Blood Safari Read Free Page A

are taken.
    He looks like Jacobus would have. It was her abrupt, instinctive thought, purely an observation, and a touch of … nostalgia, almost.
    ‘The Limpopo police are searching for a Mr Jacobus de Villiers, also known as Cobus, an employee of an animal hospital at Klaserie, to help them with their enquiries. Anyone with information can contact the police station at Hoedspruit …’
    She shook her head. She grimaced. Coincidence.
    The newsreader moved on to commodity prices and she returned her attention to the computer screen and the large amount of work awaiting her. She drew the pointer over a block of data. She selected the graph icon.
    What would Jacobus have looked like at… forty, would he have been forty this year? Her memories of his features were based mostly on the photographs in her parents’ home; her own recollection was less reliable. But she did remember her brother’s incredible intensity, his spirit, and his overwhelming personality.
    She turned the graph into multicoloured towers of data meant to bring insight about sales trends in relation to the competition.
    Coincidence. Strange that the TV photo man should also be called Jacobus.
    She selected more blocks of data.
    Jacobus was not such a common name.
    She needed to make a pie graph of this, with wedges of market share to demonstrate that her client’s salad dressing was the slow horse, last across the line. The problem was hers to solve.
    The remains of fourteen protected and endangered vultures were found at the scene.
    That would have upset Jacobus.
    She made an error compiling the graph and clicked her tongue at herself. Coincidence, pure chance. If you absorbed a thousand pieces of information every day for twenty years, it would happen at least once, maybe twice, in a lifetime. The numbers would conspire to tease you with possibilities.
    She suppressed this vein of thought for nearly two hours, until she had processed all the data. She checked for new emails and turned off her computer. She fetched a clean towel from the linen cupboard and climbed on the exercise bicycle, cell phone in hand. She read SMS’s, listened to her messages. She pedalled systematically harder, watched the television absent minded, channel-surfing with the remote.
    She wondered how much like Jacobus the photo really was. She wondered about her ability to recognise him. Imagine if he hadn’t died and walked in here now? What would her father have said about that news item? What work would Jacobus be doing if he were alive? How would he have responded when faced with fourteen dead rare vultures?
    More than once she forced her thoughts away to other things, plans for tomorrow, preparations for a few days at Hermanus for Christmas, but Jacobus came back to haunt her again and again. Just minutes after ten o’clock, she dug into one of her cupboards and brought out two albums. Swiftly flipping through one, not dwelling on the pictures of her parents, or the happy family groups. She was looking for a particular photograph of Jacobus wearing his bush hat.
    She removed it, put it aside and studied it.
    Memories. It took considerable willpower to suppress them. Did he look like the man on TV?
    Suddenly she was sure. She took the photo to her study and dialled enquiries to get the number of the police station in Hoed-spruit. She looked at the photo again. Doubt crept back. She called the Lowveld number. She just wanted to ask whether they were sure it was Jacobus de Villiers and not Jacobus le Roux. That was all. Just so she could get this idea out of her head and enjoy Christmas without the frustration of longing for her deceased family, all of them, Pa and Ma and Jacobus.
    Eventually, she spoke to an inspector. She apologised. She had no information, didn’t mean to waste his time. The man on TV looked like someone she knew, also called Jacobus. Jacobus le Roux. She stopped then, so he could react.
    ‘No,’ said the inspector with the exaggerated patience of someone