Murderous

by David Hickson

  Andile acknowledged me with a raised hand and a few minutes later the door into the adjoining laboratory opened and he came through with the pathologist. Andile pulled his face mask off and breathed in deeply as if he’d been holding his breath.

  “You’re quite sure about that?” he asked the pathologist, a small man with a ring of hair around a polished dome of a head, and spectacles with perfectly circular lenses.

  “Quite sure,” he said in a voice that sounded as if the bass chords had been filtered out.

  “Felt like I breathed in several dread diseases,” said Andile, “but the doc here tells me it’s not dangerous.”

  “Absolutely not,” said the pathologist. He wasn’t going to change his story, no matter how many times Andile asked him. “The cause of death was not disease. That man died from a bullet wound. You’re as likely to catch a disease from being in the same room as a stick of biltong.”

  “Biltong doesn’t have maggots crawling over it,” said Andile.

  “Maggots are very clean,” said the pathologist. Andile curled his lips up at that and turned to me.

  “Hello, Freddy,” he said and reached out his hand, but then thought better of it, and pulled off the rubber gloves before shaking my hand. “They’ve told you who it is?”

  “They have,” I confirmed.

  “The doc has discovered something interesting.”

  The pathologist nodded and swelled with the importance of a man who has made interesting discoveries.

  “Frozen,” said the pathologist. Andile and I looked at him, and so he dropped his face mask below his chin so we could read his lips, and he gave me another clue. “Body was frozen,” he said.

  “Frozen?” I said. “You mean that he was killed, and then frozen?”

  “That’s what I mean,” said the pathologist. “He was killed and then frozen, not the other way around.” He did something unpleasant with his mouth, which might have been his way of smiling. I realised why he liked to wear that face mask so much.

  “Can you determine how long he was frozen?” asked Andile.

  “We cannot,” said the pathologist, and he removed his circular spectacles and polished them with a sparkling white handkerchief. His eyes were small and vulnerable and squinted slightly. “We can however determine that he was frozen within a few hours of death.”

  “I see,” said Andile, and we both turned to look at the remains of Xolani on the brightly lit table on the other side of the glass where an assistant was collecting loose bones and pieces of flesh and carefully inserting them into plastic packages.

  “In pieces?” asked Andile. “Was the body cut up before it was frozen?”

  “There was no dismemberment.”

  “So it would have been a big fridge,” said Andile.

  “Indeed,” said the pathologist.

  “A walk-in freezer,” said Andile, “a butcher’s freezer, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” said the pathologist.

  “The kind of big walk-in freezer that the Van Rensburgs have up at that lodge,” suggested Andile.

  “That would be your area of expertise, captain. We have learnt all that we can,” said the pathologist in a closing ceremony kind of voice. He returned his glasses to his nose and blinked as his eyes adjusted. “The body will be available for five days, after which we will return it to the next of kin.”

  “Thank you,” said Andile, and he turned to me. “Let’s have a quick cigarette, shall we, Freddy?” He frowned. “You do something to your eye?”

  “I had a misunderstanding with a car door,” I said.

  “Steak,” said the pathologist. “Put a raw steak on it. It’ll bring down the swelling.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and the pathologist lifted his face mask again to indicate that he had finished imparting his interesting discoveries. I suspected that it was living people like us who worried him, not the rotting corpses that the maggots had cleaned.

  Andile had been driven to the morgue by one of his junior officers, and so I drove us back into town, and we had our cigarettes while beating a path against the north-westerly wind.

  “She wants a full verbal report,” said Andile.

  “Khanyi?”

  “Considers it part of the arrangement. Now that our prime suspect has turned up dead, she wants a full report so she can do a risk assessment. I have no idea what that is, but I’m to give it to her in person.”

  “She’s making up reasons to see you,” I said.

  “You think so?” Andile glanced at me to see whether I was teasing.

  “I’ve worked with her for long enough,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a regular request.”

  “She’s a tough nut to crack,” admitted Andile. “I won’t lie to you. Very tough.”

  “It’s all an act,” I said. “Don’t believe any of it. There’s nothing tough about her.”

  We drove in silence for a moment.

  “You know a man called Breytenbach?” asked Andile.

  “Breytenbach?” I said.

  “Riaan Breytenbach. He’s in mining, gold mining I think.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “He called, from a hospital up north. Wanted to know about someone called Gabriel. Works with Major Fehrson.”

  “Don’t think I know him.”

  “That’s what I said to him. Never met a Gabriel.”

  We drove on in silence, and the rain came swooping down the mountain to swallow us.

  Eighteen

  Khanyi’s teeth had been polished in order to smile brighter at Andile, who regarded her with the wariness of an animal that knows it is being watched by a predator. I was relieved not to be the only one dripping on the painted concrete floor of the Attic, and for once Khanyi said nothing about my dampness. But I received fewer of the sparkling teeth, and her eyes flashed a warning because she could see me watching the way she and Andile greeted each other, and her psychic abilities enabled her to know that I was thinking about tough nuts and Andile’s struggles to crack them. Fehrson completed the foursome, and we sat down at the table like he was about to deal the cards. Then Andile said that he would be fine without any of Belinda’s coffee or her biscuits, which was a relief to us all.

  “The pathologist tells us that the brother’s body was frozen before it was left in the bush,” said Andile as an opening move.

  “Frozen?” said Khanyi incredulously.

  “That’s what he says,” said Andile.

  “Why on earth would anyone freeze the body?”

  “Good question,” said Andile, and he rewarded Khanyi with some cigarette breath. “It implies that the brother was killed some time before the church killings because the level of decomposition tells us that the body had been there at least that long. If it was frozen, he must have been killed before the church killings, and the body preserved.”

  “Preserved for what reason?” asked Fehrson.

  “An even better question,” said Andile, but he didn’t reward Fehrson with as many teeth or as much cigarette breath. “The obvious answer is that the body was preserved in order to provide us with a suspect for the church killings. A dead suspect, someone we couldn’t question. And the weapon was then planted with the body.”

  “If the brother was lying in a freezer somewhere, then whoever put him there had access to his DNA,” said Khanyi.

  “Exactly,” said Andile. “The whole thing was set up. The brother was killed, and his body stored so we could be taken on a mystery tour of false leads. The DNA evidence we found in the church was probably planted. A trail of breadcrumbs laid out for us to discover.”

  “And ballistics have confirmed?” said Khanyi. “The weapon used in the church also killed the brother?”

  “Yes,” said Andile. “The same weapon. An AK-47 that probably belongs to the White Africans.”

  “Hendrik van Rensburg was firing an AK-47,” said Khanyi. “The night he went to the village.”

  “And Xolani followed him back to the lodg
e,” I reminded them. “Q went to the lodge and accused Hendrik of killing his brother.”

  “Stop right there,” said Fehrson, and he held up a hand as if that would stop me. “It sounds as if you are suggesting that Hendrik van Rensburg killed the brother. Then put him into a freezer, and then – and this is where you lose me – he walked into a church and killed those people? A white supremacist killed all those white people?”

  Fehrson gave a scoffing laugh, but none of us joined in. He turned to Andile.

  “You need to go in and arrest the lot of them,” he said.

  “On what grounds?” said Andile. “We have nothing to go on. It’s all circumstantial.”

  “There’s this body found on their farm. The frozen body.”

  Andile shook his head. “We have no evidence that had anything to do with them. Besides, it was Hendrik van Rensburg who called it in. Hurt himself in the process.”

  “Hurt himself?” said Khanyi.

  “He was on his way to hospital for X-rays,” said Andile. “Took a fall climbing down a hill to get to the body.”

  Khanyi turned to me and her eyes narrowed as she looked at my bruised cheek. But she turned back to Andile.

  “There is something we need your help with,” she said. “Something which might enable you to arrest all of them. Why don’t you tell Captain Dlamini about the weapons?” she suggested to me.

  “The Van Rensburgs are bringing weapons into the country,” I said. “If we could smooth the way, arrange that customs inspectors turn a blind eye, and track the weapons, we could find their secret stash.”

  “A secret stash?”

  “They have a store of weapons in a concrete bunker,” said Khanyi. “If we found it, we could have grounds to arrest the lot of them.”

  “Which border crossing are they using?” asked Andile.

  “They’re coming in to Cape Town harbour,” I said.

  “We could probably arrange it,” said Andile.

  Khanyi turned to Fehrson. “What do you say, Father? Shall we go ahead?”

  “It sounds costly to me,” said Fehrson. “But I suppose if the captain will share in the costs we could consider it.”

  Andile nodded. “Of course, major,” he said. “These White Africans have caused enough trouble. I’ll start the paperwork.”

  “Not that it has been a particularly expensive operation so far,” I pointed out. “There is the outstanding issue of my remuneration.”

  “The police service would have to pay half of that,” said Fehrson, brightening perceptibly at the thought.

  “We’d be happy to do that,” said Andile, and he smiled in a way that made me wonder whether he had already done the math and knew that half of nothing was still nothing.

  We were finishing up with the African handshakes when Silindile appeared at the top of the stairs and stood there with a buff folder and an expectant look on her face. Silindile was one of Khanyi’s assistants, a cherubic-faced Xhosa with braids that looked like a bunch of tightly coiled springs bursting out of her head.

  “I found one,” she announced.

  “Found what Sili?” said Khanyi.

  “A survivor. You asked me to go through them and find other survivors. I found one.”

  She beamed at us and brandished her folder. Andile and Fehrson disengaged from their handshake and we returned to the table where Silindile spread the contents of her buff folder. The familiar press clippings augmented with Khanyi’s pink highlights were accompanied by additional typed pages.

  “Someone survived,” said Silindile. “There was no mention of it in the official reports, but when I looked closer, it was obvious.”

  “Is this the Van Rensburg farm?” asked Andile, looking at a press cutting.

  “It is now. Look at this.” Silindile handed Andile a press cutting with a black-and-white photograph of a family. “And here is the report.” She passed Andile a typed page, which he studied carefully.

  “A boy,” he said after a pause. “Where is the ten-year-old boy? There are two sisters and a younger boy in the photo, but here,” he waved the printed report, “there are two girls. No mention of the boy.”

  “They protected his identity,” said Silindile. “You can see the clumsy handiwork of the Nationalist dinosaurs all over it.” She paused for a moment. None of us looked at the relic of the Nationalist era standing at the head of the table. “Trauma-induced schizophrenia,” she continued. “That was the diagnosis. They placed him in a psychiatric institute for observation, and that’s as far as I’ve managed to go.”

  “Are you telling us that Piet van Rensburg has a nephew?” said Fehrson.

  “I suppose so. The mother of the young boy who survived the murder of his family was Piet van Rensburg’s sister.”

  “What became of him?” asked Andile.

  “I cannot work it out. He was taken out of the psychiatric home, and his identity was changed again. He was placed in foster care. And then the trail goes cold. He could be anywhere.”

  “Keep looking,” said Khanyi. “He sounds like someone we need to find.”

  “And with some urgency,” agreed Andile. He turned to me. “Let’s get the ball rolling on those weapons, Freddy. Try and find this nephew before he attends any more church services.”

  Silindile provided us each with copies of the press cuttings, and I read through my copy when I returned to the harbour warehouse that evening. The Ukuthula luxury lodge had been a simple farmhouse in which the family lived on a few thousand acres of land with a large flock of sheep. The father had inherited the farm from his own father and was known as a kind man who worked himself to the bone in the constant struggle to keep his animals alive in the near-drought conditions. He and his wife spent every Sunday morning in the church with their three well-behaved children. Shortly before the first democratic elections in the country, as the family sat down to their Saturday night dinner they were surprised by gunshots, which smashed the windows of their living room and showered them with glass. The front door of their remote farmhouse was where the killers gained entrance, but the exact sequence of what happened next was not known because the only survivor of that evening had not been able to tell the story. Child welfare services had stepped in to point out that forcing a ten year old to relive the trauma would achieve nothing because the killers had been wearing balaclavas and all the boy was likely to remember were the things he was looking at: his own family as they died, not the men holding the guns.

  They found the father on his back in the entrance hall. The mother and two daughters made it to the kitchen before the killers caught up with them. Their bodies reached towards the back door as if they had been crawling to safety when they were gunned down.

  The boy was found in the bathroom, alive, but so terrified that it was weeks before he could use his voice. He was ushered into a victim relocation plan that the outgoing Nationalist government had put in place to manage the increasing number of victims of political violence.

  The ten-year-old boy had disappeared into a program of therapy and the creation of a new life. Silindile had added a few notes that described her efforts to trace the survivor, but he had disappeared. I wondered about Hendrik’s obscure origins, and whether it had been a coincidence that he had been ten years old when he moved in with his father. Was Piet his father? Or was he his uncle?

  It rained later that evening, but I opened the doors of our warehouse and Robyn and I sat on the broken deckchairs. Robyn had slept most of the day. She looked drained and miserable. Her hair was pulled back, her skin was pale, and the expression in her dark eyes made me think she was leaning in to kiss me. Her ears were like an elf’s, pointy and delicate.

  “The colonel called,” she said. “Told me we’re going ahead.”

  “That’s right. They’ve agreed to allow the crates in without inspection.”

  “They’ve given you that number Sandy called?”

  “Not yet.”

  I lit us each a cigarette. Robyn inhaled o
n hers and then allowed the smoke to drift as if she had stopped breathing.

  “He won’t let me go,” she said. “The colonel. I told him I wanted out, but he said no. Even though I fucked up.”

  “You know how he thinks,” I said. “It’s all of us or none of us.”

  “Perhaps it should be none of us,” she said. The smoke drifted out of her mouth like she was a seductress in a 1940s movie. “The colonel said you had news about Hendrik. Something about him not being who we thought he was?”

  “That game farm of theirs belonged to a sheep farmer,” I said, “who married Piet’s sister. The family was murdered, but one boy survived. He was ten years old.”

  “You think the survivor is Hendrik?”

  “He might be.”

  “If Hendrik survived that kind of trauma,” said Robyn, “we should be careful of him. The playboy buffoon would have to be a big act.”

  “That’s what worries the colonel. But perhaps the therapy worked, and he’s left his past behind.”

  “It’s not that easy. You don’t get over the things that happen to you at that age.”

  “I suppose not,” I said. Robyn would know. She had been sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of eleven until she finally spoke out at sixteen.

  “The psychos squash the nightmares with their drugs,” said Robyn, “and plant the happy thoughts with their hypnosis and all that shit. But there are some things that can’t be fixed.”

  The smoke hung in the air before her, as if the memories of her own trauma were holding her breath in.

  “Guilt,” she said after a pause. “That’s what it is. Guilt. The guilt of having said yes. The guilt of ‘maybe it’s something I did?’ Or just who I am. Asking yourself, ‘was it me?’ Did I cause an innocent, kind man to do what he did?”