by Malla Nunn
“Would the Roselet station commander know the way?” Emmanuel asked. He didn’t recall a signpost for Covenant Farm or a track splitting off from the main road.
“Could be.” Karin sheathed the knife and stuffed one hindquarter of the carcass into a hessian sack. “He came out when the thieving started from the house and the barn. That was four years ago. No sign of him since.”
English law was another bitter pill to swallow—for a long time crimes against Afrikaner families were a lower priority for the mostly English Natal police. As a result, resentment of the British was common among the Afrikaners but Emmanuel remembered that Nomusa and Chief Matebula had also complained about Bagley’s absence from the valley. This professional neglect might be the reason the anonymous caller had contacted the Durban police rather than the local constable.
He tore a clean page from his notebook and placed it on the corner of the butcher table along with the pen. “A map would be good,” he said.
Karin drew a rudimentary map, picked it up by one corner and gave it to Emmanuel. Then she lifted the full hessian bag and shoved it in Shabalala’s direction, saying in perfect Zulu, “Boy, take this meat to the hut behind the big barn and give it to the workmen. Tell them it’s springbok for the evening pot. Go. Quick.”
Shabalala grabbed the heavy sack, speechless. Karin crossed the stoep with a crunch of boots and said over her shoulder in English, “I’ll get Cyrus.”
Emmanuel and Shabalala remained rooted to the spot, stunned by the command and by the faultless Zulu used to issue it. Karin did not speak the “kitchen kaffir” used by whites to give basic orders to their servants. Her inflection and pronunciation were perfect. With eyes closed she’d be mistaken for a native.
“Hiya . . .” Shabalala made a sound of grudging admiration. “I will go, Sergeant. The workmen will be waiting for their food.”
He held the dripping sack away from his suit and made for the stoep. A native policeman was still subservient to a white woman.
“While you’re there, ask around about Mr. Insurance Policy and see if the workers have anything to say, good or bad, about Amahle. Someone wanted her dead.”
“Yebo.” Shabalala set out across the muddy yard, keeping to the grassy edge to save his leather shoes from the mud.
Emmanuel moved away from the bloody table. Impala and springbok were the staple food of his teenage years because his adopted parents couldn’t afford anything else. Even now the memory of eating the gamy meat roasted, dried, fried and stewed made his stomach turn.
He stepped into the yard, which was ringed by lush green fields and hazy mountains. It was easy to see why the early Boer settlers believed that God Himself had ceded this land to them. The rise and fall of the terrain and the crystal-clear air were divine.
Karin appeared from behind a low milking shed, a loose-limbed Zulu boy trailing two steps behind her. Emmanuel folded the hand-drawn map into a second piece of paper with a simple message written on the page: Immediate help needed. Covenant Farm. On the outside he wrote Ella Reed’s name along with instructions to call the Roselet police station with the message and to verbally describe the map if necessary.
“This is Cyrus, our runner.” Karin motioned the boy forward. “He knows the quickest way to the English farm.”
“Baas.” Cyrus bowed his head in greeting and withdrew from his pocket a stick with a split top. “I will return within the hour.”
“My thanks.” Emmanuel gave the runner the message, which he slotted into the split at the top of the stick for safekeeping. “If Miss Ella Reed, the little madam, is not at home you must give this message to the young baas Thomas Reed.”
“I understand.” Cyrus wheeled in a half circle and hit the muddy yard at a run. Within a minute he’d disappeared into the stand of wild pomegranate trees and was gone.
“You know Ella?” Karin asked, and returned to the butcher’s table. She lifted a bucket of salt from the floor, balanced it on a corner and wiped the wood surface down with a dry cloth.
“Not really,” Emmanuel said. “I interviewed her and her brother this morning.”
“About the chief’s daughter?” Karin unrolled the buck skin and pegged it to the table. She scraped the blunt edge of her knife over the underside of the fresh skin, removing fat.
“You heard about Amahle?” Emmanuel asked by way of a prompt. If he had to stand by and watch a hide being dressed, he’d make the minutes count.
“Of course.” Karin kept scraping. The muscles on her arms and shoulders were strong from physical labor. There was no trace of the pampered white madam about her. “The whole valley is talking about that girl.”
The statement was resentful and intrigued Emmanuel. He decided to persist with this blunt Afrikaner female.
“Do you have much contact with the Matebulas?” he asked.
“The Matebula kraal is on our land but it’s Pa who collects the rents.” Karin flicked fat onto the pile of innards slopped on the floor. “I could do the job easy but the chief won’t allow it. He only does business with men.”
“Not much of a chief,” Emmanuel said.
“A full stomach and a new wife to stick his piel into every five years, that’s all Matebula cares about.” Karen grabbed a fistful of rock salt and sprinkled it over the hide. “He takes everything for himself. The children from the kraal come to trade for bread and meat from the farm store—they get sick of eating ground corn and nothing else.”
“Did Amahle ever trade with you?” The lipstick, toothbrush and pencils in Amahle’s cardboard box must have come from somewhere.
“She didn’t have to trade,” Karin said. “The Reeds spoil their servants. Amahle especially.”
“How do you know Amahle was spoiled?” Emmanuel asked.
“It was obvious.” The statement was sharp. “They gave her special food and dresses and even let her wear earrings. She was their pet.”
Emmanuel understood the pet system, knew it well. Afrikaner, English and native boarding schools all practiced this colonial institution. The simplest and sweetest version saw the pet following his or her owner, weighed down with books, eager to run and fetch on command. The more complicated version was darker: a relationship of intrusive fingers and tongues perpetuated under the weight of silence. Despite the privileges, being a “pet” could break a person into pieces.
“Pretty girls always get more of everything,” Emmanuel said, hoping to provoke Karin into revealing more.
“That’s the way of things.” Karin worked the coarse salt into the buck’s skin. “The English made a big mistake with that one. She forgot she was a kaffir and treated everyone like they were the servants.”
Karin called them “the English” with barely concealed contempt. Little Flint and Covenant were adjacent to each other but the only thing the English and Afrikaner families had in common was they were white.
“You included?”
The Afrikaner woman glanced up at him across the hide, suddenly aware that an answer to the question might reveal more about her than about Amahle. She continued salting and said, “Pa knows the Matebula family better than I do, Detective. He’ll be able to answer all your questions.”
Nice try, Emmanuel thought, but too late to cover her antagonism toward the dead Zulu girl. Karin was jealous of a black maid.
“Tea?” The question was accompanied by a tight smile before she rapped a salt-encrusted knuckle on the back door of the homestead. “Come.” She opened the door and disappeared into the house without waiting for an answer.
Emmanuel hesitated for a moment, then ducked under the low entry and stepped into a scrappy kitchen.
“Take a seat over there.” Karin pointed to an oak table at the center of the room. A Zulu maid, no taller than a ten-year-old child but well past her fiftieth year, stood aside while Karin reached into an upper cupboard and removed what must have been the good china. She handed the porcelain to the miniature servant, who wiped the inside of the cups with her apron.
Emmanuel’s eyes gradually adjusted to the dim light. He looked around. Thrift and invention characterized the Paulus kitchen. A long wooden counter was inset with an iron bucket to make a rudimentary sink. Old flour sacks covered the dirt floor, a poor man’s carpet.
The maid set two cups on the oak table and then waited for the madam to retrieve the teapot painted with yellow roses and green leaves. Emmanuel leaned forward, curious to see what was in the bowl placed at the center of the table. A pyramid of fresh honeycomb dripped through cheesecloth into the wide bowl. This was how his adopted Afrikaner mother had strained the honey that he’d collected from the wild bees when he was fifteen.
“Sugar or honey?” Karin asked.
“One sugar, thank you.” He resisted the urge to run out of the house, away from the smell of blood and wild honey and the faint trace of wet dog mixed with mud. The odor was familiar and repugnant. It was the smell of his adolescence, of hard winters and scorching summers on the veldt, of narrow boarding-school hallways and fistfights. But it was also the smell of praying girls who turned their backs on him in public and then came creeping through the tall grass to the abandoned shed with its bed of stolen blankets and contraband cigarettes.
The maid lifted an iron kettle from a wood-burning stove and poured boiling water into the teapot. Emmanuel returned to the present time. The kitchen was stifling but he decided against removing his tie. He took off his hat.
“You were born and bred here?” he said. The scarred walls and wooden table looked like they’d been there since just after the Voortrekkers came over the hill.
“Ja, of course. Except for boarding school in Pietermaritzburg, the farm is it.”
“You don’t mind being all the way out here by yourself?”
“I have my pa.” Karin sat down and signaled the maid to pour the tea. “And I know how to make my own fun.”
Where and with whom? Emmanuel wondered.
“Cooper. That’s an English name.” Karin’s tone was accusatory.
“Afrikaner mother, English father.” Emmanuel switched the facts around, kept the family lineage simple to put off further digging. He left the possibility that he might be part Cape Malay unsaid. “You?”
“Pure Dutch. My people came over the mountains on the tail end of the Great Trek. Their wagon is in a museum in Pretoria.”
The Paulus family were one of God’s chosen few, then. It didn’t change their fortunes. God had still only given them a basic education, no running water and no cash in the bank. They had plenty of bullets for their guns, though.
Emmanuel brushed off the reference to the Great Trek, the holy Afrikaner caravan traversing southern Africa in search of land to establish a racially pure, slave-owning society. It meant less than nothing to him.
“So it’s just you and your father . . .” That would be unusual. Old Dutch families bred in the tens and the dozens.
“My ma died having me, so Pa keeps me close.” Karin traced her fingertips over her arms. The maid poured tea, careful not to clank the spout against the rim of the good cups.
“Where’s your pa?” Emmanuel asked. The water in the creek would not recede for another hour and he wasn’t sure he’d last the next ten minutes in the stuffy room.
“Down by the river, filling water barrels for the week.” Karin’s brown fingers curled around the pale teacup. “You and the kaffir policeman found something on the mountain. What was it?”
“You’re very sure.” Emmanuel sipped his tea. It was sweet and dark, with a bitterness that caught in his throat.
“Two and two makes four,” she said. “The vultures were on the crest of the mountain this morning and then you come asking for a telephone. Something is up there.”
“Why didn’t you go and check?” Emmanuel asked.
“Lammergeiers circling a kill are common as dirt out here. I’d run myself thin going to every sighting.” She leaned back and gulped a mouthful of tea. “I could track your path back up the mountain easy and find out what you won’t tell me.”
“So you could.” Karin was a hunter and tracker who had spent her life in these mountains. She’d find the shelter and the body in half an hour. “But you’re too clever to interfere with official police business.”
Karin shrugged and turned to the maid, now perched on a stool in the corner closest to the woodstove. “Do you think Mandla found the gardener from the English farm?” she asked in Zulu.
The maid rubbed the soles of her bare feet against the sacks on the floor and then answered in a quiet voice, “It might be so. The chief’s son and his men came down from the mountain just after dawn this morning. They did not stop to pass the time but went straight to the river and cleaned their spears with sand.”
“The spears were used.” Karin glanced at Emmanuel with bright eyes and continued in Zulu. “I think this umlungu policeman found the gardener.”
“If that is so, I will get the word to his mother.” The maid sat in the dim corner with her hands folded on her lap. Her business would have to wait until knock-off time when the sun fell below the mountains.
“What did she say?” Emmanuel asked. It was an effort to keep a blank expression and pretend he had no idea what was going on, and more difficult still to ignore Karin calling him an umlungu, a derogatory term for a white man.
Karin pointed to the straining bowl. “I asked where she got the honey from and she said from out in the woods, just behind the barn. It’s good. You should try it.”
Emmanuel dipped his index finger into the bowl and tasted it. Playing the clueless city detective had advantages. The clandestine conversation confirmed that Shabalala was right about when Mandla and the impi had discovered the body. Cleaning their spears in full view of Covenant Farm proved they had nothing to hide.
“Delicious,” Emmanuel said, and Karin smiled, enjoying the ruse. Toying with an out-of-town policeman might be one of the ways that she made her own fun out here in the sticks. Three distant whistles and the faint snap of a whip broke the quiet in the kitchen.
Karin drained her cup and stood up. “That’s Pa and the boys. They’re getting ready to load the water barrels. Come to the river, I’ll introduce you.”
Emmanuel was glad to get out of the hot kitchen and onto the stoep. The springbok entrails on the floor were gone, removed by a faceless servant. A filthy cat lapped at the blood puddle left behind.
“Forgot my hat,” he said, and ducked back into the house. The maid hadn’t moved from the corner. He moved closer and caught her attention.
“Do you know where the gardener’s mother stays?” he asked in Zulu.
The maid looked up, surprised at his fluid command of the language. She hesitated, then said, “The mother is staying at the other side of the English farm. At the Mashanini kraal.”
Emmanuel held her gaze and saw that the cornea of the woman’s eye was frosted over at the center. Blindness was a few years away but inevitable. “When the time is right I will go and collect her and tell her what has happened to her son. Will you let me do this?”
There was a pause before she answered, “Yebo, inkosi.”
“I thank you.” He collected his hat and moved outside. That the maid should not mention their conversation to Karin did not need saying. He had promised to go directly to a frightened Zulu woman and explain things face-to-face. That gesture had earned the maid’s silence.
9
WE’LL STOP ON the way and pick up your kaffir,” Karin said when Emmanuel joined her at the side of the house. “He needs to be introduced. Pa doesn’t like strangers roaming the property.”
The Boer farmer might not be so different from Thomas Reed after all. The sun was high in the bright sky and the muddy ground steamed with heat. Karin cut straight through the mud in her heavy boots and stopped at a large wooden barn. Emmanuel picked his way across the yard, stepping from one clump of damp grass to another. Karin watched him, amused.
“The workmen’s hut is back there,” she said. “C
areful of the wet ground, Detective.”
“Thanks.” Emmanuel took the insult on the chin.
“Sergeant.” Shabalala broke away from a cluster of Zulu workmen leaning on their shovels and drinking tea from tin mugs. A half-dug irrigation ditch ended a few feet away from them.
Emmanuel waited by the barn. Any trust Shabalala had built with the workers would be compromised by the intrusion of a white man.
“Time to meet the boss,” he said to Shabalala. “We’ll talk afterwards.”
They caught up with Karin on a wide, uncultivated field cut by deep wagon tracks. A wrought-iron fence circled a crop of white headstones eroded to stubs. The Paulus family graveyard, Emmanuel supposed.
Shabalala hesitated on the lip of a steep drop to the river and whispered, “Look there, Sergeant.”
An ox wagon was drawn up on the near bank of a fast-flowing river. Two black laborers lifted a five-gallon water drum onto the flat wagon bed while a pack of dogs splashed in the water. A white man wearing torn overalls and worn boots cracked a whip over a team of oxen straining at the yoke. The man’s face was tanned and his high cheekbones and a wide forehead suggested an infusion of Hottentot blood: a true Afrikaner. Pure Dutch my arse, Emmanuel thought.
“My pa.” Karin pointed to the whip hand. “And the dogs.”
“Six of them,” Shabalala added quietly. A pack of African boerboels with massive jaws and sleek brown coats lurched up the bank, barking and snarling.
“Stay close and don’t move,” Karin said. “They look tough but they’re gentle. Honest.”
One bite and you’d lose a hand. Easy. Paws found purchase on the rise and spit flew from their mouths. Emmanuel and Shabalala stood motionless and waited for father or daughter to stop the dogs from getting too close. Finally, a whistle sounded. The white man called, “Heel!”
The dogs stopped midstride, retreated to the sandy bank and milled around their master’s legs. The black workmen patted the oxen’s flanks and held them steady.