Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (120 page)

“Well, my dear.” At last Tug dabbed his leathery lips with the folded table-napkin. “May I suggest that we take coffee at Holland Park. There are a few small matters that I would like to discuss with you.”

Modestly she hesitated a moment. Could she afford to make herself too readily available? Shouldn’t she play just a little hard to get? Should she hold out until the second time of asking? But what if there were no second time? She quailed at the thought. “Go for it now, honcychild,” she counselled herself, and smiled at him.

“Thank you, Sir Peter. I’d love that.” She was awed by the splendour of the Holland Park house. It was hard not to rubberneck like a tourist as he led her up to his study and settled her into a deep leather armchair.

It was a masculine room with a set of rhinoceros horns on the panelled wall. She noticed the two paintings and shivered as she recognised their value.

“Are you cold, my dear?” He was solicitous and motioned the black servant in flowing white kanza to close the window. Sir Peter brought the coffee cup to her with his own hands. “Kenya Blue,” he told her. “Specially picked from my private plantation on the slopes of Mount Kenya.”

He dismissed the servant and lit a cigar. “And now, my dear…” He blew a streamer of cigar smoke towards the ceiling. “Tell me, are you sleeping with Daniel Armstrong?”

It was so unexpected, so brusque and alarming that she lost her equilibrium. Before she could prevent herself she flared at him, “Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” He raised a beetling silver eyebrow at her.

“Ah, a temper to match the colour of your hair, I see. However, that’s a fair question, and I’ll answer straight. I think I am talking to Thelma Smith. That’s the name on your birth certificate, isn’t it? Father unknown. My information is that your mother died in 1975 of an overdose. Heroin, I believe. That was the period when a shipment of had stuff got loose in the city.”

Bonny felt a cold nauseous sweat break out on her forehead. She stared at him. “Like your mother’s, your own career has been, shall we say, chequered. At the age of fourteen, a juvenile school of correction for shop-lifting and possession of marijuana. Then at eighteen, a nine-months sentence for theft and prostitution. It seems you robbed one of your clients. While in women’s gaol you developed your interest in photography. You served only three months of your sentence. Time off for good behaviour.” He smiled at her. “Please correct me if I have got any of these facts wrong.” Bonny felt herself shrinking down into the huge chair. She still felt sick and cold. She kept silent.

“You changed your name to the more glamorous version and got your first job in photography with Peterson Television in Canada. Dismissed in May 1981 for stealing and selling video equipment belonging to the company. They declined to press charges. Since then a clean record. Reformed, perhaps, or just getting a little more clever? Whichever is the case, it seems you are not burdened by too many moral qualms and that you’ll do almost anything for money.”

“You bastard,” she hissed at him. “You’ve been leading me on. I thought…”

“Yes, you thought that I was lusting after all that decidedly palatable flesh.” He shook his head with regret. “I am an old man, my dear. As the flames burn lower, I find my appetite becomes more refined. With due respect for your obvious charms, I would class you as Beaujolais nouveau, a hearty young wine, tasty but lacking integrity or distinction. The wine for a younger palate, like Danny Armstrong’s perhaps. At my age I prefer something like a Latour or a Margaux, older, smoother and with more class to it.”

“You old bastard! Now you insult me.”

“That was not my intention. I merely wanted us to understand each other. I want something other than your body. You want money. We can do a deal. It’s a purely commercial arrangement. Now to return to my original question. Are you sleeping with Daniel Armstrong?”

“Yes,” she snarled at him. “I’m screwing his arse off.”

An expressive turn of phrase. I take it that no mawkish sentiments complicate this relationship? That is, not on your side at least?

“There is only one person I love, and she’s sitting right here in this room.”

“Total honesty,” he smiled. “Better and better, especially as Danny Armstrong is not the type to treat it so lightly. You have a certain influence and leverage over him, so you and I can do business now. What would you say to twenty-five thousand pounds?” The sum startled Bonny, but she screwed up her courage and followed her intuition. She dismissed the offer scornfully, I’d say “Up yours, mate! I read somewhere that you paid ten times more than that for a horse.”

“Ah, but she was a thoroughbred filly of impeccable bloodlines. You wouldn’t set yourself in that class, surely?” He held up his hands to forestall her furious response. “Enough my dear; it was just a little joke, a poor one, I agree. Please forgive me. I want us to be business associates, not lovers, nor even friends.”

“Then before we talk about a price, you’d better explain what I have to do.” Her expression was bright and foxy. He felt the first vestiges of respect for her.

“It’s very simple really…” And he told her what he wanted.

Chapter 20

Daniel had spent every day that week at the Reading Room of the British Museum. This was invariably his practice before leaving on an assignment. In addition to books specifically on Ubomo, he asked the librarian for every publication that she could find on the Congo, the Rift Valley and its lakes, and the African equatorial forest.

He started with the books of Speke and Burton, Mungo Park and Alan Moorehead, re-reading them for the first time in years. He skipped through them rapidly, merely refreshing his mind on the half-forgotten descriptions of the nineteenth-century explorations of the region. He moved on to the more recent publications. Amongst these he found Kelly Kinnear’s book,
The People of the Tall Trees,
listed in the bibliography.

He called for a copy of her book and studied the author’s photograph on the inside of the dust-jacket. She was rather pretty, with a strong and interesting face. The blurb did not give her birth date but it listed her honours and degrees. She was primarily a medical doctor, although she also had a PhD. in Anthropology from Bristol University.
When not conducting research in the field, Doctor Kinnear shares a cottage in Cornwall with two dogs and a cat.
That was the only personal information that the blurb contained and Daniel returned to the photograph.

In the background of the photograph was a palisade formed by the trunks of large tropical trees. It seemed as though she stood in a forest clearing. She was bare-headed, dark hair pulled back from her face and twisted into a thick plait that had fallen forward over one shoulder and hung down her chest. She wore a man’s shirt. It was difficult to tell what her figure was like, but she seemed slim and small-breasted. Her neck was long, with clean graceful lines, and her collar-bones formed a sculptured cup at the base of her throat.

Her head sat well on the column of her neck, strong square jaw and high cheekbones like an American Indian. Her nose was thin and rather bony and her mouth was determined, perhaps obstinate. Her eyes were probably her best feature, wideset and almond-shaped, and she stared coolly at the camera. He judged that she had been in her early thirties when the photograph was taken, but there was no indication as to how old she was now.

A handful, Daniel decided. No wonder she has my friend Tug running scared. This is a lady who gets her own way. He flicked through to the first dozen pages of People of the Tall Trees, and read the introduction in which Kelly Kinnear explored the first references to the pygmies in the writings of antiquity.

This began with the report of the Egyptian leader Harkbuf to his child-Pharaoh Neferkare. Two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Harkhuf had led an expedition southwards to discover the source of the Nile river. In his field report, discovered four and a half thousand years later in Pharaoh’s tomb, Harkhuf described how he had come to a mighty forest to the west of the Mountains of the Moon, and how in that dark and mysterious place he had encountered a tiny people who danced and sang to their god. Their god was the very forest itself and the description of their dancing and worship was so tantalizing that Pharaoh despatched a messenger ordering Harkhuf to capture some of these tiny god dancers and bring them back to Memphis. Thus the pygmies became familiar figures in ancient Egypt.

Over the ages since then, many strange legends have grown up around these tiny forest people, and much that is fanciful and apocryphal has been written about them. Even their name was based on a misconception. Tugme was a Greek unit of measurement, from elbow to knuckle, an imaginative estimate of their height by people who had never seen them.

Daniel had read all this before and he passed quickly to the more enjoyable portion of the book, the author’s description of three years spent living with a pygmy clan in the depths of. the equatorial forests of Ubomo.

Kinnear was a trained and professional anthropologist with a keenly observant eye for detail and the ability to marshal her meticulously garnered facts and extract from them reasoned conclusions, and yet she possessed the ear and heart of a storyteller. These were not dry scientific subjects she was describing but human beings, each with his own character and idiosyncrasies; here was a warm, loving and lovable people pictured against the awe-inspiring grandeur of the great forest, a merry people, wonderfully in tune with nature, expressing themselves with songs and dances and impish humour.

At the end the reader was forced to share with the writer her obvious affection for and understanding of her subject, but even more, her deep concern for the forest in which they lived.

Daniel closed the book and sat for a while in the pleasant glow of wellbeing that it had inspired. Not for the first time he felt a desire to meet and talk to the woman who had created this small magic, but now at last he knew how and when to do so.

The annual general meeting of the shareholders of BOSS was set for a week before his departure for Ubomo, and Pickering in public relations arranged an invitation for Daniel and Bonny to attend. The AGM was always held in the ballroom of BOSS’s own magnificent headquarters in Blackfriars. The AGM was always held on the last Friday of July and began at seven-thirty in the evening. It ran for an hour and twenty-five minutes: ten minutes to read the previous minutes, an hour of sonorous prose from Sir Peter as he made his chairman’s report and, finally, fifteen minutes of appreciation by the members of his board, capped by a vote of thanks and approbation, proposed by an individual planted in the body of the shareholders. The vote was always passed unanimously by a show of hands.

That’s the way it always went. It was company tradition.

Security at the door was very strict. The name of every person entering was checked against the current register of shareholders and special invitations were scrutinised by uniformed members of BOSS’s security staff.

Sir Peter didn’t want wild Irishmen or anti-Rushdie fundamentalists letting off bombs in the middle of his carefully rehearsed speech, nor did he want freelance journalists or trade unionists, or other free-loading riffraff making pigs of themselves at the heavily laden buffet table and complimentary bar.

Daniel had mistimed their departure from the flat in Chelsea. They would have been at Blackfriars thirty minutes earlier but Bonny had, at the last minute, begun feeling very healthy. She had made a suggestion which Daniel, always the perfect gentleman, had been unable to refuse. Afterwards it had been necessary to take a shower together during which Bonny had started a water fight which had reduced the bathroom to a sodden shambles with water running out under the door into the passageway.

All this took time, and then they had battled to find a taxi. When they finally flagged one down in the King’s Road they ran into traffic along the Embankment and only arrived at the BOSS building after Sir Peter was in full stride, mesmerising his audience with an account of BOSS’ performance over the previous twelve months.

All seats were taken and the overflow crowded the back of the hall.

They sneaked in, and Daniel shepherded Bonny into a corner near the bar, and pressed a large whisky and soda into her hand. “That should hold you for half an hour,” he whispered. “Just please don’t start feeling healthy again until we get home.”

“Chicken.” She grinned at him. You can’t take it, Armstrong.

The shareholders around them frowned and shushed disapproval and they settled down contritely to an appreciation of Sir Peter Tug Harrison’s wit and erudition.

On the dais Sir Peter faced them from the centre of the long table with a microphone in front of him and the members of his board spread out on each side of him. Amongst them there was an Indian maharajah, an earl, an East European pretender and a number of run-of-the-mill baronets. All were names and titles that looked good on the company letter-head, but not a person in the room that evening had any illusion as to where the true power and might of BOSS lay.

Sir Peter stood with his left hand thrust into his jacket pocket, occasionally extending the forefinger of his right hand and pointing at his audience. As he made each point, he stabbed his forefinger like a pistol barrel at them, and even Daniel found himself flinching and blinking as though a shot had been fired at his head.

Everything Sir Peter had to tell them was good news, from the results of offshore oil drilling in the Pemba channel, to the cotton harvests and ground-nut crop of Zambia, and the increase in both pretax profits and declared dividends. The audience hummed with delight at each fresh revelation.

Sir Peter glanced at his watch. He had been running for fifty minutes, ten to go. It was time to move on to future plans and projections. He took a sip of water, and when he resumed, his voice was velvety and seductive. “My lords, ladies and gentlemen, I have given you the bad news…” He paused for laughter and a volley of applause. “Now let me move on to the good news. The good news is Ubomo, the People’s Democratic Republic of Ubomo and your company’s participation in a new era for that beautiful little country, the opportunity that we have, not only to provide employment but also prosperity for a sadly disadvantaged population of four million souls.”