It was the sort of expression, she realised, with which the soldiers in the village would have looked at the naked N’Kuru girls before they started playing their games with them.
With that thought, Ann’s hands were in action, almost independently of the rest of her shaking body. With short, ugly, brutal movements, she shoved the food down onto the seat between them, revealing the camera case. The black eyes flicked down then up again, speculative greed warring with stirring lust. She jerked the zips with convulsive movements like punches until the sides gaped open. His eyes fell languidly again, and lingered on the seductive shadows of the interior — the black leather, the expensive-looking plastic. He licked his lips. His fingers stopped sliding up and down his knife.
And Ann pulled out Harry Parkinson’s pistol. With one flowing movement, as though in some previous existence she had been a master gunfighter, she pulled out the automatic and, two-handed, slammed its butt onto die top of his nearest thigh, pointing downwards at point blank range. Her whole face was aflame, her skin literally burning with rage as though with sunstroke. She looked at him through a faint blood mist and his eyes when they met her red gaze had lost all of their arrogance. His knife drooped in his numb fingers and his skin was suddenly dewed with great drops of sweat.
She flicked her right thumb upwards and he jumped and began to whisper. Perhaps he was praying. A bright red dot pointed unwaveringly to where his trousers strained at their tightest. The bulging cloth began to look looser very, very quickly.
She looked up again, feeling a little calmer. The knife was gone and so was the last vestige of that arrogant expression.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, her voice like a rusty hinge.
He understood but he did not move until she lifted the gun off his trembling thigh. Then he was gone, silently into the sudden, overwhelming silence.
In the middle of that silence, the train jerked into motion. Ann jumped as though shocked awake by the unexpected movement. The carriage gave another lurch. The seat patted her firmly in the back. The noise of wheels squealing and couplings straining stormed across the air. Ann’s head whirled. She thought she was going to faint. The thought of being trapped alone in this train, so utterly, absolutely alone, brought a wild scream to her throat and tears flooding to her eyes.
In the last twenty-four hours, Africa had reduced the confident, worldly-wise reporter to the level of a confused, lost and lonely child.
When Robert tore the door open and hopped easily in, she swept him into a wild hug, oblivious of the fact that the camera bag tumbled to the floor between them or that she was still holding Harry’s gun.
A few half whispered words served to acquaint him with what had happened in his absence and to explain the reason for her well-armed and unexpectedly enthusiastic greeting. His black visage set sternly and his dark eyes raked the carriage, though Ann was unsure whether his ill-contained rage was aimed at the vanished gigolo for importuning her in such a way, at her fellow passengers for failing to defend her, or at herself for reacting in the manner she had. The last one, she concluded gloomily. Her panic had attracted even more notice than her skin had and the gun, protection for ten seconds, was now a massive liability. They would have to be very careful indeed throughout the journey — especially if they met any of General of Police Nimrod Chala’s checkpoints.
After they had finished their meal, Robert took the first watch and suggested that she sleep. She would dearly have loved to do so, but she was still too full of adrenaline. She settled herself back in her seat, half closed her eyes as though at least trying to rest, and watched through the window at her side. The township’s outskirts fell back rapidly to reveal the red earth of the same sort of country that they had crossed in Harry’s Land Rover. But instead of the scrub and brush of the grassland, here it was covered in orchards and grassland badly run to seed. There was some sign of farming, but it seemed ill-organised and increasingly desultory, a far cry from the great communal farms of Julius Karanga’s time, though the fact that they were still producing marketable fruit and vegetables so long after his death testified to the way they must once have been. The train snaked through the farmland as it slowly surrendered to the bush proper. Soon there was no sign of any trees other than baobabs. The fields became rough grass filled with herds of ubiquitous goats guarded by sharp-eyed teenagers armed with rifles.
As the train escaped from the last vestiges of civilisation, the straight track began to twist from side to side. At one moment Ann could see the whole profile of the train, all the way up past the festooned carriages to the great puffing monster of the engine itself. The next, she could see nothing of the train itself but was instead granted a spectacular view of the great tectonic cliff towards which they were heading. Tall and damson-dark, even at this time of day, it towered across the northern horizon and rolled towards them with all the power and inevitability of a great slow wave.
Soon enough, as the train coiled round in front of her dazzled gaze, the jungle-green foaming crest of the great rock wave seemed to be about to break over the very top of it. Not long after that, the train rattled hollowly over the huge span of the Stanley Bridge which stepped across from the plain to the cliff over the valley of the River Mau. The river should have been in full flow, brimming dangerously close below them, greeny-brown and still carrying the quick lace memory of white foam from the Leopold Falls ten kilometres upstream. It should have been a sweep of water reaching out from the swift currents of its heart where only the great fishes lived to the slow, shallow bays at its sides where the hippos sported and the crocodiles waited patiently in the lush foliage along the slick, verdant banks.
Instead there was a stinking trickle in the midst of interminable mudflats where indistinguishable corpses had rotted into unrecognisable skeletons and even the scavengers that had scattered the bones were long gone.
The train swung wearily to the left, as though it bore all the responsibility for the failure of life below, and began to toil along the cliff face, following a wide ledge which occasionally allowed a glimpse over a scrub-strewn, black gravel edge down into the vertiginous, mud-bottomed depths of the dying river. And whenever the wind dropped — and there was precious little wind — clouds of flies would rise in search of a replacement for the food sources which had dried with the blood of the great river animals.
The last image Ann was aware of was that of the massed bodies of the hungry insects as they oozed across the window pane immediately in front of her like melting tar, or cooling blood.
Robert’s firm hand shook her out of a nightmare in which she actually witnessed the destruction of the N’Kuru village. She awoke with the sound of her own cries of horror in her ears. She looked around in groggy confusion, never at her best on first waking. It took her some moments to register his look of deep concern and the fact that the train was first silent and secondly absolutely still.
‘Are we there?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what—’
‘Ssssh!’
Distantly on the still, faintly buzzing air came a shot and a long, falling scream. The sounds accorded so horribly with her dream that her flesh crawled and she shivered convulsively.