Silent Valley

by Malla Nunn

  ‘Inkosi yami, my god.’ Shabalala stumbled back. He made it to the rock edge and threw up over the side, his body convulsed.

  ‘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 labourer. 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 detective 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’s 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 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 post-mortem.’ 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 burned 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 where 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 discrete 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 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-defence 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.

  ‘We need to find the nearest farmhouse and phone the murder into 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 laboured.

  ‘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 h
ad 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 policeman 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 travelling 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 wild cats 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, which brought them to a dirt yard and 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 bushfire.

  ‘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 work table.

  ‘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 springbok 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.’ She 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 it 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 cleaned with a piece of cloth. ‘My great-great grandfather settled this land over a hundred years ago and 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 plough. Now the English, with their telephones and tractors, owned most of it and the blood and sweat of the Boer pioneers were forgotten.

  ‘Would the Roselet station commander know the way?’ Emmanuel asked. He didn’t recall a signpost for Covenant Farm or a track splitting off from the main road.

  ‘Could be.’ Karin sheathed the knife and stuffed one hindquarter of the carcass into a hessian sack. ‘He came out when the thieving started from the house and barn. That was four years ago. No sign of him since.’

  English law was another bitter pill to swallow – for a long time, crimes against Afrikaner families were a lower priority for the mostly English Natal police. As a result, resentment of the British was common among the Boers, but Emmanuel remembered that Nomusa and Chief Matebula had also complained about Bagley’s absence from the valley. This professional neglect might be the reason the anonymous caller had contacted the Durban police rather than the local constable.

  He tore a clean page from his notebook and placed it on the corner of the butcher’s table along with the pen. ‘A map would be good,’ he said.

  Karin drew a rudimentary map, picked it up by one corner and gave it to Emmanuel. Then she lifted the full hessian bag and shoved it in Shabalala’s direction, saying in perfect Zulu, ‘Boy, take this meat to the hut behind the big barn and give it to the workmen. Tell them it’s springbok for the evening pot. Go. Quick.’

  Shabalala grabbed the heavy sack, speechless. Karin crossed the stoep with a crunch of boots and said over her shoulder in English, ‘I’ll get Cyrus.’

  Emmanuel and Shabalala remained rooted to the spot, stunned by the command and by the faultless Zulu used to issue it. Karin did not speak the ‘kitchen kaffir’ used by whites to give basic orders to their servants. Her inflection and pronunciation were perfect. With eyes closed she’d be mistaken for a native.

  ‘Hiya . . .’ Shabalala made a sound of grudging admiration. ‘I will go, Sergeant. The workmen will be waiting for their food.’ He held the dripping sack away from his suit and made for the stoep. A native policeman was still subservient to a white woman.

  ‘While you’re there, ask around about Mr Insurance Policy and see if the workers have anything to say, good or bad, about Amahle. Someone wanted her dead.’

  ‘Yebo.’ Shabalala set out across the muddy yard, keeping to the grassy edge to save his leather shoes from the mud.

  Emmanuel moved away from the bloody table. Impala and springbok were the staple food of his teenage years because his adopted parents couldn’t afford anything else. Even now the memory of eating the gamey meat roasted, dried, fried and stewed made his stomach turn.

  He stepped into the yard, which was ringed by lush green fields and hazy mountains. It was easy to
see why the early Boer settlers believed that God himself had ceded this land to them. The rise and fall of the terrain and the crystal-clear air were divine.

  Karin appeared from behind a low milking shed, a loose-limbed Zulu boy trailing two steps behind her. Emmanuel folded the hand-drawn map into a second piece of paper with a simple message: Immediate help needed. Covenant Farm. On the outside he wrote Ella Reed’s name along with instructions to call the Roselet police station with the message and to verbally describe the map if necessary.

  ‘This is Cyrus.’ Karin motioned the boy forward. ‘He knows the quickest way to the English farm.’

  ‘Baas.’ Cyrus bowed his head in greeting and withdrew from his pocket a stick with a split top. ‘I will return within the hour.’

  ‘My thanks.’ Emmanuel gave the runner the message, which he slotted into the split at the top of the stick for safekeeping. ‘If Miss Ella Reed, the little madam, is not at home you must give this message to the young baas, Thomas Reed.’

  ‘I understand.’ Cyrus wheeled in a half-circle and hit the muddy yard at a run. Within a minute he’d disappeared into the stand of wild pomegranate trees and was gone.

  ‘You know Ella?’ Karin asked and returned to the butcher’s table. She lifted a bucket of salt from the floor, balanced it on a corner and wiped down the wood surface with a dry cloth.

  ‘Not really,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I interviewed her and her brother this morning.’

  ‘About the chief’s daughter?’ Karin unrolled the springbok skin and pegged it to the table. She scraped the blunt edge of her knife over the underside of the fresh skin, removing fat.

  ‘You heard about Amahle?’ Emmanuel asked by way of a prompt. If he had to stand by and watch a hide being dressed, he’d make the minutes count.

  ‘Of course.’ Karin kept scraping. The muscles on her arms and shoulders were strong from physical labour. There was no trace of the pampered white madam about her. ‘The whole valley is talking about that girl.’

  The statement was resentful and intrigued Emmanuel. He decided to persist with this blunt Afrikaner female.