14
THE DARK BLANKET of night had spread over Jacob’s Rest by the time Emmanuel arrived back from Lorenzo Marques. He parked in front of his room at The Protea Guesthouse and eased his aching body out of the driver’s seat. The Security Branch was conducting a raid in another part of the country and that left him free for the first time to use his own accommodation without fear of intrusion.
He limped to his room with the leather satchel in his hands and unlocked the door. Inside, he flicked the light on and pulled the drawers of the bedside table open. He checked the empty cavity, fingers sweeping into every corner in the hope that one magic pill had come loose from the pack.
The drawer was empty and Emmanuel calculated a window of perhaps half an hour before the pain burning along his calf worked its way to his shoulder, then up to his head—a half hour tops before he was limping along the kaffir path toward Dr. Zweigman’s modest brick bungalow.
Drops of sweat broke out on his top lip when he reached down and pulled the photos from the first envelope. His injured shoulder protested at the movement and he narrowed the window of rational function to fifteen minutes.
He opened the envelope and laid out numbers one to four. The photographs showed the cells, the desks, the table with tea and cups, and the back window. Harmless images that could have been taken by a keen twelve-year-old on a Voortrekker Scouts excursion. Numbers five to ten showed the station’s backyard. A tree. A chair. The circle of stones used for the braai fire.
A sense of panic welled up. Was Ahmed so desensitized by years of developing hard-core that only images of ordinary things turned him on? The urge to split the pack of photos and check the middle was strong but Emmanuel resisted. Maybe there was method to Ahmed’s madness.
He laid out numbers eleven and twelve and his luck took a turn. Photo number eleven was a sunlit boulder out on the veldt. Number twelve was the same rock, but with a young woman leaning back against it, her tanned arms crossed over her torso. She was fully clothed. An unremarkable image except for the fact that it was a photo of a mixed-race woman taken by a white man and the woman’s face was not shown.
Emmanuel laid the rest of the photos from the first package out in order and examined them one at a time. Each image was a fumbling, almost adolescent revelation of the woman’s body, the photographer a novice asking for just a little more in each frame. The woman’s dress, a plain cotton frock tailor-made for church hall revivals and family picnics, was undone two buttons at a time and the sleek curves of breasts, thighs and hips gradually revealed themselves. Then the modest covering was gone. The images contained brown skin, sunlight, dark, hard nipples and pubic hair.
The last photograph in the pack, number twenty-five, was the woman, face still unseen, leaning naked against the rock with her legs spread wide. She was a beautiful, sunlit invitation to bliss.
Emmanuel examined the slow-motion striptease. He could see why Ahmed loved the photos; they documented a shedding of innocence more profound than the removal of clothing. There was the sense in every shot that the woman and the photographer were moving slowly and inexorably to a place they had both never been before.
As evidence, there was a lot less to like about the images. There wasn’t one single element in the photographs to connect Willem Pretorius to the mystery woman. Anyone with access to the police station could have taken the first few shots and there was only Ahmed’s word that the Afrikaner captain was the one to hand over the undeveloped rolls for processing. A dark-skinned half-Arab Muslim pornographer was not a reliable witness in a South African court of law.
“Open the second envelope.” The sergeant major slid into the room on a wave of pain and took his position at the head of the parade. “You’ll not get the pills until you know exactly what you have, laddie.”
Emmanuel opened the envelope and pulled out a fresh stack of photographs. His shoulder ached with an intense throbbing that spread across his back and forced him to breathe through an open mouth.
He laid out the first five photos with shaking hands. Same woman in a different location: a bedroom with a wide wrought-iron bed and lace-edged curtains at the window. It wasn’t the stone hut with its narrow single cot. The room in the photos was a feminine space, possibly the woman’s own bedroom.
“The naked female is a wondrous thing, is it not, soldier?” The Scotsman was in awe. “Look at that arse. I could bounce a shilling off it, it’s so tight.”
Emmanuel kept flipping, quicker now as the pain worked its way up toward his neck. In five minutes his head was going to be alive with the sound of jackhammers. The photos flashed in front of him in a blur of hard-core images. The woman naked on all fours, then naked from behind, thighs open to display every fold and detail of her shaved sex.
“Oh, yes, lad.” The sergeant major was delighted. “After food and water and whiskey, this is the stuff of life. Exactly what the doctor ordered, hey?”
“Unless I can tie these photos to Willem Pretorius,” Emmanuel said aloud, “the Security Branch will throw them out the window as unrelated to the case. Smut and Communist infiltrators don’t mix.”
“Not so fast. You’re missing all the good bits, lad. Can’t you take a moment to enjoy your work? Take a look at the last one.”
Emmanuel picked the photo up. The woman was lying naked on the unmade bed with her hips tilted upward and her hand buried deep between her legs. He backtracked and examined the preceding photo, which showed the woman lying on her side with her face masked by the fall of her long dark hair. A new element was added and he’d all but missed it. Around the woman’s neck was a necklace, an opened flower with a small diamond at the center.
“Pretty,” the sergeant major cooed. “I like the look of that.”
“The necklace or what it’s resting against?”
“Both. Jewelry on a naked woman is a sacred thing, my lad.”
“You’d say that if she had a tire iron around her neck,” Emmanuel said. The pack of photos thinned to nothing and he flicked the last two photos onto the bed. The woman’s identity was going to remain a mystery. The slim waist ruled out Tottie, and the long hair and bold physical presence of the woman’s body made Davida Ellis an unlikely suspect. Was the captain’s model someone from an outlying farm or hamlet? Emmanuel placed the last photo down and felt its mesmerizing power grab hold of him.
“Well, well,” he said. The pain in his body drained away and was replaced by an unassailable sense of well-being. Maybe he was going to win the war after all.
“What in hell makes a man do something so…unsavory?” the sergeant major blurted out.
Emmanuel wiped the sweat from his forehead and examined the last photograph. A naked man lay on the unmade bed with his forearm thrown over his eyes in a playful parody of the woman’s efforts to hide her identity. A crumpled sheet was pulled low over his hips to expose an edge of wiry blond pubic hair. The hard shape of the man’s erect penis strained against the cotton sheet, proof of his readiness to go again, despite the fact that the smile on his mouth suggested he’d already spent a good deal of time thrusting his way to heaven.
“Jesus!” The image made the cast-iron sergeant major ill at ease. “It’s wrong for a man to parade himself like that.”
“She asked him to pose. And he said yes.”
“He did it to please her?”
“Yes.”
“Well…” The Scotsman considered that fact for a moment. “There’s not much a man won’t do for p-ssy.”
“There more to it than that,” Emmanuel said, and traced a finger over the broken nose and the unique gold-faced watch that clearly identified this slab of Afrikaner manhood as one Captain Willem Pretorius, moral defender of the town of Jacob’s Rest and enthusiastic amateur photographer. p-ssy, as the sergeant major suggested, was only part of the reason for such a flagrant act of self-revelation. Willem Pretorius had taken a life-threatening risk by posing for the camera.
“He loves the fact she’s looking at him: seeing him for who he really is. Check the expression on his face. He’s not Captain Willem Pretorius, upholder of the sacred covenant with the Lord. He’s a bad man who’s spent the afternoon doing bad things to a woman his tribe says is unclean and he couldn’t be f*cking happier.”
“Maybe it was love made him do it?”
“I doubt it,” Emmanuel said. The morphine-like sense of well-being ebbed away and the pain surged up to his jawline. “Forty-something pictures of her doing every imaginable thing for his pleasure and one photo of him looking like the king of cock hall. Being the white induna is what he loved.”
“The necklace cost a few pounds.”
“A trinket.” Emmanuel began packing the photos. His thoughts had taken a turn to a dark place. “A piece of insurance to gain her loyalty. You really think he’d stand by her if it affected his perfect Afrikaner family? He’d have her on a bus to Swaziland with ten pounds in her pocket or six feet underground with nothing.”
“What the hell are you so angry about? I only meant that he gave her presents and made sure no one knew who she was. He protected her, didn’t he?”
“He protected himself,” Emmanuel said, and returned the pictures to the leather satchel as quickly as he could without damaging them. He needed the pills. He needed something to stop him from limping over to the captain’s house and shoving the feast of hard-core down Mrs. Pretorius’s lily-white throat.
“You’re not going to do that,” the sergeant major cautioned. “The old Jew will fix you up and first thing tomorrow you’ll send this lot off to van Niekerk, fast post. This shit is going to save your life, soldier.”
The sergeant major was right but that didn’t diminish the anger Emmanuel was feeling. It was the last photo. The satisfied look on Willem Pretorius’s face needled him into an incomprehensible rage. Emmanuel could almost hear the woman’s teasing voice coaxing the naked Dutchman to smile for the camera after she had arranged the sheet just so.
Emmanuel clipped the satchel shut. He had to dream of a woman in a burned-out cellar while Pretorius got the real thing. The rage was sharpened by another emotion. He stopped short. He was blindingly, furiously jealous of the captain and the woman who’d spent the afternoon f*cking and then shared a dangerous joke.
The pain pushed Emmanuel onto the kaffir path toward the old Jew and his scarred leather doctor’s kit.
Emmanuel knocked on the door a third time and waited. It was 10:35 PM and Jacob’s Rest was a small town: the residents had locked up for the night and it would take Zweigman a while to answer.
“Yes?” the German asked through the door.
“Detective Sergeant Cooper. I’m here on a personal errand.”
The double lock clicked open and Zweigman peered out. His white hair stuck out at odd sleep-tossed angles but his brown eyes were sharp and focused. He was wearing plain cotton pajamas under a tatty dressing gown that sported a moth-eaten velvet collar.
“You are injured,” Zweigman said. “Come this way.” He indicated a doorway immediately to his right and Emmanuel shuffled his aching body into a room barely large enough to house the leather sofa and armchair that stood at its center. There was a gramophone on an occasional table with a stack of records in paper sleeves resting next to it, but what dominated the space were the books. They lined the walls and jostled for room in the corners and at the ends of the sofa. There were more books than could be read in a lifetime.
Zweigman picked up an old newspaper from the leather armchair and threw it aside, not caring where it landed.
“Let us see what damage you have done,” he said.
Emmanuel sank into the cracked leather chair and pushed his injured leg out with some effort.
“Some aches and pains. Nothing that a few painkillers won’t fix.”
“That is for me to decide,” Zweigman said, and gently lifted the torn trouser leg out of the way to examine the wound. He emitted a satisfied grunt.
“Painkillers will help, but the wound is deep and needs both cleaning and stitching. May I see your shoulder, please?”
Emmanuel didn’t ask the German how he knew about the other souvenir collected from the guard in Lorenzo Marques. Despite his current circumstance, Zweigman couldn’t shrug off the mantle of intellectual superiority that hung from his stooped shoulders. He had commanded respect in another life and Emmanuel imagined the good doctor’s expertise was once dispensed to gold-plated families in rooms with polished furniture.
Emmanuel’s shirt was half unbuttoned when there was a knock at the door that started out as a soft tap and rapidly turned into a manic pounding when the call wasn’t immediately answered.
“Liebchen?” The woman’s voice was husky with tears. “Liebchen?”
“Please stay seated,” Zweigman said, and walked to the door and opened it gently. Lilliana Zweigman stumbled into the room in a pale silk dressing gown embroidered with dozens of purple butterflies in flight. Her hands reached out and patted her husband’s face and shoulders like a field medic searching for hidden injuries.
“We have a visitor.” Zweigman gave no indication that his wife’s behavior was in any way unusual. “Would you be kind enough to make us a pot of tea to be served with your excellent butter cookies?”
“Is he?” Lilliana mumbled. “He is?”
“No, he is not. The detective is a book lover and we were discussing our favorite writers. Is that not so, Detective?”
“Yes.” Emmanuel picked up the book closest to him and held it up. His shoulder screamed in protest but he didn’t let it show. “I was hoping to borrow this copy for a few days.”
“Ahh…” Lilliana became bright as a welder’s spark now that the danger had passed. “Yes, of course. I will make the tea.”
She floated out of the room and Emmanuel wondered at the capacity of the human mind to mold reality to its will. He was seated in Zweigman’s house with bloodied trousers, an unbuttoned shirt, and a copy of A Field Guide to Spores and Fungi in his hand, and Lilliana had willed herself into believing it was a social call.
“The shoulder,” Zweigman continued as if they had not been interrupted. “Let me see it, please.”
Emmanuel removed his shirt slowly and hot pain coursed through his muscles. The guard would be able to tell Mr. Fernandez, the Portuguese land whale, that he’d given the thief a taste of suffering.
“An old bullet wound overlaid with a new bruise. I will not ask how you acquired such aggressive injuries.” Zweigman pressed his fingers around the edge of the bruise. “Arnica to take down the swelling and painkillers to take away the pain. Nature will do the rest in its own time.”
The doctor found his medical kit among the chaos, snapped it open, and rifled through the contents. He pulled out a container of pills and shook four into the palm of his hand.
“Swallow these with your tea,” Zweigman instructed before digging into his bag to extract a tub of cream. “Please rub this into your shoulder while I arrange for the washing bowl and sterilize a needle from my wife’s sewing kit.”
Emmanuel scooped ointment out of the jar and spread it over his shoulder as the doctor left the room. Zweigman was right. The nightstick had brought the pain of his old injury back to life.
Zweigman reentered the room and set up the bowl next to the gramophone. He moved with such certainty that Emmanuel wondered again what had landed the old Jew and his wife in Jacob’s Rest.
“How did the captain know you were a doctor?” he asked.
The German dipped a cloth into the washbowl and started cleaning the cut. “You asked me once before and I have told you that I do not know.”
“Something happened back in April that tipped him off. What was it?”
“I recall no such incident, Detective.” Zweigman reached up for a pair of tweezers and began digging into the cut. “Hold still, please, I have found the source of your discomfort. There.” He lifted the tweezers to show a jagged piece of clear glass. “Once again I will not ask how you came by this.”
“Very kind of you. But I can’t return the favor.”
The doctor didn’t respond to the statement and set about preparing the sewing kit. At some point during his fall from grace, the German had learned to keep his mouth shut. He would not volunteer any information.
“Which one of the coloured women was the captain close to?” Emmanuel asked the question straight out.
“‘Close’?” Zweigman gave a top-notch impression of a penniless migrant hearing the English language for the first time. “What does this mean, Detective?”
“It means close enough to stick his tongue in her ear and a few other places besides,” Emmanuel said, and the doctor flushed.
Zweigman said nothing for a moment. “If you repeat that accusation outside this room, even in jest,” he warned, “it will take a team of surgeons to sew you together and I am not sure they will succeed.”
“Was it one of the women in your shop?” Emmanuel asked as the German threaded a needle and tied a knot into the surgical thread. His hands were steady, but there was an odd tilt to his head, as if he was trying to get as far from the conversation as possible.
“Tottie or maybe Davida?”
“I’m afraid that I cannot help you,” Zweigman said, and closed the cut. He stitched the flesh together with the quick skill of a surgeon used to mending much deeper wounds. Emmanuel was sure that the old Jew knew more than he was telling, but unlike the Security Branch, he preferred confessions to be voluntary.
“You know what’s strange?” he said to Zweigman after the thread was tied off and the sting in his flesh had subsided. “You didn’t tell me I was mistaken about the captain. The suggestion that a morally upright white policeman might be fooling around with a coloured girl didn’t get a response from you. No surprise. Nothing at all.”
Zweigman carefully packed everything back into his wife’s sewing kit. He looked old and worn out, his shoulders pushed down by a heavy weight.
“We are men of the world, Detective. We have been through a war and seen cities burn. Does an affair really have the power to shock either of us?”
“Maybe not. But the rest of the town and the country will see it differently. The Immorality Act is the law, and the fact that it was broken by a policeman will shock plenty of people.”
“The Immorality Act.” Zweigman snorted. “The forces of nature are more powerful than any law made by men.”
The door to the lounge cum library opened and Lilliana Zweigman backed into the room carrying a tray containing a teapot, cups and a plate of butter cookies cut into the shape of snowflakes.
“Here.” Zweigman took the tray from his wife and balanced it on the wide arm of the sofa. “You are a marvel, liebchen, a true wonder. You have earned a rest. Why don’t you go to bed now while we talk?”
Lilliana didn’t move. She sensed something not quite right about the detective’s presence in her house.
“Please help yourself to tea and one of my wife’s cookies.”
Emmanuel bit into a pale yellow disk of pastry sprinkled with sugar. It was delicious and he hadn’t eaten for hours. He finished the cookie in two bites and reached for another one.
“You see?” Zweigman touched his wife’s arm. “You have not lost your touch. I’m sure our visitor would appreciate a small tin of your pastry to take home.”
“Yes.” Lilliana backed out slowly. “I will pack him some in the container with the red roses on the outside.”
“The ideal choice,” the doctor said, and gently closed the door behind her.
“Please excuse my wife, Detective. She’s not comfortable with members of the police.”
“No offense taken,” Emmanuel said, and swallowed the painkillers with a mouthful of tea.
Zweigman sat down and rested his teacup on his knee. A wealth of past sorrows seemed to surround the doctor and the melancholy reached out and embraced Emmanuel like an old friend. Men of the world, Zweigman had called them. Men formed by war and cruelty—and unexpected kindnesses.
Emmanuel picked up a book to break the morbid spell and ran his fingertips over the smooth calfskin cover. City of Sin was embossed on the spine. It was the same size and style as Celestial Pleasures, the slim volume he’d found in the captain’s locked sanctuary. In a town the size of Jacob’s Rest, the book of erotica could only have come from this room.
“Did Pretorius borrow any of these books?”
“He never honored me with such a request,” Zweigman said. “I believe the Bible was his mainstay.”
“Do you lend books from here?”
“Everyone is welcome, Detective.”
Emmanuel breathed out in frustration. “No specific names to give me, I suppose. No clue as to who borrowed a book entitled Celestial Pleasures.”
“I have no memory of that particular book and no idea who may see fit to read it.”
Emmanuel finished his tea and pushed himself out of the deep folds of the leather armchair. The painkillers surged through his blood and he felt just fine.
“When Constable Shabalala avoids telling me something, I know it’s to protect Captain Pretorius. Who are you protecting, Doctor?”
“Myself,” Zweigman answered without hesitation. “Everything is done to protect my soul from further onslaughts of guilt and blame.”
“I was hoping for something as simple as a name,” Emmanuel said, and turned to leave. He needed sleep. Tomorrow he had to try to identify the woman in the photos and hope that she would lead him to the man who’d stolen the evidence from the stone hut.
“Detective.” Zweigman held the jar of ointment out. “Apply this to your shoulder once every two to four hours. It will help reduce the swelling.”
“Thanks. I also need more painkillers. I’m out.”
Zweigman’s brown eyes made a close study of the wounded detective before he answered.
“You received a three-week ration less than one week ago. What has happened to the rest?”
“Gone,” Emmanuel said, conscious of how that must sound to a medical professional. “I don’t normally run through them so quickly.”
“What made you lift your dosage?”
The sergeant major’s voice and the memory of running through the smoke of wood fires were not things he was prepared to share with anyone, even a highly qualified surgeon. The town of Jacob’s Rest opened all the cages he normally kept locked and he couldn’t find a reason for that.
Zweigman went to his medical kit and returned with a half-filled container of white pills.
“These are for physical pain. They will not cure the pain you are feeling in your heart or your mind. That pain can only be cured by feeling it.”
“What if the pain is too much to bear?” Emmanuel asked. The army psych unit was big on drugging the pain away: on the patient not feeling anything that ruled out a return to active duty. Fit enough to pull the trigger meant fit enough to return to the killing fields.
“You will go mad.” Zweigman smiled. “Or you will transform yourself into a new being, one that even you will not recognize.”
“Is that what you’ve done? Transformed yourself?”
“No.” The old Jew looked ancient as Jerusalem stone. “I am merely hiding from who I used to be. A sad and cowardly end in keeping with the rest of my life.”
“You stood up for Anton. You protect your wife and the women in your care. How is that sad and cowardly?”
“Rearguard actions to keep the past at bay.” Zweigman opened the front door and let fresh air into the room. “Come to the store tomorrow. I will check on your injuries and give you my wife’s tin of cookies. It appears she has been delayed.”
Quiet sobbing came from the back of the house, and Emmanuel stepped out into the sleepy embrace of Jacob’s Rest.
“Thank you,” he said, and limped to the front gate. It seemed to him that the German refugee and his wife had run from the past only to find they had brought it with them to a distant corner of southern Africa.
Zweigman watched the injured detective slip away into the night, then rushed to the kitchen tucked at the back of the small brick house. His wife stood at the table with the tin of butter cookies held tightly to her chest.
“That man…he will take what we love from us.”
“No, liebchen.” Zweigman tried to remove the rose-covered tin from his wife’s hands but found her grip impossible to loosen. He touched her cheek. “I promise that will not happen to us again.”
Emmanuel was halfway back to The Protea Guesthouse when the singing began. It was a popular tune rendered almost unrecognizable by a high-pitched voice that broke on every fifth word and then started up again like a scratched record. He located the drunken songbird behind the coloured church.
“Hansie.” Emmanuel greeted the tottering figure. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sarge, howzit?” The teenaged policeman held up two bottles of whiskey triumphantly. “See? Louis said he wouldn’t give it, but he did when he saw the uniform. My uniform.”
“Tiny gave you those bottles?” One of them was already half empty. Hansie was having the time of it.
“Won’t give any to Louis. But he gives to me because of the uniform.”
“Where are you going with the bottles, Hansie?”
“Louis bet me I couldn’t but I did.” Hansie thumped his chest. “Because I am the law and people respect the law.”
“You going back to Louis’s house?”
“The shed.” The boy squinted out across the dark veldt, then turned in an unsteady circle. “Louis said take the kaffir path but I don’t know…where…where’s the way back?”
Emmanuel put his arm around Hansie’s shoulder. He was interested in how the lion of God managed to talk his friend into shaking down a coloured merchant for liquor.
“I’ll show you,” he said, and turned Hansie in the direction of the nonwhite houses in order to get more time to “interrogate” him. “Why didn’t Louis get the bottles? He knows the kaffir path better than you, doesn’t he?”
“See.” Hansie held the bottles up. “I got them. Me.”
“Good job.” Emmanuel tried another tack. “Does Louis normally get the bottles?”
“Ja. But he sent me this time.”
“Why?” It was hard to stop himself from smacking some sense into the idiot constable.
“He went, but Tiny said no, no, no dice.”
“Why?”
“Captain found out about the drinking. He sent Louis away to a farm in the Drakensbergs…long way away up in the mountains.” Hansie gave a full-bodied burp that echoed across the empty veldt. Up ahead, the light from the captain’s work shed punctuated the darkness.
“That’s the shed. Go in but don’t tell anyone you saw me. Understand?”
“Ja.” The drunken Afrikaner lurched forward, eager to show his spoils.
Emmanuel spun Hansie around to face him and leveled the police boy a severe glance, the kind used by headmasters about to hand out a “six of the best” caning.
“Forget you saw me. That’s an order, Hepple.”
“Yes, sir, Detective Sergeant, sir.”
Emmanuel launched Hansie toward the light with a gentle push. The inebriated boy stumbled toward the open door with the bottles held aloft like the conquering hero. A chorus of cheers greeted his entrance. Louis wasn’t the only one waiting for the whiskey river to start flowing.
At the open shed door, Emmanuel risked a quick look in. Hansie, Louis and two freckle-nosed teenagers sat on an oil-stained blanket and passed the half-empty whiskey bottle among them. The second bottle of amber was placed in the middle of the circle with its top off in readiness.
“Hey, Hansie.” A boy with a train-tunnel-sized gap between his front teeth took a swig. “Louis here says that Botha’s daughter isn’t the prettiest girl in the district. Says he’s seen better.”
“Who?” Hansie was flabbergasted. “Who could be better than her? No one.”
“I’ve got different tastes from you.” Louis pushed his messy blond hair from his forehead. “Just remember that no matter how modest women are in their appearance, no matter how shy and clean, they are the reason Adam fell into sin.”
“That’s exactly what I’m hoping for, man!” Hansie replied.
The policeman’s answer set off a round of laughter that continued even as Emmanuel slipped away into the veldt. He didn’t have to stay longer to know how the evening would unravel. There’d be talk of girls, imagined and real, then someone, most likely Hansie, would lie about having lost his virginity. There’d be more talk of girls and cars and the next big social dance. And during all this, Louis the sleeping lion of God, and Louis the juvenile delinquent, would jostle for supremacy.
15
EMMANUEL CALLED IN at the Grace of God Hospital early the next morning and found Sister Bernadette and Sister Angelina supervising a breakfast of cold porridge without milk for the twenty or so orphans collected on the open veranda. He waited until they’d dished up the last bowl, then approached them. He had no idea how to ask for what he wanted.
“Sisters…” He cleared his throat and started again. “Sisters, I’d like you to witness a likeness of Captain Pretorius for me.”
“Of course,” Sister Bernadette said. The tiny white nun wiped her pale hands on her apron. “Do you have a pen, Detective?”
“Yes, I do…it’s just that…I…” He trailed off.
“Yes?” Sister Angelina prompted.
“I should warn you that it’s a…a provocative image. One that might upset or shock you.”
“Oh…” Sister Bernadette’s smile was strained. “In that case we should get it over and done with as quickly as possible.”
God bless the pragmatic Catholic sisters, Emmanuel thought, and pulled the second of the two envelopes from the leather satchel. In fifteen minutes the photographs were due on an express bus to Jo’burg with Miss Byrd’s cousin, Delores Bunton.
Sister Angelina motioned him over to the far end of the veranda to an old gurney covered by a sheet. They were out of sight and earshot of the children. Emmanuel hesitated, then pulled the image free.
“Look at the photo,” he said, “then turn it over and write ‘I swear that this is a true image of Captain Willem Pretorius.’ Sign your names underneath and date it, please.”
He put the image faceup on the trolley and felt the heat of a blush in his cheeks.
“Oh, my,” Sister Bernadette gasped.
“Gracious.” Sister Angelina crossed herself and blinked hard.
“This is a surprise,” the little Irish nun muttered. “I had no idea.”
“Yebo.” The black nun pursed her lips. “Who knew the captain had such a big smile.”
“Yes.” Sister Bernadette pushed an imaginary strand of hair into her head covering. “I don’t recall seeing him this happy before.”
The sisters stood motionless and stared at the photograph. Emmanuel turned the image over and heard a sigh from the nuns. He handed over the pen and watched them sign and date the photo. He placed it back in the envelope.
“Thank you, Sisters,” he said. “If anyone from the Special Branch or the Pretorius family asks about this photograph, deny ever having seen it. It’s the safest way.”
Poppies General Store was quiet. The normal hum of sewing machines was replaced by the soft scrape of Zweigman’s shoes as he unpacked cans of sardines from a box and stacked them on a shelf.
“Detective.” The shopkeeper greeted him with a nod. His hair, normally chaotic, was now positively Medusa-like with warring white strands fighting each other in an epic battle for control.
Emmanuel motioned in the direction of the silent back room. “Nobody home?”
“My wife is unwell,” Zweigman said. “She has given the ladies a day off.”
“Anything to do with my visit?”
“The damage was done long before you appeared.” The German stacked the last can of sardines on the shelf. “You have come for your checkup, yes?”
“That and use of the phone if I may.” He had to let van Niekerk know that the satchel of photographs was already on its way to the address he’d telegraphed through two days ago.
“Of course.” Zweigman picked up the phone from the counter and shuffled into the back room, where the rows of sewing machines stood with their night covers still on. Poppies felt deserted without the ladies bent over patterns and pins under the watchful eye of Lilliana.
“I will be in the front unpacking.” Zweigman put the phone on the tea table. “Call me when you are ready for your examination.”
Emmanuel sat down and dialed the operator. He wanted to be at the Jacob’s Rest police station within the half hour to see if the Security Branch raid had netted a big Red fish during the night.
He got through to headquarters without any trouble and was given a new number to call. Van Niekerk knew how to fly under the Security Branch radar.
“I’ve sent you something,” Emmanuel said once the major picked up.
“Is it useful?” Van Niekerk was in high spirits for a powerful man forced to dirty his hands in a public call box. Like a prized bloodhound, he sniffed something on the wind.
“Extremely useful,” Emmanuel said.
“Smut? Dirty money? Political?”
“Smut.”
“Can it be tied to our departed friend or a member of his family?”
“Let’s just say the captain was as good behind the camera as he was in front of it.”
“My God! Are you absolutely sure it’s him?”
“One hundred percent,” Emmanuel said. “I had the image signed and verified by two people who knew him.”
He felt guilty using Sister Bernadette and Sister Angelina, but nuns were hard witnesses to push around on the stand. It was uncharitable to attack a bride of Christ.
“Good man,” the major said. “I knew you’d come up with the goods. You always do.”
Giving the information to van Niekerk didn’t feel as rewarding as Emmanuel thought it would. Willem Pretorius’s homicide was still unsolved and that was the only reason he’d come to Jacob’s Rest. The pornographic pictures were of value only if they helped catch the killer.
“The packet will be hand-delivered this evening to the address on the telegram.” He was suddenly impatient with van Niekerk. Catching the killer was secondary to the power that possession of the photos gave the major over the Security Branch and factions of the National Party. “I have to go and check out what the Security Branch dragged in,” Emmanuel added. He wasn’t leaving Jacob’s Rest until he found out who’d killed Willem Pretorius and why.
“They got him,” van Niekerk stated bluntly. “Your man from Fort Bennington College.”
“How do you know?”
Van Niekerk laughed, as if the question itself was too stupid to answer.
“I just do, Cooper.”
“Anything else you can tell me?” Emmanuel asked. There was no way Piet or Dickie would let him in on the questioning.
“He was at the crossing on the night the captain was killed,” the major said. “That’s a solid fact. The miner Duma from the location was his contact. You may want to start entertaining the possibility that the Security Branch is on the right track.”
“I’ll do that, sir,” Emmanuel said before signing off. He knew in his bones that the Communist agent wasn’t a fit for the murder. Why was the body dragged to the water when it could have been left on the sand? And Shabalala was sure the killer had swum back to Mozambique. Maybe the Security Branch had some answers.
He went to the front of the store, where Zweigman was busy cleaning the shelves with an ostrich feather duster.
“I’ll come back for my examination this afternoon,” he told the shopkeeper, and set the phone back on the counter. “I have to check in at the police station.”
“Of course. I will be here until approximately five-thirty.”
Emmanuel stepped onto the pitted dirt sidewalk fronting Poppies and the liquor store. It was time to hammer on Shabalala’s door until the black man told him everything he knew about Willem Pretorius’s secret life.
Four Chevrolet sedans were parked in front of the police station, the shiny chrome trim of each car flecked with dust and the dried bodies of crushed insects collected on the night drive. A handful of plainclothes officers in creased suits mingled on the porch, smoking and talking to a plump man with a camera slung around his neck. Press, Emmanuel guessed. The reporter would be in the employ of one of the toady Afrikaner newspapers that ran with the official National Party line no matter what the real story was.
Emmanuel climbed the stairs, ready for the brush-off. The Security Branch machine had a stranglehold now on the police station and he wasn’t on their list of invited guests. One of the new Security Branch officers stepped forward.
“This is a restricted area,” said the moonfaced man in the badly cut suit. “No entry without Lieutenant Lapping’s say-so.”
Emmanuel stepped back. He was unlikely to get pockmarked Piet’s nod of approval in this lifetime.
“I was looking for the regular police. Constable Shabalala, Lieutenant Uys and Constable Hepple. I’m working a local investigation.”
“Check out the back.” Moonface smiled, then said, “Hey, you caught the pervert yet, Detective Sergeant?”
Emmanuel walked away without answering. Lieutenant Lapping had isolated him from the murder investigation and made him a figure of fun into the bargain. He’d eat humble pie for as long as it took to find Shabalala and until he’d finished sifting through Willem Pretorius’s dirty laundry.
He opened the side gate to the police station’s backyard. Paul Pretorius and the diminutive Lieutenant Uys were sitting in the shade of the avocado tree with three men he didn’t recognize. Was there anyone left at the Security Branch offices?
Paul Pretorius stood up and closed the gap between them with his slow swagger. “So.” The hulking soldier smiled at him for the first time in their acquaintance. It was an unpleasant sight. “How does it feel to be at the arse end of the investigation, Detective Sergeant?”
“You’ve got a confession from the suspect?” Emmanuel said.
“Another hour or two and it’ll be done,” Paul said, stroking the bristles on his chin to emphasize how long a night it had been for those at the center of power. “I tell you what, those boys inside know what they’re doing.”
“They’re sure he’s the one?”
“Absolutely. And you thought Pa’s killer was some degenerate white man. Looks like you’ll have to run back to Jo’burg with empty pockets. Shame, hey?”
Emmanuel knew just the thing to wipe the smile off Paul Pretorius’s face: a single image of the respected white police captain nursing a giant hard-on in a coloured woman’s bed. That would do the trick. It was just as well the packet of pornographic photographs was on its way to van Niekerk and well out of his reach.
“The constables aren’t here?” He continued with the conversation as if the arrogant Pretorius son hadn’t taken the whip to him. Paul was destined to find out the truth about his father one day, and Emmanuel hoped he’d be there to witness the moment.
“Hansie’s out with his girl, and Shabalala I haven’t seen.” Paul Pretorius strolled back toward the group of men seated in the shade with a shrug that implied he had more important things to do now that he was finished baiting a detective with no power and no credibility.
Emmanuel moved onto the kaffir path. He had to find Shabalala and explain to him that protecting Willem Pretorius’s memory was a waste of time. With enough pressure he might even be able to find out the identity of the mystery woman in the photos.
At the juncture of the kaffir path and the main street he spotted Constable Hepple nestling close to a hugely betitted brunette with milkmaid’s arms. It was the girl from the churchyard: the one Hansie had targeted after the captain’s funeral. The lovebirds didn’t notice him until he was almost on them.
“Detective Sergeant.” Hansie sprang back and straightened his jacket over his slim boy hips. “I…I didn’t see you.”
“You were busy,” Emmanuel replied, and the girl made a hasty attempt to straighten the neckline of her dress. “Do you know where Constable Shabalala is?”
“The location.” Hansie’s breath was short and his color high. “Lieutenant Lapping said for him to come back tomorrow.”
“Lieutenant said Hansie could have the day off as well.” The girl’s work-worn hands fluttered up over her enormous breasts to stroke the diamond center of her necklace. “We were going for a walk.”
Emmanuel pointed to the necklace nestled in the girl’s cleavage. “That’s an unusual design. Can I take a closer look?”
“Of course.” The milkmaid flushed with self-importance and lifted her chin to allow a better view. “It’s real gold and diamonds.”
“A flower,” Emmanuel said, and examined the gold petals set with a sparkling diamond stamen. It was the necklace worn by the brown-skinned woman in the captain’s flesh extravaganza. Hansie shuffled closer, intent on protecting his girl from the big-city detective’s attentions. Emmanuel ignored him. The farm girl’s mammaries were important only because their eye-popping size ruled her out as the model in the photos.
Emmanuel’s brain leapt from one bizarre scenario to the next in an attempt to explain the appearance of the gold flower around the neck of an Afrikaner brunette. Did Captain Pretorius have a multicolored harem of women he rewarded with identical gold flower necklaces?
“Where did you get the necklace?” he asked.
“Hansie.” The girl beamed at her idiot boyfriend. “He gave it to me just now.”
That explained the sweaty clinch. It wasn’t every day a farm girl was given an expensive piece of jewelry to flash around.
“You’ve got good taste, Constable.” Emmanuel placed his hand on Hansie’s shoulder and moved him farther onto the kaffir path. “Where did you get the necklace?”
The boy tensed at the serious tone and scraped the toe of his boot into the sandy path.
“I don’t remember.”
“Tell me.”
“I…I found it.”
“Where?”
The constable’s cornflower-blue eyes filled with tears just as they had when the Pretorius brothers made a move to beat the daylights out of him at the crime scene.
“By the river. On the path leading to the veldt.”
Emmanuel regretted not letting the Pretorius boys give Hansie a solid pounding. It was more than the imbecile policeman deserved.
“You’re talking about the riverbank where the captain was found?”
“Ja.” Tears rolled down the constable’s face and dripped onto his starched uniform. His mother was going to have to spot clean the fabric this evening.
“The necklace was on the path the boys used to get back to the location?” Emmanuel clarified the facts and struggled to stop his fingers digging into the flesh of Hansie’s shoulder. Surely the National Party government realized that giving a uniform to a boy like this was the same as giving it to a monkey?
“Ja, on that path.”
“Why didn’t you call me to look at this unusual thing?”
Hansie chewed on his thumbnail and gave the question his best efforts. It was an excruciating exercise to watch. “Well…A woman’s necklace has nothing to do with the captain dying. I mean…it would be like a woman was there with him…and…there wasn’t a woman with him, so…because…Captain wasn’t like that.”
“Hepple.” Emmanuel dropped his hand from the young man’s shoulder and rifled in his jacket pocket for the car keys. “That necklace is evidence. You have until this afternoon to get it back from your girlfriend and give it to me. You understand?”
“But…she…she really likes it.”
“This afternoon,” Emmanuel said, and made for the Packard. He had an idea now of what Shabalala was hiding and why the Zulu policeman was covering up for his boyhood friend, Willem Pretorius.
He ran through the unplanned maze of dilapidated dwellings, on the lookout for the pink door that he was told marked the Zulu constable’s house. He found it and pounded twice. The door swung open and Shabalala stepped back in surprise.
“A woman was with him,” Emmanuel said. “There was a woman with Captain Pretorius at the riverbank on the night he was shot.”
“It rained and many of the marks—”
“Don’t give me that rubbish, I’m not buying it today. You’re a tracker. You knew Pretorius wasn’t alone that night.”
The Zulu-Shangaan made an effort to speak and when that failed, he reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a blank-faced envelope, which he handed over without saying a word.
“What’s this?”
“Read it, please, nkosana.”
Emmanuel tore the envelope open and extracted a folded piece of paper with two lines of text written on the lined face. He read the words out loud. “‘The captain had a little wife. This wife was with him at the river when he died.’”
“You were the one who sent me to King’s farm,” Emmanuel said. He recognized the hand. It made sense now. The person who’d left the note ran like no one he’d ever seen, ran with a relentless stride that had left him gasping for breath out on the veldt. Captain Pretorius and Shabalala stirred the hearts of the old people as they crossed the length and breadth of the Pretorius farm without stopping, without drinking. Like so many white men, Emmanuel thought, I was beaten by a warrior of the Zulu impi.
“What happened that night on the riverbank? I’m not going to tell the Pretorius family or the other policemen. So go ahead and just say it.”
Shabalala paused as if he couldn’t bear to put into words the things he’d kept bottled up for so long.
“The captain and the little wife were together on the blanket. Captain was shot and fell forward. The little wife, she struggled from under him and ran on the sand to the path and then the man pulled the captain to the water. This is all I know.”
“Christ above, man. Why didn’t you tell me straightaway?”
“The captain’s sons. They would not like to hear these things. None of the Afrikaners would like to hear this story.”
The Pretorius boys were the unofficial lawmakers in Jacob’s Rest. Anton and his burned garage were an example of the rough justice they meted out to offenders. What chance did a black policeman stand against the mighty hand of the Pretorius family?
“I understand,” Emmanuel said.
Shabalala had to live in Jacob’s Rest. Writing unsigned notes was the simplest way for him to help the investigation and stay out of harm’s way. It was better and safer for everyone involved if a white out-of-town detective was the one to uncover the truth about the captain.
“Detective Sergeant.” The Zulu constable motioned to the back of the house. “Please.”
Emmanuel followed Shabalala through the neat sitting room into the kitchen. A black woman stood near a table. She looked up with a concerned expression but did not make a sound.
Shabalala led Emmanuel through the back door. They took seats on either side of a small card table. In the yard behind Shabalala’s house there was a chicken coop and a traditional kraal for keeping animals overnight. Behind the kraal the property fell away to the banks of a meandering stream.
Both men looked toward the distant hills as they talked. The serious business of undressing Captain Pretorius could not be done face-to-face.
“Do you know who the woman is?”
“No,” Shabalala said. “Captain told me of the little wife but not who she was.”
Emmanuel sank back in his chair. He’d had about enough of Willem Pretorius’s fire walls. Why didn’t he boast about his conquests like a normal man?
“What did he tell you about the girlfriend?”
“He said he had taken a little wife from among the coloured people and that the little wife had given him…um…” The pause lengthened as Shabalala sought the most polite way to translate the captain’s words.
“Pleasure? Power?” Emmanuel prompted.
“Strength. The little wife gave him new strength.”
“Why do you call her ‘little wife’?” He’d seen the photographs and there wasn’t one thing in them that his own ex-wife, Angela, would have agreed to do.
“She was a proper little wife,” Shabalala stated. “The captain paid lobola for her, as is the custom.”
“Whom did he pay the bride-price to?”
“Her father.”
“You’re telling me a man, a coloured man, agreed to exchange his daughter for cattle?” He leaned toward Shabalala. Did the Zulu policeman really believe such a far-fetched story?
“Captain told me this is what he did. He had respect for the old ways. He would not take a second wife without first paying lobola. This I believe.”
“Yes, well. I’m sure the white Mrs. Pretorius will be delighted to hear her husband was such a stickler for the rules.”
“No. The missus would not like to hear this.” Shabalala was deadly serious.
The sound of a woman’s voice singing in a far-off field carried back on the breeze. Spread out before them, a great span of grassland ran toward distant hills. This was one Africa, inhabited by black men and women who still understood and accepted the old ways. Five miles south in Jacob’s Rest another Africa existed on parallel lines. What made Willem Pretorius think he could live in both places at the same time?
“We have to find this woman.” Emmanuel pulled the Mozambican calendar from his pocket and laid it on the small table between them. The time for secrets was over. “She was the last person to see Pretorius alive and maybe she can tell us what he was doing on these particular days.”
Shabalala studied the calendar. “The captain was in Mooihoek on the Monday and Tuesday before he died but he did not leave the town on the other days.”
“What do you think those red markings mean? Did he go somewhere for a few days each month?”
“No. He went to Mooihoek to buy station supplies and sometimes to Mozambique and Natal with his family but not every month.”
“These markings mean something.” Emmanuel sensed another dead end coming up. “If Pretorius was doing something illegal…smuggling goods or meeting up with an associate…would you have known?”
“I think so, yes.”
“And was he doing anything like that?”
Shabalala shook his head. “Captain did not do anything against the law.”
“You don’t think the Immorality Act counts?” Emmanuel was amazed by the tenacious respect Shabalala still held for his dead friend. Of all the people in Jacob’s Rest, Shabalala had earned the right to be cynical about Willem Pretorius, the lying, adulterous white man.
“He paid lobola. A man may take many wives if he pays the bride-price. That is the law of the Zulu.”
“Pretorius wasn’t a Zulu. He was an Afrikaner.”
Shabalala pointed to his chest just above the heart. “Here. Inside. He was as a Zulu.”
“Then I’m surprised he wasn’t killed sooner.”
There was a shuffle at the back door and the round-faced, round-bottomed woman from the kitchen carried a tea tray onto the stoep and set it down on the table.
“Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is my wife, Lizzie.”
“Unjani, mama.”
Emmanuel shook hands with the woman in the traditional Zulu way, by holding his right wrist with his left hand as a sign of his respect. The woman’s smile lit up the stoep and half the location with its warmth. She was a fraction of her husband’s height but in every way his equal.
“You have good manners.” Her graying hair gave her the authority to speak where a younger woman would have stayed silent. She gave the calendar a thorough look-over.
“My wife is a schoolteacher.” Shabalala tried to find an excuse for his wife’s inquisitive behavior. “She teaches all the subjects.”
Lizzie touched her husband’s broad shoulder. “Nkosana, may I see you in the other room for just a moment, please?”
There was an awkward silence before the Zulu policeman stood up and followed his wife into the house. It didn’t do well for a woman to interrupt men’s business. The murmur of their voices spilled out from the kitchen. Emmanuel sipped his tea. How Captain Pretorius arranged the purchase of a second wife was not as important as finding the woman herself. She was the key to everything.
Shabalala came back out onto the stoep but remained standing. He tugged on an earlobe.
“What is it?”
“My wife she says this calendar is a woman’s calendar.”
“It was the captain’s. I found it at the stone hut on King’s farm.”
“No.” Shabalala fidgeted like an awkward schoolboy. “It is a calendar used by women to…um…”
Shabalala’s wife stepped out from the kitchen and picked up the calendar.
“How silly can a grown man be?” she asked Shabalala with a click of her tongue. She pointed to the red-ringed days. “For one week a month a woman flows like a river. You understand? This is what this calendar is saying.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am a woman and I know such things.”
Emmanuel was stunned by the simplicity of the explanation. It never would have occurred to him in a hundred years of looking. The calendar was about the woman and her cycle, not an elaborate puzzle of illegal pickup dates and activities. The camera, the calendar and the photos were all linked to the shadowy little wife, whoever she was.
“Thank you,” he said, then turned to Shabalala. “We have to find the woman before the Security Branch beats a confession from the man in the cells and then throws all the other evidence out the window.”
“The old Jew,” Shabalala suggested. “He and his wife also know many of the coloured people.”
“He won’t speak,” Emmanuel said. “But I know someone who might.”
Emmanuel crossed the street to the burned-out shell of Anton’s garage and Shabalala set up watch in the vacant lot next to Poppies General Store. If Zweigman took flight during Emmanuel’s talk with Anton, the black policeman had orders to follow and observe from a distance.
Emmanuel entered the work site and the coloured mechanic looked up from the wheelbarrow of blackened bricks he was cleaning with a wire brush. Slowly, a sense of order was being imposed on the charred ruins of the once-flourishing business.
“Detective.” Anton wiped his sooty fingers clean with a rag before shaking hands. “What brings you to these parts?”
“You know most of the coloured women around here?” Emmanuel didn’t waste time with preliminaries. If he didn’t get anything from the mechanic, then he’d move on to the old Jew.
“Most. This got to do with the molester case?”
“Yes,” Emmanuel lied. “I want to find out what set the victims apart from the other coloured women in town.”
“Well…” Anton continued moving bricks to the wheelbarrow. “They were all young and single and respectable. There are one or two women, I won’t mention names, who are free and easy with their favors. Molester didn’t go after them.”
“What about Tottie? You know anything about her private life?”
“She hasn’t got one. Her father and brothers have her locked down so tight a man’s lucky to get even a minute alone with her.”
“No rumors about her taking up with a man from outside the coloured community?”
The mechanic stopped his work and wiped drops of sweat from his top lip. His green eyes narrowed.
“What you really asking me, Detective?”
Emmanuel went with the flow. There was nothing to gain now from being shy or subtle.
“You know any coloured man who practices the old ways? A man who might take a bride-price for his daughter?”
Anton laughed with relief. “No dice. Even Harry with the mustard gas would never swap his daughters for a couple of cows.”
It was highly likely that the deal, any deal with native overtones, was done in secret to avoid the scorn of a mixed-race community that worked tirelessly to bury all connection to the black part of the family tree.
“Has any coloured man come into money that can’t be explained?”
“Just me.” Anton grinned and the gold filling in his front tooth glinted. “Got my last payment a couple of days ago, but I don’t have a piece of paper to prove where it came from.”
The secretive Afrikaner captain and the coloured man who’d bargained for sexual access to his daughter were not likely to advertise their venture in any way. Only a traditional black man, steeped in the old ways, would talk openly about the bride-price paid for his daughter.
“Okay.” Emmanuel abandoned the line of questioning and backtracked. “Have there been rumors about any of the women in town or out on the farms taking up with a man from outside the community?”
Anton carefully selected a charred brick and began scrubbing in earnest. “We love rumors and whispers,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like the only thing that keeps us together.”
“Tell me.”
“If Granny Mariah hears I repeated this, she will hang my testicles out to dry on her back fence. I’m not exaggerating. That woman is fierce.”
“I promise she won’t get that information from me.”
“Couple of months back…” Anton chose to talk to the brick in his hand. “Tottie let slip to some other women that she thought the old Jew and Davida were close. Too close.”
“Any truth in it?”
“Well, Davida was over at the Zweigmans’ house all hours of the day and night. She walked in and out whenever she pleased and it didn’t seem right, one of us being so comfortable with whites.”
“Did anyone ask her what she was doing there?” He couldn’t connect the heated exchange of bodily fluids with the shy brown mouse and the protective old Jew. His relationship with her seemed paternal, not sexual.
“Reading books, sewing, baking, you name it, she always had an explanation for being there.” Anton worked a lump of ash out of the brick’s surface with his fingernail. “I was sweet on Davida at the time. We went walking and I even got some kisses in but she changed, Davida did. It was like she went into a shell once the talking started. She wasn’t like you see her today, all covered up and quiet. The girl had some spark back then.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Beautiful wavy hair down to the middle of her back; all natural, not straightened. At socials she was the first one up to dance and the last one to sit down. Granny had her hands full with her, I’ll tell you.”
The description didn’t remotely match the cloistered woman hiding under a head scarf. But the fact that the shy brown mouse once had long black hair did make her a possible match for the model in the captain’s photographs. What was her body like under the shapeless clothes that hung from her like sackcloth?
“What happened?” Emmanuel asked.
“I still can’t figure it,” Anton said. “She got through the molester thing okay and then one day the hair is all gone and she won’t walk with me anymore.”
“When did this change take place?”
“April sometime.” Anton threw the damaged brick into a wheelbarrow. “Zweigman and his wife nursed Davida through a sickness and when she came out, well, nothing was the same as it was before.”
April. The same month Captain Pretorius discovered the German shopkeeper was actually a qualified surgeon. Did Zweigman reveal the extent of his medical skills during treatment of Davida’s mysterious illness? And if that were the case, how had Willem Pretorius found that out? The shy brown mouse was the only common link between the two men.
“Thanks for your help, Anton,” Emmanuel said, and held his hand out to end the informal interview. “Good luck with the cleanup.”
He wanted to run through the connections between Willem Pretorius and Davida Ellis with Shabalala so he could clarify the links in his own mind. First, Donny Rooke sighted the captain behind the grid of coloured houses on the night he was murdered. Then Davida appeared at the stone hut. Somehow Celestial Pleasures had traveled from Zweigman’s study to Pretorius’s locked room as well. The elements were beginning to connect.
“Detective.” Anton stayed half a step behind him. “I wasn’t joking about Granny Mariah. She’ll never forgive me if I cause trouble for her granddaughter.”
Emmanuel didn’t know how to tell the mechanic that Davida’s troubles were likely to run far deeper and wider than a rumor spread by an ex-boyfriend. If the shy brown mouse proved to be the principal witness in the murder of a white police captain, everyone in South Africa was going to know her name and her face.