by Ian Patrick
‘Between what and what?’
‘Between être and avoir, Dipps.’
‘What’s that?’
‘To be and to have, Dipps,’ said Pillay.
‘Whether you're a French kid aged three, Dipps, or an English-speaking beginning French student aged thirty or forty or whatever, you will learn the difference between these two words, and you will learn it over and over again, until it spews automatically out of your mouth, directly from the brain, without any mediation by thought. Automatically. Without exception. Hamlet, if he were French, would NEVER say To have or not to have, that is the question! Such a mistake in French is inconceivable.’
‘Ja, Jeremy, I get it, hey?’ added Koekemoer. ‘Like it’s the same thing, Dipps, you know, with the other word. A French prostitute is not going to say to a client Will you BE me? A hunnert rands to one says that she is far more likely to say Will you ‘AVE me, m’sieur?’
‘True, Koeks,’ said Ryder. ‘The difference between to be and to have is sacrosanct to the French. All over the world. Unless your name is Jeremy Ryder. In that devastating class, after a few years of off-and-on French lessons, I forgot the difference between those two bloody words. Those two monsters of the Apocalypse. Ed persuaded me that there were more important things to do at my age than learning a foreign language. So I gave up. That was shortly before Fiona and I came back to South Africa.’
‘Ja, and then Trewhella came out a little later,’ said Koekemoer. ‘I remember, after his Jo’burg stint, he tried to learn Afrikaans in his first week with us here in Durbs. Gave it up after one lesson. Or maybe after one day, after he heard Dipps talking Afrikaans. Sounded like someone farting, he said.’
‘Fok jou, Koeks.’
‘But lissen, ouens. You guys have had it easy. I had a moerse problem when they sent me off to learn Zulu.’
‘What? You learning Zulu, Koeks?’
‘Ja, Navi, I’m telling you. I had this Station Commander in the early days before old Nyawula came in. Told all the white guys that they had to go on a course to learn Zulu. So that we could be understood by the black okes when we said fok jou, bliksem!’
‘Lissen to this, guys. I know this story, and let me tell you, every word Koeks is gonna tell you is true. I saw it myself, man.’
‘Thanks Dipps. I appreciate your help, hey? They wouldn’t have believed a word of what I’m about to say if you hadn’t said that.’
‘Ag, well,’ said Dippenaar.
‘Anyway, guys. So I’m on this course. Me and Dipps and another four or five okes, all white, all in our thirties or forties. The SAPS paid this company moerse money to train us whiteys to speak Zulu, and we had a blerrie good teacher, hey, Dipps?’
‘Ntombi,’ offered Dippenaar.
‘There’s it, Dipps. Ntombi. You remember her, hey? Tall, very good-looking black woman.’
‘Ja, Koeks. She was really like, attractive, hey?’
‘Ja, Dipps. She was, hey?’
There was a slight pause which the others found, momentarily, intriguing.
‘Anyway, she arrives for her first lesson with us. Doesn’t say one word in English or Afrikaans. The very first thing she does, she looks at me and points at me. I think, jirra, what’s this? And she says to me one word. Wena!’
‘Yissus, I remember this so well, guys. It was just like that,’ said Dippenaar.
‘Then the next thing she does is she points to herself. To her chest, you know, like where we wear a badge or a name tag, and she says, as she points to herself, she says one word. Mina!’
‘Just like that, ja, Koeks.’
‘Then she says, again, Mina! and she taps herself there by the name badge, and she says, Mina, ngi-Ntombi! Mina, ngi-Ntombi! then she points at me and she says, again, Wena? So by now I get it and I say, very unsure of myself, you know, but I say Mina? and she says eh-heh! and I say ngi? and she says eh-heh! and I say Koekemoer and she says eh-heh! And then she says immediately, Eh-heh! Yebo! Wena, uKoekemoer! Mina, ngiNtombi. Wena, uKoekemoer! Mina, ngiNtombi.’
‘Just like that, guys, and then she moves on to me, and says...’
‘Yissus, Dipps. Fokoff, man. I’m telling the story. So she points to Dipps and says Wena? And Dipps replies, pointing to himself as if he had a badge, and saying Mina, ngiDippenaar.’
‘And she says Eh-heh!’ Dipps felt it necessary to add.
‘So anyway, this goes on, hey, and Ntombi doesn’t speak one word, not one word, in English or Afrikaans. Only Zulu words. Once a week for six weeks we met with her, and by then she still hasn’t spoken one single blerrie word in English or Afrikaans to us seven or so white okes, and, so, we’re making really good progress, hey? Then comes the night...’
‘Yissus, I won’t forget it...’
‘Shaddup, Dipps! So then comes the night when Ntombi speaks her first ever sentence in English to us guys.’
‘Oh yeah? What happened?’ asked Ryder.
‘Yissus, Jeremy, I was embarrassed, hey? So she asks me to read what I’ve written down for the exercise she gave us, and I pick up my book and I read what I’ve written, and I say to her: Ntombi, ngifuna ukukhumula nawe. And what does she do? She bursts out laughing. Like amazing, you know? Like giggling big time.’
‘You can’t believe how she laughed, guys,’ said Dippenaar.
‘And when she stops laughing I say what? what’s wrong? and she says to me, in English, you know, for the first time she speaks to us in English, and she says Mr Koekemoer, please look it up when you get home tonight.’
‘So what had you said to her, Koeks?’
‘Jirra, Navi. I was embarrassed, hey? When I got home and looked it up I thought I had said to her Ntombi, ngifuna ukukhuluma nawe, meaning Ntombi, I would like to talk with you. But I mixed up the M and the L you know? So instead of saying to her Ntombi, ngifuna ukukhuluma nawe I had said to her, instead, Ntombi, ngifuna ukukhumula nawe.’
‘Which means?’ asked Cronje.
‘Ntombi, I would like to undress with you.’
The ensuing mirth at Koekemoer’s expense was broken by Pillay.
‘Maybe the whole episode says a lot more than we realise, Koeks. Anyway, so what happened when you saw her the next time?’
‘Ja, well, Navi, I’m sure you’re right, hey? But that was also fun, when we met the next time. When the class met the following week old Ntombi asked me if I had looked up the translation and I looked at her, poker faced, and I said ja, Ntombi, I don’t know what you found so interesting, but I meant every word I said! Yissus, if she hadn’t been black I would have said she blushed big time, hey?’
‘I think she was into you, Koeks, secretly, you know?’
In response to this Koekemoer clouted Dippenaar across the head, just as Nyawula appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘OK, colleagues. Can we have five minutes together?’
And they all went in for the briefing, jostling and teasing Koekemoer amidst various comments and half-baked Freudian analysis.
10.10.
Thabethe set aside the small hand spade. He reached into the hole he had finished digging at the base of the tree. He had concealed twenty-four thousand rands here just a week ago. Easy pickings from the gangster whose car he had broken into at the time.
He retrieved the tin, took half the cash, and stuffed it into three pockets. He then buried the tin again with the remaining twelve thousand rands. Emergency fund for the future.
Once he’d filled in the hole, he patted down the disturbed soil, scattered the leaves and twigs, and stood up, looking around in all directions. No witnesses. He concealed the spade under a bush three or four paces away, and made his way back to the street. The SIG nestled into the small of his back, held by his belt and covered by a shirt, a cardigan, and a jacket.
As he walked he withdrew from his jacket pocket the cell-phone he had retrieved from the bush in Blythedale. He powered up. The battery was still OK, but barely. Less than ten per cent remaining. He switched off.
He w
alked a few blocks and eventually hailed a taxi. Twenty minutes later he was making his way to a busy intersection where hawkers and vendors were plying their trade. After testing various options he bought a cell-phone charger from one of them. Standard Nokia, early generation. Quick and easy to charge up with the right charger.
Time for something to eat. Somewhere with an electricity outlet next to his table, so that he could charge up while eating, and while planning his next move.
10.30.
Ryder and Pillay were at the KwaDukuza murder and rape scene. They were in separate cars, having come from different cases each of them was handling and which needed their attention notwithstanding the priority of this particular matter. They arrived almost at the same time and parked their cars well off the verge, back from the area that had been cordoned off and that was guarded by two uniformed constables. They identified themselves to the constables and moved carefully within the areas permitted by the police tape.
Nadine Salm was there along with other forensics people. While two of them were working in the bush on the northern side of the R74, Nadine’s own focus was on the opposite side. Ryder pointed her out to Pillay and they looked up the hill on the southern side of the road to see her moving slowly through the bracken. Police tape marked various spots on the slope. Nadine had an assistant who was taking photographs and marking different locations with tape and luminous markers. The two of them hunched down together, as the detectives watched them, and they appeared to be discussing a specific point in the ground in front of them.
Ryder wanted Pillay to meet Nadine Salm, but it was clear that they would have to wait for her to come down. She would be unlikely to appreciate two detectives trampling on her taped-out area. So the detectives questioned the other two forensics people, who were more accessible for the moment. They received replies to their questions on the more detailed analysis being undertaken in the case of the hit on Cst. Xana, the diagrammatic representation of the shootings based on the reports from the two witnesses, the positions of the bodies in the car and on the road, and the likely trajectory of the bullets. The two forensics officers deferred on the last of these to Nadine, whose full report would materialise only later, they said, after full investigation. She was balancing very carefully her own lifting of the evidence, they told the detectives, with the testing of it, which in this particular case would be done not by Nadine but by others.
Ryder and Pillay both took notes and compared cross-references about the two Isipingo constables, one who died in the front of the car in her seatbelt and the other who had been in the back with Lindiwe Xana and who had been shot dead in the road. They checked the markers, showing the position of the bodies against the photographs they had been given, and questioned the two forensics officers about various aspects of the crime scene. One of them did a rough sketch on a clean sheet of flipchart paper laid out over the bonnet of Pillay’s car, scribbling a few arrows, crosses, and other characters and explaining the assumed action. The two witnesses, twin sisters, had been brought onto the scene yesterday, the officer said, and she had walked the teenagers through what they had witnessed. She said that their evidence had been crucial in putting together the charts to which the officer now referred. The version on the flipchart paper was for the detectives to take away.
Both Ryder and Pillay were deeply affected by the specific evidence on the shooting of Sinethemba Ngobeni, and were then taken through the details of Lindiwe Xana’s fate by the second forensics officer who now joined them. Then Nadine Salm came off the hill with her assistant, and they also joined the detectives and the others, but only briefly.
Pillay had never met Nadine. Knowing that they would be meeting for the first time this morning, Ryder had already warned Navi about Nadine’s distinctive pronunciation, especially on diphthongs, where she tended to use the OO instead of the long O and the long E instead of the long A, thus show as shoo and table as teeble. He urged Navi not to register any reaction to the idiosyncrasy, as Nadine had been teased quite a bit about it in the past and he thought she was a bit sensitive about it. His own preference was that once Nadine got into the pattern of conflating vowel sounds the best policy was to pretend that it simply was not happening.
Fortunately, though, the encounter was only brief, Nadine saying that she was not in a position to provide any analysis, and that the present task was to locate every possible bullet then track back to the likely weapons and put it all together in a thorough shooting scene reconstruction. She was able, nevertheless, to confirm that everything pointed so far to the likelihood that the three weapons used were all 9mm, and from her experience probably something like SIG Sauer pistols.
12.20
Just after midday Koekemoer and Dippenaar met up after their respective investigations on other cases each of them was handling and they hit the road together shortly thereafter, heading south on the M4. The traffic was unusually fluid and they moved quickly onto the M35, passing Isipingo Hills on their right then swung right through Umlazi on their way to the Mbokodweni River.
‘Yissus. This is a big place, hey, Koeks.’
‘Ja. Third biggest township in the country, I hear.’
‘Really? What’s first and second? Soweto and Katlehong? Or Soweto and Soshanguve? What about Khayelitsha?
‘Nooit, man. Soweto and Tembisa.’
‘Oh. Ja. Tembisa. I ‘spose so. Never been there.’
‘I hear Umlazi’s so big it has a different section for each letter of the alphabet. Umlazi A to Umlazi Z. Also had its own special number-plate for cars.’
‘Really, Koeks? Where you read that? On a Chappies chewing gum wrapper when you were a laaitie?’
‘Ag no, Dipps. Somewhere. Who knows? I dunno.’
‘I tell you what my ou toppie told me once. He said that the name came from uMlaza. That meant sour milk, you know, for the Zulu okes at that time. Like fermented whatchamacallit. My old man chuned me this story that when old Shaka came through here once and someone offered him a dop from the river he said fokkof, man, I’m not drinking any of that sour uMlaza stuff. So the name Umlazi stuck. Anyway, who knows?
They began crossing the Mbokodweni on the way to Folweni.
‘Jirra, Dipps, I remember when I was a laaitie we called this the Umbogintwini. Why they have to mess with the names I dunno.’
‘Ja, well, Koeks. Maybe because we didn’t pronounce it so well when we were in charge, hey?’
‘Ag, ‘spose so. Just so blerrie difficult to remember all the new names. What does it mean, anyway?’
‘River of pebbles, or something like that. River of small stones. Stones rubbing together, I think. No. River of grinding stones! Daarsy! River of grinding stones.’
‘Just like the Springbok scrum.’
‘Daarsy!’
They followed the main road with Folweni on their left and pulled in at the police station on the far side of the township.
Koekemoer and Dippenaar encountered a deeply depressed team in the station. The loss of Lindiwe Xana had hit them badly. The detectives heard more about the popular young constable, at twenty-six a rising star with two merit awards to her credit. She had been a superb policewoman, fearless, disciplined, and also highly regarded in the local community. There was widespread devastation at the news of Sunday’s brutal homicides. Local residents were baying for blood, wanting retribution.
The toughest part of the investigation by the detectives was the interview with twenty-eight year old Sergeant Lucky Dlamini. He was a very impressive policeman, in the opinion of both Koekemoer and Dippenaar. He had been in a personal relationship with Lindiwe Xana for a few years. They had been very happy together, and had been planning to get married. He was deeply, deeply upset by her death. But through his disjointed narrative, interspersed with occasional bouts of anguish and tears, the two detectives pieced together a picture of the work of the station.
Koekemoer and Dippenaar gained a positive view of the camaraderie among the personnel at Folweni Police S
tation. They listened attentively to the examples of past successes, and of bravery in the line of duty. They were particularly moved by the 2009 story of the courageous thirty-one year old Constable Ngwane, who had given his life in the line of duty by confronting robbers, including a corrupt police detective from another station, in a shootout in the Amagwazela General Store.
Dlamini painted a detailed history of the work of the local police. He shared a personal highlight in relating his role in cracking a drug-and-gambling syndicate, seeing off a young white Afrikaner gangster who had since not been seen, going on now for a couple of years, and whose extensive criminal activities in both Folweni and Umlazi sections Y and Z had been cleaned out by the work of Dlamini and his fellow police officers.
‘Umlazi Section Y and Section Z they’re clean now, Detectives. We at Folweni have worked hard to clean up the places there across the Mbokodweni River, where I live. Lindiwe lived on this side of the river, Nkabise Place...’
Dlamini choked up a bit on the emotion as he recalled Lindiwe’s home. The detectives waited in silence as he recovered, composed himself again, and continued.
‘There, too, where Lindiwe lived, we cleaned up all the skabengas and tsotsis. The people on both sides of the river were happy. No more burglary. No more drugs. No more fighting. Folweni SAPS did a good job all around here, and me and Lindiwe, we worked together all the time...’
He hung his head in despair. Koekemoer stood next to him, and placed his hand on his shoulder as he sobbed.
‘OK, sergeant, OK. Take it easy, hey? Don’t speak if you don’t...’
‘No. It’s fine, Detective. No, it’s OK. We did good here. We keep those skelms away. The best one, the best time for me, was that Afrikaner white boy they all called Freckles.’
‘Freckles,’ said Dippenaar, ‘that name I remember. Young Afrikaans boy. Used to deal in whoonga.’
‘That’s the same one, Detective. Bad one that one. Young. Always drugs and gambling, that one. He worked also with some bad other guys. Two white guys. But Freckles, he was the one always here in Umlazi and across the river. Always selling nyaope and always gambling and always showing his gun...’