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

the terminal building emanating a warm tungsten light into the late afternoon. Roelof was finishing a mug of something hot as he stepped forward to greet the colonel. I could see from Chandler’s gesticulations that he was explaining that we would need to travel in separate vehicles because Mister Mabele insisted on travelling alone with his girlfriend and their box of samples. Chandler wanted Fat-Boy kept away from him as much as possible, lest Fat-Boy forget his role and do anything subservient. “It has to be pitch-perfect,” he had insisted, and Fat-Boy had said it would be. Robyn had assured us the same. But that had been when she was mostly sober. I felt the anxiety build in me as I watched Chandler stride back to the jet and Roelof lift his phone to his ear.

Hendrik van Rensburg arrived at the airfield in a cloud of dust. The open-topped jeep he was driving was military green, as Q had described it, and Hendrik’s face was a contrasting red as if there was a fire burning inside him. He had made us wait an hour, despite Roelof’s assurances that he would be only twenty minutes. Colonel Colchester’s stern face was a steel box of disdain.

“Bitch kept me waiting,” said Hendrik in what might have been intended as an apology and his anxious blue eyes gazed out of his red face at the colonel.

“Not a problem,” I said as the colonel climbed into the back seat. Colonel Colchester was in country weekend mode, with an off-white linen suit, soft cotton shirt, no tie, and ochre sunglasses to give him a warmer view of his surroundings. He ignored Hendrik, whose face turned more to the beetroot end of the scale. Hendrik swung himself into the jeep and let a little of his anger out on the starter motor. I lifted our matching chrome-rimmed bags into the passenger seat with me. Colonel Colchester did not share his ride with the luggage.

“Melissa,” said Hendrik clarifying the identity of the aforementioned bitch. “My fiancée.”

“How have you all been?” I asked as he released the clutch and the jeep leapt forward like it was going to vault the fence at the end of the runway.

“Good,” said Hendrik, and he tried to press the accelerator through the floor to show me just how good.

“Your family has been in the news. All that business with the church killings and that man Q.”

Hendrik gave me a sideways glance.

“Bullshit,” he said resentfully, “all a load of bullshit.”

“You don’t think it was him?”

“What the fuck do I know?” he said and turned his red face to me as if he expected a reply. The whine of the engine penetrated, and he changed from second to fourth gear with an angry shove of his hairy left hand.

The dirt road that meandered through the bush from the airfield to the luxury lodge started off with some enthusiasm where the excavators and graders had managed to travel without danger of capsizing, but as the road descended into a steep valley, it dwindled in size and eventually became little more than an animal path through the low scrub. The late afternoon sun crept in beneath the bank of cloud that was trying to clamber over the escarpment from the coast but failing miserably as it spilt rain all over the ridge. Up on the Van Rensburg farm there was a surprisingly warm wind rushing in to defend against the encroaching Cape winter. The road struggled up a rocky hill and provided us with a view into a valley. High in the sky ahead of us I could see vultures hanging in the air, gliding around in wide circles with hardly a flap of their wings, like mobiles hanging above a baby’s cot. A mobile that would give nightmares.

“Been a kill,” said Hendrik, and he shifted his accelerator foot onto the brake pedal so abruptly that we skidded to a halt and sent a cloud of dust into the air. The circling vultures reappeared as the dust drifted down the valley.

“I didn’t know you had predators on the farm,” I said.

Hendrik lifted his heavy rugby player’s shoulders and then dropped them again in an extravagant shrug.

“Animals die,” he said. “It’s what they do. They eat, they fuck, they die.” His face distorted into something that could have been mistaken for a smile, and he shoved the jeep into gear again.

Beyond the circling vultures was a cluster of buildings arranged in a grid pattern like a miniature model of a Roman town. In the centre of the cluster, was an open space with the clearly distinguishable church spire beside it.

“Is that the village?” I asked.

“The village,” confirmed Hendrik, and he kept his eyes on the road as if he was willing it to turn away and hide the village from view.

We descended into the valley and water gurgled about the tyres as we forged a shallow river.

“The colonel want to see our guns?” Hendrik asked me.

“You have guns?” I said. “I didn’t realise you had any. Roelof gave the impression you were just starting your club. Is it a club?”

Hendrik scowled at me. “I’ll show you guns,” he said.

We drove along a dry riverbed, which when it rained became a tributary of the wider river we had forged. It tested the four-wheel-drive ability of the jeep as we crawled over loose boulders and fallen logs. We reached a point where the double tracks of vehicles climbed up and over a ridge above the riverbed. We mounted the ridge and found ourselves in a clearing between the trees. Beyond the clearing were dusty green tents of the sort that served as barracks in the bush camps that sprouted wherever military groups found themselves a bit of Africa for honing their skills. Men loitered about the tents, some smoking and others busy with the preparations for an evening in camp. Hendrik killed the jeep’s engine and said again, “I’ll show you guns.”

In the centre of the