Devil's Peak: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  “Okay,” said Keyter and kicked at a clump of grass with a Nike Crosstrainer. “Okay, I get it. You look here, on the plot.”

  “There’s hope for you, Jamie.”

  “The laborers?”

  “That’s right. Who cleans the stables? Who cuts the feed? Who did Laurens shout and swear at when they came to work late? Who will do a little favor for five hundred rand?”

  “I get it.”

  “I want you to go and talk, Jamie. Watch the body language, look at the eyes. Don’t make accusations. Just talk. Ask if they saw anything. Ask if Laurens was a difficult employer. Be sympathetic. Ask if they have heard of the assegai man. Give them a chance to talk. Sometimes they talk easily and too much. Listen, Jamie. Listen with both your ears and your eyes and your head. The thing with a murder investigation is, first you look at it from a distance, look at everything. Then you come a step closer and look again. Another step. You don’t charge in — you stalk.”

  “I get it.”

  “I’m going in to the office. We need the other case files. I am going to ask the investigating officers to tell me everything about Davids and Pretorius. Phone me when you are finished, then you come in.”

  “Okay, Benny.” Grateful.

  “Okay,” he said, turning to go to his car and thinking: fuck, I’m starting to talk like him too.

  25.

  He was still in conference with the other two investigating officers when Cloete, the liaison officer, phoned and said the media had heard there was another Artemis murder.

  “A what?”

  “You know, the assegai thing.”

  “Artemis?”

  “The Argus started that crap, Benny. Some or other Greek god that went around stabbing with a spear or something. Is it true?”

  “That a Greek god went around . . .”

  “No, man, that the Laurens woman who beat the child to death is the latest victim?”

  The media. Fuck. “All I can say now is that Laurens was found dead outside her house this morning. The post mortem is not finished yet.”

  “They will want more than that.”

  “I don’t have more than that.”

  “Will you phone me when there is more?”

  “I will,” he lied. He was definitely not intending to feed information to the press.

  Faizal phoned him just before he went to the mortuary, to ask if he could deliver the sitting-room suite. He drove to the flat to open up and then raced to Salt River where Pagel was waiting for him.

  He heard the music as he closed the door of the state mortuary behind him and it made him grin. That is how you could tell Professor Phil Pagel, chief pathologist, was at work. For Pagel played only Beethoven on his ten-thousand rand hi-fi system in his office, as loud as was necessary.

  “Ah, Nikita,” said Pagel with genuine pleasure when Griessel looked in his door. He was seated behind a computer and had to get up to turn the music down. “How are you, my friend?”

  Pagel had been calling him “Nikita” for twelve years. The first time he had met Griessel he had remarked: “I am sure that is how the young Khruschev would have looked.” Griessel had to think hard who Khrushchev was. He had always had immense respect for highly educated and cultured people, he who had only his matric and police examinations. Once he had said to Pagel: “Damn, Prof, I wish I were as clever as you.” But Pagel had looked back at him and said: “I suspect you are the clever one, Nikita, and you have street smarts, too.”

  He liked that. Also the fact that Pagel, who featured so often on the social pages, Friends of the Opera, Save the Symphony Orchestra, Aids Action Campaign, treated him as an equal. Always had. Pagel didn’t seem to age — tall and lean and impossibly handsome, some people said he looked like the star of some or other television soap that Griessel had never seen.

  “Well, thank you, Prof. And you?”

  “Splendid, my dear fellow. I have just finished with the unfortunate Miss Laurens.”

  “Prof, they have given me the whole show — Davids, Pretorius, the works. Bushy and them tell me you think this is also an assegai.”

  “Not think. I am reasonably sure. What is different about you, Nikita? Have you cut your hair? Come, let me show you.” He walked ahead down the passage and opened the swing doors of the post mortem laboratory with a deft thump of his palms. “It’s a long time since we saw an assegai — it’s no longer a weapon of choice. Twenty years ago it was more common.”

  There was the smell of death and formalin and cheap air freshener in the room and the air conditioning was set quite low. Pagel unzipped the black body bag. Laurens’s remains lay there naked, like a cocoon. There was a single wound in the middle of her torso between two small breasts.

  “What was not present with Davids,” said Pagel as he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, “is the exit wound. Entry wound was wide, about six centimeters, but there was nothing behind. My conclusion was a very broad blade, or two stabs with a single, thinner blade — most unlikely, however. But I didn’t think ‘assegai.’ With Pretorius we have the exit wound, two point seven centimeters wide, and the entry wound of six point two. That’s when the penny dropped.”

  He turned Laurens’s body on its side. “Look here, Nikita. Exit wound right behind, just beside the spinal column. I had to cut the entry wound for chemical analysis, so you can no longer see, but it was even wider — six point seven, six point seven five.”

  He lowered the body carefully on its back again, and covered it again.

  “It tells us a couple of things which you will find interesting, Nikita. The blade is long; I estimate about sixty centimeters. We see a great deal of stab wounds inflicted with butcher’s knives — you know, the kind you can buy at Pick and Pay, about a twenty-five centimeter blade. Those wounds display clearly only one cutting edge and sometimes an exit wound, but never wider than a centimeter. Entry wounds usually three, occasionally four centimeters. Here we have two cutting edges, much like a bayonet, but wider and thinner. Considerably wider. A bayonet also does more damage internally — designed for it, did you know? So we have a blade sixty centimeters long, with a narrow piercing point growing steadily wider towards the back where it is just under seven centimeters. Do you follow, Nikita?”

  “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 b
usiness. 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.