Mosaic by Jo Bannister Page B

entire police force knows the Boers like you do.
    â€œIf everything works out I’ll see you in a few days. Look after yourself; but get the bastard.”
    Hamlin looked up, startled, when he had finished. “Of course she’s wrong. You will stop her.”
    â€œNo,” Shola said very softly.
    â€œNathan, you must! There’s nothing she can do in Pretoria without putting herself at terrible risk.”
    â€œThat is her choice.”
    Hamlin did not understand. There was anger in his eyes as he reached for the telephone. “I’m sorry, Nathan, but if you won’t call the police I shall. I know Grant’s your friend, but—”
    Shola’s hand closed gently, immovably, over the instrument. “Joel is my friend,” he agreed quietly. “He is also Liz’s friend. I have no right to tell her what she may do for her friends, and certainly, Will, you have none. She is not our property, even by virtue of friendship. Her life and her time are in her own gift.”
    â€œAnd if she winds up in a South African gaol?”
    â€œShe’ll be in good company. Most of our friends have served that apprenticeship.”
    Hamlin stared at him, clearly shocked. “Hellfire, Nathan, it’s not the same. She’s—”
    Shola raised a faintly sardonic eyebrow. “White? Like Joel. English—like you? A woman?” He shook his head, laughing softly. “You people have some primitive ideas; but a great sense of rhythm.”
    Hamlin yielded up the phone with an explosive, frustrated gesture of his hands. “Then what are we going to do?”
    â€œWhat she said. Fight.” Shola thought for a moment, then began to dial, calling the numbers out of his head. “She was right about something else. My people know the Boers: we know who they are and we watch them. There are Boers here too. If the one who has Joel needs help—a plane maybe?—that’s where he’ll turn. That’s our edge, the thing we can do that the police can’t—have someone watching all the cats to see which one jumps.”
    Vanderbilt found a suitable field virtually on the helicopter’s flight path. Right on top of the hills, where there were no dwellings and the only roads were mere ribbons of fractured tarmac used exclusively, but still not very often, by farmers and forestry workers, a brake of dark conifers girdled a rough meadow. There had been a cottage there once, the tumbled walls still stood shoulder high, and the few open acres had provided the occupants with a vegetable garden, grazing for the house cow, maybe a handful of sheep. Now it was reverting to moorland, and in a few more years the Ministry of Agriculture would acquire it too, the Forestry Commission would plant it and there would be nothing left to show that people once eked out a kind of living on these hard hills but yielded at last to the temptations of supermarket shopping and church hall bingo.
    At the agreed time Vanderbilt turned on the radio beacon; almost at once he heard the faint tinny throb of rotors. The sound grew rapidly but he could not see the machine until it suddenly lifted over the trees, surprisingly close and unexpectedly large. It was flying below radar, following the nap of the land. Vanderbilt switched off the beacon and showed himself. The down draught from the whipping blades cut through his dry suit to his wet body and set him shivering afresh. His overcoat was in the boot of the car.
    After a brief pause there was an answering wave from the egg-shaped cabin and the monstrous bee settled towards him, head up. The wind and the proximity of the big skids forced him back a pace. The pilot grinned at him through the big Perspex window. The helicopter was a French job, in the dignified livery of a London business house—an executive runabout for people whose time was vast quantities of money, most of whom would have been horrified to know the use to which it