12
SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH the branches of the lemon tree in the backyard of Poppies General Store and threw a patchwork of shade over the police incident reports of the attacks on the coloured girls. Six months of violence and perversity with no result.
Emmanuel checked the dates again. There were two distinct stretches of time during which the molester was active. The first was a ten-day blitz in late August when he spied through windows at women. Then, in December ’51, he went on a two-week spree of increasingly bold physical assaults. Each report read darker than the last.
The perpetrator began the December stretch peeping through windows and in fourteen days had progressed to an attack involving broken ribs and deprivation of liberty. A white man found guilty of such crimes was, in the view of the courts and the public, a deviant and a traitor to his race. Paul Pretorius laughed off the idea that his father’s murder was connected to an unsavory case involving nonwhite women, but a European man, especially, might be inclined to use drastic measures to keep his shameful secret hidden.
Emmanuel picked up the last report, written in Afrikaans by Captain Willem Pretorius himself.
Molestation Case Summary
28 December 1951
After re-interviewing the women concerned I believe the likelihood of an arrest remains unlikely for the following reasons.
1. None of the women is able to identify the offender, as the attacks occur at night and the victims are grabbed from behind.
2. The racial group of the offender remains unknown.
3. The offender’s accent suggests he is a foreigner who may come into South Africa undetected for the purposes of attacking women outside his home territory. Our border location makes Swaziland and Mozambique the offender’s most likely place of origin.
4. Due to the high likelihood that a foreign national or a vagrant camping along the border is committing the attacks, apprehension of the offender remains difficult.
5. The case files will be reopened if and when new attacks occur.
Signed,
Captain Willem Pretorius
Fast work. Two days after the last attack and Pretorius had the case summed up and the files tucked away in his private room. “If and when new attacks occur…” The captain had anticipated a cessation to the attacks despite every sign the molester was sliding into serious and compulsive criminal behavior. A week after the captain’s intervention, the activity stopped. No fresh sightings. Nothing but a sweet country silence where there’d been the sound of breaking ribs the week before.
Emmanuel drummed his fingers on the incident report. A foreign national or a vagrant camping on the veldt: who could have guessed Pretorius had such a lively imagination? Putting on an accent was presumably beyond the capability of a South African–born male. The flimsy summary didn’t feel right. Had the captain found the attacker and tightened the reins without laying charges?
At the back of the file was a list of suspects interviewed by the captain during his investigation. Anton Samuels, the mechanic, and Theo Hanson were both questioned twice with no result. At the end of the list was a Mr. Frederick de Sousa, a traveling salesman from Mozambique passing through Jacob’s Rest with a suitcase of cheap undergarments. He was in town during two of the attacks but couldn’t be tied to any others.
De Sousa was all the excuse Emmanuel needed to cross the border into Mozambique and visit the photo studio that had advertised on Captain Pretorius’s calendar. He’d face off with the Security Branch in the morning and then pretend to limp off to Lorenzo Marques to continue his vice work.
Emmanuel pushed the police report away. There was no excuse for the total disregard for the job evidenced in the shoddy files. He believed in the law and the difference it made to people’s lives. He got up and walked to the back of Poppies General Store.
“Mrs. Zweigman?” He stuck his head into the workroom and attracted her attention as gently as possible. “Can I talk to Davida and Tottie? It’s police business.”
“Please…to…” The fragile woman stumbled over the words. “Wait…”
Lilliana Zweigman disappeared into the front of the store and returned with her husband, whose hand rested on her arm.
“I need to talk to Davida and Tottie,” Emmanuel said. The hum of the machines died down and an expectant silence took its place.
“I will accompany you. Davida and Tottie, come with me, please. Angie, could you take care of the counter?”
“Yes, Mr. Zweigman.” Angie pushed her chair back and went to take her place at the front of the shop. The sewing machines whirred to life and the two remaining women went to work attaching sleeves to half-made cotton dresses.
Emmanuel motioned the women over to a table positioned beneath the shade of the lemon tree. He ignored the shy brown mouse. He couldn’t afford to expose her and the information she had about the calendar to anyone. Zweigman stood at the back window of the store with his nose pressed against the glass. He showed an almost paternal concern for the women in his wife’s care. Or was it more than that? Captain Pretorius certainly thought so.
“Sit down,” Emmanuel instructed Tottie and Davida, and slid two pieces of blank paper and two pencils across the table. “I want you to draw me a map of your houses. Label the rooms. Draw the windows and doors. Mark the room where the Peeping Tom made his appearance.”
“Yes, Detective.” Tottie gave him a smile guaranteed to pop the buttons off a grown man’s fly. The coloured beauty didn’t care how many moths got burned against her flame.
Davida was bent over her paper with intense concentration. She drew the outline of a house with a small servant’s room out the back.
“Detective?” Hot Tottie was thrown into confusion by an uncharacteristic lack of male attention. “Is this what you want?”
Emmanuel made sure to maintain eye contact before looking down at the map, which was hastily drawn but adequate for the task at hand.
“It’s exactly what I want,” he said, and smiled.
The shy brown mouse slid her finished map across the table without a word. She didn’t look up once. Emmanuel placed the drawings side by side and studied them, paying particular attention to the location of the rooms where the Peeping Tom struck.
He tapped a finger to Tottie’s map. “Your room is here at the back of the house?”
“It used to be.” The beauty flicked a strand of dark hair over her shoulder to give a clearer view of her exposed neckline. “My daddy moved me to the front room after it happened the second time.”
“Your room is here, separate from the house?” he asked Davida.
“Yes. My room is the old servant’s quarters.”
“Do you live with Granny Mariah?”
Her gray eyes flickered up in surprise. “Yes.”
Emmanuel wanted to ask why she didn’t live in the house with her grandmother but concentrated on the maps again. Both Davida’s and Tottie’s bedrooms were at the very back of the house, with windows facing the kaffir path. Was that a common element in all the crime scenes?
“Do either of you know the layout of Anton’s house?” he asked.
“You know where the bedrooms are in Anton’s house, don’t you, Davida?” Tottie said, and almost purred with satisfaction when Davida blushed two shades darker.
Davida didn’t rise to the bait, just pulled a piece of paper across the table and drew a quick sketch.
“Mary’s bedroom is in the back.” She slid Anton’s house plans back over to him. “Della’s bedroom is also in the back of the house.”
“Does the kaffir path run close to the rear boundary of all the houses?”
“I don’t know anything about the kaffir path,” Tottie said. “My daddy only lets me use the main streets. You have to get Davida to answer that question for you, Detective.”
Emmanuel took stock of Tottie. The curvy beauty was a spoiled little miss who liked to take a cheap shot. She’d as good as called her workmate a kaffir by implying that respectable girls, girls with a daddy to look out for them, didn’t go near the native byway. Why was the shy brown mouse a target for Tottie?
“The path runs by them all,” Davida said without moving her attention from the tips of her fingernails.
The connection between the rooms and their proximity to the kaffir path was too obvious to miss. How had the attacker managed to evade the captain, who policed the path and the streets most days of the week? Then a radical thought occurred to him.
“The attacker? Was he a big man like Captain Pretorius?”
“I don’t know,” Tottie announced with a triumphant smile. “That man didn’t lay a finger on me. My daddy and my brothers made sure I was safe.”
A teaspoonful of Hot Tottie went a long way. Emmanuel had enough of a taste to last a full week.
“You can go back to work,” he told her. “I have a few more questions for Davida.”
“You sure, Detective?”
“I don’t want to embarrass you with the sordid details of the attacks. You shouldn’t have to hear such unpleasantness.”
“Of course,” Tottie said. She looked disappointed at missing the good stuff.
He waited until she sashayed into the shop before he turned to Davida.
“Was the attacker big like Captain Pretorius?” he asked again.
“He was bigger than me but not as big as the captain.”
“How can you be sure?” The connection between the captain and the molester was too strong to dismiss. Willem Pretorius traveled the kaffir paths with impunity day and night and he had the power to pull the plug on the investigation when things got too hot. Was he protecting himself all along?
“Did you know the captain well enough to be certain that he wasn’t the man who grabbed you?”
“Captain Pretorius was very tall with wide shoulders. Everyone in town knew that.” She moved her hands from the table to her lap so he couldn’t see them. “The man who grabbed me wasn’t so tall.”
“You think it was a white man?”
“It was dark. I didn’t see him. He had a strange accent. Like a white man from outside South Africa.”
“Could he have been a Portuguese?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
Emmanuel noticed the old Jew still had his nose pressed hard against the back window of the store. So, Hot Tottie wasn’t Zweigman’s fancy. It was the shy brown mouse he had an eye for.
“You sure you’re not used to being touched by one of my kind?” Emmanuel asked straight out. Maybe the gray-eyed girl was keeping his secrets and a few more besides.
She shifted in her chair but didn’t look up. “Just because I don’t have a daddy doesn’t mean I run around.”
“What about Anton? Did you run around with him?” He wanted to know if he’d been mistaken in his judgment that she was a silent and watchful woman who kept to herself.
“I saw Anton a few times but it didn’t work out.”
“Have you told me the truth about everything, Davida?”
“Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know.”
He had a perverse desire to pull her head covering off and unbutton her shapeless cotton shift so he could search for the hidden places he sensed below the surface. She glanced upward suddenly and he had to look away.
“You can go back to work.” He pretended to shuffle the reports into place and then watched her disappear into the back room of the store. Was Davida hiding something or was he simply revisiting the shameful sense of power he’d felt over her outside the stone hut?
Emmanuel deviated off the path and swung past the post office before making his way to the police station’s back entrance. He rested against a tree and waited for Shabalala to appear on his bicycle. It was sunset and the kaffir path was busy with blacks funneling back to the location for the night.
“They have been looking for you,” the constable told him after they’d exchanged greetings.
“Are they still looking?”
“There were many phone calls from Graystown and now they are not looking for you anymore.”
“Phone calls about what?”
“A man. A Communist,” Shabalala said. “That is all I heard.”
“And how did you hear that?” Emmanuel asked. How did a six-foot-plus black man move in and out of a Security Branch investigation without drawing attention to himself?
“Tea.” Shabalala gave a straight-faced answer. “My mother. She taught me how to make good tea.”
“Ahh…” The invisible black servant was etched into the white way of life. Shabalala had used that to its full advantage.
They moved along the rear property line of the houses on van Riebeeck Street and soon drew level with the captain’s house. The shed door was open and the sound of contented humming drifted out onto the kaffir path.
Inside, Louis was at work on the Indian motorcycle, which was close to fully assembled. The boy’s overalls were covered in grease, his leather work boots splashed with oil and dirt. Did the contents of a hymnbook get Louis humming out loud with happiness?
“That one.” Emmanuel pointed back in Louis’s direction once they’d passed the captain’s house. “He is going to be a pastor?”
“The madam has told everyone that it is so.”
“You don’t see it?”
“I see only that he is different.”
“I see this also,” Emmanuel said, and they continued along the narrow path. The icy Mrs. Pretorius was aware that Louis was not like her other sons, but she chose to interpret this as a sign of his greatness.
“I’ve been thinking…” Emmanuel stayed with the Afrikaner family for a moment. “When did Captain Pretorius tell you the old Jew was a doctor?”
“Before the middle of the year,” Shabalala said. “I think in April.”
“Before the accident in front of the shop,” Emmanuel said. “How did he know Zweigman was a doctor?”
“The captain did not tell me how he knew this. He said only that the old Jew would fix me better than Dr. Kruger.”
Better. That was a value judgment. Willem Pretorius knew that Zweigman was more than your run-of-the-mill general practitioner. Clever Captain Pretorius had tabs on everyone in Jacob’s Rest except the killer.
“The old Jew, where is his house?” Emmanuel asked.
“It is on the same street as the Dutchmen’s church. A small brick house with a red roof and a gum tree near the gate.”
They walked on in silence until they came to the Grace of God Hospital. Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette were kicking a patched-up soccer ball across a vacant lot with a group of orphans. Dust rose in the twilight as the diminutive Irish nun dribbled the ball through the opposition defense and made a run for goal. A shout erupted from the barefoot soccer team when Sister Angelina lunged to the side and caught the ball as it sailed toward the mouth of the net. To thrive in Africa, nuns had to take and block a few shots on goal.
Emmanuel waved a greeting and he and Shabalala moved on to the grid of coloured houses where a pickup truck painted with the words “Khan’s Emporium” was backed up to a wooden gate. Two Indian men loaded crates of sealed jars into the vehicle while Granny Mariah watched.
“Detective. Constable Shabalala.” The steely-eyed matriarch greeted them with a brisk nod. “How’s the investigation coming?”
“Still checking into things,” Emmanuel said. A huge vegetable plot crowded with rows of furrowed earth ran the entire length of the backyard. To the far right of the market garden stood the one-room building that once served as the servant’s quarters.
“That’s Davida’s room?” He pointed to the whitewashed structure hemmed in by flowering herbs and empty wood crates stacked to the windowsill.
“Yes. What’s that to do with anything?” Granny asked.
Emmanuel walked over to the open gate and looked toward the small white room. There was a clear view from the kaffir path to the curtained window. He checked the locking mechanism; a piece of timber that slotted into two brackets at either side of the entry held the gate shut.
“Was this always here?”
“I had it put on after that man grabbed Davida. We had no problems once the lock was there.”
Did the assailant give up indulging his compulsion when access to the women became difficult? Tottie was moved to the front of the house where her brothers and father surrounded her, and the gate to Davida’s yard was locked tight.
“Did the other women who were attacked have extra security put in?”
“Oh, yes.” Granny Mariah paused to direct one of the Indian men to the last crate of bottled pickles. “When it first happened back in August last, the men started patrolling the kaffir path at night, but after three weeks, not a whisper. It was like the man just disappeared, so everyone went back to their business. Then came the December troubles and we all got locks put in.”
“What did the captain have to say about the patrols?”
After dark, the kaffir path was Willem Pretorius’s domain. He might not have welcomed a rival patrol.
“He said fine so long as the men kept to the coloured area. They weren’t allowed past the hospital or Kloppers shoe store on the other side of town.”
Despite what Davida said about the size of her attacker, he couldn’t let go of the niggling feeling that Willem Pretorius might be the right fit for the perpetrator. The Afrikaner man knew the kaffir paths like the back of his hand and he was used to traveling on them without arousing suspicion. He knew the women and where they lived. The patrol was no barrier to his activity. No group of mixed-race men would dare stop a white police captain for questioning.
If Willem Pretorius was involved in the attacks, that fact opened up a whole new set of possibilities regarding his death. What lawful avenue was open to a coloured man when he found a white police captain was molesting his sisters? Tiny and Theo had come after Emmanuel himself with a loaded gun.
He leaned his shoulder against the open gatepost. Candlelight flickered out from behind the curtain in Davida’s room. A shadow moved past the window. Signs of a small and secret life. Just what did the shy brown mouse do when night fell?
“You checking the other girls’ rooms or just Davida’s?” Granny Mariah’s question was hard-edged.
“I was just wondering how the attacker avoided Captain Pretorius. The captain was out here all the time, wasn’t he?”
“Here? Who says he was here at my place?”
“I meant the kaffir path. Captain ran past here a couple of times a week, didn’t he?”
“Sometimes he went past and sometimes he didn’t. He didn’t hand out a timetable.”
“No, he didn’t.”
Emmanuel raised his hat good night and set off with Shabalala. Once the last of the house servants headed home, the path became the domain of Willem Pretorius and a handful of coloured men breaking up from a once-a-week poker game. Did the captain abuse his power and molest women he knew were unlikely to be taken seriously by the law? What option did a mixed-race man have but to pick up a gun and go after the offender in order for justice to be served?
“Hamba gashle. Go well, Shabalala,” Emmanuel said, and the tall policeman swung his leg over his bicycle and steadied himself against the handlebars. He couldn’t bring up his suspicions about the captain just yet.
“Salana gashle. Stay well, Detective Sergeant.” The black man rode off into the failing light. Soon he was gone, leaving behind a red sunset.
Emmanuel walked on past the coloured church and shops. He moved past backyard fences locked and barred against the night, past the path that ran to The Protea Guesthouse and his room, then around the outside curve of the town that showed him civilized backyards pushing against the untamed veldt.
He kept his pace up until he reached a rickety back gate. He took out a letter he had retrieved earlier that afternoon from Miss Byrd at the post office. It was addressed to the captain, but it was actually for Harry from one of his daughters. Now living as white, she had no other way to communicate with her father without putting her new social status in jeopardy.
The ghost of Willem Pretorius breathed in Emmanuel. He walked to Harry’s back door, rapped twice and slipped the Durban-postmarked letter into the old soldier’s shabby room. He moved away quickly, as he knew the good captain had, and made his way back onto the path.
Darkness surrounded him. He stopped now and then to listen to the voices drifting out of back rooms. An evening prayer over dinner, an argument, a child’s unsettled cry…The people of Jacob’s Rest were preparing to say good-bye to another day.
At Granny Mariah’s again, he leaned back against the barred gate and pictured Davida’s little room surrounded by herbs and flowers. Gum leaves rustled and the wind sighed.
Off to his right a catlike footfall disturbed the undergrowth, then fell silent. Emmanuel stilled. Another footstep advanced in the dark. Something or someone was moving slowly in his direction. He eased his weight forward and the gate fell back into place with a loud click.
There was a sharp release of breath and the slither of a body in the dark. Emmanuel wheeled off the kaffir path and turned full circle as he tried to pinpoint the source of the furtive movements. The whisper of grass and leaves was the only sound. He released his breath and the night enveloped him. Under the cloak of darkness, he felt a human presence close by. Someone was out on the veldt watching.
The next day, Emmanuel walked into the police station at 9:20 AM, ready for anything after he had questioned Erich Pretorius. Instead of an ambush, he found the Security Branch policemen and commando Paul Pretorius clustered around the captain’s desk. The phone rang and Piet jumped on it.
“Ja?” he said, tapping a fresh cigarette from his pack and inserting it into the corner of his mouth. Paul and Dickie leaned close to the phone. There was an electric current in the air that signaled the beginning of a big push. The Security Branch was ready to make a move.
“Don’t do anything.” Piet sucked the nicotine from his cigarette. “We’ll be there in three hours. You will wait for us. Understood?”
The phone was slammed down and Piet swung to Dickie.
“Go to the hotel and get our bags ready. We move tonight.” He turned to Paul. “You coming?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” The hulking soldier was primed for action, his neck and shoulder muscles knotted tight in expectation.
“Just enough for one night,” Piet cautioned him. “We’ll bring the package back here sometime tomorrow. Do the work under the radar.”
Emmanuel pushed himself off the wall and approached them. He wanted to report in and be dismissed in quick order. The border crossing into Mozambique was only minutes away.
“Anything I can do to help?” he asked the Security Branch team.
Piet blew a plume of smoke into the air. “Where have you been?”
“Looking into the molester case. I’m following up a suspect who lives in Lorenzo Marques. An underwear salesman.”
Piet’s eyes narrowed and Emmanuel wondered if he’d gone too far by including the underwear comment. The Security Branch officer scrutinized him for a moment and tried to work out the angles on the Mozambique lead.
The phone rang and Piet picked it up before Dickie or Paul got a chance. Pockmarked Piet loved being in command.
“Don’t do anything,” Piet breathed into the phone. “Follow and observe. That’s all. We will direct the operation when we arrive.”
He slammed the phone down and turned his attention back to Emmanuel. His smile was an unpleasant trench dug into his irregular face.
“This Mozambique trip better be in connection with the molester case. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday.”
“That was a mistake.” Emmanuel told Piet what he wanted to hear. “I overstepped the bounds and it won’t happen again.”
“Better not.” Paul Pretorius moved toward him with his index finger stuck out like a sword. “You’re lucky we didn’t find you yesterday, my vriend.”
There was a pinprick of pressure on his chest as Paul gave him a hard jab. The fact that Emmanuel would escape punishment made Paul angry.
“Go pack your things,” Piet instructed calmly. “If Cooper crosses the line again, we’ll deal with him in a more thorough manner. Understood?”
“Good,” Paul said. The lure of a future beating was enough to placate him and get him moving toward the front door.
Piet collected the files on the desktop and handed them to Dickie. “Pack these and put petrol in the car. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”
Emmanuel gave the Security Branch plenty of room to make their exit. He’d allow them an hour to clear town, then head to the border with the name of the photo studio tucked in his jacket pocket.
Piet paused at the front door and glanced over his shoulder with cold eyes. He was still bothered by the Mozambique lead and didn’t like the idea of the English detective roaming over international boundaries unsupervised.
“Remember my promise?”
“The English snot beaten out of me?” Emmanuel said. “Yes, I remember.”
The Security Branch team disappeared onto the street. A big Red fish was on the hook and that far outweighed the need to punish a flatfoot assigned to chase a deviant.
Emmanuel walked through to the back of the station and found Hansie and Shabalala sitting in the yard.
“Where’s Lieutenant Uys?” he asked, taking a seat between the boy policeman and the Zulu constable.
“Gone,” Hansie said. “He gets to ride with the others.”
Exclusion from the carload of hard-knuckled men obviously upset him. Even Hansie understood that being sent outside with the kaffir while the other white men talked business marked a low point in his law enforcement career.
“Go inside,” Emmanuel told Hansie. “You can sit behind the captain’s desk and answer the phone.”
Hansie was up and running before the sentence was finished. Evidently, he’d never been allowed to sit in the captain’s chair before.
“What have they said you must do?” Emmanuel asked Shabalala in Zulu.
“Stay here. Go home when it is dark and come again tomorrow.”
“I have to go to Lorenzo Marques for only one day. Can you keep that boy inside, out of trouble, and doing his job?”
“I will do what I can,” Shabalala said.
“Detective Sergeant—” Hansie called out in a shrill voice. “Detective Sergeant Cooper?” Hansie was jumping from foot to foot in the back doorway.
“A messenger. He has a special envelope.”
Emmanuel’s stomach tightened with excitement. Could he really be this lucky? He rushed to the front office, where a dust-covered messenger waited by the captain’s desk. Hansie followed close behind.
“Can I help?” Emmanuel asked.
“Envelope for Lieutenant Piet Lapping.” The young man in the brown traveling overalls spoke through a tight mouth.
“Are you a courier?” Emmanuel asked, knowing full well that the Security Branch trusted no one outside the organization to relay information.
“No.” The messenger’s mouth became a hard line of discontent. “I’m the Security Branch.”
Emmanuel understood the reason for the taciturn speech pattern. The young messenger, the cream of the police academy and hand-selected for the Security Branch, was not pleased at being chosen for the lowly task of delivering an envelope to a backwater. The value of information had not become apparent to him yet.
“Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper,” Emmanuel introduced himself. “You’ve missed Lieutenant Lapping, I’m afraid. He’s out on a mission and doesn’t know when he’ll be back.”
“They’ve all gone.” Hansie spun a circle in the captain’s chair. “They even took Lieutenant Uys with them.”
“I’m happy to sign for the envelope.” Emmanuel moved in on the disgruntled messenger and his package. “I’ll make sure Lieutenant Lapping gets it when he gets back.”
“It has to be signed over to Lieutenant Lapping. Those are my orders.”
“Lieutenant Lapping has to be the one to sign for the package?”
“That’s right.”
“You could place it into the police mailbox at the post office,” Emmanuel suggested. Miss Byrd had explained the workings of the postal service to him in great detail at their first meeting. “Only Lieutenant Lapping will be able to sign it out and he’ll have to produce identification before they let him have the package.”
“I don’t know…” The messenger rubbed at the dust that had collected on his smooth-shaven chin when he’d turned onto a farm lane by accident, then had to double back to the main road. The motorbike tires still had fresh cow dung stuck in the treads.
“Maybe Lieutenant Lapping will be here tomorrow when they send you back with the package,” Emmanuel went on. “Or maybe he’ll be here the next day. I can’t make any promises.”
The messenger looked around the small-town police station like a doctor inspecting a plague house. He didn’t want to set out before dawn and travel across the country only to be turned back again and again.
“Only Lieutenant Lapping can sign it out?”
“With identification,” Emmanuel emphasized.
“Okay.” The messenger pretended to give the idea serious thought even as he pulled his motorcycle gloves on in preparation for the trip back to the city. “Is the post office close by?”
“Down the street,” Emmanuel said. “I’ll take you over and get Miss Byrd to sign the envelope into the police box.”