‘I said, piss off!’ Kim was nearly shouting now. ‘Get out of here. I’m going back to Todd.’
She turned on her heel and began walking down the long corridor away from her brother-in-law. ‘I’ll give you a day to think about it!’ Edwin called after her. ‘One day!’
Kim entered Todd’s room and slammed the door behind her.
22
Calder decided to walk from his hotel near the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront to the cigar bar on Long Street where he was due to meet George Field. It was early evening, and getting dark. Away from the Waterfront the city itself was a mixture of totally different architectural styles: towering modern office blocks, elegant British colonial, concrete government brutalist, pristine white Cape Dutch, colourful African and shabby urban dilapidated. The people too were of many different shapes and colours, whites now a definite minority. And above it all was the mountain, always in sight, its summit currently covered by a thin cloth of cloud.
The bar was dark: dark wood, dark leather and rows of whisky and brandy bottles glimmering behind the green-waistcoated barman. It did indeed smell of cigars, a group of businessmen were puffing away at huge samples near the door, but there was also the sweeter aroma of pipe smoke. This came from a man in his sixties with a shock of wiry iron-grey hair and thick white eyebrows, wearing a corduroy jacket that looked too shabby for the establishment. He was drawing contentedly on a briar, a glass of whisky in front of him. When he saw Calder, he pulled himself to his feet and held out his hand.
‘Alex? George Field. You found the place all right? I rather like it here, especially at this time of the evening. It’s quiet, you know, a good place for a chat. And there are so few places these days where one can actually smoke.’
‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice,’ Calder said. He had tracked down George Field on the internet before he left England, and when he had telephoned him the former newspaper editor had seemed suspicious.
‘Not at all. I spoke to Todd van Zyl’s wife and to his sister. Both of them urged me to talk to you. I haven’t seen Todd or Caroline since they were kids. I remember Caroline especially. Funny to hear her now, a grown woman with an American accent.’
‘But you didn’t speak to Cornelius?’
‘No,’ George said, knitting those bushy eyebrows together. ‘I haven’t spoken to Cornelius for a long time. Certainly not since he reinvented himself as an American newspaper tycoon. But I liked Martha. I owe it to her children to talk to you.’
‘Thank you,’ Calder said. He interrupted himself to order a whisky from the hovering waiter. No cigar, though. ‘I know you and she were friends. I wonder if you could tell me what happened around the time she died.’
‘We were friends, especially at that time. I was editor of the Cape Daily Mail. That winter Cornelius decided to close us down and sell off his other South African papers. I was furious, as you can imagine, and so was Martha. I know she tried to change Cornelius’s mind, but she failed.’
‘There was a lot of tension between the two of them, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes, at least at that stage. From what I could tell they had had a pretty good marriage until about a year before Martha died. She was ten years younger than him, but she was much more than a blonde trophy wife. In fact, she didn’t really do the trophy-wife thing very well.’ George chuckled to himself. ‘That’s one of the reasons I liked her. Then it all fell apart. Part of it was the row about the Mail, but there were other reasons.’
‘Such as?’
George sucked at his pipe, his eyes assessing Calder. ‘Such as Cornelius’s mistress.’
‘Mistress?’
‘Mistress, lover, call it what you will. A young woman named Beatrice Pienaar. Stunningly beautiful, and intelligent. She was a journalism graduate and the story was she wanted a few months’ work experience at Zyl News.’
‘The story?’
‘She was a spy. I had a strong suspicion of it at the time, but later, in the late 1990s, her name came out during testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Oh, she wasn’t involved in any violence or torture or anything, but she was working for the security police. She even had a rank: lieutenant. The security police recruited a number of spies among students, put them through liberal universities and encouraged them to work for the newspapers or join radical movements. Some of the names have become public: Joy Harnden, Craig Williamson, Beatrice Pienaar; some we will never hear about.’
‘Did Cornelius know?’
‘I told him of my suspicions, but he said I was being ridiculous. I also told Martha.’
‘Did she know about the affair?’
‘She strongly suspected something.’
‘What about Martha’s death? What do you think happened to her? Do you believe she was killed by ANC guerrillas?’
‘No, I’m sure she wasn’t. That was a classic security-police cover story.’
‘Did you try to find out what really happened? You are a journalist, after all.’
‘I never got the chance. The day after Martha was murdered, I was arrested.’
‘What for?’
‘I never found out.’ He smiled wryly. ‘In those days you often didn’t know why you were arrested. The police were allowed to lock you up for ninety days without charging you. While I was in jail the paper was closed down and Cornelius left the country for America. At the time I assumed that I was locked up to prevent me from finding a rescuer for the Mail. But perhaps it had something to do with stopping me asking awkward questions about Martha’s death.’
‘Were you able to find out anything when you were let out?’
‘I didn’t bother,’ George said, looking uncomfortable. ‘I had become disillusioned with being a journalist in South Africa. I decided I could do more good reporting on the country from abroad. So I moved to London and became the South Africa correspondent for a newspaper there. I never did dig into Martha’s death. And neither did her husband.’
‘Does that surprise you?’
‘Yes, frankly,’ George said. ‘When the TRC was set up I expected Cornelius to ask for Martha’s death to be investigated, but he didn’t. It would have been a high-profile case. They might well have got to the bottom of it.’
‘Cornelius says it’s because the case would have been so prominent that he didn’t want to stir things up again.’
George shrugged.
‘Did Martha mention the Laagerbond to you before she died?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact she did. It was the first time I’d heard the name.’
Calder felt his heartbeat quicken. He was getting somewhere.
‘It was the week before she died. She was quite agitated by then, about the Mail and about Cornelius. But we had lunch in Greenmarket Square, I can still remember it. She started off by asking me about Muldergate.’
‘Muldergate?’
‘It was a big scandal here in 1978. You’ve never heard of it?’
Calder shook his head.
‘Too young,’ George said. ‘It was a big deal. It destroyed the career of Connie Mulder, who had been a shoo-in to succeed Vorster as prime minister, and left the door open for P. W. Botha to take over.’
‘What happened?’
‘A man called Eschel Rhoodie at the Department of Information diverted lots of government funds to set up newspapers in this country and to acquire media abroad. The idea was to influence the way South Africa was perceived at home and abroad, to put across the government’s point of view. They bought a couple of magazines in Europe and tried to buy the Washington Star. The money was diverted illegally and the press found out. The Mail helped break the story. Connie Mulder, who was then Minister of the Interior, Nico Diederichs the Finance Minister and General van den Bergh, the head of the secret service, were behind the whole thing. Vorster was forced to resign, and P. W. Botha beat Connie Mulder in a leadership election to succeed him. The irony is that during the 1980s Botha diverted much larger sums into a secret nuclear and chemical weapons buying programme. But at the time of the scandal, he seemed like a relative liberal. Even I was fooled for a couple of years.