by Deon Meyer
John Afrika looked at Griessel, at Joubert, at Ndabeni, and back to Griessel again. Conflicting emotions passed like the seasons across his face. He nodded slightly. 'Get her, Benny,' he said, and walked out, careful not to step in the pool of blood.
Griessel's phone rang again, he answered it and the man from Telkom said: 'Benny, between twelve and two there were only two calls made from that number. The first was to West Lafayette in Indiana, that's in America, and the second was to you.'
'Dave, what time was the first one made?'
'Hold on ... thirteen thirty-six. It lasted for two minutes, twenty-two seconds.'
'Thanks, Dave, thanks a lot.' He ended the call and thought. He tried to piece the thing together, the thousands of loose strands in his head.
'Benny ...' Vusi said, but he held up a hand, checked his cell phone screen, looked up the call register for the record of Rachel's call to him. He received it at thirteen forty-one. Then he had run out of Van Hunks and they had raced here. If her attackers had somehow intercepted her first call, they had only had five minutes more. What if they had been in the area somewhere nearby? They must have arrived just after he had finished speaking to Rachel. That was some quick reaction. Too quick ...
A spark lit up in his brain, a flash of insight. 'Vusi, was it here on the corner that she went into the cafe?'
'The deli,' Ndabeni nodded.
'And then she ran down here,' Griessel indicated Upper Orange.
'Mbali found footprints in the garden.'
Griessel scratched his head. 'They were waiting somewhere, Vusi. They must have seen her, but with all the police around ...'
'Benny, the panel van ...'
But Griessel did not hear him. Why hadn't they shot her? Just the old man. They had cut Erin Russel's throat. But they allowed Rachel to live when they could easily have killed her. Here in this house. But they abducted her?
Another revelation.
'The rucksack,' he said. They had cut Erin Russel's rucksack off her shoulders. He bent and looked under the table. 'See if you can find a rucksack.' He walked down the passage. 'Vusi, take the left,
the bathroom, that bedroom, I'll take the right.' He stopped. 'Mat, please, can you look in the kitchen and outside?'
'What does the rucksack look like?'
'I have no idea,' said Griessel. But a thought occurred to him and stopped him in his tracks so that Vusi nearly bumped into him. He began to phone feverishly. As the sergeant in Caledon Square answered, he identified himself and asked if there were still uniforms at the Cat & Moose in Long Street.
'Yes, they are still there.'
'Sarge, tell them to ask where the American girls' luggage is. Erin Russel and Rachel Anderson. They must find it, and guard it with their lives.'
'I'll do that.'
Griessel said to Ndabeni: 'They're looking for something, Vusi, the fuckers are looking for something the girls have. That's why Rachel is still alive.' And he dashed off to the bedrooms to look for the rucksack.
Chapter 37
'What now?' Natasha Abader asked as he closed the late Adam Barnard's door behind her.
'Sit down, please,' said Dekker, leaning against the desk, intimidating her with his proximity.
She didn't like that, her beautiful eyes showed it, but she sat.
'Can I trust you, sister?'
'I told you, I'm not your sister.'
'Why not, sister? Are you too la-di-da working here with the whiteys and I'm just a common hotnot from Atlantis? You're chlora, finish en klaar.'
'Do you think that's what it's about?' Her eyes flashed. 'You can't stand it that I slept with a white man, can you? No, it's no use shaking your head, I saw how you changed, just like that, when I said he did it here with me too. Let me tell you, he wasn't the first white man and he won't be the last. But I don't discriminate, I sleep with whoever I want, because it's the New South Africa, but you don't want to know about that. You want to "brother" and "sister" us all. You want us to be a separate tribe, us coloureds; you're the kind who goes around complaining how hard it is to be a coloured. Wake up, Inspector, it's useless. If you don't integrate, you won't. That's the trouble with this country, everyone wants to complain, nobody wants to do anything, nobody wants to forget the past. And, just for the record, how many white women have you slept with?'
He looked away, towards the window.
'I thought so,' she said.
'What makes you think I have?'
'What woman can look at you and not think of sex?' she said.
Now he looked her in the eyes, and she looked back, challenging, angry.
'I'll take that as a compliment.' Knowing he had lost the battle, he tried to consolidate his position.
'Why am I here?'
Now he felt uncomfortable to be so close. He stood up and walked around the desk.
'Because I trust you.'
She shook her head, long hair cascading.
'I am going to tell you things you can't repeat,' he said.
She just looked at him.
'The people who shot Adam Barnard knew him very well. They know his wife passes out every night. They know where he keeps his pistol. You are the only one I can trust. Tell me who knows him that well.'
'How can you say that? He was shot in his house ...'
'No, he was shot somewhere else. Maybe not far from here, in the street. We found his shoe. And his cell phone.' He saw that surprised her and it gave him satisfaction.
'Then they took him to his house and carried him up the stairs and put him down there ... Who knows about his wife, Natasha? Who knows about the pistol? The Geysers?'
She adjusted her skirt and brushed her hair back over her shoulder before answering. 'No. I don't think so. I don't think they have ever been to his house. Adam was ... ashamed of Alexa. A few times she'd ...'
'What?'
'Made a scene when he took people to his house. He lived here. From morning to night. He would go home about seven o'clock, but he would come back, often. Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, then he would work till twelve ...'
'So who would have known that?'
She considered before she answered. 'I really can't say.'
'Please. Take a guess.'
'A guess?'
'Speculate.' 'I knew about his wife ...'
'Who else?'
'Willie and Wouter and Michele ...'
'Who's Michele?'
'She's been sitting in there all morning. She does the PR.'
'I thought Willie Mouton did production and promotion?'
'Yes, but she does the PR. Promotion is when we pay for something. PR is when the papers write about stuff, or someone is on TV or radio and you don't pay for it.'
'Which one is Michele?'
'She's the oldish woman who was sitting with Spider and Ivan ...'
He had a vague recollection of an older woman between the younger men. 'And she knows Adam well?'
'They've worked together for years. From the beginning. She went freelance about seven years ago but she still does our PR on contract.'
'She went freelance?'
'You know, she set up her own agency. For artists who don't have a label, or for minor labels.'
'Did she and Adam get on well?'
'They were like brother and sister .. .'There was a hint that this wasn't the whole story.
'What does that mean?'
'They say Adam and Michele were lovers. Years ago.'
'How many years ago?'
'It's just rumours.'
He gave her a look that said, 'Drop the shit.'
'From when Alexa began drinking, apparently. He went and cried on Michele's shoulder. She was married herself then ...'
'Fuck,' said Dekker.
She looked at him with disapproval.
'Damnit, sister,' he said indignantly. 'My list keeps getting longer.'
Mat Joubert walked back through the kitchen to the hall where Griessel and Vusi were watching him expectantly. He shook hi
shead. No rucksack. He watched Benny process the information silently. Joubert waited patiently until he knew he could speak.
'You know about the blood out there?' he asked Griessel, watching him while he said 'yes'. Benny was standing still, head tilted sideways, right hand reaching unconsciously for his head and the fingers scratching in the thick, unruly hair just behind his ear.
A feeling of compassion swept over Joubert for this colleague, this friend, this man he had known for a lifetime. Griessel's frame had always been too small for all his energy, so that sometimes it seemed to vibrate, shock waves of passion pulsing through it like a tsunami. That face - twenty years ago it had an elfish quality, the mischievous cheek of the court jester, with an infectious laugh and a preposterous witticism perpetually crouched behind those bright Slavic eyes and wide mouth, ready to take off in full, unstoppable flight. You could barely see it now - life had eroded it away in a network of tiny furrows. But Joubert knew that in that brain the synapses were firing now. Griessel, sent from pillar to post all morning, was trying to get his head around the puzzle. When he succeeded the sparks would fly. Benny had the brain of a detective, always faster and more creative than his. Joubert had always been slow, methodical and systematic, but Griessel had instinct, natural flair, the sparkling fly half to Joubert's plodding front ranker.
'It might be drugs,' said Griessel, but to himself. 'I think the ... the rucksack ...'
'Benny, the panel van was in the Metro pound,' said Vusi.
Griessel stared into nowhere:'... the girls ... no, I don't know. Maybe they stole the drugs. Or took them but didn't pay ...'
Joubert waited quietly, till he saw Benny focus on him and Vusi. Then he asked: 'Is it the girl's blood?'
'No.' Then Benny focused sharply on Joubert, with sudden insight, and he said: 'It's someone else's blood, not Rachel's, it's the blood of one of those fuckers.' He grabbed his phone.
Joubert said, 'Benny, let me phone the hospitals.'
'No, Mat, let Caledon Square do it,' and he called their number and gave the order to the radio room Sergeant: 'Any young man between the age of, say, eighteen and thirty-five, any colour, any race, any language, Sarge, every young fucker with blood on him, I want to know about.' Then Griessel looked at Vusi and said: 'Metro's pound?'
'That's right. The same Peugeot, same registration. It was stolen, and Metro recovered it in Salt River. It has been parked in the pound since October, because the owner died of a heart attack and the estate is frozen. I'm going, Benny. I'm going to find out what's going on there. How did they get it out of the pound?'
Joubert saw a flicker in Griessel's eyes, a momentary realisation. 'What?' He knew the value of Benny's intuition.
Griessel shook his head. 'Don't know. Something. Jissis, I have to sit and think, but there's no time. Vusi, excellent work, go and find out, let's get the van, because that's about all we have ...' A sudden intake of breath. 'Wait,' he called Ndabeni back. 'Vusi, I want to make absolutely sure, the man from the deli, did he look at the pictures of Demidov's people?'
'He did.'
'Nothing?'
'Nothing.'
'OK. Thanks.'
Vusi jogged away and Griessel hung his head while Mat patiently stood and watched him. For a long time. In silence, so that the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the study could be heard. The two of them were the dinosaurs of the SAPS, he thought, an endangered, dying breed. Political global warming and racial climate change should have taken their toll long ago, but here they were still, two old carnivores in the jungle, limbs stiff, teeth blunt, but still not completely ineffective.
Griessel scratched audibly at the bushy hair behind his ear. He grunted: 'Hu ...' turned and went outside. Joubert followed tranquilly across the little doormat and the veranda, past the bougainvilleas and down the slate pathway. Griessel opened the garden gate and went and stood in the street. He turned to face Lion's Head. Joubert stood behind him, looking, seeing the rocky dome rising above the city, feeling the wind, watching how it ruffled Benny's hair even more. This day that had dawned in such perfection, was being overtaken by the southeaster. Tonight it would howl like a demon around the side of Table Mountain.
'Before six this morning, up there,' said Griessel, pointing at Lion's Head, 'she told a woman to call the police. Those young men had been chasing her since two in the morning. At eleven at the deli there, she told her father over the tickey-box that she couldn't talk to the police ...'
Tickey-box, thought Joubert. A prehistoric word.
Griessel dipped his head again. Then he looked up at Table Mountain. His eyes measured the distance to Lion's Head. He looked at Joubert. 'Five hours after she was on Lion's Head she arrives at the cafe. And the fucker parks in the street and comes in after her. How did they know, Mat? Where was she in between, why couldn't they find her? Why did she change her mind about the police?' He lifted his hand to his hair again. 'What do you do? A girl, a foreigner, you are desperate to find her, she could be anywhere. How do you watch the whole city?'
They stared at the mountain. As always, Griessel's ability to put himself in someone else's shoes, either victim or the perpetrator, charmed Joubert.
Then he realised what Griessel obviously already had. They had been sitting on the mountain and watching the whole city. 'Could be,' he said.
'Fokkol use to us now,' said Griessel, still one step ahead. 'They've got her.'
'But you can't see this house from the mountain,' said Joubert, nodding at the Victorian building beside them.
'That's true . ..' Lost in thought again, Benny's brain was searching, Joubert knew. He knew the frustration, the junkyard of information from a day like today when everything happened at once. You had to sift through the chaos; everything you had heard and seen, everything you knew, had to be sorted. For him it was the labour of the night, when he lay beside Margaret, behind her warm body with his hand on the rounding of her belly. Then his thoughts would travel down slow, systematic pathways. But
Griessel's process was different: impatient, quick, not always faultless, but much faster. Griessel's head jerked, a tumbler had dropped and he looked down the street and began walking in that direction. Joubert had to stretch his long legs to keep up. A hundred metres further on, Griessel stopped in a driveway, looking at the house, the garage. 'He sat here, in a bakkie ...' Excited. 'He nearly drove us off the road ...'
Griessel jogged up the drive, turned and looked back at Piet van der Lingen's house and said: 'No ...' He walked back and forth, jumped up and down and said: 'Mat come and stand here.'
Joubert came and stood there.
'Stand on your toes.'
Joubert stretched.
'What can you see of the house?'
The big man looked. 'Just too low to see everything.'
'He drove out of here, a guy in a bakkie. Toyota four-by-four, faded red, the old model. Little fucker behind the wheel was young, in a hell of a hurry, drove right in front of us and raced off towards the city ...'
Joubert focused differently, unburdened by memories. 'He could have stood on the bakkie,' he said. 'He would have been able to see everything then.'
'Jissis,' said Griessel. 'Young, he was young, just like the others.' He looked at Joubert. 'I will recognise him, Mat, if I see his fucking face again. I will know him.' He was quiet for a heartbeat, then he said: 'An old Toyota . . . that's not a drug dealer's car, Mat...'
Griessel's phone rang. He checked the screen before he answered. 'Sarge?' He listened for about forty seconds and began walking. Mat Joubert walked behind him, faster and faster, keeping his eyes on Griessel. Here came the tsunami again.
'Get more people, Sarge,' said Griessel over the phone. 'I'm coming.'
Griessel looked back at Joubert, the familiar, spark-shooting fire in his eyes. 'About ten minutes ago someone dropped off a young white guy at City Park Casualties, and then left. In haste. Victim was stabbed in the throat with a blade; they might be able to save him. I'm off, Mat...' Grie
ssel began to run.
'I'll do the scene,' shouted Joubert after him.
'Thanks, Mat.' Benny's words were blown away on the wind.
'Get her, Benny,' shouted Joubert, but he couldn't tell if Benny had heard him. He watched his colleague's running figure, so determined, so urgent, and again he felt that emotion, nostalgia, sadness, as though it were the last time he would see Benny Griessel.
Chapter 38
It was Jess Anderson who broke the silence in the study and put words to their anxiety. 'Why doesn't he call?'
Bill Anderson did not want to sit, he wanted to walk up and down to vent some of his tension. But he couldn't, because he knew that would upset his wife even more. So he sat beside her on the brown leather couch. His lawyer friend, Connelly, and the Police Chief, Dombkowski, had insisted he stay, so he could be here when the South African policeman phoned. Now he was sorry he hadn't gone along to Erin's parents. It was his duty. But he couldn't leave Jess alone in these circumstances.
'It's almost forty minutes,' she said.
'We don't know how far he had to travel,' said Anderson.
'We could call him ...'
'Let's give it a little more time.'
They held her down on the concrete floor, four of them. A fifth put a blade under her T-shirt and cut it away, then her shorts, then her underwear. The same knife that had cut Erin's throat, the same hand, stripped her naked, effortlessly. They pulled her up and pushed her against the narrow steel pillar, her arms bent backwards and tied with something around the pole. Then they stood back and all she could do was sink down as far as her bonds allowed, to hide her shame, so that her gaze fixed on her running shoes.
'Where is it?'
She didn't answer. She heard him coming, footfalls on the floor, two steps only. He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that it banged against the metal of the pillar. He knelt in front of her.
'Where is it?' the question was repeated.
Her left eye was swollen shut and painful. She focused the other on him. His handsome face was against hers, calm. As ever. His voice carried only authority, control.