As Bad as it Gets By Julian Rathbone

Synopsis:

Chris Shovelin, the Bournemouth PI with a marital problem, is on the
move again.  Coming out of Mombasa, where he has been checking out the
unsuspicious death of a millionaire's son in a scuba accident, he's
made enough money to treat himself to a safari.  But Danielle (call me
Danny) recruits him to be her minder before leaving him... on a safari
trip.

An international food conglomerate, playing Faustus with GM, aided by
corrupt police, is forced to protect itself from the consequences of
his unintended intrusion into its affairs.  From a mugging in Nairobi,
through meetings with lions and a Maasai warrior, to a truly scary
escape from the sewer beneath Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Shovelin faces beatings, shootings, wild elephants and a crazed killer
who will not give up.

As Bad As it Gets is a more than worthy successor to Shovelin's
acclaimed debut in Homage.  This racy and entertaining thriller has an
emotional and thought-provoking depth which puts it miles ahead of the
rest.

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Allison & Busby Limited

Bon Marche Centre

241-251 Femdale Road

Brixton, London SW9 8BJ

http://wzvw.allisonandbusby.com

Copyright 2003 by Julian Rathbone

The right of Julian Rathbone to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and

Patents Act, 1988

This is a work of fiction and all characters, firms, organisations and
instants portrayed are imaginary.  They are not meant to resemble any
counterparts in the real world; in the unlikely event that any
similarity does exist it is an unintended coincidence.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent
purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

ISBN 0 7490 0611 0

Printed and bound in Ebbw Vale, by Creative Print & Design

JULIAN RATHBONE's first book was published in 1967 and has been
followed by more than thirty novels and one work of non-fiction.  He
has been translated into fifteen languages.  Twice nominated for the
Booker Prize, he has been awarded the Deutsches Krimi Prcis and the
prestigious Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Award.

A contributor to various newspapers, magazines and periodicals, he is
also a successful television and film scriptwriter whose work has been
broadcast in over forty countries.  After long spells in Turkey, France
and Spain, he currently lives in Hampshire.

Chapter One

You don't want to know why I was in Mombasa, but I'll tell you anyway.
Normally I hang out in Bournemouth, where I earn my crust as an enquiry
agent.  Bournemouth you may not know this if you're not a Brit is the
UK's premier seaside resort, great club-scene, casinos, lap-dancing
bars, an h and c town, and I don't mean the plumbing.  Four miles to
the west you come to Canford Cliffs and then Sandbanks which are
enclaves for the seriously rich, very nouveau rich.  Two of these, a
Mr.  and Mrs.  Margeon, had employed me to go to a beach club hotel,
one of those all-inclusive jobs, about fifty miles up the coast from
Mombasa, to check out that their twenty-year-old son Arnold had indeed
died in a scuba accident and that there were no suspicious circs.

Some years back Jimmy Margeon invented a soft drink, a soda: two thirds
conventional cola cut with one third nonalcoholic ginger beer.  It
didn't go too well.  Then, one day, finding herself fresh out of tonic,
Tina Margeon used it as a mixer with one-third vodka.  They called it
Jinjapep.  "Have a drink on the margin Go to the edge with a Jinjapep'
was the slogan.  Two years later Jimmy sold out to a global food and
drink conglomerate for twenty million quid.

My one visit to them (they took my name from the Yellow Pages) was, at
that time, one of the saddest experiences of my life.  Imagine:
elegantly curved art deco style picture windows overlooking Brownsea
Island with the Purbeck hills blue on the horizon beyond, the parquet
floors like pale gold ice, the drinks trolley as well as the bar in the
corner, the white kid sofas, the kitsch paintings of nudes (no
fig-leaves), the out-of-season peonies in a Waterford bowl with gold
mountings, Jimmy in white slacks, an Armani pull and Gucci shoes, Tina
in Westwood Lycra pants that hugged lipo-ed buttocks as if they were
madly in love with them, Enya from the Lord of the Rings on the Bang
and Oluf sen, all this and sorrow.  Real misery.

They paid me a couple of grand plus expenses.  "Money don't mean a
thing no more, Chris fly Club, hire limos, kit yourself out if you
haven't got the right clothes, just bring us back peace of mind that we
done all we could, OK?"  On the flight out I read up on the coroner's
report, and Scuba for Beginners, spent three days at the hotel talking
it all through with the manager, the Scuba instructor and so forth, and
came to the same conclusion the Coroner had: Arnold drowned in his own
vomit having filled his mask, and all this in the hotel swimming pool
during his second half-hour of beginners' instruction.  Yes, he had
been told not to eat for two hours before the lesson, yes he had had a
very late buffet-lunch because he'd spent the morning as well as the
early afternoon going round the golf course in one hundred and nine
which was also what the temperature was.  He'd had a couple of girls
with him, who'd gone long before I turned up, and they'd said he'd had
diarrhoea the night before.

So much for that.  I faxed my findings to Sandbanks using the hotel's
business centre, and added that I'd call on the Margeons when I got
back, if they wanted me to.  Meanwhile, I thought I might take two or
three days even a week out -after all I was two grand ahead of the game
and have a look at Kenya.  Maybe try and get a late booking on a safari
tour, that sort of thing.  This may seem a daft way of doing things but
there were factors: I live on my own and can do what I like; it was my
first time ever in real Africa; any money I spent was money the Child
Support Agency, aided and abetted by my ex, would not get its claws
on.

So there I was, and that's why I was there, sitting in the departure
lounge at President Moi, Mombasa's glassy, gleaming airport, waiting
for the evening flight back to Nairobi, watching the sunset and feeding
the crows.

There were two of them big and black, but with white collars and bibs,
pied crows, they're called strutting their stuff over the tables and
floor, wherever there were crumbs or even lumps of food returning
trippers had given them while they waited for the inevitably delayed
flight.  The wall of the cafeteria was glass and faced west, but
expanses of it were kept open for coolness which is how the crows got
in.  The area inside was big and airy with high corniches they could
perch on before swooping down for scraps.  I guess the airport
authority was still trying to figure out what to do about them.

Just as the blood-orange sun dipped below tree-tops and a low rise of
hills on the far side of the airfield, and the 737 from Nairobi that we
were all waiting for touched down with a scream of tyres on the runway,
I became aware of a presence at my shoulder, a large hand on the back
of the plastic chair next to mine, and a voice that was deep, musical,
and somehow went with the hand, which was strong, tanned brown, and
with black hair almost to the knuckles.

"May I join you?"

My first instinct was to take a slow meaningful look at the tables
around us, unoccupied since most of our fellow-travellers were sitting
in the rows of seats between the shops in the mall behind the
cafeteria, but I took a look up at him, decided he looked
interesting.

"Of course."

He pulled the chair away from the table, sat in it, placed a buttercup
yellow camel-hide bag with push-button catches, a bit like a Gladstone
but designer, close beside him and floated that hairy hand in front of
my chest.  I gave him a second before I took it to let him know I'm no
push-over.  Dry palm.  Firm squeeze but not demanding.  I returned it
likewise.

"Ludwig Holly," he said.

"Chris Shovelin," I replied.

Holly was shortish, thick-set, bow-legged, deep-chested, arms that
looked longer than they were.  Short-cropped thinning white hair above
a broad face, small nose slightly squashed, his lips thick.  In short,
a touch simian, an impression strengthened by the hair on his wrists
and the white hair that was visible where he had left the top button of
his maroon pique shirt open, but coloured, no.  Maybe Levantine,
Egyptian perhaps, even gypsy, but who am I to say?  His eyes, behind
gold-framed, slightly tinted specs, were deep-set and very dark, with
bloodshot yellowish whites.  When they weren't smiling with an open
friendliness they had the melancholic appearance of mountain tarns. His
clothes were old-fashioned cream linen jacket a touch crumpled,
unlined, the shirt, baggy cotton trousers with turn-ups.  Somerset
Maugham would not have been surprised to meet him in Mombasa, Conrad
would have recognised him and Graham Greene would have bought him a
drink.

He was about my age, which is a lot older than I care to admit to, but
not yet sixty.

"Nairobi?"  he asked, pushing the sides of his jacket apart as he
relaxed into the chair.

"Is there anywhere else I can go at this time of night?"

For night it was already.  Only the merest aquamarine glow above the
hills was all that was left of the day.  Holly laughed.

"Not unless you have a private plane.  Or know someone who does."  His
accent was vaguely but not genuinely American.  Berlitz American you
could call it.  We exchanged the usual chat for the forty minutes it
took the ground staff to turn the plane round, he giving out rather
less than I... which is unusual.  I make my living asking questions
-answers, I charge for.  By the time the flight was called he knew why
I was there and in what capacity, that I was going to stop over in
Nairobi for at least three or four nights, I might even try to get on a
safari trip, that the Serena Hotel was holding a room for me, no
problem.

"Everywhere businessmen go, or tourists, is underbooked," Holly
commented.  "Bin Laden must be a happy man.  Just about everything he
could have hoped for has happened.  I

hope you bargained with them.  They'd rather let a room go at
half-price than keep it empty."

Of course I'd done nothing of the sort.  Englishmen of my age and class
lower-middle pretending to be middle don't bargain, not when we're
buying.  Not that I was of course.  It was the Margeons' money I was
using.

He also had a basinful of my reactions to my few days on the Kenyan
coast, what I felt about the wonderful green lush fertility, the wide
brown rivers, the atrocious roads, the contrasts between glitzy wealth
and mud-hut poverty, the small holdings with a stand of bananas and the
huge prairie-like fields of sorghum, pineapples and sisal presumably
owned by the giants of international agri-business.  Perhaps, if the
concept was familiar to him, he recognised a streak of knee-jerk,
uninformed Old Leftism in my discourse; certainly he knew I was by
profession an enquiry agent or, in the inevitable gloss everyone puts
on the job description, a private eye.

"Ah," he said, and his eyes twinkled with a slightly mocking smile,
"that explains your headgear."

And he picked my hat up from the table where I had put it, and turned
it over.  It's a fairly wide-brimmed felt fedora.

"Genuine Stetson, I see."

I couldn't resist spilling the beans.

"I bought it in San Francisco," I said.  "Seemed appropriate, though it
was very expensive.  I've owned suits that cost less."

"But worth every cent.  Hammet had one, as well as Sam Spade."

"Precisely."

About him I learned bugger all.

One thing I did learn though was that here was a man who knew his way
round.  He followed me up the steps into the 737, leaving the twenty or
so mostly elderly Brits and Germans on the tarmac, and upgraded himself
into Club by offering the senior steward a twenty-dollar note folded
behind his boarding card.

My chief memory of the flight, and I'm still grateful to him for it
since he pointed it out and I might otherwise have missed it, is the
sight of Kilimanjaro seen in the light of a just risen full moon, as
big and gibbous and bright as they come, out of the left hand window.
We were the only customers in Club and the cabin lights were out.  It
looked as if it was just below us, rising out of a flat sea of nacreous
mist or lowish cloud that reflected the moonlight.  Then he got me over
to the other side of the plane to look out of the window opposite.

"Sometimes," he said, his voice soft now, almost reverent, "you can
make out the summit of Mount Kenya to the northeast.  They say if you
get to the top of either on a clear day and you can see the other, then
that is the longest view you can get on Planet Earth."

I couldn't swear I saw it, but I like to pretend I did.

"Wonderful to see snow so close to the equator," I commented.

"Make the most of it.  It's thinning out.  Probably be gone and the
glacier with it in a decade or so."

"Global warming?"

He shrugged.

"Of course.  But not necessarily caused by greenhouse gases.  Could be
part of the global cycle that brought and took away the Ice."

He said it as if he knew what he was talking about.

Once the big mountain had slipped by we settled back into our wide
seats, stretched our legs and continued to chat for the half hour or so
that was left.  He refused the South African champagne-style the
stewardess offered and had a Tusker beer which he span out for most of
the trip.  I don't drink alcohol so I had a tomato juice.  With Lea and
Perrins.  Amazing.  I guess every airline with any pretensions at all
carries Lea and Perrins on its planes.  He spent most of the time
talking about Nairobi, or rather warning me about it.

"You go to Rio, Jo'burg, Kingston, San Francisco,

Mombasa even, and the concierge in the good hotel gives you a street
map and marks it up for you.  Don't go here or here, or even there. The
rest is safe.  Not in Nairobi.  Not in Nairobbery.  In daylight you're
relatively safe inside Moi Avenue, between Moi and Uhuru Park. But not
if you're carrying a camera, or wearing jewellery..."  He glanced at my
rings.  I wear three or four, more than most men do. "Don't stand
around, keep moving as if you know where you're going.  At night you
take a taxi and you order it from the hotel desk and you keep it until
you get back.  Maybe it cost you?  Ten of your pounds, fifteen?  So
what?  Better than a broken head and everything gone, even your shoes.
And if the worst does happen keep away from the police. They'll take
anything the muggers left, lock you up, and make you pay them to let
you go."

Lots of lights, but with black, blank patches, scrolling into the
leading edge of the wing, then it tipped against the moon-full sky and
we heard the rumble of the under cart going down.  Only four days since
I had landed here first, in my first African dawn, over a grey ochreish
plain dotted exactly as it should be with the etiolated acacias you see
on all the posters, and wildebeest and buffalo we were coming in over
the Nairobi National Park.  Tower blocks on the horizon, rumble and
bump of wheels on the imperfect tarmac.  That time, of course, I'd been
in transit with a four hour wait in the crummiest transit lounge I've
ever been in, before flying on to Mombasa.  This time I was to get the
full Jomo Kenyatta Airport experience.

Not too much hassle since we were coming off a domestic flight, then a
long wide concrete bunker-style corridor with closed gift, souvenir and
jewellery shops set incongruously in the walls at either end, leading
into a big barn-like concourse.  More shops, cafeterias closed apart
from a kiosk or two, exchange booths, guys with placards, taxi-touts.
Fairly crowded even at that time of night, black faces, very black,
everywhere.  The coast is part Arab, part Indian, as well as

African, whereas Nairobi is pure Africa.  The deep ebony blackness was,
what shall I say?"  noticeable, faintly disturbing at first.  But after
a day or two you get used to it.  Even more surprising to me was the
presence everywhere of armed black police, surprising because they
treated the ordinary guys and women around with a ready rudeness and
roughness that made you think 'redneck'.  But I guess pigs are pigs
whatever their colour.

Holly walked beside me, went with me to the baggage reclaim where I had
a hold-all to pick up.

"I'll leave you now," he said.  "If the Serena knows what flight you're
on there'll be a car for you.  If not I think there's a shuttle covers
the four or five best downtown hotels.  If you have any problems while
you're here that you think I might be able to help you with, give me a
buzz."  And he slipped a thin sliver of paste-board into my palm.  "And
here's a thing..."

He paused, and a sort of speculative but distant look came into his
eye.

"... I know where you are so if I need a private eye, and I might, I'll
get in touch."

This was an odd thing to say under the circs, but before I could say
anything he'd moved on from me to something else.  My eyes followed him
and I saw him met by a Greek God.  Tall, athletic body, early thirties,
powder blue shirt with the sleeves of a cashmere sweater loosely
knotted at the neck, immaculate ivory-coloured chinos, tightly waved
sun-bleached blond hair, complexion a pale terra cotta six-foot-three,
not more than one seventy pounds, moving with a natural, animal
elegance as he took Holly's bag and put an arm round his shoulder. Gay?
Gay couple?  Perhaps.  But it's not something you wear ostentatiously
in President Moi's Kenya.  Those big black policemen beat queers to a
pulp and then eat them.  Greek God?  That's a silly cliche.  This guy
was nordic, Scandinavian, Swedish maybe.  Looked like he could have
stepped out of one of those Third Reich posters advertising the
herrenvolk.  Then the conveyor belt jolted into motion, and I forgot
about both of them.  I didn't even give the card more than a cursory
glance as I slipped it into my top pocket.  Ludwig Holly in
copperplate, an address.  Two lines, a number and the name of a street,
and the one word Nairobi beneath it.  In the left bottom corner an
email address, in the right a telephone number, both in tiny print.

My canvas hold-all came round, I scooped it up and headed for the
taxi-rank.

Chapter Two

Eight o'clock in the morning and I was looking out of my hotel window.
Maybe I was paying more than I need have done, but certainly I had one
of the best or better views.  In front of me, under the window, a neat
hotel garden with a couple of guys in uniform cotton jackets, scouring
lush cropped grass for litter or fallen leaves.  To the left a swimming
pool.  Then a high hedge with, to the right, a narrow gate where a
couple of security guards were checking in the day-staff, cleaners and
the like.  They had clipboards and the workers had IDs with photos.
Beyond the hedge a park -grey grass, pine trees and eucalyptus, an
avenue of jacaranda along the perimeter road, but not in bloom, and
beyond them the high-rises, some of them big enough to be called
skyscrapers, glitzy and glassy, of downtown Nairobi.  To the right, at
right-angles to the hotel which was on a loop off it, a main
thoroughfare cut through the park.  It was busy.  Traffic streamed into
town, cars and buses, but the most common vehicles were bicycles and
matatus, the clapped-out minibuses discarded by the safari companies
and now carrying as many as twenty-five passengers in spaces designed
for eight.  The sidewalk was busy too, hundreds of men and a few women
streaming into town.  Most of the men wore western jackets and trousers
that didn't match and carried battered looking document cases; the
women wore conventional, definitely non-sexy sweaters and dull skirts
apart from a few who were wrapped in multi-coloured printed cotton or
fine woollen sheets.

In the park itself sacred ibises walked on black stilts and stabbed the
ground with long curved beaks sacred maybe, but they looked scruffy,
ill-kempt; around them pied crows squabbled over scraps.  Men gathered
in groups.  They looked shabby, ill, poor.  Some seemed to be at
collection points where they hoped to be picked for a day's work, but
others were settling in for the day with cigarettes and booze.  Later I
worked it out for myself, and confirmed it in a copy of the English
language Daily Nation they were on the edge of the more debilitating
stages of AIDS and occasionally, come evening, there would be those who
had dozed off and didn't wake up.  The sky was overcast but not solidly
so.  Within an hour much of the cloud broke up and the sun shone with
what felt more like a burn than warmth.

I turned from the window, and the thought crossed my mind that maybe
this wasn't after all the room with the best view.

Breakfast was the full five star international buffet: tropical fruits,
waffles, omelettes, the cooked "English', croissants, fresh rolls,
toast machine, the lot.  Left me feeling bloated but ready for
anything, and worryingly un bothered by the poor starving sods outside.
They crossed my mind, give me some credit, but what could I do?  Fill a
doggy-bag?  While I ate I had a look at the other punters: trippers on
a pre-safari night-stop or, done that, and now waiting to be bussed to
the airport for a week on the coast, and three or four top, and I mean
very top businessmen.  You know how I know they were top?  They were
old: the silver waved hair, the thousand quid suits, and most of all
because they had underlings, male and female, in tow, who made notes in
electronic notebooks while the Masters of the Universe tucked into
their guavas and passion-fruit.

It was a conference of course.  At ten o'clock on the dot, just as I
was going through the foyer and out under the marquee, six large black
BMWs, top of the range, flags on their wings, cruised in off the main
road and swung round the flower-filled roundabout.  Men in black, black
men in black, were getting out of the front passenger doors before they
had properly stopped, unbuttoning their jackets, eyes sweeping over the
shrubberies, eyeing up the hotel frontage, and, bloody hell, wondering
who the fuck I was.  I turned my back on them, grinned at the doorman
in a you-know-I'm-a-guest-don't-let-them-shoot-me sort of way and
sidled off towards the main road.  But I glanced back and saw Kenya's
rulers, in a human capsule of secretaries and bodyguards, moving as if
on wheels through the glass doors.

So who were the Masters of the Universe at breakfast?  Arms dealers?
The Pharma-industry?  Mineral Extraction?  Agri-business?  No point in
wondering no one was going to tell me.

I strolled down Kenyatta Avenue, with the park I had seen from my
window on my left and another on the right, to the big intersection
where Uhuru (Freedom) Highway crosses it.  Downtown Nairobi now rose in
front of me in the shape of the usual gleaming forest of banks, hotels,
and regional HQs of the bigger global corporations that you see at the
centre of every major conurbation the world over.  But first there was
a maelstrom of flesh and storming metal to get across.  Police whistles
shrilled, brakes screamed, distressed engines spewed black smoke, women
who appeared to be moving house with their belongings on their heads
sailed past like clippers, sum ps clanged as vehicles were squeezed by
their neighbours into potholes at least a foot deep.  I hovered on the
edge like a cowardly swimmer, braving not cold rapids but the
possibility of being mangled alive between hurtling hunks of hot metal.
Somewhere a light changed, or a policeman blew a whistle those around
me understood, and I was almost carried to a central reservation marked
by broken kerb-stones.  The flow of metal resumed in front of me but
now, by and large, going in the opposite direction.  Again an almost
momentary pause in the screaming cascade of rusty metal, peeling
chrome, whirling fumes, allowed a surge across; as part of it I was
buffeted by the crowd coming from the other side.  Sidestepping,
weaving, challenged and knocked sideways by a shoulder charge I tripped
on a loose lump of concrete and almost fell on to the sidewalk as a
matatu clipped my heels.

Well, I was in culture shock and maybe it wasn't quite as bad as that.
Invigorated rather than intimidated, I made my way on up Kenyatta, past
the new General Post Office, and almost immediately I was brushing
aside just about every blandishment and threat aimed at getting
anything valuable I might have on me, off me.  Babes wrapped tight and
lying in the crooks of the arms of healthy, indeed beautiful young
girls could win a fifty-shilling note off me so long as they looked
happy and smiled, the maudlin ones I rejected.  Small boys dragging at
my sleeves and gawping up at me with tragic eyes imbued with suffering
I could handle.  I made myself a rule: if I could get that soulful look
to change to a comp licit grin I was prepared to part with ten Kenyan
shillings, ten pence.  Older hustlers I tried to ignore, kept my eyes
fixed above their heads, shrugged off any physical contact with
unaggressive determination.  But once or twice I was frightened: a
young man would try to engage me in conversation: "Where you staying,
man?", "You English, man?"  and so forth while others slowly closed in
round me, one or two on each side, a couple behind, edging up closer. I
began to feel glad I'd taken those rings off, that I wasn't carrying a
camera.  All I had was a wad of K shillings, about thirty quids' worth,
held in a roll in my jacket pocket, and I was quite ready to part with
them if things began to look seriously physical.  I'm a coward.
Believe me.

Then suddenly they were gone, melting away like scavenger gulls behind
a ship which has crossed an invisible border.  I glanced over my
shoulder.  A family maybe twenty yards behind me, two adults, two
adolescent kids, clearly looked likely to provide better or easier
pickings.  And suddenly it really hit me how we stood out, me as well
as that family, how we were different, how we were the ethnic minority
now, this was their city, not ours.

Less bothered, I began to take in something of my surroundings.  Above
me the sky was now almost clear of cloud, the sunlight was hot if you
stood in it, black kites swirled like those paper planes one used to
make, not the darts but the delta-shaped ones with tails, at five
hundred feet or so above the avenue; then came the big blocks, some
upended shoe-boxes, several newer, post-modern ziggurats or with
curved, bent frontages of coloured mirrored glass: Barclays,
Deutschebank, AFI with its corncob, green and gold, for the T, the
Mercedes star, BAthe logos one sees in every developing conurbation
from Lima to Macao, from China to Peru.  The contrast came at street
level.  The pavement was cracked, the kerb stones fell away round deep
holes, some with a snake pit of cables at the bottom, gaping without
warning or protection.  The trees looked as if they were dying and the
flowers in the neglected beds rattled in the fumes and slipstreams of
the traffic.  Shops were boarded-up or half empty, often they were just
open spaces between concrete piles filled with litter, trash and
garbage.  Every now and then pedestrians were forced into narrow files
where an older building was being demolished in a confused racket of
falling masonry, drills, bulldozers and dumper trucks.  The big glass
doors of the corporations were inches thick, with uniformed police,
para-militaries and security guards on both sides, the harsh black
hardware of H and K MPs or Berettas swinging at their sides or from
their belts.  But between blocks sidestreets ran into areas where the
buildings were lower and older and at the end of one on the far side I
could see a sunlit square with palms and the impressive frontage of a
mosque.  There were market stalls too.

Near the top of Kenyatta, a hundred yards or so short of the junction
with Moi, I found a bookshop with quite a large stock in English: the
usual Grishams and Clancys, TEFL textbooks, and guides.  You'll have
guessed by now that I'm a bit of a birdie and I bought the Collins
Guide to Birds of East Africa for only a little more than I would have
paid in England.  Then, mindful of Holly's warning that the bad lands
lay on the far side of Moi, I retraced my steps a short way, found a
more or less official crossing and got to the other side with no rush
of adrenalin at all.  Easy-peezy.

Street markets don't vary any more than downtown skyscrapers, yet they
all have their own quirks and even if the aubergines glow as richly
purple in Cape Town as they do in Cairo, and the heaped chilli peppers
and judias beans are as lushly green, the music blaring from
sound-systems varies, and so do the knickknacks for tourists, and
anyway, they're always fun and every now and then you have to stop and
look, usually at a food-stall, and ask yourself "What the hell is
that?"  And while the "Calvin Klein' knickers, "Tommy Hilfiger' tops
and "Reebok' trainers are the same, the local clothing is not.

From the street market I strolled into a big oblong, partly enclosed,
galleried courtyard filled with the tourist stuff, everything you could
possibly make from ebony, ivory and soapstone, from troupes of serried
elephants to beetles, from chessmen to crocodiles; there were baskets
made from sisal, jute and cane, and decorated with African motifs;
masks, feathered head-dresses, assegais, elliptical shields, fly whisks
made from the tails of colo bus monkeys or antelopes (bone-in),
knobkerries and huge collars consisting of thousands of bright beads.
If you stopped for more than ten seconds the cry went up: "Seeing is
free, come in and look, you are my first customer today, kind sir, I
can see you are a connoisseur, have a shufti," but all done with an
open friendliness, cheery fatalism, and little apparent resentment when
you moved on with a shrug and a dismissive wave of the hand.  There
were so many tiny shops, so many potential customers you might buy
elsewhere but the next one along might buy here.

But then I found myself in the meat and fish-market.  This was
something else.  All right it was nearly lunch-time, the best produce
no doubt had gone while I was still having my breakfast, but what was
left, offal, heads and tripes, attracted flies like William Golding
never imagined, the smashed remains looked like Waterloo two days after
the battle, the smell was something Dante never thought of.  I
staggered out into a side street, handkerchief to my mouth, on a corner
by a cinema (Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible 2) and made it back on to
Kenyatta.

Never mind that market, I was peckish by now.  I looked up and down.
Behind me a cyber cafe, but not the sort that actually sells coffee,
just rough plaster walls, flaking paint, tatty posters, a booth where
you got your ticket, and stalls set up on tables with screens and
keyboards.  The latest thing?  Yet somehow it contrived to look older
and shabbier than the professional letter-writers with their
typewriters it no doubt replaced.  But across the road, in a gap
between two blocks, there was a space, a rectangle of sunlight with
tables and chairs and a glass frontage set back on the side Simmers
Restaurant.  Again I crossed the cataract, quite the old Nairobi hand
by now.

Simmers was what I wanted.  "The Answer on a Plate' was its English
slogan.  Not smart, not a McDonalds either, but an ordinary place where
the local office workers were already having their lunches.  The tables
outside were all taken but I found one inside.  OK, it was not a diner,
it was grubby and busy, but cheerful too with a counter at one end
where cooks fried and grilled and big pots, yes, simmered on
bottled-gas rings.  The menu was in whatever brand of Swahili was the
common language but English too.  I chose Kuku Choma -fried chicken and
out of the choice of manioc or chips, chickened out and went for chips.
It was OK, you know?  And with a Coke cost about one pound fifty.

What now, I thought, as I pushed back my chair and stood.  The national
museum seemed worth a visit, according to the Lonely Planet guide. Huge
collection of stuffed birds.  Casts of footprints made by our ancestors
four million years ago.  But again I remembered the warnings. So... go
back to the Serena, get them to call up a taxi.  And maybe use the
swimming pool first.  I made my way back on to the main drag.

They closed in round me straight away.  Perhaps, I

thought, one of them had been in Simmers and had seen the wad of
shillings I peeled notes from to pay.

There was one on each side of me, and I sensed another behind.  But it
was the one in front I had a proper look at.  Black baseball cap with
the white NYPD logo, pocked skin, yellow teeth, breath like sewage
overlaid with garlic and raw spirit.  Shabby black leather bomber, GAP
t-shirt, white on black.  Big boots like DMs.  I took a step forward,
hand in front.

"Don't be raising your hand at me, Mister," and he lashed out with his
right boot at my left shin and then took advantage of my reaction to
knee me in the balls.  As my head came forward his hands came up in a
double fisted blow that caught my upper lip and nose.  I sat down, very
heavily, on a corner of broken concrete.  All four began to kick me.  I
blacked out.  My last thought was, hell, I'm no longer just a tourist,
I'm a victim.

Chapter Three

I wasn't out for long.  I came to as strong hands in my armpits lifted
my torso, and another pair hooked under my knees.  They tried to be
gentle but it was an awkward business getting me onto the floor of the
back of a Land Rover.  Once in, I looked up between the spread knees of
a big strong policeman who was sitting on the sideways facing bench
above me, and he looked down and grinned.  A slight jolt, enough to
lift and bump my head on the floor, and we were off.  A siren wailed,
loud enough to shut out the traffic noise.  Good, I thought.  If they
get me to A&E, Nairobi Hospital, in five minutes, I may not die, I may
not even wet myself.  I felt the blood trickle down the inside of my
chin and on to my neck.  I might, though, bleed to death.

A&E?  Apparently not.  It was at the Central Police HQ at the north end
of Moi that they unloaded me.  Worse than that, the two policemen in
the back with me expected me to walk, though when there were steps to
get up they were kind enough to hook an arm or two round my waist. They
smelled of fresh sweat and their bodies felt hard.  As the shock wore
off I was beginning to hurt, my face especially and my shin when I put
any weight on my left foot.  Enough to make me wonder if there was a
fracture, a crack anyway.  I squealed, moaned and groaned, just to let
them know.  And because I'm a cry-baby.

They took me into a communal toilet; pools on the cracked tiles, one of
the basins coming off the wall, only held there by the pipes.  In a
doorless cubicle they sat me on the pedestal above caked shit and tried
to sponge my face down with coarse paper to welling  I yelped again as
any scabs that had begun to form were scraped off and I bled worse than
before.  One of them, the fatter of the two they were both pretty bulky
pushed more paper into my hand.  I got the message and held it to my
mouth and nose, then pulled it away.  The blood looked dark.  I went on
dabbing, they went on handing me paper towels, some of them soaked in
water.  They looked down at me, and at each other, muttered at each
other in Swahili or Kikuyu or whatever.  They looked worried, then the
fatter one leant towards me.  He looked concerned and that made me want
to cry again.

"How you feel?  You feel OK?"

"You can walk.  Can you talk?"  his mate chimed in.

I ran my tongue round my teeth.  Neither tongue nor teeth were damaged,
only my lips.  The top one had swollen into what felt like a ballooning
blister.

"Yeth, I gun dawk," I said, but was already wondering why it was
important that I should.

They nodded at each other, got me to my feet, headed towards the
door.

"I god da pee."

They carried on.

"Your-In-Ate."

They got the message, changed course for the urinals.  Armitage Shanks.
So do I. But although the feeling became a pain, I couldn't get
anything to come.  I farted.  They helped me back to the cubicle.
Sitting down again, this time with my trousers round my ankles, and the
company politely out of my vision, I peed a bit, not much, farted a lot
more, then I turned myself round and vomited.  Chicken and chips and
some blood internal bleeding or just what I'd swallowed?  More paper
towels, then we tried again, down some stairs, along a corridor, a
knock on a door, into an office.

A cheap desk, filing cabinets, a couple of telephones, and a guy behind
the desk, one shoulder part hidden by a bulky looking monitor sitting
on top of its computer, could have been the first IBM compatible
Amstrad, or even older, the sort that took floppies that were floppy.
One of my friends let go of me, pulled up a chair, the other dropped me
in it.  Then they took up positions behind me, against the door, arms
folded, legs apart.  I tried to get the guy behind the desk into
focus.

"I am Commander Tom Komen and it is my job to find out what happened to
you and with your help bring your assailants to justice."

I managed to nod.  Against the dirty window and in the general gloom,
and not forgetting vision that was blurred with tears, I was still only
getting an impression, not much more.  Greying hair, cut short, a bony
face with highish cheekbones, a pale brown suit, more a taupe I
suppose; not, I thought, a uniform.

"And you are?"

"Christopher Shovelin."

Name, rank and number.  But hell, forget what I'd read about the
police, this was the law, on my side, surely?  Don't call me Shirley. I
shook my head.  A mistake.

"Staying at...?"

"The Serena."

"Tourist?"

"Sort of."

He made a note on a pad or note-book.  A moment's silence disturbed by
the cliche of a buzzing fly.

"Explain yourself."

I sighed, pulled in breath.  It didn't increase the pain, but it didn't
help any either.

"I came to Kenya on business.  When it was done I decided to stay for a
few days.  As a tourist."

"And what happened just now?"

His accent was educated, sort of Oxbridgey the way some Africans are.
Brisk, got a job to do, not sympathetic.

"I was just walking back to the Serena..."

"You'd finished what you had come here to do?"

"No, no.  That had been at the Turtle Paradise Shoreline Club, up the
coast from Mombasa.  I flew in from Mombasa last night."

"You were at the Turtle Paradise Shoreline Club..."  he was reading off
the note he had made on his pad, "on business?"

"Yes."

"So what were you doing this morning?"

"Just going for a walk.  Looking around."

Why was this guy giving me a hard time?  I was the bloody victim, for
chrissake.

"And then?"

"Like I said.  On my way back to the Serena these... thugs set on me.
Four of them I think."

"Did you get a good look at them at all?"

"Just the one in front.  Black New York Police Department baseball cap,
pocked face, one point seven five metres, seventy kilos.  That's
five-eight, eleven stone."

I wasn't too sure how metric Kenya is.

"You'd recognise him again?"

"Yes."

"You're very sure."

"Yes."

"Why?  Isn't it the case that to whites all blacks look alike?"

"Blex' is what he said.

"Professional training."

"Really?"

"I'm an enquiry agent."

Silence.  Did he look a touch smug?  Maybe.  Good technique, trust me,
I know, the way he'd led me to give him my occupation without him
having to ask.  Or was there more to it than that?  Had I confirmed
what he already knew?  We were both experts at this game, I thought,
enjoying a little exploratory foreplay.  Then, come on, I told myself,
you're drifting into paranoia.

"Let me be sure I've got this right.  You were at the Turtle Paradise
Shoreline Club as a private investigator, a PI?"

"Yes.  My client's son died there in a scuba diving accident.  The
client sent me out to check the facts."

He thought for a moment, made a note.

"This morning.  Did they take anything?  Did they rob you?"

"I don't think so."  I felt in my jacket pockets.  Bird book still in
the left hand one, the right one empty.  "No, I'm wrong.  About two
thousand shillings."

"Not your passport?  Travellers' cheques?  Camera?"

"No.  I followed the guide book's advice.  Left all that in the
hotel."

"Very sensible."  Komen leant back, fiddled with his pen, held at each
end by each hand in front of his face.  Even so I got a better look at
him.  Older than I had thought.  Skin slightly greyish beneath the
darkness, deep lines running down the sides of the cheek-bones to the
corners of his mouth.  The suit looked a good one, maybe with some
cashmere or silk in the mix.

He put the ballpoint down.

"Mr.  Shovelin, tourism is of vital importance to our economy.  We have
to do everything we can to make sure incidents like this are cleared up
and the perpetrators properly punished, as a deterrent to others.  If
we pick up these hooligans we might want to ask you to identify the
ring-leader.  So I am asking you for how long you are expecting to
remain in Nairobi.  At the Serena."

Well, that's a thought.  I had to admit to myself that the town had
lost what appeal it had had in the last half hour or so.  Nevertheless,
I felt no urgency about getting back to Bournemouth.

"I really haven't decided.  Look, right now I'd like to have a doctor
or whatever check out the damage, and then just sleep it all off at the
hotel."

"Of course.  There's a doctor on call at the Serena.  No need for the
hospital unless he advises it.  My boys will run you back there."

He pulled in a second pad and scribbled on it.

"Here's a number," he said.  "Ring it when you have decided about your
departure."  He added an afterthought.  "And if you should see the man
who led your attackers."

The same guys as before helped me up on to the front bench of the Land
Rover and I sat between them.  I glanced back as we pulled out of the
yard in front of the Central Police Station.  There were several
vehicles parked there: four by fours like the one we were in, riot
control vehicles like the old Pyrene water cannon on a Foden chassis
and the usual patrol cars.  I saw a baseball cap moving above them.
Black.  Then its owner stooped and let himself into the sort of
souped-up Cortina Dorset police used ten years ago or more.  Excuse me,
I should have said, do you mind stopping and letting me have a close
look at that guy over there.  In the cap.  Before he steals one of your
cars.  But then... black baseball caps are almost as common these days,
in Nairobi like everywhere else, as trilbies or bowlers used to be.

Dr.  Sanjit Ray, well, something like that, was part at least Indian,
youngish and cheery.

"Strip off please and lie on the bed.  All off, since you say you took
a kick in the testiculars, we'd better make sure they're still there,
eh?  Let me see.  Yes, one, two, a full-house."

He tut-tutted over my shin bone but decided on balance there was no
break, and was confident enough to put an X-ray on hold... "until we
see how it develops.  If it gives you too much gyp then maybe we are
having a closer look but it is being my opinion that if there is a
hairline it will mend itself."

For the rest he gave me aspirin, and slopped some mercurichrome round
my nose and mouth which made me look even more of a clown that the
actual damage had done, and left me with some anti-inflammatory
ointment in case the bruising elsewhere got to be a nuisance.

"But not your arse hole or your testiculars," he warned.  "You'll need
the services of the Nairobi Fire Brigade if you do.  Actually, a good
forty winks, make it fifty, will do more good than anything else.  You
are taking Lariam for the malaria?  Once a week?  Well, not for
twenty-four hours, all right?  Just keep the mozzies away from you if
your dose is due."

Not Lariam actually it doesn't go too well with a dodgy liver, and mine
was still dodgy, the quack at home said, though it's five years since I
had a drink.

He charged fifty quid, discounted from sixty for sterling cash, gave me
a headed receipt.  "Get it back from your insurance."

Insurance?  Moi?

Chapter Four

I slept pretty fitfully until about half-four, came to with the sort of
jerk that tells you, that's it, you might as well get up.  I don't know
that I felt any better, but it was different.  Sharp, localised pains
had become more general, some new ones had crept in, like a sore
throat, I felt stiff the way one does on the second day after a sudden
burst of ferocious and unaccustomed exercise.  Psychologically I felt
miserable, damaged, picked on: fucking bullies, I kept saying aloud.
But I felt restless too, and wallowing in my misery was not going to
help that so I dug out the trunks I'd brought, still a touch sandy and
damp from the Indian Ocean, which I'd been in, good gracious, only the
morning before.  Then I pulled on some of the clothes Dr.  Ray of
Sunshine had made me take off.

The pool was OK, ten metres with shallow steps at both ends, and a warm
gusher which you could sit near using the steps, and get a Jacuzzi
effect.  On two sides it was shielded by high thick hedges, on the
other two there were changing rooms, a bar and a kiosk with the hotel
behind.  A guy at the entrance handed out nice big towels and there
were recliners, tables, and parasols dotted about.  The deck was almost
hot enough to be uncomfortable to the soles of your feet, though the
sun was now struggling with low cloud above a hill.  There was
something about where it was that snagged in my mind, but I was in no
mood to work out what.

Eight or nine people were sharing the facilities with me.  They all
seemed to be English.  There was the family I'd seen on Kenyatta at the
beginning of my walkabout: Dad, Mum, lad of about twenty, girl about
sixteen.  They seemed all right.  Then there were a couple of couples:
a pair of ageing yuppies, well into their thirties, and an older pair
of women, I took them to be teachers, spinsters but not that good
friends since I could hear them bickering at each other.  Or perhaps
that meant they were good friends.  But one of them anyway definitely
seemed the sort who was going to find something to complain of wherever
she was, whatever happened.  Just then she was whining that the tea the
waiter had brought her was less than very hot.  The ageing yuppies had
the gear: designer shades, she in a floppy felt hat, he in a baseball
cap, yes, black, but a lot cooler than NYPD, class swimming-wear, their
own towels, a big canvas carrier-bag with a splashy flower pattern, sun
lotions, drinks with fruit and brollies.  From their conversation I
worked out that they had all arrived that morning and that next morning
they would be off on a safari tour.  It occurred to me that even at
this late date I might be able to join them -I felt that while it might
be said that I had not yet 'done' Nairobi, Nairobi had done me.  Six
days it seemed like the trip lasted.  If I could get on board for, say,
six hundred quid, well that would be fine.  In a dozy sort of way I
wondered how I might make contact with the tour rep.

And the ninth?  She joined me just after I'd ordered a tropical
fruit-juice cocktail, no brolly or straw, thank you, but lots of ice.

"Do you mind if I join you?"

Well, what can you say?  Second time this had happened in twenty-four
hours.  Coincidence, or my approachable good looks?

I looked up, squinted since she was against the sun, but more because
of the way I felt than because of it it was already hazed.
Five-foot-four, hundred and ten pounds, gingery blonde hair, longish,
slightly coiffured into near ringlets, a hint of a peekaboo curl to the
side of her forehead which was pale, pale greenish eyes, a recollection
of freckles.  Small nose, nice mouth, lines, but the smiling sort, thin
neck, short green cotton wrap, gold bangles and an amethyst ring, thin
thighs, reddish knees, long, slender feet in thin-thong sandals,
toe-nails as well as finger-nails painted cerise.

About forty, or near it.  She was carrying a book: Isac Dinesen short
stories, Anecdotes of Destiny, not Out of Africa.  Score five for not
having the obvious book but one by the same author.  Go forward three
spaces.

"If it seems like I'm picking you up, well, there's some truth there.
If I sit on my own I'll have to fend off the real creeps of which, I
have to say, there are a few around."

"I'm not a real creep, then."

She frowned, made a show of passing judgement.

"I don't think so.  We'll see."  Very slight accent.  East Coast
American?  Or even educated soft south-west Irish.

She put her book down, open, cover up, bent towards her bag, came up
with a pack of Sportsman and a Hotels Serena box of wax matches.  But a
passing waiter got in first and lit her fag for her.  She had the looks
and manner that waiters go for.  She breathed out smoke, glanced across
at me.

"I am sorry.  Did you want one?"

"No thanks.  Gave up.  What are they like?"  I nodded down at the paper
packet.

"Cheap and nasty.  But not too nasty.  I always smoke the local brands
unless they're really disgusting.  If they are I fall back on
Gitanes."

My waiter brought my drink and hovered.

"That looks nice.  What is it?"

"Just fruit juice."

"No booze?"

"I don't."

"Poor you."  She looked up at the waiter who was young, not
bad-looking, and ready to fall in love.  "I'll have one of those but
with a large vodka in it."

He went, on wings of desire, to do her bidding and she turned back to
me, raised her hand in front of me.

"Danielle Newman," she said.  "You can call me Danny."

Which somehow made Irish the more likely.

"Kit or Christopher Shovelin," I said.  "You can call me what you like
so long as it's not 'creep'."

I ii

And I took her hand, gave it a slight squeeze.  She took it back, leant
towards me.

"So," she asked.  "What happened to you?"

I was just in the action of putting down my glass with one hand and
trying to catch and stop the dribble that was coming out of the corner
of my mouth with the other.  My top lip still looked like an inflated
condom: as a lip it was inoperative.  Danny rose to the occasion, found
a tissue in her bag.

"Stupid of me to turn down a straw," I managed at last.

"So?"

"Got mugged.  On the pavement of Kenyatta.  Lunchtime."

"You never!  Are you all right?"

"I'm all right now."

"Did he take anything?"

"Twenty quid in shillings.  Not a problem."

"Tell me about it."

I did.  She listened... raptly, which was flattering, for about thirty
seconds, then her attention wandered before I got on to the police bit,
so I cut the tale short.  When her drink arrived she took the straw
from her glass and put it in mine, without saying a word, which was
nice of her.  The sun, red from the cloud, dipped below the hill.
Lights came on round the pool, and under its sill.  Squealing swifts
racketed across the surface, nipping up insects, mosquitoes I hoped. We
had a second drink each, while Danny continued to work through her pack
of Sportsman.  Most of the others went, leaving only the lad and his
sister who were setting each other competitive tasks like "Can you swim
right round the pool underwater?"  Danny watched them for a moment then
turned back to me.

"Best of a pretty dispiriting lot," she said.  "Are you one of the
party?"

"Not yet.  I thought I might try to join them.  They leave tomorrow
morning, I gather."

She pursed her lips, expressing minor disapproval.  Then she raised
eyebrows and lifted her head to indicate the lady of a certain age on
the table next to us who was now berating her companion in a
high-pitched whine for not bringing the mosquito deterrent down from
their room.  There was not a mozzie in sight that I could see.
"Supposing you have to share a mini-bus with them," she whispered.

She looked at her watch and stubbed out the current Sportsman.  "Taxi
ordered at eight.  If I'm going to swim it had better be now."

She stripped off the green wrap, sleek black one-piece underneath, did
a shallow dive though a notice told her not to.  Less gracefully I felt
my way down the steps, holding on to the side.  I glanced down at my
torso.  Maybe it was the quality of the lights but the bruises really
showed now, not quite blue and black yet but on the way.  I tried
swimming but it hurt, so I sat by the gusher, holding on to a sort of
pillar thing, one of a row, that stood near it.  Presently she joined
me there, attached herself to the pillar next to mine.

"You look like a Turner sunset," she said.

"The Fighting Temeraire," I offered and made with my fists in front of
my face before clutching back at the pillar as the current from the
gusher caught me.

She laughed.

"Where are you going at eight?"  I asked.

"The Carnivore," she replied.  "Do you know of it?"

"It's in the guide book."

"You can come with me if you like."

"I would like."

"We'll go Dutch, right?"

"Fine."

On my way back to my room I had to cross the main foyer.  The tour rep
was behind a counter next to reception dealing with some enquiry or
complaint from the whiny woman I'd sat near at the pool.  I thought
about it.  On the one hand I'd had enough of Nairobi, didn't really
trust the place not to hit me on the head again, or elsewhere.  The
idea of safari appealed, but not if I was going to spend it in a
mini-bus with the likes of the lady at that moment making the rep's
life a misery.  Anyway... would there be vacancies?  Would I not just
look a prat even thinking I could get on board at the last moment?  For
a minute or two I dithered, like the poor cat i'the adage, then
shrugged my shoulders, and, with my mind firmly made up to leave the
whole thing to the morning, see how I felt, headed for the lift.
Indecision, I'm almost sure.

An hour or so later I was sitting in the back of an elderly Merc, half
facing Danny across the cracked leather, watching the light and shadow
of the street lights floating across her face.  She was made-up now,
looked quite glam, hair more gold than I remembered from the pool-side,
hint of greenish eye-shadow, lipstick enhancing the upward tilt at the
corners of her mouth, drop earrings, emerald, could be real.  She was
wearing a silk stole and short-sleeved dress, eau-de-nil could be the
right description, though the Nile I've seen was never that colour,
lowish at the front, full skirt.  She carried a small sparkly purse. In
short, I wondered if my best casual chinos and linen jacket, navy Ralph
Lauder polo shirt, all albeit clean and decently pressed, were up to
the mark.

You know, I'm not bad at my job, but I was so taken with her that I
forgot to ask myself: had she really been planning to do this outing on
her own?

For about ten minutes the road was dual carriage way in intention,
though twice we were in contra-flow, and the verges were rubble.  The
housing beyond the street lights went steadily down market from
apartment blocks that would not have looked out of place in a working
class suburb of, say, Marseille, to shanty-town.  We passed an
airfield, not Jomo Kenyatta, then took a left down what was really no
more than a track, concrete cratered with pot-holes, hardly any
light.

"Have we been kidnapped?"  I whispered, not wishing to upset the
driver.

"What fun if we have," Danny replied, eyes gleaming.

But no.  Shortly we pulled into a crowded parking lot in front of low
buildings.  A liveried attendant opened the door, white teeth flashed
in what I was learning was the Kenyan greeting: effusive, warm,
transparently sincere?  Well, almost.

"Janibo," he shouted.  "Welcome to Carnivore..."  and a burst of
Afro-Pop and the smell of burning meat billowed in on us from behind
him.  But on this occasion the welcome turned out to be less than
entirely warm.  At the entrance, in front of the cloak-room desk, were
four Men in Black, tall, lean, tough.  Very quickly, with a minimum of
fuss they patted me down and got Danny to open her purse.

"What was that for?"  I muttered.

"VIPs, I guess, dining out."

You must have heard of Carnivore.  It is precisely what it says on the
label: a restaurant where you eat meat.  Split level carousels of
tables beneath timbered and tented roofs surround a lit water-feature,
and a second large circular counter enclosing a battery of grills where
chefs cook meat in lumps and on huge skewers: beef, lamb, goat, pig,
obviously, but also antelope, zebra, crocodile, buffalo, water-buck,
ostrich... it looks like one of the jollier circles from Dante's hell.
The devils are tall hatted chefs, the flames are real enough, the noise
pandemonium, and the sinners?  The meat of course, except here it's the
guilty who barbecue the innocent.

You are sat at a table, you have a starter, you can go to the grills
and choose, or they bring the skewers and platters to you, there are
sauces and salads on the side and in the middle of it all is a paper
flag.  Eating was not a problem, once the food was past my still
swollen lip.

But what I had failed to hear (I don't always hear too well) was that
when I'd had enough meat I was meant to take down my flag.  I had five
helpings, all from different animals, before Danny rumbled what had
gone wrong, and told me.  Maybe if she had not been so interested in a
group of our fellow customers she would have spotted the problem
earlier.

There were eight of them, at a big table not far from ours and slightly
above us, behind me but out on my right.  Eventually, I half-turned,
had a look to see what was grabbing her attention.  It was the Masters
of the Universe, the same ones, I was almost sure, that I had seen at
breakfast, although they had shed their operational suits and were now
relaxing in what the catalogues call leisure-wear.  Five of them, and
hosted by three Kenyans in Hawaiian-style shirts whose patterns
reflected Africa as seen through the eyes of Parisian or Milanese
designers.  One was big, not Sumo-big but on the way, the second had
white hair, the third looked younger and meaner.

I reckoned they might have been amongst those who had arrived that
morning at the Serena in ministerial limos.  And if that was the case
that explained the presence of the Men in Black we had passed on the
way in.

"The new imperialism," I suggested as I turned back to face Danny.

"You could say so.  Interesting bunch.  The oldest of the whites, no,
don't turn round again, is a vice-president of AFI..."

"Agrob-Food International..."

"No.  Lots of people call them that because they merged with Agrob.
Actually it's Associated.  Associated Foods International.  Another
heads up the African subsidiary of Hunt Madison.  I'm not sure about
the others.  But if I'm right one of them is Pepe Boltana, CEO of the
Banco de Corpus Cristi whose head office is on Grand Cayman.  They
handle Mob money.  And if I am right then that implies some of the
money movements they may be putting in place are dodgy.  From what I
remember of our database the Kenyans they are with are land
development, trade and industry, and internal security.  High powered
bunch."

I was flabbergasted.

"Do you really know all this or are you making it up?"

"To impress you?  Why should I want to impress you?"

I'd needled her.  She went on.

"No, it's all real."

I waited.  She relented, smiled a touch, very slightly raising the
corners of her mouth.

"I'm a... newsperson, what you might call a journalist, but more a
hunter-gatherer.  East Africa is my stamping ground.  I'm part of a
three-person agency with an office in Jo'burg.  Now, let's at least
pretend we're not interested in them, at all, shall we?  They do good
sorbets here."

I chose mango which turned out to be a bit sweet for my taste.  Over
coffee, which was very good, best local, Kenya triple A, I asked her:
"Since you know so much about those guys," I tilted my head backwards,
"I suppose you're actually here on business."

"Oh dear me no, strictly on holiday."  But it came with a knowing grin,
as she tipped sugar into her cup.  "Though I suppose it's fair to say
that wherever I go in these parts for a break it's bound to be a bit of
a busman's holiday.  But my professional brief on this trip is simply
to suss out how tourism is holding up under the stresses of the
times."

"Which are?"

"Global slump in tourism, war and refugees on the northern borders, a
corrupt government getting more and more overt in its readiness to sell
the country cheap to the big corporations.  But the really bad guys
need tourism to launder the hard currency they want to ship out to
Switzerland or wherever so they have a personal interest in keeping it
going."

On the way back in the taxi she put her hand on my knee in a very
companionable un sexy way and said, "You can't just hang about Nairobi
for a day or two and then go back, just like that."

"So I'll go on safari.  I'll speak to the rep first thing tomorrow. I'm
sure she'll be able to fix it up.  It's worth a try anyway."

"Oh come on!"

"Well, what do you suggest?"

"I've got the figures, the statistics I want, or as much as I can get.
My plan now is to drive around a bit, see what it feels like on the
ground.  I'm hiring a self-drive car for a week.  I'm going to Mt.
Kenya, Samburu, then the Aberdares where I have friends I can call on.
Maybe we'll stay with them.  I'll be driving through game country.  The
Rift Valley.  Maybe as far south as the Masai Mara.  Now, the thing is
I don't want to do this on my own.  In fact to be frank I'd be an idiot
to try to.  One of my colleagues was meant to come along but he had a
spot of bother, and I got an email this afternoon to say he couldn't
make it.  In short..."  She turned full on me and gave me her most
seductive grin.  Not sexy seductive you understand, but the sort of
total flattering charm very few males can resist.  Certainly not me.
"I'd like you to come with me."

I chewed a lip, glanced out at a passing filling station which had been
torched and abandoned.

"I'll treat you.  All expenses."

"No you won't.  I can pay my way."

"The car-hire and petrol, anyway."

I shrugged.

"Does that mean you'll do it?  It does.  Doesn't it?"

I let the taxi rumble on until the street lights came back.  She moved
her hand away.  Well, perhaps it had been just a touch sexy.

And then there was that moment of slightly awkward intimacy as we
shared the hotel's small lift.  I caught her eye in the mirror and cast
around for something more to say.

"Do I need anything special in the way of clothes?"  Stupid really,
since what was I going to do if she told me to put on my David
Attenboroughs?

"If you pitch up in a safari suit I won't even speak to you."

Even.

Chapter Five

Well, I wasn't in a safari suit, but Danny damn near was: pale tan
waistcoat with zip-up and Velcro-secured pockets over a white shirt cut
like a man's, cotton combat trousers, darker than the waistcoat.
Slightly incongruously she had a pair of slip-on, flexible shoes on her
feet.  Later, I realised these were what she kept for driving.  We met
over breakfast which was, as they used to say about that eaten by a
condemned man, once more hearty.  Over it she said that if it was OK by
me we'd head north towards Mt.  Kenya, have a look at that, and then
may be go on towards the Samburu National Reserve and spend the night
there.

The car was a red Polo, about three years old, in reasonable nick.
Danny had a smart soft red leather suitcase, a smaller matching
hold-all, a professional photography bag and a laptop in a zip-up.  I
had a black cloth hold-all that had been a 'free' gift with a
stationery order and a floppy document case, ditto.  With a bit of care
we got it all into the boot except my document case with the bird book
in it and Danny's hold-all, both of which we kept in the car on the
floor in the back.  She took the A2 north-east out of Nairobi
signposted for Thika and Nyeri.  Boulevards and avenues climbed through
parks and gardens with ministry buildings and embassies, clearly the
nob hill end of Nairobi.  We passed a sign for Jomo Kenyatta University
of Agriculture and Technology.  She looked as if she were about to say
something about it, but then shut up.

Soon the road became a wide dual carriage way with wide grass verges
and narrower roads for local traffic running parallel to the main road.
Beyond them a ribbon of shanty towns unwound with occasional patches of
cultivation between.  The shanties were built out of split timber with
corrugated iron roofs and were often quite long.  Did several families
live in them?

Every kilo metre or so there was a market, spilling across the local
roads on to the verges.  They were crowded, bustling: the men in their
non-matching jackets and trousers, the women deep hipped with the grace
of caryatids balancing their purchases on their heads, often in
traditional dress or a pick and mix of European and African.  Lots of
goats, some sheep, flocks of chickens and turkeys, donkeys, occasional
cows, huge dew lapped creamy oxen used as draft animals, pyramids of
cabbages and potatoes, sacks of greens and fruit.  Cattle driven slowly
along the verges in quite large herds, headed for the shambles in
Nairobi.  The stalls sold simple wooden furniture, pots and pans,
ironmongery and hardware, racks and racks of clothes, potted plants in
plastic bags, basket-ware.  Almost everywhere there were hoardings for
Tusker beer, Sportsman cigarettes, Raid insect killer" Deadly Doom
Protects, Cockroach Extermination in a Can', and signs hand-painted to
a formula with the slogan "Let's Talk Trust'.

"What are they about?"  I asked Danny.

"Aids.  Use a condom.  Use several condoms.  The government admits to
twelve per cent of the population infected.  It's probably a lot
more."

"That's terrible."

"Yes."

The consolations of religion: a big Hindu temple on the left, painted
in white and day-glo colours, caparisoned elephants and gods and
goddesses in plaster.  Churches too: African Independent Pentecostal,
Jesus the Fountain of Life Centre, Full Gospels Church of Kenya, Holy
Spirit Revival Centre most of them neatly built and evenly stuccoed in
whites and pale ochres: clearly any spare money you had went to the
congregation you favoured.  Schools, church schools and municipal, kids
often very neat in uniforms that English children haven't worn for
twenty years.  Ten anyway.

"It looks poor," I said, "but not destitute, not hungry."

"There's plenty of destitution and hunger.  But out here they're still
in touch with rural life."  She drove carefully, with the traffic, only
swerving to avoid the worst potholes and carefully checking out the
rear-view mirrors when she did.  Her speech was punctuated by the more
noteworthy hazards.  "Food at least is cheap.  But if you want real
work you have to go into Nairobi and take your chance.  But it is still
a network society.  Get in with a strong group, extended family, clan,
tribe, church, whatever, and it'll be self-supporting, self-sufficient,
look after its own.  But fall into a crack, and that's what is
happening more and more with this lousy government, and you end up dead
under a tree with a bottle of crystal meth clutched in your hand."  The
areas under cultivation became more and more extended.  A lot of it
industrial in scale, like I'd seen on the coast, mono culture across
the rolling hills, the AFI logo.

"That's another problem.  The big food giants use intensive farming,
chemical intensive, land intensive, machine intensive, but labour cut
to the bare bone.  Cash-crops for processing and export.  Even
cut-flowers for Christ's sake.  Smaller farms bought up, or their
tenancy taken away, tribal land expropriated, it's all mega-bucks for
the few and starvation on the city edges for the many.  Starvation,
crime, social breakdown."

"Britain in the eighteen hundreds."

"Not to mention Ireland.  But we at least had emigration.  Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, the US, even God forgive us, Africa.  We
repopulated whole continents with our masses, used genocide when the
natives wouldn't move over, but now, of course, you pull up the
draw-bridge."

I couldn't persuade myself that it was all as bad as all that.
Presently the landscape broke up into steep valleys between volcanic
cones, long since extinct, covered in greenery.  It was threaded with
rivers crossed by high bridges and, in the valleys and on the
hillsides, mostly grown in what were clearly prosperous small or
medium-sized holdings, coffee, kumquats, maize, avocado, peppers,

with tomatoes and potatoes stacked by the roadside for collection, huge
and red.  And bananas.  Is it possible to starve in a climate where
bananas grow?

Presently, having overtaken a large pick-up truck filled with
passengers clutching the ends of cloaks and improvised turbans over
their mouths against the dust, and seeing the road clear in front of us
for several hundred yards, she half-turned to me with a smile lifting
the corner of her mouth.

"You must have an interesting life in your line of business."

"Not really.  Adulteries, missing persons, add up to getting on for
half."

"Credit-rating?"

"Not unless I'm hard-up."

"Why not?"

"Boring and intrusive.  Often illegal.  And if a guy is getting a loan
he's not good for, then good luck to him, say I. I've been there too
often myself."

"No murders then."

"Only the one."

Something in my voice must have reflected the sudden cold stab that
always affected me when I remembered... That sidelong glance again.

"And you'd rather not talk about it."

"It was in another country and the wench is dead."

I shuddered minutely, seeing again the curtain of flame that folded
itself round her.

Danny glanced at me and drove on.  And the thought crossed my mind how
did she know what my line of business was?  Had I told her at the
Carnivore, or before that by the swimming pool?  Must have.  But I
couldn't remember that I had.

"And you're married?"  Of course she'd noted the wedding ring I wore on
my ring finger.

"No.  Divorced.  I wear the ring because my daughter, who expects me to
patch things up with her mother, gets upset if I take it off."

"How old is she?"

God help me, I have to give that five seconds thought.

"Twelve.  She has a brother a couple of years older."

"Why did you break up?  Infidelity?"

"Hers not mine.  But infidelity, like alcoholism, is an effect, not a
cause."

"I wouldn't know.  I've never married."

She said this with a hint of smugness.

"You're asking a lot of questions," I added.

"Only one sort of person more curious than a PI... an investigative
journalist."

"I'm not curious.  Just inquisitive."

She shifted a little in her seat, changed down as we neared the crest
of a hill.  As we crossed the crest the plain to our left spread to
hills on a distant horizon.  The landscape on that side was dusty with
only occasional stunted acacias, flat-topped, cropped, etiolated.  A
dust-devil rose like a white ghost out of the pale ochre soil, swayed
like a drunk, and collapsed.

"That looks like Africa," I said.

Her mouth hardened into a line, then the tip of her tongue caressed her
top lip, putting me in mind of a cat.

"I wonder if you know what you're saying."

I waited.  Her knuckles whitened again but not out of driver's
stress.

"Fifteen years ago it was savannah.  Still subject to drought but with
the means of recovering from long periods, years even, without rain.
The soil was kept compacted at the right levels by the cattle of the
nomadic herdsmen and fertilised by their droppings.  There were wild
herds too of zebra, giraffe, antelopes.  It didn't belong to anyone.
The nomads, Samburu or related tribes, had their own system of sharing
out the grazing and browsing, and they knew how to keep it in
sustainable bounds.  Then government agencies moved in.  Gave

land title to the elders and then made them offers they couldn't refuse
or found other ways of getting the nomads off the land.  Next step was
Canadian advisers who prairie-farmed it with wheat.  But the soil is
shallow, they found no way of making a reliable irrigation system. They
created an uninhabitable dust-bowl within a decade.  Yes.  That's
Africa.  You're right."

Food for thought.  I let it digest for twenty minutes then cleared my
throat.

"You never married, then."

"Partners, yes.  Husbands, no."

"One on the go at the moment?"  ;

"Curious or just inquisitive?"

I shrugged.

"Or are you..."  she grinned, "testing the water?"

"More a matter of putting my foot on the first rung of a ladder and
seeing if it holds."

"It's a long way up."

"I thought it might be."

"Men!"  And the smile turned to a grimace.

After an hour or so we left Nyeri down on the edge of the plain while
in front and over to the right the ground rose and broke up into
forested foothills, climbing to a grand massif lost in the long grey
cloud spread over it like a table-cloth: Mt.  Kenya itself.  Lying
between the road and the first substantial hills there were patches of
wilderness, uncultivated land, forest and grassland, watered by the run
off from the big mountain.

Presently we pulled off the roadside and dropped on to a sandy parking
lot filled with safari minibuses and a couple of bigger coaches. Almost
instantly we were surrounded by urchins, smiling, earnest, insistent,
but not, one felt, desperate, appealing for small coins and pens.
Behind them were sheds filled with stacks and stacks of tourist stuff,
a couple of stalls selling refreshments, two or three rather more
permanent buildings advertising themselves as hotels.

"Toilet stop?"  I asked.

"If you need it.  But no.  There's another reason."

She glanced up and indicated with a nod a metal painted sign set on a
pole in the sandy verge between the parking lot and the road we had
left.  It was rusty and flaking, but the design was clear enough.
Yellow background with what at first I took to be a black head in
silhouette but then realised was an outline of the continent, bisected
below the ear, above the jaw, with a broad red line and on the line,
painted in white, the one word: "Equator'.  There was a crowd round it,
nearly all white.  I got out and joined them.  She'd seen it all
before, lit a Sportsman and waited for me.

The centre of attraction was a young man with a red bucket lidded with
a white bowl filled with water which trickled into the bucket through a
hole in the bottom.  Two matchsticks floated listlessly, without
movement.  He picked it all up, moved twenty metres north and the
matches began to turn clockwise.  He moved twenty metres south and they
turned anti-clockwise.  I looked at my watch.  Just gone twelve midday.
I looked up at the sun, shining through broken, moving cloud.  It was
dead overhead, near as I could tell.  And it burned, my face and the
retina at the back of my eye which ached for an hour afterwards.  A
line at the bottom of the sign read "Altitude: 6389 Ft.". The man with
the bucket wanted three hundred shillings for a signed certificate
saying I'd crossed the Line.  Since I was crossing back, having entered
the southern hemisphere on the plane out, I refused the certificate,
gave him a fifty.  He wasn't pleased.

"Why not?"  I asked, when I was back in the Polo.

"He was selling, not begging," Danny said, drily.  "If you've got a
spare Bic or cheap ball-point give it to one of the kids.  The school
will buy it from him for five shillings.  They're desperate, the
schools.  They get very little government money, and parents have to
pay fees.  But it's not enough, it never is.  Pens, paper, every little
helps."

"And the coins?  The kids keep asking for pennies, English pennies."

She laughed.  "It's a little scam they run.  They know you'll part with
English coppers, small change, it's just in the way while you're here.
Then they take them to the next punter and say a tourist paid them in
pennies by mistake, will you give me shillings for them they're no use
to me.  And of course she, or he does!  Again, it's a step up from
begging which is forbidden, and anyway they don't like to beg."

She chucked her cigarette, and started the engine.

"I know a good place for lunch."

She drove to the next village, on the outskirts of Nanyuki.  There were
more people on the road now always you can see people walking in Kenya,
apparently for considerable distances, but more nearer the towns.  At
one point a bend at the bottom of a slope led us into a cutting.  Danny
applied the brakes, we slewed about in the dust and hit a pot-hole that
reminded me I'd taken a nasty fall on my coccyx only twenty-four hours
earlier.  There was a lorry on its side blocking one half of the road
and behind it a large dead cow.  The accident was barely five minutes
old.  You could tell because you could see it had been a live cow very
recently: men with machetes were already hacking it up and one, bigger
than the rest, was walking away with a huge haunch on his shoulder.

Danny drove on into the village, took a right.  Shanty town beneath
trees, eucalyptus and palm, dusty mauve bougainvillea, then farm
buildings.  The tarmac gave out, but the road was metal led and
well-kept.  We climbed slowly, not really hair-pinning, into thicker
deciduous forest, passed a fork with a track off to the left which we
ignored.  There was a sign but I didn't take it in.  A buzzard had my
attention, soaring above the trees.  White from below with black wing
tips but more striking than that, a bright russet wedge of a tail.
Augur, it's called.

Another mile brought us to a gated entrance made out of dark timber
with a vaguely oriental looking lintel.  A khaki-ed but private guard
responded to Danny's Swahili and let us through.  I couldn't decide
whether he recognised or expected her or not.  A few more turns took us
into a car park beneath pines, with needles on the hard earth floor.
Four safari minibuses were there before us, and a medium sized 4x4 SUV,
not a Land Rover but the sort that has a stencilled rhino on the spare
wheel cover.  Beyond, on the far side of a low fence with a wicket gate
was a raised wooden bar, dining area and kitchens, surrounded in the
open air by longer tables with benches at which the safari tourists
were waiting for their lunch.  Already they were feeding their bread
ration to the black and white, long-haired colo bus monkeys who knew
the routine and posed for their cameras.  We parked, Danny opened her
door and twisted so her feet were out on the ground and changed her
shoes. She changed the lightweight black slip-ons for a pair of
Wrangler trainers with raised ankle protection and sturdy soles,
practically walking boots.  Then she went round to the boot and got out
the photography bag.  I supposed, because she didn't like leaving it
behind.

As we approached the building two men stood from a table under the roof
and came to the top of the steps to welcome Danny.  Us, actually.  I
knew them.  One short and stocky, the other tall and blonde.  Ludwig
Holly and his ubermensch companion.

"Hullo there, Mr.  Shovelin.  I hope Danny has been looking after you
properly."

"He's been looking after me," she said.  "You're a genius, Ludwig.  He
couldn't be better."

He grinned with self-satisfaction and she kissed him on the cheek.
Then, while I was still on the step below him, and struggling with what
was clearly not a series of coincidences, he gave me his strong hand to
grasp.

"Mr.  Shovelin," he went on in his deep, slightly mesmeric voice, "Kit.
I don't think you've met my good friend Leo

Vincey.  Leo, this is the Kit Shovelin I told you about.  The private
eye.  But not wearing his wonderful hat today."

"It's in the car," I muttered.

Vincey came forward and I shook his offered hand.  Firm, manly grip.
You know the sort: it says in a tight spot, you can rely on me.  He
looked down at me.  I'm five ten so not many men can do that.  His
sunny face clouded with sympathy.

"Whatever happened to your face?"  His accent was East Coast American,
Ivy League, almost British but more marked than Danny's.  The sort that
eludes you if you move your upper lip.

"I wish it was only my face."

Tell the truth, after several hours sitting in a Polo driven over some
of the worst road-surfaces I had ever experienced, my shin and arse
were giving me a bit of gip.  "Got mugged.  Par for the course, Mr.
Holly warned me."

"Ludwig, please."

They had formed a little group around me, were ushering me up the
couple of steps on to the verandah that circled the bar.  Chairs were
re-arranged, we sat.

"Drink?"  Holly suggested.

"Diet Coke.  If not, then a fizzy mineral water with a slice of lemon
or lime would be fine."

"Ice?"

"Not if it's already cold."

He stammered away in Swahili at the hovering waiter.

"No Diet Coke, so it will be the mineral water.  And Danny, don't
bother to correct my Swahili."

"Considering the short time you've been here it's very good."

Danny, opposite me and on the edge of the area, smiled at him, leant
back, her face in shade, watched us.  Vincey sitting next to me at the
round table, angled his body towards me.

"Tell us about this mugging," he asked.  "It does rather look as if
they did a thorough job on you."

"Nothing to tell, really.  But you can tell me just what is going on. I
mean, have I been set up or something?  How come you all know each
other?  Have I been kidnapped, or what?"  I tried to get an edge into
my voice without being threatening or plaintive.

"Hardly," Holly cried.  "Does it feel like a kidnap?"  He shrugged,
spread his hands.

"I'd be hard put to it to get up and go."

Danny chipped in at last, moving her head so a sun-flake or two,
filtered past the eaves of the roof, caught her hair.  She offered me
that easy smile.

"Don't even think of it, Chris.  It's all exactly as I said.  I've been
stood up, the guy who was going to accompany me can't.  The only thing
I didn't tell you was that yesterday morning, when I told Ludwig there
might be a problem about my coming, he told me about the chat he'd had
with you on the plane from Mombasa, that you were staying at the Serena
and that you were at something of a loose end.  I checked you out,
liked what I saw."

The drink came.  Nothing for them, just my mineral water which
originated, so the label on the bottle read, on the slopes of
Kilimanjaro.  It was ice cold without ice.  So that was all right.  I
squeezed the circle of lime, wiped my fingers with a tissue from a
dispenser on the table.  Classy joint.  Over at the long tables waiters
were serving grilled trout.  I began after all to wish I was on safari
too.  The punters all looked cosy, sure of their situation, nothing bad
was going to happen to them, nothing really unexpected even.

I waited.  There were a lot of questions in my head, but I sensed, the
way you sometimes do in my line of business, that I might get more if I
left it to them to decide what to tell me.  I was wrong.

Holly put his hairy hands on the table, pushed his chair back, looked
at the others.

"Shall we?"  he said.

They nodded, stood up, made we-are-about-to-go sort of movements. Danny
looked down at me.

"We're going, um, for a walk.  Actually," hurrying on to forestall the
move I was about to make to join them, "it would be better for you if
you stayed here.  I mean... you know, you're still rather stiff and you
even limp a little and the going is a touch rough in places.  They do
good lunches.  We won't be more than an hour."  She looked enquiringly
at the others.

"Make that two.  Not more than two hours," answered Holly, and he
followed Vincey up the steps.  I got the impression that Vincey knew
better than the other two where they were going.  I was building a mild
dislike for him.  Too confident, a touch over-assertive.  Body language
as much as what he actually said.  Danny followed, then hesitated,
turned, fumbling in her purse.

"Here's the car key," she said, talking quickly now, almost whispering,
"in case you want anything from your bags.  Um, if we're not back by...
five, drive back to the Serena, leave the car with them, and get the
next flight back to London."

Well that was reassuring.  Reassuring as hell.

They made their way up a track, up into the mountain.  A monkey
chattered at them, a big bird clapped its wings in the canopy above and
a leaf swung and circled, catching the sun, before it cruised to a
perfect landing behind them.  Then they were gone and I was looking at
the one single key.  VW and a tag with the name and telephone number of
the hire-firm.

Chapter Six

I felt confused, left out of it, excluded.  I tried to feel angry but I
have a long fuse, and anyway the surroundings were attractive.  The
waiter brought a menu.  I ordered trout, farmed not river trout, but
from their own ponds it said, and very good it was, salad, ice-cream. I
made the mineral water last, and had a coffee to finish up.  Then
another one.  The coffee came with hard white mints.  I told you, it
was a class joint.  The safari people wandered around, apparently
looked at the trout pools and the gardens, then piled into their Toyota
minibuses and drove back off down the hill.  The Polo and the
off-the-road vehicle were now the only two vehicles left in the park. I
felt bereft.  I went to the Polo, and fished Anecdotes of Destiny out
of Danny's bag.  It was all of thirty years, no, damnit, more than
that, since I'd read it.  It got quieter and quieter, just the noises
of washing up and so forth a little way off.  The barman stayed
standing behind his counter, as impassive as a rock, staring straight
out in front of him, not moving.  A monkey checked me out, found me
wanting, moved on.  There weren't even any insects to bother me.  I
glanced at my watch.  Five past two.  They'd been gone an hour.  I
promised myself I would not look at it for an hour.  Two twenty-three.
Shit.

And then the distant rumble and hum of a motor coming up the hill from
the main road.  Another jeep, but this time painted khaki and with a
badge stencilled on the door.  The driver parked it next to the Polo
and stayed on board while his companion got down on the other side.  He
was tall, thin, in a khaki suit you could have taken for a safari suit
but for the badge stitched on to his left breast pocket and brass
buttons.  On the tight black, very short curls of his head a khaki
baseball cap with the same badge.  It added up to a uniform.  The short
bamboo swagger-stick he had tucked under his arm and held in place by a
hand sheathed in white kid leather completed the impression.  He took a
slow walk, then came up the steps on to the verandah, ignored me, went
straight to the bar and sat on a stool.  The barman opened a bottle of
Tusker, poured from it into a glass and left both at his elbow without
saying a word.  The visitor drank, batted a fly away from his forehead,
peeled off his gloves and drummed his long fingers on the counter.  He
said something to the barman, presumably in Swahili: it sounded like a
question.  The barman shrugged, muttered what I took to be a
non-committal reply and resumed his fixed, unwavering examination of
the lower branches of a forest giant on the edge of the clearing.

Presently the new arrival emptied his bottle into his glass, came off
his stool and strolled over to me, carrying the glass with him.  He put
the glass on the table, took the chair Holly had sat in, twisted it,
smiled down at me, gold in the yellow teeth, a thin shiny moustache
above them, and sat down.  He arranged swagger stick and gloves neatly
alongside the glass.

"English?"  he asked.

"English," I agreed.

"Safari?"

"Not exactly."

He picked up his stick, tapped it on the leg of his chair, leant back,
the smile came again.

"Just touring?"

"Sort of."

"On your own?"

"With a friend."

Thin eyebrows raised, he looked around.  I began to feel irritated. And
very slightly disturbed.  Clearly I was being interrogated.

"She's gone for a walk.  In the forest," I grudgingly offered.

"And you stayed here."

"I was mugged yesterday.  In Nairobi.  Beaten up.  I still find it
difficult to walk."

"She should not be alone in the forest.  On the mountain.  A white
woman... on her own."

I felt a touch miffed.  No comment about my mugging.  Were such
incidents that common?  Didn't merit any curiosity at all?  And anyhow,
how did he know she was white?

"Actually, she's not on her own.  We met two other... friends?  Here.
They are with her."

"They have the Polo.  And you the four by four?"  "The other way
round."

He nodded as if I had said something seriously wise, drank his beer,
stood up, looked down at me.  "Passport."

I reached for the inside pocket of my jacket, then with my finger and
thumb on the top corner of it, my hand froze.  Who is this guy?  I
thought.  "You have the authority to ask?"  "Oh yes, mister.  I have
the authority."  And his index finger prodded the badge on his pocket.
Now, I'm long-sighted and I had put on my reading glasses.  I took them
off and the badge came into proper focus.  Machine-stitched to suggest
embroidery it was a shield with scroll work across the top and bottom.
The scroll work carried the message: Security Warden.  The shield was
blue with A F I in gold, except the T was a corncob, gold and green.
Associated Foods International.

I could have argued, this guy was not a government officer, but why
look for hassle?  I handed up the passport, he riffled through it.  Was
it my imagination, my innate paranoia that suggested the back page,
with its very basic information about me, gave him the satisfaction of
finding what he expected?  He handed it back.

"Have a good trip, Mr.  Shovelin," and he tapped the side of the peak
of his hat with the swagger stick before sauntering back to his four by
four.  The driver started up the diesel and with a puff of black smoke
and a little cloud of dust, drove back down the hill, the way they had
come.  One bend and the trees closed round it.

His beer remained half-finished.

Twenty minutes later and I heard them: feet scuttering on loose stones,
and whistling the Magic Flute, Papageno's opening aria: Der Vogelfanger
bin which ja, stets lustig, heisa hop-sasal I'm the bird-catcher,
always merry, always gay!  And round the corner they came, Holly in
front, then Danny, and Vincey last.  It was Vincey who was whistling.
Cocky bastard.  He was carrying Danny's photographer's bag for her, but
gave it back to her as they came up the steps and collapsed with
ostentatious weariness around me.

"Whoof!  That was quite a climb, quite a walk," Holly expostulated.  "I
could do with a beer."

"Tea for me," cried Danny.

"You're right.  Tea's the thing.  Much better idea," and he bent over
his knees to loosen the laces on his designer desert boots.

"I'll stay with beer," said Vincey.

"Mineral water again?"  Holly asked, looking back over his shoulder at
me as the waiter hovered.

I went for the tea.

They were red-faced, sweaty, still even a touch breathless.  But there
were oddities too, like green grass or leaf stains on Danny's waiscoat.
If she'd fallen it must have been quite a tumble.  And Holly had a
small scratch on his cheek, a line breaking up into dots, as if he'd
tangled with a bramble or thorn.  Clearly they had gone off the track,
which, at least at its start was a good six feet wide with a surface of
impacted stones.

"Did you have a good walk?"  I asked, somewhat innanely.

"Wonderful, wonderful!"  Vincey cried, and it dawned on me that they
were all a touch high.  Clearly not on drugs, but excitement, adrenalin
even.  "We saw many strange things, wonderful things."

"Such as?"

"Um... monkeys?  Sunbirds.  A tree filled with weaver birds and their
nests.  That sort of thing, you know?"

"You'll make Kit jealous," Danny remarked.  "He's into birds."

She turned to me, but glanced at my visitor's beer.

"You told me you didn't drink."

"I had company..."

But before I could explain, or she question me about it, Vincey had
taken over again.

"You didn't hear anything while we away?"

I wondered what he meant.  Holly filled in.

"There were some shots.  Not far from us but when we were about as far
from here as we got.  Illegal hunters, I suspect.  Poachers.  It's not
just ivory they come for, but the colo bus monkeys' tails, exotic
plumage, animal skins, that sort of thing."

"I doubt if I'd have heard anything at that distance," I said.  "Or
they may have coincided with the noise of my visitor's four-by-four."

"The visitor who ordered a beer.  But didn't stay to finish it?" Danny,
but all three looked a touch concerned, indeed glanced at each other,
suddenly serious.

"Some sort of warden.  He had a badge.  AFI Security Warden, it said.
He left about half an hour ago."

"How long was he here?  Did he speak to you?"  The questions came,
nonchalant in a studied way, it seemed to me, and I told them what had
happened, exactly as I have set it down.  All the time they tried to
keep it casual, but there was no hiding their concern.

"But you didn't give him names, our names?"  This from Holly.

"No."

Vincey looked across the table at him.

"Car registration numbers?  He could have got our vehicle numbers."

"If he had the sense to take them."

"He didn't write anything down that I saw," I chipped in.

The tea came and Vincey's beer, and the waiter cleared away the
Security Warden's glass.  With it gone they dropped it, contrived an
impression that it was a matter of only very minor interest, went on to
talk of other things.  Then they looked at watches, settled up with the
waiter, and we moved back to our respective vehicles.  The two men
kissed Danny, warmly, but like good friends, not lovers or anything
like that.  Holly climbed into the driver's seat of the jeep, Vincey
stood at the passenger door and waved a final salute while Danny stowed
her photographic kit back in the boot of the Polo.

"Hopefully we'll see you in the Aberdares, day after tomorrow."

The Aberdares?  Hadn't she said she had friends who lived in the
area?

We followed them.  Half-way to the main road we passed the junction
again and I looked back at the sign.  The AFI logo.  AFI Research and
Development Station.  Entrance restricted at half a mile.

"I suppose that's where he came from," I said, nodding back as it
receded in the rear-view wing mirror.

"Your visitor?  I guess."

Chapter Seven

The four by four went left, south, back towards Nairobi.  We turned
right on to the main road and drove on with the huge mountain, which
looked more like a range than a mountain, on our right, slowly receding
behind us.  And not all that high, but then the plain we were on was
already halfway up it.  From a distance we could see the higher slopes
and cliffs, a dun green with outcrops of rock emerging above the
forested foothills, though the summits were still hidden beneath that
spread of grey cloud towards which the sun was beginning its descent. A
large town, Nanyuki, was bypassed on our left and we took the sun with
us, left the mountain behind.  To begin with, the road was for the most
part reasonably surfaced and for longish stretches dead straight,
slicing through a flatfish landscape, in better nick than the dust-bowl
we had passed through earlier, lightly covered with the thorny acacias
and yellowish grass that figure in the safari adverts and the sort of
films you see on TV in the early evening on a Sunday.  I'm remembering
the days, some time ago now, when for me family viewing on a Sunday was
a routine.

But there were stretches too where the road was being widened or
rebuilt behind barriers which had been erected out of empty oil drums
and planks, and we were forced to cruise along the verge trailing huge
clouds of dust or battling through the fog created by a battered bus or
lorry in front of us.  Whatever else the lorries carried, they were
almost always topped out with passengers reclining on plastic covered
bales or leaning over the tail-gate, rocking from side to side and
waving cheerily at us.

There were villages too, set back off the road in ribbons, always with
the same features: three or four rival churches, a Coca-Cola kiosk,
shacks that called themselves hotels and doubled as brothels, truck
drivers for the use of, since the road we were on was, Danny told me,
part of the Trans East African highway, a tributary of the Trans
African artery for the distribution of commerce and HIV.  And
everywhere there were the usual hoardings for Sportsman, Tusker and
Trust.  The larger villages had blue and white liveried branches of
Barclays Bank which struck me as both comfortingly familiar and
blatantly neo-colonial, though I suppose to the inhabitants they were
just banks.  There were check-points too: large heavy planks placed
across the road with sharpened spikes of freshly hewn wood pushed
through them, angled towards the on-coming traffic, primitive but
efficient.  Small groups of armed police stood at the roadside,
smoking, chatting up kids or girls from the village.  They waved us
through after we had slowed to get round the spikes.

"Who are they hoping to catch?"

"Cattle rustlers, maybe.  Moving their booty in lorries.  Did you
notice the shoulder flashes "Stock Theft Police' on that last lot?  But
also refugees or insurgents from the civil war in Sudan to the north,
or raiders from Somalia to the west."

We were, she said, heading for the Samburu National Reserve where we
would stay, at her expense, in the Samburu Lodge, so she could continue
her investigation into the collapse or otherwise of the tourist
industry.

"Oh yes?"  I asked, and I meant it to sting.

She glanced across the small space between us, pale green eyes suddenly
wary, and her hands tightened momentarily on the steering-wheel.

"Something bugging you?"  she asked.

"Oh come on."

"I don't know what you're getting at."

"Holly chatting me up at Mombasa airport and on the plane.  You
latching on to me at the Serena.  Then we all meet up back at the trout
restaurant.  Something's going on, right?  And it's not to do with
tourism."

"How do you know that?  How can you say that?  It's all exactly as we
said.  The guy who was coming with me couldn't make it.  I said I
wouldn't come on my own.  Holly, who's a good friend, left a message
for me at the Serena, telling me about you..."

"Bullshit."

She drove on in silence for five minutes or so.

"OK," she said, at last.  "When we get to the lodge there'll be a
safari group there.  There will be vacancies, they really are in
trouble at the moment, and they'll be glad to take you on, fill a
space.  Cost you a ton a day for five days and worth every penny.  I'll
manage on my own."

But I wasn't ready to be dumped.  I smelt adventure, profit, and let's
be honest about this, um, romance.  Fairly honest.  I suppose what I
mean is sex.

"That's not what I meant."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

Silence for another two minutes.

"I'm not sure I do."

"Look.  All I want is to know what this is really about.  Once I do,
the chances are I'll want to remain part of it.  But not without
knowing what you three are up to and how you think I can be useful to
you.  Really know.  And no bull-shitting."

More silence, except that for a mile the road was corrugated, no doubt
as part of the preliminaries to putting a proper surface on it, and it
was like riding on the back of a machine gun.  Her knuckles whitened
again on the juddering steering wheel.  We couldn't have talked even if
we had wanted to.  And then there was a barrier at the end of the
stretch and we had to swing left down on to what had clearly been the
old road.  The ramp was steep and we had to slow down which gave a
cloud of urchins a chance to settle round us and bring us to a halt. We
could have cruised through them but Danny wasn't like that.  She bought
a water melon for fifty shillings, fifty p, and they were very pleased
indeed.  Three women, two young and startlingly beautiful, sat by the
roadside dressed in red robes with collars made up of hundreds of
strands of beads round their necks.  They had baskets with the melons
and other produce.  They gave us smiles of pure pleasure, welcome, and
waved pale palms at us as we picked up speed again.

"Samburu," Danny said.  "Like the Maasai but not quite so way out in
their lifestyle."

We passed a small herd of humped, dew-lapped cattle watched over by a
youth in a red cloak, holding a spear, with one foot raised so the sole
rested against the haft.  His hair, reddened and plaited in thin
strands reached half way down his back.  I felt a surge of euphoria:
this was Africa, real Africa.  The feeling went through the roof when I
saw the neck and head of a giraffe cropping the shoots off the top of
an acacia.  Then the nagging worries came back.

"You know what really worried me?"

"I can't guess."

"When you went into that spiel about how I should drive back to Nairobi
if you didn't get back in two hours.  Not send for the police or the
rangers or whatever, just get out."

"Yeah.  That was silly of me.  Didn't mean to frighten you."

"You must have had a reason."

She shrugged, pouted, said nothing.

"OK.  How about this?"  I suggested.  "You thought something bad might
happen to you on your walk and you suspected that if it did, it could
happen to me too if I hung around.  So you weren't thinking of getting
lost, or falling over a precipice."  I thought about it a bit more.
"Those shots Vincey spoke of.  They were aimed at you?"

She replied with a sudden vehemence that took me quite by surprise.

"You have a lively imagination and you ask too many questions."

That provoked a sort of febrile irritation with her which also
surprised me.  Thinking about it I realised I already cared, after
twenty-four hours, no more than that really, what she thought about me,
about us.

Towards evening, we came to an arched gateway, neatly if plainly
stuccoed, with a block house and out-buildings.  Samburu National Park.
Uniforms came out, took a small fee, checked a reservation Danny had,
waved us through.  Signposts to a couple of lodges and camp-sites.  The
vegetation was thicker now, the grass taller and greener, shrubs and
low trees followed narrow water-courses, steep hummocky hills closed
round us.  There were a lot more animals.  Giraffe and zebra,
apparently of different types, and antelope, big ones like oryx, pretty
ones like Thompson's gazelles, tiny ones like dik-dik.  Lot of oryx.
Danny suddenly said: "Alas, more oryx, I know them well," which had me
giggling for a minute or so and softened the rather prickly atmosphere
that had grown up between us.  She pulled up at one point and let me
have a good look at one solitary elephant, big with big unevenly
curving tusks.

"Maverick," she said.  "Trouble-maker.  Been known to have a go."

"Have a go?"

"Charge vehicles."

She moved us on before Jumbo got any ideas.

"You've been here before?"

"Twice.  In the course of business.  But it's a good spot.  Lots of
game.  Look.  Secretary Bird."

"Crumbs!"

White head and chest, black wings and belly and thighs, which looked as
if they had been squeezed into Lycra cycling shorts, orange predatory
beak, stalking and nodding through the grass on long yellow legs. Crest
behind its head, red round its eye.

"Hunts snakes."

I wished I had my own photographic stuff, the gear I take when I go
birding or looking for evidence of adultery or whatever.

The lodge was great.  We were taken to our rooms and we arranged to
meet in an hour at the bar.

"Give me time to shower and change," she said.

Fine, I thought, but wondered if I could come out grand enough for such
a well-heeled looking place.  Well, I'd got by at the Carnivore, the
night before, so I supposed I'd be OK.

Beneath its roof the bar was open to the wild, overlooking a river with
crocs, and we had a drink or two there before dinner.  She was right:
the place was less than half-full which was fine for the guests who had
made it, some of whom had been at the Nairobi Serena the night before,
but was bad news for Kenya.  She drank a couple of long vodkas with
natural lemon juice, mineral water, crushed ice, sprig of fresh mint. I
had the same but without the vodka.

"Don't you ever drink?"

"Nope."

"Why not?  Did you ever, or have you always been TT?"

She looked across the low table, leaned forward and I could see the
shadows between small breasts and the top hem of a scant bra beneath
the peacock blue plain top she was wearing above a black silk skirt.
She prodded a slice of lemon with a plastic cocktail stick, so the
lemon bobbed beneath the ice then, borne up by bubbles, struggled back
through.

I get asked this.  If I don't like the person I'm with or feel I don't
know them well enough, I keep as much to myself as I can and get off
the subject.  But Danny had a way with inhibitions... mine anyway.

"In forty years I did a life-time of boozing.  One morning I woke up,
felt poorly, sat on the loo, then had to grab the wash-basin.  I
brought up four pints of blood.  Later the same day I passed almost as
much again, the difference being that coming from the other end it
looked like used coffee grounds.  By then I was in hospital and on the
critical list.  Oesophageal varices burst because of pressure from a
swollen liver."

"Why did you drink so much?"

"Don't know really.  Family trait I think.  I hardly ever got falling
down drunk, I was almost never completely sober.  Dad was the same. But
he fell off his moped and got run over."

She nodded, as if I'd said all that needed to be said on the subject.
Perhaps I had.  Across the slow river a nightjar chattered and then
something else went 'oo-hooo, oo-hooo!"  a bit like a pigeon.

"Owl?"

Head on one side she listened.

"Eagle owl," she said.

"Really?"

"Really!  Look."

And a large, pale, buttery shape cruised low in lazy flight over the
tree-tops on the far side, tilted huge wings in a smooth scimitar
silhouette, and was gone.

"This really is rather good," I said.

"Glad you came, then."

"Oh yes.  But I'd still like to know why."

"What's puzzling you?  Why don't you accept what I've told you?  What
else do you want to know?"

She spoke quietly, no irritation in her voice.  I felt there was a gap
showing that I might get through, if I went about it carefully.

"Well, let's start with Holly and Vincey.  What do they do?"

"Ludwig is a biologist, to be specific a micro-botanist, of some
reputation.  He is on a year's sabbatical from MIT, setting up a
genetic modification department within the botany department at Jomo
Kenyatta University.  Leo is... I'm not sure what he is.  He turned up
a few weeks ago, moved in with Ludwig.  I guess they'd known each other
before.  Maybe they were old buddies."

"Are they an item?  Is it a relationship?"

She pulled back, a line creasing the space between her discreetly
pencilled eyebrows.

"You mean like gay?  I don't think so.  Maybe.  I guess Leo's a sort of
playboy, single, perpetually on tour, never stays in one place for
long.  I'd say he was loaded, wouldn't you?"

"And how did you get to know them, know of them?"

She shrugged.

"One meets people.  It's part of my job.  Shall we eat?"

And that was as far as I got, after all.  Virtually nowhere.

No difficulty in finding a table clear of the other guests.  The big
dining room was built like a tribal hall, at least I suppose that was
what it was meant to suggest.  Wide wooden roof supported on beams and
by two rows of pillars, tables dotted beneath.  Two semi-wild spotted
genets, a bit like silver spotted tabbies, haunted the eaves and took
food left in their reach while a big white moth, or was it a bat?"  big
as your hand, fluttered like a wind-blown paper bag along one end.

We had a reasonable meal, then watched a leopard mauling a goat leg
left out for it on the other side of the river in a pool of dim light.
We were once more sitting in cane chairs on the terrace and when what
passed for the action was over she reached out, put a warm palm on the
back of my hand.

"I'm going to make a phone call from your room, if you don't mind."

Well, I was puzzled, naturally, but assumed that maybe she had already
established there was a fault with the phone in her own room.  I pulled
my key from my pocket and handed it to her.

"Carry on," I said.

"It's OK.  You can come with me."

The rooms were in two-storeyed blocks along the river front behind a
screen of immature eucalyptus.  I had one on the ground floor with a
small verandah, she was in the one above me.  She took my hand as we
strolled along the river bank.  Dry, warm, oddly familiar.  I fumbled
with the key.

"I'll be down in a mo," and she went round the back to climb the
outside stairs to her own room.

Well, you know what men are like.  Was this a come-on?

Quick dash to make whatever preparations or precautions she normally
took?  Stab of doubt in my case: marriage went bust five years ago,
Bournemouth clients not in the same league as Philip Marlowe's, no real
social life at all, apart from weekends with the kids, all in all I
felt it was quite likely I could turn out to be something of a
disappointment.  A fling I'd had, a one-off, actually in Marlowe
territory in LA a year before, the murder case I'd mentioned, actually,
had been... exciting, but, I had to admit I had not performed that
brilliantly.  And, right there in Samburu Lodge, with an attractive,
worldly but basically decent woman possibly about to offer sex,
important bits of my mugged body were still aching, indeed quite
painful, and I was fucking tired which at my age means you sleep if you
possibly can.

"Right then," and here she was again with her lap-top and photography
bag.  She pushed back the mosquito nets the management had thoughtfully
provided, put her gear on one of the beds, unzipped zips.

Her computer was a Toshiba, the Tecra 9100 series, and the camera she
took from the bag was a Fuji Fine Pix 4900.  There was a more
conventional though new Canon SLR with it, but she left that where it
was.  The phone was on a small bedside table, between the beds, the
socket in the wall behind the table and shielded by it.  It wasn't
difficult to shift the table and unplug the phone.  Working briskly,
clearly knowing exactly what she was about, she connected the computer
to the socket with a six-way modem lead.  She then opened it, switched
it on and waited a moment or two while it booted up.

I picked the Fine Pix up off the bed and hefted it in my hand.  It was
almost familiar.  Fact is I'd been thinking of getting one, or one of
its close rivals, for several weeks and had been hanging about Dixons
and Jessops, getting the sales staff to let me handle the things, but
the four hundred quid or so that I'd have had to shell out held me
back.  Nevertheless, your aspiring PI needs to keep up with the
technology and my old Pentax SLR with zoom lenses a foot-long was a bit
of a giveaway.

"Please?"  She held out a hand.

"Nice bit of kit," I said.  "Point and shoot on default, but fully
manual too if you want it to be."

"Yeah, it's OK.  Not really pro, but very good amateur."  She used a
USB lead to connect the camera to the computer.  Her fingers flickered
over the keyboard.  An image came up on the screen of a steep hillside
covered with a crop of low green shrubs.

"Do you mind?"

I was leaning over her shoulder.

"Oh, come on!"  I really was getting cheesed off with this unvarying
closing down whenever I might be getting near to what was really
happening.  Nevertheless I moved back to the verandah door, and peered
through the glass at the lamplight playing on the eucalyptus leaves,
with a gleam coming off the rippling water of the river beyond. Passing
croc?

"Better for you not to see any of it."

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you why not."  Her voice hardened.  What she was about to
say was for real that was the message I was getting.  "You won't see
enough to understand what is going on, but you will see enough to
convince anyone you talk to about it that you know more than you are
letting on.  That way they'll have an excuse to beat the shit out of
you to get out of you what you can't tell them.  And they won't readily
give up."

Well, that shut me up.  One beating per trip is all I'm prepared to
take without heading for the nearest international airport, and I kept
my eyes very firmly away from the screen.  Though it crossed my mind
after a bit that if I did know what it was all about and what was on
the pictures, then whoever was beating the shit out of me might stop to
listen.

"High resolution, eight pictures, it'll take about fifteen minutes,"
she said.

"As long as that?"

"There's no land-line out here.  It's all going by radio."

You can do a lot of thinking in fifteen minutes.

Why come all the way to Samburu and use a radio link when there must
have been landlines available at any of the larger villages or small
towns, each with its Barclays Bank, we had passed in the hour or so
after leaving the restaurant?  And the answer that occurred to me was
that though the radio link was unreliable it had one big advantage.  It
was less likely to be scanned and monitored than a landline.  To do so
would certainly require a higher level of technology.  I followed the
train of thought.  If it was scanned and traced it would be traced to
my room not hers... "Hey," I said, still not turning back, "this is
going through my phone not yours."

"Which means that it's that bit less likely that anyone is bothering
with it."

Of course.  She was booked in in advance.  Which room she was in, and
therefore which phone she'd be using would be known, assuming she was
under that sort of surveillance.  Surveillance?  High level
surveillance?  This was fantasy land.  Could she really be involved in
something so big it had people sweeping the phone lines and airways for
the sound of her voice or a digitalised picture she had taken?

Was she serious?  Was any of this serious?  You know how it is when
you're in a strange place at night, and the lights are too bright in
some areas and too dim in others, add to that a more or less complete
stranger saying unthinkable things full of hidden menace, plus pretty
near extreme tiredness... you want to say: it's all a dream and I'll
wake up in my own bed.  In short I felt the whole situation was
characterised by a marked reality deficit.  I tried to get a grip.

"There was an AFI research station near that restaurant.  Their
security guard came and checked me out.  Ludwig, you say, is a
botanist.  Nice word.  Suggests a Victorian amateur bumbling about an
exotic landscape, picking flowers and giving fancy names to the ones no
one has named before.  But that's not what botanists do any more, is
it?"

I pushed my silly head on to the next step.

"Agricultural research station.  That used to mean raising new hybrids
of crop plants by selective breeding, testing them for the qualities
you wanted to breed into them, higher yields, resistance to pests, that
sort of thing.  Long process.  Not any more.  Now it's genetic
engineering."

She lit a Sportsman, blew smoke.  Take off twenty years she'd have
looked like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.  No, that's
ungallant.  Ten years.  And I look more like Boris Karloff than
Bogie.

"You know," she said, and picked a shred of tobacco off her bottom lip,
"you must be quite good as a PI.  Go on."

"Genetic modification.  AFI's already famous for it.  Or infamous.  So,
Doctor Ludwig Holly of MIT gets to hear they're up to something that's
fishy in some way and he gets in touch with an outfit of investigative
journalists in South Africa, and invites them to send a team in to look
at what he's found.  But one of them falls ill, or whatever..."

"Actually, he was run over in a hit and run car accident.  He's in
intensive care and on a ventilator."

"Oh shit."

"Just so."

I pulled in a deep, unhappy breath, sat on the bed that didn't have her
computer on it.

"It's big then," I said as I let it out.

"It's big."  She took another drag, walked past me to the window.  "Do
you remember the guys at the Carnivore?  The ministers?  The crook
banker from the Banco de Corpus Cristi?  The vice-president of AFI?
That's how big it is."

I remembered them, remembered how they'd started the day in the
conference suite at the Serena.  Had she known they'd be at the
Carnivore?  Was that why she needed a companion, so she wouldn't stand
out as a single white female?  Yes.  And yes again.

Five minutes later she closed the system down, unplugging leads,
zipping the kit back into its bags.

Her silk skirt rustled as she stood up.  She stood by the verandah
door, holding lap-top and photography bag.  I opened the door for her.
It was what I was meant to do.

"Breakfast at eight."

And then she was gone.  Not even a goodnight kiss.

Chapter Eight

The night, though, was not over.  At about three in the morning I was
woken by thuds, crashes even, the sound of tearing vegetation, and
cracking wood.  I lay in the bed for a few moments considering.
Whatever was happening sounded nasty, dangerous.  At least, I told
myself, you have to have a look your survival might depend on it.

Without turning on my light I pushed myself out from under the mosquito
net, pulled back the net window curtain covering the verandah door and
pressed my face against the glass.  I was looking at the giant
testicles and up the arse of the biggest elephant I had ever seen.
Jumbo the Maverick.  If he takes a step back I'm done for.  But it was
OK.  With an even bigger rending sound he pulled up a quite large
eucalyptus sapling, waved it above his head in triumph, dropped it,
trumpeted like a squealing rubber-bulbed horn magnificently amplified,
and lumbered off down the path.

At eight o'clock, I sat down at the table we had used for dinner, and
looked around.  There was only one elderly couple there, all the rest
seemed to have had breakfast and gone, waiters were clearing the
tables.  One of them asked if I wanted coffee or tea, I chose coffee.
But he was back almost straight away, not with coffee but two envelopes
and a small packet.  I gave them a professional once-over.  You know
what I mean, held them up to the light, weighed them in my palm,
sniffed them, the way a PI should.  Watson, this one was sealed by
someone who had just smoked a black Sobranie, a cigarette favoured more
by women than men.

Well, actually, not.  I looked at them the way anyone looks at
unexpected mail before opening it.  One envelope was unstamped and
carried my name, Chris Shovelin, nothing else.  I'm not too wild about
being addressed as Chris, I prefer Kit.  The other was directed to J.
Skiros, 118 Garlenda

Drive, Twickenham, UK, and was stamped with one hundred shillings worth
of un franked stamps and an airmail sticker

As well as a letter I reckoned it also contained a tiny plastic card,
the sort that supports a micro-chip the memory card from her digital
camera?  Seemed likely.  The packet was one of those bags that comes
with 35mm transparency film, carrying the Agflk or Fuji logos,
whichever, and with a printed address to a processing plant, usually in
the country where you bought the film.  In this case Brentford,
Middlesex

Inside, as well as the cassette of exposed film there would be a
completed address slip to be stuck on the packet of processed
transparencies.  I wondered: could I get it open and find out what that
address was?  I tried lifting the corner of the stuck down flap with my
thumb-nail but it wouldn't budge.

The envelope addressed to me had one sheet of closely written
notepaper.

Dear Chris (I read), Forgive me for rushing off like this, but I think
it will be better for both of us if I do.  There are a couple of things
you can do for me though.  I've booked you onto the Cheetah Safari.
Just as I said, they are glad to take an extra paying customer Judy,
the rep here at Samburu Lodge, will explain the schedule and itinerary,
but after you've left here you'll be in the care of Sami your mini-bus
driver.  If you get up at eight you will have missed the early morning
game drive, but there is a bird walk in the afternoon and another game
drive in the evening.  Tomorrow you'll be taken to the Outspan Hotel in
the Aberdares for lunch and then up to Treetopsfor the night.  Next day
you do a couple of the lakes, another stop-over, and then the Masai
Mara for two more nights before they take you back to the Nairobi
Serena.  I'm sure you will enjoy it all and it will only cost you fifty
thousand Kenyan shillings.  You can pay with Visa or Mastercard.  After
all, it is what you were planning to do before I intruded on you.

What I want you to do for me is very simple.  In the foyer of the
Outspan Hotel there are two letter boxes, labelled Kenya and Abroad, or
something like that.  Just pop these into the abroad one

That's all.  Don't post them anywhere else, and certainly not here in
Samburu Lodge.

It's been great knowing you, and I wish we could have spent some more
time together, but there you go.  Needs must when the devil drives, and
the devil's certainly in this one.

Take care

Danny &

My first verbalised thought was: bloody bitch!  My first feeling was
one of relief, albeit stained with a hint of nostaglia for far off
things and tales of might have been.  But no, genuine relief.  I'd been
briefly made part of some deep, deep nastiness with implications and
ramifications way out of my league.  Exciting?  Yes.  But at my age?  I
should co-co.  All I had to do now was join the normality of an
organised safari trip, post those two packages as instructed, and
forget about it all.

Judy was a big girl with bushy semi-straightened hair like black shiny
wires, bright big eyes.  Her well-rounded figure was contained in a
green suit with yellow piping.  She occupied a space behind a sectioned
off part of the reception desk, as if she were a garrison.  And she was
of course entirely helpful, went through the itinerary, explained what
was inclusive and what wasn't, checked my passport, swiped my Visa
card, and briskly, like a croupier handing out selected chips, scooped
up three or four handouts and a brochure from the rack behind her.

I went back to my room.  The awareness that I had nothing to do until
lunch at twelve, in more than three hours time, followed by the bird
walk, became a presence that felt like the start of a headache.  I sat
in the one chair and leafed through the pamphlets Judy had given me. No
surprises there.  I cleaned my teeth.  I pushed the packet and the
envelope to the bottom of my hold-all.  Then I thought... no, and
pulled them out again, pushed them in the forward facing velcroed
pocket of the cotton trousers I had dug out.  No, not combat trousers,
nor safari-type, just holiday trousers.  Until I'd posted them the
packets would stay with me, I decided... least I can do.

Time ticked on.  Then I had a thought, prompted more by boredom than
anything else, and I walked round to the side of the block, climbed the
outside stairs on to the first-floor walkway, found the room Danny had
had.  The door was open.  Cleaner inside.  Well, if she'd left anything
at all it was gone now, and anyway there wouldn't have been anything
that could have told me anything I didn't know already.  Which was
zilch.

I put my elbows on the outward facing rail of the walkway and looked
out, wished I hadn't given up smoking the very occasional cigarillo. An
eagle owl, roosting in the branches of a big spreading tree, I wished I
knew what sort of tree, batted an eyelid at me, it was that close.
Down to my left there was a quite large enclosure round a swimming pool
where a man in a red jacket with a long handled brush was doing the
things staff do to swimming pools early in the morning.  I wondered:
was Danny all right, driving around the wilder parts of Kenya on her
own?  Something tightened in my chest at the thought.  Anxiety? A sort
of tenderness?  I chucked the virtual cigarillo I wasn't smoking, made
my way back to the bar, had another coffee, leafed through the Lonely
Planet guide in a desultory sort of way, took a wander round the public
rooms, went back outside and eyed a croc.  Bet you blink before I do.
He won, I took another wander.

I passed the elderly couple sitting at a table.  He was doing a very
competent water-colour.  She was doing crochet, a circular lacy mat
sort of thing.  I passed the time of day with her.  She had a hint of
Devon in her voice overlaid with school teacher diction.  She told me
that when the mat thing was finished she'd soak it in a solution of
sugar and, as it dried, shape it into a bowl which would be quite
sturdy once it was dry.

"I give them to my friends at Christmas," she said.  "They use them for
potpourri or to serve bonbons in."

"They don't eat them then?"

"I beg your pardon."

Shit.  Overstepped the mark.  Shows what a foul mood I was in.

"I just thought... soaked in sugar, you know."

"The sugar is to stiffen them."

"Of course.  Silly of me."

Christ.  Suppose I was detailed to share their mini-bus?  I looked over
her husband's shoulder.  He was a small man, wearing an old-fashioned
cotton sun hat a linen jacket over a striped shirt, cotton trousers,
sensible shoes.  He had a portable easel which supported a board angled
just slightly towards him, almost flat.  His brushes and portable
water-colour palette looked serious.  He was working some detail into
the river, carefully negotiating the spots where he had left the paper
almost white to represent sunlight on ripples.

"Golly, you really have caught that, haven't you?"  I muttered.  "The
light, you know?  The movement?"

"Just a sketch.  If I like it I'll work it up into something bigger
when I get home.  The information's there, you see.  That's the main
thing at this stage.  Collect the information."

"He sells them," his wife supplied.  "Five hundred usually, don't you
darling?"

"Five hundred?"  Five hundred paintings, I thought, the mind
boggling.

"Guineas," he said, his voice as dry as dust.

Ah.

"That's out of my range."

The silence said it all.  We expected as much, it seemed to say.

"So you gave the morning game drive a miss?"  I hazarded, trying to
retrieve something from the wreckage.

"Alfred can't paint on the drives.  They never stop for long enough.
And the tracks are too bumpy for me to crochet.  Really, we only come
for the scenery."

Not far away a diesel engine turned over, fired, ticked over, going
nowhere.  Raised voices from the direction of the reception area. Worth
a look, better than staying where I was.

It seemed dark after the bright mid-morning sunlight.  The wide, almost
circular area was like a cave, a cave with ferns and so forth,
palmettos, that sort of thing, one of which I was able to get behind.
It seemed the best thing to do.

An argument was going on, in what I supposed was Swahili, between Judy,
the tour-rep, and a big man in a black leather bomber and a black
baseball cap.  Feeling suddenly rather sick, I turned back out on to
the verandah, but remained in earshot.

The man smacked the counter and gave a shout.  Reprimand?  Incredulity?
A bit of both.  Then he turned sharply and headed out to the main
entrance.  I let the swing door flap to behind him and then moved after
him, reaching it in time to see him crossing the wide semicircle of
tarmac in front of a bed of tropical flowers.  He hoisted himself into
the front passenger seat of a working, non-luxury Land Rover, painted
black or dark grey.  He slammed the door and I saw the crest and read
the lettering: Kenya Police.  The uniformed driver let out the clutch,
span the wheel and it slewed round in front of me before heading up the
slope away from the Lodge.  I only got a brief glimpse of him... but
enough I reckoned to suppress the thought that it was paranoia talking
to me and not the evidence of my senses.  I mean, when you've had your
face only six inches from his and smelled his breath before he knees
you in the balls and smashes your mouth and nose, his becomes a face
you tend not to forget.

I turned back into reception.  Judy looked battered but still in
possession of her space.  She smiled at me wanly, shrugged, showed pale
palms.  Her eyes glowed in the darkness, what light there was reflected
from tears that did not fall.

"Not my fault," she said, and her voice trembled.

I smiled, sympathetically, I hoped.

"I gave the station a bell as soon as I knew she was leaving," she went
on.

I shifted my smile from sympathy to polite enquiry.

But she pulled herself together, professional de fences closing down
again.

"It's no matter," she said, "no matter at all," and she pulled a ledger
towards her, opened it, picked up a pen.  The breach was repaired.  She
was back in charge but in the interim she had said more than she should
have done.  "As soon as I knew she was leaving'.  That had to be Danny,
didn't it?

Chapter Nine

Ten o'clockish the four minibuses cruised round the flower beds and the
toured tourists spilled out.  Goodness, they were excited as they
streamed into the bar and surrounding public spaces.  Chatter, chatter,
chatter.  The things they had seen!  Four immature lions playing in the
bush, tiny dik-diks, big impala, African buffalo (the most dangerous
animal in Africa!) and best of all a troop of elephants with a baby
only six weeks old, and you should have seen the way they all looked
after it, especially when they crossed the river and gave it a push to
help it up the bank on the other side.  And I never realised mummy
elephants had their tits between their front legs, did you know that? I
was jealous I suppose, I'd have liked to have seen it all.  I blamed
Danny.  Breakfast at eight, to give her time to get clear.  If I'd been
up at seven I'd have gone with them.

Next on the agenda was the optional bird-walk, my initiation into the
tour.  It was no more than a short stroll through a copse, along the
riverbank, but the guy who took us knew his stuff.  Grey-headed
kingfisher, pied hornbill, black-capped oriole, a flock of superb
starlings which were just that, blue-collared, red breasted, green in
the wings, and, best of all, a bateleur eagle, cruising beneath a
perfectly unblemished blue sky, not soaring, just moving steadily
forwards without, apparently, moving its wings.  Looking up at it I
suddenly realised how hot it had become, sensed the heat building over
the savannah, the steady winding down of movement, activity, both human
and animal.  The heat also brought up the not so subtle smells of
Africa, the stable smell of dust, straw and dung, cut with something
sharper, menacing, the secretions of predators, lions, cheetahs,
leopards and hyenas.  The walk ended beneath the tree behind the
residential building looking at the roosting eagle owls I'd seen hours
earlier, and two pearl-spotted owls I'd missed, tiny ones, much like
the little owl, Athene noctua, my favourite, my private totem.

Then lunch.  Again I sat on my own.  A Samburu warrior, a youth of
about sixteen, stood at the maitre d's desk, inviting us to come to the
enclosure behind the swimming pool at three o'clock to see a display of
Samburu dancing.  He was probably the most beautiful human being I had
ever seen, Adonis in the flesh.  Big eyes, small but perfect nose,
mouth like an angel's, wearing a red plaid robe round his waist like a
skirt, which gave him an oddly epicene look, exposing a lot of torso
and arms that Were lean, smooth, all proportions perfect.  His reddened
hair reached halfway down his back and was plaited in hundreds of thin
strands.  He had a bead collar, a bead necklace, bracelets and anklets
and he carried a spear with a willow-leaf metal point.  Magnificent.
And what was best about him was that he knew it.

A swim first?  Why not.  The evening game drive was scheduled for four
in the afternoon, it would be getting dark by the time we got back. The
pool was very decent, surrounded by dry grass beneath trees, sun beds
the water, constantly replaced, cool but not cold, a bar and they did
have Diet Coke.  Being for the most part British, no one appeared to
notice the now fading signifiers of the beating I'd had, though this
may have been due to the way the very bright sun drained out some of
the colour.  But it was here that her absence hit me. After all it was
by a pool that she had first picked me up, just forty-eight hours
before.  I felt uncomfortable about it all, irritated, bothered,
resentful that I was being used as a postman without really being told
a thing about what it was all about.  Just her muted confirmation of my
reasoned guesswork, that was all.  But there was more than that.
Clearly there was danger in what Danny, Holly and Vincey were up to,
and I surprised myself by feeling, really feeling, not just saying it
to myself as a matter of course, that I did not like the idea of her
being in danger.

For an evening and a whole day I had been constantly in her company and
now I missed her and feared for her.  I missed her easy, unassertive
good looks, her intelligence, her sensitivity, her humour.  I feared
the sense I had of her as someone driven, driven by concern,
understanding, awareness of the things that are done in Africa that
most of us would prefer not to know too much about, that we keep
ourselves deliberately ignorant of.  I feared it all because this
driven ness was what could bring her into danger.  And, damn it, with
kids running around splashing each other, married couples and unmarried
couples enjoying each other's company, in the warm air and beneath the
immaculate sky, I was lonely.  Presently I dried myself off, finished
my Coke, and got dressed.

Probably, I felt, she would not have enjoyed the dancing, which began
at three.  It took place in a circular compound with wooden benches
roofed with thatch for the punters, a couple of dessiccated trees
shading trestle tables and covered with beads and other
hand-made-for-tourists stuff, a floor of beaten earth.  Eight or so men
and youths, all almost as handsome as the guy at lunch, who was one of
them, seemed happy enough, opening with voiced bass and baritone chords
beneath an ululating extended cry and then moving off into a shuffling
dance broken by extraordinary leaps into the air.  But the five women,
with massive collars of beads round their necks which rose and fell and
gave out a sort of gasping rasping noise as they did so, the beads I
mean, looked distanced, bored, withdrawn, and then the word came,
humiliated.  Once, how long ago?"  these dances and songs had been
parts of massive liturgies, marking the stages in the year and in their
lives, and had gone on for days and nights, especially the ones when
the tribes came togther and the elders sorted out the grazing
strategies for the months ahead, and the shamans forecast rain or
drought.  Now a handful did selected snippets for twenty or so one-eyed
whites.  One-eyed, because the other eye was always hidden by a
view-finder.

Well, I was still feeling sour, a spoilsport.  A couple of us got up
and joined in at the end.  The lad with his family I'd seen on the
street in Nairobi, he had punkish bleached hair and a pierced eyebrow,
especially got into the mood of it, chucking himself about like
nobody's business.  And even the Samburu women cheered up when people
bought bracelets and necklaces from the tables.  I bought a bracelet,
seeds and mock pearls, for Rosa, my daughter, three hundred
shillings.

"You're meant to bargain."

At my elbow a plump lad with a mop of black hair, arse big in
cut-for-comfort cotton shorts, hair above his knees, socks pulled up
and sandals, not a pretty sight.

"No you're not."

"Why not?"

"Because if I knock her down to two pounds I rob her and her family of
a meal."

As I walked away I was aware of him making screwing motions with his
podgy finger in the side of his head.

So, I'm a nutter?  So what.

"Let me take you to your driver, and your companions, for the next few
days."  Judy, that evening.  She singled me out from the little crowd
drifting through the reception area to the mini-buses outside.  I
followed her.  Although she was wearing the international uniform of
her kind, padded shoulders, fitted waist, tight skirt, she walked with
the upright stance, chin in, shoulders back, that dignity and grace of
just about all Kenyan and most African women, that comes from carrying
loads on your head from early childhood.  Or maybe from unconsciously
imitating the walk of your mum and aunts who really did.

"This is Sami.  Sami, this is your new passenger, Mr...," she glanced
at her clip-board, "Shovelin."

A spatter of Swahili followed.  She turned back to me.

"You will be very happy with Sami.  He is one of our best drivers.
Tip-top."

"The best," he said, and shook my hand.

Sami was immense, gross, obese, with arms that filled the short sleeves
of his red shirt so it was like a second skin, and wodges of flesh
above his buttocks, but he had a nice smile, and turned out to be great
as both driver, guide and source of information, though not wholly
reliable at bird identification.  Less promising was the presence of
Alfred the water-colourist and his crocheting wife, sitting in the
middle row of seats, exposed by the open sliding side-door.  There were
three seats in front of them and three behind.

"Joining us, are you?"  the woman asked.

You look pretty well joined up already, I thought, but this time
managed to keep it to myself.

I hesitated.  Front or back.

"So far," she said, "Bianca and Peter have always had the front
seats."

And that is set in stone, I thought, the way these things are.  I took
the back seats, sitting in the one furthest from the door.

"Not painting then, this afternoon," I said, as cheerily as I could.

"The light changes and fades too quickly," Alfred replied, turning to
peer across the back of his seat so he could see me, "at this time of
day."

"Well, that's the tropics for you," I offered, somewhat inanely.

Silence.  The vehicle lurched a little beneath me as Sami got in the
front and pulled his door to.  He began to drum fingers on the steering
wheel.  The mini-bus behind pulled out, slid past, the driver leaning
forward to grin across at Sami, who sighed and turned away.

"Bianca and Peter are always late," Mrs.  said with the sour
satisfaction of someone who rejoices in the failings of others.

"They've been late every time so far.  I am afraid that annoys Sami who
likes to be first away."

"Except the first time," Alfred chipped in.  "When we left the
Serena."

Which is how they got the front seat.  Clever Bianca and Peter.

"Best to get acquainted properly," he went on, "I'm Alfred Cobleigh and
this is my wife Doris."  This time he thrust a brownish, thin-fingered
hand over the back.

"Shovelin," I said.  "Chris.  You can call me Kit."

But no, for the short time I knew them, they both called me
Christopher.

Bianca and Peter arrived.  They turned out to be the aging yuppies,
that is they were I would guess in their late thirties, I had seen by
the pool at the Serena.  She was blonde, attractive, pleasantly chatty.
He was dark, quiet.  Both wore designer baseball caps, designer shades,
tops with short sleeves and collars, whose designer labels were so
small you'd have to be into such things to be able to recognise them,
full-cut shorts, woollen socks turned down over walking-boots which
looked serviceable without being clunky.  She had her straw bag and he
had an Olympus SLR, not the latest slimmed-down version with built-in
zoom, but not an old one either.  Sami was off before they were
properly settled, which meant the intros had to be called out across
the Cobleighs and were managed without the hand-shaking routine.

We followed the other buses over a bridge and into a bleaker landscape,
dryer, stonier, with less vegetation, just scattered thorn-bushes for
the most part, dotted across low but steep and irregular hills.  The
sky was overcast above us now, but on the rises we could see across the
plain for maybe twenty miles to black mountains beneath banks of dark
cloud that hid the sun.

There was not much to see.  A small group of antelope glided away from
us, and then there were three black-masked dog-like creatures who
looked up at us from ten yards with cat-like curiosity.  Sami stopped,
Peter snapped away, his automatic reload whirring on after each
click.

"Jackals," Doris announced, with heavy certainty.

"Bat-eared foxes," Sami grunted.

His radio suddenly gave a low pitched scream, a voice came through,
Sami answered, and suddenly we were off again, much faster, slewing
away off the track, the bus, which had no four-wheel drive and I should
imagine only standard suspension, clanging and jolting.

Doris fastened her fingers on the grab-rail on the back of Peter's
seat.

"I would have thought foxes are shyer than those animals," she
muttered, and then more plaintively, "he's not meant to leave the
approved tracks, you know."

Within two or three minutes we reached the curving spine of a ridge
looking over a long gulley that narrowed as it climbed towards us.
There were four mini-buses parked on the ridge on the other side, their
roofs raised, one eyed punters leaning out.  Sami pointed down the
slope to his right.

"Cheetah," he said.

We were far nearer than any of the others.  Well done, Sami.

She was... She?  Yes.  Bianca asked Sami, and Sami said female... she
was washing.  Spread out in a scree-filled hollow beneath bushes, head
up, front paw sweeping down over her ear and cheek, quick lick and back
it went again.

"Going to rain," said Doris, with knowing satisfaction.  "Cats always
do that when it's going to rain."

On the far side two more mini-buses arrived and a pair of four by fours
from some other lodge, not ours.

"We're lucky to see a cheetah," said Peter.

"Really?"  asked Doris.  "After all, we are on the Cheetah Safari."

I was beginning to feel I could get really irritated by Doris.

"There are so few left, the gene pool has shrunk.  They're inbreeding.
Can't last much longer."  He snapped on, for posterity one presumed.

Cheetah got up, stretched a bit, cat aerobics, and walked slowly up the
hill, found another hollow, slumped into it but this time remained on
the qui vive, head up, slowly taking us all in, tail lashing the air
behind her in slow motion.  She stayed like that for five minutes,
during which I got bored and then my attention was caught by a large
hawk or small eagle that landed, claws spread, in the top of the acacia
about ten yards in front of us.  Bianca noticed my attention had
shifted.

"The bird, is it?"  she asked.

"Yes."

She reached over Doris's head and handed me a pair of slim light-weight
modern 'noes.

"Come up the front."

I did.  Doris's bag was on the floor.  To avoid it I had to step over
the well in front of the side door.

"What is it?"

"Harrier," said Sami.

Well, I didn't think so.  Granted it was basically a very pale grey,
almost white and had black primaries, OK, but also it had bright red on
the back of its beak, and black round its eyes.  Very handsome.  I
fumbled for Birds of East Africa.  At the same time Cheetah made a
decisive move up the slopes behind us, going at a steady loping trot
now.  Sami fired the motor to follow her and the bird took off with a
sharp descending call 'whioooh'.  I sat down quite sharply as we
lurched forward, and then into reverse as Sami did a sort of racing two
point turn.

"Oops, sorry."

Bianca took the middle seat, Peter stayed by the window,

"Stay here," she said.  "Much better view.  So?  The bird?"

I fumbled a bit more and came up with the answer.

"Dark Chanting Goshawk," I said.  And later marked it with a tick, the
place, and the date.

We followed the cheetah back up the ridge and watched it as it trotted
off down the long broken slope on the other side.

The plain stretched out in front of us, near desert, to the west and
heavy black clouds above the Laikipia Escarpment.  Livid sunlight lit
patches here and there, and elsewhere columns of dark grey drifted
between clouds and parched earth, but many miles away.

"I said it would rain," said Doris.

We trundled about the hillsides for another half hour or so but saw
only some distant zebras shadowing a pair of giraffes and a few
antelope of one sort or another.  Amazing how quickly one accepts and
dismisses all but the rarer and more dramatic sights, how quickly one
begins to resent it if they don't turn up.

I had dinner on my own and went to bed early.

Chapter Ten

Bianca cheery, fresh, morning-scrubbed and fragrant, patted the seat
beside her as I climbed in after her.  I looked round.  Doris and
Alfred looked slightly peeved, perhaps because my place in front of
them now seemed established, fixed.  I slammed the side door, sat
beside Bianca, and grinned at Peter as he smiled a welcome across her.
Another bang as Sami slammed the rear hatch on our baggage and then the
lurch as he hoisted his eighteen stone or so into the driver's seat.

"So, Sami, where are you taking us today?"  Bianca chirruped, making
conversation really, since we all knew darn well where we were going.

"First to Nyeri in the Aberdares," he replied, adjusting his rear-view
mirror, "for lunch at the Outspan Hotel.  There your main luggage will
be placed in a safe room.  Leaving at four in the afternoon you will be
bussed up to Tree-Tops.  You will take only one small night bag each."
Sami, I had begun to realise, rarely used two words where one would
do.

He fired the engine, let out the clutch.

For the first hour or so, once we had left the national reserve, we
kept to the main roads Danny had come up two days earlier the same
strung-out villages, the same parched landscape, the same stretches
where the surface was being reconstructed and we dropped behind the
other vehicles to let their dust settle in front of us.  Occasionally
the radio gave its screech, and above the purr of the engine and the
rumble of the wheels, Sami chatted to the other drivers.  I told Bianca
and Peter how I had come out to do a job in Mombasa and found myself
with time on my hands and money to spend, when it was done.  I did not
explain how I had got to Samburu Lodge.  It came out though that I was
a PI and that provoked the usual interest and curiosity.  I don't mind
this.

I've been told, most often by my wife, that I lack most of the social
graces, and certainly I don't chat easily, so it gives me something to
rattle on about.

Mt.  Kenya lay like a giant sleeping tawny lion on our right but then
we headed off south-west and it slowly sank away again.  Presently the
road climbed, the landscape became greener, richer, plantations and
crops re-appeared."  the hills and valleys became sharper, deeper.
Clouds collected in the mountains above us and there was even a spatter
or two of rain.  We skirted a big straggly, unkempt town in a basin in
the hills, climbed above it, swung between gate posts guarded by para
militaries with automatic weapons, and entered another world of
shrubberies well-tended, flower-beds and immaculate lawns.  Views
across terraces opened up to blue and green hills, and beyond them, Mt.
Kenya again, a low hump beyond the horizon, now nearly a hundred miles
away.  A final turn took us to a long building stretched across the
slope it looked like a colonial but modernised mansion.  Which is what,
I suppose, it originally was.

"Welcome to Outspan Hotel," said Sami, standing up and facing us.
"Lunch.  Then buses to Treetops.  Before that there is time to visit
the Baden-Powell museum in the bungalow you see down there or witness a
display of Kikuyu dancing.  Tomorrow you will be brought back here, and
I shall resume being your driver."

"Rest of the day off for you then, Sami," crowed Bianca.  "Have a nice
time!"

He flashed us a white grin, and let himself out.

"I bet he will," Peter grunted.  "He probably has a wife in every
lodge."

But all through this my mouth had dried and my pulse was up.  Supposing
the letter boxes were not in the foyer as Danny had written they should
be?  What would I do then?

The rest of the tour were already gathering on the gravel in front of
the big doors set in the side of the building.  Inside it reminded me
of the neo-gothic pile that housed the small private school I was sent
to in my teens.  The tour was a mixed lot in age and background, but
with one thing in common money.  Not hugely wealthy, not rich, but
solid middle-class citizens, professionals, academics, solicitors, with
wives and often enough children, teenagers.  A couple of families were
looking disconcerted wearing shorts, impressed t-shirts, sandals, they
were faced with the embarrassment of entering the sort of establishment
they would normally have suited up for, or at least worn their best
casual.  With the air of those entering a stately home with awareness
of the heritage they are trespassing on, we all filtered into a
baronial reception area while our drivers humped our cases into a
side-room.  An elaborately laid out dining room, I believe it even had
chandeliers, stretched in front of us, but we were ushered towards an
oak lined room on the corner of the building where drinks were served
in a parody of colonial ceremony: weak buck's fizz, is what I remember,
or straight orange juice for the non-alcoholics, before being shunted
into a less formal dining room with the usual buffet.  I ducked about,
turned and twisted my way back, accosted a black-suited white-gloved
functionary.

"Letterboxes?"  I gasped.  "I have mail to post."

He waved a casual hand across the vestibule.

I had of course been looking for... letter boxes  These were oak
cabinets, labelled in dark carved gothic lettering, "Abroad' and
"Local'.  Stooping I ripped back Velcro from the pocket above my knee,
extracted the envelope and the packet from where they rested against my
lower thigh, and with a last glance at the addresses, slipped them into
the slits near the tops of the boxes.  And that, I thought, is that.
Goodbye Danny, and, for the matter of that, Holly and Vincey too.

Well, I don't want to make this My Holiday Diary, so I'll skip the
Kikuyu dancing, the trip up to Treetops, the night spent watching the
waterhole through gusting cloud whose droplets looked like tiny flakes
of snow, and seeing two hyenas drive a waterbuck into the shallows of
the pool before the cloud closed over them.  The carcass, or some of
it, was still there when the mist rose and the dawn came up.  Back to
the Outspan, and reunited with Sami we set off through the Aberdares
for Lake Nakuru.

The country we went through was amazing rich, fertile, well-watered by
the run off from the Aberdares, with tea and coffee plantations and
rolling grassland that looked like well-kept golf-courses.  No wonder,
when the British first saw it a hundred years ago, they said 'we'll
have that!"  White mischief, replaced now by a newer, less innocent
sort of nastiness.  Many of the plantations carried billboards with the
AFI logo and others, and there was even another AFI plant research
station, a small complex of gleaming glass and chrome that looked as if
it would be more at home on the Bath Road out of London than in the
middle of Africa.  It was set at the foot of a long, wide, ordered
slope of green, but different shades of green, planted in squares and
oblongs, divided by roads and breaks, climbing to a crest maybe as much
as two miles above us.  I wondered: was it to photograph this that
Danny had headed for this area the day before?  It would not have been
easy: the outer perimeter was punctuated with small watch towers and a
small helicopter in the livery of yellow and green cruised above it.

We crossed the equator, twice, again without a stop, but we did stop at
Thompson's Falls where hucksters charged us to hold chameleon lizards
tied to sticks so we could see them change colour against our clothes,
and where Bianca bought postcards with batik pictures of savannah fauna
stuck to the card.  Doris wouldn't let Alfred buy an ebony statuette
with pointy breasts.  The falls themselves were OK too.

And although much of the town of Nakuru looked as haphazardly put
together as the other towns, had that frontier feel that comes with
inadequate resources, we motored briefly through a suburb where the
streets were lined with palms, jacaranda, and oleander, and the
porticoed bungalows gleamed with fresh white paint.  On the edge a pine
wood and wired and guarded gates opened into the Lake Nakuru Reserve,
and through the screen of trees and bush we could see the brilliant
blue of the lake and the shocking pink of the flamingos which, in
colonies hundreds of thousands in size, ringed its edge.  On the other
side of the road grass alternated with managed forest, grass patrolled
by falstaffian rhinos, who marked their territory with clouds of
secretions expelled, pumped even, from their rear ends.  Presently we
left the main track and followed the convoy onto dried and cracked mud
flats to within a couple of hundred yards of the flamingos and the
soupy water, a solution of centuries of bird shit which fed the small
Crustacea the stilted birds fed off... talk about nature's economies.
For once we were let out of the vans -no big cats here or poisonous
snakes.  It all pen and inked a bit, very like the artificial
fertiliser smell you get where intensive mono-culture of, say,
tomatoes, is carried on.  The birds themselves were amazing, especially
in flight.  I seem to remember there were plovers too, but I must
confess it's all a bit vague, the memories smudged by what came next.

After twenty minutes or so we got back in the mini-bus and Sami drove
us back to the lake shore and the main track.  We rounded a gentle bend
that followed the distant edge of the lake, with reeds and bush on the
lake side and acacia forest on the other, and there it was.

"Stop, Sami, please stop," I shouted.

He did so, perhaps thinking I'd been summoned by a sudden call of
nature, or seen an animal or bird he'd missed he had by now gathered I
was into birds.

But it was the ruin of a burnt out car that appeared to have run off
the road-side and into a tree that had grabbed me, a red VW Polo.

It was as if I had been plucked from an almost paradisial world and
dropped into an alternative universe where much was the same, but
everything was tinged by horror and nightmare.

I hauled back the sliding door and ran across.  The front of the car
was crushed up against the young tree it had smashed into, partially
uprooting it.  A bough had cracked and like a broken limb hung askew
across the bonnet.  Its slimmest twigs poked into the space where the
windscreen had been and were singed.  The rear of the car had burnt
furiously, perhaps explosively for a time.  The trunk lid was twisted,
warped, and sprung open, the rear window had fallen in, the paint-work
was blistered and in places burnt down to a raw brownish colour.  The
upholstery was blackened and covered with tesserae of glass.

Sami was pulling at my elbow.

"Please to come back immediately.  It is not allowed, not allowed to
leave the vehicle at any time without I say so, and especially not in a
game park.  If I report you you will be excluded from the rest of the
trip..."

He was really very agitated, and glancing back the way we had come.
Later I worked out that he was scared we might be seen by a following
mini-bus, in which case he would have to report the incident and
possibly be blamed for letting me out.  But they were all in front of
us thanks to Peter and Bianca's usual reluctance to get back in after
we had done watching the flamingos.

But Bianca had joined us, and Sami, confronted now with two bolshie
clients, smacked his shiny black forehead in frustration.

"Is it your girlfriend's car?"  she asked, her voice full of...
anxiety, I suppose.

I walked round to the back.  The registration number, like that of
almost all the vehicles I had seen began with two letters, the first a
K. I'm good at remembering numbers, but it's an acquired skill I manage
in my own way.  I can retrieve them only if I have made a conscious act
of filing them.

"I don't know."  I looked up at Bianca, quite sharply.  "She wasn't
really my girlfriend."

Bianca shrugged, eyebrows pulled together in a sudden frown.  I suppose
I had sounded gruff.  I walked slowly round the back of the wreck and
up the other side, the driver's side.  There was churned up dust,
footprints, quite large boots for the most part, at least three
different people, men probably.  Well there would be.  Police, Park
Rangers, whatever.  There was dust inside the car, and some seeds, a
dry leaf or two, rain-drop marks in the dust on the roof.  I reckoned
it had been there, in the condition it was in, for at least twenty-four
hours.

"Please to get back in.  Both of you.  I am instructed to report any
non-compliance."  Poor Sami.

I began a more careful examination of the interior but without touching
anything, and it was clean, almost as if it had been cleaned out.  Not
even a sweet-paper, apple-core, or pocket tissue.  But there was blood.
Not much, and dried hard, a deep brownish maroon colour, smeared thinly
as if someone had tried to wipe it up.  Again, at least twenty-four
hours old, a patch of it on the edge of the driving seat as though it
had bled from a face or head wound, and dropped between her knees.
Her?  I remembered she had worn trousers when driving.

I straightened, looked at Sami and Bianca, and Peter too had come out
and was standing behind Bianca, face even more serious than usual, a
hand on her shoulder.

"Best do as he says," he muttered.  He meant Sami.  Alfred peered at us
from inside the minibus, Doris beyond him, leaning forward so she could
see too.  They looked as angry as Sami, sensing a serious threat to the
success of their holiday.  In his other hand Peter was still holding
his Olympus SLR.

"Sure," I said.  "But first, do me a small favour.  Take photographs of
the wreck, just three or four, don't fuss about getting it all in, but
include the license plate."

He glanced at me very soberly for a second or so, and I thought he was
going to refuse.  But there must have been something pretty determined
in my face.  He nodded, pushed back the peak of his cap, and very
quickly fired off six or seven frames.

"You'll have to wait until we get home for the results," he said.
"There's stuff I took at Treetops I don't want to lose."

And at last I let Sami almost push us back towards the van, me and
Peter that is.  Bianca was behind him.  I didn't see her stoop and pick
something up.  And the reason why I didn't was that something had
caught my eye too, a gleam of yellow metal about ten yards down the
track, in the dried grass and thorns on the verge.  The sun must just
have flashed off it at that moment and then the leaves shifted above
and it was gone.  I walked over to where I had seen it, poked with my
foot in the secondary growth and it chinked against a stone.  One spent
cartridge case.  I picked it up, put it in my pocket.  Sami was now
looking very angry indeed, so I only gave the area a quick look more,
trying to see signs that a gun had been fired, possibly at the Polo as
it approached.  I couldn't see any.

"Well!"  said Doris, as we got back in.

"Was all that really necessary?"  asked Alfred.

Sami slammed the side-door behind me, and slammed his own door too.
He'd copped a moody all right.

As we pulled out from the verge where he'd stopped, Bianca placed what
she had just picked up on my knee and I took it in my hand.

It was a shoe.  Black, soft-leather, slip-on.  Inside a label -Next.

"Is that hers?  It was under a bush."

I remembered how Danny had taken off shoes like this and put on boots
on Mt.  Kenya, how she kept a pair like this one for driving.

"Could be," I said, and then a wave of awful insecurity and longing
broke over me.  "I think so."

Chapter Eleven

Peter leaned forward.

"Sami," he said, "How do you think it happened?"

"Driving too fast.  Rhino came out of the trees.  Better to hit a tree
than a rhino."  And he shut up.

More quietly, looking down at the shoe in my hand, Bianca asked:
"What's her name?"

I blessed her silently for making that present tense.

"Danny," I said.  "Danielle Newman.  And she isn't my girlfriend.  I've
only known her a couple of days."

"We all thought she was your girlfriend, and that you'd had a major row
and she'd driven off because of it."

Suddenly I had a sense that I had not had before of the group as just
that... after three or four days together they knew each other well
enough to gossip about each other behind each other's backs. Especially
about a late arrival, an interloper.

"No.  Like I said to you earlier, I was at the Serena with time and
money on my hands, thinking of joining the safari, but she offered to
take me instead.  She wanted company."

I explained how Danny was a journalist, how she was planning an article
about the collapse of tourism in places like Kenya, and so on, and her
proposed companion had been unable to make it... It all sounded even
more hollow than it had before.  Bianca gave my hand a squeeze and left
me holding the shoe.

It took another twenty minutes for us to reach the lodge where we were
to have lunch, time for me to get my feelings under some sort of
control and work out something of a plan.  Clearly I must do something
if nothing more than check out whether or not the Polo and the slipper
were or were not Danny's, and if they were try to find out what r?  id
happened to her.

We broke away from the lake and the trees and climbed a long curving
road up a gently undulating grassy slope for a mile or so.  The lodge
was a long low complex of buildings, modern but well designed to sit in
the hillside, with terraces, a ha-ha and low walls to keep the larger
fauna at a distance, with artfully disposed boulders rising hump-backed
from the ground.  Sami said we had an hour for lunch but he himself
stayed in the van, at least until we were out of the car park and out
of sight.

The view from the terraces was magnificent, the lake with its ring of
pink, dark mountains beyond, forested but riven with deep valleys, a
huge sky with shifting clouds capes sending fitful patches of sunlight
cruising across the lake and the land.  But I was not prepared to
bother with it.  I looked around for a uniform, for authority or
officialdom, but saw none, so I picked on a maitre d' type, a short man
in black with a black tie, holding a big menu.

"Table d'hote?  This way, sir."

There was buffet on one side, which the party were heading for, but a
step up the split level there was also an area where the tables were
dressed with linen and silver.

"No thank you.  But I would like to see the manager."

He fed a look of solicitude and concern into his eyes.

"About what matter sir?  If you have a complaint to make I am the
person to whom it may be addressed."

"No complaint.  Just an enquiry."

He pulled his brows together, pursed his lips.

"The manager is very busy, perhaps I -?"

"The manager, please."

"Very well.  Come this way."

He minced off giving the menu a flap as if to fan his face, and I
followed him, back towards the car-park, then through a timber
back-door and into a functional corridor.  Another door, labelled
'manager'.

"Wait here, sir, if you please.  If I could have your name?"

"Shovelin.  Christopher Shovelin."

He knocked, went in, closed the door behind him.  And kept me waiting
for four minutes which seemed like forty.  Then out he came.

"Mr.  Tuku will see you now."  That's what it sounded like, and he
stood aside.

Mr.  Tuku was sitting in a dark, plain room behind a modern desk, with
the usual contemporary office furniture on it -telephones, computer,
fax machine and so on.  There was a large photograph of President Moi
on the wall to my right and one, taken in the air, of flamingos
cruising above the lake to my left.  The light behind him was blinding,
framed by a square window from the car-park.  Tuku was also wearing a
black suit but sharper than his maitre d's when he stood I saw it was
full-cut and double-vented.  A grey shirt and a silver-grey tie.  The
corners of a matching silk handkerchief stuck up out of the pocket. His
hair was cut short and grizzled at the temples, his face long and thin,
and, apart from a certain wariness in his eyes and a sour mouth, quite
handsome.

"Mr.  Shovelin, what can I do for you?"

He gave my hand a perfunctory squeeze across his desk, and sat down
again.  He didn't suggest I should.  He leant back in his
self-adjusting leather-covered throne, fingers together beneath his
chin.  Gold flashed in the smile he stitched on to his face.

"It's a simple enough matter," I began, and at least I had had time to
prepare what I was going to say, "on our way up here we passed a car
that had crashed into a tree by the roadside, a VW Polo, red.  It is
possible that it was being driven by a friend of mine when it crashed,
I know she was driving a car very like it, and I would like to be sure
that it was not hers."

"When you say 'on the way here' do you mean actually within the
reserve?"

You know bloody well I do, I thought.

"Yes."

"On the main road between the gate and here?"

"That's right.  And I would guess it's been there for at least
twenty-four hours, may be more."

"I should have been told."  He frowned, leaned forward over his desk,
examined a pad of buttons by the answer-phone, selected one and dabbed
it.  "Sergeant Nkeli to the Manager's Office immediately..."  and then
he added something in Swahili which included the word "Polo'.

Bugger this, I thought, if I'm going to have to wait... and I sat down
in the only other chair in the room, black leather slung from a chrome
frame.  He raised his eyebrow at that, picked up a matt stainless steel
Parker, and tapped the desk with it.  We waited.  No flies this time,
but a distant clash of plates and so forth, kitchen sounds.  Thirty
seconds and then a knock on the door and in came the sergeant.  Whether
or not his dark green uniform and black beret were official army or
that of a private security force I would not know, but he was the
genuine article.  Six feet tall at least, robustly built, neatly
trimmed moustache beneath a pale scar on his very black cheek-bone
above it, carrying a swagger stick.  Again a quick, sharp exchange I
could not understand, then in English... "Sergeant, Mr.  Shovelin here
has complained that there is a car wreck in the preserve, close to the
road."

"I am not complaining," I butted in, "my concern is that the driver
may-"

Manager Tuku bore me down.

"Why was I not told about this?"

"Sah!  It was a trivial matter.  The occupants were not hurt.  I gave
orders the car should be removed.  I do not know why it has not been
dealt with.  It will be seen to immediately."

Suddenly Tuku's voice was hard, cutting, saw-like.  For the first time
I felt he was speaking from the heart, not putting on an act.

"Sergeant, get it done.  New."

The soldier, whatever, saluted, turned smartly, stamping his feet the
way they do, swagger stick in his armpit, the other arm and hand dead
straight aligned with the seam in his trousers, and was gone.  Tuku
leant back again, tapped the steel pen casing on his teeth and smiled,
then came forward briskly.

"You can find your way back to the dining area, Mr.  Shovelin?"

"I don't think you understand," I said, "I want to know what happened
to the driver."

Tuku shrugged.  "You heard what the Sergeant said.  Unharmed.  I
imagine they went back to Nakuru, hired another car, and went on with
their trip."

For a moment I wanted to continue the fight, say that the crash was not
the sort that you could easily walk out of, that as far as I knew there
had only been the one driver, and so on.  Had there really been two
people in the car?  Or were Tuku and the sergeant attempting to put me
off the track by asserting there were?  But I sensed Tuku had had
enough of me, and would continue to stonewall until he threw me out.  I
also realised that any further pursuit of the matter with him would
reveal I had got out of the mini-bus and examined the Polo, and that
this might well get Sami into trouble.  But mainly I just felt the
uselessness of it all.

I went back to the terrace, stood away from the tables, looked out
across the wonderful huge bowl of the lake.  Nearby a troop of baboons
messed about with each other, jabbered a bit, and moved on.  Lower down
the slopes a couple of giraffes with a young one sauntered across the
grass towards a clump of trees, their movement like that of high-masted
square-rigged sailing boats.  I once saw a very similar sight, doing
the Sunday visit with my kids, at Marwell Zoological Park near
Winchester.  I felt a sort of loss; as if wonder had leaked out of me.
What I was looking at was not wild, un spoilt Africa.  It was a bloody
park.

I fetched the spent cartridge case out of my pocket, turned it over in
my palm.  I'm no sort of expert in this sort of thing, what gun-crime
does occur in Bournemouth is always a

police matter, but I could see it was 9mm parabellum, which meant it
had almost certainly been fired by and ejected from some sort of
automatic or semi-automatic pistol or machine pistol.  It was odd
therefore that I had found only one.  No, it wasn't.  Whoever fired it
had picked the others up afterwards, but missed this one that had
fetched up in the plants on the verge.  Anyway, one thing was for sure.
This was not a gun a ranger would use or even carry as a protection
against the larger fauna.  It could, let's face it, have been fired as
part of a short burst at the approaching car, causing it to leave the
road and crash into a tree.  But there had been no bullet holes in the
car.  Still, both the windscreen and the rear window had been
thoroughly smashed perhaps to remove evidence of shooting.

So who are the users of Brownings, HKMPs, Uzis and the rest?  Anyone
who wants a weapon that can be carried easily, brought into use
instantly and at short-range: police, security, body-guards, and
criminals.

I turned back to the dining area.  Bianca and Peter were nearby with an
empty chair at their table.

"Come and join us," Bianca called out.  "It's help yourself, but very
good.  Especially the curry."

"Sort of fruity," Peter added.  "Anglo-Indian, I'd say."

Once I was settled in front of her with a plate of curried chicken stew
with mango in it, plain rice and a couple of pop-padoms, she looked to
left and right as if checking for eavesdroppers and leant forward over
her nearly empty plate.

"So?  What did you find out?"

"Nothing.  I saw the manager and the head of security.  Could have been
regular army.  They said whoever was in the Polo had walked away and
disappeared."

Peter shook his head and waved his fork from side to side.

"Not possible," he commented.  "Not from a shunt like that.  Well, not
likely anyway."

"So what are you going to do?"  Bianca took it up.

"I don't know, I really don't know."

"You're quite sure it was, what was her name?  Danny's car?"

"The shoe you found was hers.  I'm just about as sure as I can be of
that.  She kept the pair in the car for driving."  I let out a sigh
which was a poor expression of the emptiness I was feeling.  "I've got
to do something."

The curry was good but suddenly I didn't want it any more.  I pushed it
away.

"Of course you have.  Of course you must.  But what?"

"Embassy?"  Peter sugggested.  " "Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador
requires and expects..."  however it goes.  You know what I mean.
"Afford such assistance and protection as may be needed'.  Something
like that.  They might be able to tell you if they've had news of her.
They might be able to make enquiries after her."

"It's an idea..."  But a doubt nagged at the back of my mind.

"No harm in trying."

The doubt coalesced.

"Problem is..."  I couldn't hold back a silly, apologetic laugh, "I'm
not even sure she was English, British.  She had a slight accent, you
know?  Could have been Irish.  Or East Coast American."

Then, at last, a flash of rational thought or memory blessed me and my
fingers flew to the breast pocket of my linen jacket.  What I was
looking for was so small I thought for a moment it had gone, but it was
still there.  The card Ludwig had given me when we parted at luggage
retrieval at Jomo Kenyatta Airport.

"But I do have the telephone number of a mutual acquaintance who lives
in Nairobi."

I pushed back my chair and headed back into the reception area.  Again
I was intercepted by the maitre d'.

"Telephone," I said.  "I need to use a telephone."

"I am most sorry to inform you that in the restaurant area there is no
telephone for the use of guests."

"Where then?"

"Perhaps at residential reception, but that is five minutes walk away."
He waved his hand at another group of buildings further across the
hillside.

"The manager has a telephone."  I made it sound as peremptory as I
could.

And I headed off down the short corridor, knocked on his door and went
in, with maitre d' bleating at my heels.  Mr.  Tuku was surprised and
angry.

"I have a call to make to Nairobi," I said.  "Please let me use your
phone."

Instant refusal was on his lips, any fool could have seen that.  But
what this fool, I mean yours truly, did not take in sufficiently well
was how quickly it changed to almost obsequious acceptance, promoted by
the gold-filled grin.

"Of course, Mr.  Shovelin.  Please use the phone at your convenience.
And in case your call is of a confidential nature, I shall be pleased
to wait next door while you make it.  Get out!"

The last two words were directed at the maitre d' who scuttled out
ahead of him.

"Please to press nine for an outside line.  The code for Nairobi is
02."

On the sixth ring the answer phone cut in.  "I cannot take your call at
this moment.  Please leave a message after the tone or call back
later."  Yes, it sounded like Holly's voice.  The bleep came.  Then the
slightest, tiniest of small coughs.

"Mr.  Holly, are you there?  I think I can hear you.  Chris Shovelin
speaking..."

Then a came a click, but the line remained open.

"Oh fuck," I said.  "Oh SHIT!

I was professionally mortified, apart from anything else.  A Member of
the Association of Private Enquiry Agents caught so easily: I'd have to
keep quiet about it.  They wouldn't drum me out if it got to be known
at the next annual conference,

but by god I'd be the laughing stock... But that mattered nothing in
comparison with what I might have done to Ludwig Holly.

On the way out of the park, just as we were approaching the gate we
passed a yellow towing vehicle, a pick-up with a small crane on the
back.  Behind it was the VW Polo, nose in the air, trundling along on
its rear wheels.  The lid of the boot had sprung up and was banging up
and down like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy.  What do you think
of it so far?  Ruddish.

Chapter Twelve

I made an effort to set my mind to it all as we continued to rumble
along the sides and occasionally the bottom of the Rift Valley.  The
traffic was fairly heavy we were now on the Trans Africa Highway,
Mombasa and Nairobi to where... Kampala, Lagos?  Green volcanic cones
rose out of green pastures, fat kine drifted across it.  Sami told us
an English lord owned most of it.

"Just fancy," said Doris.  "An English lord!"

She looked around with more interest than she had yet shown, as if
trying to seek out someone she could curtsey to.

Mountain ranges floated beneath the sky ten, twenty miles away on both
sides of what was soon a very flat plain.  We passed another saline
lake also ringed with flamingos and presently acacia forest took over
from grasslands.  On the verges women hawked oranges and others stood
hopefully by big plastic bags recycled to hold what looked like green
fodder.  Big lorries with ZA number plates Zambia, Zaire?were parked
beneath eucalyptus on the edge of the town of Navaisha, together with a
double-decker red Route-Master.  Was it serving as a bus or a hotel?  A
railway ran with us like a narrower thread than the road for most of
the way, but we saw no trains or rolling stock.

And I tried to get my head round what was happening, what had happened.
Go back to the beginning.  Holly at Mombasa airport, Holly on the
plane, Holly giving me his card, met by Vincey at Jomo Kenyatta.  And
what did I know about him then?  Nothing, really.  Next, leave out the
mugging and all that, that was surely irrelevant, next was meeting,
being picked up by, yes, surely that was right, she had picked me up
not I her, Danny, Danielle Newman by the Serena Pool.  No, that was not
next.  Rewind.  Next was the morning, the corporate bosses and the
ministers arriving at the Serena and what made them next was the way
Danny had seemed to know all, well, a lot, about them when we saw them
again at the Carnivore.  Agri-business in the shape of AFI, government,
and finance, some of the latter at any rate decidedly dodgy.  Grand
Cayman and a bank with a Spanish name, tied into the Mafia.  Really the
mafia, I wondered, or was that just shorthand for organised crime, like
it could be the cocaine cartels?  The Spanish name suggested cartels.

Then I'm persuaded to go with her as she goes round the tourists spots
checking out how they're making out after Nine-Eleven.  Accompany her
because the guy, the colleague who was to have gone with her dropped
out.  Or, possibly, was taken out in a hit and run.  Could all be true,
or partly true.  Certainly Holly had backed up the
friend-who-had-dropped-out scenario.  But then, since they were all in
cahoots, whatever cahoots are, he would, wouldn't he?  And then off
they go on a private walkabout on the slopes of Mt.  Kenya, leaving me
on my tod.  And I'm interrogated by a ranger working for AFI.  And it
could well be their walkabout took them close to or even into an AFI
research station.  And a local boss of AFI was at the Carnivore.  Yep.
Here was a link, a thread that poked up more than once out of life's
rich tapestry: Associated Foods International.

Now, it may not have come across all that blatantly in what you've read
so far but back in the good old pre-marital bliss days I was a bit of a
leftie.  Trot, even, in the late sixties.  Paris, Grosvenor Square,
flogging the Socialist Worker on the unemployment marches in the early
eighties.  Then, you know how it is, marriage, kids, you need a job, a
three bed-roomed house, one car, two cars.  But I knew that whatever
happened I had to be my own boss.  Of course you never are to begin
with, but this is how it went.  Her dad, Charlie, had been a
Bournemouth bookmaker.  Bought out by William Hill in the late
seventies, he was well-to-do, nearly wealthy.  "Chris," he said, once
we'd made it clear that he'd be a grandfather in a furlong less than
the full mile, "I'll set you up in your own business.  Once, mind you.
I'll only do it once.  What's it to be?"

"Private Eye," I said.

"That tatty magazine?"  he exclaimed.

"No," I said.  "Like a Private Enquiry Agent."

Bookmakers know about private eyes, they have recourse to them. Charlie
always used Tommy Pilger who had the traditional two room office above
a jewellers in Westover Road, just below the Royal Bath Hotel, next to
the first casino, and opposite the Pavilion.  If you stood on a chair
in his office you could see the sea until, that is, they built the
Imax.  He was thin, was Tommy, with the emaciated look of a forty a day
man, and he was having big trouble getting up the steep stairs to those
two rooms.  I was his legs for four years, learnt the trade, then he
topped himself the day they delivered him his own oxygen mask and
cylinder, and it was mine, all mine.

But I was still a leftie, though of course I'd dropped all my old
connections, let my memberships lapse and so on.  What did it mean
then?  It meant I undercharged widows and orphans, soaked the rich,
like the Margeons (remember them, where we came in?) and read enough
magazines and samizdat stuff, and nowadays the websites, to keep up to
date with the big corporations, client states, neo-colonialism and the
rest, and what they get up to.  So, I reckoned I knew where I was, in
the broadest sense, you understand, with AFI.  Certainly, and you'll
forgive me if I reveal whodunit right now, when we're barely halfway
through, I was ready to believe that if there were villains behind what
was going on, then AFI were behind them.

Sorry, back to my resume.

Holly.  I knew a bit more about him now, thanks to what Danny had told
me.  Micro-biologist on a sabbatical from Massachusett's Institute of
Technology but I was pretty sure he wasn't American, certainly not from
birth.  He had neither the accent nor the attitudes, you know, the
sincerity, the concern they all cloak themselves with, until you find
out what their agenda are.  Let's do a bit of guessing, see how he
might tie in with Danny.  Suppose he finds out something he wants to
know more about, or perhaps make public, that AFI are up to in Kenya.
He calls in Danny who belongs to a South African-based news collecting
agency, possibly 'investigative'.  He is, in effect, whistle-blowing.
She doesn't want to travel on her own, and Holly doesn't want to be
seen too much in her company, so she plans to bring along a colleague.
Colleague is removed violently from the scene.  They recruit me to take
his place.  Pause for thought.  That's a bit wild, isn't it?  An odd,
not to say unlikely thing for them to do?

But... think about it.  Did Holly have this in mind when he sat down
next to me at Mombasa airport, while he chatted with me on the plane?
Probably not.  Not necessarily.  The idea came later.  Perhaps at that
time he didn't even know Danny's friend had been hospitalised.  Perhaps
when he got home there was a message from her, from the Serena, saying
she was on the next plane out because she was on her own and he said,
hang on, there's this bloke at the Serena, I met him on the plane, he's
at a loose end, why not see if he can't be recruited as a substitute?
Or... hang on.  What was it he had said when we parted?  I know where
you are so if I need a private eye, and I might, I'll get in touch.
Something like that.

All that I could believe.  Just.

Naivasha, the town of.  The road took a by-pass, but we could see it
spread out in the plain to our left.  Palms, eucalyptus, jacaranda
above shanties, bungalows, even some taller buildings further off.  An
abattoir, which you might expect on the main road outside the town, but
one of those branches of Barclays as well presumably there was a main
office in town.  Some cattle, and oxen pulling carts.  Overloaded
bicycles, men pedalling with those sacks of fodder on their cross-bars.
The usual check-point, wooden dragon's teeth, sour uniformed men with
machine pistols (9mm?  Almost certainly), Sami took us through the two
ninety degree corners the barriers made, his face as dour as those of
the police.

Go back to thinking, speculating, resumating.  The trout cafe on the
flanks of Mt.  Kenya.  The AFI research station.  The three of them go
off for over two hours.  I don't hear distant shooting but they seem to
think I should have done, certainly they return on adrenalin highs. And
by then I've been questioned by the AFI Ranger.

Samburu Lodge.  I'm getting to know her, like her.  What's that sudden
surge of feeling in my diaphragm, that comes as I remember her?  Sense
of loss.  I think like' might not be the right word.  Anyway, we go
through wiring, or radioing the digitalised photos she's taken of the
Mt.  Kenya AFI Research Station and I see one on the screen of her
lap-top.  Low green shrubs on a hill side.  Did they look faintly
familiar?  Have I seen pics of similar crops?  Maybe, but I can't place
it.  Coffee?  Tea?  We'd seen both between Tree-Tops and Naivasha, up
in the Aberdares, the tea densely grown, the tops of the bushes flat
where the leaf-tips had been picked, the rest glossy evergreen
camellias just like we grow in our Bournemouth Winter Gardens.  Not tea
then.  And not as tall as coffee or as straggly.  Unless they were GM
versions, prepared to rock the tea or coffee markets and economies of
the Third World.  How's that for a scenario?

What was next?  Night, and Jumbo tearing the riverside apart.
Presumably not part of the plot.  Then breakfast, her note and the
packets to post.  Undeveloped film and probably the card from her
digital camera.  What was all that about?  Not difficult to guess.
She'd taken pictures which people unknown would not like her to have
taken.  Which they might try to get off her before she'd had them
printed.  And suspecting they'd be after her, she dumped them on me and
asked me to put them in the post, even though she'd sent the digital
ones by radio.  Fail-safe.  It was that important.  And that was it.
Except she had been right.  They'd ambushed the Polo and presumably
either killed her or at best kidnapped her.  They'd have looked for the
film, the card.  Did she have substitutes she could pass off on them?
Or would they... persuade... her to tell them what she had done with
them?

Meanwhile I'd had two days being a safari tourist until, bang, the red
Polo, and her slipper, shoe.  Oh fuck.  When things are bad I'm as
ready as the next man to clutch at any straw that let's you say maybe
they're not that bad.  But the shoe did for that.

We were slowing down.  We were slowing down quite quickly.  We were
approaching what looked like a small village characteristically strung
out along the road, and yet another police check point, with the
overlapping dragon's teeth in front of it.  Except they weren't
overlapping they were strung right across the road so we had to stop. A
policeman, dark blue uniform, peaked cap, carbine in his left hand, was
waving us down.  There were five more like him, backing him up, as if
he needed it.  Personally, show me just one man with a gun and I'll do
what he tells me.  Sami's point of view too.  He swore audibly and
pulled us into the road-side.

The policeman hardly waited for the mini-bus to come to a halt before
yanking back the sliding side door.

"Out," he barked.  "Everybody out!"

Doris was first, bundling her crochet-work into her knitted bag.  She
put out a hand, as she always did for Sami to take, but this guy
ignored it.  Her knee gave as she set her first foot on the ground, but
he still wasn't going to help her -mind you, she probably put on the
lurch sideways to get sympathy or make him feel awful.  Fat chance of
either.  We all followed her out of the mini-bus, one by one, and
huddled up into a little group the way threatened sheep do.  They
snapped at us like so many sheep-dogs, hustled us down a low dusty
bank, across the track pedestrians and cyclists used and into a dark
doorway beneath a corrugated tin roof with a Kenyan flag above it.  We
blinked in the darkness, saw whitewashed walls, a counter with a fan
and a half-empty Coca-Cola bottle on it.  Behind it a photograph of
Moi.  There were some stack able chairs against the back wall, but they
pushed us on into one of two side rooms.  It had a small unglazed but
barred square hole for a window, four chairs for the five of us and
nothing else, no fan.  And there we were penned.

"What's all this about, then?"  growled Peter.  And sat down on one of
the chairs next to Bianca, with his photographic case on his knees.
Alfred and Doris took the other two.  I thought about it for a moment,
then pushed back through the door thinking I'd get one of the chairs
from the front room.  What I got was a nasty push in the chest, but not
before I had caught a glimpse of Sami sitting in one of the chairs I
had been heading for, looking up into the face of one of the policemen.
Already Sami had a red welt across his black round face and in the
second I was looking at him before they moved in on me and pushed me
back, he took another back-handed swipe from the swagger stick his
interrogator, who had his back to me, was wielding.  He wasn't wearing
a peaked policeman's hat.  He was wearing a black baseball cap.

"What the fuck is going on?"  Peter repeated, and then as he got up and
peered through the bars of the window: "Oh, shit.  They can't bloody do
that."

"Do what?"  Bianca cried.

"They've only spilt my hold-all out on the ground.  Jesus!  Hey, they
really cannot do that!"

He, in turn, made for the door.

We heard him shout: "Hey, leave those alone," then the door was kicked
shut behind him.

I heard the blows that thudded into him.

Bianca didn't.  She was now at the window.

"What are they doing?"  Doris cried.

"They're stringing the film out of the cassettes of his exposed films.
Now they're undoing Alfred's portfolio."

"No!"

And Alfred was up, trying to see past her, but she broke away then as
the door slammed open again and Peter came through, crashing on to his
knees, hands over his face, blood streaming between his knuckles.  Two
of the thugs followed him in, one of them grabbed me, twisted my arm
up.  Pain streaked through it as he forced my fist up between my
shoulder blades.  Bent double and howling as I was they had me across
the central room and through the other door and into a sparsely
furnished office on the other side, where they dropped me on to a stool
in front of a scuffed and seedy deal and hardboard desk.  Nursing my
arm, I looked up through streaming tears at the man behind it and
caught my breath, cutting off the noise I was making, almost as if they
had also managed to thump me in the solar plexus.

The man behind the desk was wearing a taupe suit, had short grey hair
above a bony, sculpted sort of a face -Commander Tom Komen.

You know, one thing I've learnt since I started in that office in
Westover Road, is that coincidences do not happen.  If I was going to
end up in front of Komen's desk every time I took a beating, there had
to be a reason.

Chapter Thirteen

Problem was Commander Komen, who was, let's face it, in a similar line
of business, didn't believe in coincidences either.

"Mr.  Shovelin," he began, "I have some questions for you.  You will
answer them truthfully and fully, because the security of the state
demands that you should.  Lies, prevarication, and omissions will be
punished most severely.  Do you understand?"

Nursing my upper left arm in my right hand I managed a nod.

"You do understand?"

"Yes.  Yes, I suppose so."

He looked at me hard as if he might be about to question that
'suppose', then gave his head a slight shake, pursed his lips, made a
church out of his fingers beneath his chin.

"The day after you were mugged you travelled to Samburu Lodge with a
Miss Danielle Newman.  Correct?"

"Yes."

"On the way you stopped at a restaurant on Mt.  Kenya where you met a
Mr.  Ludwig Holly.  Was this your first meeting with Mr.  Holly?"

Well, by then I had my wits about me, more or less, and I spotted the
trap.  He had not asked me if I had ever met Danny before, so why ask
me if I had ever met Holly?  Because he knew the answer.

"No.  I met him in the departure lounge at Mombasa airport, two days
earlier, on my way to Nairobi.  I sat with him on the plane."

"That meeting was prearranged?"

"No.  Indeed not."

"Nor that with Miss Newman?"

"No."

"You were not acquainted with them before you came to Kenya?"

"No."

He leant back, folded his fingers and gave the slightest of nods
directed above my head.  A crack like thunder, flashes of light and
pain.  One of the heavies behind me, I'd even forgotten they were
there, had given me a hell of a belt over my right ear.

I felt sobs welling up and I tried to control them.

"You don't believe me, do you?"  I bur bled

"No, Mr.  Shovelin.  You say you are a private enquiry agent.  You have
some knowledge of interrogation techniques.  Ask yourself, would you
believe your story?"

See what I mean?  A cynical attitude to coincidence.

I stumbled on, trying to give him Holly's account of how he knew I was
at the Serena, that Danny was there but thinking of aborting her trip
because she'd been let down by a colleague... blah, blah.  I was having
serious doubts about it all myself so I could hardly fault Komen's
scepticism.  Which, fortunately, he expressed not by signalling another
thump or two, but by yawning a little and drumming his fingers on the
desk.

He interrupted me.

"With or without your connivance, these people were using you."

A long pause during which I said nothing.  He took my silence for
assent.

"So-o-o..."  he drew out the word with a sort of relish, "in what ways
did they use you, Mr.  Shovelin?"

I didn't take my eyes off his, which was just as well, for I caught the
way they glanced across my head.  I flinched, pulled up shoulders, made
as much like a scared tortoise as a man can, and waited for the blow.

"Well?"

I calculated, rather quickly.  Surely the mail boxes at the Outspan
Hotel would have been emptied by now, the packets well down the line
and presumably jumbled in with all the other mail leaving Kenya.  Take
a chance, I thought.  Why not?  What did I owe Danny or Holly,
anyway?

"Miss Newman left a note and two packets for me at the Samburu Lodge.
In the note she asked me to post the packets in the Outspan mail boxes
when we got there.  I did as she asked."

"What were the addresses on the packets?"

"I don't remember."

The answer was too pat.  Before I could duck, the brute's knuckles came
from behind again and smashed my left ear in a back-hand swipe.  This
time I went with it and it didn't hurt quite so much.  Or at any rate
it wasn't quite so cataclysmic ally shocking.  Indeed I felt a tremor
of anger as well as pain and humiliation.

But I made a scene of it, gasped, spluttered, whimpered... and
collected my thoughts.

"One," I mumbled, "was a proforma packet containing a film cassette. It
was addressed to a film processing laboratory in England.  There are
hundreds of such places.  I did not record the address or try to
remember it.  The second looked like an ordinary letter with, I would
guess, not more than one sheet of paper in it.  It was directed to an
address in Twickenham, a small town on the Thames to the west of
London.  I don't remember the name or the rest of the address."

But, I decided not to add, if you go on beating the shit out of me I
might be persuaded to.

"I know Twickenham.  It is not far from the Police College at Hendon
where I attended a six month course in 1985.  Interrogation techniques
were on the curriculum."  Komen offered the smile of a cop who has
decided to play Good Cop after a spell as Bad Cop.  "What did you do
with Miss Newman's note?"

"It's in my hold-all."

Again he raised his gaze but this time he rattled away in Swahili or
whatever, then glanced back at me.

"George will take you outside.  You find that note and bring it back,
right?"

George, a big lanky character in a cotton suit that left his wrists and
big hands exposed, hoicked me out of the chair, and pushed me through
the door, across the front room, and out on to the wide strip of dried
up ground that separated the main carriage way from the police post.  I
blinked in the bright sunlight.  Our mini-bus was where we had left it,
but with all the doors open.  Sami was back in his seat, his arms
across the wheel, his head resting on them.  All our luggage had been
taken out, forced open where it had been locked, and tipped into the
low creeping thistles that poked through the stones and dust, and then
turned over, picked through, and probably kicked about a bit.  Alfred
and Doris were on their knees trying to shake their stuff out and fold
it back into their cases.  I noticed the remnants of one of his sketch
pads, the sheets torn into twos, drifting about in the hot, gusty
breeze.  Alfred looked up at me, his eyes filled with the purest hate I
think I've ever seen.

Peter and Bianca had already repacked their stuff and she was sitting
on one of the cases, like Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.  If
you have a daughter who was at the right age when the film became
available on video, you'll know what I mean.  Mine watched it at least
fifty times.  Peter who was hunkered beside Bianca and drawing patterns
in the dust be ween his knees with a piece of dried grass, looked up at
me, squinting against the glare.  His face was bruised and there was
blood on his shirt.

"They smashed my camera in there," he said, jerking his head back
towards the hut.  "It's going to look fucking funny on my insurance
claim when I say the police did it."

I pushed the few things I had about a bit, found Danny's letter.  I
desperately wanted to see if it contained anything that might harm her,
assuming the car crash had not left her beyond any further possible
harm, or compromise me, but I

11K

sensed George would not take to me holding things up while I gave it a
read through.

We went back inside.  I handed it across the top of the cheap, scuffed
desk and Komen took it.  He actually pulled out a pair of glasses to
read it.  The frames NHS, circa mid-eighties?  Could be.  He read it,
placed it on the desk top and smoothed it out, head on one side, as if
it were a prized possession.  Then he looked up.

"You can go now," he said.

"Can I have the letter back?"

"No."  He grinned, and there was a hint of sarcastic cruelty in it.
"The value... sentimental?"

That really pissed me off, partly I suppose because there was truth in
it, and I suppose I must have let it show because he was laughing as I
went through the door.

Baseball cap was there, leaning against the counter, talking to the
local sergeant.  He half-turned as I went through and I saw him clearly
for the first time.  Yes, it was him.  NYPD machine-stitched above the
peak which was bent into the short tunnel wearers of these hats affect
these days.  Leather jacket, pocked skin, yellow teeth, but he'd
changed his t-shirt no longer GAP, it now claimed to be Calvin Klein,
the big cK tight across a well built chest, pecs and six pack, but I
bet his breath still stank.

We hoisted ourselves back into the mini-bus.  Alfred and Doris remained
totally silent for the half hour it still took us to get to the Lake
Navaisha Country Club, staring stonily in front of them.  They were in
shock, frightened, and, in Alfred's case, angry.  Bianca and Peter gave
me blank, almost expressionless glances, which, at least in her case at
any rate, seemed to carry a hint of sympathy mixed with the
bewilderment that was clearly their main response to what had happened.
Sami was the worst.  I caught his eyes, bloodshot above bruised and cut
cheek-bones, in the rear-view mirror.  They were sullen, pained. What
did I do?  they seemed to say.  But it was the silence that was the
worst.  Not a word for half i an hour.  Clearly they all blamed me, the
interloper, the Johnny-come-lately, the guy who hadn't made a proper
booking and had been dragged off for personal questioning, for what had
happened.

We took a right turn, sign-posted to Hell's Gate National Park. Perhaps
the name prompted Pete to speak.

"Well, you know," he said at last, and leaned in front of Bianca so he
could speak to me across her, "you hear stories like ours.  But you
never think they're going to happen to you," and he smiled wanly at me.
"Not your fault, I'm sure."

"They said my sketches showed I was a spy," Alfred said.  "Damned
bloody fools."

"Language, Alfred, language," muttered Doris and then she began to
weep, silently.  It was as if Alfred's lapse was the last crumb of a
world that had turned into a crumbled cookie.

Which capped the train of thought my still singing, buzzing, dancing
head had been trying to follow.

In Nairobi I'd been mugged.  By the police.  Unless there were two
identical guys in the story, both with NYPD caps.  Not, if the
guide-books and popular wisdom were right, an entirely noteworthy thing
to happen to one.  And then I'd been rescued by them and taken to be
'interviewed' by Commander Komen.  Who had been more interested in who
I was and what I was doing in Kenya than in tracking down my muggers.
So why had I been mugged?  Simply so he could have the opportunity of
asking me these questions while I was in a fragile state?  Possibly.
But why had he been interested in me in the first place?  Well, I could
think of only one reason.  Because I had been seen talking to Holly,
Ludwig Holly, in the departure lounge at Mombasa, and had sat with him
on the plane.  Which meant they were very interested in Holly, and very
interested in any contact he made, had had him under surveillance, even
then.  And that was as far as I got.  Big deal.  For here was the
Country Club, by the lakeside, with the usual polished reception area,
immaculate lawns beyond, established shrubberies, water sprinklers
going, tropical flowers everywhere, muzak of a particularly soothing
nature, hot towels like you get club class on a plane and drinks five
star civilisation.  Doris burst into noisy tears again, and I wasn't
far off myself.

The rooms were in cabins, chalets, whatever the right term is, set in a
wide semicircle round a marvellously green and manicured lawn with
trees and shrubs.  On one side there was the main building, public
rooms, bar, restaurant, even a billiard room with a full-size table, on
the other, three or four minutes walk away across the lawn, the lake
itself, a big expanse of calm pewter coloured water fringed with rocks,
trees, and the distant hills.  It was quite big, the furthest shore ten
miles away, and, this time, fresh water.

I sat in my chalet for half an hour or so, feeling bruised, hurt,
lonely.  I wished I'd never come.  I wished I'd never met Danny.  I
wished I knew what to do about her.  Then I heard voices, looked out
and saw the family with the youth and younger girl heading towards the
lake, and four or five others as well.  Quickly I checked the itinerary
Judy had given me at the Samburu Lodge and found what I'd half
remembered, that an optional and recommended extra here was an evening
boat-trip on the lake.  What the hell, I thought, pulled on a sweater
since I'd taken off my jacket, and followed them.

Well, the family were OK, gave me sympathetic sort of half grins,
budged up, made a place for me on what I think must be called a thwart,
though I couldn't be sure about that: although I've lived on the south
coast of England for most of my life I never joined the yellow-welly
brigade.  No, I'm wrong.  A thwart of course goes athwart the boat and
this was a seat on the side.  My reception from the rest was not so
cordial.  A lean grey tall sort of a bloke, with a halo of white fluffy
hair round his bald dome and glasses there with his wife, who looked
like an ostrich, and a couple of teenage daughters whose accents
suggested the snobbier north London fee-paying day schools made a joke,
except he wasn't joking.

"Abandon ship while we can," he said.  "Here comes Jonah."

So, in the forty minutes or so since we'd got there the story had got
round the group of our adventure on the way.  How much more?  Did they
know that the crashed car at Lake Nakuru was my 'girlfriend's'?
Whatever, they certainly suspected or feared I was trouble.

Couldn't fault the boat-trip.  The first excitement was a group of
lithe naked men a hundred yards or so away, casting nets, and I mean
naked.  The young girl, from what I have called the family, I suppose
she was about sixteen, picked them out with binoculars, went bright
red, and handed them to her brother.

"They've got nothing on," she said.

The north London girls went into paroxysms of the "Hey let me have a
look," and "Can you really see their dongers?"  variety.

We rounded a headland and there in a pine tree was the nest of a pair
of African fish-eagles, white heads and breasts, red scapulars and
tummies.  There were plovers and pelicans too, moor hens and
kingfishers.  And what of course excited everyone most, apart from the
fishermen's dongers, were the hippos, families of them, a colony, huge
double-barrelled snouts and ears above the water, backs like rounded
mud-banks, puffing and snorting if we got too near.  Well, you know, it
all took my mind off things.

Not for long.  I walked back from the tiny jetty across the lawn,
dodged the swinging sprinkled water, rain bowing in the last shafts of
sunlight against the dark spreading cedars, heading for my chalet,
thinking to change back into my jacket for supper, when I realised
there was a light on inside, a table-lamp, that I was pretty sure I had
not turned on at all before.  The window was curtained with lacy
cotton, and the circle of light was all I could make out until I
crossed the small verandah and pushed the sliding door open.

19?

He was sitting in the armchair.  At his elbow, on the glass-topped
table a tumbler, and a half bottle of The Macallan.  Leo Vincey.

"Hi," he said.

Chapter Fourteen

"Snifter?  I think there's a second glass.  But of course you don't, do
you?  Oesophageal varices.  Nasty.  Very."  And he took a slurp.

I looked down at him.  I was conscious that my blood pressure had gone
up, blood thumping in my ears.

"Would you mind telling me what you're doing here?  And how you got
in?"

"I wouldn't mind at all.  Why don't you pull up the other chair, and
I'll tell you?  Do you mind if I smoke?  I don't often, but it's been a
stressful day, what with one thing and another.  The answer to your
second question is that you didn't lock your door properly.  I imagine
you're pretty stressed too."

I fetched the ashtray off the dressing table, pulled in the other
chair, sat on it.  He clicked open a slim gold case and offered it
across.  I could see the Dunhill crest above the filters, all neatly
laid out in a line like soldiers, facing the right way.  I hesitated
but turned it down.  Even when I did smoke, I kept off Virginian.
Instant sore throat as far as I was concerned.  Slim rectangular gold
lighter, old-fashioned, liquid fuel.  The smell of both lighter and, to
me, harsh tobacco, made me feel sick.

"First," he said, blowing out a thin stream of blueish smoke, "you know
about Danny, don't you?"

A cold fist gripped my innards.

"What about her?"

"After she left you she drove into the Aberdares where she photographed
the third of the research stations AFI has in Kenya.  She then headed
for Nairobi, stopping to phone us, Ludwig and me, on the way.  But by
then she suspected that she had been spotted and was being followed, so
she headed in the opposite direction, heading for Nakuru.  When she got
there she phoned us again.  She hoped to hole up in one of the lodges
near the lake.  By now it was almost night.  She was ambushed, her car
was shot up, crashed, we're not sure what happened to her, but we think
she's dead.  You're not taking this well.  But I thought you knew it
all already.  You saw the car..."

"But not her body.  I hoped.

"I'm sorry."  He leant forward, flicked ash.  "I thought you knew.  If
it helps, we don't know where her body is.  Until we do..."  he
shrugged, "there's hope."

"I really am sorry," he repeated.  He ran his fingers through the
golden curls above his forehead, reached for his glass again.  He was
wearing a linen jacket, just creased enough to make you feel at home
with him, over an open white shirt revealing quite a lot of hairless
but ruddily bronzed chest.  God, but he looked fit... and rich.  A
combination that usually gets up my snout and did this time.  Call it
the politics of envy if you like, but you don't get like that without
grinding the faces of a few at least of the poor.

"Now it's you we have to think of."

"What do you mean?"

"The police have been giving you a hard time, haven't they?  Well,
believe me, it could get worse."

I got up from the chair and stood with my back to the window.

"I do think," I said, "I really do think it's about time you filled me
in, gave me the whole picture."

And then damn it, something in what he'd said, something about my whole
situation, whatever it was, got to me and I realised I didn't like
standing with my back to a window, not one that looked out onto a lawn
and shrubberies that were now dark apart from pools of light from the
globe lamps that were dotted about the place and had been turned on.  I
moved so I was against the wall by the dressing table.  And, damn it
again, he smirked ever so slightly as if he knew exactly what had gone
through my head.

"Of course.  You're very right.  It is about time."

He re-angled himself, leant forward, wrists on his knees, looked up at
me, took a pull on his Dunhill, let smoke out through his nostrils as
well as his mouth, cleared his throat, and began.

"Ludwig is a scientist, special ising in genetic modification of
mycota, not a thing he necessarily approves of, indeed much of his
recent work has been devoted to studying the possible bad effects.  As
of now he is on a sabbatical from MIT, where he normally works, to Jomo
Kenyatta University.  A couple of months ago the department he is
working with, indeed setting up, was approached by a landowner down on
the coast who grows hemp for fibre, canvas, oil and so on and whose
crop, more than a thousand acres worth, had withered and died for no
apparent reason. Ludwig flew down there and found the plants had been
attacked by a mycoherbicide which was both extremely virulant and
appeared to be hemp-specific"

"Mycoherbicide?"

"A fungus that kills plants.  He returned to Nairobi, examined the
genetic structure of the spores and concluded that not only had they
been genetically engineered to be pathogenic to hemp, they were the
same as those already being produced by laboratories in America, to be
used by drug agencies, the DEA and others, to eradicate hemp crops
grown for cannabis.  The hemp-farmer's land borders an AFI research
station.  There was a small plantation of hemp on it which was
healthy..."

"But..."  I could see what was coming, "but this is not what he
expected.  He would expect their plantation to be filled with dead or
dying plants."

He nodded, appreciating I was up to speed.  More or less.

"You'd think so.  But he approached AFI and they told him that what
they were actually doing was creating a strain" of hemp, with low
cannabis content and high in fibre, which would resist the
anti-cannabis fusarium.  The seed will be patented thus ensuring AFI a
good profit on the whole shennanigans, but the genuine hemp growers
will benefit too.  All well and good.  But at this point, and I am
talking about eight weeks ago, a bit more, he, we, were approached by
Danielle's firm.  They had heard, on whatever grapevines they plug in
to, that AFI was conducting secret experiments with genetically
modified or engineered plants and fungi, including fusarium and not
just on hemp.  They are also developing mycota strains that will attack
tea and coffee plantations, while at the same time developing teas and
coffees that will resist them.  By indiscriminate use of the former and
patenting the latter, they plan to get a hold on the whole global tea
and coffee market.  Did you know more money changes hands buying and
selling coffee than any other commodity?  And of course, one of the
global leaders in coffee wholesale and retail is bidding for a slice of
the action.  That's by the way.  Knowing Ludwig's reputation in this
area, Danny's lot were wondering if he could help them.  Ludwig was
interested all right.  Danny flew up here a couple of times and we
arranged that she should come with us on a tour of AFI research
stations in Kenya, and see for herself what we had so far found.  It
was at this point that things took a more sinister turn."

Vincey stubbed out his Dunhill, stood up, moved across to the window
and looked out over the darkened lawns.

"They say the hippos come up at night and crop the grass," he said, and
then turned back to me.  "She had planned to come with a colleague, a
man.  Two nights before they were due to leave he was mugged.  He took
a knife between his ribs which put him in hospital..."

"Danny told me..."

Vincey looked up very sharply, eyes grey like year-old ice.

I left it in the air, what Danny had told me.  That this colleague had
been the victim of a hit and run accident.

"Never mind," I ended up.  "Go on."

He held the look for a moment then leaned across his body to pick up
his glass.  That exposed his wrist.  Yes, he was wearing a heavy gold
chain.  You'd expect that, wouldn't you?  He downed what was left and
refilled with a couple of fingers or so.

"Sure you'd rather not?  OK.  Where were we?  Yes.  Danny's chum in
intensive care.  She rang us and asked to postpone the trip.  I took
the call.  Meanwhile Ludwig was returning from his latest jaunt to the
coast and he ran into you at Mombasa airport.  We told Danny.  You know
the rest."

"I was a lousy minder."

"But a damn good courier, and that's what she really wanted."

I thought about it.  Got up, went to the bathroom, poured myself a
glass of Kilimanjaro water the management had left there, came back,
sat down again facing him.

"There's still a hell of a lot I don't know, a hell of a lot I don't
understand."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Well, for a start, what are you doing here?"  I blundered on.  "Why
have you come here?  Indeed, who are you?"

"That is indeed the nub.  The fact of the matter is we have put you,
largely unwittingly, in very serious danger and we think we have a
responsibility to get you out in one piece.  You are a private
investigator..."

"Enquiry agent."  I like people to get this right, otherwise they take
me for some sort of sleazy gumshoe.  I hardly noticed that he was
ignoring my questions.

"Enquiry agent," he conceded.  "You have been seen in the company of
people, us, who are investigating experimental plantations where
genetically modified mycoherbicides are being tested possibly with
illegal intent, certainly controversially.  They probably think you
know a hell of a lot more about it than you do.  Certainly they believe
you were instrumental in getting the photographs Danny took out of the
country.  Add all this up and you must see that you are in danger.  In
danger, not to put too fine a point on it, of being rubbed out. Wasted.
 Killed.  Clipped.  Like Danny."

I struggled to appear unfazed.

"And you too," I chipped in, "and Holly."

"Not to the same extent.  Ludwig is a well-known figure, much
respected, a possible Nobel laureate.  He is an alumnus and prominent
teacher in the most noted academic establishment in the world.  No
doubt they think they have ways of coping with him, but murder is not
one of them.  As for me, well, I can look after myself.  But you..."

"I am a sleazy gumshoe from a town no one outside Britain has heard of,
and no one would bother much if a hippo or an elephant trod on me."

"Precisely."

He was reaching for the cigarette case again.

"I think perhaps I will try one."

"Be my guest."

The lighter flared beneath my nostrils.  I gagged, stubbed the thing
out, after one throat-rasping drag.

"Sorry," I mumbled.  "OK.  So what are you proposing?"

He straightened his back, leant forward again so his face was close to
mine and I got almost as much of his cancer stick smoke as if I had
after all kept the one he had given me.  He dropped the drawl, became
brisk.

"We have to get you out.  And not by any normal route.  Stick with the
safari and they'll know where you'll be all the way.  They'll be able
to pick you off at will."

His voice dropped.  Almost as if he were afraid of being overheard.

"Tomorrow the safari you are on goes into the Masai Mara National
Reserve.  You'll arrive at the Keekorok Lodge shortly after noon and
you'll be taken on a game drive in the evening.  Between the two there
will be time to book yourself on to the advertised balloon flight which
takes place at dawn the next day.  The balloon, which holds about
twelve passengers, takes off ten minutes or so before sunrise.  The
flight lasts about forty minutes.  The balloon then lands.  You have
breakfast, during which your normal safari vehicles arrive to take you
back to the lodge.  While everything is being loaded up you will hide
in a nearby thicket, possibly, if necessary, announcing a peremptory
call of nature as your reason for going there.  However, if anyone does
ask you why you are not boarding a vehicle you say you have arranged to
be taken back on a different one that hasn't arrived yet.  The balloon
will have taken you at least three miles or so in the right direction.
That's the way the wind always blows at dawn at this time of year."

He peered through the lazy spiral of smoke, searching my eyes out.  I
noticed his were a little bloodshot and the skin around them more lined
than I had thought.  That air of youthfulness was something he was
holding on to.  He was older than I had thought.

"The lodge is just ten kilometres, less than six miles, from the
Tanzanian border.  The balloon will drop you anything between two and
four miles nearer.  When all the vehicles have gone we want you to slip
away and head south until you come to the Mara river.  You follow the
north bank going east until you reach an ancient crossing point where
there are still big boulders that serve as easily negotiated stepping
stones.  Continuing in the same direction you will eventually come to
the road.  The border is now less than a mile further south and there
is a small Tanzanian post.  The Kenyan post is further back at the road
bridge, which is in Kenya.  We have arranged that the Tanzanian officer
in charge will take immediate care of you and see you on your way by
bus to Mwanza on the southern coast of Lake Victoria.  You get a plane
from there to Dares-Salaam, and so back to Blightie."

"A four mile walk.  An hour at least.  I'm bound to be seen.  Isn't it
illegal to wander about without a guide?  And dangerous?"

"Certainly not illegal.  Camping is allowed in the reserve, people,
admittedly for the most part back-packers and the like, do far crazier
things.  There is so much game the predators hardly ever attack humans.
Elephant or water buffalo with young are the most likely to go for you,
but only if they take it into their heads you're a threat."

"Snakes?"

"Most species are very shy and will avoid you before you see them."

I leant back, fidgeted.  I can't say I was at all ready at that point
even to contemplate going walkabout in safari land.

"And you?"

"I'll hang about until tomorrow morning and then I'll be off."

"Why don't you take me over the border?"

"In my little Cessna?  I don't think so.  If I flew across, the
Tanzanians would probably scramble their Migs and knock me out of the
sky."

He flicked a switch on voice control and turned grumpy.

"Look," he went on, "we, Ludwig and I, put all this together as soon as
we heard your message on his answer-phone.  At two o'clock this
afternoon.  We thought it was urgent enough to warrant my flying here.
We've gone to a hell of a lot of trouble organising this, so don't come
coy about it, right?  If you do, you'll end up like poor Danny.  That's
the bottom line."

You're lying, I thought.  But I felt sick with worry, no, fear and
indecision.  Vincey got up and took a stroll round the room, pausing to
peer out at the lawns and the moths that were fluttering over a nearby
white hibiscus.  I'd decided I'd had enough way back when Tomen was
supervising the brute who thumped me.  Like I said, two beatings and
I'm out of it.

"OK," I said at last.  "I'll give it a shot.  But the moment any of the
fauna show signs of hostility, I'm going back."

"Good chap.  Your best interests at heart.  Believe me.  Right."  He
stood up, patted his pockets the way you do when you think money or a
credit card might be needed.  "Let's have a bite together, then there's
a reasonable billiard table here, the real thing.  Do you play?"

"Snooker."

"We'll have a couple of frames.  Best of three?  What do you say?  Take
your mind off poor Danny, eh?"

We were very closely matched, and were one all after two games with
both going to the last black.  In the third I notched up a break of
thirty odd which left me fifty ahead before an error let him back to
the table with three reds left.  He cleared the lot taking the three
blacks after the reds, then the twenty-six points for clearing the
colours in the right order.

"Game, set and match.  Close run thing, eh?"  he said, racking his cue.
"That's... what did we say?  Five hundred shillings you owe me."

Now the reason why I play a fair game of snooker is that my dad was,
for a time, paid secretary of a posh social club, and I spent a lot of
the afternoons of my misspent youth pushing the porcelain around with
him between the lunchtime swill and evening opening.  But I also
learnt, from watching him play with the customers when they couldn't
find anyone else to play with, that you don't argue with the punters.
Not over a fiver anyway.  For you see, I knew, and Vincey damn sure
knew too, that his final break actually netted him fifty points, not
the fifty-one he was apparently claiming.

After that the two north London girls moved in on the table and began
to fool about with the podgy son of a lawyer who lived in Wimbledon,
the one who told me off for not haggling with the Samburu.  He seemed
to think the girls ought to rate him in spite of the long floppy shorts
he wore over very hairy legs.  I shook hands with Vincey, whose hand
was hot and damp now, and went to bed.

I lay on my back and thought about Danny.  I couldn't believe, didn't
want to believe, she'd walked into my life and then been snatched from
it.

Blood, the 9mm cartridge case, her slipper.  I felt alternately
horribly upset and frightened.

It's only the funk I was in that can explain why I agreed to go along
with this barmy plan for getting me out of Kenya.  OK, I know, guys who
walk the mean streets in fairy stories don't get spooked that easily,
but this was no fairy story and I had been beaten up twice, apparently
been close to some shooting on the slopes of Mt.  Kenya, and had seen
the wrecked car.  All in all it did seem a good idea to take the
opportunity to dip out.

Chapter Fifteen

There was no sign of Vincey in the morning.  I assumed he had been up
with the lark and a little later soaring with it, flying back to
Nairobi in his 'little Cessna'.  However, I was not alone at breakfast.
First the Wimbledon lawyer, carrying his own coffee cup from his
family's table came over and, with a "May I?"  parked himself in the
empty chair on the other side of my small table.

"I gather you were questioned by the police yesterday."

"That's right."

"And they roughed you up and the others in your minibus, including the
driver."

"Yes."  I pushed a piece of tomato and cheese omelette the chef at the
buffet had cooked for me round the plate and on to my fork.  Sort of
nonchalant, you know?  An occasional run-in with the local fuzz all par
for the course.

"Well the others, Doris, Alfred especially, and Peter with his
photographic equipment, are looking for some sort of compensation."

"Not from me, I hope?"

"Noo o!"  With a not quite committed shrug, he slurped coffee, pushed
his body sort of sideways on, and put his elbow on the table.  He was
wearing a white shirt with long buttoned sleeves, navy voluminous
shorts like his son's.  He had a round darkish face and very black
thick eyebrows, pepper and salt hair with a wave in it..  He took off
half moon gold framed specs, gave them a polish on the unused napkin,
put them back on.

"But it would help," he added, "any claim they choose to make if they
know just why the police wanted to speak to you."

"I think that's my business, really, don't you?"

"Of course.  Up to a point.  But their insurance companies will want
to-"

"And it's certainly not yours."

"My business?"  He turned back to me, glasses flashing.  "The Cobleighs
know what I do for a living and they have asked me for advice."

"What are you charging them?  Hundred quid an hour?  That would be
about right wouldn't it?"

He gave me a long, slow, burning, God-forgive-you sort of a look,
picked up his cup and trundled back to his brood.

Next in the queue was Peter.  His face was still puffy with the
beginnings of a moderate shiner.  He came over to me on his way back
from the buffet, with a glass of freshly squeezed in his hand, as if it
had just occurred to him that a chat with the jail-bird might be fun.

"Everything all right, Chris?"  was his opening shot as he took the
chair the lawyer had vacated .

"Of course, Pete.  Why should it not be?"

"Everything sorted then?"  And since I didn't answer, he went on: "Like
with the local old Bill."

"Look, I'm sorry about your camera, film and stuff"

"Yes, well, I was pissed off about it for a bit, but the tour rep says
he'll sort out a document for the insurance and meanwhile the others
have agreed to send us prints of the best of their lot when they're
processed, and Jack Mayer is lending me a spare SLR he has, so it's no
big deal.  I must say everyone's been most sympathetic."

Not to me, they haven't, I thought.

"But anyway, that's not really why I dropped by."

I waited.

"I'll not beat about the bush.  The Cobleighs, you know, Alf and
Doris... well, they've actually asked me, and I wouldn't have worn it,
but Bianca said I should, they've..."

It dawned.

"They don't want me in the mini-bus".

"That's about it."  He grinned, now the worst was over.  "In case
there's a repetition.  Can't blame them really.  In fact Doris wanted
the tour operator to ship them back to Nairobi right away.  She was in
shock.  Understandable.  And I can see you you understand, so that's
all right."

And he was off, back to Bianca, before I could ask him which mini-bus I
would be in.

As I walked back through reception the tour rep or whatever, not Judie,
they didn't travel with us but at each lodge there was a new one,
buttonholed me and explained that a second group had caught up with us
the evening before and there was an all male bus I could travel with
for the three days that were left.  An hour later I was in it, rolling
down the Rift Valley on the last outward leg of the tour.

They were as weird a bunch as you could meet.  Four blokes.  All from
Stoke on Trent as far as I could gather.  They consisted of an oldish
man in his sixties, with his nephew and two of his nephew's friends,
all in their late teens.  The older man, Uncle George, had come into
some money, possibly, from the way he talked about it, a lump-sum
payout from life insurance, that sort of thing, and was treating the
rest.  He was pale, overweight, got out of breath far too easily.  I
put him down as a retired youth leader, scout-master, or maybe a Sally
Army colonel or whatever, a working-class do-gooder.  At least two of
the young ones had done time, or anyway had been held on remand for
some months, but they seemed simple, even retarded, rather than
naughty.

They tried to talk to me but their minds seemed to wander after a
sentence or two.  They plied me with peppermints and Werther's
Originals.  They had a bottomless bag or two filled with stuff they'd
bought from England: baked beans they ate cold from the tins, crisps,
Cheddars, Hula-Hoops.  They drank bright green or crimson sodas from
small plastic bottles with screw-caps.  And they sang.  A mixture of
Robbie Williams ("We know his Mam, y'know?  She used to live oop our
street!") like "Rock DJ', and "Let Me Entertain You', and, worst of
all, "Angels', football anthems, and led by Uncle George old camp-fire
chants with nonsense choruses of the "Wally, wally, boom, boom, bonk"
sort, even "We're Sailing

Along on the Crest of a Wave', for Christ's sake.  It was like a
travelling Ralph Reader Gang Show.  George touched them a lot: a hand
on a bare thigh here, a pat on the cheek there, so you began to
wonder... "Lodda niggers in this part of the world, eh, Uncle
George?"

"Where they come from, in nit Uncle George."

"Get stuffed, wanker.  Niggers come from what's that island called?
Jamaicy."

"And Brum."

"Yeah.  Lodda niggers come from Brum.  Pakis too."

Uncle George looked at me with a sad twinkle in his eye and murmured:
"They're like good lads, really.  Wouldn't hurt an 'air on yer 'ed."

Well, I do try not to be a snob, I really do, but honestly, I preferred
their company to that of the lawyers and professors, let alone Doris
and Alf, though I have to admit I missed Bianca.

It was a magnificent drive, especially early on when we crossed the
western wall of the Rift Valley with truly wonderful views, then
dropped slowly through hills to the Masai Mara.  A lot of wheat grown
up on the high ground, being harvested by combines but with lines of
women bent double over the stubble, gleaning what the machines had
left.  Danny would have had something to say about that, I reckoned.
Danny... Oh, shit!  As we dropped to the plain there were signs of
drought too, the acacia forest, more parkland than what you or I would
call forest, with trees dotted about quite sparsely, looked dried up
with almost leafless branches above dusty, yellow grass.  After a time
it petered out in vast featureless spaces that shimmered with mirages.
Occasionally men in red wraparounds clutching spears like the Samburu,
herded white and skewbald cattle across the flats, stirring up white
dust devils in the hot wind.  The animals looked listless, their ribs
deeply corrugated, and they moved as if they'd given up hope of ever
finding more than a scant mouthful every twenty yards or so.  Yet the
most extraordinary sight on the way were two huge dishes on an
east-west axis, one facing north the other south, so they covered the
heavens above them, reducing space to two quarters of an orange.
Satellite tracking?  The Evil Empire watching its frontiers?  Although
they were set a mile back on the west side of the road they dominated
the landscape.

We by-passed the town of Narok, no more trees now, just tussocky grass
and ochre dust, a flock of goats which might explain why the trees had
gone, and a couple of ostriches.  But we were still heading down into
the plains and the land greened up a little, especially close to
water-courses marked by snaking lines of bush and greener grass.  There
were gazelles too, Thompson's and Grant's, and small villages of round
huts made from mud and branches, behind impenetrable thorn hedges, and
many more herds of cattle with their red-clad herders.  Jimmy, our
driver, much like Sami but not quite so substantial, announced that we
could pay about a fiver each to see a Maasai village.  They'll dance
for you, he said, show you inside their huts, you can take photographs,
they don't mind.

He pulled off the road and parked in a wide flat space in front of a
thick wall of chopped down thorn bushes.  We were welcomed by a tall
character in full regalia, wearing a high hat made of tawny fur.  He
clutched a spear as tall as himself, hung with the tails of various
beasts.

"He is allowed to wear the hat because he has single-handed killed a
lion.  The hat is made from its skin."

This drew cries of admiration from most of the lads, who clicked away
with their instamatics.

Uncle George clasped his hand.

"Respect, man!"  he cried.

We were shown inside an impenetrably dark hut made from a cow-dung loam
over wattle.  There were cots made from hurdles to sleep in, and a low
fire: it stank of smoke and dried cow-shit.  The eyes of one of the
lads adapted to the dark quicker than others and he claimed the floor
was crawling with cockroaches.  I got out.  I can't stand the
buggers.

Outside about thirty people, mostly women and children, did a dance for
us, much like the one I had seen at Samburu, and two of the men
demonstrated with dextrous efficiency how they lit fires by spinning a
stick in a socket, and that was about it.  Apart from the opportunity
to buy necklaces and bracelets made from beads and twisted copper and
wire stripped from old car engines.

The lads declared themselves well impressed but Uncle George took a
more cynical view.

"Rip-off," he announced.  "It's treating them like animals in a zoo."

But his charges were already moving on and thinking of the next item on
the agenda.

"I want my dinner," his nephew cried.

"You could have had it there," one of his friends suggested.  "You know
what they do?  They puncture their cows' necks wiv an arrer, bleed'm
off into a jug, smack some mud on the hole in the poor bleeder's neck,
mix the blood with some milk, and then when it's thickened up a bit,
they eat it."

"That is disgusting."

Minutes later we went through another gateway.  Guards checked us in,
in a routine, bored sort of way and we were in the Masai Mara National
Reserve, the high-spot of the trip, at last.  But in spite of the name
Maasai warriors no longer herd their cattle over these plains, as they
had for centuries they belong now to the animals, the birds and the
tourists.  The Maasai, apart from those who work in the lodges, are
excluded.

The lads were not that happy about the game drive out of Keekorok Lodge
that evening.  It started all right when a zebra crossed the track in
front of us to a chorus of "Zebra crossing, geddit?"; they were amused
by a couple of secretary birds strutting their stuff in the long
grasses; they sang "We Are Your Friends to the Bitter End' from the
Jungle Book, when they saw three vultures and a nest in the flat top of
one of those trees, and they duly gasped when we skirted an enormous
herd of wildebeest which was yet just a fraction of the migration that
had just started.  It began to go wrong for them though when a couple
of male lions padded across the track in front of us and one of them
squatted and let loose a huge viscous puddle of black shit.

"Too much blood," Jimmy grunted, "he's drunk too much blood."

It got worse when we came upon a lion ness literally eviscerating the
carcase of a wildebeest whose torn guts revealed a dung-like mixture of
the grass or whatever it had been cropping.  Then she went for an
eyeball, which she seemed particularly to enjoy.  But it didn't get
really bad until Jimmy's radio screamed, whistled and gabbled and with
the one word "Cheetahs!"  on his lips he took the van remember: no four
wheel drive or improved suspension off the track, up over hillocks,
across dried river courses and up a rise to the top of a down.

There were at least ten mini-buses there before us, parked untidily in
a loose semi-circle across the top of the hill which was like an
inverted saucer with a couple of shrubby trees crowning it.  More
vehicles arrived behind us.  There were four cheetahs under the trees,
magnificently nonchalant, holding court, accepting our homage.
Occasionally one would give another a lick, occasionally they yawned.
Cameras clicked and whirred, a susurration of whispered talk hung like
a miasma over the raised roofs of the vans.  From the mini-bus parked
next door I heard Bianca's voice, saw her leaning forward under the
raised roof, blonde hair held back in a pony tail by the back of her
baseball cap.

"Their faces, they're so strange!  Like a clown's make-up with black
tears running down their cheeks."

Then up came her 'noes.  No sign of Alf or Doris, she and Pete now
seemed to be sharing Sami's van with the family with late adolescent
children.  The girl was one-eyed with a camcorder, dad and mum also had
their 'noes up, so they looked like insects with protuberant black
chitinous eyes.

Then it happened.  One of the cheetahs, as it rolled on to its front
and stood, slowly lowered its long low-slung belly close to the ground,
and with neck stretched out, ears flattened, pointed, began to edge
forward.

"She's seen something, she's hunting."  This was the mother of the
family.  "Just like Winny when she's seen a bird on the lawn."

It was not difficult to guess that Winny was the pet cat they had left
at home.  Here her distant cousins slowly, almost languidly, pulled
themselves on to their feet or haunches.  They turned towards the very
young kid, a Thompson's gazelle that had wandered into the arena formed
by the safari vehicles.  Like all Tommies she was chestnut above, white
underneath with a broad black brush-stroke along her lower flank
separating the chestnut from the white, and a black tail.  I doubt she
was more than eighteen inches at her shoulder but with her neck and
elegantly curved black horns adding another foot.  She tripped on ebony
hooves further into the circle we had made, looked around for a moment,
clearly puzzled, a touch lost, and uttered a short high double noted
bleat.

"Mum-mee?"

The cheetahs edged closer, their bellies stretched oh-so-closely to the
ground, their necks thrust forward, their ears flattened, the strength
of their concentration making a force field around them.  This, I
thought, could be Bambi with an H for horror-rated unhappy ending.

And so it turned out.

The cheetahs were a team.  One drew a semicircle behind the kid,
padding noiselessly on the soft leather of its paws,

head angled across the line it made, eyes now focused like lasers; the
second completed the circle in front of her, but more slowly, long
belly slipping over the grass almost like a python, thighs coiled ready
to strike or launch her into a fifty mile an hour dash.  The third
inched forward towards the centre of the trap their movements had made.
The fourth kept her distance, patrolling the outer perimeter: either to
cut off a final break for safety should the kid get past the others,
or, more probably, keeping a look out for other predators, hyenas or
lions, that might dare to take their prey off them.  The whispering
died away.  Engines were turned off.  Even most of the cameras fell
silent.  Then suddenly gazelle was off, like an arrow from a bow,
obliquely away from the cheetah in front of her.

Almost she broke the circle but the one behind leapt forward to cut her
off, one swung paw smacked her on the rump and sent her tumbling
awkwardly across the slope.  Twisting and turning she got her rear
hooves under her, was up and off again, but straight into the leader
who slapped her across the neck and sent her rolling again.  This time
as she came up she bleated again, higher, more frantic: "MAMA!".

They made her the centre of a three pointed star with each of them at
the extremities, five yards off, and there they waited, rib cages
inflating, deflating, long tails, each bobbed with a white powder puff
behind the last black ring, swaying briskly behind them.

It went on for five, nearly ten minutes.  Each time she ran they biffed
her and she lay on the ground till they nosed or prodded her up again
and coaxed her into another rush.  The lads around me were shocked,
angry.

"Christ, they're fucking playing with her!"

"Bastard sadists!"

"Hey, Jimmy, start your motor up and get at them, stop it, fucking
cruel it is!"

She made a dash for it, almost got through and this time the blow she
took across the joint in her right back leg broke it.  She twisted
away, trailing the useless limb, dragging herself forward on her front
legs and, up against a four by four luxury Land Rover from another
tour, not ours, seemed to fall forward.  This was it, I thought, but
no, she'd seen the space, it was just big enough, neck stretched, horns
lying along it, nose questing into the darkness beneath, she dragged
herself under.

"Jesus, she's got away with it!"

"Not with a broken leg she hasn't."

"Well, drive'm off, get her to a vet or sumfin."

From the mini-bus next door I heard the lad comment to his mother: "If
that was Winny you'd have got out by now and given her a good slap."

The cheetahs circled the Rover, heads down, tails thrashing,
momentarily frustrated, then one of them, hugging the floor, squeezed
most of her long lithe body into the darkness under, got a set of claws
into the buttock of the trailing leg and awkwardly, bum and tail in the
air, backed out.  A quick scuffle between the four of them with
snarling wicked teeth exposed, before the three waiting let her wrench
off the leg and carry it five yards off.  Then they fell to butchering
the rest.

Uncle George's nephew was quietly sick over the side of our mini-bus.
On the other side the professor, or whatever, the guy who had called me
a Jonah the day before, was launching into an aesthetic appreciation of
the event.

"That was worth the whole trip," he was saying to his mute family, the
North London Collegiate.  "What immortal hand or eye could frame thy
fearful symmetry?  What art could twist the sinews of thy heart?  But
did you see the teamwork, how they worked together?  Wonderful!
Wonderful!  What I'm sure you all noticed, what made the deepest
impression on me..."

But we never learnt what it was, for his high braying voice was drowned
in the surging rumble and rasp of motors starting up, while the black
exhaust fumes drifted across the four cats as they munched their way
through their supper.

Chapter Sixteen

I should have bought my ticket for the balloon ride before the game
drive and, as we motored back to the lodge, I was more glad than sorry
that I hadn't.  What I had seen of the Masai Mara had done nothing to
encourage me to think I could go walkabout without ending up as lunch
for some monstrous cat.  The place was seething with animals, preyed on
and predators, nature red in tooth and claw, every cliche you can think
of, including the Rector of Stiffkey.  But when we got back into
reception he was still there: Mr.  Balloon Man taking bookings behind
his desk.

"Mr.  Shovelin?"  he asked, as I approached, and that he knew my name
should have told me something.  "I've got just the two places left, and
I guess you'll want one of them."

He was American, possibly Canadian, had a nose like a hawk's beak,
sandy hair, skin freckled and red with exposure to the sun, and
possibly the bottle, wore a cowboy hat, checked shirt, jeans and
calf-high boots.

"I want you on the site by six, we leave you behind if you're not
there, turn left as you leave the lodge, climb the hill past the trees,
you can get a coffee down here at a quarter before.  Make sure you go
wee-wee, and don't have the runs.  Once you're on board you stay on
board unless you got wings.  One hundred and seventy of your pounds,
Visa's fine."

Shit, I thought.  Somehow I'm just going to have to get this trip
allowable as expenses and get some of it back.  And how do I get up at
that hour without an alarm-clock this time there was no telephone in
the room.  But the concierge or whatever said he routinely sent a boy
around for the ballooners at five o'clock, he'd put me on the list.

It went off OK.  Five o'clock in the morning in the Masai Mara was as
black and even as chilly as it is anywhere.  I got up, wondered what I
should take.  I could hardly take my hold-all on a forty minute balloon
ride.  In the end I found a an ASDA shopping bag I'd used for my
swimming things, emptied them out, and put in instead a small Keekorok
Lodge towel, my shaving things, the Lodge freebie toiletries, spare
reading specs, the guide book, the bird book, my second complete change
of clothing, and Danny's slipper.  Don't ask me why the last -I
couldn't begin to explain.  All in all it just about emptied my freebie
hold-all, which I wasn't sorry to leave behind.  Stupidly I did not
include water or anything to eat.  Too heavy I told myself but probably
because in my heart of hearts I was pretty sure that I was not going to
go through with it.

Nevertheless, one side of me was pretty determined.  The one feather
that tipped the scales was the feeling that I did not think I could
stand the company of the wankers I was sharing the trip with for yet
another twenty-four hours.  On the one side, the Stoke on Trent side as
it were, there was affect but almost total ignorance; on the other, the
very well-heeled side, knowledge but no affect.  Oh yes, they knew a
lot about the corrupt government, the appalling poverty, the onslaught
of AIDS, the internationals' organised brigandage, and, rather
seriously nodding their heads, they would argue, and indeed I had heard
them do so, that perhaps the best way they could help the Kenyans was
by going on holidays like this one.  But did they care?  Fuck, no.  I
pulled my hat on, at least I was not so stupid as to think of going
walkies in the sun without it, and pulled my door to.  Shit.  I've
locked the key inside.  OK.  That's it.  I'm really going for it.

Blearily we had coffee and went wee-wee, three couples I didn't know,
the English family and me, and followed each other, as if someone
amongst us knew where we were going, up the hill as instructed.  We
were soon guided by the roar of a gas-fired flame thrower, the
incandescent orange of the flames, headlights from a lorry and a couple
of four by fours, and the sight of the slowly filling red and yellow
striped envelope they call a balloon.  At first it was like a giant
condom in festive colours, flopping about, then, as tumescence swelled,
it rose and rocked and finally took on the shape of a mango standing
proud above the basket.  Somewhat to my consternation this was exactly
what the label said: a big wicker cube divided into compartments, the
walls about three and a half feet high.  No doors.

"Why no doors?"  asked the English lady, hoicking herself in with
minimal aid from the Captain.

"At five hundred feet you'll know," he said.  "Doors can open.  You'll
be glad there are no doors."

He directed us to different compartments, like eggs in an egg-box,
carefully putting the heaviest of us on the corners, and introduced us
to his wife.

"Spare place this morning so the little lady has come along too."

Not that little, and wearing a folksy scarf over dark hair with wisps
of silver in it, an embroidered waistcoat over a black shirt and a
folksy skirt.  Large hoop earrings.  You only had to look at her to
guess she could be bad news.

A smaller flame thrower in the middle of the basket took over from the
big one; ropes were cast off, sand bags dropped; and to a variety of
screams of delight, panic, and cheers we got lift off.  Almost
immediately, as we cleared the crowns of the nearby trees, we all fell
silent.  There was no noise except for a quiet sighing in the rigging
as the great plain slowly spread its vastness beneath us.  Its rolling
downs flattened, the big hills in the distance stood out bold and
black, behind them the sky shifted from a deep aquamarine to a blush to
a moment of gold and then here he came, the Sun-God himself, a sliver,
a half disc, a blinding light and day flooded across everything, not
like a tide but more a sudden spill, giving form and substance to what
had been indistinct, throwing purple shadows that seemed to shorten
even as we watched.  The few wraiths of mist that had snaked through
gullies evaporated, and a heap of cumuli nimbus above the distant
escarpment that formed the horizon opposite the sun went from stony
grey to eye-piercing white in moments.  And it all began to seethe,
like a turned over ant-hill, with wildebeest, antelope, giraffes,
elephants and quite close beneath us a pair of loping hyena.

"Oh boy Mrs.  Antelope had better keep an eye on her kiddies if she
doesn't want them to end up as breakfast to that pair of meanies..."
Yes, it was Mrs.  Balloon Man.  Well, Mr.  had her measure, but the
cure was almost as bad as the disease, for he cut her off by giving the
flame thrower a blast.  This not only lifted us up and away but made a
noise like the steam engines of my childhood when they let off steam.
Still, though it didn't stop the inane chatter of Mrs, it did render
her inaudible.  In short between them they did not do a lot for the
magical near silence that had been wrapped round our first moments in
the air.  And so it went on.

"So many beasties, you'd think Noah's Ark was just round the corner..."
Whooooosh!

"How do all the gnus know where to go?  Because Old Mr.  Wildebeest has
done it lots of times already and they do what he says..." Whooooosh!

I heard the English Dad mutter: "If she doesn't shut up, I'll want my
money back."  Fair enough.  Presumably he'd paid out for four... nearly
seven hundred quid!

Landing was one aspect of the whole experience that Mr.  Balloon Man
had not gone into.  When it happened you realised why not.  Nobody
would buy a ticket if they knew.  He had us dropping towards a slight
incline facing us.  The bottom of the basket bumped, then acted as a
break as the balloon, pulled by the slight breeze, rushed on up the
slope, so of course the basket tipped on to its side and we were
dragged for many bone-shaking yards while the actual ground came nearer
and nearer our heads until finally the basket was grounded on its beam
ends and we were all stacked as if in pigeonholes above it.  Getting
out was not easy indeed, if you were in the mood for it, it was a
laugh.

For a terrible moment I thought my hat was under the basket, but no,
Mr.  Balloon Man found it, dusted it off and smacked it down on my
head.  And over the crest of the hill came the four by fours with
trailers for the balloon, a trestle table, and breakfast: coffee from
flasks, croissants and rolls, fruit, and... champagne.

And there was a thicket nearby, filling a shallow gully, which Mr.
Balloon Man announced would do if we couldn't wait until our buses
arrived to take us back.  Did he give me a look as he said this?  Did
he even half bat one eyelid as he said it?  I don't know.

Three mini-buses turned up.  The English family's was the last.  By
then I was deep in the bushes, with my trousers authentically round my
ankles as a sort of alibi should they come looking for me, and
definitely letting I dare not wait upon I would.  Like the poor cat i'
the adage.  You're being a bloody fool.  Just stick with these people
and nothing will happen to you.  No?  What about being mugged in
Nairobi?  Hauled out of the safari vehicle and given a good thumping by
Commander Komen's henchman?  And maybe others will get hurt, as they
were before, when they come for you.  Remember Sami getting a crack
across his face with a riot stick.  Pete smashed in the stomach.  Poor
Alf chasing his torn up sketches through the dust.  Remember the
gazelle kid crying for its mum as the cheetahs circled.  Take the
chance.  Get away, get out of it while you can.  You're nothing but
trouble.

"That man Mr.  Shovelin, where is he?"  the girl asked.

"I'm pretty sure he went in the first bus," said her dad.

The sliding door clanged shut and they were gone.  I pulled up my
trousers.

I set off, walking towards the sun, over the rise through savannah
grasses with occasional bushes.  Crickets rose around me, looking like
the biplanes that bother King Kong in the old movie.  There were big
conical ant-hills dotted about, and, at that time of day lots of birds:
a violet-chested roller with its swallow tail, some green sun birds and
a small group of guinea fowl scuttling away from me.  A pair of large
buzzards or small eagles without my 'noes I couldn't decide which
soared at a great height against the blue of the sky.  The air was
still and hot.  Near to you could hear and then forget you were hearing
the rustle, chirp and buzz of insects, and from far away, very far
away, the sound of a vehicle and the hum of a generator.  I crossed the
visual ridge.  Ahead the ground undulated towards higher hills a few
miles off, behind and much further away, hardly more than a line on the
horizon, a much bigger escarpment marked out in violet and blue the
limit of the rolling plain.  The heavy clouds we had seen from the
balloon were gathering above the nearer hills.  About five miles off a
huge herd of wildebeest was scattered like a Tvinding trail of grains
of black dust across a long wide slope, there must have been a thousand
of them at least, and no doubt the lions and cheetahs were scouting for
the calves and weaker ones on the peripheries, but I couldn't see them
at that distance.  A bit nearer, in a winding shallow valley, I could
just make out three giraffe heads, poking about in the green foliage
that marked a water-course.  I felt not only alone, but alien, an
interloper.  And worse than that when I tripped on the oyster grey,
friable skull of a wildebeest.

I also felt insecure and when I came on a track made by the repeated
passing of safari vehicles I decided to follow it.  Perhaps I still
hoped one would come along and pick me up.  Left or right?  South,
anyway.

South.  Where was south?  I glanced at my watch.  Seven minutes to
eight.  I stood up straight, turned slowly round on my heels.  My
shadow was not long, even as early as this, but clearly fell to one
side and not the other.  At midday the sun shines from the south. Every
boy-scout knows that and at that dreadful prep school I had been a
scout.  When it's not midday you point the twelve on your watch at the
sun and bisect the angle between it and the hour hand, and that's
south.  The track ran more or less on a north-south line.  I did the
coarse geometry and set off, more confidently than before.

Fine dust rose in puffs around my feet and an occasional stone
skittered away.  The track I was on bifurcated, and I quickly saw that
both prongs joined another, which made the base of the triangle on
whose apex I was standing.  About three hundred yards away there was a
simple telegraph pole with maybe two wires on it, and then I became
aware of a moving cloud of dust half a mile away.  I stood and watched
as a lorry came out of it and sped by with a rattling roar.  Clearly
the track I was about to join ran parallel to a road.  The great clouds
over the hills were nearer now and shedding sweeping curtains of rain,
but the sun still shone where I was.  Once again I checked south.

Chapter Seventeen

I walked.  Four miles to the frontier, Vincey had said, and then a bus.
Four miles, two hours, tops.  All right.  I had no food or water so
what: after all this was not the Gobi desert or even the Kalahari.  But
it was hot, flies became a nuisance.  Was I in tsetse fly country?
Malarial mosquitos?  Remember, as a guy who had had liver disease I was
not taking Lariam.  The prophylactic I had been on dealt with the
coastal variety but not those inland and upland.  And what about the
botfly which lodges itself in the wildebeest's ')rain and drives it
mad?  Talking of wildebeest, a couple of thousand snuck up on me from
behind and surged by, a quarter of a mile away I admit, but in such
numbers they felt a lot nearer than that, a huge irregular column
mooing or bellowing in their creepy melancholic fashion, heads twice
the size they should be for their bodies, lumbering hooves they seemed
ready to trip over stirring up a low cloud of dust.  Suddenly the rear
guard took off in an attempt at a stampede which concertinaed against
the main body and the bellowing rose in volume.

Why?  A couple of spotted tawny brutes with wedge-shaped heads and
shoulders too large and too high, were scouting round the peripheries
in a fast loping stride.  Hyenas.  Maybe the pair we had seen from the
balloon.  Ugh!  OK, that's specism.  Speciesism.  Are hyenas really any
more horrible than lions or cheetahs?  Yes.  They have ugly faces, a
dirty laugh, and they scavenge.  But when they kill they often,
apparently, give up on eating the prey once it is dead, preferring the
living flesh.  And at a very impressionable age, at the Odeon,
Bournemouth, I saw The Snows of Kilimanjaro with that hyena snuffling
round the tent in which Gregory Peck's leg is going gangrenous.  It had
such an effect I can hardly remember Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner in
it at all.  Whatever.  This pair cut out a valetudinarian gnu, or at
any rate one that was, for whatever reason, slower on its pins than the
others, and after yapping around its heels for a moment or so, went for
its haunches and brought it down.  The herd, having paid its dues,
settled down and continued to file past the munching crunching
predators, and ten minutes later were winding across the slope, round a
bend, and, apart from their dust, out of sight.  No gnus are good
gnus.

Now things began to go wrong.  I'll rephrase that.  Now I began to
realise, but only slowly, how things had gone wrong from the start.
First of all those clouds came over me like a blanket pulled over my
head and the first warm heavy drops on a gust of hot wind splashed
about me.  I sighted the sun just before it disappeared, found it
disconcertingly less on my right than I had expected, took a bearing
from it on a distant conical hill with an acacia on the top, and put my
head down, and the collar of my cotton jacket up and headed for it even
though it meant leaving my track.  The dusty ground was pockmarked,
then reduced to a splashy sticky skin.  Tiny rivulets formed and
tumbled past stones and hummocks of grass.  Puddles formed and, of
course, in moments I was soaked.  The brim of my hat flopped over my
eyes and ears.  Lightning forked and thunder rumbled after, but,
thankfully, several seconds away.  I kept that hillock in front of me
and plodded on.  That slightly acrid but not unpleasant smell that
comes with such storms filled the air.  I used to think it comes from
dust suddenly laid by the rain, but no actually it comes from the
nitrogen fixed as nitrates in the water by lightning, and without it no
plants would grow.  Anywhere.  Not many people know that.

You see, after less than an hour, I was already almost exhausted, very
wet, miserable, lonely, my plastic bag felt heavier than it should, and
my mind was wandering randomly.

I laboured up the slope, which close up was a lot steeper than it had
looked from a distance, to the tree on top, and looked down and across
the vast, broken, hilly, rainswept plain in front of me.  And then
caught the eye of one of the three young male lions that were
sheltering amongst an outcrop of rocks just below the summit.

Oh Christ, I thought, I do hope you've had your breakfast.

"Don't turn away," a voice murmured in my ear.  "Above all don't run.
Keep your eyes on his eyes.  Out-stare him if you can.  No, don't look
at me."

Oh shit, I thought, this is the hallucination lost exhausted travellers
crossing deserts or Antarctica get when they're reaching the end.  Some
say it's Jesus come to give a helping hand across that bourn from which
no traveller returns.  Odd, though, that His breath should smell of
fried onions.  Meanwhile young lion waved his tawny tube of a tail with
its black paint-brush end above his back like a panache and growled.  I
thought.  Then he put his bearded chin on his paws, so his eyes now
appeared to look up at me, and blinked.

"He's purring," said the voice.  "He's saying that for the time being
we're the boss."

"Could have fooled me," I replied.

"No, really."

The rain eased.  A pool of sunlight drifted across the plain towards
us.  I looked up.  Again the sun was a touch less to my right than I
expected.  Lion 2, behind Lion 1, heaved himself up on to his feet and
gave himself a shake.  Tiny drops of water made a momentary rainbow
nimbus round his out-flung mane.  Then he yawned.  Lion 3 did likewise,
then Lions 2 and 3 turned and lolloped off down the slope.  After a
pause Lion 1 did likewise but paused after five yards or so, and gave
me, us, the last lingering look over his shoulder an overindulged diner
might give the pudding trolley before calling for his bill.

Us.

"Hi.  Europeans find it virtually impossible to get their tongues round
my real name but at Guy's they call me Golly."

Golly.  Golliwog.  Guy's?  Must be Guy's Hospital.  Medical students
are such wags.  I turned round and faced him.

I don't know what I expected: not, I presumed, a white-coated intern
with a stethoscope round his neck.  What I got was a naked mo ran or
Maasai warrior.  Naked?  You can't call a guy whose long hair is finely
braided in hundreds of strands and covered in grease coloured with red
ochre, who has tattoos and paint on his body and face, is wearing
earrings, collars and bracelets of twisted metal and beads, naked.  But
he wasn't actually wearing anything.  His skin was the colour of pale
teak and his face and body were those of a youthful Greek god except
that he was circumcised.  He was carrying a spear in one hand and a
small bundle of red cloth in the other.

"And you are...?"

"Christopher," I said, "but I prefer to be called Kit."

"As indeed did the poet and playwright Marlowe."  His accent was
demotic not posh but careful.  "You were heading north, I think.  So am
I. Well, north by north-west.  Shall we?"

And he gestured with his spear down the slope, the way the lions had
gone.

North!?!

Still, I fell in with him.  We could argue the toss about north and
south later.

"Or perhaps you should return to the Lodge.  You really should not have
gone so far out into the wild without a guide."

"But now I have you," I replied.

"Yes, but," and he glanced critically at me and at my feet, "I'm
heading for my village outside the national park.  It's thirty miles
away and I expect to be there by nightfall."

Already he had adopted a long loping stride, which even on the wet
ground was noiseless.  No wonder I hadn't heard his bare feet coming up
behind me through the storm.  Although it was a sort of walking, I
could hardly match the speed with which he covered the ground without
running,

or at least jogging.  With wet clothes and that damned bag.  I gave the
sun another glance.  Still too far to the left, or was that my
imagination?

"Your village must be well into the Serengeti," I panted.  "In
Tanzania.  If I can keep up with you, or you slow down enough, we
should be at the border quite soon and that's as far as I mean to
walk."

He stopped and faced me, head on one side.  He was no taller than me.
His lean, smooth, youthful body belied the strength he obviously had.
He frowned.

"You know," he said, "you're not going in quite the right direction if
you want to get to the border."

"I'm not?"

He pointed ahead with his spear.

"That's north."  He and his spear swung round through one hundred and
eighty degrees.  "And that is south.  Tanzania is south of Kenya."

"I know where Tanzania is," I riposted, somewhat testily, and batted
away the flies that were homing in now we had stopped moving.  "And the
sun "

"The equator.  We are in the southern hemisphere."

I gave that some thought.

"Fuck!"  I said.

He let out a crow of laughter, saw my irritation, suppressed his mirth,
contrived to look concerned.

"Trust a Western European not to take note of the consequences of
crossing the equator."

And off he went in that confounded speed walk.

"Please," I called out at his twinkling receding buttocks, "could you
go a shade slower?"

He waited for me, then forced himself to go at a more reasonable speed,
first handing me the red cloth he was carrying and taking my bag from
me.  There was a label on one corner of the cloth, which was
light-weight woven wool and had a simple sort of tartan pattern.  It
read Spinners and Weavers Coop, Kenya.

"Actually," I said, "I've crossed the line so many times in the last
fortnight I'd forgotten which side I'm on."

Not strictly true, but mildly face-saving.  I looked up at the sun
again, thought about it: no wonder it kept moving to my left when I was
going north.  The bastard was going from east to west as usual, of
course, but anti-clockwise.  I remembered the matches slowly turning in
the bucket between Nairobi and Mt.  Kenya.  I remembered Danny.

Presently we saw three mini-buses in convoy rolling along in what I now
knew was a southerly direction beneath the line of well-spaced
telephone poles.  They were still, I would guess, even at their nearest
to us, a good eight hundred yards off, with rolling hummocky savannah
spotted with bushes and ant-hills between us and them.  The sun was out
again and it was hot.  I could see my clothes steaming if I stood
still.  Golly stopped, handed me my bag, and held out his hand.  I
passed over the red cloth.  With neat practised movements he wrapped it
round his waist, leaving a length which came up over one shoulder.
There was a lot of it, eight feet by six.

"Your government started this nonsense," he said, as he went through
the process.  "Stupid fetish ising of nudity.  And our own government,
once we had one, took it even further.  Afraid we'd frighten the
tourists if they saw us as nature intended.  Or seem un civilised  Of
course we refused to buy clothes but they got round that by handing
these out for free, and fining us or sending us to prison if we forget
to put them on."

And we all, safari tourists that is, thought the fetching red cloaks or
wrap-rounds the Maasai and Samburu wear were part of their tribal
gear.

A final tuck, and then he looked at the still damp, steaming earth in
front of us.

"Here.  Have a look at this."

A squirming but neat runnel across the track.

"Puff adder.  Bitis arietans.  Must be close by since he was here after
the rain."

Suddenly the road seemed a good place to be.  The road and a vehicle on
wheels.  First lions, then snakes.  But that's not how it turned out.

Meanwhile... "Always something new out of Africa," I offered, as we
trudged on at a more reasonable pace, "but you are even more of a
surprise than most of what I've seen or come across."

"Ex Africa, semper aliquid novi.  The older Pliny.  Again, you are
guilty of that so British insularity.  I am Maasai.  I will shortly
qualify as a doctor.  Is that so strange?"

"It can't be that usual.  I suppose you got some sort of
scholarship."

"Not at all.  The Maasai lands were held communally until quite recent
times.  Your lot, who are so hung up on property and ownership of land,
did not approve such an anarchic arrangement.  Private ownership was
handed to the elders of each tribe and clan.  My grandfather was one
such.  He exploited the situation in ways I do not approve and became
quite wealthy.  Wealthy enough to ensure that I and some of my siblings
received good educations in Nairobi.  Good enough to get me into
Guy's."

"But in the holidays you come back and dress up, or rather down, and
pretend to be a Maasai warrior."

He flashed a very angry look at me.

"Certainly not.  At the age of fifteen, three years before I went to
England, I went through the full initiation ceremony and became a
moron, a warrior, a herdsman and owner of cattle.  Which is what I
shall be until I reach my thirties."

"Why?"

"Why not?  It is what male Maasai of my age do."

"And, at the same time you will become a doctor and come back to look
after your people?"

"Would you, in my situation?  No.  I shall become a specialist in some
branch of consumerist diseases, bowel cancer, say, and either set up in
Harley Street or go to America where I will make even more money than I
could in Britain."

That crow of a laugh came again, so I remained uncertain as to whether
or not he was serious.

"What are you doing so far from your village?"  I asked.  "You don't
seem to be herding your cattle."

"You must surely know that we are not allowed to herd within the
confines of the National Park.  No.  I came to be by the pool at
Keekorok.  It is a holy place for us.  Even though it has been
suburbanised by silly walkways.  Every time I come back I make a
pilgrimage and talk to my ancestors."

"Are they buried there?"

"Only those who died after the Occupation.  Before that it was our
custom to leave bodies out in the savannah or by a watering pool like
the one at Keekorok for the scavengers.  The hyenas even dealt with the
bones.  But I'm afraid your lot could not countenance the exposure of
corpses and we were forced to bury them.  I am not at all sure that the
buried are as fully with us as those that inhabit the animals and
birds."

"But they still speak to you?"

He flashed me a coy sort of a smile.

"In a manner of speaking.  But mostly they say what I want to hear."

He said all this in a very matter-of-fact sort of a way: there was
little or no anger or regret in his voice, that I could detect, that
ancient customs had or were disappearing.

A little later we reached the road which was surfaced at this point
with ragged edged bitumen.  There were shallow broad ditches along each
side.

"Something will come along before long.  You really do want to go
south, to the border?  Is that right?  In that case we should stand on
the other side.  I think.  Let me see.  Let me take a bearing from the
sun..."

He was sending me up, taking the piss.  We crossed the road and took up
our position.  We must have looked an odd couple he elegantly posed
against his spear, part of the landscape really in spite of his red
covering and privileged education, me bedraggled, damp, grubby, with my
bulging ASDAbag and my misshapen hat.

A truck went by but the front bench was filled not just with the driver
but three fetching looking girls as well, while the back was crammed
with at least six cattle.

As it belted away towards Tanzania, Golly cleared his throat of the
fumes it shed behind it.

"And you," he asked.  "Your situation is far more strange than mine.  I
take it you are a tourist.  Tourists are not v ften found trekking
across the savannah, albeit in the direction opposite to that which
they intend, seeking to walk out of Kenya and into Tanzania.  I should
like to be assured that I am not assisting you in some criminal or
treasonable endeavour."

An even bigger lorry, its deck piled to twelve or fifteen feet at least
with crates of Tusker beer, roared towards us.  It swayed, no, it
waltzed from side to side across the road and I was glad really that it
didn't stop.  I got the impression that it might not have been able to,
even if the driver had wanted it to.

"It is a very long story," I began, "but no, I have not, as far as I
know, and certainly not intentionally, been guilty of anything
criminal."

His formal, careful way of saying what he wanted to say was
infectious.

"I am, however," I continued, "on the run from people whom I take to be
criminals.  A... person who claims to have my best interests at heart,
suggested that I could escape them by crossing the border, where he
would arrange for me to be put on a bus to a commercial airfield, from
which I could begin my flight back to England."

"Your story, without the corroborative detail I am sure you can supply,
has the feel of a cock and a bull about it.  However" he gave an
apologetic sort of grunt or cough.  "I think it's time I came clean
with you.  Our meeting was not a coincidence.  It was contrived."

But where this was leading remained un realised for a four by four, one
of the big, luxury sort, was now approaching us but from the south. The
windscreen was tinted of course, so it wasn't until it was quite close
that I realised who was in it.  The driver was in uniform, a uniform
like that of the AFI Ranger who had interviewed me on Mt. Kenya.  The
passenger was wearing shades, and a black baseball cap, with, yes, NYPD
emblazoned above the peak.

Chapter Eighteen

I turned, picked up my bag, and set off at a brisk canter away from the
road and into the savannah.  About a mile away two hills, covered with
quite thick vegetation, folded themselves in towards a declivity or
maybe a valley between them.  They appeared to be the nearest cover
where a chap might get lost.  After a moment's hesitation, Golly
followed me.  The Jeep, for that is what it was, the new luxury
vehicle, not the WW2 maid of all work, pulled in.  I did not look
back.

"Mr.  Shovelin!  Please come back."  The shout was punctuated with the
sound of the Jeep door slammed.  I didn't look back.

We pounded on.  I was aware of Golly behind me but all my attention was
on my feet, dodging outcrops of rock, bushes, the larger loose
stones.

"You must stop.  We will shoot if you do not."  Already they seemed
more distant, as if they were not actually following us.

Golly's black hand brushed against my forearm.  He was holding his red
robe, already partially bundled again.  I got the message and took it
while he once again grabbed the ASDAbag from me.  A pistol cracked some
way behind us, but I had no idea where the bullet went.  It banged away
three more times, and six yards ahead of me and two to the right,
something clanged off a lump of rock, chipping it, and whining away
ahead of us.  You've no idea unless you have experienced it what such a
moment can do for your physical prowess.  I would imagine I damn near
doubled the speed I was running at.

Golly pulled at my arm again and slewed me off to the left down a brief
but steep slope, I slipped on the ca key wet earth and did the last
four yards on my backside.  I was at the bottom of a shallow, winding
water-course, filled with greenish but well-cropped bushes, and
occasional small trees.  I looked around for Golly and for a moment
felt a desperate spasm of fear: I couldn't see him, had he been hit?
And then there he was, body twisted away from me, above me, looking out
round another rock.  I started to scramble up towards him, but, without
looking, he flapped a palm at me, clearly waving me back.  I sat down a
yard or so below the soles of his feet.

"They've stopped following us," he said, speaking softly.  "They've
gone back to their vehicle.  The one in the black cap has lit a
cigarette but is still looking in our direction.  The other one is
speaking into what I presume is a radio microphone.  Now, he has joined
the one who is smoking and both are leaning against the vehicle,
looking out in this direction."

I got my breathing under some sort of control and managed to ask: "How
far off?"

At last he looked round, and said, as if to an idiot: "As far as we
ran."

"How far was that?"

"Three hundred yards or so.  Well beyond effectively accurate range of
his pistol.  I take it you don't want to reconsider and give yourself
up?"

"No."

"Then we had better get a move on."

He slid more gracefully than I had down the short slope to the bottom
of the river-course, picked up ASDA which had preceded him, and we set
off, moving more or less west from the road, though the riverbed
twisted and looped.  Its floor shifted from smooth boulders rolling up
out of patches of coarse grass and dried up rushes to patches of
gravel, and was overhung by a variety of trees, not just the
flat-topped acacias and thorn bushes of the savannah above us, but
bottle-shaped baobobs and lower shrubs I lacked the knowledge to
identify.  As we progressed we came across small pools and even places
where a tiny rivulet had formed, trickling down a crevice in the high
banks before disappearing in a patch of dark sand.  There were insects
of course, even a dragon-fly or two and butterflies, and small birds
that flitted and darted from bush to bush ahead of us.  The only
animals we saw in the first half hour or so were a family of wart hogs
nosing up roots until we got near enough to frighten them: they
scurried off into the undergrowth with their tails up like pennons.
Golly said the larger fauna were resting up in the shadier places and
most would stay like that until late afternoon.  Which was a relief.
There was no sign of any more rain: a disappointment for Golly.  The
'long' rains, he told me, should have set in, brief storms like the one
that had overtaken us were not enough.

And of course as we walked, I wanted to know just why he had been
saying that our meeting had been 'contrived'.

"We have mutual friends," he began.  "They felt you were in danger.
They asked me to find you at Keekorok and take you to a safe area where
your enemies would not find you.  I suppose I was just in time."  He
pulled a switch of green leaves from a bush and used it as a fly-whisk
as he went on.  "That tale about getting you across the border seemed
to me, right from when you described it, a ruse to get you into a
situation where you could be killed with impunity.  They only had to
wait until you were in a suitable place to knock you on the head and
leave you for the hyenas.  Or push you in the river for the crocs.
Or"

"Never mind.  I get the picture."  I was dying to ask who these mutual
friends could be.

"But their plan was foiled by your solar mistake"

"Heading north instead of south."

"And when you didn't show they came looking for you."  He stopped,
looked up at the already almost cloudless sky, cocked his ear.  The
beat of a helicopter's rotor.  He pulled me down and into the shade of
a baobab tree growing between two boulders.  The chopper soon came into
view, apparently following the river bed.  Small, a blister right at
the front and a long boom at the back, much like the dragon-flies we
had seen earlier.  I'd like to show off and say it was a Sikorsky or
something, but really I have no idea what make it was.  It was brightly
painted though, in a vivid green and a gold sort of a yellow like the
one I had seen hovering over the Aberdare AFI research station.  Golly
shaded his eyes as it flew over our heads.  He waited until its clatter
had receded somewhat.

"If it's you he's looking for us, then you really are in serious
doo-doo," he murmured.  "It's as well I found you."

Since it was only forty minutes or so since we had been shot at with
intent to kill, I wondered what could possibly be worse.

"They must have radioed for it," he went on.  "I imagine, to have got
here so quickly, it came from Narok.  Or maybe even from Keekorok.
There's a strip a couple of miles from the lodge.  Look out.  He's
coming back."

Much lower this time, low enough for the rotors to stir the tops of the
taller trees.

"Can they see us?"

"Not if we stay in the shade.  Problem is they know we can't have got
much further than this, and they can be pretty sure they'd see us if we
were up on the veldt.  So they know we're down here somewhere.  Hide
your face.  It shows up more than mine."

He was right.  And not just because he was black.  The painted slashes
and whorls on his face had the effect, in the dappled shade, of
disruptive pattern camouflage.  Indeed the damn thing was creeping
along above the riverbed towards us so slowly I had time to wonder just
how far the face-painting might be functional rather than ceremonial.
Nevertheless either their vision was very good or assisted, for see us
they did, or anyway enough to make them think that that was where we
were.  The brute, no longer looking that small, slowly circled the top
of our small tree.  The racket was now deafening and had we wanted to
talk we would have had to shout.  Dust and leaves thrashed around us as
if we were in the centre of a whirlwind.  Even though it was only the
one undersized chopper it felt like Apocalypse Now with Dolby Surround.
And of course my fucking hat, almost dry again, blew off, whirled away
like the one in Jeff Wall's Sudden Gust of Wind, and maybe they saw it.
Anyway they now saw enough of something to know that was where we were,
under the baobab tree.

The fuckers opened a hatch or something and dropped a hand grenade.  It
plummeted down so fast we hardly had time to think what it was: it hit
the lip of the river bank above us, bounced, and in mid-air blew up.
Some casing whistled over us but none hit.

"All mouth and no trousers," said Golly, and stood up.  Bullets
shredded the air and the leaves above him.  He dropped his spear and
sat down again, right hand grippir g his upper left arm.  Dark blood
oozed quite quickly through his fingers.  I wanted to shout at him: Go,
piss off, get out of here, this is nothing to do with you.  The chopper
took another slow turn round the tree and this time a canister, about
eighteen inches long, a baton slowly turning on its centre, dropped
about twenty yards away and immediately began to spew purple smoke,
smoke and noxious gas: instant sore eyes, and nausea.  It filled the
little valley around us, and in the still heat lay close to the ground.
We had to get out of it.  But up river, down river, back up on to the
plain?  Spluttering and with Golly still clutching his bleeding arm, we
were already, almost without thinking, three-quarters of the way up the
bank.

He gestured upwards with his head, then cocked it on one side.  I
caught his drift.  There was silence, apart from the hiss of the gas
canister below us.  Then I caught the much quieter and changed note of
the helicopter's motor.  It was turning over more slowly, ticking over,
and was some way off.  It had landed.

Golly clambered a bit higher, then slipped and landed on his side.  He
swore, at least I think he did.  It wasn't English this time.  He'd
slipped because he couldn't use his hands to climb with.

"You've got to bind that up," I said.  And without waiting unravelled
the red robe I was still clutching, put one end on the ground, stood on
it, selected a point on the edge and made a huge effort to rip off a
length.  I really had to put a lot of concentrated effort into it, but
it went in the end, leaving me a bandage in my hand, a full six feet
long.  I looked round.  He'd gone again.  No, he was lying along the
lip amongst stones and with a bush or two near his head.  He looked
down, over his shoulder.

"They've landed about four hundred paces away.  Down river.  On the
edge of that patch of forest on the hill-side above the valley.  Three
are getting out.  That's as many as it'll hold.  They're not your
friends.  They are in some sort of uniform.  Yellowish.  Could be AFI
Rangers, their own private army."

By then I was up with him.  Both of us were still spluttering and
retching from the fumes we had left behind us.

"Here.  Let me bind your arm."

"OK.  If you know what you're doing."

He took his right hand away revealing a furrow a couple of inches long,
running across the outer side of his upper left arm.  It was filled
with dark blood that now spilled out of it as the pressure he had been
applying was removed, although it was already thickening where it had
run down his arm.

I bunched up a section of the strip of light-weight wool over the wound
and began to wind the rest round it.

"There's far too much," he muttered, and put the edge between his teeth
and yanked with his good hand.  The tear ran the wrong way, and it was
a moment or two before we managed to do what he wanted.  He took the
end out of my hand and began to complete the binding.  But I remembered
some Boy Scout First Aid, and took it back from him, shredded the end
into two, knotted it to prevent it spreading further down, took one end
against the direction we had been winding and knotted the two strands
together on the other side.  With a reef knot of course.  And then
tucked the ends in.

"Oh, very professional!  Now I think we had better see what they're up
to."

The three had fanned out so there was a good ten metres between them
and were moving away from the chopper towards us.  They were carrying
what looked like lightweight carbines across their chests.  They were
not being particularly cautious; why should they be?  All we had
between us was a spear.  And that was still on the floor of the little
valley below us.  But they didn't seem in any great hurry either.

"What do we do now?"  I asked.

"I'm really not sure.  Wait until they get within range and throw
stones at them?  If they were coming from the other side we could get
into the woodland.  They'd never find us then.  Not without dogs."

"They knew what they were doing then when they landed where they
did."

"Maybe."

The heat bent the moisture-laden air they were walking through and for
a moment they seemed blurred, darker, and looked as if they were
walking on water.  I wondered about that 'maybe', then saw what Golly
had probably been aware of well before I was.  Beyond the helicopter,
coming down the hill, picking their way through the forest perimeter of
scattered trees, two very large, enormously tusked elephants.  Their
ears slowly wafted like sails trimmed by master mariners to catch a
fitful breeze, their huge jointed legs plodded lightly through the
grass and undergrowth.  They came out onto the plain and their stride
quickened.  The rangers, if that is what they were, still had not heard
them and were now barely two hundred paces from us.  They stopped,
called to each other, the middle one shaded his eyes, pointed not at us
but at a point some fifty yards to our right.  His companion on that
side raised his carbine and firing from somewhere between his hip and
chest, loosed off a short burst in that direction.  An ostrich that had
been keeping a low profile, with its head down if not actually in the
sand, unfolded its long legs, loped out of the grass and rocks and was
instantly shredded in a cloud of blood and black plumy feathers.  We
could hear their laughter.

Behind them the elephants broke into a swaying, lumbering trot.  The
leader went past the parked chopper, and stood facing us and the backs
of the rangers, whose ears were no doubt ringing with the shots they
had just fired, so the first thing they actually heard was the slow
rending crash as the second elephant, with its huge anvil shaped
forehead against the side of the helicopter's cabin, with its back legs
bent to give it a better purchase, slowly tipped the whole thing over.
For a second it was poised halfway on one of the rotor's blades, then
that buckled and the grinding became a drawn out splintering crunch.

They heard that all right.

Chapter Nineteen

"Why did the elephants attack the helicopter?"

"Poachers.  They used choppers to herd the elephants to where the guns
were.  Elephants have long memories.  More than that.  Some say they
can pass on acquired knowledge from generation to generation."  He
sensed my scepticism.  "OK, I know.  But there have been some pretty
strange occurrences, not easily explained any other way."

We were stumbling on, along the same water-course, and had been for
what seemed like several hours.  It had gone through a deep, narrow
stage, almost a gorge if not a canyon, then as the forested hills
parted and sank away behind us, broadened out to meander across a plain
much like the one we had left.  For a time we were parallel to another
road with occasional traffic on it, but Golly didn't like this and
steered us off in a southerly direction round the north east side of
one of the largest hills in the area.  He had his spear again and to
begin with walked well, so again I had a problem keeping up, even
though he still insisted on carrying my bag.  Oh, yes, and in case
you're worrying, before we set off Golly found my hat for me, almost
straight away.  With the sky clear, and the sun getting lower in it
behind us, my brains would have fried without it.  But after three
hours or so the effects of the gunshot wound were clearly beginning to
weaken him, whether from infection or loss of blood I couldn't say.
Whatever, he sweated a lot, grunted every now and then, and was clearly
using his spear as a support.  I insisted on taking ASDA and the mere
fact that he let me have my way said a lot.  We were, he said, heading
for one of the first Maasai villages outside the perimeter of the
reserve.  Not his own village, but one where he was known.

We didn't talk much although a twister of questions whirled in my head.
Eventually I had to ask.

"These friends," I asked.  "Who are they?"  "Need to know," he said
slyly.  "You'll meet them tomorrow."

It was hot, flies were a bother especially when there was water about
and the river became just that, shallow, wide with occasional pools. As
the day lengthened and the shadows with it we saw most of the more
common of the animals: zebra, giraffe, waterbuck, gazelles, antelope,
lions and so on.  And once another extended family of elephants.  But
none of them came any nearer and indeed strayed away almost
imperceptibly if we appeared to be approaching them.  No cheetahs
though, or hyenas, which was a relief though Golly may have seen a lot
more of everything than I did.

We plodded on.  I complained of thirst.  Golly stopped, looked around
him, tapped his perfect teeth with his thumbnail.

"Hang on for half an hour," he said.  We had left the river bed but now
he angled our course back towards another.  After twenty minutes we
were in it.  It was as dry as a bone, dry as the not infrequent animal
skulls, mostly wildebeests', that littered the plain.  I felt despair.
My tongue seemed swollen, the inside of my mouth felt like cardboard, I
had a splitting headache and my joints ached.  The sweat running down
my cheeks had never tasted so salty.

"Not long," Golly murmured, when I stumbled on a loose stone and he
caught my elbow.

And of course he was right.  The first thing we saw was a clump of
reeds, bright green, then we heard the trickle of water.  It was a tiny
clear spring creating a small pool about ten feet across and only a few
inches deep which never seemed quite to fill up and flow over.  The
upcoming water barely stirred its surface, looked like a sort of
shifting swelling near the middle.  The area around was broken up by
hundreds of footprints, one or two of them the bare feet of humans.

"Spoon it up in your hands as close to the source as you can.  It's
quite pure there."

I splashed in and did as he suggested.  There was a slightly metallic
tang to the water, like rust, and indeed it carried a trace of russet
colour.  I noticed now that the pool's damp edges were coated with a
deposit of the same reddish hue.

"Don't you want any?"  I asked.

"I can wait."

We stumbled back out of the river bed and resumed our march across the
plain.  It was not a desert, not even semi-desert, just drought-ridden,
waiting for rain that had, in this particular part of the reserve,
failed for a year or so.

"Are you hungry?"

"Yes."

"I can find you edible grubs to eat."

"I can wait."

Towards sunset we approached the lower slopes of the quite substantial
hill that had been a dominant feature of the horizon for most of the
day, higher than any of the other rises we had passed between.  The sun
behind us lit it with a golden glow and threw deep purple shadows from
its ridges and outcrops.  You could see that it was volcanic in origin,
the now eroded extinct crater tilted towards us so the further rim was
above the nearer semi-circle.  For a time it so filled our view I
thought Golly was going to lead us high over the shoulder, just below
the crater, but then quite suddenly, and long before our course would
have taken us anywhere near the crest, we were going down and the plain
opened out again ahead.

It was not the same as the one we had left on the other side of the
hill.  For a start it was much lower, in fact it was probably the
western side of the Rift.  Here the grass was not greener, quite the
opposite.  In fact there wasn't any, or very little.  Although it still
had its undulations and was crisscrossed with winding watercourses and
even ravines, there was almost no vegetation.  Dust devils formed,
caught gold fire from the last of the sun, and sank away; two small
herds of skeletal cattle drifted towards a black circle of thorn
enclosing saucer-shaped roofs only a mile or so in front of us, black
kites wheeled lazily on motionless wings above it, and a couple of thin
wisps of blueish smoke climbed towards them.  We were leaving the
Reserve.  A white thread of road, straight as a ruled line, arrowed
north east from the village into the lilac-coloured haze.

"This really is desert," I said, as we slithered down a scree of
pumice-like stones.

"It is now.  Fifteen years ago much of it was grass land and forest."
Golly's voice was harsh now, the sentences came with long pauses
between them.  "Then came the wheat.  Bulldozers to root out the trees.
Huge ploughs, huge harvesters.  Canadian dollars for my grandfather.
Nairobi, London and Guy's for me.  Three good years, prairie farming as
far as you can see, then the harvests got smaller and smaller.  Without
animals, without our herds or the natural fauna, the surface broke up,
the soil was denatured in spite of artificial fertilisers.  Eight years
ago they gave up.  The year I was initiated as mo ran  Some agronomists
reckon it'll take forty more years for the land to recover.  If it ever
does.  Not easy to reverse the onset of desert."

We were welcomed by a couple of scrawny dogs who barked and snarled but
did not actually bite, then by half a dozen or so children using the
last rays of the sun to play football just outside the gate in the
thorn wall.  They were barefoot, most in torn shorts, though one had a
faded Man United Beckham shirt.  They were thin, but not, as far as I
could see, famine-thin.  Their ball, which was not as inflated as it
should have been, carried the Coca-Cola logo.  They broke off their
game and three of them crowded round Golly, one taking his hand,
another carrying his spear.  It may not have been his village but he
was certainly known there.

There were some points of correspondence between this village and the
one I had visited with Uncle George and his nephews, but not many. From
outside the huts looked much the same apart from one with a corrugated
roof, built out of shaped mud and dung adobe bricks that had been
whitewashed.  Its one room served as municipal office, community
centre, school-house, and guest room for visitors.  And there were
three broken-down vehicles a mini-bus, a Morris Oxford, and a very
large Massey-Ferguson tractor with huge flat smooth tyres and a patch
of oil beneath it, four wrecked bicycles, and a Chewy pick-up which was
functional.  There was a well with a wind pump, but the water table had
dropped and, so Golly said, was yielding no more than fifty lit res a
day for sixty people and about as many head of cattle.

More than these it was the ambience, the atmosphere that was different.
This village was bedraggled, used, over-lived-in, yielded too many
signs of make-do and mend, mostly with the broken cast-offs of
twentieth century industry.  There were plastic bottles, scraps of
cardboard and polystyrene, old but factory made spades and hoes, the
left-overs of government attempts to turn nomadic herdsmen into sons
and daughters of Cain.  Later I commented on all this to Golly, who
laughed at my naivety.

"You didn't think the tourist village was real, did you?  No one lives
there.  They turn up each morning, leave each evening.  It's a
nine-to-five job."

But before that we were taken to the school-house where Golly was made
to sit on the thin mattress of an old bed with a cast-iron frame while
his wound was cleaned and bandaged by a thin old man with a straggly
white beard.  He was one of the few there who wore something like
traditional dress, beads, bracelets and so forth, though the four mo
ran who shortly came in having corralled the cattle were got up in much
the same way as Golly.  Although this old man seemed to be some sort of
shaman or witch-doctor, the techniques he used were those of the first
world.  He had antiseptic ointments, butterfly plasters to pull the
edges of the wound together, and he would have given Golly an
anti-tetanus jab if Golly hadn't insisted that he'd had the inoculation
a year ago in England.  His medicine chest was a stout cardboard box
labelled Medecins sans Frontieres.

"He'd use medicinal herbs if there were any.  They all went under the
plough," Golly commented.

Next came supper.  I'll draw a veil over that apart from telling you
that it included just edible tortilla-like pancakes made, I think, from
maize flour taken from an Oxfam sack and a cloggy, claggy concoction,
brick red in colour, which tasted both yoghurty and metallic.  It was
only after I had got a couple of mouthfuls down that I realised this
was probably what Uncle George's nephew had reckoned is the standard
fare of the Maasai coagulated cow blood mixed with milk and left to
thicken.  It seemed particularly attractive to flies.  We ate outside
the school-house, surrounded by four of the elders, with a small fire
in front of us and the light from a hissing paraffin pressure lamp.
Outside the circle women and children were faces rendered in shifting
chiaroscuro by the flames and the harsh light of the lamp.  The boy
with the Beckham shirt asked me why Man United had failed to win the
Premiership.  I couldn't say, which surprised him.

I made the mistake of commenting to Golly that this must all be a
falling off from the fully tribal days, with decent food, dances, beer,
mead and so forth.

"Bollocks, my dear Kit.  First, you must remember that all that tribal
kitsch seems very romantic and exciting to Europeans, but it was as
commonplace to us as an evening in the pub or in front of the telly are
to you.  And believe me I've had a better time in the Mass at Brixton
than I ever had in a tribal knees-up."  He was riding a hobby-horse, I
could tell.  "Lot of rubbish talked and written about the dying away of
ancient tribal ways and wisdom.  Of course it causes pain and
dislocation while it happens, but it's a stage we have to get ourselves
through.  Believe me, the misery of the English poor for, say, the
fifty or so years between 1800 and 1850, as they moved from farming to
factory work, was as bad or worse than anything but the unluckiest of
us have to put up with "

"AIDS?"

"Cholera."

"Come on, Golly.  Why, if you believe all that, do you go wandering
about the savannah in that gear?"

He laughed again.

"I'm Maasai," he said.  "You've seen us, you know what we're like.
We're poseurs, vain, fancy ourselves.  Dandies.  Wide boys of the
veldt, even.  And it's a human trait to be a laudator temporis All is
it not?  Think of your Morris dancers, your re-enactors of ancient
battles, your Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, your Bewildered of Buxton.
Think of the old men who claim it was a better life down the pit or
riveting plates in a ship-yard than doing telephone sales or driving a
truck.  I know they're all pretty horrible jobs but I know which I'd
choose to do.  And, incidentally, as a doctor I rate penicillin
ointment above herbal infusions or poultices made from cobwebs."  He
touched his arm as he said this.

"And your people are better off now than their grandparents were?"

"There's a lot bad now.  But it comes from civil wars to the north,
AIDS, corrupt and often brutal officials, and above all the ruthless
greed of global corporations, not from the breakdown of tribal life.
All we need is a good dose of old-fashioned, from the bottom up,
workerist socialism, and we'll be living like pigs in shit."

Fat chance of that happening, I thought.

He leant towards me.

"You'd better get some sleep now.  They'll still be looking for you.
First light we get you out of here and on your way back to Nairobi.
Then if you've got any sense you'll be on the first plane back to
Blightie.  But first, I've got something for you.  The chief man here
said it was left here for you earlier today, after I had left."

He unfolded his long thin heron-like legs and the flames played over
the smooth ebony muscles and shiny shins as his height took his face
beyond the light.  He was back in a moment or two, annoyingly holding
his right hand behind his back.

"Guess what," he said.

"Come on, Golly, don't be silly."

Like a conjurer who knows smooth confidence is more impressive than a
showy flourish he brought his spread palm out in front of my face.  On
it, lying across it so his extended index finger supported the toe, the
heel of it on the heel of his hand, a small, black, slip-on shoe.  I
took it and he melted away into the darkness before I could even begin
to put words to the questions that fluttered around the cave of my head
like a storm of disturbed bats.

I didn't really need to check it against the one in the bottom of ASDA,
but I chucked a sheet of cardboard on the embers of the fire and got
enough light.  It was a match all right.

Did this mean Danny was alive and well and living in the next village
down that long straight road?

Was it a coincidence that this slipper had turned up or been left in
the same village I had fetched up in?

And so on.  You get the idea.  I tossed and turned on that twangy bed,
and eventually, in pitch darkness got off it again, thinking I might
look for him.  The doorway was a square of lightness in the perfect
blank of that small square hot room.  I stood in it for a moment,
hoping my eyes would adjust to the dark, and slowly they did.  There
was no moon as yet, but above me in the huge perfect hemisphere of the
sky massed constellations swung in unfamiliar patterns around the
swathe of stars and galaxies that make up the Milky Way.  It wasn't
long before I could make out the humped silhouettes of the village in a
circle around me.  There was not a glimmer from them.  The air was not
cold, crisp rather than cold, and again I caught that smell of Africa,
of dried dung, dead fires, and animals.  Slowly I became aware of
noises.  The scuttle of small mammals or large insects, the chirp-chirp
of a cricket, the scuffle of a shifted hoof, the whimper of a sleeping
child, the distant call of an owl.

"Golly?"  I called, pitching it high but not loud.

I waited, then driven by desperation let go at the top of my voice.

"GOLLEEEE!"

For a second or two I swear even the insects shut up.  Then I felt the
heat rise up the back of my neck as I asked myself: What will they all
be thinking?  Has the European done his nut?  What should we do about
it?  And I shambled, groping, back to the bed.

And of course, came the dawn and he wasn't there.  He d gone.  He'd
left a verbal message which the shaman, whatever, passed on to me over
a breakfast of charcoal burnt tortilla and a chipped cup of coffee.
There was a small town, anyway a larger village, twenty miles away,
from which I could catch a bus to Nairobi, or if I was lucky I might
even bum a lift in a plane from the airstrip that was there.  A guy
called Elisha would take me in the pick-up and I should give him two
thousand Kenyan shillings for the fare.  That was it.  Seemed steep,
but I was in no position to argue or bargain.

Meanwhile, I was a wreck.  The huge hike of the day before had left
every joint in my body aching, my muscles, especially in my calves and
hamstrings stiff as well as painful, and a huge heavy weight of
tiredness on my shoulders.  I was filthy.  What was worse, I felt
filthy.  My head itched, my eyes were gummed up, my teeth and tongue
coated, my armpits and groin felt sticky, and I stank.  I rummaged
listlessly through my bag, but everything in it had already been worn,
there was nothing fresh at all, and a heavy damp, musty smell came off
it.  There seemed no point in putting on clothes slightly less noisome
than the ones I had walked and slept in unless I could have a bath or
at any rate a good wash first.  I thought of asking for water but
remembered what Golly had said about the inadequacy of the well.  They
probably grudged the half cup of coffee.

I stuffed it all back but paused over the slippers.  I laid them out
together in the patch of bright sunlight that lay like a cloth across
the dusty concrete floor.  OK'I was very tired, dispirited, confused,
and in a general sort of a way rather frightened.  I looked at them and
as the cold hollowness filled my chest the tears sprang and tipped down
my cheeks.  They were as much for me as for her.  What could I do? What
was I going to do?  Had I done enough?  What more could I do?

I was on my knees.  How had I got there: had I knelt because I wanted
to surrender, give in, but had no one to surrender to?  At all events
it was when I was kneeling above them that I pushed my forearm across
my eyes, blinked and sniffed.  Snorted.  And as my vision cleared I saw
that there was a small raised square in the insole in the left hand
slipper.  People often have an insole in the left shoe if their left
foot is slightly smaller than the right.  I picked up the slipper, got
a thumbnail (my nails needed clipping by now) under the edge of the
insole and lifted it.  Yes.  A second memory card like the one I'd sent
to Twickenham.  I placed it carefully back beneath the insole but this
time further in so the upper covered that slight bump that had given it
away.  Then I put both slippers back in the bag and sat back on my
ankles.

I felt better and I knew why.  I had a purpose now, something to do.
I'd get back to Blightie and I'd go to Twickenham, and deliver it.  If
I did nothing else for her, I'd do that.  That's what I'll do, I said
to myself, and gritting my teeth, pressing my lips together so I
wouldn't start blubbing again, I repeated: That's what I'll do.

Chapter Twenty

Elisha was a thin old man with thin stick-like arms and a chicken's
wrists.  He had high cheekbones, a long straight nose and deepset eyes.
If he'd had his full ration of teeth he would have been as handsome as
all the Maasai are.  He was wearing a polo whose little red polo person
claimed Ralph Lauren, the usual red robe wound round his waist below
it, and sandals whose soles were probably carved from tyres.  He was
disappointed to learn I had no cigarettes and from then on terrified me
by rolling his own from dog-ends, using both hands while his knees kept
the steering wheel steady.  We didn't say a lot to each other. Possibly
because of the noise: the pick-up had a leaky silencer and every screw
or bolt in its body was loose, and though his English was OK, his lack
of teeth didn't help.

It took nearly two hours to get to the small town he was taking me to
and I realised twenty quid was a good deal.  It must have cost him most
of that in petrol.  After the first straight stretch we climbed back
out of the Rift and into the highlands, following the escarpment and
then dropped back down.  In Europe you would have called the place we
arrived at a village, but in Maasai-land villages move every five years
or so as the grazing gets tired.  Towns have adobe houses, some even
made out of breeze blocks, several churches, at least one school, a
municipal building, a police station, and a Barclays, even though there
may be no more than a thousand or so permanent inhabitants.  There was
also a street market and the last I saw of Elisha he was leaing over
one of the stalls trying on a digital watch with an expandable
bracelet.  I just hoped he wasn't about to be ripped off.

The town, like most, was on a road junction.  At the top of the street
market a bitumen surface, made briefly into an avenue, Avenue Moi of
course, by a double row of tulip trees,

had a sign: Narok, 105kms; Nairobi 275... or thereabouts.  I bought a
slice of watermelon for five shillings and strolled slowly down the
dirt sidewalk, inside the usual grass verge with its trees, towards one
of the few two story buildings.  This one was marked out by the Kenyan
flag hanging listlessly out in front of it and I reckoned it probably
indicated the town centre.  I was looking out for any sign that might
indicate a bus-stop or even the whereabouts of an air strip.

They saw me before I saw them four Caucasians sitting in plastic
chairs, the white ones you see all over the world from English garden
centres to San Francisco street cafes, in front of a kiosk selling
Coca-Cola.  Two of them were elderly, thin, skin tanned to a yellowish
leathery look, the man wearing a real Panama with the spine across its
crown and a slightly grubby linen suit, and, would you believe it?  an
R.A.F tie.  I know, not because I'm a PI, but because my dad had one.
The woman was in a cloth sun-hat and a printed blue dress with a bold
white daisy pattern.  The other two were youngish men, complexions a
reddish oak, fair hair, tan short-sleeve shirts with combat pockets,
shorts and safari boots with thick socks.  The elderly man was already
standing.  His lined face wore an expression half-way between a smile
and an apology.

"Mr.  Shovelin?"  he called.

I walked over.

"Yes?"  I offered, a touch hesitantly.  In the previous forty-eight
hours or so total strangers had smacked my head, shot at me, dropped
bombs on me... and then there had been Golly.  Whose side are you on?
was the question uppermost in my mind.

"Edward Fitzmaurice, and this is my wife Dorothy.  These are James and
David.  They are from Australia."

I dropped my melon rind in the dust, wiped my hand on my thigh and let
them all shake it in turn.  I even remembered my manners and let
Dorothy have first go.  That was the effect Eddie's accent had on me he
spoke the sort of English

I haven't heard since Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Prime Minister.  One of
the Aussies pulled in a chair and told me that he and his mate were
really Jimmie and Dave.  A kid came from behind the kiosk removing the
top from a Coke bottle for me.

"Miss Newman spoke very highly of you."  Mrs.  Fitzmaurices's voice was
louder than I had expected, with an authoritative rasp behind it.  Much
the way I imagine Wooster's Aunt Agatha spoke.  "She asked us to try to
get her shoe to you, so you can take it back to England with you.  I
asked N'Goolilah to make sure you received it.  Did he reach you?  Miss
Newman said you would be found at Keekorok."

"N'Goolilah' is my recollection of what she called Golly, and is
probably quite inaccurate.  But I knew who she meant.  Meanwhile she
had racketed on, as if I was fifty yards away and not giving me more
than an opportunity to nod an affirmative to her question.

"You are a detective we understand so no doubt you found the memory
card she had placed under the insole."

Well, I was glad I had.  She would have judged me grossly incompetent
if I had not.

"She was confident you will know what to do with it when you get
back."

Yes.  I'd worked that one out already.  Twickenham.  Garlenda Drive, a
Mr.  Skiros.  Her husband now added his pennyworth.

"Miss Newman was anxious that you should get back to GB as soon as you
have the memory card.  To that end we have arranged that James and
David will take you on the first leg as far as Nairobi."

Jimmy, or Dave, leant back in his chair and, looking across at me,
shaded his eyes with his left hand.

"We fly a Beaver aircraft.  It's out on the airstrip here.  We aim to
leave within the hour if that suits you."

"That's fine."

"Cool," said Dave or Jimmy, and took a swig from his Coke bottle.

"James and David," Mrs.  Fitzmaurice remarked, "are in the
transportation business.  They are very reasonable.  My husband and I
have a small coffee plantation up in the hills which we run on
traditional lines.  Half a dozen times over the last couple of years or
so we have had occasion to use their services.  So much quicker and
more reliable than the larger firms."

Mr.  Fitzmaurice pulled a wrist-watch from his jacket pocket.  It was
old, gold, and one of the two halves of its strap had disappeared.

"Time we put our skates on if we are to be home for lunch."

Ice skates or roller skates?

He stood up, leant on a walking stick which had been hanging by its
handle from the arm of his chair.  I realised he was even older than I
had thought.  Maybe as much as eighty.

"Glad to have met you.  I'm sure you'll do the right thing."

"Hang on a sec!"  I was up with him pretty sharply.  Indeed my seat
might have toppled if Jimmy (or Dave) had not steadied it.  "Please
tell me about Danny... Miss Newman.  Do you know what happened to her?
Do you know what all this is about?"  I was suddenly aware of my heart
pumping while embarrassment at my un-British behaviour fought with the
desire to know.

Mrs.  was up too by now, her hand under her husband's elbow.

"Danielle," she rasped, her voice and manner more aunty-ish than ever,
"was very clear in her instructions.  It would be much better, she
decided, for all concerned if you know as little as possible about her
circumstances.  Come, Eddie."

Did that mean she could be alive?  Not dead?

Perhaps sensing the question that was trying to force itself out of me,
Eddie Fitzmaurice smartly lifted his hat to me.  They quickly filtered
themselves through a small semi-circle of shyly grinning children which
had formed between us and the road and he thrust a fifty shilling note
at the oldest.

"That's all I've got, young feller-me-lad.  You'll have to share a
couple of bottles of pop amongst you."

I sat down again, looked at Jimmy and Dave.  Words failed me.

"Shit!"  I said.

They shrugged.  Presently, carving its way through cyclists and
pedestrians and causing a large truck to brake savagely with a roar of
its horn, a very ancient faded jade green Ford Prefect went by. Dorothy
Fitzmaurice was driving.  Edward sat next to her, sunk on the broken
springs of his seat so the handle of his stick was under his chin.
Once they were out of sight I turned back to Jimmy and Dave.

"Is this going to cost?"  I asked.  "I've bugger all cash on me.  But
if there's a cash-machine at the airport..."

"No prob.  There's a spare seat.  Buy us a tube when we get there,

OK?"

"Cool," I said.  It seemed to be the right thing to say.

"Might as well push off then.  The airstrip's on the edge of town, not
more than ten minutes walk.  OK?"

"Fine."  I didn't risk another 'cool', I didn't want them to think I
was taking the piss.

"Anyway, seems you travel light," remarked Jim (let's decide this was
Jim), nodding at my ASDAbag.

They stood up, and Dave dropped a handful of notes on the table.

"Show on the road," he said.

I damn near got myself dropped out of the Beaver, which turned out to
be a high-wing monoplane with fixed landing gear, and a heavy,
fat-looking body.  They'd cleared out six of the eight passenger seats
at the back to make room for freight, and I was sitting up front behind
them, looking over their shoulders.  Their equipment was an
idiosyncratic mixture of the old and new: for instance, they wore
leather helmets with goggles framed in spongy rubber pushed up on their
foreheads, but also tiny earphones and stalk mikes, as used by the
likes of Madonna.  They gave me a set so we could chat easily above the
racket of the single bull-nosed engine in front of us.

Anyway, once we were up I popped the potentially offensive question.

"Are you friends of Dorothy..."  at which point I realised what I'd
done, so the rest came out rather lamely, "... and Edward.
Fitzmaurice."

There was a pause while they assessed the possible but unintended
sub-text of my question, then Dave answered.

"Yeah, we know them.  Not well, but they did take us up their pad one
day for a meal.  Leg of Tommy.  It had got under their fencing and was
browsing the coffee bushes, so Eddie bagged it.  Dot fixed it up like
it was lamb with red currant jelly and sprouts, but it was pretty gamey
for lamb."

"OK, though," said Jimmy.

"Oh sure, it was OK.  Danny was with us on that trip."

Again that lurch in my diaphragm and the stab of loss.  I looked out of
the window for a moment.  We were crossing the Great Rift Valley from
west to east, the great escarpments that lay between us and Nairobi
were in front of us, green and rocky, but beneath us the plain looked
flat with patches of sparse acacia forest and ruler straight roads. The
only life I could see in that short glimpse was what I took to be a
herd of zebra, wheeling, shifting and coalescing as something, possibly
a lion, disturbed them.  They looked like tiny ants, their shapes
distorted from above by their own shadows.  I turned back to peer over
the Ozzies' shoulders.

"You knew Danielle, then?"

"Sure.  If we were a regular airline we'd have given her frequent flyer
status."

We rumbled on through the sky.

"She used you a lot then?"

"Right on.  Often as not we could give her a lift dead cheap, because
we were headed the way she wanted to go anyway, but that's not the
reason she used us."

"No?"  I tried to give the word an enquiring, why-don't-you-carry-on
sort of an inflection.  They responded to it.  Turn and turn about.

"As long as the flight was internal there was no documentation
necessary, no evidence she had been where she went.  And of course if
the ground is flat and any big stones have been cleared, we can get
down almost anywhere.  And that suited her too."

"She did a lot of looking into aid agency fraud, and that meant getting
right into the outback so she could check just what was getting
through, and what got hijacked on the way."

"None of that made her best friends with everybody.  Once when we were
carrying her out of an aid distribution centre where she'd been
checking manifests against what got to the front-line, we got shot at.
We'll show you the patches when we land."

"Yeah, but that was up near the Sudanese border where people shoot at
you as a matter of course."

The ground below us seemed to soar up towards us as we left the plain.
I could see the main Nairobi road hair pinning up what looked like a
vertical face though it supported thick vegetation.  It was busy with
big trucks spewing black smoke, safari buses and matatus.  I hauled in
breath to ask the next question.

"Do you know what happened to her?"

For a brief moment we passed through a patch of rain cloud streaming
droplets streaked across the cockpit windows and a chill grey shadow
filled the cabin.

"Nope!"

"No idea."

It was like closing the lid on a box.  Then we were in sunlight
again.

Five minutes later the wings above our heads tipped to the right as
Dave put us on the bearing that would take us to

Nairobi and a loop of webbing, no more than ten inches of it, slipped
from a rack above my head.  I looked up.  Dull blueish dark matt steel.
A barrel perforated with regular rows of holes, a simple metal butt
made by three struts welded in a triangle, a magazine that stuck out at
right angles so it protruded and lay against the roof.  And the webbing
sling.  I had no idea at the time, but I've checked since.  Sterling
sub machinegun.  And, as I've already said, like nearly all weapons of
its type, nine millimetre.

"The rack for it was already there."  Jimmy was peering at me round the
back of his seat.  "What we're in was used by the SAS in the Yemen.
Christ knows how it got on to the open market but it did.  We picked
the gun up south of Addis from a guy who'd lost his head to a mortar
shell.  Since we had the place to put it, seemed silly not to take
it."

He turned back, but went on speaking.

"You got your passport?"

I patted my jacket.  Wallet still there.

"Yes."

"And valid plastic?"

"Yes."

"Righty.  Now we can't land at Jomo Kenyatta International because our
flight-plan doesn't have us coming in from abroad.  So we'll be landing
at Wilson.  We'll put you in a matatu for Kenyatta.  Once you're there
try the BA desk first, then, if they're booked out, Kenyan Airlines.
Once you've got your ticket stay put.  Don't leave the airport.  Might
even be worth hiding there until boarding time.  You know, like lock
yourself in the bog."

Dave chipped in.

"We're going down now.  ETA ten minutes.  Fasten your seat belt. Jimmy,
see if you can raise air traffic control at Wilson.  Take a look to
your left, Kit.  Mt.  Kenya, not often you see her without her clothes
on."

No clouds or mist, he meant.  And from our height dominating the
rolling, hilly plateau, and lesser ranges,

surprisingly green after the Rift Valley, like a big woman lying on her
side, the thrust of her hip and shoulder forming the peaks, all of a
hundred and fifty miles away.

Chapter Twenty-One

They thrust a handful of shillings in my hand in case I didn't have
enough, and then pushed me into the leading matatu at the head of the
queue.

"What about that beer?"  I cried.

"Another time, Kit, another time."

"I owe you."

"Don't give it a thought, mate."

The matatu lurched off, side door still open, couple of guys leaning
out with their outer arms over their heads, clutching the roof rack.

That was when I learnt a minibus built to seat a maximum of nine people
including the driver can carry twenty-seven.  I was perched on the edge
of a seat, with ASDA in my lap, a big woman in a robe and turban
pressing her huge hot thigh against mine, and my knees poking out into
the gangway where they knocked the black curly head of a four-year-old
urchin.  I was in culture shock straight away.  The crowds, the rush,
above all the noise.

The route was a dog-leg and on the angle twelve people got out and
thirteen got in.  Somehow a very thin adolescent boy squeezed through
between everyone, collecting our fares.  He clutched a sheaf of notes
in his left hand in a peculiar interweaving, interlocking grip which
presumably made it impossible to snatch them.  The van half-emptied
again as we passed the last of the factories and workshops that lined
the dual carriage way to the airport.  None of these people were on
their way there to fly, I guessed.  Flyers go by taxi, hotel shuttle,
or chauffered limo.

Why wasn't I in a taxi?  The answer came to me and set off a few
questions with it.  In a taxi I could have changed my mind and headed
back into town.  At least in a matatu I was sure to get to Kenyatta.
And that's where Jimmy and David wanted me.  At Kenyatta International
and then safe on a plane back to Blighty.  Why?  Out of concern for my
personal safety?  Or was there more to it than that?  Whose side they
were on suddenly became a more complicated question than I had
previously thought.  How many sides were there?  How many conflicting
interests involved?

But already the matatu was emptying in a bay on the side of the huge
inner circle of the two that make up the main buildings of the airport.
These are concentric.  In the centre are the main administrative
buildings; the departure and arrival areas make up the outer perimeter
and are linked to the centre by two enclosed bridges corridors inside
one of which Holly and I had trundled our bags following our arrival
from Mombasa.  The six-lane carriage way between, a vast roundabout, is
edged with parking lots and bays leading out and back on to the main
road, giving the whole complex from the air the shape of a giant
key-hole.  I found my way into the main block, a huge space beneath a
girdered ceiling with the usual banks, offices, check-in points and so
on and found my way to the BA desk.  Nice black lady in the usual dark
blue dress filled with tiny red and white triangles and an accent
straight out of Benenden.

"You are too late for the morning flight, sir, but there is
availability on tonight's flight.  Take off is twenty-two twenty-five,
arrival at Heathrow five fifteen local time.  Shall I book you in on
that one?  Club class or standard?  Will you be paying cash, cheque or
credit card?  Visa?  That will be fine, sir.  Could I see your
passport?  Perfect..."  And so on.  While she went through it all I
caught sight of myself in an angled strip of mirror glass above her
counter.  Christ, I thought.  Clothes crumpled, dirty with a tear in
one knee from where I'd tumbled into a dry riverbed the day before, or
maybe it had happened when I was tipped out of the basket of that
bloody balloon, stub bled jaw, and a torn ASDA bag for luggage.  And on
top of it all my shapeless fedora.  I looked like shit, a Bin Laden
hoplite with my shoes filled with the other sort of plastic.  I'd even
picked up enough sun-tan to be taken for an Arab.  Or Indiana Jones?
Perhaps not.

"There we are then.  Check in at twenty fifty-five.  Have a good
flight."

I looked at my watch.  I didn't believe what it said.  I checked a
digital display at the top of the departure board.  It agreed.  Eleven
thirty-two.  Left the Maasai village in Elisha's truck at, say, half
seven.  Met the Fitzmaurices and Jimmy and Dave at half eight.  In the
air by a quarter to ten, maybe earlier.  Flying just over an hour.
Matatu and messing about here for another forty minutes.  OK, eleven
thirty-two could, after all be right.  So.  Was I going to hide in the
men's bog for nine hours?  No, I was not.

I pushed my wallet and ticket into my inside pocket and looked around
for a seat, found one of those high stools at the counter of a
functional coffee-bar, ordered a coffee.  For a moment I felt dizzy and
nearly fell off.  Exhausted, still aching in just about every joint and
other places too, I suddenly realised I was very hungry.  I ordered a
cheese roll to go with the coffee.  It was like cheese rolls used to be
on British Rail back when I was a student.  A good honest lump of soft
white stodge with a sliver of yellow plastic in the middle.  None of
your imitation Pret a Manger with a crust that can damage your denture
and sets you back two quid fifty.  All the same, coffee and roll took
almost my last shillings, or rather Jimmy's, and I looked around for an
ACM.  Looked like there was one over in a glassed in portakabin sort of
an affair in the middle of the concourse with the good old Barclays
livery.  I ate a little, drank a little, and, since I found I was
incapable of thought, let my feelings speak to me instead.

Danny, never ceasing to be an aching loss; Vincey, had he known he was
sending me into the arms of Baseball Cap and the AFI hoods?  That his
apparent effort to save me would have killed me if I had known about
the sun, and the equator and all that shit?  Golly.  Where had he
really sprung from?

Sent to find me by the Fitzmaurices or Danny herself?  And Jimmy and
Dave?  What was their angle?  Who else?  Why Holly, of course, Ludwig
Holly who apparently had got me into this fine mess in the first place.
Holly.  Who knew as much about it all as anyone and lived in Nairobi,
and I had his address and a good nine hours I could use to find him in.
Right.  Better than spending the time sitting on a loo seat.

I slid off my stool and headed for the ACM.  Out of order.  Try window
number one.  There were three people in line in front of me, and
another twenty minutes went by.  Passport?  Yes.  Barclaycard, Visa?
Yes.  Other form of identification?  Would you believe it but I
actually had my driving licence in my wallet?  How much do you want?
Remember you'll have a hell of a job changing shillings back to
sterling in the UK.  OK.  Fifty pounds worth.  Five thousand shillings.
Sign here and here and here, and take these papers to window six. Again
the same three in front of me, one of them just walking away with a
grin on his face and a wad of notes in his hand.  Another fifteen
minutes, and there I was liquidity restored.

Was I really going to try and find Holly?  Put myself back in the
firing-line?  Risk another thumping or worse?  I walked towards the
sunlight at the end of the hall, stopped, turned back.  That poor cat
i' the adage, how I knew how it felt!  Then, shit, I thought, I owe
myself this much to know why, even just a little bit of why, I'd been
put through all this in what, five?  Six days?  I was still trying to
add up how many nights since Danny and I and the Masters of the
Universe had been gorging ourselves on meat at the Carnivore when I
reached the taxi rank and joined the queue.  It moved quickly, quick
enough to prevent me from letting I dare not wait upon I would.

It was an old Merc but the driver had all his bases covered.  Hung from
his rear-view mirror the beads that tick off the thirty-three Names of
Allah jostled with a miniature leaf-shaped shield with two crossed
spears behind it.  Our Lady of

Lourdes waved a hand at us from her little plinth super glued to the
top of the dash.  His name was Al.  A stick-on plastic label fixed just
below the statuette read "Call me Al' (cue for song?).  I guessed it
didn't apply to the BVM.  The fact that Al was in his late fifties,
with short-cropped curly white hair and a happy grin, was even more
reassuring.  No doubt his even, easy-going temperament, as well as
sheer skill, was why he had survived in a high risk job.  I stuck my
head through his window and handed him Holly's card.  He scratched his
head, frowned.  I thought perhaps because he did not know the street,
but in fact he had another reason for wondering at the card, which, for
the time being, and not wanting to lose a fare, he kept to himself.

"Maybe near Jomo Kenyatta University," I suggested.

"That's what I figured," he said.  "Off Thika Road, the A2.  Get in.
Cost you two thousand."

"That's a lot.  How about one big one?"

"I can't do it for less than seventeen and a half."

"Fifteen?"

"Try the guy behind me."

"OK.  Seventeen and a half."

I got in beside him.  His grin was Cheshire Cat size now.

He cruised at the speed of the traffic, elbow on the sill of his open
window, finger-touch control on the power assisted, Sportsman clamped
between the nicotine-stained fingers of the other hand.  We reached the
junction where a left would take us back to Wilson, and went straight
on, heading for the centre.  Traffic thickened, decibels mounted,
driver behaviour went through neurotic until the needle hovered on
psychotic.  Al chucked his Sportsman he needed both hands now, one to
steer, one to give the finger to matatu drivers who tried to cut him
up.  He pushed a tape cassette that was sticking out of his player
right in.  Bouncy Afro pop.

Jambo, jambo bwana, Habari gani ?  Mzuri sana

Wageni, mwakaribishzva, Kenya yetu... Welcome, welcome man!  How are
you?  Very well thank you.  Tourists, you are welcome, To our Kenya.

"National anthem," said Al.  "Better than the real one, let me tell
you."

I'll bet he plays it to all the new airport arrivals I thought.  We
stop-started down Uhuru with the Central Park on our left, crossed the
big intersection at Kenyatta Avenue, the crossing where I had risked my
life a century or so ago, and then been mugged.  The groups of thin men
chasing out the loneliness of dying with cigarettes and cheap or home
brewed booze still haunted the park and I caught a glimpse of the
Serena above its groomed hedges.  Al's fingers drummed on the rim of
the steering wheel for a moment in time to the beat and then quite
suddenly he killed it.

"That guy whose house I'm taking you to.  He a friend of yours?"

"Sort of."

"Shame some bad guy of fed him."  He lobbed a sideways glance at me.
"You didn't know, huh?"

"No."  Oh, shit!

"It's in the paper.  Up behind the visor."

His eyes flicked up.

I pulled the Daily Nation down.  My hand shook.  PROF KILLED IN
DRIVE-BY SHOOTING was the headline.  I looked at the date.  It was two
days old, Saturday's edition.  OK, so today was Monday and Al hadn't
yet cleared out the old paper.  There was a column on the front page
and more inside.  Dr.  Ludwig Holly had been taking his usual evening
walk in the leafy streets near the Jomo Kenyatta University when he was
shot four times from a cruising black car, believed to be a ne wish
Audi.  A gardener in one of the properties bordering the road saw the
incident and gave the alarm.  His employers called for ambulance and
police both of which arrived promptly on the scene.  Dr.  Holly was
taken to the nearby Aga Khan Hospital where he was pronounced dead on
arrival.

I fumbled my way through to an inside page where there was a resume of
his recent work on genetic engineering and a brief account of his work
at Jomo Kenyatta.  And there was a separate piece that speculated as to
possible motives behind the killing.  He had been researching the
mycoherbicides genetically modified to attack Cannabis saliva and it
was possible therefore that his murder was drug-related.

"Snake Park up there on the right."

"Snake Park?"

"Like a zoo, but snakes only."

He took us round a couple of roundabouts and up a short hill.  Suddenly
the A2 was clear of the city and slicing a rather classy suburb
instead.  Danny had driven us down this road when we left Nairobi for
Mt.  Kenya and Samburu.  Villas in late colonial twenties style sat in
lush gardens where sprinklers played and spacious trees carried
tropical blossom.  Then again it went slightly down-market with roads
on a grid serving smaller, more modern bungalows in smaller gardens. We
passed a sign for Jomo Kenyatta University, campus, residences,
departments of this and that, and then took a left into one of the side
roads.  Al slowed, and watched the numbers go by.

"This is it."  And he pulled into the kerb.

I sighed, clenched my fists, unclenched them.

"You know," I said, "I'm not sure there's a lot of point now.  It's
sure to be all locked up."

"Up to you, boss."

"Maybe I'll just have a look around.  Would you mind waiting?  I won't
be long, and then you can take me back to the airport."

I put the ASDA bag on the floor, swung my feet over it.  As I got out
Al pushed the cassette back in and lit up a Sportsman.

Hakuna matata Kenyainchinzuri Hakuna matata

No problem.  Kenya is the lovely country.  No problem.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Holly's road was an up market version of the swathe of bungalows that
circles Bournemouth like a boa constrictor -his was squat, four sided,
had a pyramidal tile roof, meagre metal framed windows, a front door
set behind a built-on porch.  But this was Africa, a well-watered bit
only miles from the equator but high above sea-level, and Africa
asserted itself with shrubs whose huge flowers pulsed with colour and
the fluttering of butterfly wings as big as the palm of your hand.
There was a pair of lemon trees in front of the porch with clumps of
star-shaped white flowers and some green fruit too, and a hybrid
weeping jacaranda whose last blooms had not quite formed into black
pods like the ones down on Uhuru but still trailed swags of fading
flowers, pale lilac, like wist aria  A group of sun birds probing the
lush green grass of the lawn with thin curved beaks, splendid sun birds
(the epithet is part of their proper name), the males with purple
masks, green capes, and rich bluey-black under-parts, skimmed the top
of the shrubbery on flickering wings, and presumably landed next
door.

You get a sense, in my line of business, that a house is empty when it
is or you think you do.  There's something blind about the windows, the
doors give off a sort of dormancy as if they can't be bothered to open.
I walked down each side, using a laid path of concrete flags, looking
as well as I could through the windows.  The first side was utilities,
frosted glass for separate bathroom and loo; a smaller high window,
also with a ventilator brick near it, which probably indicated a larder
or store-room.  The next, the back of the house, was two bedrooms with
Venetian blinds, but the slats half open.  Neither large, one with a
double bed, the other with a single.  The covering on the single had
not been pulled back, and the pillow was awry, so I guessed this was
the one

Holly had used.  A dark mirror reflected what I took to be shadows.

Then up the other side: just one room, his study.  I found I was
looking at the back of an Apple-Mac on the desk under the window, and
what was probably a combined fax, telephone and scanner.  Filing trays.
A small printer.  Behind, seen only dimly, bookcases and filing
cabinets.  I reckoned that was the room I had to get into.

Back now to the front.  One window looked into a living room with a
zebra pattern sofa, which could, seeing this was Kenya, have been real
zebra hide, a faux fireplace with a print above it of the painting you
see the world over of elephants coming out of a forest, room-divider
with shelves, adding up to the ambience of a room designed and
furnished to please no one and offend no one.  In short, a residence
for transient or visiting professors and the like.

The front door in its porch opened, I guessed, into the one room I
hadn't seen, a kitchen-diner.  The door's upper panel was frosted
glass, and there was a Yale above a dead-lock mortice.  The Yale I
could have managed, Pis do have some skills, but not the mortice. There
was also a cat-flap.  I've used cat-flaps in the past, that is got an
arm in and a hand on an inside handle, but again the mortice would
defeat me.  There was also a yellow band of gaffer tape printed with
the words "Kenya Police, Do NOT Enter', and the same in Swahili, acting
as a seal.  Not much really, considering the guy had been murdered
three days earlier, but then this wasn't the actual SOC.

I gave it all some thought.  I remembered Holly.  Jolly, even
easy-going in his way.  Academic.  This, I thought, is a guy, living on
his own, who could well lose his keys, or close the door leaving them
inside, and people like that leave a set hidden outside.  There was no
garage, just an empty drive-in, but there was a small garden shed at
the back.  It was padlocked.  No it wasn't.  There was a standard hasp
with a padlock on it, but the two screws securing the hasp were loose,
just pushed into their holes.  Inside there were a few garden tools and
an electric mower.  There was also a narrow strip of timber above the
door, making a ledge.  I ran my hand along it and -bingo!  The very two
keys I was looking for on a conventional sprung ring, no tag, plus a
small one which I reckoned could be for the mail-box at the end of the
short drive.

I went back on to the road, round to Al's window.  He had the radio on
now: news in English, Dubya and the White House not so much rattling
sabres at Saddam as loosening them in their scabbards.

"I think I can get in after all," I said.  "Can you give me half an
hour?"

He grinned up at me through the smoke of his cigarette.

"With the meter running you can have anything."

"You don't have a meter."

He tapped his forehead with his finger.  He had a meter.

I went back to the door.  The keys worked all right, the door opened
easily.  No mail on the mat, the mail-box might bear a look later, I
told myself, but there was a small handful of feathers, small ones,
bright colours.  Cat.  Although I'm a birdie, if not an actual
twitcher, I'm cool about the hunting habits of domestic cats.  I'm as
likely to blame a cat for hunting birds as I am to approve shutting
birds up in cages.  I paused and sniffed, listened too.  The air was
stale but no unpleasant smells.  There was a hum which I took to be a
fridge-freezer, and indeed it cut out almost straight away.  And almost
immediately the cat flap clicked and a lean but healthy looking tabby
brushed herself against my shins and miaowed.  I know cat language: she
was pleased to see me but expected to be fed.  I knew I'd get no peace
from her until I'd seen to that, so I moved through into the kitchen
area.  It had the usual appliances but in small, not the family, sizes.
I quickly located dried cat food in an eye-level cupboard and an opened
but covered tin of Whiskas in the fridge.  Like I say, I know cats, so
I had to wash up her saucers before putting the food in them. She went
on pushing her head against my trousers as I did all this, then, when I
put the saucers down, gave each one a sniff without touching them, and
was off out again through the flap.  Cats.  You have to like a man who
looks after his cat, and I suddenly felt a stab of loss.

Time now to attend to less important matters.  I went to Holly's study,
stood on the threshold, and let myself attune to the room before going
properly in.  Here, partly because it filled quite a large space back
from the small window, the ceiling seemed lower, the light darker.  I
sniffed, detected nothing unusual, not even the slight mustiness of a
room where the air had not moved for a day or two.  Today was a Monday,
Holly had been shot on the Friday.  However, I sensed someone had been
there since then.  Well, you'd expect the police to have at least had a
look.  I glanced over the carpet, plain oatmeal but with a kilim
between the office chair and the bookcases that lined the back wall, to
make sure there was nothing visible there I should check out before
walking on it.  There were scuff marks and a ruck in the kilim that
suggested the last thing that had happened there was that it had been
cleaned with a vacuum cleaner.  Why?  Forensic?  So they could analyse
the dust?  I recalled that Komen, and others too no doubt, had been to
Henley Police College.  But, as I have already pointed out, this was
not a SOCA step or two further in so I could look the desk over, and
the shelves and surfaces on my side of it, and I began to pick up signs
that the whole room had had a very thorough but professional
going-over.  For instance, there was a pair of soapstone owls on a
bookshelf which had been left an inch too close together and off
centre.  There was a small open cabinet containing small piles of
stationery, envelopes in two sizes, a ream of copy paper, a smaller
pile of textured letter paper, adhesive labels and so on.  All were
neatly aligned except for the copy paper which was slightly askew.  And
so on.  No need to itemise but I was sure the room had been searched
thoroughly and with everything touched returned to its proper place.
I'm a PI.  Trust me.

Well, a guy's been murdered, you look through his files and documents
for clues.  Fair enough.  But I got this feeling someone had gone to
excessive trouble to make it look as though there had not been a search
at all.  I went a bit further.  There were box-files on the bottom
shelf of his bookcase and, lo and behold, they were all empty, I mean
emptied, and the hanging files in his filing cabinet, ditto.  They
would have needed a small van to take it all away assuming they had all
been full.  But why take the contents as it were, but not the
containers?  To convince the casual eye at least that it was all as
Holly had left it.  And why do that?  Not because you were looking for
clues as to why he had been murdered, but because you didn't want
anyone else to find them, or know you'd taken them.  And why do that?
Because, possibly, you were the murderer.

I pinched myself, metaphorically.  Time to get back to what was hard
fact and leave speculation to later.  Time to get down to the computer.
Although it was an Apple Mac the main system was the Microsoft Works
Suite 2000.  No passwords.  Why should there be?  Holly lived alone,
locked up behind him pretty securely.  However, I already knew he was
the sort of guy who left a spare set of keys in a fairly obvious hiding
place.  The sort of guy therefore who might not trust himself not to
forget a password.  So, via My Documents, getting into his virtual
files and folders was as easy as getting into his real ones had been.
Personal Correspondence, Household Accounts, Department Accounts, Tax
all that sort of thing seemed normal and as it should be, but it was a
different story as soon as I got into files labelled with Roman
numerals and small groups of numbers, and three boldly labelled AFI1,
2, and 3. They were empty.  As empty as his hard files.

I pushed back the high-backed black leather executive chair I was by
then sitting in and looked out of the window over the top of the
monitor.  Something much like an English blackbird from the sound of it
was repeating ad nauseam its warning cry from a tulip tree.  Cat was
probably mosying through the herbaceous below.  I glanced at my watch.
I gave Al outside a thought.  Would I have enough shillings for him at
this rate?  Well, tough if I didn't he'd just have to accept my fifty
quids worth.  I doubted if he made as much on a normal day.

Why empty the files?  If the police wanted to go through the lot they
could have, would have, taken the whole computer, hard disc and all. Or
they could have copied what they thought relevant to floppies and taken
them, but if they had, why wipe the masters?  There was only one
explanation that I could think of.  The same as the one I had already
arrived at regarding the paperwork.  Whoever done it did it, not
because they thought all of it would help them in their enquiries, but
because they didn't want the material to be seen by anyone else.  From
which, once again, it might not be a wild jump of the imagination to
guess that the same people might have been responsible for the drive-by
shooting.

The real nerds say they can find anything in a computer that's ever
been there, but that's a skill I sub-contract for.  However, I knew a
wrinkle or two yet that might help.  Back to Desktop, arrow on Internet
Explorer, give it a moment or two, AOL, Favourites, the usual, Google,
Yahoo, Amazon, and so forth, and six websites with similar sounding
addresses, like I mean they suggested the same subject area, things
like mycoherbicide.net, bhotech-monitor.nl, sunshine-project.org.  I
noted them down and then switched to History and got a similar set of
pointers.  Of course you'd expect a microbiologist to be looking at
that sort of stuff, but after I had accessed three in a row a pattern
was emerging.  They were not just sites to do with genetic engineering
and herbicides, they were anti the whole technology.  And there was one
which actually quoted a study done in Mexico on a GM corn growing area,
by a certain Doctor Ludwig Holly, showing contamination in neighbouring
crops.  And that gave me an idea.

I went back to Google, typed in Ludwig Holly.

"OK," I said to myself, quietly, but aloud, "let's see what else you
got up to."

"I shouldn't, if I were you," a voice behind me murmured.

"Fuck," I said without turning round.  And then: "Have a man come in
with a gun.  It's Vincey, isn't it?  Mr.  Leo Vincey?"

Chapter Twenty-Three

And so it was.  And he did have a gun.  I swung Holly's chair round to"
face him.  He came right into the room, his height making the ceiling
look even lower, pulled the spare tubular-framed chair in from the wall
against the end of the desk and sat in it.  I turned to face him.  He
put the gun down on the desktop (real, not virtual) and rested his
elbow on it with his right hand only inches from the pistol.  It was
small, black, and I could make out the G logo close to the muzzle which
said it was a Glock.  Lots of things were bothering me, but for the
moment professional chagrin was uppermost.

"How did you get in without my hearing you?"  I asked.

He grinned.

"I was here all the time.  I heard you arrive, got into the bedroom
before you got in, I was standing against the wall with the window in
it so you didn't see me when you went past outside.  I could see you in
the mirror.  Which means you should have been able to see me in it too,
but I was in pretty deep shadow."

So much for all that guff about sensing a house is empty before going
in.  I really should have checked the whole place out before committing
myself to the study.

"You had your own keys?"

"Ludwig's.  The set you found were spares."

I thought about it.

"The police let you have them?"

"OK, Shovelin.  That's enough.  From now on I'll ask the questions."

"What gives you the right, the authority to do that?"

He sighed and his grey eyes hardened a little.  Somewhat awkwardly,
because he wasn't going to move his right hand from its place by the
gun on the desktop, he used his left to extract a small leather fold
from an inside pocket.  He pushed it across to me.  I picked it up,
opened it.  On one side, under plastic, a round seal, with a brown and
white stylised eagle flying across a blue sky above a green hill.  In
the top half of the white border U.S. Department of Justice and in the
bottom half Drug Enforcement Administration.  On the other side an ID,
small, but incorporating a hologram of the badge and a scanned
photograph of Vincey.

"And this is valid in Kenya?"  I asked.  Sort of sarcastic, as if I
meant it to hurt.

"The local police are co-operating with us."  Then his voice hardened.
"Don't fuck with me, Shovelin."

I shrugged, broke eye contact, turned back to the screen.  Google had
come up with seven hundred and eighty-two references to Ludwig Holly.
The third or fourth one down had the heading: "American Scientist
attacks DEA policy..."

Vincey snaked out a hand, took the mouse, double-clicked on 'close'.

I re-established eye-contact, tried to make myself sound hard.

"Did Ludwig know you were DEA?"

My left forearm and hand were lying, sort of casually, along the desk
below the computer keyboard.  I was leaning back in the chair trying my
damnedest to appear a hell of a lot cooler than I felt.  The bastard
picked up his Glock by the muzzle and, quick as a snake, smashed the
knuckles of my left hand very hard indeed with the butt.  I think I've
already said somewhere that I wear more rings than most men do.  Above
my wedding ring, which I keep on, I had a gold ring I had bought at the
Turtle Paradise Shoreline Boutique.  It had little elephants walking
round between two hoops of gold.  Vincey smashed it into the
metacarpals of my fourth finger, crushing, well anyway splintering, a
bone.

I didn't know this at the time but the pain, which came a half second
after the blow, had me bent double and howling.

Vincey then got my attention back on him by swiping my cheek with the
barrel.  Through what followed I could feel blood leaking down my jowl
and on to my collar, then inside the collar too.

"I meant it," he said, "when I told you from now on I ask the
questions."

"That fucking hurt," I whined eventually, once I'd got the howling
under control.  "It still fucking hurts."

I felt angry in a fuck-you-too sort of way as well as hurt and
frightened.  Bugger it if he shoots me, I thought.  It will be a
mercy-killing if he does.  I got myself out of the chair, went back
into the kitchen, turned on the cold tap and let it run while I used my
right hand to pull an ice tray out of the freezer compartment of the
fridge.  At this point, I suppose out of impatience rather than
sympathy, he took it from me, poured water on the back of the tray,
caught the falling cubes and wrapped them in a dish towel which he
handed me.  I wrapped it round my left hand and then put the whole
bundle under the tap.  It helped a bit.  Not a lot.  I sat down on a
stool beside the short breakfast counter and looked up at him.

He looked down at me, decided with a twitch of his lips that could have
been a sneer that I was not going to cause any more trouble and
holstered the Glock in his armpit.  He was wearing a lightweight check
jacket, the check rather louder and larger than I would have considered
tasteful.

"You told us you posted some film cassettes for Danielle Newman," he
began.  "Those were intercepted.  But since then you have met known
associates of Miss Newman, particularly a Mr.  and Mrs.  Fitzmaurice.
They passed on to you more material from Miss Newman.  You're going to
tell me what you have done with it."

"Oh shit," I said.  And the reason why was that though I had received
nothing important from the Fitzmaurices, I had from Golly the night
before.  The memory card in Danny's slipper.  And it was in the ASDA
bag.  And the ASDA bag was still in Call-me-Al's Merc.

He signalled a question mark with his blond eyebrows.

"Neither Mr.  or Mrs.  Fitzmaurice gave me anything... No, I tell a
lie," I went on.  "They bought me a Coke.  That's all."  I sighed,
genuine, deep anxiety welling up from my chest as I contemplated what
might happen next.  "And you're not going to believe me."

I was right.  He did something that was not only very painful, but
extremely humilating too.  Quite simply his right hand flashed out
across the small space between us, and, through my trousers and all,
got hold of my dick and my balls and both yanked and squeezed with
ferocious determination.  Remember, I was sitting on the edge of a
small stool, so it wasn't difficult for him to do this.

"You fucking bastard," I squealed, and flailed out at him with both
hands.  He blocked them neatly with his forearms, then as the twisted
rag and ice cubes fell away from my left hand, caught the already very
swollen finger and bent it back in such a way that I was forced down on
to my knees in front of him.

"I think," he said, "that the Fitzmaurices gave you a memory card
compatible with the Fuji digital camera Newman used.  And I think you
might well still have it on you.  Jacket!"  And he held out his hand.

No 'please' you notice, so for a second or so I didn't get what he
wanted.

"Jacket.  Off!"

Now I got it.  It wasn't easy.  I had to pull the cuff of the left
sleeve with my right hand very carefully over my damaged finger.

First he went through the pockets.  He found my wallet, my passport and
my air-ticket, which he had a good look at.  Then he patted my jacket
all over, which was silly because it was unlined.

"Trousers."

I hesitated, decided I didn't like the look in his eye, and managed to
get them off by loosening the belt, letting them drop, and then doing a
sort of grape-crusher's dance till they came clear.  A handful of
Kenyan shillings in bank notes from the back pocket, some dust and bits
of dried grass from where only forty-eight hours earlier I had been
rolling about in the Masai Mara, while people who were presuambly this
guy's allies were dropping bombs on me, were the total of his catch.

He sighed.

"Shoes and socks."

That left underpants briefs.

Yes, once he'd drawn a blank with the shoes and socks he wanted those
too.

"Oh, come o-o-on!"  I cried.

He gave me that grin again, full of the kick he was getting out of the
way I hurt, the way I was at his mercy, the way he could do what he
liked with me and, as I slipped my underpants down to my ankles and
stepped out of them, that anger came back.  It was like an electrical
surge blowing fuses of self-preservation, and carrying like a surfer on
its crest the sudden realisation that he really badly wanted that
memory card and what he would do to me to get it could not include
killing me.  Not, at any rate, until after he had got it.  In short, I
could take risks.  He was preoccupied too.  One hand holding my pants
between finger and thumb, the other at his ear with a tiny cell-phone
in his palm.

"Colonel?"  he was saying.  "I'm at Holly's house.  And just like I
said he would, Shovelin turned up.  He doesn't have the memory card,
but he does have an air ticket for the BA flight which leaves JKIA at
twenty-two twenty-five.  I guess he knows more than he's told me so
far.  Sure.  I'll bring him in.  Give me half an hour."

I was standing, bollock-naked, with the fridge between us.  The small
freezer compartment was at eye-level, above the fridge cabinet.
Exaggerating the embarrassment I felt, I sort of twisted away so I was
beyond the fridge and the space in front of it was empty.  As he came
forward I got the fingers of my right hand into the spongy rubber
air-tight seal of the freezer door and swung it into his face as hard
as I could.  Which wasn't very hard.  But it knocked his head back
while his foot was still leading forward.  His foot landed on the cat's
saucer, which shot forward under it, spraying the untouched cat food,
and the combination of door and saucer dumped him on his backside. From
getting out the ice-tray earlier I already knew there was a small lump
of frozen meat wrapped in cling-film it turned out to be a
half-shoulder of lamb in the freezer compartment and as he came up off
the floor I hit his head with it as hard as I could.  He sat down
again, shook his head, pushed with one hand on the floor to get himself
up while his other hand brushed blindly along the breakfast counter
behind him, looking for the Glock.  That gave me time to open the
fridge door and take a bottle of South African Chablis by the neck from
the door rack.  I hit him with it far harder than I had hit him with
the lamb.  The bottle broke, spilling wine and shards of glass all over
him, and this time he stayed down.

I reached over him and took the Glock.  Then I rescued my clothes from
the floor.  There was wine on my knickers, not a lot, and I had to
shake them out carefully to make sure there was no glass as well, and,
keeping an eye on him struggled back into them, and then all the rest.
It took me about ten minutes, including doing up the shoe-laces more or
less one-handed.  Plenty of time for reflection.  But it was all a bit
incoherent, unconnected.

Had Ludwig known this guy was in the DEA?  Was there any point in
taking the Glock with me to the airport?  No.  I put it down again. Was
Al still waiting for me?  What the fuck was all this about, anyway? I
was hurting where had Ludwig kept his pain-killers?  This last of
course was the only question I found an answer to there and then a
packet of Solpadeine in the bathroom cabinet.  I took four (recommended
dose two only, do not exceed) and put the rest in my pocket.  While I
was there I caught sight of my face in the cabinet mirror.  Not a
pretty sight.  I wiped the thickening blood off my cheek and watched it
well up again in the gash he'd left.  I managed to stem it with a
Band-Aid, also taken from the cabinet.

At that moment I heard a crash from the kitchen, a serious crash.  A
moment or two later I was able to work out that he'd come to, tried to
get up, couldn't, opened the fridge door, tried to use it as a crutch
and had brought the whole lot down in front of him.

I looked around for a weapon.  Fucking Glock was in the kitchen.  There
was a glass shelf, greenish with bevelled edges, below the cabinet.  I
tried to lift it off its brackets it wouldn't come.  Fear gave me
strength.  I struck up at it from below with my right fist wrapped in a
towel and one end, one bracket, came loose.  I was able then to tear
the whole thing off the wall just as he came into the doorway behind
me.  The first I saw of him was his face in the cabinet mirror.

His face was ashen, his film-star good looks ruined, blood slipped down
one cheek from a scalp wound the bottle had made, and was forming a big
puce-coloured splash over the checks that covered his padded shoulder.
More blood from his nose which I'd hit with the freezer door.  He
staggered, both arms above his head, crucified in the door frame, the
Glock in his right-hand.

It went off.

Plaster from the ceiling fell about my head.

"I'm going to fucking kill you," he croaked and moved towards me.

With a double-handed back-hand I swiped the side of his head with the
glass shelf.  He toppled towards the small bath and the Glock went off
again, but this time his finger must have kept its pressure on the
trigger for it went into automatic for at least three shots.  I don't
know why it didn't kill me.  The noise was incredible, the bullets
screamed off the side of the bath, passed in front of me and smashed
tiles inches from my chest.  I lifted the glass shelf above my head and
brought it down on his as hard as I could just as he straightened his
legs and slid his back up the wall above the bath.  This time the glass
broke.  He caught the shower curtain in a reflexive grip as he went
down and that of course fell about him too.

And again he stayed down.

I thought: maybe I've killed him.  Or at any rate, since he was
breathing in quick, irregular, shallow gasps, maybe he'll die later. At
all events, this time he was staying down and I'd make sure he did.

A bit more rooting about turned up a roll of gaffer tape in a kitchen
drawer and I used it to make a parcel out of Vincey.  But I didn't post
him, I just left him where he was.  By then his breathing was heavy,
sort of effortful.  Then I went back into Holly's study, sat down,
waited for my own pulse and breathing to become marginally less
convulsive, spas my

Again I found I was asking myself questions in a moronic, robotic sort
of way, like someone doing automatic writing in a trance.  What did it
all mean?  Not the riddle of the Universe, but why all this fuss about
testing mycoherbicides genetically modified to be Cannabis saliva
specific?  Surely it wasn't that big a deal?  Not even with a
specialist like Ludwig Holly weighing in against the project.  I was
familiar enough with the territory to know that for every scientist who
speaks out against GM, the people who are developing it can find five
stooges who will say it's OK, carry on Dr.  Frankenstein, you're doing
a great job.  Then I shook my aching, throbbing head, and told myself
Shovelin, you really do have more pressing problems right now, like
staying alive.

What next?  Back to the airport?  I walked out the front door, leaving
it on the catch for the moment, back on to the street and found, of
course, that Al had gone.  Where his aging Merc had been there was now
a ne wish Audi.  The one they'd used when they gunned down Holly?
Maybe.  Or maybe they had a fleet of them.  They?  I shrugged, went
back in, thinking to find the car keys on Vincey.

I found them quickly enough in his jacket pocket, decided again that
carrrying a pistol round an international airport was asking for
trouble so left it with him, and then took one last look round the
Holly residence.  I felt a touch sad about this.  He had been a nice
guy and one of the goodies, I reckoned.  It would be nice, I thought,
to find out just why, in particular rather than in a general way, it
had been decided that he should be offed.  Was there anything there
that might tell me, something I had overlooked?  I thought of going
back on to the Net, but reckoned that whatever was there wouldn't be
specific enough, and anyway would hardly be worth killing for since it
was already in the public domain.

I wandered fairly aimlessly through the bungalow and in the spare
bedroom cupboard found three travelling cases including the camel-hide
combination overnight and document case he'd been carrying when I first
met him in the cafe at Mombasa Departure.  The first two, a hold-all
and a rigid, were empty, but not the camel-hide.  On the top of the
main compartment there was a change of clothes, folded neatly but used.
At the bottom there was a horizontal panel sheathed in the silk that
lined the whole case, but hinged by the cloth so it could be lifted up.
And under it there was a spiral-bound notebook, ten inches by six, of
lined paper, with a glossy photograph of snow-leopard cubs on the end
boards.  The small self-adhesive price tag said it had been bought in
San Diego Zoo and had cost eleven ninety-five dollars.  Half the fifty
or so pages were filled with notes, neatly hand-written, interspersed
with figures, formulae and sketches, some of which were of plants,
others plans of plantations as far as I could judge.

Well, I thought, if I can find someone who understands all this, it
might satisfy my curiosity and even be some use.  I squeezed it into
the side pocket of my jacket, but it was a tight fit and half of it
still stuck out.  What the hell, I thought, and put it back where I had
found it and took the whole case, clothes and all.  If nothing else it
would give me a bit more cred when it came to check-in time.  After all
I was now a mess, my own clothes crumpled and dirty, splattered with
blood.  I was unshaven, wore a plaster on my cheek, and my ring finger
was so swollen the two rings had almost disappeared.  Given all that
and no luggage I would have asked me a question or two before I let me
on a long-haul international flight.

One last look around, then I slipped the catch on the Yale, threw the
mortice, and out in the street let myself into the Audi, first slinging
the camel-hide onto the passenger seat.  Just as I was about to get in,
pussy brushed up against my shin.  I gave her a rub under the chin,
thanked her for leaving her saucer where Vincey could take a skid on
it, and apologised for not being able to take her with me.

She was cool about that.  She'd get by.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Driving that Audi back through Nairobi from Jomo Kenyatta University to
Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was maybe the scariest hour in the
whole trip.  Why did I do it?  Why didn't I just go back on to the A2
and flag down a cab?  Or, for Christ's sake, phone for one from Holly's
house?  Don't ask me.  I just did it, and to begin with with a slight
sense of exhilaration.  Vorsprung durch Technik about summed it up.  I
was doing well, wasn't I?  Got the better of a killer with a gun,
nicked his wheels, was on my way home.  Not only that but I had the
memory card, I could take it to Mr.  Shapiro in Twickenham, I was a bit
of a hero really, wasn't I?

And then I remembered again.  The card was in Danny's slipper.  Danny's
slipper was in the ASDAbag, The ASDAbag was in Call-me-Al's fucking
taxi.  I was coming off the roundabout above the National Museum and
the Snake Zoo when this dawned and I almost missed the left turn for
City Centre, just made it by cutting out a packed matatu most of whose
passengers were clearly shouting abuse drowned by the discords of fifty
car and truck horns.  I really was in no state to drive.  I was worn
out, my left hand was almost useless, the overdose of Solpadeine was
kicking in, and if I bothered to think about it I was thirsty and
hungry as hell.  Five minutes later I hit a pothole as I pulled away
from the traffic lights on the crossroads by the Central Park that
almost wrenched the steering wheel from my hand and kicked the base of
my spine hard enough to remind me that it was still less than a week
since I had been beaten up on the pavement that stretched up the avenue
I was crossing.

Still, the route I had to take wasn't complicated and was tolerably
well signposted once I'd sorted out which airport I was heading for.
Soon I was clear of the city and cruising down that dual carriage way
with its hoardings, its workshops and warehouses, its small factories,
some of which appeared to be having a lunch break or were on half-time.
Men and women were walking off in groups towards the shanty towns,
others stood around in the wasteland smoking or eating food they'd
brought with them.  Then, on the right, the Nairobi National Park,
which, having see Samburu and the Masai Mara, now looked more like an
unkempt, arid Whipsnade than real veldt.  And finally, seemingly dumped
in the middle of nowhere the citadel-like complex of JKIA.  I slipped
into the first parking slot that was available, hoisted the camel-hide
out of the passenger seat, and headed for the concourse where I had
used my Visa card to draw shillings, what?  less than three hours ago.
I left the keys in the Audi's ignition and vaguely hoped someone who
could substantially improve the quality of his or her life by doing so
would nick it.  Stupid thing to do, but the stupidity lay in taking the
car in the first place.

Back in the concourse I looked at my watch.  Not yet two o'clock. Seven
hours to check-in time.  And then I went cold, clammy sick cold like
frozen meat just beginning to defrost.  I was remembering the
cell-phone call Vincey had made to some Colonel or other from Holly's
kitchen.  He'd told him I was booked on the British Airway flight that
left at ten twenty-five.  And what else?  That he'd be back...
where?... in half an hour.  And that was an hour ago.  How long would
this colonel wait before checking out why Vincey hadn't done that?  An
hour, not more.  Round about now, or even earlier, they'd be phoning
Holly's bungalow, Vincey's cell-phone.  They'd be on their way there to
find out why he wasn't answering.  They'd find Vincey, the state he was
in.  Possibly dead.  Then they'd remember I had that fucking air ticket
and they'd be down to JKIA as quick as they could with sirens switched
on.  Worse than that, they only had to turn out the guard at the
airport to look for me, they could do that before they got there
themselves.  By now I was rubber-necking like the girl in The Exorcist,
wishing I had eyes in the back of my head.  Then I

remembered Jimmy's (or was it Dave's?) advice.  Lock yourself in the
Gents.

It didn't take long to find it.  Down a short flight of concrete steps
off the concourse, ten yards of corridor with those blank, locked doors
one finds in such places, and then the usual: urinals, cubicles, wet
tiled floors, strip lighting.  By the entrance there was a table,
card-table size, with a saucer on it with some coppers in it, and a
tiny room, a space marked out with composition walls and a flimsy open
door.  Inside an attendant, a woman I thought, was smoking and reading
a book.

I locked myself in a cubicle, sat on the pedestal without putting the
seat up and, well, gave myself up to despair.

What I was doing was, I realised, no more than a temporary measure.
Even if I stayed there for eight hours I was going to have to come out
eventually.  I was going to have to attempt to check in, go through
passport control, and somewhere along the line they would pick me up.
But what else could I do?  How else could I get out of this fix, this
bloody country?  The airport had been marked exit but it had become the
door to a dead-end, a trap, a cul-de-sac.

I was dead meat.  I was certainly dead tired, very hungry, and I hurt
in more places than I had realised, though that finger was the
throbbing nexus of pain.  For a moment dizziness swamped me, my vision
seemed to close from the sides.  I leant forward, over the camel-hide,
which was between my feet, put my head between my knees.  The dizziness
passed, leaving behind a sick headache.  Ten minutes later it was
compounded with a numb sort of boredom, ennui, too.  Almost without
thinking I listlessly fumbled at the three straps that held camel-hide
shut and pulled out Holly's souvenir of San Diego Zoo.  Had it been a
present from someone?  Had he been there on holiday, perhaps with his
family, children?  Had he bought it there along with the fridge
magnets, the pop-up books, the cuddly soft toy gorillas and pandas?  I
know San Diego.  Zoo and all.  Been there, done that, during the three
weeks I had to stay while the police and military cleared up the fracas
I'd got involved in.  I hadn't noticed any family photographs in
Holly's bungalow, but then they might well have been in the lounge or
his bedroom rather than his study.

I opened his book, began to give it a far closer look than I had
before.  It was in diary form, but the dates, I realised after a bit,
related to the days the entries were made rather than their content.
Occasionally the places where he was when he wrote them were included.
The technical stuff was beyond me, apart from occasional flashes, since
it was written in a personal sort of shorthand that consisted of
leaving out most vowels and using abbreviations like < and > and T and
others less familiar.  And also because, beyond what you read in the
Guardian, I remain pig-ignorant about the technology of genetic
engineering, indeed any sort of engineering at all.  Clearly, though,
they were summaries of the findings or speculations of other
scientists, leading to his own conjectures and hypothesising.  One
chunk was a resume, with his added analysis, of Gene Use Restriction
Technology (from then on GURT), which seemed to be the means by which a
plant could be restricted from using genes in its own genome unless it
was fed an inducible promoter gene that would set them going.  The
dizziness was returning.  My interest perked up, however, with a sketch
map marked AFI Research Station, Malindi.  Irregular plots were shaded
in different ways or cross-hatched and there was a key: Zea mays, Agava
sisal ana Cannabis saliva, Anannassa saliva.  Malindi I knew was some
hundred kilometres or more up the coast from Mombasa.  Had he been on
his way back when I first met him?

Another bit was a section on how genes engineered by a global-sized
food producer had accidentally 'flowed' from their maize into the maize
of Mexican peasants, with some speculation as to the possible bad
effects which I could more or less follow.  I supposed this was taken
from his work quoted on the Net.  Then came a couple of pages on
transposons which 'generate' chromosome poly morphism via reciprocal
translocations, inversions and deletions... Sorry, Ludwig, you just
lost me.

Indeed I actually dozed off for five minutes or so.  I came to to a
repeated banging on the cubicle door to find the notebook on the wet
floor between my feet and below my head which I suppose had been
between my knees again but came up with a jerk that was painful.

Swahili, or some such, roughened by nicotine and tar, but female.
Female?  In the gents?  Of course.  Cleaning out a bog is too low a job
for a black male.  Just like it is for a Frenchman.

"Speak English," I tried.

"Are you in good health in there or should I use my special key?"

"I'm OK."

"You come out of there then."

"Why?"

"There isn't a thing a man can do in there, on his own, that takes as
long as you have been."

Female, yes.  Bossy, OK.  But Oxbridge educated?  That's what the
accent said.

Wearily I used toilet paper to wipe down the glossy end-boards of
Holly's diary, the effluent seemed to be more or less just water, put
the book back at the bottom of the camel-hide, strapped it up, got
myself to my feet and the lock slipped over.  I hadn't pulled down my
trousers or anything like that, no need.

"Sorry," I said as I came out.  "Must have dozed off."

She was middle-aged, wearing a blue overall coat which was far too big
for her, the sleeves were turned up and it came down to her shins, over
black trousers, broken down trainers.  Her hair was glossy, black,
wiry, three-quarter length, pulled up under a white cloth cap, her
shoulders slightly humped.  My first impression of her dark face was
that it had a past: beautiful, sad, hurt.  And that her origins were
mixed: mostly

African, some Arab.  She put the moist cigarette she was holding
between apparently arthritic fingers back into the corner of her mouth
and reached out, I thought, for a tip.  I couldn't be bothered.  I
picked up camel-hide, went out, up the stairs, into the vast roofed
concourse and looked around.  It wasn't that busy.  Not so busy that I
couldn't see a black baseball cap about thirty yards away directing
uniformed cops this way and that.  I ducked back down into the gents,

"You again!"

I grabbed her shoulder, put down the camel-hide, fumbled in my hip
pocket, let go of her, peeled off a five hundred shilling note.

"I'm not here, all right."  I picked up the camel-hide, headed back to
my cubicle, stopped, turned round.  "If I walk out of here on my own,
if I'm not found here, I'll give you another five hundred, right?"

drew herself up to her full height which was still a good six inches
smaller than me, and with dark serious brown eyes fixed mine with a
severity which would have done credit to a judge.  This time I took in
the way her top lip

' had sunk back into the gap where her two front teeth had been.  I
also registered a slight lisp.

"Your five hundred shillings are of no concern to me at all," she said,
"but the reason for your so sudden return is of interest and if I judge
it to have merit I may assist you."

"There is a man out there," and I'm afraid I took hold of the lapels of
her overall, "who tried to kill me... yesterday."

Was it really as recent as the day before that I and Golly had been
shot at and then bombed from an AFI helicopter?  Try as I might I could
find only one night, the one spent in the village school hut, between
then and now... whenever

'now' was.

"I believe," I went on, "that he is some sort of policeman.  Anyway,
just now, out there, he was directing uniformed policemen.  It is not
impossible that it is me they are looking for."

"Have you then broken the law?  It is not in my interest to help a
common criminal."

"No," I raised my voice, for she had turned away from me and was
heading for the door.  "Only, that is, in self-defence," I called after
her, remembering the state I had left Vincey in.

While all this was going on the two or three other users of her
convenience were buttoning themselves up and moving quite quickly past
her.  Maybe they had understood enough from what we had said to guess
there was trouble brewing.  My tone of voice would have told them as
much.

The attendant was now at the door.

"What does your policeman look like?"  she called.

"Tall, leather jacket, black NYPD baseball cap."

For a moment she was gone.  I looked round the empty room, at the
gleaming urinals, the polished brass pipes, the spotless ceramic mosaic
of the floor.  Clearly she did a good job.  I glanced into her
cubby-hole, her 'office'.  One half of one wall was a window.  From the
outside it was a mirror.  Two-way mirrors are often used in such places
so the attendant can keep an eye open for pick-pockets and cottagers.
Then she was back.

She took my elbow, very firmly, and pushed me in.  There was a small
table with the fat hard-covered green book she had been reading on it,
an exercise book and a pencil, a deal rush-bottomed chair, a small
basin with a single tap, and one of those Camping Gas domed cans with a
burner on top supporting a small tin kettle.  And a cupboard at the
back.  A broom cupboard.  She opened it, gave me a shove, then dashed
back, picked up the camel-hide and thrust it after me.

"Please to be making no noise at all until I am letting you out again.
I'm sorry.  I should say 'until I let you out again'."

As the door closed and clicked tight I just had time to see that I was
sharing the tiny space with one of those zinc buckets with the top part
half covered by a conical sieve arrangement for mop-squeezing, a mop,
two brooms, and a shelf loaded with plastic bottles containing a
variety of cleaners and disinfectants.  Beneath the shelf there was a
stack of toilet rolls in plastic wrappings.  There was, really, no room
for me.  Darkness snapped in as she closed the door, just about
complete apart from a paper-thin line of dim light framing the door.

She kept me there for, I suppose, about five minutes though it seemed
much longer.  There was a lot of ambient sound, much of it running
water and plumbing noises, not loud but strong enough to drown out any
extras that may have occurred, though for a moment or so I thought I
could make out her voice, the words indistinguishable but with a
negative sort of tone to them.  I tried to tell myself she was telling
a policeman or two that no one like me had been anywhere near the
place.

And so it seemed was the case.

A quiet but firm knock on the door.

"Can you hear me?"

"Yes."

"I am not going to open the door yet in case they come back."

"All right."

"You are right to assume that the man in the baseball cap is a police
officer.  He is in fact a colonel in the state security police.  I am
not sympathetic towards him.  He is the reason why I lost my teeth and
my knuckles are swollen.  I should be interested to hear why you are
hiding from him."

I too had already had one set of knuckles smashed and I wanted to keep
my teeth.  I felt we had much to share, that we could be friends.

"It's a long story."

"That is often the case.  The briefest of precis will be sufficient for
now."

I thought for a moment, searching my mind for the most cogent way of
expressing the nub.

"He believes, your police colonel"

"Colonel Thugu."

"Really?  That's pretty apt.  He believes that I have in my possession
a memory card from a digital camera that will prove that genetic
experiments are being conducted, under government auspices, on
Associated Food International research sites, which the government and
AFI would prefer not to have made public."  The cogs of my brain
clicked on.  I remembered Vincey's phone-call to... a colonel.  "He
probably knows that I am booked on the BA flight that leaves at ten
twenty-five, so if he hasn't picked me up by then, he'll get me when I
check in.  Or at the boarding gate."

"And do you?"

"Do I what?"

She sighed.  I could sense the sigh even though I couldn't see or hear
it.

"Do you have the memory card?"

"Yes."  Cold in my belly.  "Or rather, no.  I left it in an English
supermarket shopping bag, in a taxi."

There was quite a long pause now.  I could imagine she was wondering
what sort of a fool it was she was dealing with.  Then... "I don't
think they are going to come back.  You can be com... you can come out
now."

I pushed the broom cupboard door open and stumbled slightly.

"You don't look very good.  Here, you have the chair."

She swung it towards me, went into the cupboard, came out with the
bucket, upended it and sat on it.  Then she shook the kettle to check
it had water in it and used a disposable lighter to light the Camping
Gas beneath.  Finally, first offering me one which I refused, she shook
a Sportsman out of its paper packet, lit it.

"A cup of char, eh?"  and she grinned her toothless grin.

Tea-bag, chipped mug with a picture of Nelson Mandela on it, UHT milk,
a rectangular block of slightly yellowish sugar.  Heaven.  While she
got all this together, often blinking watery eyes through the smoke of
her fag, I took a look at the green cloth-bound volume on her desk.
Ulysses by James Joyce, battered, much used, the pages annotated in
tiny neatly pencilled writing in an alphabet that could have been
Arabic.

"I am preparing an extended monograph with the title "Ulysses: an
Anti-Colonial Text'.  That surprises you?  It should not."  Of course
it bloody surprised me.  How many lavatory attendants have you come
across doing anything like that?  But she misconstrued my surprise.
"You see, the climax of the whole book is the moment when two English
soldiers are knocking Stephen down and Bloom is picking him up.  Picks.
And dusts him down in true Samaritan fashion.  You should not, I think,
be catching the flight you are booked on."

"No."

"As you have already suggested, they will be watching for you."

"Yes."

"There is, however, a Kenyan Airways flight, also to Heathrow, which
takes off at twenty-three fifty-five.  I think I can arrange for you a
transfer."

"No.  That would be too obvious.  But perhaps you could just get me a
Kenyan Airways ticket without a transfer."

She thought about it for a minute or two, tapping her pencil on the
table.

"No," she said at last, stubbing out her Sportsman and squinting
through the smoke, "I have a better idea.  There is a shuttle between
here and Mombasa.  It leaves Nairobi at five'o clock, gets to Mombasa
at six, leaves Mombasa at nine, twenty-one hundred, and gets back here
at ten."  Of course there is, I thought.  It was on the second leg of
it that I had met Ludwig.  She went on: "Back here, you can then catch
the Kenyan Airways plane for Heathrow at five to midnight without
leaving the transit area."

"What if the planes are late, get delayed."

"They always hold the Heathrow plane until the transit is made of
passengers from Mombasa.  It's a guaranteed connection."

We refined on the plan.  She'd get me a single to Mombasa.  At Mombasa
I would buy a single to Heathrow via Nairobi.  That way the only record
on the Nairobi computer would be of a ticket to Mombasa.  But it was
unlikely Colonel Thugu would even look for me there.  Once I'd failed
to show for the BA flight, he'd be looking for me on the Kenyan Airways
flight.  But if I booked that in Mombasa my name shouldn't show on the
passenger list in Nairobi.  All they'd have would be the number of
seats already booked.

"But what if the flights are booked solid from Mombasa and to
Heathrow?"

"They won't be," she said, lighting another Sportsman, "since nine
eleven they're never full.  At the worst you might have to go business
class.  If you can afford it."

"Frankly..."  Suddenly I wanted a name to call her by.

"Vikrama.  Doctor Vikrama.  D.Litt, that is."

"Chris Shovelin.  Frankly Dr.  Vikrama, right now, if it would get me
safely out of Kenya, I would cheerfully sell my house."

Chapter Twenty-Five

I finished the tea (since there was only one mug she didn't have any
herself, though she continued to smoke) then she put me back in her
cupboard as if I were a rag doll she had been told to put away.  But
first she took my passport and my visa card.  She was much longer this
time, nearly forty minutes.  However, she had locked the outer door of
her cubicle so I was not disturbed.  I got very hot though and began to
feel I might suffocate or at any rate faint.  Probably I would have
done but she had given me the bucket to sit on and when dizziness
threatened I was yet again able to put my head between my knees.

My left hand began to throb and the pain inched back as the Solpadeine
wore off.  I took two more, breaking the tablets out of the foil in the
dark, though it was rather a struggle getting them down without a
drink.  I was careful not to drop them.

She came back at last, opened the broom cupboard door.

"Goodness me, you look even less shipshape than you did."

And indeed I almost fell as she gathered me back into the chair.

"Some water perhaps while I prepare another cup of tea.  Perhaps I can
find some aspirin.  And your hand does not look good at all."

I told her not to worry about aspirin, that I had already taken
pain-killers.  As I did so I could hear her moving behind me, then came
the rasping sound of torn cotton.  She was ripping up a drying up
cloth.

"It will be better in a sling," she said.  And briskly and competently
she improvised one that kept my left elbow bent in an acute angle and
my hand against the top of my sternum, that is, upright.  Rather manic
ally I recalled how I had done much the same for Golly, twenty-four
hours earlier.  The throbbing eased considerably, almost immediately.

"You should get it seen to as soon as you arrive in Heathrow," she
muttered during the whole process, "I am sure they will have a
competent first aid post there."

"You've got me a ticket then?"

"Yes and no.  I discussed the situation with the lady at the Kenyan
Airways desk and she was of the opinion that we should not enter your
booking on the computer until the very last moment, that is at
half-past four.  She will, however, make sure that a seat is kept
available for you.  Though that should not be a problem.  There is,
forgive me for using their appalling jargon, 'plenty of availability as
of now'.  She will take your ticket, passport and credit card to the
boarding area where you will pick them up at four-forty just as
boarding is getting under way.  There is one problem..."

I'd seen it.

"How I get air side without being spotted."

"Precisely.  For international departures you must use the overhead
covered walkway.  But for domestic flights you can simply walk across
the car park.  They may be watching the entrance to that, and once you
are in you still have to go through a ticket, identity and security
check to get to air side proper.  And even if they are not keeping an
eye open for you, which they will be, at that point you will still have
no documentation."

"So?"

"There is a sewer."

"Oh shit!"

"Exactly so.  I think there is still one in the pot."  And she filled
me up.

Again the drink pulled me round, for the time being anyway, though her
damned Sportsman cigarettes almost undid the good it was doing.  I was
about half way through when she reached across the tiny space between
us and turned my wrist so she could read my watch.

"Oops, sorry.  Did that hurt?"

"No.  Just a twinge."

"Nearly twenty to three.  My shift finishes at three and we will have
to leave here.  I'll take you to the staff room in the basement where
you can wait until it's time to go through the sewer.  There will be
friends on duty in the boarding areas who will keep an eye open for you
and give you your boarding card and ticket and so on."

"You seem to have many friends here at the airport."

"Well yes and no.  You know..."  and she leant in towards me so our
foreheads were almost touching and the smoke from her latest Sportsman
drifted up between us, "many subcultures exist within the realm of a
system like an airport.  Consider.  There is admin, and ancillary
office staff, security liaising with exterior groupings in the police,
fire brigades and so forth, paramedics, service personnel providing
cleaners, cooks, toilet attendants and so forth.  Shopkeepers and bank
staff.  Then there is the technical side from air traffic control to
airplane maintenance, minor repairs, fuelling, and so forth.  Aircrew,
of course.  Now all exist as very separate entities, pocket communities
numbering some of them as many as a hundred, others only a dozen or
less, many coming and going, just passing through.  But there are
interfaces, connections.  And one thing binds them, gives them a common
interest... the enemy.  Nothing binds people the way a shared enemy
does, though it may also lead to conflicts between them.  Dublin in
1904 was such a place, the enemy the English colonial power.  But here,
the common enemy...?"

"The passengers," I suggested.  "The customers?"

"Dear me, no.  They are peripheral.  They slide by us like ghosts. They
are intangible, untouchable, insignificant.  No, I mean of course the
system itself, partly, but only partly represented by the bosses. The
employers.  The hirers and firers.  But even they, in so far as they
are being individuals, are as subject to the system, are its tools or
the bits of grit that have to be removed, as any of the rest of us. No,
it is the system itself, in our case the airport, that is the enemy to
be feared, placated, served, in much the same way as a theocracy
personified as a god is served, like the Jagganath or the Catholic
church.  But also exploited, mined, robbed, used and abused, but only
within the bounds it will itself accept.  Go too far and it will spew
you out... Dublin, Ireland, spewed out Joyce."

She leant back, sighed with weariness I thought rather than distaste,
stubbed her cigarette out in the small brass bowl she kept by her and
which now, at the end of an eight, ten, twelve hour shift was
overflowing with noisome noxious ash and dog-ends.  A tired smile
passed across her tired eyes.

"And so you see, in this underworld, this cellarage which I inhabit,
there is an understanding that you do what a co-citizen of it asks of
you, so long as the request will not lead you into more confrontation
with the system than you are prepared to accept.  And by knitting
together a net or web of tiny collusions, gifts and pay-offs, you can
often achieve quite big things."  The smile became a grin.  "There have
been bullion robberies at Heathrow have there not?  Imagine how much
goes on that is not deemed newsworthy."

Silence settled between us punctuated by a flush pulled, the gush of
the urinals.  I worked on framing my next question as carefully as I
could

"I hope, Doctor Vikaram," I said at last, "that you won't think it,
urn, forward of me to wonder why an educated person like yourself is in
this situation."

"Educated?  We are all educated, my dear.  One cannot grow up without
being educated.  But I imagine you are referring to the western,
cultural elements in my intellectual physiognomy.  My extended family,
of mixed race, we are part Bantu, part Arab, part Sinhalese, are
wealthy Mombasa-based merchants.  Wealthy enough to send me to a girls'
private school in England whence I proceeded to Wadham College, Oxford
where I was a student of Professor Terence

Eagleton.  I am now an assistant professor in European literature at
Nairobi University, suspended sine die.  The fact that I organised
student demonstrations and a petition protesting the shooting of Father
Kaiser, a Catholic Priest, by government thugs two years ago, and other
activities less obviously noteworthy, none of them actually illegal,
brought me to this pass.  I am, in fact, lucky to be alive and probably
owe my survival and moderately gainful employment to the fact that my
professor has the ear of Richard Leakey.  I should not complain.  It is
after all the sort of thing that happened in Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and it is commonplace in
satellite and client states of the United States.  At least I am not in
a gulag or a chain-gang.  Ah.  Here comes Miriam..."

A tall thin woman with the even good looks, high cheekbones and
straight nose I had come to associate with the Maasai, filled the door.
They exchanged a version of laying on five.  Dr.  Vikaram shrugged out
of her blue overall coat and handed it to the newcomer, who shrugged
herself into it.  On her it was a good fit.

"You come most carefully upon your hour," Dr.  Vikaram chanted as she
did so, "for this relief, much thanks."

She turned to me.

"Miriam," she said, "is on a forced sabbatical from being admissions
officer of the Christian Women's College for Orphans."

Miriam smiled at me.

"I attempted to exclude the bastards of senior civil servants, on the
grounds that they were not orphans," she said.

Meanwhile Dr.  Vikaram collected up her copy of Ulysses, her exercise
book, cigarettes, lighter and tea-bags into a small draw-string bag,
and turned to me.

"Please follow me," she said.

She stopped in front of a door at the foot of the stairs to the main
concourse, pulled out a bunch of keys and unlocked it.

It was one of those featureless doors you often see in such places but
rarely notice.  She waved me through it and locked it behind her.  We
were in a long corridor of sweating concrete with heavy duty pipes and
so forth running along the ceiling.  It followed the curve of the
building and we followed it, crossing a long large room the ceiling of
which was crisscrossed with machinery rollers and ratcheted wheels. Two
men on moveable scaffolding were tinkering with part of it.

"The luggage retrieval carousels.  They break down.  Often for
mechanical reasons but sometimes because the handlers have spotted a
likely-looking piece."

"Likely?"

"You know.  A Gucci with extra locks, that sort of thing."

The long slow curve continued.  There were more doors.  One was marked
Entry Strictly Prohibited.

"This is the one," she said.  She unlocked it and left it unlocked.
"But you don't want to hang around down there or get to the other side
too early.  Come back in half an hour."

The corridor ended in a plain double door.  Vikaram pushed on one side,
held it open.

"Welcome," she cried, "to the fourth circle of hell."

It was a large room, long enough for the far wall to be at a slight
angle due to the curve, and almost as deep.  Strip lighting glared from
the acoustic tiles of the high ceiling and inevitably one of the tubes
was on the blink.  The walls were lined with small lockers in stacks,
like the ones you get in swimming pool changing rooms, and there were
three automats selling beers, sodas, crisps.  A narrow flight of stairs
climbed from a gap between the lockers.  There were no chairs, no
windows, drinks cans toppled out of the one refuse bin and the floor
was filthy with cigarette ends, ash, wrappers.  That didn't deter
several men and women from sitting on it, or hunkering above it.  A
couple at the far end played drums made from sections of palm tree
trunks and goat skin, while two women swayed to the beat and sang a
rhythmically robust but mournful song.  Against the far wall two
shrouded figures wrapped in patterned blankets appeared to sleep with
their cheeks on their arms.  Most of the twenty or so people, however,
were coming or going, putting personal property into the lockers or
taking it out.  It was very hot, and the air was stale, a cocktail of
rich smells.

A young man spotted Vikaram as we came through the door, pushed his
back off the bank of lockers where he had been waiting and came to meet
us.  He wore a clean white shirt and black trousers and I thought he
could be a waiter, or perhaps a clerk from one of the cambio franchises
or banks.  It turned out he actually serviced one of the two book and
newspaper stalls.  He had been one of Vikaram's students.

"This is Zephaniah," she said.  "But he answers to Zeph.  Zeph, this is
Christopher."

"I answer to Kit," I said, and shook his warm, moist hand.

"I have to go now, Zeph will look after you," she went on, unlocking a
locker and taking from it a small tooled leather purse and a paisley
head-scarf.  Quickly, using a hand mirror, she dragged a comb through
her hair, and painted her lips a very deep carmine, folded one lip over
the other to adjust what she'd done, not easy with the gap where her
missing teeth had been, put lipstick and mirror into her bag, pulled
the scarf over her head and knotted it beneath her chin.  I realised
her background could have been Islamic.  "Just one thing though.  If it
all goes wrong and they pull you in, they will want to know who helped
you and how.  They may knock you about a bit.  You will want to stop
them doing that so you'll have to tell them something.  We don't mind
what -so long as it is not the truth.  Make up names, invent people who
look different from us.  And when you get to England tell people.  Tell
them what you know about what is going on here.  Right?"

"Right," I said, though my stomach had gone cold again, "and... I can't
say how grate"

"It's nothing.  Not a problem.  Good luck."

She surprised me with a kiss on my cheek and she was gone, up the mean
stairs, while I was still resettling my hat.  Gents always remove their
lids when embraced.  But then I thought it seemed a touch incongruous
so I put it on top of the clothes in camel-hide.

"Child-minder," said Zeph.

"Eh?"

"Her child-minder knocks off at half-past three.  She has to be back by
then."

"Oh, ah."

Long silence.  The band played on.

"Long wait, then," I postulated.

"Yeah."

Then, all together: "Perhaps..."  "You might be more comfortable..."

"No, you, carry on."

"Perhaps we could sit down."

"Why not?"

Well, there were plenty of reasons why not, see above.  Zeph cleared
some of them away, made a space, and we sat against the wall, knees up,
arms across them, camel-hide beside me.  Then he asked me if I'd like a
drink.  I said I would.  But he had no money.  He said.  In spite of
Vikaram's sling I managed to pull a handful of change from my trouser
pocket.  He took it all over to one of the automats.  A Coke tin
clanged into the trough below.  It left me with the notes I had, still
just under fifty quids' worth.  He pulled the tab in the can and we
shared it.

"What's an Eng Lit graduate doing here?"  I asked.

He crushed the can and tossed it in the general direction of the
overflowing trash bin.  By now the hall or whatever was almost empty,
the crowd diminished as the shift changing time passed.

There just weren't jobs for English Literature graduates, he said.
Apart from anything else the question he was asked was always: why
English?  Aren't there enough Kenyan, let alone African authors to
study?  To which the answer was that almost all of the worthwhile ones
were banned and it was an offence to own their books, let alone teach
them.  His job wasn't a bad one.  He got to read the English and
American newspapers, or at any rate their airmail editions, which was
nice, and it paid almost enough to cover his rent and food.  That gave
me an idea for passing the time.

"Is your newspaper kiosk still open?"  I asked.

"Yep.  Until the BA and Kenyan Airways flights to England have checked
in."

"Can you get me a paper?  Guardian Weekly if you've got it?"

"There was one left," he said.  "It costs two fifty."

I pulled out my roll, peeled off a five hundred shilling note.  He
looked at me.  He looked at the roll.

"You're loaded," he said.

He took the five hundred and went.  I thought maybe I had made a stupid
mistake.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I was right.  The clattering of boots on the concrete stairs alerted me
before I saw them.  Four uniformed police, peaked caps, belted, armed,
old Baseball Hat himself, Colonel Thugu, no less, and behind his
shoulder the traitor Zephaniah.  Had he struck a bargain?  The
shillings in my pocket in return for my body?  Fucking Judas if he had.
I didn't stay to find out, I was off like the electric hare at Poole
Greyhound Stadium.  I hoped they'd be like the dogs.  Fast, but not
fast enough.

I went the way I had come and now the gentle curve of the building was
a definite asset.  I got the lead I wanted, that is they were out of
sight behind me, which meant they had to check each blank door as they
passed it.  I took the sixth, the one Vikaram had unlocked, marked
Entry Strictly Prohibited.  It presented me with another steep flight
of concrete steps down into yet another corridor below the one I had
been in.  It was hotter and darker, the bulbs set behind small cages in
the wall dimmer, less frequent, the ceiling lower.  Another junction, I
took a right, why not?  The passage ran straight to another door.  I
pushed through it and found I was on a railed gantry which made a
diameter about twenty yards long, bisecting a circular space whose
floor was a metre lower.  Large pipes, shiny with aluminium
concertinas, crisscrossed the ceiling or looped down to what I guessed
must be heat exchangers, condensers and so forth.  There were also
heavy cables running in an out of steel grated cabinets, and a console
with large switches and dials.

I guessed it must all add up to the engine that drove the whole double
building: the water supplies, the electricity, the air-conditioning,
and it stank, I mean really pen-and-inked, and not with the smells of
hot water, hot metal, oil or whatever that you might expect, but
deeply, rot tingly organically stinking shit, bad food, dead bodies.

There were rats.

I'm not good about rats.

These were grey, slimy, long tailed, and very large, as big as sausage
dogs and they were congregated round a thin upright isoceles triangle
of dim light in the circumference equidistant from the two ends of the
gantry.  Later I made guesses as to what had happened.  A waste
disposal chute dropped wastage from a kitchen into moveable hoppers
which presumably were supposed to be emptied or exchanged on a regular
basis.  But something had gone wrong.  Perhaps a waste collection truck
had backed too far, I don't really know, but the chute had been pushed
askew leaving the triangle of light and a way into the area the rats
could use and an inexhaustible supply of their sort of food.  A cloud
of flies hung above it, dense like a shoal of tiny black fish.

Rats were not the only scavengers.  Nor were they the only creatures
who had used that gap to get in.  As my eyes acclimatised to the gloom
I realised that below and beneath the gallery I was on, there were low
heaps of material, blankets, split cushions, and the like, old coats.
There were bottles too, and in one place a little trickle of cigarette
smoke rose until a movement of the fetid air bent and dispersed it.

Shouts from above and behind me.  Clattering feet.  I ran another ten
yards, almost to the middle of the gantry, then I clambered, awkwardly,
one handed, over the railing, dropped to the floor below.  Shit, I
thought, I've left camel-hide in the staff-room.  A squawk and an oath
but not in English.  I had landed on some part of someone's anatomy.  I
stumbled, fell to one knee, grabbed up a corner of what felt and looked
like a damp tarpaulin, and hauled myself under it, dragging every inch
of me in, right down to my feet, as flat as I could be, sprawled on the
filthy floor.  I had a companion, the guy I'd trodden on.  Except that
even in the darkness beneath the thing that covered us, I could sense
he wasn't a guy: he was a lad, no more than a boy.  He squawked a
little, said something that sounded like another fuck off or whatever,
pulled his legs away from mine.  My head bumped against a pillar
supporting the walkway I had come over.  I pulled back, lifted a corner
of the tarpaulin and looked out from under it, keeping it over my
head.

Narrowed by perspective I could see the upright rectangle of the
doorway I had come through.  At that moment two policemen came through,
glanced at each other, and set off side by side along the gantry, torch
beams swinging across the floor, casting lurching shadows from the
pipes and machinery.

A third figure appeared in the doorway, lit dimly at first but then one
of the beams spot-lit it for a moment or two as the police turned at
the far end and came back.  A white bandage circled his head, came down
over his ears and supported or was secured under his chin.  His eyes
were puffed up in huge discoloured bruises.  There was a lot of dark
dried blood on the shoulders and lapels of his jacket which remained
recognisable.  Someone had found him an aluminium half crutch which
cradled his left forearm.  He lifted it, waved it like a cybernetic
extension.  His voice crackled, screeched like a powered metal-cutter,
as if it had been enhanced, his mouth a black hole, the painting of a
scream of rage and pain.

"Shovelin?  Shovelin!  Come out, you fucking bastard.  Come out so I
can break every bone in your fucking body."

Vincey, Leo Vincey.  Back, I must suppose, from the dead.

Silence.  The hum of the motors, a steady drip from nearby.

"No sign of him," called one of the policemen.

"Shovelin?  Kitty, kitty, Kit, Kit.  Be a good pussy and come out.  I
want to tie a firework to your furry tail, get it?"

Behind the taunting I could detect an uncertain note.  I held my
breath.

"Oh fuck it.  Come on."

The policemen's boots clanged on cast-iron, became muffled, faded.
Silence again.  But one of the things I'd learnt about Vincey was that
he was a cunning bastard.  I held my breath, waited.  I was right.  A
shadow fell across the door jamb.  Neither of us moved for a full
minute.  Then a lighter flame distorted the shadow and a thin plume of
smoke drifted out of the doorway and hung on the thick poisonous air.
Three more minutes passed.  What made him so bloody sure I was there?
Then a voice from way up the stairs.

"Mr.  Vincey?  Are you still down there?  We think we've got him
cornered in a storeroom."

"Really?"

And he tossed the Dunhill out over the area.  I heard the flurry it
caused as two or three of my companions competed for it.  He was gone,
leaving just the layered smoke in the air behind him.

There were six of them, six I saw, anyway.  The one nearest me, the one
I'd landed on was the first to sit up, dragging the tarpaulin to one
side.  The other five faces, heads and shoulders, rose out of the gloom
behind him, around us.  Their faces were grey rather than black, eyes
large and sunken in their sockets, hollows beneath their cheekbones. At
least three of them were blotched with ugly sores, and two were losing
their hair, in handfuls.  The one who had got Vincey's fag gagged on
it, broke into a hideous rasping fit of coughing and retching.  It
sounded terminal.  It could have been.  And the worst thing of it all
was that they were young.  The one nearest me no more than five or six,
the oldest, the one with the smoke, maybe ten.  And three of them were
girls.  I don't think I worked it out at the time, but I did later.  I
guess they were AIDS orphans, and themselves HIV positive from birth.
And no one wanted to know.

I got to my feet, shuffled through the debris to the oldest, hunkered
down in front of him, waited for the coughing to subside.

"Do you speak English?"  I asked at last.

He nodded.  Sputum, with a streak of red on it, lay across his chin. He
wiped it with the back of his hand.  He was thin, like a chicken
carcass that has been stripped to the internal membrane that covers the
ribs.  There was fear in his eyes.  But maybe there always was.

"What's your name?"  I asked him.

"David."  He pronounced it Daveed.

"David," I went on.  "Those men, bad men, want to catch me and kill
me."

He nodded again.

"They bad men."  Emphatic agreement.  He knew a piece of filth when he
saw it.

"I need to get into the other building.  The outside one.  Where the
airplanes are.  But without being seen."

"OK," he said and gave a little shrug as if to say, no problem, nothing
easier.  He dragged himself up on legs like a bird's and reached out a
hand.  God forgive me I hesitated before taking it a bundle of twigs,
hot and damp, which I was afraid I might crush.  He was wearing a rag
of a filthy t-shirt above cut-down adult trousers.  The t-shirt had a
cracked and fading picture of Kanu on it, the Nigerian foot baller in
Arsenal strip.  He applied pressure through his hand, I followed him
and then watched as he shifted blankets or whatever along the floor.  A
small girl pulled herself out of them, sat above folded legs, her knees
like tennis balls, sucked her thumb and batted away the flies that
homed in again.

Yes, there was a small circular man-hole with a hand grip.  It lifted
easily enough.  Yes, there was a spiral, functional staircase.  Yes,
there was a sewer at the bottom.  It was a half tube of concrete, three
feet deep in the middle, running along the bottom of a semi-circular
tunnel five feet high.  There was a narrow walkway alongside the sewer
which ran steadily away from us, the effluent, untreated sewage, about
a foot deep.  There was worse.  David went first.  He had a small cheap
torch, which was as well because there was no light down there.  The
passage, tunnel, took a slow turn about five yards ahead.  Caught on
the bend was a body, mostly submerged, trapping effluent against it.
Rats, as quick as snakes, slipped away from it, from the light, though
one paused and gave us a look, its clawed front feet up under its chin.
Its black eyes flashed red in the torch light, then it was gone.  The
body had been a girl, emaciated, wearing the tatters of a shift-like
dress.  She was face down.  The backs of her legs had been gnawed to
the bone.  The smell was awful.  We had to go past her.

This, I thought, is as bad as it gets.

David muttered, "What else can we do with them?"

I followed the light of his torch which got noticeably dimmer as we
went, passing beneath the car parks that lay between the two concentric
buildings above.  Within fifty yards we came to a spiral stair similar
to the one that had brought us down.

David turned to me.

"That's it.  We're here."

"I can't thank you enough.  Can I give you some money?"

"What would we buy with it?"

"I'll tell people... when I get home."

He looked up at me from those eyes like black lamps.

"Why?"

As bad as it gets when things get so bad there's no point in telling
anyone.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

This man-hole cover was heavier than the first.  It was more than a
metal plate, its frame, I soon discovered, filled with ceramic glazed
tiles matching the floor around it.  I adjusted my footing on the
steps, flattened the palm of my right hand above my head against it and
straightened knees, back, elbows.  No luck.  I shrugged my left
shoulder and wrist out of the sling.  Even to raise my left hand above
my head was agony, the effort I willed on it worse, but that extra
pound or so of thrust were enough to shift it, lift it an inch or two.
Bright light flooded in through the gap I'd made.  I heard singing.  I
don't want to rock, DJ... "Cause you're keeping me up all night.  Then
it stopped.  The singers had clocked the rising floor.  The weight was
lifted off my hands and the manhole cover rose as if by magic, was laid
aside.  The sudden relief caught me off balance and I nearly toppled
backwards.  Uncle George's nephew and one of his mates peered down at
me.  A hoarse whisper:

"Jesu Christ."

"Tis the geezer went missing."

"Can't be.  He were ate by lions."

"Tis."

"Tint."

I intervened.

"Tis," I said.

They hoisted the cover to one side and, with hands in my armpits,
lifted me out.  I looked around.  Yes, a gents toilet.  Again.

"Fuck me, but you look a mess.  Where you bin?"

"Stinks too."

I swayed.  Nephew looked around for something for me to sit on, no
chairs.  He pushed open a cubicle door, slammed down the top seat, sat
me on it.  I should say at this point that these air side loos had no
attendant.  | "Hey, Bri," his mate called, "help me get the cover back
on i before some silly fucker falls in."

"You're all here, are you?"  I asked.

"Just our lot.  We're off to a dead smart hotel on the coast for a
week," said Bri.  Smug as a cat with cream.  "Lord and Lady Muck and
all the others are on their way home.  Couldn't hack the extra week,
could they?  Not enough dosh.  Not like Uncle George."

"Uncle George?"

""Course, Uncle George."

"Good old Uncle George.  Do you think you could ask him to come and
have a word with me?"

They looked at each other.

"Don' see why not."

As they went I managed to get off the seat and bolt the door.  Then I
sat there, and tried to think.  But they were back in three minutes and
Uncle George turned out to be the complete brick I thought he would be.
He had qualities that far outweighed the pallor of his skin (now
touched-up with oddly irregular sun-burn), his flabbiness, his bad
breath.  He'd die, he really would, for anyone he had decided was one
of our lot.  He was determined to the point of mulishness and beyond.
The only authority he respected was that of his own conscience.  He was
nobody's fool.

Clearly I needed a change of clothes.

"Nobody's going to let you on a plane looking and smelling like what
you do."

But all their baggage had been checked in.  However, there was a
tourist shop open and his nephew was sent to see what he could find.
Meanwhile, and ignoring the other travellers who came and went, he got
me to strip down and made me give myself a thorough wash at one of the
hand-basins, feeding me soap, toilet paper, paper towels.  Nephew
returned with a full length, long armed robe in cotton printed with a
bold jungle pattern in black, green, orange, a round rimless hat
embroidered with beads, and a fly whisk made from a bone-in antelope
tail.  Or maybe it was a Colobus monkey's.

"I'm not wearing that," I said.

"Why not?  You're a bloomin tourist aren't you?  Tourists do the
daftest things."

They left off Vikaram's sling dead giveaway they said.  Without it I
might not be recognised.  They put my dirty clothes in the duty free
shopping bag, and I carried it with me.

"Black you up," grunted Uncle George, "and you'll be the image of old
Uncle Jomo his self  Met him once, back in the early fifties, in the
Adelphi, Liverpool.  Raising money from the unions he was.  I was like
deputy shop steward in the old boiler-makers' at the time and
unofficial minder to his nibs.  Shame he was conned by this bastard
who's took over."

I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror.  With baggy eyes, a bit more
than a fair share of nose, and a touch of sun-tan, I looked more like
Ali Baba.

I explained the ticket situation, and Uncle George went to see to it
himself.  Meanwhile I went out with the three lads into the departure
lounge which was no such thing but a largeish cream painted room with
worn vinyl-covered chairs and benches, a couple of scuffed tables, a
floor of cracked vinyl tiles and a coffee counter.

Bri, the third of the lads whose name was Tel, and the nephew, who was
Tone, played three card brag with me for Kenyan coppers.  They used a
worn deck of cards Tone had on him.  Nudes on the backs, every one
different, so I realised after a bit why I always lost.  The second lot
of Solpadeine had kicked in and I found I could use my left hand
without too much agony, though my ring finger still looked like a
banana, the rings almost buried by ballooning flesh.  I complained of
hunger and Tone got me, yes, a cheese roll, getting stale now, and a
Sprite.

Half an hour later Uncle was back, waving my passport, credit card and
a credit card slip.

"Sign here," he said.

I did.

"Tell you about it once I've delivered this."

This time he was only five minutes.  "OK," he said.  "I found the boss
Kenyan Airways woman on this side.  She knew all about it.  Said it was
important not to get your ticket on the computer until the very last
minute but she promised she'd get it over this side with a boarding
card before she let the plane go."  He looked at his watch again.  He
chewed an already bitten down thumbnail.

"I don't know why these lasses are all so dead keen to help you," he
went on.  "If they were jobs worths you'd be done for.  Must be your
sex appeal."

"It's Doctor Vikaram," I suggested.  "They know who she is, maybe she's
helped them in the past or their relations, families, whatever."

"Maybe."  He shrugged his big shoulders.  "Let's hope so."  Then he
laughed.  "Fine pickle we'll all be in if we're rumbled.  Extended
holiday at Moi's expense, eh, lads?  Chris?"

Time passed.  I dozed.  I relaxed.  The only thing I wasn't happy about
were the Kenyatta-type robes.  Seemed like laissez-faire.  No, I mean
lese-majeste.  Draw attention, anyway.  Then a shake.

"Wakey, wakeeeey!"

It was the full shout, the way Billy Cotton used to do it on the
wireless.

"Twenty-to-five.  Here's your ticket and your boarding card."

I looked up at his big, round, beaming, face.

"Uncle George," I said, "you're a genius."

"Not me.  The boss woman just brought them over and handed them to
me."

Together with about twenty or so other passengers we drifted down to
the end of the 'lounge' and through glass doors into more of the same,
though this time there was a big glass door, part of the glass
frontage, opening straight on to the tarmac.  This, apparently, was
Gate 2. Tone and Bri went out into the sunlight.  No one stopped them,
so we joined them.  A hundred yards or so away to the left there were
two parked Seven Three Sevens.  To the right an R.A.F Hercules, huge,
grey-green.  Using a stepladder on wheels two sunburnt men in khaki but
with dark blue R.A.F berets were doing something with spanners to one
of the engines.

"Support for the SAS," said Uncle George.  "They train up
nearSamburu."

Just the sort of thing he would know.

We waited a further forty minutes.  I felt I ought to fidget about it,
but I was too tired, too drowsy.  After all I'd been through I couldn't
get excited about the delay.  Inshallah, about summed up my attitude.
Eventually another Seven Three Seven rumbled up and did a U-turn which
missed clipping the wing-tip of one of the parked ones by no more than
six inches.  Down came the stairs and a stewardess holding a six-foot
post with a simple sign on top and a wooden base at the bottom.  The
sign had a single word on it: Mombasa.  She planted it at the foot of
the stairs.  It looked like a bus-stop.  She gave us a welcoming
wave.

"Good enough for me," said Uncle George and we trooped off in an untidy
line behind him, across the hot tarmac.

My robe caught on something at the top.  The stewardess unhitched me.

"Nice gear," she said.  She checked out my boarding card, tore off the
tab.  "Have a nice trip."

At about five thousand feet, as we banked to get onto a south-east
course, I caught a glimpse of JKIA in the armpit where wing joins
fuselage.  In my head I saw the body of a little girl trapped against a
bend in the sewer underneath it.  Suddenly I wanted to cry.  But
instead, I slept.  Again.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Not much more to say.  It all went according to plan.  In President
Moi, Mombasa's far more glitzy airport, Uncle George, Bri, Tone, and
Tel made a noisy and effusive farewell, full of repeated Mind How You
Go's and Look After Yourself's.  I tried to pay for the Kenyatta robes
but Uncle George wasn't having any of that.

He fixed me with cold, expressionless eyes.

"Can't take it with me," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Asbestosis.  Back from them days in Liverpool.  Got the compensation
and six months."

"Oh fuck.  I am sorry."

And I shook his hand more thoughtfully than I might have done.  What
else could I do?  It explained why he was giving his nephew and his
mates the holiday of a lifetime.

Next I bought a through ticket to Heathrow, depart Mombasa at nine o'
clock, depart Nairobi five to midnight.  Then I climbed the wide chrome
and marble stairs to the first floor, checked through security and
passport control and wandered into the air side departure area.  In the
main hall a sprinkling of tourists had already gathered and the two
shops were open.  I delved into the plastic duty-free bag, dug my
shillings out of the back pocket of my trousers, and bought a
three-day-old Telegraph, a medium-sized bar of Toblerone, and a rhino
carved out of something black for my boy back home to go with the seed
and pearl bracelet that was still in my jacket pocket, wrapped in a
scrap of tissue, waiting for my girl Rosa.

Then I went into the cafe area.  I ordered a coffee.  Do you have
anything to eat?  A cheese roll.  No thank you.  And I carefully sat
ten yards away from where I had sat a week earlier.  Lightning doesn't
strike twice in the same place, they say, but

I wasn't taking chances.  Didn't stop the pied crows from gliding in to
check out the Toblerone.  They weren't interested.

This time there was no plane to watch as it landed since it had already
landed and I had been on it.  But the sun set just as it had before.

We took off at nine thirty, or thereabouts.  Not late enough to worry,
which I was inclined to do, even though Dr.  Vikaram had said they
always kept the connection.  I missed Kilimanjaro this time.  The night
was darker, the half moon not yet risen.

We landed back in JKIA at twenty past ten.  This time the walk across
the concrete apron took me and about six other passengers to the bottom
of a flight of cast iron stairs.  As we climbed them we could look down
through windows into the room the R.A.F had taken over as an office.
It was small, about the size of two cube containers.  There were dull
green filing cabinets and what I took to be radio stuff, all dials,
knobs and switches in the same colour.  A girlie calendar.  A St.
George's flag pinned to the wall and a framed portrait of Her Madge.
Two men were working there, their big solid faces the colour of
pomegranates when you cut them up, both wearing combat fatigues with
displacement patterns and R.A.F blue shoulder flashes.  One of them had
three silver chevrons, a Flight Sergeant.  If I get into trouble, I
said to myself, I'll give them a shout.  They'll see me right.  My dad
was a Flight Lieutenant.

At the top of the stairs a short internal corridor took us to one of
the international departure 'lounges'.  Just inside the doors we were
passed through the usual baggage and personal security checks and got
our passports stamped.  At this point a large white man in a white
shirt and too clean jeans, which somehow said policeman, held out a
hand.

"Your passport again, sir, if you don't mind."

Almost every organ between my navel and my throat did a handstand as I
handed it back.  My scrotum shrank.

He flipped through it.  He used a pen-shaped optical scanner on it.

I thought: this guy is not a Kenyan.  Not even a white Kenyan.  He's a
Brit.  I summoned up the sinews of the tiger.

"And you are...?"  I asked.

He looked up from my little red booklet.

"Her majesty's immmigration officer."

"Shouldn't you be at Heathrow?"

"The Kenyan government recognises that stopping illegal immigrants here
is less trouble for everybody, and less expense, than if we wait until
they get to London."  He returned to the booklet.  "Shovelin.
French?"

"French five hundred years ago.  My ancestors were protestant refugee
asylum seekers from Catholic persecution.  There were no immigration
officers then.  Generally speaking, in the half millennium since, we
are judged to have made valuable contributions to English civilisation.
As you see, we are now English."

I do quite a good posh, thanks to that minor public school, when I
think it's called for.

He returned my passport.

"It was the gear that led me to question you," he asserted.  "The,
whadyacallem, robes."

There were benches against the walls and a few chairs scattered about.
A queue had formed behind us as the local check-in had opened by then,
so I took a bench further in over on one side, next to a glass
partition that separated the main body of the room from the security
scanners.  Interestingly enough I could see the screen and indeed
follow the whole process.

At the door two policemen.  One had a black beret, a blue shirt, red
sergeant's chevrons, a black lanyard.  He had a black cane with a short
silver cap.  The other had a peaked cap, silver stars on his jacket
shoulder.  His cane had a silver ball.  The woman who examined the
screen had a blue shirt and a black jumper.  The black jumper had a
hole in the arm below her shoulder placed so the number on her shirt,
made out of black plastic digits, was visible.  She could freeze the
images that came before her.  For some not obviously apparent reason
she could split the screen showing the baggage in monochrome on one
side and colour on the other.  Then I realised, the colour was not
real: it identified materials inside the target cloth, leather,
plastic, metal and so on.  A label on the side of the machine read
RAPISCAN, Security Products, in italic sans-serif.  Sorry about that.
Professional interest.

Meanwhile my friend the immigration was having trouble with a very
extended Indian family: Mum, in a said, with five or six gold bangles
and gold drop earrings, and at least six children ranging down from six
years old to one, was being asked to show proof that all the children
were hers.  And then I heard voices near me, but over on my right.

"Dad?  Will the pilot be a Kenyan, a black man?"

Christ.  The Wimbledon lawyer's son, young baggy shorts.  "I doubt it.
Not many of their chaps are up to that sort of thing, yet."

"We won't be hijacked, will we?  What will they crash the plane into if
we are?  Canary Wharf?  St.  Paul's?  That'd be good.  Like in that
film.  Was it Independence Day?  Near the beginning."

"Armageddon?"

"One of those."

There were others, others from the safari, but apart from giving me
long and puzzled looks they were, I suppose, deterred by those blessed
robes.  But they all knew who I was a moment or two later.  There was a
sudden commotion outside.  A woman's voice seemed to be at the centre
of it.

"Mr.  Shovelin.  I have two packages for Mr.  Shovelin."

One of the policeman scanned us.

"Mr.  Shovelin?"

The bastard immigration officer nodded and then pointed at me.

"Come this way."  And at least eight faces jerked up in my direction,
then looked away, but generating as they did so a buzz of whispered
comment and conversation.  Heart banging, I picked up my Mombasa duty
free bag and threaded my way through the chairs and people's knees and
hand baggage to the air side of the security screens.

"Abandon hope," the father of the Northern Collegiate muttered audibly
as I passed him, "it's the Jonah's Return."

On the other side, landside, Miriam, from the loos, Dr.  Vikaram
herself, and behind them, yes, Mr.  Call-me-Al.  And of course they had
both the ASDAbag and the camel-hide.

A policewoman took both bags, fed them into the scanner.  Dr.  Vikaram
called out.

"You owe Mr.  Al three thousand shillings.  The extra thousand is for
the trouble you've caused him."

"Four thousand," he objected.  She turned on him.

"Three," she said.

I dug into the Mombasa bag again, found the last of my roll of
shillings and handed them, via the policewoman, to Dr.  Vikaram.

"There should be enough there," I called.

She counted off three thousand.  There were a few left.  She looked at
them, shrugged, gave them all to Call-me-Al.  Then with a wave all
three turned and were gone.

I now had two changes of clothing.  My own, fairly dirty but nothing
like as bad as the ones I'd changed for my Kenyatta robes, and Ludwig
Holly's, worn, but not dirty, but nowhere to change them.  Oh well.

At ten-to-midnight we were led back down the outside stairs to the
tarmac.  This time a bus was waiting for us.  I managed to get one of
the few seats, a single one opposite the door.  But also on the tarmac,
deep in shadow about twenty yards away, a black Daimler, ministry
style, with a green white and orange flag on its wing.  Both rear
passenger doors opened.  Vincey, I thought?  With a couple of hoodlums?
But no.  On one side a tall, thin woman with reddish blonde hair, in a
green cotton coat, got out; on the other side an even taller black man,
beautifully suited, but with his left arm in a tan leather sling.  They
kissed each other, rather warmly if, because of the sling, a touch
awkwardly.  Then the woman walked across the short space and into the
light and I could be certain.

The bus doors hissed behind her.  Danny reached up for the grab handle
above her and smiled down at me.

"Hi," she said.  "No, don't get up."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I could spin this out.  You know, fill in all the details of the
flight, what the stewardesses did and when, what the supper snack was
like, how the lights were put out, the film (Legally Blonde, actually)
and so on.  When we slept and for how long.  But none of that's
important.  What's important is what she told me and what she didn't,
so I had to guess at it later.

But first, let me explain: she was in business class, I in economy. But
before we took off one of the stewardesses came through the curtain and
told me an upgrade had been paid for and I went through, with my
plastic bags and camel-hide, looking, I suppose, like the more
eccentric sort of dosser or wino.  Anyway I spent the trip with enough
room to stretch my legs, which was nice, and next to Danny, which was
even nicer.

"Hang on," she said, just as I was hoisting the last of the bags into
the lockers above us.  "Haven't you got something for me

"Oh, Jesus, yes."  I rummaged in good old ASDA.  "Pair of slippers."

"Pair!"  she exclaimed.

"One from under a bush near the Polo, the other, the one with the
memory card, Golly gave me."

"Oh no!"

"What?"

"You didn't find the car?"

"Yes."

"You must have thought..."

"You were dead?  Yes.  I was... upset."

She'd already lifted the insole and found the card.

"Thank God for that."

"Got something else for you," and I extracted Holly's San Diego
notebook from the camel-hide.  "Found it at Ludwig's."

Well, she was pleased about that too and said so when I finally slid
into the seat next to her.  I watched her, sort of sideways, the way
you do, as she rifled through it, nodding and muttering affirmatives,
yes, yes, that's it, this'll help, as she did so.  We took off, we
climbed.  Finally she twisted towards me so our faces were only a foot
or so apart.

"You've been wonderful," she said, and her lovely greenish eyes seemed
to glisten, "totally wonderful," and she quick as anything dabbed a
kiss on my cheek.

"I really did think you were dead.  How come you're alive and well and
thirty-six thousand feet above Africa?"  I asked.

"That's the easy part of the story.  We faked it."

"We?"

"The Fitzmaurices, Golly, Jimmy and Dave.  Drove the Polo off the track
and into the trees, Jimmy used their submachine gun on it."

"Why?"

"Ludwig got a message to me.  Just one word, one we'd agreed, because
we reckoned most of the places I'd be would be bugged.  Certainly the
Fitzmaurices' phone, which was where I was.  The word was uhuru which
means freedom, but what it meant for us was it's all gone pear-shaped,
get out.  Two days later they killed him."

"Who?  Vincey?"

"Maybe.  It's a long story."

"I'd like to know the gist."

"Of course you would."

And she put her hand on my hand and gave it a squeeze.  I have to say I
was by now in a state of sublime euphoria, a huge reaction to all that
had gone before.  It all came together in a warm glow spiced with a
sort of ethereal desire: the rhythms of the plane which in the African
night seemed so secure and safe, the feeling the nightmare was over,
and above all my closeness to her, close enough to sense her warmth,
savour the tones of elusive perfume, the caress of her hair on my cheek
when we both reached down to pick up a freebie hot towel I'd managed to
drop.  I hadn't been in love like this since I was fifteen.

Anyway... "I can't too well remember what I said before, but whatever,
it was Ludwig who initially got in touch with us..."

"Us?"

"The news gathering firm I work for."

"Of course."

"You must know a bit about him by now."

"He was taking a sabbatical to set up a GM unit in the microbiology
department at JK university.  He was looking into a case where a farmer
on the coast claimed his hemp crop had suffered through being next door
to an AFI research station.  Something he discovered led him to contact
you."  I thought for a moment.

"Go on.  You're doing very well."  She squeezed my hand.  I squeezed
hers back.

"Not really.  It's mostly stuff you told me anyway.  After that it
mostly gets to be supposition.  Except that he seemed to be on friendly
terms with a Drug Enforcement Agent"

"Really?"  She let go my hand, her head came forward so she could look
at me.  "Leo Vincey?  Why do you think that?"

"He showed me his ID."

"When?"

"This afternoon.  Then he tried to kill me, but I got away."

"Good for you!  And I thought he was a trouble-shooter and occasional
hit man, class sophisticated hit man, used by the marketing end of the
Columbians.  Actually I had no proof of that, it was little more than a
hunch, based on some stuff we had on a file back in Jo-burg that our
office emailed me while I was hiding out with the Fitzmaurices."

The plane rumbled on through the dark.  Danny chewed a nail, looked at
or out of the window.  After a moment we both realised we were looking
at each other in the reflection and grinned.

"If you're going to tell me more," I said, "it had better be now.
Before I go to sleep."

"OK.  Couple of months ago Ludwig got in touch with us and I met up
with him a couple of times in Dares Salaam.  What he told me was
hair-raising, needed to be made public, but needed incontrovertible
proof to back it.  Photographs would help.  We arranged that Tim, our
picture man, he came to us from Magnum, should do that.  Now, we've
done this sort of thing before and we've developed a routine.  Tim
always takes along a courier who will get out at least half of the
films by a different route.  I was to be the courier.  Then just before
we were to set out Tim got... immobilised.  We asked Ludwig to
postpone.  He said no, things were getting difficult, it had to be then
or never.  He was planning to cut and run back to Cambridge within a
week.  So I said I'd do the pictures, but not unless he could find a
third person to act as courier.  He found you."

I could think of so many things to say about that I said none of them.
Instead... "And how does Vincey fit into all this?"

"We didn't know anything about him at all until I met them in Nairobi
the day after you arrived, the evening of the day I... picked you up.
And I didn't learn a lot then.  Apparently he turned up at JK Uni about
a month ago, as a consultant system analyst helping with the
re-organisation of the language faculty, an area Ludwig knew nothing
about.  But in that month he became Ludwig's buddy.  Ludwig was lonely.
He had never been away from his family for so long.  He was dreadfully
worried about the stuff he was uncovering.  Vincey, it seemed, was just
what he needed.  A younger man, not too much younger, lively, witty,
similar background, East Coast bourgeois.  They were buddies."

"Queer?  Like I mean gay?"

"Subliminally perhaps.  But I doubt it went physical.  You asked me
that already."

"Did I?"

"At Samburu Lodge."

Again she seemed to sink back into herself for a bit, and it occurred
to me she was as tired as I was.  I let it ride for minute or so, then
sensing that she really was dozing off I got going again.

"That limo you were in.  At the airport...?"

She laughed.

"Quite the thing, wasn't it?  Our consul's."

"Your consul's?"  I asked, remembering the green, white and orange
flag.

"Republic of Ireland," she said, and she made the Irish in her voice
sing more than normally.  "She's, the consul that is, she's a
sympathetic sort of a person and took us under her wing.  Me and
Golly."  She sort of centred herself, bit her lip, and looked at me
intently again.  "But you want to hear the nut of it all, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Right then.  What Holly found out, and what my photographs prove, is
this.  AFI were testing mycoherbicides genetically engineered to be
plant specific on Cannabis saliva on the coast, and on Erythroxylon
coca in the mountains..."

"Erith... what you said.  What's that?"

She patted my knee in a jokingly patronising sort of way.

"Coca, dear boy.  Cocaine."

"Oh, ah."

"These mycoherbicides have already been developed and are in wide use
under the auspices of US drug agencies like the DEA in both North and
South America.  And that was the first thing that alerted Ludwig.  Why?
The work had already been done.  But he found plantations where,
seemingly, it was still going on.  He obtained spore from the areas
near them -remember the farmer whose hemp crop had been destroyed and
using the facilities he had put in place at the university, could see
nothing new about them.  Now, he knew AFI had two research stations in
both of the habitats.  So he looked at the other two as well.  In the
mountains, in the Aberdares and on Mt.  Kenya, and again he found the
spores of Fusarium oxysporum, GM-ed, just as he expected. Incidentally,
the Americans are rather proud of it and call it Agent Green -not a
hundred miles from our old friend Agent Orange.  Anyway in the
Aberdares he found coca bushes sick to death, literally, as a result,
but on Mt.  Kenya..."

It clicked.  Partly because I had sudden recall of the one digital
image I had seen on her lap-top at the Samburu Lodge: a hillside of
healthy bushes.

"They had engineered," I cried, "bushes resistant to the
mycoherbicide!"

"God, you're quick!"  she exclaimed, and there was, I like to think, a
hint of admiration under the mockery.  "Catch the stewardess's eye for
me, would you, and ask her for a glass of water with ice."

A little later she added a detail or two.

"Remember," she said, "the Masters of the Universe at the Carnivore?"

"Yes."

"I'd been tipped off they would be there which is why I wanted to go.
AFI was there, ministries of agriculture and so forth, and one of the
banks the Columbians use, the Madrid and Grand Cayman Banco de Corpus
Cristi Internacional.  OK.  So a stage in producing resistant coca
bushes, and marijuana seeds too, no doubt, had been reached.  Now all
they had to do was take samples away to Peru, Bolivia wherever, and
grow them for the Columbians to harvest.  But I think maybe there was
more to it than that.  There's lots of habitat in Kenya for both crops.
I think they were looking to stage two.  Set up plantations here." She
looked out of the black window.  "Or rather, back there."

And that really was it.  Oh, there were questions left unasked and
unanswered, but they were obvious enough and it would be easy enough
later to come up with viable answers, so I left them unasked.  We slept
for most of the rest of the way, uneasily, drinking more water, going
to the loo,

the way you do on a long-haul night-flight.  I waggled my feet, hoping
to stave off deep vein thrombosis.  Some of the time we held hands.
Deep inside me the fifteen-year-old told himself to make the very most
of it, like all the deepest loves she was illusory, she'd go, she had
Golly, but she'd leave the image of perfection intact.

And so it was.

Six o'clockish they woke us with your standard continental, a
croissant, a chocolatine, cafe au lait.  The sun poured in from the
right, horizontal, hot and eye-searing until the stewardess insisted on
pulling down the blind.

"What next then?"  I asked.

"As soon as we land I'm going to take all the photos I've got,
including the digital you saved of course, to a Dr.  Shapiro who's a
deputy director of the mycological department at Kew."  She tapped the
leather purse she still carried and which she'd put the memory card
into.  "He'll confirm what I've told you.  Then I consult with my
colleagues back at Jo'burg how best to break the story.  It's big, you
know?  Not really because of the drug angle.  Crooks will always find
ways of getting criminalised drugs on to the street, no matter what
anyone does.  What makes it big is that it blows AFI as a responsible
developer of GM foods.  If they can mess about like this, what else can
they get up to?  And by association they'll contaminate the whole evil
GM industry."

"It really is evil?"

"You'd better believe it.  Why?  It's the main route to patenting seed.
To finally getting a monopoly hold on three-quarters of the food the
world eats.  That'll leave just air and water, and I bet they're
working on that."

"Was Vincey really DEA?"

"Probably.  And why do you say 'was'?"  She turned eyes suddenly cool
and serious on me, gave a tiny shrug and then went on.  "There are
several possible explanations.  The most obvious is this.  We know that
it's been DEA policy for years to get involved in any new development.
They argue it's going to happen anyway, best to be in on it, monitor
it, until they have the means to bring it down.  Or maybe he's part of
a scam to siphon drug money into areas where the US government wants
things to happen but daren't be seen financing them."

"Irangate.  Noriega."

"That sort of thing.  Or maybe he's just straightforwardly corrupt and
on the make."  She shrugged, bit into her choco-la tine almost like a
little girl enjoying a treat.  "Who knows?"

Again I felt lost and frightened.  This was all far too big for a not
very clever provincial gumshoe, generally down on his luck, if not an
actual loser.

"White cliffs," she remarked.

"Isle of Wight.  I live down there, over to the left.  Bournemouth."

"Home in what, an hour or so?"

"Two or three."

I thought of the bus-stand, number eleven, the Flight-Link bus in the
tunnel of concrete and steel outside terminal four, and felt the cold
grip of longing that comes with separation, almost certainly permanent
separation.

"Give you my card if..."  The robes.  I gave a shrug and tried a laugh.
Failed.  "If... you ever want me to help you again, try private enquiry
agents in the Bournemouth yellow pages.  I've been thinking of setting
up a website.  Perhaps I will now."

She knew what I was feeling, gave my hand a squeeze.  Tears pricked my
eyes.  Bloody fool.  Who did I think I was?  Trevor Howard in Brief
Encounter?  She had another film in mind.

"This needn't be the end of a beautiful relationship," she murmured.
Then she looked out and down.

"God, doesn't it look green!"

If you haven't guessed what happens next, you're dumber than I thought.
I went with her through passport control and customs.  Neither of us
had baggage to reclaim.  We got out onto the pavement in that high
roaring grey tunnel of bus-stops and taxi drops and pick-ups.  A very
quick kiss and I turned away from her, heading for the Bournemouth
bus-stop.  I reckoned there'd be one along in ten minutes, even though
it's an hourly service.

Vincey didn't recognise me.  Not in my Kenyatta gear, not without my
fedora.

I don't know why I turned back.  There had been no noise loud enough to
hear above the general traffic, the diesel buses and taxis.  Maybe she
cried out.  She was sitting on the pavement like a broken doll, and the
blood slowly filled the two holes beneath her left breast.  I ran
towards her and her head and shoulders came forward and she slumped
over on her side.  A grey BMW idled past and, without it stopping, a
man got in, carrying her soft leather purse, into the front passenger
seat.  Vincey was sitting in the back.  He had one of those neck things
on now, a reversed cone, and a bandage round his head.  I guess he'd
caught the BA flight half an hour ahead of us.

Maybe she died in my arms, maybe she was dead already.

Bad as it gets.

Author's Note

It is a commonplace error these days to confuse the opinions and even
experiences of a fictional character with those of the author.  Chris
Shovelin is not Julian Rathbone.  I mention this particularly with
reference to the Kuoni Cheetah Safari Tour.  Shovelin's opinion of this
may appear critical, even satirical at times.  Julian Rathbone,
however, together with his family, had a marvelous holiday with them
and met no one at all on it who could possibly be identified with
characters in the book you have just read.  Except Sami, our driver.

Associated Foods International and the Banco de Corpus Cristi
Internacional have played parts in at least three earlier novels of
mine.  Since no one has taken exception to my depiction of them, they
too are clearly inventions.

The airline schedules between Mombasa, Nairobi and Heathrow were,
however, at the time of writing, accurate.

Some months after As Bad As It Gets was finished President Moi
surprised the opposition, and probably most of his supporters as well,
by stepping down from the Presidency of Kenya.  Seventy-one year-old
Mwai Kibaki, the compromise opposition candidate, won the election that
followed.  Mr.  Kibaki has pledged that the corruption and
institutionalised violence of the Moi regime will cease.

Julian Rathbone's first book was published in 1967 and has been
followed by more than thirty novels and one work of non-fiction.  He
has been translated into fifteen languages.  Twice nominated for the
Booker Prize, he has been awarded the Deutsches Krimi Prcis and the
prestigious Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Award.

A contributor to various newspapers, magazines and periodicals, he is
also a successful television and film script writer whose work has been
broadcast in over forty countries.  After long spells in Turkey, France
and Spain, he currently lives in Hampshire.