by Malla Nunn
‘Good morning.’ Emmanuel nodded at the maid. ‘We are here to speak with the Reed family. Are they home?’
The maid waved a hand to a circle of wicker chairs on the porch. ‘Please come and sit. I will fetch the baas for you.’
‘It would be better if we talked to all the Reeds, not just the one,’ Emmanuel said and made the shaded porch in four steps. ‘Is the madam inside?’
‘The big madam is resting. The little madam is swimming.’ The maid attempted a smile, gave up and pointed to the outdoor lounge chairs again. ‘Please sit and I will get the baas for you.’
‘Fine, we’ll wait here.’ Emmanuel crossed the polished hardwood floor and sank into a chair with three fat cushions. The maid had a set of instructions to follow and she would not stray from the script.
Shabalala gained the top step with the panting dog at his heel. The maid twisted agile fingers together, flummoxed by the sight of a Zulu dressed in a big baas suit. Workers returning home from the underground mines of Johannesburg insisted that there were black men such as this in the city, but she’d never seen one before.
‘Umm . . .’ Her glance flickered to the lounge chairs, off limits to natives. Next came a check of the front entry, also off limits. The stairs too had to be kept free of loafing gardeners and lazy delivery boys.
‘Go, please.’ Shabalala put the maid out of her misery and leaned against the porch railing, relaxed and easy. ‘I must wait here with my baas, Sergeant Cooper.’
That power arrangement the maid understood: one person to give orders and another to follow them to the letter. She retreated into the house and the slap of running feet echoed in the interior. A rear door opened and then shut. Emmanuel stood up.
‘I don’t like being corralled,’ he said and began circling the porch to the back of the farmhouse. ‘Let’s look around for ourselves.’
‘But the woman said . . .’
‘Don’t worry.’ Emmanuel understood Shabalala’s anxiety. If Reed’s orders were ignored the maid would be the one in trouble. Life was difficult enough for housemaids and garden boys without the police adding extra weight to their shoulders. ‘I’ll make sure the boss knows she did her job and I’m the one to blame. All right?’
Shabalala gave a self-conscious nod and they continued along the wide stone and hardwood porch. Formal gardens flanked the house, planted with rows of white roses, pink madonna lilies and flowering lavender bushes. Untamed bush and wild grass pressed against the perimeter fence.
‘Not bad,’ Emmanuel said when the Reeds’ panoramic landholding came into full view. Green fields sloped to the shores of a silver lake, and beyond that a sandstone escarpment shimmered gold and red in the morning light. A lone swimmer, the little madam, moved through the water with languid overarm strokes. The rear porch was a perfect place to stand with a drink in hand and wonder what the poor people were doing.
‘This man Reed is a white chief,’ Shabalala said.
‘Definitely.’ Emmanuel walked down the rear stairs to a kitchen garden planted with rows of lettuce, tomato and spinach. ‘Let’s hope he’s more helpful than Matebula was.’
Two garden boys in blue overalls and tatty cotton hats pulled weeds from between the crops and talked in low voices. The crunch of footsteps disturbed them and they glanced up. Seeing the two government men, they resumed work with extra vigour.
‘I’ll take English, you take Zulu,’ Emmanuel said quietly to Shabalala before peering over the hip-high fence enclosing the garden. He addressed the eldest of the ‘boys’, a dark-skinned man with a fractured cheekbone that gave his face a jagged, uneven appearance. ‘Where is Mr Reed?’
‘There, ma baas.’ The gardener straightened up and indicated a narrow lane leading to a far-off cattle yard shrouded in dust. The housemaid was almost there, running at a steady pace. ‘At the dipping station.’
Emmanuel touched a finger to his hat in thanks and took the concrete path. An almost physical quiet settled over the gardeners and he slowed till Shabalala and the old dog caught up. ‘Hear that?’ he said.
‘Yebo. They know we are here about Amahle and they are holding their breath.’
‘The way superstitious people do when a funeral hearse passes by or they see a cripple in a wheelchair.’ Emmanuel glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, the ‘boys’ had stopped weeding and stood immobile amid the turned rows of earth, like statues sculpted especially for African gardens.
‘I will come back and try to find out why they are so scared,’ Shabalala said.
The path turned to gravel and then to dirt halfway to the cattle yards. Beyond the yards was the dipping station. A line of black farmworkers clustered along the side of a deep trench filled with chemical wash. The cattle were prodded with sticks through the sluice gates and into the bath till they emerged on the other side, dripping and immune from tick fever.
‘That will be the Reeds,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Looks like father and son.’
Two white men sheltered under the branches of a monkey apple tree, counting the dipped cattle before entering the numbers into individual notebooks. The younger Reed looked up when the maid arrived with her news. He cocked his head to the left, listening, and then dismissed the servant with a flick of his finger. She wheeled full circle and hit the homeward path. Both Reed men followed.
‘Back to the house,’ Emmanuel said. ‘The dipping station isn’t the right place to conduct an interview.’
Sharp whistles and shouts reverberated across the yards and reached all the way to the servants’ quarters and the back veranda. The noise and dust were a good reason for having the meeting on the porch. Maybe the Reeds were not trying to corral the police after all. Emmanuel tried to be more generous; rich and landed did not necessarily mean arrogant and controlling.
‘You’re the detectives from Durban,’ the younger Reed said when he and his father rounded the corner and found Emmanuel and Shabalala standing on the front porch.
‘Detective Sergeant Cooper and Detective Constable Shabalala from West Street CID,’ Emmanuel said, wondering how the young farmer guessed they were from Durban and not from Pietermaritzburg, the closest major town to the Drakensberg foothills.
‘I’m Thomas Reed and this is my father, Ian Reed.’
A quick glance confirmed that father and son were real farmers, with dust on their skin and dirt under their fingernails. With an enormous piece of fertile land underfoot and a sprawling house high on a hill, the Reed men were highly enough placed in the world to not give a damn about appearances.
‘Welcome. Welcome.’ Reed senior squeezed his fingers around Emmanuel’s outstretched hand, a half-smile playing on his lips. He was in his early seventies with bushy grey eyebrows and a vague expression in his hazel eyes as if he’d forgotten some important fact and was trying to retrieve it.
‘You’ve met Tubby, my eldest.’ Ian Reed held on to Emmanuel’s hand. ‘He drives the car now. I sit in the back.’
‘Nobody calls me Tubby any more, Dad. It’s Thomas.’ Young Reed touched his father on the shoulder. ‘Go sit down and add up the numbers on your list before we dip the next batch of cattle. There’s still a lot of work to be done.’
‘Of course, yes.’ Ian Reed released his death grip on Emmanuel’s fingers and squinted down at the grubby notebook in his hand. Scribbled numbers, some half-formed, bled off the sides of the paper. ‘Sun-up to sundown, a farmer’s work is never done.’
‘That’s right, Dad. Sit over there and finish your calculations.’ Thomas physically turned the old man around and pointed to a wicker chair facing the driveway. ‘I’ll come just now, okay.’
Ian Reed wandered off, gripping the notebook as if it was a life preserver keeping him afloat in a vast and boundless ocean.
‘Five minutes, Detective,’ his son said. ‘We have work to do.’
Thomas Reed was dressed in khaki but the smooth English accent and the dismissive manner were a sure marker of a South African king of the veldt. Under the dust and sweat Em
manuel smelled a posh public-school education and elevated social connections.
‘Just a few questions,’ Emmanuel said. ‘How long did Amahle Matebula work for your family?’
Thomas shrugged. ‘Hard to say. She was in and around the farm from the time she was a kid.’
‘There were no problems with her that you know of?’ Emmanuel fished out his notebook, eager to fill in the half-empty pages. ‘No fights or bad blood between her and the other staff, for example?’
Thomas motioned to the vast acres merging with the gentle hills. ‘We don’t have a lot of trouble on Little Flint, Detective Cooper. Our boys get a new set of clothing and a new pair of sandshoes at Christmas. At Easter they get double provisions of sugar and flour. The housemaids also.’
‘Good to know.’ Emmanuel glanced at his blank page. Thomas’s response aggravated him. A young girl was dead and they could be discussing farming equipment for all the emotion he showed. ‘So, Amahle Matebula was a regular house servant who didn’t stand out in any way.’
‘We employ fifteen, maybe twenty natives on Little Flint.’ Thomas worked a fingernail over a seam of dirt on his thumb. ‘From my end, none of the servants are remarkable so long as they do their jobs right.’
That was country-fresh bullshit. Amahle was exquisite. Any man with a pulse would have noticed her crossing the yard or hanging up the laundry. Then again, Thomas Reed might be one of those rare white men so caught up in the differences between the races that they showed no interest in black or brown girls. Emmanuel didn’t trust those men.
‘Any idea who killed Amahle?’ he asked.
‘None whatsoever,’ Thomas said and offered nothing more.
Shabalala moved back a pace and fixed his eyes on the peaked horizon. Frustration made his face appear carved from stone. If Amahle had been white, the farmer would be crying over himself at the loss of one so special.
‘Constable . . .’ Emmanuel sensed the tension in Shabalala. Standing by while Thomas shrugged off questions took effort, but there had to be a reason for his evasiveness – and for his not once referring to Amahle by name. ‘Get statements from the gardeners and from the housemaids. Find out who was the last person to see Amahle on Friday night. Same goes for Philani Dlamini.’
Thomas Reed frowned, the ingrained dirt on his thumb suddenly less important. ‘Philani’s not here. He didn’t show up for work on Saturday and again today.’
‘Is that unusual?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘Very,’ Thomas said. ‘He’s one of my best boys. He turns up rain or shine.’
‘See if Amahle and Philani left the farm together,’ Emmanuel said to Shabalala.
‘I will ask, Sergeant.’ The Zulu detective walked to the rear of the big house, his steps slowed to allow the old dog to keep up.
Emmanuel looked at Reed. ‘Did any of the workmen take a fancy to Amahle and have to be warned off?’
‘I have no interest in the love life of kaffir girls.’ The younger Reed turned to the circle of wicker chairs, ending the interview. ‘Come, Dad. It’s time to dip the next batch.’
His father got up and walked out to meet him, the notebook now scrunched to scrap paper in his fist. ‘Is she coming back?’ Ian Reed whispered to his son.
‘Who?’ Thomas frowned.
‘The one you were just talking about. The chief’s daughter.’
Thomas steered the old man away from Emmanuel. ‘Back to work now, Dad,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’
‘If he comes home from school and she’s not here, there’ll be trouble,’ Ian Reed muttered. ‘Your mother won’t like it. Not one bit. Not after last time.’
‘Quiet now, Pa.’ Thomas gently prodded his father around the corner and Emmanuel lost the remainder of the conversation. No matter. He’d heard enough to know that Amahle Matebula was more than just a housemaid. He waited for Thomas’s response to the revealing comments.
‘My father isn’t all there,’ Thomas said when he reappeared solo from the rear of the house. ‘He mixes things up in his mind, gets his wires crossed. You can’t take anything he says seriously.’
Especially when it concerns a dead black girl, Emmanuel figured. While old man Reed was clearly losing the thread, there was enough substance in his words to have drained the colour from Thomas’s suntanned face.
‘One more thing.’ Emmanuel ignored the tight lips and the tense shoulders encased in khaki. ‘I’d like to speak to your mother if she’s available.’
‘Not today,’ Thomas said. ‘She suffers from migraine headaches and needs bed rest. Feel free to telephone tomorrow morning. She might be better by then.’
Thomas Reed was so cool, it was almost as if he’d practised his responses and knew them by heart. Every question was answered but nothing of value was revealed. The old man’s ramblings were the only spontaneous moment in the entire interview.
‘Thanks for your time, Mr Reed. I know you have work to do.’ Emmanuel cut the young farmer loose. He’d find another way into the family sanctum. ‘I’ll wait here till Constable Shabalala has finished collecting statements.’
Young Reed hesitated, weighing up the risks of leaving a policeman loose on the property. ‘Farms are dangerous,’ he said. ‘Don’t wander off the paths or into the fields, Detective Cooper. For your own safety.’
‘I won’t.’ Emmanuel returned Thomas’s hard stare. Lying without blinking was a skill he’d mastered at boarding school. ‘I’m a city man born and bred.’ Reed accepted the assurance and strode to the rear steps.
The second component to being a successful liar was patience. Emmanuel gave the self-possessed farmer a full five-minute head start before tailing him. Thomas was under the shade of the monkey apple tree by the time Emmanuel had circled the porch. Movement caught his attention and he stood for a moment and watched. A rangy Zulu man crossed the dusty yard with the loping stride of a hunter. He stopped a foot or so in front of the young white baas and held out his empty hands in apology. Thomas moved closer, index finger pointed, body tight as a fist. The cool farmer was gone, replaced by a furious big baas giving orders. The Zulu man set off again, heading for the hills. It looked like he’d been sent back on the trail of something or someone.
‘Excuse me.’ Emmanuel stopped a dark-skinned maid with a wicker basket of dirty laundry balanced on her head. She too wore a pair of blue sandshoes without socks. Reed wasn’t blowing smoke about the generous handouts to the help. ‘Can you point the way to the lake?’
‘There, inkosi.’ The woman’s voice was quiet, her face turned to indicate a path flanked by white posts. ‘That way leads to the lake.’
‘Thanks.’ Emmanuel let her go without further questions and set off. The Little Flint garden boys and Shabalala stood talking in the kitchen garden. Shabalala ignored Emmanuel completely, a cue to all the servants that the European detective was no friend. Zulu, Pondo, English and Afrikaners alike believed that members of their own tribe were more trustworthy than outsiders. That bone-deep belief might work in Shabalala’s favour and get the gardeners talking.
Good luck, Emmanuel thought. Up till this point at least, straight answers about Amahle were in short supply no matter who you asked.
*
A wooden jetty jutted out from a small boathouse and straddled the silver water. Reflections of sky and mountain rippled in the wake of the woman plying the lake with powerful strokes. Emmanuel reached the shore moments before the ‘little madam’ emerged, exhausted and panting from her swim.
She moved to the boathouse, dried her hands on a towel and then dug a packet of cigarettes and matches from behind a fishing box. Emmanuel watched her light up and draw deep, savouring the tobacco with an almost post-coital enjoyment.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ she said and exhaled.
‘Just giving you time to enjoy your cigarette.’ He walked across the wooden planks. ‘It looked like you needed it.’
‘Does my brother know you’re talking to me?’
‘No.’ For
some reason he suspected that fact might work in his favour.
‘Didn’t think so.’ She held out the crumpled packet. ‘Want one?’
‘Not right now.’
‘I thought all police detectives smoked.’
‘Most but not all.’ He presented his ID card, knowing she’d barely glance at it. Girls with blue blood and family money, even those with plain faces and sturdy limbs, divided the world into two groups: people who counted and those who did not. Detectives were servants in suits – useful but still not equal.
‘I’m Ella.’ She flicked ash onto the lake, drawing a fish to the surface. ‘You’re here about the murder.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Amahle’s death must have been a shock.’
Ella shrugged and droplets of moisture ran down her bare arms. ‘If it was going to happen to any of the house girls it was going to happen to her.’
‘Why’s that?’ Emmanuel kept his tone casual, almost uninterested. In Ella Reed’s world Amahle was a marginal entity, a housemaid who’d come to a bad end. All madams, big or little, kept mental lists of their servants’ shortcomings. He was happy to hear every one of Ella’s gripes.
‘For starters, she had everything. A job in a nice house, food to eat and all the native men fighting over her.’ Ella pulled off her swimming cap and shook free a coil of lank brown hair. ‘Other girls would have been happy. Not her.’
‘A complainer,’ Emmanuel prompted.
‘Ja,’ Ella said. ‘She was always making escape plans. The Kamberg Valley wasn’t good enough. Or big enough.’
‘Fancy that.’ Emmanuel caught the resentment in Ella’s voice. Holding down a job in a European house was supposed to be the apex of a native girl’s dreams. Steady employment, leftover food, hand-me-down clothes . . . to want for more was greedy. He looked across the shimmering water to the sandstone escarpment and said, ‘What place could be better than this?’
‘Exactly.’ Ella ground her cigarette butt against the jetty railing. ‘I went to Durban Girls High and I said to her, “Cities are dirty and dangerous. Not like here in the valley where things are clean and peaceful.”’
