‘You went to the club.’ Shuttleworth didn’t even bother framing it as a question, Tom noted, though he saw the disapproval in the by-the-book chief inspector’s eyes.
‘Yes, but it was pretty much a dead end. There was a stripper named Ebony who worked there, but she’d called in sick. The girl I spoke to didn’t recognise Nick’s description.’
‘Hmm. I’ll send Morris and Burnett around to investigate officially. Interesting that she called in sick the same evening that Nick did a bunk.’
‘We don’t know he’s done a runner. Could be something worse.’
‘Aye; well, it’s damned inconvenient whatever the explanation. Do you know much about his personal life? I remember you said he seems to have a different bird every few weeks.’
Tom shook his head. ‘Only heard rumours. I haven’t socialised with him since he split up with his wife. His house looks more like a seventies bachelor pad these days, so it could be he’s enjoying single life to the full.’
‘Write up your notes and a statement about last night. Once you’re done you can get home and pack. It’s warm in South Africa this time of year.’
Tom took the files back to one of the hot desk workstations used by the protection officers and turned on the shared computer. He would have to digest the files now, as they couldn’t leave the building. He was flying to South Africa tonight, spending the next day and night in the country, then flying back to the UK the following afternoon. After little more than twenty-four hours to rest up he would then be on Greeves’s personal protection team, and getting straight back on another plane to Africa. If there were more resources available he would have simply stayed in-country and waited for the minister and the rest of the team to arrive.
He read a sheaf of email print-outs from the file. The protection for Greeves was very lean, and that was cause for some concern. Not that he could do much about manpower issues. The recently raised security alert meant that even junior ministers such as Greeves were being afforded close personal protection at home and abroad. He didn’t have a view yet on how serious a target the man in charge of defence procurement might be, but he was getting a bare-bones service from the Met.
As he read messages Nick had typed to his counterpart in South Africa he wondered again where, when and how his colleague would turn up. He’d half expected, when he let himself into Nick’s home, that he would find him dead in the bathroom, his brains splattered on the tiled wall.
That’s how he would do it, if he made the decision. Easier to clean the place for the lawyer or doctor or accountant who moved in. Tom was one of a rare breed — a Catholic in the old Special Branch. He kept his religion to himself, not because he was worried about jibes or prejudice, particularly when the enemy were Irishmen of his own faith, but because he no longer really believed. It was ironic, he thought. If what the nuns had taught him as a child were true, then one day he and Alex would be reunited in the afterlife; however, if he took a short cut to get to her by committing suicide he would be damned in hell for committing the sin of taking his own life.
3
‘Tea, sir?’
Tom blinked and shook his head to clear his senses. The flight attendant was giving him a smile that almost passed for sincere as she hovered waiting for him to answer.
‘Please,’ he replied, pulling himself up from the flat business-class bed to a semi-sitting position. Someone had opened the shutter beside him and golden sunlight flooded the cabin of the British Airways 747.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked as she placed the cup on his side table.
‘Like the dead,’ he said. The late night at the club and early start had been a blessing in disguise, as he had fallen asleep soon after the meal. He’d long gotten over the novelty of travelling business or first class on long-haul flights. He did, however, appreciate the advent of fully flat beds in business.
A short time later the aircraft captain announced the cabin crew would be preparing the cabin for landing. By the time Tom returned from the toilet, where he had run a battery-powered shaver over his chin and combed his tousled grey-flecked hair, his bed had been transformed back to a seat. He leaned over and stared out the window at Africa.
The countryside was greener than he had expected, though the captain announced that rain was forecast at their destination. As well as open grasslands below there were circular farmed fields of some irrigated crop or other. What Tom knew about farming would fit on the back of a London Transport travel card. He knew even less about big game and wildlife. In the parts of Africa he had visited the populace were more at risk from AK 47s than from lions or leopards.
Tom had read his internet print-outs — some general information on South Africa, Tinga Legends Lodge and the Kruger National Park — before falling asleep on the flight. He had a lot to learn about the country he was about to set foot in, but in some respects that didn’t matter.
There would be a South African Police Service inspector at the airport to meet and accompany him out to the safari lodge, which he had read was about four hours’ drive away. Robert Greeves would actually fly to the park on his visit, but in the meantime SO1 could spend their money better elsewhere than on an internal flight for Tom on this advance visit. He didn’t care, as a road trip would give him a better chance to get a feel for what people referred to as the ‘new’ South Africa.
However, there were things about this job that were already starting to concern him. For a start, he shouldn’t have been on his own. A protection team was normally made up of a bare minimum of two members. Another Met policeman, Detective Constable Charlie Sheather, was already in South Africa, but he had leapfrogged ahead to check out the Radisson Hotel in Cape Town, where Greeves would stay after his visit to Tinga. Charlie would do the advance for that leg of the trip, but he and Tom would not be working together until Tom flew to the Cape. It was against standard operating procedures, but the existing staff shortages had suddenly been made worse by Nick’s disappearance. Also, Greeves was a junior minister — defence procurement was important but didn’t keep the politician in the headlines, unlike the Defence Secretary, who still rated a full team.
There was a distant clunk somewhere back beneath economy class as the wheels were lowered and the flaps extended. Out the window he glimpsed rows of detached houses on small plots of land, some with swimming pools — suburbia. No elephants or zebra. He smiled to himself. Hot air rising from the sun-warmed African landscape produced some ‘bumps’, as the pilot referred to them, and Tom peered out the window as Africa rose up to greet him.
Tom registered little about Johannesburg International Airport, other than that the terminal was bigger, busier, more modern and more efficient than he had imagined it would be. The few South Africans he had met in London seemed to like nothing better than to berate the new rulers of their former homeland about corruption, increasing crime and a deterioration in services since the advent of majority rule in 1994. Tom wasn’t naive enough to judge a country by its arrivals hall, but it was a reminder that he should leave his prejudices at the entry gate. He was a man who dealt with facts, not anecdotes or rumours. He doubted he would have a chance to form deep or lasting impressions of African and South African democracy from one recce, but he would keep his eyes and ears open.
‘Detective Sergeant Furey?’
‘That’s me.’ Tom had looked past the blonde-haired woman in a smart business suit, with nipped-in jacket and skirt. She was about five-nine, four inches shorter than he, though her heels made up most of the difference. Her hair was cut short in a bob but the first thing he really noticed about her, other than her height, was her blue eyes. He knew he was staring at her, but couldn’t help it. He forced himself to blink.