Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

country is going all over, isn’t it? Lock the doors, put up the fences, build the walls, prepare for the war.”

“A vandal would have to get through that game fence or come through the gates.”

“Or be inside already,” he said.

“You mean a farm worker?”

He stood up again, moved around to the other side of the plane and started checking the leading edge of the starboard wing.

“Those ‘bright future’ people are a twenty-minute walk from here. Only a small stretch of wild game area to get through. They pick up a stone to throw at anything that tries to eat them. Not that many of the animals would try. Mostly vegetarian, aren’t they?”

“I would have thought they would be grateful, the future village people, not resentful. Not vandalising the Van Rensburg’s property.”

“Don’t believe everything you read, laddie. One man’s generosity is another man’s condescension.”

Satisfied with the state of the wing he walked around the tail, gave the jet engines an encouraging pat and came back to the entrance of the cockpit.

“Is it big cats he’s buying?” I asked.

He paused at the steps, one foot on the lower block, and he looked at me as if trying to remember what I had said about who I was and why I had the right to ask questions.

“I read about that,” I said. “That Mr Van Rensburg wants to bring more of them down here.”

“That might be,” he said. “I’m not what you might call inner circle. I just steer the boat.” He climbed up into the cockpit and assumed the look of a man who wanted to be alone with his flight instruments.

Petrus had made good time on the pitot tube. He was tightening the last of the four countersunk screws when I joined him. The old tube was lying on the concrete floor trailing wires behind it like a body part ripped from a dying animal. I stooped to pick it up.

“Think it was an accident?” I asked. “Or vandalism?”

Petrus sucked his teeth and scowled. “What vandals d’you get out here in the bush? You think one of those wild animals came in and tried to chew it off?”

“There’s no other damage to the wing?”

“None.”

“I need to account for it to the boss, you see. Explain what happened.”

Petrus wiped his tools carefully with a cloth, then placed them reverently into his toolbox.

“There’d be easier ways to damage a plane, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

“But this was an effective way of stopping them from flying it?”

“Sure, cannot fly without your airspeed.”

He climbed into the cockpit of the Cessna and turned on the master switch.

“Give that a feel would you? Is it heating up?”

I touched the pitot tube. It was getting warm.

“If you want to blame someone for it,” said Petrus as we made our way towards the hangar doors, “look for someone who knows what that piece of metal does. Most people would try to break a prop blade or slash the tyres before they thought of the pitot. They’d hang their jacket on the pitot while they got to work on something else. If it was a vandal, it would be someone who’d flown, or seen the old man doing his pre-flight maybe, someone close to the family.”

As we arrived at the door, a tractor bumped across the apron towards us, driven by a jovial man with several bellies that bounced in time with the tractor engine. He called a greeting to Petrus.

“Chief ready?” he asked. “Said he wants a tow, taking the big bird out.”

“Looks like he’s just done polishing the hubcaps,” said Petrus with a look back to the Learjet. The Learjet lights flashed a goodbye.

“Jet jockey jerk,” said Petrus under his breath.

The town of Minhoop was settling into a low-grade state of mourning. The shops on the high street were mostly closed, but the coffee shop where Fehrson had all the trouble with the waffles was open for business. Sara was pouring her poisonous coffee and gazing listlessly into the empty street. A few journalists were trying to connect to the Wi-Fi and two of them had allowed the atmosphere to get the better of their restraint and were talking too loudly and laughing inappropriately over their post-breakfast drinks.

I called Khanyi while Sara’s chemical experiment cooled on the table.

“Like pita bread?” she asked, when I’d explained about the pitot tube.

I spelt the word for her. “The last ‘T’ is silent.”

“Vandalised?”

“Looks like it.”

“And it prevented the Van Rensburgs from getting to church that morning?”

“It provides the link you were looking for. Between the church killings and the Van Rensburgs. Not the White Africans perhaps, but it could get your nice police captain looking in the right direction.”

“It’s better than nothing, I suppose.” Khanyi sighed.

“Shall I go to see the police captain, or would you like to?”

“What makes you think I want to?”

I took a sip of the disgusting coffee and let that question remain unanswered.

“You’d better go,” said Khanyi. “It cannot come directly from the Department, though. I’ll call him and say you came to us with information. And that he can do what he likes with it.”

The police captain who had given me the guided tour of the local graffiti looked up when I walked into the prefabricated room that had been set up outside the church. It looked as if he would have shown surprise at my presence in the town if he’d been able to get any sleep in the past seventy-two hours. His thin face was drawn and his cheeks had turned into dark purple smudges beneath his blood-stained eyes.

“Still raining?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. It hadn’t rained all morning, but he didn’t look as if he knew we were in a new day.

“You still got some of those foreign cigarettes?”

“Half a pack.”

He pulled his mouth down like a child showing the adults how unhappy he was.

“Seventy-two fucking hours,” he said. Then repeated the number in case I hadn’t caught it the first time. “If it was raining, I’d