by Deon Meyer
Place Camille Pelletan is small, really just a widening of the rue Marengo where it crosses the rue Saint-François – like the bowl of a tobacco pipe at the end of the stem. It wasn’t much busier than some of the other streets in that part of the Saint Michel neighbourhood. There were always people on the way to the basilica or the Capucins market. More on Saturdays.
His new alertness made no difference: the timing was pure bad luck, the woman rounding the corner just as he was poised at his door. He turned around when he heard her heels on the cobblestones. And she looked at him. An instant of recognition. And then, just when she seemed about to smile shyly, Daniel looked away, unlocked the door, slipped in and quickly shut it behind him.
He leaned against the door, swearing. The cat, Wackett, replied to him halfway up the stairs.
Chapter 6
August, Benny Griessel, Brackenfell
A week and a half later, when the call came through from Sergeant Aubrey Verwey of Beaufort West, the shock was not as great as you’d expect, Robyn Johnson said. ‘In a way it was a relief, you know? I mean, you can stop wondering if it’s true or not. But you’re also angry. Who did this? And why? I mean, JJ was just such a nice guy . . . And how? How did JJ end up like that beside the railway tracks? So much anger. And hate. For the faceless people who did this. These animals, these bastards . . . He was a good person, he had his flaws – don’t we all? – but inside he was a good man.’
She shook her head fiercely, as if to rid herself of the negative emotions. ‘You must catch them,’ she said quietly. ‘Please, you have to catch them.’ She stubbed out her cigarette with a trembling hand, her eyes welling with tears.
‘We are the Hawks,’ said Cupido. ‘That’s what we do.’
Griessel gave her a moment, and then he asked: ‘Ma’am, how was Mr Johnson’s . . . health?’
‘His health? It was tip-top. Why do you ask?’
‘His mood. Was he wound up?’
‘I told you JJ wasn’t the type to worry.’
‘Ma’am, we understand that kind of question isn’t pleasant for you,’ said Cupido, ‘but we have to look at this from every possible angle. So, fact is, there really was no chance that Mr Johnson fell off that train by accident. Two things could have happened. Either he jumped or he was pushed. If my colleague asks about your ex’s health, what we really want to know is if maybe he suffered from depression. It’s another way of asking the awkward question, did he jump?’
‘Okay. Sorry. I understand now. No. Never. Not JJ. He . . . There were times when I thought he was too happy-go-lucky. If you’d seen him with his two girls . . .’
‘Ma’am, the other possibility,’ said Griessel, ‘the big question we usually ask in an investigation like this, is whether anyone might wish him harm.’
She considered that, then shook her head. ‘JJ was nice. That was his problem. He was just so damn nice.’
‘But he was a policeman. A detective. Did he ever mention anyone threatening him, someone he’d arrested?’
She thought for a moment, then shook her head again. ‘He hasn’t been a policeman for two years.’
‘We understand that, but still, did he ever say anything?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘No gang affiliations?’ asked Cupido.
‘JJ comes from Ashton. There are no gangs there.’
There were gangs in Ashton, but they could tell she wanted the interview over with now.
‘Okay. He didn’t, in the lean times, borrow money somewhere?’ asked Cupido.
‘You mean from a loan shark?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No. He knew he could come to me. As a matter of fact, he did borrow money from me, at the beginning of the year. But he paid it all back by June. And he was busy these last four months or so. He was making good money.’
‘How did he manage his admin? Did he have someone to send out his accounts? Do the books?’
‘He managed all that himself.’
‘What was his system?’ Cupido asked.
‘What do you mean, his system?’
‘Did he keep files on his clients and his payments?’ Cupido pointed at the shelf of multicoloured ledgers behind her.
‘No. He did that on his laptop.’
‘Where is the laptop now?’
‘I . . . It’s usually in his flat, locked in the sideboard. Or else he took it along in his case. I didn’t think to look.’
‘Don’t worry, we will,’ said Cupido.
Griessel put his pen and notebook into his jacket pocket. They stood up. ‘Mrs Johnson, what do you think happened on that train?’ Griessel asked.
‘If you had to speculate,’ said Cupido.
She looked up at the ceiling. She tapped her long nails on the desk. Slowly she stood up. From inside the shop, with apparently deliberate timing, a parrot said, out loud and crystal clear: ‘Fuck you, Fanus.’
The tension in the room dissolved.
‘That bird,’ she said. ‘How am I ever going to sell it with a mouth like that?’
They smiled.
‘You have to understand, I loved JJ with all my heart,’ Robyn Johnson said.
‘Noted.’
‘First I thought it had to be a robbery – I mean, in this country everyone’s stealing now. From the president all the way down. I wanted it to be something like that. Random. Bad luck.’
They waited silently.
‘But then I thought, on that train full of grand, rich people, why would they rob JJ? And then you’ve got to come to the point and admit that he did have a roving eye.’
They nodded in understanding.
‘My best guess is that JJ was messing with another man’s wife on the train. A man who wouldn’t stand for it.’
In the parking lot Cupido checked his watch and said they were leaving at six in the morning for Beaufort West. Tonight he was having dinner with Desiree, and she didn’t want to be too late as it was a weekday night, school term, and she was very strict with her son, Donovan.
So, they drove back to the Hawks’ offices in Market Street, Bellville, and made arrangements for the next morning’s trip. ‘Your turn to bring music for the road, Benna,’ Cupido said, over his shoulder, his coat flapping behind him as he strode down the corridor, on his way to Stellenbosch.
Griessel made notes on the docket’s Part C and said his goodbyes through open office doors as he headed out to his car. When he reached into his jacket pocket for his keys, he found the bunch for Johnson Johnson’s flat and decided it was as good a time as any to take a look. The woman in his life, Alexa Barnard, was in Johannesburg for meetings with her record company’s musicians. He wasn’t in the mood to sit alone at home watching meaningless TV.
He drove to Brackenfell.
Johnson’s flat was in a townhouse complex just a block away from the Sorgvry Police apartments, where Colonel Mbali Kaleni had lived until a couple of years ago.
Griessel parked in the bay for number five, picked up his murder case and walked to the front door that bore the same number. He opened the case, removed forensic gloves and the small Canon Powershot camera, unlocked the security gate and door, picked up the case again and went inside. The door closed behind him. He stood still just inside the threshold.
He would never grow accustomed to searching the home of a murder victim. There was a dreadful silence, as if the space knew the owner would not be returning, the uneasy feeling nonetheless that you were invading privacy, the constant tension that you would overlook something vital, or damage a piece of evidence because you didn’t know what you were looking for.
He began with the sitting-dining-kitchen area, an open-plan design with a sofa, two chairs, a coffee-table with a stack of DVD boxes of children’s films. A TV and Blu-ray player on a stand. No paintings, no dining table, just a long, low sideboard against the wall, and the breakfast nook with three bar stools at the kitchen counter. He took photos of everything before he began the search.
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sp; He located the right key on the bunch he was holding to unlock the double doors of the sideboard. On the left, plates and glasses, coffee mugs and a few dishes. Plus alcohol. A quarter-bottle of Klipdrift brandy, half a bottle of Three Ships whisky, a few small bottles of sparkling wine and two full-sized bottles of red, still sealed. For a second his demons stared into his eyes. On the right, a tangle of cables and chargers, an old ADSL modem, the box of an LG phone and ripped envelopes containing municipal and cell-phone accounts, receipts and a memory stick. No laptop. Griessel locked the sideboard again.
He deposited the memory stick in a plastic evidence bag, went to search through the kitchen cupboards and the fridge, then the two bedrooms. One was for the children. There was nothing of consequence in the cupboards or bedside drawers.
In Johnson’s room the bed was made, the built-in cupboards reasonably tidy. An attractive old chest of drawers faced the bed. The top drawer held personal documents – including an ID, a driver’s licence that had expired the previous year, the divorce decree. Photos of the children. And a photo of the family when it was still whole. They were seated on a couch – not the one in the front sitting area. Johnson was in the middle, surrounded by Robyn and the children.
He was a lean man. Fit. Handsome. With a smile full of confidence, and an expression that said: ‘Look at the beautiful things life has given me.’
As he systematically searched and recorded his findings on the Canon, Griessel thought about photos. Some of them lied. The picture of the Johnson family was about three years old. It might once have been displayed on Robyn’s desk. Or on JJ’s wall where he lived in Pretoria. It spoke of harmony and happiness, foretold a fairy tale.
And now look at them.
He was pretty sure he didn’t have any photos like that. When he and Anna, his ex-wife, were that age, he was working night and day at the old Murder and Robbery squad. Working and boozing. His life was a haze of violent crime and liquor. He had snapped the few photos in existence with a point-and-click when they’d holidayed in April. Ten days of sobriety by the sea at Langebaan or Hermanus, his mind back on his job, his heart on brandy. Only Anna, his daughter Carla and his son Fritz in the pictures. The kids were lively, happy. The look in Anna’s eyes – was he imagining it with hindsight? – a little hesitant, afraid of the monster in her husband, the post-traumatic stress disorder that no one properly understood back then.
Those photographs had predicted their future much more accurately. Because he was missing from them.
Carla was twenty-two now. She had begun work as a public-relations officer on a wine estate. She’d studied drama, but hadn’t found work in the entertainment industry. Fritz was nineteen and in his second year at AFDA, the Cape film school that Griessel could not afford. And Anna was married to a lawyer. When he and Anna saw each other occasionally, she always seemed relieved to be shot of him – and a bit embarrassed by his unfashionable clothes, his apologetic manner. And why wouldn’t she be? He was still only a policeman, a recovering alcoholic, barely eight months dry, and his greatest wish was to ask the other recovering alcoholic in his life to marry him. He had already bought the ring for Alexa. It was locked in his top drawer at work.
He kept telling himself he hadn’t asked her yet because he wanted to make the engagement special. An occasion she could recount with pride and delight. But, truth be told, he was scared.
Benny Griessel sighed. He finished up, locked the house and left.
He had found nothing.
Chapter 7
August, Daniel Darret, Bordeaux
Daniel’s life had been deliberately uncomplicated before Madame Lecompte and the violence in the night.
He worked as an assistant to the furniture restorer Henry Lefèvre. The old man with thick, silvery-white hair and moustache was a genius wood-wizard who could mend priceless seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pieces so perfectly that the best antique-furniture experts in Europe could not spot the repairs. But Lefèvre had Asperger’s syndrome. His mind was in the socially problematic range of the autism spectrum. He made no eye contact and had no sense of empathy with the feelings and intentions of others. That made him very hard to work with. Colleagues quickly felt that he was insulting, humiliating or ignoring them, even though that was not his intention. ‘He doesn’t have a filter, and he thinks everyone else is like that,’ his wife, Madame Sandrine Lefèvre, told Daniel when she interviewed him. ‘The assistants last only a week or two, Monsieur Darret, even though we pay more than double the usual salary. If you’re easily offended, you’d better say so. And rather look for another job.’
She ran a neighbouring antiques shop in the Chartons district – Madame Lefèvre. Antiquités, Brocante – that sold her husband’s handiwork, among other things. She was a very clever woman.
Daniel told her then that he thought he could handle the Asperger’s. And she hired him – mainly because he was big and strong, and accepted the salary without negotiation. Madame was desperate, just like he was.
It took him months to come to terms with the old man’s strange behaviour. Eventually a bond developed between them, unspoken, amorphous and strange. It existed in the silences of the workshop, in the rhythm of their working together, and in the rare, fleeting flickers in Lefèvre’s eyes that spoke a softer, more accommodating language. And he fell in love with the Lefèvre process, the art of making broken things whole again.
Daniel rose at six every weekday, drank strong coffee, ate his oatmeal, fed the cat, cleaned the one-bedroom flat, washed and shaved, and walked to La Boulangerie on the rue des Faures at seven o’clock. He greeted the bakers by name, and they him. He would buy two croissants and two chocolatines. The latter he would eat as he walked to work, while they were still warm from the oven. The croissants went into his small rucksack, to be eaten at ten with his tea.
He was always the first at work. He would unlock the workshop and breathe in the scent of furniture polish and varnish, glue, wood shavings and sawdust, the stacks of planks and the strange, mysterious musk of the old, worn-out pieces. Every morning the aromatic blend varied slightly, determined by what le génie had last chiselled or sawn, sanded or polished.
This was his regular daily routine when the Lefèvres were there: he would sweep and dust, pack and hang tools exactly as Lefèvre liked them; he would restack planks and furniture, check stock, replenish where needed and make a list of orders. At nine Madame would arrive, and they would consult about the tasks of the day. He marked the repaired items and carried them to the service entrance where the delivery truck would collect them just before ten. Then he ate his croissants with tea, and when the génie arrived, he worked with Lefèvre as he directed until Madame brought lunch to the back. They ate separately, each on his own wooden crate on opposite sides of the workshop. And he stole with his eyes everything that Henry Lefèvre did with the wood and furniture.
Sometime after three, Madame would quietly beckon him away and he would shift things around in the shop for her, do small deliveries or help transport pieces with the panel van. Sometimes he would work on his own project, when the schedule allowed. After five he would go home, without saying goodbye to Monsieur, for by then the cabinet maker was already deeply immersed in his own world.
It was a long day’s work, physically challenging, as he was on his feet practically all the time, and had to lift and carry heavy items, usually alone. Exactly as he liked it. It kept him fit and tired him out, so that he barely had energy at night to yearn, or mourn, or remember.
In the evening after work he watched television. Soccer. Old films. News. Or read about events in his home country on his second-hand tablet.
Saturdays, he cleaned the flat from top to bottom. He went to the market for his weekly purchases of cheese and ham, slices of terrine or pâté, saucisson and fruit, Wackett’s fish, and for a glass of wine and a chat with Mamadou Ali, who worked for the florist and was generally known as Ali du Mali – Ali from Mali. He had no other real friends; people didn
’t know much about him.
On Sundays he would clean his motorbike in the small garage he rented in the rue Permentade, then go for a ride on the BMW, alone. To Saint-Émilion for lunch. Or Arcachon, or Bayonne, now and then as far as San Sebastián across the Spanish border, or the twisting roads and landscape delights of the Périgord. He returned before sundown, put the motorbike away, and went home. Monday he would be back at work.
That was his life, more or less, before the woman and the violence in the night.
More than a week after she’d seen him at his front door, on the Tuesday afternoon, she was standing there waiting for him. The giraffe lady. Beside the big flowerpot at the entrance to his old three-storey apartment building.
Chapter 8
August, Benny Griessel, Three Sisters
‘Right here,’ said Detective Sergeant Aubrey Verwey, pointing to a dry gully in a patch of Karoo bushes beside the railway track. ‘They found him right there. With his brains hanging out, and he’d been there eight days already. You can imagine. Not a pretty sight.’
‘You mean the guy who works for the railway?’ Cupido asked, his irritability showing. He had been in a mood since early that morning when they drove out of Bellville at six.
On the way to Beaufort West – where they were headed to pick up Verwey – Griessel told Cupido about his search of Johnson’s townhouse. But he could see his colleague’s attention was elsewhere. Initially he thought it was because of the earliness of the hour.
Now they were standing beside the tracks in the expanse of the Great Karoo, nine kilometres past the Three Sisters filling station. They had to walk for twenty minutes down the dusty service road from the chained gate beside the N1, as the man from Transnet hadn’t arrive with the key to unlock the padlocked gate. Despite the blue skies the August wind was bitterly cold. Neither Cupido nor Griessel had brought warm clothing. ‘It’s a semi-desert, for crying out loud. You’d expect a bit of heat,’ said Cupido, indignantly, to Griessel as they emerged from the car.