Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2)

by Ian Patrick

  They were both distantly conscious of the fact that their friend got up twice in the night to vomit just outside the single door that was the entrance to the shack. He returned each time to his space on the floor, rather than try and reclaim his bed.

  Dawn had come. Dogs barked. Cocks still crowed, infuriatingly, as if they had no clue as to what constituted dawn and what constituted noon. Children laughed and called to one another.

  By about midday the three of them had given up on sleeping, woken by the incessant shouting of neighbours, screaming of children, and clanging of pots and pans in the street outside and in kitchens all around, most of the houses being in better condition than the shack and therefore having some semblance of a kitchen.

  As one of the men started stirring, it was a sign to the others that there was no longer any likelihood of further sleep.

  ‘Eish, ou babelas!’

  ‘Ja. Eina! Is sore big time. Where’s coffee, Themba?’

  Themba was in no state to offer any coffee. First, he had no way of making coffee in the shack. There was no electricity, no kettle and no other visible means of providing anything to drink other than what might lurk in one of the grimy vodka, gin and brandy bottles on the single shelf in the room. Second, Themba was extremely agitated by something else. He had discovered that his firearm was missing.

  As he told them the other two instinctively checked for their own weapons. And there they were, the two pistols, on the shelf next to the liquor bottles where they had put them before collapsing onto the bed.

  There was deep consternation as the three of them panicked. Hangover turned to something approaching sobriety as Themba and his skinny companion rushed out to search the car, Themba shouting over his shoulder at the third man as they did so.

  ‘Macks, check there under the bed. Mavuso, wait for me, I’m coming. You gotta keys?’

  Macks checked, and found nothing under the bed, and nothing, either, under the blanket that lay scrunched up in the corner. Within minutes Mavuso and Themba were back.

  Nothing. No gun. The three of them stared at one another.

  ‘We must go back to the beach,’ Themba said.

  ‘Haikona! No way! The boere will be looking for us,’ said Macks.

  ‘Shit! Fok! You guys! Why you...’

  ‘Hayi! No, my friend,’ interrupted Mavuso. ‘Is you, Themba. Wena. We carry you, we don’t carry your gun. You don’t blame us, wena!’

  ‘OK. OK, guys. OK. Is right,’ said Themba. ‘Is right. But we must think. Maybe that gun is not there anyway. Maybe we dropped it when we were coming back to the car. Maybe on that path, maybe in the bush, we don’t know. Maybe we just forget that one, now. Maybe we go get that Desert Eagle from Dlamini.’

  Within seconds they had agreed. No point in going back - certainly not in broad daylight - to the bush where they might not even find the SIG Sauer anyway. Write it off. Think ahead. Think of the Desert Eagle instead. Themba in any case wanted to finish the job on the sergeant who had humiliated him in Folweni, and he wanted that Desert Eagle.

  But first, something to eat. They decided on a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. They spent a few minutes switching the Mazda’s number plates with the false ones Themba kept behind the door. Then off they went. Time to eat.

  And time to plan the hit on Sergeant Lucky Dlamini from Folweni Police Station.

  14.35.

  The slope in Stellawood Cemetery was more crowded than anyone could remember. Unusually, this time, plastic chairs had been laid out for the ceremony. From the simple wooden platform at the graveside a sea of blue uniforms fanned outward up the hill in two forty-five-degree wedges. The two wedges were split by an improvised passageway in the middle. The blue wash was interspersed with a few dark and sombre civilian outfits and the occasional defiantly colourful hat, tie or skirt.

  The master of ceremonies called on Captain Sibo Nyawula to address the audience, and the formal proceedings commenced.

  Nyawula walked down the slope between the two wedges, toward the microphone. The ranks of uniform and non-uniform SAPS personnel hushed. Family members, friends, and retired colleagues joined them in respectful silence. Nyawula’s rich, resonant voice usually commanded respect whenever he spoke. On this occasion the attentive silence was instant.

  ‘Friends and colleagues.’

  He spoke without notes. He paused a moment while a gust of wind, rattling through the public address system, passed.

  ‘Most of you know that the South African Police Officers Memorial now numbers well over six thousand courageous men and women who have died in service against crime in this country. Those of you who have looked at the Roll of Honour pages for the last couple of years will see that in each year our fallen colleagues traverse the ranks from Constable to Lieutenant Colonel. The war we wage against crime puts each and every one of us in the front line. The hail of criminal bullets we confront on a daily basis does not distinguish among ranking officers. We’re all part of the single line of defence against this savagery. From Constables and Sergeants to Brigadiers and Generals. And Student Constables.’

  His gaze moved steadily over the huge audience, with each person having the uncanny feeling that the words were directed personally at himself or herself alone.

  ‘Warrant Officer Ed Trewhella was one of our finest detectives. He was with us for some years, doing work of the highest quality. Last week we lost him in the fight against crime. And against corruption.’

  Ryder didn’t miss the slight pause before the last three words. He wondered how many in the audience picked up the nuance, subtly inflected by his Captain. He looked instinctively, as he always did on such occasions, at his wife seated across the aisle to his left, behind. Fiona returned his glance. She never misses anything, he thought, as Nyawula continued.

  ‘Many of you will remember Detective Trewhella as a witty Uitlander. An Engelsman. A charming rogue. A man whose jokes always, unfailingly, started with the line: This fellow, he walks into a pub.’

  A quiet and respectful murmur of appreciation rippled through the crowd. Ryder, who was seated separately from both Fiona and his colleagues in order to be placed with the other speakers, glanced to his right and two rows back at the personnel who comprised Nyawula’s central team, all seated together. Among them Koekemoer and Dippenaar, each of them the frequent butt of Ed Trewhella’s merciless jokes and teasing, were wiping a speck of assumed dust from an eye, simultaneously, as if they were programmed twins responding on cue in identical actions. Pillay returned Ryder’s glance, with an almost imperceptible smile and a sympathetic nod. Sergeant Cronje was holding it together with some difficulty behind his dark glasses, sitting stiffly and staring resolutely forward. Cronje’s intern Mavis Tshabalala was blubbering openly next to him.

  Ryder looked again, back and over to his left, at his wife. Fiona was now a complete wreck. She could cry at a heartfelt moment during even television commercials, so why would she be any different now? She was sharing her tissues with both of Trewhella’s ex-wives. Fiona had earlier manoeuvered the two bitter rivals to keep them separate from each other, on either side of her. All three of them were now far gone, tears streaming.

  Ryder himself was not much better at fighting to keep dry eyes. How was he going to manage this? Nyawula had told him he was going to be brief in his introduction, and it sounded as if the Captain was already beginning to wrap up.

  ‘Before I call on Detective Jeremy Ryder, who first met Ed in England - and according to Ed was the reason he eventually came out to South Africa - before I call on Jeremy to say a few words about his partner and good friend, I’ll ask you all to remember the words we subscribe to on our memorial site. As we remember our officers who have fallen in the line of duty, take heart in the fact that they dedicated their lives to those principles inscribed in the memorial badge. They put their lives on the line in the interests of honor and integrity. But take heart, too, in the knowledge that whenever an officer falls our resolve is further strengthen
ed. Detective Trewhella fell to a bullet from one of the most hardened criminals this city has known, but within twenty-four hours of that murderous act Ed’s colleagues had worked around the clock to take that thug out of circulation and make the city that little bit safer. Ed would have been proud of that instant response from his colleagues. I now call on a man who was his closest colleague and friend. Detective Ryder.’

  Ryder hated doing this. He would rather be on the front line right now. But he knew there was no escape. Fiona had helped him the previous day to think through what he needed to say. Even though she herself had had a massive speech of her own that she needed to prepare for her own professional commitments.

  He reached the microphone and looked over the expectant crowd. His first words were barely audible and Fiona tensed up immediately.

  ‘Thank you, Captain.’

  Ryder looked extremely uncomfortable in a suit that was far too tight in the shoulders. Fiona thought that the moment she got him home and out of that jacket she would package it up and take it off to the Highway Hospice charity shop in Pinetown, and get him a damned new one, one size bigger. Not that there was an ounce of fat on him, she thought. It was all muscle. This current mismatch had to do with his infuriatingly constant resistance to getting any new clothes for himself.

  He stuttered a bit and coughed until he found the right distance from the microphone and heard his voice coming back at himself. Then he settled in and relaxed.

  ‘I met Ed Trewhella at a crime scene in a little English village called Islip, near Oxford, some years ago. That was a couple of years before he came out to settle in South Africa. It was pouring with rain when I met him. Well, it was England, wasn’t it? At that time my wife Fiona and I were over there for a few years. After a fairly comfortable middle-class existence in Johannesburg Fiona and I had the opportunity to extend our experience abroad, along with the children, in England. It was there that I decided to change careers and become a cop. So for a couple of years I worked my way through the British policing system and by the time I met Ed for the first time we were both what they call over there Detective Inspectors, with the Thames Valley Police.’

  Fiona registered the modesty in her husband’s brief account, and noted how he omitted mention of the hard work that had been involved in their overseas experiment. Responding to tantalizing newspaper adverts at the time, she had seized the opportunity to apply for a position giving her the platform to develop a formidable reputation as an architect in the greater London area. He had taken the opportunity to abandon a flourishing but boring academic career and pursue his previously suppressed ambition to become a police detective. By virtue of his father’s birth his dual citizenship had made it easier. They had both plunged in with gusto. She quickly rose to become senior partner in her firm. He had quickly risen through the Thames Valley system, loving the work and becoming a highly respected sleuth.

  ‘Captain Nyawula is right. The first words I ever heard Ed utter were the words This feller, he walks into a pub. I remember going home from the crime scene that first night with particularly sore cheekbones. Smile muscles, that I hadn’t previously used very much. I had never laughed so much in one night. Especially at a crime scene. A fairly gruesome crime scene, too. After that first meeting Ed and I became best buddies.’

  Ryder choked up a bit at that point, but checked himself and continued, feeling the audience was with him and willing him forward, and he realised, perhaps more than ever before, how popular Ed had been among those in the crowd who had worked with him. He continued.

  ‘But I’ve moved ahead of my story. Ed was actually in a bad way when I met him on the second occasion. It was in late September 2007. Rugby World Cup season in France. English rugby was in total disarray. You’ll recall - probably with some pleasure - that South Africa beat England thirty-six nil in the pool stage of the competition. That was the second night I met Ed. We watched the game on a large screen set up in a pub. It was an excruciatingly painful night for him.’

  There was a ripple of affectionate tittering from the crowd, many of them knowing of Trewhella’s passion for English rugby.

  ‘Of course, there was only one way a guy like Ed could deal with such a devastating loss. In England they call it the Guinness way. Three or four of us eventually carried him out to a taxi and got him home, but by the time we poured him into his bed, he had resolved to join me at the final of the rugby world cup on October 20th at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris. Of course, at that stage although I had tickets we didn’t know that South Africa and England would be the two teams meeting again in the final. And so it came to pass. Ed was no happier after that occasion, of course, though he was pleased that his team did slightly better, going down only fifteen-six.’

  There was a round of unnecessary applause from the rugby fans, which meant almost the entire gathering, along with some inevitable wisecrack in Afrikaans that produced guffaws in the top rows.

  ‘It was on the way back to England from Paris, after that memorable final, that I gave Ed the news that Fiona and I would be returning to South Africa one day. He in turn told me that when we did so he was going to follow us and come and settle in South Africa to see exactly how we bastards learned to play rugby, as he put it.’

  Fiona remembered the day she had met Ed for the first time, when the two of them arrived back from Paris completely drunk, and how for the next year he and Jeremy had worked together on Thames Valley cases, growing in experience and expertise. And how Jeremy had thrown himself into his developing career in the Thames Valley with such passionate commitment.

  ‘Fiona and I then came back to South Africa but we stayed in touch with Ed until he finally made the leap and came out here. I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase out of the frying pan and into the fire quite as much as Ed Trewhella did in those early days.’

  As the crowd chuckled Fiona reflected back on the years in England. With her comfortable income providing the means for them to experiment, Jeremy had done the obligatory two years as a policeman in uniform, and distinguished himself in the various courses and exams that were required on the way to becoming first a Detective Sergeant, then later an Inspector. At the time he had started working with Ed, Jeremy had been heading inexorably for promotion in the Thames Valley Police when both he and Fiona had fairly suddenly and unexpectedly decided to return to South Africa. They had no difficulty in making the decision. They had been considering it for some time. But when the opportunity arose they moved quickly. In her case she was invited to become a senior partner in a new firm of architects inundated with contracts as the result of a massive expansion in the building and construction industry, while in his case the murder of a relative in Johannesburg played a key role in his decision to turn his crime-fighting expertise to work in the country of his birth.

  Ryder traversed a fair bit of ground for his audience, weaving the story of his deceased partner and best friend, tracing Ed’s appointment firstly in Johannesburg and then, after a few months, joining Jeremy in the SAPS in Durban. With changes in the ranking system and the structure of the South African Police Services from April 2010, and in the light of Ed’s status as a relative outsider, he had operated at a rank considerably below that of his experience and expertise.

  Fiona couldn’t help thinking that Ryder, too, despite his talents, had not only been overlooked in the promotion game, but was widely regarded as being initially appointed far below the rank warranted by his experience and expertise. This was not only because of his atypical experience, coming back from years abroad, but also because he refused to play the system. He liked the work. Hated the politics. The result was a far more junior position than he deserved. He had been fairly comfortable with this, given Fiona’s earning capacity and his passionate commitment to the work. It was now fairly widely known that Detective Warrant Officer Ryder commanded enormous respect throughout the SAPS in KwaZulu-Natal, and none held him in greater esteem than his commanding officer, Captain
Sibongiseni Nyawula.

  As Ryder concluded his eulogy for Ed there was a massively appreciative response from the audience. This was followed by brief speeches from Cluster Command, from the Brigadier, and, via the reading out of a message, from Pretoria. Which would have cracked up Ed, thought Ryder.

  Then the interment, and the heart-rending accompaniments. And the hugs and handshakes, and claps on the back, and friendly soft punches on upper arms, and kissing fists.

  Eventually the crowd melted away, and the wind gusted, and leaves blew over the scene, and Trewhella was left in peace.

  17.30.

  Spikes Mkhize was extremely agitated. He paced up and down and around in circles outside Nomivi’s Tavern, shouting out aloud to no-one but himself. He had just come off the phone to his twin nineteen-year old daughters, Jessica and Nobuhle. He had screamed at them on the phone and now they were hysterical. They had been witnesses to a shooting on the R74 last night. To his horror they had given statements to the police in KwaDukuza.

  Idiots! Moegoes! Mamparas! The more he had screamed at them the more hysterical they became on the phone. The police? What on earth were they thinking? Speak to the police? Don’t they know? The people they will kill you for talking to the police! Impimpis! Never talk to the police. Hayibo! Stay out of it. Nothing to do with you. Haikona! Why didn’t they just leave the scene of the crime? Run. Get away. Nothing to do with you two, so go! Why get involved?

  Spikes smelt danger. Dead cops. Whoever had done this would be hunted by the cops, big time, and if these skabengas heard that there were witnesses to what they had done, those witnesses would be taken out. Self-protection. Struesbob! Don’t mess with the skollies.

  His daughters lived with their grandmother in KwaDukuza. Ever since his wife had run away to Gauteng, when the twins were fifteen, he had arranged for them to live with his mother. So that he could run his businesses the way he wanted to. So that he wouldn’t be hassled by children. Now at the age of nineteen they were still causing him grief. Speaking to the police! Hadn’t he taught them when they were young not to have anything to do with the police?