Sipho
The weather was pleasantly warm. Sipho Maduna sat in the porch of the de Villiers mansion and waited for Petra to emerge. Her father’s attorney had called. Richard de Villiers had been missing for five days and hope of finding him alive was beginning to fade.
At twenty-eight, Sipho was six years older than Petra. He had a wife and child back home in the Xhosa tribal lands of the Easter Cape. The de Villiers were supporting him and his family while he was in Cape Town, studying for a degree in electrical engineering.
Richard had offered him a room in the family home but Sipho preferred to live in the rambling assortment of buildings in the grounds. The neighbours called it as a hippy commune. All sorts of people lived there. They came and went. Some were artists. Most were scientists working on environmental projects funded by the Simon de Villiers Foundation.
The neighbours regarded Richard as mad. Sipho was thankful to have him as a friend. The de Villiers treated him as a member of the family and referred to him as a cousin. By European standards, that was stretching the relationship. He shared a surname with Petra’s mother and belonged to the same clan. But most members of the clan used the surname and there was no evidence of a blood relationship. If Richard knew he didn’t care. And it didn’t worry him that Sipho’s parents were poor farmers and the social inferiors of Petra’s mother who came from a family of chieftains.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Sipho recognised the heavy tread of the attorney and guessed that the meeting was over. The front door opened and the man emerged followed by Petra. She looked tired and anxious. Her face was blotchy and her hair was a mess. Sipho had noticed that it got like that when she was stressed and couldn’t stop scratching her head. She waited for the attorney to leave then turned to speak to him.
‘Thank you for waiting, Sipho.’
‘You said there was something I could do.’
‘Yes. I want you to pick up someone from the airport. I was going to do it myself but I don’t have time. There is so much happening. Anna is coming and so is Carla. They are worried about Richard. We are running out of hope.’
Petra usually referred to her father as Richard. Most people called him by his first name and Petra was no exception. She produced a photograph.
‘This is the person I want you to fetch. His name is David and he is coming to stay. Take my old car and don’t tell anyone what you are doing. If anyone asks, say that David is a diver and he has come to work on one of Richard’s marine survey projects.’
David was easy to spot. He was tall and suntanned and stood out amongst the passengers streaming into the arrivals hall. Sipho watched him go to the carrousel and remove a heavy backpack. He walked across.
‘You must be David.’
David looked down at him.
‘Who are you?’
‘Petra’s cousin … she sent me.’
David hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder.
‘Petra couldn’t come …’
David continued to eye him suspiciously.
‘She’s very busy …’
David showed no sign of listening. He took a phone from his pocket and pushed up a number. Sipho heard a dialling tone. It went on for a while and no one answered. David switched off the phone.
‘Was that Petra you were phoning?’ Sipho asked.
‘Yes.’ David’s manner seemed to soften a little.
‘Her phone is probably turned off.’
‘Why should it be turned off?’
‘The newspapers won’t leave her alone. They want to know if she has anymore news about her father. He was on that plane … the one that vanished … it belonged to him. It’s been five days now.’
David returned the phone to his pocket.
‘You said you were Petra’s cousin …’
‘Our families belong to the same clan.’
‘And that makes you cousins?’
‘Not in your country but in mine it does …’
He did his best to explain. David asked more questions. Sipho had never come across anyone like him. He had to recount his life history before David would agree to get into the car with him. The guy was seriously weird.
Petra glanced in the mirror. The blotches had gone. A half-hour yoga session had done wonders to calm her nerves and her complexion was back to normal. Sipho was her saviour. He had gone to the airport to collect David.
He was the first of two mysterious people who were coming to help her. The other would arrive later. Perhaps, he was already here. She didn’t know. Steven hadn’t made that clear. All he had said was that the second man didn’t like his photograph taken. It was all very strange and more than a little frightening.
She braced herself for the inevitable. Richard had been missing for over five days and was almost certainly dead. The two of them had been very close since her mother died. He said she was just like her … kind and caring.
Richard had never described Anna like that. Her sister’s behaviour had brought their mother to tears. Anna was a self-willed teenager who grew into a ruthless, self-seeking adult. She flaunted her fame as a daughter of one of South Africa’s richest families and made friends with the sort of people her parents loathed.
Anna liked being fabulously rich and despised people who weren’t. Her disputes with Richard provided rich pickings for the writers of gossip columns. They relished her lavish lifestyle and contrasted it with that of Richard who lived modestly and devoted his energy to “controversial” projects.
“Controversial” was their way of saying “nutty”. Anna had no such inhibitions. She went out of her way to say her father was a crank and joined the chorus of applause when he was called a crazy conspiracy theorist who couldn’t recognise reality when it stared him in the face.
Richard had no problems with reality. His problem was with people who might want to kill him. Names like Union Miniere, Tshombe and Hammarskjold came to mind. Petra remembered him talking about them and saying that he didn’t want to suffer Hammarskjold’s fate.
Jag Hammarskjold was UN Secretary General and the mining companies took him out because he threatened their interests. Richard was threatening a lot of interests and they weren’t all in mining. The world had moved on. Multinational companies were bigger and stronger and some were doing things that Richard detested.
‘No one fears a nutter.’
Petra remembered him saying that. She was about sixteen at the time and didn’t fully understand what her father was trying to tell her. His message was much clearer now. Richard was using the immense resources of the de Villiers Foundation to take on some very dangerous people. In doing so he was putting his life at risk. His defence was to paint himself as a harmless nutter.
It looked as if his enemies had seen through his ruse. A shiver ran down Petra’s spine. She was now the only one who would continue his struggle. Anna was opposed to everything her father stood for and so were the other members of the family.
They would be arriving soon. The de Villiers clan was flocking back to the ancestral home like vultures to a corpse. There would be rich pickings if Richard was declared dead. The vultures would fight over his bones.