by Mark Graham
“All in the line of duty.” Mansell produced a leather-bound note pad from his sports jacket. Business supplanted jocularity. He asked, “So how does it stand?”
“The call was taken by a night patrol at four forty-two. Our victim is a male Caucasian, discovered, curiously, in the ladies’ bathroom. That much you know. But get this. The body was found by a railroad employee, right? A male railroad employee.”
The inferences, Mansell realized, were blatantly obvious; the maggots from Security Branch would have a field day. But the unease he had felt before returned now with renewed vigor, and he knew there was no way he could explain this to Joshua.
“Identification?”
Joshua shook his head. “The victim’s face is turned inside the locker. Messy.”
The passenger terminal resembled a cavernous pavilion, a single hall that opened onto an atrium with a vaulted ceiling of glass and timber. Mansell gazed upward at four brass-and-glass chandeliers that hung in a cluster from huge beams.
“The Transport people won’t like it much, Joshua, but we’ll have to reroute all incoming trains, until noon at least. Outbounds, the same treatment.”
“We dragged the stationmaster out of a toasty bed, speaking of diplomacy, and as you can imagine, he’s elated at the prospect. Our main concern for the moment is a Blue Train from Cape Town due in at five twenty-five.”
Mansell nodded and then turned his attention to the rows of head-high wooden pew benches that dominated the main floor of the terminal. Three families huddled around a sunken bar in the White Race Group Only section, and a handful of college students watched the proceedings with growing interest. The businessmen seemed a molded lot: matching fedoras, opened newspapers, and a wonderful aloofness that Mansell found improbable but amusing.
Further on, a broken candy machine stood vigil over migrant laborers as they slept head-to-toe on the same benches. A colorfully robed mother fed her baby on an exposed breast, while her oldest ran from aisle to aisle and her husband snored.
The smell of cheese sandwiches grilling caught Mansell’s attention, and he saw smoke rising from behind the counter of the soda fountain. As they passed the doorway to a restaurant called The Depot, he heard two waitresses complaining about the bloody barricades and the goddamn cops and “isn’t it amazing how they think they own the whole blessed world and . . .”
Directly ahead, wooden barricades and rope formed a half circle across the face of the south terminal wall. At the hub of the circle stood the entrance to the ladies’ lounge, and like a magnet, it reached out to Mansell.
The black detective who stepped forward to meet the chief inspector was built like a misplaced athlete. A trimmed beard lent a note of distinction to Merriman Gosani’s persona, but the effect was at once victimized by a rumpled, knee-length trench coat. He removed a toothpick from the side of his mouth and said, “I’ve talked to the stationmaster. He’ll reroute passenger traffic to the Summerstrand station. They’ll use shuttles for the passengers, and something equally as exciting for the luggage.”
“And the five twenty-five Blue Train?”
“Same scenario.” Merry used his toothpick to gesture toward a glass-enclosed office on the west wall. “I’ve set up shop in the stationmaster’s office. We’ve got the guy who made the initial find there. A baggage worker named Anthony Mabasu.”
“All right. Merry, you’ll handle the center, then.” Mansell set his shoulders and peered intently in Joshua’s direction. “Joshua, I think Mr. Mabasu deserves your personal attention first thing.”
At last, the chief inspector broke the plane between the barricades and the lounge. Steenkamp, the team pathologist of sour demeanor and superior skills, his in situ photographer and sketch artist, Anna Goodell, and Chas du Toits, the chief of forensic science, observed the signal, and together they stepped past the floral curtain that stood watch over the entrance. Beyond was the sitting room.
The floor was cheap linoleum with a worn footpath leading inside. The walls were a crusty tan, water-stained from exposed overhead pipes. Head-high windows, painted shut, looked out to the south.
Cracked vinyl chairs, red with chrome arms, lined one wall. There was a pop machine, a broken candy dispenser, full ashtrays, and an empty magazine rack. A single chiffon neck scarf, expensive, and very out of place, Mansell thought, hung from a wooden coat rack.
They skirted the beaten path, past a solemn policeman, through a hinged door into the locker room. The scent was more disinfectant than death, but Mansell could feel its presence.
The locker room was even drabber, if that was possible, than its antecedent. Cracked and flaking paint was pee-colored at the edges. Rust-colored tile lay unevenly on the floor. Fluorescent bulbs emitted an annoying buzz and stained the olive green lockers with the dull patina of neglected bronze. The third bank stood flush against the back wall, and latched windows ran the length of the room above it. Mansell was drawn immediately to the shattered glass in the middle window.
Steenkamp followed the chief inspector’s feline gait to this third row. A dozen locker doors stood ajar, but a shoulder and arm protruded from one near the center of the bank. Mansell sucked air into his lungs.
The body had been jammed sideways into the locker, the face peering across the inside shoulder hiding unsuccessfully from death. A ligature of nylon rope was tied fast about the neck. The rope extended to a coat hook inside the locker, thereby holding the body upright. Two of the victim’s fingers were still caught between the cord and his neck. Swelling about the neck was a ghastly black and blue. Blood, now brown as it dried, had smeared along the inside of the locker and on the door.
Steenkamp stepped forward gingerly. At the foot of the locker lay three coins, and these he straddled. “He’s definitely dead,” he muttered after a time. “Body’s still warm. Rigor hasn’t set in yet. Perhaps two to four hours.”
“All right, then,” said Mansell, glimpsing on the faces of his confederates the inertia that death inevitably brings to the living. “Let’s get some photos first. Anna, start here with this room. Follow up with a baseline sketch. Do the same in the sitting room.”
The echo of footsteps interrupted them. An abrasive voice clashed unharmoniously as the staccato claps grew in volume. Mansell wheeled around. Wolffe, he thought coldly.
“So what have we today?” A thundering voice exuded an air of bravado and spurious good humor.
Two men appeared in the aisle. The first, a squat, bloated man stuffed like a sausage into the gray-blue uniform of the Security Branch, was, indeed, Major Hymie Wolfe. Good humor took its true place when he saw the inspector. “Mansell!”
The chief inspector tipped his head. “This must be your lucky day, Wolfe.”
Security Branch was the appointed handler of all matters, subtle and high-minded, concerning the “Security of the Republic.” There was no love lost between Security’s “elite” circle, as Wolffe fancied it, and Mansell’s lowly Criminal Investigation Branch, the CIB.
“Luck, Inspector, has not one thing to do with it.” Wolffe removed his gloves, sniffing the air. He stepped over the wooden bench that faced the locker. A blue-and-white rag, once surely recognizable as a bandana, lay on the floor a meter from the victim. Stubby fingers swept it up. Rheumy eyes pondered it without effect, and he held it to his nose. Then, as if shaken from a brief slumber, Wolfe peered at the locker. “And who is our victim today?”
He reached for the locker, but Mansell brushed the hand aside. “Identity,” he said, “hasn’t been determined yet, Major. Shall we do it according to the law this time? Just for fun?”
Major Wolfe glared at Mansell through thick wire-rimmed glasses.
“My law,” he hissed, and with a quickness belied by his bulk, plunged both hands into the locker. He grasped the victim’s head and brutally twisted it about. The face was caked with blood and losing color rapidly. Still, recognition was instantaneous.
Steenkamp paled. “Superb police work, Major. And a fair catc
h at that. The thorn in Pretoria’s side.”
“Elgin!” exclaimed Wolfe. “God almighty. Ian Elgin.”
“Yes, a curious ossuary for the vice-chairman of our fair nation’s most notorious mining union, wouldn’t you say?” Steenkamp’s sardonic wit lay in wait for moments such as these, and he added, “Ah, but that hardly does the man justice. Doesn’t he also own some oblique title with the dockers, and the stevedores, and all those other hardworking chaps at the harbor, as well? But then dead is dead, isn’t it, Major?”
Mansell was still grappling with the foreboding he’d felt before, though now at least, he told himself, there was some substance to its being. Substance, however, did not wash away the feeling, and he saw that Wolffe, too, could not keep his eyes off the distorted, pain-struck face. Mansell had to rid himself of Wolffe’s presence somehow, and he decided to use the death mask to this end.
“This looks like something right up your alley, Major,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at Wolffe’s companion, a slight man with a manicured moustache and the insignia of a lieutenant. “Maybe we should leave it with you and your investigative wizards, then.”
This seemed to shake the major from his momentary lapse. He struggled into his gloves and dabbed beads of sweat from his upper lip. “Very amusing, Inspector. But you will continue with your investigation. As will Security. Lieutenant Rhoodie here will handle liaison between our investigations, and he will have free reign to observe your actions and to carry out his own tasks without interference from you. Do I make myself clear?”
The slightest hint of a smile touched Mansell’s lips, and he stepped forward. He extended an arm around Wolffe’s shoulder. As they approached Lieutenant Rhoodie, he removed the bandana from the major’s grasp. “We wouldn’t have it any other way, Major.”
“As I said.”
The words fell on deaf ears; the chief inspector had already returned his attention to the body. Wolfe departed less the ceremony of his arrival. Chas du Toits held out a white paper bag, and Mansell set the bandana inside. Anna Goodell proceeded with her rendering of the scene.
“As if the major had never been here, Anna,” said Mansell.
A forensic team entered the room carrying trays of black and silver fingerprint powders, camel-hair and fiberglass brushes, and spray atomizers for silver nitrate and ninhydrin solutions. Carefully, they set up floodlights and lampstands with ultraviolet and infrared lights. Last came an array of photographic equipment. Mansell, in his early years, had loved the process: dust, spray, photograph, lift, and photograph again. Methodical, graceful, precise.
Forensic set to work in the immediate area of the body the moment the sketch artist finished.
Mansell pushed a wooden bench over in front of the third bank of lockers. He stepped lightly up. Cool sea air rushed in through the broken window. “Chas,” he said, calling out to the forensic chief. “Have a look at this, will you?”
Chas du Toits lumbered up next to the inspector. The top of the lockers reeked of neglect. Shards of broken glass lay over a thick layer of dust, telltale signs of damage recently done, but the window latch was still in its locked position.
Mansell gestured to an oval impression at the edge of the locker. “By chance?”
“If you’re suggesting a footprint, I would say yes,” du Toits replied, his eyebrows raised in delight. A kid in a technological playhouse was Chas du Toits—gas chromatography, photomicrography, neutron-activation sampling. “I’ll send one of my chaps round back for a look-see. This becomes interesting at last, Inspector.”
Pathologist Steenkamp returned to the body after forensic had made its mark, and Mansell pointed a finger at SB Lieutenant Rhoodie. He motioned toward a closed door at the rear of the room. A Do Not Disturb sign hung from the doorknob.
“Make yourself useful, Lieutenant. Check out that back room over there. Carefully.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Rhoodie. He used a handkerchief on the doorknob and the tip of a nail file to flip the light switch.
Mansell watched him. So be it, he thought. A murdered union official bounced between departments like a Ping-Pong ball. Fuck it. Security would soon take over the whole affair anyway.
Methodically, Mansell toured the attached washroom area. Toilets, shower stalls, basins, trash cans. He emerged carrying an empty Sprite can, a used toothbrush, a box of disposable douche, and three magazines. The pathologist called him over.
“The victim was almost certainly dead before he was hung in this locker, but other than that, there’s no sign that he’s been moved,” Steenkamp said. “I do so love a tidy killer.”
“The confrontation occurred here then, in this room?”
“More than likely, on this very spot.” The pathologist used his little finger in describing the damage to Ian Elgin’s face. “Lividity of the mucous membranes, quite obvious. Petechial hemorrhages of the conjunctival sacs, here and here. Contusions and abrasions around the neck and jaw. Note the discoloration of the lips, the frothing about the mouth, and the groove in the neck, a lovely thing which runs beneath the larynx in front to this point just below the base of the occipital—”
“Asphyxia from strangulation,” said Mansell.
“For a preliminary, yes. By the way, there’s some discoloration at the wrist and on the ring finger, you might note.”
“His watch and wedding band. Both gone.” Mansell felt gently about the victim’s shirt and pants pockets. “Empty.”
Lieutenant Rhoodie had returned with similar findings, adding, “And there’s a sports jacket draped over the back of a chair in the other room. No wallet. No papers. It’s a sleep room. Two mattresses. One’s been slept in.”
“Chas.”
“I heard, I heard,” du Toits replied, rubbing his hands together as his team carefully packaged laboratory samples.
A uniformed policeman appeared at the locker entryway. “Excuse me, Inspector. The district prosecutor is here, sir. And Detective Gosani says he’d like you to have a look outside that broken window.”
Mansell nodded, an absent gesture accented by fixed eyes and the remoteness of deep thought. How does a man like Ian Elgin, he asked himself, end up in a place like this? He set a hand on Steenkamp’s shoulder and stared at the rope slicing into the victim’s neck. He said, “Let’s get this body out of here as soon as you’re ready, Joe. I’d like the autopsy done today.”
****
The union headquarters of the United Dock Workers was located a stone’s throw from the King George terminal on Charl Malan Quay. Plagued by the prospect of her own empty house, Delaney Blackford had come straight here following her confrontation with Ian Elgin the night before.
The lingering effects of that confrontation had made work impossible. Sirens at dawn had driven her from the restlessness of her office cot.
At 8:05, the telephone rang. It was the union’s general secretary. His call informed her that Ian’s body had been discovered at the station, a victim of foul play. Details were sketchy, he said, and . . . Delaney replaced the receiver without a word. She blamed this shortfall in etiquette on fatigue, and brewed tea on the office hot plate.
Then she took her cup and a day-old pastry to the tiny porch out front. But she wasn’t surprised when the tea tasted bitter, less so that she had no appetite. Her ankle throbbed, and she leaned heavily on her walking stick, her constant companion. “A memorial,” as she called it in those frequent bouts with cynicism, “to the black holes in an otherwise lukewarm past.”
Delaney set the cup down, discarded the pastry. Blooming in planter boxes along the porch railing were Hilton daisies, and her hand idly sought out their fragile petals. A protea, uncanny in its resemblance to a pincushion, took her eye momentarily. On most occasions, the flowers were a priceless source of escape; this morning they were of no interest.
Three hundred meters away, beyond the laden cars of a slow-moving freight train, police vehicles and uniformed officers swarmed over the same parking lot on which she
had stood hours before. She watched an ambulance plunging down Military Avenue, lights ablaze. It swept past the barricades and the policemen and came to an abrupt halt at the station’s main entrance. When the wail of its siren had spent its last breath, Delaney set out across the quay without knowing exactly why. This morning, Ian Elgin was a victim of foul play. Last night, he had talked like a man struggling to keep his head above water. . . .
“Pretoria has taken it upon itself to see to it that the unions toe the line.” At twelve o’clock at night, the restaurant was dimly lit and nearly deserted, and Elgin’s voice reflected his somber mood. “They know damn well I can’t be thinking of toeing any bloody line. The unions wouldn’t stand for it. They’ve had their taste of power. They’ve had their taste of the penthouse and the champagne cocktails and the expensive cigars.” Elgin gazed forlornly across the table in search of sympathy, a gift he himself never bothered to offer. “Pretoria doesn’t like sharing the penthouse with anyone, Delaney.”
“This is news?” Delaney made no attempt at concealing her sarcasm.
“And Jo’burg’s nearly as bad. I swear I can’t make a move without some asinine gold-mining official complaining about the price of their precious metal. The masters of gold. To be sure. It’s their last and greatest illusion. If they only knew the truth. . . .” Elgin consumed his wine with a vengeance, avoiding her gaze. “But it’s not just that. It’s the foul weather, the ill-tempers, the . . . blank stares.”
“Meaning things are lousy at home, as usual.” But Delaney could see that it was more than just politics, and business, and an empty family life.
“There’s something about Port Elizabeth, though, kiddo. It’s like a cocoon. They can’t get to me here. They can’t.” Delaney searched his words and found an almost indistinguishable thread of panic.
Over coffee, which Elgin refused, Delaney brought up the matter of the additional responsibilities she had been seeking with the Affiliated Union.
“The recommendation has been with your board for over a month now. Is there a problem?” Her rising voice caught the attention of their waitress, but Delaney pressed on. “It’s in your hands. A simple `yes’ is all it will take. I’ve earned it.”