by Ian Patrick
‘Anything but, Piet. Drinks and dinner with a Lieutenant-Colonel, a Brigadier, and a Major-General. Can you think of anything worse?’
‘Not really, Captain. Well, maybe. My parents-in-law are coming for dinner. Again.’
‘Hmmmm. Want to swap places, Piet?’
‘Yislaaik! No way, Captain.’
‘Sure? You’d find the senior officers can be a real barrel of fun, Piet.’
‘No, Captain. Sorry. When I said no way I wasn’t talking about me and the generals. I meant that I wouldn’t want you to go through the experience of eating with my in-laws.’
‘Oh. OK, Piet. I see. That bad, hey?’
‘S’why I spend so much time in the office, Captain.’
‘OK, Piet. Don’t stay too long, though. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Bye, Captain.’
22.30.
The ten people seated at the Ryders’ dinner table were finishing dessert. Three of them were relatives visiting from England and staying overnight with the Ryders. Fiona’s widowed cousin Jennifer was in her fifties and she was accompanied by her two late twenties-something children. Harry and Katherine were both young architects in England and Fiona had thought it would be useful for the three of them, while on holiday in South Africa, to meet a few of her own architect friends in Durban.
Mongezi was a senior partner in the firm, and his wife Ntombi was a chartered accountant. Ivan was there alone. He was a highly regarded architect and distinguished academic in urban design and planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, and visiting consultant to their operation in Durban. Busisiwe was a junior in the firm, in her mid-twenties and in Fiona’s opinion the most talented young architect in town. Her husband Hans was an academic in mathematics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Fiona and Jeremy made up the ten. Their two children were away for the mid-term with friends at a farm in the Midlands, they had explained to the guests. Along with the dog, who was never happier than when near a herd of sheep.
The evening had been warm and convivial, and Harry and Katherine in particular had seized on the opportunity to learn about the local scene and current interests in Built Environment projects. Katherine and Busisiwe exchanged contact details and there was talk about an intended ongoing email relationship. Harry and Hans also got on superbly.
The babble of separate conversations slowly began to converge toward a point at which a single strand naturally and without ostentation from the speaker becomes more interesting than others. The focus of the table was now on the sixty-something Ivan, a gentle and elegant man. He was in mid-flow, in response to a question from Ntombi about Nelson Mandela. The mere mention of the name had silenced the other conversations and all eyes were now on Ivan.
‘Well, Mandela had us eating out of the palm of his hand. He was so utterly charming and disarming on each of the occasions he visited. Especially on that incredible night in September 1991 when he received his honorary degree. We’d been told that the timing was not exact, but his security people would bring him to the side entrance at some point mid-way through the event.’
They all listened with rapt attention as Ivan continued.
‘The planning was impeccable. At the given moment the Vice-Chancellor would interrupt the graduation proceedings, at whatever point they had reached by then, by standing and announcing to the audience Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the African National Congress. It had been arranged that Mandela would then walk onto the stage from the wings, shake hands with the VC, then go straight to the podium to begin the formalities that would culminate in his address. A standing ovation was expected, to fill the time from the entrance to the commencement of the action. All very carefully planned and stage-managed. But guess what happened next? It was an amazing moment. Having taken his place at the podium, with the applause dying down, Mandela saw Gerrit Viljoen in the front row of the audience, and - ’
‘Who?’ asked Jennifer.
‘Minister of Constitutional Development at the time,’ Fiona whispered to her. The whisper was particularly hushed, as a signal to Jennifer, who had asked her question in full voice to the whole table, rupturing the attention. Ivan continued.
‘So immediately leaving the podium he walked straight over to the edge of the stage, leaned over, and said Hullo Gerrit. How very nice to see you! It was one of the most incredible moments, former Chairman of the Broederbond, and…’
‘That’s just what I do!’
Ivan stopped, and turned. Everyone, hanging on his words, also turned, in some surprise and with some irritation at the interruption of Ivan’s captivating story.
‘I’m sorry, Jennifer, what was that?’
‘I said that that is exactly what I do.’
‘Sorry. Do what?’
‘When I have a speech to make to a large audience.’
‘Um… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘When I give speeches to large audiences I find it useful to relax everybody by finding someone in the audience and going over to greet them. Just like Mandela. It makes everyone feel at ease. I remember when I spoke at the Albert Hall...’
Jennifer’s son Harry raised his eyes to the ceiling and smacked his open right hand irritatedly against his forehead. Her daughter, Katherine, just groaned and dropped her head, almost onto her plate. Others sat with their mouths somewhat open.
‘Please go on, Ivan,’ Harry said. ‘I think for the moment we should hear about Nelson Mandela instead of mum’s prowess as a public speaker.’
‘Um… where was I...’
‘Mandela greeted Viljoen,’ Harry offered.
‘Oh, yes. Well. Anyway. It was quite a moment...’
Ivan tried to get back into the story, and did, to some extent. But the moment had passed and the structure of the narrative was ruined. The nuance had been lost through Jennifer’s intervention.
Ivan was perplexed. Harry and Katherine were embarrassed and furious. Fiona despaired. Jennifer was oblivious. She turned to Mongezi, opposite her, and started telling him about her Albert Hall fame. The rest of the table began to start up different conversations about Mandela.
The tone had changed, so Ryder tinkled a glass and suggested that they all move through to the living room or spill out onto the patio to have coffees and whatever else might take their fancy. There was a hubbub of conversation as they all stood up from the table and started moving through. Mongezi took the opportunity to escape from Jennifer by asking someone where the bathroom was. Fiona walked through with Harry, who was apologising for his mother. Katherine took Jennifer by the arm and hurried her out ahead of the others, whispering agitatedly at her. Someone was asking someone else what Jennifer did for a living.
Ryder couldn’t help thinking about a formal dinner he had attended in England some years before, where Jennifer had been present. She had arrived a little late as a guest at a large black-tie dinner table in The Liberal Club. The host was in full flight with a short but dynamic and passionate speech to the fourteen or sixteen guests, and nodded graciously to Jennifer as she arrived, a little sheepishly, to take the only remaining seat at the long table. Which was the one next to Ryder. As she sat down she whispered to him, asking how long the speaker had been going.
‘Started a minute ago,’ he whispered, swivelling his body away from her and turning his attention back to the speaker.
‘I’ve hosted quite a few events here, myself,’ Jennifer had said.
Startled, he had turned back to her.
‘I’m sorry?’ he had whispered, as quietly as he could.
‘I said I’ve hosted a number of events here. I’ve been a member...’
‘Shhhht!’ offered the guest opposite Ryder, trying to put a stop to the oral history of Jennifer’s club membership.
‘How rude!’ Jennifer had whispered in his ear.
He didn’t turn this time, and did not reply, but kept his attention fixed resolutely on the speaker, hoping that the shusher opposite would therefore see him as an ally and not an adversary.
‘I once had dinner here with Lord...’
‘Shhhh!’ went another guest, halfway up the table, turning irritatedly and staring at Jennifer.
This had some impact, and with some difficulty Jennifer had kept quiet for the remainder of the host’s short speech. But she made up for it after that, and Ryder and those placed around her then had to endure an evening of torture as she delved into anecdotes about her various meetings with the great and the good. Ryder noted that every single person around Jennifer, including himself, had left the table to go to the toilet during the course of the dinner.
It had become a real problem among her friends and family. There was not infrequent discussion about it. Jennifer seemed unable to listen to a speaker, or hear a brief social anecdote or story or snippet of interesting information without seizing any opportunity to insert her own experiences, social standing and reputation into the narrative.
It was a great pity, thought Ryder, because when he had first met her he thought she was at heart a warm and generous person, intelligent and charming, elegant and gracious. What dreadful experiences had she endured as a young person to make her feel undervalued? What was the driver that prompted her to insert herself as the narrative centre in any social discourse?
But for now, thought Ryder, Fiona’s carefully selected liqueurs and coffees and chocolates proved to be successful. Whatever Katherine had said to Jennifer on the way through from dinner had produced the desired effect, and she had retreated into the background to some extent. The highlight of the evening was Mongezi capturing everyone’s attention and gathering them all into a group standing in the living room, before toasting Fiona and announcing the details of her latest achievement in securing one of the biggest design contracts in the firm’s history.
‘Fiona Ryder,’ said Mongezi, raising his glass, ‘has put our firm on a trajectory that will not only secure our work for a decade but will also play a key role in the transformation of the Built Environment we see all around us. It has been a magnificent experience working with her, and tomorrow we’re attending a signing ceremony where we’ll be handed an enormous cheque. I shall be insisting that the photographers show her and not me receiving the cheque. She has not only led us to this moment. She has bossed us, and cajoled us, and persuaded us to get better and better at what we strive to do.’
Amidst toasts and laughs and jokes about not believing it until the cheque had been cashed, Fiona graciously accepted the compliments, sharing the glory, as always, with her colleagues, pointing out the crucial roles they had all played in the exercise, especially Busisiwe, and generally deflecting the accolades from herself and onto others. Harry and Katherine marvelled at it and looked, simultaneously, at their mother to see whether she was absorbing any lessons. They couldn’t tell whether she was or not.
Then the alarm went off.
22.45.
Nadine Salm was with her assistant in the laboratory. Earlier in the afternoon they had put together the information on the slugs recovered from the KwaDukuza cop homicides and the passing motorist who had been hit by a bullet. They had then had dinner together before coming back to the lab for further meticulous recording and the generating of computer-aided diagrams, simulations and animated reconstructions. They had worked well into the evening.
There was no question in their own minds that three SIG Sauers were involved in the massacre, but they had to resist the temptation to move from being lifters and recorders of evidence to becoming the testers of that evidence. Nevertheless, they worked painstakingly, going through records of past homicides, looking at possible connections between different weapons recovered from different crime scenes, and generally building up a picture for themselves of what connections there might be.
They also puzzled over the Vektor Z88 used by Sergeant Dlamini from Folweni. Nadine looked through the reports on his death, and the evidence recovered from the scene, and the drawings she herself had made at the scene, along with the photographs taken by her assistant. She drew some arrows on a piece of paper. She pulled out a protractor and jotted down some measurements.
Something wasn’t hanging together. She would need to go back and have a closer look.
She looked up at the charts and photos and drawings on her noticeboard, compared them with the computer-based drawings, and frowned.
22.45.
Except for the Ryders everyone did what most people did when an alarm went off. In the first second they wondered what’s that? In the next second they wondered where’s that? In the third and fourth seconds a couple of them considered whether the sound was their own car alarm outside while others wondered whether the sound was a fire alarm. In the fifth second Jennifer thought that Fiona had another surprise in the oven and the alarm was simply informing her that whatever it was, it was now ready. For the first five seconds none of the guests moved as they thought through these possibilities.
Except for the Ryders. Instantly, as the alarm was triggered, their eyes met for a nano-second. Then he was off, immediately, heading toward the passageway to their bedroom where his Vektor SP1 lay with its double-stack magazine fully loaded under a T-shirt in his wardrobe. Fiona turned immediately toward the kitchen to the panic button and where she also knew her heaviest ribbed cast-iron heavy duty skillet still lay on the stove, put there earlier to cool down.
They were both too late. Ryder was stopped in the passageway by one of the three men pointing a SIG Sauer 9mm SP2022 directly at his face. Fiona was stopped just as she entered the kitchen by a second man, tall and skinny, with exactly the same make and model of weapon, pointing at her chest. The third man, obese, smirking, came up from the garden onto the patio, brandishing a titanium gold Desert Eagle, Mark XIX with a six-inch barrel. All three of the men advanced slowly, herding them all back into the sitting room. The man from the patio did the talking.
‘Good evening, my people! Everyone, now, you must be standing still right there. No move, people. You be good people, you not die. You stand still and my friend there he will be collecting the wallets and purses and jewellery and watches, nè?’
Jennifer fainted. Katherine caught her before she hit the floor and lowered her the rest of the way. Everyone else froze.
The telephone rang.
The alarm company, Ryder thought. They’ll be here in three or four minutes. Then there’ll be mayhem. Danger. Trigger-happy armed response. Could be disastrous. Better that they stay away.
The man who had stopped Fiona entering the kitchen had the same thought. He pointed the gun at Fiona’s forehead. Ryder tensed but held back as the man directed his words at Fiona.
‘You. You answer that telephone. You tell them no problem. You give them one clue, one time, only one time, and I shoot you. No secret password, nè? If they come here, then we shoot everybody. Everybody she die!’
Ryder’s eyes locked with Fiona’s. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. They agreed. Play along for now. No password clues to the alarm company. Too dangerous. She picked up the receiver, which was just inside the entrance to the kitchen, visible to all of them diagonally across the passage from the sitting room.
‘Hullo. Yes, no. No, I thought it would be you. No. No sorry, it was me, my fault. Mrs Ryder. Yes. Fiona Ryder. Yes, I forgot I had switched it on. No, no problem. Yes. OK.’
In answer to a specific careful question from the control room caller she provided the information signalling that all was genuinely fine and that the company could stand down their armed response team who had already been dispatched to the scene. Both she and Ryder were computing the situation in exactly the same way. They knew that on many occasions it was advisable to give the caller the code word that meant they were actually really in trouble. But there was always the slimmest of chances that insider collaboration might blow the procedure. As could a nervous robber. In this particular situation it looked as if the intruders knew what they were doing, and that they were after wallets and jewels and nothing else. Not worth endangering the l
ives of their guests. So play it cool. No signals to the armed response guys this time.
The Ryders were wrong about the intentions of at least one of the three men.
Fiona hung up the phone, and her guard moved around behind her in the kitchen so that he could herd her back into the living room. Meanwhile the man in the passageway, having moved Ryder back into the living room with the others, was the one assigned to collecting wallets and valuables. But even before the collection started it immediately became apparent that he had other intentions, focussed on Busisiwe.
‘You! Wena. You show me the more stuff in the bedroom, first, nè? Then later we want to talk to the Detective, Mr Jeremy Ryder, after we have some fun, you and me.’
He held his weapon in his right hand and reached for Busisiwe with his left hand. Just at this point Jennifer started moaning and coming round and Hans moved forward instinctively to protect Busisiwe. As these three things happened, simultaneously, the rest of the group shifted slightly on their feet and vocal protests started, along with the man with the Desert Eagle shouting at his companion.
‘No, Macks! Not now.’
‘Fokoff, Themba,’ came the reply, ‘two minutes, is all!’
The Desert Eagle man was about to reply when Jennifer, suddenly realising the intentions toward Busisiwe, screamed. Unbelievably loudly.
It was the distraction Ryder needed. Fiona had been watching her husband like a hawk, and at the precise moment he made his move she also made hers.
Ryder had to choose between the two men in the living room, knowing that Fiona would try something of her own with the third man in the kitchen. He decided that there would be a split second in which the would-be molester of Busisiwe would have his attention still lingering on her. The danger man was the man from the patio. But he was fat, and therefore probably slower than he might otherwise have been. Ryder propelled himself across the room, dancing in two rapid strides like a cartoon ninja, his massive right fist smashing into Themba’s nose and upper lip just as he realised what was happening and started bringing up his gun hand. Ryder, fearing that he might still manage to let off a bullet that would cause damage to someone, a split-second later brought his left arm swinging down from overhead to smash the fat man’s right arm downward. Just in time, because as he fell, blinded by the blood from his nose and with teeth collecting in places where they didn’t belong in his shattered mouth, he let off a round that was diverted into the lounge floor as Ryder’s blow dislodged the weapon from the man’s hand.