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the way other people do. Unemotional type.”
    “I wonder,” Rohrbach had said. Beneath the cold exterior he had seen marks of strain, of bottled-up emotion. It showed through unexpectedly: the restless brooding eyes, the long fingers clenching his fists into a ball until the knuckles were white. Once Widmark was telling him about the sinking of a liner eighty miles south of Cape Point: “There were a lot of women and children on board. Service families coming back from the Middle East. It was blowing hard. Some of the boats capsised as they were lowered.” There was a pause and he could see the veins standing out on Widmark’s temple. “Women and children in them. Can you imagine it? What it must have been like? In the dark, I mean. So many helpless people. Those children.”
    Rohrbach saw that he was tormenting himself. “No good thinking about it, Steve. Doesn’t help, you know,”
    Widmark turned on him, white faced and shocked. “For Christ’s sake! What d’you want me to do? Pretend it didn’t happen? Look the other way?”
     
    Johan and Rohrbach experienced no difficulties at the border posts at Komatipoort and Ressano Garcia. They produced their passports and the documents for the car, and were identified and accepted as South African civilians visiting Lourenço Marques on holiday. They declared their cameras, testified that they had no firearms, and filled in the customs and immigration forms. The luggage and the car were cursorily examined, and they set out on the last lap of the journey; some eighty miles across the Lebombos, abundant with acacia thorn, wild fig and the tangle of African bush, and then on through the fever trees of the lowlands to Moamba and Lourenço Marques. At six o’clock that evening, they reached the Cardoso Hotel, tired and dust streaked. After a bath theychanged and went down to a dinner throughout which, covertly, they searched the room for familiar faces. There weren’t any and they sighed with relief and decided to make an early night of it. But they were more effectively disguised than they knew, because Rohrbach had started growing his beard only two months before, and Johan had just lost his.
    That night they slept soundly.

Chapter Four
    Next morning, in shorts and open-necked shirts, sandals and sunglasses, they took their bathing bags and drove down to the beach at Polana. They had a camera with them, and binoculars in one of the bags. They changed in the kiosk, swam in the shark-netted enclosure, lay on the sand in the sun, photographed each other and, for good measure, played leap-frog. It was a hot day, the sun burning down from an empty, quivering sky. Rohrbach wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and shook his head. “No weather for a beard.”
    Johan said: “If we don’t look like a couple of tourists, man, then I don’t know.”
    Rohrbach looked at his watch. “Now for the job. It’s after ten o’clock.”
    “What’s next?”
    “Let’s drive into town and park somewhere near the City Hall. Then wander down to the harbour.”
    “What’s that road with the name like a gun? The one passing the Cardoso. From that park next to the hotel we can see over the harbour.”
    “Avenida Miguel Bombarda?” Rohrbach stumbled over the words.
    “That’s it.”
    “We can see the harbour from the terrace in front of the hotel.”
    “Yes. But we can’t use binoculars there without attracting attention.”
    “Okay! Let’s go.”
    They changed, got into the car and followed the steep winding road up the cliff, then through the Avenida do Duquede Connaught to Bartolomeu Dias and along it to Miguel Bombarda where Rohrbach stopped the car. But for a few Africans, sweeping and cleaning, the park was deserted when they got out and walked across to the edge of the cliff. Below them lay the casuarinas and blue gums of the Aterro do Machaquene; on the right the reds, yellows and greys of the town buildings, on the left the older buildings: the