Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  “What’s the size of the estate?”

  “At this stage it seems to be just under two million.”

  He had suspected it. “Van As is your client.”

  “She lived with Mr. Smit for eleven years. She supported him in his business interests, prepared his meals, cleaned his house, looked after his clothes, and at his insistence had their child aborted.”

  “He never offered to marry her?”

  “He was no… advocate of marriage.”

  “Where was she on the evening of the…”

  “Thirtieth? In Windhoek. He sent her there. On business. She returned on the first of October and found him dead, tied to a kitchen chair.”

  He slid farther down in his chair. “You want me to trace the will?”

  She nodded. “I’ve already explored every possible legal loophole. The final sitting at the Master of the Supreme Court is in a week’s time. If we cannot supply a legal document by that time, Wilna van As doesn’t get a cent.”

  “A week?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s almost… ten months. Since the murder.”

  The attorney nodded again.

  “I take it the police haven’t had a breakthrough.”

  “They did their best.”

  He looked at her and then at the two certificates on the wall. His ribs were hurting. He made a short, obscene noise, part pain, part disbelief. “A week?”

  “I —”

  “Didn’t Kemp tell you? I don’t do miracles anymore.”

  “Mr. van —”

  “It’s ten months since the man’s death. It’s a waste of your client’s money. Not that that would bother an attorney.”

  He saw her eyes narrowing, and a small rosy fleck in the shape of a crescent moon slowly appeared on one cheek. “My ethics, Mr. van Heerden, are above reproach.”

  “Not if you give Mrs. van As the impression that there’s any hope,” he said, and wondered just how much self-control she had.

  “Miss van As is completely informed about the significance of this step. I advised her of the potential uselessness of the exercise. But she is prepared to pay you because it’s her last chance. The only remaining possibility. Unless you don’t see your way clear, Mr. van Heerden. Evidently there are other people with the same talents…”

  The crescent was bright red but her voice remained measured and controlled.

  “Who would be only too pleased to join you in taking Miss van As’s money,” he said, and wondered if the fleck could become any redder. To his surprise she smiled slowly.

  “I’m really not interested in how you acquired your wounds.” With her manicured hands she gestured at his face. “But I’m beginning to understand why.”

  He saw the crescent moon slowly disappearing. He thought for a moment, disappointed. “What else was in the safe?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “She doesn’t know? She sleeps with him for eleven years and she doesn’t know what’s cooking in his safe?”

  “Do you know what’s in your wife’s wardrobe, Mr. van Heerden?”

  “What’s your name?”

  She hesitated. “Hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “My parents were somewhat… romantic.”

  He rolled the name around in his mouth. Hope Beneke. He looked at her, wondered how someone, a woman, thirty years old, could live with the name Hope. He looked at her short hair. Like a man’s. Fleetingly he wondered with which angle of her face the gods of features had fumbled—an old game, vaguely remembered.

  “I don’t have a wife, Hope.”

  “I’m not surprised… What’s your name?”

  “I like the Mister.”

  “Do you want to accept the challenge, Mister van Heerden?”

  Wilna van As was somewhere in her indefinable middle years, a woman with no sharp edges, short and rounded, and her voice was quiet as they sat in the living room of the house in Durbanville while she told him and the attorney about Jan Smit.

  She had introduced him as “Mr. van Heerden, our investigator.” Our. As if they owned him now. He asked for coffee when they were offered something to drink. Strangers to one another, they sat stiffly and formally in the living room.

  “I know it’s almost impossible to find the will in time,” Van As said apologetically, and he looked at the female attorney. She met his gaze, her face expressionless.

  He nodded. “You’re sure of the existence of the document?”

  Hope Beneke drew in her breath as if she wanted to raise an objection.

  “Yes. Jan brought it home one evening.” She gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “We sat at the table and he took me through it step-by-step. It wasn’t a long document.”

  “And the tenor of it was that you would inherit everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who drew up the will?”

  “He wrote it himself. It was in his handwriting.”

  “Did anyone witness it?”

  “He had it witnessed at the police station here in Durbanville. Two of the people there signed it.”

  “There was only the one copy?”

  “Yes,” said Wilna van As, in a resigned voice.

  “You didn’t find it odd that he didn’t have an attorney to draw up the document?”

  “Jan was like that.”

  “How?”

  “Private.”

  The word hung in the air. Van Heerden said nothing, waiting for her to speak again.

  “I don’t think he trusted people very much.”

  “Oh?”

  “He… we… led a simple life. We worked and came home. He sometimes referred to this house as his hiding place. There weren’t any friends, really…”

  “What did he do?”

  “Classical furniture. What other people describe as antiques. He said that in South Africa there weren’t really any antiques; the country was too young. We were wholesalers. We found the furniture and provided traders, sometimes sold directly to the collectors.”

  “What was your role?”

  “I began working for him about twelve years ago. As a kind of… secretary. He drove around looking for furniture, in the countryside, on farms. I manned the office. After six months —”

  “Where’s the office?”

  “Here,” she indicated. “On Wellington Street. Behind Pick ’n Pay. It’s a little old house —”

  “There was no safe in the office.”

  “No.”

  “After six months… ,” he reminded her.

  “I quickly learned the business. He was in the Northern Cape when someone telephoned from Swellendam. It was a jonkmanskas, a wardrobe, if I remember correctly, nineteenth-century, a pretty piece with inlays… In any case, I phoned him. He said I had to have a look at it. I drove there and bought it for next to nothing. He was impressed when he got back. Then I started doing more and more…”

  “Who manned the office?”

  “We started off by taking turns. Afterward he stayed in the office.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “I liked it.”

  “When did you start living together?”

  Van As hesitated.

  “Miss van As…” Hope Beneke leaned forward, briefly searched for words. “Mr. van Heerden must unfortunately ask questions that might possibly be… uncomfortable. But it’s essential that he acquire as much information as possible.”

  Van As nodded. “Of course. It’s just that… I’m not used to discussing the relationship. Jan was always… He said people didn’t have to know. Because they always gossip.”

  She realized that he was waiting for an answer. “It was a year after we began working together.”

  “Eleven years.” A statement.

  “Yes.”

  “In this house.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never went into the safe.”

  “No.”

  He simply stared at her.

  Van As
gestured. “That’s the way it was.”

  “If Jan Smit had died under different circumstances, how would you have got the will out of the safe?”

  “I knew the combination.”

  He waited.

  “Jan changed it. To my birth date. After he had shown me the will.”

  “He kept all his important documents in the safe?”

  “I don’t know what else was in it. Because it’s all gone now.”

  “May I see it? The safe?”

  She nodded and stood up. Wordlessly he followed her down the passage. Hope Beneke followed them. Between the bathroom and the main bedroom, on the right-hand side, was the safe’s big steel door, the mechanism of the combination lock set in it. The door was open. Van As touched a switch on the wall, and a fluorescent light flickered and then glowed brightly. She walked in and stood in the safe.

  “I think he added it. After he bought the house.”

  “You think so?”

  “He never mentioned it.”

  “And you never asked?”

  She shook her head. He looked at the inside of the safe. It was entirely lined with wooden shelves, all of them empty.

  “You have no idea what was inside?”

  She shook her head again, small beside him in the narrow confines of the safe.

  “You never walked past when he was busy inside?”

  “He closed the door.”

  “And the secrecy never bothered you?”

  She looked at him, almost childishly. “You didn’t know him, Mr. van Rensburg.”

  “Van Heerden.”

  “I’m sorry.” He could see the woman blushing. “I’m usually good with names.”

  He nodded.

  “Jan Smit was… he was a very private person.”

  “Did you clean in here after the…”

  “Yes. When the police had finished.”

  He turned and walked out, past Hope Beneke, who was standing in the doorway, back to the living room. The women followed him. They sat down again.

  “You were the first to arrive on the scene?”

  The attorney lifted her hands. “Could we have a bit of breathing space?”

  Van As nodded. Van Heerden said nothing.

  “I would love some tea,” Beneke said. “If it’s not too much trouble.” She gave the other woman a warm, sympathetic smile.

  “With pleasure,” said Wilna van As, and she walked to the kitchen.

  “A touch of compassion wouldn’t hurt, Mr. van Heerden.”

  “Just call me Van Heerden.”

  She looked at him.

  He leaned back in the chair. The pain around his eye was surpassing the ache of his ribs. The hangover throbbed dully in his head. “Seven days doesn’t leave me much time for compassion, Hope.” He could see that his use of her name irritated her. It pleased him.

  “I don’t think it will take either time or trouble.”

  He shrugged.

  “You make it sound as if she’s a suspect.”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said slowly, tiredly: “How long have you been an attorney?”

  “Almost four years.”

  “How many murder cases have you handled during this period?”

  “I fail to see what that has to do with you and your lack of basic decency.”

  “Why do you think Kemp recommended me? Because I’m such a lovable guy?”

  “What?”

  He ignored her. “I know what I’m doing, Beneke. I know what I’m doing.”

  4.

  For years the painting of my father hung on the wall facing their double bed—the lithe miner with his coppery blond hair and muscled torso set against a ridge in the Western Transvaal, bleached by winter. The painting was a symbol of their unique meeting, their unusual romance, the love at first sight that evidently happened more often in those days than it does now.

  I don’t offer Emile and Joan’s meeting as an amusing prologue, but as one of the great factors that shaped my life.

  In the shadow of their romance, I would spend most of my life searching for that moment in which I, too, would discover the same immediate and dramatic certainty of love.

  It would, eventually, lead to my downfall.

  My father was a man of integrity. (How disappointed he would have been, had he known his son as an adult.) That—and his body—possibly formed the foundation on which my parents’ marriage was built, because they had nothing in common. Even after their marriage, three years later, they lived in separate worlds in the mine house in Stilfontein.

  I must admit that I don’t recall much of the first four or five years of my life, but I did know that my mother, the artist, was always surrounded by her artistic friends: painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians, odd people who came on visits from Johannesburg and Pretoria, occasionally filling the third bedroom to overflowing, even bedding down in the living room on some weekends. She guided the conversation, a cigarette in her hand, an open book within reach, music coming from scratchy records, especially Schubert, but Beethoven and Haydn as well. (Mozart, she said, didn’t have enough passion.) She didn’t like housekeeping or cooking, but there was always a meal for my father, often an exotic dish prepared by one of her friends. And he was a figure on the periphery, the man who came off shift with his hard hat and his tin lunch box and went to rugby practice. Or went jogging in summer. He was a fitness fanatic years before it became fashionable. He ran the Comrades Ultramarathon year after year, other forgotten marathons as well. He was a quiet man, and his life revolved around his love for her and his love for sport—and, later, his love for me.

  Into this household fate shoved me on January 27, 1960, a boy with his mother’s dark features and, evidently, his father’s silences.

  It was his suggestion that they should name me Zatopek.

  He was a great admirer of the Czech athlete Emil Zatopek, and the fact that he shared his first name with him, even if the spelling differed slightly, probably also played a role. For my mother, “Zatopek” was different, exotic, bohemian. Neither of them, with their ordinary names, could have foreseen what this would do to a boy growing up in a mining town. Not that the children’s insensitive teasing left a scar. But neither did they foresee the lifelong irritation of spelling your first name every time a form had to be filled in, the raised eyebrows and the inevitable “Come again?” every time you introduced yourself.

  There were only two events during my first six years that would remain with me forever.

  The first was the discovery of the beauty of women.

  The applicability of this is multifaceted and you must bear with me, forgive me if I digress from narrative and chronology. But it was a subject that would fascinate me, enchant me, and eventually add to the jigsaw of my psyche.

  The specifics of the event have been forgotten. I think I was five, probably playing with my toys in the living room of the mine house, among the adults, my mother’s wide circle of artistic friends, when I looked up at one of her friends, an actress. And in that moment recognized her beauty, undefined, but with the complete knowledge that she was beautiful, that one was swept away by the sum total of her features. I must admit that I can’t recall her face, just the fact that she was small and slender and possibly had brown hair. But it was the first of many such experiences, each one a milestone of growing admiration and meditation on the beauty of women.

  The danger, of course, was the possible loss of objectivity. Because all men, after all, admire beautiful women. But I believed that my feeling for beauty, the way in which it impressed me, was above the average. Perhaps, I thought then, when I still had the energy and the hunger for reflection, that it was the only inheritance from my mother’s artistic genes—to be enchanted by the shape, the angles, the separate particles that make up the sum total of a woman, as my father’s body had enchanted her. The difference was that she wanted to paint it, as she did so many other people’s faces and postures. I was always content merely to look and to
ponder. To wonder about the unfairness of the gods who conferred beauty in a haphazard fashion; about the devils of old age who could take back the beauty so that only the personality that had been shaped by it remained; about the influence of stunning beauty on a woman’s character; about the strangeness of beauty, its many wonderful facets of nose and mouth and chin, cheekbone and eye. And I wondered about the gods’ sense of humor, their wickedness and meanness in giving some woman a perfect body and then holding back at the very epicenter of beauty, the face. Or connecting an exquisite face to a hideous body. Or adding a fraction of imperfection to the mix so that it hangs there in no-man’s-land.

  Oh, and the talent women possess to enhance nature’s parsimony, using clothes and color, lipstick and brush and small movements of hands and fingers, to produce an improved, more alluring product.

  From that moment, in a living room in Stilfontein, I was a slave to beauty.

  The second unforgettable event during my first six years began with an earthquake.

  5.

  I returned from Windhoek and Jan was supposed to fetch me at the airport. But he wasn’t there. I phoned home. There was no reply. So I took a taxi after waiting for about two hours. It was late, probably ten o’clock in the evening. The house was in darkness. I was worried because he always came home early. And the kitchen light was always burning. So I opened the front door and walked in and I saw him, there, in the kitchen. Immediately. It was the first thing I saw. And I knew he was dead. There was so much blood. His head hung low on his chest. They had fastened him to the chair, one of the kitchen chairs. I sold the set. I couldn’t keep them. His arms were tied behind him with wire, the police told me. I couldn’t go any closer, I simply stood there in the doorway, and then I ran to the neighbors. They telephoned the police. I was in shock. They called the doctor as well.”

  From the sound of her voice he knew that she had repeated the story more than once: the lack of intonation that repetition and suppressed trauma brings.

  “Later the police asked you to look through the house.”

  “Yes. They wanted to know lots of things. How the murderer had entered the house, everything that was stolen…”