Mosaic (15 page)

He looked once round the room, located the door behind him with obvious relief. He looked very much older than when he had first come to the house, old and weary and disappointed. He moved stiffly, as if in pain. “I believe, gentlemen, I've said what I had to. I'll go now.” He moved stiffly towards the door.

With the fluency of youth and outrage, Will Hamlin intercepted him. “You do realize, Chief Inspector, I'll have this on the front page of every newspaper in the land?”

George Corner regarded him levelly. “I hope you will, Mr. Hamlin. But until then, watch out who you answer doors to. No, forget that,” he added, his voice flat, “they don't wait to be asked in. It's the ones you find behind your desk when you've been out of the office that you have to watch for.”

Nathan Shola moved out from behind the table he had been using as a desk. In the close confines of a small room he was startlingly tall. “Mr. Corner—before you go. I am grateful for your honesty. I recognize that this situation is not of your making. What I can do I will, and without embarrassing your government if that is possible. Thank you for coming.”

After the policeman had gone he sat down again slowly, folding his length into the chair, and Hamlin let out his breath explosively. “The bastards!”

Shola shook his head. “You're spoilt, Will. I tell you, there isn't too much wrong with a state where a senior policeman will sacrifice his career for a man he doesn't know, whose ideals he doesn't espouse and whose presence in his country he probably rather resents.”

Like Corner, Hamlin was ashamed, too deeply humiliated to listen to a counsel of conciliation. “When the Home Office gave Joel Grant permission to stay here it accepted a duty to protect him. To deliberately renege on that responsibility is monstrous.”

Shola laughed softly. “Will, men like you and Chief Inspector Corner are the keystones of democracy. I doubt you'd last five minutes in my country. But if you did—by God, what a land fit for heroes you'd make there!”

Hamlin could not tell if he was joking. He was not, but he smiled anyway and reached again for the telephone. “All right, I suppose we'd better do something useful with the information Mr. Corner has put his head on the block to give us.”

Evening wore into night, and into early morning. The time passed slowly and, for the two men working in the quiet house, wearily; but not without profit. Colombian coffee put on a couple of points on the FT index and British Telecom was assured a dividend for its shareholders. Finally, a little before dawn, Hamlin was startled awake by a hoarse cry from the front room. For a moment he stood confused, unable to recall where he was or what he was doing. Then he recognized the kitchen sink where he had rested his eyes a moment while the kettle filled yet again; probably he had drowsed for only a few minutes, but it was fortunate that the plug was not in place for the kettle had filled and overflowed.

Then he remembered the cry and hastily turning off the tap hurried back to the front room.

Shola was grinning at him, a slash of brilliant white in the dark face. There were black shadows under his eyes, even if they were hard to see.

“You've got something.”

“I believe so, yes. You remember the plane at Gatwick?”

“They've moved it?”

“No; no, they're not that stupid. But it finally occurred to someone—it should have been me but it was in fact Tom Savimbe who works at Heathrow—to check on the pilot's activities. And it turns out that two hours ago he received a telephone call at home and immediately left for the airport. He told his wife he was required for a mercy flight with a sick child: I told her I was the anxious father and she was very reassuring. But Gatwick doesn't have him down for a flight of any description. I eventually found him on a flight to Glasgow, travelling as a passenger.”

“Glasgow?” Hamlin's tired mind worked at it. “They've got another plane.”

“Glasgow has Captain Crane down to take a leased Heron out to Zaire via Cairo with an urgent cargo of mining equipment this morning.”

“Christ. How long have we got?”

“Not long enough. All right: where do we get an air taxi?” Jacob Sithole drove the De Wittes'big car. Liz wondered if it was safe to talk in front of him, but the thought that it might not be clearly did not occur to Mrs. De Witte. Liz shrugged off her misgivings: time was important—for Joel, and also because she could not risk De Witte's wife having second thoughts about talking to her. As soon as the car was moving and the driver at least partly occupied with the traffic, she said, “You know why I'm here, don't you?”

Elinor De Witte nodded her head once, precisely. She was looking out of the window at the passing city and made no attempt to meet Liz's gaze. “About Joel.”

“You know him?”

“I've never met him.”

“Your husband tortured him within a few inches of his life but he hardly remembered the name. It meant much more to you. What do you know about Joel Grant that Colonel De Witte doesn't?”

“I've known about Joel since before he was born.” Suddenly she was crying, silently, without tears, betrayed only by a slight rhythmic shaking of her narrow shoulders. It was a way of crying for people who could not afford to be seen crying.

All Liz knew of Grant's childhood was that he had been born illegitimate, raised poor and more or less adopted by Joshua Mpani in his early teens. Liz made a great leap of intuition. She said incredulously, “Joel is your
son
?”

Elinor De Witte shook her head again, struggling for control. Her hands were knotted in a cotton lawn handkerchief, twisting and wringing. “Not mine. Joachim's. Neither of them knew. Neither of them ever knew.”

The early years of their marriage (said Elinor) had been hard and idyllic. Elinor worked beside De Witte as he broke the bright veldt for farmland, and loaded for him as calmly as a duchess on a grouse moor as he fought off raiding parties. At first they thought the hardship and worry were why they were not having children, which both of them wanted passionately. They supposed that when their life settled down a little it would happen.

But after ten years, with Elinor approaching thirty, they were desperate enough to seek help. When the doctor declared there was no physical obstacle to conception they returned to their farm inspired with new hope; and indeed, within six months Elinor's swelling belly was beginning to push out her clothes.

“I was thrilled, of course. Delighted. But Joachim was like a child at Christmas.”

They lost the baby. It died before term, and she had to labour to expel the thing with no hope of fulfilment. The hard, long travail damaged her inside and afterwards the doctor said they must not think of trying again. De Witte swore to her it did not matter, and cried like a thing broken when he thought she could not hear.

“Tell me about Joel.”

When De Witte was called to Pretoria they were almost middle-aged. It was then that her husband had the only (Elinor said with confidence) fling with another woman in all the years of their married life. It was brief, apparently not very meaningful to either of them, and over by several weeks before Elinor learnt of it—from the girl herself, who arrived on the farmhouse step one day with the two bottom buttons of her cardigan unfastened.

It had not been blackmail which prompted her visit, or vindictiveness, so much as sheer desperation. She had not known when she saw him last, and she had been unable to break through the ring of security at his office in order to tell him. She thought he might have given instructions to keep her at bay because no one would even take a message. They took a phone number and said he would call, and he never did. Finally, thinking he might be at home one weekend, she got a ride out to his farm, only to be met by his wife.

“I think she would have left without saying anything, but between what I could see and what I could guess there wasn't a lot of point. And I wanted to know.”

She was about twenty-two. Elinor could see nothing about her that would have tempted her husband to adultery after fifteen years, but accepted that she was not seeing her at her best. She was worried and frightened, carrying a baby she did not want for a man she never expected to see again, with no family of her own to see her through and no money to raise a child. She was in dire need of help, and by the time Elinor had prised her story from her and supplied handkerchiefs and coffee to stem the tears it had been clear to both women that whatever arrangements needed making would be best made between themselves.

“I don't remember being shocked, or even terribly surprised. I felt I should have seen it coming. I wasn't even angry with her, and I still loved Joachim with every ounce of my being and believed he loved me the same way. The thing with Mary Grant had been an aberration. The more I thought about it, the luckier I felt that she had come to me, not to him. He would never have left me, but having to choose between his wife and his child would have ripped him apart.”

Elinor provided the money for the girl's confinement. She thought that once the baby was safely born and the risk of disappointment past, she would adopt it and present Joachim with his child with as much love and pride as if she had borne it herself. But by the time she was ready to leave hospital Mary Grant had become as attached to her baby as mothers usually do. Anticipating—unfairly, in fact—that Elinor's interest in the baby would result in a custody battle she was ill-equipped to win, she discharged herself a day early and disappeared up-country with the new infant in a flight that both must have found tough to survive.

Elinor knew that one word to her husband would have half the security forces in the country searching for his missing son. She did not want to do that, seeing in it the start of a chain of consequences that would destroy them all. Instead, discreetly, she employed a private detective. Whenever he found them she sent money and expressions of friendship, and they hit the road again, trekking the length and breadth of the country in Joel's first year of life. At last Elinor came to see that she was hounding them with her money, sent a final contribution and notice of disengagement, and dismissed the private detective.

For twenty years she heard nothing, did not know if her husband's son was alive or dead. Then the rebel group of Joshua Mpani rose to prominence, and a counter-insurgency measure captured fourteen terrorists including a twenty-one-year-old white boy called Joel Grant. The weeks that followed were the worst of Elinor De Witte's life.

“Should I have told him?—that by keeping Mary's secret I had let his son become a traitor and a terrorist; that the boy whose body and mind he had already mangled and would have to mangle some more was his only child? What could he have done? To help him escape would have been to betray everything he had worked for and believed in. To hand Joel over to someone else would have meant only that his interrogation would have been less efficient, and so longer. I had to spare him that choice. I had to. I lay awake nights praying that the boy would die.” She smiled shakily. “I don't know what our minister would have to say about that.”

Liz wondered how their minister, or indeed Mrs. De Witte herself, came to terms with the fact that her husband extracted information from people in the same way that a liquidizer extracts juice from vegetables for his living. But she refrained from saying so. She was acutely aware that the answers she had come here seeking were only moments away, and hardly dared breathe for fear of scattering them like startled butterflies. She chose her way and her words with exquisite care.

“Mrs. De Witte, Joel is a friend of mine. He lives in my house in England; I've been helping him get over what happened to him here. It took time because he was hurt badly, but he was beginning to pull his life together again. I think you might have liked one another, at least if you'd kept the conversation off politics. Anyway, I like him. I care about him.

“And then two nights ago a man broke into my house and took my friend away. He was a man from your husband's department, and he appears to be trying to smuggle Joel out of Britain, presumably in order to bring him here. Mrs. De Witte, can you tell me why?”

Elinor De Witte met her eyes for almost the first time since the surprising moment in the hospital room. Her head lifted and her voice was almost steady. There was an unmistakable courage in her demeanour, at once dignified and vulnerable. She said, “I too acted from love. What I did was inexcusable, unforgivable. I knew that at the time. I managed to persuade myself that it was an act of patriotism, that the greatest good of the greatest number was what counted, and that somehow it made a kind of sense of everything that went before—losing the baby, my childlessness, Joachim having a son he didn't know about. That was essential, you see. And he had to live. So many people depending on him—not only me. No, I cannot ask you to forgive me. But try to remember that I did it for love.”

“Did what?”

“Afterwards I had this terrible sense of awe. I knew then how wrong it was—even for Joachim, even for love. I tried to stop it, but nobody would listen to me then. I had served my purpose, told them how to save him—they weren't going to turn back because of what they considered my quite irrational sense of guilt. They said I'd get over it when I had Joachim safely home again. And poor Joel was only a terrorist to them, you see, not a son—not nearly a son. I couldn't stop them. Can you? Please, can you?”

“Elinor. What did you do?”

The telephone rang as Hamlin was about to pull the front door closed behind him. He waved an explanation to Shola in the car and trotted back inside.

The line from Pretoria was clear. The tremor was in Liz's voice. “Will, have you found him yet?”

“No. But we have a good lead—we're hopeful. Liz, you have no idea what the police—”

“Will, listen. Tell Nathan. You have to stop this. Somehow you have to. I know what they want him for.”