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

seen the day before. Roelof glanced up and saw them too. Kenneth tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at them.

“Looks like there’s been a kill,” he said in an echo of Hendrik’s comment.

Roelof looked back to the road and said nothing. We were heading towards the epicentre of the spiraling vultures, and Roelof’s hands fluttered over the controls as if they wanted to be doing something else, like driving in the opposite direction.

We bumped gently over the rough road towards the death that lay ahead. The terrain here was rocky, with patches of long grasses and thorn trees like crippled refugees struggling over the low hills. The vultures were gliding down to a cluster of trees a few hundred metres from the road. They sat on the low branches and shifted restlessly, opening and refolding their huge wings, and jumping up impatiently when another landed.

“Too far off the road to see anything,” said Roelof, but he brought the jeep to a halt beside Piet and Billy, who were using binoculars to see what the vultures were picking at.

The shapes of low-slung animals the size of big dogs could be seen through the grasses beneath one of the thorn trees.

“Hyenas,” I said. “You’ve got the scavengers alright. When your cats arrive, they’ll fit right in.”

Roelof nodded without enthusiasm and cut the motor, which coughed and died. I climbed out of the jeep.

“I wouldn’t do that,” warned Kenneth. “You don’t want to go near them.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed.

I walked around to the back of Piet and Billy’s jeep, and pulled a metal box out of our collection of samples. I released the clips on the box and opened it to reveal an Enfield 4-16x50 telescopic sight: the kind of scope that brought your prey so close you could choose the point of entry so that the trophy wouldn’t have any ugly holes in it when the animal was hanging on your wall. It had mil-dot reticles so that you could judge the height of your prey, with 0.1 milli-radian increments. Good enough for rough calculations up to half a kilometre. It was only if you wanted to get the bullet under the helmet of the prey that you needed a finer adjustment, which was why I trained on the finer resolution scopes with the diagrams of stick figures with helmets on their heads and had learnt how to accommodate for bullet drop and wind drift. I didn’t need any of that now. I also grabbed a lightweight tripod ground mount and the M240 machine gun that Chandler had packed in for demonstration purposes.

“You going to shoot them?” asked Roelof.

“Just taking a closer look,” I said.

It had been some years since I’d handled a gun like the M240, but mounting it was an automatic process – like riding a bicycle. I mounted it on the bonnet of our jeep, and Piet clambered out to look. I fitted the scope onto the gun and adjusted the diopter to focus on the scene beneath the vultures. The stubby black noses and shaggy fur of the hyenas filled the eyepiece. They were brown hyenas, prowling around the remains and snarling at each other. The Enfield scope was more powerful than I had expected and it was difficult to hold it steady, but I could catch glimpses of the carcass between the shifting shapes of the hyenas.

“Probably a zebra,” Piet said in a loud whisper beside me, “or something smaller. We’ve got wild dogs here.”

“Looks smaller,” I said, and held my breath a moment to keep the scope steady. There was something that bothered me about the way the hyenas were circling. Hyenas fight over a carcass like squabbling siblings, trying to grab the best bits for themselves and breaking through the flesh so that the vultures can gain access and use their powerful beaks to rip pieces of flesh free. But these hyenas were pacing around as if they were waiting for something. And the vultures too were waiting in the trees. One of them fluttered down clumsily, and tugged with frustration at something, the hunched back of its wings straining like a deformed man. A hyena tired of pacing and grabbed onto a loose piece of skin, but that also did not move. I edged the scope a tenth of a millimetre at a time and scanned the area. I found what I was looking for on the third pass and felt the shiver of shock run down my back and the involuntary rise of bile in my throat.

The exposed skull had been pulled clear of the spine and had rolled a few metres away, so that it lay on its own, and grinned at me. The flesh had been torn off, and the maggots and ants had cleaned it so that the cranium shone brightly in the early morning sun. The gaping holes of the eye sockets, the inverted triangle of the nasal passage, and the long teeth created a macabre impression of a nightmarish creature laughing at some joke. I stood back and offered the scope to Piet.

“We have a problem,” I said.

“Problem?” said Piet, and he looked through the scope.

“They’re all sitting around because they cannot break through the clothes,” I said.

“Clothes?”

“That’s a human body.”

Roelof radioed ahead and drove us back to the lodge with a little more speed but no less control. Piet and Billy followed us, both looking faintly nauseous. Roelof had been seized by a focused energy that tightened his face and locked his mouth down, as if he was keeping a furious anger trapped inside him. Kenneth had fallen completely silent and raised the shotgun as if he might need to use it.

We arrived at the lodge at the same speed that Hendrik had used the day before, but Roelof’s approach had none of the edge-of-the-seat sense of near catastrophe to it. The bulky figure of Hendrik emerged from the glass front of the reception, looking like an inflated schoolboy in elastic-waisted shorts that ended