Death Dealing

by Ian Patrick

  As they prepared for bed there were pockets of silence, with both of them deep in thought. Pauline’s thoughts were all about Nadine’s distraction. Nadine’s thoughts were eclectic. They roved across different cases, different time frames, and different people. Every now and then the image of the young Khuzwayo girl loomed large, and Nadine would force the thought away by consciously focusing on something else. Eventually they got into bed, and Nadine accepted the whisky-laden hot toddy that Pauline insisted she should drink in order to get a good night’s sleep.

  They read largely in silence until Nadine began to doze. Pauline continued reading, watching her from time to time. Eventually she turned on her side, away from her partner. She angled the light slightly to take it off Nadine’s face and to favour her side of the bed, and continued reading. Nadine turned with her into their favourite spoons position. Her breathing settled into a steady rhythm and the whisky started having some impact.

  Nadine’s thoughts meandered to bring into focus the dreadful drowning she had had to deal with two weeks previously. A young woman in her early twenties, found at Brighton Beach many hours after it was reported that she had gone swimming, alone, in the rain. Nadine’s careful work on the corpse had thrown up some anomalies. Within twenty-four hours the boyfriend had been arrested and had confessed to the murder. As she thought back on the young woman’s body, bloated and lifeless, she started clenching her jaws. She consciously fought against it. Dentist’s instructions, she had told Pauline. Stop grinding your teeth. Wear this plastic bite plate. She never did.

  Nadine’s thoughts drifted from Brighton Beach to Umbilo, the scene of last month’s brutal killing of an old woman. She had been beaten to death with an iron bar. The perpetrator escaped with nothing more than a cell-phone and less than a hundred rands in cash. The headlines ran for three days. Brutal thugs slaughter eighty-year old woman. Crime out of control. Citizens no longer safe in their own homes. The story faded when Nadine and Pauline, working all weekend, finally connected the forensics to the grandson. The new headline Man slays own grandmother lasted no more than one day.

  ‘You’re grinding your teeth again,’ said Pauline, her back still turned.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Your teeth.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She snuggled down further into the warmth of Pauline’s back and pushed the murdering grandson from her thoughts. But she soon found herself back thinking about Brighton Beach, so she consciously forced her thoughts back to her laboratory.

  The images she saw there were all pinned to the notice board in her office. Photographs. Wounds. Charts recording Blood Spatter Analysis. Notes on Gunshot Residue. A piece of bone from a human body. From the left scapula of a young teenage girl. She imagined herself sitting at her desk. She found herself staring out of the window in her office. Someone was crying outside in the street. A young man. She stared at the pile of cases stacked on top of one another at the far left-hand corner of her desk. She watched as the pile started tipping. She marvelled as she watched them, one at a time, cascade to the floor. The crying in the street got louder. Now there were two young men, both crying. Then a woman wailing in the distance. A mother, running toward the two young men, trying to comfort them. A police siren. Then suddenly the door burst open and there were the two young men, their mother right behind them. All three of them charged over to Nadine. It was the Khuzwayo boys. They were bleeding. Their mother was trying to stop the bleeding. She had a towel in her hand. She screamed at Nadine to come and help her stop the bleeding. Nadine couldn’t move. The police siren was getting louder.

  Nadine sat up, panting. Where was the siren? Where was Pauline? Why had the siren been cut off?

  Her heart was pounding. She was breathless. She realised immediately that it wasn’t a siren. Pauline had taken the call on her iPhone and had moved rapidly through to the bathroom in an effort to avoid disturbing her. Now she returned.

  ‘Can you believe it? Stupid idiot! Wrong number, at this time of… Nadine? What’s wrong?’

  Nadine was staring into nothingness. She was panting as if she’d run a hundred metres. Then she started wailing: a deeply disturbing, frightening sound. It seemed to emanate from deep down in her torso. Pauline was terrified. The sound was that of a wounded animal. It wasn’t Nadine’s voice. It was an anguished howl that seemed to reach upward and outward, aimed at nothing in particular. Aimed at the void that Nadine felt was enveloping her on all sides. Pauline had been ten years old when she first saw a film about exorcism. It had shaken and disturbed her, and she had had nightmares about it for some time. The horror she now experienced as she watched her beloved Nadine was equivalent to what the ten-year old had experienced.

  The two women froze as they stood watching each other, one trembling wildly in traumatic shock and wailing out aloud, and the other struck rigid, silent, in helpless immobility.

  01.15.

  The Ryders were shocked out of a deep sleep by the sound of Jeremy’s iPhone. Both of them sat up instantly as he snatched the instrument.

  ‘Hullo? Ryder. Who’s that?’

  ‘Jeremy? I’m sorry. I didn’t want to… it’s Pauline Soames.’

  ‘Pauline? What’s wrong, Pauline. What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m so sorry to call so late…’

  ‘It’s not a problem, Pauline. Tell me. Is it Nadine? What’s happened?’

  Fiona, shocked at what he had just said, leaned in to eavesdrop on the conversation. Ryder opened the face of the iPhone to enable her to hear, and they were both instantly distressed at what Pauline said next, through a flood of tears.

  ‘Nadine’s behaving… I don’t know what to do, Jeremy. I didn’t know who else to call… I think she’s having a breakdown. She’s been strange all night. She’s incoherent. She’s talking about the Khuzwayo girl. I can’t…’

  ‘I’m on my way, Pauline. Where are you? I don’t know where the two of you…’

  ‘We’re on the Berea, Jeremy. Just past the Musgrave Centre…’

  She blurted out the address, barely coherent, and Ryder told her he would be there in ten minutes. He hung up and both he and Fiona tore around the room getting him ready. She pulled out clothes for him to wear while he quickly rushed through to splash water on his hair and face. Within minutes he was dashing downstairs, tucking in his shirt as he went, with Fiona calling out after him.

  ‘Call me as soon as you can. If she needs to get to a hospital, I’ll set it all up…’

  ‘Don’t do anything till I call. It sounds as if she’s hit a wall. Too much of the stuff she has to do every day of her life. Looks like the Khuzwayo murders were a bridge too far. I thought she was… I’ll call. Don’t do anything till you hear from me.’

  He was gone. Fiona heard the Camry roar out of the driveway and up the road. She paused for a moment. Then she decided to ignore his advice and call the hospital.

  *

  Pauline opened the door and Ryder followed her down the passage to the bedroom. She had recovered sufficiently to tell him that Nadine had woken her up in a flood of tears, speaking incoherently about the Khuzwayo girl. As they entered the bedroom he saw instantly that Nadine Salm’s legendary cool and calm control had completely evaporated.

  She wailed in a high-pitched voice as she saw Ryder and collapsed into his arms. Her voice sounded so tortured that Ryder thought she was straining her vocal chords to breaking point. He held her tightly and let her do what she needed to do. Meanwhile Pauline was on the phone. Fiona had called just as Ryder entered the bedroom and within a minute she was giving Pauline clear and precise advice. She had called the hospital, negotiated her way past the first two sleepy officials, and very quickly found herself in contact with the right person.

  Ryder, in trying to comfort Nadine, immediately encountered all the signs he had once heard someone talking about over some dinner, but to which he had paid scant attention at the time: clammy hands, irregular heartbeat, trembling, dizziness, exhaustion, tensed muscles, rem
ote, inconsolable. Not the person he knew. Nadine seemed to be a textbook case of those symptoms, every one of them. For the first time in a long time Ryder felt completely helpless, unable to decide what to do.

  Pauline came to his rescue, and with her words he immediately thought how idiotic he had been to tell his wife to do nothing till he called. Fiona was the one that should be giving the lead in this, not him. No-one was more decisive than her in situations like this.

  ‘Fiona has been in touch with the hospital, Jeremy. She’s arranged for an ambulance. She says they’re on their way.’

  Ryder relaxed slightly, still holding Nadine in his arms as she began to babble.

  ‘I haven’t watered the plants, Jeremy. The plants are dry. I have to get the plants. But the watering can has a hole. The water spews out of it all the time. I need to… I need to find something else. I can’t hold back the blood. It keeps on leaking. It leaks everywhere. I’ve tried so hard. So hard…’

  The wailing started up again. Both Ryder and Pauline tried to soothe her. Pauline was also in tears. She tried her best, but Nadine buried her face into Ryder’s chest and clawed at his shoulders as she wailed.

  Ryder needed Fiona. He couldn’t handle this without her.

  08.05.

  Thabethe and his two companions woke up for once on proper mattresses. After spending the previous two nights in the bush on different beaches on the north coast, last night they had had a stroke of good fortune. They struck a deal with two men who were short on cash but desperate for whoonga. The consequence was a significantly reduced rate for the drugs they had given the two men, and a night’s accommodation in return, in a flat in Victor Lane, Greyville, right next to the racecourse.

  The two men had smoked the drug voraciously, and then vomited extensively during the night. The signs of their accompanying diarrhoea were evident in the bathroom. They were now unconscious, and their three guests roamed freely through their apartment.

  Mgwazeni very soon filled in the gap in income as a consequence of the lower price paid for the drugs: he helped himself to an expensive leather jacket, probably stolen but nevertheless now belonging to him, he told his companions. Wakashe changed his own battered tennis shoes for a good pair of almost-new lace-up black leather shoes, removed from the feet of one of the comatose hosts. Mgwazeni helped him tie the laces and put on a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt to disguise the plaster casts. Thabethe searched a chest of drawers and took out a brand new pay-as-you-go Apple iPhone 5s still in its box along with a conveniently placed contract and simcard. All ready and waiting for a new owner, he said with a snigger to his companions. He set up the instrument, connected the power for some rapid charging, and the three friends ransacked the kitchen for a better breakfast than they had enjoyed for some time.

  An hour later, with their hosts still fast asleep, the three men left the apartment and made their way on foot down to the centre of Durban, where at eleven a.m. Thabethe was to meet a contact who was a go-between for a new supply of nyaope. As they walked, Thabethe made a few calls on his new phone.

  08.35.

  Piet Cronje took a call from Fiona Ryder. She told him she was about to leave the hospital to take Pauline home. Pauline had agreed that the team should know what had happened to Nadine. Better to have the facts out there rather than start rumours.

  ‘Pauline asked if I would make the calls, Piet. Jeremy was with us until about five-thirty but then one of us had to go and sort out the children and the dog, so we agreed I would stay with Nadine and Pauline at the hospital until we knew what was happening. Has Jeremy been in yet?’

  ‘Yes, Fiona, he came in normal time, mentioned it to me very briefly, but then had to leave quickly to get to the meeting at Durban North.’

  ‘Yes, he told me about that appointment. If he calls you before he calls me, please tell him Nadine has been admitted and all the tests are complete, there’s further observation necessary but the doctors are happy so far, and Pauline is fine.’

  It had been a tough six or seven hours, but when they eventually saw Nadine the doctors had been brilliant, Fiona told him. She asked him to pass on the news to the rest of the team, too. She then drove Pauline back to her apartment, they had a coffee together, and Fiona drove home to change and then get in to work.

  During the drive home she thought through the many instances of high drama that she and Jeremy had had to endure over the years. Good friends being traumatised. Good cops being killed. Injuries. Near-death escapes. The fraught lives of people working in the criminal justice system. The comparative calm of her own office in the company of some of the top architects in the province.

  The most traumatic thing that had happened in her office all week was a struggle with the CAD/CAM software that had developed a glitch.

  She paused at a red light as she came off the highway, and stared vacantly at the graffiti on the underpass. To live and die in Durban. Wise-ass kids. What do they know?

  11.10.

  While Thabethe sat in a car concluding his purchase of a large parcel of nyaope, Mgwazeni and Wakashe stood back in the shelter of a doorway in Mahatma Gandhi Road, which Wakashe resolutely insisted on calling by its long-standing common-usage colonial name, Point Road.

  ‘Eish! This is all causing me confusions, these new names for streets. What’s wrong with Point Road? Why do they want to name streets after amaNdiya?’

  ‘Politics,’ Mgwazeni replied, ‘all politics.’

  They watched as Thabethe left the car and headed toward them, while the driver pulled out into the traffic. Thabethe was carrying a bundle the size of a small shoe-box, and was grinning.

  ‘Good price,’ comrades. ‘This guy knows me well. He says he will sell to me any day because he knows me. He told me some bad stories about under-cover cops. He trusts nobody. Except me.’

  ‘Good one, Skhura,’ said Mgwazeni. ‘That guy, he has some strong supplies?’

  ‘Big supplies. He was telling me the stuff comes from Swaziland. They have a good system. They can bring in lots and lots of the stuff. No problem.’

  ‘How much you pay him, Skhura?’ asked Wakashe.

  ‘Cheap, bra. Cheap. Don’t worry. We will make three times the price.’

  Mgwazeni thought Wakashe still had some learning to do. Don’t ask Skhura anything about price. He gets nervous when guys start asking those questions. He had got to know Thabethe well during the three months they had spent in prison, and one of the lessons was never ever to question Thabethe on price. Just trust the guy. He won’t let you down. But don’t ask too many questions. Mgwazeni resolved to take Wakashe aside sometime soon and talk to him about this.

  Wakashe picked up the lesson without Mgwazeni having to tell him. There was something in Thabethe’s response, he thought. It carried an implied warning that the price was something he would worry about and to which his two friends should not give another thought.

  ‘But that guy told me one other thing, too,’ said Thabethe.

  ‘What, Skhura? What was he saying?’ said Mgwazeni.

  ‘He was telling me there’s a big police plan going on from tomorrow night until Friday night in Durban. They are doing raids tomorrow and Friday all over the clubs and taverns in Durban. They got plain-clothes cops and impimpis and everyone working for two nights. Operation something. Some name I forget. I don’t know. But the guy tells me we shouldn’t try and sell the stuff for two days. Saturday it will be finished. But for two nights, Thursday and Friday, he says we better stay away from the places in Durban.’

  ‘Shit. Is bad,’ said Mgwazeni. ‘We were going to do those clubs…’

  ‘Wait, friends,’ said Wakashe. ‘Wait. If we stay away from Durban tomorrow night then we can go back there near my mother’s place. Tomorrow night is good. Thursday nights there at Mabaleng Tavern. You know that place, Skhura?’

  ‘Mabaleng’s? I know it well, bra. I know it very well.’

  ‘Good. That one, you know there they do hip-hop and stuff and they bring
in lots of guys. Especially on Thursdays. Business is good. We can stay away from the Durban places tomorrow and then maybe again on Friday.’

  This made sense to the other two. They considered the extra possibility that they might stay over again at Wakashe’s mother’s place, which was very near to Mabaleng’s, but after discussion they dismissed that. The police might have discovered the vehicle they had stolen and that might lead to investigations. They resolved that they would head out to Mabaleng’s later on Thursday night, but that after concluding their business there they would come back to the city.

  11.25.

  With the Captain still out at his meeting, they were gathered around the desk in his office. Ryder was looking through the photographs that had been taken by security cameras at various ATMs. Pillay, Tshabalala, Koekemoer and Dippenaar were looking over his shoulder.

  ‘He’s a clever bastard, Jeremy. Not one of the photos catches him full on.’

  ‘’You’re right, Dipps. This one here is about as close as it gets. Maybe he lost concentration this time and didn’t stand back far enough, or maybe the camera was located in a different place, but those are his eyes.’

  ‘No question,’ added Koekemoer. ‘Only Satan and Thabethe have got eyes like that. And Dipps, after a brandy and coke. Jirra, what an evil bastard. You ever met a guy as bad as this, Mavis?’

  ‘Sorry, Detective Koeks, what was that?’ replied Mavis.

  ‘Okes like Thabethe. You ever run into a guy like this in the township?’

  ‘No, Koeks, only in the city. I don’t live in any township. I live in Musgrave.’

  Ryder and Pillay exchanged a glance as they saw Koekemoer walking right into it.