by Ian Patrick
The cop in question had bust his drug deal, a big deal, months in the planning, and had set him back a couple of years, financially. He had long been a major player in the local trade in nyaope. Then he had seen an opportunity to move into terrain further afield. Up the coast, reaching all the way to Maputo and beyond. He had been set to make millions. Then the cop had taken him down, and more than a third of his supply had been confiscated. Mercifully, the rest of his stock had been well hidden.
Thanks to his lawyer he had made bail. The court case would take months. His lawyer was unbelievably expensive, but he knew the game inside out, and if it ever came to trial, Big Red had no intention of being around in the country to face anyone in court. The bastards had taken his passport, but he had connections, and money. And he had sea-going transport. They had impounded one of his yachts, but they had no idea about his other holdings.
There was no way he was going to get caught again. Especially by the cop that had taken him down. A cop who he needed to meet again, on a quiet night. A cop called Detective Jeremy Ryder.
His thoughts turned from Ryder to Thabethe. That guy who had long been a customer of his. Scary guy. Weird eyes. But a no-nonsense guy. He always paid and then disappeared for a few months. Went into the bushes up and down the coast, they said. Then he would come back for more. A regular, he used to be. Before he was put away for something. Now he was back. He had been making enquiries.
But Big Red was being extra careful ever since the cop had taken him down. He wasn’t going to get caught again.
15.05.
Pillay stood in the office of the Station Commander in Durban North, waiting. The Durban North sergeant on duty was present, seated, but no senior officer was there. Whether this was intended as a deliberate slight against Nyawula was not clear, but it had taken the intervention of the Cluster Commander, who greatly admired Nyawula, to overcome some perceived resistance from the Station Commander at Durban North to having his people do any work on a Saturday.
Why the SC at Durban North should have the rank of Colonel while Nyawula remained still only a Captain had for some time been the source of some personal irritation to the Cluster Commander. With a single phone call he had cut through the bullshit and told them that one of Captain Nyawula’s detectives was coming to interview their Constable Maishe Manaka, so they better have a senior person present, along with Manaka, and they better bring them in from whatever Saturday lunch party they might be having. He also told the duty sergeant who answered his call that he was at pains to try and understand why it was that persistent phone-calls from Captain Nyawula remained unanswered by the SC at Durban North. The duty sergeant promised the Major General a response to that question the moment the Colonel returned to the office. The Major General told him to tell the Colonel to stuff his formal response and not waste his time, but to simply do his job properly and respond promptly next time to requests from colleagues. Then he slammed the phone down.
Within minutes the sergeant called Nyawula’s office and told him that the Station Commander’s office in Durban North would be at the disposal of Nyawula’s detectives to interview Cst. Manaka, but that with regret the Colonel would be out and unavailable to meet them when they arrived. But someone, still to be designated by the Colonel, would be in attendance.
Pillay was then immediately dispatched by Nyawula. She had responded instantly to his call and said she could do it before heading out directly after that for Sinethemba’s funeral. He had thanked her and told her he would see her at the funeral. She wondered how the Captain managed to do a hundred things a day, seven days a week.
Pillay knew nothing about the politics and rivalries behind the scene. All she experienced was a frostiness in the Durban North office when she arrived, which made her even more grateful that she worked for a guy like Nyawula.
While waiting for Constable Manaka to arrive, Pillay tried to start a conversation with the sergeant, with little success. After dropping a few unanswered hints about how nice a cup of tea or coffee would be at this time of the day, Pillay ambled around the office looking at photos on the walls.
‘Check this out, hey? This private security oke getting an Award for an Outstanding Contribution by a Local Security Company. You guys use lots of private okes in Durban North?’
The sergeant grunted a reply which indicated something that Pillay heard as a few, I suppose.
‘Is that your Colonel shaking hands with the oke?’
‘No.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Previous Station Commander.’
Pillay read further on into the accompanying blurb.
‘Durban North Performance Awards Dinner. Looks like a grand dinner. Were you there, sergeant?’
‘No.’
‘They do this every year?’ She persisted in her attempt to find life.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, here’s a nice picture of the Provincial Commissioner, and check here, a chart of all the stations and cluster commands in KwaZulu-Natal. I knew there were twenty-five clusters but I didn’t know there were so many stations. Did you know there were one hundred and eight-five stations?’
They were interrupted by the arrival of Constable Manaka. The sergeant stood up and whispered a few words to the constable then introduced the detective.
‘This is Detective Pillay from Durban. She just wants to ask you a few questions.’
Pillay nodded, offering no handshake, and the sergeant ushered Manaka to the chair before standing back to lean against the door that he had closed. Pillay leaned back against the desk in front of the constable.
‘So tell me, Maishe. You been with Durban North long?’
‘Eh-heh.’
‘How long?’
‘Six years.’
‘Six years?’
‘Eh-heh.’
‘Happy in your work?’
‘Yebo.’
‘Happy with your salary?’
‘Yebo.’
‘Really?’
‘Eh-heh.’
‘You must be the first cop I’ve met who says that.’
Silence.
‘But then there are nice ways for a cop in your position to supplement your salary, yes?’
Silence.
‘You like having access to the database?’
‘Excuse?’
‘You like having access to the database?’
‘I’m not understanding.’
‘Oh, but you do. You understand the database very well.’
Silence.
‘You know it so well that you’re able to give private information quite freely to people who ask you for that information from the database, don’t you? Or maybe not freely. Maybe you sell that information.’
The sergeant made a move to intervene but Pillay held up the index finger of her right hand. Something in the glance she gave him was extremely dangerous. He thought the better of it and subsided back into his leaning position against the door.
‘How much do people pay you when you give them private information from the records you have access to?’
Silence.
‘What is the name of the person who called you on Wednesday?’
‘No-one she call me on Wednesday.’
‘No-one?’
‘No-one.’
‘Now think very carefully about your next answer, Constable Maishe Manaka. Your sergeant is a witness to this conversation, and what you say next might be the difference between you going to jail or not.’
Both Manaka and the sergeant froze as Pillay continued.
‘At a few minutes before 9.00 am on Wednesday you received a call from someone asking you for information...’
Manaka panicked. How did she know the precise time of Themba’s call? They must have someone spying on him. He’d better be careful.
‘I was not giving him the information...’
Pillay paused and moved forward from her position leaning back against the desk. She now stood directly in front of him. The
re was something about her that was very unnerving to the constable. His mind was racing as he tried frantically to remember what he had said to Themba on Wednesday.
‘So now you’re telling me that it was a he. Just now you told me that no-one called you on Wednesday. Now you’re telling me that a man asked you for information.’
‘I was forgetting.’
‘You were forgetting?’
‘Eh-heh.’
‘Did the person call you again?’
‘Tchai.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Ag, shame. Now you’re forgetting again.’
Silence.
‘You’re forgetting that the same person called you again at exactly 12.25 on the same day. Three and a half hours after the first time he called on Wednesday. Three and a half hours later. Now that’s a very long time, isn’t it? Stands to reason that someone like you would forget. I mean, you don’t have a good memory at all, do you? Constable Manaka. Constable Maishe Manaka.’
‘I am remembering.’
‘You are remembering?’
‘I am remembering now.’
‘But that’s really good, Constable Manaka! That’s excellent! Well done! That’s really so good! My goodness. What an improvement! In such a short time. Now you remember, do you?
‘I am remembering. Yes.’
‘What are you remembering?’
Manaka was flummoxed. He had lost track of what she had said. Of what he had said. Of what he was trying to think should be said.
‘I was...that man, he was saying to me that he was wanting some information, but I’m not finding it for him...’
Pillay squatted right in front of him, eyes level with his. She was deadly serious this time. She spoke very quietly. So quietly that the sergeant had to take a couple of paces forward so that he could hear.
‘Constable Manaka, I want to say one thing to you and I want to say it only once. Are you listening to me?’
‘I am listening,’ he said, lips trembling as his thoughts started embracing the plight of his wife and two toddlers and what might happen if he lost his job.
‘Constable Maishe Manaka.’
‘Yes, Madam. I mean Detective.’
‘On Wednesday morning just before 9.00 am you received a telephone call asking you for certain information. The same man - you have been truthful and you told me it was a man - the same man telephoned you at exactly 12.25 on the same day. You said that the first time you did not give him the information he was requesting. When he called the second time you gave him the information. Now think very, very carefully before you answer me, Constable. Take your time. Think before you answer me, because what you say next can be very serious for you. What was the information you gave to the man when you spoke to him at 12.25 on Wednesday?’
Manaka started weeping, quietly. He squeezed the words out, slowly, agonizingly, weighing what Themba might do to him if he found out, against what this detective might do to him if he didn’t tell the truth.
‘That man, he was asking me...he was asking me… he was wanting me to tell him the name and the address of one detective there in Durban...’
‘What was the name of the detective?’
‘His name was spelling funny. With the y and not the i. His name was Detective Jeremy Ryder.
15.15.
Thabethe and Mkhize met across the way from the KFC. Thabethe didn’t leave his car, and watched Mkhize walk toward him across the road, carrying a KFC bag.
Mkhize hadn’t been able to resist the extra little touch of buying a bag of chicken and chips, removing the chips for himself, and handing Thabethe a branded KFC bag containing one chicken burger and thirty-eight thousand rands in cash.
They didn’t hang about. Thabethe laughed as he opened the bag, appreciating the gesture. They confirmed that the next step would be the call from Big Red to Mkhize, and then from Mkhize to Thabethe. Sometime tomorrow.
Thabethe touched fists with Mkhize, and drove off.
Mkhize watched him go before walking back to his own car. He had just handed thirty-eight thousand rands to Skhura Thabethe and watched him drive away. How many people would do that? How many people who knew Skhura Thabethe would do that?
He felt OK about it. He knew this guy a lot better now. He had an intuition that Thabethe would never renege on a deal.
15.25.
Pillay drove away from the interrogation of Cst. Manaka with mission accomplished but with mixed feelings. On the one hand she wanted to nail the guy and see him drummed out of the police services. On the other she contemplated the culture of work which conspired to make people like him what they were.
She was sure the guy had, at one time, had the right motivation, made the right choices, and then tried to make his way in the system. But with arseholes around him like the sergeant, and others higher up the line, maybe the poor guy felt like shit all the time at work and saw no prospects for advancement. So one day he was tempted to make a bit of money on the side, and no-one showed any respect for him, so why should he have respect for his office?
Wheels within wheels, she thought as she drove. And got bogged down in traffic.
Maybe she could soften her report. Maybe the constable would have learned a lesson. Maybe he could reform.
She thought through what had happened in the interview. Interrogation, more like it. Mission accomplished? She had nailed the one elusive fact that Ryder had asked her to establish: that it was indeed one of the three guys now in hospital who had called Cst. Maishe Manaka in order to ascertain the name and address of Detective Jeremy Ryder. That fitted with what the Themba guy had told the two detectives in hospital.
But what Ryder didn’t yet know was what she had just learned from Manaka about the nuances of the telephone exchanges that had played out on Wednesday. In the first call in the morning the guy known as Themba had provided the wrong name for checking on the database. They had spent a long time arguing, the constable had told Pillay, and eventually Themba had hung up, very angry, because there was no Jimmy Rider. Then, in the second call, Themba had the correct name, and he was very confident, and he was correct. The name Jeremy Ryder was indeed on Manaka’s database.
Pillay pondered these nuances. What had happened in the interim? How had Themba got the correct name?
Ryder, in his briefing of Pillay, had sketched out for her the details, the different phones, the times of different calls, and his own conjectures about how it might all hang together. Pillay had taken notes, scribbled diagrams, and made a summary on a piece of A4.
She pulled over, suddenly, onto the verge. She reached for the piece of paper and spread it out against the steering wheel. Her eyes flickered over the sketch and the notes. She spent some time on it, making more notes. Then she reached for her iPhone.
‘Ryder.’
‘Jeremy, its me.’
‘Hi, Navi. What’ve you got for me?’
‘Constable Maishe Manaka has been singing to me, Jeremy.’
‘Nice voice?’
‘Not so nice. It trembled a helluva lot.’
‘You and Ed Trewhella both, Navi. Very intimidating. Far too tough. You didn’t resort to waterboarding, did you?’
‘No need, Jeremy. He’s poep scared. Might lose his job. I told him he might even go to jail. So he gave me what you wanted.’
‘Which was?’
‘He confirms that the guy called Themba was the one who called him to ask for your full details and home address.’
‘Thanks, Navi. No surprise, but another piece of the puzzle in place.’
‘But I’ve been thinking, Jeremy.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hit me with it, Navi.’
‘Jeremy, you told me it was phone number three, as you describe it, that called Constable Manaka on Wednesday, firstly just before nine and then again at 12.25.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you also told me that what you call phone number
one - the phone that Themba confirmed in the hospital interview was the one lost on Sunday - called phone number three just before the 12.25 call to Durban North.’
‘Right again, Navi.’
‘Well, Jeremy, from what Manaka tells me, the Themba guy was convinced when he called in the morning that the name on the database must be Jimmy Rider as in horse-rider and was very pissed off when that spelling couldn’t be found by Manaka. Then he was equally, in fact much more convinced, in the 12.25 call, that the actual name on the database was the correctly spelled Jeremy Ryder that we all know so well and love so much. In fact, Manaka tells me, Themba was absolutely and totally convinced that he had the correct spelling when he called at 12.25.’
‘Your point being, Navi?’
‘Maybe it was the call from phone number one to phone number three that provided the correct information, and one minute later the 12.25 call was made by Themba to verify that information.’
Silence.
‘Brilliant, Navi.’
‘I know, Jeremy. Do I get a raise?’
‘No. You’ve just had promotion. But I’ll buy you a beer.’
‘See you tomorrow morning, Jeremy, for the surprise visit to Mkhize. I’m out for the rest of today. I’m on my way to the funeral.’
‘Give Mavis a big hug from me, Navi.’
‘Will do. Gotta rush.’
15.30.
Big Red emerged after only a few minutes onto the deck of the small yacht moored at the end of the pier, having stowed the small bundle in a cavity behind one of the walls in a spot difficult to access. He had resolved to bring the stuff down to the boats bit by bit, as sales determined, rather than to stash whole mountains of the stuff. Just in case of another bust.
He then walked back to the Lamborghini and, staying within the perimeter of Wilson’s Wharf, he purred along the road a few hundred metres to the restaurants. He had long been a regular at the fish restaurant, and the sight of him had given rise to rumours and murmuring among the John Dory staff. The waitress instinctively chose to ignore what he looked like as she took his order. Which he appreciated.