by Deon Meyer
The man raised his eyebrows, glanced at Griessel, who indicated he didn’t want anything. Then he left.
‘So we have no real crime scene,’ said Mbali. ‘And today he is going to shoot again.’
Lieutenant Colonel Bevan Dlodlo pulled on the aluminium handle to open the door of the Green Point Police Station.
At that instant, with a thunderous clap, the glass directly in front of him exploded.
His whole body jerked in fright, a glass shard stung his forehead. Shouts from inside, the tinkle of glass raining down and shattering on the concrete. His instinct was to duck, to move to the wall, away from the door. His hand reached for the service pistol on his hip.
With his back to the wall, the pistol in his hand, on his haunches, head turned to the door, he wanted to shout to those inside to find out what was going on. He felt the warm trickle of blood running down his forehead. Then something jerked at his ankle, with so much violence that he fell over onto his left side.
He looked down in astonishment at his lower leg. He saw his blue police boot in tatters, the blood seeping through it and slowly spreading in a growing pool on the concrete.
He looked across the parking lot. There was no one.
He looked at the street outside. There was nothing.
Only then did he feel the incredible pain.
11
With the file open in front of her Mbali tapped her finger on the emails and said, ‘I don’t get this guy. Am I missing something, is it the culture gap?’
‘No,’ said Griessel. ‘I don’t understand him either. Last night I thought … it’s like he’s trying to sound like a crazy. I think … if you read the emails, he comes across a lot like a wacko. But then he actually goes and shoots someone … I’ve never seen that before. If you look at that one email, he said: You have two weeks to catch the killer. He was planning back then. He was preparing. He’s … different. And he’s not … your everyday crazy.’
She nodded in agreement. ‘You think he knew Sloet?’
That was a good question, one that he had wondered about last night. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If he was part of her life, he must have known that it could lead us to him, eventually. So I have my doubts.’
‘Unless he is crazy.’
‘Yes.’
‘No candidates,’ said Mbali, a statement.
‘No.’
‘No communists?’
‘I don’t think he means a real communist. It’s a …’ His English let him down.
‘A metaphor?’
He wasn’t sure what that meant. She saw that. ‘Like he’s using a figure of speech. Maybe he means black people?’
‘Something like that. As if he doesn’t want to sound like a racist.’
‘But he doesn’t mind sounding like a religious nut.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, any black suspects?’
‘Maybe a coloured guy. The caretaker …’
Mbali closed the file in front of her, pushed it into her handbag. ‘I’m going to send the emails to Ilse Brody at Investigative Psychology … but what else, Benny? What am I missing? Where would you look?’
‘There’s not much to look at …’
From the expectation on her face he could see she was hoping for more. He thought it over, then asked, ‘Nobody heard the shot? Not even the constable?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Then it’s probably a long-range weapon. A rifle, probably a scope. And a silencer. I’ll look at silencers, they’re scarce, I don’t think you can buy them from a shop … Do you know Giel de Villiers? From the armoury?’
‘No.’
‘He’s the one I go to if I have questions about weapons. He’s very quiet, but he knows everything. That’s what I would do. Talk to Giel.’ Realising it was Sunday, Griessel added, ‘He lives out in Bothasig. He’ll probably be in the book.’
‘Thank you, Benny.’ She got up and picked up her handbag. ‘Why do you think they gave me the case?’
That caught him off guard. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m new at CATS, I only got back on Friday. I was still unpacking …’
‘You know how it is, everybody’s got too much work …’
He wanted to add that she was a good methodical investigator, but with a look of suspicion she said, ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ Then her cellphone started to ring, and she had to scrabble in her big handbag to find it before she could answer.
The conversation was brief. She made only a few affirmative grunts, then said, ‘I’m coming.’ Then to Griessel, resigned, ‘He’s shot another one. The SC, at Green Point.’
He drove to the Bo-Kaap, only four blocks away, to the home of the caretaker, Faroek Klein, in Bryant Street. His mind was in too many places at once, he wanted to think about how to approach the man, about Mbali’s parting words, but the new email haunted him. You know who it is. This one addressed to him personally now.
In the very first one it was, You know very well who murdered Hanneke Sloet. In one of the others, You know why she was murdered. Between all the variation in singulars and plurals and Bible verses, this repetitive theme.
He had read the case file, he had been to the scene, he knew enough to be able to say that it was nonsense. There was no obvious suspect.
Mbali had said, ‘Unless he is crazy.’ What he could add was, ‘Maybe he’s even crazier than we think.’ In normal circumstances he would have ignored the emails – just another lunatic.
The rifle, the scope and the silencer were the problem. You couldn’t be too crazy if you could put all that together with a long-distance shot and get away with it. And the latest email, there was a new tone to it, self-satisfied, a certain awareness of power. I hope not, because then I would have to escalate things. This was a man who could force the SAPS to reopen a case, a blackmailer who had to be taken seriously.
This was trouble. It fuelled his frustration. He still knew too little. About everything.
He struggled to find parking, had to cross Bloem Street for a bay in front of the St Paul Primary School. Griessel got out and walked back, between the brightly-painted little houses. Coloured people sat on their porches, their eyes following his progress with a certain wariness. He thought of Mbali back at the street café. Just before she walked away, she’d said, ‘Thanks, Benny, for not asking about Amsterdam.’ She had a vulnerability about her he had never seen before. And she was subdued this morning, not her old, obstreperous self.
Now he too was curious about what had happened in Holland.
Klein’s home was a yellow terraced house with white pillars, and a tree that dominated the small front garden. Griessel reached to open the red garden gate. His cellphone rang.
He paused, saw an unfamiliar number, and answered simply, ‘Yes.’
‘Hey, Benny, it’s Vaughn, where are you?’ Captain Vaughn Cupido.
‘I’m still in the city, Vaughn.’
‘I thought you were going to call me?’
‘Call you?’
‘Jis. The Giraffe said you would phone me. About the Sloet case.’
Griessel tried to remember what Colonel Nyathi had said the night before. ‘As far as I know, you are just on standby, Vaughn, nobody said I had to phone you.’
‘Jissis, the brass … always mixed messages. Anyway, I’m keen to help, Benny. Can I come and get the files, get myself up to speed?’
‘I’m still busy with it myself. Listen, I’m standing in front of a …’ If he said ‘suspect’, Cupido would definitely broadcast the news that Griessel had made great progress. ‘… witness’s house, I’ll call you as soon as I have something. Thanks, Vaughn, I appreciate your offer.’
Silence over the line. Then, ‘Cool,’ his tone unenthusiastic.
Griessel ended the call. Cupido was not his favourite detective. He was one of those men who knew everything, and was extremely pleased with the fact that he was a Hawk. Vaughn was with the former Organised Crime Unit, which had been di
rectly incorporated in the DPCI. Cowboys.
He put his phone away and opened the garden gate.
She was as slim and sleek as a cat, with long black hair and big dark brown eyes, beautiful, and not much older than sixteen. She looked Griessel up and down critically and then called over her shoulder into the house: ‘Dadda, the Boere are here again.’
She tossed the cascade of straight hair over her shoulder with a gesture of disdain, turned and stalked off, as if he didn’t exist.
Heavier footsteps on the wooden floor, as a man walked into the small hallway. ‘Can I help?’ Surly.
‘Mr Klein?’
‘That’s right.’
Griessel held up his SAPS identity card. Klein glanced at it. He was taller than Griessel, with manicured stubble on his upper lip and chin, the thick black hair combed, a strong face. Early forties. He said, ‘What do you want this time?’
‘Is there a place we can talk?’
‘Here is good.’
A woman appeared behind Klein, middle-aged, with the same enchanting heritage of Malay genes as her daughter, the same antipathy on her face. ‘Invite him in,’ she said, turned and walked away.
Griessel could see Klein was not in the mood. He stood patiently waiting.
‘Come in.’
They were a united front on the sofa, Klein in the middle, the wife and two teenage daughters beside him.
Griessel sat opposite, in an easy chair, his notebook in hand. He didn’t get the chance to ask a question, before the wife began, ‘I am Noor, this is Laila, and this is Asmida. I am Faroek’s second wife, he is the stepfather of my children. You can ask them, he is a good stepfather. Faroek’s first wife was a bad apple. He caught her sleeping around, and not only once. When he couldn’t stand it any more, he smacked her, and she laid a complaint and they made a case. He pleaded guilty, he got a suspended sentence, he divorced her. Last year she got married for the fourth time.’ Everything said with a factual tone, without judgement.
The two daughters glared. Klein sat there with a hidden, satisfied smile, encircled by three pretty women.
Griessel nodded, drew a breath to say something, but she didn’t give him a chance.
‘The evening the Sloet woman was murdered, Faroek was here at home. With all three of us. We ate at seven o’clock, like we do every night, and then the girls sat in the kitchen doing homework, and Faroek and I watched TV. These two went to bed around ten, and Faroek and I at about half past ten, because we are both gainfully employed and we take our responsibilities seriously. We love each other very much. We aren’t white, we aren’t rich, but we have our values. And they do not include lying if any one of us commits murder. Is there anything else you would like to know?’
He closed his notebook. There was one question remaining, but he suspected the answer would not come without more chastisement. ‘Mr Klein, are you … communist in your politics?’
They laughed at him, all four of them.
‘No,’ said Klein. And they laughed again.
The tall, beautiful woman stood up. ‘We are about to have Sunday lunch, would you like to join us?’
12
He drove home, wanting to get rid of the pressure inside, the urge to curse and beat the steering wheel. There were times he didn’t want to be a policeman – to go knocking on the door of a house on a Sunday morning, to disturb the peace, to carry trouble across the threshold with him. The Klein family, standing united against him, had upset him in a peculiar way. And the undisguised reprimand, We aren’t white, we aren’t rich, but we have our values. He wanted to protest, wanted to say it had nothing to do with colour, it was about who had keys and a criminal record. They wouldn’t have believed him – that’s what frustrated him. Only in this country … Colour, everything revolved around colour, all the time, every which way you looked, it was there. Jissis. He just wanted to do his job.
We have our values. They were actually implying that he didn’t, that his very presence proved it. And when he left with his tail between his legs, he wondered fleetingly, if Anna married the lawyer, would they sit on a couch like that with his children, such a new, happy family, so communally pious, free of the struggling alcoholic policeman? Anna who would sit and explain, ‘My first husband was a bad apple, a drinker and a wife-beater.’ Would he ever get away from the consequences of his weakness?
He pulled in at the Engen garage near his flat to buy lunch at the Woolies Food. Without any appetite he looked at the sandwiches and the microwave meals, angry all over again at Steers, for discontinuing their Dagwood burger. ‘It takes too much time, sir, the clients don’t want to wait that long, sir.’ What was happening to the world – people didn’t want to wait for decent food any more. Everything had to be fast: tasteless, ugly, but fast.
Nothing was ever simple.
He remembered the dream he had had repeatedly a month or so ago, four nights in a row. He was playing with Roes, he couldn’t get the notes of the bass guitar to keep to the tempo, he buggered into the wrong key, and the band members gave him sidelong glances with questioning, worried faces.
That’s how he’d felt, since yesterday. Out of rhythm with the world. Out of tune.
On the other hand, in the last ten years had he ever felt any other way?
In his kitchen he shoved the chicken and broccoli in cheese sauce into the microwave and phoned Mbali.
‘It’s chaos, Benny, they brought in Forensics before I could call the PCSI task team. The whole station trampled my crime scene to help the SC. I had to interview him in the ambulance.
‘He’s not sure where the shot came from, maybe from the tennis courts. But we are talking to the players, and they didn’t see or hear anything.’
‘He was shot in the leg?’
‘In the ankle. But there was another shot, Benny. He hit the door first, the entrance door, we have two bullets to search for. It might help.’
‘So he missed.’
‘Yes. The first shot was a miss.’
At his breakfast counter he ate the chicken straight out of the container, without pleasure. He sat and stared at his mountain bike – it hadn’t moved in two weeks. There wasn’t enough time in the morning to ride – he had to get up earlier to handle the traffic all the way to the DPCI offices in Bellville. If they would only finish building the damn flyovers on the N5. But the World Cup was over now, everything was at a standstill again.
The solution was to move, to find himself a flat in the northern suburbs. He didn’t want to. He liked living under the mountain, near the city and the Gardens Centre. And the distance from Anna, from his old problems and trouble. Bellville was full of temptation, all his old drinking spots, his old drinking buddies …
But he wasn’t getting to ride his bike now.
Life was never simple.
He got up, went and lay down on the couch, hands on his chest. He felt the fatigue of too little sleep, maybe he should take a nap, half an hour, to clear his head.
You must get moving. This mad bastard is going to shoot policemen until you solve the case. Afrika’s winged words.
He tried to focus. Premeditated murder. Someone she knew.
Not the caretaker.
No other suspect. No motive.
The trouble was, he actually knew nothing about Sloet.
He sighed, got up, fetched the file, sat down again at the breakfast counter. He read the statements of Mr Hannes Pruis, director of Silberstein Lamarque, and Gabriélle (Gabby) Villette, Sloet’s personal assistant, over again. There was detail about the morning the body was found, there was broad information about her work, but basically they said nothing about her.
He pulled his notebook closer, found the telephone numbers and wrote them down.
Gabriélle Villette lived alone in a town house, in the back of the Avenues complex in Sea Point, away from the noise of High Level Road. She was barefoot, her body as small and skinny as a child. Her face was narrow beneath her short blonde hair. He guessed she was just un
der thirty. Her mouth was a stingy line, so her warmth surprised him. Griessel apologised for the hour and the short notice. She said, ‘I don’t sleep during the day, please come in,’ with a smile that revealed two prominent eye teeth, reminding him vaguely of a vampire. ‘I saw the piece in the newspaper this morning.’
The sitting room was a cheerful blue and yellow. There was a series of framed colour photos of fruit on the wall, very close-up shots of a glowing green bunch of grapes, a red apple, a yellow pear, an enamel bucket full of bright orange apricots. She saw him looking. ‘It’s my hobby,’ she said, nothing more, and he wondered if she meant the fruit or the photography. ‘Please sit,’ she encouraged him, and made herself comfortable on the light blue-grey sofa. Her eyes were almost the same shade.
He sat in a pale yellow chair, took out his notebook. He saw her cross her legs and look at him expectantly.
‘I’m trying to find out who Hanneke Sloet was,’ he said.
She nodded slowly and thoughtfully, looked at the nest of books, magazines and newspapers on the coffee table. ‘I tried for three years. And I’m not sure if I made much progress,’ she said almost formally, every word pronounced clearly. And then, as though coming to her senses: ‘No disrespect to her memory.’
‘Anything will help,’ he said.
Again the nod, as though she was considering the words and consenting, the eyes cast down. He guessed it was a usual mannerism of hers.