Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

  “That one of the iron ore ships?” I asked. “Looks a bit off course.”

  “It’s a yacht,” said Fat-Boy. “Big fuck-off yacht.”

  “You sure? It looks too big to be a yacht.”

  “It’s only ninety metres long. The big ones are well over a hundred.”

  “You can tell that by looking at it?” I asked.

  “Course not – it’s owned by a brother isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  Fat-Boy heaved himself out of his chair and fetched another couple of beers from the fridge. I looked at the glistening lights of the yacht in the middle of the bay and could make out several levels to it, with rows of lights on each. I picked up the binoculars and took a closer look. It was very much like a miniature cruise ship, with a strong, sleek prow, and elegant lines like smooth waves leading the eye to a glowing swimming pool and helicopter pad at the stern.

  “Which brother is it?” I asked Fat-Boy, although I had guessed the answer, and was beginning to realise the extent of Fat-Boy’s careful planning of our camping trip.

  “It’s the Dark Maiden,” said Fat-Boy. “The brother is Lebo Madikwe, the one you keep calling Lebogang.”

  I studied the boat again through the binoculars. The decks seemed deserted, but I could make out the shadowy forms of several men standing at a distance from each other. They were not being sociable, and nor were they enjoying the view – they were sentries watching for trouble.

  “What is your idea?” I said.

  “Had myself some dinner at the yacht club last night,” said Fat-Boy, then waited for my reaction.

  “Did you?”

  “It was a private function, but I told them I’d lost my invite.”

  “A good dinner?” I was getting an uncomfortable feeling. Fat-Boy on the loose was a worrying thought.

  “The best,” said Fat-Boy, and he took a gulp of beer.

  “What kind of private function?”

  “There was a funeral in the afternoon, and they were doing a sort of party afterwards.”

  “You didn’t, Fat-Boy. Tell me you didn’t gatecrash Vusi Madikwe’s wake.”

  “Course not.”

  Fat-Boy gulped at his beer again; my sense of discomfort increased.

  “Billy Mabele did,” said Fat-Boy.

  I could think of nothing to say for a moment, but Fat-Boy saw the concern on my face. He pouted with irritation.

  “The colonel let me keep the clothes, the cards, the jewelry, everything. He trusts me, the colonel does.”

  Fat-Boy finished his beer and struggled to his feet again to fetch another. Billy Mabele was a fake identity Chandler had created for Fat-Boy to play for the Van Rensburg family when we were helping them to transport some lions and an assortment of weapons down from Maputo. Billy Mabele had posed convincingly as an arms dealer and wildlife smuggler. The lions had made it all the way to Cape Town, along with the weapons and the gold bars, but it had been a narrow victory. Fat-Boy had overplayed his character to the point that the rest of us were convinced the Van Rensburgs would call our bluff. They eventually did, but by then they had other things to worry about.

  “You don’t think I can do it, Angel?” said Fat-Boy as he collapsed back into his chair with another beer.

  “What is it you want to do?”

  “They’ve been cutting it out of the concrete. I watched them yesterday, throwing bags of concrete chips over the side of their yacht. They’re cleaning it all up for us, polishing it, and making a big pile of our gold in that floating whore house. What do you think Lebo’s going to do with it? Stare at it?”

  “He’s going to sell it,” I said.

  “Course he is.” Fat-Boy’s cheeks rose into a self-satisfied smirk. “He’s gonna sell it to me.”

  We drank more beers and Fat-Boy explained his plan. In his reprisal of the role of Billy Mabele, he intended to extend Billy’s criminal activities to include that of a fence. In this case, he would be fencing bars of gold.

  “You didn’t suggest this to Lebo at last night’s dinner?” I said.

  “Am I a fool, Angel? I told him how much I loved his brother. He told me how much I reminded him of his brother, and that was all.”

  “No mention of gold bars or fences?”

  Fat-Boy blew a scoffing riff with his lips.

  “Gave him my card is all.”

  “Those cards the colonel made? Just the name, no number?”

  “Planted the seed is all. I’ve learnt how to do this shit, Angel. Learnt from the best, haven’t I?”

  “Why are you telling me about it? Why didn’t you call the colonel up?”

  “The colonel won’t listen to me, will he?”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  Fat-Boy shook his head and took some more beer.

  “Need you to convince him. Go talk your war stories and convince him.”

  “Convince him of what?”

  Fat-Boy looked at me. “What do you think? Of me, Angel.”

  I said nothing for a moment.

  “Forget it,” said Fat-Boy. “Should have known you wouldn’t help. I’ll just do it on my own.”

  “I’ll speak to him,” I said, before Fat-Boy’s resentment turned violent.

  Fat-Boy’s eyes narrowed to check that statement for authenticity. Then he raised his bottle as if proposing a toast. He clambered to his feet to fetch more beers and insisted on enveloping me in a bear-sized embrace to make our new union official.

  We finished our beers in companionable silence, then cleared up camp and Fat-Boy stripped down to his boxer shorts, which were a pink cheetah print design and were mostly concealed by the bulbous flesh of his stomach so it appeared as if he wasn’t wearing anything at all. He clambered onto the foam mattress, leaving a sliver of space for me to squeeze into, and unfolded a feather duvet to keep us warm.

  “Did you kill that chick, Angel?” he asked as he rolled himself up in the duvet and pulled it off me. “That journalist, did you kill her? You can tell me, I don’t mind if you did.”

  “I didn’t kill her, Fat-Boy,” I said.

  “Who did?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. You’ve been creeping around like you’re playing the big detective. You think I’m stupid, Angel? You know who it was.”

  “I think it was one of three men she was investigating.”

  “What three men?”

  “Three important men, high up in society.”

  “What do you mean, high in society? Like big businessmen?”

  “One’s a judge, one a politician, and the third is a church leader.”

  “It was the church guy. It’s always the ones who go to church who turn out to be rotten.”

  “Perhaps. But they were all rotten in their own way.”

  “Take it from me,” said Fat-Boy. “Those church people are the worst.”

  And a few minutes later his snores were shaking the camper van as if they were being played through the amplifier’s sub-woofer. I climbed out and had a cigarette in the deck chair, gazing out at the glistening lights of the Dark Maiden in the middle of the bay. Fat-Boy could have been right about the church leader. And, although I only had initials to go by, I had a good idea which church leader it was that Sandy had suspected. He was the third and last person who might be able to tell me what had happened to her, and I didn’t have a good feeling about what he might have to say.

  III

  Third, a Church Leader

  Twenty

  Johannes Stephanus Erasmus was no stranger to hardship, as the numerous newspaper and magazine articles about this paragon of Christian virtue liked to remind us. The youngest of seven children, he had grown up in a family that struggled to afford clothes and food, and Johannes, who preferred to be called Stephanus or JS, for reasons known only to himself, had spent much of his youth begging for food on the back streets of Brixton, a suburb of crowded apartment buildings near central Johannesburg. That had been over fifty
years ago, in the early days of apartheid, a government system that had saved his family from sinking below the breadline by providing his father with sheltered employment on the railways. This provided the family with a small trickle of money, an absent father, and an opportunity for the mother to augment the family income with a host of paying lovers, most of whom were angry and violent. They occasionally expressed their anger against the dirty, underfed and under-clothed children, rendering JS Erasmus’s childhood not only miserable, but perilous.

  Many years later, as a man of God, JS expressed gratitude to the apartheid government for saving him from a life of misery by providing social services which removed him and two of his siblings from the family unit and found foster homes for them. They had done this after the tragic death of another of his siblings, a seminal moment in the life of JS, and the start of his path towards righteousness. It was while staying with his third foster family, at fourteen, that JS had found God, who had presented Himself to JS by means of a blinding flash of light in the middle of the night. He had called upon JS to dedicate his life to Him. JS had answered the call and despite his troubles, and his multitude of sins, had been welcomed into the House of Our Lord, although JS had only named his church years later when he decided to make money out of his religious experience. He had founded the church that was to become the largest and most profitable church in the country.

  The House of Our Lord was in fact many houses: huge warehouse structures where JS Erasmus and his apprentices, whom he liked to call novitiates, would orate. Their passionate pleas for goodness and generosity were displayed on huge screens so that even the latecomers squeezed into the back of the auditorium could feel the power of their message. Musical bands would play modern hymns on their electric guitars and vast crowds of enthusiastic followers would sing along and get caught up in the emotion of the experience to such a degree that they would occasionally find themselves speaking in tongues. Even when not moved to speak in tongues they were obliged to pay a tithe to the House of Our Lord, and as the potential protection offered by the House had such a strong appeal to many business owners and entrepreneurs, the tithe system was working well in the favour of God, or at least His House, and certainly to the benefit of JS himself, who was now one of the wealthiest men in South Africa. No doubt the business owners hoped that their contributions to God would protect their fragile businesses as the country collapsed in flames about them, but as far as I could tell the only person who was really protected by their generous tithes was JS Erasmus himself.

  That protection took the form of a fifteen-foot wall topped with high-voltage fencing, which wrapped around his extensive property in the foothills of the Hottentots Holland mountains. In the hundred acre estate were a small forest of oak trees, a lake with a wooden rowing boat, a tennis court, a twenty-three bedroom mansion, and an orchard of fruit trees. An apiary produced honey that was gifted to senior members of the House of Our Lord every year in a ceremony that had been dubbed the ‘Anointment of Our Lord’ by the envious media, who were granted only mysterious glimpses of the holy members praying at dawn.

  Entrance to the property, if you wanted to avoid electrocution and mauling by killer dogs, was through a pair of huge steel gates set into the fifteen-foot wall, behind a boom and a set of retractable spikes. A camera lens stared at me insolently, and the sullen face of a uniformed guard flickered onto the small screen below it. His finger hesitated over the button that would release the boiling oil from the parapets as he determined whether I was going to be a difficult customer. I smiled and gave him my name and he confirmed with the secretary at the big house that I had an appointment, and it all ended on a positive note with the retraction of the spikes and reluctant opening of the enormous gates.

  The drive up to the main house was almost a kilometre through the oak tree forest and around the lake. I passed a small team of men jogging beside the road – the leader raised his hand in greeting, or perhaps as a benediction as I passed. I guessed they were part of his team of novitiates, all clean-shaven, athletic and glowing with the happiness Our Lord promised, according to JS Erasmus. The drive swung around in a great circle about a fountain before the Cape Dutch mansion which housed JS Erasmus, his two young daughters from his third marriage, their nanny, the constant stream of novitiates and a small army of household staff, one of whom was standing at the top of the stairs ready to brief me about the terms, conditions and protocol of entering the House of their Lord.

  I parked my rusty Fiat off to the side of the grand staircase so as not to spoil my entrance, and the young man at the top of the stairs allowed me to squeeze his limp, fleshy hand in greeting. The whole of him was limp and fleshy and he wore thick spectacles through which his eyes peered anxiously. He was wearing a long, brown robe, like a monk’s tunic, pinched about the middle with a length of rope. He had the softer, more friendly features of the people of one of the smaller southern African tribes who had been defeated by the fearsome Zulus. He smiled nervously, blinked and withdrew his hand as if I’d crushed the bones when shaking it.

  “The Master was not clear about the nature of your business,” he said, and his smile broadened.

  “The master?” I said.

  “Father Erasmus. Our Master. He was not clear.”

  “Just a quick conversation,” I said, and increased my smile to match his. “It’s a magnificent place – just the family stay here?”

  “We are all one family in the House of Our Lord,” he said, and the smile slipped a little.

  “Wonderful,” I said, “a very lucky family.”

  “Those who know God’s love don’t need luck,” he said, then asked, “What is the nature of your business here?” His smile lost its grip and dropped off his face.

  “It’s personal.”

  “We have no secrets here, Mister Gabriel. As the Master’s personal secretary I share in all of his concerns, even the personal ones.”

  “I’m not sure you would share this concern. It had to do with a young woman.”

  “I see,” said the round man, and he wet his lips as he considered a response to that. JS Erasmus had survived more than his fair share of accusations of inappropriate behaviour with young women. He had even admitted to his philandering ways in a televised confession when he announced his divorce from his third wife, and had begged for the forgiveness of the South African people – after revealing that God had already forgiven him in a beneficent gesture which should be an example to us all. His third wife had also forgiven him – but I suspected that was because of the Ferrari that he had given her in the divorce settlement. Ultimately, Father Erasmus had turned the difficulty of his philandering ways to his advantage, as the televised confession and plea for forgiveness went viral and gave the House of Our Lord a boost in membership and commensurate increase in tithes.

  “Which young woman would that be?” asked the round man in tacit acknowledgement that there were many candidates. His mouth twisted a little, as if the smile was trying to climb back up.

  “A journalist has been asking questions about a young woman who died some months ago.”

  “Journalists should direct their enquiries to the press office.”

  “Except that in this case I believe there is also a potential threat to your master’s safety.”

  “His safety?” said the man, and the smile reappeared because of the absurdity of there being any danger behind the walls and electric fences.

  “I am concerned for his safety,” I confirmed, and didn’t share in the smile lest he think I was joking.

  “Very well,” said the round man, as if he had concluded that I was nothing but a harmless fool. “You will need this.”

  He lifted a white circular object he had been holding in a limp hand and offered it to me. It was made of canvas and trailed a bunch of black netting beneath it like the stings of a jellyfish. He poked his other hand into it and popped up the central portion of the disk to convert it into a wide-brimmed hat from the edges of which hung
the netting.

  “For the bees,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to get stung while expressing your concern for the Master’s safety.”

  It was a beekeeper’s hat, and I carried it with me as the round man led the way back down the stairs, crunched across the gravel and then took a path that followed a hedge into an orchard.

  “Pear, apple, prune, cherry, orange, quince, and lemon,” he said as we proceeded between the trees. A man in brown robes was raking up leaves and the round man raised his hand in the same gesture the jogger had made earlier. The man with the rake raised his hand in return and watched us as we passed him.

  “Brother Isaiah is undergoing a period of silence,” confided the round man. “The gardens provide us with the opportunity to engage with God’s creation, and access His love through our silence.”

  “He is one of the novitiates?” I asked.

  “Not yet. There is too much sin in his heart.”

  “Does he get to keep trying after engaging with God’s creation? Or is the sin more of a permanent stain?”

  “God forgives all our sins, no matter how bad they might seem to us. In His eyes they can be forgiven, thanks to His endless grace.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said. “Speaking personally.”

  I glanced back at the man with the rake, whose eyes were still fixed on me from beneath a pronounced forehead, which made him look like an example of primitive man. I wondered whether they supplied all the novitiates with handguns, because I could make out the outline of the shoulder harness he was wearing beneath the robes. Perhaps only the novitiates with too much sin in their hearts were provided with weapons and forced to stay silent in order to focus their minds on protecting their master.

  We reached the edge of the apiary, which comprised about thirty wooden boxes arranged haphazardly in the dappled shade of eucalyptus trees. Standing in the centre of the boxes, resplendent in a full-body, white beekeeper suit, complete with hood and a black net visor was a man holding a frame of honeycomb before his face and scrutinising it, apparently oblivious to the cloud of bees that swirled about him.