Peter Robinson - Before the poison

January 2011

I thought I had mastered the art of sleeping on planes, but that night as we droned somewhere over the Sahara Desert, I just couldn’t do it, despite the dimmed lights and the spacious business-class seat. I had dozed just long enough to miss the end of the movie I was watching, and the flight attendant had surreptitiously removed my half-full glass of wine from the tray. Now I was wide awake again. I reached for the touch-screen, desperately seeking something else to watch, but there was nothing that interested me, especially not Death Knows My Name, and though my eyes weren’t heavy enough to close in sleep, they were too tired to read. Instead, I plugged the headphones into my iPhone and went back to the late Beethoven string quartets I’d been listening to earlier.

Even then, my mind wasn’t so much on the music as it was thinking forward to the meeting I was hoping for. Louise had done a great job, though it had taken her a couple of weeks, and it was now the end of January. She had tracked Billy Strang through his father, the shoe shop manager, finding an address and birth details. Then she had gone on to work her magic and, after a short period of despair, when the trail seemed simply to end, she found that he had done his National Service between 1952 and 1954, then emigrated to Rhodesia in 1956 and moved to South Africa in 1980. He now lived near Cape Town. It was simply the outline of a life story, and though I could imagine some of the details myself, given the dates, it would be interesting to get to Billy himself and hear his story to fill in the blanks.

After talking to Louise, I had booked a flight as quickly as possible, but I had deliberately not tried to get in touch with Billy for the same reason I hadn’t phoned Sam Porter before my trip to Paris. It’s a lot easier to say no to someone from a few thousand miles away, over the telephone, than it is if he’s standing on your doorstep. Again, I knew this was a risk. He could be out of town, could even be dead – though Louise assured me the public records showed he was still alive and paying taxes – but the risk of alerting him and of having him simply refuse to talk to me at all was too much to contemplate, so I decided to play it by ear.

The odds were good. I calculated that Billy would be close to eighty now, much the same age as Wilf and Sam, so he probably didn’t get out and about all that much. And I could also think of no reason why Billy should not want to tell me his story. If nothing else came of my trip, I would at least get a few days’ holiday in Cape Town. It was summer there, too, another reason I might find Billy Strang at home.

Because it’s an overnight flight, about twelve hours or so, and there’s only a two-hour time difference, I had hoped to arrive well rested and ready to go, but it didn’t seem to be turning out that way. After breakfast, we began our descent and landed without incident. I looked out of the window and saw that the sun was shining on the lush green hills, the light possessing that ineffable quality I had only ever seen in parts of Africa.

I could feel the heat as soon as the doors opened and I stepped on to the jetway. Cape Town is a busy airport, but the formalities didn’t take too long, and in no time I was in the Hertz office signing my life away for a cheap Japanese compact and asking for directions out of the airport.

It turned out not to be too difficult to get on to the N2 and then head north-west towards the city centre and the waterfront, where I was staying. It was still the morning rush hour, and there was plenty of traffic going both ways. Before long, I came to that stretch of highway, several kilometres long, which appears to the American or northern European eye to be one enormous shanty town, with row after row of flat-roofed leaning shacks of corrugated iron and cardboard and hardly a gap between them. The kind of place you see straggling down hillsides in Caracas, Rio or Buenos Aires. But people who knew better had assured me that there is some level of organisation within the communities, schools and health facilities, and the government is also building some decent brick houses to move families into.

Soon I could see Table Mountain ahead of me, and I began concentrating on the road as it neared the city. I could stay on the highway most of the way, the woman at Hertz had assured me, but I would have to negotiate one or two city streets at the end. It wasn’t so hard. At least they drove on the left, and I had got accustomed to that since moving back to Yorkshire. Soon I was telling the guard at the gate that I was a guest at the hotel, and he was waving me through. I parked by the waterfront, took my small travel bag and computer case from the back seat and went to check in.

I had booked two nights at the Cape Grace, both because its name sounded appropriate, and because I’d heard it was one of the best hotels in the city. That became pretty evident right from the start, when I was invited to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea as I checked in. In no time, I was in my room on the top floor, opening the French windows to the balcony and gazing out on Table Mountain to my left and Signal Hill straight ahead of me, across the marina and the downtown core. Though the rest of the sky was clear, there was a hint of cloud and mist on Table Mountain, which really did resemble a long, flat table, or anvil.

I leaned on the railings, breathed in the warm air and sighed. Laura and I had come here for our ‘second’ honeymoon in the late nineties, not long after apartheid was overthrown. I remembered South Africa then as a beautiful, blighted, haunted, hopeful, exciting country. It had fascinated us, from the tensions of Johannesburg to the beauty of the Cape Winelands and a three-day safari at a private game reserve near Kruger Park. I had so many memories, but that had been over ten years earlier, and the country had changed a great deal since then.

Laura had loved the markets, the craft shops and clothes stores with their unusual patterns and bright colours, colours that seemed to exist only here, greens or browns that somehow never looked the same anywhere else in the world. I also remembered a large record shop where I had bought a lot of CDs of South African jazz, and I wondered whether it was still in business.

But I wasn’t here to get maudlin over my loss, I told myself. I was here to find Billy Strang, and after a shower, over an early lunch on the waterfront, I would take out the road map the Hertz lady had given me and plot a route to Simon’s Town, where he was living.

I drove more or less straight south. Years ago, with Laura, I had driven down the peninsula as far as Cape Point, but I didn’t remember much very clearly, except for the rolling waves and the penguins and baboons. Simon’s Town wasn’t quite as far, but it was a good way down, and it seemed like a beautiful place to retire.

The house I was searching for stood high above the town, overlooking the harbour and the purplish-blue and green Indian Ocean beyond. Though the sun shone brightly and the sky was pure blue, a strong wind had sprung up, and I had to struggle to get out of the car. Below me, I could see thousands of whitecaps and larger waves crashing on the beach and the big rocks that reared out of the waters of the bay.

I turned and gazed at the house. It was a boxy sort of place, a modern design, all white stucco, large picture windows and hacienda-style open verandas. There were three storeys, each a different-sized cube stuck asymmetrically on top of the one below. It wouldn’t have been out of place in southern California. Laguna Niguel, say, or Huntington Beach. Whatever Billy Strang had done since he had left England, he had done very well for himself.

When I found what I thought to be the front door, I rang the bell. Nothing happened. I knocked, then rang it again. Still nothing. He was out, and I had no idea where or for how long. I only had myself to blame for coming on spec like this, assuming an eighty-year-old man would be pretty much housebound. Maybe he was off surfing somewhere, or having a tryst with his twenty-year-old lover. The only thing I could do was keep trying.