Wierda’s chambers were a mess, a typical advocate’s room: unpretentious, worn furniture, dusty, outdated paintings on one wall. A row of sagging bookcases lined another. There were briefs everywhere, on the table, on the chairs; some were even stacked on the floor in the corner. He might have been youngish but he was obviously very busy.
‘How long have you been at the Bar?’ I asked.
He was quick to catch on. ‘Not long enough. I still have to do pro Deo’s,’ he said. That meant he had less than six years experience in practice.
I watched him as we sipped our coffee. While I could be described as tall and skinny, gaunt even, like Cassius, he was more of a Brutus, short and round and soft. He was also balding prematurely. I knew, though, that eventually his innocent face would be lined like mine; the job does that to you sooner or later.
‘Let’s get down to business,’ I suggested. ‘I can see that you have a good practice going here. If I am right you can’t afford to run about spending days on a pro Deo case while your paying briefs are queuing up on the floor. We are going to have to get someone to help us with the investigative stuff, for which neither of us has the time.’
We discussed the matter for a while. I mooted the idea that had been forming in my mind since we had walked past the burghers on the Square.
‘I’m going to speak to my brother-in-law. He lives up here in one of the eastern suburbs. His name is Pierre de Villiers and he is on extended sick leave from the Army.’
‘How can a soldier help us? Why don’t we get our attorney to do the dirty work?’
I explained that Roshnee was a divorce and personal injury lawyer who was not experienced in criminal cases, but he was not convinced. ‘Who exactly is this brother-in-law of yours?’
I gave him the thumbnail cv. ‘He was in the intelligence section of the Special Forces Brigade, the Recces. He has a BMil Honours from Stellenbosch. He can be our investigator. We won’t have to pay him either. Look, we are unlikely to get any assistance from the Prisons Department, and the police are on the other side. We need our own investigator, one who has connections.’
He was still not convinced, so we agreed to have lunch and talk it over with Pierre.
Magazine Hill, Pretoria
7
I took a seat with my back to the rear wall of the restaurant, and waited. Wierda had dropped me there before fetching his children from school; his wife was writing a Unisa exam.
Pierre de Villiers arrived quietly, a tall, handsome cat of a man. The one moment I was alone watching the door, the next he was looming ominously over me.
‘Can I sit there?’ he said, pointing at my chair.
I stood up and moved around the table. Pierre quickly took my place and then, still standing, took a good look around the restaurant before he shook my hand. His grip was firm and in his demeanour a hint of power kept in reserve. He was taller than I; about six feet two, with a shock of thick blond hair and light-blue eyes. There was an angularity about him, heavy bones anchoring a lean and sinewy body, wide wrists and big powerful hands. At the same time there was a delicacy to his facial features belying the sense of physical strength his wiry frame exuded. The thought crossed my mind that my brother-in-law really was a cat, a big, distrusting, eternally aloof, scheming Siamese. Or maybe not; maybe more of a tiger.
We didn’t have much time before Wierda was to join us so I got right to the point. ‘I need to learn about killing and I need to learn quickly.’
Pierre pushed himself back with his hands on the edge of the table, looking ready to leave.
‘I can’t talk about that,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve had enough of it and I won’t talk about it. You should know that by now.’
I felt the reproach keenly; my sister had warned me not to attempt to delve into his past. He doesn’t talk, Annelise had said. It is as if there is a gap of three years in his life, the three years he spent in Angola fighting Swapo and the Cubans. Don’t even think of mentioning any of that.
Pierre wouldn’t meet my eyes and I had to pacify him quickly. ‘It’s not like that,’ I said. I tried to cram as much as I could into as few words as possible.
As I continued my brother-in-law slowly unclenched his fists.
‘I need to learn about the men who take part in the legal execution process,’ I said. ‘Why do they do it? How does their work affect them? How do they feel when they kill, knowing that they have the authority of a court order to kill? What sort of people are they?’
He shook his head. ‘Not all of them do the killing there. Only the Hangman does.’
It was my turn to shake my head. ‘That is true only in theory, and not what we’ve heard.’
Wierda arrived before Pierre could respond. I introduced them. They shook hands and eyed each other with mutual distrust. We passed the time with small talk while we ate. When the coffee arrived, Pierre asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’
The blue eyes did not waver or register surprise as I explained. ‘In short,’ I said in conclusion, ‘we want as much detail as you can lay your hands on about what happens in Maximum Security Prison generally, and on execution days in particular.’
Pierre nodded again. Then he said, ‘Can I go now?’
He was out of his chair before I could answer. I shook his hand, then changed my mind. ‘I’ll walk with you to your car.’
I turned to face Wierda. ‘Back in a minute.’ Then I followed Pierre out the door.
I stood blinking in the sun next to his car. He had his hand on the door handle.
‘I am sorry if I am opening old wounds.’ Pierre fidgeted with the key. ‘But I really need help and I could think of nobody who could help as much as you can,’ I said.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘as long as it is not about me.’
‘No, of course. That goes without saying.’
‘In that case I can tell you now that you are looking for the impossible.’
‘What do you mean?’
He shook his head. ‘No one kills without a reason.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said after a while when he didn’t elaborate.
He turned his head sideways as if he was listening to a voice in his head. ‘That’s why we are going to have to find out exactly what they do in there,’ he said, echoing my thoughts.
‘But they won’t talk,’ he added. ‘Men who kill don’t talk about it. They never do.’
He faced me squarely as he bent over to insert the key into the door lock. I squinted over his shoulder and saw a battered VW kombi minus front bumper approaching, a long-haired man in his forties at the wheel. The engine revved up for a double-declutch change of gears and the van backfired, a silly grin on the driver’s face. Suddenly I had my breath knocked out of me, and the next thing I saw was the tarmac under Pierre’s car. It took a few seconds to gather my wits about me, and when I had, my brother-in-law was picking himself up off me. Avoiding eye-contact as I dusted myself off, Pierre cast a resentful glare at the disappearing vw.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘The war is still messing with my head. I thought someone was shooting at you,’ he added unnecessarily.
I used the opportunity while he was uncomfortable. ‘It’s alright, Pierre,’ I said. ‘I understand. I need some help here and you are the only one I know who knows enough to be able to help me.’
He shook his head.
‘I need to know what it takes to turn an ordinary man into a killer, someone who kills for his job, for money,’ I said.
‘I’m not a killer,’ he said, hitting the door of his car for emphasis with the side of his fist. ‘And I never killed for money.’
‘I know. I am not talking about you. But you know people who are like that, and you understand them.’
My brother-in-law and I stood together in the sun. He was still breathing hard.
‘The ones who talk are not the real killers. The real ones don’t talk.’
He got into his car and drove off without a b
ackward glance.
‘Why is he no longer in the Army?’ Wierda asked as we were heading towards the airport.
‘He is still on their payroll, but he’s become too dangerous for them, too much of a liability. Bosbefok.’ I toyed with the word for a moment.
Wierda nodded. ‘Has he been in the war in Angola?’
I thought about it for a while, about the stories my sister told, about the snippets we could read in our heavily censored newspapers, about the sanitised and politically skewed images we were allowed to see on television.
I caught Wierda looking at me. ‘Watch the road,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to do this case on your own.’
I weighed my answer to Wierda’s question carefully. ‘He went in a nice guy. He came out mean and dangerous. And now he is on forced sick leave.’
‘So why are you asking him to help us when this case has nothing to do with the military?’ Wierda wanted to know.
‘He knows a thing or two about killing,’ I said. ‘Plus, Pierre can help us with our inquiries at the Prisons Department, I think.’
‘What time is your flight?’ Wierda asked. We were still in the suburbs and I had not taken note of the route.
‘Just before five, but I’d like to try getting on an earlier flight,’ I said. We made half a turn around a traffic circle and headed west towards the Fountains.
‘The reservoir is on the way,’ said Wierda, pointing almost directly ahead to a koppie rising between other koppies. ‘It is there, on that koppie there,’ he pointed. ‘Should we perhaps have a look at it while you are here and we have the time?’
Wierda had couched his question very carefully, leaving it to me to decide. It was a good idea and I started paying more attention to the route we were taking. We reached Fountains Circle with Unisa strutting over its hill on our right and the Voortrekker Monument just visible ahead to the left. I felt apprehensive as we drove slowly up Magazine Hill. Wierda’s car rattled and groaned as it bounced along the steep track to the reservoir. When we stopped it stood squat in front of us, the ground sloping down towards it.
We got out of the car after the dust had settled and stood in silence in an open area above the reservoir, a grey concrete structure with no markings. I could hear cars passing along the highways and roads on three sides of the hill, but they were out of sight. I felt strangely alone and exposed.
Wierda unrolled an aerial photograph on the bonnet of his car. It showed the area in grainy black and white. I traced the route we had taken up the hill. Wierda pointed at the structures at the foot of the hill on the northern side.
‘That’s the prison over here, with Maximum nearest to the hill, here.’ I followed his finger and turned to look, but the trees and the slope of the land isolated us at the reservoir and obscured our view. We could not see more than twenty or thirty metres in any direction.
‘Where did you get this?’ I asked Wierda.
He smiled. ‘At the municipal offices. They asked me what I needed it for and I said for a court case. I think they thought I was doing a traffic case.’
I looked at the photograph again. ‘The Prisons people are not going to be happy with the municipality handing out photographs that show the prison complex in its finest detail, are they?’
‘For sure.’
I took my time; having abandoned the idea of an earlier flight there was nothing else to do until departure.
The trees around us were tall exotics, mostly saligna, with nondescript shrubs fighting in vain for sunlight and nutrition. The grass was sparse and brown, the early onset of winter having taken its toll. The air was dry and the sun beat down on us. I walked around the reservoir slowly. The ground was uneven and strewn with rocks. There was no sign that anyone ever visited the place. I counted seventy-five paces around the reservoir back to the point where I had started.
‘Where did it happen?’ I asked Wierda.
He walked straight to the spot. ‘This is where they found the bodies.’
I looked at the ground, expecting some sign of the violence that had brought us there, but the earth where Wierda pointed was as unmarked as the rest of the ground. Tufts of dry, brown grass. Dirt. Small stones. Shrivelled leaves and twigs. Ants in line, marching to their orders.
Wierda lined up a tree with the reservoir and paced out a distance from it. He put a rock at the place where he had stopped and repeated the exercise, measuring this time from the reservoir. Then he moved the two rocks with his foot until they were adjacent.
‘This is where the front of our client’s bakkie was.’
I estimated the distance from the bakkie to the bodies as no more than five paces.
‘Point blank range,’ said Wierda.
Wierda’s self-assuredness intrigued me.
‘Have you been up here before?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘How can you prepare for a trial without visiting the scene?’
He was right and I didn’t argue the point. ‘What else is there to see?’ I asked.
‘We can take a walk and look at the prison from the ridge over there,’ he said, pointing into the trees behind me. I was curious and followed him through the bushes, over and around rocky outcrops. The prison complex gradually came into view.
We crept closer to the edge of the ridge. My eyes were trained on the guard towers at the corners of Maximum Security Prison when a man rose like a ghost from under my feet. I don’t know who got the greater fright, he or I, but I nearly fell over.
‘Jammer, Baas. Ek rus net hier.’
I was shocked out of my wits, the breath knocked out of me for the second time in less than an hour. I shook my head to clear the drumming of my heart from my ears and watched as the vagrant picked up his greatcoat and a plastic bag and scampered down the hill.
Wierda stood smiling at my embarrassment. Then he clambered onto a rocky outcrop behind me and peered over some shrubs. I saw that he had a camera with him. He pointed it at the complex below and snapped off several shots in different directions, angling the camera up and down and sideways to get the best shot.
I looked down at Central Prison with Maximum Security Prison in the foreground. There were rows and rows of shiny roofs beneath us, like sheds of a battery chicken farm, with high walls and guard towers along the perimeters and towering lights placed all around. Brown brick buildings clearly housed the admin sections. There was no vegetation within the complex, but immediately behind Central sprawled the warders’ sports fields. Several prisoners were working in the sun, tending the grassy surface of a football field, and two were bent over a machine marking the lines in white chalk.
Maximum Security Prison lay between us and Central, separate from the greater prison complex but included in its security perimeter. It sat flush against the hill but the trees and shrubs on the side of Magazine Hill partly obscured it from view. It had similar rows of roofs – I counted three – and some brown brick buildings towards our right but I could not see much more. There was no way to get nearer. I wanted to look more closely at the three-storeyd building in the foreground. It had to be the gallows building. It stood clear of the rows of cell blocks.
I was concerned about the guards in the towers. All I could see from the hill were dark uniforms in the shadows. Could they see us up here? I turned back towards the reservoir.
‘They’ll lock you up one of these days,’ I said to Wierda as we walked back to his car.
‘It’s a free country,’ he said, ‘and how do I know that the buildings in my viewfinder are secret prison buildings, eh?’
We completed the rest of the journey to the airport in relative silence.
As I stepped out of his car I said, ‘I heard that no one in Pretoria would touch this case. Why are you doing it?’
His handshake was firm. ‘It’s a pro Deo. What choice do I have?’
It was not as if I hadn’t ever done a capital murder case before. The consultation with our client in the cells below the Magistrates’ Court had rekindled m
emories I had thought would have been buried under more pleasant ones since I had last been involved in a murder trial.
In my first few years in practice I must have done between forty and sixty capital murder cases. They were too many to remember and too ordinary to bother counting. That was the seventies, when the rand equalled about one dollar fifty and we were paid thirty rand per day for the trial and ten rand for the consultation with the accused. Most cases were done on Circuit, away from the provincial or local divisions of the Supreme Court, in the sticks, as we would say. It meant travelling and sleeping away from home in strange, uncomfortable beds, in local hotels with no star ratings of any kind. Once, the prosecutor and I ended up sleeping in the police cells when the only hotel was full. We struggled in small courts without air-conditioning or heating, sweating in our robes in summer and freezing our butts off in winter. We fought by day and drank by night.
It was the custom that prosecuting counsel and defence counsel would join the Judge at the dinner table every evening. The Judge would usually bring his wife along on the month-long excursion, and we would have to entertain her and the Court’s Assessors too. The Assessors were usually the Chief Magistrate and one of the town’s senior attorneys. The dinners were informal but stiff and we would escape to the nearest drinking hole with the prosecutors as soon as we could. There we would swap war stories and try to settle the next day’s case.
We were able to plead most cases down to culpable homicide or, when it really looked bad, to murder with extenuating circumstances, murder with ECs for short. We needed the ECs to avoid the mandatory death sentence. Often the judges intervened in the plea-bargaining process.
‘What, you want to run an alibi defence? You know these people don’t wear watches; they tell the time by the sun or the stars.’
Shepherds and Butchers Page 8
