Craig realized that he was putting off the moment and clenched his jaw determinedly. He left the Land-Rover in the car park and climbed the front steps of the museum.
"Good morning, Sergeant. "The girl at the enquiries desk recognized the three stripes on the sleeve of his khaki and navy blue police uniform. Craig still felt vaguely ashamed of his rapid promotion.
"Don't be damned silly, boy," Bawu had growled when he protested at the family influence. "It's a technical appointment, Sergeant Armourer." " Craig gave the girl his boyish grin, and her expression warmed instantly. "I'm looking for Miss Carpenter." "I'm sorry. I don't know her." The girl looked unhappy at having to disappoint him.
"But she works here, "Craig protested. "Janine Carpenter." "Oh, she brightened. "You mean Doctor Carpenter. Is she expecting you?"
"Oh, I'm sure she knows I'm coming, "Craig assured her. "She is in Room 2." Up the stairs, turn left, through the door that says "Staff Only", and it's the third door on the right. Craig pushed the door open at the invitation of "Enter!" that greeted his knock. It was a long narrow room with skylights and fluorescent tubes overhead and the walls lined as high as the ceiling with shallow drawers, each with a pair of bright brass handles.
Janine stood at the bench table which ran down the centre of the room. She was dressed in blue jeans and a brightly checked lumberjack's woollen shirt.
"I didn't know you wore glasses," Craig said. They gave her an air of owlish erudition, and she whipped them off her face and hid them behind her back.
"Well!"she greeted him. "What do you want?" "Look," he said, "I just had to find out what an entomologist does. I had this bizarre picture of you wrestling with tsetse flies and beating locusts to death with a club." He closed the door quietly behind him and kept talking as he sidled up to the table beside her. "I say, that looks interesting!"
She was like an affronted cat, back arched and every hair upon it erect, but slowly she relaxed.
"Slides," she explained reluctantly. "I am setting up microscopic slides." And then with fresh irritation in her voice, "You know, you show the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman. As soon as anyone mentions insects, you immediately think of pests like locusts and disease-carriers like tsetse flies." "Is that wrong?" "Hexapoda is the largest class of the largest animal phylum, Arthropoda. It has literally hundreds of thousands of members, most of which are beneficial to man, and the pests are in the vast minority."
He wanted to take her up on the "vast minority" as a contradiction in terms, but his good sense for once prevailed. Instead he said, "I never thought of that. How do you mean beneficial to man?" "They pollinate plants, they scavenge and control pests, and they serve as food-" She was away, and after a few minutes, Craig's interest was no longer feigned. Like any dedicated specialist, she was fascinating while talking in her chosen field. Once she realized that he was a receptive and sympathetic audience, she became even more articulate.
The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the world. She showed Craig microscopic feather winged beetles of the family Pdhidae which were a mere one hundredth of an inch long and compared them" to the monstrous African Goliath beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes. There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that, like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were ants that kept aphids as milk cows and farmed crops of fungus.
She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater and even larvae that existed in pools of crude Petroleum where they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.
She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants. that could lift a thousand times their own body weight, she explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such was her rapture that she forgot her -vanity and put the horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that Craig wanted to hug her.
At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced him defiantly. "Okay," she said. "So I am primarily the curator of the collection of Hexapoda, but at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health. That's what entomologists do, mister now what the hell do you do?" "What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to lunch." "Lunch?" She looked vague. "What is the time? My God, you've wasted my entire Saturday morning!" "T-bone steaks," he wheedled. "I have just been paid." "Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,"she told him cruelly. "Roly is in the bush." "How do you know that?" "I phoned Aunty Val at Queen's Lynn to check." "You crafty blighter." She laughed for the first time. "Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch." The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold, with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the end of the meal he asked, "What do entomologists do on Saturday afternoons?" "What do police sergeants do? "she countered.
"They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird and wonderful places want to come along?" She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect them from the wind, and Craig restocked the cool box with crushed ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine to the heart.
"The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along the banks of the Rhine." In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.
It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far as the gates that bore the inscription. "Here are buried men who deserve well of their country."
They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.
"I know so little about him,"Janine confessed.
"I don't think anybody knew much about him," Craig said. "He was a very strange man, but when they buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some incredible power over other men." They went down the far side of the hill to the square mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic figures.