Icarus

by Deon Meyer

  He met Mooiwillem in the passage. ‘I’ve been looking for you, Benny. We have to go and see the Habenicht guy.’

  ‘I just need to go to the office first.’

  So he could stash four bottles, and take four along with him.

  Then he’d be ready for this day.

  Nothing of note really happened until Bones Boshigo arrived at Alibi.co.za in the afternoon.

  Cupido and Lithpel Davids drove through to the offices in Stellenbosch. Cupido said he had to pay a quick visit to the Premier Bank branch, he wanted to deliver the search warrant, so that they could see what was going on there.

  ‘You know he banked at FNB too, Cappie?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because he had an FNB app in his phone, that’s how.’

  ‘And Premier’s’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘Then we will have to go to FNB as well.’

  Griessel and Liebenberg met Werner Habenicht, chairman of the board of ShipSure, in his luxury office in Loop Street, on the top floor of Triangle House. It had a magnificent view over Table Bay.

  Habenicht was one of those trim middle-aged men – grey hair cut short and neat, tailored suit, subtle, stylish cufflinks on the pale blue shirt, and his figure still fit and athletic. The lawyer who was also seated at the conference table was younger, with thick black brows and an indignant attitude.

  They could get nothing.

  Yes, he was an Alibi client, said Habenicht. He sat completely still when he spoke; his words and sentences were just as careful and deliberate as the man himself. But his tone of voice was authoritarian, like someone who was accustomed to being in charge. And he talked down to them, with the sort of disdain they increasingly encountered, especially from the wealthy.

  The reasons for his membership had nothing to do with them. Yes, someone tried to blackmail him. No, not over the phone, but via anonymous, untraceable email. The blackmailer wanted a hundred thousand rand. No, he no longer had the email. The case had been dealt with already.

  How?

  He had been to talk to them, and never heard from the blackmailer again.

  Had he waited in the car park for Desiree Coetzee one evening?

  He had been waiting for any of the three top people. She was merely the one who came out first.

  How had he known who she was and what she looked like?

  He did his research. All the information was available on CIPC. And all three were on Facebook. Richter, Coetzee and the financial director, Vernon Visser.

  Did you have any contact with Richter?

  No, none.

  And because Griessel thought Habenicht was a doos, he asked: ‘Where were you on the evening of Wednesday 26 November?’

  Habenicht was not a man who sighed. He looked at Griessel with icy dislike, got up, walked to his desk, and pressed a button on his telephone. A woman’s voice answered: ‘Mr Habenicht?’

  ‘Where was I on the twenty-sixth of November?’

  ‘Just a moment, sir . . .’ He waited impatiently until she said: ‘London, sir. You were in London, for your meeting with Lloyds.’

  Vusumuzi Ndabeni was there when Forensics fine-combed the blood red Volkswagen Golf GTI Cabriolet belonging to the programmer and seeker of zero-day vulnerabilities, ‘Tricky’ Rick Grobler.

  Vusi could see the car was sparkling clean. And he thought there wasn’t enough room in this vehicle to hide a corpse, especially not one wrapped in black plastic.

  They took fingerprints inside and out, they vacuumed the seats and the carpets, they took samples of the carpet fibres, and they linked a computer to the car’s GPS system so that they could see precisely where Grobler had driven.

  This is not a murderer’s car, thought Vusi. It was just too sexy.

  One day he would also have a car like this.

  At precisely 12.08 @NoMoreAlibis said: Full database of all former and current Alibi clients now available at pageeasy.com/nomorealibis/

  57

  Advocate Susan Peires mentally totted up the sums while Du Toit was talking.

  If Paul du Toit had been sentenced for rape as a youth, first offender, he would theoretically already have been released. And able to murder Ernst Richter.

  She knew psychopaths. As a criminal defence lawyer she had dealt with her fair share. And the whole concept of Alibi – the ability to deceive others about your activities while you were up to no good – was one that would appeal to a violent criminal with a serious personality disorder.

  Francois du Toit was here to ask her to represent his brother. For the sake of his parents who had suffered so much. This was the groundwork he was trying to lay.

  She wouldn’t accept the case. Without exception, her experience of psychopaths as clients had been upsetting and unpleasant. They lied, manipulated and in the end terrified you. She had also listened to enough forensic psychologists to know they must be removed from society for as long as possible, because they would simply wreak havoc again, every time, as soon as they were released.

  Out of courtesy she would hear him out. But she had made up her mind.

  58

  Vaughn Cupido’s day wasn’t going quite as he had hoped.

  He’d been in a hurry to get to Stellenbosch to see Desiree Coetzee again, but she wasn’t at the office. According to her personal assistant she had gone to the city for negotiations with the two venture capital companies about the future of Alibi, along with the other member of the management team they needed to throw some light on the subject – the head of finance, Vernon Visser.

  He could sense the tension among the staff over the outcome of the talks, and a vague antagonism towards the members of the Hawks, as if they were responsible for the possible dissolution of the business. It was only the ever-animated Lithpel Davids who quickly bonded with his digital brethren, the programmers, and began to immerse himself in the systems.

  Cupido sat in Desiree Coetzee’s office and struggled with the statements that he had received from the two banks. Richter had two accounts at Premier – a credit card and a cheque account. At FNB there was another personal cheque account. And besides ordinary expenses like house rental (an astronomical R38,000 per month), municipal services, petrol, groceries and restaurant meals, nothing really made sense. Amounts were transferred back and forth between accounts and there were quite a few totally inexplicable expenses and deposits.

  He needed Bones Boshigo.

  At lunchtime he crossed the street to the Pane e Vino restaurant alone. Intent on a computer screen Lithpel had said, ‘I’m in the zone Cappie, sommer bring me back a takeaway.’

  There were fewer reporters outside today, but he was greeted as usual with a chorus of questions. He just shrugged, holding up his empty hands: they knew they had to talk to Cloete.

  He sat looking at the Alibi offices through the restaurant window. He thought about Desiree and the fact that today she was fighting for her professional life.

  That was the problem with crime. A detective came in and did his detecting and made his arrests and he stood in the witness stand and then he moved on. But the crime didn’t stop there, it touched people’s lives; it’s like that little klippie in the water, the pebble dropped in the pool, the ripples don’t stop when the accused is sentenced.

  Desiree needn’t worry, he would take care of her.

  Cupido ordered pasta. It was the most delicious he had ever eaten, and he wished she were there to share it with him.

  Before he had finished eating, his cellphone rang. An unfamiliar number, but he answered.

  ‘Vaughn, this is Arrie September . . .’ He sounded stressed.

  Cupido’s gut contracted instantly. There could be only one reason why the commander of Cape Town Central was phoning him directly.

  ‘Jis, Arrie?’

  ‘We have a bit of
a problem. An ou from the Son called my press liaison. Wanted to know if Benny Griessel of the Hawks was involved in an assault on Wednesday night. My liaison knows nothing about it, Vaughn, ’cause there’s nothing booked. But the outjie from the Son said he had it on good authority, and my liaison should check with me and call him back.’

  ‘Jissis, Arrie,’ said Cupido, putting his fork down, his pasta forgotten.

  ‘I know, my bru’. Did you square things up at the Fireman’s?’

  ‘I did. They swore to the heavens, hoog en lag, that they would drop the thing.’

  ‘Okay. All I can do is to say we have no record of such an incident, because that’s true. But you and Griessel have to do something, Vaughn. Make this thing go away.’

  ‘Arrie, thanks. I owe you big time.’

  ‘Make it go away, Vaughn. You know how things are, nowadays. It’s my gat on the line here.’

  When Benny Griessel began working at the Hawks, the Information Management Centre – later known as IMC – had been an intimidating place for him. He was constantly afraid that someone would unmask him as the technophobe he was. But with the help of IMC Captain Philip van Wyk and Cupido the technophile, always flamboyantly willing to share his knowledge, Griessel had learned a great deal over the past two years.

  When Van Wyk and his team projected the phone spider web on the wall, he knew how it worked: the icon in the middle of the image represented Ernst Richter’s cellphone. The lines that stretched out from it like a web represented, on the left, the calls he made and, on the right, the calls he received – within a certain time period. IMC could manipulate the program so that the spider web displayed any time period, from a specific hour to a year or more.

  The thicker the lines, the more calls were made to a specific number or received from it.

  ‘Here we are looking at calls over the past year,’ said Philip van Wyk. ‘There are seven people whom Richter phoned frequently. His mother’s number is one. The rest are all colleagues. One of them is the guy you suspect . . . Ricardo Grobler.’

  ‘How many calls to Rick Grobler in the week before Richter’s death?’ Mooiwillem Liebenberg asked.

  Van Wyk waited for the technician to make the necessary adjustments to the program. The image changed on the screen. ‘Not one,’ he said. ‘Give us the last month before the murder . . .’

  The slide changed again. ‘He only talked to Ricardo Grobler twice in that month, but if you look at this time period, things look slightly different. His mother is still number one, but there are two new numbers on the hit parade, in the second and third place. Both are landlines, to companies in the city: Marlin Investments and Cape Capital Partners . . .’

  ‘Those are the guys who financed Alibi,’ Griessel said.

  ‘Show them the graph of total calls to those numbers over the past year,’ Van Wyk requested. And then: ‘It’s a hockey stick pattern, as you can see. From January to September the total calls increase steadily, but in October and especially November there is a strong upward curve. I don’t know if that means something to you.’

  ‘We think their money began to run out,’ said Griessel. ‘He must have been asking for more financing.’

  ‘That is the only anomaly we can pick up,’ said Van Wyk.

  ‘Did you RICA them all?’ asked Griessel. Thanks to the RICA legislation, every cellphone number was linked to a personal identity with complete address details. IMC identified all the people who a victim had contact with, and then did a database comparison to determine whether any of them had a criminal record, used a stolen phone or evaded the RICA process.

  ‘We did. There’s nothing.’

  Frank Fillander spoke up for the first time. ‘I have the number of the husband of one of Richter’s skelmpies. Can you run it through the system quickly?’

  At 13.52, when Cupido was back at Alibi, Major Mbali Kaleni phoned. When he saw the number his unease grew. Had the media phoned Cloete too about Benny’s assault?

  ‘I have a toxicology report for you, Captain,’ she said.

  At first relief, then astonishment that she could have the toxicology report completed in only two days. The Department of Health usually took six months to process a victim’s blood tests. That there was not even a trace of triumph in her voice was even more impressive.

  ‘Major, that’s incredible. Thank you,’ he said in genuine admiration.

  ‘They found low levels of active THC, but that’s all.’

  Cupido knew that meant that Richter had probably smoked dagga in the last seven days before his death, which they more or less already knew.

  ‘Thank you, Major.’

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘We’re waiting on Bones.’

  Just after two the thirst began to gnaw at Griessel. With two little bottles in his pocket he walked to the bathroom, drank them down to the last drop, rinsed his mouth with water, then masked his breath.

  He lingered so that the six peppermints could do their work, and his thoughts drifted to the conversation this morning with the regional bank manager, Habenicht, and the IMC. He’d been functional. No, more than that. He was a good detective, he hadn’t missed anything.

  This drinking routine could work. The monster was under control and he could keep his focus. He must just carry on like this. Then nobody could say anything.

  Before he walked out, he blew into his palm and sniffed it. As long as he didn’t get too close to anyone . . .

  Outside in the passage, wondering what to do next, it occurred to him that he couldn’t remember seeing the name of the regional bank manager on IMC’s spider web. He remembered clearly that the man had said Richter had called him on his cellphone.

  Had he just missed it?

  Probably a good idea to go and make sure.

  Major Benedict ‘Bones’ Boshigo was a member of the Statutory Crimes group of the Hawks Commercial Crimes unit in the Cape, and something of a legend. He was a Pedi from Limpopo; a clever man, who thanks to a bursary had earned his Bachelor’s degree at the Metropolitan College of Boston University in the USA. His nickname was thanks to his reed-thin figure, the lean body of a long distance athlete – he had completed the Comrades marathon seventeen times and the Boston and New York marathons once each.

  And, after Vaughn Cupido, he was also the detective with the best self-image in the DPCI. When he walked into Desiree Coetzee’s office just after three, his first words to Vaughn were, ‘Hey, relax. The cavalry is here . . .’

  ‘The cavalry took its own sweet time. Married life slowing you down, Bones?’ Boshigo hadn’t been married a year yet and told everyone who would listen about the huge amount of lobola he’d had to pay ‘for my special lady’.

  ‘Married life is what speeds me up, brother . . .’

  They were interrupted by Cupido’s ringing cellphone. He saw that it was Major Mbali again.

  If it was about Benny this time, then he was ready for her.

  59

  Transcript of interview: Advocate Susan Peires with Mr Francois du Toit

  Wednesday, 24 December; 1604 Huguenot Chambers, 40 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town

  FdT: What I remember best about that time is my feeling of guilt.

  It was a huge shock for the whole community. Few people knew about Paul’s . . . problem. Most simply knew him as the phenomenal rugby player, so there was this . . . trauma, at the school, in the town, in the wine community.

  My father, everyone loved Pa. I think it was because everyone knew what a hard time he’d had with Oupa Jean, and because he was so different, so gentle. He was good with people, he was very humble as a wine maker, this underdog who had worked so hard to . . . So, when Paul was arrested, there was huge sympathy for him and Ma. And there was this atmosphere of . . . as if someone had died, which wasn’t very far from the truth.

  But for me . . . I couldn’t help
it, I was sad, and shocked, but I also felt this intense joy. I thought now I can farm. If Paul is in jail, I can farm. And then I would feel so guilty for thinking like that, that I could be so glad about it. And I wondered if I was a psychopath too, and then I would try to rationalise it . . . I was sixteen, it’s probably not abnormal for a sixteen-year-old to do that. I thought Paul wasn’t interested in the farm, he didn’t love it the way I did, so it was really the just right thing . . .

  But then the guilt ate me up when I looked at my mother and father’s grief.

  No one wanted it to go to court. The girl’s parents wanted justice done, but if they could avoid having her testify . . . My father hired the best legal people. Everyone tried to make a deal with the State prosecutor. The problem was, Paul . . . Psychopaths enjoy the limelight; it’s such a weird thing. Paul wanted people to notice him; he wanted to be the centre of attention, whether it was on the rugby field or in court.

  So it went to trial. There was a lot of publicity. I don’t know if you remember it, it was ten years ago . . . It cost my father a fortune, that case. A fortune that he didn’t have. It broke him. In every way, I think . . .

  It changed my life too. I was only one term away from Grade Eleven in Paul Roos. It was hard. I wasn’t the brother of the aspirant Springbok Paul du Toit any more, I was the brother of the sick rapist.

  In April of that year I went to boarding school, Boland Agricultural High School, in Paarl.

  60

  The computer specialist at IMC searched the database for the regional bank manager’s number, without success.

  ‘We imported the records for the past year,’ he told Griessel. ‘When was the call made?’

  ‘In May, of this year,’ said Griessel. ‘The eighth.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then he didn’t phone from this cellphone number.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Griessel. He wanted to tell Vaughn, and as it so often and inexplicably happened, his phone rang at that instant and it was Cupido. ‘I think Ernst Richter had another cellphone,’ Griessel said when he answered.