The First Rule of Survival

by Paul Mendelson

‘You lock it last night?’

  MacNeil takes a breath, squeezes his eyes shut. De Vries looks at the wide freckled face on a thick neck, knows that these gestures are only for show.

  ‘Ja. I think so.’

  ‘How often don’t you lock it, Mr MacNeil? Let’s be quite clear here.’

  MacNeil avoids de Vries’ eye.

  ‘I locked up last night,’ he mutters. ‘For sure.’

  De Vries stares at him. The expression on MacNeil’s face is open: the man apparently believes what he has just said. Everything sounds right; nothing is helping.

  ‘Stay here. My Warrant Officer will be with you now.’

  MacNeil asks him plaintively, ‘My business. When will I be able to open again?’

  Two dead kids.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ de Vries answers bitterly.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  London is dark and grey, the Thames cow-dung dirty. The entire city is blurred through the dense misty rain. John Marantz turns away from the porthole; the view makes him feel depressed. He has been airborne for eleven hours and has another six hours to wait before the next half of his journey. It will be the first time he has been back on native soil for five years.

  In the airport lounge, his cellphone rings and a number he has almost forgotten appears on the screen. On answering, the voice is just as he remembers it.

  ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘See me on the cameras?’

  ‘Saw you in Vegas. We can see anyone, any time. Are you drinking?’

  ‘Not for three years.’

  ‘What are you on?’

  ‘Seroxat and cannabis. What about you: claret and Prozac?’

  A momentary pause, then: ‘Who are you seeing?’

  ‘Sexually or psychologically?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘You’re an asset. I know where you are all the time.’

  John Marantz likes no part of that sentence.

  ‘I need to know you are all right, John.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of what happened. Because of what we did.’

  ‘For that,’ Marantz says slowly, ‘you deserve nothing.’

  De Vries walks back to his car with the Scene of Crime team-leader. Most of the vehicles have left the car park now, and there is an officer at the driveway entrance, turning away disappointed customers. MacNeil’s farm-stall seems to be a thriving business, and de Vries knows this will mean that with a steady through-flow of customers, staff will be unlikely to identify anyone who might normally have stood out.

  ‘One night outside? That your view too?’ de Vries says, lighting a cigarette carefully, shielding his lighter from the breeze, not looking at his colleague.

  ‘Until the coroner confirms time of death, yes. But based on what I’ve seen, I’d think twenty-four hours tops since they were dumped. Preliminary observations only, Vaughn, but there’s no spatter, almost no blood. I’d say you’re looking at an alternate crime scene.’

  ‘No IDs?’

  ‘Not on them, obviously. And nothing that we’ve found so far in the skip or around the site. I’m guessing we won’t find anything. Whoever killed them stripped them. He knew that would make identification harder.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘I’ll give you my guess: forty-eight, seventy-two hours perhaps. I want the coroner to open the wrapping. Until then, you can’t see much.’

  ‘How stacked up are they at the labs?’

  ‘Same old. You’ll get prioritized, but I can’t promise you anything from my guys for at least forty-eight hours.’

  De Vries shakes his head. ‘That’s why they haven’t made CSI: Cape Town,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t have the lab results from the first crime till the series ended.’

  Dryly: ‘Nice one.’

  ‘How long will you be here?’

  ‘Should finish up before it gets dark. If the bodies were just dumped, there’ll not be much outside the immediate scene – though we’ll look, of course. After that, as far as I’m concerned, we can reopen everything. Unless you have any objection?’

  ‘Your call now. I’m done here.’

  The coroner’s van passes them, heading back towards Cape Town.

  ‘I’ll have the preliminaries for you by first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Good.’

  De Vries stands by his car, lost in thought. Something at the corner of his brain, his memory, is plaguing him.

  ‘Vaughn?’

  He exhales two lungfuls of smoke, sputters: ‘Sorry. Was on another planet . . .’

  ‘I was just asking: this scene – are you a policeman who rejoices because this is what you do and it is all about to begin under your charge, or do you despair because there’s so much death in our country?’

  De Vries hadn’t taken his colleague to be a philosopher, not when all he does, week in, week out, is study the detritus of death. He looks over to him, his face blank.

  ‘Neither.’ He shrugs. ‘Or both?’

  The pathology suite is not lit by recessed LEDs, a soothing blue mist of light; nor are the benches gleaming and new – but even if they were, you would not be able to see them for the bodies. There are no banks of slim wide-screen computer monitors. You do not enter through swishing, automatic sliding doors . . .

  At 6 p.m., Vaughn de Vries and Don February push through the slatted, grey-blue plastic curtain into the large, white-tiled mortuary. Five fluorescent tubes hang on chains from the grey ceiling. The only moderately blue light comes from the ultraviolet fly traps on the wall. Their zapping punctuates the stench of death as it lodges in the men’s sinuses.

  At the far end of the room, a burly, thick-set man in protective, spatter-resistant clothing is hunched over a table. As they walk past the other benches, de Vries looks at each body. They are all young black men. At the final table, the skinny body in the sickly light is very white.

  De Vries, his voice loud in the hush, asks: ‘Where’s the other one?’

  The pathologist looks up at de Vries. ‘Good evening, Harry. Thanks for jumping the queue for me. I owe you a beer—’

  De Vries baulks. ‘Sorry, Harry. Thank you – and, yes . . . Beer.’ Vaughn grimaces. ‘I’m dog-tired and the adrenalin just kicked in again. I want to get this going. Sorry.’

  ‘Body A has already been processed and is now back in storage. As you can see, we have a backlog.’ Harry Kleinman glances back up the room. ‘These all need attending to before I go home.’ He sighs, looks back at the body on his table, and then back at De Vries. ‘I’m finished here. You want what I have?’

  ‘Ja. Any clue to identities?’

  Kleinman peels off thick gloves and disposes of them.

  ‘Assuming no one is claiming them, no, not unless we have records on characteristics for missing persons.’ He reaches for two clipboards proffered by an assistant, switches spectacles, balances the bottom of the boards on the top of his small, round beer belly. He glances at the first one.

  ‘Body A is a Caucasian male, aged between fourteen and sixteen. Shot once through the chest. Clean through and through – that is to say, the heart exploded but the bullet continued on its way. No traces of munition found, but the wound is consistent with that of a high-powered rifle – a hunting rifle, perhaps. I estimate time of death as between noon and six p.m. on Sunday.’

  ‘That wide?’

  ‘Impossible to judge accurately. Ambient temperatures are all over the place – the wrapping distorts any normal measures. But,’ Kleinman adds, ‘the wrapping was not done straight after the boys were shot.’

  De Vries counts back: the boy died about forty-eight hours ago. The bodies must have been kept for a night, then wrapped in polythene and transported to the farm-stall the following day. They then spent one night out of doors in the skip.

  ‘Anything on the wrapping?’
/>
  ‘Nothing yet, but it’s at the lab.’ He looks up at de Vries over his glasses. ‘Heard the CSI Cape Town gag. Very droll,Vaughn.’

  ‘How long were they wrapped for?’ de Vries asks, ignoring Kleinman’s comment.

  ‘I would say,’ the pathologist begins, looking down to open a chocolate bar, ‘that both boys would have been dead for at least twelve hours before wrapping. I’ve already heard the theory that they spent one night in the open whilst wrapped, and I’m inclined to concur. But I can’t be definite on that. There are some small areas of post-mortem bruising, possibly from being transported from the original crime scene.’

  ‘Pre-mortem? Signs of struggle?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t expect signs of struggle in a shooting case. However, the wounds indicate that the shooter was standing no more than twenty metres from his targets, and this second boy has classic defensive wounds. He was probably also shot only once, but this bullet made more of a mess. Firstly, it looks like it took the fourth finger of his left hand off. It’s possible that this is a separate shot, but I’m inclined towards the theory that it is the same one. Then it punctures his left lung, before ricocheting through him. If the first boy took twenty seconds to die, this one, it was about as instantaneous as it gets.’

  ‘Facing the shooter?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘Moving towards him?’

  ‘I can’t tell, but this victim certainly had his hands raised. If I’m right about the same shot taking his finger and piercing his lung, then his hands were more in front of him than up in surrender. I’m merely speculating here, piecing what I have into some kind of a working theory.’

  ‘The boys are definitely from the same scene?’

  ‘Judge for yourself. Body B, here, is also a Caucasian male, as you can see – probably a little older, sixteen to seventeen years. Also, the single shot. Although we don’t have the ammunition, it seems pretty clear that it is the same gun. Same estimate of time of death.’

  De Vries interrupts him. ‘Can we say, with any certainty, that they were shot at the same time by the same gun?’

  Kleinman smiles at him. ‘I know you want me to say that, and I concur that it is highly likely. The evidence all points that way, but it is not conclusive yet, not in a scientifically proven sense.’

  De Vries feels the first small steps being taken.

  ‘But we can work on that assumption. What else?’

  ‘The contents of their stomachs reveal identical eating patterns leading up to their deaths: both had eaten only one meal, I estimate almost eighteen hours previously, and it appears to be identical: pasta, tomato sauce and carrots. They had drunk only water.’

  Kleinman refers again to the boards.

  ‘I noticed a similarity in their builds. Both are lacking muscle for their general development, and carry excess weight in the stomach region. Both display very poorly maintained teeth, with both boys having large amounts of dental decay, which would surely have been causing discomfort, if not pain. You want to see?’

  De Vries shakes his head, rotates his hand to restart Harry Kleinman.

  ‘We’ve run preliminary blood samples and there is no indication that these boys are related.’

  ‘Unrelated, yet showing similar signs of upbringing; recent behaviour?’

  ‘The diet, yes, but they may simply have eaten the same meal on this occasion. The lack of exercise, leading to muscle deterioration, the similar dental patterns, the overall . . . physiognomy of these boys, suggests that they have been living similar lives for many years.’

  ‘Living rough?’

  ‘No. At least, I certainly doubt it. Look how pale his body is. This is a boy who spends very little time outdoors. Palms and soles of feet smooth. Same on Body A.’

  ‘Any forensic interest?’

  ‘One more thing. Both boys display signs of homosexual activity, over a period of years, and seemingly relatively recently also. It’s difficult to say, but I tend to think that it was not consensual. I can’t identify whether the activity took place between them, or whether it was perpetrated by a third party – or more than one other party. Instinctively I’d say it suggests sexual attack or even sustained abuse.’

  There is a silence, interrupted only by a shocking zap from the fly-killer on the wall. Vaughn and Don turn towards the noise, see a narrow wisp of brown smoke rise towards a stained patch on the ceiling.

  ‘However, I can’t tell you whether there was a sexual element to the attack which resulted in them being shot. It seems unlikely. And the weapon used, if I’m right, suggests an outdoor scene.’

  ‘Because it is a hunting weapon . . . ?’

  ‘And also that it would be an unwieldy gun to carry around or use indoors.’

  Vaughn notices that Kleinman is still staring at the body on the table. ‘Forensics?’ he asks.

  ‘One substance on the body, looks post-mortem. Both bodies are pretty clean, underneath all of that. Body A has something on his heel. Not sure what it is. Probably from when his body was dragged to where it was wrapped. It’s in the lab already.’ He looks back down at his clipboards. ‘I retrieved samples from beneath their fingernails and particles from their hair, which may come from the original crime scene, and particulate from their throats and lungs.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I can’t tell. It might simply be from dust from whatever area they were confined in, but there is a build-up over time.’

  Don February asks, ‘What do you mean, “confined”, Doctor?’

  De Vries smiles to himself, glances at his Warrant Officer: rarely speaks, but misses nothing.

  Kleinman turns to Don. ‘You’re quite right; that was conjecture. It seems to me that these boys have been confined together, probably without proper exercise, possibly for a long period of time. They have been subject to similar routines and, at least recently, a similar diet. This suggests to me a prison – a children’s correctional centre? An overbearing, perhaps abusive family, where both, though unrelated, are living?’

  In the silence that follows, de Vries begins to hear his heart pumping inside his head, deep and sickly.

  He stutters, ‘Show me a picture of the other boy, Body A.’

  Kleinman gestures at his assistant, who passes him a file.

  ‘Just the face. I only need to see the face.’ De Vries is very pale. He feels a fever hit his groin, his stomach, begin to move its way upwards through his body. His legs feel wet with sweat. He grits his teeth and wills these sensations away.

  Kleinman pins a picture of the face of Body A to the illuminated board. De Vries looks at it and shuts his eyes. Then he opens them and studies it more closely. He looks up, tries to swallow away the bile that is rising in his throat. His eyes dart from side to side.

  Kleinman puts his hand on Vaughn’s shoulder.

  ‘What is it, man? You know this victim?’

  ‘It’s worse than you can possibly imagine.’

  ‘Who is it then?’ Kleinman stares at de Vries, uncomprehending.

  ‘Those boys,’ de Vries murmurs. ‘All these years, I thought they were dead.’

  2007

  The Area squad room is packed with detectives, uniformed police officers, now even off-duty officers, chattering in low voices. Expectation is rife. Vaughn de Vries watches the men stand loosely to attention as Senior Superintendent Henrik du Toit weaves through the room towards De Vries’ office.

  De Vries waits at his door, shakes hands and ushers his commanding officer to his desk. He then turns back to the squad room, announcing: ‘Inspector Russell will brief you on the background, so that everyone knows exactly where we are. Then we will assess our reaction and assign officers. It’s going to be a long night, so make your excuses to your families, grab a pie and get ready.’

  He goes back inside his office, hides his disconcertment that Du Toit is sitting in his chair behind his desk, sits opposite him in one of his deliberately uncomfortable guest chairs.

  �
��There’s discontent brewing, Vaughn,’ Superintendent du Toit starts, loudly as ever, ‘that you weren’t at the Annual Family Day.’

  De Vries sits up, immediately indignant. ‘I have a possible double abduction, and they think I should be braiing with the wives?’

  ‘No, I meant that you weren’t at the scene immediately.’ Du Toit shakes his head despairingly. ‘Anyway, relax Vaughn, I put them straight. But you must understand, if Toby Henderson is really missing – if he doesn’t turn up somewhere, really soon – then this could be the third. Three in three days – a serial abduction case. The moment the media get hold of this, that will be it: the floodgates will open. So we need to move fast, and get results. Bring me up to speed with the first two.’

  De Vries is downcast.

  ‘There’s fuck-all, frankly. Steven Lawson, aged seven years four months, presumed abducted from Rondebosch Common area, Thursday the eighth between 1500 and 1530 hours, walking home from Rondebosch Boys’ Prep School to Peacock Lane. Ten-minute walk; safe area. We believe he was seen crossing Campground Road, heading towards the common. He’s usually accompanied by a neighbour’s son who, that day, was absent from school due to emergency dental work. We’ve stuck signage in the locale, stopping school-run cars yesterday. We’ve knocked on everyone’s doors: nothing. Absolute blanks.’

  Du Toit shakes his head again. De Vries wishes he would stop. He clears his throat.

  ‘Robert Eames, usually called Bobby, eight years, eight months, disappeared from Main Road between Mowbray and Observatory yesterday afternoon, Friday ninth between 1545 and 1615 hours. He was on his way from school to meet his father, who owns the used-car dealership opposite the Shell garage just past Groote Schuur Hospital. His dad called us at 1830 yesterday, having checked with his wife and friends that Bobby had not gone anywhere else.’

  Du Toit looks bleak. ‘My God. One a day. I can’t believe this.’

  ‘We’ve had officers on the street all this afternoon,’ de Vries says. ‘As you know, I took them off leave for Family Day. Again nothing. We assume the suspect is in a car. The boy gets in, the car drives away. So far, there are no known connections between the boys, or their friends. Early days still. Why do they get into the car with this guy? Why does nobody see anything?’ He tilts his head, like a nervous tic.