... On a wall of the
deceased's "Berth" in the "Long
Ward" of the "Royal Hospital
Chelsea"
there sticks a battered poster, and on the bed
Clarissa notices an interesting book ...
THE PLOT
CONTINUES:
| Lainet
and Gertrud do not trust their eyes...
this is what they get to read, when
— a couple of days later, back in
Burombo's Hackney-flat — they check
out the author on Internet: |
|
"Sir
Stephen Hastings, Soldier, Spy and
Conservative MP with trenchant views on
defence policy and majority rule in
Rhodesia, born on May 4, 1921,
died on January 9, 2005, aged 83."
...
|
... the Conservative Member of Parliament
for Mid-Bedfordshire (1960-83) had passed
away exactly three days after they had
found the dead Chelsea-pensioner.
The one who had left Sir Stephen's
memoirs on his bunk ...
... Lainet wonders: is there a
Zimbabwe-connection?
"At
17 his father had run away to Southern
Rhodesia and
bought a farm where the young Stephen
spent his first two years. Despite his
short stay, tales of his adopted homeland
were to play a large part in his later
life...
After school he attended Sandhurst and
was commissioned into the Scots Guards at
the start of the Second World War seeing
action against the Italians and Germans
in the western desert and at Tobruk...
In 1978 Hastings supported the internal
settlement in former Rhodesia under which
the “moderate” (and
minority-party) black leaders, Bishop
Abel Muzorewa, the Rev Ndabaningi Sithole
and Chief Jeremiah Chirau, agreed to
forswear the armed struggle and come to a
peaceful composition with the Smith
regime. The settlement, which excluded
the leaders of the majority nationalist
parties, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo
(and effectively left power in the hands
of the Smith regime), found no
international support, and it was a
further two years before the new state of
Zimbabwe emerged under majority rule.
Hastings ... deplored the outcome, which
he ascribed to British Government
timidity in the face of the 'Afro-Asian
lobby' — and American
interference."
"They may have met", Lainet
says, "the link being the 'Scots
Guards', you know, the old mens'
network!" ...
"And wasn't there, just last year,
another ex-Scots Guard", Gertrud
adds, "who got jailed in Zimbabwe
because he plotted a coup in
Africa?" ...
Both
women will have to leave London the
following day — Gertrud returning to
her German home-town Bremen, Lainet
taking Burombo with her to Zimbabwe's
capital Harare for a holiday.
Clarissa agrees to assist with further
investigation in London ...
... and Lainet and Gertrud will again
have reason not to trust their eyes when
they are going to watch on Internet
Clarissa's first summary of further
investigation ... |
|
