by Deon Meyer
Tell all that to a shrink and all he would say was: ‘Here’s a bunch of pills.’ And then he, Griessel would be addicted to something else. Or even worse: ‘Get another job.’ At forty-five. White. With the maintenance payments after the divorce and university fees and not a fucking cent saved in the bank.
Life was never simple.
Eventually he reached into the box.
Systematically, he built up the jigsaw puzzle of her life. The phantom pieces from the albums and letters were not enough to form a clear image, so he had to fill the gaps with his imagination. The story was ordinary, mostly typical Afrikaner middle class. It began in Ladybrand in the Free State in the mid-seventies. Willem Sloet, co-op clerk, tall and thin and slightly stooped; the hairline already beginning to recede in the face of more than thirty summers, the little moustache uncertain, like an experiment – on some of the photos he had the intimidated expression of a man who had married above his station and had, slowly, begun to realise the consequences. His wife, Marna, with her pleasant face, her smile frequently determined and brave. And the only child, Hanneke, lucky to have inherited from the start the best combination of her parents’ features.
In the early eighties there was a move to Paarl, apparently a better position for Willem, because the old reddish-brown Ford Escort in the holiday photos is replaced by a white Volkswagen Passat station wagon. Hanneke grows into a lanky schoolgirl, her thick hair in a plait, the slight gap between her front teeth displayed without embarrassment in every smile, cute, plucky and carefree.
Willem Sloet becomes a marginal character, presumably behind the camera most of the time. Where he does appear in the photos, the space between him and Marna has subtly widened, a deliberate distancing by one of them perhaps. Marna’s grace increases, her attractiveness becomes more interesting with the years, and their offspring blossoms, in a single album page, somewhere around her fifteenth year. In the photo on the top left she was still a child, skinny, crouching before the unpredictable leap into puberty; bottom right the metamorphosis is nearly complete, and the chips have fallen in her favour. Suddenly a head taller than her mother, athletic, but with feminine, elegant lines, the eyes wider apart, the mouth full, the curve of her neck and shoulder enchanting. And, along with that, another apparent awakening: at the Paarl Girls High School, she was chairperson of debating, hockey captain, member of the student council, and winner of the academic prize for accountancy.
He looked through the letters. There were two from boys, raw and clumsy declarations of teenage love and desire, warm letters of friendship from other girls, their admiration shining through. And a series written by mother Marna, initially just best wishes for her daughter’s achievements in school – the encouragement and aspiration delicately camouflaged. Later, at university and during Hanneke Sloet’s backpacking year in Europe, her mother’s wistfulness over her own lost opportunities, her disappointment in her husband, and her ambitions for her daughter glimmered through ever more strongly.
The letters ended there, at the end of 2000, just before Hanneke Sloet started at Silberstein Lamarque. The glued and captioned snapshots too. In the back of the last album was a sheaf of loose photographs of Sloet and someone whom Griessel assumed must be Egan Roch. The man was tall, with powerful shoulders and arms, and abundant self-confidence. They were, in the words of Gabriélle Villette, ‘two good-looking people’. The photographs showed they had frequently walked in the mountains, had visited a wine farm, sailed in Table Bay, socialised, and been to New York together at least once.
Loose photographs, thought Captain Benny Griessel. As though Hanneke Sloet didn’t want to commit this relationship to permanent record.
He thought it all over while he searched the master bedroom meticulously. He tried all the parts of Villette’s revelations for fit and what he could glean from the albums and letters.
Hanneke Sloet the Ambitious.
Should he be concerned with this?
The thing was, he had often seen the dangers of extreme ambition. In women, the consuming desire to rise in social stature, to keep up with neighbours and colleagues, sometimes led to fraud and theft from the employer, or the smuggling of drugs on planes.
But Sloet had followed another route, honourable and acceptable. Hard, disciplined work at school and university, later at Silbersteins. The alleged affair with the older, married man early in her career could as easily be attributed to compensation for a weak father figure as to the desire for advancement.
This was the territory that roused his instincts: the forbidden affair, the sensual photos, the breast enlargement, the pornographic movies, the bizarre vibrator. Therein lay a pattern, and he believed absolutely in patterns of behaviour – you always find one if you look long and acutely enough. Add to that the fact that eight out of ten women were murdered by the husband, the fiancé, the lover, the hopeful suitor, the sex partner …
15
He could find nothing. No spare key, no new insights or clues.
In the sitting room, out of desperation, he examined the telescope and decided it was ornamental, the magnification unimpressive, the interesting peeping tom possibilities outside the window just too far away.
Griessel walked to the door, stopping in frustration and indecision beside the pool of dry blood. He understood why Nxesi’s investigation had yielded nothing, because there were only shadows of possibilities, vague spectres that evaporated when you looked more closely. Communists? The shooter had the wrong end of the stick – there were no communists in her life, just a Big Boy vibrator in the bedside cupboard. A whole day wasted and he had made no progress, and tomorrow the bastard would blow another policeman’s leg away.
He bit off the F-word with considerable effort.
He would phone Cupido and tell him he was leaving the case files at the DPCI office, see if you can find something. He reached out to turn off the light and suddenly came to a realisation, the thing that had been in his subconscious since his visit to Villette: the contrast between the two apartments. Villette’s was personal, with obvious signs of life – the framed photographs of fruit on the wall, the coffee table in the sitting room strewn with books and magazines and newspapers … But Sloet’s was too bare, too neat, too impersonal.
Before he could consider the meaning of this, his cellphone rang – the DPCI office number.
He answered.
‘Benny, can you come down here?’ asked Brigadier Manie, and Griessel knew this spelled trouble.
He said he was in the city, he could be there in fifteen minutes. He hastily locked the apartment, waited impatiently for the lift, jogged to the BMW and drove with sirens and lights flashing through the sparse Sunday traffic. It took him twenty minutes anyway, because Durban Road was, as usual, a traffic light mess.
He found them in the brigadier’s office. Manie, Nyathi, du Preez, Mbali Kaleni, and Cloete, the liaison officer. No John Afrika.
‘The bastard sent emails to the papers,’ said Manie.
‘The sniper?’ Griessel asked, and sat down in a vacant chair.
‘Yes. And now there are two stories. One about how he is going to shoot policemen until the Sloet case is solved, the other about how the SAPS tried to keep it quiet.’
‘Three,’ said Cloete. ‘They are asking if we only reopened the Sloet case because someone was shooting at us.’
‘It’s a mess,’ said Nyathi.
Manie shoved the email towards Griessel. ‘How are you getting on, Benny?’
‘Badly, Brigadier,’ he answered, because he had learned to stick to the truth. It didn’t help to say what your boss wanted to hear.
Manie’s granite face revealed nothing. He merely nodded, as if it was what he had expected.
Griessel read.
[email protected]
Sent: Sunday 27 February. 16.07
To: [email protected]
Re: Why haven’t SAPS told the media about wounded policemen? Yesterday at 18.45 I shot a policeman yetser
day at Claremont police station. This morning at 11.50 I shot a policeman at Green Point police station. Why haven’t the SASP told the media about that? Becuase they are hiding something. They know who the murderers of Hanneke Sloet are. Why has no one been arrested yet? I will keep on shooting policemen in the leg until they charge the murderers of Hanneke Sloet.
‘He doesn’t say anything about a communist,’ Griessel said.
‘Thank God,’ said Manie.
‘He was in a hurry. Or he’s feeling the pressure.’
‘How do you mean?’ Mbali asked.
‘The spelling. He made a lot of mistakes this time,’ said Griessel. The brigadier’s phone rang on his desk. ‘The pressure,’ said Manie, ‘is on us. That is the general. Calling from Pretoria.’
From where he sat, Griessel could hear the lieutenant general from Pretoria’s agitation, his shrill, angry tone, tinny, like an enraged electronic insect.
He listened to Brigadier Manie’s stoic ‘Yes, General,’ and ‘No, General, we will formulate and release a statement, General.’ He looked at Nyathi, sitting with his chin in his hands, deeply worried, and Colonel Werner du Preez of CATS, twirling his cigarette lighter around and around in his fingers. At Cloete, always so astonishingly patient, but the nicotine stains on his fingers and dark rings under his eyes testified that it came at a price. He was the one between the devil of the media and the deep blue sea of the SAPS. And Mbali Kaleni, with her scowl and body language, which said she had no time for this tripe, they had work to do. He felt anger stirring inside. Why were the press and the top management always at it? Why the extra pressure, as if this job wasn’t hard enough already.
Griessel’s phone rang loudly in the room, which had been quiet for a second. He quickly rejected the call, turned it off.
When Manie eventually returned to the table, and he and Cloete and Nyathi planned the press release word for word, Griessel thought it was a good thing he had drunk away his career prospects. He wouldn’t want to be a boss, he couldn’t play this game. He would tell the press, you sit and wait like vultures for us to mess up, so you can make a hysterical fuss about it. But where are you when we do something right? When a murderer or a robber or a rapist is found guilty, where’s the piece about ‘thanks to the good work of the SAPS’? Why do you think the jails are full? Because the bastards turn themselves in? So fuck you all, write what you want.
It took half an hour to finish the release:
A decision to transfer the Sloet case to the Hawks for further investigation was already taken at high level two weeks ago, and was subject to standard evaluation and transfer procedures. On Saturday 26 February it was placed on a fast track, due to a possible link between the case and sniper attacks on members of the SAPS.
Any allegations that the guilty parties are already known to investigating officers is devoid of any truth. DPCI task teams to investigate the Hanneke Sloet murder and the sniper case have recently been set up, and the SAPS will spare no effort to bring the guilty parties to justice.
The possible link between email threats that have been sent to the SAPS and a sniper, were only finally confirmed on Sunday 27 February. That, together with considerations about the safety of the public, and priorities in the investigation of the sniper, prevented the SAPS from issuing a statement earlier.
In the course of high profile criminal investigations, the SAPS receives many telephonic, postal and email messages. While some useful information from responsible members of the public is often acquired this way, unfortunately there are also many communications that are of no value. Due to the incoherent, seemingly religious extremist, homophobic (Mbali’s word contribution) and racist nature of the sniper’s earlier correspondence about the Sloet investigation, the SAPS view its credibility as suspect.
When they at last began to discuss the case, Mbali said firmly and confidently, ‘He is shooting from a car.’
She could see the men were sceptical. ‘There is no other explanation. At Green Point the only secluded vantage point is from the Civic Centre across the road, where everything is locked. I went back to Claremont to look at the scene again, and it is the only thing that makes sense. That parking area, it faces a quiet little street.’
‘A car is very visible,’ said Colonel Nyathi, still not convinced.
‘I know. But do you remember the Beltway Sniper in America, in 2002? Two men who shot people from a car?’
Those were Griessel’s drunken years, he didn’t remember that.
‘Yes,’ said Manie, with growing understanding. ‘In Washington DC. Didn’t they take out the back seat so they could lie flat? Made a hole in the boot …?’
‘Exactly.’
‘A mobile crime scene,’ said Werner du Preez. ‘You take all the evidence with you.’
‘Yes. That’s how they shot thirteen people before they were caught. I Googled the case just now. One of the big problems for law enforcement was that nobody notices a car. There are so many of them, all the time. And they thought it was a van, they ended up looking at the wrong sort of car.’
‘You think our shooter isn’t working alone?’ asked Nyathi.
‘It is a possibility. One to watch the road, while the other one does the shooting.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Griessel, and pointed at the email. ‘This fellow … All his letters, it’s just, “I, I, I”.’
‘You know how the Yanks caught the buggers, in the end?’ Manie asked, gloomily, and then answered his own question, ‘By accident.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mbali, ‘and there are a lot of similarities. The Beltway Sniper was a religious nut, he sent letters to the police and the media. But it’s how my case is different that is important. The Beltway Sniper shot members of the public at random, no real motive, despite the theories. His letters were weird, really crazy. Our guy specifically shoots policemen at police stations. It narrows things down in a geographical sense. His letters are much more specific and coherent. And he’s got a thing about the Sloet murder. There must be motive in there somewhere.’
‘Why has he dropped the issue about the communists?’ asked Griessel. ‘In the emails to the papers?’
Everyone looked at him.
‘Brigadier, this man is not a moron. He must have known the media would be interested in communists. But he said nothing.’
‘Why do you think?’ Mbali asked Griessel.
‘Because the “communists” are a crock of … rubbish. Like Nxesi says, in Sloet’s world there are only capitalists. I think it’s a smokescreen. I just don’t know why.’
‘The big question is, did he know Sloet?’ said Nyathi.
Nobody wanted to venture an answer. With fanatics you never knew.
‘We’ll keep our options open,’ said du Preez.
‘I think we have to deploy people around police stations,’ said Mbali. ‘They must start looking for a car.’
16
Griessel listened to his cellphone messages in his office. The first one was from Hannes Pruis, the director of Silberstein Lamarque. ‘Captain, I only received your message now. Can we talk tomorrow? I will be at the office from seven.’
The second was from Alexa. Just a tentative, ‘Hello,’ a short moment of silence, and then the click of a call cut short.
Griessel felt unease stirring. He called her number. It rang for a long time. She didn’t answer.
Bad sign.
‘I won’t drink again today,’ she had said when he had left, in the late morning.
Maybe she was in the shower or something.
He should have phoned this afternoon.
He had better go and check.
Hastily he looked up Cupido’s number and called, because Brigadier Manie had said to him emphatically, ‘Benny, people are queueing up to help. Use them.’
‘Thought you would never call,’ Cupido answered with barely concealed reproach, like a sulky teenager. Which reminded Griessel of Fritz’s tattooing plans.
‘Vaughn, I’ve just
come out of a meeting with Manie.’
‘I’m just saying, partner.’
‘I’ll leave the files on your desk. See if you can spot anything. Tomorrow at ten we are talking to her former boyfriend, Roch. I’ll come by around half past nine tomorrow, if you want to come along.’
‘Cool.’
He said goodbye and rang off, then took out the white envelope with the risqué photographs. Tomorrow morning he wanted to talk to Anni de Waal, the photographer in De Waterkant Village, before they drove to Stellenbosch. He knew Cupido would have something clever to say about the photos, and he wasn’t in the mood for that at all.
It was nearly half past nine when he drove back to the city. First he prepared for his conversation with Fritz, making sure not to step into traps like, ‘Where are you?’ or, ‘What are you doing?’, because what came next would be, ‘Don’t you trust me, Pa?’
His relationship with Fritz had become complicated since the divorce. In contrast to the motherly, forgiving Carla, his son blamed him for everything. He had cautiously pointed out to Fritz that, in accordance with Anna’s ultimatum at that time, he had not drunk for one hundred and fifty-seven days. And then she told him, ‘There is someone else.’ The little lawyer with the BMW and the shiny suits and his fringe combed oh-so neatly. And Fritz had said, ‘But, Pa, you were drunk for thirteen years.’
It was the truth.
He phoned.
‘OK, so Carla told you,’ were Fritz’s opening words. ‘Told me what?’
‘About the tatt, jissis, she is such a sneak.’
‘How are you, Fritz?’
‘Pa, I’m eighteen, I can get a tatt if I want to. It’s a free country.’
‘How was your weekend?’
‘That’s not what you want to talk about. You never phone on a Sunday night at this time.’
Griessel gave up. ‘What does your mother say about the tatt?’
‘Carla hasn’t told Ma about it yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Supposed to be a varsity student, but she’s still so childish.’