by Deon Meyer
She explained the rules and conditions. Outwardly she was the picture of self-confidence, but inwardly her fear was great and her hope faint.
Because everything that she had heard and read underlined one single fact again and again: Paul was a time bomb. The only question was when he would explode.
54
At 08.08 @NoMoreAlibis tweeted: 4 hours to go. Alibi client: Userid: JohnTwo. Paid by Johannes Frederickus Nel. Author? ABSA: 4155791155. 19 alibis.#WhoKilledErnst
Within three minutes the first journalist called the head office of Ad Altare Dei, the publisher of religious books in Cape Town’s Foreshore area, to hear whether Johann Nel, author of One Day at a Time and fourteen other bestsellers, wished to make any comment.
The regional manager of Premier Bank and his lawyer were like peas in a pod – both fat, middle-aged, balding and bespectacled. The only difference was that the regional manager was scared and the lawyer indignant.
Griessel had no idea why lawyers were so often indignant when talking to detectives. He suspected it was part of a defence strategy, and partly influenced by their habit of jumping up in court and saying: ‘Your Honour, I object . . .’
He and Mooiwillem talked to the pair in one of the Hawks’ small meeting rooms. The room was too hot. Someone had forgotten to turn on the air conditioning at the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations – the DPCI – after Eskom’s customary load-shedding power cut yesterday. The two fat men perspired heavily, the regional manager mopping his forehead and the back of his neck with a handkerchief.
The lawyer’s sweat dripped onto the table in front of him. ‘It was in May. Early in May,’ said the regional manager, his voice surprisingly shrill for such a large man. Stress, perhaps.
‘Of this year?’ asked Griessel.
‘That’s right. The eighth of May.’
‘Your memory is good.’
‘I wrote it down.’
‘How did he contact you?’
‘On my cellphone.’ And then he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and was silent.
‘Could you see his number?’
‘No, it was one of those No Caller IDs. But when he SMSed, I saw the number.’
‘Go on, tell us the story,’ Liebenberg prodded.
‘Oh. Okay. He phoned me, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, just a few minutes after three. When he asked if I was alone, I said yes. Then he asked me, did my wife know I had a skelmpie? Then I asked who’s talking? He said it didn’t matter, did my wife know I had a bit on the side? I put the phone down. Then he sent me an SMS, and he said if I didn’t want my wife to know where I was on Friday 11 April, I better pick up when he phoned again. And he phoned again. He said it wouldn’t help to put the phone down, I would just make things difficult for myself. I said what do you want? He said an overdraft of a million. And I said no. Then he said he would call my wife. I said he should go ahead. Then he put the phone down.’
The regional manager dabbed the handkerchief against his forehead, and then against his upper lip.
‘That’s all?’ asked Liebenberg.
‘Yes, that was the last time that . . . but I wanted to know who it was. Then I thought, that night, who could have known. And I thought there could be no one, because . . . The circumstances . . .’
The lawyer lifted his hand to caution his client. The regional manager nodded. ‘I . . . we were very . . . discreet. Nobody could have known the date or time, except the people at Alibi. That was the only possibility. The next day I phoned them, because I wanted to tell someone there that one of their people was blackmailing clients. I phoned and asked to speak to the boss. They wouldn’t put me through. Then I googled the company, I wanted to know who the managing director was. I found out it was this Ernst Richter. So I googled him and there was a video on YouTube from a news website, about this Ernst Richter, when he launched Alibi. I watched it and then I recognised the voice. That’s all.’
‘You did nothing further?’
‘No. Yes . . . I tried to delete my profile at Alibi, but it’s nearly impossible. I could only cancel the service.’
‘You never contacted him?’
‘No.’
‘You did nothing more?’
‘No.’
‘Why are you here?’ asked Griessel.
The lawyer said: ‘We are here in the spirit of full disclosure.’
‘What for?’ asked Griessel.
‘Because you . . .’ the regional manager began, but the lawyer lifted his warning hand again.
The regional manager wiped the handkerchief nervously across the back of his neck and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it will do harm to tell them that I know they can see nowadays everyone who Ernst Richter phoned on his cellphone.’ He looked at Griessel. ‘I don’t want you turning up at my house one night with a lot of questions, Captain. I’m sure you will understand. That’s why I’m here.’
‘You said he could phone your wife?’ Griessel didn’t believe this part of the story.
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t want us to come to your house?’
‘Captain,’ and the regional manager sighed long and deep. ‘I . . . if I allowed him to blackmail me, if I began to sacrifice my professional integrity . . . What do I have left, as a banker? Where does it end? My marriage . . .’
The lawyer put a hand on the regional manager’s arm.
The regional manager pulled his arm away. He said: ‘For twelve or thirteen years now, my marriage hasn’t been what it should be. If I have to, I can do without it. My children are out of the house, they will be able to cope. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if there is no other way . . . My job, I can’t be without my job. That is who I am.’
At 08.47 Vaughn Cupido received an SMS from Desiree Coetzee:
The man’s name is Werner Habenicht. He’s the chairman of ShipSure. www.shipsure.com Cell 093 448 9091 thank you for last night, it was quite lekker.
Cupido read the last nine words over and over. Repeated them, analysed them.
She needn’t have said them. But she wanted to. Because she thought, let me encourage this guy, I like him. Was quite lekker. As if she was a little surprised over how lekker it was. Or the ‘quite’ could also say, it was very lekker, but I don’t want to say it quite so strongly . . .
Of course it was lekker, Desiree Coetzee. I am Vaughn Cupido, pride of the Hawks.
He got up to go and fetch Lithpel and give Griessel the details about Habenicht.
It was already after nine when Frank Fillander phoned Sarah Woodruff.
She answered with: ‘Louise, hello?’ The question in the melodic voice was playful, who might this be?
After a moment of uncertainty about the name that didn’t fit, the penny dropped – Sarah Woodruff was an alias.
‘Can I speak to Sarah, please?’ he said deliberately, because if she wasn’t alone, it would give her the chance to say it was the wrong number. ‘Sarah Woodruff.’
The long silence on the line had a meaning he could not yet fathom. ‘Who is this?’ she said, barely more than a whisper.
‘Louise, my name is Captain Frank Fillander of the police Directorate for Priority Crimes Investigation. I would like to talk to you about Ernst Richter.’
She didn’t reply. He went on: ‘I think I understand the circumstances. Can I meet you somewhere? In the next few hours?’
It took her a while to process it all. ‘Can I . . . is your office private?’
Jimmy, the tall, thin member of the Thick and Thin team, phoned Ndabeni just before nine.
‘We have solved one of the great mysteries of the case, Vusi.’
Ndabeni couldn’t tell if Jimmy was playing with him again. ‘That’s nice,’ he said.
‘I’m not kidding you this time. We’re going to save you guys a lot of work.’
/> ‘That’s nice, Jimmy.’
‘That’s nice, Jimmy? That’s the best you can do?’
‘I can do better, once I know what mystery has been solved.’
‘Okay, Vusi, that’s fair enough. So, here it is. You can forget about vegetable farmers and apple farmers. We think you should start concentrating on grapes, because we have now completed our analysis of the pocket dirt, and we’ve found a significant percentage of decomposed vine leaf matter. We can’t tell you what kind of vines, we will have to get DNA analysis done, and that’s going to take weeks. But we are talking Stellenbosch, and that’s pure wine country.’
‘That’s great, Jimmy.’
‘At last we get a ‘‘great’’.’
At 09.08 @NoMoreAlibis tweeted: Every date of every alibi of every client coming in three hours. URL to follow soon. #ErnstRichter #WhoKilledErnst #NoAlibi
His followers now numbered 31,714.
55
Transcript of interview: Advocate Susan Peires with Mr Francois du Toit
Wednesday, 24 December; 1604 Huguenot Chambers, 40 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town
Sound file 9
FdT: One per cent of any population are psychopaths. That means there are over half a million of them in South Africa. Half a million. That’s a lot. And one of them was my brother. They are fascinating, and impossible to understand, for normal people. You can’t put yourself in the shoes of someone who has no conscience. Absolutely none. Zero. There was this interesting research a few years ago on a psychopath’s language use and patterns. All of us, when we speak, use filler words. Hesitations like ‘um’ and ‘ah’, when we have to think before we say something. They found that psychopaths use more fillers than ordinary people. Because they have to think hard what will sound normal, so they can hide their sickness. That’s the theory.
Psychopaths talk twice as much about basic needs as we do. Things like eating and drinking, and money . . .
I can tell you thousands of facts about psychopaths. My mother became an expert on them. She made it her life’s task to protect the world from Paul. She went to tell the principal her son was a psychopath, and he had the choice of whether to admit Paul to the school, or not.
I think that was an interesting moral dilemma. This fantastic sporting talent . . . there was this former Springbok coach who said then that Paul du Toit was the greatest genius player he had ever seen in his life. His vision, his skills, hands, feet . . . How do you keep a boy like that out of your school? And what cruel fate would dish up that combination?
The principal said Paul could stay, as long as he behaved. They made an agreement on feedback about Paul’s behaviour at school. She went to see the rugby coach, explained the system to him. My mother was absolutely consistent and fair. If Paul hadn’t exhibited any socially unacceptable behaviour on a Monday or Tuesday, he was rewarded with rugby practice, the same for Wednesday and Thursday. A whole week of good behaviour earned him a rugby match. And it worked.
Until the first term of matric. Then he couldn’t help himself. He raped a girl.
It was on the spur of the moment. My mother was a few minutes late fetching him from rugby: the traffic in Stellenbosch . . . He saw the girl walking along the Eerste River, past Paul Roos rugby fields . . . Two guys heard her scream, they ran to help, but they were too late. My mother was standing beside her car waiting for him when she saw the police van stop. She knew then.
The trouble was, it was three weeks after his eighteenth birthday. He would be tried as an adult.
56
She was a beautiful woman, Sarah Woodruff. In a quiet, understated way. It was a beauty that whispered, that grew, with the ripening awareness of every dimension – appearance, voice, hand movements, shy smile, focus of the dark eyes.
Frank Fillander, with his knowledge of people, his ability to judge character, thought about her afterwards. His theory was that she was a late bloomer, maybe a brooding, gangly teenager, introverted, but with a desire for sensual things that were beyond her. Until, at seventeen or eighteen, her body and face gradually bloomed to beauty. She would have been surprised by the sudden windfall of young men’s attentions. She would have enjoyed it as something possibly fleeting – in contrast to women who had been as pretty as a picture, ever since they were little, and viewed it as their right.
He speculated that she got serious with her future husband early on, that the first years of their marriage were intense, that her husband was captivated by her sensuality and appetite. But time and children and his career and the tedium of being a stay-at-home-mother made everything worn-out, pale, diluted. Only the dynamo inside her was still driving, energetic. So that at the age of forty-two she craved one last roll of the carnal dice. Before her looks – so she told herself – began to fade, before her transient allure evaporated.
She read about the phone app in a women’s magazine. She downloaded Tinder, curious, and with just enough nervousness to heighten the excitement. Sarah Woodruff’s real name was Louise Rousseau. She told Fillander she’d chosen the Woodruff alias from a book: The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, a literary reference of which the men on Tinder were completely ignorant, since not a single respondent ever referred to it.
She chose her profile photo carefully and started to use Tinder. She got a lot of attention, but only from younger men. Her hopes for, and fantasies about the older, wiser, cerebrally stimulating and sexually more experienced older men evaporated quickly. They – and her peers – were apparently active elsewhere online.
She responded to only one: Ernst Richter. The lowest common denominator on Tinder was really astonishingly low, and at least he was polite. He was cheerful, lively, interesting in his way, with a childish sense of humour. And he was patient, not intrusive.
She began a conversation with Richter that went on for two weeks. It made her solitary mornings fun. Entertaining. Sexy. The sound of an incoming message was a little thrill. Slowly she began to wonder: what would it be like with a young man? All that sexual energy, all that lust; for though he was never vulgar, he was honest about his desires.
She agreed to a meeting at his house, as it was very private. Her greatest fear was to be seen by a friend or acquaintance, to be confronted with awkward questions.
She took trouble with her appearance, her perfume, her clothes. When she picked up the car keys, her courage deserted her. She stopped in front of the mirror, feeling suddenly both relieved and disappointed, looked at herself, and decided to go after all.
He met her at the front door with a bunch of flowers and box of expensive chocolates. The thoughtfulness, the gesture stole her heart.
But even when he kissed her in his sitting room, she didn’t know whether she was going to have sex with him. She let herself be led, minute by minute, by impulse, by what felt good. Eventually she rewarded Richter’s patience with total abandon. And to her surprise he was skilful, gentle, and was blessed with the rare talent of endurance. So she met him at his house twice more in the following weeks.
Initially she suppressed her feelings of guilt. But it was as though her husband sensed her awakened sexuality and began to pay her attention again. She sent Ernst Richter one last message and removed the app from her phone. And that was it.
‘Is there a chance that your husband knew?’
‘No.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I know him too well. He would have said something, he would have confronted me, he would have tried to access my . . . I have a code on my phone, there is no way he could have . . . Even if he suspected: I was incredibly careful, because the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt him.’
Fillander just looked at her. He wasn’t entirely convinced: he knew people think they’re so smart, so careful, but they make mistakes. Always.
Where was her husband on the night of Wednesday 26 November?
He observed her closely, because the body and eyes reveal the unease and lies. He saw nothing. She just said with quiet certainty it wasn’t him. And she was practically certain that he had been at home, as usual. He almost never worked late, he didn’t travel. He sat watching TV, every night.
She would have to make absolutely sure. Could she?
Yes, she could. Give her a day or two.
He asked her for her husband’s cellphone number. She gave it to him.
He asked her about Richter’s personality.
She said he was a boy. Nothing more, nothing less. A boy, a lovely boy in a man’s body, with too much money and too many toys, who wanted to try it with an older woman, as a novelty. He was the sort who was nerdy at school, and now wanted to exploit the attraction that success brought before it disappeared.
She didn’t know if it was her imagination, it could be . . . But there was a sense of urgency about him, an intensity. As if he knew the end was near.
Griessel slipped away from the DPCI building just after the bottle stores opened. Midmar, Home of Discount Liquor, was just around the corner, in Voortrekker Road.
They sold Jack Daniel’s in miniature fifty millilitre bottles, in packs of ten; the kind you get on planes. He asked for a tin of Fisherman’s Friend, paid for it all, and broke open the pack of mini-Jacks right there at the cash register. The cashier’s eyes were on Griessel, knowing, as he divvied up the bottles between his jacket pockets. He ignored her. His big challenge would be to keep the bottles from clinking when he walked down the passage to his office.
Griessel adjusted the bottles in his pockets on the way back. He went to the toilets and swiftly downed one of them. Hesitated a moment, then drank another. Popped four of the peppermints into his mouth and stood sucking them, swishing the saliva around. Then he went to the rubbish bin and hid the two empty bottles under the used paper handtowels. He rearranged the remaining eight bottles so that there was less risk of noise.
