Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  The forensics crew had arrived with a squad car and two uniforms in tow and Turner had left them to it. While he’d waited for them he’d called Mohandas Anand and told him what he needed from him. Anand asked if it was an iPhone. On hearing it was a Motorola running Android, Anand laughed and said, ‘No problem.’

  In Woodstock Turner parked illegally on a street of semi-detached Victorian houses. Ten years ago you could buy heroin on this street; now it had an eco-cafe where, for the price of a Big Mac and fries, you could buy a ginger-and-pineapple smoothie. He rang a bell and a lanky Indian answered the door.

  ‘Anand,’ said Turner. ‘I appreciate this.’

  ‘Always my pleasure to assist an agent of state oppression,’ said Anand, ‘as long as that agent is you.’

  Anand was an immigrant from Bangalore. At twenty-seven he ran a thriving cyber-security business, including corporate espionage, most of which amounted to employers spying on their own employees. These days people didn’t think twice about putting information in their phone that in the recent past they would have trusted only to their lawyer. It was rumoured, though not proven, that Anand was a member of the African Anonymous hacktivist collective that had embarrassed the Gupta empire in 2016. He and Turner exchanged favours. The police department’s computer forensics team could have handled the job, but it would have taken them two weeks.

  Anand gave Turner a cup of coffee. Turner gave him a pair of latex gloves and Jason’s phone. He followed Anand to his home office on the first floor. Two tables, one desktop computer, two laptops. The room was cool and uncluttered. Two Herman Miller chairs. Anand offered one to Turner.

  ‘This phone is almost two years old,’ said Anand. ‘My Python script is way ahead of it.’

  Turner nodded. It was why older phones commanded a better price on the black market. Easier to crack and recycle. A stolen late-model iPhone wasn’t much more than sixteen gigabytes of scrap.

  ‘Pin lock, not pattern. You know who this belongs to?’ asked Anand.

  ‘Jason Britz. A petty offender on holiday from the Northern Cape.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound the type to use sixteen-digit alphanumeric encryption. Do you know his date of birth?’

  ‘I thought about trying that but decided to leave it to the master.’

  ‘We put in five four-digit pins and the screen locks. Python script will extract the salt and give me root access. Brute force will do the rest.’

  ‘I like the sound.’

  ‘However, in proceeding to screen lock we don’t risk anything by trying the obvious numbers.’

  Turner said, ‘Sixteen, ten, nineteen ninety-three.’

  Anand tapped in one number, then a second, then grinned, and showed Turner the screen. The desktop wallpaper was of two young men laughing.

  ‘Voila,’ said Anand. ‘One-nine-nine-three.’

  Turner opened the photo app. The title at the top of the screen read ‘Today’. Underneath the title were nine thumbnails. The first photo was gold. Turner tapped to open it.

  Five white men stood in front of a white Toyota and a red Range Rover in an almost full-length group portrait, four with their arms across each other’s shoulders, grinning into the lens, the fifth, older, man standing behind them and trying not to scowl. Most numbers of both licence plates were visible beyond their legs.

  Turner double-tapped to zoom in. He scrolled across the faces. Four young men, out on a spree. He spread the image between his thumbs to zoom in further, and scrolled over them again. Well fed, strong-boned, captured in a moment where they had not a care in the world. They didn’t know it, but they were about to be tested.

  Turner said, ‘As the Mennonite said, there is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ said Anand.

  ‘That’s life.’

  ‘Surely not.’ There was pity in Anand’s surprise. ‘Surely not always.’

  ‘No, not always. If you’re lucky.’

  Turner re-examined the photo and scrolled over the older, taller, bearded man at the back. His eyes were red in the flash, lending him a demonic aspect that was not out of keeping with his features. He scrolled again. The garbage dumpsters, if a little blurred, were caught behind the vehicles. He tapped the information button. The photo had been taken at 00:07.

  ‘I can pull GPS data off those photos, too,’ said Anand.

  ‘I know where they were taken.’

  Turner swiped through the other photos. A second, tighter, group shot in the same location. Another portrait of the younger four outside the shebeen, their fingers pointing in mockery at the LUXURY! sign. A tall black man at the edge of the frame, his face turned away from the camera.

  The other shots had been taken inside. One proved that by many standards the sign outside was no boast. Cosy lighting. A rough plank floor. Tea candles burned on half a dozen tables. On the benches around the perimeter men sat passing a galvanised pail of sorghum beer. The walls were decorated with posters and magazine covers. Some were of old movies – The Harder They Come, Dirty Harry. Some were political – Malcolm X ‘By Any Means Necessary’; a map of Ireland, pierced through the north by the barrel of an AK-47, promoting the Belfast Brigade. Shamrocks. A toucan with a glass of Guinness balanced on its beak. Khwezi had a passion for the Emerald Isle. At the rear was what appeared to be a small dance floor and two speakers. From behind a zinc-topped bar, Khwezi glared at the camera.

  A portrait of the young invaders, lifting shot glasses of peach brandy.

  Two selfies showed a man with a thick neck, huge shoulders, and the kind of tan that is painfully hammered out from years of raw sunburn. Short fair hair; clean-shaven. Something childlike in the rough, rounded features. Something frightened in the eyes, something defeated, as if in looking into themselves they did not find what they hoped for. A strange sympathy stirred in Turner’s chest. Jason Britz. He was glad that Jason seemed unlikely to be the driver.

  The last two shots were studies of another young man. Handsome, sun-lotion-tanned, expensive dark hair. In the first he raised a shot glass, unawares. In the second he looked at the camera with mild irritation; perhaps disdain. Somehow Turner knew that this was Dirk. He felt no sympathy at all.

  In none of the faces, except for the bearded one, did he see anything that would resist even polite questioning for more than a few minutes – if he could talk to them without a lawyer or their red-eyed minder in the room.

  ‘If you find that any of the phone’s apps are protected,’ said Anand, ‘he probably uses the same pin number.’

  Turner nodded, opened Jason’s messages. The first lines of recent texts were tabled down the screen. Eight of them were either to or from ‘Dirk’. The fifth began: ‘We’ll be staying at the Elysium Hotel. Check their website! Phone is …’ Turner opened it, noted the number, and rang the Elysium from his own phone. He exchanged greetings with the receptionist.

  ‘Do you have Jason Britz staying with you?’

  ‘Just a moment, sir.’

  Turner waited. He could be at the Elysium in fifteen minutes.

  ‘Hello? Mr Britz checked out this morning, sir.’

  ‘Can you tell me at what time?’

  ‘I’m not sure I should. Let me ask my supervisor.’

  ‘I’m Warrant Officer Turner, Cape Town homicide. You’d be saving me considerable inconvenience.’

  ‘He left at 1.47 a.m.’

  ‘And his companions? He was part of a group booking of six.’

  An anxious pause. ‘They all checked out at the same time, sir.’

  ‘Could you verify their names for me?’

  ‘Only if you have them, sir.’

  Turner knew he’d already done well for a voice on a phone claiming to be a cop. Anyone could claim to be a cop. To get more information he’d have to show up in person with his badge.

  ‘You’ve been very kind, miss,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  He hung up and thumbed his way back to the first group portrait on Jaso
n’s phone and zoomed in on the bearded minder. He didn’t look like hired security. A professional, such as the Zulu, would have no good reason to join the gang, even if invited. What he did look like was the man in charge. The man who made the decisions.

  ‘Bad news?’ said Anand.

  ‘The wicked flee when no one pursueth.’

  ‘You pursueth, don’t you?’

  ‘They didn’t know that when they left their hotel at 1.47 this morning instead of going to bed to sleep off the mampoer. It means at least one of them was aware of what they’d done and decided to run for home.’

  ‘What did they do, if I may ask?’ asked Anand.

  ‘Hit-and-run. They killed a girl.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘To be more precise,’ said Turner, ‘they crushed her against a dustbin and left her to die in the dark.’

  ‘That sounds worse.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How did you get the phone?’

  ‘Jason dropped it in the parking lot. The girl found it but didn’t get the chance to use it.’ Turner handed the phone to Anand. ‘Can you clone this thing?’

  ‘I could,’ said Anand, ‘but it would take some time and I don’t know why you would want me to. This is GSM, they all are now. The network won’t authenticate both the original and the clone, even if they appear identical. It would just lock out one or the other. Perhaps you mean, can I make a copy of all the information inside it?’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Turner.

  Anand looked at the photo on the phone in his hand and tapped the screen. ‘Do you want to know their names before or after I dump the copy?’

  ‘That’s a smug smile.’

  As Anand thumbed the screen, Turner caught up with him.

  ‘Jason posted the photo on Facebook, from the bar.’

  ‘At twenty past midnight,’ said Anand. ‘The faces are tagged. Mark Lewis. Dirk Le Roux …’

  Turner rolled his chair over to look.

  ‘Chris Gardner. Jason Britz. The big man at the back has no tag.’

  Turner said, ‘Which one is Dirk Le Roux?’

  7

  Eric Venter was sixty-one, trim in build, and grey in both hair and spirit. He wore an unfashionable moustache that stopped short of the edges of his thin-lipped mouth. He was down on one knee in his back garden when he heard an engine and the crunch of tyres on the gravel of the driveway on the other side of the house. He was tending a bed of tall blue and white flowers, Neomarica gracilis, with a trowel. They had lasted longer than usual this year, he didn’t know why, but now they were fading and drooping and it was time to help them propagate for next year.

  Venter wasn’t willing to admit to himself that he enjoyed gardening. It was tedious and repetitive; the job was never over; results came slowly; and nature conspired day and night to undo one’s efforts. Yet he liked the sense of order it imposed, and it mattered that he imposed it himself rather than via some hired hand. He was told it was good for osteoporosis, high blood pressure and depression. He hadn’t noticed any marked effect on the last condition, but he could say the same for the latest round of pills his doctor had prescribed. ‘You’re a young man!’ the doctor, who was perhaps forty, had exclaimed. ‘You can expect another twenty years of tolerably good health.’ Venter had left his office feeling suicidal.

  The truth was he had never had any great experience of happiness, even in his youth. ‘When were you at your happiest?’ a therapist had once cheeped at him, no doubt recycling the latest mumbo-jumbo imported from the States. Venter had trawled his memory for fifteen silent minutes without finding an honest answer. He suspected he was at his happiest when in dreamless sleep, though that too was hard to come by, and waking to the defeat of each new dawn was a particular purgatory.

  ‘Captain,’ said Turner.

  Turner stood over him, brimming with vitality and a strange physical magnetism that Venter had never been able to fathom, though he envied it. ‘You’re the patron saint of the violently dead,’ Turner had once told him, intending this, as far as Venter could tell, as a sincere compliment. Venter oversaw the machine tasked with honouring those dead with something approximating to justice. To what exact point, Venter no longer knew. He was like a doctor whose experience was immense but whose compassion had long since burned out and who viewed each new consultation with a vague dread. Perhaps that was the kind of doctor he needed. Turner, an enigmatic figure to all and a thorn in many sides, seemed to hold Venter in high esteem, though Venter did not know why.

  Venter indicated the flowers. ‘Walking irises, an unusual bulb. As you see, they’re on their last legs, but if you bend the stem down and bury the dying flower near the mother bulb, it will take root and grow into a second plant.’ Venter stuck the trowel in the soil and stood up. ‘I’m sure there’s a metaphor there, but I can’t think of one that pleases me.’

  ‘They’re us,’ said Turner. ‘Homicide. Our heads are buried in the dirt.’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Venter. ‘But where are the beautiful blooms?’

  ‘That would be someone like me.’

  ‘Now I’ll have to dig them all out. Every time I look at them, they’ll remind me of you.’

  Turner wasn’t sure how to take that. He looked almost wounded. How strange. The man was a relentless predator. Colonel Nyathi, his tongue only partly in his cheek, called him the Lion of Nyanga. A meticulous observer of procedure without a single accusation of brutality on his record, his tenacity was indefatigable, if exhausting for everyone else. He was lethal when crossed. He had fired his gun in the line of duty on four occasions and had killed four men, including a colleague caught importing heroin who unwisely chose to make a stand. All four shootings had been judged good. Turner managed to be superb without being vain. He was everything Venter was not and Venter hated him for it.

  Venter smiled. ‘Just kidding. Let’s have some tea.’

  Venter himself had never been a good street detective. The dirt didn’t agree with him. But he had a genius of sorts for management, for handling the beasts, like Turner, who did thrive in the township jungles of Cape Town – both the most beautiful city on the planet and the crime capital of Africa. Its homicide statistics were thirty per cent worse than those of Ciudad Juarez.

  If Venter hadn’t been white, he would have made Major, and probably Colonel, years before. His resentment of this injustice had not helped his prospects, which were and would remain zero. No one was going to promote him and bump his pension on the verge of retirement.

  He and Turner sat under a hinged awning on the patio and Venter poured iced tea. The house was small and modern, under ten years old, part of a suburban gated community in white-flight land. A little piece of paradise, according to the developer. But two failed marriages had cost Venter significantly grander dwellings. He dated the birth of a certain toxic bitterness in his soul to the loss of the second. As Orson Welles had put it, ‘What do I have after thirty years? A little turkey ranch.’

  ‘Thanks for seeing me, Captain,’ said Turner.

  ‘I’m sorry for spoiling your weekend off but we racked up a lot of bodies last night. I hope the overtime is welcome.’

  ‘This is an important case.’

  ‘If I understood your briefing we have a street girl killed by a drunk driver. I don’t see the headline.’

  ‘It’s important to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s important because you need to ask me that question.’

  Turner’s voice was low and easy but his gaze, without meaning to be so, was intimidating. Turner had black skin and green eyes; uncommon but, in this vast swill of DNA, not exactly rare. Venter had always found them disconcerting. What did he mean by his answer? Some implication that Venter wasn’t sufficiently committed? Or that he didn’t understand Turner’s zeal, which was true enough.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ said Venter.

  ‘Push it hard, close it fast,’ said Turner. ‘I need your per
mission to go to Langkopf, to interview the suspects.’

  ‘Langkopf.’ Venter searched his memory.

  ‘The Northern Cape,’ said Turner. ‘Population around four thousand.’

  ‘That’s a long way. I don’t just mean the mileage.’

  ‘I can be there by dark.’

  ‘You want to go today?’

  ‘I’ll have a confession by tomorrow.’

  ‘The evidence is that strong?’

  ‘Strong enough,’ said Turner. ‘One of them killed her. It’s just a question of who. Confessions will put it to bed. But if we let this drift, they might walk.’

  ‘Spare yourself the strain. Get the Langkopf police to conduct the interviews.’

  ‘They’d bury it deeper than shark shit.’

  ‘Is that based on something more than your usual opinion of our brethren?’

  ‘One Sergeant Rudy Britz is the uncle of one of the suspects, Jason Britz. Jason has avoided prosecution for at least three serious crimes, including a double aggravated assault. It’s a good bet the rot goes higher than Rudy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Turner. ‘First, I need something more from you, sir.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A priority autopsy on my victim, this afternoon. You have the power to move her to the top of the list.’

  ‘The morgue must be like a bus station.’

  ‘Bread-and-butter cases. Shootings, stabbings, cerebral haematomas. Paperwork for the courts. Not one of those reports will assist an early arrest. Except mine.’