by Julia North
‘If there is proper evidence then of course it will be.’ Inspector Govender shuts my cardboard file with an angry jerk and shoves back his chair.
Elsa’s eyes harden. ‘I’ll be sure to tell Thabo how helpful you’ve been.’
They lock eyes like warring buffalos before Elsa turns to Nat and motions for them to leave.
Inspector Govender stands up and shuffles through the pile of brown files on his desk.
‘Well, are you going to ask for Karlos’ medical records from Shaloma?’
Inspector Govender looks at Elsa with half-closed eyes, like a hooded cobra. ‘I will send a detective as soon as I can. Now, I’m sorry, I’m very busy.’
Nat and Elsa fling him a dirty look and slam the door behind them. Their heels clop loudly on the hardwood floor.
‘What a useless arsehole,’ says Elsa as soon as they step out into the humid Durban air. ‘No wonder the country’s descending into criminal chaos. He doesn’t give a damn.’
Nat nods. ‘If that’s how he acts when he owes a favour, I’d hate to see what he’s like when he doesn’t.’
‘Fucking idiot. I’ll speak to Thabo about him.’
Elsa yanks open her car door. She gets in and waits for Nat to sit in the passenger seat. ‘Maybe we should just employ a private detective and get this bastard ourselves? The police aren’t going to make it a priority, not unless we can provide proof that it’s murder.’
Nat bites her bottom lip and nods. ‘Perhaps we should.’
Elsa stiffens her face in resolve and swings the engine into life. She squeals away and I watch the red blur of her BMW disappear among the darting, hooting cars with a mix of irritation and despair. Maybe getting a private detective will be the best move. At least he’ll be objective. You can’t solve a murder if you start off with a bias.
Chapter 33
I stand stiff in the counselling room at Shaloma and watch Dr Brink and Helen sift through a pile of papers. The seats are arranged in a circle with the television in front. Outwardly, nothing’s changed. Life goes on without me and I guess the longer it carries on, the less I’ll be missed or remembered.
Nic enters, his face tight and drawn. I look in surprise at his loose Wrangler jeans and pale arms. He really doesn’t look well, nothing like the good-looking, tanned surfer boy I first encountered.
Helen gives him a welcoming smile. ‘Good to see you, Nic. How are you doing?’
‘I’m here.’ Nic shrugs his shoulders and sits down. His whole body looks like it’s shrunk.
George enters, staying in the doorway, pale with his pock marks even more pronounced. His lizard eyes dart from Nic to Helen to Dr Brink and back to Nic. I see him swallow and clench his fists by his side while his chest rises and falls in short, shallow pants. I wonder what’s going through his mind. Looking at him now it’s fairly obvious that he’s got some type of mental illness. Both he and Nic look worse than I remember. Were they always like this, or was it only because I was down there with them in the pit of addiction that they didn’t look so bad?
Dr Brink looks at the clock. ‘I’ve tried to contact Hattie and Wolf to no avail I’m afraid, nor Karlos. We’ll give them a few minutes and if not we’ll have to start without them. Alison’s not well tonight and nor is Mike, so they won’t be joining us.’
My heart drops at the sound of Karlos’ name. I so want him to be here but at the same time I can understand that maybe coming here is too painful. The desire to see him again swamps me. His bearded face fills my mind. We could have had such a good life together. Why is life so horribly unfair!
‘Can I give anyone some tea … water?’
Nic shakes his head at Helen while George stares forward and says nothing. My eyes burn into him. He shifts uncomfortably on his chair as if he senses my hate. There’s something just so off about him, but why would he have something against me? I look back to Nic. He’s sits with his head held in his hands and his shoulders hunched. Did he do it? Is that why he looks in such a bad way? Is he consumed and eaten with guilt at his crime? Nic has got to be on the list. I wasn’t imagining his stalking – Nic could easily be a murderer.
‘How has the week been, George?’
George is sitting on the edge of his chair, hands clasped together and his chest still rising in fast pants. He shakes his head and murmurs, ‘Not, good. They’re trying to say O.J. murdered his wife.’
‘Yes, I saw it on the news. It’s tragic.’
George nods and swallows. His hands twist and turn as he mumbles, ‘It was her fault.’
Dr Brink narrows his eyes at George. ‘Did you have a drink?’ His voice is calm and empty of accusation.
George shakes his head. ‘Nearly … someone was trying to force me … I think it might be them.’
‘Oh.’ Dr Brink and Helen exchange a glance.
‘They’re in America George, not here.’
George stares ahead without responding.
Dr Brink looks at George for a few minutes before speaking. ‘I think it might be best if you stayed with us for a few days. I want to refer you to another doctor who I think can help you. Can you do that?’
George’s head jerks up. He looks at Dr Brink with his gecko tongue half out before giving a short nod. Nic is looking sideways at George with his mouth slightly open. He looks at Helen and raises his eyebrows in question. He’s obviously in the dark about George’s condition. Why the hell was a patient with psychosis allowed in with us? George shouldn’t have been there even if he was on medication.
Helen gives a small smile and asks in a quiet voice, ‘How have you been, Nic?’
Nic shrugs. ‘Been a hard week, but I’ve held out.’
‘Well done. The longer you do that, the easier it will be,’ says Helen.
George jerks and begins hitting out madly at the air around him. ‘Leave me alone … don’t sit near me. I know you’re trying to hurt me. Bitch … bitch! You always want to hurt me …’ He jumps up, his face contorted and thrashes his skinny arms around like a flailing fish trying to escape the fisherman’s net. His eyes are narrow and glazed, filled with a dangerous cocktail of madness and fear. He’s definitely seeing someone. Is it me? I move back towards the door. There’s something so dark about him. His eyes remain transfixed on the space in front as he continues to hit out and scream. It can’t be me he’s seeing.
Dr Brink grabs one of George’s flailing arms and tries to catch the other one as he flings it around in front of him. ‘No…. don’t touch me, you bitch. Don’t touch me!’ George screams. ‘I can’t do this any more … leave me … leave me.’
George tries to yank his arm from Dr Brink’s grip. Saliva dribbles from the sides of his mouth and his whole body shakes. Dr Brink manages to grab the rebel arm and I see the flesh on it turn white as he closes his grip around it. He holds both the arms together in front of George, before raising his knee with one sharp movement to George’s underbelly. George’s legs buckle under him and Dr Brink draws him forward towards the floor.
‘Help hold him down, Nic. Quick.’
Nic jumps up to help Dr Brink wrestle the squirming body of George onto its side. George goes rigid and I see his back arch. He twists sideways and pushes back his head while letting out an gut-wrenching scream and sending forth a torrent of flying saliva. Dr Brink and Nic draw back with wrinkled noses. Helen, syringe in hand, kneels next to the struggling George while Dr Brink holds his upper arm still so she can plunge the needle into the thin flesh. George continues to writhe and twist for a few seconds more before his mouth goes slack and his eyes roll inward, showing only the whites. He lies like that for a few more seconds before his lids close.
Helen takes a tissue and wipes away the streams of salvia which have dribbled down his chin. The writhing shudders to a stop. Nic lets go of the flaccid arm and sits back on the carpet looking like a shell-shocked soldier. His hands tremble and his chest moves up and down in fast pants. Hardly a session to help keep you off the booze. Poor Nic, I wouldn’t bla
me him if he didn’t bother coming back.
‘Phone the Psychiatric Ward at Fort Napier, Helen. They’ll have to take him in. He must be off his Trithapon.’
My eyes rest on the now prone form of George. Why the hell is he off his meds? They know he’s got serious psychiatric problems, so why is he even back here? I look at his inert body. The gecko tongue is limp and lolling out from the side of his mouth. It’s quite possible he’s my killer. A psychotic is capable of anything given their condition. I think back to the first time I met him. He’d done a double take when he first saw me. Maybe I reminded him of some woman in his past, someone he obviously hated?
I frown back into the time before my sudden fit. I’d seen Nic, but I can’t remember ever seeing George. Nonetheless, just because I didn’t see him doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been there. He’s the last person I would’ve thought of, so why would I even notice him if he was somewhere in a crowd? Killers often look ordinary, just like that Boston Strangler or Yorkshire ripper bastard, Peter Sutcliffe. Time and time again they’re revealed as little grey men with huge issues in their blackened souls. George is as grey as they come. He could quite easily be a killer for whatever dark reasons he carries in his sick head.
Chapter 34
Thabo clicks open his briefcase and takes out an envelope. ‘I’m sorry Mannie wasn’t helpful, but he’s passed me copies of Lissa’s medical records from Shaloma as well as those of Karlos.’
He hands the sealed envelope to Elsa. ‘Hopefully this’ll be better than the one from King Edwards,’ she says.
Nat sits straight and tense as Elsa expertly slices open the brown envelope. The room is thick with tension. Elsa takes out some stapled sheets of white paper. They crackle through the silence as she pages through them. Finally, she places the pages on the table. ‘Nothing. Karlos was admitted to Greytown Hospital for alcohol dependence, but no medication’s listed.’
Thabo looks intently at Elsa. ‘You think he could’ve given her some medication?’
‘It’s possible she was poisoned in my opinion. I’ve spoken to some doctors and they feel it’s unlikely to be just alcohol to cause that degree of fitting. My instinct is that if Karlos wanted to kill her, he gave her some drug and then mixed it with the alcohol. The question is, how?’
‘And what drug,’ says Nat.
Elsa pulls down her mouth. ‘Nothing he was prescribed, unfortunately.’
Nat raises her eyebrows and then shrugs. ‘Still doesn’t mean he didn’t do it that way. He could’ve got something from another doctor.’
‘Yebo,’ says Thabo, ‘That’s possible.’
I watch with frustration and exasperation at my sisters’ attempts to play detective. I need to get them to look at the others and not fixate on Karlos. Elsa slits open the second envelope. She scans through another wad of white papers until her eyes become frozen on the second page.
Thabo frowns and lean in towards her. ‘What’s wrong?’
Elsa stares at the paper. ‘Liss was on a daily dose of a drug called Trithapon. Why didn’t Shaloma or the hospital tell us?’
Did she really say Trithapon? Why would Trithapon be on my record? They must be looking at George’s file not mine. My head begins to spin. Am I psychotic and just can’t remember? My eyes blur. I strain to hear Nat and Elsa, begging them silently to confirm I’m not psychotic.
Nat takes my records from Elsa. ‘That’s a drug prescribed for psychosis. Dave’s cousin takes it.’ She looks up at Elsa with wide eyes. ‘Was Liss psychotic?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Nat. We would’ve known if she was.’
Nat remains po-faced with doubt clouding her eyes. I stiffen as she turns to Elsa. ‘Phone Dr Rogers and ask him. Perhaps she just hid it from us.’
Elsa scrapes her chair back on the white tiles. Thabo and Nat sit in silence, intent as listening lions, as Elsa demands to speak to Dr Rogers. She scribbles down notes as the doctor’s muffled voice ripples out from the phone into the silent room. She thanks him and turns to their waiting faces. ‘Nothing on her record about Trithapon. He’s as surprised as we are. He says he hadn’t even seen Liss for at least two months prior to her admission to rehab and even then it was just for a throat infection. If Shaloma had prescribed anything or thought there was any sign of mental illness like psychosis, they would have notified him.’
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Nat puts her face into her hands and shakes her head. ‘If Lissa wasn’t psychotic, what the hell’s an anti-psychotic drug doing on her record?’
The hurt of Nat’s doubt still lingers in my gut, but did Dr Brink put it on by mistake? Or was he giving it to me without my knowledge? I think back to our sessions. He gave me a glass of water to drink on several occasions. It could well have had something in and I wouldn’t have even noticed. Does it have a strong flavour? Probably not. I shake my head. Did George put it there? Did he want to hurt me for some reason, or was he just trying to get out of taking it himself? He’s psychotic, after all. It’s quite possible he could’ve imagined Dr Brink was trying to kill him and so he passed it on to the first file he could find. My mind paces back through the surnames. Alphabetically our names would’ve been close together, but was it Trithapon that caused my fitting, or was it something else?
Thabo’s face is creased in a frown. He rubs his fingers across his forehead. ‘I’ll speak again to Mannie. Her death is not as cut and dried as he thinks. He’ll need to speak to the doctor at the Shaloma as well as the hospital. I’ll do what I can to help.’ He pauses and then looks intently at Nat and Elsa. ‘You would not be sensing Lissa’s spirit if there wasn’t something wrong, and the Sangoma would not have said she needs a donation. We need to get to the bottom of it. Your father would expect nothing less from me.’
‘Thank you, Thabo. We appreciate it,’ says Nat, her face a mix of sadness and confusion.
‘We’re going to employ a private detective to look into Karlos’ background. I bet he gave her something, maybe this Trithapon, I don’t know, but I do know that somehow we’ll nail the bastard. I promise you that,’ says Elsa.
Chapter 35
A thin man resembling a ferret and dressed in a crumpled beige linen suit sits opposite Nat and Elsa. He clicks open his briefcase and takes out a brown file. What is it with all the boring brown? He sucks in his cheeks and surveys a tense Nat and Elsa. ‘I’m still trying to gather information on Mr Karlos Beukes. There are records of a Greytown farmer by that name but I want to find out a bit more about him.’
He flicks open the file with thin fingers and long, yellowed nails. ‘These are copies of the records of the other patients admitted to Shaloma at the same time as your sister. I’ve found an interesting one.’
He pushes across a paper with yellow highlighter slashed midway across the page like a rising sun. Nat and Elsa lean in together and stare wide-eyed at the paper.
‘Whose record is this?’
‘George Mannering. He was admitted two days before your sister. He’s a diagnosed psychotic. He’s on that drug you asked me to look for.’
Elsa snatches the file out of Ferret-man’s hands and flicks stiffly through it, her eyes scanning fiercely down each page. ‘What the fuck was he doing there?’ she demands, her face screwed up in anger. ‘He should have been in a psychiatric ward not a rehab?’
‘Do you think he gave Lissa something? If he’s psychotic he could do anything.’ Nat looks up at Ferret-man.
‘Could be,’ he says, pulling down the corners his mouth.
Elsa shrugs and slams down the file. ‘I don’t know. Why would he? We’ve never even heard Liss mention him.’
‘I don’t know either, but I really think we need to look into him more; maybe it’s him and not Karlos,’ says Nat.
Elsa pulls a face. ‘No, I want Mr Fletcher to focus on Karlos.’
Nat lets out a sigh and raises her eyes briefly to the ceiling, while Ferret-man’s eyes scan from Elsa to Nat and back to Elsa. ‘I don’t think we must ignore the listi
ng of the same drug, especially since Mannering’s psychotic, but are you sure your sister wasn’t prescribed it?’ He stops and leans back in his chair, putting his fingers together in a steeple position. ‘Maybe she had this hidden condition and you didn’t know about it?’
Elsa leans across the desk and slaps the top of the file so hard that the desk vibrates. ‘I think we’d know if there was a history of psychosis with her,’ she says through clenched teeth. ‘She was an alcoholic, nothing else. Her death is suspicious. Let me spell out the facts: her GP says she has never been psychotic so the Trithapon on her record at Shaloma is suspicious; King Edward hospital’s record shows no post-mortem so we don’t know what caused the sudden heart failure. And this happens right before she was about to be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital because she was making such good progress? Yet, she suddenly died. If there wasn’t a strong case for looking into her death, and the police weren’t so fucking useless I wouldn’t be employing you.’ Elsa’s voice has risen manically with each phrase and now she’s shrieking and spitting at Ferret-man.
He leans back into his chair and pulls his head down into his neck like a tortoise. He wafts a wiry hand up and down in front of Elsa as if calming a child. For a second I think she’s going to slap it, but she gives an angry shake of her head and sits back in her chair and begins chewing hard on a strand of blonde hair.
‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I had to ask. Personally I don’t see anything of alarm in Beukes at the moment, but I’ll keep looking.’
Elsa leans back in her chair, her chest still heaving with emotion. Nat looks pale, probably as shocked as I am at Elsa’s uncharacteristic loss of control. Poor Elsa; this is really getting to her and it’s all my fault. Nat places her hand over Elsa’s clenched fist and gives it a squeeze. Elsa reddens slightly and gives a slight smile. She stiffens her shoulders and moves back into the chair.