“Looks like there’s been a kill,” he said in an echo of Hendrik’s comment.
Roelof looked back to the road and said nothing. We were heading towards the epicentre of the spiraling vultures, and Roelof’s hands fluttered over the controls as if they wanted to be doing something else, like driving in the opposite direction.
We bumped gently over the rough road towards the death that lay ahead. The terrain here was rocky, with patches of long grasses and thorn trees like crippled refugees struggling over the low hills. The vultures were gliding down to a cluster of trees a few hundred metres from the road. They sat on the low branches and shifted restlessly, opening and refolding their huge wings, and jumping up impatiently when another landed.
“Too far off the road to see anything,” said Roelof, but he brought the jeep to a halt beside Piet and Billy, who were using binoculars to see what the vultures were picking at.
The shapes of low-slung animals the size of big dogs could be seen through the grasses beneath one of the thorn trees.
“Hyenas,” I said. “You’ve got the scavengers alright. When your cats arrive, they’ll fit right in.”
Roelof nodded without enthusiasm and cut the motor, which coughed and died. I climbed out of the jeep.
“I wouldn’t do that,” warned Kenneth. “You don’t want to go near them.”
“Certainly not,” I agreed.
I walked around to the back of Piet and Billy’s jeep, and pulled a metal box out of our collection of samples. I released the clips on the box and opened it to reveal an Enfield 4-16x50 telescopic sight: the kind of scope that brought your prey so close you could choose the point of entry so that the trophy wouldn’t have any ugly holes in it when the animal was hanging on your wall. It had mil-dot reticles so that you could judge the height of your prey, with 0.1 milli-radian increments. Good enough for rough calculations up to half a kilometre. It was only if you wanted to get the bullet under the helmet of the prey that you needed a finer adjustment, which was why I trained on the finer resolution scopes with the diagrams of stick figures with helmets on their heads and had learnt how to accommodate for bullet drop and wind drift. I didn’t need any of that now. I also grabbed a lightweight tripod ground mount and the M240 machine gun that Chandler had packed in for demonstration purposes.
“You going to shoot them?” asked Roelof.
“Just taking a closer look,” I said.
It had been some years since I’d handled a gun like the M240, but mounting it was an automatic process – like riding a bicycle. I mounted it on the bonnet of our jeep, and Piet clambered out to look. I fitted the scope onto the gun and adjusted the diopter to focus on the scene beneath the vultures. The stubby black noses and shaggy fur of the hyenas filled the eyepiece. They were brown hyenas, prowling around the remains and snarling at each other. The Enfield scope was more powerful than I had expected and it was difficult to hold it steady, but I could catch glimpses of the carcass between the shifting shapes of the hyenas.
“Probably a zebra,” Piet said in a loud whisper beside me, “or something smaller. We’ve got wild dogs here.”
“Looks smaller,” I said, and held my breath a moment to keep the scope steady. There was something that bothered me about the way the hyenas were circling. Hyenas fight over a carcass like squabbling siblings, trying to grab the best bits for themselves and breaking through the flesh so that the vultures can gain access and use their powerful beaks to rip pieces of flesh free. But these hyenas were pacing around as if they were waiting for something. And the vultures too were waiting in the trees. One of them fluttered down clumsily, and tugged with frustration at something, the hunched back of its wings straining like a deformed man. A hyena tired of pacing and grabbed onto a loose piece of skin, but that also did not move. I edged the scope a tenth of a millimetre at a time and scanned the area. I found what I was looking for on the third pass and felt the shiver of shock run down my back and the involuntary rise of bile in my throat.
The exposed skull had been pulled clear of the spine and had rolled a few metres away, so that it lay on its own, and grinned at me. The flesh had been torn off, and the maggots and ants had cleaned it so that the cranium shone brightly in the early morning sun. The gaping holes of the eye sockets, the inverted triangle of the nasal passage, and the long teeth created a macabre impression of a nightmarish creature laughing at some joke. I stood back and offered the scope to Piet.
“We have a problem,” I said.
“Problem?” said Piet, and he looked through the scope.
“They’re all sitting around because they cannot break through the clothes,” I said.
“Clothes?”
“That’s a human body.”
Roelof radioed ahead and drove us back to the lodge with a little more speed but no less control. Piet and Billy followed us, both looking faintly nauseous. Roelof had been seized by a focused energy that tightened his face and locked his mouth down, as if he was keeping a furious anger trapped inside him. Kenneth had fallen completely silent and raised the shotgun as if he might need to use it.
We arrived at the lodge at the same speed that Hendrik had used the day before, but Roelof’s approach had none of the edge-of-the-seat sense of near catastrophe to it. The bulky figure of Hendrik emerged from the glass front of the reception, looking like an inflated schoolboy in elastic-waisted shorts that ended above his thigh muscles, and a rugby shirt with a club logo on the chest. He strode towards us angrily, his limbs twitching with excess energy.
Roelof climbed out of the jeep almost before we’d rolled to a stop, and called out to Hendrik, but the blown-up rugby player was not looking at Roelof. He was looking at me. I interpreted the look of rage on his puce face just seconds before his right fist struck out towards me. I pulled back sharply and bent my knees so that his fist swung through the air, but it happened so quickly that my balance was thrown and I fell back against the sharp edge of the jeep’s open door which jabbed at my kidneys like a blade. The pain caused an involuntary twist, and Hendrik’s left fist came up and struck my cheekbone a crushing blow. It sent a spasm of pain through my skull and my right eye filled with blood. I allowed the momentum of the blow to twist me around and my shoulder deflected Hendrik’s next blow. I caught a blurred image of Kenneth sitting immobile in the back of the jeep, still holding the shotgun as if he was trying to decide which of us to shoot.
Distance becomes difficult to gauge with only one eye, but I caught Hendrik’s fist as it glanced off my shoulder. It was as big as a child’s head, and my grip slipped, but I brought my other hand up and held his fist in both hands. I twisted his fist about and used the force of his blow to extend him towards me. His big shoulders made him top-heavy, and he’d planted his feet laterally because he’d seen me as a static target, which proved to be a mistake. I slid under his shoulders as he fell forward, and secured my grip on his wrist, pulling the arm back and under him so that his head dropped against the open door of the jeep with a crunch, and I felt the pop as the tendon attaching the supraspinatus muscle to the humerus at the shoulder was torn under the strain.
Hendrik emitted a howl of pain. I released his wrist, and he sprawled onto the dusty ground.
“What the fuck?” he screamed as he writhed with pain. “You’ve broken my arm. What the fuck?”
“It’s not broken,” I said. “The tendon has torn, but the bones are fine.” I looked up to see Roelof watching me in horror. Kenneth was standing up in the back of the jeep, pointing the shotgun at me. Piet and Billy were watching in stunned silence from beyond Kenneth.
Chandler emerged from the reception area like a gliding pillar of ice, his crisp linen suit with open-neck silk shirt and cropped white hair exuding a sense of cool tranquillity.
“What have you done, Freddy?” he asked in a calm voice.
I held out a hand to help Hendrik to his feet, but he shied away from it as if I was launching a fresh attack. He cradled the damaged arm with his other, and rose onto h
is knees, where he opened his mouth and wailed with pain. The whole thing seemed a little overdone to me, but the others appeared moved by the performance and the look of horror on Roelof’s face deepened. Several staff members emerged from the reception area, as if answering the animal call of their master, and they stood in a ring around the howling Hendrik and his brutal assailant. Hendrik was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, which made the situation look worse than it was. When he’d drawn a rasping breath and seemed to be done with the howling part of the performance, he turned to me and spat to clear his mouth of the blood.
“Touch my woman again and I’ll fucking kill you,” he said.
“Oh Freddy,” said Chandler with evident disappointment, although I detected some relief mixed in with it.
There were several objections I could have made to Hendrik’s statement. Did Melissa really belong to him? And strictly speaking, had I touched her? Admittedly, that was a grey area. And his closing threat weakened his status as victim. But I opened my hands like an innocent man.
“I would never think of it,” I said, although I confess the thought of touching Melissa had lingered for a moment after she had floated down the terrace the night before.
“She’s got marks all over her backside,” Hendrik said. “What the fuck did you do? Stick pins into her?”
Chandler raised a hand as if he was about to impart a benediction.
“Oh … my … goodness,” he said with gentle emphasis on each syllable. It had the desired effect, and everyone turned to him, even the sobbing Hendrik.
“There has been a terrible misunderstanding,” said Chandler. “You are thinking perhaps that the brief conversation I had with your lovely fiancée on the terrace last night, might have been Freddy up to no good?”
Doubt appeared behind the tears in Hendrik’s pink eyes.
“She smells of his cigarettes,” he complained, but Chandler smiled and allowed himself a small laugh.
“My mistake again,” he said. “Freddy was kind enough to leave me with a cigarette that I indulged in. I should have been more careful and not stood upwind of your beautiful bride-to-be.”
Hendrik looked as if he had other objections to Chandler’s flimsy story, but they weren’t coming through clearly enough for him to vocalise.
“Get off my land,” said Hendrik. “All of you.”
“Let’s get you on your feet,” said Chandler. “We’ll get a doctor to give you the once over. Bill me for it, will you, Roelof? I insist. X-rays, full body scans, blood tests, do the whole thing. It is absolutely unacceptable what Freddy has done.”
He glared at me, and the crowd swung round to see my return. I bowed my head and mumbled an apology.
“Get your things,” said Chandler, “and for goodness’ sake change those clothes,” he added, drawing murmuring support from the crowd. “You’re bleeding all over them.”
“You’re incorrigible,” said Chandler as we settled back in the leather seats of the jet as it reached cruising altitude. “You know that, Gabriel? Incorrigible. Why must you always do that with the women?”
“Do what with the women?”
“Steal the other man’s.”
I checked to make sure that Robyn was asleep. Fat-Boy was wearing an enormous pair of headphones from which we could hear a rhythmic beat.
“It was eighteen months after we buried Brian that I stole his woman,” I said. “Is that what you mean by stealing?”
“We didn’t bury him,” said Chandler. Which was true, because the land mine had left nothing to bury. There had been a ceremony of sorts. Dark suits and sunglasses and organ music. And I had held Robyn for a minute and promised myself I would never do what I did eighteen months later.
Chandler poured a tumbler of vodka and handed it to me as a peace offering. Vodka was Chandler’s standard prescription after a physical fight.
“We’re going to get ourselves into trouble with all this amateur theatre,” said Chandler.
“I thought Fat-Boy was a triumph?”
Chandler shook his head.
“Billy Mabele might have been a hit, but it was like amateur hour at a village theatre. William the Conqueror, where the hell did he get that from? And Robyn could hardly string a sentence together. We’re lucky they were so distracted by that dead body you found.”
His pale eyes held mine as he wondered whether to give me a hard time about that, but he stretched his mouth into a straight line to show me he would let it go.
“It might have been amateur theatre,” I said, “but we are playing to an amateur audience. As long as they bought it, we’re still on track.”
Chandler considered this.
“Complacency,” he said. “That will be our downfall.”
“We’ve not got far to go,” I said. “We might just make it.”
Chandler raised his glass.
“Here’s to entering the home straight,” he said, then threw back his own vodka and showed me how it made his eyes water.
Seventeen
“Why does that man insist on hitting members of my staff?” complained Fehrson after I had explained my swollen eye. He sniffed. “Does he have some kind of vendetta against the Department?”
“It was a misunderstanding,” I said.
“Isn’t it always.” said Khanyi and her eyebrows arched accusingly.
Fehrson turned from my black eye and gazed at his clocks behind me. I had noticed that they were all telling very different times, and it looked as if this was bothering him.
“We will need a report,” said Fehrson. “Something in writing. Cannot have members of the public hitting staff like this. Put it into a report. Isn’t that what we are paying you for?”
“If you like,” I said, “although I was not there as a member of your staff.”
“Why were you there?” asked Khanyi.
I had called the Department and asked for this meeting. Which was so unusual that it was arousing Khanyi’s suspicions. She was trying to find my ulterior motive.
“I was exploring an opportunity to locate Hendrik’s stash of weapons,” I said.
“The White Africans’ weapons?”
“Their concrete bunker,” I confirmed. “Are you still interested?”
“You know we’re interested,” said Khanyi.
“We cannot have you out there drawing attention to yourself,” said Fehrson. “Did he hit you because you were snooping around?”
“Not at all. Hendrik van Rensburg was being a little overzealous in keeping his fiancée from telling any of his secrets. That is all.”
“I should have guessed there was a woman involved,” said Khanyi.
“What secrets?” asked Fehrson.
“His propensity for violence, for one thing. And she mentioned that Hendrik’s origins are a little obscure.”
“Obscure?”
“He lived with his mother until the age of ten.”
Fehrson sniffed again. “You will have to put it all in the report,” he said.
“Of course,” I said. “It’s what you’re paying me for after all.”
There was an awkward silence.
“You did not need to be paid,” said Fehrson confidently. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“Tell us about the concrete bunker,” said Khanyi, who was not distracted by irrelevant details.
“If you could provide the tracking devices that Dirk proposed, we could follow Hendrik to his concrete bunker.”
“Follow what, exactly?” asked Khanyi. “Hendrik himself?”
“Hendrik’s new weapons.”
“You are providing those white supremacists with weapons?” spluttered Fehrson. “I hope to goodness they are fake weapons.”
“It was Dirk’s idea,” I said. “And a good one.”
“We would need to coordinate several departments,” said Khanyi. “That operation involved customs inspectors turning a blind eye and advanced tracking technology, if I remember correctly. Not the kind of thing we could do alone
.”
“And costly,” pointed out Fehrson.
“Impossible in our current situation,” agreed Khanyi. “But I suppose we could get the police on board.”
“Of course,” I said, and restrained myself from any mention of getting into policemen’s beds.
“We have asked Khanyisile’s policeman to give us a report,” said Fehrson as if he had read my mind. “We can discuss it with him then.”
“A report?”
“On that body you helped them find. He is with the pathologist now. What on earth were you doing digging up rotting corpses on their game farm?”
“Have they identified it?”
“It’s Q’s brother,” said Khanyi, and she pursed her lips to show that she was not at all impressed that I had predicted it would be.
“And there is something else,” said Fehrson.
“The gun,” said Khanyi, like they were doing a comedy act and drawing out the punch line.
“What gun?”
“They found an AK-47 with the body,” said Fehrson.
“Ballistics have confirmed it’s the gun that was used in the church,” said Khanyi. “The brother appears to have died from a bullet wound, perhaps from the same gun. They are suggesting he might have turned the gun on himself.”
“He killed himself?” I said. “With the gun he’d used in the church?”
“He might have,” said Khanyi. “Although the pathologist says it’s unlikely. Something about the angle of the bullet.”
“We said you would join Khanyisile’s policeman at the pathologist’s lab,” said Fehrson.
“Now?”
“The pathologist has some information the police captain feels you should hear.”
Fehrson looked up at his clocks. “We said you would be there by four.” He frowned.
“That was half an hour ago,” said Khanyi, who had fewer timepieces, but greater clarity as a result.
I waited in a room adjoining the pathology laboratory and watched through a window where bright lights glared onto the remains of the body that had been retrieved from the Van Rensburg farm. Andile Dlamini’s eyes were visible above the mask he wore and from the way in which they were screwed up I guessed the chemicals didn’t cover the smell of the rotting flesh. Andile was listening intently as the pathologist pointed out something on the skull with a tool that looked like a woodworker’s chisel.
Murderous Page 21
