Harold followed his finger with his eyes and nodded determinedly. ‘Thank you, baas.’
He immediately started walking away from them, as if Tom had pointed out a bus stop a hundred yards up the road.
‘Hey!’
Harold glanced back, impatient.
Paul laughed. ‘He could be anywhere by now!’
Harold shrugged and kept going, holding the cold cream soda against the back of his neck.
Ness shook her head. ‘Unbelievable.’
They leaned against the ice chest and watched Harold Robbins Mhleli become a watery-legged mirage once more.
*
Pam had the paperwork for the fan disc to hand. Ever since they’d found the scoring, she’d kept it in the nearest thing she had to a filing system: the glove box of her battered government-issue 4 × 4, along with ‘Serviceable’ tags on a missing rudder servo and on a flap track they’d found that looked as if it might have been hit by something. They were the Holy Trinity of her investigation: any one of them could be the probable cause of the downing of Flight SA77. Or none of them, of course – she was no fool.
But the fan-disc paperwork had just moved right to the top of her mental list of suspects …
She laid out the paperwork on top of the ice chest. Having obtained it by fair means, not foul, she had the full story of the SA77 fan disc at her fingertips, including the crucial FAA Form 8130-3, the ‘birth certificate’, which reassured them that it was an approved part manufactured to the highest standards and tested under the most stringent conditions at the WAE plant in Irving, Texas. Beside it, she smoothed out the CalSuperior ‘Serviceable’ tag for the Pride of Maine, and six heads bumped as Tom and the South Africans ran their eyes over them, searching for something that would connect the two parts.
‘They’re both replacement parts from WAE,’ said Rian.
‘So’s every 737 fan disc replaced on the North American continent, and this jet was bought from there,’ said Tom. Suddenly he put two dusty fingers on the two dockets. ‘Same batch.’
‘What’s that mean?’ asked Ness.
‘See here? The SA77 fan disc has a batch number on the release certificate: WAE 8989-B501. And the serial number of the Pride of Maine fan disc is B501-7776512. The serial number starts with the batch number.’
‘Is that good?’
He nodded slowly. ‘It might be. It’s something. I mean, it’s a link at least. If we find something wrong with this fan-disc assembly, it’s probably enough to justify getting WAE to check all the others from the same batch, but without the disc from the LA plane it’s tenuous.’ He sighed deeply, suddenly weary beyond belief. ‘Goddamn Lenny Munro to hell! If we still had the other disc he could compare it to this one and be sure that the faults were the same.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Gone – recycled into dog-food cans. Fuck!’
He stepped away from the others and back to the fan disc, his mind overloaded with information and swirling anger.
He felt Ness come up behind him and touch his arm. He didn’t turn, but she ran her hand soothingly across his shoulder-blades, where his shirt stuck to his back in a line of perspiration. She put her Coke can down beside the fan disc and took his hands in both of hers. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You need to sleep.’
*
Pam and her team were booked into a rickety guesthouse half an hour away in De Rust and suggested Tom and Ness join them.
The dust kicked up by the 4 × 4 ahead of them made the ride unpleasant, even after Tom dropped a quarter of a mile behind. The particles hung seemingly for ever in the still evening air, and were efficiently scooped up by the Honda’s vents to circulate up their noses.
De Rust was a one-horse town where the horse had died: a single main street, with a hardware store, a liquor store and a scattering of tin-roofed houses with broken-down corrals between them. Desultory livestock – goats, sheep, donkeys – stood, heads drooping, in the dust, pelvic bones on sharp display.
The guesthouse didn’t have a name, but it had a small, clumsily made Voortrekker wagon on a plinth beside the front door; Tom idly wondered how the apparently Afrikaner owners felt about having four black guests demanding breakfast and messing up their sheets less than a generation since their own separateness and superiority had seemed enshrined in law.
He quickly realized that the owner, Lettie Marais, didn’t give a shit, as long as they kept her in cigarettes. Tiny, wiry, brown and terminally creased after seventy years without sunscreen – but with the constant companion of the cigarette smoke that curled around her head like a pale blue permanent wave – Lettie was an equal-opportunities scowler.
Between photos of white-haired grandchildren and whip-thin mongrels, the mantel in the breakfast room held a cigarette on a pair of chopstick holders. Lettie had written on it ‘The One I Didn’t Smoke’ in a proud but empty boast. By the look and smell of her, Tom figured it was the only one she’d ever declined to light up.
Pam and her team said good night almost as soon as they got through the door, Pam giving Tom a quick hug at the foot of the stairs before she turned away. It was a confidence-giving hug. Even though Tom hadn’t had one since his mother had died when he was fourteen, he recognized it immediately.
Lettie said, ‘Good night,’ to the team in a puff of smoke, then squinted at Tom, picking stray flecks of tobacco off her tongue with yellow fingers. ‘What kind of room? Single or double or twin?’
Tom suppressed his own desires and looked at Ness for guidance.
‘Two singles?’ she suggested.
Shit.
‘Haven’t got two singles.’
Tom warmed fractionally to Lettie.
Ness hesitated and Tom was gripped by the fear that she’d ask him to try another guesthouse. Then she said, ‘Twin should be fine.’
‘Haven’t got a twin.’
This was getting better and better, thought Tom, his stony face hiding his growing enjoyment.
‘What have you got?’
‘One double.’
Ness shared with him a brief exasperated look that begged, ‘Then why bother asking?’
Tom sighed. He hated to be a gentleman. ‘You take it. I’ll find somewhere else.’
Lettie snorted eloquently. ‘There is nowhere else. This is it!’ Then she eyed them both more carefully. ‘You not having sex, then?’
Tom saw Ness blush.
Lettie lit a fresh cigarette from her old one. ‘You should. Life is short. Wish I’d had more.’
Ness started to giggle, then sighed. ‘Okay. Whatever.’
Hardly a landslide vote in favour, but it was better than nothing, thought Tom, as he picked up their luggage and followed Lettie’s baggy butt up the stairs.
Just because they had to share a bed, he wasn’t assuming anything. He showered standing in a rust-stained bath, then pulled on fresh boxers and a T-shirt. He took a towel with him, drying his hair as he entered the small, dingy bedroom with its dusty picture frames and the faded home-made quilt on the lumpy-looking bed.
Ness was already changed into plaid shorts and a white tank top. It was not a classically erotic combination, but somehow she looked just perfect.
