by Tony Park
‘Prison might be more fun than being locked up here,’ Sonto said. ‘At least there might be some dagga.’ Her mother gave her an admonishing look, but Sonto just poked her tongue out at her. ‘Just let me get my shoes on.’
Sannie craned her head past the mother to make sure Sonto was not running away, but the teenager was clearly glad of any excuse to escape the house. She returned with a pair of sneakers on her feet.
‘We won’t be long,’ Sannie said to the mother, who eyed her warily as Sannie led Sonto outside.
‘I got nothing to say to you,’ the girl said, but all the same, she fell into step beside Sannie.
‘You don’t know what I’m going to ask you.’
The girl glanced over at her, but said nothing more.
‘What do you think happened to Thandi and Lilly?’
The girl shrugged.
Sannie stopped. They were past the last house on the road, next to an abandoned car that had been stripped down to a metal carcass. Sannie took out her notebook and pen. ‘We can do this at the police station if you like.’
Sonto looked around. ‘At least it would be a change of scenery.’
‘Don’t push me.’
‘You can’t arrest me.’
‘I have no desire to do so.’ Sannie said nothing more, just waited.
‘I’m not sure about Lilly, but . . .’
Sannie stayed silent and did not take any notes.
‘Um, people were not too worried about Thandi, at first, when she went missing,’ Sonto said, carrying on. ‘It was like they didn’t care about her.’
Sannie paused, but when Sonto didn’t continue she prompted her. ‘What did you think about Thandi going missing?’
Sonto shrugged. ‘Thandi would sometimes disappear, like, even when we went out together. There was a boy she liked . . .’
Sannie raised her eyebrows.
‘Sipho. Her mother didn’t approve of him.’
Sannie made a note. ‘Surname?’
‘Nyarhi.’
‘Why didn’t Thandi’s mother like Sipho?’
‘He had been in trouble with you people, the police.’
‘What for?’ Sannie asked, underlining the boy’s name.
‘He likes snakes. The cops came one time and said he had to have a permit. He was fined.’
‘Was he around the night she went missing?’ Sannie asked.
Sonto shrugged. ‘Maybe. Thandi and me, we were drinking . . . like, cool drinks, not alcohol, and I had to go . . . you know, behind a bush, and when I got back she was gone.’
‘What time was this?’
‘After dark. Maybe twenty-thirty.’
‘Had you been drinking a lot of cool drink, by then?’
Sonto shook her head. ‘No.’
‘You didn’t go looking for her?’
‘Sure,’ Sonto said. ‘I called her name, like, many times. And I walked around looking for her. I figured that maybe Sipho had been following us. He did that once before, scared us in the dark, and he and Thandi talked, and then she left me . . . went off with him.’
‘Why would he do that, creep up on you, in the shadows?’
Sonto seemed to think about the question for a few seconds. ‘I don’t know. He was like that, secretive, sneaking around, you know? And the whole snake thing was creepy. He lives alone – his parents are dead – and his house is full of slimy reptiles; snakes and stuff.’
‘Did all of you, or Thandi and Sipho, meet at that place with the big flat rock, near where the construction work has been going on?’
‘Maybe.’ Sonto couldn’t meet her eye. ‘That’s not a place many people go.’
‘Why not?’
Sonto looked around her. ‘It’s, I don’t know the word . . . scary? No . . . more like, spooky.’
‘Spooky?’
The girl nodded.
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s a place most people stay away from. There’s a sangoma who has a hut in the bush near there, on the edge of the old farm.’
‘Why would people stay away from a sangoma?’ Sannie asked, as much to herself, out loud, as to Sonto.
Sonto lowered her eyes and shrugged.
‘Sonto? Look at me. Who is this sangoma? Why do people stay away?’
Sonto looked up and around again, and Sannie thought she saw fear in her eyes. The girl lowered her voice. ‘We’re all told to stay away from that one.’
‘Why?’ Sannie persisted.
Sonto fidgeted with her hands. ‘Sipho said that bad men go to that sangoma. He showed me and Thandi the sangoma’s hut; hidden in the bush, but then he told us we must never go there. It was like Sipho wanted to show off, or scare us with his inside knowledge.’
Sannie made some more notes. When Sonto didn’t fill the void she looked up. ‘How did Sipho know about this sangoma?’
‘He said he went to the sangoma once, for some medicine, umuthi, you know?’
Sannie nodded. ‘What did he need umuthi for?’
‘To protect himself.’
‘From what, from whom?’ Sannie asked.
Sonto said nothing, and looked away.
‘This could be important. You know that, right? It’s why you told me, isn’t it, Sonto? If you’re scared, you don’t need to be. My job is not to hurt you or put you in danger, it’s the opposite.’
Sonto looked her in the eye now and stuck her chin out. ‘You say that, but then you people come around here with your uniforms and your guns, and you beat us for not obeying the lockdowns. You say you care for us but you bring the army and you hurt us, shoot us. I’ve seen it, on social media – the police were killing more people than the virus at the beginning of the lockdown. You don’t care about us.’
‘I’ve got three children.’
‘So?’
‘So, I take the disappearance of young girls seriously.’
Sonto pursed her lips but did not say anything more.
‘What did Sipho need umuthi for, and where did he get the money to go to a sangoma? Does he work?’
Sonto shook her head.
‘Where did he get money?’
‘A man gave him some.’
‘Why?’ Sannie sighed inwardly, but knew that patience would be her best weapon with this teenager. She sensed from the girl’s body language and continual vigilance that she was more scared than defiant. ‘I’m waiting.’
Sonto shrugged. ‘He wanted him to do something for him, but Sipho isn’t bad like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like bad or stupid enough to get himself killed.’
Sannie sat back on the log, giving the girl a little distance. She had heard of this kind of thing, all too often. ‘Did this man give Sipho money to become a poacher?’
‘I did not say that,’ Sonto said, urgently.
‘I didn’t say you said anything. I know how the system works. Rhinos are getting harder to kill and the work is becoming more dangerous for poachers. It’s not unusual for the poaching syndicates to go to a young man, to offer him money and a rifle and to send him into the game reserve to try his luck.’
Sonto looked up at her again and blinked. ‘He never had a gun.’
Sannie went back to her notebook and wrote in it, deliberately saying nothing more.
‘You have to believe me; he never had a gun, he was not going to shoot any rhino or anything like that.’
Sannie looked her in the eye. ‘So why did he receive money from a poacher? Why did he need umuthi to protect himself?’
Sonto bit her lower lip. She probably realised she had been lured into revealing as much as she had, and was now trying to think of a way out, to backtrack from what she had already said. ‘I want to talk to my mother.’
Sannie closed her notebook. ‘Fine
, we will all go to the police station together, with your mother present.’
‘No, no, no!’
Sannie sighed. ‘Then what more do you have to tell me?’
‘Sipho was told to go into the game reserve, but he did not have a gun and he was not going there to kill a rhino.’
Sannie opened her notebook again. ‘For what, then?’
‘To check snares. You know?’
Sannie grimaced. ‘Yes. Bushmeat.’
‘He is not a killer, not even of animals, even though we are all hungry. Someone else sets the snares, he just paid Sipho to check them. Sipho came home with nothing.’
Sannie shook her head. ‘He still broke the law. I need to talk to him.’
‘You will arrest him.’
‘Listen to me, Sonto. My priority right now is finding your two missing friends and it should be your only concern right now, as well. If this boy has information about what might have happened to them, then I need to find him and talk to him. I’m less concerned about him jumping the fence in the game reserve than I am about the girls. Will you help me?’
Sonto’s lower lip started to tremble. ‘I will try.’
‘When and where did you last see Lilly?’
‘She was on her way to the library. I was . . . I was busy with someone else. I saw her walking through the bush, towards the library, and then . . .’ Sonto wiped her eyes. ‘I never saw her again.’
‘Tell me, what do you think happened to Thandi and Lilly?’
The first tear rolled down Sonto’s cheek. ‘I don’t know, but I am scared.’
Chapter 8
The rain beat a tattoo on the corrugated tin roof of the staff quarters at the rear of Kaya Nghala Lodge, where Mia lived and Graham was an increasingly frequent visitor.
Mia lay on her bed, naked under a sheet, her wet clothes piled in the corner of the simple, one-room suite she called home. Graham stood in the open doorway, still in his camouflage trousers but bare-chested, exhaling cigarette smoke outside. Mia checked her watch. It was half past eleven in the morning – she had slept for half an hour. The constant surges of adrenaline, the highs of pursuit and the lows of failure, had exhausted her. So much had gone on during the handful of hours since dawn, but she still needed to collect guests from the airport. That, in itself, should have been the highlight of her day given the lack of tourists during the pandemic. Now, it was a chore she almost did not want to think about.
‘No one disappears into thin air, Mia,’ Graham said, as if continuing a conversation he’d been having in his mind, or maybe he had been talking to her, not realising she was asleep.
Mia crooked an arm behind her head as she leaned against the wall. All of them, even Askari the dog, had failed to pick up the second poacher’s trail beyond the stream bed. Graham and Oscar had searched the area around where the female rhino had been shot, also to no avail. The one piece of good news was that Dr Baird, the veterinarian, had been able to dart the baby rhino and had taken it to the rhino bomas at Skukuza. Graham was still wired from the fruitless chase.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but –’
‘But what? Jislaaik, you can’t believe this black magic mumbo jumbo.’
She frowned. ‘Don’t use language like that, please. These are people’s beliefs you’re talking about.’
‘Ja, but which “people”? You? Look, I know you love the Shangaan and maybe think you’re one of them.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘My Shangaan nanny all but adopted me.’
Graham finished his cigarette and ground out the stompie on the concrete stoep. ‘Ja, I know you had a rough upbringing, but you can’t really believe all this superstition.’
Mia quietly fumed. When and where did any religion start or stop being a superstition? Her rational mind, the one that had been moulded at university through a scholarship for gifted girls, told her there was no basis to Bongani’s conclusion that the older poacher with the gun had disappeared, or turned himself invisible; but the other part of her, the side of her that had turned her back on a qualification that could have seen her practising environmental law and made her return to the only home she had ever loved, the bush, told her there were some things in life that could not be explained.
Mia’s greatest source of frustration was that both she and Bongani had lost the tracks of the man they were following.
‘Maybe he backtracked?’ Graham said, in a more conciliatory tone. ‘Maybe he’s just really good at it.’
‘Maybe,’ Mia said. She had considered the possibility and both she and Bongani had taken some time to inspect the various tracks at the scene. ‘That would have been easy for him to do in the soft sand, in the dry riverbed, as the tracks there were never going to be crisp or well defined, but then it started raining. You try walking backwards in those conditions and see if you can get your boot to fit in exactly the same position as the first track you made, in every single footprint.’
Graham leaned against the doorframe, staring outside. He didn’t look at her as he spoke. ‘Of course, if the guy didn’t use umuthi to turn himself into water, or make himself invisible or just vanish into thin air, then the only other explanation is that you and Bongani lost his trail.’
There it was, the accusation. Graham was saying that she and Bongani had blamed magic instead of admitting their failing.
‘The dog didn’t do much better,’ Mia said after telling herself to stay calm.
‘Sure,’ Graham agreed. ‘He had plenty to occupy him – scent from the two poachers, plus the hand grenade in that satchel. Might have just been, like, sensory overload.’
‘Bongani’s cousin –’
Graham ran a hand through his wet hair as he closed the door and walked back inside. ‘Alfred, I know. I heard the story. That oke claims he saw a poacher disappear. You have to be careful with this shit, Mia. If people like you and me start believing it, or giving it credence, then it takes hold. Next thing my anti-poaching guys will be too scared to go out looking for the bad guys and they’ll be blowing even more of their pay than they already do on their own imithi.’
Mia said nothing. Graham was right, she told herself. She was being irrational. It was one thing to accept that izangoma knew about herbs and other bush remedies that actually worked in the treatment of a variety of ailments, and another to believe that a sangoma could give a poacher a potion or a talisman that would make him vanish into thin air or assume the form of an impala.
‘There has to be a rational explanation,’ she said.
He crossed the screed concrete floor to the bed and sat beside her, reaching out to brush a strand of hair from her eyes. She was tired, and a little annoyed at him, but his physical presence was invading her space and her senses. She felt her body start to respond, a kind of magic all of its own that she was unable to control.
‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked her.
‘Nothing.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to criticise you,’ Graham said.
‘It’s OK. I’m annoyed at myself for losing that guy’s tracks.’
‘Blame the rain. He just got lucky. We’ll catch him next time.’
‘I hope so,’ Mia said.
Graham leaned closer and kissed her. Again, she was acutely aware of her body responding to his. She just wished he could be a little more tolerant of her other friends and their beliefs.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Hm-mm.’ She kissed him back, forcing her mind back to the job at hand. She felt down and she knew that being held, caressed and loved now was what she needed.
Graham’s lips tracked down her neck to her chest and, as he lowered the sheet, her pulse started to race. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on his touch and her pleasure.
Unbidden, and unwanted, the face of Sipho, the teenage poacher, came back into her vision. He was h
olding the pangolin, his eyes wide as she spied him. He would be in so much trouble.
Graham had stopped kissing her and had rolled back to the edge of the bed so he could take off his boots and loosen his belt. Normally Mia was as voracious as he was, and enjoyed touching him, seeing his arousal, but now she stared at the ceiling.
‘What’s wrong?’
Graham was standing, wearing just his boxer shorts, looking down at her. Mia blinked up at him.
‘Is it us?’
She shook her head, quickly. ‘No. I was thinking about that boy.’
‘What bloody boy?’
‘The one we tracked first, the decoy or whatever he was. I know him.’
‘You do? Why didn’t you say, Mia? We can arrest him, interrogate him.’
‘You’re not going to torture anyone. I told Sean I think I know who he is.’
‘No one said anything about torture, and you just said that you do know who he is. You have to tell me, Mia. The cops need to know.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll talk to him. I’m sure Bongani will, in any case. He’s respected in the community.’
Graham sat down on the bed beside her. ‘Mia, I know you’re close to these people.’
‘These people are my people, Graham.’
‘That’s my point, Mia, you are part of the local community and that’s mostly a good thing and really one of your strengths as a person. You’re not like most of us in this bloody country. You don’t have a race or a tribe, you just do what most of us tell ourselves we do: see people as people. But now you’re acting like too many people in this community do; you’re turning a blind eye to crime, covering up for someone.’
She glared at him. ‘That boy made a mistake. He shouldn’t go to prison for it and he might just be able to help us find the guy who’s killing the rhinos.’
‘Julianne wants blood,’ Graham said.
‘No. She wants her rhinos protected, and so do I. We’re all on the same side, Graham.’
He stared at her, saying nothing.
To hell with Graham, Mia thought, if he thought she was on the opposing side to him just because she didn’t want to see a slightly odd schoolboy arrested and put in prison.