Dead Before Dying: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  “You withdrew it later.”

  “Mike gave me a bonus.”

  “And then you shot him on Saturday, sister.”

  She smiled slowly, her teeth uneven and yellow. “You’re cute, brother. You must come for a freebie.”

  “You possess a firearm.”

  “Of course, bro’. In my line of business . . .”

  “May we see it?”

  She stood up slowly, swung the black cloak theatrically over her shoulder.

  “What’s with the cloak, sister?”

  “One must give the product a unique package, brother.”

  She walked with precise steps on her high heels to a door next to the reception desk. She opened it, left it open. The three detectives looked into another room, where four women were seated, one with a magazine, one doing her makeup, two chatting. Then Eleanor Davids closed the door, a handbag in her hand. She took out a pistol, small and black, and gave it to Petersen.

  Petersen turned it in his hands. “It’s an Escort, sister.”

  She sat down again, lit another cigarette, shrugged her shoulders.

  “So am I, bro’, so am I.”

  “This is the Mauser murderer’s other pistol.”

  “It’s not me, brother. I’m bad but I don’t kill.”

  “You’ll have to come with us, sister.”

  “I know my rights. I have an alibi.”

  “You think the magistrate will take your word?”

  “No, but he’ll probably take the word of a policeman.”

  “Sister?”

  “Ask Hatting, the desk sergeant at the Bay’s station, which evening of the week he gets his brown bread, brother. On the house. Sunset to sunup.”

  Hatting was a middle-aged man, balding, which he tried to disguise by combing the few remaining hairs over the bald patch. He was in civvies because the station commander had called him in.

  “I’m going to lose my pension,” Hatting said and he looked old and frightened and defenseless.

  “It won’t go any further, Sergeant,” said Joubert and looked at Petersen, Snyman, and the Hout Bay OC. They all gave affirmative nods.

  “My wife is deceased, Captain. It’s been twelve years.” No one said anything. Hatting rubbed his hands and stared at the floor, his face contorted with regret. “The children go back to boarding school on Sunday afternoons, Captain . . . dear God, the Sunday evenings.”

  They sat in an uncomfortable silence. But Joubert had to make sure.

  “Sergeant, are you very sure that Eleanor Davids was with you until after seven on Monday morning?”

  Hatting merely nodded. He couldn’t look at Joubert.

  “The whole night?”

  Nod. Then silence again.

  “Never again,” said Hatting, and he wept.

  Griessel’s eyes were deeply sunken into their dark sockets, his skin the bluish yellow of the very ill, but he listened to Joubert’s every word, craving normality, the routine, the life outside. Joubert sat on one iron bed, on a bare mattress. Benny sat on the other, his legs drawn up. The sanatorium was quiet, a mausoleum.

  “Snyman will follow Nienaber, from tomorrow morning. With Louw relieving him in the evening. That’s all we’ve got, Benny.”

  “Can’t be him.” Griessel’s voice was vague, as if he were speaking from a distance.

  “I don’t know, Benny. Hairdresser. I was . . .” He had to think when he had been at Anne Boshoff’s. Today? It felt like yesterday or the day before. He remembered her and his discomfort and he wanted to laugh at himself and tell Benny Griessel about her, but he merely gave a slightly embarrassed smile. “I saw a beautiful woman today, Benny. A doctor in criminology. She said that the murderer could be queer. Nienaber is married but he’s a hairdresser . . .”

  “My nephew is a hairdresser in Danielskuil and he’s screwed every farmer’s wife in the area.”

  “It’s all I’ve got, Benny. Because Nienaber is lying. I don’t know why or about what, but he’s lying. He’s slippery, Benny. As an eel.”

  Joubert looked at his watch. It was half past ten. The nurse had said only fifteen minutes.

  “I want to come and help, Captain.”

  “Come when you’re ready.” He got up. “’Night, Benny.”

  Joubert walked down the ward. His footsteps echoed off the walls. He had almost reached the double doors when he heard Griessel calling him.

  “Mat.”

  Joubert stopped, looked back.

  “Why don’t you ask her out? The doctor.”

  He stood in the semidark and looked at the figure on the bed.

  “Maybe, Benny. Sleep well.”

  A block away from his house he stopped at a stop sign, his window open so that the smoke of the Special Mild could waft outside. He heard the big motorcycle before it stopped next to him. The driver, in a black safety helmet, looked straight ahead, a passenger clung to him.

  Joubert looked up, curious, instinctively, and saw the eyes of Yvonne Stoffberg through the narrow opening of her helmet.

  Then the motorcycle revved up and drew away from his car. Joubert’s mind put two and two together. Ginger Pretorius’s Kawasaki, just before midnight on a Monday night. Yvonne Stoffberg’s eyes.

  There was something in the way she looked at him, something in the frown, the sudden manner in which she looked away. Perhaps it was only his imagination, he thought, when he drove away from the stop sign. But it seemed as if she was slightly self-conscious. “I can do better than Ginger Pretorius,” is what he thought she wanted to say.

  And then he knew he wasn’t going to follow Griessel’s advice. He wasn’t going to ask Anne Boshoff out.

  Because he wanted Dr. Hanna Nortier.

  30.

  Margaret Wallace woke just after three in the morning with the realization that Tuesday was garbage removal day—and that she would have to lug the garbage bags from the kitchen door to the front gate on her own. Early. They usually came before six. Last week her brother-in-law had still been there to lend a hand but she was alone now. Without Jimmy. Tomorrow it would be two weeks. And there were so many things to do. A thousand things. Too many.

  She got up, put on her dressing gown, and went to the kitchen, knowing that sleep would elude her. She switched on the kettle, unlocked the back door, took the garbage bin by the handle, and manhandled it to the gate, a long and tiring job, by the light offered by the garden lights and the streetlamps. But it gave her satisfaction. In future she would have to be self-sufficient. Jimmy would’ve expected it of her. She owed it to the children.

  At the front gate, she removed the garbage bags from the bin, placed them on the pavement, dusted her hands, and turned back to the kitchen, dragging the empty bin.

  She remembered Ferdy Ferreira.

  Without warning, without encouragement, her memory suddenly released the information, between the gate and the kitchen.

  The man on the television. The third victim. Ferdy Ferreira. She remembered where she had seen the face before. He’d been here, in their house, one evening. She was busy in the kitchen when the doorbell had rung. Jimmy had answered it. They had gone to the study without her seeing the man. But when he left, she thought, I saw him hobbling through the living room, slightly lame. He had looked up and met her eyes, a man with a sad face, like a large, faithful dog’s. But he hadn’t greeted her, simply kept on walking to the door.

  A long time ago. Four years? Five?

  She had asked Jimmy who the man was. “Just business, my sweet.” Some or other explanation, vague, lost in the mists of so many people who had come and gone, traipsing through her house, Jimmy’s business acquaintances, instant friends, cricket people . . .

  But Ferdy Ferreira had been there. And later today she would phone the big policeman with the unseeing eyes and tell him.

  Perhaps it would help.

  He was already swimming just after six, knowing that it was going to be a long day, determined to make an early start. He counted the first two
lengths and then became enmeshed in a search for solutions. What did he have to do today? Oliver Nienaber. Suspect number one. Gerrit Snyman was probably parked in front of the expensive house by now, ready for the first round of follow-the-hairdresser. The autopsy. Find out whether the pathologist had been able to establish the time of death. That might pin Nienaber down . . . despite Petersen’s blow. Talk to the previous victims’ relatives about MacDonald. Who had known him? Where? The bank robber. Ask Brigadier Brown whether people had been deployed in all Premier Bank’s branches by now.

  Two more days before he would see Hanna Nortier again, he thought. Only two days.

  He wanted to ask her out. Where to? “Drink in the canteen, Doc?”

  Ha.

  Dinner by candlelight in a good restaurant, one of those in Sea Point with the heavy curtains, perhaps one of the new ones in the Waterfront that everyone was talking about? No. Not for a first time—it would be too intimate, too much him and her.

  Flick? Perhaps. What? “Seen Rocky VII, Doc?” Maybe one of those European numbers with the subtitles that showed in the southern suburbs? No. Too many bare breasts and blatant sex. She would get a wrong impression about him.

  Joubert suddenly realized that he had subconsciously kept count and that he had completed eight lengths. And he wanted more.

  He couldn’t believe it. Eight lengths. How about that? Eight fucking lengths.

  Who needed to give up smoking? He turned the way he’d been taught all those years ago, in one smooth movement, his feet kicking against the swimming pool wall. He slid through the water until his big body broke surface and his arms stretched and his head turned to inhale and he tilted his chest for the next stroke upward and the next. Left, right, left, breathe, right, left, right, breathe . . .

  He swam another four lengths, rhythmically, easily, while his heart beat deep in his chest, a thrust. His satisfaction grew until he knew after the twelfth that it had been great and it was enough. He hauled himself effortlessly out of the pool and, dripping water, walked to the changing room. The long room was still empty at that time and the temptation was suddenly overwhelming. He bellowed: “BAAA!”

  One sound, explosive, an echo in the building. The shout that resounded in his ears was an embarrassment, but the feeling enfolded him like a cloak even when he got out of the car at the Hout Bay police station, passed the voices of the journalists, and walked up the stairs and through the big wooden door.

  But it melted away when he saw the district commissioner, the chief of detectives, and de Wit.

  They said good morning, the eyes of the three senior officers fixed hopefully on Joubert. His own revealed nothing. They walked to the ops rooms and closed the door.

  Joubert told them everything—up to the point of Petersen’s blow. And he began to lie. “We had to let him go.”

  “You had to let him go,” the district commissioner said without intonation, stunned.

  “We thought about the reputation of the force, General, in these difficult times. Our image is at stake. Oliver Nienaber is a well-known personality. If we lock him up, we must have sufficient evidence. And we haven’t. One witness who saw him at the scene of the murder. The pathologist hasn’t even established whether MacDonald was murdered at more or less that time. We have no proof that Nienaber owns a Mauser. His story . . . It might well be true. But our image, General. If we charge the wrong man now . . .” Joubert stressed the image, knew that it was the one strong point in his argument.

  “Ye-e-es,” the General said thoughtfully.

  “But I have a team following Nienaber, General.”

  “What do we tell the press?” the Brigadier asked. “After last night’s drama at the news conference they’re like hyenas who’ve smelled blood. Die Burger even says someone might well be charged today. Where do they get hold of such nonsense?”

  Silence fell in the room.

  “Don’t we have anything else, Captain?” the General asked but knew the answer.

  “We have a great deal of follow-up work to do today, General. It might produce something.”

  “We have to sound positive in front of the media. I’ll say we’ve had a breakthrough and are following up new leads now. That’s virtually the truth.”

  “The medium,” said de Wit, making his first contribution. The others stared at him. “She’s arriving tonight. Madame Jocelyn Lowe.”

  “We can’t be the ones to tell the press, Bart.” The Brigadier sounded irritated.

  “I know, Brigadier. Nor will we. The Madame has a press agent. And the press agent said she was sending faxes to the local newspapers this morning. From London.” De Wit looked at his watch. “I promise you, our lack of success won’t be the main copy this afternoon.”

  “I hope you’re right, Bart,” the General said. “Let’s go and speak to the vultures.”

  While the General spoke to the media, Joubert stood to one side. He listened but his thoughts were still concentrated on the things that had to be done. Here and there he caught press questions: “When is an arrest going to be made?” “Is there a connection between the murders and the bank robberies?” The usual stuff. And then a new one. “General, have you heard that the so-called field marshal of the Army of the New Afrikaner Boer Republic said that the Mauser was a voice calling the Afrikaners to the service of their nation?”

  “No,” said the General.

  The reporter paged back in his notebook. “I quote: ‘The Mauser is the voice of our forefathers, the echo of their blood, spilt for freedom in two wars against overwhelming odds. It is a trumpet call for the uprising of the nation, a war cry from a forgotten era when Afrikaner pride was still pure and true.’”

  The whole press group was silent. So was the General. Joubert looked at his shoes, which shone in the sharp sunlight.

  “I’ll ask Captain Joubert to answer that,” said the General.

  Joubert looked at the expectant faces, speechless for a moment. His panic grabbed at words, selected, discarded, chose others, until he started to speak, carefully. “We cannot summarily exclude any motive for the murders. To be frank, we investigated political motives from the start. But I have to tell you that there has been no reason up to now to believe that any political groups are directly or indirectly involved in this.”

  “But you don’t discount it altogether?” asked a radio reporter, the microphone extended.

  “We don’t discount anything at this stage.”

  The group realized that the impromptu news conference was over and began dispersing. The television teams packed up their equipment, photographers unscrewed their flashlights. Joubert walked up the steps, back to the ops room. He had to get hold of the pathologist.

  Professor Pagel, the pathologist, complained about O’Grady. “The man has no respect for death, Captain. I would prefer you to be present in future. I find his kind of gallows humor unprofessional.”

  Joubert mumbled an apology, then asked about the time of MacDonald’s death.

  “It’s difficult, Captain. You know I can’t give an exact time.” Always the academic carefulness, honed by a thousand cases as witness for the state. “But it looks like six o’clock, with a sixty-minute margin either way.” Then he began explaining what he ascribed it to. Joubert was saved by a voice from the charge office shouting his name. He excused himself and trotted off. The constable held out a receiver. He took it.

  “Joubert.”

  “Captain, this is Margaret Wallace.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Wallace.”

  “Captain, I don’t know whether this is going to help you at all, but I think Jimmy knew one of the victims.”

  He heard her using the past tense and knew she had passed through the Portal of Night and now knew the texture of the landscape on the other side.

  “MacDonald?” he asked.

  “No. The other one. From Melkbos. Ferreira, I think.”

  And suddenly Joubert’s heart beat faster, because this was the first probable link. Along w
ith Oliver Nienaber’s lie, the first sign of a breakthrough. “Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Margaret Wallace invited him to a breakfast nook at the big swimming pool behind the house and made him sit down while she went to make tea. Then she came back with a pretty tray with porcelain cups and saucers and a banana loaf, which was freshly cut and spread. She put it down on the white PVC table. “Jimmy loved banana loaf, you know. But I stopped making it. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those things. Life moves on, past things like banana loaf. With the kids growing up, you start worrying about their favorite foods, their needs.”

  She poured the tea. Joubert heard the birds in the trees, the fluid whispering from pot to cup, saw her slender hands with the delicate freckles, the wedding ring still on her left hand.

  “And then yesterday I wanted to make banana loaf. Isn’t it strange?”

  He looked at her, saw her looking at him with her mismatched eyes, but he didn’t feel like replying.

  “Would you like some?”

  He nodded but immediately added guiltily: “I’m on a diet.”

  She smiled. Her teeth were white and even and he saw that she had a pretty mouth. “You? Do you really need it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does your wife say?” Still amused.

  “I’m not married.” And then for no rhyme or reason: “My wife is dead.”

  “I’m so sorry.” There was a silence that caused the sun to darken and drowned out the garden sounds, to lie on the table between them like a tangible divide. Suddenly they were partners, buddies who knew the road up to here but didn’t want to meet each other’s eyes, too frightened that the other would cause the pain to return.

  In silence they poured milk, added sugar, stirred the tea with tinkling sounds. She told him about Ferdy’s visit, but her eyes were on the cup and saucer, her voice flat. He wondered how good her memory was, after four or five years, until she mentioned the visitor’s limping walk.