by Malla Nunn
“Like you cracked the suspect at the station?” Emmanuel said. A Security Branch officer he might be, but Lieutenant Lapping had superiors to report to, generals and colonels hungry for a victory against enemies of the state.
Lieutenant Lapping blinked hard, twice, then got to his feet and strode to the doorway. He put his hand out and Dickie placed a brown paper envelope in it with a look that sent a chill down Emmanuel’s back.
What the hell did they have? It was good. It had to be. Keep calm, he told himself. You’ve been through a war. You’ve seen things that killed other men and you survived. What was there to be scared of?
“You know what’s in here?” Piet held the envelope at eye level.
“I don’t have a clue.” Emmanuel found that he sounded calm despite the sick rolling of his stomach. What the hell was in the envelope? Had they somehow gotten a new background report on him in the last fourteen hours?
Piet opened the envelope and extracted two photos, which he held up with schoolmarmish precision. “Tell me, Cooper, have you seen these images before?”
There wasn’t time to slip the mask of indifference back into place. He tried to make sense of it, to see all the angles at the same time, but he couldn’t get past the stark black-and-white images of Davida Ellis, first with her legs spread-eagled and then stretched out on the bed like a cat waiting to be stroked. His copies were halfway to Jo’burg, safely packed under a layer of pink plastic rollers in Delores Bunton’s luggage. Unless…Unless the Security Branch had somehow intercepted his courier.
“So…” Piet ground his cigarette out with the heel of his shoe. “You have seen them before.”
“Where did you get them?”
“We found them exactly where you left them. Under your pillow.”
Was Piet telling the truth or just trying to catch him out in a lie? He had no idea and that was just the way the Security Branch boys liked it. Until he knew exactly where the photographs came from, he was going to play for time and information.
“What were you doing in my room?” he asked. “You looked through it the other day and didn’t find anything.”
“Some fresh information came to light.” Piet signaled to Dickie, who took the photos, but remained standing by his partner’s side. “Information concerning your personal tastes.”
Dickie made a tutting sound and leered at the images of the woman: “That’s two laws broken right there, Cooper. If it was a white woman or a light-skinned one, we might have turned a blind eye, but this…this is serious business.”
“Where did you get the information from?” Emmanuel asked. It seemed that both Dickie and Piet were playing the personal angle. They were tying the photographs to his alleged perversions and not to the homicide investigation. Good. That meant the bundle of photos he’d sent off on the “Intundo Express” bus this morning were safe. The feeling of triumph passed quickly. He was still in hot water: caught in possession of banned materials.
“Who told us about the photos, Dickie?”
“A little bird.” Dickie replied as if the expression were something he’d just made up off the top of his head.
Emmanuel glanced at the photos. If his copies were safely on their way to van Niekerk in Jo’burg, then these images must have come from the safe in the captain’s stone hut. It was the only logical explanation, and all the connections he’d made this morning pointed to the thief being the captain’s youngest son.
“Was it pretty boy Louis who told you where to find the photos?” Emmanuel kept his eye on Dickie to see if the name and the description triggered a reaction. What he got wasn’t a subtle clenching of the jawline but a teeth-baring snarl.
“How you can even mention his name after what you—”
“Dickie!” Piet interrupted. “I know this kind of activity upsets you but you must remove your personal feelings from the work. We are miners and it is our job to find the seam of gold in the dirt. You cannot let the dirt bother you.”
“Activity”? The word stuck with Emmanuel. What activity would upset Dickie enough to warrant professional counseling from his superior officer in the middle of questioning? The answer made Emmanuel sit up straight. How deep was the hole the angelic-looking boy had dug for him?
“Louis says I molested him?”
“What exactly are you doing here in the shed, Cooper?”
“Gathering evidence.” Emmanuel stemmed the rising panic. The blond boy had set a stunning trap baited with banned images and topped it off with an accusation guaranteed to outrage every red-blooded male in Jacob’s Rest.
Dickie snorted. “A pervert looking for a pervert. That’s a good one.”
“Go back and stand with the others,” Piet instructed his partner with a flex of his knotted shoulder muscles. “I’m too tired to question Sergeant Cooper and instruct you in the finer points of the work.”
“But—”
Piet gave Dickie a look that sent him lumbering back to his corner, from where he glared at Emmanuel as if it were his fault that he’d been dismissed from the action.
“Well, which one is it?” Emmanuel asked. “Do I enjoy looking at dark girls or chasing white boys?”
“They’re not mutually exclusive. You could have used the photographs to stimulate the interest of a boy who would otherwise find you unattractive. You get my drift?”
“Why the hell would I choose to show an Afrikaner boy photographs of a coloured woman in order to arouse him? What kind of sense does that make?”
“Maybe those are the only photographs you could get hold of.”
“We’re policemen. Either one of us could get pictures of a white girl doing everything except fucking a gorilla. The cops and the criminals always have the best stuff, you know that.”
“You’re right.” Piet patted his shirt pocket and extracted a squashed cigarette pack. “But that doesn’t take Louis Pretorius’s complaint away. A jury won’t think about the finer points, like the race of the woman in the photos. The fact that it’s a coloured woman will only get you more prison time.”
Why had Louis exposed himself so openly? He must have known that planting the photos would finger him as the person who’d stolen the evidence from the stone hut and yet he’d done it anyway.
“Did Louis swear out a formal complaint against me in writing?” Emmanuel asked. How serious was Louis about keeping him hemmed down and out of action?
“Yes.”
“Show it to me,” Emmanuel said. The Security Branch men were in the middle of breaking the biggest case of their careers. Where did they find the time to pen a formal report on the matter of an English pervert attempting to corrupt an Afrikaner country boy? Small potatoes compared to getting a confession from a Communist Party member tied to the premeditated murder of a police captain married to Frikkie van Brandenburg’s daughter.
“You don’t get to ask us for anything,” Piet said.
“Arrest me and charge me,” Emmanuel said clearly, to make sure there was no confusion. He didn’t believe they had more than Louis’s verbal complaint, and that wasn’t enough to hold a fellow white policeman behind bars. Right at this moment he had better things to do than provide a break for the exhausted Security Branch officers.
“You know what I think?” Piet said. “I think the file you stole had the dirt on you and your pal van Niekerk, on your mutual affection and your shared interest in boys. Penny to a pound, that’s the reason he tipped you off about it.”
“Why don’t you call district headquarters and get them to tell you exactly what was in the file, or is it a bad time to admit you lost the pages? No confession and no file. Your superiors will be pleased to hear that.”
There was movement at the door and Dickie shuffled aside to let the moonfaced policeman in the badly cut suit into the shed.
“Ja?” Piet gave the newcomer permission to speak.
“It’s been an hour, Lieutenant. You said to find you and alert you of the time.”
Piet checked his watch wi
th a weary shake of his head. Where had the minutes gone? “You are free to leave, Cooper, but before you go, I should warn you about something.”
Emmanuel waited for the threat. He wasn’t about to play second fiddle in Piet’s grand orchestration of events by asking him to specify the nature of the warning.
“Louis came to the station and complained to his brother about your…attentions. You’re lucky we were there to stop Paul Pretorius and the rest from coming after you straightaway. I can’t make any promises regarding your safety because we have more important things to attend to at the moment.”
The Security Branch officers regained some of their spark. They were letting him go because he was a minor impediment to the smooth running of their investigation. An hour to shake the tree for the information about the missing file contents and Louis’s allegations was all they’d allowed while Moonface kept watch on the real prize back at the police cells. God knows what position they’d left the young man from Fort Bennington College in while they took a quick break: strung up by his thumbs or suffocating in a wet post office canvas bag?
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Emmanuel said, “that the man at the station hasn’t confessed to the murder because he isn’t the killer?”
Piet turned on him. “The kaffir was at the river at the same time and the same place as Captain Pretorius. We have the right man and by nightfall we’ll have a signed confession. What have you got, Cooper? Some sad pictures of a coloured whore and a whole family of Afrikaner men ready to skin you alive. You were only on the case because Major van Niekerk was desperate for a piece of the action, and now it is time for you to fuck off and let us get on with our jobs. You are way out of your depth. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” Emmanuel said. How would he end the day: beaten and kicked to shit by the Pretorius brothers or with the killer behind bars? A betting man would lay two to one on a beating. The only unknown factors were the time and the severity of the punishment.
The shed emptied. The wide stretch of the veldt spread all the way to the horizon. How was he going to find one boy in all that space?
The call, a series of short whistles followed by a soft coo, was nothing Emmanuel had ever heard before. He stepped onto the kaffir path, and the birdcall repeated with a loud insistence that caught and held his attention for a second time. A thick tangle of green scrub stirred and Shabalala materialized from the underbrush like a phantom. The Zulu constable stood to his full height and waved toward the bush with an insistence that seemed to say “run like hell,” so Emmanuel did. He ran across grass and dirt, followed now by the sound of male voices in the captain’s garden. He was level with the wild hedge when Shabalala grabbed him and threw him down to the ground.
Emmanuel tasted dust and felt his shoulder spasm with pain as he was held down on the ground by the Zulu’s powerful hands.
“Shhh…” Shabalala put his finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the captain’s shed.
Emmanuel peered through the slender gap Shabalala had made in the bush cover. The Pretorius brothers were in the empty shed, searching for the English detective who’d tried to corrupt their baby brother. Henrick and Paul were the first ones out onto the kaffir path, rifles slung across their backs in a show of armed strength.
“Fuck.” Paul spoke the word with venom, his frustration evident in the hard set of his shoulders.
“He can’t have gone far.” Henrick was calmer. “Take Johannes and go round the hospital and the coloured houses. Erich and I will go this direction past the shops. We’ll meet up behind Kloppers.”
“What if he’s not on the kaffir path? What if he’s gone bush?”
“Englishmen from the city don’t go bush.” Henrick was dismissive. “He’ll be in town, hiding somewhere like a rat.”
Johannes, the quiet foot soldier of the Pretorius corps, stepped out of the shed with his hands sunk deep into his pockets. “The motorbike. It’s gone but I don’t see how. Louis is still waiting for the part to come from Jo’burg.”
“We’re not looking for the fucking motorbike.” Paul turned his frustrations onto his brother. “We’re trying to find that detective.”
“Well, he’s not in the shed.” Erich joined the musclebound trio. “He must have heard us coming and taken off into the veldt.”
“If he’s out there he won’t last long,” Henrick said. “First we’ll check the kaffir path and then The Protea Guesthouse. If we don’t find him, we’ll have a sit-down and decide which houses to search.”
The brothers split up and moved along the grass path in opposite directions. Only Johannes appeared uncertain as to the purpose of their mission. He gave the empty shed one last puzzled glance before following Paul in a quick march toward the Grace of God Hospital.
The hunting party began their first sweep of the town. The Pretorius boys had taken the law into their own hands and no one was going to stop them.
“How am I going to find Louis and dodge his brothers at the same time?” Emmanuel wondered aloud. The smallness of the town made it impossible to escape the Pretorius family, and the unbroken stretch of veldt made it unlikely that the boy could be found without an army of searchers.
“We will find him,” Shabalala said.
Emmanuel turned to the Zulu policeman; Shabalala needed to know exactly how deep the water was before he stepped into it. “Louis has told his brothers that I interfered with him. It is not true, but the brothers believe him, and if you are caught with me, they will punish you also.”
“Look.” The black man shrugged off the warning and pointed to a shallow dip carved into the ground and camouflaged by the thick brush. Inside the hollow was a can wrapped in oilskin cloth. He pulled out the package and handed it over for inspection. Emmanuel unwrapped the can and sniffed at the still-damp oilskin wrapping.
“Petrol,” he said. “Louis’s?”
“I think the young one kept it here to fill his motorbike. The can is empty.”
“Mathandunina is planning to travel,” Emmanuel said. The international border was just a few miles away. If Louis slipped across to Mozambique it would take months to track him, and that was if the Mozambican police decided to cooperate. “Can you point the direction Louis is headed in?”
“I can find where the young one has gone,” Shabalala said without arrogance. “I will go to the shed and follow the tracks. You must follow me out here on the veldt. It is not good for you to be on the path.”
“Agreed,” Emmanuel said, and the Zulu constable walked to the deserted shed and stood for a while, examining the prints in the sand. He turned in the direction of the Grace of God Hospital and set off at a measured pace. Louis hadn’t taken off across the veldt in a haze of petrol fumes and churned grass like an impulsive teenager blowing off steam. He had stuck close to the outer edge of the town for some reason. And, Emmanuel figured, there had to be one: everything Louis had done so far was planned and thought out. The boy was slippery enough to fool his own father about the motorbike—an impressive task when you considered just how secretive and two-faced the captain had been. Like father, like son.
Emmanuel picked up his pace to catch up with Shabalala, who followed the trail to the edge of the Sports Club playing fields. They crossed from the white side of Jacob’s Rest to the rows of coloured houses and then the paths that led north to the black location. Where the hell was Louis headed?
The buildings of the hospital came into view. Emmanuel and Shabalala sidled past the morgue and the nonwhite’s wing. It was the same stretch of the kaffir path where the captain had parked when he came to pick up Davida Ellis for their last outdoor frolic—and where Donny Rooke had had the bad luck to be at the same time.
The distinctive line of gum trees that marked Granny Mariah’s property was visible up ahead and to the left. A memory stirred and Emmanuel moved faster. He had good reason to know this place as well. It was here, within sight of that back fence, that he’d encountered the watchful human presence breathing in
the darkness.
Shabalala stepped off the kaffir path and headed into the veldt at a right angle so that he was almost directly in front of Emmanuel.
“What is it?” Emmanuel asked when he reached the spot where the Zulu constable was crouched down to inspect an area of disturbed earth.
“He has come off the path and parked his motorbike here.” Shabalala pointed to markings in the dirt that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but a tracker. “The young one has parked and then walked back in that direction.”
They looked toward the line of gum trees. The back gate to Granny Mariah’s garden swung back and forth on its hinges in the breeze. Thoughts of the Pretorius brothers’ vigilante rule vanished and he and Shabalala ran to the kaffir path and the open gate.
One step into the yard and Emmanuel spotted Granny Mariah lying in a furrow of turned earth, the blood from the gash in her forehead feeding the newly planted seeds in a steady red stream. He ran to her side and felt for a pulse. Faint but there. He turned to Shabalala, who was wisely locking the gate behind him.
“Go out the front door and get the old Jew. Tell him to bring his bag and his wife’s sewing kit with him.”
Shabalala hesitated.
“Go out the front,” Emmanuel insisted. The coloureds of Jacob’s Rest would just have to deal with the shocking sight of a black man leaving and entering Granny Mariah’s house in plain sight. “The Pretorius boys are still on the kaffir paths, so you have to use the main streets. Get back as quickly as you can without causing a commotion.”
“Yebo.” The Zulu constable disappeared into the house and Emmanuel took off his jacket and rolled it under Granny Mariah’s battered head. He felt her pulse again. No change, so he went to search the old servant’s quarters, already certain he would find it empty. He put his head in and looked for signs of Davida before checking under the bed to make sure she wasn’t hiding there.
“Davida? It’s Detective Sergeant Cooper. Are you here?” He opened the wardrobe. A few cotton dresses and one winter coat with fake tortoiseshell buttons. He walked out to the garden, where he soaked his handkerchief in the watering bucket and gently wiped Granny Mariah’s bloodied face. This mess was exactly what the information in the molester files pointed to: an escalation of violence leading to deprivation of liberty and God knows what else. The captain had only delayed the inevitable by sending Louis off to a farm in the mountains and then on to theological college, where, it would seem, the Holy Spirit had failed to dampen the fires of sin burning within him.
