The Last Hunt

by Deon Meyer

  ‘No, there isn’t. Who cares anyway?’

  ‘She does. She taught us it’s a toep.’

  ‘A toep?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle.’

  ‘Toep. I ask you.’

  ‘That’s what she says.’

  ‘That’s never gonna catch on. Nobody in their right mind is gonna talk about a toep in Afrikaans or any language. You can tell that to your teacher.’

  The boy nodded in agreement. ‘So, Uncle, are you going to buy a Tesla, then?’

  ‘Nah, too expensive for a policeman.’

  ‘Brantley says Uncle has lots of money.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, he said Uncle is captured. All the Hawks are captured so they’ve got loads of money.’

  ‘Donnie, don’t sit and talk nonsense. Eat your chips before they get cold,’ said Desiree.

  ‘It isn’t me, it’s Brantley that says so.’

  Cupido gritted his teeth. ‘We are not captured,’ he said. ‘We are the Serious and Violent Crimes Unit. Nobody can capture us.’

  ‘Not even the state president?’

  ‘Not even—’

  Cupido’s phone rang on the table. He could see the call was from Lieutenant Colonel Mbali Kaleni.

  Chapter 52

  At half past eight that night Griessel drove down the narrow Nuttall Street in Observatory. In the yellow of the streetlights he saw only Kaleni’s white Hawks BMW parked in front of a blue Toyota Yaris on the narrow sidewalk. It was a strange sight, in the absence of other police and emergency vehicles. He stopped in front of the old corrugated-iron flat-roofed house with a little white wall and a big lemon tree in the garden.

  Mbali Kaleni got out of the passenger side of the Yaris, and walked towards him. Her face was stern. She was still in her full PPE suit, the official prescribed personal-protection equipment that included booties, coveralls, cap and gloves, all in light blue. Only her face mask was pulled down around her neck. There was another woman behind the steering wheel of the Toyota, unrecognisable in the dark.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Benny,’ said Kaleni. Her voice was strange, without its normal tone. ‘Please bring your murder bag.’

  He nodded, went to fetch it from the boot of his car. She waited for him at the gate, opened it, and they went through. He was still thrown slightly off balance by the absence of local station detectives and uniforms.

  ‘The woman in the car is Thandi Dikela,’ said Kaleni. ‘She has been my friend for more than fifteen years. The man inside is her father, Menzi. He was a great man, he was—’

  She stopped speaking and Griessel looked at her. They were standing in the shadow of the lemon tree that blocked the streetlights and it took a second for him to realise that tears were trickling down her cheeks. He couldn’t recall ever seeing her weep. He didn’t know what he should do – he wanted to put out a hand to comfort her, but she was his commanding officer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Colonel,’ he said.

  She shook her head, as if she could rid herself of the feelings. After a while she said: ‘Thandi called me. Three hours ago. She came here to check on him because he’d said things that made her very worried about his safety. He’s seventy-four. She called him this afternoon and he didn’t answer. Five times, he didn’t answer.’ Her voice broke, her shoulders sagged, and she began to sob. Griessel couldn’t bear it any more. He dropped his murder bag and put his arms around her shoulders. She stood meekly as he hugged her.

  The sobs racked her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. Those were the only words he could think of. He’d never had to hug a commander in sympathy before.

  It took her a while to come down. Then she stepped back and began to dry her tears with her hand. ‘Thank you, Benny,’ she said self-consciously, straightening up. ‘When he did not answer, she came here. The front door was closed, but not locked. When she went inside . . . It looks like he shot himself, Benny.’ She took a deep breath to gain control. ‘She says that’s all wrong. She says he told her on Saturday that if something happened to him she should call me. Thandi was very upset. She asked him what could happen, what was going on? He said he wasn’t serious, just an old man with bad jokes, she shouldn’t worry. But she did. She called him a few times on Sunday, yesterday too, and he just laughed, said she should forget what he’d said, he was fine. And then, today . . . She works in Nyanga. She’s a town planner with the People’s Housing Process, and she was very busy, so she only started calling in the afternoon. He didn’t answer . . . And then she came . . . He was a solid, happy man, Benny. He was never depressed. She says this is all wrong. She says someone came and killed him. And they wrote that suicide note. That is not her father’s handwriting, because she knows it very well. That was someone trying to make it look like her father’s writing . . .’

  She made a small helpless gesture, as if she wished this wasn’t real. She said: ‘Vaughn is coming too. I need you both. I need you to be very, very careful with this. I need you to treat this as a crime scene. Just . . . be very thorough, Benny. I can’t do it. I’m too close, too subjective and too upset. I’ll wait with Thandi in the car. Please don’t call anybody yet. Just be very thorough. Tell me if this was suicide, Benny.’

  Griessel nodded.

  ‘He’s in the kitchen.’

  Griessel was covered from head to toe in the PPE outfit, the Canon PowerShot camera in his pocket, the small LED torch in his hand. He switched it on, studied the front door. There were no signs of damage to the lock or bolt.

  He opened the door.

  It was dark inside, with a soft beam of light shining through one front window, between the curtains. He could make out the shapes of chairs and a couch, a coffee-table, illuminating each with the torch.

  Nothing else.

  He found a light switch on the wall, switched it on. Turned off the torch.

  Beside the switch was the control box of an alarm system. Griessel saw the motion sensor in the corner of the room.

  The sitting-room furniture was smart but not luxurious. Burgundy and blue Oriental carpet on the floor. Flatscreen TV on a cabinet against the wall, DSTV decoder below. He walked forward, to just inside the front door, closed it behind him. The room – the whole house – became eerily quiet. He stood still for a moment and considered the situation. Mbali Kaleni, who never let her feelings show, always did everything by the book. And the book said you reported everything to the local SAPS station. Regardless of how suspect a suicide seemed. And especially if you knew the victim. You called the Station Commander in whose area it had occurred and you let the uniforms come in, cordon off the area and control traffic, and his detectives come in to inspect and Forensics and the pathologist, and an ambulance for the body. That was what the book said. That was what Kaleni always said.

  But not a week ago with the Johnson case, and not tonight either.

  Something strange was going on. And the eerie atmosphere in the house didn’t help. Evil seemed to linger, as if a tragedy had played out there. Or would still.

  He tried to shake off the feeling. He trusted Mbali Kaleni completely. If she was prepared to ignore the book, then he was too.

  He fumbled pulling the camera out of his pocket because the PPE coverall made it awkward. He took a few photos to cover the whole area.

  The front door was closed, but not locked.

  Just be very thorough. Tell me if this was suicide, Benny.

  He did what he always did – tried to visualise what had happened, tried to put himself in the criminal event.

  If the front door was not locked, if it wasn’t suicide, had the potential murderer come in through this door and left by it again? Knocked, waited for Menzi Dikela to answer? Or barged in?

  No apparent signs of violence.

  His eyes traced the logical route from there to the passage at the back. A metre of dull yellow wooden floor was visible, between the skirting boards and the carpet. He saw a mark, like a faint footprint, something that looked like dark grains of sand. It was lying besid
e the edge of the carpet, where someone entering by the front door would have stepped. He sat on his haunches, clicked the torch on again, and shone it on the spot. A sprinkling of greyish-blue grains of earth. It was the contrast of texture and colour that made it stand out, unusual and coarser than sand.

  He took a photo of it, pulled out his cell phone, and called Kaleni.

  She answered instantly. ‘What is it, Benny?’

  ‘Colonel, did your friend enter the living room?’

  ‘Yes. She went in through the front door.’

  ‘We need to bag her shoes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Did she turn off the alarm?’

  ‘She says it was off when she went in.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He rang off, stood up.

  He walked carefully along the left-hand wall, avoiding the direct route to the passage at the back. He shifted one of the chairs slightly, seeing the hollows the chair feet had made in the carpet from years of standing on the same spot. He shifted it back again. He inspected all the other pieces of furniture and the carpet near the feet. He saw no sign that anything had been moved. There were no signs of a struggle.

  In the short passage he found another light switch, clicked it on. Bent down again, shining the white beam of the torch on the floor.

  Nothing.

  The kitchen was through the first door to the left.

  He looked inside.

  The old man was seated there, slumped forward, his head touching the kitchen table. The gunshot wound was on the right temple, small and swollen. The exit wound was gaping wide, half of it visible where his left temple rested on the table top, in the relatively small pool of blood. In front of him, to the right, lay a single sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen. The paper looked like it had been torn out of a notepad. There were two short lines of writing.

  Menzi Dikela’s right hand hung down beside the chair, pistol still clamped in it. He sat behind the table and would have been looking at the passage door before the shot.

  That was the moment Griessel hated, his first sight of the victim, the grim observation of death. His own damned mind always wanted to reconstruct it, as if he was the one experiencing that horrible moment. He was lifting the weapon slowly, heart beating wildly, the cool barrel against his temple, then pulling the trigger, slowly and deliberately. The bullet ripping through skin and bone and tissue, the shot, the primal scream dragging him down into the darkness. His psychologist had given him advice, techniques to fight the vortex of images, but still he struggled with the visions his brain conjured instantly. He wished Cupido were there. Vaughn understood. Vaughn would talk to him non-stop, keep his attention this side of his imagination’s graphic reconstructions with meaningless babble. But now he was alone in the silence. He lifted the camera, took photos mechanically. A few things troubled him about the scene.

  Griessel’s phone rang shrilly in his pocket, vibrating, making him jump in alarm. ‘Jissis!’ he said, so loudly that he felt he should apologise to the dead man for his lack of respect.

  ‘I’m at the front door,’ said Cupido, over the phone.

  His partner was there; he felt a wave of relief. ‘Okay. I’m in the kitchen with the victim,’ he said. ‘Kaleni sent me right in. Can you check outside if there are any damaged doors or windows? The front door doesn’t show any signs of forced entry.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Right inside the front door there’s a possible footprint. Keep to the left against the wall. The kitchen is the first door off the passage.’

  ‘Check. See you just now.’

  Griessel was still standing just outside the kitchen. He put away the camera, then carefully stepped inside. The tiled floor might have been white once, but was now a colourless beige. The table was pine, as were the four chairs. Three were pushed under the table, the dead man sat on the fourth. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a thick blue woollen jersey, dark blue jeans, comfortable black shoes. Apart from the blood, Menzi Dikela’s shattered grey head, the pen and the sheet of paper, there was nothing else on the table.

  Behind the dead man was a kitchen window – thick curtains – and in the corner a back door. Small cup hooks were screwed into it from which hung bunches of keys. Below the window was a double sink with a drying rack beside it. Kitchen cupboards were fixed to three walls, all the doors and drawers neatly shut. Work counters with a kettle, toaster and bread bin. Clean, orderly.

  Griessel bent down to study the floor. Under the table he found a small pool of dark, dried blood next to the chair Dikela was sitting on. It was directly under the edge of the table, where it had dripped down from the head wound. Twenty centimetres in front of Dikela’s black shoes something was visible on the dull floor. Griessel edged closer, switched the torch back on to illuminate it. A small cluster of greyish blue grains. The same texture and colour as those inside the front door. They could have come from Dikela’s shoes, although there was nothing at his feet. He would have to mark it, and get the shoes into an evidence bag as well.

  He walked carefully around the table, making sure there was nothing he could step in or on.

  The sink was empty, the drying rack as well.

  He read the two sentences scrawled in an untidy, hurried hand on the paper: I am sorry. I have failed my country.

  He judged the trajectory of the shot, his gaze finding the bullet where it had struck a kitchen cupboard to the left of the victim. It was badly misshapen, impossible to say whether it matched the calibre of the pistol in Menzi Dikela’s hand.

  Then he crouched to study the weapon in the dead man’s hand, as well as the fine blood spray on the skin, the sleeve of the shirt and jersey.

  He heard the front door close, then Cupido’s voice: ‘Honey, I’m home.’

  Chapter 53

  Down the years they had seen so many suicide victims – as young constables first on the scene, as junior detectives sent to investigate those nasty routine cases, when their seniors wanted to avoid the depressing drudgery of it all. Cupido and Griessel knew that in approximately 80 per cent of cases where people shot themselves, the victim was male. Using a handgun. Most of them with a shot to the right temple. Nearly always indoors. The trajectory of the bullet was usually slightly upwards. And in more than three-quarters of those cases there was a clear, star-shaped contact wound.

  When a suicide note was left, it was always written by hand.

  They saw all of that in Menzi Dikela’s kitchen. More than enough to believe that no foul play had been involved. In addition, Cupido could find no sign of forced entry.

  But something didn’t feel right.

  Cupido was the first to put it into words. ‘Benna, something is just a little bit off,’ he said. ‘It’s the way he’s sitting there.’ Usually the body would fall in the direction of the shot. To the floor, not forward.

  ‘Still holding the pistol in his hand like that,’ said Griessel. ‘I only saw that once before. A guy who was lying on a bed.’

  ‘The suicide note,’ said Cupido. ‘Even if it is in his handwriting, it’s not exactly typical.’

  Griessel nodded in agreement. Most suicide notes were addressed to someone specific, written with resentment or hate.

  ‘This . . . It looks just a little bit staged to me, Benna. It looks like someone saw a movie about a suicide scene, and arranged it just like that.’

  They stood back from the table, trying to identify exactly what was bothering them.

  Cupido rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. ‘Could we be brainwashed by the daughter insisting it’s murder?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Griessel.

  ‘What are we missing?’

  They stood side by side, studying everything carefully, aware of the two women outside, waiting in anticipation, anxious and distraught. Griessel and Cupido were both quietly cognisant of their responsibility to reach the correct conclusion, and swiftly.

  They walked around the table. Deathly silence reigned in the house, besides the
shuffle of cloth shoe covers on the tile floor.

  Then Cupido said: ‘Wait a minute . . .’ He crouched on his haunches, right by the bullet lodged in the cupboard door, following the possible trajectory with his eyes. He went round the back of the body, bent down by the pistol that was clenched in Dikela’s hand, hanging halfway between the table top and the floor. He examined it closely. ‘This is a Z88, right?’

  ‘Yip,’ said Griessel. Just like the one on his belt. The Z88 was standard equipment in the army and the SAPS’s official weapon of choice up till 2007. Many of the older members of the police force still used it. Cupido had exchanged his a year or so ago for the Glock 17. Cupido straightened up, rubbed the back of his neck again. ‘So where’s the shell casing, Benna?’

  ‘Shit,’ said Griessel. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘He held the gun like this, so the shell would have jumped forward. That way. To the floor, maybe the counter top, around here by the kettle. Or, if it bounced weirdly, down the passage . . .’

  They searched the whole of the kitchen floor and the counters thoroughly, scanning closely with their torches, to be absolutely sure. Then Griessel said: ‘Wait, she might have picked it up.’

  He phoned Kaleni again. ‘Colonel,’ he asked, when she answered anxiously, ‘did you remove anything from the scene?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Could you ask your friend if she did?’

  ‘What is missing, Captain?’

  ‘The shell casing, from the pistol.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  He heard her speaking to Thandi in Xhosa. Then Kaleni told him: ‘She says she did not touch anything whatsoever, except for the front door handle.’

  ‘Thank you, Colonel.’ He rang off.

  ‘They don’t know anything about a shell casing,’ he told Cupido.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t see it and knocked it down the passage.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The detectives extended their search to the passage. They didn’t find it. Next the two bedrooms, the bathroom, and then a room that apparently served as a study or office. Every door was open, though they were sceptical that the shell could have rolled that far.