Dead at Daybreak

by Deon Meyer

  Focus. He arranged his notes, read the newspaper reports, clever reheating of the investigative leftovers, quotes from Superintendent Bart de Wit: “Murder and Robbery have always been part of the investigation and we gladly shared our information with the private team. Murder and Robbery will remain part of it and are following up new leads.”

  Ha!

  The telephone seldom rang now, nothing usable. He had to wait for Hope and Carolina de Jager and the parcel she was bringing, the next big step.

  Marie at the door. “There’s a policeman to see you, sir.”

  “Send him in.”

  Captain Mat Joubert. “Morning, Van Heerden.”

  “Mat.”

  “You still believe the devil is in the detail.” Joubert looked at the notes, sat down, his voice soft for such a big man. “How are you, Van Heerden?”

  “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “No.”

  “Bart de Wit changed his point of view?”

  “No. The super doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve come to warn you. The commissioner phoned this morning. Military Intelligence is taking over the investigation. It comes from on high. Ministerial level. Nougat is preparing the dossier for the handover.”

  “And he’s mad as a snake.”

  Joubert rolled his big shoulder. “You’re their next port of call, Van Heerden. They’re coming with a court order. Law on Internal Security.”

  He had no reaction.

  “You opened up something that makes them very nervous.”

  “They can’t stop it now.”

  “They can. You know that.”

  “Mat, this thing goes back to ’seventy-six. Bush war. It’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission material. The ANC would welcome it.”

  “How many spooks did you see appearing in front of the TRC? I’m not talking about the butchers and semispooks like the Vlakplaas men and Basson. I’m talking about the main men. The obscure units inside National Intelligence and MI of which we’ve only heard rumors. There was nothing on them or about them. There was nothing from Namibia. Do you think it was a coincidence?”

  He had never thought about it in that way. “I didn’t follow the TRC with great attention. I was… distracted.”

  “In the final TRC report they mention masses of records that were destroyed in ’ninety-three. And there are rumors all over the place. Do you know how much paper was burned in Iscor’s furnaces? Forty-four tons. And Military Intelligence destroyed hundreds of files in Simon’s Town in ’ninety-four. With the knowledge of the ANC. Nothing could stop them then. Nothing is going to stop them now. And with reason.”

  “What reason?”

  Joubert took a deep breath. “I don’t know. But if I were you I’d make copies of everything. Because they’re coming to confiscate everything. And they’ll be here shortly.” He got up. “They mustn’t find me here.”

  “Why, Mat? Why did you come to warn me?”

  “Because we owe you, Van Heerden. All of us.”

  It was only after he had said good-bye to Mat Joubert in reception and was sitting at the desk again that he realized he had to get hold of Hope. Carolina de Jager and her parcel must not be delivered here. He dialed her cell phone. “The number you have dialed is unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.”

  Jesus.

  “Hope, don’t bring Mrs. de Jager to your office. Go… I’ll phone my mother. Take her there. I’ll explain later.”

  He looked at his watch. Were they on the return flight already? Probably. Would she listen to messages before she came to the office?

  He put out his hand for the telephone again. Had to warn his mother. He dialed her number.

  “Hallo,” he heard his mother say.

  The door opened.

  “Morning, motherfucker,” said White. He held a document in his hand. “We have a love letter for you.”

  Marian Olivier, the other partner of Beneke, Olivier, and Partners, was an unattractive young woman with a highly arched nose, a small, narrow mouth, and a rich, melodious voice like a radio personality’s. “The document is in order,” she said.

  “Nice to work with professional people,” said Black.

  “Who understand all the big words,” said White.

  “Please translate it for sonny-boy here, in easy-to-grasp concepts. He’s not allowed to play with all the dangerous toys any longer.”

  “He must go home.”

  “Find other toys.”

  “Or we’ll lock him up.”

  “That’s correct,” said Marian Olivier.

  “Correct,” said White. “Such a nice, official word.”

  “It’s also correct that we may search the offices,” said Black.

  “Which we would like to do now.”

  “We brought some help.”

  “Fourteen men.”

  “With itchy hands.”

  “Who are waiting outside.”

  “Out of decency.”

  “Politeness.”

  “And then we want to visit sonny-boy at home.”

  “To make sure that he’s not hiding toys that are dangerous for a child of his age.”

  “And unfortunately we’ll also have to search Miss Beneke’s little place.”

  “We apologize in advance for the discomfort.”

  “Sometimes our work is hell.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Everything is in order,” said Marian Olivier.

  “In order,” said Black. “That’s another nice one.”

  “Correct,” said White, and they giggled like teenagers. “I’ll stay here. Major Mzimkhulu will accompany sonny-boy a little later.”

  “Unpack his toy cupboard. As soon as he’s shared everything here with us.”

  “Like a good boy.”

  They ran in the rain to Hope’s BMW in the parking area at the Cape Town International Airport. And when they had put the luggage in the trunk and closed the doors, Carolina de Jager said, “Oh, how lovely to see rain again.”

  Hope started the car, pulled away. “We wouldn’t mind a bit of sunshine. It’s been raining for more than a week.”

  “The farmers should be grateful.”

  “Too true,” said Hope, and pulled her handbag toward her to find money for the parking gate. Saw her cell phone. Better switch it on.

  At 16:52 on Tuesday, July 11, Major Steve Mzimkhulu of Military Intelligence’s Special Ops Unit died on the N7, one kilometer north of the Bosmansdam exit.

  They drove from the city in silence as if Mzimkhulu’s comedy rhythm was disturbed when White wasn’t present, but the officer’s last words were in a more serious vein. “I must admit, sonny-boy, you haven’t done badly,” he said when they took the N7 exit.

  Van Heerden didn’t say anything. Later, when he thought back, he realized they had been followed. He had been unaware. He had been thinking about Joubert’s words: Because we owe you, Van Heerden. All of us. He thought about Hope and Carolina de Jager and the influence of the latest events on his plan, and then, beyond the Bosmansdam exit, at about 130, 140 kilometers per hour, the truck in the right lane swung into them. He would only remember the color, a dirty white, big, bigger than an SUV, with a bull bar, overtaking him, that was all he could remember. It struck the Corolla on the right wing and suddenly he was fighting the steering wheel and then they rolled, right over, the deafening noise of metal and glass breaking, and then the car lay on its roof and he hung in the seat belt, the rain on his face and Mzimkhulu’s blood against the front window, and then there was a gun against the side of his head. “Are you alive?” He wanted to turn his head but the muzzle prevented him.

  “Can you hear me?”

  He nodded.

  “You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother. I’ll burn her with a fucking blowtorch, do you hear me?”

  “Bushy,” he said, his voice faraway.

  “You don’t know me, you pig, cunt, leave me alone or I’ll burn her. We should’ve
burned the fucking will a long time ago. Leave me alone or I’ll kill you.” And then the muzzle was no longer against his face, footsteps, he tried to look, saw long hair, long, blond hair, heard the truck leaving, other cars stopping, rain against the Corolla, against his face, tink-tink of metal cooling, the smell of blood and petrol and wet earth, and he shivered, his whole body shook and he knew it was shock and he wanted to unfasten the seat belt but he didn’t know where his hands were.

  He was in the Milnerton MediClinic in a six-bed ward and the woman at administration wanted to know who was going to pay because he didn’t have a medical fund, and he wanted to go home and the doctor didn’t want him to leave because he had to stay for “observation” and until the injection against shock had worked, “perhaps tomorrow morning,” and then White was there and said he was Colonel Brits of the South African National Defence Force and insisted that Van Heerden be moved to a private room and that the state would pay if necessary and put two guards in front of the door and the woman from administration said she wanted a letter of some kind, because the state only paid after a fight, but they moved him to a private ward and the doctor said Brits had to leave him alone, he wasn’t ready to talk, he was going to sleep after the injection, and Brits said it was a matter of urgency and then they were alone, he and Bester “White” Brits, and the man stood next to his bed and said Steven was dead from a head injury and he said he knew, the ambulance men had told him at the scene, and Brits wanted to know how it had happened.

  His own voice was faraway, his tongue slow and clumsy, his head thick. “I don’t know. There was… a truck, we were hit, I —”

  “A truck? What fucking truck, Van Heerden?” And in the wool of his head it registered that he was no longer “sonny-boy,” that the whole tone had changed. Aggression.

  “It happened so fast I couldn’t see.” His words were slowing down even more. “Like a Ford F100, the old pickups, bigger than an SUV. Left-hand drive.” And then he wondered why he had said it because —

  “And then?” Huge impatience.

  “Overtook us, swung into us, hit the nose of the car. Then we rolled.”

  “Fucking Steven. Would never wear a seat belt. And then?”

  Don’t say anything, don’t say anything.

  “Come on, Van Heerden, what then?”

  “Ambulance…”

  “There are eyewitnesses who said a man or a woman with long blond hair ran away from your car, got into a big cream-colored truck, and drove away when they stopped.”

  Don’t say anything. He wanted out, to protect his mother, he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he heard voices, Brits calling his name, others, he heard his mother’s voice, Hope, Nougat O’Grady, forced his attention, his eyes open but could see nothing.

  In the middle of the night he woke and he heard her breathing and looked and saw his mother next to his bed in the dark, moonlight through the window.

  “Ma.” His voice almost inaudible.

  “Yes, my son,” she whispered back.

  “Ma, you must stay here.”

  She took his hand. “I will.”

  For her own protection, he meant. Not for him.

  Her other hand was in his hair, stroking his head. “Sleep. I’m here.”

  His shoulder and neck ached, not excessively painful, the discomfort of stretched muscles. He wanted to ask where Hope and Carolina de Jager were, but he lay still. He’d been eight or nine when he had the high fever, they thought it was meningitis, never really found out what it was, and his mother had sat next to his bed for five days and held his hand and stroked his head and had spoken to him in between the compresses and the medicine and the fever dreams, and he thought now how nothing had changed, it was still only the two of them, and everything had changed and then he slept again.

  36.

  I’m dragging my feet over my story, lingering over the murder of Baby Marnewick because it was my professional coming-of-age, my zenith, my fifteen minutes of fame.

  But also because it was the final chapter in the history of Zatopek van Heerden the Innocent, the Just, the Good. After this I’ll have to begin the prologue to damnation and I hesitate because the mere thought fills me with repugnance—not fear, no longer fear.

  So let me close—but without the suspenseful denouement of a second-rate thriller. The truth was far duller.

  The trail of Victor Reinhardt Simmel reached a dead end in 1980 and I found the reason eventually at Intercontinental Mining Support (or IMS, as it’s known). IMS took over Deutsche Maschine in 1987 but had kept none of the lapsed personnel records. It was an ex-colleague of Simmel’s, at IMS headquarters in Germiston, who supplied me with the information: the Masking Tape Murderer had emigrated to Australia in early 1981.

  “He said it was due to the political situation here.”

  I asked the ex-colleague what he could remember about Simmel. “Not very much. He talked a great deal and he was a liar.”

  I knew it wasn’t the political situation that had made Simmel flee. It was the heat of the murder inquiries. Somewhere in their investigations of the last two or three murders, the police probably came too close. And so I went to Australia, with the permission of the prof and the University of South Africa picking up the tab. We—Superintendent Charley Edwards of Sydney’s Criminal Investigation Bureau and I—went to arrest Victor Reinhardt Simmel in Alice Springs, in the dry, dusty Northern Territory, an unsensational event, an anticlimax. We knocked on the door of his house, asked the short, ugly little man with the powerful shoulders to accompany us, and he came along without demur.

  In an unbearably hot interrogation room, Simmel denied everything. But eventually, after days of fending off and lying, using the distancing mechanism of most serial killers, he said that “the other Victor Reinhardt Simmel, the evil one,” had done terrible things—and told us about his murder trail, which ran through South Africa, Australia, and even Hong Kong.

  I wanted to know about Baby Marnewick and he, the “evil Victor,” could barely remember her. I had to show him the photographs in the yellowing dossier. I had to describe her and remind him how he had followed her from the shopping center, watched her for two days, humiliated and murdered her.

  I looked for absolution in his insanity—and eventually found it. I had to dig for it because ostensibly he was no monster, merely a self-important, unattractive, damaged product of a casual sexual encounter between a slut of a mother who didn’t want him and an unknown father and a lifetime of derision about his background, his height, his acne, and his social status.

  Thirty-seven women. Thirty-seven victims who had to pay the price of his rage. Had to pay the social debt of a community that finds it easier to reject than to accept, that prefers to remain uninvolved.

  You, I, every one of us has a share in those thirty-seven murders. Because we’re bad by omission.

  My absolution had a price.

  And a reward. I was a hero in Australia. ACADEMIC SLEUTH CORNERS SERIAL KILLER was the front-page headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, the first of a storm of newspaper reports, television programs, and radio interviews. And back in South Africa I was the darling of journalists for two long weeks. (But how soon they forget. Only eight years later, with the Wilna van As case, not a single journalist made the connection—not until the end.)

  I cannot deny that I enjoyed every moment of the attention. Suddenly I was someone, I was successful, I was good. Good.

  And if all that still doesn’t jog your memory: Victor Reinhardt Simmel committed suicide before he could be extradited. In a cell in Sydney, he cut his wrists to ribbons with a sharpened table knife. Not with the neat transverse cuts of fiction and the movies but with the demonic lengthwise slashes of reality.

  My life carried on. My life changed. The last great turning point, the prologue to my own downfall, happened two weeks after I had handed in my doctoral thesis. I was in Cape Town to hold a seminar on the profiling of serial killers for Murder and Robbery in those d
rab headquarters in Bellville South. And Colonel Willie Theal, then the officer in command, came to me after the proceedings.

  “Come home,” he said. “Come and work for me.”

  DAY 1

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 12

  37.

  He was awake by five o’clock, his mother still sleeping in the chair next to the bed, and he lay quite still and thought that he hadn’t seen it coming, tried to relive the moments on the N7: the truck next to him, just another vehicle passing, he was driving fast, the truck still faster, and then it swung into him, against the bumper and the right front wheel of the car. Perhaps there was immediate damage, because he had lost control, Lord, the roll was so quick, the disoriented Steve Mzimkhulu hadn’t said a word, didn’t make a sound, only breaking glass and metal on tarmac, rolling, rolling, rolling, and then the Corolla lay on its roof and he hung there and heard the footsteps and the voice of Bushy Schlebusch.

  You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother.

  How did he know?

  We should’ve burned the fucking will a long time ago.

  We…

  It still existed. The document was somewhere, but no one had said anything about a will. Not in the Die Burger copy, not in the follow-ups the previous day, not to MI, not to the American.

  Only he and Hope and Wilna van As and Murder and Robbery.

  Wilna van As.

  Nougat O’Grady had been suspicious of her.

  You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother.

  There was hatred in that voice, pure, intense hatred.

  You have a mother, policeman. Do you hear me? You have a mother.

  How was he going to protect her? How was he going to do his work and protect her against Schlebusch?

  He had followed him in the truck. From the office? For how long had he watched? How had Schlebusch known what he looked like, what kind of car he drove?

  Probably not too difficult to find out if you wanted to.