The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  De Villiers contemplated the physics. ‘I can’t see how you can make that work with a self bow or a bow made of the traditional materials. And, with a very short bow, you can’t be accurate.’

  ‘Can you make a Bushman bow?’

  It was another odd question, but De Villiers nodded. Any schoolboy could, he thought, but maybe not here.

  ‘How?’

  De Villiers looked at Henderson. ‘You cut a suitable sapling to length, you shape the stave to taper towards the nock at each end, you add a gradual bend to the bow over an open fire, and you’re ready to fit the string.’

  Kupenga spoke for the first time. ‘Where would you find a suitable sapling?’

  De Villiers answered without looking at Kupenga. ‘Anywhere. In the reserve behind the house, for example.’ He indicated with his thumb over his shoulder. ‘I’ve just taken a walk through it.’

  ‘You’ve seen this arrow before,’ Kupenga said. It was an accusation, not a question.

  De Villiers looked Henderson in the eye. ‘I’ve seen many arrows like this one.’ He diverted their attention to the Macleans Reserve and pointed. ‘You could also find a suitable sapling or branch down there.’

  ‘We’ve established this one comes from Botswana,’ Kupenga stated, not distracted by De Villiers’s attempted evasion.

  Angola, De Villiers thought, but kept his opinion to himself.

  ‘You’ve seen how it’s made,’ Kupenga said. His tone suggested that it was a question.

  De Villiers chose his words carefully. He didn’t want to be accused of lying or of withholding information. Since the arrow had been used in an attempt on the Prime Minister’s life, the case was serious, not the run-of-the-mill investigation. ‘I’ve seen Bushmen making their arrows, arrows just like this one.’

  Henderson took over from Kupenga and changed the subject. ‘Can you make a bow that can fit into a backpack no more than forty centimetres deep?’

  The answer was in De Villiers’s eyes.

  ‘Can you show me?’ Henderson asked.

  De Villiers shook his head, not in denial but in surprise. Why should a bow have to be made to fit into a small backpack? He thought immediately of Angola and his struggle for survival without his regular backpack. His own bow can do that, fit into a backpack.

  De Villiers asked, ‘Why does it have to fit into a backpack?’

  Henderson took his time before he answered. ‘A man was seen riding a bicycle away from the Prime Minister’s house at the time of the assassination attempt and all he carried with him was a small backpack. We have several witnesses and we also picked him up on the CCTV cameras in the city. He abandoned the bike in the Victoria Car Park on the corner of Victoria and High Streets and then went off-camera towards Albert Park.’

  ‘Bring your coffee with you,’ De Villiers said and led the detectives to his garage.

  There was a small workbench with some basic tools. They watched as De Villiers scratched around and produced a multitool from a pouch. It was a Leatherman Charge and had a variety of blades and tools, including pliers. He went out onto the deck at the back of the house and returned with a bamboo garden torch.

  They made small talk while De Villiers shaped the bow and talked them through the manufacturing process.

  ‘Because this bow has to be no longer than forty centimetres but still cast the arrow with some accuracy over a distance of thirty metres, it would have to be a combination bow, a bow consisting of more than one piece. By contrast, a self bow consists of only one piece, usually wood.

  ‘I’m going to make this bow out of bamboo. I need a forty centimetre section for the two staves or limbs and a shorter section for the grip or handle. The staves will be shaped so that they taper towards the ends and fit into the handle. The ends are called nocks. That’s where the string is fixed to the bow.’

  De Villiers measured the pieces on the bamboo and marked the positions with a pencil. Then, using the Leatherman, he sawed the sections to length.

  ‘Next you split the bamboo for the limbs like this: you stand the bamboo on the floor and hold the blade of the knife at the top, well centred. Then you tap the blade with a hammer – tap, tap – and the bamboo splits into two, each half forty centimetres long, like this. These now have to be shaped so that they taper towards the nock.’

  De Villiers cut strips off the limbs with long strokes of the knife. In minutes he had two tapered limbs.

  ‘Now comes the time-consuming part. You have to shape the two limbs so that their inner ends fit snugly into the handle. You’ll see that I’ve cut the handle so that there’s an open section of bamboo at each end. The staves have to be made to fit into those openings.’

  Henderson and Kupenga watched as De Villiers shaped the ends to fit. He put the three pieces of the bow together.

  ‘There, you now have the bow ready for the string to be fitted. But first, you need to reinforce the ends of the handle with insulation tape to prevent the bamboo from splitting when the string is pulled back and the bow is placed in tension.’

  De Villiers wound black insulation tape around the ends of the handle. He looked around the workbench and turned to face Henderson and Kupenga.

  ‘I don’t have any string, so my shoelaces will have to do.’

  He leaned down and removed the shoelaces from his shoes.

  ‘The bow is about ninety centimetres when assembled, and I’ll have to tie the shoelaces together, like this, and bend the bow while I fit the string into the slits in the nocks, like this, and there you have a bow.’

  It had taken De Villiers forty-five minutes to produce a small bow in three pieces that fit together as a combination bow. None of the pieces was longer than forty centimetres.

  ‘May I keep it?’ Henderson asked. ‘I think the Commissioner would be interested to see this,’ he added.

  They returned to the house and sat in the study. Henderson caught De Villiers looking furtively at the backpack on the wall.

  On impulse Henderson stood up and lifted the backpack from its hook. He slowly turned the backpack over in his hands. A rusty knife fell out.

  The straps of the backpack were stiff, reinforced with some kind of batten. When he turned the backpack over, Henderson saw the end of one of the battens protruding from the canvas strap. The batten was of black steel and had a slit in the exposed end, in what Henderson now knew to be the nock of a bow.

  Henderson pulled the batten out of the strap and found its companion in the second strap. Looking De Villiers in the eye, he slowly unwound the sisal rope holding the two halves of the handle of the backpack together. The guitar string was in one of the side pockets.

  It took Henderson less than five minutes to put the bow together. It was identical in its parts and shape to the combination bow De Villiers had manufactured under their eyes, except that it was made of blackened stainless steel, not bamboo. De Villiers remained silent throughout. Kupenga sat with his mouth agape.

  ‘I think I’ll have this backpack too,’ Henderson said.

  !Xau’s Best lay where it had fallen on the desk.

  Henderson looked at De Villiers for a long time before he spoke. ‘I think you know more than you’re telling us.’ When there was no denial, he continued. ‘You are now a suspect. In fact, you’re the only suspect.’

  De Villiers felt inclined to argue, to explain the bow concealed in the straps of his Recce backpack, but Henderson was already heading for the door.

  On their way out they found Emma in the lounge. She accompanied them to the front door.

  Henderson turned to address De Villiers. It was a formal communication. ‘You know the drill,’ he said. ‘You’re not to leave this house without my permission.’

  ‘But what about medical treatment?’ Emma demanded. ‘You know he has to go for treatment.’

  Henderson thought about it. ‘Alright then,’ he relented, ‘except for the purpose of medical treatment.’

  As De Villiers watched them driving off and saw the Arm
ed Offenders Squad following them, he regretted his decision to cooperate. He had been showing off a bit, and Henderson had been subtle, not showing his hand until the very end.

  He looked down at his feet. Henderson had walked off with his shoelaces.

  I feel like a prisoner, De Villiers thought. They’ve even taken my shoelaces.

  Auckland

  March 2008 23

  This time round Dr Annette de Bruyn wore her professional face.

  A second blood test had been positive for PSA. The count had doubled in less than three months. ‘Pierre, the tests have come back. I think you had better come in so that we can decide on a way forward.’

  De Villiers had been sitting around at home since mid-December, for three months now, the longest he had been inactive since he had been a baby in nappies. He wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination or whether it was real, but he felt as if an evil force was keeping a grip on him, a cold hand holding his insides behind the operation scar. He had not obeyed Henderson’s injunction not to leave his house. He had made inquiries on the North Shore, speaking to the South African immigrants there, asking questions about who lived where and what organisations had sprung up amongst them.

  There were no surprises. A Dutch Reformed Church with its own dominee from Verwoerdburg. The South African Shop in a small shopping centre near the church was run by an Indian family from Durban and sold South African wines, biltong and Mrs Ball’s chutney. The owner of the store had arranged for the South African electronic newsletter to be sent to De Villiers each month, but he had found no clues there.

  De Villiers watched as the doctor fussed with the file. She wasn’t her usual gregarious self.

  ‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said at last. She looked at De Villiers over her glasses, making eye contact, but the focal point was somewhere behind him.

  De Villiers had expected something out of the ordinary. He waited for the doctor to explain.

  She swallowed before she spoke. ‘The PSA has doubled in the last two months when there should be no PSA at all. I’ve explained that to you previously. There can only be PSA in two circumstances. One is if there’s still some prostate tissue. The other is if the cancer has spread.’

  The words had come out in a rush.

  ‘How can that be?’ De Villiers asked, eliminating the obvious circumstance in his mind. ‘Shouldn’t the surgeon have removed all of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She watched De Villiers more closely.

  ‘Where could the cancer have spread to?’ De Villiers asked. A slow acceptance grew in him, confirmation that the evil presence he had felt inside him was real, not imaginary.

  ‘Prostate cancer usually spreads to the lymphatic system in the lower abdomen and then to the bones of the pelvis and upper legs,’ she said. ‘Have you felt anything in your bones, anything unusual in that area?

  ‘All I’ve felt is some pain … no, it’s not really pain, below the operation scar,’ De Villiers said. He moved his weight on the examination gurney and felt exactly what he had tried to explain to the doctor, a slight twitch inside him.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s quite normal and would probably be with you always. It’s just the scar tissue below the cut.’

  ‘Does that mean then that the cancer has spread somewhere else?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I just don’t know. There’s something here that I don’t understand and I’d like to have a biopsy done.’

  De Villiers was getting impatient. He’d always preferred to have bad news delivered fast, without delay or obfuscation. ‘Annette, please tell me what’s going on. Be straight with me.’

  ‘I am being straight with you. I’ve told you exactly what I see.’

  ‘That can’t be all,’ De Villiers insisted. ‘Exactly what is it that you don’t understand?’

  She turned the file around so that De Villiers could read. ‘Read this,’ she said. ‘It’s the path lab report on the tissue that was removed.’

  De Villiers studied the report. It didn’t make any sense to him. There were crude drawings with some areas shaded and numbered. He shook his head and looked up.

  Seeing the question in his eyes, she fixed her pen on one of the shaded areas. ‘See this area here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘This is the edge of the gland as examined by the path lab.’ She looked up to see if De Villiers was following.

  He sat forward and nodded again.

  ‘See this shaded area here, on the side?’ She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. ‘This is the specimen as examined by the pathologist, but see here, the shaded area? See how that extends to the edge.’

  De Villiers looked more closely. He saw the outline of what he assumed to be the prostate gland. There were several shaded areas marked within the outline. ‘Are those the cancers?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem? I don’t get it.’

  The doctor rested the point of her pen on one of the shaded areas. ‘It looks as if they have cut through one of the cancers, leaving part of it behind, right here, at the top.’

  De Villiers tried to assess the import of the information he’d been given. When he could see no clear way forward, he asked, ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘We need to do another biopsy,’ the doctor said.

  ‘I’m not going back to that surgeon,’ De Villiers said.

  There was a wry smile on Annette de Bruyn’s lips when she spoke. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you to a specialist radiologist first to confirm the diagnosis and he’ll report to me alone.’

  At the door she said, ‘I’ll hold thumbs for you.’

  When he didn’t answer, she added, ‘It’ll be good news if they find prostate tissue there.’

  It was only in his car on the way home that De Villiers caught her meaning.

  If they find more cancer cells there, at least we’ll know where they are.

  The second biopsy was as painful as the first had been, but De Villiers submitted stoically. Each of the six clicks of the probe stung like a dart and retracted in a millisecond.

  He bled for several days.

  Annette de Bruyn made the suggestion and then made the final arrangements.

  ‘Look, Pierre,’ she started when she had shown him the path report. ‘I won’t joke about good news and bad news, not about cancer anyway, but there’s some good news in this report. It means that there is prostate tissue there and that explains why there is still a positive PSA reading. But it’s bad news because they should have removed all the prostate tissue at Brightside.’

  ‘So what do I do now?’ De Villiers asked.

  They discussed the options in detail.

  ‘Why would I want to go back there?’ De Villiers asked. ‘I haven’t been back there in fifteen years.’

  The doctor pushed the hair from her forehead. ‘Pierre, whatever the reasons for our leaving, we must accept that the medical facilities there are far better than here, in the private sector anyway. There are long delays here, as you know, and you have to go onto the waiting list.’

  When De Villiers hesitated, she added, ‘And your file shows that you’re still on the SANDF medical aid. You can have the best treatment money can buy, and you can have it quickly, and you can have it for free.’

  There was a long pause as De Villiers considered the options.

  The thought of returning brought !Xau and the arrow back into focus. He would have the opportunity to get behind that arrow, to find proof of its origins.

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ she said, ‘but don’t take too long.’

  De Villiers made a quick decision. ‘I’ll phone you later today or early tomorrow.’ He stood up.

  Dr de Bruyn must have anticipated his decision. ‘I’ll write a full report so that we can send it ahead of your arrival. And I’ll give you a set of path reports, operation notes and blood counts to take
with you.’

  De Villiers thought of the logistics of treatment in South Africa. ‘Where would you suggest I go, if I decide to go back?’ he asked at the door.

  ‘I think any of the major centres, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban. Or Bloemfontein or Cape Town. It really depends on where you are able to stay for a while.

  ‘Do you have relatives or friends where you can stay?’ she asked.

  ‘In Pretoria and in Durban,’ he said. There would be too many complications in Pretoria, he thought. After a pause he added, ‘But I don’t want to stay in Pretoria.’

  Early the next morning he telephoned his brother-in-law. It was late evening in Durban, but Johann Weber was still working.

  Weber’s response was immediate. ‘Of course you’re welcome.’

  ‘It’s only for a few days,’ De Villiers said.

  ‘Stay as long as you like,’ Weber insisted.

  ‘I don’t want them to know in Pretoria,’ De Villiers said, alluding to his mother. ‘It will only worry her for no good reason.’

  He was about to put the phone down when Weber cleared his throat. ‘Pierre, there’s something you should know before you come out.’

  De Villiers waited for the explanation.

  ‘I have some bad news. They’ve applied for a presidential pardon and will be freed this week.’

  ‘You mean they’re letting the killers go?’ De Villiers asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘We can talk about that when I get there,’ De Villiers said.

  De Villiers was again forced to think of the men who had murdered his wife and children. On several occasions he picked up the phone but put it down without dialling. An hour after receiving the news from Weber, De Villiers phoned his sister in Pretoria.

  ‘Heloïse?’

  There was a pause, much longer than the delay on an international line warranted. ‘Pierre, is that you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Goodness, when last did we hear from you?’

  Twenty minutes later De Villiers got around to the reason for his call. ‘I have a criminal investigation and will be coming to Pretoria soon.’ The half-truth had rolled easily from his lips.