‘I hope you’re satisfied, Kitto,’ Winter said bitterly and Kitto nodded slowly, still gazing at Sheba, fortified by his certainty of lawfulness and right.

  Winter stared at him, then he scrambled to his feet and ducking from the rock, ran towards Babylon and the group of horses.

  ‘What’s that damn’ fool up to?’ Romanis said, staring after him. ‘Got the wind up or something?’

  Kitto lowered his glasses and turned. His dark eyes glittered as Winter scrambled on to a horse, his shabby figure awkward in the saddle. For a second, he wrestled with the startled animal, wrenching the reins from the fingers of the Kaffir who was holding it, then he swung it round, dragging savagely at its mouth.

  ‘Let him go,’ Kitto said. ‘We’re well rid of him.’

  ‘Suppose he tells somebody?’

  Kitto shrugged. ‘What’s it matter?’ he said confidently. ‘We’re behaving according to the rules.’

  Two

  Sammy Schuter’s eyes were cold as he lowered the Mauser.

  Polly was crouching alongside him, her face pale and shocked. Long after the running figures below had vanished, she caught a glimpse between the rocks of someone dragging away the body of the ginger-haired man and even from that distance she saw the blood that stained his chest. For the first time she realised he was dead.

  ‘Sammy, you killed him!’ Momentarily, she had a picture in her mind of the duiker they had shot on their first day out of Plummerton Sidings, one moment full of enormous pulsing life and the next snuffed out of existence. There was a man below like that now, a big, raw-boned man with red hair who had leapt up the slope full of confidence in his own strength, a man who probably had a wife or a girlfriend somewhere, and perhaps even children. He was as dead now as the duiker was. She remembered then how the flies had come from nowhere, clustering round the blood, horrible and obscene, and she shuddered as she connected it all with the man below.

  She stared at Sammy and drew away from him quickly, horrified, as though the dead man’s blood were actually on his hands.

  ‘Sammy, you killed him,’ she said again.

  Sammy nodded, still gazing below at the empty plain. ‘I could have killed anyone of ‘em, Poll, at this range. Any time I wanted.’

  She swung round, staring at his face. It was lean and hard, mercilessness showing in the angular thinly-fleshed features and pale blue eyes, while his mind remained obscure and silent as a wild cat’s behind his inscrutable eyes.

  ‘But he’s dead,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Sammy, you don’t even seem to care!’

  He glanced at her briefly, his eyes resting on her for a second before they turned back again to the plain, searching unceasingly for any sign of further movement.

  ‘That’s what I came up here for,’ he said flatly. ‘I gave ‘em plenty of warning. You heard me. If they try again - ‘

  ‘Oh, God,’ Polly moaned. ‘No more of ‘em!’

  The words were wrenched out of her in her horror. She had seen him kill a man with the same air of professional detachment he had employed to kill a buck. Those same thin bony hands which only a short time before had held her, now held the Mauser lightly across the rock, and the blue eyes which had been warm when he had looked at her were now glittering with menace. She saw him suddenly as a different individual, as solitary and self-dependent as the beasts he hunted, and it seemed impossible in that instant to imagine him as a domestic animal, moving about a farm or a house, attending to the duties of a home, living with other human beings.

  She drew away from him, feeling as distant from him as if he’d been on the moon, cold and hard and ice-brilliant in his skill.

  He looked round sharply, sensing the change in her. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  He reached out a hand to touch her but she pulled away from him.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, her voice high and shrill.

  Sammy stared at her and, as she saw he didn’t comprehend, couldn’t even hope to understand her horror, it came home to her how different a man’s world and a woman’s world were, so different as almost to belong to different planets. While her own lay with warmth and love and all the sensualities of life, he was as set apart from that aspect of living as if it never existed. His home had been too often the veld, his companions only his horse and his gun.

  The light was fading rapidly now, and the rocks below were merging slowly into the darkness of the veld. As they watched, they heard a rolling of stones and they saw a bunch of men move away and dive in a scuttling run towards Babylon from the lower slopes of the kopje.

  Sammy pushed the rifle forward, his eyes cold again, and Polly flung herself across his arms, staring up at him.

  ‘No, Sammy,’ she begged. ‘For God’s sake, no more!’

  He tried to pull the rifle away from her but she refused to let go and he slowly relaxed, lowering it. Finally, he put it down and moved into the shelter of the rocks.

  ‘Better eat,’ he said heavily.

  He fumbled among their belongings and, bringing out the remains of the cold meat from the saddle bags, he pushed it towards her with one of the water bottles.

  ‘Easy on the water,’ he said.

  She raised her eyes, saying nothing.

  ‘We might be a long time,’ he pointed out.

  His face was suddenly strained and tired as he knelt beside her and tossed a blanket across her. Her eyes followed him but she made no attempt to speak. For a while, he knelt by her, looking at her, his expression as enigmatic as the distant aloof hills, then he sat down.

  ‘Reckon it’s safe to sleep,’ he said. ‘They won’t trouble us till daylight now. And I’ll be waiting for them then.’

  Her eyes were still on his face and for the first time he saw the horror in them.

  ‘Polly,’ he said, desperation in his voice, ‘they started it. I didn’t.’

  Three

  There was an air of tension about Plummerton West when Winter arrived, clattering on to the newly-made surface of Theophilus Street from the dusty earth that was all that paved the rest of the town.

  He was surprised to see police about, uniformed and plain-clothed, waiting in the shadows, and small groups of soldiers sitting on the wooden stoeps, smoking, their horses tethered in bunches to the pepper trees and swishing at the inevitable flies. Saddles lay along the walls with piles of blankets and cooking tins; and a fire was glinting briefly by the brick wall of the livery stable.

  As he arrived, hammering at a staggering horse that he knew would never recover, two men ran out from the darkness and grabbed at the bridle of his mount.

  ‘Wie gaan?’ one of them demanded in guttural backveld accents. ‘Where do you think you’re going, man?’

  ‘Into town.’

  ‘Oh, no you’re not!’ the other chimed in, in the chirpy tongue of a Londoner. ‘We want no visitors, mister! Not after this afternoon. It was a cross here between the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night at the Palace. Them Boers is out,’ he went on. He indicated the street, and then Winter noticed broken windows, an overturned cart and a dead horse lying under the trees. ‘There was some talk of treachery, mate. I don’t know whose side they were on, but the police couldn’t control ‘em. You wouldn’t be one of ‘em, would you?’

  Winter shook his head. His horse stood with its feet astride breathing heavily in snoring gasps and Winter heaved up the long head. ‘I want Sir Theophilus Plummer,’ he said, ‘and I want him quickly, so let me go.’

  The two men glanced at each other, but Plummer’s name carried sufficient weight for them to release the bridle.

  ‘Goed Genoeg,’ the Boer said. ‘Fair enough.’ He stared at the horse. ‘Hi, you’ve come a long way, man.’

  ‘Fast too, by the look of your nag,’ the other chipped in.

  ‘Look, I’m in a hurry - ‘

  The soldier studied him for a moment, then he hitched at his belt. ‘I’ll come with you, or you might be stopped again.’

  He disappeared into the shadows and, returning with his horse plodding behind him, swung into the saddle and rode alongside Winter into the town, through the scattered groups of soldiers camped under the trees.

  The bright cold starlight was glinting on the iron roofs and the flat brick facades of the new buildings, giving the dusty road an icy tint as they pulled up outside the Plummerton Hotel.

  The Cockney soldier swung to the ground and reached for Winter’s bridle. ‘I’ll look after your horse,’ he said. ‘Not that he’s going to be worth much now.’

  ‘I’ll need another,’ Winter said as he dismounted, staggering a little from weariness. ‘I’m going back.’

  The trooper stared at him. ‘Christ, what’s the hurry, mate? De Wet come out?’

  He stared at Winter’s shabby clothes, and at the dust which lay in their folds and in his hair, but he nodded. ‘I’ll tell ‘em to have one ready,’ he said.

  Winter pushed into the hotel, stumbling with stiffness, and saw at once there were sleeping figures on the floor of the bar, as though they were refugees from the uproar that had clearly been taking place in the streets. The Portuguese clerk rose from behind the reception desk, blinking, his face strained with tiredness.

  ‘Mr Plummer?’ Winter said, and the Portuguese cocked a thumb at the billiard room and disappeared out of sight again at once, yawning heavily.

  They had brought a cot into the room and Plummer was stretched out on it, fully clothed, and in the shadows Winter could see Hoole lying awkwardly on the horsehair bench, his face covered by an old copy of the Illustrated London News, his pince-nez on a chair beside him.

  They were both on their feet in an instant as the glass crashed in the door, Hoole reaching for his spectacles, Plummer’s heavy face drawn with weariness, his hair on end, as he swung his feet to the floor.

  ‘Frank! What the hell are you doing here? Where’s Kitto and the rest of them?’

  ‘They’re at Sheba.’

  ‘Sheba?’ Plummer ran his hands through his hair. ‘Good God in Heaven, haven’t they got any farther than that? What are they doing there?’

  ‘They’re trying to blast the life out of that boy there! They’ve got him pinned up on the slope, and they’re shooting.’

  ‘Shooting?’ Plummer looked shocked. ‘I said no violence. For God’s sake, what’s going on, Frank?’

  Winter gestured wearily with a heavy hand, his back against the door. ‘Offy, that damned old fool Kitto’ll destroy you,’ he panted. ‘You’ve got to come and stop him. I can’t. They’re out to kill the boy.’

  ‘Kill him?’ Plummer looked ill, his plump face veined and sagging. He began to button up his waistcoat quickly, and reached for his collar. ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘that’s murder!’

  ‘Not quite. They’ve got their excuse all right. It’s all nice and legal. The boy fired on them first. There’s one dead already. One of the troopers. Offy, we took the wrong path in the beginning. We’ve got to get back on the right one.’

  Plummer gestured helplessly. ‘What the devil was the boy doing firing on them?’ he asked. ‘He must have been mad.’

  As he turned from the heavy gilt mirror, his face red with the struggle to fasten his collar over the stud, Winter swayed, dizzy with fatigue, and Plummer dragged up a chair quickly.

  ‘Here, sit down, man,’ he said, concern in his face. ‘You look all in. Hoole, damn you, get him a drink! If they’re asleep, knock ‘em up!’

  As Hoole disappeared through the clashing glass door,

  Plummer pushed the chair forward and Winter dropped into it, trying to explain what had happened.

  ‘Offy, I told you,’ he said. ‘He’s death with a rifle.’

  Plummer sat down and grunted as he reached for his bootlaces.

  ‘But why did he do it, Frank? Why? It don’t make sense.’

  ‘I think he just grew tired of being told where he’d got to go. He just grew tired of us, Offy - me, and Kitto, and you. We made a mistake, not leaving him alone. He’d probably have kept his mouth shut anyway, if we had.’

  Plummer tugged at his moustache, his pale eyes popping. ‘Good God, what have I done?’ he said.

  Winter knocked the dust from his face with a clumsy hand. ‘It’s my responsibility,’ he pointed out. ‘It was my suggestion that we encourage him to get out of the town. It’s my responsibility that he’s turned round and bitten us.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have called ‘em off, man?’ Plummer looked agitatedly at his watch with the instinctive movement of a busy man, and shoved it back in his pocket again, his thick fingers trembling.

  Winter had loosened his tie now and was wiping the dust from his eyes.

  ‘Kitto’s in charge,’ he said, ‘not me. I was only there to watch but it’s got beyond watching now. It wants some strong action from someone with enough authority to override Kitto.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You, Offy. You. And even then I’m doubtful.’

  Plummer gestured. ‘Good God, man, what can I do? If Kitto considers it’s in the best interests of the country -’ He stopped uncertainly as the door rattled and Hoole returned with a bottle of gin and a couple of bottles of soda.

  ‘Hoole’ - Plummer looked around - ‘go and arrange for a meal to be brought in.’

  Hoole nodded, and putting the bottles down on the edge of the billiard table, turned back to the door again. Plummer rose and poured a drink.

  ‘By Snuff, Frank,’ he said, ‘this is the worst thing that could happen to us. There’s been hell to play here today. I didn’t let Hoole leave for the Cape in the end. I thought it best to hang on to him. Willie’ll have to sink or swim on his own. A runner came in to say that Ackermann from Brits’ Commando had run into De Wet’s rearguard and was on his way back here for supplies. He’d had casualties.’ He clashed the bottle back to the metal tray and turned round, holding out a glass to Winter.

  ‘Hertzog’s been at it again in the House,’ he went on, recovering his confidence as he found himself dealing with something he understood. ‘It was in the Cape Times that came up yesterday. Said the rebels were being murdered. Murdered, by Ginger! After what they’ve been doing in the Free State! Fabricius organised a meeting here last night as a follow-up. He knew about Ackermann and he soon picked up Hertzog’s phrase. He even hinted pretty strongly that De Wet had got support from the British element here - meaning me, of course! He was damned careful to say nothing seditious but what he was suggesting was plain enough for his followers to smash the town up. He’s heard about Willie all right. They tell me he’s been turning the place upside down, looking for that boy.’

  ‘He’ll find him quickly enough if he goes to Sheba. He might even meet him coming back.’

  Plummer gestured angrily. ‘He can’t come back,’ he said.

  ‘Kitto hasn’t been able to stop him yet!’

  Plummer banged his fist down on the table. ‘Fabricius is going to love this,’ he said. ‘And so are a lot of other people! We’re going to be busy, Frank, you and me, shoving up the barricades. We’ve got to be ready for ‘em.’

  As he moved back to the mirror, smoothing his hair into place, prepared to give battle, Winter looked round the billiard room, remembering other meetings he’d seen in there, meetings like this and the one of several days ago, with Offy and his minions standing around, a different man for every facet of his business, sometimes Hoole, sometimes others; politicians and businessmen all mixed up together, each trying to see to Offy’s tangled affairs at the same time, all of them demanding Offy’s attention. Inevitably there was always some frightened offender too, some businessman who’d opposed them, some politician who’d been threatening; and Winter, always Winter, in the background, complete with the dirty work in a notebook in his pocket, the evidence, the goods; half-ashamed of himself and trying to pretend that it didn’t matter what a man did with his life, that pride was unimportant.

  Somehow now, though, it all seemed different.

  ‘Offy,’ he said slowly, ‘not me. Not this time. You’re on your own now.’

  Plummer turned, his expression incredulous. ‘On my own?’

  Winter nodded. There’ve been many things I’ve done for you, Offy,’ he went on. ‘There was Abbey and Mrs Williamson’s husband, and van der Stel, and a few others. I’ve fixed ‘em all for you, Offy, fixed ‘em so their grandchildren will burst into tears every year on the anniversaries. I dug out the dead dogs on their consciences, or buried yours according to the circumstances. But it’s over now. I’ve finished.’

  Plummer was standing over him, his thick neck bulging over his collar, angry and disappointed. ‘You could manage it just this once more,’ he said, pleading as he always did when Winter rebelled.

  But this time Winter shook his head. ‘No, Offy,’ he said. ‘I’ve knocked too many nails in the coffin of my conscience, and for once I’m crying enough.’

  ‘Frank-’

  Winter shook his head. ‘There hasn’t been much you’ve asked me to do that I let you down with,’ he said, ‘but I’m backing out of this one now. Offy. When we can condone murder by calling it duty, I’ve finished.’

  Plummer’s eyes were hurt and he looked old and lonely and deserted. ‘Don’t leave me now, Frank,’ he begged. ‘Don’t back out at this stage. I’m going to need you. I’ve always relied on you because you’ve always told me what I ought to know, not what I wanted to know. I’ve trusted you even though we haven’t always agreed, and my God, I need someone now -not some smooth legal josser like Hoole but somebody who knows what makes me tick. I want you around because there’s trouble and there’s going to be more trouble.’

  He poured himself a drink and swallowed it quickly. ‘They’ve been selling shares on the Stock Exchange in Jo’burg,’ he said. ‘I’m losing money. They’ve heard of the riots already and they know the signs. The market’s gone down with a bang. There’s talk of an inquiry here.’

  Winter didn’t reply and Plummer grabbed his arm.

  ‘If there is an inquiry - and the boy comes into it - whose side are you on, Frank?’