by Malla Nunn
‘Tell me,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It doesn’t have to make sense.’ Bullshit theories spun out of thin air had their uses.
‘What I see is strange,’ Shabalala said.
‘Tell me anyway.’
The Zulu policeman pointed to scuff marks in the dirt and to a heavy stick lying on the grass. ‘I think that the animals did not come near because the one who brought the girl to this place kept them away.’
‘You have to explain,’ Emmanuel said. The indentations in the dirt meant nothing to him and the stick was clean of blood or other signs of use.
‘A man . . .’ The Zulu detective hesitated and moved to the right to examine another patch of disturbed earth. ‘A small man was here. He ran from where the girl is lying to here with the stick. See this, Sergeant?’
The spoor of a wild cat was identifiable even to Emmanuel’s untrained eye. ‘He moved out to defend the body from predators. That means he must have stayed with her.’
‘Yebo. I believe this.’
Emmanuel underlined the word ‘loved’ and then added ‘protected’.
‘Was he a human predator and the girl his prey?’ he wondered aloud. People often killed the one they loved the most.
Shabalala shook his head, frustrated at not having the full picture. ‘I cannot say if this man was the one to harm her. People have come to this place and walked all around. Some of the women scooped the earth with their hands and threw their bodies in the dirt. Many tracks have been lost. A man brought her here and kept the animals away. That is all I see.’
‘We know a lot more than when we got here,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Let’s take another look at the body and then we’ll talk to the women, see what they can tell us about the victim.’
‘Yebo,’ Shabalala agreed and they walked back to where the girl lay. A yellow grasshopper had landed on the curve of her neck and was busy cleaning its wings and long antennae.
‘No visible injuries,’ Emmanuel said and waved the grasshopper away. Natural causes couldn’t be ruled out yet. ‘We’ll have to turn her over, find what’s hidden.’
They rolled the body onto its side so the back was visible. A soft gasp came from the women under the paperbark thorn. The girl was theirs and still alive in their minds. To see how easily she slipped from their embrace and into the hands of strangers shocked them.
‘There,’ Emmanuel said. A small hole, the size of a thumbtack head, punctured the white calico dress just above the waist. Spots of blood speckled the fabric. ‘Could be a bullet entry wound.’
‘Maybe a knife also.’ Shabalala pressed his fingertips into the ground where the girl had been lying and checked them. ‘The soil and grass are damp with blood but not soaked.’
‘She didn’t bleed to death. But this isn’t a good time to look at the entry wound.’ The mourners had edged closer to the crime scene and their anxiety was palpable. ‘The district surgeon will have answers for us in a few days. Till then we can only guess at the murder weapon. Lay her on her back and let’s find out who she is.’
They rolled the girl’s body into its original position and Shabalala pushed the tartan blanket under her head again as if she might be uncomfortable without the support.
‘Do you want to take the questioning?’ Emmanuel asked. He spoke Zulu himself, had mixed with Zulu boys and girls and been in and out of their homes till the violent events of his adolescence had seen him and his sister banished to a remote farm and then to an all-white boarding school. But this situation was different.
‘You must start,’ Shabalala said. ‘They will know that the police are serious if a white policeman is in charge.’
That made sense. Native policemen were armed with sticks and given bicycles to ride. They were not allowed to drive police vehicles. The power of the gun and the car and the law itself was in the hands of Europeans. Shabalala knew that. The rural women waiting under the tree knew it also.
‘Speak in Zulu,’ Shabalala suggested in a quiet voice. ‘And thank them for looking after the girl until we came.’
‘Will do,’ Emmanuel said. ‘If my Zulu isn’t up to scratch, you’ll have to take over.’
He approached the mourners. There were six of them, barefoot and dressed in heavy black skirts that fell below the knee. Supple cowhide aprons covered their breasts and each wore a fine black head-covering decorated with porcupine quills to signify that they were married women, mothers of the clan.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Emmanuel said in Zulu, addressing a woman at the front of the group who was being held up by her elbows to stop her collapsing onto the ground. She possessed the same beauty as the girl lying on the grass – surely the victim’s mother or aunt. ‘Thank you for keeping her safe until we came. We are grateful.’
‘Amahle Matebula,’ the woman said. ‘That is my daughter’s name.’
Amahle meant ‘the beautiful one’. Emmanuel had run the streets of Sophiatown with a fat Zulu girl of the same name. She was meaner and tougher than most of the street boys and proud of it. Shoplifting was her speciality; she sold on the goods for a small profit and a kiss from the boys she favoured. He’d used her services sparingly, buying only last-minute Christmas gifts from her stolen haul.
‘You named your daughter well.’ Emmanuel introduced himself and Shabalala before retrieving his notebook and pen. ‘What may I call you?’
‘Nomusa.’
Mother of grace. Another perfect name. Emmanuel meant ‘God is with us’. He was certain his mother had named him in one of those bright, dazzling moods that overtook her every few months, when she shone like a fire.
‘Tell me about Amahle,’ Emmanuel said. ‘When did you last see her?’
‘Friday morning. It was still dark outside. She went to work but did not come home.’ Nomusa’s weight sagged and the women holding her upright couldn’t take the strain. They eased her to the ground and propped her up with their hands and shoulders. Emmanuel and Shabalala crouched and waited for the women to settle.
‘Where did she work?’ Emmanuel asked when Nomusa lifted her head off her chest. Five more minutes and she would not even be able to do that.
‘At the farmhouse of inkosi Reed.’ A grey-haired woman to Nomusa’s right whispered in her ear and she added, ‘Little Flint Farm. It is close to here. In the valley.’
‘What time did Amahle normally leave work?’ Other girls, more fortunate ones, would be home from school in the early afternoon, filling exercise books with the vocabulary words of the day.
‘Sundown. Amahle knew the paths over the mountains and she never tarried.’ Nomusa lifted her head high now, spurred on by a sudden flash of anger. ‘This was told to the white policeman on Saturday morning but he did not come! He did not look for her!’
‘You reported her missing to the commander at the Roselet police station?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘Yebo. Constable Bagley. That very man,’ Nomusa said. ‘He did not care to find my daughter and now the ancestors have taken her.’
‘Easy, my sister.’ One of the women placed a hand on Nomusa’s shoulder. No good came from criticising the police.
‘What I say is true.’ Nomusa shrugged off the hand and leaned in closer to Emmanuel. Rage lit her dark eyes. ‘The white policeman is a liar. He promised to help but sat on his hands. He cares for no-one else’s daughters but his own.’
‘Please, sister,’ another woman said. ‘What’s done is done.’
The finality of the woman’s words seemed to drain the anger from Nomusa. Her expression softened and she said to Emmanuel, ‘From the day my daughter was born her eyes were on the horizon and what was beyond it. I should have kept her by my side but she did not like to be watched over. Now she is gone . . .’
Nomusa covered her face with her hands and began to cry. A woman held her and rocked her like a child as she sobbed. Emmanuel put the notebook away and stood up. Pressing for more information would gain him nothing. Nomusa had become unreachable in her grief.
‘Find out who discover
ed the body and see if the women can help us with a list of people to talk to,’ Emmanuel said to Shabalala. ‘I’ll search the area for a possible murder weapon.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’ Shabalala shuffled closer to the women and waited patiently for the right moment to speak.
Emmanuel walked away. Grief and despair were part of the job. He was used to it. But there were times, like this one, when the ghosts of the dead from his past tried to break through into daylight instead of waiting for night to fall.
He combed the grass, searching for a knife, a spent bullet casing or a sharpened stick: anything that might have caused the injury to Amahle’s back. He could do nothing for the war dead. This death on a Natal hillside, however, he could do something about.
TWO
‘Nothing,’ Emmanuel said to Shabalala when the Zulu detective joined the hunt for a murder weapon ten minutes later. ‘This area is clean. The only place left to check is that ledge up there.’
They climbed a steep grade to a gnarled fig tree with thick white roots that pushed into the face of the basalt. From the ledge, they had a clear view of the majestic spine of the Drakensberg mountain range. The air seemed brighter and crisper than in the valley below.
‘Wait, Sergeant.’ Shabalala picked up a half-eaten fig and examined the stalk. He moved to the far side of the rock face and bent low over sprouting tufts of grass. ‘The small man was here,’ he said. ‘He ate the fruit from the tree and then made a toilet in the sand.’
The toilet was a neatly dug hole, filled with dirt and then heaped with a mound of dried fig leaves.
‘An African man or a European with bush skills,’ Emmanuel said and eyed the wide swathe of land running to the feet of the mountains. ‘Plenty of both kinds of men in a place like the Kamberg Valley.’
‘A white man without shoes who fights off the wild animals with a stick and also eats fruit from the fig tree?’ Shabalala was sceptical. ‘A man who also makes a toilet like that of a Zulu?’
‘You’re right. Our most likely suspect is a native man who knew Amahle.’ Emmanuel peered over the rock ledge to the grassy slope. ‘But if all that’s true, the tartan blanket is wrong.’
Zulus used carved wooden headrests as pillows.
‘Yebo, the blanket is a mystery. None of the mothers has seen it before. It does not belong to the girl or to anyone at her kraal.’
‘The person who found the body could have left it.’ Emmanuel knew that possibility was a long shot. Why leave something expensive under the head of a dead girl? Who would take the time and effort to make a dead girl more comfortable unless there was a deep personal connection to her?
‘Who did find her?’ he asked.
‘A man going down to the river for a baptism service found Amahle this morning.’ Shabalala joined Emmanuel at the rock ledge. ‘The mothers think this man is still at the river but I do not believe this blanket belongs to him.’
‘And what about the flowers?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘Zulus do not bring flowers to the dead. I cannot explain them.’
They stood on the lip of the rock and looked down at the crime scene. Spring was all around. It was in the smell of damp earth heated by the late morning sun and in the hum of the bees. It was a perfect day for a beautiful Zulu girl in a calico dress to stretch out in the sun and listen to the rustle of leaves and the sound of birds. Instead, a group of women sat under the branches of a thornbush tree, now mute with sorrow, afraid to let her corpse out of their sight. Nearby, men armed with spears and clubs guarded the crime scene.
‘We’ll check the blanket for a name or a label once we’re clear of the family. We don’t want the impi jumping to conclusions and going after the owner,’ Emmanuel said.
A young man with a dented bicycle wheel tucked into his armpit spilled over the crest of the mountain, running fast enough to escape his own shadow. A cloud of brown and orange grasshoppers flew off the path and a wood dove jumped up from the grass. The impi closed ranks but the young man peeled away to the left and dodged past them. He shouted, ‘Take up your shields. He is coming.’
The impi overlapped the edges of their cowhide shields to form a barrier and looked towards the mountain ridge. Emmanuel and Shabalala did the same, impelled by a growing sense of danger.
A lean Zulu man appeared at the apex, armed with a short stabbing spear. He surveyed the land and took in the impi defending the pathway. He raised his spear and thumped the wooden handle against his shield to make a bass note like a beating heart. Four more Zulu men appeared on the ridge, all of them pounding their spears against their shields, until the noise reverberated across the mountainside.
‘There will be a fight. We must move. Now. Before the two sides clash.’ Shabalala hit the steep decline at a run, feet sliding on the grade, his arms held out for balance. The drumming grew louder and faster, that human heart now pumped with adrenaline.
Emmanuel matched Shabalala’s pace. Zulu military tactics were not his area of expertise but he figured that the men on the hill would spill down the path with their spears drawn the moment the drumming stopped. He tracked right, aiming for a space between the two groups of Zulu men.
Four harder beats of the spears against rawhide and then silence. A shout went up and the men on the hill ran fast towards the impi guarding the path.
‘Sergeant,’ Shabalala gasped. ‘The sagebrush.’
Emmanuel saw it, a clump of scraggly green vegetation that grew on the path a few feet in front of the impi. That was their target, the last point at which he and Shabalala could access the path to form a human buffer between the two groups of Zulus.
Footsteps thundered closer, a cloud of dust rising behind the attacking impi. Shabalala and Emmanuel sprinted hard and hit the path just short of the sagebrush marker.
‘Take the rear impi.’ Emmanuel pulled out his police ID and unclipped his holster. ‘I’ll take the attackers.’
The detectives stood back to back, shoulders squared, projecting a confidence that neither of them felt. The advancing impi pressed closer, their spears gleaming in the sun.
‘Stop! Police!’ Emmanuel held up his ID, a shield of sorts backed by the power of the white government. He reached for the Webley revolver, snug in its leather holster, but thought better of it. He didn’t want to escalate the confrontation. ‘Drop your weapons. Now!’
The leader of the attacking group kept coming, undaunted by Emmanuel’s laminated piece of paper. He was tall, with a starkly handsome face built of sharp angles and taut skin. Keloid scars, silver in the sunlight, spread across his chest and shoulders. The men behind him slowed but did not stop either.
Emmanuel switched to Zulu. ‘Two steps back. Now.’ He moved to meet the challenge, index finger pointed, his voice loud and dark with menace, just like the training manuals of the South African police force instructed. ‘I will not ask you again.’
Shabalala turned and stood at Emmanuel’s right shoulder, adding muscle to the police order.
The leader of the new impi finally stopped and seemed to weigh up the risk of pushing the attack. ‘You speak Zulu very well for a European,’ he said in English and allowed his stabbing spear and shield to slip to the ground.
Emmanuel stepped closer. ‘Hands up where I can see them,’ he said. ‘Your men also.’
The four Zulu soldiers held on to their weapons and shields, unwilling to act without a direct order from their commander.
‘What will it be?’ asked Emmanuel. ‘Shall we talk or fight? I’m happy either way.’
The man smiled. ‘Only a fool brings spears to fight a policeman with a gun.’ He signalled his men to lay down their arms on the grass. They complied.
Emmanuel kicked the spear out of the lean man’s reach. ‘Name,’ he said.
‘I am Mandla, the great chief Matebula’s eldest son.’
Mandla. It meant ‘the strong one’.
‘Your mother?’ Emmanuel asked. Mandla could be Amahle’s full blood brother, so remarkable was their shared
physical beauty.
‘My mother is La Matenjuwa. First wife of the great chief.’
‘First son of the first wife,’ Emmanuel said. Mandla was a chief in waiting and Amahle’s half-brother. ‘What business do you have here?’
‘I come to collect the great chief’s daughter.’ Mandla turned to the impi guarding the pathway. ‘Her body is the property of the Matebula clan. There is no place for you here.’
‘You come without honour,’ the oldest male of the original impi shouted. ‘You insult the dead and the ancestors with your violence.’
Mandla’s head snapped back and his lips thinned. ‘A child belongs to the father, not to the mother. The girl must return with us to her father’s kraal as the law says.’
‘He who fertilises the egg but has no time for the chicks is no father, even amongst the Zulu,’ the elder replied.
Shabalala sucked in a breath at the accusation and eased around again so he had Emmanuel’s back.
‘Move off ten paces,’ Emmanuel ordered both sides of Amahle’s family. ‘Empty palms facing out where I can see them.’
The men obeyed, unhappily.
‘Listen to me carefully.’ Emmanuel spoke in a calm voice. ‘We are the detectives in charge of investigating Amahle’s death. She is your sister and your niece, but for the time being she belongs to us. The police. We will say how and where she travels. I know this is difficult for all of you but it is the way it must be.’
He turned to make eye contact with the elder who’d escorted them to the ring of grieving women. ‘Is this understood?’
The man took a deep breath, still angry. ‘It is, ma baas,’ he said.
Allowing Amahle to pass into the care of the South African police was worse than giving her back to her father’s house but there was no other choice. The police were stronger than all the valley clans put together.
Emmanuel turned to Mandla and said, ‘Is this understood?’