Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  Turner pointed at a machine behind the desk. He took out his iPhone.

  ‘Does that printer use Bluetooth?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need to print a report.’

  ‘What kind of report?’

  ‘Police business.’

  ‘I am the police.’

  Turner opened the flap in the desk and walked towards the printer.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ said Rudy.

  Turner discovered the printer on his phone and tapped ‘print’. The machine hummed.

  ‘Is there a hospital in this town?’

  ‘If you can call it that. Six beds and a trainee with a stethoscope from Bloemfontein.’

  ‘Call me “boy” again and you’ll need to fly his boss in.’

  Rudy stared at him, his face reddening with a mixture of anger and, if Turner wasn’t mistaken, shame.

  ‘If I was you,’ said Rudy, ‘I’d –’

  ‘You’re not,’ said Turner.

  Turner collected the sheets from the printer. As he walked back to the gap in the desk he stopped and eyeballed Rudy from a distance close enough to smell his breath. He didn’t wait for him to blink; he didn’t give him the respect of a contest. He turned away and walked back out to the car park.

  He sat in the Land Cruiser and switched on the dome light. He speed-read the autopsy. It was more ghastly than he had expected. He placed it in a folder with the photos and got out of the car and locked it. After nearly eight hours at the wheel he was glad to follow Rudy’s directions on foot.

  He walked down a street lined with small, shabby shops, glancing at door numbers. He was looking for 29. He carried the folder under his left arm. He reached a glass window emblazoned with the words: LA DIVA

  Hair and Beauty

  Behind the glass he saw bad photos of various hairstyles and a row of empty roller chairs facing a long wall mirror. The salon was unlit. The door bore no number. He stepped back to check the shop next door. It was a bookmaker’s, closed and shuttered; its number was 31. The door of La Diva opened and a coloured woman in her mid-twenties looked at him. Her skin was a milky brown. Strong features and eyes that put him in mind of a panther were framed by a black cloud of unprocessed hair. The eyes checked him out, head to toe. He couldn’t tell if she liked what she saw. He did.

  The woman said, ‘Winston’s inside.’

  Turner followed her past the chairs and mirror. A faint but rich smell of cooking made Turner’s empty stomach ache. They passed through a door and a short corridor, the smell getting stronger, into a dimly lit room the same size as the salon, where boxes of shampoo and hair products were stacked along the walls. A burgundy-red leather sofa sat in front of a wide-screen TV. A large wooden table dominated the remaining space.

  Behind the table a big African rose like a king from a swivel chair, upholstered to match the sofa. He had two inches on Turner and his shoulders filled his shirt like cannonballs. He was in uniform, the collar undone. He gave a smile of such encompassing warmth that Turner felt he was meeting a long-lost uncle. Considering the captain’s history, which Turner had looked into before he left, it was quite a talent.

  ‘Warrant Turner. Winston Mokoena, late of robbery homicide, Johannesburg, now happily out to pasture in the Thirstland. Or Dorsland, as the Afrikaners call it. Please, be welcome.’

  Mokoena was sixty-three and formidable in stature and energy. His head and face were cleanly shaven, oiled and perfumed, accentuating the illusion of greater youth. His features were those of a man who had witnessed every extreme of human nature without surprise. His eyes not only took part in his smile but were its true, deep source; yet at the same time they had the quality of bullets. Mokoena offered his hand across the table and Turner shook it.

  ‘Sit down, my friend. Your timing is impeccable.’

  Turner sat and set his folder down against the legs of his chair. Among a clutter of papers, receipt rolls, a laptop, three smartphones and an ashtray holding a smoking cigar, the table was set for dinner with wooden bowls, plates and spoons wrought with delicate and artful design. The woman reappeared with a matching serving dish that steamed with the extravagant aroma. She set it in the middle of the table and sat at the third place setting.

  Mokoena took Turner’s bowl and raised up a ladle brimful of stew.

  ‘I hope you like your curry hot,’ said Mokoena. ‘Iminathi has no mercy.’

  Turner said, ‘What right man does not like his curry hot?

  9

  Mokoena watched the way Turner looked at Imi as she cleared the table. He had watched them both throughout the meal. Neither had said much to the other beyond compliments given and accepted on the excellent goat curry, but beneath the lingering pungency of the chillies, Mokoena sensed the pheromones circulating. Why not? He loved Imi, in a strictly fatherly way. Imi had emerged from her last, and to his knowledge only, romantic affair with painful wounds that had not yet healed, though she would have denied this. Turner was a fine figure of a man and worthy of her, which could not be said of anyone else Mokoena could think of.

  He wondered how this might be put to his advantage. He was sure he would need one. He offered Turner a cigar from a humidor of polished ebony. Turner declined.

  Mokoena liked the younger man for the same reasons that made him afraid of the trouble he had undoubtedly brought with him. Turner was not incapable of fear; everyone was capable; yet it was not clear where in Turner it resided, and Mokoena had spent his life in the study of fear. With the skill of a seasoned interrogator, Turner had avoided answering every personal question he had been asked. A big man yet his body seemed strangely weightless. A sense of balance, of calm cultivated by discipline; his movements precise and flowing with a liquid energy. Not an African energy. Chinese, perhaps. He had asked Turner which martial art he practised, and Turner had answered, ‘I try to take care of myself.’

  The energy contained and masked a deep anger, Mokoena was sure. Turner would not be swayed by mere authority. Mokoena would not even try. Here was a man committed to himself and his own purpose, but Mokoena could not tell what that might be. Turner would reveal his intentions soon enough, but would he reveal his purpose? Was he a good man or a bad man, or did he exist, as did Mokoena, beyond such distinctions? And what kind of man needed to cultivate such balance? One thing was clear. Though he did not wear it, and few would have the eyes to see it, Turner was a killer of men.

  Imi returned to the table and looked at Mokoena. He nodded for her to join them. He wanted to see how she conducted herself while two dangerous men discussed business.

  He chose his cigar and lit the end amid a fragrant cloud of smoke and brief bursts of flame. He closed the lid of the humidor and showed Turner the back, into which was screwed a small brass plate. The plate was engraved with the name ‘Sir Philip Abercrombie’.

  ‘Philip Abercrombie was the magistrate who founded this town for the Great Empress, in 1866,’ said Mokoena. ‘For twenty years it was the most remote settlement in the Cape Colony. It sometimes amuses me to think of myself as his successor, though I’m not sure it amuses his ghost. There’s a story behind his arrival on this God-cursed plain, somehow emblematic, I feel, of our condition. Though I am no philosopher.’

  ‘That I don’t believe,’ said Turner.

  Mokoena laughed.

  ‘Tell me the story.’

  ‘Abercrombie was sent, with a contingent of native police, to put down an anti-colonial rebellion by the Griqua. Are you familiar with the Griqua?’

  ‘I know it’s the nickname of the Kimberley rugby team. I don’t know much about the original tribe.’

  ‘They survive but are scattered among us, barely identifiable as a group. Abercrombie made his base camp on this spot and with time it evolved into a town. But it’s the Griqua rather than his deeds that merit our attention.’

  Mokoena drew on his cigar and continued.

  ‘When the Dutch East India Company founded their outpost on t
he Cape, they had no fantasy of creating a state, let alone our own happy republic. They sought only wealth. But as the settlers came and began to resent the Company’s autocracy, the trekboers struck out into the interior. Most of them were single young men and naturally they made free with indigenous women – the Khoi, the San, the Tswana. In effect they often married them, though such unions were not Christian and therefore unlawful. Hence many children were born whose social and legal status for all concerned was, to say the least, uncertain.’

  ‘The Bastaards,’ said Turner.

  ‘You are familiar. I’m impressed.’

  Turner shook his head. ‘Just a name in the back of my mind. Please, go on.’

  ‘When the boys in question came to manhood, the trekboers conceived the idea of using them to fulfil the military duties of their fathers, who were permanently fighting their new neighbours. They trained them to replace their own commandos and so there came about a new tribe – of mixed-race, Dutch-speaking sharpshooters, who lived on the backs of their horses and were expert in guerrilla warfare.’ Mokoena smiled.

  Turner said, ‘What’s not to love about that?’

  Mokoena laughed. ‘What not indeed? As any right men would – I like that phrase – they soon abandoned their paternal communities and struck north beyond the confines of the colony, bearing allegiance to no one but themselves. Slaves ran away to join them. They became the scourge of the indigenous peoples along the length of the Orange River and challenged the colonials at their own game. A century later their descendants, calling themselves the Griqua, established their own rival state.’

  ‘Griqualand,’ said Turner, his memory finally stirred. ‘Which was where the British discovered diamonds.’

  ‘Such is life,’ said Mokoena. ‘Even the Griqua had to kneel before the power of commerce.’

  Turner took the point. He didn’t smile. He picked up the folder from by his chair and laid it on the table.

  ‘Can I offer you a glass of Irish whiskey?’ asked Mokoena.

  ‘You can.’

  Mokoena glanced at Iminathi. She rose and left the table and returned with a bottle and three glasses.

  Mokoena uncorked the bottle and poured. ‘Writer’s Tears. Because when the Irish poet cries, he sheds tears of whiskey.’

  ‘I was at an Irish bar, of sorts, this morning.’

  ‘Another admirable race.’

  ‘They’re bastards, too, when the circumstance demands it.’

  ‘I will not hear a word said against them.’

  Turner said, ‘That wasn’t meant as an insult.’

  ‘A toast, then. To bastards of all nations.’

  They clinked their glasses and emptied them. Mokoena poured refills. He gestured at the room with the bottle.

  ‘You may have been surprised to find me here,’ he said, ‘but I learned in Johannesburg that a beauty salon makes an excellent base of operations within the population. You’d be amazed how much intelligence flows beneath the hairdryers. Most things worth knowing are known to the women. Isn’t that so, Imi?’

  Iminathi didn’t answer. Mokoena saw that she was anxious for Turner. She couldn’t read him as Mokoena did.

  ‘I also own two bars but they generate more mayhem than information. Nothing that would call for your talents. Petty theft, whores, a few tik and weed dealers. As in prison, a drugged population is a docile population. My most profitable investment is the licensed bookmaker’s next door. The miners like a flutter.’

  He had made it clear where he stood in the matter of modest, harmless and intelligent corruption. He gave Turner the chance to disapprove.

  Turner said, ‘Small business is the lifeblood of the economy.’

  ‘I have three officers under my command and one of the lowest murder rates in the country. I’m proud of that.’ Mokoena gestured with his brows towards the folder. ‘If a local man committed a homicide, even as far away as Cape Town, I would expect to hear whispers.’

  ‘These locals have the wrong kind of hair to whisper in here.’

  Mokoena caught his first glimpse of potential crisis. ‘I see.’

  Turner glanced at Iminathi. She didn’t move. He looked a question at Mokoena.

  ‘Imi’s my personal assistant, my right arm. I keep no secrets from her.’

  Turner opened the folder.

  ‘Just after midnight this morning six men stopped at a shebeen in Nyanga township. They killed a bottle of sixty per cent mampoer and fired a gun at a portrait of Madiba, no harm done.’

  Mokoena waited for the punchline. Turner took out a photo of the dead girl’s face and laid it on the table.

  ‘On their way home they killed a teenage girl. With a red Range Rover.’

  Mokoena felt cold. His face turned stony. He had sat in Margot’s red Range Rover many times, admiring the custom interior. Cream leather, Arctic air con, cooling massage seats. There wasn’t another in the Northern Cape.

  ‘Who was she?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s unidentified,’ said Turner. ‘Chances are she’ll stay that way.’

  ‘A tragic accident, then. They probably don’t even know they hit her.’

  ‘Her death wasn’t instantaneous. From the pattern of the haemorrhages, which were numerous, the coroner estimates she lived for around thirty minutes after the collision. At least one suspect knew she’d been hurt when they fled the scene.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘All six checked out of their hotel at 1.47 a.m.,’ said Turner. ‘A surprising decision for intoxicated men enjoying a holiday weekend. They grabbed their bags and ran.’

  ‘Speculation,’ said Mokoena, without conviction.

  Turner handed him several sheets of paper.

  A full autopsy report. Written up in less than – what? Twelve hours? Mokoena resisted an urge to wipe his brow. He scanned the pages. Details leapt out him.

  ‘Severe malnutrition … Microcytic anaemia. Megaloblastic anaemia … Hepatitis C … Multiple metastases?’ He looked up at Turner. ‘This girl already had both feet in the grave.’

  ‘The cause of death was massive internal trauma, caused by two tons of metal and a drunk.’

  Turner’s tone was even. Relentlessly so. No challenge or accusation. Just the sense that this man would move forward, no matter what stood in his way. Mokoena dragged on his cigar and blew a grey plume from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Read past the blood work,’ said Turner. ‘Fracture dislocation of the pelvis at the sacroiliac joint. Fractured neck of femur. A ruptured left kidney. Anorectal avulsion. Her cervix plucked from the neck of her vagina –’

  Iminathi let out a groan and put a hand to her mouth.

  ‘You’ve made your point,’ said Mokoena.

  Turner laid out the photos of the suspects.

  Mokoena didn’t need to look at them. But he did.

  ‘Jason Britz, Mark Lewis, Chris Gardner, Lionel “Hennie” Hendricks, Simon Dube, Dirk Le Roux. Do you know any of them?’

  Mokoena said, ‘I know all of them.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘They’ll accept an approach more easily coming from you,’ said Turner. ‘If you’ll invite them down to the station tomorrow, I’ll take their statements.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t come from me?’

  ‘I’ll run them down myself.’

  Imi picked up a close-up of Dirk Le Roux raising a shot glass and stared at it.

  ‘Imi, put it down,’ said Mokoena. She did so. Mokoena looked at Turner. ‘Where did you get these photos?’

  ‘When I found the girl’s body, she had Jason Britz’s phone in her hand.’

  ‘It would have to be Jason’s,’ said Mokoena.

  ‘He must have dropped it in the lot as he got in the car. She crawled five metres to get it with a shattered pelvis but wasn’t able to make a call.’

  ‘I presume Jason was the shooter, too.’

  Turner nodded. ‘He posted the photos on Facebook, from the shebe
en.’

  Mokoena forced an involuntary grimace into a smile. ‘Any eyewitnesses? To the accident?’

  ‘Not in Cape Town. All eyewitnesses to the accident are here.’

  ‘Who is your prime suspect? The driver?’

  Turner said, ‘The barman believes, based on an exchange he witnessed, that Dube, Lewis and Gardner left in the white Toyota, on the instructions of Hendricks. He also witnessed a fight over the car keys between Le Roux, who was staggering under the influence, and Hendricks, who was stone-cold sober. It’s likely that Le Roux was the driver.’

  Mokoena had a vision of two trains steaming towards each other on the same track. Neither train could see the other yet but he could see both, because he was standing in between them, chained to the middle of that track. He drew on his cigar, but the taste had soured. Various courses of action ran through his mind. None were attractive. All were dependent on the decisions – more likely the irrational compulsions – of others, and were beyond his control.

  His best hope lay in Turner, and his obscure purpose. With luck it was greed. A force so potent, so unpredictable, that the bravest and noblest men that Mokoena had ever known had been buckled into its yoke like stunned oxen. Not that he blamed them. No city so strong that it cannot be conquered by gold. He gave Turner the opportunity to pump up the price.

  ‘For the moment that’s conjecture.’

  ‘Someone killed her,’ said Turner. ‘Someone decided it was in their interest not to call an ambulance. Either they tell the truth or they conspire to pervert the course of justice. Whichever they choose, I’ll be making arrests.’

  ‘Local warrants will be hard to come by.’

  ‘On a charge of culpable homicide, I don’t need one.’

  ‘Do you know who Dirk Le Roux is?’

  ‘You’re talking about his mother.’

  ‘Fifteen years ago this town was on its knees in the dust, a glorified petrol station on the way to no place anyone wanted to go. Then Margot inherited her husband’s farm. She gambled everything on a geological survey and discovered deposits of high-grade manganese ore. Nothing in her life prepared her for what she went on to do. She was born and bred here, pregnant at sixteen, a sheep farmer’s wife. This is a woman who spent her honeymoon in Kruger shooting antelope and lions. She’d never had a passport. But she went out and found investors, partners, in Frankfurt and Shanghai. She built nine kilometres of road. She built a water pipeline from the Orange, a reservoir in the desert –’