Predator. Wilbur Smith

not hear Jo leave the bed or the bedroom. When he woke again he heard her in her bathroom. He checked the bedside clock and found the time was not yet five in the morning. He roused himself and went through to his own bathroom.

      On his way back he paused by her closed door and heard her busy on the telephone. He smiled and thought that she was probably calling her mother in Abilene. Sometimes he wondered what they still had to talk about after phoning each other almost every night. He returned to the bed and soon drifted off into sleep once more.

      When he woke again it was seven o’clock and Jo was sequestered in her dressing room. Hector slipped on his dressing gown and went through to the nursery. He returned to the bed with Catherine in his arms wearing a fresh nappy and clutching her morning bottle. He propped himself on the pillows and cradled Catherine in his lap.

      He studied her face as she drank. It seemed to him that she was growing more beautiful and more like her dead mother Hazel with every passing day.

      At last he heard the door to Jo’s dressing room open. As he looked up the smile melted from his face. Jo was fully dressed and she carried her small travelling valise. Her expression was sombre.

      ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, but she ignored the question.

      ‘Johnny Congo has escaped from prison,’ she said. Hector felt the ice forming around his heart.

      He shook his head in denial. ‘How do you know this?’ he whispered.

      ‘Ronnie Bunter told me. I have been on the phone with him half the night, discussing it.’ She broke off to cough and clear her throat, and then she looked up at him again and her eyes were swimming with misery. She went on, ‘You will blame me for this, won’t you, Hector?’

      He shook his head, trying to find the words to deny it.

      ‘You will go after Johnny Congo again,’ she said with quiet certainty.

      ‘Do I have any choice?’ he asked, but the question was rhetorical.

      ‘I have to leave you,’ Jo said.

      ‘If you truly love me you will stay.’

      ‘No. Because I truly love you I must go.’

      ‘Where to?’

      ‘Ronnie Bunter has offered me my old job back at Bunter and Theobald. At least there I can do something to protect Catherine’s interests in the trust.’

      ‘Will you ever come back to me?’

      ‘I doubt it.’ She began to weep openly, but went on speaking through her tears: ‘I never imagined there could be any other man like you. But being with you is like living on the slopes of a volcano. One slope faces the sun. It is warm, fertile, beautiful and safe there. It is filled with love and laughter.’ She broke off to choke back a sob, before she went on. ‘The other slope of you is full of shadows and dark frightening things, like hatred and revenge; like anger and death. I would never know when the mountain would erupt and destroy itself and me.’

      ‘If I can’t stop you from going, then at least kiss me once more before you go,’ he said, and she shook her head.

      ‘No, if I kiss you it will weaken my resolve, and we will be stuck with each other forever. That must not happen. We were never meant for each other, Hector. We would destroy each other.’ She looked deeply into his eyes and went on softly, ‘I believe in the law, while you believe you are the law. I have to go, Hector. Goodbye, my love.’

      She turned her back on him and went out through the door, closing it softly behind her.

      There were two people Major Bobby Malinga wanted to talk to right away: the only two people outside the prison system who he knew for sure had been in contact with Johnny Congo after his arrival at the Polunsky Unit. And both fitted the description of ‘smart and rich’. The first of the pair to fit Malinga into his busy schedule was D’Shonn Brown. Malinga went to his private office. It was large, decorated with the kind of minimal, modern, tasteful understatement that screamed serious money far more cleverly than a gaudy display of lurid marble and gold ever could. The personal assistant who led Malinga in was an impeccably mannered woman whose plain, knee-length charcoal skirt suit and white silk blouse were both tailored to fit her trim figure perfectly, but without the remotest hint of titillation.

      Though Brown had met a great many celebrities, business leaders and senior politicians, he did not display any photographs of those encounters on his walls. His diplomas for his undergraduate degree from Baylor, his master’s from Stanford Law and the state bar exams of both California and Texas, framed behind his desk, were the only overt sign of ego. And they were there for a very obvious and even necessary purpose. Several academic studies have shown that even the most liberal Caucasians harbour unconscious assumptions about the intellectual abilities of young African-American males. This was just a way of reminding visitors to D’Shonn Brown’s office that however smart they were, he was almost certainly smarter.

      Malinga took off his hat. He was of the opinion that a man’s office was as personal to him as his house and courtesy demanded the removal of headgear in both places. There was no hat stand, so he placed the hat on the desk, sat down opposite Brown and looked at the impressive display behind him. ‘You sure spent a lot more time in school than I ever did,’ he said, going the self-deprecating, Columbo route.

      Brown shrugged noncommittally, then asked, ‘What can I do for you, Major?’

      ‘You came to Huntsville for Johnny Congo’s execution,’ replied Malinga, getting out his notebook and pen. ‘How come?’

      ‘He reached out to me, through his attorney Shelby Weiss, and asked me to be there.’ Brown sounded relaxed, open, like an honest citizen with nothing to hide, doing his best to assist the police with their investigation.

      ‘So you’re a close friend of Congo’s?’

      ‘Not really. I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid. But he was tight with my brother Aleutian, who was killed last year. As far as I’m aware, Johnny Congo doesn’t have any family. So I guess I was the only person he could think of.’

      ‘Did he ask you to do anything else, aside from come to his execution?’

      ‘Johnny didn’t ask me anything directly. But Mr Weiss told me that he had expressed a wish for me to organize his funeral and also a memorial party in his honour.’

      ‘And you did this?’

      ‘Of course. I found a plot for Johnny’s grave, arranged flowers, a mortician and so on for the funeral and made preparations for the party, too. My assistant can give you all the details.’

      ‘Even though you hardly knew the man?’

      ‘I knew my brother and he knew Johnny. That was good enough for me.’

      ‘Who was paying for all this?’

      ‘Johnny paid. He arranged for me to be given money through Mr Weiss.’

      ‘How much money?’

      ‘Two million dollars,’ said Brown, without missing a beat, letting Malinga know that a sum like that was no big deal to him.

      Malinga wasn’t nearly so cool about it. ‘Two million … for a funeral … you gotta be kidding me!’

      ‘Why?’ Brown asked. ‘Whatever you or I might think of Johnny Congo’s crimes, and I don’t deny that they were heinous, he was a very wealthy man. As I understand it, his lifestyle in Africa was extremely lavish. So he wanted to go out in style.’

      ‘And for that he needed two million dollars?’

      ‘It’s not a question of need, Major Malinga. No one needs to drop a million bucks on a wedding, or a birthday party, or a bar mitzvah, but there are plenty of people right here in this city who would do that without blinking. Hell, I’ve been to parties where Beyoncé was the cabaret, and there’s your two million, just for her. Johnny had the money. He wasn’t going to be spending it where he