by Malla Nunn
A gravel path cut through the formal garden to the rear of the hotel and led on to a smaller path signposted ‘SCENIC WAY’. This curled around the outer edges of town and ended at the mouth of Greyling Street. ‘For guests who enjoy a brisk walk after breakfast or before lunch,’ the rotund receptionist had explained over a map of the hotel grounds and an exhaustive list of ‘things to do while in Roselet’. Investigating the murder of a Zulu girl was not one of the recommended activities.
The Reed family were not home when he and Shabalala had called by Little Flint Farm late the day before. The essential facts of the investigation – time of death, last known sighting of the victim alive, suspects and motive – were still unconfirmed. But other worries, less obvious than the puzzle of the murder, had awakened him in the pitch black of his hotel room.
Clumps of sugarbush protea on either side of the path glittered with dew and the air was chilly. Goosebumps prickled Emmanuel’s skin and the knot of heat at the centre of his chest slowly dissipated. It felt good to be cold, to wake from the tangle of images that surfaced only briefly and then disappeared into a void without knitting together into a fluid dream.
Eight years out of his infantry uniform and he’d learned, in an incomplete way, to defeat the dead that visited him in his dreams. Wake up, switch on the light, breathe deeply and name the place where your body lay wrapped in a patchwork quilt: Roselet. At the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains. South Africa.
Last night was different. No firestorms or missiles or swollen rivers washing the dead out to sea broke his sleep. Instead, he remembered Sophiatown. The family shack with the corrugated-iron roof held down by stones. His sister, Olivia, playing in the dirt street with Indira, the Indian shopkeepers’ daughter, the smoke from winter fires blanketing the sky above them. And his parents, sitting in the doorway of their crumbling home laughing at a joke he’d not heard. They were relaxed and beautiful, even in the dusty township light.
Emmanuel walked on. He had unwittingly unlocked a forgotten memory of his mother and father happy and in love.
The heat in his chest was in the exact spot where Baba Kaleni had laid his hand. The old man had smashed a hole in him and now ghosts and secrets were climbing out from the inside. The past bled into the present. He remembered his difficult adolescence. After a staunch, God-loving Afrikaner family had adopted him and his sister, he’d tried to be good. No fighting with the boys who called him unclean and his dead mother a whore, no talking back to the brutal teachers at the Fountain of Light boarding school, no questioning the superiority of whites over blacks despite knowing English and Afrikaners who were thicker than mud.
It was exhausting work. After six months, cracks began to appear. By then he’d learned to exact revenge in cunning and insidious ways.
Not now: Emmanuel stopped the past from breaching the walls punched in by Baba Kaleni. The damage was done, the cuts and bruises healed. All that mattered was now.
The stars dimmed and a few hundred feet ahead the outline of houses became more distinct. Emmanuel skirted the edges of Roselet. Wide gardens and fences enclosed pretty cottages and a silver stream marked the border between the town and the countryside. He recognised the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of Dr Daglish’s home.
He walked past two more lots and the clustered buildings of the police station appeared. Yellow light shone from the yard.
Curious about the source of the glow, Emmanuel jumped the water. He moved along the back wall of the station house, careful of twigs and loose stones, and edged around the corner.
Constable Bagley sat on the rear steps of the station commander’s house smoking a cigarette by the light of a paraffin lantern. He huddled against the cold, red hair spiked out at odd angles, the chilled mist of his breath mingling with exhaled tobacco smoke. If he’d slept at all the night before, it didn’t show. Spent butts littered the ground.
A smudge of movement at the back window caught Emmanuel’s attention. He squinted and made out the figure of a woman in a white nightdress standing behind the glass. Bagley had no idea she was there, watching his nocturnal struggles tip over into day.
Emmanuel heard a footstep and turned to check the field sloping down to the stream. Shabangu, the older of Roselet’s two native policemen, hesitated on the path to the station, also caught by surprise. He quickly stepped aside to give the visiting city detective right of way, then remained perfectly still, face turned away, eyes to the ground. Questioning the actions of a white man caught spying at dawn was unwise. Playing the silent and obedient native was the safest option.
Emmanuel slipped past the Zulu policeman and continued in the direction of Greyling Street. Hitting the top of the main street, he followed the line of unlit shops and country cottages. The next twenty-four hours were critical to the investigation. He and Shabalala had to generate a list of suspects before the trail went cold.
*
Empty car park, empty yard and empty station. The rustle of the giant sycamore tree provided the only movement at the Roselet police command.
‘So much for “Anything we can do to help”,’ said Emmanuel, looking around the unmanned station. The room was unchanged from yesterday afternoon but for the position of the telephone on the commander’s desk. At some point, Bagley had made or received a phone call.
‘There could have been an emergency, Sergeant.’ Shabalala stopped to examine a map of the world hanging from a nail in the wall. The pink stain of the British Empire spread over several continents.
‘What kind of incident takes three grown men to bring it under control, Detective? A multiple cow theft or a cat stuck up a tree?’
‘Maybe it is both,’ Shabalala said, deadpan, and Emmanuel smiled.
He walked to the window and contemplated the wide grasslands and the steep mountain peaks.
‘It’s odd, don’t you think . . . a station commander stepping back from a murder in his own district? We’re not the Security Branch. We didn’t demand control over the investigation.’
‘Strange, yes.’ Shabalala circled round to the window and gazed out. ‘Maybe the commander does not care about the death of a Zulu girl.’
‘A murder is a murder. Solving a homicide is the closest we come to being heroes. You’d have to be lazy or stupid to give up the chance.’
‘Then we are alone,’ Shabalala said.
‘As always.’ Emmanuel checked his watch. Eight fifteen. ‘We’ll let the doctor know her substitute is on the way and then head back out to the Reeds’ farm.’
‘Just so, Sergeant.’
With hat brims tilted low to block out the sun, they stepped out into the dirt yard. Bagley’s daughters peered through the back window, their noses flattened to the glass as they studied Emmanuel and Shabalala. The older girl rapped her knuckles against the wood frame, demanding attention. Shabalala lifted his hat in greeting. The girls squealed with delight and the hand of an unseen person yanked them away from the window.
*
‘Dr Daglish?’ Emmanuel knocked on the front door of the cottage a third time, harder, and got no response. ‘It’s the police. Open up.’
Shabalala peered through the window into the front room. The curtains were open to let in daylight and a small reading lamp shone on the mantle. A paperback novel lay face down on an oak side table.
‘Someone is home,’ the Zulu detective said, ‘but there is no movement inside.’
‘Around the back. The doc might have skipped town and the lights are just a bluff.’ Emmanuel skirted the hydrangea bushes and walked quickly. He shouldn’t have let the doctor off so easily yesterday afternoon. With a little more pushing, Daglish might have agreed to conduct the examination right away. Now she could be anywhere in the province of Natal.
They took the path to the rear of the house and to the root cellar where Amahle’s body lay on a retired examination bed. The door to the basement room was ajar, held open by an old typewriter with rusted keys. The clinical scrape of surgical steel broke through
the music of birds and insects hidden in the dense garden foliage.
‘Doctor . . .’ Conducting an impromptu autopsy on a body she was too scared to examine twenty-four hours ago was beyond the realm of the possible. ‘Doctor?’
‘One minute, Detective Cooper.’ Daglish soon appeared in the cellar doorway, her dark hair held in a fine net. She was gloved and gowned and ready for surgery. ‘This cellar is like a bomb shelter and sound bounces right off the walls. I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘What are you doing?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘Assisting the police surgeon,’ Daglish said. ‘A car dropped him off at the front fifteen minutes ago. I didn’t expect him to get here so fast.’
‘Neither did I.’ Roselet was four hours drive from Durban, putting the doctor’s departure at around four o’clock that morning. ‘Constable Shabalala and I will say our hellos and head out to the valley.’
‘Come in.’ Daglish retreated into the root cellar, pulling off her gloves. The wrist bandage was gone. A bruise darkened her skin but otherwise it seemed she’d staged a remarkable overnight recovery.
Emmanuel and Shabalala ducked under the low eaves. The air in the dug-out room was chilly, the gloom lifted by the glow of two naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling. Glass jars of yellow and pink fruit added a block of colour to the bare walls.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Emmanuel was caught by surprise. ‘You.’
A man, on first impression a mix of mad wizard and wise professor, pressed inquisitive fingers into the back of Amahle’s skull, seeking out what secrets lay below the skin. Gold-rimmed glasses resting on the tip of his nose defied the laws of gravity.
‘You’re thinking of another Jew, crucified two thousand years ago by the Romans,’ Dr Daniel Zweigman replied. ‘As you can see, I am alive and well.’
‘Colonel van Niekerk said . . .’ Emmanuel didn’t bother with the rest of the sentence. He should have known better than to believe the crafty Dutchman’s promise to find another doctor. It had been given all too easily. The colonel wanted the old Jew on the case and the colonel always got what he wanted.
‘Yebo, sawubona.’ Shabalala greeted the German physician with a fingertip touched to the brim of his hat and a smile. Amahle was in the best hands. In a private moment, when the room was empty, he’d tell the girl to let this good and kind man uncover things that she kept hidden from others.
‘Shabalala.’ Zweigman thumbed the glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose. ‘Your wife sends her best. My wife also.’
The lack of a personal greeting from the wives to him didn’t worry Emmanuel. He was the unpredictable single man who dragged their husbands from their safe domestic worlds into the embrace of a violent and often dangerous one. While Lilliana and Lizzie liked him personally, he knew it would be just fine with them if they never heard from him again.
‘Did van Niekerk strongarm you?’ Emmanuel asked. He didn’t want his friends to be pressed into service as part of the Dutch policeman’s private militia.
‘Colonel van Niekerk is too cultivated to issue threats,’ Zweigman said. ‘He bribed me.’
‘The colonel doesn’t have anything you want,’ Emmanuel pointed out. After spending three years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Zweigman cared nothing for money, social status or appearance.
‘True, but Lilliana wishes to start another tailoring business like the one she ran in Jacob’s Rest. The colonel placed an advance order for ten dresses for his bride, to be made when they return from honeymoon. Money to be put aside for Dimitri’s schooling.’
Dimitri, a white-blond Russian baby boy, was born at the Zweigmans’ medical clinic during a counter-intelligence operation gone wrong. His father had been an ailing Russian general captured by the South African secret police and his mother, Natalya, a young, beautiful actress. Two weeks after giving birth, Natalya discarded Dimitri. A child would slow her down in her quest to find a new man, drink champagne and see the rest of the world beyond Moscow. The Zweigmans believed Dimitri’s abandonment at the clinic was an act of God. Their own three children had been killed in the German death camps and the orphaned Russian boy gave them a miraculous opportunity to love like that again. Dimitri was now their adopted son. For those with the patience of stone, the German couple had a list of the baby’s outstanding qualities memorised and ready to be repeated ad nauseam.
‘How did van Niekerk know Lilliana’s plans?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘The usual way. Via a direct line to the devil,’ Zweigman replied dryly. ‘It hardly matters, Sergeant Cooper. My wife is happy and I am here. With Dr Daglish’s help, the post-mortem examination to determine time and cause of death will be complete by lunch.’
‘Anything interesting so far?’ Emmanuel asked. The puncture wound on Amahle’s back and the small amount of blood at the crime scene made determining the murder weapon difficult.
‘The injury to the girl’s spinal cord is highly unusual. I’ve never seen one like it before.’ Zweigman bent close to Amahle, who was propped on her side and covered by a white sheet, like a child sleeping through a hot night. He touched the base of her skull tenderly. ‘There’s also a red–purple colour stretching from the wound all the way up to her hairline. Fascinating.’
‘Yes indeed.’ Daglish joined Zweigman and they examined the affected skin with the same intensity that Emmanuel imagined lit the faces of stamp collectors and pornography enthusiasts when they encountered something new and rare.
‘A few more hours,’ Zweigman said, still puzzling over the mystery presented by the wound, ‘and we’ll have some answers and some educated guesses for you, Sergeant.’
‘What next, Dr Zweigman?’ Margaret Daglish’s right hand hovered above a line of steel instruments arranged on a fresh bath towel that had been draped over a sideboard.
‘Cotton wool and the small scalpel, please. Let’s see what’s causing this skin discolouration.’ Zweigman glanced up from the examination bed and appeared surprised to find Emmanuel and Shabalala still in the room. ‘We will see you both at noon,’ he said and resumed probing the flesh at the base of Amahle’s neck, his attention wholly absorbed in the task, a strange and subtle joy lighting his face. Emmanuel imagined that running a medical clinic in the Valley of a Thousand Hills was tiring, the days filled with whooping cough, smallpox vaccinations and broken limbs. Every operation was vital to the health of the isolated rural community but few of them challenged a man of Zweigman’s intellectual calibre.
‘We’ll be at Little Flint Farm if anything comes up. You have the telephone number, Dr Daglish?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll call when the examination is done.’
Emmanuel moved to the cellar door and hesitated, remembering something. ‘Does anyone in town sell insurance, Dr Daglish?’
She looked up and frowned. ‘Not as a permanent job. A salesman from Sun Life drops in once a year. Usually in early January. We pay our premiums every month at the post office. Why?’
‘Just curious.’ Emmanuel left the root cellar before the sheet could be peeled back to reveal Amahle lying naked and vulnerable under the harsh electric light. He and Shabalala walked to the car. Neither of them wanted to imagine the scalpel blade slicing into the dead girl’s skin, exposing the secrets hidden in her blood and muscle.
‘The little sister said the Afrikaner farmer was burning his field on the day Amahle met Mr Insurance Policy.’ Emmanuel dug out the car keys. ‘It can’t have been the real insurance salesman if he only comes to town once a year, in January.’
‘Summertime.’ Shabalala spoke across the hood. ‘When the fields are planted and there is no burning.’
‘Exactly.’ Emmanuel opened the door, slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine. ‘Ask around about a Mr Insurance Policy when we get to Little Flint Farm but don’t spend a lot of time on it. This mystery man might have no connection to the murder. What we really need is a list of Amahle’s friends and enemies and the name of the last person to see her alive. Any ideas o
n where the gardener Philani might have disappeared to would also help.’
That was the job. Ask questions, cross-check the information and follow the leads till they led you somewhere or disappeared into the sand. Conducting a criminal investigation provided calm, purpose and direction for dealing with the chaos in the aftermath of a murder. Without the law and the promise of justice for the victims, Zweigman was just a charnel-house sawbones and he and Shabalala mere undertakers.
SEVEN
Emmanuel pulled into the driveway of a beautiful sandstone building with a wraparound porch dotted with wicker lounge chairs. He cut the engine and looked over the rural scene through the dusty windscreen. Rows of bright yellow roses in the formal garden and the circular drive made of white river stone clearly stated, ‘Servants, police and Jewish tinkers enter via the rear door.’
A middle-aged Zulu maid in a green housecoat and blue sandshoes worn without socks rushed from the front door to the top of the stairs. She glanced at the car then back over her shoulder like an anxious actor who’d stumbled onto the stage before the other players were ready to take their places.
‘Quick work,’ Shabalala said. ‘She could not have come from the kitchen or the back of the house.’
Emmanuel pocketed the keys. ‘She must be the maid in charge of greeting visitors before their car doors are open.’
They got out of the Chevrolet and a scruffy dog of undetermined breed bypassed the maid and trotted towards them. Rheumy-eyed and broad as a tailor’s table, there was no bark and little bite left in the old hound.
‘This one is not so bad.’ Shabalala scratched the mutt behind the ears with rough fingers, instantly disproving the old belief that all black Africans were afraid of dogs. Although fear of German shepherds specially trained to attack native men on sight seemed perfectly reasonable to Emmanuel.
They crunched across river stones and stopped at the bottom step. The distant lowing of cattle and the shouts of workmen came from the rear of the property.