Silent Valley

by Malla Nunn

  ‘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 practised 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 perpetrated 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 her servants.’ Karin called them ‘the English’ with barely concealed contempt. Little Flint and Covenant farms were adjacent to each other but the only thing the English and Afrikaner families had in common was that 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 towards 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 centre 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 characterised 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, which was painted with yellow roses and green leaves. Emmanuel leaned forward, curious to see what was in the bowl placed at the centre 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 odour 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 asked. 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 signalled 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 stifling 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 wood stove. ‘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 detective 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 centre. 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.

  NINE

  ‘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. ‘Careful 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.’

  A wagon was drawn up on the near bank of a fast-flowing river. Two black labourers lifted a fifty-gallon water drum onto the flat wagon bed while a pack of dogs splashed in the water and 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 wide forehead suggested an infusion of Hottentot blood; a true Afrikaner. Pure Dutch my arse, thought Emmanuel.

  ‘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 mid-stride, retreated to the sandy bank and milled around their master’s legs. The black workmen patted the oxen’s flanks and held them steady.

  ‘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 smouldered. 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 hard-working 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 colour, carried a twisted mental illustration of each race group for easy reference.

  ‘Height, weight, hair or eye colour?’ Emmanuel asked. Sampie’s brief description fitted 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 rumour 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, signalling 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.