by Malla Nunn
“Get anything, Detective?” Emmanuel asked.
“Yes, Sergeant. There is no Mr. Insurance Policy here. The kitchen maids and the garden boys have never heard this name.” Shabalala produced his notebook and scanned the pages. “Also, Philani the gardener did not leave with Amahle on Friday night but fifteen minutes after her. It was customary for them to walk home together but the madam said Philani must finish weeding the flower beds.”
“Amahle left when?”
“At six o’clock. Philani at six-fifteen.”
“You got the gardeners to talk,” Emmanuel said. “What did you use, threats or charm?”
“Neither, Sergeant. The young gardener is also a Shabalala. He told me everything. The gardener with the broken face said not one word.”
“And the housemaids?”
Shabalala grinned. “For them I used charm.”
“So the National Party government is right.” Emmanuel kept a straight face. “A black man in a suit is a danger to the community. What else did the maids tell you?”
“That Philani was angry that he was left behind. He ran after the chief’s daughter and tried to catch her.”
“Maybe he did,” Emmanuel said.
8
EMMANUEL SLOWED THE Chevrolet to thirty and shifted down to third. The dirt road connecting Little Flint to Roselet was a rough strip of corrugated bumps and loose sand. Tall kaffir weeds whipped against the car doors. He checked the western sky and saw black thunderheads swollen with rain. Dark specks circled in a clockwise direction, against the gathering tempest.
“Vultures?” Shabalala said, and leaned out of the open passenger window to get a better look.
Emmanuel pulled over and parked in a patch of dried mud.
“Could be anything,” he said, and got out. “How far off, do you think?”
Shabalala studied the terrain. The land sloped down from the road to a trench and then climbed steeply again to a hill covered in thick native forest. The vultures circled the peak, riding the air current, patient as undertakers at a funeral.
“Half an hour,” Shabalala said. “A quick climb.”
Worth the detour, Emmanuel figured. He shrugged off his jacket, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. Reviewing the information gathered at Little Flint could wait another hour without any damage being done to the investigation. Shabalala laid his folded jacket on the passenger seat and wound up the window. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and eyed the rise.
“You enjoy this,” Emmanuel said. Shabalala was a Zulu sphinx but Emmanuel was learning to see beyond the mask. “Climbing mountains, running across the fields and breaking a sweat.”
“Sitting at a desk and writing notes, that is no life for a man, Sergeant.” Shabalala shrugged an apology for maligning the job of detective. “But my wife, she likes the pay and the nice suit and the hat.”
“Then you’re stuck,” Emmanuel said with a grin, and dropped the car keys into his pants pocket. The clouds edged closer, casting blue shadows over the grasslands.
“Yes, stuck,” Shabalala agreed, but his tone said, Happily so. He set out across the narrow dirt road and down the slope. At the bottom was a ditch overgrown with prehistoric-looking ferns and moss-covered stones.
Emmanuel followed close. “Happily stuck” also described his relationship with the Detective Branch, for now. Three months of hard graft he could take. But if this murder case hit a wall and he slipped back into a series of thankless investigations broken up by troubling dreams and the occasional night with a woman, the future looked grim. Unlike him, Shabalala and Zweigman had wives and children to hold them steady through rising and falling tides of fortune.
Emmanuel used two stepping-stones to cross the stream at the bottom of the trench, setting off a chorus of frogs. Saplings with lichen-covered trunks gave way to stands of Natal mahogany, wild fig and marula trees. They climbed higher on an overgrown walking trail for twenty minutes, then Shabalala slowed and tilted his head to the wind.
The odor filtering from the woods was familiar to Emmanuel. Blood, spilled stomach contents and urine: butchered animals and humans smelled very much the same. Seven vultures rode the air current, their black shapes now almost indistinguishable against the rain-swollen clouds overhead.
“Dried blood and flesh,” Shabalala whispered. “Behind that rock.” A raised stone outcrop surrounded by bush blocked a view of the kill.
“Slow and steady.” Emmanuel crept through ankle-deep leaf litter and climbed onto a flat sandstone ledge wide enough to lay a blanket and a picnic basket on. Vultures rose up from their meal, their black and brown wings blocking the sky.
Emmanuel leaned forward with his hands on his knees, fighting the urge to vomit. The flies, the overwhelming stench, the odd twist of limbs were all too familiar.
“Inkosi Yami. My God.” Shabalala stumbled back. He made it to the rock edge and threw up over the side, his body convulsing.
“Get it all out.” Emmanuel moved a little closer to Shabalala but not too close. Leaving well enough alone and letting a person know he was not alone was a fine balance. “You’ll be sick for a while longer and then again, just when you think your stomach is empty.”
A vulture descended from a tree limb and hopped across the sandstone ledge, eager to continue feeding. Emmanuel chased it off and stood awhile to steady his nerves. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his nose and mouth to block out the smell.
A black man of small build lay on his right side with his arms and legs twisted in opposite directions. He wore a pair of faded blue overalls: the uniform of the South African laborer. The heel of his right foot was rough and cracked from walking barefoot across the mountains, while his left foot still wore a blue sandshoe. Broad, calloused hands confirmed that the man did hard physical work. A deep cut sliced his stomach open to expose lengths of bloated intestine.
“One of us has got to take up smoking,” Emmanuel said when Shabalala joined him, looking drawn and washed out.
“First thing, Sergeant.” The Zulu man acknowledged the joke with a wan smile and pressed his handkerchief to his face. He studied the corpse and said, “Philani?”
“That’s my guess. He’s wearing the blue sandshoes given to Little Flint workers at Christmas. And there are grass stains on the knees of the overalls. We’ll still need to get a formal ID from someone who knew him.”
The vultures had been at work on the man’s face and body, breaking him down to mere flesh and bone. Emmanuel leaned closer and said, “That cut across the stomach is deliberate.”
“Yebo. From the blade of a knife or a spear.” Shabalala circled the body, reading hidden signs. “Made after he was already dead.”
“Mutilation,” Emmanuel said.
“No, Sergeant. A kindness. We Zulu believe the soul lives here in the intestines.” He pointed to the wound. “If the stomach is not cut, the soul will be trapped in the body and fester. It is a tradition from the old days.”
Emmanuel absorbed that fact and said, “So a Zulu did this.”
“More than one. Four men were here, around the body and on this ledge. Maybe five hours ago.”
“Mandla and his men.” It all added up. The motive was simple: revenge for Amahle’s death. “They tracked down the gardener and killed him. Blood washes blood, like you said.”
Blue cloud shadows darkened the ledge and lightning forked across the sky. The wind picked up. Leaves and dust blew across the ground. Rain would come soon.
“Four men. One cut across the stomach made postmortem.” Emmanuel puzzled over the sequence of events. “What actually killed him?”
Shabalala followed some tracks to a curve of basalt jutting from the hillside to form a natural shelter. Rising wind blew a pile of burnt twigs and ash against the back wall of the sanctuary: the remains of a night fire. Scraggy tree branches were thrown in a pile a few feet away.
Emmanuel skirted the ledge and approached the shelter, sure that this was wh
ere Philani the gardener had hidden away after disappearing on Friday night. He hadn’t run far enough.
“This is where he lay covered in the branches.” Shabalala crouched close to the spent fire. “This is the place he died. Lying on his back.”
A few tablespoonfuls of dried blood stained the rock. Very similar to the discreet pool found under Amahle’s body.
“Let’s check his lower back for injuries.” Emmanuel returned to the corpse. Deep lacerations made by tearing beaks crisscrossed the man’s spine and shoulders. There might be a small puncture wound on the skin somewhere but finding it would take a detailed examination: yet another job for Dr. Daniel Zweigman.
“Died over there. Placed out here in the open for the vultures to devour,” Emmanuel said. “Make sense of that for me, Detective.”
“I can think of only one reason for the four Zulu men to uncover the body and bring it onto the rock. They wanted this man to be found.”
Thunder rolled and the birds in the trees raised a chorus. Lizards and ants scurried into cracks and crevices. The rain came down, first in fat lazy drops and then in a lashing torrent. Shabalala and Emmanuel raced to the shelter and crouched under the rock like cavemen. They stayed quiet for a long while, content to watch the power of the storm on the landscape. Tridents of lightning sliced the sky, illuminating the treetops and the far valley.
Emmanuel shook raindrops from the brim of his hat and said, “You’re right, Shabalala. The only logical reason for leaving the body out like bait was because the men wanted to draw attention to the location of the murder. The question is, why?”
Shabalala pointed to brush marks raked across the loose sand in the shelter. “Whoever killed the man wiped their tracks from the scene. They did not want to be found but the men did not try to hide what they had done with the body.”
“Like pointing a finger and saying, Come and see what’s happened but we’re not responsible.”
“Yebo,” Shabalala agreed. “That is what I think.”
“The motive for attracting attention could be selfish. Someone got to Philani before Mandla and his soldiers and they want the guilty party found and punished. They’ve got no leads of their own so they’ve handed the job over to us,” Emmanuel said. “Do you think the Durban Detective Branch called Mandla and told him that hopeless cases are our speciality?”
Shabalala laughed softly. It was the best self-defense for a detective surrounded by vultures and decomposing human remains.
The rain continued to lash the hillside. Thunder boomed and spectacular rods of lightning forked across the mountaintops. From the damp ground rose the scent of Africa after the rains: a mix of dust, crushed leaves and clean rivers cutting through open veldt. What Emmanuel’s mother had described as “the smell of heaven in the morning.”
Within minutes the storm dissipated and the lightning faded. Birdsong filled the silent woods and the world was fresher, greener than before the rains.
“We need to find the nearest farmhouse and phone the murder in to Roselet.” Emmanuel stood up and brushed creases from his trouser legs. “If Bagley’s available we’ll request backup to get the body off the mountain and to Zweigman for examination.”
A big if. Instinct told Emmanuel that Constable Bagley and his native police were still out in the countryside and would be for hours yet. There was no way that he and Shabalala could transport the corpse over rough terrain without help.
“There will not be much of him left in one or two hours.” Shabalala motioned to a string of vultures gathered in the branches of a yellowwood tree. They’d fly away if chased and come back just as quickly. Time was their ally. All they had to do was wait.
“Christ above . . .” Emmanuel knew what had to be done and so did Shabalala, who took a jagged breath to calm his nerves. “I’ll sketch the scene for reference and then we’ll move him back under the shelter.”
Shabalala gathered the discarded branches and pulled them across the ledge. He laid them next to the corpse to make a bush stretcher and waited. Emmanuel finished drawing the crime scene and then scribbled the victim’s approximate height and weight in the margin. At around five-foot-three and between nine and ten stone, the victim was a compact man. Next, Emmanuel added details of the rock shelter, the raked-over footprints and the deliberate exposure of the body, then tucked the writing pad away.
“One moment, please, Sergeant.” Shabalala turned away from the smell and the flies. His broad shoulders hunched and flexed and his breath was labored.
“There’s no hurry.” Emmanuel took the lead. Working quickly and with grim determination, he rolled the man onto the branches and settled his arms across his distended stomach. War was the best training ground for dealing with the dead: malnourished children, pretty girls in tattered dresses and soldiers barely old enough to shave, Emmanuel had seen and buried them all.
“I am ready,” Shabalala said, and turned back to the corpse without being sick.
“Take the right branch, I’ll take the left.” Emmanuel grabbed the thickest limb of the makeshift stretcher and prepared to haul. “Straight to the shelter on the count of three.”
“Yebo.” The Zulu detective grabbed a branch and helped drag the body to the spur of rock.
“In the hollow,” Emmanuel said, and they laid the body in the sandy indentation with the blood spill. Philani’s next journey would be much longer: all the way down the hillside, into a mortuary van or car and into town. It might be the only time the diminutive Zulu had had the luxury of traveling in a motor vehicle. “Let’s cover him and find the nearest telephone.”
They collected fallen branches from the damp undergrowth and re-covered the body. Shabalala found two heavy logs and weighed the branches down to make it harder for the wildcats and jackals to uncover it.
“We can see all the farmhouses from up there, Sergeant. At the top.”
“Not all the white-owned farms have telephones,” Emmanuel said on the slippery climb to the summit. “But the nearest European house will do as a starting point.”
They gained the rise in under five minutes and scanned the valley for whitewashed walls and the glitter of corrugated iron roofs. Smoke from cooking fires rose from kraals and from two European dwellings connected to the main road by narrow access lanes.
“Little Flint Farm.” Shabalala gestured to a sprawl of buildings miles away from their vantage point and then pointed to a smaller homestead, much closer. “That house is the nearest.”
Glimpses of mud-brick walls and a silver roof showed through the dripping trunks of the wild pomegranate trees. Emmanuel led the way along a grass path that brought them to a dirt yard and a homestead. Geese bathed in the mud puddles and a rooster crowed in the world made bright by the rain.
“It doesn’t look promising,” Emmanuel said. “No electricity wires. No generator. And I’m betting no book in the house but the Bible.”
His adopted father was a staunch Afrikaner who viewed modern conveniences as works of the devil. The mean little homestead and the scrappy yard he stood in now triggered memories of days on the sun-blasted veldt and of his stepfather and mother praying through endless cycles of drought, flood and bush fire.
“On the back veranda,” Shabalala said. “There is a person.”
They crossed the sodden ground to the patched-together house. The bathing geese scattered from the puddle, honking loudly. Emmanuel reluctantly stepped across the threshold of a porch at the rear of the house.
A young, tanned white woman with thick black hair held in a single braid bent over the carcass of a gutted springbok. The tip of her bone-handled hunting knife flicked under the animal’s skin with expert precision. Flies swarmed over the pile of intestines thrown to the side of her worktable.
“Who are you?” She stopped working and looked at Emmanuel across the veranda. Her pale green eyes showed mild interest and no fear. A sighted .22 rifle lay within reach of her bloodied hands.
“Police.” Emmanuel took shallow breaths. The
smell of death brought back the memory of the man they’d left concealed under branches.
“Is it illegal to hunt for buck now?” She spoke with a guttural accent. A backwater Afrikaner.
“No.” A clean hole was bored into the animal’s bloody temple; a single shot had brought the buck down. “Your name?”
“Karin Paulus,” she said. “You?”
“Detective Sergeant Cooper from West Street Detective Branch in Durban, and that’s Detective Constable Shabalala. Do you have a telephone I can use?”
Karin was probably only in her early twenties but she looked older and harder than that. If she had grown up in the ritzy suburb of Berea, surrounded by flowers and servants, she might have been beautiful.
“Nearest phone is at the English farm.” Karin went back to work. Her strong hands swiftly stripped away the hide before she inserted the blade into the joints to quarter the carcass. Sweat glistened on her top lip. “Quickest thing is to send Cyrus, our runner, with a message and one of the English can ring through for you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Our car is only half an hour away.”
“That won’t help you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“The. Rain.” She put equal emphasis on both words, as though giving condescending instructions to a native. “It will take an hour, maybe two, for the creek between here and the main road to go down. Cyrus can make it to and from the English in an hour.”
“I see.” They were trapped in this Afrikaner Eden for a few hours longer. Emmanuel retrieved his writing pad and pen. “Where are we exactly?”
“Covenant Farm.” The butchered carcass was piled on one side of the table and the bloody knife was cleaned with a piece of cloth. “My great-great-grandfather settled this land over a hundred years ago, before the war with the British, but the newer people in the valley might not know where we are. I can draw a map.”
Karin’s words contained both pride and resentment. The Paulus family must have wrestled this fertile valley from the Zulus and tilled its soil with only oxen and a plow. Now the English, with their telephones and tractors, owned most of it and the blood and sweat of the Boer pioneers were forgotten.
