The Woman in the Blue Cloak

by Deon Meyer

  By five that afternoon Sergeant Tando Duba had sent the digital photos of the Bleached Body’s face to the SAPS liaison officer. They decided to forward only one to the press – the one that would give least offence; after all it was the image of a person who had died only days ago.

  The liaison officer immediately sent it to all the media on his list.

  The Sun was the first newspaper to get it on its Twitter feed. The other news publications and websites were hot on its heels. By six o’clock it was the main item on Network24, News24 and IOL.

  By eight the photo had gone viral, causing a macabre sensation on Twitter, especially in the age group from fourteen to eighteen.

  At half past eight that night Sergeant Tando went home because he’d had no response. No one had the faintest idea who the Bleached Body had been.

  The destination of this bus looked increasingly ominous.

  Vinnie Adonis was one of two men who worked as day shift concierges at the prestigious Cape Grace Hotel on the Cape Town Waterfront.

  It was he who tipped the first domino in the management of the Bleached Body homicide. He was fifty-eight years old, but still walked every day from Cape Town Station to work. Just past seven on Friday morning, 19 May, on the corner of Riebeeck and Adderley, he spotted the front page of Die Burger newspaper stacked in a heap on the pavement beside the vendor. He registered the colour photo of the strange face, skin bluish-white, eyes closed, with the caption above it: Do you know her?

  ‘Yes.’ The word formed in his mind, but he rationalised, no, he didn’t know her. His mind continued to insist, ‘yes’, and he turned and retraced his steps to the pile of papers and had a better look.

  ‘Piracy viewing’s a crime, uncle,’ said the newspaper seller.

  Vinnie chuckled and dipped his hand in his pocket. ‘How much?’

  ‘Special price for you today, uncle, eleven rand.’

  He dropped three five-rand coins into the boy’s cupped hand. ‘Keep the change,’ and he picked up his newspaper and stared at the photo while he walked.

  It’s the American woman, he thought. Mrs Lewis. Mrs Alicia Lewis. Not an oil painting, but very pleasant. You got those Yanks who tried too hard to be agreeable to the natives, you got your Yanks who were condescending, and then you got your Yanks who were just normal with everyone. She was one of those. She’d asked him for a couple of things, on Sunday. He thought it was Sunday that she’d arrived.

  Yes, he did think the pale woman on the front page of Die Burger was Mrs Alicia Lewis.

  But was it really?

  Vinnie Adonis showed the newspaper to his day shift colleague. ‘Doesn’t this look like Mrs Alicia Lewis in 202?’

  ‘It does, hey . . .’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Now that you mention it . . .’

  They weren’t sure. They took the newspaper to the assistant manager, who listened to their story, thought about it, and then accompanied them to the manager. The manager sent for the head of hotel security, who fetched the copy of Mrs Alicia Lewis’s passport from the file, and all five staff compared the blue-white face of the Bleached Body on the newspaper page with the passport photo. Two of them couldn’t see a likeness, two suspected it might be the same person. Vinnie was convinced.

  The hotel security manager said he would retrieve video footage from the hotel CCTV cameras, because passport photos could be misleading. The manager said he would knock on the door of room 202 in the meantime.

  It was only at nine o’clock that the second domino fell, when the day manager of the Cape Grace Hotel called the number at the end of the article in the paper, and informed Sergeant Tando Duba they had reason to suspect that the Bleached Body was Mrs Alicia Lewis, an American citizen apparently living in London; the address they had on record was 10 Carol Street in Camden Town, London.

  ‘What makes you think it’s her?’ Sergeant Tando asked.

  ‘Because we’ve checked the CCTV footage, which by the way is hi-def 720p HD, and the similarities between the photo in the paper and the woman on video are remarkable. Also, according to the video footage, the last time she left the hotel was on Monday morning at nine thirteen. And according to our cleaning team, her room has not been touched since Monday.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Sergeant Tando Duba quietly.

  The third domino toppled when the station commander of the SAPS in Somerset West called the chief of investigations – the general! – in the Western Cape to inform him that the Bleached Body was most likely a foreign tourist; and what’s more, an American-living-in-England foreign tourist.

  The general had been in the front line for a long time. He had come up through the ranks, his ability to predict the future had been honed by a wealth of experience, and what he could see here, very clearly, was trouble. He told the station commander of Somerset West that he was genuinely sorry for Sergeant Tando, but in the best interests of all, including the young detective, it would be better to hand this hot potato over to the Hawks.

  The station commander breathed an audible sigh of relief. This bus had just gone international, and it was better that he and his people got off. Because there was only one destination for a big fat bus with a foreign tourist as the victim of murder. This bus was en route to the circus.

  6

  12 October

  He stole a piece of salted fish, and then a string of sausage hanging beside the head and trotters of a huge pig. He ate the sausage raw, as he walked. His stomach rumbled and complained, but he knew he needed this fuel, any fuel, urgently.

  He avoided the eyes of the market-goers, kept his head down, walked out of the market, north on the Delft road.

  Only once he had been walking for fifteen minutes did he look back.

  He couldn’t see them.

  He ate the salt fish beside the Oude Lee, so that he could quench his thirst with water. He didn’t linger, drinking long and deep before taking to the road again.

  An hour after the Schiedam market, nearly halfway to Delft, he looked back again. There was less traffic and the road was straight. And there they were, the four of them. All dressed in black. Still far off, barely more than specks. But they had been chasing him long enough for him to recognise their shapes. Their purpose.

  He groaned in despair. The dark coat, abandoning his hat, it hadn’t helped at all.

  He couldn’t go on much longer. He thought of leaving the road, trying to hide somewhere, but the terrain was too flat around here, and they had seen him now, they had a clear view of him; if he tried to escape across the fields they would know.

  They were going to get him.

  He lengthened his stride.

  7

  Captains Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido were the two Hawks who caught the bus to the circus. They were high in the Hottentots Holland Mountains, standing at the viewpoint with Sergeant Tando Duba, while the northwester teased Griessel’s hair and Cupido’s jacket, and the cold front swung its scythe of cloud across the peninsula like a portent.

  ‘Why?’ Cupido asked the head of the Unit for Serious and Violent Crimes, Major Mbali Kaleni. ‘Why do we always get the case after some rookie has f—’ He checked himself – the major didn’t tolerate bad language. ‘Has messed it up?’

  Major Mbali knew Cupido was fishing for a compliment along the lines of how they were such excellent detectives that they could handle anything. She knew her men. Cupido flourished on a diet of positive feedback and praise. But that treatment made Benny Griessel uneasy. Benny didn’t like himself much. All he asked for was space and quiet trust and maybe a private word of thanks when a case was wrapped up.

  ‘We don’t know that it is messed up, Captain,’ she said.

  ‘It’s always messed up. These station detectives are under-brained, under-trained, over-promoted and over-confident. Generally useless.’

  ‘Hhayi!’ the major said in Zulu, but in such a way that anyone would know she meant ‘enough’ and ‘basta’ and ‘stop it’ an
d ‘just get out of here’. All that wrapped up in one firm word.

  So, they drove off to Sir Lowry’s Pass as it was there that the major had arranged for them to start taking over the case. And now here they were in the teeth of a biting wind, with Sergeant Tando Duba showing them photos on his mobile phone, a big Samsung Galaxy Note: images of the Bleached Body draped over the low wall. Duba was a bit intimidated by these two legends. Every detective in the Western Cape knew about Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido, the sweet and the sour.

  ‘They say it’ll take weeks to process all the forensic stuff they found here,’ said Duba, pointing at the area around the viewpoint.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll find anything,’ said Benny Griessel.

  Cupido nodded. ‘If you’re smart enough to wash a body in bleach, you don’t leave evidence where you stash it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Duba, ready to learn from the masters.

  ‘You know what bleach does?’ Cupido asked.

  Duba knew. He had also expanded his knowledge talking to the forensic team. He wanted to say that, but Cupido didn’t give him the chance: ‘Your household bleach destroys DNA evidence, actually it spoils a lot of chemical evidence. And it masks blood.’

  ‘Not all bleaches,’ said Duba. ‘Chlorine bleach can make it difficult to see blood, but luminol will still pick it up.’

  ‘Look,’ said Cupido, ‘there’s only one question you want to ask about this place: why did he leave the body here? Why didn’t he bury her somewhere? Or just dump it in a more secluded place? That’s your first question.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And you also might want to ask yourself how he got the body out of the vehicle, and onto the wall, without being seen from the N2 there,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Sometimes there are no cars, for a few minutes . . .’

  ‘Still, it’s risky,’ said Griessel.

  ‘Have you ever carried a dead body?’ asked Cupido.

  ‘No.’ The ambulance personnel normally did that.

  ‘Heavier than you think,’ said Cupido. ‘So maybe, this was more than one guy. And you also start thinking about the vehicle itself. Your ordinary sedan could be a problem. Too low to hide you from the traffic there. Car standing here, open boot, guy taking out something that looks like a body . . .’

  ‘I see . . .’ said Duba.

  ‘So, you have to think about a big four-by-four. Maybe a panel van, or a minibus,’ said Cupido. ‘And you get people to start checking all the N2 traffic camera shots of big SUVs or minibuses that night, with two or more people in them, on the road after dark.’

  ‘I didn’t have enough people,’ said Duba.

  ‘He’s not criticising your investigation,’ said Griessel, knowing how people sometimes misread Cupido.

  ‘I’m just putting stuff out there,’ said Cupido.

  ‘We did start looking at the traffic. But there were more than six and a half thousand vehicles on this stretch of road that night, between sunset and sunrise,’ said Duba. ‘And the traffic cameras belong to the province, and tracing all those plates, it’s going to take weeks. Months even . . .’

  Cupido looked with closer focus at the young Xhosa detective. He knew how complicated the relationship between the DA-controlled province and the SAPS was. Not always easy to get whole-hearted cooperation. ‘Good job,’ he said.

  Benny Griessel could see that Sergeant Tando Duba was unsure about Cupido’s tone. ‘He means it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’

  ‘You know those phones catch fire?’ Cupido pointed at Duba’s Samsung Galaxy Note.

  ‘No, only the new ones, the seven. This is a six.’

  ‘Okay, so he’s not useless. Even his docket is organised,’ said Cupido as they drove back to the city via the N2. He paged through the dossier Duba had handed over while Griessel drove.

  Vaughn studied the pathologist’s report in Section B of the file. He read aloud: ‘Female, early to mid-forties, no signs of sexual assault, no defensive wounds . . . Body comprehensively washed in household bleach . . . No fingernail scrapings, no gunshot residue . . . Blunt force trauma to the head, shattered the occipital bone . . .’ Because only he could see the sketch, and he knew the detectives didn’t always know the names and precise locations of all the anatomical parts, he touched the back of his head just above the neck, and said, ‘It’s this one, at the back . . . Cause of death is severe trauma to the cerebellum, probably instantaneous. Wound was caused by a single blow of substantial force. Wound comprehensively washed with household bleach. No wound residue, no splinters, no micro-particles. Blunt force weapon probably rounded metal cylinder, approximating five-centimetre-diameter pipe.’

  Cupido looked at Griessel. ‘One single blow, Benna. Substantial force.’

  ‘Big, strong guy.’

  ‘And not rage, not panic, not overkill. Just efficiency.’ They both knew this sort of single wound was commonly found in accidental deaths at home or in traffic. In cases of murder it was common to find more than one wound – signs of struggle, a killer who, either out of rage or panic or desperation, inflicted multiple blows, stab or bullet wounds.

  One single, brutal blow from a metal pipe didn’t fit a possible opportunistic crime against a foreign tourist who had only been in the country one day before she died.

  ‘Time of death?’ Griessel asked.

  Cupido scanned the report. ‘Probably Monday afternoon.’

  Griessel sighed. That meant the crime was already ninety-six hours old. The conventional wisdom was that the first seventy-two hours were critical to an investigation. They were already behind the curve and the gap would probably grow.

  In the day manager’s office of the Cape Grace Hotel, the detectives compared the CCTV screenshots and the photo of the Bleached Body. They could see similarities, but weren’t entirely convinced.

  ‘That’s her,’ said the concierge Vinnie Adonis. ‘Mrs Alicia Lewis.’

  ‘What makes you so sure, uncle?’ Cupido asked, always courteous when talking to a coloured man with a respectable, legal, white-collar job.

  ‘I assisted her on Sunday, at my desk, and I helped her again on Monday morning. I’m the person who had the most contact with her.’

  ‘Uncle, are you prepared to go and identify her at the morgue?’ Cupido asked.

  ‘If it must be done, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Thank you, uncle. Now, we want you to tell us all about Mrs Lewis. Everything you can remember.’

  ‘Okay. She arrived at the hotel on Sunday afternoon, from London. This Sunday, the 14th. I know that, because when she came to ask me some things just before five o’clock, she commented that the weather was so good here, the day before in London it had rained so much. I said, Mrs Lewis, you don’t sound like an English lady, and she laughed, and said, no, actually she’s from America, but she’s been living in London for quite a while.’

  ‘So, uncle, what did she want to ask you?’

  ‘She asked me the best way to get to Villiersdorp. It was a bit funny, the way she said the name, I didn’t understand it, “Vil-yees-door” in that American accent. I had to get her to write it down, and then I said, “Oh, okay, Villiersdorp,” and she said, yes, she had to go there on Monday, and should she Uber or hire a taxi or a private car, what was the safest?’

  ‘She had to?’ Griessel asked.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Did she say she had to go to Villiersdorp?’

  Adonis hesitated and frowned and then said, ‘That’s a good question, maybe she said she wanted to go, I can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘What did she want to do in Villiersdorp?’ asked Cupido. ‘Did she say?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, uncle, and then?’

  ‘Then I said, no, everything is equally safe. A taxi or an Uber all the way to Villiersdorp could be very expensive, but she wouldn’t have to worry about getting lost. She laughed and said Google Maps was her navigator. She was really very nice; not all the Yanks are nice, but
she was. And she said she was going to be here for two weeks, she thought it best to hire a little car, and could I help her. I said no problem, what sort of car did she want, and did she want the car delivered at extra cost, or would she take a taxi to Avis at the airport? She said, no, get them to deliver a medium-sized car, around nine o’clock. I said, right, I’ll arrange it. So, Monday morning, she came back to my desk, just before nine, and she and I and the Avis man did the paperwork. And then, at nine thirteen, according to the CCTV, she left with the Avis car keys, a Group E Avis car, silver Toyota Corolla with an automatic gearbox. Most boring car in the country, but what can you do?’

  Griessel was going to ask Avis to get the car registration number as fast as possible, but the door opened and the day manager put his head in and said, ‘We might have something for you . . .’

  They looked at him with anticipation.

  ‘It’s difficult to talk to all the staff at once, because they’re tied up with work, so we’re having small meetings during breaks. And a waitress who works in the Signal just told us Mrs Lewis had breakfast with a man on Monday morning.’

  ‘The Signal?’

  ‘Our restaurant.’

  ‘We’d like to talk to her,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Of course. She’s waiting for you.’

  ‘Is there CCTV footage of the man?’ asked Griessel.

  ‘We’ll start looking right away,’ said the manager.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Griessel.

  ‘You’re welcome. Look, I . . . I’m sure you’re aware of this, but we have Mrs Lewis’s home number available. Her London home, I mean. It’s on her booking info.’

  ‘We can’t call until we’ve identified the body,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  8

  Cupido drove Vinnie Adonis to the Government Mortuary in Salt River, so it was only Griessel who accompanied the manager to the CCTV monitor room.