Dead Before Dying: A Novel

by Deon Meyer

  He opened it. The pistol lay there, the safety catch on. He took out his notebook, wrote: Antoinette Nienaber? Always carried the pistol? Knew Oberholzer? Ferreira? Wilson? Faithful?????

  He put down the pen and the notebook, picked up the pistol and sniffed the barrel. Hadn’t been fired in a long time, nor cleaned. Why carry the pistol, Oliver? He put the pistol aside, picked up the cigarette, drew on it again.

  A black diary, reinforced with gold on the four corners of the covers. Diary and notebook. He paged to the date of the first murder. Nothing of importance. He paged on. January 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Appointments with people unknown to him. Ollie’s birthday. One of the sons. January 9, 10, 11.

  Then Joubert saw the list.

  Mac McDonald. Incorrectly spelled. Carina Oberholzer. Jacques Coetzee. Space. Hester Clarke.

  Mat Joubert forgot about the Winston between his fingers. He read the list again. He got up and walked to the door.

  “Nougat!” he yelled down the passage, an urgent bellow. “Snyman! Basie!” There was a new note in his voice. He shouted again, even more loudly.

  He’s sick, Matthew. He’s out of control.

  Anne Boshoff’s words were his driving force now. He was going to stop the bastard. He would see to it that Jacques Coetzee and Hester Clarke didn’t become dossiers as well. He was a drowning man who had been tossed a lifebelt, a nomad in the desert who saw the oasis reflected in a mirage. He was a combat general—the war had begun in earnest.

  The parade room was a hive of activity. Joubert sat against the wall. Next to him, O’Grady. They distributed the list of names. The reinforcements that arrived from other police stations joined the queue. Two to a team. The order was to find the right Coetzee and the right Clarke. The only lead was the set of names and photos of the Mauser victims. And Carina Oberholzer.

  “There are fifty-four Coetzees in the fucking directory,” O’Grady had complained when they held a meeting in Joubert’s room and he had looked up from the directory.

  “There are hundreds of Clarkes with an e,” Snyman had said.

  “He made a spelling mistake with MacDonald,” Joubert had said. “We’ll have to tackle the Clarks without an e as well.”

  “Another hundred,” Snyman had said despairingly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” was Joubert’s reply. “This thing ends today.” With finality in his voice.

  De Wit had come in. Joubert had informed him of the latest state of the investigation and asked for reinforcements. De Wit, unashamedly excited, had trotted off to his office to telephone the Brigadier and the General.

  Louw was late, with the smell of old liquor on his breath and a satisfied expression in his eyes. Joubert had given him the task of questioning the deceased’s relatives about the new names. Then they went to the parade room to put the men available from Murder and Robbery on the trail of the J. Coetzees and H. Clarkes. But Joubert knew initials were meaningless. Jacques might well be a second name, the initial appearing after that of the first in the directory. But they had to start somewhere.

  “Ask them to look at the photos. Read out the names to them. Watch them, because they may lie,” was the instruction given to each team. Nienaber had lied about MacDonald and Wallace, and now he was dead. Why had Nienaber lied? Why the pistol? Had he always carried the pistol?

  Feverishly Snyman made copies of the list of names, goaded by the Captain’s tone of voice.

  And now the detectives poured in—from Paarl and Fish Hoek, from Table View and Stellenbosch—some annoyed because they were busy with other important cases, some grateful for the change and the opportunity of working on the sensational Mauser murders.

  “Phone the hospital. Ask them if we can speak to Nienaber’s wife yet,” Joubert told Gerrit Snyman, delivering the last pile of photostats.

  Snyman scurried. Joubert and O’Grady dealt out more work.

  “The doctor says she’s conscious but she can’t see anyone,” said Snyman when he came back.

  “We’ll see,” said Joubert. “Take this. I’m going to the hospital.”

  In Kraaifontein, on the open piece of ground between the Olckers High School and the railway line, there was a huge tent. At the entrance to the tent a banner had been erected.

  TABERNACLE OF THE REDEEMER SERVICES:

  THU. 19:00. SUN. 09:00, 11:00, 19:00.

  Next to the big tent, there was a 1979 Sprite Alpine trailer with a small tent pitched in front of it. On the trailer’s couch, which could extend into a double bed, sat Pastor Paul Jacques Coetzee. He was busy preparing for the evening’s service.

  Pastor Coetzee was unaware of the fact that more than eighty detectives in the Cape Peninsula were looking for him, because he didn’t own a television set and didn’t read the newspapers. “Instruments of the devil,” he had called the media in many of his rousing sermons.

  He was engrossed in his work, heard all the phrases that he would fling from the pine pulpit, heard the refrain of the Message that would reecho from the loudspeakers.

  From the heart come wicked thoughts, murder, adultery, corruption, theft, false witness, scandalmongering.

  “Sergeant, I have the information you were looking for,” said the secretary of Premier Bank’s district manager.

  Griessel sat in his office, pen at the ready.

  “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “Of the fourteen names you gave us, there are five who have accounts with Premier. Carstens, Geldenhuys, Milos, Rademann, and Stewart.”

  “Yo?” he said when he’d finished writing.

  “Carstens and Rademann are women. Of the three men remaining, two are problem clients.”

  “Yes?”

  “Milos and Stewart. Milos has overdraft facilities of forty-five thousand rand, with sixteen incidents of repayment arrears in the past twenty-four months.”

  Griessel whistled.

  “His checking account was frozen and he has no other account with us. Legal proceedings have already been instituted against him to try to recover the outstanding amount. Stewart’s car was repossessed two months ago after he had, for six consecutive months, failed to pay the monthly payment of nine hundred eighty rand. His checkbook and credit card have also been frozen. He still has a savings account with us. The balance is five hundred forty-three rand and eighty cents.”

  Griessel wrote it all down.

  “Sergeant,” said the woman with the sweet voice.

  “Yes?”

  “My chief asked me to remind you again that the information is absolutely confidential.”

  “Absolutely,” said Griessel and grinned.

  “I understand your position, doctor, but you must understand mine. Out there is a man with a Mauser who, according to the criminologists, is out of control. And in here lies a woman who can help to prevent more bloodshed.”

  Joubert was proud of his choice of words.

  “You don’t understand, Captain. Her condition is . . . She’s on a knife edge. My only responsibility is toward her.”

  He played his trump card. “Doctor, I can go to court and apply for an interdict.”

  “Captain, the court will hear me, too.”

  Check. They stood facing each other in the passage of the private hospital. The doctor was short and slender, with dark circles under his eyes.

  “I’ll have to ask her if she’s willing to see you.”

  “I’d really appreciate that.”

  Joubert waited while the doctor opened the door and disappeared. He put his hands in his trouser pockets, took them out again. He was unhappy. He didn’t have time. He turned, walked on the thick carpet. He walked back and forth.

  The doctor came back. “She says she owes you.”

  “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Five minutes, Captain. And be very gentle with her.”

  He opened the door for Joubert. Antoinette Nienaber looked dreadful. The lines next to her mouth were deeply etched. Her eyes were sunken, her face the ghostly copy of a skull. She lay w
ith her head deep in the pillows, the upper part of her body slightly raised. There was a drip attached to her arm, the tube snaking up to the plastic bag. She wore powder-blue nightclothes. Her blond hair lay lifelessly on the pillow.

  He walked to the bed.

  “I’m sorry . . .” he said uncomfortably.

  “So am I.” Her voice was remote. He saw traces of a narcotic in the unfocused eyes that stared at him.

  “I have only a few questions. You must tell me when you’re tired.”

  She nodded her assent.

  “Do you know if your husband knew Ferdy Ferreira or Drew Wilson?”

  It took her a while before she shook her head. No.

  “Carina Oberholzer?”

  No.

  “Jacques Coetzee?”

  No.

  “Hester Clarke?”

  “No.” A thread of a voice.

  “Did your husband usually carry his firearm in his attaché case?”

  Her eyes closed. The moments ticked past. In the passage there were footsteps.

  Had she heard him?

  The eyes opened. “No,” she said and a drop formed under her eye, ran down the pale cheek, fell onto the blue collar of her nightgown, lay there for a second before being absorbed into the material.

  He was caught up in conflicting emotions. The urgency in him made him want to ask her whether her husband had been faithful, but he knew he couldn’t, not now. What about a euphemism? Had they been happily married? He saw her looking at him, the eyes waiting, a deer facing a shotgun.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Nienaber,” he said. “I hope you . . . I wish you well.”

  Thank you. Her lips formed the words but there was no sound. She turned her head away, toward the window.

  Joubert was back in the office, telephone against his ear.

  Julio da Costa said that Carina Oberholzer may have mentioned names like Jacques Coetzee or Hester Clarke but he wouldn’t have remembered. “She talked a great deal, Captain. All the time. And laughed. She was a very lively girl. She liked fun and parties and people. Her job was only something to make money and to pass the day. She was a night person. That’s how we met. She came in here one Friday night, after midnight, she and a crowd of friends.”

  “And then?”

  “Hell, Captain, you know the way it goes. One can’t work all the time. And you know what it’s like with a wife at home.”

  Joubert said nothing. Because he no longer knew.

  “It’s not illegal,” Da Costa said defensively. “And in any case, it wasn’t her first time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A man always knows, Captain. If you’d had her, you would also have known what I mean. Hot stuff.”

  “Did she ever discuss it?”

  “All she ever said was that she didn’t want life to pass her by. She wanted to enjoy every minute.”

  Joubert ended the conversation.

  Carina Oberholzer from Keimoes. Who laughed and talked and lived her short life to the full. The willing girl from the farm, the sly of a Portuguese Catholic and who knew who else. Had no one known her well enough to know what she knew?

  He got the number of her parents, dialed the long code and the number, waited. It rang for a long time. A woman’s voice answered, a servant.

  “The people aren’t here now. They’ve gone to fetch their son in Johannesburg.”

  He took the Tupperware container out of his drawer and opened it: 60 grams of fat-free cottage cheese; four rice cakes; tomato, avocado, and lettuce with a small portion of fat-free dressing. He was going to die of hunger. At least the Winston was waiting, the high point of his day, his greatest pleasure.

  Someone came running down the passage.

  They’ve traced someone, he realized.

  It was Louw. “He shot Jacques Coetzee, Captain. Less than an hour ago. And someone saw him.”

  The two schoolboys were in sixth grade and they were very keen to see the body, but the police wouldn’t hear of it. The boys had to keep out of the way, stand between the guy ropes that kept the walls of the tent upright, watching one police vehicle after the other arrive. But it was much better than the double biology class they were missing.

  One of the first detectives to arrive there came up to them with another man, a big one.

  “These are the boys, Captain.”

  “Thank you,” the big one said. He put out a huge hand. “Mat Joubert,” he said.

  “I’m Jeremy, sir.”

  “Neville,” said the other one.

  He shook their hands.

  “You’ll have to tell me everything.”

  “Weren’t you on TV the other night, sir?”

  He shrugged. “May have been.”

  “Then this is the Mauser thing, sir?”

  “We think so.”

  “Sheesh, sir, but that guy is blowing them away, hey.” Great admiration.

  “We’re going to catch him.”

  “We only saw his car, sir,” Jeremy said. “We heard the shots. We were behind the tractor barn when we heard the shots, but a train passed and we weren’t sure. Then we walked over to have a look. Then we saw the car.”

  “What make?”

  “That’s a bit of a problem, sir.”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t know one car from another,” Neville said.

  “I know cars. You should have your eyes tested.”

  “Hey,” Neville replied but without aggression, as if their arguments were a normal ritual.

  “It was a Fiat Uno, sir, a white one. I think it was a Fire but I’m not sure. It wasn’t a turbo because the turbos have fancy stripes and a louver.”

  “It was a CitiGolf, sir. White. I know a Golf’s backside because my brother drives one. He’s also in the police, sir. In Natal. They shoot Zulus.”

  “Hey,” said Jeremy. “They’ll lock you up.”

  “You’re sure it was an Uno.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re sure it was a Golf.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Registration number?”

  “We were too late. We only saw his tail as he drove away.”

  Joubert measured the distance between the school grounds and the boundary fence and the road the vehicle had taken. “You didn’t see what he looks like?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, men, thank you very much. And if either of you makes a different decision about the make, you’ll let me know. I’m with Murder and Robbery.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  He was about to walk to the trailer when Jeremy spoke again.

  “Sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “May we really not see the body?”

  He suppressed a smile and shook his head. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “Lots of blood, sir?”

  “Buckets.”

  “And the bullet holes, sir?”

  “As big as hubcaps,” he lied shamelessly.

  “Sheesh,” Jeremy said.

  “Jeez,” said Neville. “That Mauser is a cannon.” And they walked away deeply impressed, with information worth a fortune in their world.

  37.

  It was one of the additional teams who found the body. “We must’ve missed him by minutes, Captain. The blood hadn’t even clotted.” The body lay in the trailer, driven back by the first shot, which had ripped into Coetzee’s skull just above the left ear. The other shot was through the heart, as in all the previous cases except MacDonald’s.

  If only he had looked at the attaché case the previous day. But how could he have known? He walked to the Sierra, radioed O’Grady. They must try to recall the teams who were looking for Jacques Coetzee. The whole effort must focus on Hester Clarke now. He must try to save at least one life.

  “There’s an address on the telephone account, Captain,” Louw called from the trailer. “Durbanville.”

  At least, Joubert thought, the connection had been proven. They now knew that Nienaber’s l
ist meant something. And there was only one name left.

  He called Louw and they drove to Durbanville to a dilapidated house in the center of the town. The grass was long and untidy, the flowerbeds overgrown with weeds.

  “I hope he was a better pastor than a gardener,” said Louw. He had brought a bunch of keys that had hung in the trailer door’s lock and tried until one fitted the front door’s.

  They walked in. There was no furniture in the sitting room, only a telephone, which stood on the floor. In the kitchen there were dirty plates in the sink. An old refrigerator rattled in the corner. The empty hallway was uncarpeted. So was the first bedroom. The second held a single bed, a bedside table with no drawers. On the floor there was a pile of books. Joubert picked up one. Praise His Name. The second one was also religious. All the others as well.

  On the bed table there was an opened envelope. He picked it up and took out the contents.

  SMUTS, KEMP, AND SMALL, ATTORNEYS AND NOTARIES

  Dear Mr. Coetzee:

  According to our client, Mrs. Ingrid Johanna Coetzee, you are still in arrears with regard to the alimony set out in the divorce decree . . .

  Griessel was hot on the trail of George Michael Stewart.

  He found no one at the man’s flat in Oranjezicht, but the caretaker there said the suspect worked part-time as a waiter at Christie’s, the restaurant on Long Street.

  He couldn’t find a parking space, eventually parked in a loading zone on Wale Street and walked around the corner. The restaurant was virtually full for lunch, with yuppies very much in evidence. He was received at the door by a tall, refined man with a tense smile who quickly led him to a table at the back, near the kitchen door, and pushed a menu into his hand.

  Griessel sat down and felt people looking at him. He didn’t fit in here. He looked self-consciously at the dishes on the menu and saw that he wouldn’t be able to afford much. He decided on the pumpkin soup and looked up again. There were only two men serving, both white—the refined one who had taken him to his table and another one, of average height and build. Both were dressed in the same outfit, a pair of black trousers, white shirt, and black bow tie. Both had short dark hair and were clean-shaven. Each had a nose that looked somewhat like the bank robber’s.