Compassion
Petra was aghast. The workers had staged a protest at one of the de Villiers mines. They wanted to know what had happened to her father and they wanted to know why Uncle Henry had changed their conditions of employment. That was three days ago when Henry was still alive. True to form, her uncle sent in a security team to disperse the protesters. The outcome was predictable. Shots were fired. Three miners were killed and seven injured. The wife of one lived close to where they were staying. Petra had gone off to visit her. David was horrified when Sipho told him what had happened.
‘Why didn’t you stop her?’
‘She was greatly distressed.’
David’s mind boggled.
‘We have come here to hide, Sipho.’
‘She wants to console the injured man’s wife.’
David felt the need for consolation. Sipho was meant to be looking after Petra and that included stopping her from being stupid. His problem was that he thought of her as a princess. She was Xhosa royalty on her mother’s side. That was very apparent when they were with his friends in the lowlands. They never called her Petra. They used another name and spoke it with respect.
As far as David was concerned, Petra de Villiers was a well-meaning, wet-behind-the-ears young lady, studying for a degree, in something-or-other, at a university. The world was full of idealistic young people. His concern was to keep her alive out of respect for her father. He was determined to nail Richard de Villiers’ killers and deal with them appropriately.
He focussed his eyes on Sipho.
‘When did Petra leave?’
‘About half-an-hour ago.’
‘Was she alone?’
‘Mario went with her.’
That was a plus. Mario had a firm grounding in the facts of life. He knew what happened to people who upset the Cabal. They were eliminated. As a child, he had soaked up that basic truth with his mother’s milk.
David knew roughly where Petra had gone. He had ridden up the road with her on horseback. It wasn’t unusual for South Africans to go on trekking holidays in Lesotho. People didn’t find their presence unusual. They exchanged greetings in the Basuto language. He had learnt some himself.
The meeting started with Stay Well and ended with Go Well. It was considered rude to pass by without stopping and talking. People who did that were more likely to attract attention than those who fell in with the local customs.
Houses were strung out along the route. Like the buildings of iron-age Europe, most were round. Stone was used for walls and plastered with clay. The conical roofs were thatched. David guessed they were bitterly cold in winter. There was little opportunity to gather firewood. The only obvious fuel was bracken and dried horse droppings. He wasn’t surprised that people wore blankets. They were a comfortable and a very effective way of keeping warm.
There was no point in going after Petra. The damage would be done by now. Hopefully, Mario would have stopped her from revealing who she was. She had money with her and could merely have handed a few banknotes over. With any luck, she would come over as a nice South African lady who wanted to help as best she could.
David wasn’t going to count on it. Their situation was precarious. The Lesotho highlands were not as cut off from the outside world as he had hoped. Too many people had relatives working in the mines around Johannesburg. Rumours spread like wildfire. You didn’t need the internet to get your message across. Word-of-mouth did just as well in tightly-knit communities.
He resolved to speak to Winston. Their host was a tough, intelligent man in his late fifties. He was the sort of person who could assess the situation and give good advice.
Kirstin consulted her email and looked pleased. Humphrey saw the smile on her face and walked across. Her screen was covered in pictures of plants and trees. Maps showed their global distribution and the dates during which they were in flower.
‘You appear to have taken up botany, Mother.’
‘Up to a point …’
Kirstin continued to click her mouse.
‘I recognise some of those flowers.’ Humphrey peered over her shoulder. ‘Your cousin, Inge, has them growing in her garden on Bornholm Island.’
‘Yes,’ Kirstin agreed. ‘Perhaps that’s where Olaf became contaminated.’
‘How does Olaf come into it?’
‘You will recall that I souvenired one of his woolly hats when we visited his mother in Copenhagen. I sent it to some of my forensic friends for pollen analysis. This is what they’ve come up with.’
‘You are saying that there is pollen from some of these flowers on his hat?’
‘Yes, Humphrey’
‘And you think he might have picked it up in Inge’s garden?’
‘No. I think it possible that he picked it up when visiting his relatives on Bornholm. However, there is a far more likely explanation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He picked it up here, in the Pyrenees. These mountains have contributed a lot of flowers to the gardens of northern Europe. They like places where it is cold and wet and much of northern Europe is like that. Horticulturalists came here and collected pretty flowers to propagate and sell. Fortunately, they left the ugly ones alone.’
‘Why was that fortunate?’
‘Because Olaf had pollen from plants that are not found anywhere but here. They have no commercial value so no one tried to raise them anywhere else.’
‘So we know that he’s been here?’
‘Yes, Humphrey. We can gain some comfort from that. I was beginning to think that he had sent us on a wild goose chase. It seems that he was telling the truth when he said he was doing a lot of work here.’
‘What about South Africa?’
‘Same thing. There are pollens from plants that have been exported all around the world and there are pollens from plants that are only found there.’
‘Anything else?’
‘There are pollens that are found only the mountains of Columbia. It is fortunate that Olaf is such a grubby fellow. Otherwise, he would have washed the hat and destroyed the evidence.’
Humphrey considered the last point and decided to send his tweed jacket to the dry-cleaners at the first opportunity. The story of his wanderings, over the past six years, would be etched deep in its woollen folds and needed to be erased.
‘The Columbia thing is interesting.’
‘It is,’ Kirstin agreed. ‘Mario said his parents are Olaf’s principal minders and that he often stays with them in Columbia. The pollens bear witness to that.’
‘Young Mario appears to be telling the truth.’
‘Yes, Humphrey.’ Kirstin switched off her computer. ‘Mario is the key to this case. The sooner Kate brings him here the better.’
The landscape below was desolate and brown. Kate had thought of Madagascar as being green: a land of tropical rainforests teaming with lemur monkeys and other creatures that lived nowhere else. Parts of the huge island might be like that but the part they were flying over wasn’t.
She had arrived on a commercial flight from Mozambique. Rodriquez met her at the airport. He was not an ideal choice as a business partner. The problem was to find someone who was competent, trustworthy and contemptuous of the law. These qualities rarely come together. Rodriquez possessed the first and the last. The one in the middle could only be relied on if he thought he was going to be amply rewarded.
That meant she had to keep up his interest with the expectation of sex. Rodriquez had cultivated the image of a macho male and she had acquired the image of a femme fatale. Both were phony but that didn’t matter. So long as he lusted she could lead him on. The problem was to maintain his passion without letting him get her into bed.
He wasn’t her sort of man. David Paget was. He was totally different. David wasn’t just handsome and strong. David cared about others and he wanted to create a better world. They had been on missions together. Kate thought about him as she sat beside Rodriquez. He was taking her to his base on the west coast of the island.
It wasn’t clear what he did there. Kate guessed it was illegal. That didn’t matter. She was on her way to rescue David and his companions. If it meant sucking up to an arsehole like Rodriquez … so what?