Devil's Peak bg-1

by Deon Meyer

  “I’m with you, Prof.”

  “It’s the classical assegai, nothing else approaches that description. Not even a sword wound. Sword wounds are naturally very rare, I think I have seen two in my life. Swords have a much wider exit wound and the wound widths are much more uniform. But that is not the only difference. The results of the chemical analysis produced a few surprises. Microscopic quantities of ash, animal fats and a few compounds we could not identify at first, but had to go through the tables. It appeared it was Cobra. You know, the polish people use to shine their floors. Animal fats were of bovine origin. You don’t find that on swords. I began to look around, Nikita, as it has been a long time since we had an assegai, one tends to forget. Let’s go to my office, the notes are there. Something different about you. Wait, let me guess . . .” Pagel went ahead to his office.

  Griessel looked down at his clothes. Everything was as usual, he couldn’t see anything different.

  “Sit, dear fellow, and let me get my story straight.” He removed a black lever-arch file from the shelf and paged through it.

  “The ash. They use it to polish the blade, the blacksmiths. I suppose they are assegai smiths as they only make those. Ancient method, they used it to polish Cape silver in the old days, sometimes you see pieces in the antique shops, the wear is distinctive. This tells us the assegai was made in the traditional way. But we will come back to that. The same applies to the beef lard and the Cobra polish. That is not for the blade but for the shaft. The Zulus use it to treat the wood, to make it smooth and shiny. To preserve the wood and prevent warping.

  “All very well, you will say, but that isn’t much help in catching the fellow—with Cobra polish? I made some calls, Nikita, I have some friends in the curio business. They say there are three kinds of assegai on the market today. The ones we can ignore are the ones they sell at the flea market on Greenmarket Square. Those come from the north, some from as far away as Malawi and Zambia—poor workmanship, with short, thin blades and metal shafts and lots of African baroque wirework. They are made for the tourists and are replicas of some or other ritual assegais of various African cultures.

  “The second kind is the so-called antique or historical spear or assegai—either the short stabbing assegai or the long throwing spear. Both have blades which match our wound profile, but there is one major difference: the antique assegai blade is pitch black from ox-, sheep’s or goat’s blood, as the Zulus use it for slaughtering. To kill the animal. The ash residue will also be visible under the microscope in much greater quantities. Do you know, Nikita, they sell the old assegais for five or six thousand apiece? Up to ten thousand if there is good evidence of age.

  “But none of your victims had traces of animal blood, which means your assegai is either antique but very well cleaned, or it is one of the third kind: exactly the same form and manufacture as the antiques, but recently made. And the rust tells us it is the latter. I asked them to look for oxidation deposits in the wound under the spectrometer and there were practically none. No rust, no age. Your assegai has been made in the last three or four years, more likely in the last eighteen months.

  “Oh, and one more thing: I suspect the assegai is not thoroughly cleaned after every murder. We found traces of the first two victims’ blood and DNA in Laurens’s wound. Which means it is the same weapon and most likely the same murderer.”

  There went his theory that Bothma had been involved with the murder of Laurens. He nodded at Pagel.

  “The thing is, Nikita, there are not many people making traditional assegais anymore. Demand is small. The craft mostly survives in the rural areas of KwaZulu where the traditions are still practiced and they still slaughter oxen in the old way. Where they still use beef lard for the shafts and buy Cobra to polish their

  stoeps.

  I also don’t believe we are dealing with the long throwing spear. The entry angle of the wound is not high enough. I think this is a stabbing assegai, made by a blacksmith somewhere on the Makathini plains, in the past year. Naturally the question is, how on earth did it get from there to here, in the hands of a man who has a bone to pick with people who do harm to children? An odd choice of weapon.”

  “A man, Prof?”

  “I believe so. It’s the depth of the wound. To push an assegai through a breastbone is not so hard, but to thrust one right through the body, breaking a rib on the way and protruding four or five centimeters out the back takes a lot of power, Nikita. Or a lot of rage or adrenaline, but if it is a woman, she is an Amazon.”

  “It’s a good choice of weapon, Prof. Quiet. Efficient. You can’t trace it like a firearm.”

  “But even the assegai is not small, Nikita. Meter and a half, maybe longer.”

  Griessel nodded. “The question is: why an assegai? Why not a big hunting knife or a bayonet? If you want to stab there is plenty of equipment.”

  “Unless you want to make a statement.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too, but what fucking statement? What are you saying? I am a Zulu and I love children?”

  “Or maybe you want the police to think you are a Zulu while all the time you are a Boer from Brackenfell.”

  “Or you want to attract attention to your cause.”

  “You can’t deny, Nikita, that it’s a good cause. My first impulse is to let him go his way.”

  “No, fuck, Prof, I can’t agree with that.”

  “Come on, you must admit his cause has merit.”

  “Merit, Prof? Where’s the merit?”

  “Much as I believe in the justice system, it is not perfect, Nikita. And he fills an interesting gap. Or gaps. Don’t you think there are a few people out there who will think twice before they hurt their children?”

  “Prof, child abusers are lower than lobster shit. And every one I ever arrested I felt like killing with a blunt instrument. But that’s not the point. The point is, where do you draw the line? Do you kill everyone that can’t be rehabilitated? Psychopaths? Drug addicts who steal cell phones? A Seven-Eleven owner who grabs his forty-four Magnum because a manic-depressive kleptomaniac steals a tin of sardines? Does his cause have merit too? Shit, Prof, not even the psychiatrists can agree on who can be rehabilitated or not; everyone has a different story in court. And now we want every Tom, Dick and Harry with an assegai to make that call? And this whole thing about the death penalty . . . Suddenly everyone wants it back. Between you and me, I am not by definition against the death penalty. I have put fuckers away who more than deserved that. But about one thing I can’t argue, it was never a deterrent. They murdered just as much in the old days, when they were hanged or fried in the chair. So, I see no merit in it.”

  “Powerful argument.”

  “Chaos, Prof. If we allow bush justice. It’s just the first step to chaos.”

  “You’re sober, Benny.”

  “Prof?”

  “That’s what’s different about you. You’re sober. How long?”

  “A few days, Prof.”

  “Good heavens, Nikita, it’s like a voice from the past.”

  26.

  Before he reached his car, Jamie Keyter phoned to report, and without thinking Griessel said, “Meet me at the Fireman’s.” As he drove down Albert Street in the direction of the city his thoughts were on assegais and murders and the merits of a vigilante.

  “Powerful argument,” the prof had said, but where had it all come from? He hadn’t stopped to think. Just talked. He could swear a part of him had listened in amazement to his argument and thought, “What the fuck?”

  Suddenly he was this great crime philosopher. Since when?

  Since he had given up the booze. Since then.

  It was like someone had adjusted the focus so he could see the past five or six years more clearly. Was it possible to have stopped thinking for so long? Stopped analyzing things? Had he done his work mechanically, by rote, according to the rules and the dictates of the law? Crime scene, case file, footwork, information, handing over, testimony, done. Alcohol was like a golden haze over everything, his buffer against thought.

  What
he was now and the way he thought, wasn’t how it had been in the beginning. In the beginning he had operated in terms of “us” and “them,” two opposites, two separate groups on either side of the law, sure in his belief that there was a definite difference, a dividing line. For whatever reason. Genetic, perhaps, or psychological, but that was how it was; some people were criminals and some were not and it was his job to purify society of the former group. Not an impossible task, just a huge one. But straightforward mostly. Identify, arrest and remove.

  Now, on this end of the alcohol tunnel, in his rediscovered sobriety, he realized he no longer believed in that.

  He now knew everyone had it in them. Crime lay quiescent in everyone, a hibernating serpent in the subconscious. In the heat of avarice, jealousy, hatred, revenge, fear, it reared up and struck. If it never happened to you, consider it luck. Lucky if your path through life detoured around trouble so that when you reached the end and the worst you had done was steal paperclips from work.

  That was why he had told Pagel that a collective line must be drawn. There had to be a system. Order, not chaos. You couldn’t trust an individual to determine justice and apply it. No one was pure, no one was objective, no one was immune.

  Albert Street became New Market became Strand and he wondered when he had begun thinking like that. When had he passed the turning point? Was it a process of disillusionment? Seeing colleagues who had given in to temptation, or pillars of the community that he had led away in handcuffs? Or was it his own fall? Discovery of his own weaknesses. The first time he had realized he was drunk at work and could get away with it? Or when he raised his hand to Anna?

  It didn’t matter.

  How do you catch a vigilante? That mattered.

  Murder equals motive. What was the assegai man’s? The why?

  Was there even a simple motive here? Or was he like a serial killer, motive hidden somewhere in the short circuits of faulty neural wiring? So that there was fuck-all, no spoor leading to a source, no strand you could twiddle with and tug on until a bit came loose and you get hold of it and start unraveling.

  With a serial murderer you had to wait. Examine every victim and every murder scene. Build a profile and place every bit of evidence alongside the rest and wait for a picture to form, hoping it would make sense, hoping it would reflect reality. Wait for him to make a mistake. Wait for his self-confidence to bloom and for him to become careless and leave a tire track or a smear of semen or a fingerprint. Or you were just lucky and overheard two nurses chatting about supermarkets. You took a big gamble and the very first Friday you put out the bait, hit the jackpot.

  In the old days they used to talk about Benny’s Luck, shaking their heads: “Jissis, Benny, you’re so fuckin’ lucky, my friend,” and it would make him fed up. He was never “lucky”—he had instinct. And the courage to follow it. And in those days he had been given the freedom to do so. “Carry on, Benny,” his first Murder and Robbery CO, Colonel Willie Theal, had said. “It’s the results that count.” Skinny Willie Theal, of whom the late fat Sergeant Nougat O’Grady had said: “There but for the grace of God, goes Anorexia.” In those days the Criminal Procedure Act was a vague sort of guideline that they used as it suited them. Now O’Grady was buried and Willie Theal in Prince Albert with lung cancer and a police pension and if you didn’t read a scumbag his rights before you arrested him they threw the fucking case out of court.

  But it was part of the system and the system created order and that was good; if only he could create order in his life, too. That ought to be easy, as the Criminal Procedure Act of the alcoholic was the Twelve Steps.

  Fuck. Why couldn’t he just follow it blindly? Why couldn’t he become a disciple without thinking, without a feeling of despair in the pit of his stomach when he read the Second Step which said you must believe that a Power greater than yourself is going to heal your drinking madness?

  He turned right in Buitengracht, found parking, got out and walked in the early evening to the neon sign:

  Fireman’s Arms.

  The southeaster plucked at his clothes as if trying to hold him back, but he was through the door and the tavern opened up before him, the safe, warm heart, musty with the smell of cigarette smoke and beer that had been spilt drop by drop on the carpet over the years. Camaraderie in the bowed shoulders hunched over glasses, television in the corner showing the Super Sport cricket highlights. He stood still a moment, allowing the atmosphere to settle over him.

  Homecoming. He felt the yearning to sit at the wooden bar counter with its multitude of stains. The yearning to order a brandy and Coke. To settle in for the first deep draught and feel the synapses in his brain tingle with pleasure and the warmth glide through him. Just one drink, his head said to him, and then he fled, banged open the door and strode out. A tremor traveled through his body, because he knew that chorus: just one drink. He walked hastily to his car. He had to get in and lock the door and leave. Now.

  His phone rang. He gripped it in a hand already shaking. “Griessel.”

  “Benny, it’s Matt.”

  “Jissis.” Out of breath.

  “What?”

  “Good timing.”

  “Oh?”

  “I . . . uh . . . I was just on my way home.”

  “I am at the provincial commissioner’s office. Could you come by here?” His tone of voice said: Don’t ask, I can’t talk now.

  “Caledon Square?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there now.”

  He phoned Keyter and said something had come up.

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Benny.”

  * * *

  There were four people in the commissioner’s office. Griessel only knew three of them—the provincial commissioner himself, head of investigations, John Afrika, and Matt Joubert.

  “Inspector, my name is Lenny le Grange and I am a member of Parliament,” said the fourth with an outstretched hand. Griessel shook it. Le Grange had on a dark blue suit and bright red tie like a thermometer. His grip was cool and bony.

  “I am truly sorry to bother you at this time of the evening—I hear you’ve had a long day. Please sit down; we won’t detain you long. How is the investigation proceeding?”

  “As well as can be expected,” he said, glancing at Joubert for help.

  “Inspector Griessel is still familiarizing himself with the case files,” said Joubert as they all found places around the commissioner’s round conference table.

  “Naturally. Inspector, let me go straight to the point. I have the dubious privilege to be the chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee of Justice and Political Development. As you may have gathered from the media, we are busy developing a new Sexual Offenses Bill.”

  Griessel had gleaned nothing from the media. But he nodded.

  “Very good. Part of the bill is a proposed Register of Sexual Offenders, a list of names of everyone who has been convicted of a sexual offense—rapists, sex with minors, you name it. Our recommendation is that the register be made available to the public. For instance, we want to prevent parents handing their child over to a pedophile when they enroll the child in a crčche.

  “To be honest, this aspect of the new bill is controversial. There are people who say it is a contravention of the constitutional right to privacy. It is one of those cases that create division across party lines. At this stage it looks as if we are going to push the bill through, but our majority is not large. I am sure you’re beginning to understand why I’m here.”

  “I understand,” said Griessel.

  The MP took a white sheet of paper from his jacket pocket.

  “Just to make matters more interesting, I would like to read an extract from

  Die Burger

  of two weeks ago. I gave a press conference and they quoted me thus:

  ‘If there are consequences for the sexual offender, such as vigilante attacks on him or inability to find work, then let it be so. A sexual offender forfeits the right to privacy. The right to privacy is
not more important than a woman or child’s right to physical integrity,’ the chairman of Portfolio Committee for Justice and Political Development, Advocate Lenny le Grange, said yesterday.”

  Le Grange looked pointedly at Griessel. “Me and my big mouth, Inspector. One says these things because one believes with such passion that our women and children must be protected. One says it out of reaction to what one perceives as far-fetched scare stories dreamt up by the Opposition. I mean, a vigilante . . . Perhaps I thought it would never happen. Or if it did happen, it would be an isolated incident where the police would rapidly step in and make an arrest. One never foresees . . . not what is going on at the moment.”

  Le Grange leaned over the table. “They are going to make me eat my words. But that goes with the job. It’s the risk I run. I don’t care about that. But I do care about the bill. That’s why I am asking you to stop this vigilantism. So we can protect our women and children.”