Detective Kubu 01; A Carrion Death

by Michael Stanley

  The group lapsed into silence, each lost in uncomfortable thoughts of madness and possession.

  After dinner, the mood lightened, and the party continued with convivial conversation. An hour later, Joy served coffee and deliciously light wafer biscuits she had baked herself. After the guests had eaten the last of these, Pleasant and Bongani decided to leave at the same time. As Pleasant kissed Joy goodbye, she winked and whispered, “Progress! We’re going to the Grand Palm for some more coffee.”

  Joy squealed with delight and pinched Pleasant’s arm affectionately. “Have fun. But be careful,” she said with a glint in her eye. Kubu admonished them to drive carefully, with a joke about the police being ready with a roadblock. Ilia barked her encouragement.

  Back on the veranda, Joy and Kubu found Ian and Mabaku nursing glasses of Scotch, and Marie a glass of red wine. “Topped up everyone’s drinks. Hope you don’t mind?” Ian said.

  “Of course not,” Kubu replied. “I’ll go and get one for myself. A glass of wine for you, my dear?”

  “No thanks. I must start clearing up.”

  Ian stood up and took Joy by the arm. “No, no. Come and sit down and relax. You’ve been working hard this evening, lassie. Time to put your feet up. Kubu, get her some wine, or even better, a Scotch.”

  “No, no,” Joy protested. “Wine is strong enough for me. I don’t want a hangover in the morning.”

  When Kubu returned with the drinks, the five relaxed and gossiped about Pleasant and Bongani.

  “I am not sure Bongani has any idea that he’s being reeled in,” Ian said with a smile. “Perhaps I’ll have to take him to lunch and educate him about the wiles of women.” He raised his glass. “A toast! To young love!” No one had the energy to stand up, so they just raised their glasses and drank.

  For the next few minutes, everyone enjoyed a convivial silence, all lost in their own thoughts. Kubu wondered whether the others were wistfully recollecting young loves, or whether, like him, they were merely content to enjoy the moment without much thought.

  Mabaku broke the silence by standing up and walking over to the table, where Kubu had thoughtfully put a bottle of Scotch. He poured a generous helping.

  “What a mess this case has been,” he said, more to himself than to the others. “Seven people dead and nothing to show for it. The only suspect we had in our hands kills a cop and escapes across the border. I doubt if the Angolans will ever find and extradite him. What a fiasco.”

  Mabaku walked over to the steps and gazed out into the darkness. Eventually he turned and said, “There are still loose ends. For example, for the life of me, I can’t work out why the letter Cecil Hofmeyr got from Frankental caused so much trouble. Just think of it. It caused a break-in at BCMC; it probably caused the deaths of Frankental, Kobedi, and the hit man from Angola. Cecil was willing to pay thousands of pula to retrieve it, and yet it had nothing of real importance in it.”

  “What letter was this?” Ian asked. “I didn’t hear about it.”

  Kubu replied, “It was a letter Frankental sent to Cecil Hofmeyr. I agree with the director. I’ve no idea why it was such an issue. Some negative comments about the mine manager Ferraz—which I strongly suspect were entirely justified—and a suggestion that some of the best diamonds were being stolen. But the response should have been an investigation, not bribery, blackmail and murder!”

  “Do you have a copy of the letter here?” Ian asked him.

  Kubu rubbed his chin, feeling the roughness of the lengthening night. “I think I have a copy in my briefcase. I took it down to the mine in case I wanted to confront Jason, and I haven’t taken it out.” He stood, pottered around in the spare bedroom, and came back waving the copy. “There you are, Ian. Let’s see what brilliant insights you have to offer, then!” Having parted with the letter, he went off to open another bottle of red wine. He was thankful the other men were into hard tack, leaving him to enjoy something really decent in peace.

  Ian fished in his pocket and took out his pipe. He then extracted a small tin of tobacco and stuffed some into the bowl, prodding it firmly down with his little finger. As much as she liked Ian, Joy was upset at the idea of pipe smoke. But Ian made no move to light it; he merely put the stem of the pipe in his mouth and sucked contentedly as he started carefully reading the three typed pages of Aron Frankental’s letter.

  While Ian read, Marie asked Joy how Kubu had held up under the growing number of unsolved murders. Joy pursed her lips. “As time passed he got more and more tense. He was still very attentive to me—that’s the way he is—but I can tell that he’s stressed when he stops singing. He loves to sing, mainly opera. Yes, opera,” she repeated in response to Marie’s raised eyebrows. “He thinks he’s great, but he’s really only enthusiastic. But I haven’t heard him sing for weeks.”

  “Mabaku is the same. He doesn’t talk about his stress or the problems at work. He just goes into the garden and digs holes for new plants. Normally it’s like pulling teeth to get him to do anything.”

  Both women laughed at the foibles of men.

  At last Ian put down the letter, and everyone’s attention turned to him. “It’s written in a very scholarly fashion,” he began. “One of the things about a German education is that there is no compromise. A scientist must be trained as a real scientist, not as a technician. Used to be that way in Scotland too. His English is a bit rough here and there, and perhaps that gives the impression that his analyses are rough also. But that’s certainly not the case. I know very little about geology, but it seems that he’s carefully identified each possible hypothesis and broken it down and analysed it. So when he comes to the more contentious stuff on the last page, all the obvious alternatives have already been dealt with. Impressive.” He nodded in admiration.

  “Yes,” said Mabaku. “You’re also a pretty careful scientific chap, so I’ll take your word for it, but that brings us no farther. Why all the fuss about it?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said Ian, enjoying the limelight. He took a few sucks on the cold briar.

  “Well?” asked Kubu. He would be annoyed with himself if he had missed something.

  “It’s the wording,” said Ian at last. “Kubu, you said that ‘some of the best diamonds were being stolen’. But that’s not what he wrote. It’s here right at the end: “Perhaps some of the best quality diamonds are actually stolen.” He meant to write that the best quality diamonds are actually being stolen, but left out the participle. The German sentence construction is different. If you know the context, as we do, you come to the right interpretation, which is that he wants to alert Cecil Hofmeyr that someone—and he is suggesting Jason—is stealing diamonds from the mine. But Jason, seeing this letter cold and knowing that the mine was being salted, would think Aron had found that out and was telling Cecil that the diamonds used to salt the mine had been stolen. From some mine in Angola, for example? Jason would have thought his scam had been discovered. I don’t know how he came to know about the letter—perhaps Aron kept a copy—but he couldn’t afford to have it floating around.”

  Kubu was impressed. “But why was Cecil so concerned?” he asked. This time Mabaku answered. “Originally we thought Maboane was a BCMC mine—Cecil even told us that. But it wasn’t. Cecil had his own money in it. It wasn’t BCMC’s at all. He knew Ferraz wouldn’t steal the diamonds because he was a significant stakeholder himself, so he may have interpreted the letter the other way too. I think we’ll find, if we look into Cecil’s finances a lot more closely—which we will—that he had a lot to lose if the mine went down. And he needed that letter for leverage with Jason. That, and keeping it private, was easily worth a few thousand pula to him. But Kobedi got greedy. He thought Red Beard and Jason just wanted to know what was in the letter. So he thought he could get away with selling them a high-quality colour copy. That was a mistake. A fatal mistake, as it turned out.” He swallowed the rest of his whisky. His face became grim. “I think we’ll take a careful look at Mr Hofmeyr’s affairs over
the next few weeks.”

  Kubu shook his head. “So Aron’s false deduction about Jason was twisted into the truth by the way he incorrectly wrote the English! And we were too smart to see it at the time. But probably Cecil and Jason did see it. That missing word indirectly may have killed Kobedi and Sculo, as well as Aron, and nearly killed me! Words can be more important than we might think!”

  Ian nodded, took the pipe out of his mouth by the bowl, and pointed to Kubu with the stem. “Don’t forget that, young David. There isn’t anything more important than the right words!”

  ∨ A Carrion Death ∧

  EPILOGUE

  Painted Devil

  “The sleeping and the dead,

  Are but as pictures; ‘tis the eye of childhood

  That fears the painted devil.”

  Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2

  MAY 2006

  Kubu sat in the waiting room, wondering why he couldn’t let go of the Hofmeyr case. Everyone else seemed to have returned to a normal life. Bongani was relaxed, no longer haunted by the witchdoctor, and getting on well with Pleasant. Mabaku was back to his usual grumpy self, keeping his distance from the commissioner, and closing in on Cecil. Ian was waiting for his next dead body.

  Mabaku had insisted that the Maboane mine use a bulldozer to move the recent tailings at the mine dump. It had only taken a couple of days of careful work to unearth Aron’s decomposed body. The autopsy showed that he had been shot with the same gun that had killed Sculo. The remains were then transported to Germany to the Frankentals, who now had closure and could start to heal.

  Only Kubu remained frustrated by the need to understand what had happened to the young Hofmeyrs. Once he put his mind to it, it hadn’t taken him long to locate the psychologist who had treated Dianna so many years before. I’m fortunate, he thought, to live in Gaborone and not in a similar-size city in America. I would never have been able to contact all the shrinks there.

  After a short wait, the receptionist ushered Kubu into the inner office, where comfortable chairs and ordinary couches were strewn below colourful abstract paintings. In one corner stood a cluttered desk with a formal but empty desk chair. A friendly elderly lady was sitting relaxed in an armchair, whose upholstery depicted little Red Riding Hood patting a friendly wolf.

  “Superintendent Bengu?” she said without rising. “I’m Hilary Mayberry. You look a little surprised?”

  Kubu laughed. He walked over to her and they shook hands. He chose an armchair. Its upholstery had a greenish background and seemed to have something to do with leprechauns.

  “I was looking for the psychiatrist’s couch, I suppose.”

  Hilary smiled. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Superintendent. I’m a psychologist. I don’t pretend to be able to treat mental illness. Basically, I’m a counsellor specialising in helping children. They don’t appreciate the sort of formality that their parents might expect. Now, how can I help you?”

  “I want to talk to you about someone who came to see you quite a few years ago. A little girl.”

  “You understand that I can’t talk about what my patients tell me or do here? Just because they’re children doesn’t mean that they are not entitled to a confidential relationship.”

  “Yes, that’s quite clear. I only want to talk about the facts of the situation, which you may be able to help me with. If you feel I’m going too far, just say so, and I’ll back off.”

  “That’s fair enough, Superintendent. What was the child’s name?”

  “Dianna Hofmeyr. She—”

  “I remember her,” Hilary interrupted. She looked more alert, almost tense.

  “I think she came to see you after her brother died?”

  “Yes.” It was more acknowledgement than agreement.

  “And she would’ve been about thirteen at the time?”

  Hilary nodded. “What do you want to know, Superintendent?”

  “I want to ask you about the leopard.”

  “This was about seventeen years ago. I don’t remember the details. Please give me a few minutes.” She retrieved a file and reviewed it, nodding as the story came back to her.

  Kubu said nothing until she was done. Then he asked, “Would you tell me the story more or less as she told it to you? Just the facts. Particularly about the leopard.”

  Hilary considered this, reaching into her superb memory.

  “All right. She didn’t say much about the leopard, you know. It was very traumatic. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d refused to talk about it at all. But she did. She said it was very large and had big teeth and attacked them from behind a rock.” Kubu waited, and the psychologist realised he wanted the whole story. She shrugged and said, as if to herself, “What’s the harm now? It was so long ago.”

  Then she continued: “She told me that she liked to explore the koppie on the family farm. She called it the farm, but it was actually her father’s estate—several hundred hectares, I think. It was security-fenced and patrolled by guards, and I suppose they thought it was pretty safe for the kids. So she and her brother took a picnic lunch and went up the koppie. They were to be back for dinner. They climbed up the side farthest from the house, deliberately taking the more difficult route to make it more exciting. About halfway up they had their sandwiches and spent time playing with the lizards on the rocks, tossing them scraps of the meat from their sandwiches. So it was getting late when they went on, and they got stuck in a thicket of thorn bushes where they got quite scratched. Daniel was tired and wanted to go back, but she persuaded him that they should push on to the top. Then they could take an easier route that they knew on the house side and still be in time for supper. And when they came out of the thorn bushes, they were nearly at the top. They found a narrow path that went past some large granite boulders. The leopard sprang at them from behind one of those. They both fled, but got separated. Dianna thought she was running down the koppie towards the house, but it was getting dark, and she must have become disoriented and then completely lost. She was very scared. She climbed a tree and spent the night there. She was crying, but very quietly because she was afraid the leopard might be just below her. She knew they are excellent climbers. She even heard people calling in the distance but didn’t answer. They found her the next morning.”

  “And the boy?”

  “They found his body about halfway down the koppie. He’d fallen off a ledge near the top.”

  “Was he mauled?”

  “No. There was no sign of that, thank God.”

  “Did they find tracks? Any signs of other kills?”

  Hilary shook her head. “No one ever found any signs of the leopard. But it was dry, and the ground was baked hard. And anyway it was up among the rocks.”

  “Why did she come to see you?”

  “Her mother brought her. She said the child was depressed and unusually quiet. Dianna was suffering from feelings of guilt. She was the older child, and her brother had wanted to turn back. She blamed herself for his death. There were a lot of other things that I wanted to work through with her, but I don’t think the mother liked the idea of her daughter seeing a ‘shrink’, as she put it. She didn’t bring her back. Less than a year later, Roland Hofmeyr died in a plane crash, and she took her children back to the UK.”

  “Thank you, Dr Mayberry. You’ve been very helpful and generous with your time.” But Kubu didn’t get up. He moved the fingers on each hand one by one, as if trying to check that he really had ten. Then, still looking at his hands, he said: “Did you believe her story? About the leopard, I mean?”

  Hilary looked surprised. “Of course. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that it didn’t catch one of the children? It sounds as though it was very close to them. That there were no tracks? That it got over the security fence?”

  Hilary shook her head. “I grew up on a cattle ranch out here, Inspector. I know a bit about leopards. They are survivors, and their behaviour can be almost uncanny.
They have been known to climb game fences to get in—or out. Cattle fences they simply jump. They are hard to track, and they are tidy and secretive. And they hunt small buck or, failing that, baboons—also survivors. If even that fails, they are quite partial to domestic dogs. So of all the world’s large cats, these are the ones most able to live near man and survive.” She sounded as though she respected leopards, but didn’t really like them. “As for catching the children, I don’t think it was really after them. I think that by sheer bad luck they just got too close to it—into its personal space—and so it went for them. But when they ran, it let them go.”

  “Wouldn’t a ‘survivor’ have wanted the free fresh meat available at the bottom of the cliff?”

  “We don’t know when he fell. I think the leopard was scared and probably heard the searchers calling. It probably took itself off. What are you getting at, Superintendent?”

  “Is it possible that she made the leopard up? That Daniel just fell over the cliff?”

  “Yes, it’s possible, but why would she do that? Why not just go back for help as quickly as she could? She didn’t know then that her brother was dead.”

  “Is it possible that he didn’t just fall?”

  She hesitated for a few moments. Then she answered: “I think Dianna was very focused on the leopard. She said that if they didn’t find it and shoot it, she would kill it herself when she grew up.”

  “She did, you know. She claimed she recognised it.”

  The psychologist shook her head. “It’s very unlikely. Leopards don’t live that long in the wild. And they are very hard to tell apart, anyway. The one she bagged was probably just a large leopard with similar markings.”

  Kubu nodded and got up to leave. The leprechauns gratefully regained their usual shape. But Hilary had one last piece of the puzzle to give him. She hesitated before she spoke.