"Only thirty-four, just thirteen years older than me."
Emma saw something other than l.u.s.t or a jocular memory of a fling in his eye. There was pain there. Emma hoped she hadn"t hurt Alex. She was going to tell him she didn"t need to know any more, but he beat her to it.
"We had an affair, Emma. It was wrong, but we were in love, at least I thought we were. Andrea, my professor, tried to end it, but we could not stay away from each other. It lasted another three months but in the end her husband caught us out."
"My gosh."
Alex looked away, shamefaced. "He threatened to report her to the university. She would have been dismissed, the scandal was too great. He wanted her back. She didn"t want that; she wanted to live with me. I left Munich the next day, and flew back to Windhoek from Frankfurt. I never heard from her again."
Emma put a hand on his arm. "I"m sorry, Alex."
He looked at her again, back into her eyes. "I"m not the virgin you thought I was. I slept with my teacher, a married woman. I broke my own personal code of honour. It"s why I like living out here, in the desert, away from people."
Now he"s just being maudlin, Emma thought. She gripped him harder. "We all make mistakes. I have, and my mother certainly has, but we all have to move on, Alex."
He shrugged. "Maybe I don"t want to move on. Maybe I"m happy out here, with the solitude and the wildlife. Did you ever consider that?"
"Emma? Are you out here?" It was Sutton, calling from the direction of the fire.
"Yes, Professor?"
"Ah, there you are." He appeared, silhouetted against the fire. "Farmer Van der Westhuizen is on his own, his wife is away visiting her mother and he gave his maid the night off, he was not expecting company. He"s asking for help in the kitchen and I"m afraid I haven"t cooked anything other than sausage and eggs, and that was when I was your age."
And what, I"m supposed to know how to cook because I"m a woman? Emma thought to herself. The old man was insufferable. "OK, Prof, I"ll be there in a minute."
"He"s already burning the cooking oil. I fear we have a disaster in the making."
Alex folded the antenna down on the phone. "We can do this later," he said, zipping the phone back into its case.
"OK," Emma said. "Prof, I"m all yours, but I must warn you I"m no gourmet." Emma walked towards Sutton and the fire. She cast a glance over her shoulder and saw Alex staring up at the stars.
Emma strode past the fire, where Dorset had returned to his seat and was drinking what looked like a scotch and ice next to Andre Horsman, who also had a drink.
On the other side of the fire pit from the rondavels was a rectangular building with a thatched roof that housed the communal kitchen for the camp and an inside dining area, whose open sides were enclosed with mosquito mesh and chicken wire. Sutton, the silly old fool, had been exaggerating. As Emma walked in she was greeted with the mouth-watering smell of fried onions. Benjie was dropping fist-sized chunks of meat on the bone into a heavy steel pot, browning each piece in the onions. "Smells good."
He looked to her and grinned. "Just my personal specialty potjie. The meat is gemsbok neck. It"s going to be delicious."
"If you do say so yourself."
He laughed. "Modesty is not one of my strong points."
Emma leaned against the door frame. The farmer was relaxed and friendly and clearly in his element. He didn"t seem to be missing his wife or his maid. He began adding a selection of spices and condiments to his one-pot stew.
"How do you know Andre?"
Benjie added chopped tomatoes and white wine to the pot, then took a sip. She wondered if he hadn"t heard her question, but after licking his lips, he said, "The war."
"Were you in the air force as well?"
"Yes. It hurts any military person, be they army or air force, if you leave men unclaimed on the battlefield. I was a part of the initial search for that missing Dakota. Truth was we didn"t really know where to start looking."
"Do you think we"ve got a chance now?"
Benjie put the lid on his pot and wiped his hands, finally satisfied with his potjie, which was simmering away. "This is the best chance Andre"s going to get to find that plane. Until you found that man in the ground no one knew where the start point was. If the Dakota crashed in a rocky part of the desert there will still be pieces of it visible; if it crashed in the dunes it might have been swallowed by the sand, but if it ditched in the Atlantic it"s long gone. In any case, it"s worth trying. Now, whatever your professor may have said to you, I don"t need a woman in the kitchen, but you can pour yourself a gla.s.s of sauvignon blanc from the fridge if you really want to make yourself useful."
Emma smiled. "Best idea I"ve heard all day."
Emma walked out of the kitchen only to find the path blocked by Sebastian Lord. He held a dewy bottle of white wine in one hand and two gla.s.ses in the other. "I was just bringing the sous chef some sustenance."
She smiled. "Well, Gordon Ramsay has just politely ordered me out of his kitchen so I"m unemployed."
"Sauvignon blanc?"
"Sure. You"re a mind-reader."
He pa.s.sed her a gla.s.s. "Here, hold this." Sebastian filled her gla.s.s then his. "Andre"s got fingers in everything, including the wine industry. He"s got a small vineyard outside Franschhoek and for some reason I find myself having to give them a lot of legal advice."
She laughed and sipped the wine. "Yum."
"You want to join the party, or just chill for a bit?" Sebastian nodded to a bench made of an old railway sleeper perched on brick piles, outside the kitchen hut.
"Chilling sounds great. I"ve been spending all my time with the professor and Natangwe the last few days, but it seems like longer."
Sebastian laughed. "And your friend Alex?"
Emma shrugged. "He comes and goes. He"s a bit of a nomad. He researches lions and cheetahs so he"s always on the move."
Sebastian looked into her eyes. "It must have been such a buzz, finding that guy in the ground."
"It was." She recounted the moment when she had realised she"d discovered a body, and liked the way she seemed to command Sebastian"s full attention. "Sorry, I don"t want to bore you."
"Impossible," he said.
Emma thought she should ask Sebastian something about himself. "So, you like to travel?"
He nodded. "Lots of businesspeople will tell you how much they hate being away from home and travelling for work, but I say, what"s not to like? I get to see the world, stay in nice places and meet plenty of different people. I was an air force kid and I spent my time growing up in places such as Bloemfontein and Louis Trichardt, so I think it makes me appreciate Paris and Rome more."
He was funny and s.e.xy and interesting, she thought. Emma cast an eye back to the fire.
"Sorry, I"m monopolising you," Sebastian said.
She looked back at him. "No, no. I love travelling, too, though I haven"t done enough of it. And I"d like to see Bloemfontein and Louis Trichardt as well."
Sebastian laughed. "I"d be happy to show you."
"Is your father a pilot?"
Sebastian looked up at the night sky and took a breath. "Was. He flew Bosboks, bushbucks, small observation aircraft. He was shot down over Angola and killed."
"Oh my G.o.d, Sebastian, I"m so sorry."
He looked at her with his dark eyes and blinked. "It"s OK. I was a baby. My mom remarried and my stepdad, who was also in the air force, was a good guy, but Uncle Andre kind of looked after me like I was his own kid. Your folks?"
"Now that"s complicated. But the short story is that I lost my dad as well. And my mom kills people for a living."
Sebastian"s eyes widened. "Serious?"
Emma sipped her wine and Sebastian topped her up. "I kind of wish I wasn"t, but yes. She"s, like, a military contractor, security and stuff."
"Cool. A hot chick with a gun; doesn"t get much better than that."
"And how would you know what my mum looks like?"
Sebastian smiled. "I"m guessing you take after her."
Emma felt herself blush, and gulped down some more wine. She was getting tipsy, but she didn"t care. She asked Sebastian about Paris and Rome and Hong Kong and New York, and other places she wanted to visit one day. In turn, he wanted to know why she was interested in conflict archaeology and what brought her to Namibia. By the time he opened the second bottle of white wine Emma had taken him up on an offer to visit the vineyard where it had come from, when she came to Cape Town after spending time with her mother.
Time pa.s.sed quickly and Emma was a little unsteady when Benjie ordered them all to carry the tables and chairs out of the indoor dining room and set them up by the fire for dinner.
Emma made a conscious effort not to appear as though she was devoting all her attention to Sebastian, but every time she looked across the fire to Alex he seemed to look away.
Alex stood up as soon as he had finished eating. "Excuse me. I"m tired, I"m going to turn in. Goodnight."
The group said their goodnights and Emma started to feel bad about the way she had teased Alex, and about Sebastian, but Sebastian distracted her by asking her where in the world she would most like to work as an archaeologist. Unlike Alex, he was actually interested in her, and could hold a conversation.
"Hey," Alex yelled as he re-emerged from his room, "I"ve been robbed."
Chapter 18.
Hudson Brand saw the woman walk into reception at Etosha National Park"s Okaukuejo Camp, and while he immediately knew he had seen her before it took him a few seconds to realise who she was.
She joined the queue for accommodation just as Brand finished paying the daily park entry fees to a woman in national parks uniform at the second queue. He went to the woman and removed his baseball cap. "Mrs Chapman, isn"t it?"
She looked at him, startled, and he noticed that her blue eyes were bloodshot. Her blonde hair that was what had thrown him at first; he remembered it being auburn was long, tied back in a ponytail, and looked like it needed a wash. There were perspiration stains on her bush shirt. "Who? No," and then Brand saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes before she looked down at the ground. "Sorry, you"ve got the wrong person."
Brand was used to hunting people as a private investigator; he could look at a photograph and memorise the features, even picture the person with different hair, or gla.s.ses, or some other minor disguise. There was the strong jawline, the high cheekbones; she was prettier in the flesh, though unkempt now, as though she hadn"t slept and had been in the same clothes for days. He smelled her body odour, plus stale alcohol. "Sonja."
She looked up at him instinctively, though he"d doubted she would fall for such a simple trick. Her eyes tried to ward him off. "Sorry, I thought you were Sam Chapman"s wife. I was with him, the day before he died."
She opened her mouth as if to speak but no words came out. He saw her defiance crumble, her lip start to tremble. She turned on her heel and walked out of the air-conditioned reception building, into the midday glare. Brand followed her outside. He caught up with her and she turned to face him when she heard the door close behind him.
"It"s Sonja Kurtz. Sam and I never married."
"I"m sorry for your loss, ma"am. Sam was a good man."
"Can you possibly imagine how much I hate those words, "sorry for your loss"? I didn"t lose him, he f.u.c.king died."
Brand gave a small nod. He should leave her be, but he knew something of her background and he had seen that faraway, hurting look in her eyes in other people he"d known, as well as in the mirror more than once. "I know the words don"t help, nor does the booze or the pills, or whatever. Time is all, and even that"s not a permanent cure. I didn"t mean to offend, but, like I said, I did know him, briefly."
She nodded. "Ja, I remember now, you sent an email."
"Yes, ma"am. Hudson Brand. I was guiding your husband and his film crew while they were shooting in the Kruger Park. I left him with the section ranger and an anti-poaching patrol the afternoon he went with them. I wanted to go with them, but it was against national parks regulations."
She took two deep breaths, as if to calm herself. "I wanted to go with him as well. I still keep thinking that if I"d been with him he would still be alive."
Brand nodded. "I had the same thought for a while, but with respect, ma"am, we both know that"s bulls.h.i.t. We"ve both been through that before."
Her eyes seemed to focus on him then, as if she were seeing him for the first time. She looked down at his right forearm and saw the tattoo of the buffalo head over crossed arrows. "Three-two battalion. You were in Angola. But what do you think you know about me?"
"Friend of mine, Steve Oosthuizen, served with me in the battalion and couldn"t ever shake off the life. He served with you as a contractor in Afghanistan with your mercenary crew, Corporate Solutions. We"re in email contact every once in a while and when he found out I was going to be guiding Sam he mentioned he knew you, told me of your background, your relationship. Later, afterwards, I saw your picture in a newspaper story about the funeral; the article said you were married."
She looked away again, as if to another place far away. "The media always gets things wrong. We didn"t marry because I wanted to be independent." She said it as though it had been one of the greatest mistakes of her life.
It seemed like the utterance of each word progressively sapped her strength. "Steve"s given up contracting, for good, he says," Sonja said.
"I"m pleased for him, and for Linda, his wife. He"s been pushing his luck for too long. How about you?"
Sonja sniffed and knuckled her eye. "d.a.m.n dust. I"d forgotten how dry this place is. How about me what?"
"Are you still in the game; still contracting?"
"I don"t know what I"m doing," she said, "other than looking for my daughter. You sound American."
He told her his story in a couple of sentences. "Is your daughter missing?"
She seemed to regain her composure. "No, she"s working on an archaeological dig near here. I"ve come to visit her. Now, if you"ll excuse me, I must go sort out somewhere to stay and try and find out where the dig site is."
Brand was surprised by the coincidence. He normally liked to play his cards close to his chest, but he didn"t want Sonja Kurtz walking away from him.
"Wait," he called. She stopped and looked over her shoulder. "That"s the darnedest coincidence. I"m here with a friend to investigate a dig as well. How about that?"
Sonja turned and regarded him through narrowed eyes, instantly on her guard again. "You"re a safari guide. What interest do you have in archaeology?"
Brand decided to come clean with her. "I"m a private investigator in my spare time. I"ve been hired by the father of the pilot of the aircraft that was carrying the man whose body was found at your daughter"s dig site."
"My daughter found that body," she said, unable to conceal every trace of a mother"s pride. "What do you know about the man she unearthed?"
"What do I know, Ms Kurtz? I know that man should have been me; almost was."
Now he had her full attention. "All right, I"m listening, Mr Hudson Brand, whoever you are. Do you know where the dig site is? I want to check into this camp and then go look for my daughter, this afternoon if I can, or if not, first thing tomorrow morning."