Death Dealing

by Ian Patrick

  Mavis Tshabalala had managed to get her two coffees less than a minute before the power failure occurred. She waited apprehensively for Navi Pillay, with the two polystyrene cups placed before her on the table, wondering why she had got hot drinks instead of icy cold drinks from the vendor outside.

  She had not yet told any of her colleagues about the dissertation she was doing as a component of her part-time degree. There had been enough teasing from detectives Koekemoer and Dippenaar already, without her opening up a new avenue for that teasing.

  But Pillay was different. She felt she could confide in the detective in a way she was unable to do with the others. Navi could be trusted to provide valuable insights and further helpful leads. Most importantly, thought Mavis, Navi would take her seriously.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Mavis,’ Pillay said as she arrived somewhat breathless, and with a towel around her neck for the perspiration. ‘I’ve just finished my class with the new recruits. There are always more of them on Sundays, so I usually go over time. We were doing some judo and some kick-boxing, and one of them seems very keen. She wanted me to show her some high kicks. I thought of you in your own very first class. You also accosted me afterward for the same reason, remember.’

  ‘Did you send any of them to hospital?’

  ‘I never hurt my students, Mavis, you know that. They just happen to end up, most of the time, on the ground. Like you, in that first class.’

  ‘I remember. I remember so well.’

  ‘I like to surprise them, that’s all. So that when the really bad guys surprise them they’ll know how to react. I see you’ve enrolled for my Tuesday evening class?’

  ‘Definitely. I would have started today if it wasn’t for the fact that I had so much to do to settle back in.’

  ‘But wait a minute. Before anything else: congratulations! You’re now a full constable. Wonderful.’

  ‘Thanks, Navi. But I’m still an intern for a couple of weeks. Promotions only take place next month.’

  ‘Who cares,’ said Pillay, high-fiving her. ‘Constable Tshabalala. Not just Student Constable any longer but Constable. Sounds great. Next step you’re going to be a detective.’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to do. You’re my role model. Except for the martial arts. I’ll never lift my legs that high.’

  ‘You just have to keep training, that’s all. I’m glad you’re coming to the next course. I’ve got some hot stuff to show you all. It’s good to see you’re coming back to me for more punishment.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve really missed your classes, Navi. It’s been nearly three months since my last one. Just before I went away I felt I was getting quite strong, you know, and getting better at it…’

  ‘You were. You definitely were. I was very impressed with your kick-boxing in that last class. It’s going to be good to have you back.’

  ‘Anyway, thanks for giving me the time. Especially on a Sunday. I got you a coffee. I hope I got it right after such a long time away. White, no sugar?’

  ‘Perfect, thanks. So what’s this all about? I haven’t had a chance to have a proper chat about your three months in Greytown. How was it up there?’

  ‘Well, what I wanted to chat about is connected to what happened there. But the main thing I wanted to discuss is the research project I have to do for my degree.’

  ‘Oh? OK, Mavis, I’m all ears.’

  As Pillay reached for her coffee, and used the towel to wipe the perspiration off her face, Mavis shifted a little uncomfortably in her chair and started.

  ‘We have to do a research project for one part of the degree at UNISA, Navi. A dissertation. We’re allowed to propose our own subject and as long as our supervisor is happy with it we can go ahead. So I managed to persuade him to let me research the case of one specific criminal and to weave through my research some of the different arguments that demonstrate the theories we’ve been learning in tutorials and assignments.’

  ‘An actual practising criminal? South African?’

  ‘Yes. A guy from KwaZulu-Natal. Someone in the files, and who was mentioned some time ago in the newspapers, and…’

  ‘Won’t you face a problem with confidentiality, and stuff like that?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly right. I couldn’t just go ahead and write it all up without sorting out those things, but my supervisor came up with a solution, and introduced me to a new word, too.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. My criminal - and a lot of the stuff he did and where he did it and when - is going to be anonymised.’

  ‘Anonymised? Old Dipps is going to have a field day with a word like that.’

  ‘Yes. I know. That’s why I’ve kept it secret from everyone. Except you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mavis. You can trust me. I’ll keep it all to myself. I know how those guys can tease with things like this. But presumably there’ll be a record somewhere of who this anonymised guy is? I assume you can’t just invent the guy?’

  ‘That’s right. Students can do this kind of thing, where names and actual events are protected, but only on condition the supervisor is given a reference spreadsheet identifying all the real facts and people behind the anonymised information. I suppose that’s to prevent students just making things up. So, anyway, on that basis my project was approved.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable. So, you’ve found a bad guy and you’re writing up a case history on him. How does that tie in with the rest of your degree? I thought you were into science?’

  ‘Well, I am. A big focus in this project is on DNA analysis and finger-marks and fingerprints, and the science around that. But there’s a big emphasis on context and causes and management of crime cases, and related other information. So there’s a lot of other stuff ranging from sociology to history, too. Part of the multi-disciplinary stuff they want us to do.’

  ‘I wish I’d had the chance to do something real like that at university. Instead, I became an expert on one - only one - of the battles Napoleon fought in Italy. Can you believe it? Navi Pillay, a Tamil from Durban, being an expert on the battle of Rivoli. Sounds like pasta, doesn’t it? Anyway, you said your project is also connected to your time in Greytown. Tell me more.’

  ‘Well, OK, you remember I told you when I went up there I was supposed to be a personal assistant to one of the senior people in the station? It’s part of what Captain Nyawula was trying to do: get secondment opportunities and experiences for his student interns in different centres in the province. So when he offered it to me I thought it was a good opportunity.’

  ‘Well, we missed you. Three months is a long time. KoeksnDips went into withdrawal, not having you to tease. They know if they try to tease me I’ll just beat them up.’

  ‘Thanks, Navi. I enjoyed it, but I’m really glad to be back.’

  ‘So tell me more.’

  ‘OK. So, it ended up as a ten-week secondment as personal assistant to the commander of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit up there.’

  ‘You must have seen some bad stuff.’

  ‘Some terrible stuff. Terrible. But they do really good work in Greytown. Anyway, the pseudonym my supervisor and I have just chosen for my selected criminal is Thando. There were many reasons for selecting this man to focus on. Before I decided on him as the subject for the dissertation I was looking at lots of files on some of KwaZulu-Natal’s worst criminals. There were so many I could have chosen. But then I started thinking. I had done such a lot of work on this one guy when I was up in Greytown, I thought, why not use all of that work that I’ve already done and just plug it into my dissertation? Once I told my supervisor about the work I’d done on this one guy, he agreed immediately, and so the man I call Thando is now in my mind every day again as I work on the dissertation. I thought I’d have nothing to do with the real man once I left Greytown, but now he’s back in my head and I’m thinking about him all the time.’

  ‘Sounds intriguing, Mavis. Tell me about your nice Mr Thando.’

&n
bsp; ‘I have to take you back to my first day in the job in Greytown. I was so depressed that first day. I was missing all of you guys, and my family, and I missed my flat in Musgrave, and I didn’t know anyone up there. The commander of the unit gave me a brief orientation but then he thought the best way to show me the work they did was to tell me to just go through the files and read up on some of the worst cases they’d handled. Navi, I can’t tell you how depressed I was. I read on that first night. Right through the night. One file after the other. Right through the night. I read about such terrible things...’

  ‘I can imagine. I know about some of the things the Family Violence teams have to deal with.’

  ‘But finally I identified this one man. The one I’m calling Thando. It took a long time before I started looking at the specific man instead of just reading more and more of those individual cases. At first I started putting all of the files with the same kind of crime in one pile. I couldn’t believe what I was reading there, but then I started seeing a pattern. Same method. Same kind of situation. Same kind of witness statements. I began to realise that in a whole lot of cases covering many years the perpetrator could have been the same man...’

  Mavis took Pillay through what she had found in the files. The man she had come to focus upon was as devious a customer as the South African Police Service in KwaZulu-Natal had ever encountered, she said. He had consciously and very deliberately used at least four identities over sustained periods, and had invoked half a dozen other identities for short-term purposes on other occasions. His various forged identity documents were as expert as any seen by the SAPS. He had been arrested on numerous occasions and he had constantly avoided incarceration in prison by allegedly bribing police and court officials, threatening witnesses, and intimidating relatives and friends of his various victims. On two occasions he had walked straight out of two different station charge offices by producing ID documents proving they had arrested the wrong man. On another occasion he was alleged to have purchased the docket that had been opened in a case of assault with GBH and then he added insult to injury when he walked out of the court building with a huge smile and with a package tucked under his arm. Some people said they thought it was the docket itself, but he was gone before anyone could verify this. Shortly thereafter the key witness suffered grievous bodily harm by persons unknown. On yet another occasion he was rumoured to have eliminated the single witness to the murder he had been questioned about just two days previously. At one point a detective had written a note on one of the files to the effect that the man had tried to avoid detection through fingerprints because, according to a laboratory report, he had washed his hands in acidic compounds over a sustained period of time. Instead of this information being properly documented and shared across the province, it had disappeared into the individual file. It had taken the arrival of student intern Mavis Tshabalala to have all the information from different files properly cross-checked, recorded in matrix form, and logged.

  All of this information had a history in the files that Mavis had painstakingly put together and then studied day and night. The historical record on the man she identified as Thando started as gossip, assumption and surmise, moving to hearsay and then to hard testimony, supported only much later on by irrefutable evidence. The man had been slippery at the beginning, but gradually the case had been built up against him.

  Pillay grew increasingly incensed as she heard about the litany of police errors, obvious miscarriages of justice, and blatant bribery and corruption that hung over the man.

  ‘I can’t stand hearing this kind of stuff, Mavis. I get so woes, you know? It makes me want to get out there and take down more of these guys.’

  ‘I know, Navi. Part of what I agreed with my supervisor is that in re-visiting all the information for my dissertation I’ll show step-by-step some of the mistakes made by the police so that I can argue the case for tighter controls over evidence-gathering, processing, and monitoring.’

  She drained her coffee before continuing with her narrative.

  11.30

  Wakashe, Mgwazeni and Thabethe started their day in high spirits. After complaining bitterly to one another about the unbearable heat, and having had to squeeze into a packed taxi with no air conditioning, they couldn’t believe their good fortune when they finally alighted at a supermarket and found that not one of the stolen bank cards had been cancelled. They went from one ATM to another, and doubled the previous day’s cash withdrawals within twenty minutes. They left the last of the ATMs cackling together in good humour.

  ‘You think we can try again tomorrow, Skhura? These moegoe prison guards, maybe they are that stupid? That dead one, maybe his family is as stupid as him and they won’t cancel his cards until next month?’

  ‘Maybe, bra,’ Thabethe replied to Wakashe. ‘Maybe. That dead one, that guard, we called him hodoshe, me and Mgwazeni. That dirty fly. Now he is not putting his eggs in dead men. Now it is him who the maggots are eating. Maybe when those maggots they come to his brain they will say Eish! There is nothing here.’

  ‘Is right, Skhura,’ Mgwazeni interjected. ‘That hodoshe was bad, that one. Mampara. Maybe his wife and children they are stupid like him. Maybe they won’t think about the bank cards until there is no money left.’

  They were now back at the scene they had observed the previous day. Thabethe’s two friends were ecstatic. They were watching the four boys treble the value of Thabethe’s investment. The money was rolling in. Thabethe had bought only a few thousand rands worth of the drugs, receiving an additional agreement from the supplier that he would recommend Thabethe to a friend who also had access to a supply. Another few thousand rands worth of supplies could be purchased later in the day. They would send a messenger to Thabethe to provide instructions about where and when.

  For now, Thabethe was satisfied with his team of youngsters. He paid them well, and his price to the buyers was higher than that of his competitors, but it was all playing out perfectly.

  The ten-year old walked across to Thabethe during a lull in the action. He told Thabethe about another location where they could work for him, not far from where they were now, where there were lots of young people who paid big money for whoonga. Thabethe resolved to check it out with the youngster at the end of the current session.

  The boy ran off to take up his position as a car appeared at the top of the street. False alarm. The car simply drove down the street into the distance. They waited. Then the eighteen-year old received a call on his iPhone. He spoke for a few seconds, closed down the call, and came across to where Thabethe and Wakashe and Mgwazeni were sitting on the kerb. He spoke rapidly, in Zulu, and Thabethe responded in Zulu.

  ‘This man is with five friends and they’re talking about getting some whoonga. They don’t have a car but they know we can get the stuff for them. They want to hit a house with rich people tomorrow and they want the stuff before tonight.’

  ‘These guys. They want nyaope just so they can hit a house?’

  ‘Yes. I know these ones. They do bad things. But they always need whoonga before they hit the houses or do the mugging.’

  ‘I know guys like that,’ added Wakashe. ‘They’re normal guys like us and then they do whoonga and then they do bad things and they become like dogs.’

  ‘This stuff it burns the brains,’ said Thabethe to the youngster. ‘You’re not going to smoke it yourself, nè? You want the burnt brains, too?’

  ‘Hayi! Not me, Skhura,’ said the young man. ‘Me, I’m selling only. I’m not smoking. What must I tell this guy?’

  Thabethe told him to arrange with the contact to meet for a special sale. They discussed the place and the time. The six men wanted it almost immediately, within the hour if at all possible, the young man said. To him, the guys seemed desperate. They would want to get the stuff very quickly. Thabethe paused and thought. Then he decided the urgency could mean a significantly increased price. He gave his instructions. The sale wouldn’t follow the normal procedure, b
ut the eighteen-year old would be the go-between because he said he knew these men. The youngster walked off, making his call on the iPhone as he did so.

  Business returned to normal and during the course of the very next trade the boy came back to give Thabethe the details about the special sale. Within the hour. Even less. They were on their way.

  These men must be desperate, thought Thabethe.

  11.40.

  Pillay looked on in admiration as her young companion continued with her story.

  The work on the files in Greytown was undertaken by Mavis not only during the day in the office but also in her private lodgings on weekends and during most evenings. Her fascination with her subject matter, she told Pillay, frequently transported her into the depths of despair, and had occasionally lifted her into the foothills of optimism as she put together connections and established various links.

  Apart from his expertise in identity theft, forgery, and circumventing the criminal justice system, the man who had become named by Mavis as Thando would become infamous, once his past crimes were linked by her, for a four-year reign of terror commencing in 2010 during the football frenzy of that year in South Africa. With the football world cup dominating the headlines, there was only scant reporting of the crimes perpetrated by the man. He had raped more than a dozen women, most of them in front of their partners. He appeared to have taken malicious pleasure in tying up partners and forcing them to observe his horrific crimes.

  ‘My boss in the unit told the Greytown Station Commander about the work I was doing, Navi. I was very scared one day, about three weeks after I had started, when the SC came in to see me. He’s a Lieutenant Colonel. I was surprised to hear that. He was a nice man, but he was a full Station Commander and I couldn’t help comparing him with Captain Nyawula, who is only...’