Deadly Harvest: A Detective Kubu Mystery

by Michael Stanley

  “I have to stop them,” he said. “I don’t have much time left anyway.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  BY THURSDAY WITNESS WAS conscious and out of danger, so Kubu drove to Jwaneng to interview him. He hoped that Witness would confess and offer the missing motive for Bill Marumo’s murder. Then they could put this case behind them.

  The receptionist called the doctor who had been keeping the police up to date. When he arrived, he looked harried and busy.

  “Dr. Baku, I’m Assistant Superintendent Bengu from the CID. I spoke to you on the phone about Witness Maleng. I need to interview him as soon as possible about a very serious case.”

  “Oh, dumela, Assistant Superintendent. You want to see Maleng? He’s conscious now, but very confused. Half the time he doesn’t know where he is, and he has no recollection of the accident at all.”

  “Will he get back to normal?”

  The doctor hesitated. “It depends what you mean by normal. Will he be able to function properly physically? I think there’s a good chance, despite the severity of the head wounds. Will he recall what happened to him? Remember all his past? I’m doubtful.”

  “You mean he has amnesia?”

  “He needs psychiatric help. We’ve just been trying to keep the physical stuff going so far.”

  “May I talk to him?”

  “I don’t see why not, but I doubt you’ll get much sense out of him at the moment. Now I must get on with my patients. Good luck.” He nodded and hurried off.

  KUBU FOUND HIS WAY to the intensive care unit. A police constable sat at the door with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Kubu thought he might be asleep, but he glanced up as Kubu approached and jumped to his feet, blocking the door. Kubu showed him identification, and he immediately became respectful and apologized. Kubu smiled, told him he’d done exactly the right thing, and then went in. He greeted the duty nurse, and she pointed out Witness Maleng.

  Witness was lying in bed connected to the paraphernalia of intensive care, drips running to his arms, cables running to monitors, screens blinking and chirping. He was awake, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, apparently lost in his thoughts. There was nowhere to sit, so Kubu dispossessed the constable of his chair and pulled it into the room.

  “Rra Maleng, I am Assistant Superintendent Bengu of the Botswana CID. I would like to ask you some questions. I warn you that you are a suspect in a serious crime and that anything you say will be noted and may be used as evidence.”

  Witness looked around and frowned. “You’re from the police?” He tried to sit up, but the connections stopped him. “Have you found Tombi? Is that why you’re here?” The heart monitor raced, but then he shook his head and relaxed and things returned to normal. “No, no . . . I’m sorry. What is it that you want?”

  “I want to ask you some questions about the murder of Bill Marumo.”

  “Marumo is dead?” Witness’s face was a mask of surprise. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry. He was not a good man. He was an evil man.”

  Kubu was rather nonplussed by this reaction. “Rra Maleng, I think you know very well that Rra Marumo is dead. I think you know, because you killed him!”

  Witness appeared to think about this but then shook his head. “No,” he said calmly. “I only saw him once. He was with Tombi in the park by the school. It was quite wrong for him to be alone with such a young girl. I told him off, and he ran away. Then I drove home with Tombi.”

  Kubu was interested at once.

  “How long was this before your daughter disappeared?”

  “Disappeared? What do you mean? She’s at home. She’ll be here to visit me soon.”

  Kubu sighed. “What day did you see Marumo with your daughter?”

  “It was about three weeks ago. Saturday. I was at the school looking for someone . . .” He seemed to lose the train of his thoughts, and the sentence petered out.

  “Rra Maleng, where were you on the evening of the twenty-eighth of April? Last Saturday night?”

  “Last Saturday?” Witness thought hard. “Why?”

  “Please just answer the question.”

  “I was at home. Tombi wasn’t there. Maybe she was staying over with a friend. So I stayed at home, had some supper. Maybe I had a beer. I don’t like to drink in front of my daughter.”

  “Where was your car?”

  “In front of my house. Where else would it be?”

  Kubu hesitated. All his instincts told him this man was telling the truth, but the truth as he believed it to be. Everything else seemed to have been wiped away.

  “I think you are having trouble remembering things. Do you remember that Tombi went missing three weeks ago? She did. You phoned lots of people. You went to the police, the church, all the neighbors. Do you remember?”

  Witness frowned and was silent for almost a minute. “I remember we were looking for someone. I helped. Then I went home with Tombi.”

  Kubu tried a more circuitous tack.

  “Rra Maleng, did you have a briefcase when you drove here? Perhaps you found it somewhere? Or someone gave it to you? I’m very keen to take a look at it. May I do that?”

  Witness looked at him blankly. He seemed to have absolutely no idea what the detective was talking about.

  “A briefcase? Where would I get a briefcase? I’m not a rich man who carries around a briefcase. What would I do with it? If I need to carry something, I put it in a cardboard box.” He shook his head.

  A young nurse bustled in with a cup of soup and sat on the corner of Witness’s bed.

  “Here, Rra Maleng, drink this. You’ll feel better.” She shared her smile between Kubu and Witness.

  “Ah, Tombi! You look after me so nicely.” Witness took a sip. “This man is from the police. He tells me Rra Marumo is dead.” He shook his head. “I’m not surprised. A man like that. But we must pray for his soul.” He concentrated on the soup while the nurse helped him.

  “Is your name Tombi?” Kubu asked her.

  She shook her head, pointed at her name badge, and gave the charming smile again.

  “Aaii, he calls all the young nurses that! Tombi is his daughter, but she never comes to see him. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s far away. But there’s no harm in it, and it makes him happy.”

  “Does he have a wife?”

  “He says she left him long ago, but that it doesn’t matter because he has Tombi.”

  Witness finished the soup and coughed a little. The nurse squeezed his shoulder, smiled again, and returned to her station.

  Witness turned back to Kubu. “Was that all, Rra Bengu?”

  Kubu decided to try shock tactics. “No, Rra Maleng, that is definitely not all. You know very well that your daughter, Tombi, was abducted and murdered. You decided that the culprit was Marumo. You drove to his house on Saturday night and stabbed him to death. We are quite sure of this. Your car was seen nearby. Then you went home, cleaned up, and fled. We found human blood in your house and lots of other clues. And you tried to run a roadblock. You must stop this nonsense now and tell the truth.”

  For a moment Witness’s face expressed surprise and shock, and Kubu thought he had broken through. But suddenly Witness laughed with delight and pointed at the ceiling. Patterns spread out around the neon light. Witness tried to follow the shapes with his hands, and knocked over his water glass, which rolled to the floor with a clatter. Witness laughed again.

  The nurse hurried over and retrieved it. “I think he’d better rest now,” she told Kubu. He wanted to argue but gave up. There was no point in continuing until Witness regained his senses, and interviewing him now might do more harm than good. He climbed to his feet.

  Witness ignored him but said to the nurse, “Now, Tombi, you mustn’t neglect your schoolwork. It’s very important. I’ll be fine. I can look after myself.” Then he smiled and closed his eyes.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  AS SOON AS KUBU returned from Jwaneng, Mabaku summoned him, Samantha, and Zanele to his office. M
abaku sat at his desk with his hands behind his head, seemingly relaxed, but the stiffness of his body indicated tension.

  “Okay, Kubu. What have you got?”

  Kubu drained the tea he’d grabbed on the way. “Well, in a nutshell, Witness Maleng is insane, at least for the moment. He denies killing Marumo but says that Marumo was with his daughter, Tombi, on April the fourteenth, and he was upset about it. He says he chased Marumo away. But that’s all nonsense. Samantha checked. Marumo was in Lobatse that day addressing a meeting. There’s no way he could have been in the area where Witness Maleng said he saw him. He’s obviously making it up. He’s confused about his daughter as well. He thinks she’s still alive and comes to visit him. He calls every young nurse in the ward Tombi and treats each as though they’re his daughter.”

  Mabaku frowned. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “No confession?”

  Kubu shook his head. “He expressed surprise that Marumo had been murdered but seemed to think he deserved it.”

  “Do you think this madness is genuine, or is he just pretending?”

  Kubu thought for a moment before he answered. “If he was acting, he’s better at it than most actors. He missed his calling if he was faking it.”

  Mabaku turned to Zanele. “What have you come up with on the forensics side?”

  “Director, I think we’ll have him on the forensic evidence.” She counted off on her fingers. “One, the blood in his house is probably Marumo’s. It’s the same type. We’re waiting for the DNA tests to confirm it. Maleng’s blood type is different. I got it from the hospital. Kubu also brought back all his clothes, and we’ll check those for blood later today. Two, some of the hairs we found on Marumo’s clothes match ones we found at Maleng’s house. We’ll confirm that they are Maleng’s. And three, his foot size matches the prints we found in the driveway. Now we have his shoes and boots, we’ll test those too for soil and blood.”

  Kubu nodded. “Add to that the circumstantial evidence. From what he told his friends and Big Mama at the shebeen, he hated Marumo. He tried to attack him at a public meeting. Then a blue Volkswagen Golf was seen near the murder scene, and Maleng owns a blue Golf. Finally, for no obvious reason, two days after the murder he abandons his house, he moves to Jwaneng, and he runs a roadblock—nearly knocking over an officer—before racing at a mad speed into a cow.”

  “Well, we’ll get him with the forensic evidence,” Mabaku said. “Zanele, we need to exploit that and make it absolutely iron-clad.”

  Kubu looked pensive. “But—” he began, but Mabaku cut in.

  “We’ll charge Maleng with the murder but, from the sounds of it, he isn’t fit to stand trial. It may be months before the psychiatric reports are in. And our problem is motive. If we can’t show a clear motive, Freedom Party troublemakers will say it’s all a setup. Find a madman with a grudge against politicians, fake some forensic evidence, and pin the murder on him. Or, worse, a government agent exploited him and egged him on, telling him where Marumo lived, telling him he had muti made from the daughter.” Mabaku shook his head. “And he did have muti. We mustn’t forget that.”

  Kubu sighed. “They’ll say government agents planted it. To discredit him and to persuade Maleng to commit the crime.”

  “It doesn’t add up—” Samantha began, but Mabaku interrupted again. “No, of course it doesn’t add up. They didn’t need to actually plant the muti if they told Maleng that Marumo had it. But that’s how conspiracy theories work.”

  “How would they get to him? Why would he believe them?” Samantha asked. Then she had another thought. “Oh, no, they could be working through that awful witch doctor he consulted, that Gondo woman.” She looked shocked.

  “I think Gondo just made the sort of general statement that can be interpreted in different ways, and Maleng twisted it to mean what he wanted it to mean,” Kubu said.

  Mabaku looked as though he had just tasted something extremely disagreeable. Why was life always so complicated? He needed a nice clean solution to the murder to get the press off his back, calm down the antigovernment hotheads, and make the commissioner happy. Right now, it was very important for him to make the commissioner happy, if he wanted to be the next deputy commissioner.

  Kubu shifted in his seat. “Let’s take a step back and think this through. None of us have doubts as to whether Maleng murdered Marumo. The problem we have is to find out why. If he was persuaded by someone else, we have to find who that was even if he was working for the government or the BDP. That would be our worst case from a political point of view. The country would erupt in turmoil. Personally, I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, but we can’t dismiss it.” He paused. “The only other possibility is that he did it of his own accord and, as the director says, that could provide the Freedom Party or someone else an opportunity to exploit the situation for their own gain. So how do we prevent that?”

  The others waited and let Kubu think.

  “The answer is the muti.”

  “Marumo’s muti?” Samantha asked with astonishment.

  “Yes, Marumo’s muti. It’s the only way to prevent the situation being exploited. We can’t do that by just announcing that we found muti in his desk. We’ll be accused of planting it—that it’s also part of the conspiracy. We’ll have to follow the trail of Marumo’s muti. Find out who was the unfortunate person who died to make it. Find out who Marumo got it from and bring that person to trial. And have that person tell the court and the people of Botswana that Marumo ordered it, paid for it, and used it. That’s the only way to keep the conspiracy theory people quiet.”

  For a few moments nobody said a word. They all looked at Mabaku.

  “You’re right,” he said finally. “If we can’t find a clear motive for Maleng’s actions, we’ll have to show that Marumo wasn’t as clean as he presented himself. He may, in fact, have been an accessory to a muti murder. That will stop the Freedom Party critics in their tracks.” He paused. “Let’s do it. We’ve got to wrap up the Maleng case properly, but let’s see if we can trace this muti back to the witch doctor who made it.”

  He turned to Samantha. “Samantha, we may well be able to tie the murders you are looking into with Marumo’s muti even if neither of the missing girls was used for this muti. It’s not unlikely that the same witch doctor is involved in all of them. This is no longer a cold case. It’s scorching hot. I’m putting Kubu in charge of it. We need his experience.”

  “But—”

  “This has nothing to do with you or your competence, Samantha. You’ll work closely with Kubu—he’ll need lots of help. Understood?”

  Samantha didn’t look enthusiastic, but nodded her assent.

  “Okay. Now tell me what we’ve got on these missing-girl cases.”

  Kubu and Samantha filled Mabaku in on the backgrounds of the two girls and what little they had discovered about their abductions—Lesego in Mochudi and Tombi in Gaborone.

  “We think the girls knew the person who abducted them,” Kubu said. “But that may not have been the witch doctor. In each case—according to the people who caught glimpses of the cars—it was very quick, which suggests that the girl got in willingly.”

  “Why don’t you think the witch doctor would do it himself?” Mabaku asked.

  “I think it’s too risky. If someone else is caught, there may be no ties to the witch doctor, and if there are ties, the witch doctor would put a spell on the abductor, which would effectively shut him up.” Samantha shook her head in disgust.

  “Also it seems unlikely that the abductor used his own car, so Samantha’s been trying to come up with other possibilities,” Kubu added.

  “I checked the files of stolen cars but nothing seemed to match,” Samantha said. “I decided to take a look at rental cars, too, so I spoke to all the rental companies in the area. That was over a week ago. They’ve all promised me lists of cars rented on the days of the abductions and the day before with the names of who rented them. I’ll push them again to get t
hem.”

  “Tell them if we don’t have them by Monday morning, I’ll find all sorts of reasons to make life difficult!” Mabaku was getting impatient. “And how do we link all this to Marumo in any case?”

  “Zanele has confirmed that the DNA found in Marumo’s muti is not from Tombi,” Kubu said. “She’s going to Mochudi tomorrow to get some DNA from Lesego’s sister to check whether it’s from Lesego.”

  “And if it is?” Mabaku asked.

  “If it is, we at least have some sort of timeline for when Marumo got it. We can then go back through his records to see if there’s a suspicious payment or a strange meeting. We’ll push hard on his girlfriend to see if she can remember anything. If it’s not from Lesego, we’re no worse off than we are now.”

  Mabaku thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “And no bodies have turned up?”

  Kubu shook his head. “No, and that’s very odd. Usually they’re buried in shallow graves or just dumped once the witch doctors have the parts they want. But there’s been nothing.”

  Mabaku frowned. “Well, what clues do you have to the witch doctor himself?”

  “When we interviewed the Gondo woman, she denied any involvement but said there was a witch doctor in town who deals with body parts. She refused to identify him because she said she was scared. But she did say it was a male. That may help a little.”

  There was a pause. “That’s all you’ve got at the moment?” Mabaku asked.

  Kubu and Samantha nodded.

  Mabaku frowned. “Not much to go on! Still we’ve got something.”

  He sighed and turned to Zanele. “Zanele, please wrap up the forensics as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I must inform the commissioner, and I’ll call a press conference for five o’clock to announce we have Marumo’s killer.”

  He waved at his three subordinates, dismissing them.

  As they walked out, Mabaku said under his breath, “Let’s pray this doesn’t stir up a nest of puff adders.”