When I reached the top, still nothing moved at the hut. There was only that open window as a giveaway. Watching it, I dropped down carefully, silently, ducking for a minute behind a fallen rock halfway to the back door. I made a final sprint from its cover and flattened myself against the hut's wall by the open window.
Then I risked a glance into the room beyond. There were plates and a cup on a crude deal table and a cut loaf of bread, but no human occupant. An inner door was shut; the outside door locked.
I was overcome by a sense of unease and suspicion. The kitchen set-up looked like a trap.
I disengaged the Mannlicher's safety catch and made my way, inch by inch, towards the front.
It was the smell which brought me to a halt: not the fishy stench of the river, but a fetid, animal odour which reached into the pit of my stomach and knotted my muscles. I knelt down, scarcely breathing, and by feel alone double checked the rifle's safety catch while I cased every point of the compass. I snicked back the flap of my shirt pocket containing the shells in order to be able to reload quickly. Then something thumped softly on the inside of the wooden wall close to my face.
I started my spring for the front door as the thought crashed home that the murderer was only an inch or two away through the planks.
He came out carrying the dead man's head.
I cannoned headlong into him, tripped and hurtled over his back, firing from the hip as a purely reflex action. The brute lay kicking. It was not on the dying hyena, however, that my sickened gaze fastened. A man's head, the lower jaw missing, with stray pieces of skin and hair adhering to the face and scalp, rolled away from the animal's snapping, frothing jaws.
Between the eyes was a bullet-hole and the back had been smashed wide by a soft-nosed bullet.,
CHAPTER FOUR
I hauled myself up by the verandah post, winded and sick from the heavy fall. I stared transfixed at the sight of tobaccostained teeth projecting from beneath a fragment of lip on the skull; as I did so terror mounted like a quick-burning fuse from the sphincter muscles of my anus into my stomach. Blind panic exploded like a grenade and I jerked away into a wild career across the open terrace-away, away, anything to be away from the awful silence of that bizarre execution and the thought of the murderer's sights on my own back. I ran zig-zagging from the imaginary gun until I was brought to a halt by the security fence. I clawed my way along it and threw myself more by instinct than reason through the gap I had cut, and hid my head below the level of the terrace, out of sight of the watchful eyes with which my supercharged imagination invested The Hill.
Gradually my breath returned, and with it my sanity. The sun on my hatless head and the unbroken stillness bore in upon me the futility of my crazy sprint. The wild oscillations of irrational fear steadied round the deadpoint. I got a grip on myself and tried to make some sort, of assessment, and to force myself to go back to the hut.
It was essential to establish the identity of the dead man: Rankin or a guard. If it was Rankin, my whole plan was shot and then all I could do would be to return, tail between legs, to Nadine — if she would still have me after my walkout. For the first time since leaving I began to have doubts. The hardships of the river had enabled me to push consideration of my shabby trick out of mind but now I had to face it squarely. The end had to justify the means and if Rankin was dead I had lost the end-and possibly Nadine as well.
If the skull was the guard's, there was only one person likely to have murdered him: Rankin. The thought gave me a measure of grim inverted satisfaction: I had often wondered, during my stay in jail, whether time had passed me by and I would arrive at The Hill to find Rankin gone. But if the murderer was Rankin, I was in deadly danger and I would have to watch every step I made. If he was capable of killing an official guard, he was capable of anything. But why hadn't he disposed of the body? Or — the thought brought a taste of sourness into my gullet — had I interrupted the disposal process: hyenas? What I needed now was a gun and a lot of vigilance. The mere fact that the hyena had been busy inside the hut indicated that the killer could not be around and therefore it would be safe to go back.
What then had I run away from? I had seen dead men before, in the war. True, the skull was a ghastly sight, but if it was Rankin's, so what? I had little sympathy to spare for him. If it was the guard's; he was a stranger. What then had sparked off my terror?
I felt the rising surge in my bowels as I forced myself back on to the terrace. The Hill? Whichever way one looked one's eyes always came back to it; sprawled shimmering, ugly, gigantic across the view. The hard sunlight seemed to magnify rather than decrease its mystery. It was inevitable, too, that my concentration should focus on the tabletop with its royal grave. It seemed to echo the accusation: you double-crossed Nadine.
I started back towards the hut, walking straight and fast. If I went on thinking in this way, in this isolation, I'd be crazy within a few days. The Hill, I told myself, was nothing more than an unusual koppie at a strategic river junction. The mystery of the lost origin of a group of unknown invaders who had fortified it had been blown up to become a riddle into which one could read anything.
I strode up to the skull and I blenched. I temporized about examining it by first retrieving my hat and rifle. I felt again the tiny ripple of fear-activated muscle in my buttocks and to counteract it I took out a shell for the Mannlicher. The bolt action was looser than it should have been but I put this down to the bang it had had when it fell, and to its age. While I loaded I found myself eyeing every corner of the surroundings but once I had a bullet in the breech I felt better. I then made my way to the verandah. I needed a wall at my back as a precaution against ambush while I took stock of the situation. First, I decided to force myself to examine the skull. However, when I started towards it and had only reached the edge of the verandah, there was such a stench of decaying flesh that suddenly I found myself hanging on to a post, vomiting violently. When the fit had passed I went to the water tank and had a long drink. I came to the conclusion then that it would be better to postpone my examination of the hut and the victim until I could face the ordeaclass="underline" perhaps in the cool of late afternoon. I still couldn't bring myself to approach the skull so I fetched the ladder and shinned up the roof for the long bamboo pole supporting the radio aerial, which I then used to spear and edge the skull inside the hut. Then I shut the door and window.
The ladder gave me another idea: laid over the rolls of barbed wire below the security fence it would give easy access to the river from the terrace and back again. Acting on this, I carried it on my shoulder across the bare stretch of terrace with a feeling of trailing my coat to unseen enemies; as if to tempt them further, I rested at intervals with my back deliberately turned to The Hill. I took my time, too, at the gate and painstakingly sawed with the diamond pencil through several more strands of wire, to make a sizeable gap. In the end I had a quick, safe route open.
It was my need for a rational approach which also crystallized my decision to make camp at The Hill itself. I made my choice of site as much with my heart as with my head. I plumped for a circle of big rocks near the foot of the secret stairway, not far from the trench where our love had taken fire. This site, I reasoned, commanded the fortress's most vital strategic point and if Rankin were holed up on the summit he could not by-pass it. Footpaths dating from the time of the expedition all converged there. Also, being on the side of The Hill away from the river, I could hide myself and avoid discovery from that quarter. And the soaring cliffs gave welcome shade. The actual entrance to the secret stairway was about twenty-five feet above the ground and concealed by the big old fig tree whose roots, hanging down from the cliffside, formed a grassy cage. It could be a useful hide-out if the need arose.