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

“Dicky Mabele is a bit of a stickler,” I said, as if I needed to explain myself.

I looked up at Roelof and confirmed that his eyes had followed mine, and even though the letters were upside down for him, the way his eyes followed the papers made me think he had registered the name.

“We got the farm now, anyways,” said Hendrik, as if he was following the conversation with a slight lag and had only now remembered the silver lining.

“The farm?” I said.

“Such a lovely farm,” said Melissa, and her eyes reached out across the table to touch me again.

“Game farm in the Cape,” said Roelof, and his eyes came up to mine. I could almost see the dots being joined.

Piet took some more rum and said nothing. Hendrik glanced at him anxiously. The door behind me opened, and the ominous shadow of Chandler darkened the room. The others all looked up.

“Dicky wants a word, Freddy,” he said in reverent tones, and handed me his phone like it was a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.

I muttered my excuses and was out of the room in seconds. Richard “Dicky” Mabele was not the kind of person one kept waiting. I heard Chandler saying that his name was Colchester, and no, he wasn’t a town in the old country, nor was he a castle, and giving what he thought was a laugh but sounded more like an animal in pain.

“What the fuck?” said Fat-Boy on the phone.

“Yes sir, of course, Mr Mabele,” I said. I closed the door behind me.

“I’m not doing no animals,” said Fat-Boy. “I don’t do wildlife.”

“We’ll do whatever the colonel decides we do.”

“Yeah right, you war heroes stick together, why don’t you? Put on your smart suits and send us darkies out to handle the wildlife. Let the darkies do the dangerous stuff. What’s the bet I’ll be the guy with the whip on the wrong side of the bars. Hundred bucks I’m him.”

I did a pass by the glass door again, phone to my ear, head down, the obedient assistant to the colonel.

“You still there, Angel?” said Fat-Boy, “You’re so fucking irritating, you know that? Can we stop with this now? When am I gonna play my part? You said I’d be the main man.”

Our time was nearly up. I opened the door and said, “Of course sir, this evening. Absolutely, absolutely.”

“Tonight, then. I’ll hold you to it, fucker,” said Fat-Boy.

“You too, sir.” I said obsequiously and ended the call.

Melissa had taken it upon herself to open another blind and was standing at the glass demonstrating the practical outcome of her decision not to wear anything opaque beneath her silk dress.

“Which is yours?” she asked when I joined her there. Chandler was holding forth. He had imposed some structure onto the proceedings: Hendrik had joined them at the table beside Roelof, and Piet’s attention was fixed upon Chandler. Kenneth had resigned himself to his role and was still standing, but he had managed to fold his arms despite all the muscles.

“The big cats,” I heard Chandler saying, “are more difficult, of course. No wonder you’ve encountered some headwinds there.”

“Ours hasn’t been able to get in yet,” I said to Melissa, because I knew that if I picked one of the neat line of private jets, the chances were it would turn out to belong to a distant cousin, or to one of her previous suitors and I’d be caught in the lie.

“That’s ours over there,” said Melissa, pointing to the jet I’d seen their Yorkshire pilot inspect at the airstrip on the Van Rensburg farm. “Did I show it to you before?”

“Lovely,” I said.

“It’s not the biggest,” said Melissa with regret.

“Goes pretty fast though, I’ll bet.” Melissa nodded but was not much cheered by this thought. She wanted the fastest and the biggest. Then she frowned, a small delicate frown of the sort that would not leave crease marks.

“I thought all the flights were stopped,” she said. “Where are they going?” The flock of Japanese tourists had formed a single file and were leading a column of other holidaymakers like a trail of ants heading across the apron towards a waiting airbus.

“Must have sorted it out,” I said. The air traffic controllers had told us we had only two hours, and that our money would expire before the Johannesburg flight. Messing with the commercial flights would have been a different price scale altogether.

“They’re boarding the flights,” Melissa announced to the room. Hendrik and Piet turned to her, but I noticed that Roelof’s gaze remained fixed on Chandler.

“They’ll announce it, poppie,” said Hendrik. “Don’t worry your little head about it.” He turned back to Chandler. Poppie was the Afrikaans word for ‘doll’, but Hendrik used it more as a slap in the face than as a term of endearment.

“I don’t want lions, anyway,” said Melissa with some bitterness as Chandler resumed his disquisition and moved into the closing arguments. “They have families, you know that? Can’t move them without breaking up the family, but Hendrik doesn’t care about that.”

Chandler was wrapping up the story about the rhinos. “We couldn’t bring them into harbour,” he was saying to his rapt audience. “The officials refused entry. That poor crew were floating out there with those three beasts for five days. The captain told them to stop shovelling the shit overboard because he had some loopy idea the port authorities would let them in if he told them the rhinos were dead. Well … I don’t know if you have any idea of the volume of dung that a single rhino can produce in a day.” His mouth stretched as a cue for laughter. Hendrik and Piet obliged. Roelof was doing sums in his head, so he didn’t join in. “After a couple of days they were swimming in the stuff, and the crew were passing out from the stench. The captain revised his manifesto to