Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  Then all his fuel was burnt and he leaned against the car, his head on his chest.

  “I am still fucking here.”

  “Hey!” shouted Swart Piet from the trees.

  “Benny,” said Joubert softly.

  He looked up slowly. “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Hey!”

  As he walked around to the other door, the man’s voice carried clear and shrill: “Hey, you! Fuck you!”

  8.

  Your father abused you,” said the minister with certainty.

  “No,” she said. “Lots of call girls say that. The stepfather messed with me. Or the mother’s boyfriend. Or the father. I can’t say that. That was not his problem.”

  She checked for disappointment in his face but there was none to see.

  “Do you know what I would wish for if I had only one wish? To know what happened to him. I wonder about that a lot. What did he see to make him change? I know it happened on the Border. I know more or less which year, I worked it out. Somewhere in South West Africa or Angola. But what?

  “If only I could remember more of how he was before. But I can’t. I only remember the bad times. I think he was always a serious man. And quiet. He must have . . . They didn’t all come back from the Border like that, so he must have been a certain kind of person. He must have had the . . . what is the word?”

  “Tendency?”

  “Yes. He must have had the tendency.”

  She searched for something for her hands to do. She leaned forward and took the sugar spoon out of the white porcelain pot. It had a municipal coat of arms on the end of the curved handle. She rubbed the metal with the cushion of her thumb, feeling the indentations.

  “The school held a fête every year. On a Friday in October. In the afternoon there were Boeresport games and in the evening there were stalls. Tombola and target shooting. Braaivleis. Everyone would go, the whole town. After the games you would go home and dress up nicely — for the evening. I was fourteen. I borrowed some make-up from Lenie Heysteck and I bought my first pair of jeans with my savings. I had a sky-blue blouse on and my hair was long and I think I looked pretty. I sat in front of the mirror in my room that evening, putting on mascara and eyeshadow to match my blouse, and my lips were red. Maybe I used too much make-up, because I was still stupid, but I felt so pretty. That is something men don’t understand. Feeling pretty.

  “What if I had taken my black handbag, walked into the sitting room and he had said, ‘You look beautiful, Christine.’ What if he had stood up, taken my hand and said, ‘May I have this dance, Princess?’”

  She pressed the curve of the sugar spoon against her mouth. She felt the old and familiar emotion.

  “That is not what happened,” said the minister.

  “No,” she said. “That is not what happened.”

  Thobela had memorized the address of Khoza’s brother in Khayelitsha, but he didn’t drive there directly. On the spur of the moment he left his original route two off ramps west of the airport and drove into Guguletu. He went looking for the little house he had lived in with Miriam and Pakamile. He parked across the street and switched off the engine.

  The little garden that he and the boy had nurtured with so much care and effort and water in the sand of the Cape Flats was faded in the late summer. There were different curtains in the windows of the front room.

  He and Miriam had slept in that room.

  Down the street, childish voices shrieked. He looked and saw boys playing soccer, shirt-tails hanging out, socks around their ankles. Again, he remembered how Pakamile used to wait for him every afternoon on that street corner from about half-past five. Thobela used to ride a Honda Benly, one of those indestructible little motorbikes that made him look like a daddy-long-legs on it, and the boy’s face would light up when he came around the corner and then he would run, racing the motorbike the last hundred meters to their gate.

  Always so happy to see him, so hungry to talk and keen to work in the front garden with its sunflowers, in the back vegetable garden full of runner beans, white pumpkins and plump red tomatoes.

  He reached a hand out slowly to turn the key, reluctant to let go of the memories.

  Why had everything been taken from him?

  Then he drove away, back to the N2, and past the airport. He took the off ramp and turned right and Khayelitsha surrounded him — traffic and people, small buildings, houses, sand and smells and sounds, huge adverts for Castle and Coke and Toyota, hand-painted signboards for home industries, hairdressers and panel beaters, fresh vegetable stalls alongside the road, dogs and cows. A city apart from the city, spread out across the dune lands.

  He chose his route with care, referring to the map he had studied, because it was easy to get lost here: the road signs few, the streets sometimes broad, sometimes impossibly narrow. He stopped in front of a house, a brick building in the center of the plot. Building materials lay about, an extra room had been erected to window height, an old Mazda 323 stood on blocks, half covered by a tarpaulin.

  He got out, approached the front door and knocked. Music was playing inside, American rap. He knocked again, harder, and the door opened. A young girl, seventeen or eighteen, in T-shirt and jeans. “Yes?”

  “Is this the home of Lukas Khoza?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I have a message for John.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What sort of message?”

  “Work.”

  “John is not here.”

  “That’s a pity,” he said, “he would have liked the job.” He turned to go, then stopped. “Will you let him know?”

  “If I see him. Who are you?”

  “Tell him the guy who gives good work tips was here. He will know.” He turned away again, as if he had lost interest.

  “John hasn’t been here for ages. I don’t even know where he is.”

  He sauntered towards the pickup and said with a shrug, “Then I will give the job to someone else.”

  “Wait. Maybe my father will know.”

  “Luke? Is he here?”

  “He’s at work. In Maitland. At the abattoir.”

  “Maybe I will go past there. Thank you.”

  She did not say goodbye. She stood in the doorway, hip against the doorframe, and watched him. As he slipped in behind the wheel he wondered whether she spoke the truth.

  She told the minister about the evening her father called her a whore. How he stood over her in the bathroom and made her scrub off the make-up with a face cloth and soap and water. She wept as he lectured her and said not in his house. There would be no whoring in his house. That was the night it began. When the thing happened inside her. As she recalled the tirade, she was aware of what was going on between her and the minister, because it was familiar territory. She was explaining The Reason and he wanted to hear it. They. Men looked at her, after she had done her job, after she had opened her body to them with gentle hands and caressing words and they wanted to hear her story, her tragic tale. It was a primitive thing. They wanted her really to be good. The whore with the golden heart. The whore who was so nearly an ordinary girl. The minister had it too — he stared intently at her, so ready to empathize with her. But at least with him, the other thing was absent. Her clients, almost without exception, wanted to know if it was also a sex thing — really good, but also horny. Their fantasy of the nympho myth. She was aware of all these things as she sketched her story.

  “I’ve thought about it so much, because that is where it all began. That night. Even now, when I think about it, there is all this anger. I just wanted to look nice. For myself. For my father. For my friends. He didn’t want to see that, just all this other stuff, this evil. And then the religion thing just got worse. He forbade us to dance or go to movies and sleep over at friends and visit. He smothered us.”

  The minister shook his head as if to say: “The things parents do.”

  “I can’t get a grip on it. Gerhard, my brother, did nothing
. We had the same parents and the same house and everything, but he did nothing. He just grew quiet and read books in his room, escaped into his stories and into his head. And me? I went looking for trouble. I wanted to become exactly what my father was afraid of. Why? Why was I built like that? Why was I made like this?”

  The minister watched while she talked, watched her hands and eyes, the expressions that flitted in rapid succession across her face. He observed her mannerisms, the hair she used with such expertise, the fingers that punctuated her words with tiny movements and the limbs that spoke in an unbroken and sometimes deliberate body language. He placed it alongside the words and the content, the hurt and the sincerity and the obvious intelligence, and he learned something about her: she was enjoying this. On some level, probably unconscious, she enjoyed the limelight. As if, regardless of the trash that had been dumped on it, somewhere her psyche sheltered unscathed.

  At twelve o’clock, hunger pangs drew Griessel’s attention away from the murder file he had been buried in. That was when he remembered that today there would be no sandwich, no lunch parcel neatly wrapped in clingfilm.

  He looked up from the paperwork and the room loomed suddenly large around him. What was he going to do? How would he manage?

  Thobela made an error of judgment with Lukas Khoza. He found him at the abattoir, in a blood-spattered plastic apron, busy spraying away the blood from the off-white floor tiles of the slaughterhouse floor with a fat red hosepipe. They walked outside so Khoza could have a smoke break.

  Thobela said he was looking for his brother, John, because he had a job for him.

  “What sort of work?”

  “You know, work.”

  Khoza eyed him in distaste. “No, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. My brother is trash and if you are his kind, so are you.” He stood, legs apart in a challenging stance, cigarette in hand, between the abattoir building and the stock pens. Large pink pigs milled restlessly behind the steel gates, as if they sensed danger.

  “You don’t even know what kind of job I am talking about,” said Thobela, aware that he had chosen the wrong approach, that he had been guilty of a generalization.

  “Probably the usual work he does. Robbery. Theft. He will break our mother’s heart.”

  “Not this time.”

  “You lie.”

  “No lie. I swear. I don’t want him for a criminal purpose,” he said with spirit.

  “I don’t know where he is.” Khoza crushed the butt angrily under the thick sole of his white gumboots and headed for the door behind him.

  “Is there someone else who might know?”

  Khoza halted, less antagonistic. “Maybe.”

  Thobela waited.

  For a long time Khoza hesitated. “The Yellow Rose,” he said, and opened the door. A high scream, almost human, rang out from inside. Behind Thobela the pigs surged urgently and pressed against the bars.

  9.

  Thobela drove to the Waterfront, deliberately choosing the road that ran along the mountain so that he had a view of the sea and the harbor. He needed that — space and beauty. The role he had played had disturbed him and he couldn’t understand why. Impersonation was nothing new to him. In his days in Europe it had been part of his life. The East Germans had coached him in it down to the finest detail. Living the Lie was his way of life for nearly a decade; the means justified by the goal of Liberty, of Struggle.

  Had he changed this much?

  He came around the bulging thigh of the mountain and a vista opened up below: ships and cranes, wide blue water, city buildings and freeways, and the coastline curving gracefully away to Blouberg. He wanted to turn to Pakamile and say: “Look at that, that is the most beautiful city in the world,” and see his son gaze in wonder at all this.

  That is the difference, he thought. It felt as though the child was still with him, all around him.

  Before Pakamile, before Miriam, he had been alone; he was the only judge of his actions and the only one affected by them. But the boy had moved his boundaries and widened his world so that everything he said and did had other implications. Lying to Lukas Khoza now made him as uncomfortable as if he had been explaining himself to Pakamile. Like the day they went walking in the hills of the farm and he wanted to teach his son to use the rifle with greater responsibility, a piece of equipment to treat with care.

  The rifle had awakened the hunter in the boy. As they walked he pointed the unloaded rifle at birds, stones and trees, made shooting noises with his mouth. His thoughts went full circle until he asked: “You were a soldier, Thobela?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you shoot people?” Asked without any macabre fascination: that is how boys are.

  How did you answer that? How did you explain to a child how you lay in ambush with a sniper’s rifle in Munich, aiming at the enemy of your ally; how you pulled the trigger and saw the blood and brains spatter against the bright blue wall; how you slunk away like a thief in the night, like a coward. That was your war, your heroic deed.

  How did you describe to a child the strange, lost world you lived in — explain about apartheid and oppression and revolution and unrest? About East and West, walls and strange alliances?

  He sat down with his back to a rock and he tried. At the end he said you must only take up a weapon against injustice; you must only point it at people as a very last resort. When all other forms of defense and persuasion were exhausted.

  As now.

  That is what he would like to tell Pakamile now. The end justifies the means. He could not allow the injustice of his murder to go unpunished; he could not meekly accept it. In a country where the System had failed them, it was now the last resort, even if this world was just as hard to explain, just as complicated to understand. Somebody had to take a stand. Somebody had to say, “This far, and no further.”

  That is what he had tried to teach the boy. That is what he owed his son.

  He knocked on doors the whole afternoon, and by four o’clock Detective Inspector Benny Griessel knew the victim was forty-six-year-old Josephine Mary McAllister, divorced in 1994, dependable, unremarkable administrative assistant at Benson Exports in Waterkant Street. She was a member of the New Gospel Church in Sea Point, a lonely woman whose former husband lived in Pietermaritzburg and whose two children worked in London. He knew she was a member of the public library, favoring the books of Barbara Cartland and Wilbur Smith, owned a 1999 Toyota Corolla, had R18,762.80 in a current account at Nedbank, owed R6,456.70 on her credit card, and on the day of her death had booked a plane ticket to Heathrow, apparently planning to visit her children.

  He also had, as with the previous two murders, not a single significant clue.

  When he dragged his cases across the threshold of her apartment he understood the risk in what he was doing, but he told himself he had no choice. Where the hell should he go? To a hotel, where alcohol was one finger on the telephone away? Forensics had already been through here and there was no other key but the one in his pocket.

  Josephine Mary McAllister’s flat had no shower, only a bath. He ran it half full and lay in the steaming water, watching his heart sending delicate ripples across the surface with each rhythmic beat.

  The broad connection between McAllister, Jansen and Rosen was elementary. All middle-aged, living alone in Green Point, Mouille Point. No forced entry. Each strangled with an electric cord from the victim’s kitchen. How did the perpetrator pick his victims? On the street? Did he sit in a car and watch until he spotted a potential victim? And then just knock on the door?

  Impossible. McAllister and Rosen’s apartment blocks had security gates and intercom systems. Women didn’t open up for strange men — not anymore. Jansen’s house had a steel gate at the front door.

  No, somehow he befriended them. Then made a date for a Friday night and picked them up or brought them home. And used the electric cord, which he found in the kitchen. Did he take it into the sitting room or the bedroom? How did he manage to s
urprise them? Because there was not much sign of struggle — no tissue under fingernails, no other bruising.

  He must be strong. Fast, and methodical.

  The forensic psychologist in Pretoria said the fucker would have a record, possibly for minor offenses: assault, theft, trespassing, even arson. Most likely for sexual offenses, rape perhaps. “They don’t start with murder, they climb the ladder. If you catch him, you will find him in possession of pornography, sadomasochistic stuff. One thing I can tell you: he won’t stop. He’s getting more skillful and more and more self-confidence.”

  Griessel took the soap and washed his body, wondering if she had sat in here before he fetched her. Had she prepared herself for the date, unknowing, a lamb to the slaughter?

  He would get him.

  Friday nights. Why Fridays?

  He rinsed off the soap.

  Was Friday the only night he was free of responsibilities? What professions were off on Friday nights? Or rather what professions worked on Friday nights? Only bloody policemen, that’s all — the rest of the world partied. And murdered.

  He climbed out of the bath, walked dripping over to his cases and took out a towel. Anna had placed one neatly on top of the clothes. She had packed carefully for him, as if she cared. But now he rummaged around in the suitcases. He would have to hang the clothes up, or they would be wrinkled.

  He had to find a place to stay. For six months.

  He listened to the silence in the flat, suddenly aware that he was alone. That he was sober. He chose some clothes and dressed.