I needed to get a look inside before it came down. What better place to hide something than in a building destined for demolition, one that would be left as rubble to be overgrown, a semisacred monument to an ancient and troubled past?
I waited another half hour, thinking uneasily about Mnenga, and what Tanish had said about the Mahweni, not knowing what to believe and wary of my own instincts. It was almost a relief when the boys dragged their wagon into the shade to eat, and I could break into a skulking run, careful to keep the tower between me and them. As soon as I got close, I could smell the paraffin and oil with which the timber supports had been doused, and I winced away from it, eyes watering. I tried the tower door. Locked.
Why seal a building destined for demolition?
The tower windows were little more than rifle ports and far too tight to squeeze through. But the top of the tower was open, with only a timber frame remaining of what had once been a roof. There would be a way in from there.
The tower was vertical and considerably higher than the perimeter wall, but its brickwork was no better maintained. I fished in my satchel for a chisel on a loop of cord, which I hung round my neck. I pulled my hair back and began to climb carefully, using the lintels and sills of the gun ports where I could.
It was slow going. Twice I had to stop to work my chisel into the mortar line to give me a handhold, and by the time I reached the top, my shoulders ached and my hands were unsteady from the exertion. I was rewarded with a trapdoor in the floor. Unlocked.
The boys had finished their break and were coming back across the square. Staying low, I unlatched the trap cover and folded it carefully back, revealing an ancient iron ladder set rusting into the wall below. I shinned down into a guardroom with an alcove containing a stained and fractured toilet bowl. The door, which was hanging open, gave onto a tight spiral of concrete steps, the only part of the structure not constructed from brick. I descended onto a landing with another solid door, this one locked.
There was a screen in the upper portion, not unlike the one in the police cell, but it was stuck. I worked it with my chisel but didn’t want to use the hammer in case the sound carried to the boys outside. I strained at it, then tried cutting away the doorjamb around the hinges.
But it was hard work and I was tiring. Partly it was the heat which—far from being less intense in the tower’s shady interior—seemed to be mounting, and I slumped against the door, trying to get my breath back, fighting the urge to cough. It was only then that I caught the acrid tang of woodsmoke on the air. The boys had set the fire.
I had minutes before the tower became unstable.
I jammed the chisel into the shutter groove, cursing, slamming the heel of my hand against it, and felt it shift a fraction. Gasping in the thickening air, I adjusted the chisel and tried again. Part of the rusted groove popped out. The shutter moved, and with three sharp blows from my hammer, I drove it open.
The room inside was bare save for a heavy wooden chair with a high back and leather straps fastened to the arms. Restraints. Sprawled against the far wall was the body of a man.
CHAPTER
23
HE WAS DEAD, AND probably had been for some time. Even through the smoke, it smelled sour in there. The corpse lay on its back, one arm twisted beneath it, the other splayed, hand open. He was black, elderly, his hair gray and unkempt, and he wore nothing but a loincloth and sandals, one of which had been kicked off. A bottle lay empty beside him. The floor was stained, and in one moist patch, something like fungus seemed to be growing pale pink tubes, delicate and foul.
I pulled my face away, tried to gasp fresh air and got only smoke, which left me wheezing and hacking.
I followed the concrete spiral down, but it was clear before I saw the flames that I would not be able to reach the door in the intense heat. The skin on my face was starting to shrink, and a wisp of hair stuck to my sweaty forearm curled and smoked. I would have to leave the way I had come in.
I ran up the stairs, past the torture cell, and up to the ladder, breaking out into the hot, dry air with a cry of relief. There was nothing to be gained now by staying hidden, and I moved to the parapet and began to wave and shout to the boys below. They had retreated from the fire and were watching from a safe distance. For a moment I feared they wouldn’t hear me, but then one of them was pointing, and Tanish was jogging forward, shouting and gesticulating.
“Put it out!” I yelled. “Put the fire out!”
Tanish stopped, ran back to the building where they had been eating, and dragged out the water barrel, but he had made it only a few yards when someone stopped him. Fevel. I couldn’t hear what they said, but they were arguing, and when Tanish tried to push past him, Fevel knocked him down. Two of the other boys came to help him up, but they did not let him return to the barrel. I could just see the anguish in his upturned face.
No, I thought. They wouldn’t.