by Malla Nunn
“Who’ve you got there, girl?” Pa shouted in Afrikaans, and looped the plaited whip over his shoulder.
“The police.” Karin scrambled down to the river’s edge. Emmanuel and Shabalala followed, giving up on saving their leather shoes from damage. “These are Detectives Cooper and Shabalala from Durban.”
Pa frowned at the sight of Shabalala and said in Afrikaans, “They have kaffir detectives now?”
“A handful,” Emmanuel replied in the “Taal,” as insiders of the true faith called the Afrikaans language. He waited for the man to sneer at the idea of black detectives.
“Good. You need a native to catch a native.” Pa extended a gnarled hand. “Sampie Paulus. You’ve met my daughter Karin.”
“I have.” Emmanuel shook hands, struck by Sampie’s powerful grip and the sandpaper texture of his skin.
“Those are my boys, Johannes and Petros. Brothers. Good with the oxen.” Sampie pulled a tobacco pouch from the top pocket of his overalls. “You’re here about Amahle.”
“Yes. We arrived yesterday morning.”
“Make any progress?” Sampie removed two papers from the pouch and tipped a small mound of rough-cut tobacco into the palm of his hand.
“Early days,” Emmanuel said. “We know when she disappeared and where she was found. But not much else.”
“Here. In the shade.” Paulus retired to a damp patch of sand where the remnants of a fire smoldered. The dogs followed. Sampie sank onto his haunches, arms resting on his knees just like a native. “You’ve been to the Matebula kraal?”
“We met the chief and his number-one son, Mandla.” Emmanuel crouched next to Sampie. He ignored the burn in his fatigued calves and Karin, who sat cross-legged and carpeted in dogs. Shabalala stood on the outer edge of the patch of shade and listened.
“Mandla came around the other day.” Sampie rolled the cigarette and sealed the papers with a lick. “Asking after Philani Dlamini the gardener at the English farm.”
“Did everyone know he was in the area?” If Philani’s location was an open secret, the list of suspects in his murder increased.
“Nobody had seen him. Karin and me included.” Sampie dug a rusty metal lighter from a back pocket. It took four hits of his thumb against the wheel to produce a flame. “If Mandla was on my tracks I’d bury myself good and deep and stay there.”
Sampie was right. Philani would not have disclosed his location to a wide circle of people. The killer must have been someone the gardener trusted.
“We’re tracking Philani ourselves,” Emmanuel lied. “What does he look like?” His gut told him the body in the shelter was the gardener but it would be hours before the corpse was moved and a formal identification arranged. A list of physical attributes to match with the ones he’d jotted down at the crime scene would help give his intuition weight.
“About thirty, thirty-five, give or take a few years. Light-skinned. Small for a Zulu.” The blunt-faced farmer pointed to Shabalala with nicotine-stained fingers. “Not like your boy. Now, that’s a proper Zulu.”
Yes, and all Englishmen were pigeon-chested, with pink skin, and had no idea about Africa. Indians were hardworking but crafty and not to be trusted. Mixed-race coloureds were sly and spiteful and most likely to lead your children into sin. Most South Africans, no matter their skin color, carried a twisted mental illustration of each race group for easy reference.
“Height, weight, hair or eye color?” Emmanuel asked. Sampie’s brief description fit the body at the crime scene. Zweigman could use the finer details at the examination.
“He was short. Stocky. Brown eyes . . . I think.” Sampie drew in a mouthful of smoke before exhaling through flared nostrils. “What’s the gardener got to do with any of it? Mandla gave me a story about Philani owing him money, but that was kak.”
“There’s a rumor that Philani was involved with Amahle.”
Sampie turned to his boys and called out in Zulu, “The Englishman’s gardener and the daughter of the great chief. Have you ever heard such a thing?”
The workmen shook their heads in the negative and turned back to tending the oxen. Evidently, the intimate question was embarrassing and any discussion about the dead girl was dangerous.
“In his dreams, maybe.” Sampie pinched the end of the hand-rolled cigarette between thumb and forefinger and shoved the butt into a top pocket. A waste-not, want-not man. “Pretty girls do that, hey? Make fellows think stupid things. Dlamini wouldn’t be the first.”
The Afrikaner farmer stood up and snapped the leather whip in the air, signaling a move back to the homestead. The dogs stretched and yawned, while Karin brushed fur off her pants. Shabalala crouched amid the flurry of activity and watched the river current surge over the rocks.
“See you back at the house, Detective,” Karin said, and walked away, the dogs running ahead of her. The workmen steadied the wagon onto two deep tracks cut into the dirt. Even Sampie took up their Zulu work chant as he got behind the cart and pushed.
“Come, Sergeant.” Shabalala stood up and headed across the sandy bank in the direction of the departing oxen. “The water is dropping fast. In one hour we will be able to cross the stream to the car.”
“Ja,” Emmanuel said reluctantly. He was in no hurry to tell Philani’s mother that her son was in pieces on a rock ledge.
The churn of wagon wheels and oxen hooves turned the farmyard into mud. Johannes and Petros, Sampie’s boys, rolled the full water barrels across the stoep and rested them against the rear wall of the house.
Emmanuel and Shabalala crossed the muck, their shoes and trouser bottoms caked with river sand and now more mud. Smoke from the kitchen fire made a long gray finger against the sky. A male figure sprinted from the stand of pomegranate trees and closed the distance to them in a blink.
“That was quick,” Emmanuel said.
Cyrus the runner was back at Covenant, dripping sweat and sucking air into his mouth. His shirt, already shabby and eaten with holes before the run, was now ripped and hanging loose from one shoulder. Cyrus must have cut through thornbush to travel the quickest route to Little Flint Farm.
“For you.” The runner presented the split stick with a shaky hand. “From the little madam at the English farm.”
Emmanuel dug in his pocket and exchanged a handful of coins for the message.
“Thank you, Cyrus. And sorry about the shirt,” he said, and unfolded the note. Six words were written across the page in blue ink: No answer at the police station. Ella’s signature looped under the reply. He gave the paper to Shabalala.
The Zulu detective read it and handed the note back to Emmanuel. “We are still on our own,” he said. A tribe was nothing if all the factions did not pull together in times of trouble. The police force demanded the same kind of allegiance.
“It’s just you, me and Zweigman again,” Emmanuel said.
“Yebo,” Shabalala said. “But we know well how to work that way.”
Emmanuel laughed and remembered that, yes, they had worked well together—it was just the trouble they got into on those other cases that bothered him. He wondered if nosy police detectives and Jewish doctors had as many lives as cats.
Karin crossed the yard with a confident stride. “Cyrus brought bad news?” she said. She hooked her thumbs into the belt loop of her dirty jeans and waited.
“No answer at the police station,” Emmanuel replied. Removing the body without Bagley’s help would be a challenge.
“Pa says your boy can eat lunch with the workers at the kaffir hut.” Karin pointed beyond the milking shed to a whitewashed hut with a grass roof, adding to Shabalala, “Come back to the big house when I call, okay?”
Shabalala tipped his hat and walked off.
Emmanuel had the honor of joining the whites-only table in the homestead. Sampie, Karin and Emmanuel ate springbok stew with potatoes in almost complete silence. Occasionally, Sampie grunted requests and Karin obeyed. For dessert she served peeled oranges accompanied by a nip of p
each brandy poured into old jam jars. Emmanuel had eaten only half his serving of stew and was about to request second helpings of the brandy when a shout came from the yard.
“What’s that?” Sampie jumped up and cocked his head to the right, listening. More shouts and the slap of gum boots on dirt. Karin stood and reached for the rifle in the corner of the kitchen.
The dogs pawed the ground at the back door of the homestead, their unclipped nails digging into the dirt floor. Sampie pushed them out of the way and turned the handle. “Go!” he growled, and the boerboels sprinted into the yard, howling. Father, daughter and Emmanuel followed the pack of dogs outside, Karin slinging the rifle over her shoulder like a seasoned army sniper. The air was cool after the kitchen, the sun past its zenith.
“By the coop,” Sampie said. “That’s where they are. Go, Karin.”
The dogs were already running along the perimeter of the wire fence surrounding the poultry yard. Sampie and Karin closed in. If anyone was still inside the henhouse there’d be no escaping now.
“Thieves,” Shabalala said when Emmanuel moved in the direction of the fracas. Workmen scattered among the farm buildings, shouting. The dogs barked. Guinea fowl in the woods raised their own alarm. “Stand and be quiet, Sergeant.”
The growls of the boerboels overwhelmed the crow of a rooster and the clucking of chickens. Emmanuel stood in the yard, straining to listen through all the sounds of panic.
“Did you hear?” Shabalala whispered.
“Footsteps,” Emmanuel said. The sound was only just discernible. “Where from?”
A string of filthy Afrikaans curses issued from the direction of the chicken coop. Both Karin and Sampie were calling down a plague on the thief, who must have slipped the net.
A thud came from inside the Paulus homestead. Emmanuel and Shabalala ran to the front door left open by the maid, who now huddled against the wall in fear. The house was dark after the sunlight outside. Rusted metal clicked against rusted metal.
“Back door lock,” Emmanuel said, and ran the obstacle course of rickety chairs and piles of yellowed newspaper in the passage. Something heavy fell from the top of the family organ and hit the floor. A gasp of breath was heard and then the creak of an opening door.
Emmanuel and Shabalala entered the kitchen together. A slim male figure bolted across the stoep and sprinted for the treeline. Alert to a new front of attack, the boerboels streaked around the corner of the lean-to. The figure melted into the brush, the dogs following him.
“Did you see that?” Emmanuel said after the dogs had disappeared.
“Yebo,” Shabalala said. “My eyes saw it, too. A white boy in a school uniform.”
10
SAMPIE PAULUS’S FACE dripped sweat and his pale eyes glittered in the dim light. He tapped the bottom of a jam jar on the kitchen table and Karin poured more peach brandy into it. The dogs had come back from the hunt and were now asleep in front of the woodstove.
“It was that Reed bastard,” Sampie said. “For sure.”
“Of course,” Karin agreed. “Who else?”
“From Little Flint?” Emmanuel was still trying to make sense of a white thief in a public school uniform stealing from people living below the poverty line. What did they have that he could possibly want?
“Ja.” Sampie downed half the contents of the jar. “He steals from all the farms around here. Been doing it for years, but what does that shithead Bagley do about it? Nothing. Filing a police report is a waste of time. The whole business is a fokken disgrace.”
Emmanuel glanced at Karin, who stood back in the shadows and said nothing. Shabalala kept to an unlit corner and also remained silent.
“I met Thomas, Ella and the parents this morning,” Emmanuel said. “Who is the boy?”
“The younger son,” Karin answered. “The befokked one.”
“What makes him crazy?” Emmanuel almost felt her shrug in the gloom.
“He’s just not right in the head. Never has been.”
“Give me an example,” Emmanuel said. By some standards he’d be considered “befok” himself.
“Well.” The word came out short and exasperated. “He runs away from school every term. He lives in the woods and steals from all the farmers, even from his own people. The shops in town have banned him because he steals from them, too.”
“Easter holidays he beat one of the farmhands at Little Flint and the doctor had to come from Roselet,” Sampie said. “The constable kept that quiet.”
“What’s his name?” Emmanuel asked. A disturbed, violent young man at Little Flint could have killed Amahle, he thought.
“Gabriel,” Karin said. “And he speaks funny, doesn’t he, Pa?”
“Like a skipping gramophone record. All here and there.” Sampie swallowed half the remaining brandy and tears welled up when the alcohol hit. “What did he take this time?”
“The honey.” Karin was annoyed. “I only got it this morning. Plus the gray and yellow blanket from my bed.”
There was a long a pause before Sampie said, “Funny, he normally takes eggs from the chicken coop or sardines from the pantry. Sometimes jam. First time he’s ever taken anything that wasn’t food.”
“Befok. Like I said.”
Emmanuel considered the new information. Every family had outcasts: embezzling uncles, aunts pickled in gin, curb-crawling sons or promiscuous daughters. The Reeds weren’t special in that regard. “Gabriel might have taken the blanket because he was cold,” he said. “The temperature drops at night, especially out on the hillside.”
“Ja, but not so much in spring,” Sampie said. “And he knows how to build a fire. Karin found one of his hideaways last Easter, didn’t you, girl? A rock tunnel behind a tree.”
Emmanuel heard Karin shift her weight from one foot to the other, the way a boxer might before dodging a blow. “Do you know all the caves in the mountains around the farm, Karin?” he asked.
“Not all,” she said defensively. “I don’t know where that boy is hiding. His pa and brother normally get one of their Zulus to track him down and then they drive him back to school, crying like a baby.”
The Zulu man Thomas Reed had dressed down in the cattle yard might well have been a tracker. “Do you know how long Gabriel’s been on the run this time?” Emmanuel asked.
“No idea.” Sampie rolled the jam jar between his palms, considering a top-up. “First we know about the little bastard being out in the woods is when he gets into the henhouse or the pantry.”
“Today was the first time in a while, then?”
“Ja. He must have ditched school two or three days ago. That’s how long it takes him to run down the valley and back home.” Sampie pushed the jar across the table. “I’ll give him his due: he outfoxes my dogs every time.”
“The devil knows the darkness, Pa,” Karin said, and Sampie nodded in agreement.
Emmanuel drew the threads of the story together. If what Sampie and Karin said was true, then the Reed boy was a habitual runaway and thief sheltered from the consequences of his actions by Constable Bagley’s willful blindness. Emmanuel knew how this story could play out. It was easy to go from breaking minor laws to breaking major ones. In fact, if the perpetrator remained unpunished, it was almost inevitable. Some of Emmanuel’s childhood friends had graduated from school to running the streets and then to prison before they reached twenty years old. He’d felt the insistent pull of the shadowy, dangerous corners of Sophiatown himself. In one of life’s ironies, joining the army had saved him and perhaps ruined him at the same time.
“So, Gabriel could have been in the hills for days without anyone knowing about it,” Emmanuel said. Depending on when the boy had absconded from school, he might have been in the area on the night Amahle was murdered.
“That’s the Reeds’ business, not mine. You’ll have to check with them. And while you’re there, Sergeant Cooper, ask them when they’re going to buy me a new blanket and replace the jar of honey.” Sampie pushed back fro
m the table. “We’ll check the river level in half an hour, see how we stand.”
Karin removed the jam jar from the table while Sampie shuffled out of the kitchen and back to work.
“Have you seen Gabriel in the last few days?” Emmanuel asked Karin. A schoolboy could have made the prints around Amahle’s body.
“No.” She stared at the alcohol swirling at the bottom of the jar she held in her hand. “Haven’t caught sight of him.” She made eye contact with Emmanuel and swallowed the brandy in one shot. “I have to get back to work,” she said, and walked away.
She was almost through the passage doorway when Emmanuel stopped her. “Wait. Your pa said that Gabriel Reed hit one of the farmworkers at Little Flint Farm.”
“Ja. The doctor came out from town to fix things up.” She rubbed a fingertip along a seam in the mud-brick wall.
“Must have been bad.”
“Doctor couldn’t come out here when Pa had the flu last winter but she travels to help a kaffir. What do you make of that?”
“I think someone got hurt badly,” Emmanuel said. The family had been forced to send for proper medical help instead of using the first-aid box or calling on a local nun with a supply of novocaine. “Do you know what led to the beating?”
A smile curved Karin’s mouth and she appeared soft and pliant in the half-light. “I can’t say for sure. It might have had something to do with a workman laying a hand on one of the Reeds’ special kaffirs . . .”
“Amahle?” Emmanuel asked.
“I don’t know. That’s English business.” She left the kitchen.
“Well, that was either a hint about Amahle being the cause of the problem, or spite,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala. “Karin doesn’t like the Reeds or the way they treated Amahle when she was alive, that much I do know.”
“The kitchen gardener with the broken face must have been the one beaten by the little Reed baas.” Shabalala made the connection. “He will never talk. We must ask the constable and the doctor about the fight.”
“Bagley is nowhere, so let’s ask Dr. Daglish when we get back to Roselet. If the workman’s injuries were serious she would have visited Little Flint a few times.” Emmanuel swallowed a mouthful of brandy and offered the bottle to Shabalala, who declined. “Daglish knew Amahle after all,” he said. “Why would she lie about a thing like that?”