The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Read online

  ‘I can’t say I enjoyed all that detailed violence in your book,’ she told him severely. ‘Do you think it was really necessary?’

  Craig kept any trace of irony out of his voice. ‘Africa is a violent land. He who would hide that fact from you is no true story-teller.’ He wasn’t really in the mood for amateur literary critics, and he let his eye slide past her and rove the lawn, seeking distraction.

  What he found made his heart jump against his ribs like a caged animal. From across the lawn she was watching him with green eyes from under an unbroken line of dark thick brows. She wore a cotton skirt with patch pockets that left her calves bare, open sandals that laced around her ankles and a simple T-shirt. Her thick dark hair was tied with a leather thong at the back of her neck, it was freshly washed and shiny. Although she wore no make-up, her tanned skin had the lustre of abounding health and her lips were rouged with the bright young blood beneath. Over one shoulder was slung a Nikon FM with motor drive and both her hands were thrust into the pockets of her skirt.

  She had been watching him, but the moment Craig looked directly at her, she lifted her chin in a gesture of mild disdain, held his eye for just long enough and then turned her head unhurriedly to the man who stood beside her, listening intently to what he was saying and then showing white teeth in a small controlled laugh. The man was an African, almost certainly Mashona, for he wore the crisply starched uniform of the regular Zimbabwean army and the red staff tabs and stars of a Brigadier-General. He was as handsome as the young Harry Belafonte.

  ‘Some have a good eye for horse flesh,’ Morgan said softly, mocking again. ‘Come along, then, I’ll introduce you.’

  Before Craig could protest, he had started across the lawn and Craig had to follow.

  ‘General Peter Fungabera, may I introduce Mr Craig Mellow. Mr Mellow is the celebrated novelist.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Mellow. I apologize for not having read your books. I have so little time for pleasure.’ His English was excellent, his choice of words precise, but strongly accented.

  ‘General Fungabera is Minister of Internal Security, Craig,’ Morgan explained.

  ‘A difficult portfolio, General.’ Craig shook his hand, and saw that though his eyes were penetrating and cruel as a falcon’s, there was a humorous twist to his smile, and Craig was instantly attracted to him. A hard man, but a good one, he judged.

  The general nodded. ‘But then nothing worth doing is ever easy, not even writing books. Don’t you agree, Mr Mellow?’

  He was quick and Craig liked him more, but his heart was still pumping and his mouth was dry so he could concentrate only a small part of his attention on the general.

  ‘And this,’ said Morgan, ‘is Miss Sally-Anne Jay.’ Craig turned to face her. How long ago since he had last done so, a month perhaps? But he found that he remembered clearly every golden fleck in her eyes and every freckle on her cheeks.

  ‘Mr Mellow and I have met – though I doubt he would remember.’ She turned back to Morgan and took his arm in a friendly, familiar gesture. ‘I am so sorry I haven’t seen you since I got back from the States, Morgan. Can’t thank you enough for arranging the exhibition for me. I have received so many letters—’

  ‘Oh, we’ve had feed-back also,’ Morgan told her. ‘All of it excellent. Can we have lunch next week? I’ll show you.’ He turned to explain. ‘We sent an exhibition of Sally-Anne’s photographs on a tour of all our African consular offices. Marvellous stuff, Craig, you really must see her work.’

  ‘Oh, he has.’ Sally-Anne smiled without warmth. ‘But unfortunately Mr Mellow does not have your enthusiasm for my humble efforts.’ And then without giving Craig a chance to protest, she turned back to Morgan. ‘It’s wonderful, General Fungabera has promised to accompany me on a visit to one of the rehabilitation centres, and he will allow me to do a photographic series—’ With a subtle inclination of her body she effectively excluded Craig from the conversation, and left him feeling gawky and wordless on the fringe.

  A light touch on his upper arm rescued him from embarrassment and General Fungabera drew him aside just far enough to ensure privacy.

  ‘You seem to have a way of making enemies, Mr Mellow.’

  ‘We had a misunderstanding in New York.’ Craig glanced sideways at Sally-Anne.

  ‘Although I did detect a certain arctic wind blowing there, I was not referring to the charming young photographer, but to others more highly placed and in a better position to render you disservice.’ Now all Craig’s attention focused upon Peter Fungabera as he went on softly. ‘Your meeting this morning with a cabinet colleague of mine was,’ he paused, ‘shall we say, unfruitful?’

  ‘Unfruitful will do very nicely,’ Craig agreed.

  ‘A great pity, Mr Mellow. If we are to become self-sufficient in our food supplies and not dependent on our racist neighbours in the south, then we need farmers with capital and determination on land that is now being abused.’

  ‘You are well informed, General, and far-seeing.’ Did everyone in the country already know exactly what he intended, Craig wondered?

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mellow. Perhaps when you are ready to make your application for land-purchase, you will do me the honour of speaking to me again. A friend at court, isn’t that the term? My brother-in-law is the Minister for Agriculture.’

  When he smiled, Peter Fungabera was irresistible. ‘And now, Mr Mellow, as you heard, I am going to accompany Miss Jay on a visit to certain closed areas. The international press have been making a lot of play regarding them. Buchenwald, I think one of them wrote, or was it Belsen? It occurs to me that a man of your reputation might be able to set the record straight, a favour for a favour, perhaps – and if you travelled in the same company as Miss Jay, then it might give you an opportunity to sort out your misunderstanding, might it not?’

  It was still dark and chilly when Craig parked the Volkswagen in the lot behind one of the hangars at New Sarum air force base, and, lugging his hold-all, ducked through the low side-entrance into the cavernous interior.

  Peter Fungabera was there ahead of him, talking to two airforce non-commissioned officers, but the moment he saw Craig he dismissed them with a casual salute and came towards Craig, smiling.

  He wore a camouflage battle-smock and the burgundy-red beret and silver leopard’s head cap-badge of the Third Brigade. Apart from a holstered sidearm, he carried only a leather-covered swagger-stick.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Mellow. I admire punctuality.’ He glanced down at Craig’s hold-all. ‘And the ability to travel lightly.’

  He fell in beside Craig and they went out through the tall rolling doors onto the hard-stand.

  There were two elderly Canberra bombers parked before the hangar. Now the pride of the Zimbabwe airforce, they had once mercilessly blasted the guerrilla camps beyond the Zambezi. Beyond them stood a sleek little silver and blue Cessna 210, and Peter Fungabera headed towards it just as Sally-Anne appeared from under the wing. She was engrossed in her walk-around checks and Craig realized she was to be their pilot. He had expected a helicopter and a military pilot.

  She was dressed in a Patagonia wind-cheater, blue jeans and soft leather mosquito boots. Her hair was covered by a silk scarf. She looked professional and competent as she made a visual check of the fuel level in the wing tanks and then jumped down to the tarmac.

  ‘Good morning, General. Would you like to take the right-hand seat?’

  ‘Shall we put Mr Mellow up front? I have seen it all before.’

  ‘As you wish,’ she nodded coolly at Craig. ‘Mr Mellow,’ and climbed up into the cockpit. She cleared with the tower and taxied to the holding point, pulled on the handbrake and murmured, ‘Too much pork for good Hebrew education causes trouble.’

  As a conversational opener it took some following. Craig was startled, but she ignored him and only when her hands began to dart over the controls setting the trim, checking masters, mags and mixture, pushing the pitch fully fine, did he understand that the ph
rase was her personal acronym for pre-take-off, and the mild misgivings that he had had about female pilots began to recede.

  After take-off, she turned out of the circuit on a northwesterly heading and engaged the automatic pilot, opened a large-scale map on her lap and concentrated on the route. Good flying technique, Craig admitted, but not much for social intercourse.

  ‘A beautiful machine,’ Craig tried. ‘Is it your own?’

  ‘Permanent loan from the World Wildlife Trust,’ she answered, still intent on the sky directly ahead.

  ‘What does she cruise at?’

  ‘There is an air-speed indicator directly in front of you, Mr Mellow,’ she crushed him effortlessly.

  It was Peter Fungabera who leaned over the back of Craig’s seat and ended the silence.

  ‘That’s the Great Dyke,’ he pointed out the abrupt geological formation below them. ‘A highly mineralized intrusion – chrome, platinum, gold—’ Beyond the dyke, the farming lands petered out swiftly and they were over a vast area of rugged hills and sickly green forests that stretched endlessly to a milky horizon.

  ‘We will be landing at a secondary airstrip, just this side of the Pongola Hills. There is a mission-station there and a small settlement, but the area is very remote. Transport will meet us there but it’s another two hours’ drive to the camp,’ the general explained.

  ‘Do you mind if we go down lower, General?’ Sally-Anne asked, and Peter Fungabera chuckled.

  ‘No need to ask the reason. Sally-Anne is educating me in the importance of wild animals, and their conservation.’

  Sally-Anne eased back the throttle and went down. The heat was building up and the light aircraft began to bounce and wobble as it met the thermals coming up from the rocky hills. The area below them was devoid of human habitation and cultivation.

  ‘Godforsaken hills,’ the general growled. ‘No permanent water, sour grazing and fly.’

  However, Sally-Anne picked out a herd of big beige hump-backed eland in one of the open vleis beside a dry river-bed, and then, twenty miles further on, a solitary bull elephant.

  She dropped to tree-top level, pulled on the flaps and did a series of steep slow turns around the elephant, cutting him off from the forest and holding him in the open, so he was forced to face the circling machine with ears and trunk extended.

  ‘He’s magnificent!’ she cried, the wind from the open window buffeting them and whipping her words away. ‘A hundred pounds of ivory each side,’ and she was shooting single-handed through the open window, the motor drive on her Nikon whirring as it pumped film through the camera.

  They were so low that it seemed the bull might grab a wingtip with his reaching trunk, and Craig could clearly make out the wet exudation from the glands behind his eyes. He found himself gripping the sides of his seat.

  At last Sally-Anne left him, levelled her wings and climbed away. Craig slumped with relief.

  ‘Cold feet, Mr Mellow? Or should that be singular, foot?’

  ‘Bitch,’ Craig thought. ‘That was a low hit.’ But she was talking to Peter Fungabera over her shoulder.

  ‘Dead, that animal is worth ten thousand dollars, tops. Alive, he’s worth ten times that, and he’ll sire a hundred bulls to replace him.’

  ‘Sally-Anne is convinced that there is a large-scale poaching ring at work in this country. She has shown me some remarkable photographs – and I must say, I am beginning to share her concern.’

  ‘We have to find them and smash them, General,’ she insisted.

  ‘Find them for me, Sally-Anne, and I will smash them. You already have my word.’

  Listening to them talking, Craig felt again an old-fashioned emotion that he had been aware of the very first time he had seen these two together. There was no missing the accord between them, and Fungabera was a dashingly handsome fellow. Now he darted a glance over his shoulder, and found the general watching him closely and speculatively, a look he covered instantly with a smile.

  ‘How do you feel about the issue, Mr Mellow?’ he said, and suddenly Craig was telling him about his plans for Zambezi Waters on the Chizarira. He told them about the black rhinoceros and the protected wilderness areas surrounding it, and he told them how accessible it was to Victoria Falls, and now Sally-Anne was listening as intently as the general. When he finished, they were both silent for a while, and then the general said, ‘Now, Mr Mellow, you are making good sense. That is the kind of planning that this country desperately needs, and its profit-potential will be understood by even the most backward and unsophisticated of my people.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Craig be easier, General?’

  ‘Thank you, Craig – my friends call me Peter.’

  Half an hour later Craig saw a galvanized iron roof flash in the sunlight dead ahead, and Sally-Anne said, ‘Tuti Mission Station,’ and began letting down for a landing. She banked steeply over the church and Craig saw tiny figures around the cluster of huts waving up at them.

  The strip was short and narrow and rough, and the wind was across, but Sally-Anne crabbed in and kicked her straight at the moment before touch-down, then held the port wing down with a twist of the wheel. She was really very good indeed, Craig realized.

  There was a sand-coloured army Land-Rover waiting under a huge marula tree off to one side of the strip, and three troopers saluted Peter Fungabera with a stamping of boots that raised dust and a slapping of rifle-butts. Then while Craig helped Sally-Anne tie down the aircraft, they loaded the meagre baggage into the Land-Rover.

  As the Land-Rover drew level with the mission schoolhouse beside the church, Sally-Anne asked, ‘Do you think they have a girls’ room here?’ and Peter tapped the driver on the shoulder with his swagger-stick and the vehicle stopped.

  Goggle-eyed black children crowded the veranda and the school-mistress came out to greet Sally-Anne as she climbed the steps, and gave her a little curtsey of welcome. The teacher was about the same age as Sally-Anne, with long slim legs under her simple cotton skirt. Her dress was surgically clean and crisply ironed, and her white gym shoes were spotless. Her skin was glossy as velvet, and she had the typical moon face, shining teeth and gazelle eyes of the Nguni maiden, but there was a grace in her carriage, an alert and intelligent expression and a sculpturing of her features that was truly beautiful.

  She and Sally-Anne talked for a few moments and then she led the white girl through the door.

  ‘I think you and I should understand each other, Craig.’ Peter watched the two girls disappear. ‘I have seen you looking at Sally-Anne and me. Let me just say, I admire Sally-Anne’s accomplishments, her intelligence and her initiative – however, unlike many of my peers, miscegenation has no attraction for me whatsoever. I find most European women mannish and overbearing, and white flesh insipid. If you will pardon my plain speaking.’

  ‘I am relieved to hear it, Peter,’ Craig smiled.

  ‘On the other hand, the little schoolteacher there strikes me as – you are the wordmaster, give me a word for her, please.’

  ‘Toothsome.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Nubile.’

  ‘Even better,’ Peter chuckled. ‘I really must find time to read your book.’ And then he was serious again as he went on, ‘Her name is Sarah. She has four A levels and a highschool teacher’s diploma; she has qualifications in nursing, she is beautiful and yet modest, respectful and dutiful with traditional good manners – did you see how she did not look directly at us men? – that would have been forward.’ Peter nodded approval. ‘A modern woman with old-fashioned virtues. Yet her father is a witch-doctor who dresses in skins, divines by throwing the bones, and does not wash from one year to the next. Africa,’ he said. ‘My wonderful, endlessly fascinating ever-changing neverchanging Africa.’

  The two young women returned from the outhouses behind the school and were chatting animatedly to each other, while Sally-Anne clicked away with her camera, capturing images of the children with their teacher who seemed not much older than they.
The two men watched them from the Land-Rover.

  ‘You strike me as a man of action, Peter – and I cannot believe you lack the bride-price?’ Craig asked. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘She is Matabele, and I am Mashona. Capulet and Montague,’ Peter explained simply. ‘And that is an end of it.’

  The children, led by Sarah, sang them a song of welcome from the veranda and then at Sally-Anne’s request recited the alphabet and the multiplication tables, while she photographed their intent expressions. When she climbed back into the Land-Rover, they trilled their farewells and waved until the billowing dust hid them.

  The track was rough and the Land-Rover bounced over the deep ruts formed in the rainy season in black glutinous mud and dried now to the consistency of concrete. Through gaps in the forest they glimpsed blue hills on the northern horizon, sheer and riven and uninviting.

  ‘The Pongola Hills,’ Peter told them. ‘Bad country.’ And then as they neared their destination, he began telling them what they might expect when at last they arrived.

  ‘These rehabilitation centres are not concentration camps – but are, as the name implies, centres of reeducation and adaptation to the ordinary world.’

  He glanced at Craig. ‘You, as well as any of us, know that we have lived through a dreadful civil war. Eleven years of hell, that have brutalized an entire generation of young people. Since their early teens, they have known no life without an automatic rifle in their hands, they have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man’s desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.’

  Peter Fungabera was silent for a few moments, and Craig could see that he was reliving his own part in those terrible years. Now he sighed softly.

  ‘They, poor fellows, were misled by some of their leaders. To sustain them in the hardships and privations of the bush war they were made promises that could never be kept. They were promised rich farming land and hundreds of head of prime cattle, money and motor-cars and many wives of their choice.’ Peter made an angry gesture. ‘They were built up to great expectations, and when these could not be met, they turned against those who made the promises. Every one of them was armed, every one a trained soldier who had killed and would not hesitate to kill again. What were we to do?’ Peter broke off and glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Time for lunch and a stretch of the legs,’ he suggested.