by Malla Nunn
‘Come.’ Shabalala shepherded Nomusa and her daughter towards the passage. They crossed paths with a lushly proportioned female, who came out of the great hut carrying a carved wooden stool and a rolled cowhide. The newcomer’s ochre-stained hair was brushed high into a stiff crown and adorned with shells and porcupine quills.
‘My fifth wife,’ Matebula said as the woman sidled barefoot across the dirt circle, her hips swaying widely enough to knock a child to the ground. Amahle’s little sister clutched the dresses tighter and narrowed her eyes like a cat ready to unleash its claws. Nomusa cast the woman a cold glance. Matebula’s wives were rivals, not friends.
‘Great chief . . .’ The fifth wife unrolled the black and white cowhide in the shade of the umdoni tree and placed the stool at the very centre. A dried leaf fluttered onto the hide and she flicked it away.
‘Tell me, policeman from the city . . .’ the chief settled onto the stool, feet apart, chest thrust out like a pigeon, ‘how will you compensate for the loss of my daughter?’
‘The police and the courts will exact a payment for the crime,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Whoever killed her will be found and punished.’
Matebula grunted. ‘These courts are far away in Pietermaritzburg and Durban. They cannot know the depth of my loss.’ The chief’s words did not contain a shred of genuine emotion. He was talking about money. A beautiful daughter of marriageable age had been killed before lobola, a bride price, could be paid.
The fifth wife cooed agreement from where she’d sunk down on her knees at the chief’s feet. She simmered for her husband. She was still young enough to enjoy her favoured status and did not yet understand that another nubile girl would, in time, replace her. Matebula clamped a hand on his knee and massaged the flesh under his palm.
‘How much was Amahle worth?’ Emmanuel asked, curious to gauge the depth of Matebula’s callousness.
‘Chief Mashanini from Umkomazi offered twenty cows. Not ordinary ones. A fat herd with long horns and speckled skins.’
‘Did you accept his offer?’
‘Of course, yes. Amahle was getting old and the price for her was fair.’ The chief pursed his lips. ‘Now I will get nothing.’ His wife made a sympathetic sound and shook her head.
The mixture of self-pity and greed fascinated Emmanuel. Matebula’s world ended at his fingertips.
‘Amahle was happy to marry and move to Umkomazi?’ he asked. Not far from this kraal missionaries taught girls to read and write and do sums, preparing their souls for heaven and their minds for life in the twentieth century. Marriage was no longer the only option for a Zulu girl.
‘Happy?’ Matebula grappled with the word, trying to find its relevance. ‘She was satisfied to do her duty to me.’
Maybe, Emmanuel thought. Marrying to escape was common in every racial group: indeed he’d often suspected his own ex-wife Angela had chosen him as the quickest way to break free of her overbearing father and her defeated mother. But life as a detective’s wife was not the peaceful refuge Angela had been looking for. They divorced when it became clear to both of them that their marriage was a way station, not a sanctuary. Amahle might have decided that life under the chief’s rule was worth ditching.
Shabalala returned, stepping up to Emmanuel’s left.
‘Your daughter had no admirers? No-one she fought with?’ Emmanuel asked.
The chief heaved a sigh, bored by the question. ‘Amahle spent much time with the white people on their farm but here at the kraal she was modest and silent,’ he said.
The fifth wife leaned back, her shoulder almost touching Matebula’s thigh, and whispered softly in Zulu. ‘There was one such man.’ The chief followed his wife’s prompt. ‘Philani Dlamini. He is a garden boy at the farm where my daughter worked. He told many people that he was betrothed to Amahle.’
‘Was he?’ Emmanuel wrote the name on a blank page. The first and only suspect in the investigation so far.
‘Never.’ The word was dismissive. ‘This man has a herd of five cows and he is not a chief.’
‘Where does Philani live?’ Emmanuel asked.
Another urgent whisper came from the fifth wife, who kept her eyes cast down to the cowhide, the model of a good Zulu wife.
‘Near the Dutchman’s farm.’ The chief pointed over the thorn fence to a mountain dotted with orange aloe blooms. Shabalala marked the direction and the travel distance at a glance. ‘But Dlamini is not there. His mother has not seen him for two days.’
‘How do you know that?’ Emmanuel asked.
A small bump of the shoulder against the chief’s thigh acted as a warning from the fifth wife to take care. Matebula shrugged and kept quiet.
‘Where is Mandla?’ Emmanuel asked. ‘We’d like to speak with him and his impi.’
Matebula sat up higher on the stool. ‘My son does not have an impi. Everything in this kraal belongs to me.’
‘Excuse us, great chief.’ Shabalala stepped forward with his shoulders dipped to decrease his size and presence. ‘We wish only to warn your son and your men that searching for Amahle’s killer is a job for the police and the police only.’
‘Why should my impi withdraw when the police stay in the town and never set foot on this land?’ asked Matebula.
‘Because,’ Emmanuel said, ‘if the impi continue to threaten witnesses, the chief of police will send more policemen to this valley, enough to trample the cornfields and outnumber the rocks.’
‘The truth is spoken,’ Shabalala said to emphasise the point. Black-against-black violence rarely caught the eye of the authorities but if the trouble spilled over to white-owned farms, Matebula could expect his world, and his authority, to come under threat.
‘I will talk to my men when they return,’ Matebula said.
After you’ve rolled your fifth wife, had a nap and smoked another marijuana cigarette, thought Emmanuel. It was time to move on with the information they had obtained. He pocketed his notebook, happy for the one name in it.
‘Stay well, great chief,’ Shabalala said, taking up the burden of good manners when Emmanuel turned to leave. A flock of tiny red birds flew overhead and settled in the branches of the umdoni tree, above the chief. The crimson flash caught Emmanuel’s eye and he glanced back over his shoulder.
The fifth wife remained nestled close to the chief’s thigh but her gaze was no longer on the dried cowhide but on the two detectives leaving the yard. She looked away but not fast enough to hide the calculating expression on her striking face. Not so naive then and probably brighter than her husband by fifty watts. Yet Matebula would go to his grave believing that she was soft and yielding and born to please.
As they walked through the kraal, Emmanuel asked Shabalala, ‘What do you think of the great chief?’
‘Unworthy of the title.’
‘Can he rein Mandla in?’
‘No chance.’
‘Thought not.’ Emmanuel paused outside a hut and noticed Nomusa and her daughter seated in its front yard. They were hunched over a bowl of brown lentils, picking stones and other impurities from the dried food with their fingers.
Nomusa lifted her head like an impala testing the air for the scent of a predator and saw Emmanuel and Shabalala standing at the boundary of her home. ‘Go,’ she said to them, and shuffled her child back into the hut. ‘Please, go from this place.’
Emmanuel moved towards the small break in the stick fence outside the hut. He wasn’t happy leaving Nomusa here, battered and grieving. A palm touched his shoulder.
‘Sergeant,’ Shabalala said. ‘You must not walk past the fence. Things will go worse for the chief’s wife if you do. This is not her family kraal. It belongs to her husband and his clan.’
Shabalala was right. Long after Amahle’s murder was written up in a case file and handed to a judge in robes and a wig, Nomusa would still be here, living in the shadow of the great chief.
Emmanuel turned and walked away. He remembered his own mother, injured and hiding in the dark. He cut
off the memory. He hadn’t been able to save her either.
*
Five minutes out from the Matebula kraal, with Shabalala scouting the way across a rocky field covered in mountain aloes, Emmanuel sensed they were being followed. A small shape darted from boulder to boulder and slipped behind clumps of sagebrush in an attempt to stay undetected.
‘It is the little sister,’ Shabalala said without turning around. ‘She has been with us since we left the chief’s kraal.’
‘Let’s sit down to rest for a minute,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Give her a chance to catch up and talk.’
Even with Shabalala as the only witness, Nomusa had added nothing to what she’d said in the yard of Matebula’s hut. Amahle was a good girl. She was loved. She had no boyfriends and no enemies. The cardboard box with the lipstick had come as a surprise to her mother.
Shabalala stopped at a grassy area between two large boulders. They sat down and waited. A breeze lifted the scent of wet rocks from the valley floor. Emmanuel took off his hat and set it down, letting the air cool him.
Stones skittered down the rock behind the detectives and a girl’s voice said, ‘Do not go to the Dlamini kraal. Philani is not there.’
Emmanuel turned slowly and saw Amahle’s little sister crouched in the rocky field like a sprite. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.
She shook her head, refusing to give the information: smart move for a child.
‘How do you know the gardener is not home?’ he said.
‘His mother came to the chief yesterday morning and said her son did not come home from work at Little Flint Farm on Friday night. He is missing.’
Shabalala picked up a stone from the grass and examined it closely. ‘Could it be that Philani’s mother is not telling the truth to protect her son?’
‘Mandla and the impi went to the mother’s kraal.’ The girl twisted her glass bracelets one way and then the other around her wrist: a nervous habit. ‘They did not find Philani even after breaking the hut apart and scattering the goats and chickens.’
‘Amahle knew Philani Dlamini?’ Emmanuel nudged the conversation back to the dead girl. That Mandla was a major problem for the investigation he already knew.
‘They worked for baas Reed at Little Flint Farm. Philani tended the garden and Amahle tended the white women in the big house.’
Shabalala smiled encouragement. ‘Philani and Amahle were friends.’
The little sister stopped twisting the bracelets and said, ‘Philani followed her up the mountains and down again and she did not chase him away.’
Walking together over mountains was love in a child’s mind. Emmanuel thought she might be right. He took his notebook and pen from his jacket and scribbled the word ‘flowers’ next to Philani’s name. Ordinary Zulus did not bring flowers to the dead but a Zulu man employed by white farmers as a gardener might have adopted the European habit.
‘Tell me about this chief from Umkomazi,’ Shabalala said. Emmanuel had filled him in on the bride price and the chief’s bitter disappointment. ‘He is rich and handsome, I’m sure.’
‘He is fat and slow and smells of cow dung,’ she replied flatly. ‘The great chief agreed to the marriage because he is greedy and not fit to work in the gold mines in Jo’burg. Amahle had no love for him.’
‘Huh . . .’ Shabalala was impressed by the blunt assessment. At near eleven years old she could already tell the wheat from the chaff and silver from tin. His wife, too, told things as she saw them. ‘Perhaps there was another for whom Amahle had love but that she kept hidden from the chief and from your mother?’
The girl looked away and began to spin the bracelets around her slim wrist, faster and faster. Emmanuel took his cue from Shabalala and focused on the stones peppering the field. They might each have been sitting alone in the grass and listening to the chirp of crickets.
‘There was one other,’ the girl said. ‘A man with a strange name.’
‘Mmm . . . ?’ Shabalala breathed out, keeping the conversation going without asking a direct question.
‘Mr Insurance Policy,’ the little sister said in English.
Black Africans adopted names from a rich array of sources. Emmanuel knew a juvenile delinquent called Justice, a housemaid named Radio and a shoeshine boy with the evocative moniker Midnight Express Train. Every name was linked to a real story, an actual event that had shaped their lives. Where had an Insurance Policy sprung from in an isolated valley connected by a network of dirt paths? This bastion of shimmering cliffs and meandering rivers was surely one of the few places on earth that travelling insurance salesmen had not penetrated.
‘Did you ever meet this Mr Insurance Policy?’ he asked.
‘No.’ The girl shook her head. ‘Amahle mentioned him one time. Never again.’
‘Was it in the winter or now in the spring time that she spoke of him?’ Emmanuel asked. In the country, the seasons told the time. At the turn of each season, the men working in the gold mines of Jo’burg returned home to plough the fields or hand out modern marvels like aluminium cooking pots, lengths of brightly printed cotton, and cash.
‘It was on the day the Dutch farmer burned the edges of the field by the river. I remember that my sister came home after dark and our mother was angry with her.’
Farmers lit firebreaks in winter. The memory of stinging smoke and black ash embedded in his skin and hair for weeks was still vivid in Emmanuel’s mind. Tilling the fields and harvesting crops for six years alongside his adopted father had destroyed any romantic notion he might ever have had of living off the land.
‘I understand,’ Shabalala said. ‘Your sister was with this Mr Insurance Policy and paid no attention to the sun going down. That is why she came home late.’
‘No, inkosi.’ The girl’s lips pursed to a perfect rosebud. ‘Amahle was left behind in the town by accident and it took many hours to find and return her to the kraal. It was on that night when she couldn’t fall asleep that she whispered his name and said, “He is the one that I have waited for . . .”’
Emmanuel leaned closer to the girl and initiated eye contact. ‘Tell me everything that Amahle said about this man, little sister.’
‘Amahle did not speak of men often. She said they were like stepping stones, to be skipped over lightly until you reached the other side of the river.’
It was deeply cynical attitude for a teenage girl and one that might have led to her death. Emmanuel knew that being ‘skipped over’ by a young beauty was enough of a motive for murder for some men.
‘Did your sister say what was waiting for her on the other side of the river?’ Shabalala asked.
‘Life,’ the little girl said.
Twigs snapped and stones rolled loose from the approach path as a calf stopped to nibble grass. The noise startled the girl, who was up and flying across the field before the word ‘wait’ left Emmanuel’s mouth. He stood and watched her weave between the orange mountain aloes like a little springbok, the outline of her body soon absorbed into the landscape. Fleet as she was, she’d never be able to outrun the future. In three or four years she’d likely be married off in exchange for a herd of long-horned cattle.
‘I can catch her but . . .’ Shabalala cleared his throat, uncomfortable with having to explain his lack of action.
‘Let her be.’ Emmanuel adjusted the rim of his hat. ‘She risked a lot by leaving the kraal without her parents’ permission. I don’t want her punished for helping us.’
He did not want her punished either for having the heart of a lion – just like the girl his mother had requested.
*
They swung by the Dlamini kraal and found a ransacked hut and two white-haired goats nibbling corn spilled from a broken clay jar. Chickens roamed the yard and a skinny cat dozed in the afternoon sun. Philani Dlamini and his mother were long gone.
Emmanuel reread his notes out loud. ‘The mother told Chief Matebula that Philani didn’t come home from work on Friday. That’s the same night Amahle went missing
. It can’t be a coincidence.’
‘We must find the gardener before Mandla and the impi do,’ Shabalala said. ‘They think this man is guilty of murder and they will kill him.’
‘What if he pays a fine of twenty cows?’
‘It is too late for an exchange of cattle, Sergeant,’ Shabalala said. ‘Only blood washes blood.’
‘Great,’ Emmanuel muttered. Was there one country, just one on Earth, that did not demand blood for blood? Before striking out for the path leading down to the river he paused to study the terrain. A deep valley cut through a string of towering mountains covered in alpine grass and native forest. The sky stretched in endless blue over Mandla’s vast backyard.
Two detectives looking for one gardener in all that landscape and they were getting tired. Emmanuel hoped Philani was getting tired too.
SIX
Emmanuel dressed at dawn in a shaft of pale yellow light. Clouds the colour of India ink broke the crests of the far mountains. Birds sang from the branches of the jacaranda trees in the hotel garden, too late to wake him.
He left his jacket hanging in the stained pine wardrobe with mothballs piled in the corners and took the stairs to a side exit. A nightwatchman in a long overcoat and gumboots shone his torch across the garden and the patio. Emmanuel slowed and let the beam find him. He raised his hand in greeting and got a ‘Morning, ma baas’ from the watchman.
Emmanuel thought of Shabalala, billeted for the night and for the remainder of the investigation three miles north of town in the black location. The native branch detective had probably already left the back room of the cement-block dwelling with its one window and outdoor toilet, and would be making his way to Roselet. By black location standards, the local shop owner’s house where Shabalala was staying was deluxe but it was many rungs below Roselet’s ‘Europeans-only’ guesthouse and eight-room faux-Tudor hotel.
Shabalala did not complain. He thanked Emmanuel for the lift when dropped off at the house late yesterday afternoon and declined a pick-up for this morning. How many words and thoughts were sealed in the Zulu policeman’s mouth because all that was required in the presence of whites was a ‘Yes, ma baas’, ‘No, ma baas’, and ‘Thank you, ma baas’?
