There was silence after his question, then Rian said: ‘What does it look like?’
Tom snorted laughter at the absurdity of the question, but nobody else did.
The boy had perfected his description. ‘He’s a big male. He has a ring on his left leg, and there is a lead on his head. His name is Lemon.’
This time they all laughed a little, and even the boy grinned – just a brief flash of white.
Suddenly Tom realized that this was the boy in the picture – the boy whose face he’d last seen in the relative comfort of his living room: the ostrich jockey with the memorable name.
‘Harold?’ The boy turned surprised eyes to him. ‘Harold Robbins, right?’
This time the grin broadened and Harold beamed at him. He ducked his head shyly. ‘Yes, baas.’
‘I saw you on the Internet after the crash.’
‘Yes, baas. I was in the newspaper. And on the TV at DuPlessis’s shop.’
None of them knew what this meant, and Harold tried to explain further by pointing back in the direction he’d come. ‘In De Rust.’
They nodded, still not sure, and Harold Robbins Mhleli took the initiative once more. ‘Lemon’s very scared. He’s lost and I want him to come home.’
‘I thought the ostrich farm was destroyed,’ said Tom.
‘No, just …’ He twitched a shoulder, not finding the right words, and settled for: ‘Not all destroyed. But I lost my job. Some ostriches were killed and Lemon ran away. So, too many boys and not enough tourists or ostriches. If Lemon comes home, maybe I can get my job back.’
They nodded silently at the simplicity of the equation: that meant a twelve-year-old boy’s livelihood depended on a giant bird.
‘You been looking for him ever since the plane crashed?’ said Pam.
‘Yes, madam,’ said Harold, and – for the first time – his eyes flickered past them to the twisted wreckage he’d last seen smoking in the ruins of his dreams.
September waved an arm back towards the unseen town over the horizon. ‘Can’t you get work in De Rust?’
Harold faltered. Tom could see his brain working fast and, for a moment, thought he was going to lie to them. But then he dropped his eyes, as if ashamed, and mumbled, ‘But I want to ride again.’
Tom understood. Harold might get work in De Rust, might pick up litter or run errands or dig ditches, but he was clinging to the fading dream that he would find Lemon and be allowed to go back to the job he loved. The parallel with his own situation made Tom’s eyes burn. He turned away under the guise of finishing his Coke and tossing it into the bin.
‘We saw an ostrich on the way here,’ said Ness. ‘Didn’t we, Tom?’
He turned back and nodded.
‘That was a big male,’ she continued. ‘Well, it was male anyway. I don’t know how big they get.’
Harold’s eyes were warily hopeful in a way that Tom recognized meant he’d been disappointed before. Carefully he added, ‘He did have something hanging off his head. Like a bit of string …’
‘Yes!’
‘I couldn’t see that well, but I noticed it as he turned. Very thin.’
‘Yes!’ said the boy again. He held out his left arm and quickly ran his right forefinger from his shoulder to his wrist. ‘Two times this long?’
‘About that. And he was limping, I think.’
‘Limping?’
Clint demonstrated and Harold understood. ‘Maybe he’s hurt.’ Then he looked at Tom again. ‘Where is this?’
Tom pointed back towards Oudtshoorn. ‘About ten miles that way.’
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.
