Just a Dead Man

by Margaret von Klemperer

  “Oh yeah? You calling him Adam, and he’s just the cop who arrested Dan? Come on, Laura.” She sat back, a forkful of cake halfway to her mouth, and eyed me out. “This doesn’t sound like the relationship between a cop and the friend of a suspect.” I glared at her, thankful I hadn’t told her about our meeting in the plantations yesterday, still less about the way I felt in his company. She would have had a fine old time with that. I had merely said that I’d talked to him.

  One of the problems with Ness is that once she has a bone to chew over, she’s a bulldog. No letting go. I tried to get the conversation back to her and Ben. I raised a whole lot of issues about the exhibition, and told her how the boys had thrown Simon and Sonia’s plans into disarray by insisting on being with us for it. That did divert her briefly. I don’t imagine she has ever met Sonia, but she’s an endearingly loyal friend. My enemies are, by association, her enemies. But the diversion was short-lived, and she promptly steered the conversation back to Adam Pillay.

  Mercifully, just as we were finishing, my phone rang. “Private number”, as usual. Silence, but again I sensed a presence, as if I was being watched. Reprimanding myself that I was simply being foolish, I glanced quickly round the restaurant, hoping to catch someone sitting silently with a cellphone to the ear. But all I could see were ordinary people going about their Sunday breakfasts, brunches and coffees. Nothing sinister.

  I was, however, frightened. Ness understood that, and realised I wanted to get back to Mike as soon as possible. He was alone, and someone might know that. We paid our bill, and left, and for once, Ness’s erratic and speedy driving seemed too slow and too decorous. I needed to be home.

  Of course, when we got there, Mike was sprawled in front of the television, eating his way through a stack of marmalade sandwiches. It looked about as unappetising a breakfast as I could think of, and for the umpteenth time I found myself wondering where his peculiar passion for sour, sticky, orangey preserve came from. He also had a litre of Coke, and had the grace to look a little guilty when I fixed it with a more than disapproving eye.

  “Coke? For breakfast? Really, Mike. It rots your teeth, gives a caffeine buzz you do not need and has a ridiculous amount of sugar. And do you have to drink out of the bottle. We have glasses.” I was so relieved to see him there that I spoke more sharply than I needed to. I had been imagining him lying in a pool of blood, or kidnapped, his ears and little fingers delivered to me piecemeal over the next few days. He didn’t know that, of course, and just glared at me: the glare of the righteous teen to the unreasonable mother.

  Ness brushed my remark aside. “Oh nonsense, Laura. He’s a growing boy, and a gorgeous one.” She ruffled his hair, and bent down to kiss him. Mike would have recoiled from most people trying that on him, but Ness has the personality to get away with it. He blushed, and ducked away, but with not without a smile.

  Ness and I then went through into the studio. “Girl, you’ve got to calm down. Seriously. Think about moving in with your folks, even if you don’t want to come to me. Just until it’s all over. I’m sure nothing’s going to happen, but it’s not good to be on edge like this.”

  “I’m fine, Ness. Really. And it looks as if Dan is going to be released this week. So I’m sure it’s almost over now. Don’t worry.” In reality, I was far from sure that anything was over, but I couldn’t articulate my fears. I was aware only of that heavy presence – and I was afraid.

  We looked at my paintings. Vanessa was delighted with the hands, and we spent a long time discussing how to frame them. The first three cupboard interiors were all back from the framers, and, even though I say it myself, they were looking good. The final painting, the table of oddments seen through an open window, was coming along well too, despite the alarms and excursions of the past couple of weeks. I find painting an escape, and once I am engrossed in the creative process, my other worries seem to vanish. It’s the best therapy I can get and, to all intents and purposes, it’s free. The only problem is getting started when your head is full of other rubbish.

  Ness had brought a disc of photographs of her completed work, and we loaded it onto my laptop. As we talked about the work, hers and mine, I began to feel excited again. This exhibition could be really good. Vanessa was determined to bombard her entire and large acquaintance with invitations to the opening. “We’re going to sell, Laura. You need to get invitations out to everyone. I’ve just about completed the invitation – all I need is a photograph of one of your paintings. Probably the one with the china in the cupboard: good colours there. Then I’ll email you a copy and you can get it out to your contacts list. And don’t be modest. Send it to everyone. I’ll send one to Adam Pillay.”

  “Vanessa! You’ll do no such thing. He probably doesn’t even like art.” Though I had a feeling he did. He had been interested in my work, after all.

  “Nonsense, of course he does.” Ness gave me a wicked grin, and looked at her watch. “I have to be going. You take care now – and I mean it. That’s not just a cliché.” She whirled through the sitting room with a call of “Look after your Ma” to Mike, and was gone.

  Mike had apparently forgiven me for the dig at his breakfast habits, and asked why I needed looking after. I knew I had to tell him more than I had up to now. I was terrified Thabo Mchunu, or whoever the murderer was, would try to get at me through Mike, and, although I had wanted to keep him out of it all, he had to be put on his guard.

  It was cold in the sitting room, on the side of the house that doesn’t get much sun, and the under air was sharp, clean and dry. In the sun there was still warmth, but out of it, the enveloping heat that had wrapped around us for six months was gone. We headed through into the studio, and I sat Mike down on the sofa while I stood by the window, fiddling with the catch and told him all about my stupid phone call, the intruder at Paul Ndzoyiya’s house, the calls that went silent as soon as I answered and I reminded him about the bakkie he and Stephen had seen outside the gate. Maybe it meant nothing and I was simply being foolish, but I urged him to be careful, not to go around alone and if anything, anything at all, worried him, he should phone me, or even the cops. I gave him Adam Pillay’s numbers, feeling slightly self-conscious as I watched him key them into his cellphone. Vanessa’s nonsense had done its work.

  “I’m sure you’re imagining things, Ma. But, yeah, I’ll be careful. So you think that this Thabo Mchunu guy is the murderer?”

  “Well, no, not really. I mean, he’s high up, well connected. I can’t imagine that he goes around bashing people’s heads in. But I do think he may have something to do with it – him or maybe even Rhoda Josephs. Her name keeps cropping up. There’s the whole mining thing too. And if Dan gets out of jail this week, and Inspector Pillay as good as said that he would, then the killer, whoever he is, might get really pissed off. Look, Mike, do you want us to move to Granny and Grandpa’s? Just until it’s all over?”

  “God, no. Come on, Ma. That would suck big time! I mean, I love them: they’re great and all that, but I don’t want to stay there. And imagine how Gran would go on about it all if we had to tell her all this stuff. No. We’ll just be careful. And if I’m being careful, what about you? You’d better stop taking Grumpy into the plantations by yourself. Go with Philippa, or I’ll come.”

  The offer was a noble one. Mike doesn’t much like walking unless he’s going somewhere and there’s no lift available. If he wants exercise, he runs or cycles. I sat down, and we promised each other we would be careful all the time. Then Mike broached the subject of what he wanted to do the following year. It was no coincidence that his father and I had discussed the matter earlier. I gathered he had spoken to Simon, who must have called him while I was out with Vanessa. Probably woke him up. Simon was not one to be relaxed about teenagers lying around in bed for the whole morning at weekends. They should be out and doing something, though he wasn’t often specific as to what, and most of what they did irritated him anyway.

  “I told Dad I really want to do architec
ture. And that I don’t want to be in Cape Town. It’s a great place, sure, but I’d rather be in Durban. Close enough to home, but not under your feet. He doesn’t seem to think much of architecture, or architects, but he did say he’d think about it. He was pretty calm about it all. Not in full rant mode.” Mike grinned at me. His relationship with his father has been tricky since the divorce. I’ve tried hard not to project my feelings onto the boys, and Rory and Simon get on pretty well, but Mike – maybe because he’s younger – has always been on my side. If there is such a place.

  27

  ROBIN CALLED ON MONDAY morning, having just been told by Hannah Bhengu that the police would not oppose bail for Dan on Thursday. He was delighted.

  “So they’re dropping the charges?”

  “They haven’t said so, though they probably will. Unless they charge him with obstructing the course of justice. But it looks to me as if they’ve worked out that he wasn’t involved.” Robin went on: “Hannah said the police are following other leads. If it comes down to what’s happening in Pondoland, there could be some pretty nasty people involved. That coastal area is a hot potato. I don’t know how much you know about it, but there are ecologists, multinationals, BEE companies, all squabbling over it. People are looking for ways to get a toe into mining the titanium, and making a fast buck. And if it goes ahead, there will be road-building contracts up for grabs as well. I don’t know if the murder has anything to do with all of that, but it seems a more likely motive. For God’s sake, watch your back, Laura … The cops, if they have finally convinced themselves Dan’s not a killer, are likely to stir up some kind of hornets’ nest, and you may have made yourself unpopular. And, Laura, don’t say anything until Thursday. Hannah says it’s not official yet. She just told me as a professional courtesy.”

  I thanked Robin profusely and, heart in mouth, raised the subject of paying him, and bail for Daniel if the charges weren’t dropped. Lawyers’ fees seem to be so far off the scale of normal people’s lives that I felt slightly nauseous. Verne and Chantal had agreed to join me in trying to stump up for bail, so would probably be prepared to take a share of what was owed to Robin, and Dan presumably had some money, but I had visions of all of us reduced to penury. Still, Robin couldn’t be expected to work for nothing.

  “Don’t worry, Laura. I’ll keep it to my expenses – it really will be minimal. I feel strongly about people being victimised just because they’re foreigners, and there has to be an element of that here. Dan was a bit of a fool, but I reckon he seemed like a convenient person to arrest. ‘Round up the usual suspects’.” What a nice man, I thought to myself.

  So maybe, at last, my life might get back to normal. Dan would be released, the cops would presumably arrest the real killer and we could all return to trundling along in our usual way. Which goes to prove that I am ludicrously naïve. I didn’t tell Robin that I had been doing a bit of investigating into the Wild Coast mining angle and that Alec had phoned me and reported on his search. He, like everyone else, told me I shouldn’t be interfering in the case, but as the cops would have access to the information he had found, he supposed he might as well tell me. But I mustn’t do anything, etc etc. I had agreed and said I was just curious.

  Anyway, there was little to tell. Thabo Mchunu was director of a whole slew of companies, some of which didn’t seem to do much, although there were two construction companies, one of which I remembered from some of the mining stuff on the Internet. It did seem that, for a civil servant, he had many fingers in many pies, but Alec told me nothing that shrieked “murderer”. It seemed that all I could now do was to contact Paul Ndzoyiya and find out what he had heard down in Pondoland.

  But I went off to teach in a cheerful mood. It was a good day. The sun was shining and the air was deliciously fresh. We were attempting a still life, using grapefruit, apples and naartjies: winter fruit. The girls were attentive, and their attempts to capture the differences in skin appearance were really not bad.

  At break, I headed towards the staffroom, pleased with the world. One of the secretaries caught me as I passed her office. Someone had delivered a package for me, and it was in my pigeonhole, she said. I thanked her, and detoured along the gloomy back corridor, which smelt of disinfectant, stale hockey kit and the other things that make up the indefinable, agonising smell of school. Even for those who were, and are, happy in their schooldays, the smell of it catches the throat with a sensation of guilt and loneliness. I sometimes wonder why I became a teacher when the smell can depress me in an instant.

  I took a brown manila envelope from my pigeonhole, a substantial dark wooden frame with my name neatly printed, school-style, on a sticker below it. On the package, my name was written by hand in blue ballpoint. Just Laura Marsh, nothing else, and nothing on the reverse. I stood for a moment, weighing the envelope in my hand. It gave slightly to my fingers, but was not bulky. Whatever was inside felt like paper of some kind.

  There was nothing overtly sinister about the package, but I was reluctant to open it. The chilly passage felt icy, and a shiver ran down my back, raising goose bumps on my skin. Someone walking over my grave. It was a relief when I heard my name being called, and I turned to see a couple of colleagues waiting to go down the corridor that led to the staffroom and coffee. I slipped the envelope into my basket and went off to join the friendly grumbling that passes for conversation over the morning break. But my mind was elsewhere, and the basket at my feet seemed to give off a radioactive heat. I was relieved when the bell rang. I now had a free period.

  The staffroom emptied: Mrs Golightly didn’t stand for dawdling, either by the girls or those of us who she insisted were their role models. There were a couple of other teachers left, but I went over to the table that ran under the window and sat with my back to them, muttering something about having some papers to check. I pulled the envelope out of my basket, reassuring myself that it was a perfectly innocent delivery.

  The envelope lay on the scarred wooden surface in front of me. I slid my thumb under the flap and pulled out a thin pile of what seemed to be brochures. For a moment, I didn’t understand. Dog-eared and well used, the images on them were of coffins. I could hear my breath unsteady in my ears, and I was sure my colleagues would hear it too. I fumbled through the pamphlets. Coffins, from cardboard with rope handles to horrible shiny wood, with pleated silk linings, a glazed panel in the lid and opulent brass- or silver-coloured handles. But nowhere was there anything to show who could have possibly put them in the envelope, written my name on the front and dropped it off at school. At school, of all places.

  Shakily, I stuffed the whole lot back in my basket and blundered out of the door, heading for the secretaries’ office. Carol Odendaal, a venerable old soul who had been at the school for many years and was, to put it charitably, a little slow on the uptake, was on duty.

  “Carol, were you here when someone dropped this envelope off for me? Only … They’ve forgotten to put their name on the stuff inside, and I don’t know who it’s from. Did you see them?”

  “Oh, hello Laura. How are you, my dear?”

  Bloody terrible! I wanted to scream, but all I could manage was, “I’m fine.” Carol seemed to be in a trance, waiting for me to ask how she was, so I did. And she told me. It was her arthritis this time. Eventually we managed to chew through that, and I asked my question again.

  “An envelope? For you? No, I don’t think there’s anything here. Just a minute, let me look.”

  If I ever get to heaven, it will be because of my patience with Carol that morning. My voice stayed steady – at least relatively. I mean, someone out there was threatening me with death – or that was what it felt like, at any rate – and here she was, rooting around on the floor and babbling on about her arthritis.

  “No, dear, nothing for you.”

  “No, Carol. Someone dropped an envelope off for me. Today. Here it is. It’s got my name on it, see? Did you see who brought it?”

  Carol peered short-sightedly at
the envelope as if she had never seen such a thing before.

  “Someone dropped that off here for you? Oh yes, so they did. But you’ve got it now, dear.”

  “Did you see the person who dropped it off, Carol? Did they give it to you?”

  “To me? Oh yes.” She paused, the effort of casting her mind back all of half an hour obviously taking its toll. “It was a man.”

  Right. That was helpful. It ruled out half the population of the planet. “Okay … what did he look like? And did he come in a car, or on a bike, or what?”

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t know, dear. He came in the front door and walked up to the office window. And then he went away again. I didn’t see any car or anything. Maybe he walked. The security guard at the gate – I think it’s Alpheus this morning – might have seen him. He was a black man.”

  Now we were getting warm. “Old, young, tall, short? What did he look like, Carol?”

  She looked blanker than ever, if that is possible. “Oh, ordinary. He was a black man, dear.” And in Carol’s book, it seemed, that meant he looked like every other black man, from Nelson Mandela, to Barack Obama, to Julius Malema, to Tiger Woods. I began to realise that there was nothing to be gained in prolonging the agony. I thanked her, and left as quickly as I could.

  It was almost time for my next class. Carol’s meanderings had taken up almost all of my free period. I went out of the door and into the garden, thumbing my phone open and going to my contacts list where Adam Pillay’s name was at the top, first under “A”. My hands felt cold, and I was trembling. God, I hoped he was going to answer.