#Youdunnit

by Nicci French

  He felt himself tense. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What don’t I understand, Ben?’

  For some reason, he thought of Lucinda Berrington, and something he’d said to her: Is this how you imagined your life turning out?

  He shrugged. ‘I’m trying to pay the bloody bond on our house, keep the water and lights running, our medical, our pension. When I’m not doing that, I’m standing at a disused railway station next to a girl who’s been raped, who’s been strangled to death with a bicycle chain, and thinking: “What the fuck is wrong with the world?”’

  ‘Oh, not this shit again.’

  ‘Yes, this shit again.’

  He got up from the bed.

  ‘It’s your job, Ben. It’s been your job for twenty-five years.’

  ‘And, in twenty-five years, you’ve never understood.’

  It was a cheap shot, and they both knew it.

  He stepped past her but she came up behind him and grabbed his arm. ‘Do you even remember your daughter growing up?’

  He turned to face her – prickling with anger, light-headed with exhaustion – looking at her hand on his arm. ‘What the hell kind of a question is that?’

  ‘I listened to you a couple of weeks ago – when you actually made the effort to get home and sit down with us for dinner – and you were remembering things that never even happened. Do you know that? Do you even realize what you’re saying? You’ve invented a version of her childhood: things you did with her, places you took her. But you never did any of those things with her, Ben. April’s sixteen and you’ve never been here.’

  He studied her. ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘It’s not bullshit. This picture-perfect memory you have of her growing up, it doesn’t exist. You’re rewriting history based on what you wanted it to be like.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Ben.’

  ‘No.’ That’s a lie. She’s lying. I’m not remembering things wrong. I’m not losing my grip. I’m tired, but I’m not losing my grip. He shrugged her off. ‘Leave me alone.’

  She grabbed him again.

  He shrugged her off a second time. ‘Leave me alone!’

  And then it happened so fast, it was done before he could stop himself: she went to grab him again and he pushed her away, hand flat to the centre of her chest. She stumbled back, hitting the corner of the bed – and, as she did, it knocked her off-balance, and she pirouetted and fell face-first into the dresser.

  Shit.

  Oh shit.

  He rushed across the room towards her. She’d fallen beyond the bed, hidden from him, her legs visible but nothing else. When she saw him coming, she scrambled on to all fours and scurried away, into the corner of the room, backing up against the wall. There was blood running down her face.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. I’m so sorr –’

  ‘Get away from me, Ben.’

  ‘Please,’ he said, dropping to his knees in front of her. ‘Please forgive me.’

  ‘I … ’ There were tears in her eyes now. ‘I don’t know who you are any more.’

  He held out a hand to her. ‘Please, Suze.’

  ‘Who are you, Ben?’

  ‘Please … ’ Tears filled his own eyes now. ‘I’m your husband.’

  #Friday_3_August_2007

  The second woman was found dead on the third of August. She lived in a place called Bristol, a mid-sized town on the other side of Kleinkop. At night, if the evening was clear, Lucinda could sometimes see Bristol from the veranda of her house, its series of gridded streets tracing the blackness of the Atlantic Ocean.

  She was late arriving, having been photographing cadets at the academy, and by the time she got to the house, everyone was already there, gathered around the body. The victim was older than Vorster, but had been treated by the murderer with as little respect. She’d been punched in the throat, and had fallen through a glass coffee table in the middle of the living room. As she laid there, dazed, her attacker had raped her, strangled her with a tie that had been left on a chair in the kitchen, and then vanished. On a second sweep of the house, Moses discovered that the killer not only appeared to have taken money from the bedroom, but had also raided the victim’s jewellery box.

  ‘You think he took something as a trophy?’ Lucinda overheard one of the uniformed officers asking Moses. Lucinda looked to Zill, who barely reacted, and then to Moses, a man who rarely offered an opinion unless he knew it to be right.

  Moses left the room.

  On a drive into work during her first three months with SAPS, back when Zill didn’t so readily let his guard down in front of her, he’d told Lucinda he’d once been an expert spotter of talent. ‘But then people stopped wanting to be cops,’ he’d said, ‘so I’ve been reduced to recruiting second-rate cadets just to fill spaces.’ But he’d always spoken highly of Moses. ‘He’s from a different time,’ Zill had said.

  ‘Was it a better time too?’

  ‘In some ways.’

  Yet, as she watched Zill standing in the carnage of the living room, eyes on the woman, on the bed of shattered glass she was lying on, Lucinda wondered whether there had ever been, or ever would be, a better time. In the old days, South Africa had a racist government storming townships, massacring innocent people as they scattered through the scorched streets. Now they just had this: an enemy with no cause at all.

  ‘Do you?’ Zill said.

  They all looked around. Zill was staring past Lucinda, almost through her, to the uniformed officer.

  ‘Do I what, sir?’ the officer replied.

  ‘Do you think he took something as a trophy?’

  She glanced at Lucinda. ‘I, uh … ’

  Lucinda looked from Zill to the officer and back to Zill, his face chalk-white, days of stubble lining his jowls. ‘Ben, do you want me to start taking photographs?’

  He just looked at her.

  ‘Ben?’

  No reply.

  Lucinda looked around the room. Without Moses, there was no one willing to step in. No ranking officer. No deputy for Zill. A couple of the forensic techs glanced at her, their thoughts projected onto their faces: Ask him what the hell he wants us to do. There was a sudden kind of panic in the room, something heavy and unspoken. Lucinda felt like she was on the outside, looking in. What did they all know that she didn’t?

  She looked from face to face.

  No one helped her.

  So she turned back to Ben: ‘Ben, what do you want us –’

  ‘Everyone out,’ Zill said.

  ‘Do you want me to –’

  ‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he said to her, quietly, evenly, without a hint of emotion. Then he looked around the room. ‘I don’t want anything from any of you.’

  As she stood with the others on the outside of the murder room, she found out what was going on. To start with, in the moments after she’d first arrived, she’d thought it had been because Zill was first on the scene. She’d come to realize that a lot of cops felt an attachment to the case when that happened, as if it was theirs by default.

  Then she thought it was the location: the fact that it had twenty-four-hour security and two fenced gates, two guards at the first, and yet the killer had got beyond both – and back out again – without anyone appearing to notice.

  But it wasn’t those things.

  Zill saw the connection to Jo Vorster the instant he arrived at the scene. Both had been strangled. Both had been raped. Both had been left face down, dresses around their waists, discarded like they meant nothing. There were twenty years between the two victims, but physically they were almost the same: blonde, fair skinned, slim. The only difference was that Vorster had been dumped miles from her family home, while the second woman had died inside hers, the killer presumably deciding that it was too risky to get a body out of what was – in name, at least – a secure complex.

  Yet he’d opted for the same method to trap both victims, this time using Vorster’s lapt
op and another UCT student’s Twitter account to send direct messages to the victim.

  ‘She seems too old to be a student,’ Lucinda said to Moses.

  Moses looked at her. ‘That’s because she’s not. We found a DM in her Twitter account, sent yesterday from a student who’s out of the country this week. It’s just like we thought: the killer’s stealing identities and posing as UCT students. He’s not a student. He just pretends he belongs there. The woman thought the person turning up today was called Cebo Bhongela. She phoned down to the guards at the front of the complex here and told them to wave him through. So the guy turns up, tells the guards he’s Bonghela, and they wave him through.’

  ‘Did the guards get a look at him?’

  ‘We’ve got a physical description.’

  ‘Anything we can use?’

  Moses shrugged. ‘No identifying marks. Average height. Average weight. There are one-point-three million black Africans in this city. You do the maths.’

  DNA from the Jo Vorster murder had already confirmed that the killer was black, so the name of Cebo Bonghela would fit just fine. As long as he didn’t do anything to get himself noticed on the way in or the way out, he could pass through without raising as much as an eyebrow. Lucinda felt a fizz of frustration, for Moses, for Zill, for Jo Vorster, for the woman lying dead on the floor of the living room. But when she looked back at Moses, she saw something else in his face. Not just frustration.

  Sadness.

  ‘What’s going on, Moses?’ she asked.

  He looked at her. Swallowed. ‘The woman in there didn’t know Bonghela was out of the country. Instead, she thought he was coming here to discuss his dissertation.’

  ‘Wait, so the victim’s a lecturer?’

  After she’d asked the question, the hallway hushed, every face slowly turning in her direction. ‘Yes,’ Moses said softly.

  ‘Do we know her name?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Her name is Susan Zill.’

  #Monday_6_August_2007

  In the month after he’d pushed her against the dresser, he’d tried to make it up to Susan by taking care of the jobs that needed doing. One of them was getting the car fixed. He took it to the normal place, the guy replaced something, and then Zill brought it back home and assured her everything would be fine. And, for thirty-five days, it was.

  But then the car stopped working again.

  On 3 August, the morning she was killed, it had been her day off. Susan had wanted to go to the mall at Century City, and ordinarily he would have just loaned her his car and organized a lift with someone else, but he needed to pick Lucinda up and then drive them both down to the station where there was a press conference for the Jo Vorster case. ‘I’m so sorry, Suze,’ he’d said to her. ‘If it was any other day, you could have just had my car.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine, Ben.’

  That was how conversations had gone since the incident: him apologizing, her telling him it was fine, even though clearly, understandably, it wasn’t. The irony was, he actually meant every word in those last days of her life. His apologies were no longer weightless. He’d only have to look at her before he began immediately telling her he was sorry. He began wondering whether it might have been easier – for both of them, though more selfishly for him – if she’d just upped and left. But she didn’t, perhaps because of April.

  Perhaps, even more understandably, to punish him.

  ‘You want a hand with that?’

  As he’d been trying to get Susan’s Polo started that morning, Zill had looked across the road to the houses opposite. The day she’d died had been a cold, wet morning marked by granite skies, and one of his neighbours, a podgy man in his fifties called du Toit, had been standing out front in shorts, a shirt and a raincoat. In his hand he held a video camera. Beyond him, visible through one of the windows of his house, Zill had glimpsed du Toit’s wife, Patricia, stick-thin and greying. They’d only been in there a month, but Zill had never taken to her. He’d never really taken to either of them.

  Despite that, Zill had smiled politely. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got a bit of a problem there.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  Du Toit must have seen Zill’s eyes move to the camera. He’d smiled, and held it up. ‘Nothing sinister,’ he said. ‘Used to work as a cameraman for SABC until they kicked me out for being too white.’ He’d rolled his eyes, as if expecting to find some solidarity in Zill’s face. Zill just nodded. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘just trying to keep my eye in.’

  A couple of minutes later, after du Toit had disappeared back inside, and the rain had started to get harder, Zill had given up on the Polo.

  Two hours later, his wife was dead.

  In the early hours of 6 August he began to dream of a different outcome; of the moment he got the car started and Susan headed out in her Polo to the mall. And when he woke up from the dream that morning and peeled back the sweat-stained sheets, he sat looking out at the rain, imagining other scenarios too: leaving home, forgetting something and then coming back and finding the killer already in his house. Zill began to fantasize about what he would do to him: imagined his knuckles pounding down into the killer’s face, chest, stomach, over and over until all Zill could see was blood. He imagined the sound those strikes would make – thud, thud, thud – and the wet, choking gargle coming from deep in the killer’s throat. But mostly he imagined leaving him lying there, dazed, casually walking through to the bedroom, selecting one of his ties, and returning to the living room. He imagined knotting it around the killer’s neck, just like the killer had knotted it around Susan’s. He imagined strangling him.

  He imagined seeing the light go out.

  Instead, as he got ready for work, Zill’s mind returned to what really happened: forty minutes after trying to get the car started, he gave up. ‘I’m probably going to be late tonight because we’ve got a stats meeting,’ he’d said to Susan after that. ‘Plus I’m going to pop into Motor City on the way home and see if we can’t replace this piece of crap.’

  She’d maybe smiled then.

  He hoped she had, just like he hoped he’d kissed her and told her he loved her, but the truth was, in the three days since she’d been gone, he had no clear idea of whether he did or didn’t. He was forty minutes late by then, and though he’d tried not to let his anxiety play out on his face, his mind was already in the office, in the files that awaited him, in the crime scenes he was yet to walk. He couldn’t even recall if he’d waved to her, or spent a moment looking back. Normally she stood on the steps at the side of their house as he left. Normally he waved back, one hand out the window as he moved through the security gates at the front of the complex. But that day was a blank.

  Perhaps he did wave. Perhaps he didn’t.

  He liked to think he did.

  Even if, deep down, he feared he’d forgotten.

  #Wednesday_12_September_2007

  Cape Town Central Station sits in the shadow of Table Mountain, an ugly red-brick building that looks more like a prison. Before he ran Murder and Robbery, Zill had told Lucinda that he’d worked a lot of gang crime, carving out a niche for himself on the third floor of the station. On their way into work in the mornings, he’d drive along Baden-Powell, a beautiful, desolate coastal road that wound its way east towards Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s biggest township, and he’d give her a running commentary of the things he’d seen. But after Susan was killed, the commentaries stopped. After Susan was killed, they rarely spoke in the mornings. Lucinda became so uncomfortable with it that, without even realizing, she started bringing her camera bag into the front with her. She’d sit it on her lap, let her fingers move up and down the plastic casing, finding comfort in it, and watch Khayelitsha pass in a blur. Occasionally Zill would ask her something, small, inane things, perhaps about her year’s contract almost being at an end, but often they’d drive for an hour in sil
ence. And, in the silence, she became more and more aware of her surroundings.

  Most days, even ten months in, she’d still be surprised at the size of Khayelitsha, a vast, sprawling satellite town built on about a millionth of the budget of the rest of the city. Shacks mixed with whitewashed one-room houses; garbage blew along the streets; there was no drainage, few street lights. Zill had once told her that its people were either proud, always looking for an exit and a way to better themselves, or they were fighting against their circumstances, trying to hit out. ‘That’s how gangs are made,’ he used to tell her. ‘Anger, resentment, desperation building and bubbling away.’

  That was what Zill had dealt with for seven years, what he faced down – and what some people in the police service believed had come back to bite him.

  ‘He made enemies in Khayelitsha,’ she heard an Afrikaans cop say one morning in the first week. ‘The gangs there, they remember him. The crews, the leaders, they hate him. He shut them down. He took their weapons. He confiscated their drugs.’

  And so the whispers began, in the corridors of the station, out in the bars after work and then finally in the newspapers. Even though it was clear he was targeting victims through Twitter, some said the killer was a member of a gang Zill had shut down. Others, that Jo Vorster had actually been a practice run for the ultimate act of revenge.

  Susan Zill.

  Lucinda would stand there, camera around her neck, awaiting instructions from whoever was supposed to be in charge, listening to rumours being spread. Zill was always retreating to his office and pulling the blinds; Moses – stubbled, eyes a buttery yellow – seemed unsure how to make the step up. Lucinda heard him on the phone to his wife one day, talking in Xhosa, and although she didn’t understand, she got the gist: How do I tell Zill to step back from the murder of his own wife? It shouldn’t have been his job, it should have been the job of Zill’s boss, whoever that was. Someone should have stepped in. But the reality was there was no one else senior enough to give the case to.