Detective Kubu 01; A Carrion Death

by Michael Stanley

  They also had several types of other succulents, such as the tall aloes that were particularly prolific around Molepolole. Privately he thought of the garden as a tribute to his old Bushman friend Khumanego, who had opened his eyes to seeing. There was no grass, and pebbled paths separated the beds. Two large umbrella thorn trees, with their flat tops, provided some relief from the sun, and a single jacaranda struggled to provide its beautiful lavender flowers each October and November. Although hardy, it was generally too dry for it to thrive. Kubu thought it might be pining for its native Brazil.

  Joy and Kubu returned to the veranda, where Ilia lay panting on the cool concrete. Kubu said he would get the wine. Ilia didn’t move, but her eyes followed him. A few minutes later he returned with a large ice bucket, in which he had put a bottle of Moet. Although champagne was normally well out of his price range, he had bought the bottle a few years ago to keep for a special occasion. He thought he would make this evening fit that description. Kubu stripped off the metal foil and untwisted the wire retainer. Why did all champagne bottles have exactly the same number of twists? he wondered. Why three, not two or four? He walked down the steps to the garden and slowly prised the cork. It suddenly separated from the bottle and exploded out, flying high and far into the garden. Ilia yelped, and several startled birds flew out of the acacia tree. Like a little boy, Kubu loved the sound of an unhindered cork and the sight of its majestic flight. He pitied those who opened the bottle with restraint, keeping the cork in their hands.

  Before the pale liquid frothed out of the bottle, Kubu deftly started pouring it into a champagne flute. As it fizzed up, he poured the second glass. A few seconds later, he topped up both glasses and handed one to Joy.

  “My dear, a toast to us and the good fortune that brought us together. Every day I give thanks that you are my wife. I am a lucky man.”

  “To us,” Joy responded, her eyes moist. “I am the lucky one, Kubu. Thank you.” She paused a moment. “What is the occasion we are celebrating?”

  Kubu didn’t want to admit that the evening had started as a joke with Pleasant, so he just smiled.

  They sat down and said nothing for a few minutes, each enjoying the fine wine, lost in their respective thoughts about luck, love and companionship.

  After a while, Kubu stood up, took the bottle from the bucket, and refilled their glasses.

  “What have I done to deserve such a treat?” Joy eventually asked, with a twinkle in her eye. Kubu just smiled, took her hands in his, kissed her, and led her into the cool darkness of the house.

  It was over an hour later when they emerged on to the veranda again, this time carrying large sandwiches and glasses of white wine. They sat down at the table. Joy lit a candle and turned off the light.

  “Again, my dear, to us!” Kubu murmured. Again they touched glasses. For the next ten minutes they said little, but enjoyed the sandwiches—brown bread, sharp mustard, thick chunks of ham, lettuce, thinly sliced onions, slivers of avocado smothered with fresh coriander leaves, all covered with freshly ground pepper and coriander seeds. What a feast, he thought, as he took a large sip of wine—can’t get much better than this.

  “Pleasant asked me what you are investigating. You know how curious she is about other people’s business. I told her you were trying to solve a murder, but that I didn’t know much about it.” Joy looked at Kubu enquiringly. She sipped the wine and leant back to listen.

  “Well, it’s a real puzzle,” Kubu said quietly. “A white man is found murdered at a waterhole in the middle of the Kalahari. He is left there, we think, for the hyenas to get rid of the evidence. To make sure he can’t be identified, the murderers take his clothes and shoes and knock out his teeth so that we can’t trace the dental records. One leg is missing and one of his arms has been broken off at the elbow. Ian MacGregor thinks it was broken on purpose and not gnawed off by the hyenas.”

  Kubu paused, and Joy said, “Perhaps it was removed because it had some special feature that would allow the man to be identified. What about a very pronounced scar or a tattoo?”

  Kubu thought about that. “But the surface of the arm would be the first meat eaten by the scavengers. And a human lower arm would be difficult to get rid of. What would they do with it? Feed it to the dog?” Without thinking, he tossed a crust from his sandwich to Ilia, who chewed and swallowed it with wide-mouthed relish. Joy grimaced, but Kubu didn’t notice.

  Another novel idea occurred to her. “Well,” she said, recovering, “perhaps he had a false arm. They wouldn’t want to leave that.”

  Kubu at once realised where this idea had come from, and started to smile. A few weeks earlier they had seen an American film on television about a man who had been erroneously found guilty of his wife’s murder. He had managed to escape and wandered about looking for a one-armed man whom he believed was the real culprit. Kubu had been most unimpressed by the police, who had not only arrested and convicted the wrong man, but seemed unable to recapture him despite all their resources. Now he visualised Dr Richard Kimble catching up with his elusive quarry in the Kalahari, killing his nemesis in a fight and knocking out his teeth in the process, and taking the wooden arm as a souvenir. By this time he was chuckling out loud.

  “Why are you laughing?” asked Joy.

  Kubu tried to explain, reminding her of the movie. But Joy didn’t find it funny. “You’re laughing at my idea,” she said flatly.

  Kubu tried to rescue the situation. “No, no,” he said, “A wooden arm is a very interesting idea. I was just laughing because—”

  Joy interrupted. “A prosthetic arm. And you’re laughing because you never take my ideas seriously, David.” Using his real name was a bad sign. She pointedly started to clear up the plates. Even Ilia got a dirty look when she begged for the scraps.

  Kubu realised that he had carelessly hurt her feelings and tried to change the subject. “You may well be right about why they removed the arm,” he said quickly. “There are really no clues to the identity of the body. The coroner found old healed breaks in both arms, but what’s the use of that? We’ll never be able to trace the records of all injuries like that.”

  Joy was looking at him, still holding the plates, but she no longer seemed angry. “But Kubu,” she said, “those breaks are exactly the same as having the teeth. You wouldn’t have found his identity by asking all the dentists to give you their records. You would use them to check, or prove, a tentative identification once you had one. Nowadays most injuries involving a full break in an arm would be X-rayed. Once you have a theory, you can obtain those medical records and match the exact position of the two breaks. That should be as diagnostic as having the teeth and the dental records.”

  Kubu saw the opening and took it. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said glibly. “That makes a lot of sense.” He gave her a big hug. This caused the scraps to drop—much to Ilia’s approval. The issue of the false arm was completely forgotten.

  Joy asked if he had any ideas who the victim could be. She seemed ready to go after the medical records herself.

  “There are no missing person reports, as far as we know.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “The manager at Dale’s Camp—that’s close to the waterhole—and a guy who does ecological research at the university. They saw vultures circling and went to find a lion kill. Instead they found a mutilated body. The ecologist is a really sharp guy—picked up a lot of the clues and put them together very quickly. I enjoyed meeting him, even though he seemed very nervous around me—can you imagine that?” Kubu smiled. “When the case is closed, I may invite him around for dinner. You’ll like him, I think.”

  “What’s his name? How old is he?” Joy asked.

  Kubu sighed, knowing exactly where this was going.

  “His name is Bongani Sibisi. I would guess he’s about twenty-eight or so. Has a PhD in ecology. And no, I don’t know whether he is single or whether Pleasant would approve of him!”

  ∨ A Carrion D
eath ∧

  PART FOUR

  Pricking Thumbs

  “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

  Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1

  SIX WEEKS EARLIER: JANUARY 2006

  ∨ A Carrion Death ∧

  CHAPTER 19

  Despite its relatively small size, and attempts to avoid excessive environmental damage, the Maboane diamond-mine complex interrupted the arid vista like a scar. It was an open-pit mine that corkscrewed down, following the kimberlite host rock into the depths. Nearby, the crushing, washing and sorting plant stood waiting. A galvanised corrugated-iron construction, it glared hotly, its unpainted walls dulled by sand storms and the sun. Heavy-duty ventilation fans could not alleviate inside temperatures usually reserved for Hades.

  Aron Frankental was standing on a small ridge, where the rough dirt road started winding down the side of the pit to the mine’s current floor. He was puzzled. He had a problem, and it was occupying much of his time despite his boss’s apparent lack of interest. Aron was a geologist, and a good one. He had a degree from the University of Erlangen near Nuremberg and had come to Africa to pursue his interest in diamond-iferous kimberlites. He had hoped that Maboane might be a stepping-stone to De Beers. The diamond giant probably did more research on kimberlite geology than all the other mining companies and the local universities combined. That hope had been shattered when De Beers pulled out of the Maboane joint venture.

  Recently, however, Maboane had started producing some much higher-grade gemstones, and it seemed as though De Beers had made their decision prematurely. But the good gems came in bursts, and therein lay the puzzle. Aron wanted to know why the stones were not more uniformly distributed. If he could find the answer to that question in the geology, he felt sure that he could use it to direct the miners to the right locations to keep those good stones coming. He turned this over again in his mind as he watched the sun sink to the horizon and swell into a huge crimson ball. He loved the fantastic Kalahari sunsets, made garish by the dust from the mine.

  If Aron had met Kubu, he would have discovered that their minds worked in similar ways. An exploration geologist needs to be a good detective. He (and it is usually a he out in the wilderness, with a four-wheel-drive vehicle and only rocks for company) follows surface clues to try to determine the structure and nature of the rocks below. Still more important is to understand the development of those rocks and structures, for that will offer pointers to what valuable gems or ores may lie hidden, and where best to look for them. Diamonds are amazing. Kimberlite pipes started life deep in the earth’s mantle and thrust upwards, picking up carbon that, at huge temperatures and pressures, crystallises into the gems. If the conditions are just right, those crystals will be large, but most of the time the process is too fast and only tiny valueless micro-diamonds result. So the new flush of gemstone-quality diamonds from the mine suggested a different geological past from that of the smaller and much less valuable stones it had been producing before.

  Kubu would have found this approach familiar. He, too, followed history and tried to understand background structure and development. Clues were pieces of information that led to facts, and the facts needed to be placed in the context of human behaviours and motivations. Only the timescales and motives were different. Geology makes no deliberate effort to confuse; the aeons take care of that.

  Aron’s current theory postulated two kimberlites: a hasty one that had rushed up, allowing the development of small diamonds, mostly of fojumercial rather than gem quality; and a slyer, slower one that had husbanded its resources, allowing the formation of wonderful gems. Somehow the second had intruded into the first, mixing their very different prizes. The puzzle was that he was unable to pin down the geology that would allow that to happen. But there were strange alteration patterns in the country rock around the mine that could have been caused by some such event.

  The sun sank below the horizon; there would be no twilight in the desert. Aron turned away from the mine and headed to his vehicle. It was time to go home.

  Aron was one of just seven professional staff. Management costs had to be kept down at the marginal mine. He and his boss, Jason Ferraz, were the two geologists. There was the mine supervisor, a mechanic to maintain the machinery and vehicles, and the security officer—Jacob Dingake. The two administrators—the Devlin sisters—dealt with the accounts and the cumbersome red tape around the production of gem diamonds, including the Kimberley Process.

  The Kimberley Process was the procedure that assigned to each batch of stones a document that was a cross between a pedigree and a passport. The KP document accompanied a diamond in coddled safety to the ultimate consumer, who could thus be assured that it was what it said it was, that it came from where it said it came from, and that its background was free of the horrors of civil wars and the human suffering that certain diamonds had so liberally financed in the past—the notorious ‘blood’ diamonds.

  The seven staff members lived in a block of small units some distance from the main mine complex, in a different part of the compound from the miners. Aron entered his unit and immediately switched on the window air conditioner, which laboured into life. He no longer noticed the sudden temporary dimming of the lights brought on by the greed of its ageing motor at start-up. He walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer, where he kept a couple of beers during the day to guard against the high summer temperatures and the occasional power outages caused by the mine’s intermittent diesel generator. A really cold beer in the evening was a necessity.

  He opened one of the bottles of Windhoek lager, deep-chilled. He was thankful for the German heritage of neighbouring Namibia, which had produced a decent local beer. Although he quite liked the taste’ of Botswana’s St Louis beer, the 3.5 per cent alcohol content was too low for a real drink. He poured the beer into a pewter mug, which had also been stored in the freezer. He disliked the local habit of drinking straight from the bottle. Sitting at the dining table, which doubled as a work area, he put the tankard on a blotter so that the moisture would not damage his papers, and started to review his work.

  Each month the complete details of the diamonds and their weights were published. This was as much for tax considerations as for the Kimberley Process. But Aron needed much more detail. He wanted to know where each batch of the larger gemstones had been found. He did that by checking the production records against the locations where the miners had been working. He had developed a graph covering the last three months showing by weight the number of larger stones found each day. The graph showed peaks of five or six days, separated by troughs that might be weeks in length. The mine plan marked the locations where the diamonds had been found. It wasn’t encouraging. There seemed to be three main areas where the larger diamonds had occurred, but he had been unable to determine a significant distinction in the geology at those sites or even a convincing relationship between them. He had spent most of the day in the pit trying to do just that. However, the geology was complex, and he felt that he might be missing something important.

  The previous week he had performed an experiment. He had carefully collected some of the rock still attached to the larger diamonds and compared that under a geological microscope to the rock collected from the smaller ones. Both were kimberlite, of course, since diamonds are rarely found in other rock types, but he felt that the trace minerals were sufficiently different to support his double-kimberlite theory. Unfortunately he couldn’t be sure without more detailed analysis.

  In common with many geologists, Aron was a loner. He liked to have a sense of a solution before he shared the problem with others. He felt he had enough to intrigue Jason, and had tried out his theories over lunch one day. The response had been abrupt and discouraging. Jason had been dismissive and uninterested, going so far as to suggest that this sort of speculation was not part of Aron’s job, and that in any case all kimberlites had an uneven distribution of gem quality. Aron had been hurt, but
not discouraged. He had heard some disturbing rumours about Jason, and although he only believed what was proved to him, he felt uncomfortable with the situation.

  Aron wasn’t very hungry because he had eaten lunch at the mine. The mine workers were served a meal of chicken or beef each day with the ubiquitous pap. Aron had developed a taste for it and felt that he should not be over-critical of the mine food until his own cooking improved. But he did feel the need for a sandwich and another beer.

  He returned from the kitchenette after a few minutes with a new beer in a fresh chilled mug, and a springbok fillet sandwich smothered with mustard and canned sauerkraut. He glanced at his maps, plans and graphs, and went so far as to push away the graph of gem quality per day before he gave up trying to make place for the plate. Paper is winning this war, he thought wryly. The other side of the table was clear, and he settled himself there with his sandwich and beer. The maps and plans blurred a little because of his short-sightedness; only the graph was now close enough to be clear. He took a big mouthful, careful not to spill the sauerkraut out of the edges. As he chewed, he looked at the graph. Something struck him as different, new, surprising. Of course—it’s upside down, he thought. The peaks have become troughs, and the troughs have become peaks.

  That change of perspective changed the meaning. He stopped chewing, the meat untasted in his mouth. His mind churned. All along, until now, he had tried to discover what was causing the peaks of good-quality gems. Suddenly he thought of it in the converse: why were there times when there were fewer good-quality gems? He immediately rejected geological reasons. Any event that would destroy the bigger stones would also have destroyed the smaller ones. It was people who must be removing the good gemstones—men stealing them for their own gain. He had no idea how that might be done, but suddenly he felt sure that it was happening. He remembered that his mouth was full of food and swallowed. As it hadn’t been properly chewed, he needed to wash it down with several generous swigs of beer.