by HJ Golakai
Kwela Books
This is mine.
“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind …”
Proverbs 11:29
The Holy Bible
King James Version
Prologue
Dawn snuck up out of nowhere. Across the grass, patches of morning gold swelled and merged, creeping over stretch by stretch of dewy lawn. Blinking as rays striped across her face, Vee swallowed hard and picked up the pace.
She squatted and examined the dead man’s feet. His shoes were relatively clean, bar disks of dried mud and grass caked to the back of the soles. Flecks of mud spattered the bottom inch of his chinos. She leaned closer and snapped a picture with her phone. Gingerly, Nokia pinched between two fingers, she inched up the cuff and peered up his leg.
A flurry of gasps made her jump.
“Hhayi, wenza ntoni!” Zintle yelped.
“You flippin’ crazy?” Chlöe growled.
“What I should do?” Vee hissed over her shoulder. “Y’all got a better idea?”
Huddled like lovers, Chlöe and Zintle wild-eyed her in silence, ample bosoms undulating in unison. Zintle tightened her grip on Chlöe’s arm, chunky fingers digging trenches of red into Chlöe’s milky skin. Dah helluva mark dah one will leave, Vee thought, wincing.
“We’re not supposed to touch anything. And you’re touching things!”
“Dammit Bishop, I touched one thing!” Vee wobbled getting to her feet and reached out to steady herself. Her flailing hand grappled over dead leg, immediately sending her stomach contents into a slow roil. The man’s body, strung by the neck to the coat hook, took up a gentle pendulous swing, the fabric of his jeans and leather of his shoes making a low, eerie rasp against the grainy cement wall. Chlöe and Zintle shrieked and leapt away. Vee toppled onto her butt, scrabbling in the gravel till she found her footing and scurried over to them. Together, the circle heaved in harmony.
“I’ve never seen a dead person before,” Chlöe whispered. “No, I mean I’ve seen a normal dead person before. At a couple of funerals, when they’re clean and stuffed and make-upped. But not like this.” Knuckles to her cheek, she moved her hand in frantic circles against her skin, a sure sign she was freaking out. “Not, like, a brutal murder.”
Vee sucked her teeth, a biting ‘mttssshw’, clipping it short in consideration of the sombre atmosphere. “Dah whetin you call a brutal murder? It somethin’ like a very orange orange?”
“Ag, man.” Chlöe rolled her eyes. “I mean … you know …”
“I’ve been to hundreds of funerals,” Zintle breathed, then stopped, mouth agape. From her expression, this was clearly a new one for her too.
“Exactly. Who’s seen this kinda thing happen every day?”
Vee held her tongue. In her time, more recently than she cared to recall, she’d seen far too many abnormally dead people. Shot, hacked, diseased, starved … And once, bloated flesh piled high enough to darken the horizon of her young mind for months, years even. In comparison, this hapless soul had gone with reasonable dignity.
She averted her eyes, the violence of her heartbeat reaching up her chest like a witch’s claw, squeezing her throat closed. Now was not the time to let an acute phobia of dead bodies run riot. The dangling man had her property. Every time she peeked, tried not to, her eyes were drawn to his neck, a thickened, bruised pipe wrapped in purple fabric. Her flesh tingled and shrank, drawing her face tight. Time to think clearly and quickly. Neither was happening.
“Why isn’t anyone coming? Why the hell’s it taking so long?” Chlöe whined.
Zintle turned her back to the hanging man. “They’re coming. We called them, so they should be here soon. But you’re right, it’s taking forever.” Eyes fixed to the gravel, she smoothed down the front of her maid’s uniform and shuffled her feet. “I want to leave this place.”
Chlöe clucked sympathetically. “It’s cool if you want to go back to reception. We can all wait there.” Vee whipped her a withering look. “Or maybe hang around a bit longer. Please. It’ll look weird to the cops if we’re left alone with him, when we’re the ones …”
Vee launched another eye, sharper still, watched Chlöe taper off to gnawing at her lips.
The situation was bad enough already. Why help it escalate from strange to outright damning, which it sure as hell would when the police inevitably found out exactly which guest had been present when the body was found? The less incriminated she looked, the better.
“I can’t keep working here anymore,” Zintle elaborated. “Too much bad luck.”
Vee softened. The last forty-eight hours had been rough on all of them, but Zintle had borne the brunt. If she heard the phrase ‘excelling outside of one’s job description’ ever again, she would think of hospitality’s unluckiest ambassador.
Zintle’s face contorted. “Ugghhnn, I feel sick.” She doubled over, clutching her stomach.
Chlöe’s horror magnified. “Sies man, don’t throw up.” She rubbed a soothing hand over the maid’s back. “If I see or even hear someone throw up, it makes me sick too.”
“I … uuggghhnn … won’t vomit …” Zintle compelled herself, gulping air like a landed fish.
“Oi! Can you not say ‘vomit’ either? It’s not helping.”
Vee edged closer. The man’s eyes were shut, tiny slats of the whites just visible when she crouched. She’d always thought the standard strangled expression was one of bulging, terrified eyes, shot through with harried blood vessels. Tongue drooping over toothy grimace for effect. Nothing like that here. Facial muscles slack, expression … not peaceful, or particularly anything for that matter. Just gone.
She sucked in a deep breath and clamped her airways, creeping even nearer. Once upon a time in a faraway lab somewhere, super-nerds had taken time to ascertain that the soul allegedly weighed twenty-one grams. They probably hadn’t bothered identifying its odour, but some process made the human body smell torturously different after death. Not decay exactly; this man had been gone a mere matter of hours. But there was that subtle yet unmistakable turn after the flesh and spirit parted ways, the most repulsive aspect of the thing. She stared at the noose around the man’s neck, throbbing alternately with regret and then shame for feeling such regret.
“Don’t even think about it.”
Vee whipped around. Eyes narrowed, Chlöe stared her down over the head of a wilting Zintle, now snuggled in her bosom.
“I wasn’t,” Vee snapped. Maybe a tiny, foolish part of her was. But if she removed the scarf … hide it where? And explain the lack of a murder weapon how? Massive shitstorm potential.
The silk had been knotted twice, then twisted completely along the length stretched across the man’s windpipe. The noose closed in a third knot at the back of the head, where the loose material had been fashioned into a loop of sorts, easily slung over a worthy hook. Under the substantial weight, the workmanship of the coatrack was literally holding up. The tips of the man’s shoes barely touched the ground. Breath held again, Vee zoomed her Nokia’s camera and took a close-up of the garrotte. She stared at it a long time, nonplussed.
A triangular tip of white poking out of his pants caught the corner of her eye. She exhaled shakily. A furtive peep over her shoulder ran smack into Chlöe’s glare, drilling a hole through the back of her head. Throwing a puppy-eyed plea, Vee deftly plucked the object from the man’s pocket and stuck it in hers. She turned her back on Chlöe’s widening eyes and frantic head-shaking.
“They’re here,” she said.
Three older men, flanked by two strapping groundsmen in blue jumpsuits, trudged across the expanse of grass. The groundsmen were no less frantic than they had been when, short of two hours earlier, they’d come across the florid-faced white man strung up outside th
eir workroom door. They hung back with a couple of the older men, wildly gesticulating over what Vee knew was a colourful extrapolation of a story they’d told several times already. The last of the group, hard-faced and decked in a trench coat that was absurd considering the building heat, made a beeline for them.
Is it a coincidence that the police look the same every damn where, Vee wondered, or do they follow an international manual? A sudden surge of weariness cut through the shock, overcame, left her feeling like a jaded witness in a cheap private-eye novel, until the policeman tripped on the downhill verge of the lawn and nearly fell. She turned away to hide a giggle.
A crowd of gawkers, guests and staff from the lodge was in full fluster by the time the officers had questioned them. The single crime scene technician, whom Vee had anticipated would be an entire team working with scientific flourish, simply clicked away at different angles on a basic Kodak and cut the body down. Another stab twisted under her ribs as the massive pair of scissors worked through her silk scarf.
Chlöe sighed. “I feel cheated after all these years of watching CSI. We could’ve done that. Well, not take the body down ourselves, but …”
Vee tuned out. The best bit was kicking off. The cops formed a scrum of whispers for what felt like forever. They pulled Zintle, sobbing by now, aside. Head down with hands clamped under her armpits, she seemed to be speaking in fits and bursts. She shook her head and shrugged a lot. As the probing wore on, she stole guilty glances over her shoulder at Vee and Chlöe. One of the cops snuck a comforting arm around her shoulder and leered down the front of her uniform. Finally, Hardface Trench, who was clearly in charge, broke the huddle and set about creating another expert beeline. He had thrown off the coat, revealing a crisp blue shirt and pants of a brown so similar to his complexion that from afar he looked naked from the waist down.
“Ohhh Gooood …” Chlöe groaned. Vee steeled her spine and set her expression to ‘concerned but oblivious’. In the pockets of her jeans, her fingers started to tremble as they stroked the rectangle of paper.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Hardface scowled in Vee’s direction, not sparing Chlöe a single glance.
“Voinjama Johnson.” She let him blink, purse his lips, mouth the name soundlessly many times as he scribbled in a battered notebook, and offered no help. She wondered what highly revised version he’d put down. Probably just Johnson; most people went with Johnson.
“It’s my understanding you know this man.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hhhmmph. He’s one …” He squinted, flipping at leisure through the notebook.
“Gavin Berman,” Vee blurted.
Hardface stopped and raised his head very slowly. “You just said you didn’t know him.”
“You asked if I know him, not if I know his name.”
The policeman’s head reared a barely perceptible inch as his eyes hardened. His body language computed a rapid adjustment from ‘the easy way’ to ‘the hard way’, now clearly the only option on offer. “Eh-hehhh. Would you mind coming with me so long? So we can work out how everyone here knows everyone else, which you seem to know a lot about.” His arm executed an upswing as if to shepherd her along the path. Neither Vee nor Chlöe, crowded to her back like a fledgling to its mother, fell in line. The arm dropped. He flicked his head in the direction of the front entrance and abruptly strode off, a click of his tongue punching the air.
“Find Lovett now. Start with that blonde’s room, then his,” Vee whispered to Chlöe. “I doubt they’ve left yet. And call Nico.”
“I thought we weren’t calling Nico!”
“Change of plans,” Vee muttered.
Shifting of Shape
Chapter One
“Johnson …”
Vee flipped a hand for silence, frowning over the document open on the flatscreen. It was all over the place. Jumbled, wordy in the wrong places, the punch sucked out of it. The online team were a pack of butchers – why else would every thing of beauty that passed through their feral mitts come out the other end looking, sounding if that were possible, like a mangled carcass? Prose was doomed to play the ugly stepchild to graphics in their world, as if readers only visited the digital page to look at pretty pictures. She chopped a few limp lines off the third paragraph, thought better of it and deleted it completely. “Dammit!” she threw her hands up. “What’ve you done?”
“This,” Darren Februarie tapped the screen, “is a masterpiece.”
“This is shit spattered on a bathroom wall, that’s how readable it is.” She readjusted her chair. “Last time I give you anything for comments.”
“C’mon. You’re not gonna do a full re-write while I –”
“Febs, hush your mouth. This is what you do, make a mess and throw it in my lap to fix at the last minute. Who told you to merge all this? It was separate for good reason.”
“It read better.”
“It read better? Did you actually read this tripe back to yourself after you butchered it, or is comprehension another handicap of your Bantu education?”
“Ohh-hooo! Bitch switch on, people!” Darren guffawed, then slowly, very carefully, raised his middle finger in her face. Vee bared and snapped her teeth as if to bite it off, sending him stumbling backwards, laughing some more. She swivelled back around, dead serious as she sliced the cursor across the screen, muttering to herself. “You are no Hemingway, and I’m no Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of trying to do a mash-up, let’s play to strengths until …” The rest of the sentence – ‘I’m officially part of the team’ – soured in the back of her throat. She shook her head. “Well, just until.” The cursor flitted like a scalpel, ripping out the heart of the story gasping for air amidst entrails of inconsequential fluff, and transplanted it to the top of the page. “Otherwise we end up with this.”
“Fine. I defer to your brilliance only – she’s coming!”
Vee jerked one eye over his head and through the door to the newsroom. A missile of purple bore down on them in the form of a short, plump brunette. She clicked ‘save’, wiggled out the flash drive, tossed it at Februarie’s rapidly retreating back and sprang from the chair.
She didn’t get far.
“Ah, Voinjama!” Swathes of plum crowded out the nearest escape route. Vee groaned inwardly as Saskia Schoeman executed her trademark plastic smile, lips stretching by fractions like they were being tugged at the corners by invisible drawstrings. “There you are.”
“Here I am. Where I always … am.”
“Indeed you are,” Saskia sniffed. “One would think you were hiding from me!”
“Haha. One could think that. And before you ask, I’m headed there already.”
“Wonderful.” The smile cranked up a few extra tight degrees. Trouble brewing, Vee cautioned herself. Experience had shown there was very little difference between office manager and Gestapo in Saskia’s mind. The witch’s cauldron was always on the boil, and as the unfortunate newbies, she and Chlöe often served as the freshest ingredients.
“Oh, and when you run into your, umm … friend, perhaps you can impress upon her the importance of attending my meetings.” Again, hard to miss how Schoeman’s saliva practically curdled at the prospect of using the word ‘assistant’, a luxury no-one below her was supposed to have. “We start in fifteen. If you can spare her, that is.”
Vee ignored the jibe, frowning. “What meeting?” She thought for a second. “Oh, the interns’ thing. Chlöe’s not an intern.”
“She’s not a journalist either, is she?” Saskia’s head did a sly cat’s tilt.
Vee primmed her lips. “Thought that was two-thirty this afternoon, with the group from Urban.” She flicked her watch: closing on nine-thirty a.m. “I was hoping to attend.”
“Not necessary. I have it under control. You’ve stretched yourself quite thin as it is.” Something vulgar insinuated itself in her tone, another of her slithery, unsettling talents. Schoeman flicked her gaze across the newsroom to Darren, who had hust
led himself a long, safe distance away and now stood looking pointedly nonchalant as he sipped coffee and conferred with another colleague. She dragged her eyes back to Vee, the film on her irises taking on an oily, vaguely threatening glint. “May I add that I believe the office runs far better when we all look to our assigned duties, and concentrate on performing them exclusively and well. No-one need step outside the confines of their job description. It’s disruptive.”
And I believe you look like a rolling grape, Vee smirked at her back, watching her duck-waddle away.
She rotated kinks out of her neck and shoulders down the corridor to the managing editor’s office, apprehension stirring up her breakfast. She really wasn’t up for crap this early. Investigating for Urban magazine had been one thing, but wading through the innards of the City Chronicle beast had so far proved a different adventure altogether. Yes … definitely a Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale level of wading. Nico van Wyk captained his ship using strangely different coordinates, ones she had yet to decipher.
“Bugger off,” he barked in answer to her knock. “Unless it’s Johnson.”
The office was cool and furnished with spartan, practical taste; a man’s space. The premises of Chronicle were close to the top floor of the high-rise, the room made larger somehow by a perpetual cool breeze. Envious, Vee thought of her cubicle next to a sealed-off window. Then the memory of her new, private spot lifted her heart. Before it plunged immediately. They’d be ‘having a chat’ about that too, of course.
“Overtaking specific projects without permission.”
She blinked. “Beg your pardon?”
Rifling through the filing cabinet opposite his desk, he didn’t turn or look up. “Seat,” he pointed. She toyed with being a badass, thought better of it and sat. Nico towered almost two full heads over her and though his temperament was closer to a surly simmer than full-on belligerence, she’d seen him lose it a few times, really flip his shit, leaving underlings cowering on the brink of tears. Male underlings. Best not rock the boat.
