Synopsis.
Limited Liability is a comic novel about the search for justice. In 1986, in the middle of South Africa’s wars with its neighbours, all the inhabitants of the remote Namibian village of Olieboom were killed in an explosion. The apartheid regime asserted that the village had been a terrorist base and that the explosion was the accidental detonation of their own arms dump. The villagers were Basters, a mixed-race people, originally from South Africa. Only one of their number escaped: Solomon Witbooi, who was at university in Cape Town at the time.
The story begins some ten years later in London, when Solomon, by now an eccentric software designer, enlists the help of Jake Ridler and Ruthie McNulty, who work for the human rights organisation VIGIL. Solomon has reason to believe that the murder of the villagers was not accidental but that they were poisoned by some sort of chemical weapon and that the explosion was merely a cover-up. He has been hacking into banking computer systems and has traced some very suspicious money transfers at the time of the massacre. One of the players is Christopher Metcalfe, CEO of Proteus Chemicals. South African suspects include a colonel, a small manufacturer, Jasper Keate (presently based in Slough) and the leader of an extremist Afrikaner group, the GAT.
Their investigations touch a nerve. Jake is kidnapped. Solomon and Ruthie rescue him and extort the true story of Olieboom from his captors. It seems that the villagers had indeed been gassed but that there is no proof.
Metcalfe, however, still has illegal stocks of the poison and when he tries to ship it abroad, Solomon finds out and alerts Customs and Excise who arrest all involved.
Solomon is inclined to let the massacre lie, but an attempt on his own life leads him back to South Africa where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is getting under way. Here he discovers that Metcalfe’s wife Cecily is also in town. He trails her to the farm of the new leader of GAT. A police siege reveals that Cecily has been attempting to sell the recipe of NACT to potential terrorists. A video of the massacre at Olieboom is found in her handbag but even this is not conclusive proof of her involvement.
The final capitulation comes only when Solomon and Ruthie travel up to Namibia and get surprising evidence, that Cecily had once cheated at golf. Accusations of complicity in mass murder have failed to budge her but to be known as a golfing cheat is unthinkable. She agrees to a full confession as long as this fact is suppressed. At last some of the truth is told. The surviving perpetrators go to jail. Solomon and his now pregnant lover Ruthie go back to London. Jake joins the National Trust in Yorkshire as a gardener. Life goes on.
Limited Liability.
Chapter 1.
Jake Ridley lay back in the wheelbarrow, feet up on the handles, and mused. Why the fuck did the Metcalfes, despite buying tons of cheap chocolate selections, invariably leave only those varieties which he too detested? Oh no! He’d guessed right. Another strawberry cream in bad black. Still, waste not want not as his gran used to say. He ate it anyway, shuddered as the fondant hit his taste buds and tossed the box onto the damply smouldering heap which passed for a bonfire. There was a little clearing in the rhododendrons where rubbish was burnt, where Jake was wont to skulk. This wasn’t entirely sloth, he told himself. He didn’t want to blow his cover by appearing too hardworking. As it was, he’d largely cleared up the last gardener’s neglect of years within a few leisurely weeks. Admittedly he had the advantage of youth but this was counterbalanced by inexperience. He looked with satisfaction at the callouses on his dirty hands. He was still slim and middlesized but his muscles had taken shape. Time for a skive. The water-filter for the pool could wait half-an-hour or so. Smoke began to drift about him, hiding the pong of his last joint and Jake drifted into a reverie.
There were men,s voices nearby. He jerked awake. Metcalfe must have come home early. Jake slithered off the wheelbarrow onto his hands and knees and tried to peer through the thicket. He couldn’t see much, just two pairs of trousered legs, blue and grey. But he could hear alright.
“I must show you the pool, “ Metcalfe was saying affably. “It’s set in a real little suntrap - last summer was so hot that we didn’t have to heat it, although in the cooler weather of course it is necessary. Costs a bomb, but it’s worth every penny. We got so used to our pool in Capetown that we simply had to have one here.”
“Ja, you got a reely beauriful place here, Chris.” (The flat South African accent made Jake s anti-apartheid hackles rise) “ Here s to double ou eight, hey. Licensed to kill “
“I don’t know what you mean, Jass.” Metcalfe’s tone was warningly icy.
“Ag, just a little joke, man,” said the other lamely. “ Forget it. So how’s business lately?”
“Oh, can’t grumble.The pesticides division is doing well.”
Jake literally had his ear to the ground, blowing on the sulky bonfire to get it to go. A blackbird shot through the bare branches of the hedge yelling an alarm-call. A moment later the reason for Metcalfe’s sudden circumspection appeared. Jake saw the pair of slim, stockinged legs and little feet in flat calfskin moccasins scissor up and stop. The missus. He’d had a few fantasies about her. A well-preserved fifty was not to be sneered at. And he’d come upon her singing: “Young girl, get out of my mind... “and she’d smiled and blushed.
“Ah, Cecily,” Metcalfe’s hearty boom. “You remember Jasper. Jasper Keate, from South Africa.”
“Of course. What an unexpected pleasure. How are you?”
Conventional pleasantries were exchanged and Chris said: “ Come along darling, I was just going to show Jasper the pool.”
The three moved off. Jake thought of following but decided that the conversation was unlikely to yield much more. At least he had the name Jasper Keate and a joke about 008. Licensed to kill. That would seem to tie in with Metcalfe’s odious profession.
Jake’s interest in Metcalfe had come about through his friend Solomon. Solomon was one of the three friends who had regularly come to visit Jake in prison, where he was serving nine months for dealing in cannabis and it was Solomon who had hired him on his release as a sort of detective.
Before the bust Jake had been a Director of Research for VIGIL, a charity dedicated to publicising human rights abuses at home and abroad. He still remembered Solomon’s irruption into the office:
“Jesus H. Christ! It s cold as charity out there!” said a cheerful voice in what Jake was to come to know, if never to love, as a Cape Coloured accent. He’d looked up from his file of Colombian atrocities to see a short, stocky young man with yellow-ochre skin, somewhat negroid features and peppercorn hair. His grin showed two knocked-out front teeth. Dark eyes flicked restlessly about the drab office.
“Jake Ridler. Mr. Witbooi?” He extended a hand. “How can we help you?”
“Solomon Witbooi. No relation to the Nama leader killed by the Germans in 1905. Doubleyou is pronounced vee in Afrikaans, vee is pronounced eff as in vee ay enn, fun. The booi part you’ll never quite get, but don’t let it bother you. Just call me Solomon.”
“Jake.” The hand clasp was firm.
“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” Solomon continued, “Then I will a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul. My young blood s already frozen.”
“Sure. I think we can run to that. “ Jake filled and turned on the kettle and looked out of his dirty window at the traffic below which was busy churning the light January snowfall into a grey slush. The overcast sky promised more of the same. An icy draught slipped its feeler gauge through the gap in the steel window-frame and into the stuffy air of the overheated office. Jake braced himself for another load of the human misery which his job entailed although his latest client seemed different from the usual run of frightened refugees and exiles. He wasn’t used to hearing Shakespeare playfully mauled, for instance, or being pressured into offering coffee. Jake had had to harden his naturally sympathetic nature against hard-luck stories but cheerfulness crashed his defences.
The trouble was that VIGIL could do so little. Their research department could expose corruption and atrocities around the world. They could lobby for sanctions and remonstrate with recalcitrant governments and appear on Question Time but as one scandal was exposed, two more burrowed underground. In a million dark corners torture throve. Still, at least some facts and much wishful misinterpretation were in the public domain. And a lately-released Chinese dissident had told him that although VIGIL had done no more than keep his name on a monthly bulletin, the knowledge that someone in the outside world cared about his fate had more than once saved him from suicide.
The kettle boiled. Jake tipped a spoonful each of cheap instant coffee into two mugs and poured. He brought them over on a flimsy plastic tray along with a jar of non-dairy creamer and some packets of sugar.
Solomon helped himself to both, pulled a pencil from his pocket and sang as he stirred:
“Ou tant Hettie sy is so dom
Sy roer haar koffie met haar groot toon om.”
They sat. Solomon sent a sardonic eye around the latest series of posters.
