by Tim Willocks
‘We don’t need to know,’ said Hennie. He pointed at the three remaining water bottles. ‘Put them in the Land Rover. And bring me that shovel.’
As Lewis picked up the bottles he finally risked a glance at Turner. Behind his shades Lewis was sickened and scared. He carried the bottles to his truck, put them in the boot and unclipped the shovel from the bonnet.
‘What if you and Rudy shot each other?’ said Hennie.
‘Hard to believe,’ said Turner. ‘Hard to stage. More forensics. More questions. More ways to make the mistakes that will hang you. But if the choice is between a bullet and a pickled walnut, I’ll leave it up to you.’
Hennie walked over and took the shovel and stuck it in the ground. The blade crunched in to half its length. Lewis got back in behind the wheel. Hennie waved at Simon and they walked to the front passenger door of the Land Cruiser. Hennie opened it and looked down at Rudy.
‘Let’s get you to the hospital. We’ll take your weight on each arm. And put that bloody gun away.’
Rudy swung his legs out one at a time, grunting with agony. Simon and Hennie took his arms by the elbows and hoisted him upright. Rudy groaned. He was absorbed in his own pain. Hennie took Rudy’s phone from his pants and slid it into the left breast pocket of Rudy’s shirt.
‘What’s that for?’ said Rudy.
‘You’ll be more comfortable,’ said Hennie. ‘You could do without that gun on your hip, too.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ growled Rudy.
‘Have it your way.’
They led Rudy around the front of the Cruiser, Rudy shuffling. Hennie let go of his arm and walked ahead and grabbed the shovel. Simon took a step backwards.
For a moment Rudy wobbled, unsupported, bent slightly forwards from the waist. Confusion flitted across his features.
Hennie swung the shovel as he turned. He hit Rudy square across the cheekbone. A good clip but not full force. Rudy’s head flapped against his shoulder and he fell to his knees and sat back on his heels, his hands groping his thighs for balance. Hennie tossed the shovel to Simon.
‘Wipe that down.’
Hennie drew Turner’s Glock. He bent over and put the muzzle against the phone in Rudy’s shirt pocket. Then he shot him in the chest.
Rudy swayed on his knees. His shirt was scorched and smoking over the shattered phone. No blood came from the bullet hole but below the pocket the cotton was rapidly saturated. His mouth drooped open as if he was surprised but at the same time knew that he shouldn’t be. He tried to muster a final sneer but fell over sideways, his bloody cheek crunching into the salt. Hennie ejected the magazine, jacked the round from the chamber and dropped the Glock on the ground. He saw Mark Lewis staring at him through the Discovery’s open window.
‘Jessis, Hennie, I didn’t sign up for this.’
‘You mean you only signed up for one murder not two?’
Lewis’s mouth moved but no words came out.
‘You’d better tighten your bollocks, son, before someone cuts them off.’
Hennie went to the Land Cruiser and collected the Benelli. He beckoned Turner. As Turner walked over, Simon took Turner’s knife from his pocket and opened the blade. Hennie pointed with the gun barrel.
‘Kneel.’
Turner knelt. The heat of the salt pan seared through the cloth of his pants. Hennie covered him from the side with the shotgun. Simon cut through the tape binding his arms. Turner flexed his joints and fingers. Simon closed the knife and tossed it on the ground.
‘Take your shirt off,’ said Hennie.
Turner unbuttoned his shirt, arms still encased in tubes of duct tape. With difficulty, he stripped the sleeves off. Simon held out his hand and Turner took his shades from the pocket and gave him the shirt. Simon nodded at the tyre tracks leading away across the salt pan.
‘Are the Discovery’s tracks a problem?’
‘No,’ said Hennie. ‘We’re the ones who’re going to find him. There’ll be tracks and footprints galore. Have we forgotten anything else?’
‘The dash-cam,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll install a blank SD card when we come back. That’s all.’
Simon got in the rear of the Discovery. Hennie backed away, still aiming the shotgun.
‘One question,’ said Turner. ‘How did you know I was in the bookie’s?’
‘Work it out for yourself.’
Turner stood up and put his shades on. The sun on his skin was fierce. Hennie got in beside Lewis, who started the engine and swung the Discovery in a U-turn. Hennie wound the window down and called out.
‘The official advice in these situations is to stay with your car until help arrives.’
He laughed. The Discovery ploughed away through its own tracks.
Turner watched the vehicle warp into a quavering black phantom, levitating motionless in the haze above the salt pan. It disappeared; then it reappeared; then it disappeared for good. Turner went to the boot of the Land Cruiser and put the clean shirt on. It would help to retard sweat loss. He found his hat. He picked up the shovel.
They’d left him to die of thirst but they’d left Rudy Britz with him.
Rudy was sixty per cent water.
26
Margot was in no mood for smiling but she had managed to smile most of her way through lunch with Dirk.
The fake smile was something she’d been forced to master as the company had grown into a powerhouse and she into a part-time politician with it. She had neither sought nor welcomed that role; she had played it solely to become rich and free. She had become only rich. She hadn’t expected the chains that came with it.
Looking back, she had been pitifully ignorant and, worse than ignorant, naive. Hennie had been almost as ill-informed as her, but she thanked God for his cynical view of the world as one big no-holds-barred cage fight. It had saved her many times on the learning curve she had climbed. To become rich by ripping minerals out of the earth was to enter politics at its most squalid. Without politics you couldn’t pick up a shovel. She had been manipulated, cheated, humiliated and betrayed on the curve; but that was the curve and she had learned. She could smile with disarming warmth at people she despised. Somewhere inside she was ashamed to find herself using the same smile on her son, but it was for his own good. It was all for Dirk’s good. Including the anxiety now gnawing at her stomach.
She smiled at Lisebo, the housekeeper, as she brought two espressos out to the terrace and set them on the table. ‘Thank you, Lisebo. Please tell cook that the lunch was excellent.’
The anxiety had risen to the pitch of a panic attack while she’d been in the shower after her tennis with Dirk. She hadn’t had an attack in years. The last had been when the town had seemed about to explode with the influx of immigrants and Rudy Britz was firing birdshot at semi-starving shanty-dwellers more or less every day. The last she remembered previous to that had been the night before her wedding to Willem Le Roux. Three in twenty-odd years seemed reasonable; she was hardly a neurotic.
The attack in the shower had started with a tingling around her lips and the realisation that she was breathing too fast. Then her vision had shrunk to a circle surrounded by blackness and pure fear had overwhelmed her. Her legs had given way and she slipped down against the wall, hugging herself under the spray of hot water. The fear was blind, empty of content or object. She felt as if she were going to die but knew she wouldn’t. An image of Janet Leigh in Psycho popped into her mind and she laughed and in that instant the panic fled as quickly and mysteriously as it had arrived. She stood up unsteadily and hosed herself with cold water for three minutes. She felt fine, or as fine as she could feel while her husband was out kidnapping and murdering a policeman.
She thought Dirk had enjoyed the tennis and the lunch. She wanted his last days here to be good ones. She dreaded him leaving. He had left before, to go to university in Pretoria, and even though she’d known he would be back soon enough, it had broken her heart. This time he was leaving to start a whole new life.
‘What’s wrong, Mother?’ said Dirk. He was flushed with exercise and youth. So handsome. So gentle. So unlike either his father or herself.
‘Nothing’s wrong.’
‘You were off your game today.’
‘You’re sixteen years younger than me, three times as strong and you’re a man. I haven’t beaten you in ten years.’
‘But you usually fight for every point as if your life depended on it. Today you were just letting them go.’
‘I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m sad that you’re leaving. This time it feels like you’re leaving for good. I know it’s wonderful, a new stage in your life, but I’m your mother. I can’t help it.’
‘When I woke up my phone was dead. No coverage. No Wi-Fi.’
She felt hurt that he was ignoring her need for a more intimate conversation, but he was a man, a young man, so she wasn’t surprised he was more interested in banalities. ‘There’s no Wi-Fi to the whole compound today. All I know is that they’re working on it. Ask Simon about your phone.’
‘I did. He gave me a spare and said it’s a problem with the carrier network. He’ll get on to it.’
‘There you are then,’ she said.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit weird? My phone and the Wi-Fi?’
‘We can survive without Wi-Fi for a few hours. Last year, while you were in the city, thieves stole two kilometres of telephone cable from the poles out on the road, for the copper wire. In the middle of the night. The whole town was cut off for a week. That’s why we installed wireless broadband. But it’s machinery. All machinery malfunctions. Try raising a ton of manganese from three hundred metres beneath the desert and you’d know that.’ From Dirk’s point of view it had to be weird – and he was right, she’d taken him off the radar – but his whining got on her nerves. She couldn’t help adding, ‘You can’t change a light bulb, so have some patience. Being cut off from your Twitter feed isn’t going to kill you.’
The ease with which he let these barbs bounce off him gave her pause. Maybe she had thrown too many for too long.
‘So what was going on this morning? When I interrupted you?’ he said.
‘Business.’
‘You looked like you were planning a bank robbery.’
‘Dirk, I’m not in court. Stop cross-examining me.’
Dirk sipped his espresso. ‘I’m sorry I was so rude to you yesterday, when we got back.’
‘It’s forgotten. You weren’t at your best.’
‘That’s no excuse. I regret it because I meant what I tried to say, I just put it badly, very badly. I don’t like the law, I don’t like the people, I don’t like what it does to the people. They play this giant game with thousands of rules whose ultimate value is supposed to be the truth, but almost everything they do is an attempt to either hide the truth or subvert it if they do find it, which they try their best to avoid. No trick is too dishonest or absurd, as long as it fits the rules, and the rules are designed to encourage that. Of course they are, lawyers designed them.’
‘The world is the way it is, dear, not the way we want it to be. It’s called growing up.’
‘That’s an admission of defeat. That’s my point. The partners in Pretoria, my bosses, have won first prize in the lottery of life, at least in theory, but inside they’re defeated. Beneath their tans they’re grey and shrivelled and empty by the time they’re forty. They’re enslaved to a contest where the one who wins is the one who’s best at cheating. Their lives are devoted to lying. Their triumphs are victories for evasion and deceit. You’ve seen them. All those smiles and handshakes, that’s when the guilty go free. The game is so cynical you can’t play it without ending up that way, and that’s not the way I want to be.’
Margot felt uncomfortable. And annoyed. ‘So what are you saying? That you should have been a doctor?’ She realised that a homicide conviction would stop him from pursuing that too. ‘A sheep farmer?’
‘I’d like to give it a couple of years to see if I can find a niche. If not, I want you to take me into the business.’
‘You think you can do what I’ve done without lying and cheating?’
‘So why don’t you sell up?’ said Dirk.
‘And then what? Drink martinis in the Bahamas or whatever the idle rich are supposed to do? Windsurf ? Go shopping? I built this, it’s mine. It may be just a stack of money to you. To me it’s, I don’t know, a dream. My dream.’
‘You don’t trust me to share it.’
‘Of course you share it, everything I have is yours.’
‘Then why did you tell Simon to switch my phone off ? What don’t you want me to know?’
Margot’s phone rang. She grabbed it with gratitude. Hennie. Calling to talk about murder. The gulf between her and Dirk and his naive scruples suddenly seemed infinitely wide. And that made it more important than ever that he know nothing of the mendacity and criminality that circled around him even now as he bleated about lawyers and their timid little games.
‘Excuse me.’ She stood up and walked down to the garden and answered. ‘What news?’
‘All manner of madness,’ said Hennie. ‘The video’s safe, wiped, eradicated. It never left town.’
‘Our friend from the south?’
‘We’ve got end-to-end encryption on these phones, no need for code –’
‘Dirk’s nearby.’
‘OK. Turner’s stranded on the salt pans with nothing to swallow but his own tongue. Rudy Britz is dead.’
Margot almost shouted at him but kept the volume down to a hiss. ‘Two dead police? Jesus, have you gone blood simple?’
‘Don’t lose your grip,’ said Hennie. ‘Don’t go all Lady Macbeth on me – out, out damned candle and whatnot. It doesn’t suit you. If it all goes tits-up you’re shielded, but it won’t. This is perfect, it’s foolproof.’
His attempts to reassure her seemed only to confirm that she’d lost control of events. ‘Come home.’
‘First I need to get Mokoena on the job – he’s got bodies to shift. And we need our other new friend from the south to come up here tonight. It’ll all be wrapped up by tomorrow.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Well, I’ll take the Skyhawk up and spot Turner. Official search, so to speak. Maximum effort by the community.’
‘What if you don’t find him?’ said Margot.
‘Where’s he’s going to go? He’s like a beetle on a tablecloth. No human being could walk out of there without water, not even a Bushman. You walk, you sweat, even at night. It’s biology, it’s mathematics. If he sits tight he might last two days. If he walks, at best he’ll be babbling on his knees by breakfast. A little hand-to-mouth suffocation and it’s over. All our ducks will be lined up for Venter and Mokoena. A few rubber stamps and it’s done.’
‘You need to get back here now. I want more details.’
‘I was going to find Mokoena,’ said Hennie. ‘He’ll be hiding at home.’
‘No, I want to be in on that. I’ll call Venter.’
‘I’m on my way. Half an hour.’
Margot rang off and returned to Dirk at the table.
‘What’s Hennie up to?’ said Dirk.
‘Nothing that concerns you.’
Dirk stood up. ‘I’m going for a drive. Get the smell of horseshit out of my nostrils.’
Margot stood to face him. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’
‘Then don’t lie and avoid my questions.’
‘I don’t need to tell you my business. You don’t tell me yours.’
‘I don’t have to, you already know it. This place is like a five-star prison. Guards, walls, cameras, electric fences.’
‘How dare you. Only someone who has never lived in fear would say that.’
He knew what she meant. He’d only been a boy and he hadn’t seen the corpses of his relatives, but he remembered.
‘I’m sorry. I just need to get out for a while. I’m going to see Jason.’
‘Jason’s
dead. His place doesn’t have a wall.’
The colour drained from Dirk’s face.
‘Jason’s dead?’
Margot immediately regretted the outburst. ‘I apologise. I didn’t mean to tell you like that.’
‘Did you mean to tell me at all?’
‘Dirk, I know you were close. I was trying to protect your feelings.’
‘How did it happen? When?’
‘This morning. We don’t have all the details yet.’
‘What details do you have?’
‘He was shot.’ Margot floundered under his look. She remembered the four cowboys Rudy had hired. ‘It’s possible it was another farm attack. But we just don’t know. In any event, there’s nothing you can do. The police are investigating. I want you stay on the property until we know it’s safe.’
‘Until Winston decides what story best suits him.’ Dirk didn’t hide his contempt.
‘You’re too fond of that high horse, Dirk. When you fall off, it’s going to hurt.’
She had a sudden urge to tell him everything. That half a dozen people were dead because he was vain and pampered and too weak to hold his liquor like a man. That he was blind to the price that she and others had paid to secure him in his ivory tower. She resisted.
‘Winston Mokoena was one of the best detectives in this country – your country – which he has served with courage and honour through its darkest days. He has nothing to prove to me. And nothing to prove to a privileged white boy like you.’
Dirk’s lips tightened. For a moment he looked far too much like his father.
‘I don’t want to talk about this any more,’ she said. ‘Just stay here, in “the prison”. At least it is five-star. God forbid that the great Dirk Le Roux should put up with anything less.’
She saw him flinch and crumble. She had beaten him down, as she had so many times before. She was still angry enough not to regret it – yet. He was a disappointment to her. She couldn’t hide it from herself, though she spent great energy in denying it. But that was why she couldn’t have him follow her into the business like a little duckling, why she had pushed him into the law. He had wanted to study the history of art, for God’s sake – what, so he would know which paintings to spend her money on? She needed him to be someone she could be proud of. Someone to worship. As a boy she had worshipped him but as a man her emotions just would not blind her that much. She missed having someone to worship. She wanted that back.