Memo From Turner

by Tim Willocks

  ‘I don’t disagree.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake, man, how does your rejecting my charity help anyone?’

  ‘Charity doesn’t come with a price,’ said Turner.

  ‘You can’t be that naive. How does persecuting my son – who is innocent – make the world a better place?’

  ‘If the law won’t stand for a piece of human waste, we have no law. If we have no law, we have no country.’

  ‘This country eats because people like me – and my son – put food on the table.’

  ‘Your generosity is appreciated,’ said Turner.

  ‘You want a rich white scalp to hang on your belt.’

  ‘Self-pity doesn’t become you.’

  ‘Self-pity?’ The insult struck to her gut. She couldn’t even understand it. She didn’t know why it should hurt her as it did.

  ‘It’s not a racial matter with me,’ said Turner. ‘Nor a matter of economics. I’ve sent a thousand people to jail. Most of them were poor and black. They all had better excuses than you. Or Dirk or Hennie. Or Jason.’

  He said it almost gently. As if the truth didn’t require anything more. His tone goaded her. She felt her fury swell towards the breaking point. The conversation was going nowhere good. She couldn’t win it on his ground. She had to stop. Re-evaluate. Retreat to other ground. She had to talk to Hennie.

  ‘You’ve killed the guilty party,’ she said. ‘Be satisfied. Fill in the paperwork and go home. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘I’ll leave when what I came here to do is done.’

  ‘Stay away from my son.’

  ‘Your son is in a hole. Stop digging.’

  ‘I’ll pay for your coffin.’

  She found herself leaning up into his face, chin extended, her teeth clenched. Her head throbbed with blood. For the first time she wanted to kill him. He was wrong. He was irrational. Psychopathic. He had to be stopped.

  ‘Mrs Le Roux?’ said Simon.

  She felt the blood drain from her face. For a moment she thought she might faint. She stepped back. She hadn’t broken her stare into Turner’s eyes, nor he his into hers. She felt a deep, scalding hatred. She made herself turn away. She caught a glimpse of the concern – the muted shock – on Simon’s face. She put one hand on the bonnet of the Range Rover and took a deep breath. She looked into the far parched distance. The only land she knew. The barren soil in which she had grown and against all odds flourished. If the land had a lesson it was patience. Wait and the rain will come. Wait and the sea will turn into sand.

  All the accumulated rage and hatred of her life had somehow flooded up inside her. She felt a kind of panic, transmuted into aggression. It wasn’t a question of whether Turner deserved it or not, she didn’t care. He was no one to her; had Jason shot him she would have felt nothing; a stranger, a cop, one of the lowest forms of life. And he was violating her and all she’d built, threatening to bring down her fragile tower of – if not happiness, at least tolerable contentment and pride. But panic, rage and hatred would not help her win.

  She nodded to Simon and opened the car door and got in and closed it. She did not look again at Turner. She did not dare. She stared out through the windscreen. At Jason’s corpse, the great muscles of his arm and shoulder and chest shiny with blood. In death he had achieved a strange grace, a sculpted beauty, that had wholly evaded him in life. Sadness constricted her throat. A thin ribbon of shame. She had never respected him. She had rarely resisted the urge to mock him. A poor provincial redneck. Yet what had she been? Did her money make that much difference? Jason had truly been Dirk’s friend, perhaps – the thought disgusted her – her competitor. Whatever his uncle’s crude plan had been, she knew that Jason, in his heart, had died to protect Dirk.

  Simon got behind the wheel and closed the door. He reversed out of the yard. As he swung into a semicircle she saw Turner standing, loose and shabby, watching them. Simon turned onto the track and drove towards the road.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to bring the lawyers in,’ he said.

  Margot stared at him. ‘The lawyers?’

  ‘As you say,’ Simon shrugged, now embarrassed, ‘Turner’s killed his only witness.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear how that low-rent ghetto cop spoke to me?’

  For an instant Simon’s face froze with a kind of dread. She could see his mind racing, as if envisioning where this path might take them. He was clearly dubious as to its wisdom. She didn’t care. She paid him to do what she wanted. His face became impassive again. He had been humiliated by Turner. He was in.

  Simon said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Can we kill him?’

  ‘Turner can be dead by lunchtime. The problem is the busload of Cape Town murder police who’ll show up for breakfast.’

  Simon reached the gate and swung onto the tarmac. Their speed increased, the road noise diminished. Margot’s phone rang. She looked at the screen. Number withheld. She answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mrs Le Roux?’

  She didn’t recognise the voice. A white South African man, well spoken. Middle-aged. She tapped on ‘speaker’. She wanted Simon to hear him.

  ‘Who is this?’ she said.

  ‘A potential friend and ally, or so I hope,’ said the man.

  ‘Say what you want or get off my phone.’

  ‘I’ve just seen a piece of video that puts your son Dirk in an awkward position.’

  Margot tapped the mute button and looked at Simon.

  ‘Captain Eric Venter,’ said Margot.

  Simon nodded. ‘Let him play James Bond.’

  ‘Has he seen the video?’ asked Margot.

  ‘Ten minutes minimum of HD, say a minimum one gig. At local residential upload speeds, I don’t believe it. He knows what’s on it, but he hasn’t got it.’

  ‘Hello?’ said Venter.

  Margot tapped the mute button off. ‘Horseshit,’ she said.

  Venter laughed. The laugh was meant to convey confidence, but it was nervous, weak. ‘Well, all that can wait. I just wanted to ask you to make a rough calculation, to see if it tallies with my own.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘How much money is it going to cost you in legal and, let’s say, ancillary services just to keep Dirk out of jail?’

  ‘I can afford it.’

  ‘Bear in mind that even if we – as your lawyers certainly will – define that as success, your son will be a convicted killer, with all the associated … disadvantages. A very substantial sum for a less than ideal outcome, I think you will agree. Unless you want to go through the circus of a jury trial, in which case the cost would be very much more.’

  ‘What ancillary services are you offering?’

  ‘You have one fundamental problem that you can’t buy your way out of,’ said Venter. ‘Unless I overestimate you, you must know who I’m talking about.’

  Margot suppressed an impulse to step on him, as she might step on a maggot. ‘So you would call him off ?’

  ‘That’s not within my power,’ said Venter. ‘I can order him home but I can’t call him off. No one can.’

  ‘More horseshit,’ said Margot. ‘Why not?’

  ‘His case is too strong now,’ said Venter. ‘You may not be aware, but he has already killed for this case. Literally. I doubt you can understand what that means. Let’s just say it makes it personal, deeply personal, for any cop. And this isn’t any cop. This is the cop of your nightmares.’

  That much wasn’t horseshit. She was disturbed to hear it from Turner’s commander.

  ‘You’re saying you can’t control him?’

  ‘You don’t know this man. I do. He hates the police. He despises them. That’s why he became one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘His history doesn’t matter,’ said Venter. ‘What matters to you is that he’s not going to let anyone bury this case. Not you. Not Mokoena. Not me. Not now.’

  ‘He’s a psychopath.’

  ‘A psychopath has no conscie
nce. Turner is the opposite. His conscience drives him. That’s the problem.’

  ‘So what makes you think you can filch my money?’

  ‘Because if your problems were to be reduced to matters of procedure, that is to satisfying the demands of the judicial bureaucracy, you would find no barrier to the smooth functioning of the market.’

  ‘You haven’t done this before, have you?’ said Margot.

  Silence drifted from the phone. Margot adopted the Hennie approach.

  ‘If you had,’ she said, ‘you would know that all this clever-clever devious roundabout I’m-not-going-to-say-anything-to-incriminate-myself bollocks isn’t worth a pint of your piss. You claim to know Turner – I doubt it – but you don’t know me. If this doesn’t work, you will go down. Because I will take you down. I could take you down right now. I will pay your fee but understand that that makes you my dog. Never pick up the phone and threaten me or my son again. Never imagine that you can hold anything over me. Because I am not afraid to go down, into Hell and beyond. But you are. Do you understand me, Captain Eric Venter?’

  Another silence. Margot let this one ride. In the silence she could hear his fear. If she had scared him away, she was no worse off. If not, the hierarchy of power would be established.

  ‘I’m simply asking you to think about it,’ said Venter.

  ‘You think about it.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you in an hour,’ said Venter. ‘And please don’t neglect that calculation. I think doubling the result, and perhaps rounding it up, would be more than fair. Remember, Pistorius spent seventeen million rand. And went to jail.’

  Venter hung up. Margot turned to Simon. He raised one brow in disgust.

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not polite.’

  ‘I can take it.’

  ‘What a cocksucker,’ said Simon.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Margot. ‘But did you hear what I heard?’

  ‘He’s saying we can bury Turner along with the case, without that busload of cops showing up.’

  ‘You believe the video is still trapped in Turner’s laptop?’

  ‘I’m sure it is. It may be on his phone too. Either way, it hasn’t reached Cloud.’

  ‘I want that video,’ said Margot. ‘Venter mustn’t get it. Then we’ll bury Turner.’

  She sensed a heaviness fall upon him. She understood. A man not dissimilar to himself, a fighting man, a man who risked his life for his code of honour, was going to die. A cocksucker was going to get rich. It was disgusting. She was disgusted. But on the scale of disgust that she had endured and survived, these fighting men were boys.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Le Roux,’ said Simon. ‘You give the orders.’

  18

  Turner sat in the Land Cruiser and plugged his phone into his laptop. The upload was stalled, about twenty per cent completed. He copied the video file into his phone. He then mail-dropped the file from the phone to Cloud and forwarded it to Venter, Anand and himself. He had two bars of 3G coverage. At phone upload speeds of at best one meg per second, he was looking at more than two hours before it was sent.

  He had studied a map of phone and broadband provision at Anand’s. Langkopf had appeared as a small blotch surrounded in every direction by thousands of square kilometres without coverage. If he was lucky he’d find a five meg per second upload in town that would finish the job by laptop in thirty minutes. He took the original SD card from its adapter in the Mac and put it in his safe pocket.

  He considered his position and found it wanting.

  Rudy had been stupid enough to try to murder him. He was still at large with his badge, still as stupid, and the desire for revenge was unlikely to improve his cognitive abilities.

  Margot was highly intelligent but that made her more not less dangerous, if she wanted to be. She had to know that murdering a police risked bringing a storm down on her head. She and her son might well survive it. Far more scandalous crimes had gone unpunished; many more had gone undetected. Turner was no one special. Cops were buried at the rate of two a week. He wasn’t the girlfriend of a world-famous athlete. There might not be a storm at all. Venter had said that resisting pressure from above was futile. And Margot was a gambler; her success was the proof of that.

  But what did she stand to win or lose? She won if Dirk walked away untarnished, with Jason’s corpse taking the blame. But if Turner sent the video out that option disappeared. She would lose. If she killed him, then she added an obviously motivated murder, of a cop no less, to the problems she already had with Dirk. Lose– lose. He didn’t believe she would take that risk out of spite.

  If, on the other hand, she knew that the video of Jason’s testimony had been destroyed, the attractions of killing him would be real. A fake car-hijack, for instance. Hijacks happened every day. Mokoena would be in charge of solving any local murder. No doubt he could supply plausible forensics along with the corpses of the perpetrators. A neat clearance to present to anyone Venter sent north, along with a neat clearance of the girl’s homicide too. To overturn either would require a major investigation, with piles of filthy police laundry being washed in public and no guarantee of a conviction. Venter might go for it, but his superiors would not. If she destroyed the video before it flew, killing him, for her, was a win–win.

  She was ruthless enough. She had money, connections, and as many armed men as a city police captain. She had no moral boundaries. She had Simon Dube, who was unlikely to be caught by surprise a second time. She had Mokoena to tie it all up in pink ribbons.

  Turner had a car, inadequate technology, and no one he could count on within range of four hours’ travel, even if they chartered a Cessna in the next ten minutes. If he didn’t get the video out into the world, and prove it to Margot, he was probably dead.

  He searched inside the farmhouse and found two boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells in a cupboard beneath a gun case. He returned to the stoop, where the flies were now out in force. He took the SPAS-12 off Jason’s body and folded the metal stock above the barrel and recharged the magazine. He stored the shotgun where he could reach it in the rear footwell of the Land Cruiser. He laid his binoculars on the passenger seat.

  Time to leave. It was 9.57.

  Turner drove down the dirt track towards the road.

  He stopped at the gate. The tarmac ran dead straight for the horizon through the flat featureless land. At a distance of, he guessed, three to four kilometres, he saw a low mass of some kind squatting in the road. He took the binoculars, steadied the heels of his hands on the top rim of the wheel and glassed the road. He focused the left lens and then the right. Two vehicles were parked one beside the other, blocking the road. The first looked like an old dark-blue Freelander; the second a silver-grey flatbed truck. He couldn’t see inside the cabs. He could think of no good reason why they might be sitting motionless in the sun. He could think of a bad reason.

  Two vehicles; at least four men. They hadn’t come up to the farm while they’d had the chance. Maybe to deny him the cover provided by the buildings. Had Margot passed them? For the moment that was irrelevant. Assume: Rudy and some hired hands. In Cape Town you could hire a professional hit for the price of a new iPhone. If all you wanted was a desperado willing to point and fire a gun, the price of pair of Levi’s would do it. The equivalent of the latter must have existed in Langkopf. Rudy could afford them and would know who they were.

  He set his phone to record calls and rang Mokoena on the car’s Bluetooth rig.

  ‘Where’s Rudy?’ asked Turner.

  ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t listen to me –’

  ‘So he knows Jason is dead?’

  ‘The half-truths didn’t fly. I told him to go home –’

  ‘I’m looking down the road from the farm at two stationary vehicles. A dark-blue Freelander and a silver truck, maybe a Hyundai, both seen better days. You know them?’

  ‘I do. They will, without doubt, be reported as stolen within a couple of ho
urs.’

  ‘Whoever they are, they’re waiting for someone.’

  ‘It shames me to say this,’ said Mokoena, ‘but I can no longer guarantee your safety.’

  ‘It was nice while it lasted. Twelve whole hours before someone tried to kill me.’

  ‘This situation is not of my making. I wash my hands of it.’

  ‘Call him off or you’ll be washing them with blood.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can say to him I haven’t already said. He’s enraged and half crazed with guilt.’

  ‘Who does he have with him?’

  ‘I can think of a dozen candidates who would kill you for a can of hair grease.’

  ‘Get in your car and bring me in.’

  ‘Turner, I lost my taste for gunplay a long time ago. For what it’s worth, you have my blessing. I will sanction any action you deem necessary.’

  Turner had to laugh at that. Mokoena laughed too.

  ‘There’s little I’m willing to do to help you,’ said Mokoena, ‘but I won’t raise my hand against you. I tried to persuade you and I tried to persuade him. My advice was ignored. As always, I will pick up the pieces.’

  ‘There could be more pieces than you think.’

  ‘But I won’t be one of them. I can’t say my conscience is clear, but I haven’t been able to make that claim since 1976.’

  ‘You’re feeding all this to Margot.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I’m not taking her calls. I’m going to switch off my phone and watch the Test match. There’s been heavy betting on Pakistan and I want to know why.’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ said Turner.

  ‘You may not believe this,’ said Mokoena, ‘but I sincerely hope so.’

  Turner hung up. He glassed the vehicles again. They hadn’t moved.

  He wondered what Rudy’s plan was and suspected he didn’t have one. Rudy had been moving fast, on raw emotion – killers, cars, weapons, roadblock. He would be a marksman; perhaps a scoped hunting rifle. What now? Was he hoping Turner would drive at them head-on?