by Deon Meyer
Grobler shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He hesitated before he said: ‘About two million. Per year.’
‘Dollar?’ asked Cupido incredulous.
‘No, rand.’
‘So why are you working in this place, if you’re that loaded?’
‘I . . . It’s not good for me to sit alone at home . . . I have socialisation problems. My shrink says it’s very important for me to be among people.’
‘Where were you on the evening of 26 November?’
‘At home.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘No alibi?’ asked Cupido ironically.
‘Looks like it.’
‘Do you still have the email?’ asked Griessel.
Grobler looked at the detective for a long time. Then he opened his hand, revealing the other folded document. ‘I printed it out for you.’
He handed it to Griessel, who opened it out.
Griessel began to read out loud. Halfway through, the atmosphere changed suddenly and dramatically. Griessel said: ‘Jissis.’ All three detectives looked at Grobler. The room hummed with tension.
35
‘My mother was seventeen when she took on Oupa Pierre. Seventeen. In Grade Eleven,’ said Francois du Toit with a sense of satisfaction. And admiration.
He sketched the scene for Susan Peires. His Oupa Pierre Cronjé, barrel-chested, big of stature and of ego, of high social standing, the archetypal Afrikaans alpha male, Great Patriarch, ruler of the grand Chevalier Estate. Respected. A Broederbonder. Member of the Board of Directors of KWV, staunch supporter of the National Party, member of the church council, committed Christian who made his whole family sit around the table every evening for family Bible study and prayers. Boekevat, they called it.
His mother, Helena: the youngest of three children, with her deceptively fragile body, because actually she had so much strength. Pretty, in a boisterous elfin way, with a bushy head of red-blonde hair that resisted ponytail or plait, loose tendrils always escaping from captivity; lively green eyes. A natural aptitude for Science and Biology; always off-beat in her opinions, her reading, her clothes. In a house where chauvinism reigned, she was regarded as a harmless eccentric, with a philosophy of ‘give her time, she’ll grow out of it’.
The night of the confrontation was some time in 1970. The country was in upheaval again. Winnie Mandela was under house arrest. South Africa was officially banned from the Olympic Movement. On the farm Oupa Pierre still used the dreadful dop system of giving his labourers some of the inferior excess wine as part of their pay.
Pierre Cronjé and his children sat around the big yellowwood table in Chevalier’s impressive dining room. Everyone held hands, heads bowed, as he prayed with the bulky Family Bible open in front of him. In his solemn church voice he followed his usual recipe for prayer, from thanks for the abundance and prosperity, to a plea for blessing on his loved ones, the farm, and the harvest.
But tonight, mid-prayer, the voice of his daughter Helena Cronjé broke in, crystal clear, inappropriately lively and decisive.
‘No, Lord,’ she said.
Dumbstruck silence followed.
‘No, Lord,’ she said again, filling the silence. ‘Don’t do it. Don’t bless a farm where the workers are on the dop system. Don’t bless a farm where the workers are oppressed like slaves. Don’t bless the harvest that has to be picked by drunk, alcoholic workers. Punish the owner, Lord, because he deserves it.’
All this with her eyes shut, her face screwed up in righteous sincerity.
Oupa Pierre recovered himself. He let go the hands of his wife and oldest son. His voice thundered across the table. He called Helena a Blasphemer and a Communist. He ordered her to get up and go to her room. He would deal with her later.
She nodded, as if that was precisely what she had expected, and left. Her mother Elizabeth, later known as Ouma Lizzie, was normally a subservient, dutiful wife. But now she ignored her husband’s command to leave the child and followed her.
In the bedroom Ouma Lizzie tried to talk Helena round, begging her to tell her father she was sorry.
Helena shook her head, more of those rebellious strands escaping, took her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and began to pack her clothes.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Ouma Lizzie.
Helena said she was going to move in with the Genants – one of the labourer families on the estate. She would work and harvest alongside them, and her father could pay her with the daily dop too.
Ouma pleaded. Helena packed. Until Pierre Cronjé walked in and threatened her with the heavy ordinance of the father-despot: disinheritance, banishment, reformatory school.
Helena said, do as you wish, I am going to move in with the Genants until the dop system ends.
Pierre played his penultimate parental ace: he would phone the police.
‘Go on, phone them!’ said Helena.
The camel’s back broke, Pierre lost control. He grabbed his daughter’s slender arm and shouted, spit spraying, with a rage-twisted face, that he would beat her. His wife Lizzie cowered moaning and praying in the doorway.
‘Hit me,’ said Helena. ‘But make sure you don’t stop till I’m dead, because if I get up, I’m still going to move in with the Genants.’
Pierre struck out, but at the oak door of the hundred-year-old jonkmanskas. The wardrobe door splintered under the attack, the wood slicing deep into his hand. He stormed out, chased the kitchen staff away, locked every door of the homestead and shoved the keys into his pocket.
Helena took her suitcase and sat down at the front door. She called down the passage, calm and determined: ‘It’s okay, the door will open in the morning, and then I will go.’
Pierre allowed his wife to bandage his bleeding hand and fled to his enormous study, where behind a closed door, with a bottle of ten-year-old KWV brandy, he brooded over his humiliation. In the depths of the night he came to the realisation that his daughter had planned it all carefully beforehand. She had anticipated her father’s reaction, completely accurately. She knew him well. He had no choice. If he didn’t capitulate, his daughter was going to cause a scandal; a scandal that he could ill afford socially, politically or religiously.
The next morning at six a.m. he found Helena slumped asleep beside the suitcase at the front door.
‘I will stop the dop system,’ he said.
Helena merely nodded, stood up and began walking, suitcase in hand, back to her room.
‘You know it can’t happen overnight,’ Pierre growled after her.
‘Two years,’ said Helena without looking back. ‘To phase it out. That’s a realistic time frame.’ She had worked it all out for herself already.
‘She was seventeen,’ said Francois du Toit again, and grinned in admiration. ‘In Grade Eleven.’
36
At 16.23 the station commander of the SAPS in Stellenbosch phoned Frankie Fillander of the Hawks, to tell him they were paying serious attention to Ernst Richter’s laptop which had apparently been ‘mislaid’.
Captain Fillander had to swallow back his indignation, because the station commander was a colonel. So he merely said: ‘It’s a key piece of evidence, Colonel, we would appreciate it very much if you could track it down.’
Then Fillander went to Major Mbali Kaleni’s office to hear whether she could ask the big Hawks boss, Brigadier Musad Manie, to exert some pressure.
That was how it worked. As a hierarchy.
Even though he was already convinced that the laptop was stolen.
At 16.34 he was bemoaning his lot to Lithpel Davids.
‘We can track down that MacBook, Cappie. Apple has a thing they call “Find my Mac”. If that laptop is on a Wi-Fi network, we can pinpoint it. But then we must get Richter’s password for his Apple ID.’
‘How do we do that?’
‘You go out and detect, Cappie. That’s what detectives do.’
‘I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t want to be here when I start cutting, Vusi,’ said Phil Pagel, who was fiddling through his instruments to select the right one.
‘No, sir,’ said Ndabeni, relieved. ‘I’d like to get the clothing over to Forensics.’
The state pathologist smiled. ‘Of course. But I might have something else you can take to them.’
‘Yes, Prof?’
‘You see, Vusi, what we have here is almost certainly death by strangulation. We have the petechiae on the skin and the conjunctiva of the eyes – that’s the tiny pinpoint haemorrhages you can see here . . .’ and he pointed at the skin on Richter’s face. ‘And, of course, the very deep ligature abrasion around the neck. Now, you only see that kind of abrasion when the ligature was not removed immediately after he was killed. If the strangler just did the evil deed and removed the ligature, there would have been very little bruising. Come, look closer.’
Vusi had no desire to take a closer look, but he had too much respect for the legendary pathologist. He moved closer, reluctantly. Pagel slipped his right hand under the corpse’s right shoulder and tilted the body. He pointed with the tip of his scalpel: ‘Do you see that?’
Ndabeni drew in a deep breath and held it. He bent down and saw the tip of a piece of red twine in the back of the neck, as if it was growing out of the skin.
Vusi stood up quickly, blew out his breath. ‘I see.’
‘I think that is the actual ligature. Thin rope. Twine, almost. I think it has cut deep, and the post-mortem swelling is now obscuring it, or part of it. But some of it is still there.’
Vusi saw that it was the same baling twine that Forensics had so enthusiastically told him about. He didn’t want to dampen the professor’s pleasure at his discovery, so he just said, ‘That’s great, Prof.’
‘You want to go wait outside while I get it out?’
‘Please, Prof.’
From: Rick Grobler [email protected]
Subject: my money
Date: 26 November 2014 at 09:33
To: Ernst Richter [email protected]
ernst, you doos. You’re a fokken wannabe hacker with your pathietic t-shirts, you will never be a genuine geek or a nerd, just a glorified graphic designer who can’t even run a business. Fokken pathietic. You can try and avoid me at the office, but I know where you live, you doos. I’m not going to waste money suing you to get my money back. You have exactly one week to get the money into my account. The whole amount. If you can’t do that I’m going to grab you by the throat and choke it out of you, I hope you understand me . . .
That was when Benny Griessel looked up and said: ‘Jissis.’
Grobler realised the atmosphere had changed. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘I mos told you.’
‘You know where to find a lawyer?’ asked Cupido.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’d better go and find that number, just now, ’cause you’re going to need one.’
‘There’s more,’ said Griessel, and he read: ‘I’m going to beat you to death, then we’ll see if the girls are still so crazy about your fucked-up little face. One week, you doos.’
‘You don’t think there’s a slight over-use of the word “doos”?’ asked Willem Liebenberg.
‘And your spelling . . .’ said Griessel. ‘It’s pa-thie-tic.’
‘I was bloody angry when I wrote that.’
‘And when you strangled him, were you also “bloody angry” then?’ Cupido made quotation marks around the phrase with his fingers.
‘I never touched him.’
‘What did you strangle him with?’ asked Cupido.
‘He wasn’t str— Was he strangled?’
‘Damn straight.’
‘Christ.’ Rick Grobler sat up straight in the chair, and then leaned forward, like a man with a great weight on his shoulders.
‘You’re going to need some help, Rick, ’cause you are in very deep shit now.’
‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of 26 November?’ asked Griessel. He looked at Grobler with renewed attention. The blue-veined arms looked more powerful now, the sinewy body surely capable of overwhelming Richter.
‘I have the right to talk to a lawyer,’ said Grobler and stood up.
‘Sit,’ said Griessel.
‘But I have the right to make a phone call . . .’
‘Sit,’ said Cupido with a note of threat in his voice.
Grobler sat down. Reluctantly. ‘I have rights,’ he said with considerably less confidence.
‘Listen, Tricky Ricky,’ said Cupido. ‘Where do you find all these rights?’
‘The law says so.’
‘But what law?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I have to get a lawyer.’
‘Let me enlighten you, Tricks.’ Vaughn Cupido stood up from his chair, leaned over the desk. ‘Our constitution has a Bill of Rights. Chapter Two, to be exact. Article Thirty-Five. And it says you have
the right to remain silent. And we have to tell you, if you are going to give us the silent treatment, there will be consequences. Such as, we will arrest your gat, and throw you in jail, where you can hang around for forty-eight hours with rapists and gangstas, killers and sodomists. Forty-eight hours, Tricks. That’s a long time. But you got that right to legal representation and the phone call from the TV. American TV. So let me explain to you how it works at home here. Article Thirty-Five says you have the right to choose, and consult with, a legal representative. But here’s your problem, Tricks. That Article Thirty-Five says fokkol about when. Not a single thing. Except that we must promptly inform you of your right to consult. So don’t sit there and throw laws at us. We know those laws from back to front. And those laws say premeditated murder is a Schedule Six offence, and for the rest of your life the only zero-day vulnerability you’re going to see is your own. You understand me now mooi?’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ said Tricky Ricky Grobler, crossing his arms in front of him as if he wanted to cut himself off from them, from all of this.
‘Where were you that night?’ Griessel asked again.
‘At home. And I was alone, and I don’t have an alibi.’ Trying to regain his equilibrium.
‘You’re lekker hardegat, Tricks. What time did you go home?’
‘About six o’clock.’
‘Straight home?’
‘I went from work to the gym, and from the gym home. Six o’clock, close to six o’clock.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Here in Paradyskloof.’
‘Exact address.’
‘Thirty Pison Street.’
‘Piss on? What sort of fokken street name is that?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Spell it for me.’
Grobler spelled it.
‘Okay. And where was your wife?’
‘I don’t have a wife.’
‘Stoksielalleen then, all on your lonesome?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then what time did you go and ambush Richter?’
‘I didn’t . . .’ Grobler’s voice grew stubborn and uncooperative. ‘I’m telling you now, I didn’t see him again . . . I saw him that day at work, in his office. That was the last time. I went to the gym, and I went home, and I cooked a meal and ate it. Then I watched TV for about an hour, and then I sat down to work, on my laptop.’
‘Looking for vulnerabilities.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And there’s not a soul in the fucking world who can substantiate that.’
‘No.’
‘You know we are going to find forensic evidence to prove you were the murderer, Tricks.’
‘That’s impossible. I wasn’t near h
im.’
‘We hoeka have a set of fingerprints in his car that we haven’t identified yet.’
‘You can take my fingerprints. Now.’
‘And DNA samples?’
He made a gesture that said, do what you will.
‘And cellphone records.’
He shrugged. He didn’t care, he had lost interest.
‘Then that’s what we will do,’ said Cupido and took out his cellphone.
37
Francois du Toit counted silently on his fingers, and then said that his mother Helena Cronjé would have been twenty-six years old in 1979, just finished with her Masters degree in organic chemistry. As a junior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch she was working on her doctoral thesis.
Her relationship with her father Pierre had deteriorated so much due to her strong political, social and religious views that she no longer went to Chevalier. She met her mother for coffee once a week in Stellenbosch. She had had a few relationships during and after her student years, but all the men had beaten a retreat, apparently because they realised they would never live up to her high expectations.
Helena went walking and mountain climbing with the Berg en Toerklub, she was a member of the film club, she attended lunch hour music concerts. And in the winter of 1979, with an eye to travel ahead, she joined the Alliance Française.
That was where she met Guillaume du Toit.
He had been a member for a long time, to keep his French fluent. He was standing in a group of a few members, quiet, listening, when she entered. He could not keep his eyes off her. And as the evening wore on, he became all the more aware of this lightning bolt of truth: this woman was his future wife.
Two days later when she received a call from him in her tiny office, she could scarcely remember that he had been at the Alliance Française. But something about his quiet voice made her agree to a date. Later she would say it was the certainty, the sense of inevitability in his tone of voice, as if he was already sure that it was fated.
On that first date – dinner at the Volkskombuis – they realised Guillaume knew her father. He occasionally had to do quota inspections and wine tank measurements there. She told him of the rift between her and Pierre. And he revealed his troubled relationship with his own father, the first time that he had talked about it to anyone outside his family.
