The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  ‘You can’t force me to go back and you can’t arrest me here,’ De Villiers said when Henderson and Kupenga had turned their focus back to him. The thought crossed his mind that it was unnecessary to be difficult. He was going back to New Zealand anyway.

  ‘We can have you extradited,’ Kupenga argued. ‘You’re no longer welcome here and your visa expires at the end of the month.’

  ‘Where were you on December 17 when the attempt was made to murder the Prime Minister?’ Henderson asked.

  ‘I was at work. You should know. That’s the day you suspended me.’

  ‘You were there at 11:00. The incident at the PM’s house was at 9:15. Where were you then? No one saw you until much later. The techs from IT looked at your computer. You logged on for the first time at 10:45. So where were you earlier in the day?’

  De Villiers tried to remember. He had left all his files at the office and all his cases had been taken over by other detectives. He was unable to give any answer other than, ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘We’re going to have to extradite you,’ Henderson affirmed.

  De Villiers looked from one to the other and decided that there was nothing to gain by playing games. ‘You needn’t bother. I’ll be back in Auckland in a week.’

  ‘How do we know you’re not lying?’

  ‘Wait here,’ De Villiers said, and went to his room.

  ‘Here,’ he said when he returned. ‘That’s my e-ticket. I’ll be on Qantas and the plane lands in Auckland at 22:15.’

  Henderson took the ticket and studied it. He reached into his pocket for a pen and made a show of writing the details down in his pocket book.

  Kupenga filled the silence. ‘What have you been doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been receiving medical treatment.’

  Henderson stopped writing and looked up. De Villiers could see that he had caught them by surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ he rubbed it in. ‘I’ve been receiving medical treatment for the last seven weeks. But there’s one week to go and then I’ll be on the plane.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Kupenga said, but De Villiers could see that Henderson had been persuaded.

  De Villiers tired of the skirmishing. ‘Ask Mrs Weber, if you don’t believe me. Or better still, why don’t you come with me tomorrow morning and see for yourself.’ He kept his eye on Henderson, but Henderson avoided looking at him.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ De Villiers said. ‘My next treatment is at nine fifteen tomorrow.’

  He reached across the coffee table and took Henderson’s pocket book from his hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll write the address down for you with directions. I assume Superintendent Meyer will be able to find the place.’

  They watched as he scribbled in the pocket book. He placed the pocket book on the coffee table next to !Xau’s arrow. ‘Go there tomorrow morning and speak to anyone from the receptionist in the front to the oncologist upstairs. Ask them to show you their appointment book and their records and anything else your suspicions direct you to.’ He paused before he spoke again. ‘And then leave me the hell alone.’

  Henderson placed his pocket book in an inside pocket and stood up. ‘We’ll be waiting for you at the airport.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there,’ De Villiers said, still seated.

  ‘And you’d better get your story in order,’ Henderson suggested.

  He stooped to lift the arrow from the coffee table.

  ‘And I’m taking this as evidence. Do you want a receipt for it?’

  De Villiers shook his head. At the door he warned Henderson, ‘Be careful with that arrow. The poison can kill you.’

  When the men saw Liesl snipping with garden shears at an overgrown azalea, they shook hands a second time.

  De Villiers stood next to her as the police car negotiated the narrow street towards the security gate.

  ‘They looked quite serious,’ Liesl said.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk, or coffee or something,’ he suggested.

  ‘I nominate tea at the Beverley Hills,’ Liesl said. ‘Give me fifteen minutes. And that was quite nasty, you know. Now they’ve got monkey poo all over their car.’

  De Villiers shrugged and smiled. Add that to the charges, he thought.

  In the police car Henderson turned to face Kupenga in the back seat. ‘We’re also booked on Qantas. We might as well change our flight to correspond with his, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ll email our travel people from the hotel,’ Kupenga said.

  ‘We’ll pick him up when the plane lands in Auckland,’ Henderson said.

  This time it was Kupenga who put the brakes on. ‘Do we have enough to justify a charge?’ he asked.

  Detective Inspector Henderson lifted the arrow so that it pointed at the rear-view mirror. ‘If this arrow matches the one we have back in Auckland, and I think it does, our friend is going to have a lot of explaining to do.’

  De Villiers was no longer smiling when they arrived at the beach. ‘They were threatening you,’ Liesl remarked as they took seats on the veranda of the Beverley Hills Hotel. Below them the ocean was clear to the horizon. De Villiers struggled to focus on the present and counted seventeen ships of varying sizes waiting at anchor for berths in the port.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  Liesl’s laugh brought the conversation at the next table to an abrupt halt. She covered her mouth with her hand and giggled behind it.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ De Villiers asked.

  She responded by showing De Villiers a photo of her sons on her cellphone. ‘Johann says “not really” means “yes” and I couldn’t help remembering that the boys learnt when they were still little never to say “not really”. “Not really” lead to an immediate round of cross-examination.’

  De Villiers smiled with her. Even without the use of a magnifying glass or more scientific examination, Henderson and Kupenga would soon conclude that it was an exact match for the one they had in the Exhibits Room back in Auckland, except for the arrowhead, which had been made from fencing wire.

  He decided to make a clean breast of it. ‘I think I’m going to be charged in a disciplinary enquiry when I get back home.’

  ‘Why? Are these two behind it?’

  De Villiers nodded and waited for the waiter to place their tea and scones on the table. When the waiter had left, he explained. ‘I called the Maori guy a cannibal and the other one – he’s my boss – suspended me for racism. He called me a japie first,’ De Villiers insisted. ‘It was tit-for-tat.’

  Liesl shook her head. ‘Not good.’

  When De Villiers didn’t respond, she added, ‘But surely they didn’t come all this way to charge you with that.’

  ‘No,’ De Villiers was forced to concede. ‘But the rest is highly confidential. I can only tell you the broad outline, okay?’

  Liesl nodded, having taken a healthy bite of scone and jam. She wiped her lips on a napkin. ‘But I don’t keep any secrets from Johann. He sniffs them out anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to speak to him about it because I need help with my defence and how to handle the enquiry.’

  Below the hotel’s sun terrace a heavy set of waves crashed onto the rocky shore sending spray high up into the air. It was chilly and the beach was deserted.

  ‘From what you’ve said, you’re going to face a raft of charges.’

  ‘For sure.’

  Liesl smiled. ‘I have to warn you. Johann thinks all his clients are guilty.’

  De Villiers went into the city early and spent the afternoon in the public library a few hundred yards from Johann Weber’s chambers. Both Dr MacDonald and the senior radiographer had told him at the oncology centre that he would grow progressively more tired as the radiation treatments accumulated, but he felt strangely invigorated as he planned each stage of his operation.

  The library was as dishevelled as the streets outside the City Hall. De Villiers carefully scrutinised the sports news of each of the
newspapers on display in the news section. When he had finished, he asked the librarian for the previous week’s editions. He stalked his targets through the pages of the papers, finding the details he required in the most innocuous places. And when he had gathered all he needed, he left to fetch Johann Weber from work.

  At a traffic light where they were obliged to stop, De Villiers glanced at Weber’s hands, neatly folded in his lap. They were the soft hands of a lawyer, a man of books and words and principles. They were not hands that could kill.

  They settled in Weber’s study to plan De Villiers’s defence and tactics for his disciplinary hearing. Liesl Weber had been right. Johann Weber summarily pronounced De Villiers guilty on all counts and then set about sketching a detailed plan for what he called an aggressive defence.

  ‘The defence,’ he said, ‘must be so aggressive that it knocks them back behind the advantage line.’

  But De Villiers had no desire to denigrate Kupenga. They would have to work in the same squad room afterwards.

  Weber must have seen the doubt in his eyes. ‘And if you can’t take the accuser out, you must pick a fight with the judge or the chairman of the enquiry and hope that they make a mistake.’

  ‘Can we talk about General van den Bergh?’ De Villiers asked.

  Johann Weber was taken aback. ‘What does he have to do with it?’

  ‘He sent me a message that he wants to see me,’ De Villiers explained. ‘And I think he’s the one who directed Henderson and Kupenga here to your house.’

  Weber opened the drawer of his desk and opened a cigar box. ‘Have one,’ he said. ‘Liesl’s gone to bed.’

  Durban

  June 2008 35

  ‘What car do you drive?’ he asked Marissa as she tugged his underpants down to allow a clear field for the machine’s rays.

  ‘A Beetle,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  De Villiers stared at the barrel of the machine. ‘If you can drive a Beetle, you can drive a Porsche,’ he ventured.

  Marissa grunted as she pushed at his legs to get him properly aligned. ‘No way. The one is a sports car and the other is a donkey. Lie still. I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said, satisfied with his positioning.

  The machine started humming and the rays did their work. De Villiers could feel a slight warming of the skin in the exposed area immediately above the base of his bladder. What was left of his cancer below the skin and tissue was being cooked, he hoped, until not a single living prostate cell would be left. The thought struck him that the rays were like guided missiles released to strike at selected targets.

  ‘We inevitably have collateral damage,’ Dr MacDonald had warned, ‘but we can talk about that later. Our first priority is to kill as many prostate cells as possible with as little damage to healthy tissue as possible. It will take about thirty-five to forty treatments, and we’ll kill some healthy cells, but we are sure to kill the cancerous ones.’

  That was almost two months ago, De Villiers remembered, and now he was on treatment thirty.

  ‘It’s easier to ride a horse than a donkey,’ he said when he heard Marissa’s footsteps next to the gurney.

  She pulled the barrel of the machine over to the side. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, a horse is specially designed for riding, but a donkey is just for carrying things. And I’ve ridden both donkeys and horses and I know.’

  The machine started humming without warning and he realised Marissa must have retreated to her controls behind the lead-lined wall.

  ‘Seriously,’ he picked up the argument when she returned, ‘a Porsche is easier to drive than a Beetle, as long as you don’t try to show off.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Marissa eventually conceded.

  When De Villiers had pulled up his trousers and had tied his shoelaces, he turned to face Marissa. She was adjusting the gurney for the next patient. He decided to feed her the facts slowly, one by one.

  ‘If you come to Pretoria,’ he started, ‘if you come up with me next weekend, you may get a chance to find out, to drive it yourself.’

  Marissa smiled. ‘My mom says to watch out for a man driving a Porsche.’

  De Villiers became defensive. ‘I need some company on the drive there. I have no designs on you, Marissa, I promise.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not much of a compliment, that.’

  At first De Villiers didn’t know what to say, then he blurted it all out. ‘The car needs to go for a service in Johannesburg and I need someone to drive it back to Durban on Sunday, a friend, someone I can trust.’

  Marissa folded her arms below her breasts, unknowingly accentuating them. ‘Oh, so that’s the real story! You need a driver to bring the car back here. And there I was thinking that you were making a move on me.’

  It was De Villiers’s turn to shake his head. ‘Marissa, I have no designs on you. You’ve seen me naked. Besides, I’m too old for you. I just need a friend to come up to Pretoria with me and to drive the Porsche back here. You’ll have to stay at your grandmother’s.’

  Marissa had not done teasing him. ‘Mmm, now that you put it like that, perhaps I should think about driving a Porsche and stop dreaming of the man driving a Porsche.’

  ‘We’ll have to leave on Thursday. Will you come?’

  A bell rang somewhere and Marissa ushered De Villiers out of the room. ‘The next patient is waiting. I’ll tell you on Monday. And I will sleep at my grandma’s.’

  At the cycle store in the Berea Centre De Villiers bought half a dozen stainless steel bicycle spokes. He bought a complete change of clothing, shoes included, from a menswear outfit. He found a small hardware store on the same level. There he bought a small hand-operated emery wheel. He made his way to the yacht mole and tipped a car guard to look after the Porsche.

  De Villiers prepared six of the spokes on the stone wall separating the railway line from the harbour. Three would be needed, and three would be for back-up. Directly in front of him members of the Point Yacht Club were working on their boats, some scraping, sanding and painting the hulls of their yachts, while others scampered around on deck testing, repairing and maintaining the fittings and equipment topside.

  To casual onlookers De Villiers might have looked like just another yachtie, working away at one of the many time-consuming minor items of maintenance every yacht-owner has to do. The nib of each spoke would provide a firm base but the other end had to be shaped into a sharp spike. The emery wheel blasted the shavings off as sparks and in minutes the sharpening was complete. When he was satisfied with his work, De Villiers casually looked around before he threw the emery wheel into a dumpster half filled with empty paint cans and the scraps and off-cuts of a deck-planking repair. Later he emerged from the Yacht Club change rooms in a completely new outfit, down to the non-skid Sebago boat shoes. He draped his old clothes, now dripping wet, over the sun-baked stone wall.

  De Villiers walked back to the car, confident that his old clothes and shoes would disappear before they were dry, that some vagrant or passer-by would benefit from his largesse and that there would be no trace of the filings of the sharpened bicycle spokes that he now carried in his shirt pocket. Nor would there be any filings to link him with the deadly spokes on his new clothes.

  Treatment thirty-three started late. The machine had refused to warm up at first and De Villiers had been trapped behind a string of patients with earlier bookings. He watched them paging listlessly through the tattered magazines on the coffee table in the reception area. They avoided looking directly at one another and De Villiers had to wonder whether they were scared of the signs of impending death they would see in each other’s eyes. The disc jockeys on East Coast Radio laughed at their own jokes and played their favourite music. The Traffic Guy warned of delays as a result of roadworks in Pinetown.

  ‘So, what’s the plan for next weekend?’ Marissa spoke from the foot of the gurney when it was his turn.

  De Villiers was businesslike, for the firs
t time bashful and uncomfortable with his nakedness. ‘We leave on Thursday, no later than twelve. I drop you at your grandmother’s and I go to my mother’s place. I take the car in for a service in Johannesburg on Friday. I pick you up on Sunday at around lunch time. We drive to the airport, you drop me there and I fly out to New Zealand while you drive the car back to Durban. My brother-in-law will collect it on Monday.’

  Marissa had a thousand questions. ‘When am I going to get to learn to drive it? I can’t just get into the car on Sunday and drive it all the way back.’

  She had a point. ‘Okay, I’ll show you how on the way up,’ De Villiers offered.

  ‘No,’ Marissa insisted. ‘That won’t be enough, and anyway, that’s on the highway. I need to drive the car in town in traffic. I need to get used to the gearbox and the clutch first. You can’t just get in and drive a car like that.’

  De Villiers had to compromise. ‘Okay, I understand. But I think we can do that on the way up.’

  Marissa was still not convinced. ‘Why don’t you just fly home from here? Far less hassles and you won’t have to put up with my presence and be irritated by my talking your ears off for seven hours on the road.’

  De Villiers avoided the direct answer. ‘I want to spend some time with my mother before I fly back to New Zealand. My brother-in-law says the car needs a long run every now and then. It’s not good for the car to do just the short runs to work in the mornings and back in the evenings. And it needs a service, which they can only do in Johannesburg, so I thought I would do him a favour, but I need someone to bring the car back. And it’s only five hours in the Porsche. Six if we take the top down and go slowly.’

  ‘Let’s go slowly then,’ she said. ‘Lie still, I’ll be back.’

  The machine started humming and De Villiers held his breath.

  ‘You have to see Dr MacDonald on the way out,’ Marissa said when the session was over. ‘She wants to talk to you.’

  Dr MacDonald was businesslike. ‘Dr McKerron and I have prepared a report for your GP in New Zealand. We’ve given full details of your treatment here and what she has to look out for the next year or two.’ She passed a large envelope across the desk to De Villiers. ‘All the scans and reports are in there, including my dosage calculations and the graphs from the radiographers downstairs.’