The Last Leopard (11 page)

Ngwenya had helped Colonel Scott set Khan free, and it had been clear to him even then that this was no ordinary leopard. Khan’s paws had been the size of baseball mitts. Ngwenya was desperately disappointed to have been so close to the leopard again and yet miss him. Like Ben, he was certain that Martine had seen the leopard. It seemed to have scratched her. It was puzzling that she’d not breathed a word about it and was now riding her horse quite contentedly, as if being clawed by leopards was an everyday event for her.

There was no doubt that she was a most unusual child. She looked perfectly ordinary with her cropped brown hair, green eyes, and skinny limbs, but he’d noticed that Magnus and the horses had formed very strong attachments to her. Then there was this business of her riding a giraffe. Clearly there was much more to her than met the eye.

It was almost eight a.m. when the trio rounded Elephant Rock, riding three abreast. The first thing they saw was a blue and white striped car in the retreat driveway, visible through the gum trees. Ngwenya suddenly yanked at Martine’s and Ben’s bridles, pulling up their horses with a start.

“The police,” he whispered. He put a finger to his lips and dismounted rapidly, indicating that they should do the same.

“The police?” cried Martine, forgetting to keep her voice down. “Then what are we waiting for?” She sprang off her horse. “I’m going to run and see what’s going on. My grandmother or Sadie might have had an accident. There could have been a robbery. Anything could have happened.”

“No!” Ngwenya snatched her back roughly. “In this country, the police can be more dangerous than the criminals. Maybe they are on a routine patrol or maybe they have been called by Gogo and your grandmother, but we must approach with caution.”

They led the horses back the way they came and tied them up beneath an overhang screened by trees. Then they crept around the back of the stables and through the gum trees until they were within spitting distance of the police car. A low stone wall provided them with cover. Nothing happened for a few minutes and then Sadie and Gwyn Thomas emerged from the house with two policemen. Martine gasped. Her grandmother was in handcuffs and Sadie was arguing with a young constable who was gripping her arm as she swung along on crutches.

“I’m not going to deny I told Mr. Rat that I’d shoot him and his hunters if they set foot on my land . . .” she was saying.

“Mr. Rat
cliffe
,
”
corrected the constable. “His name is Mr. Ratcliffe.”

Sadie frowned. “Whatever. I’d tell him the same thing again. But that’s a very different thing from actually doing it—shooting him, that is. Mr. Rat is still alive, isn’t he?”

“Sadie,” interjected Gwyn Thomas, “I think the less said, the better, don’t you? Let’s cooperate with these nice policemen and go down to the station, and I’m sure we’ll have it all sorted out in no time.”

“Why do you want to kill Mr. Rat—er, Mr. Ratcliffe?” demanded the other policeman. “Are you jealous that his business is doing well and Black Eagle Lodge is in some difficulty?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Sadie. “How can I be jealous of a man whose business is murdering animals? And besides, if Black Eagle is in difficulty it’s because Mr. Rat has driven away all my customers. It’s him you should be arresting, not me, and certainly not my friend who has done absolutely nothing.”

“Sadie,” cried Gwyn Thomas, “not another word! Do you want them to lock us up and throw away the key? Officer, can you read us our rights?”

The young constable looked surprised at being asked to do his job. Behind the wall, Ngwenya and the children were struggling to take in this bizarre turn of events. “You have the right to remain silent,” the constable parroted dutifully. “Anything you say can and will be held against you—”

“Wait,” said the other policeman. “Where is the man who usually works with you? Ngwenya, is it? Also, Mr. Ratcliffe mentioned some children.”

Fear flitted across Gwyn Thomas’s face.

“How did he . . . ?” Sadie began. “Never mind. Yes, you are quite correct, Mrs. Thomas’s granddaughter and a boy, Ben, were here, but you know how children are these days—in constant need of entertainment. They were bored in the bush with nothing to do. They missed television or video games or something. I had Ngwenya take them to Bulawayo to stay with some friends of mine for three or four days. He had some business in the city. He was going to spend time there and bring them back toward the end of the week.”

“Kids, they are very expensive,” agreed the young constable. “All the time my son is wanting new shoes, new clothes, new CDs, new books for school. And he is always eating. I tell him—”

“Shut up, Shepherd,” said the surly policeman. “You talk too much. Let’s take these women down to the station.”

The officers were marching their unlikely prisoners to the car when Magnus flew down from the trees and landed on the wall. He hopped along the chestnut bricks until he was close to Martine, then cocked his head and opened his beak as if he was about to start chatting to her.

From her crouching position, Martine tried to wave him away before he drew attention to them. Ngwenya even prodded him with a stick. But the hornbill just hopped out of range.

“What is that funny bird doing?” inquired the policeman, locking Gwyn Thomas in the back of the car and striding in their direction.

Through a hole in the wall, Martine saw it dawn on Sadie why Magnus was behaving so oddly. “I wouldn’t go too near if I were you,” she cautioned the policeman. “You’ve heard about the deadly bird flu that kills human beings within twenty-four hours? Well, it’s been proven that hornbills are particularly likely to get it. That hornbill has been sneezing for days.”

Magnus chose that very second to swoop off the wall and make a lunge for the keys that dangled, gleaming, from the policeman’s belt.

The policeman screamed like a girl. “Get away, sick bird,” he squawked, flapping his arms. “Get away!” He dived into the car and turned on the ignition.

Sadie took advantage of the distraction to say loudly, “I’m really glad that the children aren’t here, because if they were they’d be worried about us and there’s really no reason to be. This is a ridiculous misunderstanding. We’ll be back by lunchtime, I’m sure. But whatever happens, it’s nice to know that they’ll be safe with Ngwenya. He’ll take care of them.”

“Why are you shouting when I am right here?” snapped the constable. He bundled her into the backseat, tossing her crutches in after her. “Get a move on. You are making us late.”

The police car departed in a crunch of gravel. The engine faded and the blanketing silence descended once more.

Martine felt ill. Usually it was her grandmother who worried about her. Now it was the other way around.

“What do we do now?” Ben said.

Ngwenya’s face was grim. “We make a plan.”

“
D
on’t you bring trouble to our door.” The speaker was Ngwenya’s uncle’s wife, Mercy. She stood with her arms folded like a bodyguard, glowering at the horse wrangler. A baby was strapped to her back with a towel. Her husband, a wiry man a third of her size with the mournful expression of a bloodhound, trembled slightly at her side. His eyes never left the ground, although from time to time he stooped to pet two mongrels.

Mercy jerked her chin toward Martine and Ben, whom she hadn’t even greeted. “My baby is not well. She has been crying all day. We have many problems and now you ask us to hide the children of a grandmother wanted by the police. Ha! You are very irresponsible, Ngwenya.”

Martine thought it might be the wrong moment to inform her that a) Gwyn Thomas was not wanted by the police but had been wrongfully arrested, and b) she and Ben were not related.

Mercy shook her head in disgust. “You are very irresponsible, Ngwenya,” she said again. “Do you think we want trouble coming to our house? Do you think we need the police at our door?”

Ngwenya threw an anguished glance at Martine and Ben. “Mercy, please,” he begged. “These are two innocent children. Gogo and Martine’s grandmother are also innocent. They need our help. I cannot keep them in my own village because it is too near to the retreat. You would not want somebody to turn away baby Emelia if she is ever in need of sanctuary when she is older. It is not their fault this has happened. It is the fault of Mr. Ratcliffe.”

Mercy said sharply, “Mr. Ratcliffe? What has Mr. Ratcliffe been doing now?”

“He is the reason that Black Eagle Lodge is going out of business,” Ngwenya told her. “He is the reason that Gogo has had to lay off most of her staff. I have not spoken of this to anyone because I promised her I would not, but he has made her life hell by starting rumors about thieving employees and dirty rooms. He has poisoned our cattle and threatened Gogo. We can’t prove it, but we know he is behind these things. It is blackmail.”

Mercy was briefly dumbstruck. “But why? What reason would he have to make his neighbor suffer like this?”

“He wants the leopard. Gogo would not allow him to buy Khan so that he or his hunters could kill him, and he is not a man who understands the word no. She warned him she would shoot him if he came on our land, and he sent the police to arrest her. They have taken Martine’s grandmother for no reason.”

Mercy addressed Martine and Ben for the first time. “This man Rat cost my husband his job,” she said. “Odilo, my husband, was a proud man, but Mr. Ratcliffe has friends in the government and together they shut down the mine where Odilo worked because it was close to the edge of Mr. Ratcliffe’s land. Now Odilo has a lot of sadness and life is not easy for us. There is little money. But an enemy of Mr. Ratcliffe is a friend to us. You will stay here, of course. Please, sit down for a cup of tea.”

Martine was worried sick about her grandmother, but she found the experience of being in an African village fascinating. The huts had thatched roofs like inverted ice-cream cones, and their clay walls were prettily decorated. They were insulated with cow dung to keep them cool during the day and warm at night. Inside, mattresses with woven quilts were placed on platforms of bricks, raised to keep the sleeper safe from the dwarf spirit Tokoloshe, who, Mercy told them, kidnapped his victims and took them down to his watery den. Everything had the faint smell of wood smoke.

Chickens pecked around the outdoor cooking area, where two women were pounding maize into the powdered meal used to make
sadza
porridge. The village was set on the edge of a large, flat plain, across which could be seen the low gray buildings of a school, closed since the previous Friday for vacation. Behind Martine and Ben’s temporary home, a red-brown hut with zigzag patterns, was a circle of low
kopjes
, shaggy with shrubs and trees. The hills formed a natural paddock with only one exit. Mambo, Sirocco, and Red Mist were in there grazing with the cattle and sheep. Ngwenya was planning to return to Black Eagle for the night so that he could keep an eye on the retreat and take care of the other horses.

Apart from the rhythmic thud of the women crushing maize, the village was quiet, so quiet that any approaching police car would be heard for miles.

“Don’t be frightened for Sadie and Mrs. Thomas,” Ngwenya counseled Ben and Martine. “They’ve done nothing wrong and will be home very soon. Not even Mr. Ratcliffe can make the police lock away innocent people for more than one or two days. They are just going to question them and release them—maybe even by this afternoon.”

The thing that bothered Martine was what would happen if her grandmother and Sadie didn’t return to Black Eagle in a matter of days. She and Ben could hardly ride their horses through the streets of Bulawayo, like characters out of a cowboy film, and demand that the women were freed. An unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness had come over her as Gwyn Thomas was driven away.

Ever since she’d returned from the island, she and her grandmother had grown closer and closer. For the first six months after her parents died, a little part of Martine had kept expecting to wake up and find that the fire had been a hideous nightmare and they weren’t really dead after all. She’d kept thinking that at any second her mum would walk through the door, or her dad would grab her around the waist and tickle her until she cried with laughter. But at a certain point, a little over a month ago, she’d realized that it was never going to happen. She was never going to see her parents again. It was then that her grandmother, Jemmy, and Ben had become the center of her world. She depended on them utterly. And now two of those loved ones were far away and she didn’t know when, or if, they’d all be reunited.

She glanced over at Ben. Unusually for him, he was wearing a slight frown and seemed worried. That made Martine feel even worse, because she felt like it was her fault he’d been dragged into this. She knew that he too must be anxious about how long it would be before he saw his own parents again, and when he’d be able to get to a working telephone to let them know he was okay. And yet outwardly, he was obviously determined to be strong for her sake.