A Beautiful Place to Die

17

CRUSHED GUM LEAVES…” Emmanuel said to the mechanic after he and Shabalala had made their way back to the garage. “What do you use on your hands that has that particular smell?”
Anton rummaged in a wooden bucket and pulled out a tin can stamped with an impression of a slender leaf with jagged thunderbolts spiking out from it. “Degreaser. Us mechanics use it to clean up. It gets the dirt up from around the nails and between the fingers.”
“Who would use this particular cleaner?” Emmanuel pried open the top and sniffed the thick white slurry. The gum leaf smell was intense. “Just mechanics, or anyone fixing machinery?”
“Well, it’s not cheap, so it wouldn’t be used by someone fiddling around with their bicycle or bore pump. The only other place I’ve seen this stuff in town is at the Pretorius garage.”
“Is that where you get your supply?”
Anton laughed. “Good heavens! Can you imagine Erich Pretorius letting me buy anything from his place? No, I get my little sister to bring back two or three cans when she comes home from Mooihoek for the holidays. She’s at boarding school there. She was only down this weekend because of the funeral.”
“You’d notice if a can was missing?”
“Definitely. I string my supply out over the year. Like I said, it’s expensive. December’s supply has got to last to Easter, then I have to stretch the next one to August.”
“December and August?” Emmanuel gave the can of precious cleaner back to Anton and pulled out his notebook. Something was nudging his memory. “Why those months in particular?”
“School holidays,” Shabalala said. “My youngest son comes home also at these times.”
The molester was active during two distinct periods: August and December. Emmanuel gave his notes a quick check. That was right. He checked specific dates with Anton. The attacks occurred during the holidays and at no other time of year. The attacker might be partial to schoolgirls. Or on school holidays himself.
“Gentlemen.” Zweigman appeared holding a container of his wife’s butter cookies as an entrée into the conversation. “My wife will be upset if I do not deliver these as promised.”
“The molester? What made you think it was a white man?” Emmanuel asked.
“I have no proof. Just a feeling that the color of his skin is the reason why he was not caught and brought to trial.”
“Okay.” Emmanuel included all three men in the conversation. “Let’s assume the molester was a Dutchman. Are there any white men that you know of who are only here in town for the big school holidays?”
Zweigman, Anton, and Shabalala all shook their heads in the negative. Emmanuel moved on. “Which white boys were at boarding school last year? I’m talking about boys over the age of fourteen.”
“The Loubert boys, Jan and Eugene,” said Anton. “Then there was Louis Pretorius and, I believe, the Melmons’ son, Jacob. I don’t know about the Dutch boys out on the farms.”
“What about Hansie?” It was a ludicrous thought but Emmanuel had to cover as many bases as he could. Whittling down the suspect list by scraping together pieces of information on white schoolboys was a primitive science at best.
“Training,” Shabalala answered. “The constable was at the police college during the last half of the year.”
“The boys who were away at school last year? Did any of them ever get caught on the kaffir paths after dark?”
“Louis and the Loubert boys,” Anton replied. “They were using the path to obtain…um, things that the captain thought were unhealthy.”
“Liquor and dagga from Tiny? Is that right?”
“Ja.” Anton lifted his eyebrows in amazement. “I thought only Captain Pretorius and the coloured people knew about that. It was kept pretty quiet.”
“Small town,” Emmanuel said. “Which of those three boys would have access to the cleaner?”
“Louis for sure,” Anton answered again. “The boy is always messing around with engines and fixing things up. He’s good with his hands and Erich lets him have whatever he wants from the garage.”
“Was Louis home for the August and December holidays?” Emmanuel asked Shabalala.
“Yes,” Shabalala said. “He came back for all the holidays. The missus does not like him staying too long away.”
That was three out of three for Louis. He knew the kaffir path almost as well as a native, he was home for the holidays, and he had easy access to the gum-scented cleaner. Those facts alone warranted an interview even though the idea of the boy as the molester still seemed ludicrous.
Emmanuel went back to the bit about Louis being good with his hands. On the first day of the investigation Louis had given the distinct impression that his father was the mechanical whiz. He’d said as much.
“I thought the captain was letting Louis help him fix up an old motorbike,” Emmanuel said.
“Other way around. The captain was helping Louis. There’s not much that boy doesn’t know about engines, but the captain was always asking for help after he’d stuffed something up.”
“You think Louis is capable of finishing that Indian motorbike without help?”
“Completely.” Anton placed his precious supply of antigrease cleaner into the wooden bucket. “Beats me why he went to Bible college when he should have been working at his brother’s place. Being a mechanic suits him a hell of a lot better than being a pastor.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t suit his mother.” Mrs. Pretorius had a pretty clear idea about her youngest son’s future: a future free of oil stains and overalls.
“The school holiday inquiry is an interesting one,” Zweigman broke in politely. “But that does not explain why the attacks stopped in the middle of the Christmas holidays and have not recurred.”
“You’re right. December twenty-sixth was the last reported attack. That still leaves how much of the holiday?”
“The first week of January,” Shabalala replied so softly that Emmanuel turned to him. The Zulu constable looked just as he had on the banks of the river the moment before they pulled Captain Pretorius from the water. His face carried sadness too deep to be expressed with words.
“The Drakensberg.” Emmanuel remembered Hansie’s drunken ramblings out on the veldt. When had the captain sent Louis “a long way away” after discovering the drinking and dagga smoking? “Is that where he was, Shabalala?”
“Yebo,” the Zulu man said. “The young one, Mathandunina, was taken by the captain on the first day of January to a place in the Drakensberg mountains in Natal. I do not know why.”
Emmanuel scribbled van Niekerk’s name and phone number and a query onto a page in his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to Zweigman.
“Call this number and ask this man, Major van Niekerk, if he has an answer to this question. Constable Shabalala and I will be back within the hour. If not, look for us in the police cells.”


It was five past twelve and Miss Byrd was sitting on the back steps of the post office, chewing on a canned-meat sandwich made with thick slices of soft white bread. She was startled to see both the detective sergeant and the Zulu policeman walking toward her.
“The engine part that Louis Pretorius is waiting for? Has it come in yet?” Emmanuel said.
“It came the day before his father passed. Tragic, hey? Captain not getting to ride the motorbike after all the hard work he and Louis put into it. To be so close and not…”
“I thought Louis was coming to the post office every day to check for the part?”
“No.” Miss Byrd smiled. “He calls in to collect the mail for his mother. He’s very considerate that way, a very sweet young boy.”
“Yes, and Lucifer was the most beautiful of all God’s angels,” Emmanuel said. He and Shabalala walked back onto the kaffir path. They started as one toward the captain’s shed. He’d told the Zulu constable about the attack in the stone hut and the mechanical rattle he’d heard just before passing out.
“Looks like he dismantled the bike after he finished it, so no one knew he had transport.” Emmanuel took a guess at the sequence of events. “I’m willing to bet that Pretorius didn’t know anything about the engine part arriving from Jo’burg.”
“He said nothing of it to me.”
They picked up the pace and jogged in unison across the stretch of veldt that swung around the back of the police station and curved past the rear fence line of the houses facing onto van Riebeeck street. The noon sun had burned away the clouds to reveal a canopy of blue.
“You don’t have to come in,” Emmanuel said once they’d stopped outside the shed door. “Right or wrong, this is going to cause big trouble.”
“That one inside.” Shabalala hadn’t even broken a sweat on the run. “He is the only one who knew which kaffir paths the captain was running on. I wish to hear what he has to say to this.”
Emmanuel gave the door a shove with his shoulder, expecting resistance, but found none. The door swung open to reveal the darkened interior of the work shed. He stepped inside. Both Louis and the motorcycle were gone. Emmanuel walked over to the spot where the Indian had been resting on blocks and found a large oil stain but nothing else.
“The little bastard’s taken off on his motorbike. You have any idea where he could have gone, Shabalala?”
“Detective Sergeant—”
Dickie and two new Security Branch men wrestled the Zulu constable from the open doorway, then shoved him back onto the veldt. Lieutenant Piet Lapping entered wearing a sweat-and ash-stained shirt and rumpled pants. Lack of sleep had made his craggy face look like a bag of marbles stuffed into a white nylon stocking.
“Lieutenant Lapping.” Emmanuel smelled the anger and frustration coming directly off Piet’s sweat-beaded skin and concentrated on remaining calm. The Security Branch couldn’t nail him for anything. Not yet.
“Sit down.” Piet indicated the chair in front of the hunting desk. Dickie and his two bulldozer pals followed and took up positions at either side of the door. Emmanuel did as he was told and sat down.
“Dickie.” Piet held out his hand and took a thin folder from his second in command, which he held up for closer inspection. “You know what this is, Cooper?”
“A file,” Emmanuel said. It was the information folder delivered by special messenger on the day he’d gone to Mozambique.
“A file…” Piet paused and rummaged in his pants pocket for a cigarette. “Sent especially to us by district headquarters. Have you seen this particular file before, Cooper?”
“No, I have not.”
Piet lit his cigarette and allowed the flame from his silver lighter to burn longer than necessary before snapping it shut with a hard click. He placed the file gently onto Emmanuel’s lap.
“Take a good look at it. Open it up and tell me if you see anything unusual about the contents.”
Emmanuel cracked the yellow cover and made a show of checking the inside before closing the file and resting his hands on the folder.
“It’s empty.”
“Hear that, Dickie? It’s empty.” Ash from the lieutenant’s cigarette fell onto the file but Emmanuel did nothing to remove it. “It’s obvious to me now that Cooper was promoted quick smart because he’s sharp. He’s got it up here, in the kop, where it counts. Isn’t that so, Detective Sergeant?”
Emmanuel shrugged. They weren’t having a conversation. Lieutenant Lapping was running through the standard textbook interrogation warmup that demanded the interrogator make at least some attempt to extract information via voluntary confession. Beating suspects was hell on the hands and the neck muscles, and from the look of him, Piet was coming off a heavy night in the police cells.
“I’m not angry.” The lieutenant went down on his haunches like a hunter checking a spoor trail. “I just want to know how the f*ck you managed to extract the contents of a confidential file while it was under lock and key.”
Up close, Emmanuel saw the blue smudges of exhaustion under pockmarked Piet’s eyes and smelled the gut-churning mix of blood and sweat coming off his person. It was a rank abattoir fug overlaid with the mild lavender perfume of a common brand of soap.
Emmanuel did his best not to pull back from the Security Branch officer. “Maybe district headquarters forgot to include them,” he said.
Piet smiled, then took a deep drag of his cigarette. “See, with any other team of police, I’d buy that explanation. But this is my team and my team doesn’t make mistakes.”
“I’d go back to district headquarters and see who typed the report and posted the file,” Emmanuel suggested.
“Done all that,” Piet replied almost pleasantly. “And what I found was this. You, Detective Sergeant Cooper, were the person who helped the messenger sign the folder in to the police box when it arrived in town.”
“I was being polite. One department of the police is supposed to help another department, isn’t it?”
“My first thought is that your close friend van Niekerk tipped you off about what was in the folder. You knew the file was coming and somehow you managed to lift the contents. Did one of those spinsters at the post office let you into the police box? We’ve been too busy to ask them in person but I think an hour alone with me will get them to open up, so to speak.”
The Security Branch operatives laughed at Piet’s provocative turn of phrase and Emmanuel sensed the group’s anticipation at the possibility of questioning two country maids. Affable and trusting Miss Byrd with her fondness for feather hats. Five minutes in Lieutenant Lapping’s company and she’d be broken for good.
“Why are you chasing postal clerks? I thought you had a Communist in the bag, ready to confess. Did something go wrong at the station?”
Piet’s dark eyes were dead at the very center. “The first thing you will have to accept, Detective, is that I am smarter than you. I know you took those pages and I will find out how. I will also find out why.”
“No confession, then? What a shame. Paul Pretorius was certain it would only take an hour or two for the suspect to open up, so to speak.”
Piet smiled and the dark center of his pupils came alive with a bright flash of intent. “I promised Dickie that he could work on you if the time ever came, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to enjoy seeing you crack myself.”
“Like you cracked the suspect at the station?” Emmanuel said. A Security Branch officer he might be, but Lieutenant Lapping had superiors to report to, generals and colonels hungry for a victory against enemies of the state.
Lieutenant Lapping blinked hard, twice, then got to his feet and strode to the doorway. He put his hand out and Dickie placed a brown paper envelope in it with a look that sent a chill down Emmanuel’s back.
What the hell did they have? It was good. It had to be. Keep calm, he told himself. You’ve been through a war. You’ve seen things that killed other men and you survived. What was there to be scared of?
“You know what’s in here?” Piet held the envelope at eye level.
“I don’t have a clue.” Emmanuel found that he sounded calm despite the sick rolling of his stomach. What the hell was in the envelope? Had they somehow gotten a new background report on him in the last fourteen hours?
Piet opened the envelope and extracted two photos, which he held up with schoolmarmish precision. “Tell me, Cooper, have you seen these images before?”
There wasn’t time to slip the mask of indifference back into place. He tried to make sense of it, to see all the angles at the same time, but he couldn’t get past the stark black-and-white images of Davida Ellis, first with her legs spread-eagled and then stretched out on the bed like a cat waiting to be stroked. His copies were halfway to Jo’burg, safely packed under a layer of pink plastic rollers in Delores Bunton’s luggage. Unless…Unless the Security Branch had somehow intercepted his courier.
“So…” Piet ground his cigarette out with the heel of his shoe. “You have seen them before.”
“Where did you get them?”
“We found them exactly where you left them. Under your pillow.”
Was Piet telling the truth or just trying to catch him out in a lie? He had no idea and that was just the way the Security Branch boys liked it. Until he knew exactly where the photographs came from, he was going to play for time and information.
“What were you doing in my room?” he asked. “You looked through it the other day and didn’t find anything.”
“Some fresh information came to light.” Piet signaled to Dickie, who took the photos, but remained standing by his partner’s side. “Information concerning your personal tastes.”
Dickie made a tutting sound and leered at the images of the woman: “That’s two laws broken right there, Cooper. If it was a white woman or a light-skinned one, we might have turned a blind eye, but this…this is serious business.”
“Where did you get the information from?” Emmanuel asked. It seemed that both Dickie and Piet were playing the personal angle. They were tying the photographs to his alleged perversions and not to the homicide investigation. Good. That meant the bundle of photos he’d sent off on the “Intundo Express” bus this morning were safe. The feeling of triumph passed quickly. He was still in hot water: caught in possession of banned materials.
“Who told us about the photos, Dickie?”
“A little bird.” Dickie replied as if the expression were something he’d just made up off the top of his head.
Emmanuel glanced at the photos. If his copies were safely on their way to van Niekerk in Jo’burg, then these images must have come from the safe in the captain’s stone hut. It was the only logical explanation, and all the connections he’d made this morning pointed to the thief being the captain’s youngest son.
“Was it pretty boy Louis who told you where to find the photos?” Emmanuel kept his eye on Dickie to see if the name and the description triggered a reaction. What he got wasn’t a subtle clenching of the jawline but a teeth-baring snarl.
“How you can even mention his name after what you—”
“Dickie!” Piet interrupted. “I know this kind of activity upsets you but you must remove your personal feelings from the work. We are miners and it is our job to find the seam of gold in the dirt. You cannot let the dirt bother you.”
“Activity”? The word stuck with Emmanuel. What activity would upset Dickie enough to warrant professional counseling from his superior officer in the middle of questioning? The answer made Emmanuel sit up straight. How deep was the hole the angelic-looking boy had dug for him?
“Louis says I molested him?”
“What exactly are you doing here in the shed, Cooper?”
“Gathering evidence.” Emmanuel stemmed the rising panic. The blond boy had set a stunning trap baited with banned images and topped it off with an accusation guaranteed to outrage every red-blooded male in Jacob’s Rest.
Dickie snorted. “A pervert looking for a pervert. That’s a good one.”
“Go back and stand with the others,” Piet instructed his partner with a flex of his knotted shoulder muscles. “I’m too tired to question Sergeant Cooper and instruct you in the finer points of the work.”
“But—”
Piet gave Dickie a look that sent him lumbering back to his corner, from where he glared at Emmanuel as if it were his fault that he’d been dismissed from the action.
“Well, which one is it?” Emmanuel asked. “Do I enjoy looking at dark girls or chasing white boys?”
“They’re not mutually exclusive. You could have used the photographs to stimulate the interest of a boy who would otherwise find you unattractive. You get my drift?”
“Why the hell would I choose to show an Afrikaner boy photographs of a coloured woman in order to arouse him? What kind of sense does that make?”
“Maybe those are the only photographs you could get hold of.”
“We’re policemen. Either one of us could get pictures of a white girl doing everything except f*cking a gorilla. The cops and the criminals always have the best stuff, you know that.”
“You’re right.” Piet patted his shirt pocket and extracted a squashed cigarette pack. “But that doesn’t take Louis Pretorius’s complaint away. A jury won’t think about the finer points, like the race of the woman in the photos. The fact that it’s a coloured woman will only get you more prison time.”
Why had Louis exposed himself so openly? He must have known that planting the photos would finger him as the person who’d stolen the evidence from the stone hut and yet he’d done it anyway.
“Did Louis swear out a formal complaint against me in writing?” Emmanuel asked. How serious was Louis about keeping him hemmed down and out of action?
“Yes.”
“Show it to me,” Emmanuel said. The Security Branch men were in the middle of breaking the biggest case of their careers. Where did they find the time to pen a formal report on the matter of an English pervert attempting to corrupt an Afrikaner country boy? Small potatoes compared to getting a confession from a Communist Party member tied to the premeditated murder of a police captain married to Frikkie van Brandenburg’s daughter.
“You don’t get to ask us for anything,” Piet said.
“Arrest me and charge me,” Emmanuel said clearly, to make sure there was no confusion. He didn’t believe they had more than Louis’s verbal complaint, and that wasn’t enough to hold a fellow white policeman behind bars. Right at this moment he had better things to do than provide a break for the exhausted Security Branch officers.
“You know what I think?” Piet said. “I think the file you stole had the dirt on you and your pal van Niekerk, on your mutual affection and your shared interest in boys. Penny to a pound, that’s the reason he tipped you off about it.”
“Why don’t you call district headquarters and get them to tell you exactly what was in the file, or is it a bad time to admit you lost the pages? No confession and no file. Your superiors will be pleased to hear that.”
There was movement at the door and Dickie shuffled aside to let the moonfaced policeman in the badly cut suit into the shed.
“Ja?” Piet gave the newcomer permission to speak.
“It’s been an hour, Lieutenant. You said to find you and alert you of the time.”
Piet checked his watch with a weary shake of his head. Where had the minutes gone? “You are free to leave, Cooper, but before you go, I should warn you about something.”
Emmanuel waited for the threat. He wasn’t about to play second fiddle in Piet’s grand orchestration of events by asking him to specify the nature of the warning.
“Louis came to the station and complained to his brother about your…attentions. You’re lucky we were there to stop Paul Pretorius and the rest from coming after you straightaway. I can’t make any promises regarding your safety because we have more important things to attend to at the moment.”
The Security Branch officers regained some of their spark. They were letting him go because he was a minor impediment to the smooth running of their investigation. An hour to shake the tree for the information about the missing file contents and Louis’s allegations was all they’d allowed while Moonface kept watch on the real prize back at the police cells. God knows what position they’d left the young man from Fort Bennington College in while they took a quick break: strung up by his thumbs or suffocating in a wet post office canvas bag?
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Emmanuel said, “that the man at the station hasn’t confessed to the murder because he isn’t the killer?”
Piet turned on him. “The kaffir was at the river at the same time and the same place as Captain Pretorius. We have the right man and by nightfall we’ll have a signed confession. What have you got, Cooper? Some sad pictures of a coloured whore and a whole family of Afrikaner men ready to skin you alive. You were only on the case because Major van Niekerk was desperate for a piece of the action, and now it is time for you to f*ck off and let us get on with our jobs. You are way out of your depth. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” Emmanuel said. How would he end the day: beaten and kicked to shit by the Pretorius brothers or with the killer behind bars? A betting man would lay two to one on a beating. The only unknown factors were the time and the severity of the punishment.
The shed emptied. The wide stretch of the veldt spread all the way to the horizon. How was he going to find one boy in all that space?


The call, a series of short whistles followed by a soft coo, was nothing Emmanuel had ever heard before. He stepped onto the kaffir path, and the birdcall repeated with a loud insistence that caught and held his attention for a second time. A thick tangle of green scrub stirred and Shabalala materialized from the underbrush like a phantom. The Zulu constable stood to his full height and waved toward the bush with an insistence that seemed to say “run like hell,” so Emmanuel did. He ran across grass and dirt, followed now by the sound of male voices in the captain’s garden. He was level with the wild hedge when Shabalala grabbed him and threw him down to the ground.
Emmanuel tasted dust and felt his shoulder spasm with pain as he was held down on the ground by the Zulu’s powerful hands.
“Shhh…” Shabalala put his finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of the captain’s shed.
Emmanuel peered through the slender gap Shabalala had made in the bush cover. The Pretorius brothers were in the empty shed, searching for the English detective who’d tried to corrupt their baby brother. Henrick and Paul were the first ones out onto the kaffir path, rifles slung across their backs in a show of armed strength.
“F*ck.” Paul spoke the word with venom, his frustration evident in the hard set of his shoulders.
“He can’t have gone far.” Henrick was calmer. “Take Johannes and go round the hospital and the coloured houses. Erich and I will go this direction past the shops. We’ll meet up behind Kloppers.”
“What if he’s not on the kaffir path? What if he’s gone bush?”
“Englishmen from the city don’t go bush.” Henrick was dismissive. “He’ll be in town, hiding somewhere like a rat.”
Johannes, the quiet foot soldier of the Pretorius corps, stepped out of the shed with his hands sunk deep into his pockets. “The motorbike. It’s gone but I don’t see how. Louis is still waiting for the part to come from Jo’burg.”
“We’re not looking for the f*cking motorbike.” Paul turned his frustrations onto his brother. “We’re trying to find that detective.”
“Well, he’s not in the shed.” Erich joined the musclebound trio. “He must have heard us coming and taken off into the veldt.”
“If he’s out there he won’t last long,” Henrick said. “First we’ll check the kaffir path and then The Protea Guesthouse. If we don’t find him, we’ll have a sit-down and decide which houses to search.”
The brothers split up and moved along the grass path in opposite directions. Only Johannes appeared uncertain as to the purpose of their mission. He gave the empty shed one last puzzled glance before following Paul in a quick march toward the Grace of God Hospital.
The hunting party began their first sweep of the town. The Pretorius boys had taken the law into their own hands and no one was going to stop them.
“How am I going to find Louis and dodge his brothers at the same time?” Emmanuel wondered aloud. The smallness of the town made it impossible to escape the Pretorius family, and the unbroken stretch of veldt made it unlikely that the boy could be found without an army of searchers.
“We will find him,” Shabalala said.
Emmanuel turned to the Zulu policeman; Shabalala needed to know exactly how deep the water was before he stepped into it. “Louis has told his brothers that I interfered with him. It is not true, but the brothers believe him, and if you are caught with me, they will punish you also.”
“Look.” The black man shrugged off the warning and pointed to a shallow dip carved into the ground and camouflaged by the thick brush. Inside the hollow was a can wrapped in oilskin cloth. He pulled out the package and handed it over for inspection. Emmanuel unwrapped the can and sniffed at the still-damp oilskin wrapping.
“Petrol,” he said. “Louis’s?”
“I think the young one kept it here to fill his motorbike. The can is empty.”
“Mathandunina is planning to travel,” Emmanuel said. The international border was just a few miles away. If Louis slipped across to Mozambique it would take months to track him, and that was if the Mozambican police decided to cooperate. “Can you point the direction Louis is headed in?”
“I can find where the young one has gone,” Shabalala said without arrogance. “I will go to the shed and follow the tracks. You must follow me out here on the veldt. It is not good for you to be on the path.”
“Agreed,” Emmanuel said, and the Zulu constable walked to the deserted shed and stood for a while, examining the prints in the sand. He turned in the direction of the Grace of God Hospital and set off at a measured pace. Louis hadn’t taken off across the veldt in a haze of petrol fumes and churned grass like an impulsive teenager blowing off steam. He had stuck close to the outer edge of the town for some reason. And, Emmanuel figured, there had to be one: everything Louis had done so far was planned and thought out. The boy was slippery enough to fool his own father about the motorbike—an impressive task when you considered just how secretive and two-faced the captain had been. Like father, like son.
Emmanuel picked up his pace to catch up with Shabalala, who followed the trail to the edge of the Sports Club playing fields. They crossed from the white side of Jacob’s Rest to the rows of coloured houses and then the paths that led north to the black location. Where the hell was Louis headed?
The buildings of the hospital came into view. Emmanuel and Shabalala sidled past the morgue and the nonwhite’s wing. It was the same stretch of the kaffir path where the captain had parked when he came to pick up Davida Ellis for their last outdoor frolic—and where Donny Rooke had had the bad luck to be at the same time.
The distinctive line of gum trees that marked Granny Mariah’s property was visible up ahead and to the left. A memory stirred and Emmanuel moved faster. He had good reason to know this place as well. It was here, within sight of that back fence, that he’d encountered the watchful human presence breathing in the darkness.
Shabalala stepped off the kaffir path and headed into the veldt at a right angle so that he was almost directly in front of Emmanuel.
“What is it?” Emmanuel asked when he reached the spot where the Zulu constable was crouched down to inspect an area of disturbed earth.
“He has come off the path and parked his motorbike here.” Shabalala pointed to markings in the dirt that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but a tracker. “The young one has parked and then walked back in that direction.”
They looked toward the line of gum trees. The back gate to Granny Mariah’s garden swung back and forth on its hinges in the breeze. Thoughts of the Pretorius brothers’ vigilante rule vanished and he and Shabalala ran to the kaffir path and the open gate.
One step into the yard and Emmanuel spotted Granny Mariah lying in a furrow of turned earth, the blood from the gash in her forehead feeding the newly planted seeds in a steady red stream. He ran to her side and felt for a pulse. Faint but there. He turned to Shabalala, who was wisely locking the gate behind him.
“Go out the front door and get the old Jew. Tell him to bring his bag and his wife’s sewing kit with him.”
Shabalala hesitated.
“Go out the front,” Emmanuel insisted. The coloureds of Jacob’s Rest would just have to deal with the shocking sight of a black man leaving and entering Granny Mariah’s house in plain sight. “The Pretorius boys are still on the kaffir paths, so you have to use the main streets. Get back as quickly as you can without causing a commotion.”
“Yebo.” The Zulu constable disappeared into the house and Emmanuel took off his jacket and rolled it under Granny Mariah’s battered head. He felt her pulse again. No change, so he went to search the old servant’s quarters, already certain he would find it empty. He put his head in and looked for signs of Davida before checking under the bed to make sure she wasn’t hiding there.
“Davida? It’s Detective Sergeant Cooper. Are you here?” He opened the wardrobe. A few cotton dresses and one winter coat with fake tortoiseshell buttons. He walked out to the garden, where he soaked his handkerchief in the watering bucket and gently wiped Granny Mariah’s bloodied face. This mess was exactly what the information in the molester files pointed to: an escalation of violence leading to deprivation of liberty and God knows what else. The captain had only delayed the inevitable by sending Louis off to a farm in the mountains and then on to theological college, where, it would seem, the Holy Spirit had failed to dampen the fires of sin burning within him.
Granny Mariah groaned in pain but remained unconscious. Just as well. The disappearance of her granddaughter would be a heavy burden for the normally resilient old woman to shoulder in her weakened state. She’d be lucky to get her head off the pillow in the next few days.
Zweigman hurried into the garden with Shabalala trailing close behind. The white-haired German got to work quickly, his expert hands checking vital signs and determining the range and extent of injuries.
“Bad. But, thank God, not fatal.”
“How bad?”
“A laceration to the scalp which will require stitching. Severe concussion but the skull is not fractured.” Zweigman the surgeon took control. “We will need to move her inside so I can clean her up and begin closing this wound. Please, go into the house and locate towels and sheets while Constable Shabalala and I move her to a bedroom.”
Emmanuel followed orders and soon Zweigman was setting up. He snapped open his medical bag and placed bandages, needles, thread and antiseptic on a dresser closest to the double bed where Shabalala had placed the unconscious Granny Mariah.
Emmanuel signaled to Shabalala to move out to the garden. They stood at the back door, looking at the bloodied row of turned earth.
“Davida is gone. The captain’s youngest son has taken her. There can be no other explanation,” Emmanuel said.
“I will see.” Shabalala examined the markings on the ground. He worked his way slowly to the back gate, unlocked it, and continued out onto the veldt. Why, Emmanuel wondered, did he find it necessary to have the Zulu constable confirm the obvious? Was it because he still didn’t trust his instinct where Davida was concerned and therefore couldn’t rid himself of the niggling feeling that maybe, just maybe, Davida and Louis were somehow in this together? Two star-crossed lovers bound together by the cold-blooded murder of Willem Pretorius. But that conclusion was no more far-fetched than the teenaged boy turning out, in all probability, to be the molester.
Shabalala reentered the garden and locked the gate behind him. His expression was grave. “It is so,” he said. “The young one has taken the girl with him and they have gone on the motorbike.”
“Did he take her or did she go with him?”
Shabalala pointed to scuffled lines in the dirt. “She ran but he caught her and pulled her back to where the old one was lying in the dirt. After that, the girl went with him quietly.”
“Why would Louis show his hand before we’d even questioned him?”
“We must find Mathandunina,” Shabalala said with simple eloquence. “Then we will know.”
Finding Louis would be a massive task requiring manpower and time—two things Emmanuel didn’t have and was unlikely to get anytime soon.
“What direction did he go in?” Emmanuel asked, visualizing the enormous stretch of veldt that surrounded Jacob’s Rest and spread out across the border into Mozambique. He brought himself back to the blood-soaked garden. He had to work with what he had: a Zulu-Shangaan tracker and an enigmatic German Jew. Things could be worse; he could have been left with Constable Hansie Hepple.
“Toward the location. It is also the way to Nkosana King’s land and the farm of Johannes, the fourth son.”
“Where would a white boy on a motorbike go with a brown-skinned girl he’s holding against her will?” The whole thing carried the stamp of disaster. Surely Louis saw that?
“Not to the location.”
“Or to his brother’s farm. Wherever he goes, Louis is going to attract a lot of attention. My guess is he’s going to have to keep well hidden until he’s—”
“Done with her.” Zweigman finished the sentence from where he stood in the dim hallway, his shopkeeper’s shirt and trousers stained with blood from the operation. “That is what you were thinking, is it not, Detective?”
“I don’t know what to think. As far as I can see, the whole abduction makes no sense.”
“Maybe it makes perfect sense to Louis Pretorius.” Zweigman reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed over. “Your major said to pass this on to you as soon as possible.”
Emmanuel unfolded the lined sheet and read the information. Deep in the Drakensberg mountains of Natal was a farm, a retreat, known as Suiwer Sprong, or Pure Springs, where highbred and wealthy Afrikaners with close ties to the new ruling party sent their offspring to be “realigned” with the Lord. Shock therapy, drug therapy, and water therapy were some of the ways that “realignment” was delivered from the hands of the Almighty to the suffering few. A Dr. Hans de Klerk, who’d trained under the pioneering German eugenicist Klaus Gunther prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, was head of the setup.
“A nut farm with a religious bent. Is van Niekerk sure of this?”
“Your major sounds like a man who is sure of many things. He is certain that this place in the Drakensberg is the only institution that a family such as the Pretoriuses would use to seek treatment for a psychological illness.”
The family should get their money back. Whatever therapy Louis underwent hadn’t stuck. A few weeks back in Jacob’s Rest and Louis had fallen into his old habits in a more dangerous way than before.
Emmanuel considered all the steps that had led to the abduction and assault. Louis wasn’t unbalanced enough to overlook the fact that Davida Ellis was the only one who could tie him to the molester case and to the murder of his father. With Davida out of the way, all that stood between him and freedom was the word of the English detective he’d accused of trying to seduce him. It was a clever plan, well executed. So far.
“This abduction may not be as irrational as it looks.” Emmanuel recalled the information from the molester files. Reading them had given him the feeling that the perpetrator was headed for a violent culmination to his fantasy life. “Louis gets to finish what he started in December and he gets to eliminate the only person who can connect him, however vaguely, to the murder of his father.”
“If that is the case,” Zweigman observed quietly, “he will keep her alive until he has enacted his fantasies.”
“I think so.” Emmanuel didn’t want to delve into the German’s statement. He turned to Shabalala. “Where could Louis go and hide out without being found? It has to be a place large enough to hold two people. I don’t think he’ll go to the captain’s hut. It’s not secret enough. Is there a cave or maybe an old hunting shack?”
The Zulu constable looked up at the sky for a moment to think. Then he quickly picked up a long stick and drew a crude map in the dirt. He made three crosses at almost opposite ends of each boundary.
“There are three places on Nkosana King’s farm that are known to me. The captain and I hid here many times when we were boys. The young one, Louis, has also been to these places with his father when the land was still with the family.”
“Can we get to all three in an afternoon?”
“They are far from each other and this one, here, we must go to on foot. It is a cave high on the side of a mountain and the bush is thick around.”
“The other two?”
“This one is an old house where an Afrikaner lived by himself. It is falling in but some of the rooms have a roof over them.”
“What’s it like? The area around the house.”
“Flat. The house is sad, like the white man who used to live in it.”
“That’s not the place.” Emmanuel pictured the crime scene at the river, the sweep of land and sky shimmering with a quintessentially African light. It was a beautiful place to die. Louis and his father shared a taste for forbidden flesh and they might have been sufficiently alike to prefer courting women in an outdoor setting. There was nothing like the raw beauty of nature to arouse an Adam and Eve fantasy in which the apple was eaten to the core and the racial segregation laws were nonexistent.
“To which one of these places would you take a girl to show her the view?”
Shabalala pointed to the location of the mountain cavern. “From the ledge in front of the cave you can see the whole country and a watering hole where the animals come to drink. It is a place to stir the heart.”
Just the sort of isolated and romantic spot a deranged Dutch boy might take a woman on her final outing. The Afrikaner love of the land was as tenacious as the influenza virus.
The cave was a long shot. But it made sense. The boy hadn’t torn out onto the veldt with a captive girl without a specific place to hide already in mind. And Louis wasn’t going to hide on a working farm trampled over by laborers and herds of cattle. King’s personal fiefdom, once the Pretorius family home, had plenty of open space and very few people to spoil the illusion that South Africa was, in fact, empty when the white man arrived. Louis could hide there for a long while without drawing attention.
“How far on foot to this place?” Emmanuel asked.
“We must park and walk for maybe half an hour to the bottom of the hill and then fifteen minutes to the top.”
Emmanuel rounded it up to one hour. The Zulu-Shangaan tracker covered more ground in a shorter period of time than anyone he’d ever met, and that included soldiers running like hell from the fall of mortar shells.
“We should check the cave. An isolated and sheltered place on a deserted piece of land seems right for what Louis most likely has planned. I’ve got nothing to back up my case. It’s just a feeling. That’s all.”
“Your instinct and Constable Shabalala’s knowledge of the land are all you have, Detective, so you must move and move quickly,” Zweigman said. “The men at the police station will not drop even one pen to set out in search of a dark-skinned girl.”
“Not unless she’s a Communist,” Emmanuel said, and turned to the towering black man standing at his side. Without Shabalala’s help, the wheels were going to fall off the already shaky wagon.
“We’ll need to get my car and head out to King’s farm. Are you still with me?”
“Until the end,” Shabalala said.