Facets of Death

by Michael Stanley

  Mabaku nodded. “Then the next morning there was a call from the mine with no message. So, let’s assume it was Chamberlain who picked up Tuelo’s message, and presumably he made that call at three p.m. We need to trace that. Maybe it came from a phone we can link to him.”

  Kubu agreed, but he wasn’t optimistic.

  The next message was a week later from a different Otse call box: “Ngaka to Jwaneng tomorrow.”

  “That will have been when the witch doctor started working on Tau,” Mabaku commented. “The man was an idiot and paid for it with his life.”

  There were a few more messages to arrange calls, and then on the Saturday before the robbery, there was a message: “It’s on.” After that, there was nothing until the Thursday after the robbery. Then there was a call from the mine in the morning with an urgent request for a call.

  “Thursday would have been the day when Chamberlain discovered that the diamonds hadn’t been recovered in South Africa after all. Before that, he probably thought Tuelo had been killed with the others in the SA police stakeout,” Mabaku noted.

  The final entry was later that morning, and no message was left.

  “After he picked up the message, Tuelo will have phoned the mine and told Chamberlain that he would be at the Gaborone Sun,” Kubu said. “That’s how Chamberlain knew to phone him at the hotel.”

  Mabaku nodded. “Let’s get printouts of the calls to and from those call boxes. We can try the mine too, but they’ll have hundreds of calls to go through. The problem is that if Tuelo was calling the mine, he could have been calling Chamberlain or Tau, and we can’t distinguish between them this way.”

  “I’ll go through the printouts for the call boxes with Sergeant Neo. It’ll take us a bit of time.”

  Mabaku nodded and pointed to the printout from the messaging service. “This is a good start, Bengu.” He frowned. “Chamberlain has been very careful, but he made a mistake when he called Tuelo from Tau’s house. He must have made others. We just have to find them.”

  Kubu stood up. “One more thing, sir. Neo and I think we’ve solved how the suitcases went missing. They were stolen here in Gabs. We need to bring in some baggage handlers for questioning.”

  “Interesting. You’ll have to tell me about it later. And I want to be there when you talk to them. I’m sure I know a few tricks you weren’t taught at university.”

  Kubu headed for the door, certain he didn’t ever want to be interrogated by Mabaku.

  TUESDAY

  Chapter 87

  Mabaku obtained an order from a helpful judge, and to Kubu’s surprise, the details of calls to and from the phone boxes in Jwaneng and Otse for the previous month arrived the next morning. He was also surprised by the length of the report when Miriam gave him the printouts. More people used call boxes than he’d realised. He immediately headed to Neo’s office.

  “Mathew, I need your help. The assistant superintendent wants us to match these numbers.” He dumped the printouts on Neo’s desk.

  Neo frowned. “Why am I always helping you? I’m the senior detective here. But you get to go to meetings with the director, and I get to go through printouts. Do your own dirty work.”

  Kubu was amazed by the reaction. Only last week, he’d been struggling to be accepted by the CID detectives. Now it seemed they were jealous of him.

  He thought it through. It was true he’d been assigned to investigate around Otse—an important assignment—and Mabaku had asked for him to join the meeting to brainstorm with the director. He’d thought that the other junior detectives were equally involved in important work, but now he realised that wasn’t the case. He’d been singled out. Mabaku might be gruff and demanding, but he must have been impressed by his work.

  “Nothing to say? That’s unusual,” Neo added.

  Kubu realised that Neo’s feathers were ruffled, and he needed to make an effort to smooth them.

  “We’re all doing important work, Mathew. I’ve been lucky to stumble on a few useful things. And a dead body! But the deputy commissioner made it quite clear at the meeting that this has been a team effort—we all contributed. I don’t think my work is any more important than yours. We’re all working together on this. And I need your help.”

  Neo hesitated, trying to evaluate Kubu’s response. At last he said, “Okay. What do you need?”

  The next hour was spent going through the printouts. A few calls had come in to the phone boxes, but almost all were outgoing. By matching the agreed-on times from the messaging service list with calls between phone boxes, the detectives were able to spot the two conversations that had taken place between Tuelo in Otse and the insider at Jwaneng. Both were lengthy. One was a week before the robbery and presumably covered the details of what was going to happen. The other was after the robbers had been killed.

  Neo slumped in his chair. “So what? We’ve still no idea who was calling from Jwaneng.”

  “Let’s check the other calls. Maybe we can pick up something.”

  They went on working.

  Suddenly Neo sat up. “Here’s something odd. Immediately after that second call from the Jwaneng call box to Tuelo, there’s a call to a cell-phone number. There’s only one other call to a cell phone over the whole three weeks, and it was to the same number several days later.”

  Kubu walked round the desk to take a look. Neo was correct. Immediately after one of the calls to Otse, whoever had been in the phone box had called the cell number.

  Kubu scratched his head. “It can’t be another person using the phone. It’s too soon. Just seconds between the end of the Otse call and the start of the call to the cell phone.”

  “And here’s the second call to that number from that box. On the fifth of December.”

  Both detectives stared at the printout. “That was after Tau was killed,” Kubu pointed out. “If this is the same caller who was speaking to Tuelo in Otse, then it definitely wasn’t Tau.”

  Kubu grabbed Neo’s phone and dialled the number. There was some delay, and then he heard a recorded message.

  “This is Lucas Letsa. I’m travelling out of the country at the moment. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I return.” There was a beep, and Kubu hung up.

  “There was just a recorded message. The man’s name is Lucas Letsa.”

  “Who’s Lucas Letsa?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we need to find out. If Letsa has a cell phone, I bet he has a landline too. Do you have a telephone directory?”

  Neo dug around in one of his drawers and produced it. He flipped through the pages till he reached L, and then ran his finger down the list of names.

  “Here it is. There’s only one Letsa. Letsa, L B. It has two listings. One must be his personal line. The other says Debswana and then gives a different phone number. That must be where he works.”

  Both of them sat and puzzled about what this latest loop back to Debswana could mean.

  Kubu climbed to his feet. “Come on. We need to tell Assistant Superintendent Mabaku about this.”

  Chapter 88

  Kubu told Mabaku what they’d found out, taking care to give Neo credit for spotting the cell-phone connection.

  Mabaku listened attentively and then nodded. “It all hangs together. It could only be Chamberlain who made that second call. We need to look into Lucas Letsa and what he does at Debswana. Maybe he’s the link to the fence. If so, I’ll bet that call was to warn the fence of the police trap, and the fence won’t be at Zoo Lake.”

  Kubu told him that he’d called the number, but Letsa’s cell phone went straight to voice mail.

  Mabaku considered that for a few moments. “Letsa will never admit to a connection with a fence. I’ll check if he’s being investigated for anything, but it’s a very long shot. It’s convenient that he’s away, isn’t it?” He paused. “We really don’t have enough e
vidence to take it further. Tuelo was very helpful to Chamberlain by bumping off Tau and the witch doctor. They might have known something that pointed to him. Probably Tuelo and Chamberlain met at some point, but they would’ve been careless to do it in public. And they’re not careless. As for the witch doctor, probably Chamberlain never met him at all. Why would he?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t even know that the witch doctor is dead,” Neo put in. “The man hasn’t been identified yet. We’re still waiting for input from the SA police.”

  Kubu sat up. “If that’s true, we could…” He trailed off. His idea seemed too way-out to be worth mentioning. Mabaku will laugh at me, he thought.

  “Well, what’s your idea?”

  Kubu shook his head. “I just thought of something, but it’s silly.”

  “Sometimes Kubu’s silly ideas work out,” Neo said.

  “Spit it out then,” Mabaku said

  “Well, I was just thinking that if Tuelo is caught and out of the way, and Chamberlain thinks that the witch doctor is still alive, maybe we could use the witch doctor to make him incriminate himself.”

  “But the witch doctor is dead!” Mabaku snapped.

  “It wouldn’t be that witch doctor. I know someone who might help us…”

  Neo looked uncomfortable and drew back a bit. “You know a witch doctor?”

  “He helped me find the murdered witch doctor. He would be very convincing.”

  “Why would Chamberlain even talk to him?”

  “Perhaps he could say that he knows Chamberlain was involved. Pretend to blackmail him,” Neo suggested.

  Mabaku shook his head. “He expects Tuelo to point to him. He’ll just say they’re in it together to try to shift the blame.”

  “If Chamberlain is behind the robbery…” Kubu began tentatively.

  “Well, we’re working on that hypothesis,” Mabaku interjected.

  “Then it was for a share of the value of the diamonds.”

  “But if we catch Tuelo, there will be no share. And the diamonds will have been recovered,” Neo said, obviously puzzled.

  “But Chamberlain doesn’t know that,” Kubu added. “We could say the diamonds weren’t recovered even though they actually were.”

  Neo was shaking his head. “This is like the suitcase business again,” he muttered.

  However, Mabaku was looking thoughtful. “So, your witch doctor could show him some diamonds and say he knows where the rest are.”

  “And then when Chamberlain tries to find out and goes along with the witch doctor’s instructions, we grab him.”

  “There’s a problem,” Mabaku objected. “He’ll just say he was going along with it to try to recover the diamonds for Debswana.”

  “I think we can do something a bit more dramatic,” Kubu suggested. “Something that Chamberlain will find hard to resist. And it’ll require his input. Something he could only know if he was working with Tuelo.”

  They spent the next half hour working it out in detail. Then Mabaku went to try to sell the whole plan to Gobey.

  “Wish me luck,” he said as he headed for the director’s office. “I’m going to need it.”

  WEDNESDAY

  Chapter 89

  Senior Superintendent Buthelezi was very nervous. He was sitting in the back of what looked like a delivery van in a parking area at Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake on the basis of a tip-off from the Botswana police. The man he’d been tasked to capture, Vusi Tuelo, was wanted for murder and armed robbery by both the South African and Botswana Police Services.

  It wasn’t the fact that he would almost certainly be armed that worried Buthelezi. He was used to that sort of danger. It was that the exchange of stolen goods for money was going to take place in a public park with plenty of civilians wandering around. Every one of them could be in danger if they couldn’t arrest Tuelo without a firefight.

  He was also nervous because so much was unknown. All he’d been told was that an exchange was going to take place. He didn’t know who the fence was or what he looked like. Or precisely where it would happen. After all, the Zoo Lake area was large, comprising both the lake and substantial park land. It was quite possible that they could miss the exchange completely.

  He wasn’t sure how both parties would arrive. Would they arrive by car? On foot? Or, as he expected, by motorbike, which would make escape much easier in the snarled traffic of a Johannesburg peak period? He’d planned for the latter because it made the most sense and had strategically stationed four motorcycle policemen several blocks away from the park in each direction, keeping out of sight until needed. He also had three policemen and one policewoman in civilian dress in different locations. He prayed that they looked like normal citizens and not policemen dressed as normal citizens. Finally, in the back of the van with him were four top members of the police SWAT team.

  The final big unknown was when the exchange would take place. They’d been told four o’clock, but that was just a point in time. Both Tuelo and the fence would be checking and double-checking that the situation was safe. He didn’t know how they would do that. Would they sit far away and check everyone with binoculars? Would they send surrogates? If they did that, the operation was certainly doomed. Did each know what the other looked like? One had to assume that at least one knew what the other looked like. Otherwise how would they make the connection?

  Buthelezi hated it when there were so many questions.

  As he thought through his plan, he felt very uneasy that it was based on only two pieces of solid information. He knew what Tuelo looked like, as did all the policemen and policewomen in the operation. And Tuelo would be carrying about twenty kilograms of diamonds—a heavy load that would impair his mobility. So Buthelezi’s plan was flexible. As soon as Tuelo was spotted, he would be informed and only then decide how to proceed.

  Buthelezi picked up his microphone. “Rowboat, everything okay?”

  Constable van der Merwe was an added worry. He didn’t like putting women in danger, and she’d be on a rowing boat in the middle of the lake posing as a birdwatcher. It was the best vantage point but made her a sitting duck if Tuelo suspected her. He winced at the metaphor. However, she was the least likely to catch anyone’s attention.

  He checked in on all the rest of his people, and they all acknowledged they were in position.

  He clicked the microphone. “Now we have to wait. Try to act normal.”

  * * *

  It was four thirty-five, and Constable van der Merwe was at the end of her second lap around the island. Every now and again, she raised her binoculars, ostensibly to look at the colonies of cattle egret and sacred ibis roosting in the trees, but in reality, to check out newcomers to the area. A movement caught her eye, and she saw a man pushing a motorbike over the grass towards the lake from the Bowls Club side. He was walking slowly, constantly looking around.

  She casually moved her hand to the switch under her blouse. “Ndlovu, come in for Rowboat.”

  “Go ahead, Rowboat,” Buthelezi responded quietly.

  “Man with bike approaching from the south.”

  “Roger. Camera one, did you copy?”

  “Roger. Stand by.”

  At the far end of the lake, an older man briefly dipped his 600mm lens and photographed the man and his bike. Then he quickly adjusted it back for photographing the roosting birds. At his distance, it was unlikely the man would have noticed. The photographer looked at the image on the screen at the back of the camera.

  “Ndlovu, it’s him.”

  “Thank you. Rowboat, move away now. Bikers, all move closer into your position two. All others, continue as before.”

  Buthelezi slid open a small panel on the side of the van and used his binoculars to scan. It took some time before he was able to see Tuelo and his bike.

  “Suspect is wearing a coat, probably concealing a weapon.
And has a backpack. I assume it’s the stolen goods but don’t know for certain. Old Man, he’s approaching you. Let him pass and wait until I tell you.”

  As Tuelo approached, Old Man looked up from his book and nodded a greeting. Then he returned to reading. Buthelezi could see Tuelo hesitate, but then he moved forward again.

  “Ice Cream, approach.”

  A young man on a tricycle with an ice-cream cooler on the front started moving slowly along the path next to the lake in Tuelo’s direction. “Ice creams, Eskimo pies, lollipops,” he shouted, ringing his bell. “It’s hot. Cool off. Get your ice creams here.”

  Buthelezi saw Tuelo stop and look around. He’s worried that someone’s moving towards him, he thought.

  “Ice Cream, stop at that couple on the grass to your right. Offer them a free ice cream each. Then talk to them.”

  “Roger.”

  Buthelezi decided it was time to move. “Old Man, follow the suspect.”

  “Roger.”

  Just as Old Man stood up, Buthelezi saw a dog bounding in the direction of Tuelo, followed by three children. Tuelo stopped again and looked back.

  Buthelezi grimaced. “Old Man, call the dog. Talk to the children.”

  He watched as Old Man tried to help the children catch the dog, which appeared to take delight in approaching, then running away.

  Tuelo watched for a few moments, then continued walking.

  “Damn that dog!” Buthelezi growled. “Camera one, pick up your tripod and move closer.”

  “Roger.”

  At last, one of the children grabbed the dog and gave it a couple of smacks. Buthelezi could see Old Man say something, then continue walking.

  “Get ready, Ice Cream.”

  “Roger.”

  Tuelo stopped again and looked back at Old Man shuffling towards him thirty metres away. He looked at Ice Cream, forty metres ahead.

  He’s beginning to feel trapped, Buthelezi thought. He took a deep breath.

  “Old Man, do it!”