‘What do you mean “timing issues”?’ De Vries asks.
On the screen, the picture is now running at normal speed.
‘Look at the clocks above the desk, sir,’ Morten says. ‘You can see that they all say that it is twenty-five minutes past the hour.’
‘Ja.’
‘Now look down here . . .’ He points to the digital time reading on the recording. It reads thirty-seven minutes past the hour. ‘It’s twelve minutes out.’
De Vries says: ‘Which is the correct time?’
‘I did not know there was a difference until just now.’ Don says.
‘Just call the building,’ De Vries says impatiently. ‘Ask the security guard what the time is on the clocks and compare it to the correct time.’
Don nods, ducks out of the office.
‘Now, just get me the moment when Trevor Bhekifa appears, Sergeant. We’ll solve this time matter in due course.’
Morten fast-forwards through the recording until it reaches 12.32 on Friday, 3 April. At that moment, the camera picks up Bhekifa walking slowly into shot from behind the camera. He moves straight to the elevators. He presses a button between the two doors, the right-hand doors open and he steps inside.
‘You’re sure he doesn’t arrive earlier and go out again?’
Morten reverses the action, running at twelve times normal speed, watching for any movement in the foyer. He stops the recording at 11.47 when a couple enter, summon an elevator and walk into the left-hand lift. He continues travelling back in time, but no one else appears. Throughout that time, no security guard appears at the desk. De Vries wonders whether this could have any significance, or whether, more likely, the guard was snoozing somewhere off camera in the building.
Don February comes back into the room.
‘According to the guard on duty, the clocks were showing thirteen minutes to the hour. On my watch, it was exactly ten minutes to four, so they are three minutes slow.’
Morten says: ‘If they are three minutes slow, then the surveillance system time code is nine minutes fast. Bhekifa arrived home at 12.23 on Friday morning.’
‘That is almost two hours after he claimed he left Taryn Holt’s house,’ De Vries says. ‘At that time of night, how long would it take to drive from Oranjezicht to Stellenbosch? Forty-five minutes, an hour if he drives slowly. That means he could have left Holt’s house at 11.30, even 11.40 p.m. That puts him right in the time-frame.’
‘We get him back in?’ Don says.
‘Of course . . . But maybe not just yet.’ He turns to Morten.
‘How solid is this timing evidence for court, if it comes to that?’
Morten contemplates for a moment.
‘We should obtain a copy of the recording from the present time back to the time-frame covered here. The officer should check the time against an accurate source. We can check that neither the clocks on the wall of the foyer, nor the digital display, have been altered. Then, the timing is rock solid.’
‘Good. Sergeant, not one word of this goes anywhere. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I mean anywhere.’
Morten looks up at De Vries, meets his eye, nods.
They sit in silence at the back of the car. De Vries looks out of the window at the view of the Southern Suburbs anew, as a passenger now rather than as a driver watching the road; Thulani stares straight ahead. The interior of the car is cold; De Vries notes that the police driver is wearing a coat yet, outside, it is still warm. The car turns off the freeway into Bishopscourt; the peaceful, leafy streets are deserted, the plots of land extending to several hundred metres wide, most of the houses hidden from view. The car turns into a driveway, stops at a security gate. A uniformed guard appears, salutes the occupants, raises the barrier. The car drifts down a wide lane lined with olive trees under-planted with agapanthus, and pulls up under a covered porch by the front door. Another security guard opens the car door for Thulani, and De Vries’s door is opened by the driver. He walks around the car and up the steps to the house, a few paces behind Thulani. Once inside the grand hallway, a suited man greets them, leads them to the back of the house and into a formal sitting room, overlooking an expansive garden and, beyond, the breathtaking vista of the forested southern slopes of the mountainside. In a square armchair, a small, elderly man sits writing in a leather-bound folder. He wears a tweed check three-piece suit, gold cufflinks on thin wrists. As they approach him, he looks up, smiles at Thulani, leans forward in the chair and half rises. Thulani approaches, bends down to him, shakes his hand warmly.
‘This is one of my senior officers, Colonel de Vries.’
Vaughn moves forward, shakes Bheka Bhekifa’s hand gently. It is as if he is being granted an audience with royalty. The old man holds onto his hand, looks up at him.
‘You have been with the SAPS a long time, Colonel?’
‘Twenty-seven years, sir.’
‘Yes . . . You have that look about you.’
Bhekifa releases his hand, nods, shifts back in his chair until he is propped up in its crook.
‘Sit down, both of you.’ He turns to Thulani. ‘You tell me that there is news which I must hear only personally from you. This concerns me. Do not keep me waiting any longer.’
De Vries is surprised by the man’s frailty, his slow delivery which reminds him of Mandela after his release, yet Bhekifa must have been at least twenty years Mandela’s junior when the great man died, and is perhaps now in his early seventies. Behind the shaky words, De Vries sees bright, small eyes, and thinks that this man’s brain must still be sharp amid a failing body.
‘The matter,’ Thulani begins, ‘concerns the death of a friend of your son’s – Trevor – in Cape Town two days ago.’
De Vries notices Bhekifa indicates no surprise.
‘Colonel de Vries is leading the enquiry, and Trevor made himself available for questioning as it appears that the victim was a lady friend of his. The victim was the daughter of Graeme Holt, the late businessman. Her name was Taryn Holt.’
‘I remember Holt. He was a friend of Botha’s. My son was involved with his daughter?’
‘His cell-phone number was identified by us, and we contacted him. He immediately volunteered to be interviewed and that process is now complete.’
De Vries continues to study Bhekifa; he remains silent at Thulani’s statement that the process is complete, accepts that Thulani is misrepresenting him.
‘What happened to this Holt woman?’
Thulani looks at De Vries, who says: ‘She was shot in her home, sir, in the middle of the night between last Thursday and Friday.’
‘It was a robbery?’
De Vries hesitates.
‘It is too early to say, sir. The investigation is only beginning.’
Bhekifa shifts in his chair, angling himself towards Thulani.
‘While so much inequality is permitted to remain in our country, it is inevitable that there will be property crimes against the wealthy and privileged. As the gap between rich and poor grows wider every day, so your job, Sempiwe, will become more difficult. The solution, as I have always said, must lie with us, the politicians.’ He struggles forward, his voice stronger.
‘I do not believe that people in South Africa, even the wider world, realize how lucky they have been to have had a stable ANC government for the last twenty-one years. Of course, we have made mistakes. We were not a political party . . .’ He looks at De Vries. ‘. . . We were not permitted to be . . .’ He returns his gaze to Thulani. ‘We had to learn that we must sell our ideas to the people, to help them to understand. But, at least now there is hope and change all around us: better schools, better homes, more university places, workers’ rights, a respect for what we do . . .’
De Vries doubts that any man in this room truly believes these words.
‘I am afraid that Trevor has embraced another, more Western attitude to life, with his white girlfriends and his love of cars and celebrity. He w
ill lose the support of his own people if they discover secrets about his life but, maybe, that is what should happen. Let them see him for what he is and, perhaps, it will help him to see himself.’
De Vries listens to the man’s words and glances around the room. It is styled like an English country house, filled with antiques and oil paintings of black Africans. It is, he reflects, just as much a Western attitude to life as that of his son, about whose world he is so dismissive.
‘Everything is being handled very discreetly,’ Thulani says. ‘I am certain that there will be the minimum of publicity.’
Bhekifa sits back, shrugs.
‘It is the price of democracy. We are all prisoners of our so-called free press.’
‘You have managed it well,’ Thulani says, rising. ‘In the unlikely event that Trevor is involved further in our investigation I will, of course, inform you personally.’
Bhekifa smiles at him, opens his palms at him. ‘Thank you, my friend.’
De Vries says: ‘Goodbye, sir.’
Thulani struggles in his pocket.
‘Before we go, may I impose upon you?’ He produces a pocket camera. ‘For my family?’
‘Of course, of course,’ Bhekifa tells him, sitting erect on the front edge of his chair. Thulani passes the camera to De Vries, squats with shaking knees next to the old man, puts his arm around his shoulders and draws him in. Bhekifa grimaces momentarily, then smiles wanly into the lens.
Thulani says: ‘The button on the top right, Colonel.’
‘Is this to become a routine?’ John Marantz asks, as he takes the final steps of the long staircase. ‘I thought you liked drinking alone?’
De Vries walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge, selects a bottle and opens it.
‘Being here with you,’ he says quietly, ‘it’s like being alone.’
He looks up. Marantz stares at him. De Vries smiles.
‘Well, technically, I am the only one drinking.’
They walk into the huge living area.
‘I met Bheka Bhekifa this afternoon.’
Marantz raises his eyebrows.
‘Well, well. You are mixing in exalted circles. Why was that?’
De Vries stops, turns to Marantz.
‘You got nuts?’
‘No. Tell me about Bhekifa.’
They walk through the tall doors into the garden, sit by the pool in the evening shade. De Vries takes a swig from the bottle, lights a cigarette.
‘Taryn Holt was seeing Trevor Bhekifa. Our esteemed General Thulani, apparently a friend of the father, decided this warranted visiting old man Bhekifa immediately, and I was brought along as the investigating officer.’
‘How does the hero seem?’
‘Older than I would have expected, but very comfortable in his Bishopscourt mansion, sounding off about the inequality in our society.’
Marantz chuckles.
‘You are so naïve here, thinking that politicians should be honest and true. Yours are no more hypocritical and corrupt than anywhere else. I mean, our lot wrote the rulebook: think about Blair, Bush, Cameron, even Murdoch. Your guys are amateurs.’
‘You think Bhekifa is still important?’
‘From what I read, yes. The ANC are under threat from splinter groups and new political parties. He seems to be working to keep them together. So, I suppose, he remains relevant for as long as you have, in effect, one-party politics. Is Trevor Bhekifa implicated?’
De Vries hesitates. He has involved Marantz before, enjoys hearing a fresh perspective but, at the back of his mind, Marantz’s old profession – an Intelligence Officer and Interrogator for the British Government, the consequences for his family, the connections he seems to maintain – still bothers him.
‘Yes and no. He was there, at her house, just on the edge of the time-frame estimated for time of death, but he claims he went home. There’s a little doubt about timings.’
‘So, he’s a suspect.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You did . . . In effect. That’s interesting.’
‘Perhaps . . .’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I don’t know, Johnnie. It doesn’t feel right. Unless I’m missing something, there’s no motivation for it, and this looks planned in advance, not a crime of passion or opportunity.’
‘Very little in the papers about it. That deliberate?’
‘Taryn Holt wasn’t a celebrity. It has to be pretty special for murder to warrant a front page. You know how it is.’
‘But the Bhekifa angle . . . ?’
‘Total blackout. Not a word, John.’
‘I have no contact with the press. Don’t want it. I live here quietly, on my own. That’s the way I intend to keep it.’
‘Privately, yes. On your own, I hope not.’
‘I have Flynn.’
They look up at the Irish terrier, who sits on the edge of the pool. He sees them staring and looks down, bashful.
De Vries lies in bed, head numb, mind racing. He pushes his tongue into the top of his mouth to try to loosen his jaw. It does not work. Bheka Bhekifa is not a man he had dreamed he might respect, yet something about the small man’s dignity, the conviction in his people’s achievements; it impresses him. He feels exhaustion overcome him, feels himself losing consciousness.
1987
He wears jeans, a Springbok rugby shirt and reflective aviator sunglasses, a pair of rip-off Ray-Bans from the Greenpoint flea market. He pushes through the double doors of the Heidelberg Tavern, spots his friends, greets them, buys a beer, sits down with them.
‘Howzit?’
‘Well . . .’ De Vries says. ‘From next week I’ll be keeping my eye on you all from a patrol car from here to bloody Pinelands.’
He accepts their acclamations, but knows that several of them question his decision to join the police force. There is a sense of change in their country, as yet unquantifiable, and it will bring either violence and civil war, or a slow, painful dismantling of the system. But, from the moment he gained responsibility in the army, he knew what he would do: he knew that he was disgusted and incensed by injustice; knew that he was prepared to fight to avoid it, to speak for those whose voices had been made silent.
Already, he wishes away his period of probation, longs for the years to pass before he can transfer to plain clothes. His time in the army has tired him of undue physical exertion and use of force, but has revealed to him the benefits of using his brain to deduce and infer, to plot his way to his goal, however convoluted. He knows that he is already good at it, and will be better.
He turns back to his mates, already discussing something else, seemingly unwilling to discuss his career in public. Soon, he knows, he will drink with his new colleagues in a bar which they favour; he knows that these student friendships, born of the shared misery of National Service, will fade and decay, that everything about his life will change.
He sits back on the dirty plastic-upholstered bench, letting the hubbub of the neighbourhood beer hall retreat to the back of his mind. His thoughts turn to Suzanne Basler, his girlfriend, the woman who has supported him through his training, who speaks of making a home and building a life, and he thinks that maybe this is the moment to do it all: the career, the wife, the family.
He smiles to himself, knows that Suzanne will not hurry her own decisions. She is studying television journalism, will plan her career far more carefully than he, will live at home until the time is right – for her – to move away. For now, she visits him in his shared house in Observatory – a suburb which has always subverted apartheid and seems to welcome everyone: students and artists, the homeless, the criminal. And those hours together, in the first double bed of his life, looking out from the tall window across the narrow balcony with its wrought-iron decoration, up to Devil’s Peak, they have been the making of him. They have healed his misery from his enforced time in the army, have educated him, have inspired him to take control of his life.
; ‘Hey . . . Vaughn.’
De Vries looks up, shakes his head free of his own thoughts.
‘What?’
‘Constable de Vries . . .’ they jeer. ‘Suzie like it when you dress up in your uniform?’
‘When I get out of it.’
They catcall. He feels his heart sink, knows now that everything will change . . .
2015
At the traffic lights on the crossroads between Campground Road and Rondebosch Common, even early on a Sunday, there is an array of hawkers: Big Issue and Funny Money sellers, collaged scenes of Cape Town made from tin cans, cases of fruit, beaded gifts. De Vries ignores them, shakes his head as the newspaper seller approaches. The man scowls. As he passes, De Vries sees one word on the cover of the Cape Herald, bold and black: Bhekifa.
He winds down his window and summons the man, pays for the paper and slaps it, face up, on the passenger seat.
Sunday Cape Herald, 5 April 2015
BHEKIFA JUNIOR LINK TO MURDERED HOLT HEIRESS
Senior SAPS officers are questioning Trevor Bhekifa regarding the murder of Holt Industries heiress Taryn Holt in Oranjezicht on Thursday night. Bhekifa is reported to have been sexually involved with the multi-millionaire patron of the arts and discussing her involvement in the new political movement supported by him, the Democratic Reform Party.
Trevor Bhekifa, the thirty-three-year-old son of ANC policymaker and hero of the Struggle Bheka Bhekifa, has been questioned by officers of the elite Special Crimes Unit based in Cape Town’s CBD. Over the years, Bhekifa junior has developed a reputation for dating high-profile women, driving expensive cars and promoting his property-development businesses and high-life style, all in stark contrast to his father’s political philosophy.
Bhekifa was released without charge yesterday evening but is said to be continuing to assist police enquiries.
The lights, at last, change to green. The car behind him honks immediately.
De Vries jams his foot on the accelerator, sticks his middle finger out of the window and shouts: ‘Fuck the fuck off.’
Access from the underground car park to the floors above is only by staircase to the main foyer and then by elevator, or fire escape stairs. De Vries sees a small group of reporters gathered outside the street entrance but, inside, it is quiet. He travels up to his floor alone, walks through the sparsely filled squad room to his office, where he finds Don February waiting for him.
The Serpentine Road Page 11
