The Wilby Conspiracy by Peter Driscoll

Author:Peter Driscoll [Driscoll, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silvertail Books
Published: 2023-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

PIT

Fourteen

They drove westwards among the skeletal shadows of old mine workings and factories, and then along a road skirting the edge of Soweto, the enormous self-contained complex of African townships outside the city. Beneath the infrequent street lamps, tiny identical houses in squared and symmetrical rows lay silent and smoke-shrouded like the Greek tents at the walls of Troy, housing an army of one million people – the million most advanced and urbanized and best-educated and best-housed and best-paid and most cynical and frustrated black people in Africa. There was great potential here, either as a bridge of common aspirations that could cross the racial gulf or as the power base for revolution. Hope was a scarce commodity; Wilby Xaba had foreseen the choice a long time ago. If upheaval came, it would come to Soweto first.

The road finally crossed open veld between the small mining towns of the Far West Rand. They had come in the Range Rover at Keogh’s insistence; he said it would be much faster than Mayat’s old car, but the real reason was that he feared the Morris had been bugged, like the Valiant, with a radio transmitter. The old man had had to be helped onto the high front passenger seat; his wheelchair lay folded on the luggage deck at the back.

Mayat gave directions and Keogh followed them automatically, grateful for the chance to do some thinking. He had almost no doubt now that what Horn wanted was to retrieve the missing Congress funds. Rina had found it puzzling that he should take so much trouble over fourteen thousand pounds. A quarter, of a million in uncut diamonds was quite another matter, but if Horn knew about the diamonds he could only have found out from one of the four people involved in the transaction twelve years ago: Wilby, the Mayat brothers, and the Chinaman, Lee Ah Young. Keogh found Hassim Mayat more and more puzzling. Why had he decided to tell the whole story? What had happened in the past twenty-four hours to make him appear co-operative? Only one thing seemed certain: Horn wanted the Congress funds in whatever form they existed; Mayat was the only one who knew where they were. Shack had been meant, unknowingly, to provide the essential link – but now it was Keogh who was caught between the two sides, who could only survive as long as he kept them apart, each ignorant of what the other was doing. Until he knew more about their motives this was his only hope. He kept a careful check in his mirror; as far as it was possible to tell, they were not being followed.

Mayat told him more about Lee Ah Young. The old man had been planning for some time to retire to his birthplace, Singapore, from which he had emigrated illegally forty years before. He wanted an income-earning investment, and the slump in property prices that was bound to accompany the Sharpeville crisis was an ideal opportunity. Whatever his misgivings about paper money, to buy cheap housing he needed cash.

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