Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  She was certain he didn’t see it that way, but she did. When she became pregnant, Willem married her before Dirk was born. Depressed, saturated with hormones and chivvied by her parents, she submitted like Mersault to her fate, the crowds within her mind howling in execration. Instead of going to Paris she became a sheep farmer’s wife. But she had Dirk.

  As Simon slowed and turned into Jason’s gate, Margot’s phone rang. Winston Mokoena.

  ‘Winston.’

  ‘Margot, forgive me if I’m brief. Don’t go to Jason’s. Your meeting isn’t going to happen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Things are in motion. I’ll explain later. Just go home.’

  ‘Explain now –’

  Mokoena had hung up. Margot looked at the clock on the dash. 8.39. The meeting had been set for nine. Simon glanced a question at her. She didn’t tell him to stop. As they got closer to the wind pump and the farmhouse she saw a big black Land Cruiser parked in the yard.

  ‘Do you recognise the car?’ she asked.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Simon. ‘It’s either the United Nations or Warrant Officer Turner.’

  Margot watched a tall, lean black man step out from behind the SUV and walk towards them. He had an unusual way of moving, she couldn’t say why. A lightness, as if he were gliding; yet at the same time rooted, solid. She assumed he had Jason in custody, perhaps on the gun charge. How much intelligence did it require to keep one’s mouth shut? Very little, though in Jason’s case that was no comfort. They should have come earlier, but at least she could reassure and advise him.

  ‘What did Mokoena say?’ asked Simon.

  ‘He said go home.’

  Simon headed on towards the farm. They passed the wind pump. Turner stopped and held his hand out, palm upraised. His face was impassive behind his sunglasses. Simon unbuckled his seat belt. Margot could feel a sudden rise in his vigilance. She became aware of the gun on his hip. The gun on Turner’s hip. Simon stopped the Range Rover five metres short of Turner.

  ‘Will you stay in the car, ma’am?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Until I check things out.’

  ‘What is there to worry about?’

  Turner held up his ID and badge.

  ‘Jason’s dead,’ said Simon.

  Margot wound the window down and leaned her head out. In the gap between the battered SUV and Turner she saw what Simon had seen. Jason was splayed backwards across a giant barbell on the stoop. She couldn’t see his face. An enormous pool of blood was dripping from the edge of the stones.

  Margot discovered that she felt nothing for Jason. If anything she felt a sense of relief. A corpse made a better ringer than a frightened man in a cell. The only eyewitness left was Hennie. The only thing that Hennie was frightened of was her.

  ‘He’s killed his only witness,’ said Margot.

  ‘So far so good,’ said Simon. He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and peered forward. ‘But there’s a camera on us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In his rear-view mirror. Look at the shape. Without doubt it was on Jason, too. Don’t say anything, ma’am. Please wait here.’

  Turner circled behind the Range Rover. She twisted round to watch him. He was examining the Camargue-red paintwork. Simon left the engine running and got out.

  ‘Warrant Officer Turner,’ said Turner. ‘Stay in the car.’

  ‘Simon Dube. Director of Operations, Le Roux Security.’ He nodded to the back of the Range Rover. ‘If you want to get any closer you’ll need a warrant.’

  Simon turned and walked towards Turner’s Land Cruiser.

  ‘Sir,’ said Turner. A classic cop’s tone; politeness as threat. ‘Keep away from the vehicle.’

  Turner followed him for two paces but stopped by Margot’s window. Another contest between men. She was fascinated by these unspoken duels, the way they jabbed at each other’s pride. Turner didn’t want the indignity of running after Simon. His authority, his voice, should have been enough to stop him. But Simon defied him. He didn’t stop until he reached the Cruiser’s open driver’s door. He ducked his head to look at the rear-view mirror, she presumed to study the controls for the camera. Something else caught Simon’s eye. He straightened up and faced Turner.

  ‘Are we going to fight in front of the lady?’

  ‘Whatever the lady wants,’ said Turner. He took off his shades and put them in his pocket.

  ‘You’re pretty sure of yourself.’

  ‘As sure as I need to be.’

  The two men were entirely capable of killing each other. Simon was bigger; Turner didn’t carry much weight in the shoulders, yet he seemed untroubled by either the corpse a few metres behind him or the prospect of more violence. She suppressed her inclination to get out of the car and take charge. She had to trust Simon. Simon walked towards the stoop.

  ‘I want to see what you did to Jason.’

  ‘Stay away from the crime scene,’ said Turner.

  ‘If you want to shoot me in the back, go ahead.’

  Turner couldn’t shoot him, not legally; no one’s life was threatened. To physically restrain him would be no easy feat. She was fascinated to see how much of a policeman’s power was no more than thin air, if you had the nerve to defy it. But why was Simon pushing him? Hennie would do it for no more than the pleasure it would give him. Simon was as cold a calculator as she’d ever seen. Turner seemed of similar mettle. He wasn’t a man to indulge in wasted gestures or idle threats. He had to be perplexed but didn’t show it. He didn’t show anything. Simon halted at the bloody stoop and looked at Jason’s body.

  ‘Two in the chest and one in the throat,’ he said, with the respect of a fellow craftsman. ‘I’d say the first shot burst a ventricle and he dropped down into the third.’

  ‘That’s as far as you go,’ said Turner. ‘No more warnings.’

  Simon beckoned to Margot. ‘Mrs Le Roux?’

  Margot opened the door and got out. She’d been invited to play a part in Simon’s mysterious stratagem. Diversionary, perhaps. Turner came to the same conclusion. He ran, without seeming to run, at Simon. Simon jumped up the step and darted inside the house. Turner stopped and waited.

  Simon re-emerged holding a grey plastic modem box in both hands. He smashed the box to pieces with two blows against the door jamb. He let the pieces drop. Why? wondered Margot. Simon looked at Turner with a certain fuck-you triumph. As he stepped from the stoop Turner hit him in the belly.

  What followed took place in a second, almost too fast for her to follow. Turner’s first blow was so fast, so short, so casual that it hardly looked like an attack. He flicked his hand, as one might flick at a fly, and struck Simon with his knuckles in the solar plexus. It wasn’t a punch, it had no power that she could see. Simon, almost as fast, parried the arm with his left hand just after the impact and threw his right fist at Turner’s head. Turner moved without seeming to move, the fist missing by a hair, and bing-bang hit Simon on his biceps with these odd, light, snapping strikes. Simon’s face was already twisting with pain, his arms falling, as Turner hit him again on the right side of the throat, below the jaw, with the back of the first two fingers of his right hand.

  Turner stepped back as Simon doubled over and fell from the stoop to his knees, his tongue sticking out as he gasped for air. He tried to raise his arms but couldn’t. Turner stuck two fingers into the left side of Simon’s throat and crouched, gracefully, as he forced – guided – Simon to lie on the ground. He reached out and stood up holding Simon’s gun. Simon, choking as if for his life, tried to lash out with a kick. Turner stepped away without apparent hurry and the kick missed. He walked towards Margot.

  His stride was not purposeful or aggressive; it was loose, almost a shamble, but much faster than it appeared to be. She saw that he had green eyes. The anger in them was hidden deep. She felt chilled. He ejected the magazine from Simon’s gun into one hand and jacked a shell from the chamber. He circled past her, with a strange courtesy,
and tossed the gun and the magazine through the Range Rover’s open window. He had moved from courtesy and patience to crushing violence and back with scarcely a change in the expression on his face. She was not frightened of him, because, she realised, he did not want her to be; but she was equally aware that he was a force that threatened the core of the only good reason she had for existing. Of that she was frightened indeed. She felt confident that she wouldn’t show it.

  Turner glanced over his shoulder at Simon. Margot looked back. Simon was struggling to his hands and knees, still trying to breathe. She didn’t feel for his pain; she did feel for his humiliation.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ said Margot.

  ‘He’ll be fine.’ He looked at her. ‘If I didn’t want him to be fine, he’d be dead.’

  Margot lived and worked and survived among men. She had no woman in her life she considered important to her, no female friends with whom to exchange small talk, let alone to pour out her heart. The social obligations of business and politics demanded enough of the former, and she could wear that mask well enough. As to the latter, no woman had listened to her when she was sixteen, including her mother, and she had never asked a woman to listen to her since. She lived and worked and had succeeded among men, without ever exploiting sexual wiles of which she was ignorant, and she had grown to expect them to fear her, and at worst to respect her.

  Turner was giving her respect. Yet she sensed that he would have given her that no matter who she might have been. She thought of the dead and nameless girl who had brought him here. A sudden window opened for her, into his implacability. He wasn’t an idealist. No one was, in the accepted sense. The notion was a myth. He had created for himself an ideal, a code, a principle, to which he clung for dear life. She understood that. So had she. In the larger scheme it didn’t matter what the principle was, only that it be the rope that kept you from drowning.

  She said, ‘I’m Margot Le Roux.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ said Turner.

  ‘I glad we’ve had the chance to meet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to talk with you.’

  ‘I want to talk with your son,’ said Turner. ‘If you make that happen, I’ll be grateful. Beyond that, you and I have nothing to talk about.’

  ‘I understand you’re investigating an accident, a tragic accident.’

  He looked at her, as if to say, Go on.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t realise but you’ve already closed your case. He didn’t deserve to die for it, but it was Jason who killed that poor girl.’

  ‘He died because he tried to shoot me,’ said Turner. ‘Before he died, he denied harming the girl.’

  ‘Well, of course he denied it, why wouldn’t he? You’re a policeman. Denials, confessions, statements, retractions. Reasonable doubts. Bargains. Appeals. Figments in an elaborate game, aren’t they?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Turner. ‘Those are the rules and they’re designed to be broken. But for some it isn’t a game. They might be stuck inside it, because they have no other place to be, but they’re not playing.’

  ‘Do you play chess?’

  Turner shrugged. ‘Once upon a time, in the army. Never seriously.’

  ‘Chess is one of the few things in life that isn’t a game. It’s an experience of how life should be. In chess it is impossible to tell a lie. Everything is there to be seen and known. At any given position everything can be seen and known, even if you can’t see and you don’t know. Nothing is concealed. It’s all there right in front of you: the board, the pieces, a handful of rules that a five-year-old child can learn. At the close you either win or die where you stand, or you are not yet dead but you resign – you embrace death, rightly or wrongly, and sometimes even on the brink of a certain victory that is right before your eyes but which you do not see. There is no possibility of hypocrisy, of corruption, of deception. Self-deception – and every kind of blindness – yes, certainly, but that’s not the fault of the pieces. There is only the position and your opponent and you, and your courage, and the next move.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ said Turner.

  ‘You should take it up,’ she said. ‘It would suit you.’

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  He looked past her and she turned and watched Simon approach. He dusted dirt and dried blood from his black suit. He was furious. As he passed the SUV he ducked into the open door, reached up and fiddled with the rear-view mirror. Turner was too far away to stop him. He showed no reaction. Simon stood up and showed them a tiny square of plastic between finger and thumb. A micro SD card. He put it on his tongue and swallowed. Turner appeared unmoved. Simon stared at him, as one wild dog might regard another, ready to go again. Margot moved him back to safety.

  ‘Simon, Turner tells me that Jason denied killing the girl.’

  Simon pointed into Turner’s car. ‘He’s got a Mac in there, uploading a file transfer. It’s got to be a video from the dash-cam.’

  She understood why he had destroyed the modem and swallowed the card. She fired a brief, humourless smile at Turner. ‘But you killed Jason so he’s lost his chance to tell the truth.’

  ‘You were supposed to find my body when you got here,’ said Turner. ‘Jason and his uncle wanted to impress you.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Jason in months or Rudy in years,’ she said. ‘If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t send two buffoons to do the job.’

  Turner inclined his head. He accepted that.

  ‘Whatever Jason said to protect himself,’ said Margot, ‘living witnesses – without a demonstrable history of drug abuse, mental instability and violence – will swear otherwise. Isn’t that right, Simon?’

  ‘I was there,’ said Simon.

  ‘Any decent trial lawyer could discredit anything Jason said in ten minutes.’

  ‘Then let’s go to trial,’ said Turner. He glanced at Simon. ‘You can perjure yourself however you like.’ He looked at Margot. ‘So can Dirk, if he wants to. If he’s got any intelligence, he won’t. If you’ve got any, you won’t let him.’

  A coil of anxiety tightened in Margot’s stomach and she felt anger rise in her chest. Her natural reaction to threat was to counter-attack. She restrained herself. She couldn’t see any good options. What did he know about Dirk? Who’d been talking to him? The idiot Rudy? Perhaps Iminathi, the amateur scheming bitch.

  ‘When Dirk was nine years old his father, my husband, was murdered,’ she said. ‘His grandparents and his aunt, my sister-in-law, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Turner.

  Images of the bloodbath flashed through her mind. She had never loved Willem. She had hated her life with him, cloistered in mindless tedium with his family, surrounded by parched nothingness, the bleating of sheep, the endless, repetitive chores. The horror of discovering the massacre had been real, but the event had marked her liberation. She wondered if Turner could read her mind.

  ‘It was only by chance that Dirk and I weren’t there,’ she said. ‘A farm attack. As you know they’ve killed thousands of us. The police never caught the killers, didn’t even try. But certain others knew who they were. Three local men. They sold the guns they’d stolen from the house. These certain others captured them. And I remembered a story, perhaps a legend, about Shaka Zulu. To punish a murderer, Shaka had him locked in a shack with a pack of hyenas.’

  ‘It’s no legend,’ said Simon. ‘Shaka was a general to King Dingiswayo. A rival king, called Zwide, captured Dingiswayo and beheaded him. In revenge, Shaka locked Zwide’s mother, Queen Ntombazi, in the house. After the hyenas had eaten her, he burned the house down.’

  ‘Then it’s as well I heard the wrong version,’ said Margot. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that it left me very sensitive to threats against my family.’

  ‘We all have sad tales to tell,’ said Turner.

  ‘Jason would no doubt have agreed,’ she replied. ‘Why not give this one a happy ending? Surely two deaths are enough to
square the account. Though if that’s not so, there are other ways. Other kinds of account.’

  ‘I don’t keep accounts. I do my job.’

  ‘I respect your integrity. I wish it were more common. So let’s talk about doing something of value, real value. Let some good come out of this. You must know the ancient tradition of the blood debt. You atoned for a killing by paying money or goods – cattle, land – to the family of the dead. This girl, it seems, has no family. But I could build a medical clinic in your township. A clinic for women like her. God knows they must need it.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you,’ said Turner.

  The anger thickened in her throat. His intransigence made no sense.

  ‘Thousands of murders go unsolved, uninvestigated, even unrecorded, every year.’

  ‘I regret that more than you do,’ said Turner.

  ‘This was just a terrible accident.’

  ‘The girl was unlawfully killed.’

  ‘Then let me make amends,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not my judgement to make.’

  ‘There was no malice, no intent –’

  ‘What if the girl had been drunk,’ said Turner, ‘and she had killed your son? What would you be saying to me now?’

  A low blow and it hit her hard. She struggled to keep a snarl from her lips. ‘I don’t mean to offend you, Warrant Turner, but you seem to be out of touch with reality.’

  Turner glanced at Jason’s corpse. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘The girl was a piece of human waste.’ She saw something dark pass through Turner’s eyes but she couldn’t help herself. She pressed on. ‘Even you know that, so don’t pretend that you care. Nobody cares, or she wouldn’t have been crawling in the filth.’