A Sailor's Honour Read Free Page B

quick calculation – a few minutes after seven in the morning. They should get out of bed and dress quickly before Zoë arrives, he thought, and poked Emma in the ribs.
    His special phone did ring now and then – people dialling the wrong number – but he answered anyway. ‘De Villiers.’ He didn’t mention that he was a detective in the New Zealand Police.
    â€˜Pierre?’ It was Johann.
    De Villiers sat up and swung his feet off the bed. ‘Yes, hello, Johann.’ He walked into the passage. ‘What …’
    Weber interrupted. ‘I have an urgent message for you. Please listen carefully.’
    De Villiers felt his groin muscles tighten. He ran the fingers of his left hand across the operation scar stretching from his pubic bone to his navel. The itchy keloid tissue was a constant reminder of the cancer. He looked over his shoulder to see if Emma had followed him into the passage. ‘Go on,’ he said.
    Johann Weber spoke slowly, with the clipped diction of an advocate. Every word was carefully enunciated, with equal emphasis so that each word carried the same weight. Every sentence was carefully constructed so that there was a natural balance between subject and object, with a verb the fulcrum between them.
    â€˜Listen carefully,’ he said.
    â€˜Where are you?’ De Villiers asked, ignoring the injunction.
    â€˜I’m at the office,’ Weber said, impatience in the usually calm voice. ‘Now listen, a few minutes ago I had a call from a man who said that he had been tasked – that’s the word he used – by the major to instruct me to give you a message and to do so immediately.’
    De Villiers took a deep breath and held it. The major. After twenty-five years of conflict, he still didn’t know the major’s name. He didn’t know the name of the man who had sent him into Angola on a near-suicidal mission, the man who then had him arrested by the military police, held in detention and tortured. He had long known that the major had been behind the torture and the use of the mind-altering drugs that had left big gaps in his memory. This was the man who had persuaded him to leave the army – I wanted to be a soldier, he felt like crying out – and then pulled the plug on the covert operation that was so irregular and so secret that the regular SADF could not be associated with it. This is the man, De Villiers said to himself, who was somehow involved in the murder of my wife and children back in 1992.
    De Villiers might not have known the major’s name, but he knew that a message from him spelled trouble.
    â€˜What did he say?’ he asked. A mere second had passed from the first mention of the major.
    There was a small pause. ‘He said: “And you thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’
    â€˜What’s that supposed to mean?’ De Villiers asked. ‘“You thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’
    â€˜No,’ Weber said. ‘“ And you thought we couldn’t reach you there in New Zealand.”’
    â€˜I don’t understand,’ De Villiers said. ‘What difference does it make? Are you sure you got it right?’
    This time there was a longer pause. ‘Pierre,’ Johann Weber said, ‘don’t argue with me. I can tell you at four in the afternoon what a witness said at ten in the morning, to the word, with every nuance and pause. It’s what I do every working day. I listen and interpret what people say. He said: “ And … ”’
    â€˜But what does it mean, Johann? You always say that you’re a man who works with words. What does this mean?’
    â€˜It means that something has already happened,’ Weber said immediately.
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    De Villiers thought of possibilities. He could see no immediate reason for the major to send him