'To the Shot for lunch with us, of course. I told you I have to go there. To see Tommy Beltane. I told you he phoned.'
If he had been told where they were going, he had not understood. A feeling of weakness went over his arms and legs, as if all the power had been drained from them. Strangely, it was not an unpleasant sensation, any more than floating when he had swum to the end of his strength. He wondered if Beltane had recognised him in the corner of the dark landing, if he had pushed at the unlocked door of the flat above, if he had gone in and found Mary O'Bannion. It would be strange if, instead of Peerse, Tommy Beltane was to be the hunter.
'Look at that,' Billy said. He put on the wipers as rain battered against the window. 'The sun was out a minute ago. It's going to be one of those days that change.'
For the rest of the journey, they talked about the weather and then about finding a place to park.
It was early yet, and the Shot wasn't busy. They saw Tommy Beltane at a table with two other men. Murray had expected him to be alone. He hadn't expected him to be talking just as he always did. If he faltered when he saw Murray, he corrected it so immediately there was no way of being sure. As they sat down, nods were exchanged, but, as if by complicity, without interrupting the flow of that wonderfully impressive voice. It was like a thing apart, not a possession but possessing the man, made to create an audience.
'... No after life. No hell or sweet heaven. Our true horror movie? I'll tell you the last ghost story. We'll be gathered round a corpse engaged in some conjuration we've made possible. Something scientific naturally, or how could we hope for a miracle? The channel opens and we listen to discover what lies beyond the gate of death. We're prepared for anything. Anything but silence... Our horror will be the silence, a stillness that has no waiting in it nor any place for expectation.'
'Tell me one thing,' Murray said into the silence, 'That body they used, was it a fat whore? One who had gone on because she was too stupid to do anything else.'
One of the men Murray didn't know laughed uncertainly, then trailed off.
'That's harsh,' Tommy Beltane said, combing his fingers through the full patriarchal beard.
'I would rather load dead meat in the market,' Murray said, 'than let a whore lay her dirty hands on me.'
The words came thick in his mouth. He felt their stares.
'Murray's a Calvinist,' Billy Shanks said with an uneasy difficult smile.
'That's a word we use too glibly in this city.' Over the hand smoothing, smoothing his beard, Tommy Beltane watched Murray. 'All of us mouthing that particular cliche with an air of rightful ownership as if Calvin had been born up a close in Moirhill and burned his first heretic outside the City Chambers. What do we mean by it? Ask us and, if we have what passes here for an education, we'll stammer out something about predestination. Only by that we mean nothing but guilt-and that every pleasure has a price higher than we ever wanted to pay.'
'I heard you had something you wanted to tell Billy,' Murray said. 'I heard that you phoned because you had something you wanted to tell him.' But the man he had thought of at first sight as the Prophet shook his head. 'No... no, you don't have anything to say. You talk a lot, but you don't say anything. A patter merchant. A voice in a bar.'
'Waiting for closing time.' It was a wonderful voice, masculine and commanding, and whatever he might have wished, even against his will, Tommy Beltane was given an audience. 'Isn't that what we're all doing? What makes you think you understand me? I don't claim that about you. If I spent all of a long night trying to understand, that's the only conclusion I could come to – I think some of us are not... at home... in these bodies. We should be kind to one another. I was at a conference lately and after the welcome, after the first meeting, after dinner, I couldn't bear it. I looked round this room and there were people at a piano singing, but all of them were younger than me and I didn't know the songs. I went up to my room and repacked my case and came down. I wanted to go home, but I couldn't find my way outside. I went along corridors that had locked doors. And at last I was in a corridor where the side wall was all of glass and I looked across a darkened courtyard and I saw them crowded in that room singing. It was so quiet I heard the hum of one of the lights, failing, flickering. I stood there with my case in my hand watching their mouths moving. I couldn't find my way out. And so in the end I went back to my room and unpacked and lay on the bed, waiting for it to be morning.'
He was crying.
Something in their reaction must have made him realise. He put his fingers to his cheek with a glance of dolorous bravado. It was a look most of them had not seen before and it was not pleasant to see. It said that although a man could have secret lives and separate selves yet in the end they would come together necessarily and be one.
'You shouldn't be angry with me,' he wept. 'Somebody I loved is dead.'
They watched him go.
'You didn't have to talk to him like that.'
'Maybe I know some things about him you don't.'
'I know somethings... but I admire him,' Billy Shanks said. 'And he's a kindly man – I know some of the good things he's done.'
'I've seen some of the things he does.'
'He lives his life with style. That's my definition of courage.'
'Even the sight of him makes me want to vomit.'
'If I had to choose, Murray, I think I'd choose Tommy. He's better company.'
Murray stood up, then hesitated. 'I need to get to my brother's house,' he said. 'But I don't have enough for a taxi.'
With a familiar clumsy looping movement, Billy pulled out a handful of crumpled notes from a side pocket and held them out uncounted.
'I'll square it with you when I see you.'
'Fuck you,' Billy said bitterly, 'don't bother.'
It was true that the day was changeable. As they crossed the city, crowded pavements clenched against the rain turned leisurely in a truce of sunlight.
'The nights'll be drawing in soon,' the driver said.
On instinct, he stopped him at the corner and walked the rest. It would have been easy to miss the house among its neighbours, small family houses built in the thirties; some had put a dormer window in the attic to get another bedroom; somebody, sometime after the war, had set the fashion of adding a porch. The car, sitting on the tarred slope by the front door, was what he recognised; and the shock he felt made him realise he had expected it to be gone. During the night in the cell and the interview room, what Irene had said about the murders had run through his mind like a refrain. While they were questioning him, what he had listened to instead of their voices was her voice saying: 'She could go away and start a new life. She wouldn't do it again... that would be the end of it.'
He moved swiftly up the path, carefully keeping the car between himself and the window. When he touched the front door, it gave under his hand. It had been lying a fraction open, and that dismayed him. He stepped into the hall with the soft step of a hunter. In the current of air that came with him, dry stems of withered flowers rattled in a vase. He passed through the living room and in the kitchen found tea and cups laid on the work surface, but when he put the back of his hand against the pot it was cold. The car in the drive proved Irene had come back here; it did not mean she had stayed. There was more than one way of leaving a house. Perhaps like him she had taken a taxi, or walked to the end of the road and caught a bus; the right bus could go to a railway station or an airport; a bus could be the beginning of a long journey. Back in the front room, he heard a car door slam outside and ran to the window; outside the house opposite, a man was locking the driver's side of a red Ford Escort though it was parked in the drive, a careful man. The sky had darkened, preparing for rain. Murray watched the careful man go into his house and the light went on and he could see him sitting down at the table with a boy who must be his son home from school for lunch, and the woman between them leaning forward resting her hands on their shoulders.
There was no reason to go upstairs. He s
tood with his foot on the first step and his head bent as if in thought. There would be no reason to go into the room where she had slept, where the faint smell of her body would cling to the things she had worn next to her skin. Incoherent images, of clothes spilled on a floor, of the intimate private life of a woman's hips as she eased up a zip as if she were alone, held him in an oblique suspended attentiveness like a man who would not acknowledge a shameful thing but peeped at it from the corner of his eye. The outer door lay open and he reached out and struck it so that it closed with a crash like wakening.
From above, a voice called out: 'Is that you, doctor? My son's up here in the bedroom.'
'Mother?'
When he went in, she was standing by the foot of the bed. His brother lay still with his eyes closed like a dead man. Startled, she put up a finger to the lips painted on the old bright mask of her face.
'For God's sake, what is Malcolm doing here? He should be in hospital.'
'Oh, no. I'm going to look after him. Irene helped me to bring him home this morning’.
'Irene?'
There was a sigh of breath; at the sound of his wife's name,
Malcolm was smiling. Against the white pillow, his face was a yellow axe. His eyes opened and closed again as, sedated, he was pressed down into sleep.
As if released, the old woman began to thrust Murray from the room. If it had not been for her expression, there would have been something comic in the reiterated frail shoves that sent him stumbling back. Don't come looking here for her. She's gone.' She wanted to drive him back to the head of the stairs and then out of the house, but he stepped aside into the next room, not resisting her otherwise.
'Did you expect her to stay after what you did to her? Did you think she would be ashamed to tell me? You've ruined your brother's life.'
'What is it? What is it?' Murray asked helplessly, stumbling back from her assault.
'You threatened her with a knife and took her – You know what you made her do. Don't deny it – she told me. There wasn't anybody to stop you. Your brother couldn't stop you, you coward.'
'It's not true. It wasn't like that –'
'Don't tell me lies. Who could believe you?' his mother demanded. 'Who would believe anything you said about her? You've driven her away.'
There was no mercy in her justice.
He was at the end of his retreat. The room was not large; Malcolm had used it as a study for there was a table with a file box on it and a battered second-hand office desk against the wall. One of its drawers was pulled half out and the key in its lock still swung back and forward from being brushed against as they came in. As a speculation of his trade, like a memory of an earlier life, it occurred to him that there could have been a shared bank book locked in that drawer and that Irene might not have left empty handed.
'You've ruined your brother's life.'
The old woman beat at him with brittle fists of folded bones. As the only refuge left him, he turned his back on her. Through the livid air, rain burst on the panes and leapt up in glistening rods from the curve of the road. The voice faded behind him; he refused it; but what it said had no need of words. While he watched, lights came on in more of the houses opposite because of the storm. It was over there he had seen the woman linking her husband and son at a set table. Thinking of that, he leaned forward until his forehead pressed hard against the cold of the glass, but it made no difference.
There was no way of seeing her from where he was.
If you enjoyed reading Ripped by Frederic Lindsay you may be interested in A Taste For Killing by Jon Zackon, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from A Taste For Killing by Jon Zackon
Chapter 1
1996
THERE ARE better places to be than Johannesburg at the end of August, when seasonal winds whip noxious dust off the old mine dumps. Transvaal topsoil is red, which is true of many gold-bearing regions. But the stuff that makes up the Jo’burg dumps comes from ore prised out of the depths of the earth before being crushed and processed. In the bad old days cyanide was used to help extract the gold. The result is this unnatural, toxic yellow powder that rises into the pale, cloudless sky in plumes from the crowns of enormous piles, which loom above the veldt like old battleships, or unfinished pyramids.
Hopefully, the dumps won’t be there for good. As I drive by I can see men in overalls scurrying about. They work for a new order of reprocessing companies bent on resifting the decades-old residue to retrieve scintillas of gold missed by the original miners.
The poisonous powder is accumulating on my windscreen. I hate the stuff. It gets in the hair and stings the eyes. I spray the windscreen and switch on the wipers. Inevitably, this leaves a smear on the driver’s side.
I’d forgotten how detestable the Transvaal can be at this time of the year. So should I have stayed in the UK? Fly out some other time? No. I’ve waited too long to make this trip as it is.
Jo’burg has changed a lot. It was my home until 1961, when, at the age of twenty-three, I went to work in Durban. Less than six months later I flew to the UK to become a soutpiel, a salt prick, the Afrikaans metaphor for those Japies and Rooineks who live abroad, their souls forever hovering over the Atlantic with their dicks dangling in the sea. No longer belonging anywhere.
During my boyhood Jo’burg was an exciting, pulsating place. The centre, with its great stores and tall buildings, resembled an American city. Now it is rundown and depressing. White businesses have deserted it, decamping to Sandton, a fast-growing shopping area in the northern suburbs, not far from my sister’s house, which is where I am staying right now.
There have been huge changes, too, to the roads. I hardly know where I am. New highways crisscross the city and its environs. It is said that the apartheid government built them for defensive purposes. They all link up neatly on the map but distances are great and if you don’t watch the signs carefully you can end up a long way from where you’re supposed to be.
So on this coldish day I assiduously follow the signs as I swing away from the city on a super-fast highway, driving towards the arid west. If I keep going in this direction I’ll end up in Botswana, in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. Of course, I’m not going anywhere near that far.
I’m on a mission. Self-imposed.
For the purpose of carrying out my plan I have borrowed a BMW from my niece, Beth. From her mother, my sister Penny, I have “borrowed” another crucial item - a Browning. Fully loaded, although I’m not expecting to need more than a couple of bullets at most. I’ve also brought along an old-fashioned ball peen hammer. I have a special purpose in mind for this little item.
Years ago Penny told me that she slept with a pistol under her pillow. It’s not that unusual. In some ways Jo’burg has still got the feel of a mining camp. Everyone throws up their hands in horror at the crime rate. Sure, they are right to do so, what with the carjackings that go on and all the AK47s at large. But come on, the place has always had a monstrous amount of crime, right from the day in 1886 when villains, vagabonds and opportunists began to flood in following the discovery of gold at Langlaagte, a farm close to what is now the city centre.
I waited until Penny and her husband, Abie, set out for work this morning. Then I went into their bedroom and from under my sister’s pillow I lifted the FN Browning HP - I know next to nothing about guns, but that’s what the lettering says it is. If she ever finds out what I’ve done she’ll probably use it on me. The hammer I took from a cupboard in the kitchen. I’m sure no one will miss it and who knows, I might not even bother to bring it back.
National Road 14 will take me close to where I need to go. I have a map to help me. On it a speck known as Van Zeeder’s Kopje, a settlement about fifteen miles off the N14, has been ringed. I suspect that the link road from the highway to the Kopje will prove little better than a farm track. From there I will have to turn north until I come to Van Zeeder’s Plaas. So what do I hope to find at Van Zeeder’s farm, or “plaas”?
What ties my life to this impossibly remote tract?
At the end of this particular road is a monster. A sadistic, merciless man, who has plagued my waking hours and haunted my sleep for thirty-five years. A serial killer with the blood of scores of men and boys on his hands.
I have cause to believe he may also have murdered the only woman I have ever truly loved. And yet, because of how South Africa is and has been, he has escaped any form of punishment. Which is why I am here – to dispense the very justice he has so earnestly sought to evade.
So help me, when I get to that lonely farmstead, at the end of a long, red-dust road, I am going to destroy the monster or die in the attempt.
I have a long journey ahead of me. After a while my thoughts turn to the events that have led me to my present path. It’s not easy recalling those dreadful times. On the contrary, it’s bloody painful. But doing so will serve a purpose. It will make me angry all over again; killer angry.
In practice, what I hope to be capable of doing is first using the hammer – and then the gun. But I’m the sort of person who rescues spiders with a glass and a piece of cardboard. For years my father, a keen sportsman, teased me for lacking killer instinct. He was always going on about it – and he was right. So self-doubt is an issue. Even though the monster’s crimes fill me with hatred and horror I believe there is no way I can slay him unless I’m angry enough.
There is another little problem I have to overcome – near-paralysing fear.
Yes, I am that scared. The knot of anxiety in my gut proves it. The pain presently advancing down my left arm into my hand proves it. The irregular breathing proves it. You’d think I’d be inured to fears that go back decades. The trouble is, on a scale of one to ten the story that consumes me, that has pursued me so relentlessly for so many years, scores an easy ten for scariness.
And that story, my story, as I go over it in my mind, also began with a long car journey …
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