Dream of Darkness, page 20
‘What about covert support for the ANC?’ sneered Archbell. ‘Were you as interested in having that published?’
‘It exists,’ admitted Kanyagga. ‘Naturally, we don’t wish to embarrass our friends. But we had pressing reasons to be interested in an ex-security man’s revelations. Just over a year ago, approaches were made from what we identified as British security sources, offering to trade advice and assistance for access to our intelligence networks in South Africa. We were interested. A meeting was set up in Botswana. Driving there, our two representatives were forced off the road and killed. After that, we lost interest in deals with Britain, but we never lost interest in who was responsible.’
‘So you went to see my father,’ said Sairey.
‘Who was strangely reluctant to admit common cause with me,’ said Kanyagga, looking at Ellis, who had shown little reaction to this latest interruption. From time to time he looked up at the ceiling as if trying to penetrate it to his sister. His face was pallid and his expression withdrawn and distant. Kanyagga paused courteously as if offering him the right of reply, then went on.
‘Not so strange, perhaps, was that soon after I made contact with him, I found I had company, two gentlemen called Cilliers and Kirkman. Colonel Cilliers and Lieutenant Kirkman, as I discovered they were later. You recall them, I’m sure, Miss Ellis. They were so keen to save you from the importunity of the nasty kaffir.’
‘Yes, I remember them,’ said Sairey. So far, she felt completely indifferent to what Kanyagga was saying. No new drama this, merely an interlude in which she might gather her thoughts and see if there were any future where she could hope to survive with the knowledge that her unloving father had murdered her adulterous mother.
‘They would like to see me dead, I am sure. But BOSS treads very warily in Britain, now. There have been too many scandals in recent years and their political masters are reluctant to risk alienating a country that is still their best friend in the West. So, on the whole, they contented themselves with trying to scare me off till a nice accident could be arranged. Mr Ellis, too, they hoped to scare into silence, and in this they looked for aid, or at least non-interference, from his former colleagues in the Co-op. But, despite the fact that every man’s hand seemed turned against him, and every woman’s too, he showed a dogged persistence that eventually got his enemies panicking. Isn’t that right, Mr Ellis?’
‘This has gone far enough,’ said Ellis. ‘This is no longer important.’
He was looking at Sairey and there was an anguish on his face which almost made her sorry for him. Almost.
She said, ‘Important? Do tell, Daddy. What is it that you do find important?’
Kanyagga said gently, ‘Please, just a little longer, Miss Ellis. I may be able to help.’
‘Help? A plea in mitigation, you mean? So that he’ll just get off with probation for killing his wife and betraying his friends?’
Kanyagga frowned and said, ‘As for your mother’s death, I’m sorry. I know nothing of that. But for the rest … please listen. They decided that the only way to guarantee your father’s silence was to have him killed. But it had to be a killing with no strings. Mr Bright here presented himself as the ideal candidate. Already suspicious of your father’s role in his parents’ death, it would take just a little piece of hard evidence to trigger him off. He got that tonight with Gregory Kakuba’s submission to the Commission on Human Rights. He had it on him when we … met. I read it with great interest. The thing is, I was present at Kakuba’s examination, as an observer. Mwakenya has many friends in Uganda. It was a closed session, so someone must have paid a lot of cash for a transcript. And it was a most accurate transcript. Except for the end.’ He paused and looked at the assembled faces. Just like the detective in an old-fashioned play, thought Sairey; inviting the culprit to make a break for it through the library window, where PC Plod is waiting. She felt a fit of hysterical giggling build up in her throat.
Then Kanyagga resumed, speaking with great emphasis.
‘In my recollection, when Kakuba was asked if he recognized the white man whom Bill Bright tried to attack in the PSU compound, he said, no, he’d never seen him before. So it wasn’t your father, Miss Ellis. Whatever else he might have done, he did not connive at Mr Bright’s death, nor, by implication, did he betray this boy’s mother and uncle to the authorities. You know that now, don’t you, Allan?’
‘Yes,’ said the young man, speaking for the first time. He looked weary, vulnerable and, as always in this condition, appeared little more than sixteen years old.
Sairey, regarding him steadily, no longer felt any urge to giggle. She wasn’t yet ready to deal with this partial exoneration of her father, so she concentrated on her golden boy instead. How would I have felt about him if he had succeeded in killing Daddy, she asked herself? How do I feel about him anyway? I don’t know him. The boy I imagined I knew wouldn’t have been capable of shooting a defenceless man in cold blood, even if he hadn’t made love to that man’s daughter so soon before.
Nigel Ellis seemed to make a conscious effort to bring his thoughts back into the room, as though he might find some distraction here.
He asked with more of curiosity than passion, ‘Allan, how could you decide to kill me, just like that? Surely there was enough of the past … enough of the present, too, in our knowledge of each other, to make me worth a doubt?’
‘Yes,’ said Allan. ‘I’m sorry … but I didn’t … I couldn’t …’
‘What he means is, it wasn’t him, Mr Ellis,’ said Kanyagga. ‘You don’t think they would leave something as important as your death in the hands of an untutored youngster?’
‘No,’ said Allan. ‘It wasn’t me. They were waiting for me when I got out of the car. But I might have done it. I was so certain, see, and I might have done it …’
He was talking to her, Sairey realized. He was refusing the total way out because he wanted no half-truths between them. She felt a surge of love for him but she dealt with it as easily as with the giggles. Where she stood now she wanted no one to lean on, and she felt she might collapse if anyone tried to lean on her.
She said, ‘They …?’
‘The men who beat me up in the Square …’
‘Kirkman and Cilliers,’ said Kanyagga. ‘They were expecting him, I think. And the idea was, when you all arrived they would blow Mr Ellis away, shots would be fired after them into the dark and later the boy’s body would be found in the dunes, a gun by his hand, a bullet in his back. So Mr Ellis’s death would be tidied away with much relief all round, a vendetta killing, no BOSS or Co-op involvement. Only two things went wrong. Mr Ellis seemed very well prepared. And I happened to be taking a walk among the dunes when I came across our Springbok friends about to turn young Mr Bright into a piece of evidence.’
He suddenly smiled broadly, as if pleased at his euphemism.
Sir Joe said, ‘So, now we know where we are, perhaps you wouldn’t mind putting that gun away, Mr Kanyagga.’
‘Not just yet. There are still a lot of mysteries to be explained.’
He was right. Sairey’s head was full of them, but she felt little urgency to seek their resolution. No matter how much light was shed, it could never touch the darkness in her heart.
But her father was still in search of distraction.
‘So who altered the Ugandan transcript?’ he asked.
‘And who went blazing away with his gun when we arrived?’ said Vita Gray. It was a typical Vita question, pointing the way to answers far beyond its apparently simple scope.
‘No,’ said Archbell. Then as if realizing the full extent of the accusation being levelled against him, ‘No!’ he bellowed.
His hand went inside his jacket, but before it could emerge, Kanyagga had taken one smooth stride forward and brought the barrel of his gun crashing down on the side of his head. His body slid to the floor. The Kenyan reached under his jacket and plucked out a pistol. Archbell tried to push himself upright but the black man pressed the muzzle of his gun to the other’s forehead and he went still. Only his eyes moved, focusing on Mrs Marsden.
‘Now, don’t be silly, Archie,’ she said, speaking in the tones of a kindly schoolmistress whose patience is wearing slightly thin. ‘We can work something out, you know that. We always can.’
‘Hold on!’ commanded Kanyagga. ‘What’s happening here? I don’t know who you are, lady, but if what I’m thinking is right and this is the man who got my ANC brothers killed, then no one’s going to work anything out but me.’
Mrs Marsden was suddenly no longer a vague middle-aged lady, nor even a kindly school-marm. Her face was set and cold, she had all the self-assurance of Vita Gray, but while the psychiatrist’s came from clarity of thought, hers derived from certainty of power. The truth of her ambiguous presence struck Sairey, then, with all the force of the obvious.
She said, ‘You’re the Director!’ but no one paid her any attention as the woman spoke.
‘I assured your masters we would put our house in order,’ she said chillingly. ‘But it is our house and it will be our order. If it’s simple revenge you’re after, you should have joined the Mafia. Check with your masters if you must, but check before you act, or this could be your last official action.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘The price of ANC co-operation with the Co-op was that we put our house in order. That would also be our price for dealing with them. In my book, emotional operatives make for a disorderly house.’
‘You should know,’ said Kanyagga. ‘So, you’re the boss of this pathetic outfit. Look at you! A geriatric, a psychopath, a traitor and a butch headshrinker, all ruled over by a little old lady. If this is Security, what do the people you’re meant to be protecting look like? Don’t talk to me about putting houses in order. If someone was threatening us, like Mr Ellis there, we wouldn’t have needed to form a committee to deal with him, I promise you!’
‘For Christ’s sake, shut up,’ said Ellis wearily. ‘Mary, this is all going wrong. You said nothing would come out about …’
‘Stop whingeing, man,’ said Mrs Marsden crisply. ‘It’s better out. And as for going wrong, it all looks to have gone entirely to plan to me. We’ve got what we were looking for.’
It was all getting too confused for Sairey’s tight-stretched mind. Words were being spoken which made sense and nonsense simultaneously. She felt the same dislocation that reading Alice Through The Looking Glass had caused her as a child. She opened her mouth to scream in protest, in appeal, in anger, in terror, in she-did-not-know-what. But before the sound could come out, the voice of pure reason spoke.
‘I take it this Co-op has all been a set-up,’ said Vita Gray calmly. ‘And its function was not to find ways of stopping Nigel, but to flush out quite another Antenor, with Mr Archbell here as the prime candidate.’
‘Yes. Vita, I’m sorry, but you see how impossible it was to let anyone else know. The Co-op had to perform its stated function with complete naturalness. Archie was not the only suspect, you understand.’
Mrs Marsden had reverted to her former self in addressing Vita. Her tone was conciliatory, apologetic. Perhaps, after all, truth was stronger than blind power, thought Sairey.
‘I understand that I could hardly be a suspect,’ said Vita Gray. ‘I also understood that when, for the sake of the Co-op, I extended medical confidence to include you, I could expect total reciprocity.’
‘Please, Vita, don’t ride such a high horse. And ask yourself if your motives in pursuing Nigel were quite so Simon-pure as you’d like to believe!’
The woman had resumed something of her directorial tone. It was a mistake.
Vita Gray said indifferently, ‘I’ll send you my written resignation. Or you may prefer to forge it.’
She made for the door, passing Sairey without a glance. Curiously, that hurt, and when, only a few seconds after going through the doorway, she reappeared, Sairey felt her heart leap at the certainty that Vita had returned to speak to her. Then the woman was hurled into the room with such force that she fell over the kneeling Kenyan, and now the doorway was filled with the large form of Lieutenant Kirkman. Kanyagga had lost his gun in the collision with Vita. He dived desperately towards it, but the big South African moved forward and drove his foot into Kanyagga’s face.
‘You stay down there, kaffir,’ he said, scooping up the gun. ‘Man who can’t even tie a good knot deserves to crawl on his belly, wouldn’t you say?’
Cilliers was behind him. He looked pale and there was blood drying round an abrasion on his brow.
‘Colonel Cilliers, this is a mistake,’ said Mrs Marsden sharply. ‘So far it’s only an irritation. Don’t turn it into an incident. BOSS used to be very professional. When an operation failed, you aborted and got out.’
‘Was that in the good old days when we were all friends?’ sneered Kirkman. ‘Before even the Tories went soft on commie kaffirs?’
Cilliers said, ‘Shut it, Dave. Mrs Marsden, there’s going to be no incident. I agree, the operation’s failed. What we are going to do is relieve you of the burden of our black friend here. No one will miss him. After all, I doubt if he really exists. Also I’m sure he will find your little ways with naughty boys in the Co-op hard to understand. They don’t believe in wrist slapping, not when you’ve got an old tyre and a can of petrol. Better all round if we relieve you of this embarrassment and call it quits.’
To her horror, Sairey could see Mrs Marsden considering this. Or perhaps she was merely looking for some way round the dilemma. But Kirkman was not ready to wait for a mere woman’s decision.
He said, ‘Let’s just take the bastard. No one can complain if there are no witnesses. You, Ellis, you should by rights be dead already, so why don’t we start with you?’
It was probably heavy-handed joking, but they never found out. As he laid his gun barrel along Nigel Ellis’s jaw, there was an explosion from the doorway. Kirkman let go of his weapon and grabbed at his shoulder. His hand found blood. He looked at it in amazement. Pain and shock were draining colour from his face and it looked as if some strange osmosis was sucking it all to his fingers. Suddenly he groaned, and fell like a tree. Sairey looked towards the doorway.
Fanny was standing there with a small automatic held in both hands. Her face wore its customary expression of untroubled beauty. It was impossible to tell if her accuracy had been a matter of luck. Cilliers found out. Turning, he cried, ‘You crazy bitch!’ and took a step towards her. She shot him in the thigh and he fell, screaming, with blood pumping from the wound. Then she tossed the weapon into a corner and, delicately stepping over the wounded South Africans, she knelt beside her husband.
It seemed to Sairey that now everyone had a function except herself. She was an underage spectator at an adults-only movie. She lost all sense of time. Was this what they called shock? If so, it was comfortably anaesthetizing, removing you for a time, at least, out of the world of blood and shots and betrayal. Vita moved swiftly among the injured, ministering first to the South Africans, before tending the lesser damage to Kanyagga and Archbell. Ellis and his wife were having the deepest conversation Sairey had ever observed them in. Perhaps, she thought almost lightly, Fanny was trying to explain her relationship with Archbell. Mrs Marsden was in the hall, talking rapidly, incisively, into the phone. Sir Joe had subsided into a chair, and lit a cigarette as if he, too, were resigned to a spectator’s role, but his gaze, as it flickered from one face to another, was not the gaze of a spectator. His eyes met Sairey’s for a moment and seemed to register nothing except her presence, her position. Then recognition came, and he smiled at her fondly, but the smile died quickly as the gaze moved on.
Only Allan Bright seemed as totally detached from all this as Sairey felt. He stood close by her side, their hands touching but not holding.
He said in a low voice, ‘What will you do?’
It was not a question that concerned her.
She said, ‘Does it matter? And you?’
‘The same.’
‘Nice to have something in common.’
‘Like murdered parents.’
‘But at least not the same murderer.’
She looked at him now. Why it should be important that her father, who’d killed his own wife, should not have been responsible for the death of Apiyo and Bill Bright, she could not say. But it was important.
‘No. I believe that now. It never seemed possible, not really.’
‘But killing my mother did?’
‘A crime of passion. We’re all capable. But betrayal to death takes a special kind of coldness.’
There was an interruption. Newcomers arrived, quiet young men in casual clothes, who obeyed Mrs Marsden’s commands like well-trained sheepdogs. Cilliers was carried out, presumably to a car. Kirkman, semi-conscious, was providing a problem. Kanyagga and Archbell, both still groggy, had managed to get to their feet. They made an odd couple, thought Sairey. The Kenyan paused at the door and looked at her.
‘It’s OK not to fight,’ he said, ‘as long as you do something worthwhile. Don’t let them turn you into a watcher.’
He went through the door. Archbell said, ‘The wisdom of Africa. We taught ’em to read and they got hooked on calendar mottoes. Mary, a word.’
His little animal eyes flickered towards Allan.
Mrs Marsden said, ‘You, young man, make yourself useful. Could you give that pair of weaklings a hand?’
Two of her young men were still struggling with the huge frame of Kirkman. Vita Gray was trying to help. Allan, blank-faced, went forward and took a leg. Archbell waited till the four of them had negotiated the South African into the hallway, then, in a voice meant only for Mrs Marsden, but which Sairey caught quite clearly, he said, ‘You know why I altered that transcript, Mary.’
