by Deon Meyer
‘James who?’
‘Joyce. I cannot lie to you, I had to google him. He’s an Irish novelist who wrote this hectic novel. A landmark, they call it. Ulysses. About an ou in Dublin, the whole book is just what this ou thinks. The whole time. Think, think, think. Crock of shit, it sounds like to me. Anyway, the general idea is, keep it simple. And then . . .’
‘What does “keep it simple” mean? Do you just ask straight out?’
‘No, brother, it means don’t embroider. Don’t make a long speech, don’t go fetch the baboon from behind the mountain, don’t beat about the bush.’
‘But what do you say?’
‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to help you with. I gave it extensive thought, and I suppose you tune her – wait for it, this is good stuff. You tune her, “Alexa, you are the love of my life. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I would be deeply honoured if you would accept my hand in marriage.” That’s all you say.’
Griessel was quiet for ages, then said: ‘It’s not bad, Vaughn . . .’
‘Not bad? Of course it’s not bad. It’s perfect.’
‘Thank you,’ Benny Griessel said. And he meant it.
But he remembered his dream and shivered.
Chapter 29
The pet shop was a hive of activity. Outside in the garden children were playing with the rabbits and feeding chickens, ducks and geese; inside, customers were shopping for puppies, bird cages, fish tanks and pet food.
They looked for Robyn, who spotted them first. ‘Out! Out of my shop,’ she said, as she approached them.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Vaughn Cupido.
‘Out. And make it snappy.’ Her voice was calm, as if she didn’t want to disturb the customers.
‘What’s the matter now?’
She came right up to them. ‘Suicide? You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re useless. Get out of my shop. Now!’
‘Where did you hear that?’ Griessel asked.
‘In the newspapers. That’s where I have to hear it, because you’re too useless to come tell me yourself. Now get out.’ She pointed at the door.
They turned round and left, stopped outside.
‘Fok,’ said Cupido.
Griessel called the Hawks liaison officer.
‘Benny?’ John Cloete answered.
‘When did we tell the press that the Johnson Johnson case was suicide, John?’
‘It wasn’t us. I hear it came from Pretoria. The commissioner’s office.’
‘Yesterday?’
‘Yes. Last night. Too late for TV, but early enough for the morning papers.’
‘Thanks, John.’ He rang off and passed the message on to Cupido.
‘They’re in a hurry, Benna, the commissioner’s office. Like there’s pressure.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do we do now? Are we going to talk to Neville Bandjies?’
‘I don’t know, Vaughn. I just have a feeling about him . . .’
‘That he’s corrupt?’
‘No. That he’ll put his career first if they give him difficult choices.’
‘Right.’
‘We’ll have to wait till the shop is quiet and try Robyn again. Do you feel like feeding the chickens?’
‘Story of my life. I’m a swooping Hawk, but now I get to feed the chickens.’
They waited outside in the weak winter sun and chilly wind. Every now and then they saw Robyn Johnson glaring at them, but she didn’t come out to chase them away.
They talked about the Johnson docket. They went through everything they knew, evaluating the information, building theories, breaking them down again.
At eleven minutes past eleven, short, fat Arnold from PCSI phoned Griessel. ‘Suicide? You reckon it’s suicide? I’m riding along on a fancy train, and I pick up an Okapi and stab myself in the back of the head, break off the blade, then throw myself out the window. Because I’m Superman and I’m just tired of living. Brilliant detective work, Benny. You don’t need us any more. You don’t need the SAPS. You can write comic books and make bags of money. Are you sure Johnson didn’t eat kryptonite? Just do us a favour, don’t waste our time. We have other cases open, piles and piles of them. We’ve got a backlog of weeks. Months. But when you asked, we dropped everything. And now it’s suicide. This honeymoon is over. Just so you know.’
‘Are you finished?’
‘Yes. With the Hawks I am completely finished.’
‘Did you find something on the blade?’
‘You won’t believe it, but we found Batman’s fingerprints. We can say with absolute certainty that he really is Bruce Wayne. So the big question is: why did Batman take off his Batgloves? If you can work that out, you’ll know instantly who committed suicide. Oh, wait, it was Johnson. Superman Johnson. Case closed.’
‘Did you find something, Arnold?’
‘Coriander.’
‘Coriander?’
‘That’s right, coriander. Johnson Johnson cut himself some biltong before he stabbed himself in the back of the neck. The Last Supper. Biltong. Patriotic to the end.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘What’s going on, Benny? What the fuck is going on?’
‘The national commissioner’s office told the press that it was suicide. And instructed us that the case is closed.’
Arnold was silent for a long time, until he said: ‘I see.’ And then: ‘What do we do with the blade? And the report?’
‘Send it to Mbali. Are you serious about the coriander?’
‘Yes. Coriander and red wine vinegar. Microscopic residue. Enough to suggest the knife was used to carve biltong.’
‘No fingerprints?’
‘Nothing we could work with.’
‘Thank you, Arnold.’
‘What’s happening to us, Benny?’ It was a rhetorical question.
Arnold rang off before Griessel could reply that he didn’t have a clue either.
He phoned Joanie Delport. She said she couldn’t really talk because she had guests in the reception hall.
‘Did you ever see Faku or Green eating biltong?’ He heard voices in the background, people laughing and chatting.
She said: ‘I’ll call you back.’
After seventeen minutes of watching children feeding and petting animals, and customers coming and going, the call came.
‘Faku. I didn’t see him eating biltong, but on the table in his compartment, there was . . . You know when you carve biltong, the fine bits it leaves, and those little shells from the spices?’
‘The coriander?’
‘Yes. Every evening I wiped the table clean, because he would carve biltong there.’
After twelve it quietened down. Robyn Johnson came out and sternly said they should go through to her office. She let them wait there for her for another quarter of an hour. Then she entered, closed the door and burst into tears. ‘JJ didn’t commit suicide,’ she said, through her sobs.
‘Robyn . . .’ Cupido consoled her.
‘What do I tell the girls? What do I tell them? Daddy didn’t want you any more and he killed himself? It’s impossible. You’re useless – that’s not what happened.’
‘We know,’ said Cupido.
She sprang to her feet. ‘You know?’ she screamed. ‘You know my children’s daddy didn’t kill himself, but you told the papers that? What sort of people are you? What sort of cruel, heartless animals are you? Don’t you think about the children? Don’t you think about the families and friends and the legacy of a good man? Those two girls of mine, this is going to haunt them for the rest of their lives. People whispering behind their hands, their daddy killed himself. Did you think of that?’
Cupido kept holding his hand in the air to calm her down, but she ignored it.
At last she sat down. Her shoulders shook. Tears on the desk.
‘We’re so sorry . . .’ Griessel tried.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t us who told that to the papers,’ C
upido said.
‘Are you not the SAPS?’
‘It was Pretoria. They’re trying to hide something. We’re under orders to drop the case.’
She looked up, her eyes bloodshot. ‘My God,’ she said.
They told her they were going on with the investigation, but she mustn’t tell a soul. No matter how difficult it was. She wrestled with the thought, the injustice of it, the damage, but eventually, after they had explained in broad strokes what they knew, she nodded.
‘That nest of vipers,’ she said. ‘That VIP Protection Unit. JJ told me that’s what it really was, a vipers’ nest. Politicians carrying on. Young girls. Prostitutes and groupies. Booze. Lots of booze. The high life. And the bodyguards have to arrange it all, and the bodyguards have to cover it up. And the bodyguards take the spoils, the leftovers. That’s their compensation. JJ was discreet, but over time he let things slip. Never any details. Never named names. They were all too loyal, the whole lot of them. But I’m telling you here today, that unit, that’s what ruined my marriage.’
‘Did he mention corruption? To do with the Indians? State capture?’ Griessel asked.
She wiped away her tears. ‘One time . . . After he’d left the unit, six months ago now, state capture was all over the news all the time, those emails that were leaked. I went to pick up the girls one night at his flat, and they were already asleep, and he said: “Come sit.” He opened a bottle of wine, and we talked like the old times. And then he came out with these things. Not a lot, he was being quite vague. I could hear he was torn between disgust and loyalty. Funny business. Shady stuff. Midnight meetings, bags of cash the Indians brought them. Then the Johnnie Walker Blue Label would start flowing, and money would be packed out on the tables, like drug-dealers. He said he would never forget it – they had such sly smiles, those Indian magnates. Like “We own you, you dumb natives.” Then they would pour a drink for the bodyguards too, pretend to be their biggest buddies, arm around them. But always those sly smiles . . .’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all he said to me. But I could sense there was more.’
‘Who was he guarding in those days? When the Blue Label was flowing?’
‘Dumisa. The minister of state security.’
Chapter 30
They walked into Sergeant Reginald ‘Lithpel’ Davids’s cubicle behind the IMC locale. He was wearing designer ripped jeans, a T-shirt and sandals. The T-shirt bore the words: The universe is made up of protons, neutrons, electrons and morons. There had been an attempt to give him the new nickname of ‘Lollipop’ due to his tall, skinny figure and massive Afro hairstyle, but the old one had stuck – for years he had had a bad lisp before it had been surgically corrected.
‘Don’t your feet get cold in those sandals, Lithpel?’ Cupido asked.
Davids didn’t look up from the computer screen. ‘If I could hang around outside on a Saturday morning, like a normal person, they would be cold. But now I have to sit here trying to enhance pics of geriatrics for two cappies chasing a dead-as-a-doornail docket. So, no, my feet are fine, but my heart is cold. Towards you.’
‘You know you’re just a sergeant, don’t you?’
‘So everybody keeps reminding me. Temporary situation, though.’
‘Can we have a look?’ Cupido pointed at the screen.
‘Be my guest.’
They walked around the desk and stood behind him.
The face of the man who might be Oliver Green was somewhat clearer, better lit, but the photo was very grainy. Griessel was disappointed. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ he asked.
Lithpel shook his head in disgust. ‘Now let me get this straight. You send me a badly exposed pic taken with a five-year-old iPhone Six Plus. A mighty eight megapixels, praise the Lord. And then some other idiot compresses it too. And you ask me, cappie, if that is the best we can do?’
Griessel realised he had stepped on sensitive toes. ‘Sorry, I know you’re doing your best, Lithpel. I was just asking . . .’
‘Cappie, what you see here is nothing short of a miracle, thanks to me and the best off-the-shelf software the SAPS can afford. Unless you want to send it to the FBI or spend a gazillion bucks on a private lab, that’s the best it’s ever going to be.’
‘What if we can get you the original uncompressed photo?’ asked Cupido.
‘You’re going to get a little less noise, but not all that much. I can give you a version that’s cropped less, where the man is a bit smaller. It will be less grainy.’
‘Give us a couple of options. Anything.’
‘Okay.’ He manipulated the mouse. ‘Printing the first one now.’
‘Johnson’s cell phone?’
‘I’ve got it up and running. No good news. A few SMSes, a few WhatsApps, mostly to the ex, and a few tourism contacts. He was on Instagram and Facebook, but he didn’t post much. He was more of a lurker. And he liked puzzle games, nogal. There’s no smoking gun there.’ He showed the phone that was lying on the workbench between his equipment. ‘Feel free to fiddle. Oh, and my cappie said that that Johnson dude’s bank statements are on his desk. They came in late.’
They studied Johnson Johnson’s bank statements. They told a heroic story of a man struggling to keep his head above water, and eventually just managing it. There were no remarkable deposits, no odd transactions. Just a former policeman who had to scrape by, with a gradual improvement in the last months of his life, as his ex-wife had suggested.
They drove back to the pet shop to show Robyn the three photos that Davids had printed out.
She shook her head. She didn’t know Oliver Green. She asked: ‘Was it him who killed JJ?’
They said they didn’t know.
‘Am I imagining it or is he a bit on the old side?’
They just looked at her.
‘That’s all you’ve got? That old man?’ she asked in disgust.
They had nothing to say in their defence.
While they were with her, Griessel’s phone rang. It was Professor Phil Pagel. Griessel let it go over to voicemail.
He only listened to the message once they were walking to the car. ‘Nikita, I saw the newspaper. I assume you have your reasons.’
Shame burned through him. It was just like it was back in the apartheid days, the lies and deceit.
They phoned ahead, drove to Oakglen, in Bellville, where Colonel Mbali Kaleni lived. From the front door of her little townhouse they could smell baking. Kaleni opened the door. She was wearing a white apron. ‘You’re just in time for fresh zucchini bread. No carbs,’ she said, and Cupido swore she gave him a meaningful look.
They sat in the breakfast nook. She asked if they wanted coffee. They said, yes, please. She put the kettle on, fetched a block of mature Cheddar from the fridge and began to grate it.
Griessel opened the docket and took out the three photos that Lithpel Davids had provided. He put them on the counter, so that she could see. ‘This is the only photo we have of one of the suspects.’
She looked at it while she grated. ‘Perhaps there’s just enough for someone to recognise him, if we had the freedom to call on the media’s help.’
‘We want to give you our theory,’ Griessel said, taking out his notebook. ‘A lot of it is just speculation, but it’s the best we have.’
‘Go ahead.’ She put the grater into the sink, began to make the coffee.
‘Our two suspects, Mr Terrence Faku and Mr Oliver Green, booked the Rovos train between Cape Town and Pretoria, using those false identities,’ said Griessel, ‘three months in advance. They booked adjacent compartments. They must have had their reasons for using false names and passport numbers, and for wanting to be close to each other, but we have no idea what those reasons were. What we do know is that the fake IDs were not created to perpetrate this crime. When they booked their trip, Johnson Johnson didn’t even know he was going to be on it. We think this is significant. I’ll get back to that in a moment.’
‘Okay,’ said Kal
eni. She put the mugs of coffee on the counter, beside the artificial sweetener. ‘Help yourself.’ Then she went to the fridge and took out some jam. ‘Sugar-free jam,’ she said, and looked at Cupido again.
He wondered if she’d heard somewhere that he was also on the Banting diet now. Who would have told her? You just couldn’t trust anyone.
Kaleni took the zucchini bread out of the oven. It smelt delicious. She put it on a cooling rack. ‘Sorry, Benny, please proceed.’
‘So, on the fifth of August the two phantoms board the train, and mostly keep to themselves. There are no photos showing them in the lounge or the viewing car. Only one, in the dining car. If we add that to the fake IDs, we can say that maybe they didn’t want to be seen, and seen together, too much. They wanted to fly under the radar. But they did eat together. So, they mustn’t have been too worried about the risk. Which is a bit strange. Why then go to the trouble of using false IDs?’
‘Well, maybe because it was easy,’ said Cupido. ‘Rovos doesn’t ask people to present their passports before they board.’
‘So,’ Benny Griessel said, ‘we’ve drawn up a timeline for the night of the fifth of August.’
‘Everybody is having dinner, from seven o’clock onwards,’ said Cupido.
‘Johnson is sitting with Mrs Scherpenzeel, and we assume Faku and Green are sitting together,’ said Griessel.
‘Then, somewhere close to nine,’ Cupido went on, ‘people start getting up and leaving, and Johnson recognises one of the two phantoms. Maybe for the first time. But he doesn’t get up, he doesn’t say anything.’
‘At ten to nine, Mrs Scherpenzeel tells Johnson she wants to call home. They get up and he escorts her back to her compartment,’ said Griessel. ‘And at eight minutes and twenty-three seconds past nine, we believe Johnson was killed. Those are our two markers.’