7 Days

by Deon Meyer

  ‘So, what’s new?’ One of Fritz’s phrases, one he had never used with his daughter. He was certain she would smell a rat now.

  ‘Ag, not much. Just very busy. But it’s such fun, Pappa, I’ve just had Theatre Studies, it’s so interesting …’

  ‘You mustn’t work too hard.’ He wanted to fish with, ‘You should go out too,’ but he knew that was one step too far. ‘You should relax as well,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Pa, we do that a lot.’

  The sentence came out before he could stop it, ‘You and the girls …?’ The query disguised as much as possible.

  ‘Not always …’ she said with a teasing tone.

  That was not what he wanted to hear. ‘Just tell those student guys your father carries a Z88 and there are a lot of shotguns in the police magazine …’

  Carla laughed, and he imagined he heard the tiniest hint of hysteria in her voice. ‘Ag, there are very nice guys out there too …’

  The Directorate of Priority Crime Investigations’ offices were in the old Revenue Services building in AJ West Street in Bellville. Griessel parked the BMW in the basement, between the other Hawks vehicles – the Golf GTIs, Isuzus, Nissan 4x4s, Tiidas, Ford Focuses, and the two large unmarked Ford Everests. He jogged up the stairs to the second floor. The SARS desks and cubicles were all still there. There were rumours that Public Works were going to redo the whole place for the Hawks within weeks. But if you were ‘old school’, you knew all about the promises of Public Works.

  His JOC parade room was deserted, but IMC was a hive of activity. All the computer stations were busy, nine CATS detectives stood in a semicircle and studied the screen where Mbali was sitting beside a researcher. Griessel walked up and had a look. There was a progress bar on the screen. Search 67% complete.

  ‘Any news?’ Griessel asked.

  ‘We have a vehicle description,’ the detective beside him said. ‘Kia van. Looking for a match on the database, Kia owners and triple-two rifles.’

  ‘It’s definitely a triple-two?’

  Mbali looked up, saw Benny. ‘They recovered enough fragments from the body of Constable Matthys last night. It’s definitely triple-two. Problem is, most of the Kias are registered to companies. But we’re hoping our vehicle is privately owned. You can’t cut holes in your boss’s van …’

  ‘What sort of person shoots policemen with a triple-two?’ one of the detectives asked.

  ‘Stolen, it’s all he’s got,’ said another.

  A chorus of agreement.

  ‘Because he’s a cunt,’ whispered the one beside Griessel, but very quietly, so Mbali wouldn’t hear.

  Griessel wanted to agree, but his cellphone rang in his jacket pocket and he said, ‘Sorry,’ and walked out. He could see it was Cupido’s number.

  ‘Vaughn?’

  ‘Benna, you had better come. PCSI have found something weird. Very weird, pappie.’

  34

  The PCSI minibuses were parked in front of the 36 on Rose apartment block in the Bo Kaap. The woman at security was grumpy when Griessel asked for access. He suspected she must have been up and down many times already today.

  In the lift she said, ‘The wireless people need to test that flat. When will you be done?’

  ‘Very soon,’ he said.

  Before he went inside Sloet’s apartment he saw the yellow crime-scene tape was strung up to just inside the door. The technicians stood with Cupido on the other side, near the couch and chairs. They saw him and came closer. ‘Benny, it’s just here,’ said Cupido, and pointed at a series of damp spots on the floor. Inside one was a marker with the figure five. ‘Just walk there.’

  He looked, recognised the spots. Griessel ducked under the tape and stepped carefully. ‘Luminol,’ he said.

  ‘Damn straight, pappie. Seems like Thick and Thin never thought to test – they saw the visible blood and thought that was all. But it wasn’t.’ Cupido addressed himself to a technician with a camera slung around his neck and said, ‘Show him the photos.’

  The PCSI Forensics team gathered around. Griessel knew some of them. Others were new, and introduced themselves.

  The one with the camera was Rabinowitz, young, crew cut, in a light blue overall. He turned the Canon 7D so that Griessel could see the little screen. He knew what to expect. The Luminol solution reacted with blood, and emitted a blue glow for thirty seconds only, which had to be captured on camera. What he saw was an underexposed photo, with a few dimly glowing blue smears.

  ‘The blood was there at marker five,’ said Rabinowitz.

  ‘But someone wiped it up,’ said Cupido.

  ‘With soap and water,’ said the technician. ‘That is why we could still find the trace elements.’

  Griessel looked from the photo to the floor and back. The marker was less than a metre from where Hanneke Sloet’s body had lain.

  ‘The same thing happened in the kitchen. At the basin …’ Cupido pointed at the kitchen sink. Griessel noticed that the little door below it had been unscrewed. It was leaning against the cupboards, wrapped in a plastic bag. ‘But there are more trace elements, so there was more blood in the basin,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Look,’ said the technician, and displayed another photo. The kitchen sink, with the same ghostly glow, but much more of it.

  ‘Is there enough for DNA?’ Griessel asked.

  ‘Perhaps in the sink,’ said the technician.

  ‘It’s her blood. Must be,’ said Cupido. ‘I mean, there’s nothing else. Nowhere.’

  ‘Why would he wipe the floor just there?’ Griessel asked, and pointed at marker five.

  ‘Wollie is our spatter expert,’ the technician said, pointing at one of his colleagues, slightly older, with a goatee. Wollie came and stood beside them. ‘The visible blood is caused by the stab wound, and is very typical.’ He indicated the reddish brown fan of fine blood spatters. ‘That was from the stabbing action itself, the drops are between one point three and two millimetres large, that means a relatively fast attack speed of between two and five metres per second, which you would expect from sharp trauma of this kind. The shape and tails of the drops give us the angle and height of the stabbing, and the place the victim was standing.’

  Griessel nodded. He had heard the technique described many times in court.

  Wollie pointed at the big pool of dried blood. ‘This one shows no spatters, this is where she was lying, with the blood running from the wound through her clothes and onto the floor. The combination of the big pool and the spatters tells the whole story, that is precisely what you expect with a single stab wound. That is why the Luminol results are so strange.’

  ‘So what do you think he was cleaning up?’

  ‘The first possibility would be his own blood. She might have wounded him. The main problem with that is the place we found it. It doesn’t completely fit the scene. Vaughn says there were no defensive wounds or foreign blood on her clothes or hands. The other problem is the amount and concentration. It was relatively little to begin with. He spread it over a larger area while wiping it up, but I think it was relatively localised. A patch, not spatter. And because there is more blood rinsed off in the sink, that doesn’t make sense either.’

  ‘OK,’ said Griessel.

  ‘Which means it may have been a bloody print. But there is no indication that he stepped in this blood. Both visible samples are uncontaminated. I don’t think it could be a piece of clothing either. Let’s say a jacket that had been spattered with blood that he put down. Clothes absorb blood. And our visible spatters show a complete pattern of the attack – no obstruction. All I can think of is that he put down the weapon itself. Because there would have been blood on it.’

  ‘Remember, he has this huge iron thing, and he wanted to bend down to feel for a pulse,’ said Cupido.

  ‘The other possibility is that he wanted to search her, or take something from her. So he put the weapon down to use both hands.’

  Griessel tried to envisage it. ‘Did
her dress have pockets?’

  ‘No. But her hand. Remember the crime-scene photos, her hand that was open like that?’ asked Cupido.

  ‘We think,’ said Wollie the spatter man, ‘he either wanted to make sure she was dead, or she might have been clutching something in her hand. And he must have put the weapon down, or maybe rested the point on the floor. And when he picked it up again, he saw the localised blood where it had rested on the floor. So he fetched a cloth to wipe it up, and rinsed the cloth in the kitchen. And then the weapon too. That would explain why there was more blood residue in the sink than on the floor.’

  ‘Voilà,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Wait,’ said Griessel, still battling to visualise it all. ‘After he stabbed her, he put the weapon down …’

  ‘Yebo, yes,’ said Cupido.

  ‘And he did something else, and when he picked the weapon up again, he saw there was blood on the floor.’

  ‘Like an outline,’ said Cupido. ‘And he thought, no, that’s a dead give-away.’

  ‘So he went to look for a cloth. Here. In the kitchen …’

  ‘In the cupboard under the sink,’ said Rabinowitz. ‘That’s where her cleaning products are. We’re taking the door to the lab. And the plastic bag that her cloths were in.’

  ‘Super Glue fumes, pappie. For latent prints, these manne are hi-tec.’

  ‘He wiped the handle of the front door clean,’ said Griessel sceptically. ‘But maybe we’ll get lucky.’ He thought about the possibilities again. He said, ‘When he was finished, he took the cloth with him. And the weapon.’

  ‘Must be.’

  ‘But what would he have taken from her?’ He stared at the damp Luminol spot.

  ‘The question is,’ said Cupido, ‘what did she have?’

  He went to buy a sandwich and a cool drink at Woolies Food in Mill Street, then fled to the peace of his flat, so he could think.

  He sat at the small breakfast counter and ate, letting his thoughts loose, all the stuff that had been bottled up.

  Last night, his conversation with Alexa. When she had talked about Afrikaner men who had lost their power, and women rebelling against it, there had been a lot of things running through his mind. Too rapidly, because he had had to concentrate on what she was saying. Then he had become afraid again that he would become too attached to her, because this thing between them could not work. The trouble was that he didn’t know about all this philosophical stuff. He didn’t want to either. He didn’t want to worry about people’s dramatic image or whether they were conduits, because frankly, he thought it was a crock of shit. He had been in the police for twenty-six years, and as far as he could tell, people were exactly the same as when he had begun. They stole and murdered for the same reasons. Afrikaans, English. White, black, brown. And he suspected it had always been like that, for hundreds of years. He thought there had always been women who wanted more attention than others. His instincts told him that life, people’s actions, came down to the old criminal rule of tendency, background and opportunity. The New South Africa didn’t change that. Nor did Facebook and Twitter and Linked Up or In or whatever the latest craze might be.

  He didn’t mind that Alexa wondered about such things; he understood she lived in another world – she was an artist, they thought differently. But he would be totally honest with her, tell her such things went right over his head, sooner or later. He couldn’t embarrass her in front of her friends and lie about who he was.

  And when he told her, he would lose her.

  But rather that. Because when he recalled the photos of Hanneke Sloet’s father, Willem, that expression of … defeat, of a man who had lost the battle in his attempt to be the person his wife wanted him to be. He wasn’t prepared to go through that, he had enough trouble as it was. He had to protect and preserve what little dignity he still had – the thing that made Carla say, ‘My father is handling the Sloet case.’ Being a detective. Even though much of this world would look down on that. People like Roch, and Hannes Pruis who would ‘not be threatened by a mere captain’. And surely someone like Hanneke Sloet too. He saw women like her in the Gardens Centre, pretty and well-off and sophisticated, all dolled up, all dressed up to the nines … When he walked past in his Mr Price clothes, with his cheap haircut and his booze-ravaged face, he simply did not exist for them. The only reason Alexa was involved with him was because of her damage, her weakness, she had no idea how much better she could do.

  The world was a place of hierarchies and groupings and classes. The haves and the have-nots. Sloet had lived in the former, and, like all of them, she had wanted more. More money, more power, more status, more security against the danger of being dragged back to the struggling classes. Anni de Waal and Alexa could say what they liked, the boob job was part of that desire: to create more distance. He didn’t know how to explain it properly, it was just a sense, a knowledge, she wanted to make herself more exclusive, she wanted to say she belonged in a certain league, and only men of that league could look at her. Because that is what people with money did. They separated themselves more and more, like Henry van Eeden with his high walls, and his two-million-rand Lamborghini.

  Sloet had worked so hard on the deal because it would open doors to new opportunities for making the gap wider. She had had an idea, a plan. For more power at the law firm, or, if they would not accede, to go it alone. To be a player, a deal maker. He couldn’t say that to Alexa last night, but Sloet’s hunger, in general, did not really pose a threat to anyone, if you thought about it. Silberstein Lamarque could just have said to her, ‘Pack your bags, we’re not interested’. And more likely they would have had the opposite reaction.

  Which brought him to what Cupido had said, ‘The question is, what did she have?’

  That changed everything. Up till now they had looked at ‘what had she done’, not at ‘what did she have’.

  And this was the first time that anything began to make sense to him. It took away the randomness, it provided a reason for the attacker to come to her door, a motive to bring a large stabbing weapon along. A tangible motive: robbery. Not in the conventional sense of steal-her-cellphone-and-laptop. Something specific that she possessed. Something of great value to someone. Someone she knew, and whom she allowed to come in. Someone with whom she may have wanted to negotiate.

  And the who and the what were somewhere in Hanneke Sloet’s tendency, background and opportunity. That was what had instinctively led him back to Roch this morning, to ask more questions. That was why it was on his schedule to talk to her two best friends this afternoon. And with each of her colleagues who had worked with her on the big deal.

  35

  At ten past one he knocked on Prof Pagel’s office door at the University of Stellenbosch’s Health Sciences faculty next to the Tygerberg Hospital.

  ‘Come in,’ called the well-modulated voice.

  Prof Pagel, with his long, aristocratic face, sat behind the desk. As usual he was flamboyantly dressed. He was tanned and fit for his close to sixty years.

  ‘Nikita,’ said the pathologist as if he were genuinely happy to see Griessel. Pagel had been calling him ‘Nikita’ for thirteen years. He had given Griessel one look back then and said, ‘I am sure that’s what the young Khrushchev looked like.’

  ‘Afternoon, Prof.’

  ‘Come in, take a seat. And how was your evening with the rich and famous?’

  He had forgotten he had asked Pagel’s advice about the cocktail party. ‘Ai, Prof,’ he said now. ‘Not too good.’

  ‘Whatever happened?’

  Griessel told him. The whole truth.

  Pagel threw back his big head and laughed. And Benny, burning with shame, could only smile weakly, because he knew it would have been funny, if it weren’t about himself.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ said Pagel once he had calmed down, ‘about my great faux pas, Nikita. You know who Luciano Pavarotti was?’

  ‘That fat guy, Prof? With the handkerchief?’

  ‘
The very one, Nikita, in my opinion the best tenor in history. Phenomenal voice. I’m not talking about his later years, the more popular work, I am talking about his prime. Perfect pitch. He sang so unselfconsciously, so effortlessly. Incredible. In any case, to say I was a fan was an understatement. I had every recording, I listened to them over and over, it was my dream to hear him in real life, just once. And then, in 1987, he and Joan Sutherland held a concert at the Met in New York. Sutherland, Nikita. La Stupenda. The soprano of sopranos. And my good friend James Cabot of Johns Hopkins let me know he hadn’t just got tickets, he could get us into the dressing room afterwards. I could meet Pavarotti. To cut a long story short, Nikita, for the first time in my life I had the money and the time, and we went over, to New York. Sat and listened to the concert. Overwhelming, indescribable. The quartet from Rigoletto, magnificent, I shall remember it all my life. Anyway, afterwards we went backstage. Now you must know, I had been practising my little bit of opera Italian for two weeks, I wanted to express my admiration for the man in his own language. I wanted to say: “Voi siete magnifici. Sono un grande fan.” You are wonderful, I am a huge fan. But I went blank, Nikita, just like you did with the lovely Miss Beekman. Totally star-struck, overwhelmed by the moment, I told the man I admired so much: “Sono magnifici.” I am wonderful.’ And Phil Pagel laughed heartily again.

  ‘Genuine, Prof?’ asked Griessel in amazement.

  ‘Genuine, Nikita. The man gave me an astonished look, turned away and began to talk to someone else. By the time I realised the extent of my faux pas, it was too late. For months afterwards I still blushed and regretted it and reproached myself. But all you can really do is laugh. And know your intention was true. And still enjoy the delight of his voice.’

  Griessel felt the relief slowly spread through him. If something like that could happen to Phil Pagel, this man for whom he had such admiration …

  ‘A vopah, prof?’

  ‘Faux pas,’ Pagel spelled the word. ‘French. For making an idiot of yourself. It takes the sting out of the concept somewhat.’