Deadly Harvest

by Michael Stanley

“Witness! Open up! I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Witness curled up and pulled the blanket over his head.

  “Witness. It’s Big Mama. Let me in.”

  Witness lay still. A few moments later, he heard footsteps crunching on the sand outside his window. Fortunately the window was closed; otherwise Big Mama would have been able to pull the curtain aside and peer in. Then the footsteps continued around the other side of the house. Finally, he heard a car start and drive off.

  Did she know? he wondered. Had she guessed it was him?

  IT WAS NEARLY EVENING before Witness dragged himself from his bed. He stripped and put his clothes in the sink full of hot water. He added soap and kneaded the pile for about five minutes. Leaving the clothes to soak, he took his shoes and wiped them carefully with old newspaper. He’d burn that later. Then he took shoe polish and gave the shoes a good coat, followed by a brisk brushing. When he’d finished, he returned to the sink and rinsed his clothes a ­couple of times. He wrung as much water from them as he could and hung them from various places in the bathroom. They would dry by morning in the arid Botswana air.

  Finally he showered, needing extra time to scrub the brown stains from the back of his hands. Looking in the mirror, he noticed that one side of his face was also stained. He washed that vigorously, too. When darkness fell, he would take care of the car.

  SEVENTEEN

  MABAKU LOOKED AROUND THE meeting room and checked his watch. Five to eight. Eleven ­people were already present, most with a hot drink, several chatting quietly. Ian MacGregor, the pathologist, was sipping coffee with a grumpy expression; clearly he wasn’t an early riser, especially on a Sunday. Zanele Dlamini, the head of the forensics team, looked fresh and attractive as usual, despite having been up most of the night. The others were detectives. He’d asked his assistant, Miriam, to phone around and call in every available CID detective. Even Samantha Khama was there. He didn’t really expect much from her, but it was important that she wasn’t excluded, and she’d learn from being involved in a murder investigation. She was sitting next to Zanele and chatting, obviously delighted to find a female colleague, and a senior one at that.

  Mabaku had a bad feeling about this case. A pessimist by nature, his fear was that there was more behind the murder than a lone madman. And if it led back to the BDP, there was going to be trouble. He sighed. He didn’t believe the government was responsible. For all his bravado, Marumo hadn’t really been a danger, at least not yet. He was probably more of a threat as a martyr. And assassination simply wasn’t the way things were done in conservative Botswana. But it could be the work of a hotheaded BDP supporter and, if that came out, the situation would deteriorate rapidly.

  Eight o’clock. Where was Kubu? He sighed again. Having breakfast, of course. He was relying on Kubu, whose flashes of intuition illuminated his carefully pieced together cases. But he had his blind spots. And he never missed a meal. As if on cue, Kubu hurried in, carrying a mug of tea and two cookies, and squeezed himself into a chair between Ian and Samantha. Mabaku spotted crumbs on his shirt.

  So here was his team: ten detectives led by Kubu, Zanele for forensics, and MacGregor, the pathologist. Thirteen counting himself. Not a lucky number.

  He cleared his throat, and at once everyone was quiet.

  “You all know why we’re here. You’ve heard the news. I want it clear that this is top priority. I spoke to the press already this morning, and so far they’re supportive. But I indicated that we expect to make an arrest soon. Probably this week. If we don’t get them something quickly, they’ll turn critical, start raking up the dog head thing and so on.” He gave Kubu a dirty look.

  “Jacob Pitso has declared himself leader of the Freedom Party and is calling for a massive demonstration on Parliament Drive this afternoon to protest what he calls the assassination of Marumo and to demand the government’s resignation.” Detective Thibelo grinned. Mabaku glared at him. “I’m glad you think it’s funny, Thibelo. These sorts of demonstrations can get out of hand very quickly and lead to all sorts of trouble.” Thibelo became serious at once. “At least that’s not our problem. I just hope the demonstration is handled sensibly and doesn’t turn nasty.

  “Let’s get on with it. Kubu is in charge of this case, and he gets anything he wants. Is that clear?” Without waiting for a response, he continued: “Let’s start with Ian and Zanele, and then I’ll hand it over to Kubu.”

  Ian put down his cup and examined the notes he’d brought with him. “Time of death between six-­thirty and seven-­fifteen,” he said in his soft Scottish accent. “I haven’t done the autopsy yet, but I cut his clothes off when we got the body to the mortuary. Fifteen wounds, all in the chest and abdomen except the face slash and the stab in the throat. All from the front. From the angle of entry, it looks like a right-­handed assailant and, from the look of the wounds, I’d guess it was a one-­sided blade. Maybe a pointed kitchen knife or the like. I’m pretty sure one of the stabs went into the heart.” He shrugged. “That’s about it. I’ll get to the autopsy right away, but I’ll be surprised if it turns up anything dramatic.” He paused, but no one had any questions.

  “Zanele?”

  “Yes, Director. We basically worked through the night, but we haven’t got that much to show for it yet. We’re not sure how the murderer got onto the property. There’s a six-­foot wall around it. Maybe he pulled himself over the wall, or maybe he was waiting near the gate and slipped in when Marumo drove through. Anyway, we couldn’t pick up any traces from the outside of the wall.

  “But we’re pretty sure we know how he got out. There’s a tree in the corner of the garden where the body was found, and he climbed that. We found blood on the trunk and some snagged threads of material, too. Then he jumped down from the top of the wall onto the sidewalk. And there were bloody shoe marks on the sidewalk outside the house. Probably he stepped in blood at the scene, and it was on his shoes. We got a ­couple of nice clear shoe prints.” She consulted her notebook and, in the pause, Samantha stuck up her hand. After Mabaku’s permissive nod, she asked, “What size?”

  “Ten to eleven. Bigger than average.”

  Kubu nodded to Samantha. “Big feet. Probably a big man. Useful.” Then he asked Zanele, “Did you pick up any fingerprints?”

  She shook her head. “Some smudges, but nothing useful. The bark was too rough.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “Various foreign fibers were vacuumed from Marumo’s clothing. We’re pretty sure that some are the same as the material on the fence, and some are from the doctor’s tracksuit. Some seem to match the dress that Jubjub was wearing.”

  Kubu interrupted. “She said she hadn’t touched the body.” Then he relaxed. “But maybe she kissed him goodbye that morning.”

  “There’s lots of other stuff. Dirt from Marumo’s shoes, dirt or blood under his fingernails, what could be the assailant’s hair, or his own, or Jubjub’s. We need some time.”

  “That’s exactly what we haven’t got,” Mabaku growled. Zanele was doing her usual good job, but he was disappointed. He’d hoped for some nice clear fingerprints to match with the database. What they had so far would help convict the killer, but wouldn’t help catch him.

  “Kubu?”

  Kubu filled them in on the interviews with Jubjub and the doctor. “And I managed to raise someone at the Freedom Party last night, too. She confirmed that Marumo was there till nearly six-­thirty p.m. He couldn’t have been home much before seven p.m. So I think we can be pretty certain that he was killed around that time. That agrees with what Jubjub and the doctor told us, and with Ian’s assessment. And we have a witness of a sort.” He hesitated, and Mabaku leaned forward. A straw to grasp?

  “The door-­to-­door questioning last night turned up a lady who’d heard someone running. From her front window she saw quite a large man running toward Chuma Drive. But she saw him from the back,
and it was dark so she can’t really describe him or his clothes. She didn’t think he was dressed like a jogger, and she said he was running as if someone was chasing him. She didn’t see anyone else, though. But she noted the time: seven-­fifteen p.m.” Mabaku scowled. The straw hadn’t kept him afloat after all. “That’s about it at the moment,” Kubu concluded.

  Mabaku thought it over, but nothing further occurred to him. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Well, we’ll expand the door-­to-­door. And also see if anyone saw anything suspicious before the killing. I’d guess the murderer got there earlier and was waiting for Marumo either outside the gate or in the garden. He must’ve parked his vehicle nearby. The Daily News tomorrow will carry an appeal to anyone who knows anything or saw anything to come forward; we’ll get lots of false leads that we’ll still have to follow up. I want to interview the Freedom Party ­people and Marumo’s family members about enemies and threats he may’ve received. Then check Marumo’s house for clues. We’ll need to check phone records and bank statements. There’s lots to do. I’m grateful for the help.”

  Mabaku nodded. It didn’t look as though they’d make his one-­week deadline. He checked his watch. He needed to brief the commissioner.

  “Well, let’s get to work then,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS MID-­MORNING BY the time Kubu returned to Marumo’s house in Pela Crescent. With Mabaku’s suggestion in mind, he’d asked Samantha to join him. She’d been pleased, even though it meant putting off her visit to the Malengs. But the morning had not added much to what they already knew. Marumo had political enemies—­plenty of them—­but they were more likely to stab him in the back than in front, as Kubu wryly told Samantha. Of course, they would follow up on those, but Kubu was not optimistic. He feared they were looking for a madman, and if he had no obvious connection to Marumo, he’d be hard to find.

  They found Jubjub calm with her mother and brother in attendance. Kubu greeted them, introduced Samantha, and then explained that they wanted to look through the house. Jubjub had no problem with that and showed them around.

  Kubu decided to start searching in the study, where he’d interviewed the doctor. Jubjub left them there and returned to the consolation of her family.

  “What are we looking for?” Samantha asked.

  Kubu rubbed his chin. “Something like a threat note, maybe bank records, large amounts of cash, anything unexpected. I don’t know yet. But we’ll know when we find it.”

  He sat at the desk and thought about Bill and about the house. The house was in a good area, and although not new, it had been extensively renovated. The furnishings were good quality. Not ostentatious, but certainly not cheap. And Bill’s car was a relatively new Toyota Fortuner. Plenty of money had gone there. There was no doubt that Bill was wealthy. Where had all the money come from? Not from a member of parliament’s salary. Perhaps he’d inherited it.

  Samantha was looking through the bookcase. She pulled out a book by Karl Marx.

  “The Communist Manifesto! Do you think Marumo was a communist?” She sounded shocked.

  Kubu shook his head. “Certainly not a Marxist. He was far too fond of the finer things of life. It’s probably from when he studied political science at university.”

  Relieved, she returned the book.

  Kubu pulled on latex gloves and turned his attention back to the desk. There was no diary, but there was a laptop computer. He’d leave that to the experts. There were three drawers. The top one contained pens and stationery, the second old checkbooks, correspondence, and what looked like a draft speech. He skimmed it but found nothing of interest. He flipped through the check books, too. There were some large payments but nothing that caught his attention.

  The third drawer was locked.

  Kubu dug in his pocket for the bunch of keys that Zanele had found on Bill’s body. He chose one that looked right, but it was hard to fit. Looking closer, he saw that the casing around the lock had been scratched and bent. That was interesting. He fiddled until the key slipped into the lock and turned.

  At first he thought the drawer was empty, but when he reached to the back he felt a smooth, roundish object. He pulled it out and placed it on the desk. It was a yellow-­brown gourd, the top of which was sealed with what looked to be an ordinary wine cork.

  “Take a look at this, Samantha. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

  Samantha was searching under the cushions of the couch where Dr. Pilane had been sitting the night before. She dumped the cushions in a pile and walked over to the desk.

  “Don’t!” she said sharply as Kubu reached to uncork the gourd. “It’s muti.”

  Kubu pulled his hand back. She could well be right. Muti would be in a natural container, something the ancestors would recognize and appreciate. Hide, wood, gourd. Not metal or plastic. His hand tingled. He wished he hadn’t touched the object at all. God only knew what it contained. Suddenly he recalled Marumo’s lack of concern for his safety. Perhaps he believed himself protected by magic. Then Kubu recalled Marumo’s unshakable confidence in his political future. And the recent shocking election upset. The skin crawled on the back of his neck.

  “What’re you going to do?” Samantha asked.

  “Get me an evidence bag. We’ll see what Zanele’s ­people can make of it.”

  Dog’s heads, gourds of muti. Marumo was certainly mixed up with something unpleasant. But could it be connected to the murder? Had he raised some demon, either real or imaginary? Kubu shook his head to clear the fantasy. A real man with a real knife had killed Marumo for a reason that was real, at least to him. Find the reason, find the clues, find the man. It was very unlikely to have anything to do with black magic and a gourd containing an unpleasant but probably harmless mixture.

  Yet he felt a chill, and was glad when the gourd was safely stowed in an evidence bag, out of sight.

  NINETEEN

  WITNESS DIDN’T SLEEP WELL on Sunday night. The enormity of what he’d done had started to seep into his consciousness, and he wondered how he’d turned from a God-­fearing man into a murderer. But murderer was too strong a word, he thought. Yes, he had killed the smiling Marumo, but he hadn’t really intended to. If Marumo hadn’t shouted for help, he wouldn’t have tried to keep him quiet.

  However, the realization that he had killed frightened him. What would happen if the police tracked him down? He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life in jail—­with real killers, and drug pushers and addicts. What would his friends think?

  He tossed and turned and began to wonder whether his simple plan of cleaning all his clothes and the car was enough. What if someone had seen him, seen his car near Falcon Crest Suites at the time of the murder? There were cameras everywhere these days. What if one of them had recorded his comings and goings from Pela Crescent? Or maybe there was a security guard at one of the fancy houses near Marumo’s. That big house with metal gates with diamond-­shaped centerpieces surely would have a night watchman. What if he had seen Witness running by?

  Sleep continued to elude him as these thoughts swirled through his head with increasing frequency and greater ferocity.

  Maybe he should get out of town for a while. Get work at one of the diamond mines. Get a long way from Gaborone until he could be sure the police had nothing on him.

  What had he to lose? He probably couldn’t get his job back, because he hadn’t told them about taking time off. He had hoped they’d understand and be supportive of his mission to get Tombi back. But after two weeks? They’d probably hired someone to replace him by now.

  And what had he left in Gaborone? A few friends, certainly.

  And bad memories.

  AFTER A FITFUL NIGHT, Witness eventually dragged himself from bed around 7:30 a.m. During the night he had decided to pack his belongings and head off for either Orapa or Jwaneng. He’d call both mines to inq
uire whether there were any jobs available.

  Once there, he’d ask someone to find a tenant to rent his home—­probably Big Mama would be best. She knew everyone in the area. He needed to get some money quickly—­the witch doctor had depleted his savings.

  He made himself a cup of strong tea and cut a thick slice of bread, which he covered with jam. He sat down at the table and started to think through what he would have to do before he left. After a few minutes, he realized there was little to do—­pack his clothes in the tattered suitcase on top of his cupboard, fold his only sheets and two blankets and put them in plastic bags, put his plates and cups, knives and forks, and pots and pans in a box, take whatever was in the fridge, and leave. He’d then stop on the way out of town and draw the final pula from his bank account.

  Witness drained his second cup of tea and walked out to his car to fetch some plastic bags. He’d just opened the hatchback when a Toyota Corolla stopped outside his house. It was about ten years old, but clean. The owner looks after it, he thought. A short, thin woman in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, walked over and asked, “Rra Maleng?”

  Witness nodded, puzzled as to who the woman could be. She extended her hand, which he shook, surprised by its firmness.

  “Rra Maleng. My name is Samantha Khama. I’m with the Botswana Police, Criminal Investigation Department.”

  Witness didn’t respond. He was in shock. How had they found him so soon?

  “Do you have a few minutes?” she asked, glancing at his car. “May I come in?”

  Witness looked at her. She was alone. He wondered whether he could knock her out and get away before she regained consciousness. “Of course,” he stammered.

  Once inside, he pointed to a chair. “Please,” he mumbled. He wondered if she had a gun in her purse. He’d have to be careful and try to get the purse out of her reach. He sat down, facing her.