by Ian Patrick
And it all pointed to a man who had probably been a patient in the Addington Hospital just over six weeks ago.
Next step Addington Hospital, thought Mashego.
11.05.
Nyawula put down the phone with a broad grin. The Editor, having not responded to the various messages Nyawula had left earlier, had now finally called back, asked Sergeant Cronje for him personally, and had then embarked on what he assumed would be a very difficult conversation with the Captain.
He had done so only after receiving one very important call himself, just thirty minutes previously, at 10.30 am. He had stewed over it. And called in advisors. And had screamed in outrage at Michael Pullen in a way that few in the office had ever witnessed the Editor do to an employee. Eventually he had slammed the door shut and was left alone in his office, contemplating that important 10.30 call he had received.
That important call was not the call from the Major General himself at 7.30 am, seeking the Editor. Neither was it the call from the lawyers for the SAPS at 8.30 am. Neither was it the call from the senior official at the SAPS Communication & Liaison Services at 9.00 am. All three of those calls, along with a few calls from Captain Sibongiseni Nyawula, had been fielded by the secretary to the Editor with the same response: sorry, the Editor is not available and is always very busy on a Monday morning. No, there was no telling whether he would be able to return the call today.
Various other callers during the course of the morning had received the same response from the Editor’s secretary. Until the very important call at 10.30 am. This was a call from one of the Editor’s most trusted senior journalists and a very close personal friend. She told him that she had slept in, as she had warned him she was going to do today, and had only just seen the newspaper. She had been absolutely shocked, she said, to read the front page.
‘Yes,’ replied the Editor. ‘Most of our readers, I’m sure, will have had the same reaction.’
‘Yes, but not for the same reason as me.’
‘Oh? And what’s that?’
‘I was in the presence of Detective Jeremy Ryder from 8.00pm on Saturday night until well past midnight. In fact, we said goodbye at around 2.00 am on Sunday morning. Others present during that entire period include some of the top brass of the SAPS in Pinetown and Durban.’
The Editor had gone icy cold as he heard her words.
He had been rushed into agreeing to the article. He knew it at the time. But he had been swayed, as had the others, by the emphatic testimony provided by Pullen. A witness who knew before dawn that seven cops and four criminals had been involved in a fracas on the beach just a couple of hours earlier. Which then turned out to be the case, and with the same details as reported by Pullen. Reports had come in at dawn on Sunday about four killed and seven police officers involved. Everything that was happening seemed to corroborate what Pullen had already learned long before dawn from a witness. It had seemed like a winner, even though the Editor had had reservations and deep-down wanted even more corroboration and cross-checking. But then they might lose the scoop. After calling an urgent Sunday afternoon conference he had listened to the passionate arguments on both sides, and had then given the nod against his better judgement.
And now he would pay for that mistake. They all would. They had put their foot into a big dirty pile of poo. His mind raced. That Pullen idiot. This time he’s gone too far, the filthy, slimy, malodorous little...
‘I think you need to get personally involved in this, and not leave it to the legal team,’ the journalist colleague had said, before she ended her call to him.
*
By 10.45 the Editor had had it confirmed by his legal team that the article published under Pullen’s name had been deeply, deeply flawed and that it was a travesty that the name of Detective Jeremy Ryder, one of the cleanest and most tenacious and respected cops in the country, had been dragged through the mud. There was a need for damage control. Massive damage control. Actions beyond the norm.
‘Tell me what you want me to do,’ said the Editor.
The lawyers had advised a carefully-crafted statement. Others among his senior team had various suggestions coupled with a carefully-worded statement. Eventually he had decided it needed a different approach. He would start with Ryder himself, and if necessary phone every senior SAPS officer up the line. If litigation was involved, then he could revert to clever statements. For now, he thought, something different was needed.
His secretary found the number for the Station Commander where Ryder worked. The Editor put through the call himself, and took a deep breath before speaking to Captain Sibongiseni Nyawula.
For the first time in his experience as a cop, Nyawula enjoyed a positive conversation with a newspaper editor. It had been a surprisingly easy conversation, given the circumstances. As he hung up, his day brightened.
‘Piet?’ he called.
‘Yebo, Captain!’
‘Get Jeremy for me, will you? And you can spread the word: the newspaper is going to print a grovelling retraction and apology.’
‘Ladooooma!’ cried Cronje, from the outer office, before rushing through. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression, Captain!’
‘Of course, Piet. As long as you don’t also blow a vuvuzela in my ear. I’m sure the whole team will cheer, too. Get Jeremy for me, Piet. I want to be the one to tell him.’
‘With pleasure, Captain.’
12.55
Mashego worked quickly and efficiently and found himself in the office of the secretary to a ward administrator in Addington Hospital. Once the date on the torn-off piece from the box of prescription tablets had been identified on the hospital systems, and linked to a patient whose first name was Dirk, the detective felt that he was getting somewhere useful. Then he encountered an embarrassed silence from the secretary who had unearthed all of this. She told him that she would have to refer him further up the line because of problems. What problems? Problems about the other man who is referred to in this matter. She wouldn’t answer any more questions, but referred the detective to the Nursing Manager.
This turned out to be exactly the right person, because she had six weeks previously borne the brunt of the many enquiries following the kidnapping in broad daylight of one of their patients. She was the person with the best understanding of the whole affair. She took Mashego into her office and gave him a thorough briefing on what had happened.
The kidnapped patient, she explained, looking at her notes, had been seriously injured in a confrontation with a Detective Navaneetham Pillay from Durban Central and had been put under police guard in a private ward while awaiting charges. He had had treatment for a seriously damaged knee joint and was on a prescription of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and was about to be discharged into the care of the police when he had been kidnapped. The kidnapping had shocked everyone. It had been discovered only some time after the event because it turned out that a man wearing a police constable’s uniform had put the patient into a wheelchair and taken him out in broad daylight, so no-one had thought anything of it. Subsequent study of CCTV video showed that the uniformed constable then abandoned the wheelchair in the parking area and took the patient off in a private car. In follow-up investigations the hospital learned that the kidnapper was a wanted criminal who had eluded the police on a number of occasions. His name was Mr Skhura Thabethe.
And Mr Thabethe was being sought by a team of detectives working out of Durban Central. The contact person for this was a Sergeant Piet Cronje.
Mashego left the hospital deep in thought.
It was a long shot. Could it be the case that this Thabethe guy was at the same place on Saturday night as he had been some weeks earlier when he held this Dirk guy prisoner in the bush? Is that spot one of his regular haunts, perhaps? Is that where he goes to do his nyaope deals? Certainly, whether or not that was his nyaope in the bush, the information from the hospital showed that he was very clearly linked to the garments Mashego had discovered.
Like
every detective in Durban Mashego was aware that the bushes up and down the coast from Durban provided homes to drug dealers, vagrants, petty criminals and probably far worse criminals. It had been a constant refrain from the community policing forums: Clear the bushes! Make our beaches safe! Maybe, before going down onto the beach on Saturday night, for whatever reason, Thabethe had stashed his stuff in the very same spot he had used six weeks earlier. And if that was the case, then Thabethe is the one who had watched them from the rocks.
And the one who then went to the newspaper with a story that reflected a scary amount of accurate detail except with reference to one fact.
Why did he identify Jeremy Ryder as the detective in charge, and not Mashego?
13.40.
Thabethe sat alone in Mbe Road at a table outdoors at Max’s Lifestyle in Umlazi Section V. All around were trendy upwardly-mobile fun-seekers. Scattered in among them were tourists who had been seduced by the marketing brochures to see real township life.
Not so real, Thabethe thought. The plates were stuffed with assorted meat and pap and the tables were covered with glasses of beer and wine. Both local and imported. The place had started off more than a decade ago when Max started serving braaied meat from his single room near a taxi rank. Word had spread, and now it was an enormous place attracting enormous crowds to a complex that included a bar, restaurant, lounge, and an attached butchery where patrons could select their meat.
Thabethe tried to shut out the high-pitched giggles and sometimes forced jollity of the young crowd near him. He was enjoying the Natal Mercury. Enormously. He was astounded at how easy this had been. Maybe he should get hold of this Pullen guy again and feed him some more stuff about Ryder.
But in the meantime he had a more serious problem. He had enough to pay for this meal, but thereafter he was flat broke. All the money he had was still buried in the ground near Nomivi’s Tavern. He had to work out when he could risk retrieving that stash. A cool one hundred thousand rands and more.
Then he saw his chance for a bit of money to tide him over. He had been watching the table nearest him and particularly the flimsy black handbag that the loud young woman had hung carelessly over the back of her chair. Now she got up to slink around the table on high heels, like a silkworm on stilts, and fling her arms ostentatiously around one of the young women giggling at the far end of the table.
Thabethe stood up, leaving his newspaper and his jacket as indicators that he was just visiting the toilet and would soon be back, and as he passed he lifted the bag quickly and unobtrusively, and pulled it close into his stomach as he weaved his way through the tables to the toilets.
He locked himself in the cubicle and quickly rifled through the bag, extracting only the cash, which he put into the hip pocket of his jeans, and the smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy SIII, which he switched to silent mode and tucked into his underpants. He then emerged from the cubicle and stuffed the bag with the rest of its contents into the garbage.
He was back in his seat long before the young woman returned to hers. He debated whether to simply order another drink and have his head buried in his newspaper before she started screaming, or whether to leave now before she made the discovery. He decided on the latter.
He had already bought a new sim card for the phone before the young woman discovered her loss.
15.10
Mashego put a call through to Sergeant Piet Cronje at Durban Central. After identifying himself and explaining that he was following up on some loose ends on an old case, Cronje asked him to fire away and he would help in any way he could.
‘I was told by Addington Hospital that your guys did some work tracking back on that kidnapping six weeks ago. I believe they identified the kidnapper from CCTV at the hospital and that he was a guy called Thabethe.’
‘That’s right, Detective. Bad guy. Skhura Thabethe. We’ve been trying to get him for a couple of months now. Do you have any information about him?’
‘No, sorry, I don’t. But a colleague mentioned somewhere along the line that if ever I was following up on whoonga deals then this Thabethe guy was probably going to be near to the action.’
‘Ja. No question, hey, Detective. Your colleague’s got it right there, for sure.’
‘So what can you tell me about Thabethe? Just in case I run into him, you know?’
‘Ag, well, let me see...’
Cronje then took Mashego through a quick history. Thabethe had been a rogue police constable at Durban Central a couple of years ago, and had been bust for disciplinary matters. He was then suspected of having stolen weapons from the unit, but before charges could be laid he was arrested on another matter. He ended up in jail on an assault charge, spent eight months in the tronk and the moment he came out he was a suspect in a whole lot of new things ranging from drugs to guns to murder, and he escaped arrest on two different occasions. The first time they thought he might have disappeared into Swaziland. They suspected that he was assisted in this by his old friend Spikes Mkhize, and the police then spent a lot of time and effort tracing the cellphones of the two men. They thought that the second time they slipped through the hands of the police, Mkhize escaped to Gauteng and Thabethe to Swaziland again. They thought he might still be there. Or maybe he had come back to his old haunts. They weren’t sure.
Mashego asked him what those old haunts might be, and Cronje told him that a shebeen called Nomivi’s Tavern was a favourite, and that he used to hang around there with Mkhize, until they went on the run. But after watching the place for a while the police gave up, Cronje added, and they all now suspected that the fugitives were simply steering clear of the tavern.
Mashego knew Nomivi’s. He had been there a couple of times. Socially, not as a cop. But he tried not to appear too interested in the detail or too focused on Thabethe. He didn’t want to raise any suspicions as to his motives in wanting Thabethe. So he weaved his questions through some generalities, such as how high nyaope rated in the unit’s work on drugs, and what the hot areas were for Durban Central in respect of cracking down on prostitution, and then reached a very useful point in the conversation with Cronje’s reply to his next question.
‘By the way, I meant to ask. Which of your detectives is leading in the search for Thabethe?’
‘Oh, ja, no question. The one that Thabethe is poep scared of is our guy leading the hunt for him. Detective Jeremy Ryder.’
15.20
She finished her conversation with the fifth and final constable feeling confident and upbeat. Through the course of the day Thenjiwe Buthelezi had been able to speak personally to each and every one of them. By the time she did so, each of them had already heard the news, gone out to get a newspaper, tried to make sense of the story about Detective Ryder, and been horrified to read the precision in the other details. Each of them had gone through similar reactions. Who had seen them? How had any witnesses managed to conceal themselves while so obviously having been present at the scene of the executions?
Nevertheless, their concerns about this had been offset by the other news that had also come in during the course of the day. Not from the newspapers, which seemed to have little real interest in the poor woman, but from the gossip based on the formal police reports that started to filter through. The six constables each soon learned the horrific details of the rape and butchery these men had perpetrated on the young woman in the bush.
Any moral concerns about their own actions had therefore dissipated by the time Thenjiwe had got to each of them. Her mission proved to be fairly easy. None of them needed convincing that they had had the right to act as judges and executioners on the beach on Saturday night.
They, too, would stand firm with Detective Mashego.
15.25
With the information from Cronje, Mashego was finally able to join the dots. The reason Thabethe had rubbished Ryder in the press, he surmised, was simply the result of a grudge. So, Thabethe had decided to create a diversion. A distraction. Ryder was on his tail. Therefore, mak
e life as difficult as possible for the detective. Get the press looking at him instead of the guy he was chasing. Simple.
It was a common tactic in Durban.
Mashego had been there himself. Criminals using whatever means they had at their disposal, not least of all the media, to try and throw dirt at him. And, boy, did the journalists love that stuff. Never mind the rapes and murders and assaults and robberies, thought Mashego. Find a cop who had an affair with someone’s wife. Or a cop who in a weak moment didn’t think before taking a two-hundred rand note to turn a blind eye to a speeding penalty. Or a cop who broke some burglar’s jaw. Ja, thought Mashego. There’s the news. That’s what got them excited. Never mind rape and disembowelment. A cop who isn’t Mother Theresa? So let’s tar and feather him.
Trouble is, this Ryder guy was not going to sit quietly and have someone rubbish him in the press. It’ll come out very quickly: the cop on the beach was Mashego and not Ryder. If they got to Thabethe, and the guy started singing, that would be a problem. It looks as if he had had a ringside seat for the shooting of those guys on the beach. Whatever might happen, Thabethe was bad news for Mashego.
And from what he had now learned from Sergeant Cronje, this was a bad guy through and through. Murder, drugs, assault, weapons. This was a guy who needed to be taken down anyway, no matter what else happens.
Time to hunt for one Skhura Thabethe. And to deal plainly with him.
16.05
Ryder and Pillay had just come in from Glenwood, where they had been following up with witnesses in a potentially massive prostitution and sex-trafficking case. Cronje immediately fed back the news that despite the Editor’s commitment to an apology, and despite the radio stations reporting that the information broken by a local newspaper had been based on misinformation, the Provincial Commissioner had changed her mind about Ryder overseeing the Umdloti beach case. It would now simply be handled by IPID in the normal way.
