by Malla Nunn
They pushed through the rough country, drawn on by the looming mass of towering rock and clouds. In an ancient time, long before the white man, the mountain must have had a spiritual significance. Emmanuel felt the pull of it as he struggled to keep tabs on Shabalala’s agile navigation through the monotonous blur of branches, thorns and termite mounds.
Fifty-five minutes and one brief break later, they reached the foot of the mountain and encountered a solid rock wall softened here and there by tufts of grass and stunted trees growing from crevices carved by centuries of wind and rain. As natural formations went, it had a handsome but unfriendly face.
“How do we get up?” Emmanuel leaned back against a sun-warmed boulder that nestled beside the mountainside like a schoolboy’s marble. It was good to have a break, to feel the air coming in and out of his lungs without the fiery afterburn caused by lack of oxygen.
“We go around and then up,” Shabalala said, and Emmanuel noted with satisfaction that the Zulu constable had broken a sweat on the cross-country trek.
“Is the goat on the mountain?” Hansie asked after drinking deeply from his water canteen. The boy policeman’s face had progressed from white to pink and then finally to a coal-fire red that rivaled a split watermelon for sheer depth of color.
“I hope so,” Emmanuel said, and followed Shabalala around the base of the massive rock outcrop. They walked for five minutes until they came to a deep crease in the mountainside. Shabalala pointed to a path that wound upward and disappeared behind a windblown tree with branches bleached like bones.
“Up here.” Shabalala led them onto the skinny dirt lane, slowing now and then to check a clump of grass or a snapped twig.
“Any sign of them?” Emmanuel asked as he scrambled over loose rocks and exposed roots. Louis and Davida could be a hundred miles in the opposite direction.
“There are three paths to the cave. I can say only that they have not come along this way.”
“Maybe they haven’t come here at all.” The fear that had tugged at him since speeding out of town and heading to the mountain was now lodged like a splinter in his gut. He’d made a meal of the scraps thrown to him throughout the investigation and now he was about to find out if all the hunches and conjecture amounted to anything.
Shabalala stopped at the intersection of three paths that joined up into one and examined the ground and the surrounding loose stones.
“They are here,” he said.
A moment of relief washed over Emmanuel and then he moved quickly up the path, his exhausted muscles fed by adrenaline. Louis had a good three-hour lead on them, and God knows what had happened to Davida Ellis in that time.
The grass trail ended at a wide, flat rock ledge that jutted out over the steep fall of the mountainside and offered a breathtaking view of untamed country running to all points of the compass. A martial eagle, white chest feathers flashing starkly against the pale sky, circled on a warm air current in front of them. Far below on the plain, a watering hole sparkled in the late-afternoon sunlight. It was as Shabalala said, a place to stir the heart.
“There.” The Zulu constable pointed across the ledge to the dark mouth of the cave hollowed into the rock face.
“Detective Sergeant—”
“Shh…” Emmanuel silenced Hansie. “Wait behind this bush and guard the path. If anyone comes, call out to me. Understand?”
“Ja. Call out.”
“Good.” Emmanuel unclipped the holster at his hip, the first time he’d done so since arriving in Jacob’s Rest, and pulled out his .38 Standard Webley revolver. With Shabalala at his side, he ran low and fast across the rock ledge with his ears straining for the sound of voices or the click of a rifle bolt sliding back. An eerie silence followed them into the cave.
Emmanuel did a visual sweep of the interior. The cave was a scooped-out oval, large enough for a Voortrekker Scout troop to hold an all-night sing-along inside. Diffused afternoon light illuminated an unsettling domestic scene. A thin bedroll made up of a sheet and gray blanket was laid out in the middle of the space and next to it was a lantern and a bucket of water. A container of rusks, strips of dried beef, and two enamel plates and cups lay on a flat stone. An open Bible, a box of candles, and a coil of rope were placed on an empty rucksack that served as an altar. Emmanuel holstered his weapon.
“Where are they?” he said. The cave was set up as a living place, a place to sleep and eat and do who knows what with the Bible and the rope. The teenager had every intention of spending the night and possibly longer holed up in his private chapel.
“I will see.” Shabalala checked the tracks on the floor and stepped out of the cave to investigate further. He returned quickly.
“They have gone along the narrow way to a place with a waterfall. It is spring. The water will be flowing.”
“Can we follow?”
“It is narrow. There is space for only one person to walk at a time. I can take you.”
“Let’s go,” Emmanuel said. “I don’t want to take the chance of finding a second corpse in the water.”
Emmanuel swung in behind his colleague and they approached the mouth of the pathway, which disappeared like the tail of a snake into the mountainside. A low, sweet voice singing an Afrikaans hymn stopped them at the entrance. A few swift steps and he and Shabalala were crouched behind a spiked bush with the teenaged constable, who was hot cheeked and flustered.
“What is it?” Hansie asked.
“Whoever steps out from that pathway, you are not to make a sound,” Emmanuel said. “Understand? Not even a whisper.”
Davida Ellis stumbled onto the flat rock ledge in her bare feet with her arms wrapped protectively around her midriff. She was soaking wet and her pale green dress clung to her brown skin. Drops of water splashed onto the rock surface and formed a small puddle at her feet. She shivered despite the mild spring heat.
Louis Pretorius appeared, stripped naked to the waist with a rifle slung across his shoulder like a native scout. He continued singing and dried his face and hair with a handkerchief, which he returned to the pocket of his damp jeans. The words of the Afrikaans hymn circled high into the clouds, as if on a fast track to the Almighty. Louis had the face and the voice of an angel.
He finished his song and laid his hand lightly on Davida’s shoulder. She flinched but he didn’t seem to notice her reaction to his touch. He spoke close to her ear. “‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.’ Ezekiel 36:25. It feels good to be cleansed and made new, doesn’t it?”
His hand moved to her neck, his fingers brushing the delicate ridges of her trachea. “God hears better if we speak out loud and raise our voices to Him.”
Emmanuel made ready to sprint across the rock ledge if the boy’s fingers encircled Davida’s throat.
“Agghhh…” Hansie released a scandalized breath that traveled across the open space and bounced off the hard rock surfaces. He might as well have thrown a stone. Louis tensed and swung his rifle across his chest so it nestled firmly in his hands. His finger rested on the trigger and he aimed the gun’s barrel toward the bush.
“Come out,” he called in a voice that was close to friendly. “If you don’t, I’ll unload this chamber into the bushes. True as I stand here.”
“Don’t—” Hansie jumped to his feet, his hands raised in surrender. “Don’t shoot. It’s me. It’s Hansie.”
“Who’s with you?” Louis asked. “You’re not clever enough to have made it here on your own.”
“Not clever? What—”
Emmanuel and Shabalala stood up. Emmanuel didn’t want Louis to panic and send Davida on a shortcut to the Lord God via the sheer drop just two feet to his left. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Hansie Hepple conduct the negotiations for release of the hostage.
“Detective Sergeant Cooper.” Louis greeted him with a nod of his head as he would someone he’d met on the street corner or the church steps. “I see you got out of the jam I fixed for you. And you brou
ght along Constable Shabalala for company. What brings the three of you out to the mountain?”
“We could ask you the same thing.” Emmanuel kept his tone friendly and noted the supremely self-confident way the bare-chested boy handled his rifle. He looked born to the ways of the bandit. Davida shivered next to him.
“This is a long way to come for a shower, isn’t it, Louis?” he said, and tried to appraise Davida’s condition. She stared at him with the mute shock he’d seen many times on the faces of civilians caught in the crush of two warring armies. Her eyes pleaded for rescue and restoration.
“I am acting on God’s command. I don’t expect you to understand what it is I do here today, Detective.”
“Explain it to me. I want to understand.”
“And He shall wash away the sins of the world.” Louis circled a hand around Davida’s arm and jerked her against his hip. “I have purged the dirt from her physical being with pure water and stones and now I will cleanse her soul of the sin that has made her an impure vessel.”
“Last time I checked, you weren’t the Lord God. You were Louis Pretorius, son of Willem and Ingrid Pretorius of Jacob’s Rest. What qualifies you to clean anyone’s soul but your own?”
“‘And He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.’”
In a trade-off of scripture verses, Emmanuel was sure he would lose out to Louis. The young Pretorius boy was so tightly wrapped in his holy vision that he didn’t even recognize that what he’d done to Davida and her grandmother was sin itself. For Louis, it was all holy visions backed up by a chorus of angels.
“But…” Hansie was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. “That girl is a darkie. What are you doing up here with one of them?”
The fire in Louis’s eyes was bright enough to rival his grandfather Frikkie van Brandenburg’s incendiary glare. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child and when I was grown I put away all childish things. You, Hansie, are one of those childish things.”
“What are you talking about?” Hansie asked. “You’re not supposed to be washing or doing whatnot with one of them. It’s against the law, and I know that your ma won’t be happy to see you standing so close, either.”
“My mission does not concern my earthly family or you. God called me and you are standing in the way of His works.”
“Let me get this straight.” Emmanuel tried to gauge the depth of Louis’s delusion. “God, the redeemer of souls, has called you to the theft of pornographic images, lies, assault, and the kidnapping of unclean women? When did you get this calling, Louis? At Suiwer Sprong or afterward, at the theological college?”
Louis’s pretty face seemed to distort. “Everything I do is in the service of the Lord.”
“Did the Lord call you to molest those women last year?”
“That was the work of the devil. I broke free of his chains and have been cleansed of all my sins.”
“Is this how they drove the sin out of you on the farm? With outdoor showers and fear?” Van Niekerk had listed “water therapy” as one of the cures being offered at the quasi-religious nut farm. What methods had the German-trained Dr. Hans de Klerk used to clean the sin from the Pretorius boy?
Louis blinked hard. “Everything that was done to me was in the service of the Lord. I was lost and now I am found.”
Emmanuel felt an unexpected stab of pity. Louis had been brought up by his mother to believe he was the light of the world, but he’d inherited his father’s taste for life outside the strict moral code of the volk. He was torn in two, lost, and made more dangerous by a spell of “realignment” deep in the Drakensberg Mountains.
“Was your father an impure vessel, Louis?” Emmanuel asked. He was interested in Louis’s attitude to the captain’s hypocrisy.
“Pa was led astray by the work of the devil, same as me.” The boy looked over at the Zulu constable. “My pa was a good man, hey, Shabalala? A godly man.”
“I believe it.”
“I’m not disputing your pa’s goodness,” Emmanuel said. “I’m just wondering how hard he struggled with the devil. You went away to the farm and conquered the devil, but your father stayed on, and, well…he let the devil win a few nights a week. For almost a year.”
“Captain Pretorius wasn’t in league with the devil!” Hansie’s voice rose three octaves. “You didn’t know him. He was clean inside and out.”
“No man is clean inside and out.” Emmanuel returned his attention to Louis and kept his tone even and nonconfrontational. “You know what it is to struggle with the devil, don’t you, Louis? You want to be holy and yet here you are on top of a mountain with a terrified woman, a gun, and a piece of rope coiled on your Bible.”
“This woman is the root of all the problems.” Louis curled his hand tightly around Davida’s forearm until she gasped in pain. “She is the one who needs to be cleansed of her carnal nature.”
“Like you cleansed your father at the river?” Emmanuel tested the connection between the molester and the murderer. An unbalanced boy with a sighted rifle and delusions of godhead was a dangerous animal. “That’s what you did, isn’t it? You arranged a face-to-face meeting with the Almighty and then you dragged his body to the water to cleanse him of sin. Is that how it happened?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You killed your father to cleanse him, didn’t you, Louis?”
“Of course not.”
“You knew he wasn’t going to stop sinning, so you helped him break free of Satan’s trap. I understand that. I understand how it happened.”
Louis loosened his grip on Davida’s arm and leveled a damning stare at the English detective. “I loved my father. When the devil had me in his claws, my father prayed with me and together we found a way out. I would never raise a hand to him. He saved me.”
“You didn’t shoot him at the river?”
“No. Honor your mother and your father so your days may be long on the earth. That’s God’s promise.”
“But you spied on your father when he was alive. That wasn’t an honorable thing to do, was it?”
“Witnessing.” Louis let go of Davida’s arm and pushed the messy blond hair from his forehead. “I had to witness the depth of his wrongdoing to understand just how far he’d strayed from the path of righteousness.”
“You didn’t enjoy it?” Emmanuel saw Davida slump back against the rock face and draw great mouthfuls of air into her lungs. She was still shivering and probably in shock. “You got no pleasure from watching your father having sex with one of the women you’d messed with the previous December? How many times did you witness your father straying from the path, Louis?”
“I can’t remember,” the boy muttered.
“Surely once was enough? You see your father with a brown-skinned woman and you know, don’t you? You know that a sin is being committed without having to come back a second and a third time.”
“I was witnessing. I didn’t enjoy what I saw.”
“Truly?” Emmanuel had the tiger by the tail and he had every intention of shaking it until it coughed up a lung. “I think you were doing something that began with W, but it wasn’t witnessing. You got as much pleasure as your father did, only from a distance.”
“Shabalala.” The bare-chested boy appealed to the black policeman. “You know my family. We are from pure Afrikaner blood. You are from pure African blood. This business has come about because of those with impure blood among us. Is that not so?”
“Your father was pure. The woman is pure. When they were together, there was no wrong in them.”
“You can’t believe that.” The boy was thrown by Shabalala’s calm and forgiving statement. “She’s the reason my father went astray and was killed. The fault is in her.”
“That one there. She was your father’s little wife, and I tell you again, there was no wrong in them. The captain made the arrangement for her in the old way
and did not intend any disrespect to come to her during his lifetime and even now after he has gone.”
Louis blushed at the Zulu constable’s criticism but didn’t lower his weapon. “Your native ways are not for the volk to live by. Our God does not permit the tainting of our bodies or our blood with those from a lesser sphere. It is written so.”
Davida, still shaking, had inched her way along the rock wall and was now out of arm’s reach of the teenage prophet.
Emmanuel stepped forward and drew Louis’s attention to him. “Did you ever offer your father the chance to come here and cleanse his sins in the waterfall?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There was never a good time to bring it up. I didn’t know how to tell him that I knew what he was doing.”
“Well…” Emmanuel said. “How about after he’d finished and both of you were satisfied and feeling good about the world? You could have met him out on the kaffir path and exchanged notes before praying together.”
“You are a foul-minded Englishman. It’s a pity my brothers didn’t catch you and teach you a lesson.”
Emmanuel shrugged and stared over the rock ledge to the vast sweep of country. Davida was inches from the cave mouth and safety. “‘By their deeds shall ye know them.’” He dragged out a biblical quote from the deep vaults of memory. “What’s a jury going to make of an Afrikaner boy out here with a kidnapped coloured girl? Do you really believe your brethren will understand that you washed her body to cleanse her and spied on your father having sex with her in order to bear witness to the Lord?”
“God is my guide and my staff. It is not for man to pass judgment on what I have done.”
“Things are different now, Louis. When you got rid of your father you got rid of the one person who was willing to break the law to protect you.”
Louis’s finger was tight on the trigger. “I had no hand in what happened to my father. He was struck down before his time and I pray to the Almighty that he sees into Pa’s heart and forgives his transgressions.”