by Deon Meyer
‘The Ernst Richter?’ asked the colonel, sounding worried.
Keyter wondered why everyone but him had already heard of the Ernst Richter; maybe he should read the papers even when there wasn’t a report on one of his cases. He confirmed that, and said that Richter had been reported missing just over three weeks earlier in Stellenbosch. The hair colour and features of the victim bore a strong likeness to the two head-and-shoulders photos that Stellenbosch Station had emailed ten minutes ago. And what’s more, the corpse was dressed in the same clothes that Richter had been wearing just before his disappearance.
‘Good work,’ said the station commander, deep in thought.
‘Thank you, Colonel. But Stellenbosch are talking jurisdiction now. I mean, it’s our case, finish and klaar. Isn’t it?’
‘Do we have a positive identification?’
‘I am going to phone his mother to see if she can come and identify him, Colonel. But he was discovered in our jurisdiction. So all that Stellenbosch need is a ninety-two, to close off their file . . .’ Keyter’s hopeful reference was to the SAPS form 92 that had to be filled in when a missing person was found.
The commander scratched the back of his neck while he thought it over. He knew Jamie Keyter’s strengths and weaknesses. He knew the adjutant might not be the brightest bulb in Table View’s detection chandelier, but he was dedicated, methodical and reliable, with a few successful investigations of uncomplicated murders notched up on his stick.
The big question was, if this was the Ernst Richter, could he entrust the case to him?
One problem was Keyter’s ambition. After the heady positive publicity of a car theft syndicate exposé a year or three back, Jamie frequently over-estimated his own ability and potential. And in the Table View Station there was a lot of gossip about his love of the media spotlight (and his corresponding fondness for spending time in front of the mirror).
The other problem was work load. Table View was one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the Peninsula. And the growth was in the lower middle class: among others, thousands of immigrants from Nigeria, Malawi and Zimbabwe in the Parklands area, where nearly 60 per cent of the crimes were committed that his station had to handle. If it was definitely the Ernst Richter, he would have to deploy significant manpower, because the pressure from the Provincial Commissioner was going to be extreme once the media camped out on their doorstep.
It was manpower he did not have. And media attention that only Jamie Keyter wanted.
‘Jamie, let me call Stellenbosch and see what I can do,’ he lied.
At the end of the third glass Griessel’s physical pains began to dissipate. The pain in his arm, the pain in his side, the dull ache of the bullet wounds, now six months old, from when they had shot Colonel Zola Nyathi dead – but not Benny.
The pain this morning, stoked by the stormy weather, had flared up into a fiercely throbbing memory of all of that.
And now here he sat, beginning to contemplate his fourth double.
He had known the drinking was close. Doc Barkhuizen, his sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous for years, had also seen it coming. ‘I know those glassy eyes, Benny. Confront the desire. When last were you at an AA meeting? Go and talk to the shrink again. Get your head right.’
He didn’t want to go back to the shrink. In the first place, they had forced him to have therapy after the shooting. In the second place, he had completed the process, against his will. In the third place, psychologists didn’t know a damn thing; they sat in their little, annoyingly decorated offices, carefully designed to make frightened, unstable people feel cosy and at home, with a box of tissues positioned nearby like a silent insult, and the teddy bear sitting on the windowsill.
A teddy bear: in the office of a shrink who treated policemen.
And they were oh-so-full of big words and book knowledge, but had any of them stood beside a mutilated body, time and again and again and again? Or lain and watched how the blood spurted and dribbled and dripped, as you knew for certain you were going to die, lying there with your colleague? And there was nothing you could do to save him.
She was an attractive woman, the shrink who had to counsel him. Mid-forties, just like Griessel. At first he thought it would be okay, despite the tissues and the teddy. But then she started with that fokken soothing voice, as though he was a madman who had to be kept calm. She asked her questions, about his whole life, his history as detective. And she listened attentively, her focus was so absolute, and she agreed with everything so compassionately and said she understood. After four weeks she told him he had post-traumatic stress, and survivor guilt. And it was his altruism and his depression that had made him drink.
He wasn’t absolutely sure what ‘altruism’ meant.
‘It’s caring about others,’ she said. ‘To such an extent that you sacrifice something for them, without any expectation of advantage or reward.’
‘That’s why I drink?’
‘It’s a piece of the puzzle, Captain. The popular interpretation of depression, in a nutshell of course, is that people in whom it manifested could see no meaningful future. It was a depression of self-consequence and concern about status. But recent research shows there is another kind of depression – one where people feel terribly guilty and have a high level of empathy for the fate of others. Their altruism is so strong that they experience pathogenic perceptions, where they see themselves as a danger to the people close to them. I suspect that is what we must focus on.’
Griessel didn’t like that one bit. People who suffered from depression walked around like zombies, heads down, thinking deep, dark thoughts, like wanting to slit their wrists. And that wasn’t something he had ever considered doing. So he rejected her nonsense, but out of courtesy just shook his head slightly.
Then she said, in that soothing voice again, ‘Everything you’ve told me points to it. Not only the incident where your colonel was shot. Every time you go to the scene of a murder, there’s a feeling of complicity, that this was something you should have prevented. It is not exclusive to your profession. But the main factor is that you begin to feel responsible for all your loved ones; you develop an unnatural urge to protect them against the evils that you experience on a daily basis. On a certain level you realise that’s impossible. We must explore whether that is causing your depression and drinking habits.’
Must explore. Fok. As if he were some kind of wilderness.
He sat in the pub and remembered these things. And he drank, in the hope that he would forget – because back in Edgemead that afternoon the demons that had possessed Vollie Fish had migrated into his head.
5
From her office in Suite 1604 of the Huguenot Chambers Advocate, Susan Peires had a perfect view over the green expanse of the historic Company’s Garden. On this baking hot day before Christmas it was thronged with visitors. Sometimes, when she wanted to think a case over, she would open the blinds and look out. It helped her to order her thoughts. But now her full attention was on the young wine estate owner Francois du Toit.
She sat opposite him at the conference table. She listened to every word that he said, carefully noting his tone of voice, speech patterns and rhythms. He struggled to get going, but that was to be expected. She sometimes compared her work to that of a doctor in an emergency room. If they came in here, trauma was a given.
She gauged Du Toit’s body language, his facial expressions, the eyes that glanced first at her, then stared at some fixed point on the wall.
All this, she knew, she must interpret with care.
As a young advocate, Peires had learned a valuable professional lesson. It was a pro bono case, in the last turbulent years of apartheid, a white municipal diesel mechanic who stood accused of the murder of his wife. The circumstantial evidence was strong – a day before the murder he had been told by an acquaintance that his wife had been unfaithful and there were neighbours close by
in Goodwood’s tightly packed houses who had heard the loud confrontation that followed. There were fingernail marks on his cheek, and he already had a suspended sentence for a seven-year-old assault case. And when she saw him for the first time in the interrogation room of the police station, Peires had known he was guilty. Because the man’s face was rough, primitive. Under heavy brows his eyes shiftily evaded her gaze. He was tall and strong, with sledgehammer hands. And his manner was surly. He was verbally clumsy and vague. Peires, along with the investigating detectives, believed that his alibi – he swore that he was at his mother’s house in Parow during the night of the murder – was a story concocted between mother and son.
She questioned the mother, a nervous chain smoker who would not make a good impression in court. Only when Peires told the woman that there was a good chance that her son would go to prison for life, did the mother break down in tears and confess, frightened. They hadn’t been alone in her house: her lover, a coloured officer in the South African Defence Force Cape Corps, could confirm the alibi.
And he had – a dignified, well-spoken man with a quiet, resolute voice.
When the case against the mechanic was withdrawn and the attention of the police shifted to the victim’s married lover, she asked her client if he had been so ashamed of the race of his mother’s lover that he had been ready to go to jail.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Were you trying to protect your mother? Were you afraid people would talk?’
He shook his head.
‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you have an angry face.’
That upset Susan Peires. That she, who saw herself as professional but compassionate, could be perceived to be an angry woman. That this apparently tough, burly man could be afraid of her because of the way she looked. That each of them had had their mutual perceptions of character warped by the influence of their facial form and expressions.
She thought it all over at length. She spent a long time in front of the mirror and systematically, unwillingly and slowly she had come to terms with her sharp features that were apparently, coupled with her profession, the reason she had not enjoyed any serious attention from the male of the species.
She tried to soften her appearance with make-up and clothes and a more relaxed approach in general.
She philosophised about people’s tendency to categorise and label on the strength of appearance, she speculated over the influence of facial features on the formation of personality, but above all she resolved never to make the same mistake again.
As a result, she did not let herself be influenced by the fact that Francois du Toit was an attractive, tanned, well-spoken man. She listened and she observed.
Above all, she reserved all judgement about truth or falsehood.
6
Wednesday 17 December. Eight days to Christmas.
At 17.03 the Table View SAPS station commander phoned the office of the Directorate of Priority Crimes in Bellville, and asked to speak to the commanding officer.
‘Brigadier Manie is on holiday, Colonel,’ his secretary informed him.
The station commander sighed. It was that time of year. ‘Who is head of Violent Crimes now?’
‘Major Mbali Kaleni, Colonel.’
He had heard a lot about her. He suppressed yet another sigh. ‘May I speak to her?’
‘Please hold . . .’
Benny Griessel had spun his own little cocoon in the Fireman’s Arms. He was unaware of people behind his back, the bar steadily filling up in the late afternoon. He didn’t see the soccer matches on the huge flat screen TVs, he didn’t hear the hubbub of fellow imbibers chatting and laughing in groups.
It was just him and the sixth double Jack, and the bravado and wisdom of the drunkard.
He bowed his head, trying to get his dancing thoughts in order.
He had stood there with Vaughn Cupido in front of that house in Edgemead and revelation pierced him slowly through the heart, with the stiletto of insight. The shrink was right.
Adjutant Tertius van Vollenhoven had committed the most terrible, unthinkable, heart-rending deed, because he wanted to protect his loved ones from the predatory evil that prowled the world with slavering jaws and bloodshot eyes. For no one could stop that hound, his hunger only grew.
The shrink was right. He, Benny Griessel, drank because it kept the dog from his and his loved ones’ door. Drink was the bulwark, that prevented him from becoming what Vollie . . .
He wasn’t drunk enough to venture into that place.
But he would get there, this very night.
Two collar-and-tie men in their thirties shifted in beside Griessel at the long bar. They looked at him, how he hunched over his glass. Their grins were scornful.
He didn’t like that one bit.
His cellphone rang before he could say anything to them. It was Mbali Kaleni, he saw.
Fuck that. He was on a real holiday – just him and his good friend Jack.
He emptied his glass and beckoned to the barman.
Major Mbali Kaleni sat in her office and called Benny Griessel’s cellphone number.
Cupido stood on the other side of her desk, breathing in the cauliflower aroma, and he thought, it’s a disgrace. She was a group leader now, and her quarters smelled like this?
It was all because of her diet. She had lost eleven kilos already, but he couldn’t see it; to him she looked as short and fat as ever.
Two weeks ago, he had known nothing about it. He came strolling down the passage, savouring a packet of Speckled Eggs, when Mbali walked past and said to him, in that irritating know-it-all way, ‘Prof Tim says sugar is poison, you know.’
He let it go, because an argument with Mbali was like a Sumo wrestling match – you could never get a decent grip, and afterwards, it left you all sweaty and unsatisfied. But a day later, it was ‘Prof Tim says low fat is a fraud,’ when he was eating a tub of yoghurt at his desk for breakfast. He let that slide too. Until the following morning, when he and a packet of Simba salt-and-vinegar crisps walked out of the morning parade, and Mbali said, ‘Prof Tim says it’s the carbs that make you fat, you know,’ and he couldn’t take it any more and snapped: ‘Prof Tim who?’
And so she told him. Everything. About this Prof Tim Noakes who once got the whole fokken world eating pasta, and then he did an about face and said, no, carbs are what’s making everyone obese, and he wrote a book of recipes, and now he was Mbali’s big hero, ‘Because it takes a great man to admit that he was wrong’, and she had already lost so much weight and she had so much more energy, and it wasn’t all that hard, she didn’t miss the carbs because now she ate cauliflower rice and cauliflower mash and flax seed bread.
Flax seed bread, for fuck’s sake.
Mbali, with all the passion of the newly converted. As though he were fat too.
Every lunch time she bought two heads of cauliflower and left them exuding their odours in her office, and he missed the days when it smelled of KFC in here.
After an eternity Kaleni said, ‘Benny isn’t answering.’
Cupido stood there at the desk and he had to keep a grip on himself. Because he knew, Griessel always answered his phone. And if Major Mbali was less concerned about her new diet, and concentrated more on her people, he wouldn’t have had to worry so much about Benny right now. This afternoon in Edgemead he had seen the shock and defeat on Griessel’s face. And when his colleague left, he had wondered whether trouble was brewing.
Major Mbali should never have sent Benny there.
He suppressed his frustration, just looked at her.
‘I’ve left him a message,’ said Kaleni. ‘Will you please get started? As soon as he calls back, I’ll ask him to join you.’
‘Yes, Major.’ Since she had become his group commander, she was awfully nice to him. While in the old d
ays she couldn’t stand him. What’s with that? But he just turned and left.
‘Captain, I have a feeling they’re dumping this one on us,’ said Kaleni before he was out the door. ‘When you’re sure the deceased is definitely the Alibi Man, please involve Captain Cloete.’
John Cloete was the Hawks’ media liaison.
‘Okay,’ said Cupido.
‘I want you to take JOC.’
That caught him completely off guard; he’d never dreamed she would put him in charge, give him a joint operational command. ‘Okay,’ he repeated, and he wondered whether he had been made JOC leader just because Griessel hadn’t answered his phone this time.
One suit-and-tie beside Griessel told the other one a story, loud enough for him to hear everything. He listened, because it was an escape from his own morbid thoughts.
‘Noleen says, it’s a friend of a friend. Nice girl, very pretty and . . .’
‘If a chick says another girl is pretty, she usually isn’t . . .’
‘You know it. It’s weird. Anyway, Noleen said the pretty girl broke up with her boyfriend six months back; she works at a small business, so she doesn’t meet many guys, and she decided, she’ll try internet dating . . .’
‘Bad move . . .’
‘You know it. Anyway, she had a few photies taken by a pro, checked out all the dating sites, and zoomed in on one. Made a profile with the nice new pics, wrote down her likes and dislikes, and the guys began chaffing her. Went through the whole thing, discarded the duds, and after a few weeks began chatting to this handsome dude on the site. The more they chatted, the more she realised he was actually quite cool. So she decided, okay, she would go out on a date with him. Very safe, drove there in her own car, met him at a restaurant. Dude arrived there, and he’s helluva charming and intelligent. They chatted up a storm, had a great dinner, drank some wine, she falls a bit in love. Long story short, dude walks her to her car, she gives him the right signals and he kisses her. Nothing serious, just a semi-romantic kiss, the kind that says “I respect your boundaries on a first date”. And she thinks, who said internet dating can’t work. Two days later she starts getting small white sores on her lips . . .’