‘But Zalika’s got Goldilocks hands, I get it. I’ll need to get her trained up first. You say you have plans of the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have outbuildings up at that place of yours in Suffolk?’
‘Of course.’
‘Right then. Get the target house mocked up inside a barn or something. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy: chalk marks on the floor, some stairs and a first floor made out of planks and scaffolding. Just so long as the dimensions are right. Try and get a copy of the safe, or as near as dammit, too. We’re not going to go in blasting on this. No guns, no smoke, no bombs. It’s all about timing, and that has to be perfect. If Zalika shows me she can do it, she can come. Otherwise I’ll take my chances with your undercover cop. All right?’
‘Ja,’ said Klerk. ‘But now let me give you my condition for doing the job. I’ve got great things planned for that young lady, so you just listen to me. You brought her back safely once. You damn well bring her back again.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘No, Carver, just do it.’
43
Within half an hour of Klerk and Carver ending their conversation, Moses Mabeki received another call from within the grounds of Campden Hall.
‘That’s good news,’ he said. ‘I had considered remaining in Malemba while the Gushungos went abroad, so that I would be well placed to respond in the event of any…’ Mabeki chuckled to himself as he searched for the right words. ‘Any unforeseen emergencies. But on reflection, I think the best course of action would be to accompany the President and First Lady to Hong Kong, so that I can offer any assistance that might be required there. Yes, that is certainly the better option.’
44
Carver was not a religious man, though there had been times when he was grateful for the words of comfort offered by military chaplains in the hours before battle, or at the gravesides of recently dead friends. But that afternoon he took a short drive out of town, along Route 1, parallel to the north shore of Lake Geneva. At the Nyon exit he turned left, away from the lake, up towards the village of Gingins. A little oasis of Englishness in the heart of Switzerland, it possessed both a cricket club and a beautiful old church where the Anglican parish of La Cote held a service at four o’clock every Sunday afternoon.
Carver took communion there for the first time in more than a decade. The words of the service, ingrained in him by years of compulsory religious attendance at school, came back to him with all the familiarity of an old friend encountered by chance after many years of absence. The ritual played out with comforting predictability, and the prayers retained a strange, potent poetry for all the many attempts of the Church’s modernizers to strip them of their mystery and magic.
The moments of silence and contemplation enabled him to think about what he was planning to do. Was he committing a murder, he wondered, or casting out a devil? As always, however, Carver did not waste too much energy on metaphysical speculation. His focus had to remain on the here and now, and that meant concentrating on the words printed in the Order of Service he was holding in his hand: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.
Amen.
When the prayer was over and the vicar’s preparations complete, Carver left his pew and joined the line of worshippers waiting for communion. Finally, he approached the altar and knelt to receive the bread and wine. He watched every movement the vicar made, noted the precise sequence of events and the words that accompanied each of them. And when the service was over, just to make sure he’d got it right, he drove straight back to Geneva, went out to evensong at Holy Trinity Church, which the locals called l’eglise anglaise, and took communion all over again.
45
For the rest of the day after Justus Iluko had been taken away, his house remained undisturbed. It was as if the violence and suffering that had occurred in its vicinity had created some kind of force field that held the mass of dispossessed who clustered around it at bay. It was not until the final light of the dying sun had been extinguished and the purple-black African night, heavy with the spicy scent of warm earth, had descended that the first scavengers started edging towards the walls of whitewashed concrete blocks.
This was no more than the law of nature in action. When an animal died in the bush, its carcass provided carrion for hyenas, vultures and all manner of insects until nothing remained but its bare bones. Even they provided marrow for truly enterprising scavengers. And so it was with the house. It too was a corpse from which the spirit of life had been extinguished. Its inhabitants had no more use for the beds on which they had slept, the tables at which they had worked and eaten, or the countless little possessions that spoke of a man and woman working together to raise the children they loved. This was neither a moral issue nor a sentimental one. Better that these belongings should be recycled for the benefit of those still alive and present than rot away to no purpose.
The larder was emptied of all its contents. The floorboards, joists, doors, window frames and shutters were taken for firewood and building materials. The corrugated iron panels were stripped from the roof. By dawn, only the walls remained. And with the rising sun came men with hammers, chisels and pickaxes to hack and chip away at the blocks themselves.
By noon, the house that Justus Iluko had built with such sweat and devotion, and occupied with such pride, had vanished as if it had never been. The land on which it stood was covered with brand-new huts and improvised tents, filled with the never-ending stream of people being transported to this once bountiful farm, now a dusty, barren hell.
46
As a religious man, Justus would not have described his new conditions in Buweku jail as hellish. They were more like a form of purgatory, a waiting room filled with other lost souls awaiting their day of judgement.
The cell to which he’d been taken was intended for all the remand prisoners who were awaiting trial. One of its sides faced a corridor and consisted of iron bars and crosspieces, so that the inmates were at all times visible to any passing guard. The other three sides comprised concrete walls into which concrete bunks had been fitted in three rows, rising several feet towards the roof. Justus had to reach up to grab the top bunk: it must have been seven feet off the ground. The only sanitation was a hole in the floor, ringed with cracked tiles, stained with the faeces of inmates from years and generations gone by. There was a solitary standpipe from which an intermittent dribble of water flowed, regardless of whether the tap was turned on or off. A single bare bulb, hanging from the ceiling in a wire-mesh cage, provided light to the cell, in theory at least. But it, too, worked only sporadically, and at times over which the men beneath it had no control whatsoever.
There were thirty-four men crammed into this hot, airless, fetid space. One of them was Justus’s son Canaan. They hugged each other with a mixture of relief at being reunited, profound sorrow at the loss of Nyasha and the fierce desperation of men who know their days are numbered.