got sick of it.’
Workers heading home thronged the sidewalks, and pick-ups laden with farm produce and fertilizer queued at the robots in a mini peak-hour traffic jam. Loud hip-hop blared from giant ghetto-blasters parked outside an electrical goods store. A gaggle of school-girls in starched uniforms giggled at something.
‘Did you stay at a lodge like the one we’re heading for? From what I’ve read it’s very expensive.’
She chuckled. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn, my friend. Kruger gets about three million visitors a year, and most of those are local families. You can stay in national parks rest camps which have camping sites and self-contained rondavels — huts. You don’t need to stay at one of the larney places. There’s something for everyone, although when I was a little kid the park was for whites only. It’s good now, though, to see more black families visiting. I take my kids camping there a few times a year.’
They continued driving and Sannie checked her watch. The kids would be out of school soon, and when she could she would call her mother to make sure they had got to her place safely and talk to them for a bit. Tom appeared deep in thought, and she guessed he was still mulling over what had happened to his police colleague. As much as she disliked Nick, a tiny part of her still felt bad that a detective who, despite all his faults, was always punctual and professional — at least around the man he was protecting — had suddenly disappeared. She felt a pang of guilt that she had secretly wished him ill. She hoped he would turn up drunk or stoned in the bed of some African stripper. The bol-locking — to borrow an English word — that he would receive would be long overdue and might teach him a lesson. She had never seen Nick use drugs, though when they were off duty she had noticed him easily matching Pol and Kobus, the other members of her team, drink for drink, and they were major soaks.
She had been mildly offended the night in Pretoria that the three of them had announced in the pub that they were going to the strip club. Not because they were leaving her, but because they hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to go too. She’d never been to such a place, not even as part of her job, and she was curious to see what went on.
Sannie took the turning to the Paul Kruger Gate, a major entrance point to the national park. She really did love coming to this place. Whether in the old South Africa or the new, the park was a Garden of Eden, a natural oasis where one could forget the day-to-day problems and challenges of life and immerse oneself in the restful, inspiring tranquillity of the bush. Even though she was here on a work assignment, she felt the stress melt from her body and her grip on the steering wheel relax as she crossed the Sabie River. She pulled up a hundred metres short of the thatched gatehouse and unloaded and cleared her Z88. She noticed Tom watching her out of the corner of his eye. She handled her weapon confidently and safely and was an expert shot, regularly outshooting all of her male colleagues on the firing range. She put the pistol back in its holster and smiled at him.
‘Won’t you need that for lions and tigers?’
‘No tigers in Africa, I’m afraid. No, this place is about as safe as it gets in South Africa — as long as you stay in your car.’
Tom grimaced and she laughed at him. He was a good-looking guy. Solidly built. He had a full head of hair and blue eyes, which she liked the look of, and a strong jaw. Unlike some of the other detectives she worked with, this one obviously kept himself fit. There was no sign of a beer belly hanging over his trouser belt.
Sannie had only come close to sleeping with one man since Christo’s death, and that had been one time only. It was a disaster. She had been drinking at the squad’s Christmas party — in fact, she had been so drunk that she had decided not to drive home. She was about to call her mother when her boss, Captain Henk Wessels, had offered to give her a lift. He lived not far from her home in suburban Kempton Park — only a couple of streets away.
At the time it had been a little more than a year since Christo had been shot and she had been so preoccupied with the kids — helping them to stay focused at school and to deal with their grief — that she hadn’t even thought about having another relationship. When Wessels stopped outside her home he had leaned over from the driver’s seat to give her a goodnight kiss.
It was not entirely appropriate for a senior officer to do something like that to a subordinate but, what the hell, she had thought, it was Christmas and it had been a damned good party, and he had taken her home. As she leaned over to offer her cheek he struck, fast and predatory, like a mamba, and planted a kiss on her lips. She leaned back, surprised, and not sure if it had been a mistake of timing or positioning. Henk was not an unattractive man. He had left his wife and four children for a girl of twenty-five, who was only a little more than half his age. It had been a bad situation, made worse for the captain when the younger girl ditched him after seven months. Sannie thought he was seeing a nurse these days, though the two were not living together. He smiled at her. He was a bad man.