So someone had helped him.
Who?
Arknold...
He had shut his eyes to Danilo’s fraud, when he had discovered it: had kept silent, because by not arranging better security he had put his licence at risk. But would he step deep into murder to save himself a suspension?
No. He wouldn’t.
Barty, for money?
I didn’t know.
One... any... of the van Hurens, for any reason at all?
No.
Roderick, for news? Or Katya, or Melanic?
No.
Clifford Wenkins, for publicity?
If it was him, I was safe, because he wouldn’t leave me there much longer. He wouldn’t dare. Worldic, for a start, wouldn’t want the merchandise turning up in a damaged state. I wished I believed it was Wenkins, but I didn’t.
Evan? Conrad?
I couldn’t face it.
They had both been there. On the spot. Sleeping next door. Handy for breaking in in the night and smothering me with ether.
One of them could have done it while the other slept. But which? And why?
If it were either Evan or Conrad I was going to die, because only they could save me.
The dawn came up on this bleakest of thoughts and showed me that my theories on water vapour were correct. I could see nothing of the Kruger National Park, because all the windows were fogged and beaded with condensation.
I could reach the glass beside me, and I licked it. It felt great. The dryness of my tongue and throat became instantly less aggravating, though I could still have done with a pint of draught.
I looked through the licked patch. Same old wilderness. Same old no one there.
My spoonful of water had formed all right inside the now cold plastic bag. Carefully I loosened its neck in the rubber band and squeezed the shrunken air out, to prevent it expanding again when the day grew hot, and re-absorbing the precious liquid. I wouldn’t drink it until later, I decided. Until things got worse.
With all the precious humidity clinging to the inside of the windows, it was safe to embark on a change of air. I took off my sock and turned the handle with my toes, and opened the left-hand window a scant inch. Couldn’t risk not being able to shut it again: but when the sun came up I got it shut without much trouble. When the growing heat cleared the windows by re-evaporating the water, at least I had such comfort as there was in knowing it was all still inside the car, doing its best.
The pencil I had chewed in the night (and stowed for safe storage under my watch strap) was showing signs of usefulness. One more session with the incisors, and it had enough bare lead at the tip to write with.
The only thing to write on that I had in my pockets was the inside of the book of matches, which was room enough for ‘Danilo did it’, but not for my whole purpose. There were maps and car documents, however, in the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat, and after a long struggle, tying my toes in knots and using up a great deal too much precious energy, I collected into my hands a large brown envelope, and a book of maps with nice blank end papers.
There was a lot to write.
Chapter Fifteen
Danilo had suggested to Nerissa that I go to South Africa because there, far from home, he could take or make any opportunity that offered to bring me to an accidental looking death. He had lured me to the killing ground with a bait he knew I would take — a near-dying request from a woman I liked and was grateful to.
A death which was clearly a murder would have left him too dangerously exposed as a suspect. An obvious accident would be less suspiciously investigated... like a live microphone.
Danilo hadn’t been there, in Randfontein House.
Roderick had been there, and Clifford Wenkins, and Conrad. And fifty others besides. If Danilo had provided the live mike, someone at the press interview must have steered it into my hands. Luck alone had taken it out again.
Down the mine, at the suddenly opportune moment... Bash.
Except for the steadfastness of a checker called Nyembezi, that attempt would have come off.
This wouldn’t look like a natural accident, though. The handcuffs couldn’t be called accidental.
Perhaps Danilo intended to come back, after I was dead, and take them away. Perhaps people would believe then that I had lost my way in the park and had died in the car rather than risk walking.
But the time span was tight. He couldn’t wait a week to make sure I was dead before coming back, because by then everyone would be searching for me, and someone might have reached me before he did.
I sighed dispiritedly.
None of it made any sense.
The day proved an inferno compared with the one before. Much worse even than Spain. The scorching fury of the heat stunned me to the point where thought became impossible, and cramps wracked my shoulders, arms and stomach.
I tucked my hands into my sleeves and rolled my head back out of the direct rays and just sat there enduring it, because there was nothing else to do.
So much for my pathetic little attempts at water management. The brutal sun was shrivelling me minute by minute, and I knew that a week was wildly optimistic. In this heat, a day or two would be enough.
My throat burned with thirst and saliva was a thing of the past.
A gallon of water in the car’s radiator... as out of reach as a mirage.
When I couldn’t swallow without wincing or breathe without feeling the intaken air cut like a knife, I untied the plastic bag and poured the contents into my mouth. I made the divine H2O last as long as possible; rolled it round my teeth and gums, and under my tongue. There was hardly enough left to swallow, and when it was gone I felt wretched. There was nothing, now, between me and nightfall.
I turned the bag inside out and sucked it, and held it against my mouth until the heat had dried it entirely, and then I filled it again with hot air, and with trembling fingers fumbled it back into the rubber band on the steering wheel.
I remembered that the boot of the car still held, as far as I knew, a lot of oddments of Conrad’s equipment. Surely he would need it, would come looking for that, if not for me.
Evan, I thought, for God’s sake come and find me.
But Evan had gone north in the park which stretched two hundred miles to the boundary on the great grey green greasy Limpopo river. Evan was searching there for his Elephant’s Child.
And I... I was sitting in a car, dying for a gold mine I didn’t want.
Night came, and hunger.
People paid to be starved in Health Farms, and people went on hunger strikes to protest about this or that, so what was so special about hunger?
Nothing. It was just a pain.
The night was cool, was blessed. In the morning, when I had licked as much of the window as I could reach, I went on with the writing. I wrote every thing I could think of which would help an investigation into my death.
The heat started up before I had finished. I wrote ‘give my love to Charlie’, and signed my name, because I wasn’t certain that by that evening I would be able to write any more. Then I slid the written papers under my left thigh so that they wouldn’t slip out of reach on the floor, and tucked the little pencil under my watch strap, and collapsed the air out of the plastic bag to keep the next teaspoonful safe, and wondered how long, how long I would last.
By midday I didn’t want to last.
I held out until then for my sip of water, but when it was gone I would have been happy to die. After the bag had dried against my face it took a very long time, and a great effort of will, for me to balloon it out and fix it again to the steering wheel. Tomorrow, I thought, the thimbleful would form again, but I would be past drinking it.