by Ian Patrick
‘I know what you mean, Mavis. It’s only when you meet Sibo that you realise that quality in bosses has nothing to do with rank. But I hear on the grapevine that he’s due for promotion very soon. It’s an outrage that he’s still only a captain.’
‘Yes, I agree. Anyway, the SC told me he was pleased with the work I was doing, and they were so understaffed, and I could pop in to ask him any questions, and all of that. So I felt more confident about the work I was doing. Then I began to see something else in the files.’
‘OK, Mavis’ said Pillay. ‘Now you’ve got me excited. I’m thinking you’re going to tell me something sensational.’
‘Well, the main reason I started thinking the criminals I was reading about could have been the same man, is this. I was looking at all the cases that involved some kind of sexual violence. I had to make some summary notes on each of the cases before I logged them onto the system. After a while I started to see a pattern, so I developed a chart for recording different kinds of sexual assault and different methods used by the perpetrators. In many of the cases a couple - always a man and a woman, and usually a very young couple - were hijacked by a man in his late twenties or early thirties working alone, without an accomplice. They were taken by this man to a dark and deserted area where the husband or boyfriend would be tied up and the woman was raped. In all of the cases the man had to watch the woman being assaulted. In all of the cases both the man and the woman were tortured before the woman was violated. Then their bank cards were stolen and used within twenty-four hours before being thrown away. In every case the people who were attacked gave almost exactly the same witness statement. They said the man had demanded the pin number of their bank cards otherwise the woman would be killed. In every case they gave the pin number. And in every case a few hundred rands were drawn out of their accounts - mostly nine hundred rands, and always less than one thousand rands - and then their bank cards disappeared. In each case the thief made one withdrawal and then probably threw away the card.’
‘Bastard. He clearly knew the system, and the typical one thousand rand ceiling.’
‘But, Navi, what happened next was interesting. After I studied closely eight of the files where exactly the same thing had happened, I went to see the Lieutenant Colonel again. I asked him for permission to take the eight files to Forensics in Durban, to see if they could help with finding more links between each of the cases, and he said yes. So I took the files and came down to Durban and saw Nadine and Pauline. I made a special trip down from Greytown to Forensics to see them. Actually, I popped in here on the day I arrived, hoping to see you and the others, but everyone was out on the road.’
‘Yes,’ said Pillay, ‘I remember Piet telling us you had popped in to say hello. We were sorry to have missed you. So what did Nadine and Pauline have to say?’
‘They were very helpful. After I told them my story, and explained some of the things I’d already told them in my phone-call before visiting them – things I had also emailed them about before I arrived – Nadine asked a whole lot of questions and then got that look on her face. You remember, Navi, you once told me that when Nadine or Jeremy started staring out of the window interesting things would begin happening?’
‘I remember. I’ve experienced that quite a few times with both of them.’
‘Well, Nadine told me to wait in the lab and chat to Pauline and she went off. She was away for quite a long time and when she came back she said she had some ideas and she had a pile of six other files in her hands and she asked if I could change my plans to stay in Durban for a couple of days so that I could be with her and Pauline while they did some DNA analysis. Of course I said yes, so I phoned Greytown and they were happy, and I spent two days with Nadine and Pauline. I had sub-let my flat in Musgrave for the three months I was away so I couldn’t sleep there, but they invited me to stay overnight at their place, which is very close to my own flat. It was wonderful to see them working in the laboratory again.’
Mavis grew more excited as she explained the process of investigation and analysis of the eight files and their associated materials, which Nadine Salm had pulled out of the historical samples of DNA profiles from unsolved cases. She had described in detail to Mavis the DNA analyses performed on each of the cases, which suggested to her that the crimes in each instance had been committed by the same man. Pillay’s enthusiastic response to this narrative was then boosted even further when Mavis told her that in addition they had then worked together on the six new files and Nadine had shown that exactly the same DNA profile could also be matched to these six cases.
‘That’s fantastic, Mavis! You mean that your Thando guy can be matched to all fourteen cases?’
‘Exactly. Nadine told me she had gone to look for those six files after I had spoken to her and Pauline – when she was staring out the window – because from what I had told her she said she could remember some similar details about how my eight crimes had been committed. She said the methods in each of those eight cases reminded her of some other cases, going back years. That’s when she went off and spent some time searching for the six files that she could remember.’
‘So what happened then?’
‘Well, Nadine gave me the case numbers for those six extra files. I went back to Greytown and got permission from the Greytown SC, who made some phone calls to introduce me, and then I went out to visit every one of the different stations that had opened those original crime dockets around the province. I went to Kranskop, Msinga, Ematimatolo, Muden, and Mpophomeni in our own cluster, and also to Inanda in another cluster. All of the cases were from years earlier, one going all the way back to 2007, and each one of them had been shelved because the police had been unable to get leads. It was only because Nadine never closes her own copies of files that I was able to find these six old cases. Anyway, once I got the case dockets and went through them I found the same kind of witness statements as I had for my eight files. So now I had Thando involved in fourteen cases. Meanwhile Nadine said she was going to do some more work on the DNA records from the earlier cases.’
‘More work? Didn’t she say she had already solved the problem?’
‘You know her, Navi. Most people would have said that they now had the conclusive proof, but not Nadine. She has to crosscheck and corroborate evidence and nail it down. Anyway, she called me two days later. She was amazing. She was very cross. I didn’t know she could swear like that. I had never before heard half the words she used. She’s a bit like you when you get cross.’
‘Me? Swearing? Foul-mouthed? You must have the wrong person, Mavis. I’m a gentle soul, you know? Deep down. Very deep down.’
‘She said some really bad things about the original investigators who she said had not done their jobs properly. Apparently they hadn’t even followed the requirement to re-assess unsolved cases every six months. She said she had now confirmed the same DNA profile in materials related to every single one of the eight cases I gave her and that she had done exactly the same for the six cases. So we had firm DNA evidence on all fourteen cases.’
‘That Nadine! She’s the best...’
‘Not only that, Navi. She went even further. She said that the stuff she had been looking at in the fourteen files reminded her of some work Forensics had done years back. As far back as 2004. So she went back even further in the files, and did some more work. She found that exactly the same DNA profile was in another set of files from the Amanzimtoti area where the trail had run cold after lengthy investigations and the suspect at the time had just disappeared. But guess what?’
‘What?’
‘After Nadine told me about those six files, and after we had discussed the dates and the places and the methods used in those six cases, and she then told me about Amanzimtoti, I also did some of my own extra work on the Amanzimtoti connection.’
‘What did you find?’
‘I was able to show that the trail ran cold on the Amanzimtoti case at exactly the same time that Thando was sen
t to prison for two years for a burglary.’
‘So he disappeared into the system, right under their noses, for two years.’
‘Exactly, Navi, and even more shocking, it looks as if Thando managed to bribe someone, somewhere in Amanzimtoti, because the fingerprints on the Amanzimtoti docket were not his!’
‘Omigod. You can’t be serious. So the guy was in prison and he was recorded with the wrong fingerprints?’
‘Exactly. See how clever this man is? Anyway, that’s why the investigating officers just ended up shelving the Amanzimtoti file and waiting for something to turn up. It looks like Amanzimtoti and Isipingo and all the stations down there were not even cross-checking their files with other stations to see if anything turned up. Everyone was just too busy, and AFIS hadn’t yet been rolled out to all stations. It was a mess.’
‘Until some bright spark decided to call on Mavis Tshabalala to do some research. Brilliant, Mavis. Nadine must have been thrilled to hear all of this.’
‘She was. But not as thrilled as I was. Now I had everything I wanted on Thando. I went back to Greytown and the SC put out a special alert to hunt for him.’
‘Wait a minute, Mavis. Now you need to tell me. Clearly this guy’s real name wasn’t Thando. So who was it?’
‘I’m coming to that, Navi. But it makes no difference anyway if I tell you the name on each of the eight files, or on each of the other six files, either. There were so many names he used. As I said earlier, he mainly used four aliases. But he also used other names once or twice. So if I said he committed one crime as Vusi Gumede and another as Sipho Mphahlele and another as Sugarboy Modisane, it will mean nothing. We didn’t know which of those names was real and which of them was made up. So think of him as Thando for the moment.’
‘OK. This is intriguing. So tell me more about Thando.’
Mavis Tshabalala was in full flow. Pillay marvelled at how the young constable had grown in confidence over the last few months. Her command of the language had also grown in leaps and bounds, she thought, and her developing expertise seemed enormously impressive.
‘Well, Navi, the next thing that happened was this. I made lots of enquiries and eventually I got some information that this man Thando was living in KwaMashu. The Commander at Greytown let me take a few days off and I stayed with my friend Nonnie in KwaMashu Section K. Then I got a tip that Thando spent a lot of time at the Mabaleng Tavern where they sometimes had hip-hop competitions and he thought he was good at hip-hop. So I went to the tavern a couple of times to see if I could recognise him from the photos and the identikits I had studied.’
‘Did you go alone?’
‘No. Nonnie lent me her brother.’
The two of them chuckled at the thought of someone lending Mavis a man, before she continued.
‘He’s a very nice guy, quite shy, you know, and he was happy to play along with me. I told him we wouldn’t do anything stupid, or try and tackle Thando, but that we would just try and flush him out. So I dressed up - quite sexy, I think…’
‘Oh boy, Mavis. I wish I could have seen this.’
‘…and we went to the Tavern a few times. We were hoping he would come along and see a woman all dressed up with a young man at her side, and maybe try something. But nothing. He wasn’t around. We waited and waited. So I was about to give up when Nonnie, who had come along with me and her brother on the last night, came across all excited to tell me she had found out from the barman that the man who liked to hip-hop was living over in Dada Road. So we went over right away to the address he gave us, and we sat in the car waiting to see if he would appear.’
‘Did he arrive? Was he inside?’
‘No. We waited a long time and then eventually a woman came along. She was very suspicious of us at first. I didn’t think I could tell her that I was with the police, because for one thing I didn’t look like a constable dressed up like that, and anyway I was only an intern.’
‘You could have told her that cops are getting sexier, Mavis.’
‘At first I was thinking maybe she thought I was there to steal away her man, but when I looked more closely I realised that she was much older, and was more likely to be his mother or an aunt, so I said to her that I was – I don’t know, Navi, maybe this was wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say – I took a chance and I told her I was looking for her son because he had made me pregnant.’
‘What? Oh boy, Mavis! What did she do?’
‘Well, you can’t believe it, Navi. She exploded. Not at me. It was all about her son. She shouted and screamed and used every bad word she could think of to describe her son. He was a no-good skabenga. He had never done anything but bring misery to her. Lots of things like that. She shouted and screamed and threw things and said how she had been a good mother and this was how he repaid her. I felt really bad about lying to her, and I was about to come clean and tell her the truth when suddenly she stopped and she asked me which of his ten or twenty names I was using for him.’
‘What? Amazing...’
‘I thought very quickly about all the names I had seen in the file, and I couldn’t think which one I should use so I decided to just pick one I could remember from one of the more recent files, and I told her I was looking for Sugarboy Modisane.’
‘How did she react?’
‘At first, there was hardly any reaction at all, Navi. It was almost as if it didn’t really matter what name he was using because he used a different one every day. She nodded and spat and muttered something. But then suddenly she stopped and she looked at me, and she said that if I was pregnant and was carrying her grandchild then I better at least have her son’s real name.’
‘Great! So she told you? What’s the guy’s real name, Mavis?’
‘She told me her son’s real name was Philemon Wakashe.’
12.10
Loku and his five companions stood in a semi-circle facing Thabethe, Wakashe, Mgwazeni, and the teenager. Thabethe watched them warily. He had a new bicycle spoke neatly stowed in the vertical seam of his trouser-leg. His companions also carried concealed weapons. Thabethe suspected that the teenager carried a pistol, but he wasn’t sure. Certainly, the youthful go-between was cocky and confident and showed no fear.
All six of the new arrivals were thin and wiry and had rheumy eyes and slurred speech. Few knew better than Thabethe the effects of whoonga. Eyes running continuously, permanently bloodshot. Headaches like no other. Stomach cramps, twitches, convulsions, even blackouts at times. Followed by the desire for more. And that desire was so powerful that it could lead to fantasy, hallucination, over-confidence and reckless abandon. Brutal assault, rape, murder. Dare-devil burglaries. Anything to get hold of more of the drug and to experience the sense of strength and power it could provide.
But in this case the men were not going to attempt a snatch and run. They had money. The kind of money that suggested they had enjoyed some recent success. They had hit a house, maybe. Or sold a hijacked car. Or killed someone for significant gain. Or maybe they were just into raids on shops and on individuals in the street. Thabethe was fascinated by the leader of the group. He did all the talking for them. He did so with a matchstick doing breakdance over his lips. It was as if the sliver of wood was alive. On the rare occasions when it was still it was as if the matchstick was simply preparing for a pirouette before leaping off again into a new dance.
The men had the money in abundance and they handed it over without hesitation as soon as they saw the drugs. They took their packs of nyaope, and sauntered off, all of them now talking together excitedly. Even Thabethe was surprised. He had seldom encountered such bravura and boasting and over-the-top braggart behaviour. He knew well the effects of nyaope. On numerous occasions he had felt superhuman strength after a joint. It had fuelled his anger at the world. He had felt on occasion as if nothing could prevent him from achieving his aims. But these were out-of-control juveniles. They were bragging about raping and murdering some rich kids who they despised. They
were going to strip their posh school uniforms from them, and were going to cut them up. They were going to take them apart, in front of their parents, and they needed whoonga to drive them on.
Thabethe was shocked at the level of anger emanating from the man with the matchstick.
‘You know these people you want to kill?’ asked Thabethe.
‘I know them,’ replied Loku, spitting out the surname of the family. ‘I was walking past their school and I seen them come out, and I see their rich father fetching them in his fancy car. He was hooting at me because I’m crossing the road in front of him. So I’m stopping and standing there and watching him and those fancy kids get into the car and I’m swearing. Then I’m asking some other boy from that school what is the name of these people and he is telling me. I’m putting their name in my head and I’m not forgetting. I’m never forgetting someone who does bad things to me. Then the next week I’m walking there somewhere else in Glenwood and what am I seeing? I’m seeing the same car going in by the driveway behind the big fancy gate. Then I’m thinking I’m going to get those guys.’
Thabethe marvelled at the man’s rage. He spat out the name of the family with venom each time he mentioned it to Thabethe. It was as if a simple hooting from a driver – probably only because he had walked right in front of the guy’s car – was being escalated into the turning point of this young man’s life. Rich people. Haves and have-nots. This young man was ready to kill simply because someone else had a fancy car.
But who was Thabethe to be concerned about such matters? They were paying the first price he had offered. Normally he would be prepared to cut back on price to some extent, after a customer haggled a little, but these out-of-control youngsters had no idea of the street value of nyaope. They had obviously used it frequently and were prepared to pay whatever it took to have more. From what they had to say, it sounded as if they intended to balance the cost of the drug by harvesting rich rewards from a break-in to the wealthy father’s home in Glenwood.