Ghosts of the Past Read online

  About Ghosts of the Past

  Africa, 1906: A young Australian adventurer is condemned to death.

  Sydney, the present: journalist Nick Eatwell has just lost his job, but his day is brightened when a fellow reporter, South African Susan Vidler, comes into his life looking for help with a story.

  Susan is chasing information about Nick’s great-great uncle, Cyril Blake, who fought in the Anglo-Boer War and later joined the struggle for independence across the border in the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia.

  A long-lost manuscript proves Nick’s forebear was a somewhat reluctant hero. Soldier, deserter, cattle rustler and freedom fighter, Blake was helping the lost cause before the Kaiser’s forces ordered his assassination.

  In Germany, historian Anja Berghoff is researching the origins of the famed desert horses of Namibia. She’s also interested in Blake and an Irish-German firebrand and spy, Claire Martin, with whom Cyril had an affair.

  Nick and Anja head to Africa on the trail of a legend, but someone else is delving into the past, looking for clues to the secret location of a missing horde of gold that’s worth killing for.

  Spanning two centuries, Ghosts of the Past is based on a true story.

  ‘Never disappoints as a storyteller’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

  About Tony Park

  Tony Park was born in 1964 and grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, a press secretary, a PR consultant and a freelance writer. He also served 34 years in the Australian Army Reserve, including six months as a public affairs officer in Afghanistan in 2002. He and his wife, Nicola, divide their time equally between Australia and southern Africa. He is the author of sixteen other African novels.

  For Nicola

  and

  Edward Lionel Presgrave

  soldier, rebel, Australian

  1881 – 1905

  Contents

  About Ghosts of the Past

  Title Page

  About the author

  Dedication

  Contents

  Maps

  History pages

  Author’s note

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part 2

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Historical note and acknowledgements

  Also by Tony Park

  Copyright

  THE ANGLO-BOER WAR AND THE HISTORY OF GERMAN SOUTH WEST AFRICA (MODERN-DAY NAMIBIA)

  1883

  Adolf Lüderitz, a merchant from Bremen, Germany, establishes a trading post at Angra Pequena (later named Lüderitz Bay) on the Atlantic coast of Africa.

  1884

  Lüderitz requests protection against British expansion and German South West Africa is proclaimed.

  1899

  Anglo-Boer War breaks out between the Boer republics and the British Empire.

  1902

  Anglo-Boer War ends with British victory.

  1904

  The Herero people of German South West Africa rise up against Germany in protest of unfair land and work policies. Some Nama tribes initially side with Germany, then join the Herero. Tens of thousands of Nama and Herero die of starvation, disease and overwork in concentration camps.

  1907

  Armed conflict between Germany and Nama and Herero ends.

  1914

  First World War breaks out, South Africa invades German South West Africa at the behest of Britain.

  1915

  German troops surrender in German South West Africa.

  1920

  South Africa is granted a mandate over South West Africa.

  1990

  South West Africa gains independence after a protracted struggle and is renamed Namibia.

  2004

  Germany offers an apology for the deaths of Herero and Nama during the ‘genocide’ of 1904–07, but rules out compensation.

  2011

  Skulls of twenty Herero and Nama taken for research purposes during the genocide are returned to Namibia from a museum in Germany.

  2018

  The Herero and Nama people launch a class action lawsuit in the US Federal Court against the German government, calling for reparations over the genocide.

  Author’s note

  The town of Aus, South West Africa, formerly a German colony, now a protectorate of the Union of South Africa and the British Empire, 1915

  This is a story of Africa and of love, which means it will be doubly sad.

  My name is Peter Kohl. I am the camp doctor here, administering to more than 1500 of my fellow German prisoners of war. Before the conflict began in Europe and spread like a veld fire to Africa I was a physician and a farmer. If I may record the truth on these pages, I preferred the latter vocation to the former.

  I have seen too much bloodshed in Africa. I favour the company of horses and cattle to that of humans, so it is ironic that I am penned here like one of my former livestock.

  When I was a free man my neighbours were the dainty springbok, the muscular gemsbok and the sly predators that lay in wait for them. We had to be careful, animals and humans alike, of the desert lion and the brown and spotted hyena, but we knew clearly who our enemies were and we respected them. I miss those simpler days.

  In times of war, one side seeks to demonise the other. Accordingly, the South African soldiers who have invaded this colony at the behest of their British masters will soon begin gathering evidence of Germany’s wrongdoings as a colonial power.

  The subject of their enquiries will be the last war that was waged here, when we Germans fought both the Herero and Nama people, our neighbours in this corner of Africa, who had the te
merity to rise up against the Kaiser and fight for their rights. Although this conflict ended eight years ago I can recall the events as if they happened yesterday.

  I am writing this account because I am certain I will be brought to trial, for the murder of a man in 1906.

  I do not want this story to be published, but it must, nevertheless, be told, for the sake of the people involved and the peace of mind of their families, as much as for the benefit of any vengeful investigator.

  In Africa, war is tribal and seemingly never-ending. Before the campaign against the Herero and the Nama, the white tribes across the border – the British and the Afrikaner Boers – killed each other between 1899 and 1902. And it is there, in South Africa, where my story has its genesis.

  However, this tale starts at the end, in 1906, when I was sent by my superiors to kill a man who was sleeping with my wife.

  Prologue

  The desert south of Klipdam Farm, German South West Africa, 1906

  The red sand drank his blood, gulped it as fast as it flowed so that once the lions had devoured his flesh and the hyenas had ground his bones in their jaws there would be no evidence that he had ever been here, ever lived at all.

  The land would bury what little was left of him until no trace remained, just crisp, wind-carved ripples on the surface of the dune. He tried to speak but his tongue was swollen, his lips cracked. The words wouldn’t come. Maybe he made a sound, maybe not.

  ‘Claire . . .’

  Cyril Blake crawled, hand over hand, and the coarse grains filled his shirt, found their way into his mouth, his trousers, his wound, everywhere. The sand burned his palms. In agony he made it to the knife-edge top of the dune, but when he looked beyond it there was no salvation in sight, just an empty vista with some hardy game. He slithered over like an adder and half slid, half rolled down the leeside.

  Behind him he heard the whinny of a horse, then the shouted command of an officer in German.

  He had survived through the long night and the cold had replaced the pain of the wound in his gut with teeth-chattering hallucinations. No one would have believed him, if he had ever made it home to Australia, that an African desert could be the coldest place he had ever been.

  Now the heat of the day assaulted him and the flies mobbed the hole in his belly.

  Blake blinked sand from his eyes. Below him the dry riverbed he had followed to reach this place the day before stretched away to the border and South Africa, just a few dunes distant, but impossibly far in the state he was in. He had once cursed that place, hated it with every fibre of his existence, and had later told himself he would never leave it. It had drawn him in, bewitched him, intoxicated and entrapped him in the same way the smoke from the Chinamen’s dens held in thrall the sunken-eyed whores and miners who chased the dragon.

  Africa.

  Oryx, gemsbok the Boers called them, dotted the valley, nibbling at brittle grass that drained the paltry moisture from the bed. But these handsome beasts were put to the gallop by fifty horses that trotted in confusion, still tied nose-to-tail, along the dying watercourse. He had brought the horses to German South West Africa at Claire’s request, to help the rebellion. He had failed in his mission and now he would never see her again. He hoped someone would have the decency to free the horses so that they would not have to face the horrors of war. Perhaps the man who had shot him would come back for the horses; he had left Blake to die while he rode to Klipdam, no doubt to claim the bounty on Blake’s head.

  Blake managed half a smile at the memory of the woman and was rewarded with the parting of more skin on his lips and the sting of the sweat that tortured the newly exposed flesh. He remembered the taste of Claire’s mouth, like nectar.

  A shadow brought a moment’s respite from the sun and he looked up to see a man standing over him.

  ‘Claire . . .’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the German officer.

  Blake tried to roll, but the movement sent pain shooting through his body. Momentum and displaced sand took over and he slid a little further and ended up on his back, blinking into the sun.

  ‘Don’t speak her name.’ He spoke near-perfect English. Peter Kohl was a good man, he knew, a doctor. Like Blake, the officer had been talked into donning a uniform because of a need to defend an empire, to vanquish an evil foe that had dared to rise up against the crown.

  Utter nonsense.

  Blake knew why the officer had come. It was to make sure the bloody job had been done, properly, because the Germans were like that. Everything had to be orderly, by the book, complete and tied up in a bow, even assassinations. Du Preez – he was the one who had fired the bullet that had felled him – followed no such regulations. Du Preez had left Blake to bleed and burn slowly to death under the sun because that’s what the man thought he deserved.

  ‘Claire . . .’ he coughed.

  ‘Enough!’ Spittle flecked Peter’s mouth and his face turned a deeper shade of red than even the sun had been able to burn him. The doctor took a breath, stilled the tremor in the hand that held the Roth-Sauer 7.65-millimetre pistol. He composed himself, cleared his throat and spoke in a loud, clear voice. ‘Cyril Blake, you are guilty of espionage and aiding the Nama people and the criminal Jakob Morengo in his armed rebellion against the lawful government of German South West Africa.’

  ‘Just . . . just tell me, Peter,’ Blake said.

  The officer blinked and Blake wondered if this man, who might have been treating a sick child or tending to a broken arm if he wasn’t standing there in his sweat-stained Landespolizei uniform and his scuffed cavalry boots, was crying.

  ‘She is,’ his voice quavered, though he spoke loudly, ‘dead.’

  Blake closed his eyes. ‘How?’

  ‘She drowned. It was because of you that she was on the boat. She waited for you, Blake, then she left. You dishonoured my wife and made her a spy against her own people.’

  Blake felt his own tears trying to come, but perhaps it was because his body was so dehydrated that his eyes remained dry. His head was reeling. He wouldn’t even be allowed the relief of a moment’s grief.

  ‘You . . . you saw what was happening to innocent people, women and children, on Shark Island, on the railway line your people are constructing. You call yourself a doctor and yet still you wear that uniform?’

  Peter looked away. If Blake had had the strength, if he wasn’t almost dead, he would have tried to get the jump on him, but it was impossible.

  ‘You haven’t come to patch me up and take me to prison in Keetmanshoop, have you, Peter?’ Blake said.

  ‘No,’ Dr Peter Kohl said, loudly enough for his voice to carry across the dunes to the waiting German soldiers, ‘I have come to kill you.’

  The doctor took careful aim and fired his pistol.

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  North Sydney, Australia, the present day

  Raindrops began to spatter Nick Eatwell’s back as he cut his eighteenth lap of the open-air North Sydney Olympic swimming pool. The rain annoyed him because he had not brought an umbrella for the walk back to the office.

  He remembered something from a couple of decades earlier, when he and Jill had not been married long, on a country road trip. They had watched a cattle dog on the back of a ute. The country was in drought at the time, had been for years, and there had been a freakish sunshower. Fat drops had smeared the dust on their windscreen and the dog, which might never have known rain, found itself pelted by some mysterious substance. He nipped at his back and his fur, trying to chase the drops away. Nick didn’t know what had hit him either when Jill had died of breast cancer, eight months ago.

  He focused on remembering where he was up to in his laps and used the count to work out what time it was, used the boring repetitiveness and the physical effort of the exercise itself to try and hide the pain. There would be enough of his lunch hour left, sti
ll, to have a hot shower, get changed and make it back to the office before two. However, the rain was intensifying and he would get wet again on the walk back.

  Nick finished his laps, showered and left the pool. Checking his watch, he decided to brave the downpour. He ran up the road opposite Milsons Point railway station, darting from one awning to the next. A stiff headwind that howled down the man-made canyon of flats and office blocks slowed his progress and drove the stinging drops of rain into his face. By the time he reached the office his shirt and chinos were soaked through. He got into the lift and the woman next to him shook her head. He looked like what he was: pitiful.

  The lift doors opened on the Chapman Public Relations office. The millennials, who seemed to need days off because of stress and complained of being bullied when he dared to correct their apostrophes, all had their heads down. Keyboards clattered and soft, urgent conversations were murmured. Jessica, who was young enough to be his daughter, made a point of looking up at the clock. Even on good days coming to work was not something he especially looked forward to. He’d left journalism to make more money, to set him and Jill up for a better life by paying off the mortgage sooner, so they could travel more. Even before Jill died he’d found himself regretting the move; the work bored him and he’d realised happiness was rarely found in a bigger bank balance.

  ‘Oh, Nick,’ said Pippa Chapman, the owner of the company, as she came out of her window office and intercepted him on the way to his landlocked work station, ‘I was looking for you. Glad you didn’t drown out there. Got a minute?’

  He was three minutes late. Nick was nearly always the first in the office, after Pippa, and often the last to leave. Pippa was still under thirty-five, had only ever worked in public relations and, to her credit, had built up a reasonable business with her consultancy. In private he called her the pocket rocket. He’d been her star contact once upon a time, when he’d been a comparatively old journalist on a newspaper that was struggling to stay afloat in the digital age. When there had been yet another round of redundancies she had picked him up. He owed her, but she never let him forget it.