Blessed Are the Dead

by Malla Nunn

  Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper returns in this powerful, atmospheric novel about two communities forced to confront each other after a murder that exposes their secret ties and forbidden desires in apartheid South Africa, by award-winning author Malla Nunn.

  The body of a beautiful seventeen-year-old Zulu girl, Amahle, is found covered in wildflowers on a hillside in the Drakensberg Mountains, halfway between her father’s compound and the enormous white-owned farm where she worked. Detective Sergeant Cooper and Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala are sent to the desolate landscape to investigate. They soon discover that Amahle’s life was woven into both the black and white communities in ways they could never have imagined. Cooper and Shabalala must enter the guarded worlds of a traditional Zulu clan and a divided white farming community to gather up the secrets she left behind and bring her murderer to justice.

  In a country deeply divided by apartheid, where the law is bent as often as it is broken, Emmanuel Cooper fights against all odds to deliver justice and bring together two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable worlds despite the danger that is arising.

  PRAISE FOR

  MALLA NUNN

  “Stellar.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

  “Dexterous.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Mesmerizing.” —RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

  “Breath-catching.” —THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  “Terrific.” —MINETTE WALTERS

  “A debut to savor.” —THE BALTIMORE SUN

  “Gripping.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

  “Fascinating.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Beautifully layered.” —THE BALTIMORE SUN

  “Consistently engaging.” —BOOKLIST

  “Intense.” —DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK)

  “Unforgettable.” —THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  MALLA NUNN was born in Swaziland, southern Africa, and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. She is a filmmaker with three award-winning films to her credit and is currently at work on her next novel.

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  COVER DESIGN BY ANNA DORFMAN • ZEBRA ILLUSTRATION BY CANSU CENDER/GETTY IMAGES • AUTHOR IMAGE BY DARRYL ROBINSON

  Also by Malla Nunn

  A Beautiful Place to Die

  Let the Dead Lie

  Thank you for purchasing this Emily Bestler Books/Washington Square Press eBook.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Malla Nunn

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Emily Bestler Books/Washington Square Press trade paperback edition June 2012

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nunn, Malla.

  Blessed are the dead : a novel / by Malla Nunn.

  p. cm.

  1. Police—South Africa—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Zulu (African people)—Fiction. 4. KwaZulu–Natal Midlands (South Africa)—Fiction. 5. South Africa—History—1909–1961—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.4.N86B56 2012

  823’.92—dc23 2011044416

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1692-7

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1695-8 (ebook)

  For Mark

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the ancestors, my parents, my sisters and brother, and my beautiful children, Sisana and Elijah. Also to my husband, Mark—editor, story guide and ruthless destroyer of adjectives—who was brave enough to tell me what wasn’t working. My agents, Catherine Drayton of Inkwell Management and Sophie Hamley of the Cameron Creswell Agency, are calm guides in times of doubt. Terence King, military researcher and historian, for fine work on facts and figures. Simon Lapping, Afrikaner Cultural Attaché. My auntie, Lizzie Thomas, for help with Zulu. Eric and Rose Campbell for the cottage and Michael O Klug for his invitation to the Brisbane Writers Festival. A nod to Meg Simmons for asking, “How’s Emmanuel going?” and to Burcack Muraben for constantly hounding me for “more Shabalala.” Deepest thanks to Judith Curr of Atria books. And to Emily Bestler of the fabulous new imprint, Emily Bestler Books, who helps me find the best version of my story every time.

  Thank you all.

  BLESSED

  ARE THE

  DEAD

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  PROLOGUE

  OCTOBER 1953

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT EMMANUEL Cooper woke to the sound of boots kicking in his bedroom door. He threw the sheets aside and fumbled in the nightstand for his gun. Motionless in the darkness, Webley revolver pointed at the doorway, he listened for whatever would come next. The sound diminished and became more organic. He felt its rhythm. It was not splintering wood that had wrenched him out of sleep. It was his own heart. It slammed against his chest like a prisoner trying to escape its cage of muscle and bone.

  He sat back and breathed deeply and detected the faint trace of a flowering jasmine. Three months after he’d officially rejoined the Detective Branch the dreams were back, but now they were more intense than anything he had experienced before.

  The familiar vision of his platoon huddled under a pewter sky howling with missiles had been replaced by disjointed images of red flames and black smoke. In these new dreams, he ran through burning debris toward something he could not remember. Hot cinders rained down. The dark-earth smell of blood and the hollow calls of the dying filled the void. He knew the direction he should run but flames blocked his path. The smoke became thicker and it seared his lungs.

  He climbed out of bed and crossed the linoleum floor to the open window. A cat stalked an unseen night animal across the empty driveway and slipped into a tangled bougainvillea fat with spring blooms.

  “Emmanuel,” a sleepy voice said. “Come back to bed.”

&nb
sp; He glanced at the woman lit by a shaft of streetlight coming in through the curtains. Lana Rose lay naked on the bed, cotton sheets kicked off in the heat, black hair like a ribbon of silk on the pillow.

  “Shhh . . .” The sound he made was automatic. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The cat reappeared with a lizard in its mouth, the lizard’s tail twitching.

  “Still crazy?” Lana said, and snuggled into the pillow and back to sleep.

  Emmanuel said, “Last I checked.”

  Proof of his craziness was in his bed.

  Lana was Colonel van Niekerk’s girlfriend, but by week’s end the colonel would be married and Lana bound for a new life on her own in Cape Town. That didn’t make this night of pure pleasure okay. For a few days longer she was still his boss’s mistress and should have been untouchable. She had invited him to her apartment one night earlier in the year and they had fallen into bed and drowned themselves in each other. The next morning, though, Lana went back to van Niekerk and his deep pockets. Afterward, they avoided each other and ignored the memory of how perfectly they fit together. When she called to suggest farewell drinks Emmanuel knew they’d make their final good-bye in bed. Tonight, with her body half wrapped in his sheets, he permitted himself the illusion that he was not alone. At dawn tomorrow, however, Lana would disappear from his life: one more woman he’d failed to hang on to. Wide awake now, he remembered the advice his mother gave him years before.

  “Try running away from trouble instead of right to it. Just once, Emmanuel,” she’d said after discovering the stolen cigarettes hidden under his bed in their shack in Sophiatown. He was twelve years old and already possessed the terrible knowledge that he would never grow into the good, kind man she dreamed he would become.

  The telephone rang on the bedside table and Emmanuel crossed the room. He lifted the receiver to his ear.

  “Ja,” he said quietly, to avoid waking Lana.

  “You’re up.” Colonel van Niekerk’s voice was clear on the line. “Problem sleeping, Cooper?”

  “I sleep very well, thank you, Colonel,” Emmanuel said. He had no intention of letting the Afrikaner policeman into his head. The less van Niekerk knew about his mental health, the better. Lana rolled onto her back and the bedsprings sighed.

  “You have company,” the colonel said.

  Emmanuel ignored the statement and pressed a finger softly against Lana’s mouth. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.

  There was a pause on the other end, short enough to suggest a gathering of thoughts but long enough for Emmanuel to imagine that the colonel knew just how he’d spent the night and with whom.

  “Pack a bag,” van Niekerk said. “Enough for a few days. I have a case for you. A murder.”

  Emmanuel lifted his hand from Lana’s mouth and wrote the details of the job in his notebook. A homicide in Roselet, a farming hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains and four hours out of Durban. Whoever had called in the murder left no details of the victim.

  “I’ll leave early in the morning, Colonel,” he said, and hung up. Dirt roads with potholes deep enough to bathe a child, and wandering goats and cows, made the journey to the ’Berg dangerous in the dark. He’d wait for first light to set off.

  He checked the bedside clock. Three forty-five on Sunday morning. The colonel knew he couldn’t leave for hours, so why call in the middle of the night? Van Niekerk didn’t do anything without a reason. What was the reason this time?

  “Emmanuel . . .” Lana stretched out against the crumpled sheets with her arms thrown above her head. “Do you have to leave right away?”

  “No.” He leaned over and pinned her wrists against the mattress, felt the heat of her skin and the lazy drumming of her heart. “Not right away.”

  1

  A ZULU HERD BOY walked quickly up the dirt path, his bony frame bent to meet the steep rise of the mountain. The rhythmic pounding of his bare feet on the rough ground kicked stones loose and raised red dust into the air.

  “Higher, ma’ baas.” The boy was apologetic, afraid of taxing the white policeman in the neat blue suit and the black hat pulled low on his head to block out the light. “We must go higher.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Emmanuel said. “Keep going.”

  The steady pace was nothing compared to army boot camp or the three years spent in combat, marching between battlefields in Europe during the war. Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala from the Native Detective Branch followed directly behind him and the close rhythm of his breath spurred Emmanuel to keep moving.

  “Soon, ma’ baas,” the boy promised. “Soon.”

  “I’m still with you,” Emmanuel said. The dead were patient. To them, eternity was flexible and time meant nothing. For police detectives, however, time was everything. The sooner the crime scene was located and sketched in detail, the better chance there was of catching the killer.

  The herd boy stopped abruptly and then slipped into the lush grass along the edge of the path.

  “There, ma’ baas.” He pointed a skinny finger to the rise. The path snaked behind a sandstone boulder embedded in the grass. “You must go past the rock and up again.”

  The boy wanted no part of what lay beyond.

  “My thanks,” Emmanuel said, and turned to look behind him. He saw the path they had traveled from the floor of the Kamberg Valley and the mountains rising in the distance on the other side. Clouds piled on top of each other behind the peaks. The bronze tops of the mountains, some of them dusted with snow, looked like fortresses for gods. There was nothing like the Drakensberg Mountains anywhere else on earth.

  “Where to, Sergeant?” Shabalala asked when he drew even with Emmanuel.

  “Around that bend,” Emmanuel said. “Our guide has dropped out.”

  They moved on, slowly skirting the boulder. Three Zulu men dressed in traditional cowhides worn over printed cloth stood shoulder to shoulder across the narrow path to form a roadblock. They held hardwood clubs and assegais, hunting spears with rawhide bindings and sharp blades. Together they made an impi, a fighting unit. The tallest of the men stood in the center.

  “Suggestions?” Emmanuel asked Shabalala.

  The Zulu men gave no indication that they might move from the middle of the path. Military defeat at the hands of the British army and Boer commandos had not cowed them. They stood as their ancestors must have a hundred years ago: fearless masters of their own land.

  “Should we wait for the local police?” Shabalala asked. Far below and across the emerald stretch of the valley lay the town of Roselet, the closest source of law enforcement backup.

  “The station commander might not get the message for hours,” Emmanuel said, referring to the handwritten note he’d stuck to the door of the locked police station an hour ago. A small sandstone bungalow adjacent to the station had also been empty. “I don’t want to lose any more time.”

  “Then we must go together. Slowly. Hands open, like this.” Shabalala lifted both hands and showed empty palms to the Zulu men. The gesture was simple, universal. It said, No weapons. No harm intended.

  Emmanuel did the same.

  “Now we must wait,” Shabalala said. “Do not look away from them, Sergeant.”

  Sunshine glinted off the fighters’ sharpened spearheads. The weapons were not dusty antiques from a grandfather’s hut. The men themselves were no relics, either. They were tall and muscular. Emmanuel figured a lifetime of running up these mountains and hunting game had kept them lethal.

  “Never crossed my mind,” he said.

  “Who are you?” the man in the middle demanded in Zulu. He was the eldest of the three.

  “Sawubona, inkosi. I am Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala from the Native Detective Branch. This is Detective Sergeant Cooper, the boss of detectives in Durban.”

  “Yebo, sawubona.” Emmanuel made the traditional greeting. He let the instant promotion to top boss pass. If Shabalala thought they needed extra status to move
ahead, they probably did.

  “Cooper. Shabalala. We see you.” The elder nodded a greeting but did not smile. “Come. The firstborn child of my father’s sister is waiting.”

  Emmanuel didn’t try to work out the connection. Zulus did not have family trees, they had family webs. The men turned and jogged up the slope in formation, weapons held in relaxed hands that were used to the weight.

  “You lead,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala. The Zulu detective wore the standard Detective Branch uniform, a suit with polished leather shoes and a black fedora, but the hills and untamed veldt had been his childhood playground. He knew this land and its people.

  They pushed up the steep gradient for two more minutes. An eerie low-pitched moaning swelled and rolled over the treetops before dropping away again in a wave.

  “What’s that?” Emmanuel asked but didn’t slacken his pace.

  “The women.” The words were spare, stripped down but full of sorrow just the same. Shabalala had heard the sound before.

  The Zulus stopped and pointed their assegais to a rock fig growing out almost horizontally from a craggy ledge. The sound was distinct now: female voices crying out and wailing in the bushes.

  “They are waiting,” the elder Zulu said.

  Emmanuel again let Shabalala take the lead. The tall grass and bush thinned out a few yards off the path and a group of women became visible. They sat in a circle, swaying back and forth. The rock fig branched over them like a sentinel. Emmanuel hesitated. One step closer and the sorrow would engulf him and drag him back to a time and place in his own life he’d rather forget.

  “Sergeant,” Shabalala prompted softly, and Emmanuel walked on. He’d chosen this life among the wounded and the dead. Dealing with the living was a necessary part of the job.

  “She is here, inkosi.” One of the women shuffled to the side to make a gap in the circle through which Emmanuel could approach the body. A black girl lay on the sweet spring grass, gazing up at the soft blue sky and the shapes of darting birds in the air. Her head rested on a rolled-up tartan blanket and tiny red and yellow wildflowers were scattered over the ground. Three or four flowers had fallen into her mouth, which was slightly open.