Ghosts of the Past by Tony Park

Author:Tony Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2019-07-16T07:20:42+00:00

Chapter 29

Cape Town, South Africa, the present day

Nick had a spectacular view of Table Mountain as the pilot of the SA Airlink Embraer banked the aircraft and lined up for his approach to Cape Town International Airport.

Nick had managed to read Anja’s translation of Blake and Claire Martin’s story on the flight. It was clear, now, that Claire had found and stolen a tenth of Paul Kruger’s missing hoard of gold and if there was more information to come that pointed to where some of the treasure was hidden, then that explained the value of the manuscript.

They landed and Nick made his way to the baggage carousel. While waiting he did a quick internet search and worked out that a ton of gold was worth more than sixty million US dollars in today’s money. Worth robbing, he thought. Next he typed in ‘Kruger’s Gold’ and found a barrage of hits. The internet listed plenty of stories about possible locations of the missing gold and failed attempts to locate it. There were claims of people finding evidence of the gold from as far apart as a dam near Pretoria to various spots hundreds of kilometres away in the Kruger Park, and the Bourke’s Luck Potholes in the escarpment overlooking the lowveld. His bag appeared and he put his phone away.

Nick had got online at Skukuza Airport and booked a rental car. He took his luggage and made his way out of the terminal, hitching a ride on a golf buggy shuttle via a tunnel that led to the car companies.

He needed to find Susan, but with the exception of her mobile phone number, which he had tried maybe twenty or thirty times, he knew next to nothing about the woman he thought he had fallen for.

Nick had googled Susan, repeatedly, but found very little to go on. From his journalistic eye, it was as if she, or someone else, had scrubbed the internet clean of her presence. He knew that she had worked as a journalist on local newspapers back in the early 1990s, but this was before virtually everything written for newspapers ended up online.

Susan had told him that she had worked for various public relations consultancies in recent years and he had confirmed that from a story online about an award she had received for a PR campaign for BMW motorcycles seven years earlier. Other than that there was no mention of her or the services she offered. She had, he recalled, said that most of her work was as a subcontractor to other companies, so that would explain why she was not listed in the staff profiles of other agencies.

Susan had also said she was a freelance investigative reporter, but he could find no recent articles with her name on them. Perhaps her story on the push for reparations from the German government was going to be her big splash. However, when he googled ‘reparations from Germany for Namibia’ he came up with more than 130,000 results. This was not new news.

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