Death Dealing

by Ian Patrick

  Not his problem, Thabethe thought. Take the money and let them wreak whatever havoc they want. Nothing to do with him.

  12.15.

  Pillay was enjoying the enthusiasm bubbling out of her young companion.

  ‘Omigod, Mavis. What an exciting adventure. So, once you knew your Thando was Philemon Wakashe, what happened next?’

  ‘Well, I thought that the best thing would be to retreat a little and see what I could pull together. So I went back to Greytown and I wrote up everything, and I also did some research focused specifically on Wakashe.’

  ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘I found some really interesting things on him, now that I had his real name. It looks like over the years he did everything he could to avoid having his fingerprints taken. He had been very clever. He had been very stupid, too. As one of the detectives noted in his file, he even tried to burn off his fingerprints at one stage. It seemed as if he knew that once his fingerprints were recorded alongside his real identity it would bring his criminal career to an end. He was so desperate that, according to something I found in one of the files, he broke into a police station one night and stole his own fingerprint records. It was strange. The policeman discovering the burglary said that nothing else had been stolen except for the tray containing all the fingerprints that had been taken on that day. This was before the AFIS link-up, so they still relied on manual fingerprinting at that stage. No-one could prove who actually did it, but there was a note on Wakashe’s file from one detective - almost a joke, really - where he said that nothing could be proved but there were bets going on among the detectives that the person who had stolen the fingerprints was the last man fingerprinted on that day, who had kicked up a big fuss about being fingerprinted, and had to be forcibly fingerprinted - who happened to be Wakashe.’

  ‘How weird. Did he really think…’

  ‘But anyway, Navi, the good thing is that I was able to submit a very detailed report on the whole history of Wakashe to my boss in Greytown. He took it to the SC, and they immediately got two detectives onto the case, and they went hunting for Wakashe.’

  ‘Did they catch the bastard?’

  ‘Three weeks ago he committed another rape in Westville. Because of the work I had handed over, the investigating officers had lots of information and they also had the DNA evidence. They were able to catch him very quickly and they tested his DNA to check the identity, and all the evidence was very clear so they took him into custody. There were some delays in bringing him before a magistrate, but last week bail was refused and he was remanded in custody. He was taken to the prison in Westville on Friday, and will be there until his trial, probably in a few months time.’

  ‘Closed case, Mavis? Now that they’ve got the guy behind bars you can write your dissertation?’

  ‘Yes, Navi. In the last few days I’ve done a lot of planning on how I’m going to use the case history to make points about case management, and all of that. Especially yesterday: I worked the whole day on pulling things together. I’m glad you find the story interesting. I’d be very grateful if you could read through what I write before I submit my first full draft to my supervisor. Will you be able to do that?’

  ‘What a question! Of course. I can’t wait. It sounds like a fantastic project. I suppose Wakashe’s trial will only happen long after you submit your project for examination?’

  ‘I think so. But my supervisor is happy with that. He tells me that one day I might want to do a Master’s Degree and if Wakashe is acquitted or if he escapes again or anything like that, it won’t matter because my project will cover the time only up to and including his arrest.’

  The two friends chuckled as they got up to leave, and Mavis continued.

  ‘My supervisor says I could always add a note in the preface saying that shortly after this research was completed the subject escaped from prison, and the author is now planning the next phase of her research...’

  ‘I’ll be the first to buy the book when it comes out, Mavis. Thanks for coffee, and thanks for a fantastic story. The rest of the weekend is going to be boring by comparison. I’m reading a crime thriller at the moment, but the twists and turns are nowhere near as absorbing as the story about your guy. Maybe you should turn it into a thriller one day.’

  ‘I think I prefer doing the research, Navi. I’ll leave it to you and Jeremy to have the real excitement. I like to do the backroom stuff.’

  ‘OK, Mavis. Well, enjoy what remains of the weekend. It’ll be good to have you back in the office tomorrow.’

  The two friends hugged and went their separate ways.

  22.45.

  Loku and his gang were barely able to stand. There were hundreds of people in the park. All over there were groups of people huddled together, many talking in subdued tones. Others were louder. The occasional guffaw penetrated the night.

  Loku’s group had passed their volume peak and were now much quieter than they had been all day. They had worked out their plans for the two jobs agreed on for the next morning.

  They had passed through different phases with their nyaope straws during the course of the afternoon. They would take more of the drug early in the morning, to fuel what they had to do. For now, they were in the downward phase following their afternoon high. This was the withdrawal stage. They were restless, complaining of aches in various parts of their anatomy. Two of them had diarrhoea, which prompted lewd comments and hideous cackling laughter from the others. One of them had been vomiting and retching continually for the past hour. All of them were experiencing different levels of apprehension and agitation.

  Loku sat down on the grass and shivered, partly as a result of the sudden gust of cold wind that swept through the park, partly because of his anticipation about the morning. He felt a momentary panic, as if he couldn’t go through with the hits planned for the next day. Then he shrugged it off. Another few fixes of whoonga in the morning would inject into him the energy he needed.

  As he contemplated the deeds planned for the morning, he began to feel drowsy. He clutched his pack of whoonga. His next fix would come at dawn.

  4 MONDAY

  08.45.

  Koekemoer and Dippenaar were the first detectives to arrive at the scene in Glenwood. They were driving past the Musgrave Centre when the call from Crime Scene Management was relayed to them. Their car was on the front lawn next to the ambulance when, less than five minutes later, Ryder and Pillay pulled up on the edge of the driveway, having left their meeting at Durban Central as soon as they received the call.

  Ryder saw Nadine Salm and Pauline Soames outside the front door. Pauline was talking to a man carrying a video camera and another with camera, bags, lights and the rest of the paraphernalia. Two uniforms, that Ryder assumed were the first responders who had called it in to CSM, were busy moving the cordons further out, responding to Nadine’s barked orders. A third uniformed woman was down the driveway in the road, erecting another cordon. Medics were rushing in and out from the house to the ambulance.

  KoeksnDips emerged from the front doorway and walked across to Ryder and Pillay, meeting them on the driveway. Dippenaar was ashen. Koekemoer spoke for both of them.

  ‘Yissus, guys. This is a bad one for anyone with children. Nadine allowed us to put our heads in only briefly. She said she needs a few more minutes before the tour. Two dead, the two sons, both teenagers, maybe eighteen or nineteen. Another one, the daughter, maybe following on close behind her brothers. Stab wound in the stomach, among other things: don’t know if she can make it. About fifteen years old. The medics are trying to save her.’

  ‘Pangas and knives,’ added Dippenaar. ‘They left one panga behind. Sixteen inch blade.’

  ‘Anyone else in there?’ Pillay asked.

  ‘Husband and wife,’ replied Koekemoer. ‘In their forties. Shell-shocked, but no injuries except for a big nasty cut on the dad’s head - maybe fractured skull, too - and wounds on their wrists. They were both tied up with nylon rope while the
house was ransacked. The father’s in a trance. Doesn’t hear anything. Doesn’t respond. Conscious, you know, but, like, dead inside, you know? The mother’s just, you know, howling all the time...’

  Ryder could hear. The woman’s cries floated down the passage and bubbled out through the front door in helpless, anguished, tortured spasms. For Ryder it was a sound that echoed down the ages. The horror of mothers from any species that might ever have lived on the planet. A parent trying to deal with the impossible. The death of her young. A sound to chill the blood.

  ‘Gang of four, five, maybe six. They panicked, by the looks of it, when they couldn’t get the family’s car started,’ said Dippenaar, pointing to the BMW 3 Series Gran Turismo at the top of the driveway. ‘They had already loaded stuff into the car, then they couldn’t get it going. So they ran away with nothing but three cell-phones.’

  More sirens. More uniforms. Crowds gathering down in the street. The first journalists arriving.

  Ryder suddenly felt a great weariness. Should he and Fiona have stayed back there in the Thames Valley, all those years ago? In the Emerald Isle? Where death was not by any stretch of the imagination unknown, but where one would struggle to find a family butchered simply for their cell-phones. He thought of his own two teenage sons.

  ‘Nadine’s calling us over, Jeremy.’

  Pillay’s voice brought Ryder out of his deep contemplation and the four detectives walked over to join Nadine Salm, who greeted them grimly.

  ‘One day we’ll be able to meet again under purely social circumstances, detectives. This is not one of those days.’

  ‘Are you playing CSM or technician, today, Nadine?’

  ‘CSM today, Jeremy. No-one else available. Pauline’s busy with the camera guys and the rest of it. I’m running the show. But you know me. I can’t resist getting my hands dirty, too. Shall I walk you through?’

  ‘Please, Nadine.’ Ryder thought she looked tense and nervous in a way he had never previously seen. He had always admired her cool and collected manner, coupled with her devastating perspicacity. This time there was something else happening. She looked drawn and tired and distracted.

  ‘There’s a stack of PPE stuff over there,’ she said to the detectives. ‘Please take no chances. And when we’re inside, please guys, no questions to the parents at this stage. The Police Chaplain is with them, doing his best. Hold on. Give me a minute.’

  Nadine walked off to have a quick word with one of the cameramen. The detectives donned the personal protective equipment while she issued further instructions to the uniformed constables and had a short exchange with Pauline. Then they followed close behind as she led them through.

  ‘I’ve had them mark out one access route only,’ Nadine said. ‘Let’s go.’

  The four detectives had seen their fair share of gruesome crime scenes, but all four of them were distressed by what they now saw, as Nadine pointed out the various features she thought were relevant.

  ‘As I see it, there were six perpetrators. I’ll try and show you as we walk through why I think that is so.’

  She moved down the passageway and paused at the door of the first room on the left.

  ‘This is the worst one. Looks like the two sons were busy in here with a game of Warcraft, and they both had headsets on, so they heard nothing until they were attacked from behind.’

  She entered the room. Blood everywhere. The bodies of the two teenage boys were spread out at grotesque angles. The detectives fanned out behind her, taking care where they placed their feet, adjusting position or leaning in whenever Nadine drew their attention to specifics.

  ‘Two of the perps first clobbered them from behind with heavy instruments. The one boy got it here behind the right ear, and the other was thumped here, right on the cervical curve. The medical guys will tell us whether that blow severed the spinal cord or not. Looks like it to me. Looks like that was the one that killed him. The first lad was out for the count from the blow behind the ear. Mercifully, I suppose. But he probably died from the machete blow to the neck, I would say. See the spurt reaching out as far as the window over there.’

  She pointed to the specific location of the wounds in each case on the bodies of the two young men, and indicated the blood pattern with a jerk of her head. Then she paused, and seemed to stare far into the distance. It was as if she had stepped out of the room, thought Ryder. She was miles away. Her mouth opened, as if she was going to call someone, then changed her mind and paused again, still staring. Then, just as the detectives were beginning to feel restless, she snapped back into the present and continued.

  ‘Why they then had to follow up and repeatedly hack the boys, I don’t know. Both the lads would have been out instantly as a result of the blows. Look at this. This shows the force of the blow, and here, too. So why kill them? Except for reasons of sheer hatred. Now see the panga hacks here and…here. This kind of stuff comes from deep, atavistic anger and hatred. This is not killing for theft. This is killing because of sheer unadulterated hate. Envy, maybe.’

  None of the detectives offered a response, so she continued.

  ‘Now have a look over here and over... there. Looks like they ripped open the drawers in search of something. Nothing specific. Looks quite random. Not a thorough search. Maybe just looking for a random cash bonus to go with their butchery, which seems to have been their main goal. The butchery, I mean. They seemed intent on just killing these kids. Just cutting them to pieces. See that mark there? I’ll be ensuring that we get good photos of that. Some close-ups. Looks like that will give us a good print for the shoes of at least one of the perps. Now see over here. Looks like perp number two left another mark over...here.’

  Blood in abundance on carpets and curtains, and blood on the shoes of the intruders, also in abundance. Nadine traversed the room making more observations about where she thought the perpetrators stood at various moments during the action, and how they had moved. Then she led them on to the next door down the passage, on the right.

  ‘The daughter was in here when they found her.’

  She paused again, and again she drifted off into the distance. The detectives waited. She returned within seconds. The same disappearing act, thought Ryder, that she had undertaken in the previous room. Nadine was definitely distracted.

  ‘You’ll see there was some action before they dragged her down the passage to the third room,’ she continued. ‘She was still kicking and scratching as they took her from here. Have a look at this… and this… and that. This tells us that the guys who grabbed her were not the same guys who dealt with the sons. It also tells us, I think, that there were two guys dealing with her at probably the same time as the action in the boys’ room. See here...and here. The medics are trying to save the girl but I’ve asked them to try and avoid touching her fingernails. If you get a chance to see her before they take her off to the hospital - or to the morgue, as the case may be, depending on how good the medics are - you’ll see that she got a good couple of scratches in. There should be some useful DNA there. If you catch some guys on the run in the next day or two, have a look at their faces and arms to see if there aren’t some useful gouges there from the girl’s fingernails. You’ll see that she has - or had, in some cases where they weren’t broken off - some pretty dangerous talons on her.’

  ‘Did they...’

  ‘No, Dipps, I don’t think so. We’ll only know when the medics do a proper examination of her, but from what I could tell at a quick glance, they didn’t rape her. They damn well tried, but the plucky girl managed to hold them off, I think, from the ultimate...’

  Ryder thought that for a moment Nadine’s manufactured coolness - the defence mechanism she usually invoked to deal with situations like this - slipped ever so slightly as she appeared to choke. She seemed, for a second or two, genuinely distressed. Then she appeared to shrug it off with what he saw as a falsely manufactured cough, and continued in the matter-of-fact manner she had employed until then.

  �
��I think what happened, before they could follow through, is that the dad came thundering in through here. See this? Looks as if he was like a rogue elephant before they brought him down. You’ll see just now, when you meet him, that he has a massive wound on the back of his head. Right at the beginning, before the action in the kids’ rooms, they must have clubbed him with something pretty heavy and then tied him up along with the mother, before they had a go at the children. We can’t get anything intelligible out of the mother yet, but we think, from what our first responder said after he spoke to her, that the husband came around with his hands tied in front of him and when he heard the girl screaming he took off and stopped them before they could rip off the daughter’s clothes. It took four of them to bring him down, even with his hands tied. See here, and over here, and this. It was about then that I think they started to panic. Looks like they grabbed the car keys, started loading some stuff into the car, like laptops and other electronics, and then panicked and decided to scarper with what they could grab. Which was three cell-phones.’

  She led them into the sitting room where the woman had collapsed into the arms of the Police Chaplain and was sobbing, loudly, into his chest. The husband sat on the sofa and stared resolutely straight ahead of him, his focus a mile away. He was silent, and completely immobile.

  Avoiding any direct contact with the man and the woman, and with only a slight nod to the Chaplain, Nadine pointed out various features of the scene in the room, and whispered that the nylon ropes on the floor had been cut off the wrists of both the parents by the first responder, who had then left them where they had fallen.

  She led them through to the room where the medics were working on the girl. It looked hopeless, thought Ryder. The medics looked desperate. One was holding a drip up above her head. Another was talking on his phone to some specialist who was giving advice. A third was fiddling with an oxygen mask. A fourth was trying to deal with the blood. Nadine backed off, ushering her contingent back out of the room. She then motioned for the four detectives to follow her out toward the front of the house. She drew their attention, as they went, to a few more features revealing the movements of the attackers as they had carried their intended booty out to the car, before abandoning the plan and escaping on foot.