Murderous David Hickson (best thriller novels of all time TXT) 📖

a ‘salty penis’, an Afrikaans term used to describe someone with one leg in South Africa and the other in Europe.

The Van Rensburg airstrip was a kilometre of dusty tar laid over the patchy, semi-desert scrubland. We were on the edge of the Karoo here, where the verdant coast shed its green cloak and adopted thorn bushes and dry grasses. A squat building with four glass walls served as terminal for the luxury guests, with air-conditioning and a convenient bar for bolstering their courage as they watched the aeroplanes being warmed up on the apron. The terminal was closed today and looked forlorn. Beside it was a prefabricated hangar in corrugated fawn that was large enough to hold a handful of the type of bush planes that abound on the game farms of South Africa. Today there were only two. A six-seater Cessna 210 Turbo and, keeping its distance from the Cessna, a sleek Learjet 24 crouched in the corner. The Learjet flashed its landing lights at us. A pilot with silver hair and a tie tucked into the front of his shirt to avoid having it sucked into the jets climbed out of the cockpit and waved his clipboard at Petrus.

Petrus didn’t return the greeting. He was shaking his head in disbelief.

“It’s that crazy son,” he said. “Look at it. How on God’s earth did he do that?” He was standing before the high wing of the Cessna 210, which was at the doors of the hangar, nose pointing optimistically at the runway. Petrus shook his head again and showed me what the problem was. A metal pipe beneath the wing was bent to the side, so it pointed at the pilot’s window instead of straight ahead.

“Can’t fly her like that, with the pitot tube all bent,” said Petrus, in case I missed the point. “He’s a fucking cowboy, that one.”

“Hendrik?” I said.

“Not even got a licence, has he? Who needs a licence when you got a rich daddy?”

He sighed heavily and took the pitot tube in his wiry hands and tried to bend it back. But the pitot tube is a solid chunk of metal. You don’t bend it by hand. It’s an L-shape that protrudes beneath the wing and points its hollow tube forwards in order to measure the air pressure, which is used to calculate air speed. Petrus explained that without a pitot tube, the plane effectively cannot fly. Guessing the speed at which you are moving through the air when hundreds of feet above ground is an impossible task.

“Not like driving a car at ground level and seeing your surroundings rush past,” said Petrus. He gave up on twisting the pitot tube back into position. “Knew a pilot once, said he could fly without the airspeed indicator. He’d open the window flap and stick his hand out. Feel the speed for himself.”

“Did he show you how that worked?”

Petrus shook his head and sucked his teeth. “I’m not that fucking stupid. All you get through that window is the prop-wash.” He sighed. “Fucking cowboy.”

“Hendrik often do this kind of damage?”

“Hard landings, popped rivets, cracked engine heads, bent props, I’ve seen them all. But this one … What the hell did he do, crack his thick skull against it?”

Indeed, it was hard to imagine how the pitot tube came to be facing the way it was. It protruded beneath the wing, but only a few inches. If it had struck something while taxiing there would have been some damage to the underside of the wing.

Petrus shook his head again and sighed. “Have to replace it,” he said and turned back to his car to fetch the tools he would need.

I walked over to the Learjet. The silver-haired pilot was crouched at the nose wheel with his clipboard, poking the tyre with a gold-plated pen.

“She’s a beauty,” I said.

He made a mark with the pen on his checklist, then swivelled about in the crouching position like he was doing a Russian dance. He considered me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles. Then he stood up, turned back to face the jet and nodded.

“She is that,” he said, and I experienced a moment of dislocation. It was Brian’s voice, speaking from beyond the grave. The same broad Yorkshire accent.

“Harrogate?” I said.

“Near enough. Knaresborough. You could walk to Harrogate from Knaresborough if you needed to.” He regarded me with interest, trying to place my accent. He glanced back to the Cessna where Petrus was still busy, and I could see a question forming. I spoke before he had time to ask it.

“You taking her out?”

“I’ll flip a few circuits. That church business has delayed everything. Trip’s been pushed to next week, but we don’t want any surprises, do we?”

“Long trip?”

“Couple of hours out, then back again.”

“She must cruise at four hundred knots.”

“Four-twenty.”

“You’d get to Jo’burg in a couple of hours.”

“Or Nelspruit,” he said. Nelspruit was the closest thing to a city near the Kruger National Park.

“The Van Rensburgs taking a holiday?”

The pilot from Knaresborough smiled to show me how little I understood of the Van Rensburgs.

“Quick in and out,” he said. “Big lunch. Bit of shopping. Why not? Then back home again.”

“Shopping? In the Kruger?”

“Probably not the kind of shopping you would do,” he said.

“He must be relieved he didn’t take the jet into town on Sunday,” I said.

The pilot shook his head and dismissed that idea with a wrinkling of his nose.

“You’d hardly have the gear up, and you’d be calling downwind. That grass patch is no good for her, anyway. Too short, too bumpy, too many trees. ‘Side all that, Mr Van Rensburg isn’t jet rated.”

“Bit of luck the Cessna was damaged then.”

“Vandals,” said the pilot, “you don’t do that kind of damage by accident.”

“You get a lot of that here?”

He shook his head and crouched down again to check the brake fluid tubes.

“Always a first time, isn’t there? They’ll have to start locking the doors. Never needed to before, but it’s the way this