by Ian Patrick
‘They should have just left it to Detectives Ryder and Pillay, Sergeant Piet.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Mavis,’ said Ryder, ‘but I think Navi and I are glad to be left out of this one, thanks.’
‘Anyone keeping you informed, Jeremy?’ asked Pillay.
‘Yes, I get the occasional call from Nene’s guys. Nadine is in touch with the leader of the forensics team up there, and she keeps me up to date with stuff that she thinks we might find useful.’
‘Anyone from Durban North involved?’ asked Cronje.
‘Nope,’ replied Ryder. ‘Because of the connection with the Umdloti shootings IPID wants no-one from there to be even remotely involved in either case.’
‘Maybe they’re keeping you away from the case, too, Jeremy, because of Monday’s publicity in the Mercury?’
‘I think you’re right, Navi. They’re probably trying to keep it as clean as possible. Which suits me down to the ground. If I’m not officially involved in the case then there’s nothing to stop me from talking to Mashego. I’ve been thinking about him.’
They all then embarked on a discussion about the man-mountain detective, his skills and his reputation, and drifted from there into a brief discussion about the Durban North constables. Mavis had heard from her friend Thandiwe, one of the six constables involved in the shooting on the beach, that the constables were upset because the focus was on them in such a way that they were not able to get on with their normal work.
Nyawula entered from the inner office at that point, on his way to a quick briefing on HR policy, as he explained to them.
‘See you all in the meeting room at 11.30. Jeremy’s got some interesting stuff for us.’
As he left the office Cronje picked up what he had just said.
‘Can I ask what the 11.30 presentation is all about, Jeremy?’
‘Well, Piet, you know the Captain asked me a couple of weeks ago to look into that guy who runs a fleet of taxis?’
‘Du Plessis?’
‘That’s him, Piet. I’ve been burning the midnight oil and finally come up with some stuff which is a bit hairy. I gave the Captain a preview and he thought you all needed some entertainment to boost your spirits, so that’s what’s on at 11.30.’
‘Sounds exciting, Detective Jeremy. Shall I get a cake?’
‘Brilliant idea, Mavis,’ said Pillay. ‘I’ll pay.’ And she handed over a one hundred rand note. ‘In fact,’ she then continued, ‘why don’t I come with you? We can choose together.’
As the two of them left, Ryder turned to Cronje.
‘Piet, can you try and get hold of Mashego for me? I tried him a short while ago but no-one knew where he was.’
‘Of course, Jeremy. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘His colleagues say he works mainly alone. Brilliant sleuth, they say, but works alone unless he’s called out to an action where he has to work with others. So they mostly don’t know where he is, but he certainly solves crimes so everyone’s happy with him.’
‘OK, Jeremy. Well, let me be detective for once and try and find him for you.’
10.55.
Nxumalo tailed the taxi at a safe distance as it headed south on the M21. Just after it left KwaMashu it stopped to drop off the last two passengers, leaving only the driver and what was probably his co-driver next to him as the only remaining occupants of the vehicle. The taxi resumed its journey briefly, then turned left into Musa Dladla Drive, and after thirty metres it pulled onto a dirt track.
He could see both men in the front pulling out their cellphones. Good. There was no need to pull them over with a flash of the lights. He pulled his vehicle in behind them.
Nxumalo walked up to the window on the driver’s side. The driver had his right elbow out of the window, talking on his phone. The detective could see the other man in an exact mirror position, left elbow out and cellphone clasped in his left hand.
The driver was momentarily surprised as the detective suddenly appeared next to him at his window.
‘Are you Gumede?’ asked Nxumalo.
‘What?’
‘Are you Gumede?’
‘Who’s asking? What you mean am I Gumede?’
‘What you think, big man?’ said his companion, shutting off the call on his phone and leaning over to put his question. ‘Who you asking?’
Nxumalo replied by flashing his police badge and asking again. This time he got the reply he needed.
‘Yes, OK. I’m Gumede. What you want? I’m not speeding.’
‘And you?’ Nxumalo asked his companion. ‘Are you Mofokeng?’
Mofokeng guffawed.
‘Yes, officer, me, I’m Mofokeng. You want to make the business with me? You want to buy some stuff? You want to search the taxi? You find nothing, I’m telling you.’
‘What you wanting, policeman?’ asked Gumede. ‘You want a blow job?’
‘No,’ replied Nxumalo. ‘I just want you to suck on this.’
He thrust the barrel of a Smith & Wesson Model 351PD into Gumede’s mouth and fired off two of the available seven .22 magnums into the back of his throat. He then pulled the gun back momentarily before firing three more rounds into the face of the man next to him. He then turned without emotion and walked back to his car and drove away.
Barely a mile further south, once he had passed the Newlands East police station, he pulled off to the left into John Dory Drive, found a quiet spot where there were no passers-by, and calmly changed the false number plates. He then dug a hole in the soft earth under a bush, wiped the Smith & Wesson, and buried it. The weapon was one of three or four that he had recovered from various crime scenes in the past and that he had retained. In each case he had either not declared the weapons or reported them as having probably been discarded by the relevant criminals in the course of his pursuit of them. It had been useful to have access to unregistered weapons, and the remaining ones were well secured in places known only to him.
Nxumalo then resumed his journey south on the M21. As he did so he could hear police sirens going in the opposite direction up toward the scene of the shooting.
Nxumalo was astounded at how he felt. He was completely at ease. No regrets. Calm. Cool. He put it down to the file he had read on Monday night. He had read through the documents and had stared at the photos. Among the most evil of men he had ever read about. These were two men who had committed crimes as horrific as those unspeakable crimes that had been perpetrated upon his own family. These were men who deserved to die. The fact that they had escaped prison, had wormed their way through the court system, probably with bribes and friends in high places, was scandalous. Nxumalo felt good. He had done the community a favour. He had succeeded where the criminal justice system had failed.
He was ready for more like this.
As he drove, his mind wandered to the report in yesterday’s Mercury. He hadn’t seen the previous day’s report about this Detective Ryder supposedly running a hit squad. But he had seen the next day’s report correcting the previous report and with the Editor himself now apologising. He had found that intriguing. How often do you get the press, especially a paper of that calibre, apologising, he had thought to himself. So he had read that report quite closely. And he had been intrigued to see that his old friend Mashego had been the actual guy in charge at Umdloti, and not Ryder.
Nxumalo’s thoughts ranged from there to the days when he and Mashego had been much closer. They had both had terrible experiences. Both of them had lost children to the worst of the country’s criminals. Mashego hadn’t confided in him as much as he had confided in Mashego. Nights was not the kind of guy to speak about his private life. A giant of a man. Solid. Reliable. But burning inside. Just as he himself had been burning inside for years.
Maybe Mashego would be interested in meeting this guy du Plessis, one day, thought Nxumalo.
11.30
Ryder had briefed the Captain privately, but without taking him through the mass of detail he had available. Although he h
ad offered to take the Captain through these detailed findings in another private meeting in the first instance, Nyawula had declined.
‘Some members in the team know that you’ve been working on this at my request, Jeremy. I get the sense that they have some inkling about where you might take us...’
‘That’s true, Sibo, but the journey is not going to be as straightforward as they think it might be.’
‘That’s OK. Let’s just do it,’ Nyawula had said, and he had then asked Cronje to call them all together in a meeting room to be booked for the purpose. Mavis made the arrangements, and after cake and coffee had been shared out, and after the introductory comments and formalities by the Captain, Ryder took the floor, with a flipchart behind him.
‘There were rumours back in 2006 that the man we now know as du Plessis was involved in a one hundred million rand heist at O.R. Tambo International Airport, and never faced charges because of the untimely deaths of a number of witnesses. There are further rumours that he also knew something about some fourteen million rands of the recovered money that was subsequently stolen from a walk-in safe in Benoni at the North Rand Serious and Violent Crime Unit.’
‘I remember reading all about it,’ said Nyawula, with nods and similar comments from some of the others.
‘That’s not all. There are also indications, never proved - nothing is ever proved against this guy - that for a long time he played a role in intercepting drugs at O.R. Tambo International and selling them on to dealers in Gauteng. He was known to be close friends with this guy, here, a colonel you might remember who in 2011 was sentenced to between twenty and twenty-five years in jail.’
Ryder handed a file with a photo of the colonel in question clipped to the outside, and Nyawula having already seen it passed it on for the others to circulate. As he did so, after a slight pause, Ryder continued.
‘He was also photographed numerous times at restaurants on the East Rand in the company of a well-known Czech fugitive and gangster.’
Mavis shook her head in despair but did not comment. Koekemoer and Dippenaar exchanged whispered comments.
‘Then he seems to have fallen off the radar. Little was known about his whereabouts in 2013. Then in 2014 and 2015 he started appearing frequently in KwaZulu-Natal local media. Firstly as a campaigner for private security firms to support the work of local police and community policing forums. Later on, his name begins to appear in numerous reports and photographs in relation to his donations and other contributions at charity events. Then his voice becomes more and more prominent on the issue of the police needing to work more closely with private security firms. He starts making more and more public pronouncements on the need to tackle crime in order to support local business and attract international investment to the country.’
‘Suddenly a good citizen, then?’ said Koekemoer.
‘Amazing transformation, wouldn’t you say, Koeks? But when you dig deeper you start realising why. The frequency of his public pronouncements is a perfect match with the growth of his business acquisitions in two different industries. This guy now controls two empires across the country. And this province is one of his biggest growth areas.’
‘What two industries, Jeremy?’ asked Pillay.
‘Firstly, the security industry. Armed response, alarms, home security, joint operations with police. Secondly, the taxi industry. He has the second biggest fleet in the country. And in this province he might well be running first.’
Ryder finished and there was silence in the room as they digested what he had told them. Then Ryder spoke again.
‘And now, do you want to hear the really big thing? Shall I tell them, Captain?’
‘You mean what you’ve just been telling us is not the big thing?’ said Dippenaar.
‘Nope. Here’s the big thing.’
Ryder paused before making his announcement.
‘This guy has also been financing a hit squad.’
Everyone was shocked into silence by Ryder’s remark. They listened attentively as he laid out the facts and figures and dates that reinforced what he had just said. He referred to published press reports, confidential police reports, court judgements, coroners’ reports, and coincidences of time and place and action that stunned his audience. He prefaced his comments about the need for careful treading through the rival viewpoints, the competing media interests, and the dangers of falling into traps, he said, like the Durban Cato Manor case. He said that scrupulous attention to detail rather than gossip, to established fact rather than hearsay, and the need for triple-corroborated evidence wherever possible, was crucial.
In harmony with that, he then used the flipchart to flesh out the history he had outlined. There was absolute silence for at least fifteen minutes as he took the team through that more detailed history. When he concluded, the silence continued for some twenty seconds, as they all stared at the flipchart. It was broken in the first instance by Dippenaar.
‘Fok!’ he said.
‘Yissus,’ said Koekemoer.
‘Oh my God,’ said Pillay.
‘If only that creep Michael Pullen had been half the sleuth you are, Jeremy,’ said Nyawula.
There then ensued a hubbub of excited conversation as they all climbed in and spoke together, before Nyawula called them back to order.
‘OK, everyone. OK. Let’s take stock.’
For the next half hour Nyawula and Ryder took them through a plan of action. Nyawula was careful to include within that a very careful plan for handling the media. The information that Ryder had provided was incendiary, and had to be managed strategically.
He began sketching out how that might occur.
Eventually they reached a plateau. It was time to break up the meeting. Pillay, Ryder and Nyawula remained behind after the others had left. Ryder had indicated that he particularly wanted to pick up with the two of them something arising from what they had discussed in open forum. As the rest of the team left in a babble of excited conversation, Ryder came immediately to the point.
‘I want to talk about Mashego.’
‘I thought that might be the case, Jeremy’ said Pillay. ‘What are your thoughts?’
‘I noticed, Jeremy, that you left him out all the way through,’ said Nyawula. ‘Yet I can’t help thinking of the rumours. Even before Umdloti, the guy’s reputation...’
‘I’ve looked at him really closely, Sibo. And I’ve managed to get closer to him recently. I don’t know what it is, but despite all the evidence to the contrary there’s something about him that… well … look, I was about to say that there’s something about him that suggests he’s clean. No, I don’t mean that. I think there are serious questions about how he reacts in the heat of the moment. What I mean is, I don’t think he’s part of the du Plessis set-up. I don’t think he’s on the take. I think he’s a guy on a mission, but I think it’s his own mission.’
Both Pillay and Nyawula were ready to go along with Ryder on his assessment. They listened carefully as he went through the history of Mashego’s career that he had managed to put together and that he had not included in his presentation to the team. Within ten minutes he had won them over. They were both ready to accept that Mashego was a lone operator that needed to be brought under control. A good cop, but dangerously close to blowing everything for himself.
They wrapped up with some clear lines of action in place. The Captain had the really difficult task. He would have to take the Cluster Command and key figures higher up the food chain through what Ryder had uncovered, and he would have to secure support all the way up the line for the planned media strategy. When du Plessis was taken down, Nyawula said, it had to be done in a way that showed the public that they had cut out a cancerous tumour and not simply started a long process of chemotherapy.
13.10
Mashego and Thenjiwe Buthelezi had decided to snatch a quick sandwich and tea together. She started by reassuring him that the constables would hold firm to the story. She had had another chat to each a
nd every one of them and they were rock solid, she told Mashego.
They now sat together, sipping their tea with the Mercury spread out before them at a table in the canteen. The front page sported the mug-shots of the four men shot dead by police on the beach at Umdloti. Again. In yesterday’s issue they had been unnamed. Today they were all identified, and their names were now boldly displayed under the photos. The reporting was now solid and clear, under the name of a different journalist who was running with the story. Now the deaths on the beach were linked inextricably to the rape and homicide up the hill. There was some balance to the story.
But there was new information. According to reliable sources - was that a disguised apology from the Editor, Mashego observed, or was it simply irony, following the debacle that had led to Monday’s front page? - witnesses at the Sibaya Casino had come forward after seeing yesterday’s published mug-shots, and had not only identified the four men, but claimed that those four had been in the company of a couple of other men at the casino on Saturday! No other names. Police investigating, seeking further witnesses, looking at CCTV footage.
They discussed the matter further, then Mashego made to leave, telling her that he would be up at Umdloti undertaking one last thorough search for evidence. They discussed the fact that the IPID investigation specifically ruled them out of doing this, and that as a consequence she should keep his whereabouts to herself.
‘Except for Detective Jeremy Ryder,’ he said. In response to her quizzical look he elaborated. ‘Ryder’s a good guy. He came to see me. He understands. We can trust him. If I’m not around and you need someone… well, he’s a good guy. He’s also got good contacts with the different teams involved, so he could be very helpful if we need information.’