by Deon Meyer
‘Vernon, is that you? Fok knows, Vernon, you nearly had me. Nice one, you can go work for Candid Camera now. Schustered. Twenty-third of May, nogal . . .’
‘Mr McLean, my name is Benny Griessel of the Hawks. If you want to call me back . . .’
‘The Hawks? Now you’re from the Hawks?’
‘Yes, mister, the DPCI, the Hawks . . .’
‘Vernon, it’s not you . . .’
‘Mr McLean, call me back. Here is the number.’ He read it out slowly and emphatically.
A silence, then: ‘I could swear it was Vernon trying to Schuster me. Listen, pally, it’s Sunday, my mother-in-law is here for lunch and I have to go carve the leg of lamb. I don’t know this Griessel ou, never heard of him.’
‘My name is Benny Griessel. The victim was Ernst Richter, the man who ran Alibi dot co dot za. His death has been in the news over the past few days.’
‘That thing the farmer’s wife shot her husband over yesterday, that thing in the Rapport?’ he asked in surprise.
Liebenberg had told Griessel that a woman in Bela-Bela had shot her cattle farmer husband yesterday, after his name appeared on the leaked Alibi client list. The farmer was in a critical condition, the wife under arrest.
‘That’s right. Ernst Richter. He phoned you on the twenty-third of May, according to his cellphone records.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why did he phone me? I don’t know the man.’
‘You can’t remember such a phone call?’
‘Pally, do you know how many people phone me every day? I am the only manager left at VBC; they phone me like it’s going out of fashion . . .’
‘You don’t know Ernst Richter at all?’
‘Now I know him, when you said it’s that Rapport ou that was shot by his wife . . .’
‘No, no, it’s not . . . Mr McLean, thank you, thank you very much. Enjoy your lunch.’
Cupido listened to Desiree Coetzee phone Tricky Ricky Grobler. She was one tough cookie, that he already knew, but when she talked to Grobler there was a softer side, a patience and he heard a little playfulness – a flirtatious touch even? – in her voice. Again he wondered – was Tricky the current or the next whitey in her life?
He heard her say: ‘The detective would like to talk to you.’ And then she said ‘Yes’, a few times and ‘I don’t know’, and ‘I understand, Rick, I understand that very well . . .’
She looked at Cupido and shook her head slightly, to say the conversation wasn’t going well. She said: ‘What if I’m there too? Will you talk to him if I am there?’
Eventually: ‘Yes, I promise. Thanks, Rick.’
She rang off, looked dubiously at the phone in her hand. ‘He’s not keen, that’s for sure.’
‘But he will come?’
‘Yes. He says he’s going to shower first.’ She put the cellphone down on the breakfast counter, shifted the two coffee mugs to the middle, the sugar bowl too. ‘Come, sit,’ she invited him and took a carton of milk out of the fridge.
He sat at the counter.
She took her place on the tall chair opposite him and pointed at the milk and sugar: ‘Help yourself.’ She drank her coffee black and bitter, it seemed, because she simply picked up her mug and blew on it.
‘Let me tell you about Ricardo Grobler,’ she said then. ‘When I began at Alibi . . . That place is really all programmers, that’s the heart and soul, the rest are just support staff, actually. And programmers are a breed of their own. Very exclusive, very male dominant, if you don’t know about MySQL and PostgreSQL and DDL and DML, then you’re the village idiot, and they show you no respect. And there I come, a coloured, and a girl. MBA or not, I tick all the wrong boxes, so they show me no respect. So I called this meeting with them all; I wanted to lay down the law, but I made absolutely no headway. Then Rick Grobler stands up. Now you have to understand, he’s the senior programmer there; he’s a bit of a legend because of his freelance work, he carries a lot of weight. And Ricardo says this attitude ends now. He told them he had worked at quite a few companies, and nobody treats their employees better. They were well paid, and Desiree there in front, she has to make this business work, and she’s qualified to do it. Give her a chance. Show some respect. So that we can keep getting paid.’
She sipped her coffee carefully. ‘That was a speech that Ernst should have made, but he was too much of a people pleaser, and he was too scared to upset the programmers, because they already looked down on him, because of his smart-aleck techie T-shirts and his wannabe attitude. But Ricardo Grobler stepped up to the plate.’
Another sip of coffee.
‘He’s an odd one,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you that. And a bit of a sad one. He has this social interaction problem, like in zero social intelligence. He will sit there all morose in a meeting, but if anything is interesting to him, then he gushes on and on. You can’t get him to stop. I think it’s from too much sitting alone in front of a computer, for too many years. He sees a shrink, once a week; he’s working on it . . .’
‘And the schoolboy crush . . . ?’ asked Cupido.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Social outcasts like Ricardo . . . When you show a little empathy, they grab onto it big time. It can get complicated; you have to manage it nicely. And I think I’ve always done that.’
Music to his ears. ‘So how do I approach him?’
She shrugged. ‘He lost face badly. Everyone at Alibi knows that the Cape Times was writing about him. Those are his peers, and you humiliated him . . .’
‘That’s not true. We didn’t cuff him, and we took him out the back . . .’
‘Explain that to him,’ she said and took a big gulp of coffee.
There was one advantage to carrying out an investigation on the holy Sabbath.
If you phoned a man – and they were men, without exception – who was an Alibi client, and you gave him the choice of coming to the DPCI offices, he grabbed it. They all did. And they came without legal representation, because it was Sunday, and lawyers are expensive on Sundays, or else they were simply unreachable.
There were four left to contact after Griessel had his surreal conversation with Peter McLean.
All four were wealthy – a fast food king with seven KFC concessions, an actuary at a big life insurance company in Pinelands, the owner of four massive scrapyards in Stikland, and a property developer in Somerset West.
Three of them admitted that they had received a call from an unknown person, on the date in question – someone who had tried to blackmail them. Three of them refused to pay, for more or less the same reason: once you paid a blackmailer, there was a very strong possibility that the demands would not end there. So you took a chance. As the KFC man put it: ‘I called his bluff. And he threw in his hand.’
The fourth was the scrapyard owner. He was a not a sophisticated man. He was overweight, with small piggy eyes and massive hands. There was dirt under his nails. ‘Ja, I paid the donner. Fifty thousand rand. Cash. What could I do? My Vera would have shot me, like that cattle farmer at Bela-Bela yesterday – she’s one helluva jealous woman. And if I made a bank transfer, Vera would have seen it. She does our books . . . But I put a note to him in the envelope with the money. I wrote to him, I’m going to find you, you bliksem, and I’m going to slowly moer you to death with a shifting spanner if you threaten me again.’
‘How did you hand over the money?’
‘I posted it, to PostNet in Stellenbosch. For attention: Martinus Grundlingh. Then I looked for a Martinus Grundlingh in the phone book and on Google, but I couldn’t find anything.’
‘Did you know it was Ernst Richter?’
‘No, how would I know it was him behind this thing? The drol said he was Grundlingh.’
‘Did he want a bank transfer?’
‘Jong, ja, I don’t remember a
ll the details, I think I pretty quickly said I will send you cash.’
‘And you didn’t hear from him again?’
‘No. He must have been scared off by the shifting spanner business.’
‘Where were you on the evening of Wednesday the twenty-sixth of November?’
‘I was at home. With my Vera. But if you want to check with her, you’d better tell her some lie. I don’t want to be shot.’
What gave Cupido the final assurance that Tricky Ricky Grobler was not the whitey in Desiree Coetzee’s life was the fact that young Donovan didn’t know the man.
Grobler arrived in an old Citi Golf.
‘And this car?’ asked Desiree.
‘It’s my neighbour’s. They’ – and he pointed an accusing finger at Cupido – ‘still have mine.’
‘We’ll go and fetch it now, Rick,’ said Cupido conciliatory.
‘Now, ja. Now that you want something. Now I’m Rick. But Thursday, then I was Tricks.’
‘That is just how we work. I’m not going to apologise. You were a legitimate suspect, with that angry email. I can’t take responsibility for that.’
Cupido caught Desiree’s eye, saw that she was trying to show him this was not the right approach. And he thought, it’s the truth, why should I lie now?
‘You are going to apologise to me,’ said Rick Grobler stubbornly. ‘You are going to say you’re sorry in front of everyone at Alibi. If you ever want to find out who leaked the database, that is.’
81
Transcript of interview: Advocate Susan Peires with Mr Francois du Toit
Wednesday, 24 December; 1604 Huguenot Chambers, 40 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town
FdT: My office on the farm . . . It’s in the old cellar building. Pa sub-divided it – into an office, bathroom and storeroom. We keep a lot of supplies in the storeroom for the labourers: sugar and flour and tinned food, things like that. Ma was visiting us, because my son Guillaume was born six weeks ago and she comes over to help San . . . Ma must have come to fetch something, because I saw her walking away . . .
I walked Richter to his car. Then I went back to the office, just to calm down before I went back into the house. I was standing looking out of the window, still upset about the whole thing. My window was half open, about forty-five degrees, so I could see the reflection if someone came out of the storeroom. And then Ma came out, holding some things in her hands. But the thing is, when she came out, she looked towards the office first. I don’t know . . . It was like she was afraid I would see her . . .
SP: Would she have been able to hear what you were discussing?
FdT: That’s what I was wondering. So I turned on the radio in the office, about as loud as someone would speak, and I went into the storeroom, and stood there listening. It’s possible. Definitely possible. I . . . It’s hard to remember how loudly we were speaking. I was upset, I think I raised my voice . . .
SP: Mr du Toit, you are telling me you think your mother had something to do with Ernst Richter’s death.
FdT: I know, I know . . . Look . . . the police are waiting at my house. I committed a crime; I was involved in illicit international trade. It’s going to come out. I need a lawyer. But if they . . . If my mother did anything . . .
SP: How did the police connect you to Ernst Richter?
FdT: I don’t have the faintest idea. I went to Agrimark this morning. When I got there, San phoned me and said there was a whole task force of policemen at the house, they were looking for me. Hawks, she said, the man said he was from the Hawks and it was to do with Ernst Richter.
SP: How can they link you to Richter?
FdT: I don’t know . . . There were other people involved with the whole wine business, I don’t know if any of them . . . That’s all that I can think of.
SP: Surely your mother is not capable of . . . Do you really think . . . ?
FdT: My mother . . . Remember the story of Oupa Pierre and the dop system. Remember how she handled Paul’s psychopathy. My mother is a doer; my mother is . . . You don’t mess with her. And how can you blame her when life has treated her and her family so harshly, and perhaps she says, up to here and no further. You will not send another son of mine to jail, you will not ruin my grandson’s life as well . . . That’s why I told you everything from the beginning, from Oupa Jean onwards, so you can understand the whole history that lies behind this. So that you can . . . I don’t know, I suppose I’m looking for extenuating circumstances for myself, and for my mother . . .
SP: How could she know about the French wine?
FdT: I don’t know . . . She must have wondered how I got my start. She hinted once or twice that she would love to know, but I said it was all down to that vintage of 2012 . . . I thought then that she believed me.
82
That Sunday didn’t end with a bang, but a whimper.
Vaughn Cupido had lost face in front of Desiree Coetzee. He’d had to swallow his pride – visibly and with great difficulty – and promise Tricky Ricky Grobler he would apologise to him in front of the whole Alibi team.
And Grobler said: ‘Do it first, then we’ll talk again.’
And then Cupido had to leave.
At least the boy asked, when he got to his car: ‘Are you coming back again, uncle?’
‘Maybe . . .’
On the road back to Bellville he thought he should have gone straight to Grobler. He shouldn’t have involved Desiree in it. Look where that had got him. Bloody fool, couldn’t wait to see the chick. You must think, Vaughn, you must think. But no, head over heels in love, then you think like an idiot.
Main problem was he said he would apologise, ’cause why he wanted to show Desiree he was a modern man, not just some macho guy.
And now he would have to eat humble pie in front of all those people. When he knew true as God he had nothing to apologise for.
He found Griessel still at work. Benna was doing paperwork, writing reports on all the interrogations. Benna looked the way Cupido felt. Down and out. Then he already knew . . .
He sat down with a sigh opposite his colleague. ‘Hit me with the bad news.’
Griessel told him.
‘This thing is going nowhere, Benna. First JOC chance I get and it’s a fokkop.’
‘The McLean number, the one who isn’t an Alibi client. He says he doesn’t know Richter . . . that’s the one I’m still wondering about.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Yes . . . The problem is, the call lasted ninety-four seconds. A minute and a half. It doesn’t sound long, but I timed it just now on my watch . . .’ Griessel picked up his cellphone. ‘I’m going to call you. Just play along, then we see how long it takes. You’re Vaughn Cupido, but you don’t know who’s calling, you don’t recognise my voice. Just talk the way you would handle a call like that . . .’
‘Okay.’
Griessel called. His colleague’s phone rang. When Cupido answered with ‘Hello, Vaughn speaking’, he checked the second hand on his watch and said: ‘Hello, can I talk to Pietie, please?’
‘Pietie? Pietie who?’
‘Pietie Pieterse.’
‘Sorry pêllie, I think you have the wrong number.’
‘There’s no Pietie Pieterse?’
‘No, this is the Hawks.’
‘Oh. Okay. Sorry. Bye.’
He checked the watch again. ‘Twenty-six seconds.’
‘The dude could be busy on another phone, and keep the wrong number on hold.’
‘What do you do when you ring a wrong number? What do you do straight after that?’
‘I phone the right number.’
‘Exactly,’ said Griessel. ‘But the next number that Richter phoned on that secret phone, was a whole two days later. A completely different number.’
‘Weird,’ said Cupido. ‘What exactly did this
McLean say?’
Griessel told him everything he could remember.
‘And he sounded genuine? It wasn’t an act?’
‘If it was an act, he deserves an Oscar.’
‘And you don’t mean the Pistorius version.’
Griessel smiled, for the first time in days. ‘No, I don’t mean that one.’
‘Maybe it was first someone else’s number. Maybe it was a client who put a wrong number in the database. Maybe Richter forgot it was a secret phone, and he wanted to call garden services at ABC . . .’
‘VBC . . .’
‘Whatever. Shit happens. Let’s move on.’
‘Maybe we’ll get something with the Stellenbosch station people. Vusi brought all the numbers here to IMC, they said maybe the day after tomorrow. It’s a lot of work.’
But they both knew the chances were slim. There were a lot of drug lords and gang members with unlisted, unknown cellphone numbers.
Both of them were reluctant to go back to their own houses, to this Sunday’s solitude. They sat and talked and brought the docket up to date, until well past four.
Griessel phoned Doc on the way home.
‘Are you still dry?’
‘Yes, Doc.’
‘I’ll phone her. But you’ll have to be patient, there’s a lot of damage.’
‘All right, Doc.’
Then he drove to the city. There was a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, five o’clock on a Sunday at the Union Congregational Church on the corner of Kloof Nek and Eaton. The Green Door group, as they called themselves. A few blocks from the house. He and Alexa had been there a few times. Maybe she would come tonight.
She wasn’t there.
He stood up first. He walked to the front. He said: ‘My name is Benny Griessel, and I am an alcoholic.’
‘Hello, Benny,’ they said.
‘I know I am powerless against alcohol. I know my life is out of control. I have gone one day without a drink.’
There was a Woolies ready meal on the kitchen table: Luxury Smoked Trout en Croute, with a note in her handwriting on how to cook it.
And three kisses.
