Murderous

by David Hickson

  “You’re the first today.”

  “Must you always be so devious?”

  “It’s an operational necessity,” I said. “You asked me to look into the Van Rensburg situation in an unofficial way. It would be easier if I don’t have officials greeting me in their presence using different names.”

  “One day you’re going to look in the mirror and not remember which person you are.”

  I smiled. Sometimes Khanyi could be remarkably perceptive.

  The Attic spanned the full width of the old building, all the way from the arched window over Greenmarket Square to the exposed brickwork with original block and tackle at the far end. The building had been a trader’s warehouse in the nineteenth century and a clever architect had won awards for deciding that the space would be enhanced by exposing the rafters, hanging lights like spacecraft from them, and polishing up all the old equipment that the original trader had used to hoist goods up from the ground level so that the place felt like a mix between a modern meeting room and a museum. Some poor sods had carried the better part of a three-hundred-year-old oak tree up here and created a rough-hewn table that could seat a crowd; there was enough space left over for a flip-board, a screen, a ceiling-mounted projector, and a table for refreshments. And there was room for Fehrson to pace up and down before the huge arched window that came down to the floor, because that was how he liked to do his thinking. He was pacing up and down when we arrived, wearing his English country gentleman outfit: a tweed jacket, tie with the working man’s steel tiepin, and monogrammed handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket. He pushed his left wrist forward like he was shadow-boxing and consulted his wristwatch.

  “On time!” he said, not bothering to conceal his amazement. His look of incredulity deepened as he took in my appearance. “Is this really Ben Gabriel you have brought with you, Khanyisile?” he asked with a mocking tone to raise a laugh.

  “It is not,” said Khanyi, which was her way of dealing with my deviousness. “It is Freddy.”

  “Freddy Moss,” said Andile Dlamini. “Good to see you.” The police captain rose from his seat and gave me an encouraging clap on the arm as we shook hands with a rueful smile to show that he understood my difficulty around names. I might as well not have lurked in Giuseppe’s, drinking coffee and waiting for Khanyi’s arrival. I might as well just wear a tracking device and allow Breytenbach and other interested parties to tune in whenever they felt like finding me.

  Fehrson had the confused look of a man who wonders whether he has been calling someone by the wrong name for many years. But he dismissed it as another one of my unfathomable oddities.

  “Hit the coffee button, Khanyisile, my dear,” he said, demonstrating his ability to speak the vernacular. He was still young enough to use words like ’hit’. Khanyi pressed the intercom button on the table as we took our seats. It squawked.

  “Belinda,” said Fehrson. No response from the intercom, which crouched like a sulking animal on the table.

  “We were thinking of coffee,” said Fehrson. The intercom didn’t respond for a moment, but then it emitted a further two squawks. “Yes, dear,” said Father, “biscuits would be much appreciated.”

  He beamed at Andile. “Getting high tech here,” he said, as if communicating electronically with someone else in the same building was a recent technological breakthrough. Andile looked duly impressed.

  “Captain Dlamini has some conundrums,” Fehrson said to me in a tone that suggested he was sharing Andile’s personal medical problems. “He asked us to include you in this morning’s meeting.”

  “I see,” I said. Fehrson didn’t sound as if he approved of Andile’s request to have me included.

  “The country is happy, of course,” said Andile and he smiled confidently to get things off to a jolly start. It looked as if he had managed to get a little sleep in the few days since I’d last seen him. But he hadn’t managed to iron his crumpled suit, and his breath revealed his lack of progress towards kicking the cigarette habit. I didn’t hold that against him. “Very happy,” he repeated. “The entire country would have the man we’ve arrested hanging from a tree if they had a chance.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “Nqobeni Nyambawu,” said Andile, in what sounded like a vocal warm-up exercise, commencing with a sound like two pieces of wood knocking together at the front of the first word.

  “That is the man they have arrested,” said Fehrson helpfully.

  “They call him Q,” said Andile.

  “One can see why,” I said.

  “Works at the Village of Future Hope,” said Andile. “More than works there. He is an alumnus. He’s their poster child. Their biggest success story. One of the first to go through their program. First-class matric, studied economics at university.”

  “And he’s the person who walked into the church with an automatic weapon?” I asked.

  “He might be,” said Andile with less conviction than the news reporters had suggested. “We have DNA that places him in the church.”

  “The DNA is considered conclusive?”

  Andile nodded. “The boffins say it’s definitive. Nqobeni was in that church.”

  “But he denies it?”

  “Not at all. He has confessed.”

  “A voluntary confession?” asked Fehrson.

  “Entirely voluntary.”

  Fehrson gave a disbelieving laugh. Khanyi glared at him warningly, and Fehrson’s laugh turned into a cough.

  “What is the problem then?” asked Khanyi.

  “The problem is, I don’t think he did it. There is nobody that can confirm where he was on that Sunday morning. His habit was to attend his own church, but on this occasion there was no morning service. There have been no services for the past few weeks because the pastor is on some kind of pilgrimage. Which is another complication: the pastor is Nqobeni’s brother, Xolani.” The ‘x’ at the front of the name required a softer tongue click that sounded like Andile was tut-tutting.

  “What do they call the brother?” I asked. “X?”

  “Xolani,” said Andile, conveying the scorn he had for people who couldn’t manage the clicks.

  “And Xolani cannot vouch for his brother?” I said, with my best effort at the click.

  “Not yet. He has not returned from his pilgrimage.”

  “You’ve not contacted him?” asked Khanyi.

  “We have no contact details.”

  “He’ll come forward, surely.”

  “When Nqobeni’s identity is released, assuming that it’s the kind of pilgrimage that involves reading the newspapers. He’s a very religious man. Fresh out of Bible school. Other villagers tell us that he and Nqobeni are model citizens. The heroes of the village. Both graduates of the development program who have been giving back to the community. Nqobeni’s been teaching, nurturing the youth who are where he was.”

  “He doesn’t sound like the kind of man to walk into a church with an automatic weapon.”

  “There is another side to his story. For one thing, he has had a string of mental health problems. If the village wasn’t so big on handling all their problems on site, he would have been in and out of institutions all his life. That’s what the psych doctors say. At the village everything is holistic, the personal touch, connection to the land, God, and so forth. They don’t ship their problems off to be solved elsewhere, they keep them on the farm where they sort them out for themselves. Or ask God to sort them out. They are a religious community.”

  “Sort them out, or let them fester?” I asked.

  “Exactly. And there is a lot of festering. Most of the village are supporters of the extreme EFF, the Economic Freedom Fighters.”

  “The ones that chant ‘one settler, one bullet’?” asked Fehrson.

  “More or less. They like to sing the ‘Kill the Boer’ song. That village might be winning Van Rensburg brownie points with the government, but there are some who would say that if you throw a bunch of delinquents in a pot
and stir them up a bit, you’ve got one stinking problem waiting to go wrong.”

  “What was Q’s delinquency?”

  “He killed a security guard with a screwdriver.” Andile gave us a moment to absorb that. “A white security guard. On the farm where he grew up. There were mitigating circumstances, which is why he ended up in the village, and not in confinement. For one thing, he was only ten years old when he did it. And for another, the security guard had killed Nqobeni’s father a few days before. It was in the late nineties when farms in the Limpopo were employing a new breed of security company, the kind that came with men carrying guns instead of passive infrared detectors and bells. Nqobeni’s father had worked all his life on the farm. He was trusted to make decisions for himself. He decided to move a tractor one evening so he could get an early start the next morning. The guard claimed to have thought he was stealing the tractor.”

  Andile stopped as the noise of clinking crockery and a puffing sound like a small steam train rose from the spiral staircase.

  “Give her a hand, will you, Ben?” suggested Fehrson.

  But Belinda did not want a hand. Her spherical form attained the top stair, and she tottered there for a moment and glared past my offered hand at Fehrson, huffing and puffing as she tried to control her breathing sufficiently to give voice to her dissatisfaction.

  “There’s a perfectly good meeting room on the seventh floor, Mr Fehrson,” she said.

  “We have an important guest with us today, Belinda,” said Fehrson, and he gave her a smile on full beam to stop the staff from embarrassing that important guest. Belinda looked at me with scorn and opened her mouth to protest my lack of importance, but then she noticed Andile and closed her mouth, a little mollified.

  “I brought biscuits,” she said.

  “For which we are extremely grateful,” said Fehrson, and he went back to full beam to show that gratitude.

  Belinda harrumphed and put the tray down with a clatter. “They’re last month’s,” she said. “You still haven’t given me the petty cash.”

  “I will be sure to do that later, Belinda,” said Fehrson, whose smile was getting a little worn around the edges.

  “Three months you owe me,” said Belinda, and she planted her feet squarely so we couldn’t roll her back down the stairs.

  “That is unacceptable,” said Fehrson. “I will see to it just as soon as we have finished this meeting.”

  Belinda hesitated as she decided whether to push the matter and insist that Fehrson settle his debts before we continue. But she thought better of it, swivelled about and rolled herself back down the staircase.

  “Help yourself to a biscuit,” said Fehrson with forced cheer when Belinda had huffed and puffed her way out of earshot. He passed the plate around. Only Andile took a biscuit, probably because it was the first time he had been invited to a meeting in the Attic. He tried to conceal the disappointment as he bit into it, but the look on his face revealed that Belinda hadn’t raised the catering bar since my previous visit.

  “So this Q fellow,” said Fehrson with inappropriate levity, “he seems an unlikely killer. That is why you are here? We are going to get to the conundrums?”

  Andile’s bite of biscuit required some extensive chewing. He chewed.

  Fehrson continued: “You say he has a history; mental instability, tragic past, a reason to hate the white folk. Makes more sense in that context. And you have a confession and evidence that places him in the church.”

  “DNA match,” said Andile. “That’s all we have. They’ve been matching blood samples. Looks as if he took a fall. Hair and blood on one of the pews as if he struck his head against it. Didn’t match any of the victims, but all the lights went on when we ran Q’s sample.”

  “What is the problem then? Perhaps you want to get to the bit that explains why you asked to speak with us,” Fehrson suggested, through teeth that were only gritted together because he was smiling.

  “There are a few anomalies, in my opinion,” said Andile. He put the biscuit aside and took a sip of coffee, which he also regretted.

  “What anomalies?” asked Fehrson.

  “Your message on the wall, for one. Handwriting expert says there is no chance that he did it.”

  “Spray painting on a wall is very different to writing, surely?” said Khanyi.

  Andile went through his papers and found a collection of roughly drawn triangles. “The handwriting guy can tell you all about it. Something about stroke order. The suspect draws the lines of the triangle in a different order.”

  “Seems a little inconclusive,” said Fehrson, and he reached for his coffee and stared into the mug sadly. There were small brown and white globules floating on the surface, and it looked as if he was wondering whether it was going to be worth trying to drink any.

  “There is also a problem with his height,” said Andile. “Nqobeni is not a tall man.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “We can determine the height at which the gun was held. The firing was done from a level that implies a taller man.”

  “Or he put the gun to his shoulder,” suggested Khanyi.

  Andile shook his head. “The difference is not that great. The Interpol guys say there was a taller man.”

  Fehrson looked as if he was about to say something about what he thought of Interpol guys, but he caught Khanyi’s look so he expressed his feelings with a facial expression instead.

  “Another anomaly has to do with the Van Rensburgs’ aeroplane.”

  “Aeroplane?” said Fehrson querulously. “There’s more?”

  “Let’s allow the captain to finish,” suggested Khanyi.

  “Of course,” said Fehrson, and he took the plunge with a small sip of the coffee. There was an awed silence as we watched to see what effect it had. He puckered his lips and then smacked them, winced a little, and looked down to confirm that it had been the coffee mug he had drunk from. “Of course,” he repeated, and sighed. “Go ahead, captain.”

  “Freddy’s discovery as to why the Van Rensburgs were not in the church.”

  “The pitted tube,” said Fehrson.

  “Pitot,” said Khanyi. “It’s a silent ‘T’ at the end.”

  “You’re going to tell us Q wouldn’t know the pitted tube from the landing gear lever. The person who bent that tube had to know a bit about flying?”

  “More than a bit,” said Andile. “And yet again, Nqobeni is not that man.”

  “Well,” said Fehrson, and he cleared his throat. “All this handwriting and aeroplane tube business is fascinating. And I am delighted young Ben here could do something productive.” He didn’t bother to conceal the surprise that accompanied his delight. “But what does this have to do with us?”

  Andile opened the pink file sitting before him on the table and spread a collection of computer-generated diagrams and photographs across the table.

  “I’ve been doing this for many years now,” he said. “Arriving too late at scenes like that church. But it is not often that we have members of the secret service arrive. I’m a little naïve about matters of state security, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get your titles wrong or confuse your names. But if the secret service is involved, that means to me that there is something bigger going on.”

  “I see,” said Fehrson after an uncomfortable pause.

  “I am proposing that we work together. Before we start having repeat performances of Minhoop.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Fehrson. “Absolutely not the kind of thing we can be involved with.”

  Another pause. Andile paged through his papers. “There is also the puzzle of a friend of the younger Van Rensburg,” he said. “More of an acquaintance, really.” He found what he was looking for and looked up at me and said, “Dirk Fourie.”

  I did everything I could to suppress any reaction, but the body is a treacherous instrument. A tightening of the pupils, a change in the rhythm of the breath can give away surprise, and I wondered
whether Andile was watching for those signs.

  “Puzzle?” I said.

  “One of the deceased. He’d been attending church services off and on for a few months. It seems he knew the younger Van Rensburg. Went to the same school here in Cape Town. Van Rensburg was a boarder at the school.”

  “What does he have to do with it?” said Fehrson. It was an innocent question, but he spoke too soon, and with too much anxiety. He should have let Andile finish. Andile turned his gaze onto him.

  “There were three magazines left behind in the church. Empty magazines. Two of them had been wiped clean, and the third had been wiped almost clean.” Andile paused. We said nothing and so he said: “There was a print on it. Dirk Fourie’s print.”

  We sat in silence for a moment longer. This dishevelled police captain was either turning the tables on us, or unknowingly stumbling into something he knew nothing about. I suspected the former.

  “I am not understanding,” said Fehrson. “What are you saying?”

  “It was an old print,” said Andile. “so this Fourie might have handled the magazine prior to the shooting. Which suggests that there is a connection between Hendrik van Rensburg and the weapon used in the church. It is possible that the weapon belonged to Hendrik van Rensburg. Also possible that Fourie was involved. A docket has been opened to investigate Fourie.”

  “I see,” said Fehrson, with little conviction. He raised his coffee mug to his lips but remembered at the last moment and withdrew it again. “It is not really our bailiwick,” he pronounced. Fehrson liked to start and end any discussion with a forceful negative.

  “Hendrik van Rensburg’s father,” said Andile, “Piet van Rensburg, has become a powerful man. Has the government in his pocket, they say. A word from him and entire government departments are closed down.”

  A nasty silence descended upon us.

  Andile shrugged and his shoulders drooped a little further. “I felt it was my duty, that was all. I had the sense that you might agree that the investigation should continue. And that you could contribute, given the circumstances.” He collected his papers and returned them to their pink folder. He closed the folder and looked up at us with a brave smile. Admitting defeat.