by Ian Patrick
It took him a full half hour to calm down from smouldering rage to something approaching his normal Monday demeanour. His wife was right, he thought. This journalist would be exposed for the amateur he was. But that wouldn’t come near to eradicating the foul stench that this kind of reporting left. Most people would remember the allegation. Few would remember, or even bother to read, the correction and the refutation. That would be too boring.
‘What on earth motivates guys like this? Isn’t the real story the appalling crimes committed by the four guys on Sugar Cane Road?’
‘You haven’t told me about that. What did they do?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Rape. Torture. Disembowelment. You name it. Teenage girl.’
‘Oh my God.’
Ryder paged through the newspaper.
‘Nothing about her. Nothing. Wait. Here.’
He found something on an inside page, read it quickly, and pushed it over to her.
‘Three centimetres of column space tucked away inside. Have a look.’
She read it quickly. A brief article by a different journalist. Brutal rape and murder. Police investigating.
He snatched back the paper, and turned back to the front page, spewing venom as he did so. Couldn’t the press at least do proper research before rushing to print? What happened to the right to reply before they go to press with demonstrably inaccurate information, conjecture, and false allegations? This was beginning to feel like another front in the ongoing war waged by the thin blue line. Instead of getting support in the fight against crime, we’re constantly fighting a rearguard action to defend ourselves against malicious and ill-informed conjecture, he spurted out.
And more in the same vein.
The calming down process, smoothed by Fiona with wise words, toast and marmalade and lots more coffee, gradually brought him down from that position.
Bit by bit, he acknowledged that there was a difference between shoddy journalism and good journalism. She reminded him about times when they had sung the praises of the very same publication for its top-class investigative journalism, and, yes, he accepted that there was a need for the press to play a watchdog role. Yes, it was necessary for them to report on corrupt cops. And yes, there were instances where cops were crossing the line.
She was amazing. She had a knack for finding balance.
By the time he left for work his rage had become little more than deep irritation with the odious Michael Pullen. The odorous Michael Pullen, he reminded himself.
06.30.
Sergeant Piet Cronje was in the car park enjoying the warm sun with Mavis Tshabalala in the half hour before it became too hot, when Detectives Koekemoer and Dippenaar arrived at the same time in separate cars.
‘Here they come, Mavis. The terrible twins. They tell me they never call each other before they arrive here, and never plan their arrival together, but they always pull in at exactly the same time. In the same minute. It was the same even during that period when we had that early start early finish experiment. It’s like twins, you know. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’
‘It’s very funny, Mr Piet. How long have they been working together?’
‘Ag, I dunno, really, Mavis. They seem to have been here for ever.’
‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ Mavis chuckled as she repeated the words.
‘Howzit, Mavis. Howzit, Oom Piet,’ said Koekemoer as he walked toward them.
‘What’s so funny, Mavis?’ said Dippenaar as he, too, joined them.
‘Good morning detectives. Sergeant Piet was just saying you look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’
‘Thanks, hey, Piet,’ said Koekemoer. ‘You calling us fat?’
‘Ag, no, kêrels, just saying you’re like the terrible twins, you know. You arrive at exactly the same time every day, do the same things, eat the same things...’
‘Kak, man, Piet. Ek’s Afrikaans. Oom Dipps praat nie Afrikaans nie. Hy’s Engels.’
‘Yissus, Koeks. Not yet seven o’clock and already you’re talking kak,’ retorted Dippenaar. Anyway, who said Tweedledum and Tweedledee were fat?’
‘Dunno, Dipps. To tell you the truth I don’t even know where those guys come from,’ said Cronje.
‘They come from that Lewis Carroll oke. Alice in Wonderland, you know...’
Koekemoer cut across Dippenaar’s explanation with a guffaw.
‘See? What did I tell you, Mavis? Dipps here knows fokall about Afrikaans literature but he knows all about English literature. I’m telling you, secretly this ou is a soutpiel. Where’s the coffee, Piet?’
‘Should be ready, Koeks. Here comes Navi. She looks a bit flustered.’
Pillay arrived in an agitated state. She pulled into the parking bay and got out of her car, slamming the door behind her and spewing invective to herself.
‘What’s wrong, Detective Navi?’ asked Mavis.
‘Hi guys. Have you heard the news? I just heard it on the radio.’
‘What, Navi?’ Cronje asked, in some consternation. He had seldom seen Pillay so flustered.
‘They’re saying Jeremy executed four guys on the beach on Saturday night.’
Consternation and disbelief was followed by rage as Pillay reported that the radio news was following up on this morning’s newspaper report.
‘I’m going to go and get a newspaper,’ said Cronje, and strode off, leaving the others to express their collective disbelief.
06.35.
Mashego was outraged. He was standing outside the cafe where he had just bought the newspaper, and he was staring at the front page article. It was clearly not the work of any one of his team of cops. Not one of them could have split on the rest of the group. If they did, they would go down too, with the rest of them. The whole tenor of the piece was about some witness. What witness? How could anyone have seen what they did on the beach? Impossible.
But how could they know that the four guys had had their hands up in the air? How would they know that there were more than forty bullets fired by the cops? How could the description be so accurate about so many details, like the chase from the bush to the water, and the…?
And what was this shit about Detective Jeremy Ryder? He knew Ryder’s reputation. He had never met him, but knew a lot about him. Heard him speak at a cop’s funeral six weeks ago. Good cop. Good guy. Big guy. Was he that same guy on the beach yesterday with the forensics people, maybe? Why is he named here as the lead detective in what happened on the beach? If there was a witness, how come he’s gone and named Ryder? You can’t mistake a white guy for a black guy, even if we’re more or less the same size. How could they get all these facts right and then get the identity of the key guy wrong? What’s going on here?
His mind raced as he thought back on the events of Saturday night. No-one could have seen anything from the road, even with the clear moon. It was too far away. Those rocks. Had someone been watching, listening, in those rocks on the beach?
Thenjiwe! Thenjiwe said she thought she saw something! In the rocks! She was looking at something in those rocks! Then she said no, it was nothing, she was imagining something.
Mashego’s mind raced. He had to get hold of Thenjiwe.
06.45.
Cronje had the newspaper spread out over the bonnet of Koekemoer’s car and the four others crowded over him to read. There was collective anger and astonishment. Cronje and Pillay had been able to report that they knew for a fact that Ryder had been occupied way past midnight on Saturday at the Brigadier’s function, and that he had joined Pillay on the beach on Sunday late morning. Pillay had noticed immediately that the writer of the article was the man they had humiliated at the restaurant.
Their outrage settled down as Nyawula arrived, got out of his car and strode directly over to the office, carrying a copy of the newspaper in his hand. As they approached him in agitation, he raised his hand to keep them at bay.
‘Don’t say a word, guys,’ said the Captain,
as he made for the stairs. ‘I’m on the case. The Editor is going to print a grovelling apology for this crap.’
He turned to them at the top of the stairs and added another observation.
‘Even if I have to give him an even bigger story about how drunk Jeremy and I both were, along with the Brigadier and various other top brass, while Jeremy was supposed to be pumping forty bullets into these four guys on the beach.’
07.00.
Thenjiwe Buthelezi was in search of somewhere to buy a newspaper. She was extremely agitated. She had been so ever since the call from Captain Nights Mashego fifteen minutes ago. Now she was convinced that she had, indeed, seen something on the beach on Saturday night. She remembered having seen a movement in the rocks as they were turning to move up toward the road, but after having paused for a moment to check she concluded that she must have simply imagined it. Now she knew she had in fact seen something, and regretted not having gone onto the rocks to investigate.
Nights seemed to be convinced that she must have seen something. He’d told her on the phone about the newspaper report, and had said that whoever spoke to the journalist must have been watching, and that the only place where he or she could have been hiding was in those rocks. He had read extracts of the newspaper report to her, and told her he was heading back out there to see what he might find on the beach. He had asked her to join him, but she couldn’t. She was heavily tasked for the morning. He had closed the call, telling her he would be in touch to tell her about anything that might come up in his search. Meanwhile, he told her, try and get word to the others that they must stand firm and stick to the story.
Buthelezi had been a police constable for three years since completing her training at the age of twenty-two. Initially based at Isipingo, she had been transferred to Durban North eighteen months ago and had seen more action in those eighteen months than most young constables see in a few years. This included the shooting dead of two criminals in two separate and spectacular actions, which had drawn plaudits from her superiors. And that was before Saturday’s midnight action. Now she had six kills to her name. Or, at any rate, two kills and participation in four others.
She carried no regrets in regard to those six killings. None whatsoever. She had wanted to be a cop ever since the age of eight, when she had been witness to the brutal rape and murder of both her ten-year old sister and her mother. She had been traumatised, as had her father. The policewoman who had looked after her and who had kept her informed for months afterwards, eventually bringing her and her father news of the cornering and shooting dead of the perpetrators, had kindled within her the desire to become part of the amaphoyisa in their fight against these evil people. The people who had destroyed her family. The desire grew within her throughout her schooling, and was intensified by the knowledge that her father’s troubles with alcohol had started with that brutal event and had led to his death four years later, burned out and destroyed by drink and tortured memories.
She finally found a newspaper. She read the article and was, firstly, surprised at the story about Detective Ryder. Where did this come from? But she soon passed over that when she read the rest. She was shocked at the detail. Nights was right. No-one could have had access to this kind of detail unless they had been there on the beach. Where else could they have been? The rocks provided the only possible solution.
For the first time she started having doubts about her actions. She carried no guilt whatsoever about her first two kills. Two evil men dispatched for their evil deeds. But the four on Saturday night? Their deeds were every bit as evil, but whereas the first two had been killed in a shootout with cops, the four men on Saturday had been executed. There was no other way to look at it.
But then she reminded herself about what those four men had done to the young woman up on Sugar Cane road. The details given to her by Mashego had been shocking. They were so horrific, as she now thought about them, that it enabled her to restore the balance in her thinking. The men had deserved to die, she thought. She would stick to the story.
She began the process of contacting each and every one of the other five constables to tell them to stand firm in their story. Stand firm with Detective Mashego.
She started with Thandiwe. Not only because she had been with her in the third car on Saturday night, and had participated at her side in the action on the beach, but also because they were partners in more ways than one. Thandiwe was her closest and dearest companion, and the two women enjoyed a relationship of deep mutual warmth and affection.
09.40.
Mashego was on the beach south of Umdloti. The place was still marked and taped off. Two constables were on duty to keep the public away. An officer in uniform was standing northward of the site speaking into his iPhone. What appeared to be Waterwing divers were in the surf, doubtless under instruction to see what else they might find under the waves, and following a meticulous search pattern. One of them appeared to have what looked like a metal detector. Mashego thought that they were unlikely to find anything, because the two forensics women on Sunday morning appeared already to have retrieved the four weapons from the shallow surf at the time, working with Waterwing divers, and had had the weapons bagged and labelled on a table, along with the seven police weapons, by the time they wrapped up their work.
Mashego noticed that the double police cordon ended a few paces north of the rocks. Whoever was in charge had not assumed the rocks to be part of the scene to be managed. He didn’t, therefore, need to check in with the constables because there was no need for him to enter the demarcated scene. He simply nodded at them as he passed and ambled south of the cordon into the rocks, as if casually looking around the scene but having no particular remit to do so. The two constables barely reacted, and continued with their animated conversation about the weekend’s sports action.
Mashego stood for a while with one foot raised onto the first rock, and the other on the sand, still dry because the tide was out. He faked a chat on his cellphone and then, as casually as he could, stepped onto the rocks and started moving around, with no apparent motive other than to pass the time chatting to a friend and looking out at the sea.
He moved slowly and apparently aimlessly, but his eyes were doing the real work. He scanned every surface, every cranny, every indentation, in the hope of finding something that the intruder might have left. Nothing. Mashego eventually came off the rocks and paused. What would he have done, if he had been a witness to what had happened, and needed to get out of there that night? No way would he have moved northward of the rocks or westward across the beach up to the road. The seven cops would have had a clear view across the scene from the water up to the road.
He would have gone south. But even then, with the clear moon, that would have been dangerous for the witness. Either he stayed in the rocks for hours, or he decided to get out of there as quickly as he could. If the latter, then he must have stayed in the surf and moved right down south to a spot where he felt safe.
Mashego tracked the breaking surf southward, his eyes scanning the ground from side to side between the breaking surf on his left and the beach up to a distance of some five or six metres to his right. He knew that looking for something personal that the fugitive might have dropped was wishful thinking. Such easy clues happen only in movies, he thought.
He walked slowly for some seventy or eighty paces, trying to think like a furtive escapee on the night in question, wanting to put distance between himself and the seven cops. He looked back at the rocks, now some fifty metres behind him, beyond which the divers had emerged from the water and appeared to be talking to the man with the iPhone. The two constables continued chatting to each other, paying no attention to anyone else.
Mashego saw nothing to suggest why the fugitive would have decided to move out of the surf at this particular point. But there was something in the topography. If he were to look back up the beach and then westward toward the bush, it would be here that he would choose to take his chance. Because
at this point the bush angled down slightly closer to the beach and there was a natural hollow created by a sand dune that provided some cover for anyone wanting to move from the water to the bush and not be seen from the north. Mashego walked slowly up the hollow to the bush.
In the foliage there appeared to be a natural path leading back northward, parallel to the shoreline, winding through the undergrowth. Mashego found himself walking back in the opposite direction to that which he had followed coming down. OK, he thought. Fruitless search. Give up and go back to the car. But might as well just stick with this path, because it would probably come out more or less where his car was parked.
He travelled a further seventy or eighty paces through the bush before he saw something. He bent down. The last bit of a whoonga joint. He had seen hundreds of them in the last few years. Nothing to suggest that this needed to be connected to what he was looking for, but it was certainly worth exploring. He scoured the area and his efforts were rewarded. He saw something else and went on his knees. Another joint-end. And another. And yet another. They appeared to be of varying age. One of them looked fairly fresh. Another looked a couple of months old. As he searched further he found a concealed plastic pouch with three new joints, as yet unsmoked, waiting for their owner to return.
He was intrigued. This place was obviously returned to time and time again by someone. He was about to back out from under the bush when he saw something else. The edge of some clothing protruded from the sand under another bush. He reached in and pulled, and pulled further. He uncovered a rag of some sort. He backed out and shook the soil off the garment. A hospital gown and what looked like pyjamas. A tag on the lining. Property of Addington Hospital. What else? He dropped the garments and went back into the bush slightly further over to his left. He swept aside the soil and found some more fabric. He then pulled out an entire police uniform. SAPS constable. The genuine thing.
Mashego shook out the garment then went through all the pockets, and found the most useful of all the objects that he now held in his hands. The torn-off end of a box of pharmaceutical tablets. Useful not in itself. Useful because it displayed a date and the first part of a name, with the surname torn off. Mr. Dirk…