Seventeenth chapter
What is irony? (asked Oom Schalk Lourens) If you believe you’ve managed to tame that pet snake or scorpion, it could very well be your last act of faith. That’s irony.
It finally dawned on Police Captain James Christian Wellington why the road from Winterton remained quiet, why no-one came riding along it and into his trap.
“Blast it!” His shrill voice chased birds out of trees. “They’re not bloody well coming to Frere for the explosives! What fool will keep explosives in his town?”
Peet Jansen’s Dutch great-grandfather, a dairy farmer, discovered it on the family farm while looking for a lost cow. He called it the Kruipkelder. Directly translated that means the Crawlspace. The cave actually still exists today, in what you could call a small foothill of the Drakensberg, about ten miles northwest of Winterton. It’s a thin blade of a fissure, cutting deep into the hillside. Not much headspace, you crawl most of the time. Depth wise there’s more than enough space, you can easily hide a ton of explosives under that little hill.
Which was what Peet Jansen did.
The entrance to the Kruipkelder used to be more accessible, even a cow could get in there, but in 1904 a rockfall following a snow blizzard hid it from everyone except who those knew where to look. When Peet Jansen inherited the farm, he decided the cave would make a perfect storage place for explosives, so he proceeded to construct an iron frame with an iron door right inside the cave mouth.
Naturally he kept the only key.
Knocky Koch stood watch by the fresh horses they had taken from the Jansen stable, his eyes on the dusty Frere road passing the foothill about a thousand yards to the south, while Peet Jansen transferred a sack of dynamite sticks and a plunger box from the Kruipkelder to his saddle bags.
“Will that be enough?” Knocky asked.
“More than enough,” Peet said. “We can blow up the whole mountain if we like.”
As usual he didn’t smile, just leapt on his horse and set off. Knocky followed as fast as he could. They had fresh horses but some hard riding ahead of them, probably the hardest of their journey.
And they were running out of time.
Police Captain Wellington hated making mistakes. It did things to his ulcer. At this moment it was churning like a bloody volcano. He had been wrong to think Peet Jansen would keep explosives somewhere in or close to Frere where he had his road-building business. The bastard never had any intention of riding all that way before turning north for the target, the railway cutting on this side of the Drakensberg. Peet obviously kept the explosives somewhere on his farm. Riding overland from there to the cutting would, in spite of the often rocky terrain, be much faster.
Wellington believed he could still win the day, but he and his men would have to ride like bats out of hell. So he ordered his riders to do just that, using appropriate bad language. To one of them, the one who could read and write well, he gave another order: Ride back to the police station in Frere and send a telegram to Pretoria with this message, go, go, ride as if your life depended on it!
It was a short and urgent message to the Prime Minister, vaguely putting him in the picture, so to speak, an obvious attempt to politically crawl up Louis Botha’s powerful backside and prove himself true to the Union of South Africa. Another mistake on Wellington’s part. Couldn’t he, with all the telegrams flying, the first being the one Neef Berg had Nurse Evelyn sent to someone in Pretoria, figure out who that influential someone in government could be? That the main villain of the Gibson Diamond plot was the very person he was trying to bumlick? Couldn’t this blood-thirsty police chief put two and two together and find the answer was Louis Botha?
No, not so you’d notice.
The policeman tasked with sending the important telegram, not without ambition himself, did ride as if his life depended on it. Less than ten minutes later he was watching the police station’s telegram dispatcher work the machine’s keys.
Meanwhile the race was on, Peet Jansen and Knocky Koch heading northeast overland along rocky terrain which could very well slow them down, and Wellington and his policemen heading north along the main dirt-road out of Frere. Unlike most horse races, this one didn’t feature a prize at the end of it; unless you were willing to consider death as possible prize, of course.
The horse and buggy dropped Grootjan and Kleinjan at the guarded gate of Prime Minister Louis Botha’s official residence in Pretoria.
“Nice house,” Kleinjan said by way of understatement.
Grootjan spoke to the officer of the guards at the gate. He used his limited English because the officer looked English. To his surprise the man replied in Dutch, asking them to follow him.
They were taken to what looked like a nice waiting room, where they had nice strong coffee and a nice lunch of ox-tail, baked potato and peas. The minutes were ticking away. The officer of the guards came back, apologised for making them wait half an hour, promised the Prime Minister would call for them soon. Everything seemed very nice, but Grootjan and Kleinjan had a funny feeling about all this. Why wasn’t Louis Botha running into the waiting room, excited to see them, demanding they show him the stone immediately?
Upstairs, in his private office with the door closed, Louis Botha was paging the floor like a tiger trapped in a cage. The telegram from Frere’s police station lay on his desk, its vague message extremely frustrating.
He now knew Neef Berg had somehow been compromised, probably by the pretty nurse who had acted as go-between for the telegram he sent to Pretoria. This had to be what happened, because a policeman named Captain J C Wellington now knew about the plot to blow up the track before the train reached Frere. And the damn interfering police captain thought him trying to prevent the explosion would put him in his prime minister’s good books.
If the train wasn’t stopped or derailed, if someone like Bernardus van Aswegen survived but figured out who had arranged the explosion and why, something a bright mind like his could very well arrive at, it would endanger everything Louis Botha hoped to achieve.
Right now, downstairs in the waiting room, two men loyal to the Boer rebellion cause were waiting to hand him the Gibson diamond. He wanted it, dear Father in heaven, he needed it desperately, but he didn’t want it known he had the damn thing.
Reaching a decision, Louis Botha stopped pacing and went back to his desk. The whole thing was under threat of unravelling, too many holes appearing in his master plan. It was time he closed as many holes as he could.
Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra stayed on the roof, they felt safer there. The train was still creeping around mountain bends, moving so slowly they could jump off easily, ja-nee, no problem. But that would land them in a maze of mountains and sheer cliffs so bewildering and treacherous it would take a mountain goat days to escape from it, and human beings could die of thirst and exposure before they found the way out.
That was not, to be honest, completely true. Human beings called Johnny Zulu and Manny Porra could probably survive this rough part of the Drakensberg, the part people called The Broken Teeth; it was possible because they were good at crawling and climbing, and finding hidden pockets of snow they could melt for water.
Gerrit Johannes would never make it.
They didn’t even have to talk about it. Gerrit Johannes had become family. They wanted the great blue stone, yes, but not without Gerrit Johannes. He was their brother.
Gerrit Johannes went back into the conductor’s wagon, ready to defend himself against who or whatever came at him. Emily lay on the cot, apparently sleeping. There was no sign of the bearded giant.
He didn’t believe she was really asleep. A scorpion does that. You think it’s sleeping, it’s used to you now, accepted your presence, but try and touch it. He thought it best to let the scorpion be.
He sat down under the window, staring out at rock, rock and more rock, one hand curled around the great diamond in his pocket, the other around the grip of the FN pistol in his belt. His mind was a storm.
We will be out of this mess of mountains soon, time-table says we stop at Frere in less than two hours. I will sneak off with Johnny and Manny, and the diamond. We will get out of this alive, sell the diamond, disappear. I hope I never see Em again. What if she asks to come with? How can I refuse? What will happen to her? I don’t care, dammit. What if she discovers she cares for me after all? How can I leave her? Where the fuck is Bernardus?
Emily could hear Gerrit Johannes breathe over there at the window, but she kept her eyes shut. She did not want him to look at her. She was afraid her eyes would reveal what she and Bernardus van Aswegen were planning.
She was doing the right thing, wasn’t she? Her family came first. Gerrit Johannes had known that from the beginning, but then he started playing games.
She was doing the right thing.
Definitely.
Maybe?
She realised she was crying and hated herself for it. This wasn’t helping, it was time to stop doubting herself. She was doing the right thing, damn it!
Detective Constables Thatcher and Blair were talking to Bernardus van Aswegen, in their first-class compartment next to the one holding the stiffening body of Captain Lawrence. They were in a foul mood, all three of them. Finding his FN pistol missing had done nothing to improve Thatcher’s mood.
He whispered fiercely, “Why should we listen to you, Bernardus?”
Blair, scowling darkly, obviously agreed. “Who can passengers trust if they can’t trust the bleeding train conductor?”
“I am taking you in my confidence,” Bernardus van Aswegen growled at them, “give me that, at least. I came to steal the stone but failed, that bleddy Gerrit Johannes played me like a top.”
“What if this plan doesn’t work?” Thatcher demanded.
“Don’t call it a plan, it’s madness!” Blair shouted. “We can’t trust these people, Thatcher! Emily Gibson is a scheming little cow!”
The giant towered over them. “Give me an alternative, come on, we’re heading for Durban with the diamond chest empty and its protector just shot himself, come on, give me an alternative, damn it! Under two hours from now Gerrit Johannes and his two throat-cutters will disappear from this train and the stone with them, so come on, give me a better plan, what else can we do?”
Thatcher bit his moustache. “What if they’ve already jumped off the train?”
Bernardus van Aswegen snorted. “Look outside. It’s the worst possible mountain terrain all the way to just this side of Frere. Gerrit wants out of the mountains, he doesn’t want to die here.”
A disgusted Blair bitterly spat out the words. “Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego. Why did we let that imbecile drag us into this?”
Thatcher sat down. “He promised us promotion, remember?”
Blair shook his head. “Inspector Braindead, now he’s really a corpse.”
Bernardus van Aswegen had a lot more to say, instead he kept his mouth shut. He realised the two policemen were going through an emotional process, struggling against acceptance, wrestling themselves into exhaustion before finally agreeing with Miss Emily’s plan. All he had to do was wait for that moment of exhaustion and surrender. He didn’t think it would take all that long. These two meant well, but they only thought they were good men. They were actually fucking useless.
If forced to really think about it, Peet Jansen and Knocky Koch would probably admit to suspecting some police action at some point, but they had no idea Frere’s blood-thirsty police captain and his paid men were already after them. They did know they were in a race against time, the train was on its snaking way through the broken mountains, and they had to get the dynamite planted before it reached the cutting.
The going over rocky terrain was hard and dangerous at times, but Peet had picked the fittest, most nimble horses from his stable. They were not doing too badly.
Time was ticking away and the two men knew it, but they didn’t have a watch between them. Knocky owned one, an undertaker needs to know what time it is. This morning he forgot to slip it into his pocket. Peet Jansen owned a great old pocket watch, a family heirloom, and he could have fetched it when they were getting fresh horses on the farm. He didn’t. He completely forgot about it.
Time was their greatest enemy, the most important factor in their lives at this incredibly important moment, and they had simply forgotten to keep an eye on it.
Captain Wellington and his riders weren’t doing too badly either. They had a real road under the hooves of their horses, a hard-packed road with hardly a loose rock on it surface, they were actually doing quite well. Dangerously well, from Peet and Knocky’s point of view. Wellington and his riders were closing the gap between them.
The council elders of Frere had given road-builder Peet the contract to resurface this stretch of road, using only manual labour from the town prison. That was two years ago. Peet and his convicts finished the job in fourteen months. He was proud of their work.
Remember what Oom Schalk Lourens said about irony?