Blood Trail

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

South Africa, in the time of COVID-19A lion roared outside. The deep, longing call came from the pit of its belly, and made the glass pane of her bedroom window vibrate. Normally, she loved that sound, and, being that close, she might once have found it a bit scary.

Now, Captain Sannie van Rensburg felt nothing, just empty.

As she did up the buttons of her blue uniform shirt, she felt detached, as if she was dressing one of her three children, not that she’d done that for many years. Her youngest, Tommy, her laat lammetjie, was turning thirteen in a month and it wouldn’t be too many years before her late lamb didn’t need her at all. Normally she would wear plain clothes to work, but her washing basket was overflowing.

Sannie started to cry and didn’t bother even trying to wipe away the tears as she buckled her belt and adjusted the holster holding her Z88 pistol on her hip.

She went through to the kitchen. The house was still chilly in the morning, although this winter, which had seemed like it would never end, was slowly, begrudgingly, giving way to the warmer weather, which would bring rain and fresh growth. She put the empty bottle of Nederburg sauvignon blanc from the night before in the bin and rinsed her glass; she did not need more rolled eyeballs from her two sons.

The lion called again, searching for his brother or warning others to stay away. Increasingly, lions were crossing the Sabie River from the Kruger National Park into the adjoining Hippo Rock Private Nature Reserve, a housing development in the bush, where Sannie lived. Many of the houses in Hippo Rock were holiday homes and with their occupants stuck in Gauteng or the Cape or, for the foreign owners, overseas, because of travel bans, the estate had been far quieter than normal during the pandemic. The animals were, literally, taking over.

There was never a good time for a pandemic, Sannie mused as she made herself a cup of rooibos tea and a single slice of toast, hoping it would settle her stomach. The wine had been flowing last night, when she’d been at the home of her friend, Samantha Karandis. Even though sales and transport of alcohol had been banned during South Africa’s draconian lockdown, Samantha had not been miserly and the three of them – Samantha, Sannie and their friend Elizabeth Oosthuizen – had come close to finishing six bottles between them, including the half bottle Sannie had taken home and finished herself, alone.

‘I’ve got a well-stocked cellar, darling,’ Samantha had said, more than once, but Sannie, an experienced police detective, had also noticed the briefest look that passed between the two other women. If Samantha had a secret source of booze then she was surely not the only one in South Africa. Sannie had bigger crimes to worry about.

‘Mom?’ Tommy said behind her, breaking into her thoughts.

She didn’t look over her shoulder. ‘Yes, my boy?’

‘At least turn the light on.’

‘It’s not even six am, go back to bed.’ He might talk to her like a surly teenager, but she still thought of him as her little boy.

‘Lion woke me.’ He went past her to the fridge, took out the milk and swigged it from the bottle.

Normally she would have told him not to be so rude, but there was no normal any more. He was getting taller by the day, looking more and more like his father, and the resemblance would only grow as he filled out. Nature was conspiring to prolong her grief forever. She looked out the window, not wanting him to see her tears, but not caring if he did.

‘Christo will help with your homeschooling today. Do as he says, hey?’

A couple of sullen seconds’ silence. ‘All right, Mom.’

Her middle child, six years older than Tommy, happened to be at home with them. Christo was studying zoology and botany at Wits University and had been doing a practical with the Kruger Park’s veterinarians when the government announced the country was shutting down because of the virus. As the veterinarians’ work was an essential service, Christo was able to stay in the park, or move to and from their house in Hippo Rock at will. He had slept at home last night.

Sannie’s eldest, Ilana, was studying medicine at Stellenbosch University and had decided to stay in the Cape for the lockdown. Inter-provincial travel had recently reopened, throwing a slender thread rather than a lifeline to the tourism operators, but Ilana was prepping for exams.

They’d had a fight last night, Sannie and Tommy, over him spending too much time on the computer. She’d never said so to his face, nor to her husband, Tom senior, but she thought the boy was too English, spoiled by his British father who’d had no other children of his own before meeting Sannie. Ilana and Christo were by her first husband, an Afrikaans detective, like her. She felt guilty, now, that she had ever questioned Tom’s loving parenting, even silently.

‘Are you crying?’

She looked at the kitchen window and saw now that he had been watching her reflection. She wiped her eyes for the first time.

He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I miss him too, Mom.’

Sannie covered Tommy’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘I know you do, my boy.’

He forced a smile. ‘I just saw on f*******: that there’s a leopard with a kill at the golf club.’

‘Animals are taking over the place,’ she said.

‘Please will you try to get a picture for me on your way to work, Mom?’

‘Sure.’

Sannie’s latest posting in the South African Police Service was as the head of the Stock Theft and Endangered Species unit, which was based at the MAJOC – the Mission Area Joint Operation Centre – the headquarters for anti-poaching in Kruger, alongside Skukuza Airport. Sannie and her small force of STES detectives were responsible for crime scene investigation and prosecutions arising from rhino and other poaching incidents. From Hippo Rock it was a fifteen-kilometre drive to the MAJOC, through the Paul Kruger entry gate across the river. She liked to get an early start on the day, especially as work was one of the few places where she could busy herself enough to not think too much about Tom. Her daily short cut through the Skukuza staff village took her past the golf club, so she could easily divert there to look quickly for Tommy’s leopard.

The Skukuza golf course, which was open to big game all the time, was being overrun by elephants and other herbivores feasting on the greens now that no one was playing. The predators, too, were arriving in numbers.

Despite a lull in rhino poaching at the start of the lockdowns, crime had been returning with the progressive reopening of the country. Poverty was a perennial problem in the communities that bordered Kruger, but with the collapse of the tourism industry due to worldwide shutdowns, many more people than usual were unemployed, adding to the police’s problems.

Sannie kissed Tommy. ‘Say goodbye to your brother for me and tell him I love him.’

‘Will do, Mom.’

Tommy opened the laptop sitting on the kitchen counter.

She held up a finger to him. ‘And do your schoolwork today. No computer games.’

He turned the laptop around to show her the screen, tapping the volume key as he did so. ‘No games, Mom. The Stayhome Safari morning drive’s just started.’

A young white woman with short, dark hair swivelled in the seat of her open-topped Land Rover game viewer and smiled at the camera while an older African man sat on the tracker’s seat attached to the front left-hand fender, watching the bush and the reddening sky. ‘Good morning from sunny, cool South Africa, and welcome to Stayhome Safari, wherever you’re logging on from in the world. I’m your ranger and field guide, Mia Greenaway, coming to you from Lion Plains Private Game Reserve, inside the world-famous Sabi Sand Game Reserve, and behind me is my very talented and knowledgeable tracker, Bongani Ngobeni. Behind the camera today is our Jill-of-all-trades Sara Skjold, all the way from Norway, though stuck here in South Africa these days. Now, let’s go find some lions!’

Sannie shook her head and manufactured a smile for Tommy. ‘Shame, you live in a nature reserve with lions calling and you have to go online to watch them.’

He grinned, and he looked so much like his father that she had to wipe her eyes again.

‘Mom?’

She picked up her car keys out of the carved wooden bowl on the bench top. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s OK to cry.’

She drew a breath and ruffled his hair. It wasn’t like she was the only one who had experienced loss during the pandemic. People had died; Samantha’s husband John had committed suicide because his tourism business had collapsed due to coronavirus, and Elizabeth’s husband Piet had left her for his secretary and escaped with the woman to Dubai, unable to face the prospect of not seeing his mistress during lockdown. ‘I know.’

As soon as she opened the front door the chill hit her hard. The lion was quiet now, but she knew he – and probably the rest of his pride – was close. She didn’t care. She went to her Toyota Fortuner, clicked the alarm remote, got in and started the engine.

As she drove off, she realised she hadn’t even bothered to check for the lion. Ordinarily, she would have had her powerful torch, scouring the surrounds for danger first.

Sannie didn’t care any more.

*

Mia had parked her Land Rover by Crocodile Pan, but the big reptile of the same name who normally resided here seemed to have taken a leave of absence. It was 6.30 am and while the early bird had the best chance of catching Africa’s big cats on the move, it had been a quiet game drive so far. The online audience, Mia had learned during lockdown, could be as demanding as the rudest rich real-time guest when it came to the Big Five.

Mia took out her binoculars and began scanning. ‘We’ll just sit here a few moments and see who might come down to drink,’ she told her worldwide audience of several thousand armchair safari experts. ‘Look at that beautiful sunrise.’

While Sara – the statuesque volunteer who did indeed seem to be able to turn her hand to anything around the game reserve – panned the camera and focused on the dawn, Mia checked the Stayhome Safari Twitter feed for questions.

@Atlanta_Alice where are lions?

@UKJim how about a leopard?

@Jozi_Babe maybe one of the hot guy safari guides would be able to find some animals? Just sayin’.

Mia smacked the phone down on the front passenger seat. Bongani languidly lifted a hand and pointed to a tamboti tree. Mia had already spotted the tiny riot of colour.

‘Sara …’

But Sara’s eyes, too, were accustomed to the telltale signs of movement and she was already swinging the camera around to track the tiny bird.

‘Oh my,’ Mia said, not needing to manufacture any excitement for the online crowd, ‘that’s one of the most beautiful birds in the bush, and one of my favourites, the pygmy kingfisher.’

Mia took a couple of seconds to focus her binoculars and marvel at how such a staggering palette could be present in a bird that would have fitted nicely into the palm of her hand. ‘Although this is a kingfisher, the pygmy actually doesn’t feed on fish. They eat insects and small reptiles, such as lizards.’

Mia flipped over her phone and looked at the feed.

@Bwana_joe it’s just a bird.

@Big_Frikkie it’s a malachite kingfisher. She needs to check her bird book.

Mia closed her eyes, then picked up her binoculars again and started to focus on the bird once more. Why am I doubting myself over some jerk sitting at home big-noting himself online?

Mia knew the answer to her own question and it rankled her.

‘Mia?’

She turned and saw Sara running her finger across her neck. ‘They’ve cut the feed. They’ve found some lions in the Timbavati.’

Mia put down her binoculars. Stayhome Safari was also webcast from an additional three reserves around South Africa. The production director, mindful of the attention span of many of their viewers, would always choose a big cat over a bird.

Bongani looked up from his phone, which he had taken out of his pocket. ‘The bird was a pygmy kingfisher. You were correct. Why did you just check with your binoculars?’

She felt her cheeks burn with a mix of embarrassment and anger. Her best friend in the world knew her too well. Bongani was right; she had doubted herself. It was like a cancer, eating away at her.

Mia spoke into her radio to the Stayhome Safari producer, Janine, who was based at a lodge in the Timbavati Game Reserve, about a hundred and twenty kilometres north of where Mia was. ‘Lion Plains closing down for a break, over.’

‘Roger, you may as well,’ Janine said.

‘That guy on Twitter’s a jerk,’ Sara said.

‘Whatever,’ Mia said. ‘Frikkie’ was, given his name, most likely a South African, like her. She and every other safari guide in the country knew that locals were often the hardest to deal with on game drives. Many of them had experience in the bush and knew their birds and animals, and all of them thought they did.

Sara took a Thermos flask out of her Fjällräven daypack. ‘Want some?’

‘Sure,’ Mia said.

‘Bongani?’ Sara asked.

‘Not for me, thank you.’ He yawned and stretched, face turned up to the morning sun, eyes closed.

Mia checked her i********:, making the most of the phone signal, which came and went in this part of the reserve. There were large tracts of Lion Plains where there was no coverage, particularly in the areas closest to the perimeter fence. This corner of the Sabi Sand butted up against the community of Killarney and her boss, Lion Plains’ wealthy owner, the British business tycoon Julianne Clyde-Smith, had deliberately avoided paying to have mobile phone coverage extended across her property – rhino poachers used their phones to tip one another off about targets and anti-poaching patrols.

Sara leaned over from the back of the Land Rover, around her camera, and passed Mia a steaming cup. ‘Nothing tastes better than coffee out in the field. I remember one time in Afghanistan –’

‘Are you going to tell us another war story?’ Bongani interrupted.

Sara laughed.

Their banter was good-natured, and it went some way to lifting Mia’s spirits. A few other trolls were baiting her on the Twitter feed now, about not spotting any lions this morning, and Mia regretted opening the morning’s drive with a promise to her audience that she would try to find them. That was not her, and not the way she would normally conduct a drive for in-the-flesh guests. She was out of sorts.

Sara gave her a big smile. The tall blonde was wearing her old Norwegian Army desert-pattern camouflage shirt which she had worn in Afghanistan, where she had served prior to leaving the forces and embarking on her bid to see as much of the world as she could. Her adventure had started and ended in South Africa, where she had become trapped due to COVID-19.

Sara sipped her coffee. ‘When will you get to make another attempt at the master tracker’s qualification?’

Mia had been trying to focus on some of the positive comments on Twitter and i********: and just like that, with an innocent, kindly meant question, Sara had brought her back to the one thing she didn’t want to think about.

‘Not sure,’ she said, trying to sound light. ‘COVID’s affecting everything, including assessments. I’m not sure I’m ready, anyway.’

‘You have been ready for that assessment for at least two years,’ Bongani said, without bothering to open his eyes.

‘Easy for you to say,’ Mia shot back. ‘You didn’t fail your exam.’

Bongani said nothing. Mia picked up her phone again and opened Twitter.

@rajiv_mumbai that bird was beautiful, like you, Mia.

‘Fuck.’ Mia threw her phone down on the passenger seat. When she looked up and, as she habitually did, around her, she spotted the twitch of an oversized grey ear.

‘What are you upset –’ Sara began, but Mia held up her hand to silence her and pointed at the slow-moving bulk of a white rhinoceros coming into sight. Sara shifted to get a better view, and in the process she knocked over her flask, which fell onto the metal floor of the Land Rover with a loud clang.

The rhino, which had seemed so ponderous, spun around ninety degrees to confront the noise.

The sound of a gunshot split the morning’s peace.