The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

rather good, actually.’ He closed the door and nodded
to the chauffeur.
    B awu was moored between two new commercially built yachts, a forty-five-foot Camper and Nicholson and a Hatteras convertible, and she
stood the comparison well enough, although she was almost five years old. Craig had put in every screw with his own hands. He paused at the gates of the marina to look at her, but somehow today he
did not derive as much pleasure as usual from her lines.
    ‘Been a couple of calls for you, Craig,’ the girl behind the reception desk in the marina office called out to him as he went in. ‘You can use this phone,’ she
offered.
    He checked the slips she handed him, one from his broker marked ‘urgent’, another from the literary editor of a mid-western daily. There hadn’t been too many of those
recently.
    He phoned the broker first. They had sold the Mocatta gold certificates that he had bought for three hundred and twenty dollars an ounce at five hundred and two dollars. He instructed them to
put the money on call deposit.
    Then he dialled the second number. While he waited to be connected, the girl behind the desk moved around more than was really necessary, bending over the lowest drawers of the filing-cabinet to
give Craig a good look at what she had in her white Bermudas and pink halter-top.
    When Craig connected with the literary editor, she wanted to know when they were publishing his new book.
    ‘What book?’ Craig thought bitterly, but he answered, ‘We haven’t got a firm date yet – but it’s in the pipeline. Do you want to do an interview in the
meantime?’
    ‘Thanks, but we will wait until publication, Mr Mellow.’
    ‘Long wait, my darling,’ Craig thought, and when he hung up the girl looked up brightly.
    ‘The party is on Firewater tonight.’
    There was a party on one of the yachts every single night of the year.
    ‘Are you coming across?’
    She had a flat tight belly between the shorts and top. Without the glasses, she might be quite pretty – and what the hell, he had just made a quarter of a million dollars on the gold
certificates and a fool of himself at the lunch table.
    ‘I’m having a private party on Bawu ,’ he said, ‘for two.’ She had been a good patient girl and her time had come.
    Her face lit up so he saw he had been right. She really was quite pretty. ‘I finish in here at five.’
    ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Come straight down.’
    Wipe one out and make another happy, he thought. It should even out, but of course it didn’t.
    C raig lay on his back under a single sheet in the wide bunk with both hands behind his head and listened to the small sounds in the night, the
creak of the rudder in its restrainer, the tap of a halyard against the mast and the slap of wavelets under the hull. Across the basin the party on Firewater was still in full swing, there
was a faint splash and a distant burst of drunken laughter as they threw somebody overboard, and beside him the girl made regular little wet fluttering sounds through her lips as she slept.
    She had been eager and very practised, but nevertheless Craig felt unrequited and restless. He wanted to go up on deck, but that would have disturbed the girl and he knew she would still be
eager and he could not be bothered further. So he lay and let the images from Sally-Anne’s portfolio run through his head like a magic-lantern show, and they triggered others that had long
lain dormant but now came back to him fresh and vivid, accompanied by the smells and tastes and sounds of Africa, so that instead of the revels of drunken yachties, he heard again the beat of
native drums along the Chobe river in the night; instead of the sour waters of the East river he smelled tropical raindrops on baked earth, and he began to ache with the bitter-sweet melancholy of
nostalgia and he did not sleep again that night.
    The girl insisted on making breakfast for him. She did so with not nearly the same expertise as she had