Just a Dead Man

by Margaret von Klemperer

  “But you’re not involved. Nor am I. You found the body, and you were walking my dog. That’s all it has to do with us. They’ll take statements, and that’ll be the end of it.” But as I spoke, I wondered who I was trying to convince. I had a nasty feeling that the arrival of the cops wouldn’t herald the end of it at all. It was just the beginning, and the beginning of something that was surely going to be unpleasant. And, looking at Daniel, I could tell he thought so too.

  3

  IT WAS AN UNEASY HALF-HOUR before the police came, two of them.

  “Mrs Lorna Moss? I’m Inspector Adam Pillay, and this is Sergeant Thembinkosi Dhlomo. You called in an incident.”

  Getting my name wrong wasn’t a promising start, and I would hardly have described what I had called in as an incident. “It’s Laura Marsh, actually. But yes. Come in.”

  I led the way to the studio, where Daniel was now standing by the garden door, looking mutinous. He clearly didn’t want to be there: his body language, stiff and resentful, made his feelings plain. I wasn’t happy either, but there was nothing we could do.

  “Inspector, Sergeant, this is Daniel Moyo, who found the body.”

  The sergeant eyed Daniel up and down. “What were you doing in the plantation, Mr Moyo?” he asked. To my mind, there was a sneer in his voice, a dismissive emphasis over Dan’s distinctively Zimbabwean surname.

  “I was walking Laura’s dog.”

  Dhlomo waited until the pause was a breath too long, and Daniel continued.

  “I had come to visit her, and she was busy painting, so I said I would take the dog out for a walk.”

  “So, you were walking this lady’s dog. And then what?” I didn’t like the way Dhlomo made it sound as though there was something obscene about Daniel walking my dog. Who did he think Dan was? Some kind of employee, an immigrant dog-walker to the white madam? But if there was a bait in the sergeant’s question, Dan didn’t rise to it.

  “We’d got to the end of the first bit of path, up the hill, and I was going to take the left fork. But Grumpy – that’s the dog – ran off to the right, and then he started to bark. I went to see what he was after, and there it was. The body.”

  “Don’t you want to go and see it?” I asked. “It – he – is just lying there.” The thought was terrifying me. I wanted it to be gone.

  “Oh. You’ve seen the body too, have you?” Dhlomo turned to me. He was a big, powerful man, his eyes small in a large face, pockmarked with what must have been acne scars, and he looked at me with apparent dislike.

  “No. No, I haven’t. But Daniel told me about it. Surely someone must move it. I mean, it can’t just lie there. I think it’s going to rain.” It was a lame remark, and I was beginning to feel defensive, though about what I could not say.

  “All in good time, lady.” Dhlomo took a step towards me, obviously about to ask more questions. But Inspector Pillay, who had been standing looking at the painting of the apple so quietly that I had almost forgotten about him, turned round.

  “Perhaps you should go and have a look at the body now, Sergeant. Wait for the forensic team there: they should be here soon. Take Mr Moyo with you. He can show you the way.”

  Dhlomo nodded. I got the feeling that, had anyone other than the inspector told him to go, he would have ignored them in favour of questioning me. But maybe they were playing good cop/bad cop. I had another unwelcome thought: perhaps Pillay wanted to separate me from Daniel so we would have no chance to concoct anything, or to tally our stories, even though surely we could have done that while we were waiting for the police? Not that we had stories, but maybe they thought we did. I was beginning to feel quite sick.

  Dhlomo and Daniel crossed the garden, now baking in the afternoon sun. The piercing sound of a late cicada drilled through my head, drowning out thought as we watched them go. Storm clouds were building up in the west over the distant peaks of the Drakensberg, and my prediction of rain looked likely to be fulfilled. I wanted to tell the police to hurry up, get the body in out of any danger from the weather. Though the man who lay somewhere up there was long past caring.

  “Did you paint this?” The inspector’s voice made me jump, a physical movement he must have noticed. He looked at me with obvious concern, taking a step towards me. “Are you all right, Mrs Marsh?” For the first time, I took a proper look at him. He wasn’t tall, but he looked fit, with a pleasant, aquiline-featured face. His brown eyes had smudges of weariness under them.

  “Yes, I’m fine. And yes, I did paint it.”

  “Very nice. I like that.” He stepped back to get a more distant view. “You’ve caught the look of the apple inside. And the skin. Those early autumn ones, when they’re still crisp. Very nice.”

  Well, either he was an art critic, or a connoisseur of fruit, or he thought I was about to freak out and he wanted to calm me down. I caught a glimpse of my white face in the hideous Castle Lager pub mirror the boys had given me three years ago and which I had been plotting to get rid of ever since. I couldn’t risk breaking it: seven years’ bad luck was more than I could handle. I’d already had 15 years of marriage to Simon, and that had been enough bad luck to last a lifetime. Maybe when Mike went off to university, I could simply take it down and stick it in a cupboard. But no wonder the inspector thought I needed to be soothed. Never exactly rosy-cheeked, I now looked like a ghost.

  However, he decided the time had come to be a policeman.

  “Now, Mrs Marsh, you were working in here this afternoon. Did you see anything, any vehicles, any people, going up the road?”

  I thought for a moment. “Well, no. I was painting, and I really wouldn’t have noticed. I mean, there are always odd cars and things, and people walking along. It’s quiet in the cul-de-sac – the main road along the front is busier, but you can’t see that from in here. Nothing struck me. At least … no.” I hesitated, because something tugged at a corner of my memory, but when I tried to follow it, it slipped away like a wisp of smoke, too insubstantial to grasp.

  “And Mr Moyo. You say he’s a friend of yours. Does he live here, in Pietermaritzburg?”

  “Not now. He’s been living in Joburg, working at the Bag Factory studios there. He’s planning an exhibition, and I think he’s come down here to do some research. But he had only just arrived. He saw I was working, and he offered to take the dog out so I could finish. We told you that.”

  “Of course. You live here alone, do you?”

  “No. My younger son is still at school and he’s usually here. He’s gone to Cape Town to visit his father for the holidays. So I’m alone at the moment.”

  “I see. Now. Perhaps you could show me the way to where Mr Moyo found the body? I see the forensic guys are here.”

  I can’t say I was keen. But I didn’t get the feeling I was being given an option. We headed out of the garden gate, the inspector asking me how many people knew the combination. It was me, the boys and Daniel, who had learned it when he was living here. It was pretty straightforward – my birthday: 2104, April 21, coming up in a couple of weeks’ time. The inspector made no comment, but I sensed he was filing away the fact that Daniel had once stayed here.

  We walked up the road and into the lane at the top. It’s a pull up the first part of the track to the fork, and I was glad that it inhibited conversation, on my side at least. The inspector continued to breathe easily. Ahead of us a whole bunch of people were milling around: police; someone who was presumably the district surgeon bending over a shape lying in the grass; Daniel who was now looking angry, probably because of the large sergeant who was still at his side; and various onlookers who seemed to have come from nowhere.

  “Mrs Marsh, would you look at the body, see if you recognise him? He may be someone local.”

  I glared at Inspector Pillay. The last thing I wanted to do was look. If I don’t do sick, I certainly don’t do bodies, and this, I realised, would be the first I had ever seen. I was about to refuse, but I stopped myself. A man had died. I shouldn’t be tr
ying to protect my sensibilities. Pillay was watching me, a sad expression in his shadowed eyes. “It could help us,” he said gently.

  I walked over to where the body lay among the autumn grasses, seed heads pink in a low afternoon sun that turned their stems to celadon, a rippling shroud of extraordinary beauty for what lay so still among them.

  He was a black man, probably in late middle age, with a little grey in the hair on his temples. He was neatly dressed in dark trousers and an open-necked blue shirt, with practical-looking leather shoes, the tracked soles visible. His eyes were open, staring up into a sky now patched with greying clouds. But even if those clouds shed their burden, the eyes would never blink again. There was little blood, but even I could see that the blow that had crushed his left temple, distorting the shape of his head, would have been fatal. It didn’t look as if any attempt had been made to hide him.

  I had never seen him before in my life. But looking at him made me feel, if not exactly guilty, at least complicit in his death. And he was diminished by my complicity. I felt the way I feel looking at some horrible event on a 24-hour television news channel. Horror as entertainment. However much we may feel shock, or sadness, or pity, we are also titillated. Seeing that thing that had once been human, lying in the grass, I didn’t feel nausea, or even shock. But I felt dirty, voyeuristic. Not something I could explain to the police.

  “No, I don’t know him. People do walk here. There are various paths that connect some of the roads in the area. People use them as short cuts.”

  Inspector Pillay nodded, and turned away to speak to the doctor. There was a dark-coloured van – the mortuary van, I suppose – at the end of the road and two men were walking up from it, carrying a body bag and a stretcher. Thank God, our corpse was about to be taken away.

  Pillay called the sergeant over and said something to him. The big man bent down and began to go through the pockets in the body’s clothes, putting things into a set of clear plastic envelopes he had taken from his own pocket. It all seemed a bit casual, not what I saw on those endless forensic detective shows that are a staple of television where the police fiddle around, finding one hair or a flake of skin. But I didn’t want to watch anyway. I walked over to where Daniel was still standing.

  He turned sharply towards me. “Fuck, Laura. This is a bad thing. I don’t need this.” He sounded angry, and I saw a tremor in the hand that pushed his glasses up his nose. “Can’t we go back to the house?”

  “Don’t see why not. There’s nothing we can do here. I suppose I should ask the inspector, though.”

  Pillay nodded when I told him Dan and I wanted to go back. “Please wait for us there. We’ll be along just now,” he said, and then returned to looking at one of the envelopes Dhlomo was holding out to him. I couldn’t see what was in it, but I sensed Daniel coming up behind me and peering over my shoulder as Dhlomo turned it over, and I heard Dan draw a quick, nervous breath.

  4

  CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL didn’t exactly flow as we headed back to the house. In fact, we walked in absolute silence. I wasn’t sure how to react to him: it was all very well to be angry, but I hadn’t put the body at the end of the road for him to find. And having found it, he could hardly – any more than I could – pretend it wasn’t there. We were both going to have to deal with it. We went back through the garden gate, and I headed straight to the kitchen: I needed more tea. Or coffee. That might be even better. I put the kettle on and went to ask Dan if he wanted anything.

  He was still in the garden, contemplating the stork made from recycled oil-drum metal that stands watch over my rockery. It has a permanently startled expression and a fragile leg where the varnish was thin and rust has attacked, and I am very fond of it. Now you can buy them, all looking identical, on any street corner, but when I got mine there weren’t nearly so many about. Mostly they used to be sold by Zimbabweans who had made the long trek south in the hope of earning some kind of useable cash for their families back home.

  “Dan, you want coffee? Or more tea?”

  “No, thanks.” But when he turned to me, he was smiling. At least that was some relief.

  When I had made myself a strong, real coffee, I took it out to the garden. Despite the heat my hands were cold, and I wrapped them round the mug. A sudden breeze scattered a few petals from the roses: time I did some deadheading. But thinking the word made me remember why we were here.

  “Laura … the cops’ll be here in a minute. Look, I think there might be –” But Dan never finished his sentence. Dhlomo and Pillay were at the gate. They had seen us in the garden, and obviously decided to come in that way rather than go round the corner and ring the bell at the front door.

  I opened the padlock again and led the silent duo into the studio. Dan followed us, but whatever he had been going to say was gone. “Do you know who he is?” I asked.

  “All in good time,” said Dhlomo, turning that menacing stare in my direction. Maybe he just looked like that all the time, but I was getting the feeling he had taken a dislike to both me and Dan. It was the latter he turned to next.

  “You a Zimbabwean, Mr Moyo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got ID?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at Daniel for what seemed an eternity before Dan slipped his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out an identity document. Dhlomo took a long, long look at it and compared the photograph carefully with the reality in front of him before he handed it back.

  “Been here how long?”

  “Six years.”

  Dhlomo just looked at him. Then Pillay stepped forward, holding the plastic envelope Dhlomo had been showing him earlier as they bent over the body. Dhlomo reached out for it. Pillay seemed quite happy for his sergeant to be in charge of questioning us, despite the difference in their ranks.

  In the envelope was a photograph. Dhlomo turned it over, looking at the back.

  “Do either of you know a Mr SS Mendi?”

  I could feel Daniel stiffen beside me as I gave what must have been an obvious start. I carefully avoided looking at him.

  “No,” said Daniel quietly.

  “Do you mean the SS Mendi, the ship?” I heard myself say. Dhlomo glared at me, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Pillay, standing very still as he watched both me and Daniel.

  “What ship?” asked Dhlomo.

  “The Mendi was a troop carrier in the First World War that sank in the English Channel and drowned a whole lot of South African soldiers who were on their way to France.” I hesitated, and then ploughed tactlessly on. “I thought everyone knew about it. It’s had a lot of publicity since 1994, with memorials, and cabinet ministers visiting the site to drop wreaths in the sea and so on. It was felt that because the soldiers were black, they hadn’t been given due credit.”

  Dhlomo was looking even angrier, if that was possible.

  There was a long silence. The four of us stood like statues, but no one said anything. Then Pillay stepped forward.

  “Mrs Marsh. Mr Moyo. You both reacted when Sergeant Dhlomo mentioned SS Mendi. May I ask why?”

  I waited for Daniel to speak, but as the silence stretched out, it was obvious he had no intention of doing so. There wasn’t much point denying we had both been startled by what Dhlomo had said.

  “It was just that the name of the ship came up when we – Mr Moyo and I – were talking earlier, before he took the dog out. So it was a bit of a shock, the coincidence. That’s all.”

  Pillay turned to Daniel: “Mr Moyo?”

  “Yes. The Mendi was mentioned.”

  “In what context?”

  Daniel made no response. Come on, you stupid arse, I thought. It’s hardly a crime to talk about a ship. But he seemed to have taken a vow of silence. Reluctantly, I went on.

  “We were talking about ideas for exhibitions. Mr Moyo mentioned the role of indigenous troops in colonial wars, so the Mendi came up. Along with Isandhlwana and various other things.”

 
“I see,” said Pillay thoughtfully. Dhlomo gave another grunt. I didn’t think they saw at all. Now we seemed to have a connection with the body at the end of the road, and they were determined to find out what it was. Well, that was going to be an uphill job. Daniel and my dog had stumbled across it, but that was all.

  I held out my hand for the photograph and Dhlomo passed it to me. Through the plastic sleeve, I looked at a faded and dog-eared snapshot of an elderly African man, smiling and holding onto the handlebars of an old-fashioned black bicycle. I turned the envelope over: the only words on the back, in brownish ink, were SS Mendi. I passed it to Daniel who glanced at it without comment and handed it back to Dhlomo.

  “It’s not the man … down there,” I said, more to break the silence than to make any kind of useful contribution.

  Daniel roused himself. “Do you need me any more?” he asked. “I promised to visit someone on campus this afternoon, and I need to go.”

  Dhlomo looked as if he would like to refuse, but Pillay said that would be fine. He made sure he knew where Dan would be staying, reminding him that he was not to leave town without letting the police know. I thought Dan was going to argue, but mercifully, he simply nodded. I walked with him to the front door.

  “Hey, don’t forget you promised to let me use your hand as a model for the next painting.”

  I got the feeling he had no idea what I was talking about. But then he smiled warily, nodded and gave me a kiss. “Sure. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “You okay, Dan? This doesn’t concern us, you know. It’s just bad luck. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Sure,” he said again. But he didn’t meet my eye, and he looked troubled.

  I headed back to the studio. Pillay was absorbed by the apple painting while Dhlomo was poking in my painting tray as if expecting to find a stash of cocaine or a murder weapon. Ah well, situation normal then.

  “You aren’t planning to go anywhere, Mrs Marsh?” asked Pillay.