by Deon Meyer
How did she know he hadn’t been at home? How did she know when to come here?
Three kisses. That was better than yesterday. It gave him hope.
He fetched his bass guitar. He put on Cream’s Fresh Cream on Alexa’s hi-fi system, so that he could play along with the incomparable Jack Bruce.
83
The Huguenot Chambers building was casting a long shadow over the Company Gardens as Advocate Susan Peires stood looking out of the window. ‘Let me think first,’ she had said to Francois du Toit.
He sat patiently waiting, staring at his hands clasped on the table in front of him.
It had been a long time since she’d been taken so unawares. Her suspicions had migrated from father to brother to Francois himself. She had not seen the revelation of the mother coming at all. Maybe she should have, when he’d told her of Helena’s rebellion against her own father and the dop system. She should have known that wasn’t for no reason.
Why wasn’t she convinced?
She turned to him.
‘I’m going to ask you one last time. Are you telling the truth?’
His utter stillness, the way he didn’t look up – just nodded his head slightly – was what made her decide to believe him.
She sat down again.
‘You have problems. If the police have sufficient evidence, there is a strong prima facie case against you. You participated in a fraudulent act and Richter tried to blackmail you just before he died. You have a strong motive, because you have a lot to lose if it all comes out. And the only other suspect that you know of is your mother. You don’t want to talk about her.’
‘No.’
‘We don’t know what they know, and the only way to find out is to go back to the farm. I suggest I go with you. But there are a lot of things we must agree on before we go. You have the right to remain silent and you will have to use it. It’s bad news that there’s a whole swarm of Hawks on the farm. They don’t normally turn up in force unless they are ready to make an arrest. But an arrest gives us the opportunity to find out how strong the case against you is. My advice is, leave all the talking to me . . .’
‘I am guilty of the wine fraud . . .’
‘You are innocent until the opposite is proven in court, should it ever make it to court. The jurisdiction is complicated; the organiser of the scheme is dead. And in my experience no industry likes to admit that ten thousand items of expensive product that have already been sold are fakes. I would be surprised if you are prosecuted.’
84
Monday 22 December. Three days before Christmas.
The doldrums.
Even though Captain Vaughn Cupido woke with a mission.
The doldrums because the Richter case was at a standstill.
There were storm winds elsewhere: a new case, four bodies found in a house in Kraaifontein. Crime in the Cape of Good Hope had no consideration for the festive season, no sense of rhythmic ebb and flow. The new murder-flame drew the usual moths – the local SAPS, then the media and the Hawks and Forensics and ambulances and curious onlookers. New energy, a new sensation, new headlines that temporarily pushed Ernst Richter and the Alibi clients off the front pages.
A new investigative team: Liebenberg and Fillander and Ndabeni went to support other colleagues in Kraaifontein so as to make the first seventy-two hours count.
The Richter docket was in the doldrums and in the hands of the miserable Benny Griessel and man-with-a-mission Vaughn Cupido.
He woke with a realisation, a moment of clarity, with deep insight. He was Vaughn Cupido. In love or not, he was what he was. Direct and honest and very unconventional. Unpretentious.
Your greatest problem with relationships is always this initial period, when each party put their very best foot forward, when they tried to be what the other one wanted them to be.
Now, that was dishonest, it was pretentious, and he wasn’t going to fall into that trap.
That’s why he was now on a mission.
He reported back at the morning parade, comprehensively and professionally, doldrums be damned. From Brigadier Musad Manie and Major Mbali Kaleni he heard that there was nothing but deathly silence on the Chinese diplomatic front. He asked Benny Griessel – whose eyes were a bit brighter this morning, his weathered face a little less red – to keep an eye on IMC, and on the lookout for the reports expected from the Hawks in Gauteng, the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal. Then he drove to Stellenbosch.
He walked into Alibi and bounded up the stairs two at a time to Desiree’s office: he could see her at her desk, concentrating on the PC screen. He rapped his knuckles on the glass door, pushed it open and closed it behind him, all before she could even say hello.
‘I like you,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’ she said.
He realised he was leaning right over her desk. It must seem pretty aggressive, he thought and sat down, now that he had her attention. ‘I like you – a lot,’ he added. ‘But I scheme you’ve already worked that out for yourself.’
She started to speak, but he didn’t want her to say anything just yet. ‘I don’t expect you to say anything; I just ask that you listen. Homicide investigation is a rough business. It’s not for sissies. Man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. And there’s one thing that this man’s got to do and that is catch the killer. And if that means I have to get rof with an ou, then I get rof with an ou. But now I like you kwaai, and I start second-guessing myself. I’m not true to myself, versta’ jy?’
She stared at him, eyes wide.
‘So let me be true to myself. I will not apologise to Tricky Ricky Grobler, not in front of him, not in front of you, and not in front of all these people. ’Cause why, if I apologise, it will just be to impress you with a quality that I don’t have. And that quality is pretension. That’s not my scene. What you see is what you get. Rough around the edges, I come from Mitchells Plain, after all, but here inside I’m one of the good guys . . .’
Again she wanted to speak. He held up a palm to stop her. ‘When this is all over I am going to phone you, and I’m going to ask you out on a proper date. Candlelit dinner for two, at a place a policeman can afford. And then you can politely decline, and I’ll take the hint. Or you can gracefully accept, and then I am going to woo you, all romantic and proper. ’Cause I like you kwaai; you’re beautiful and classy and you care about people, and you’re smart enough to know when an ou is pretending, which I’m not going to do.’
‘I see,’ she said, her voice neutral.
‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, but let’s leave it there. I’m going to talk to Tricks Grobler now. I will be Vaughn Cupido, Captain of the Hawks, investigating a murder. Nothing more, nothing less.’
Miserable Benny Griessel. The tedium scared him: the sitting and waiting, knowing how the Demon Drink always finds work for thirsty mouths.
He walked up and down to IMC, kept an eye on his email for the reports from other centres, went to ask Mbali Kaleni four times if there was any news from the Chinese. And he thought about the two miniature bottles of Jack that were still in his drawer, the remnants of Friday’s scheme.
He reminded himself of the complexity that came with a life of lies; if you drank on the sly, you had to hide and deceive. It took so much concentration and energy, and he forced himself to be grateful that he was past that, that he was, albeit shaken and uncomfortable, back on the wagon.
He thought about the two little bottles in his drawer. How could he get rid of them?
He wondered how Alexa had known he was at the bar. And how she knew when he wasn’t at home.
Why hadn’t Doc phoned with news from Alexa?
Would he have to start looking for a new place to stay? Now, at Christmastime?
He walked back to IMC.
In the privacy of Richter’s empty office Cupido asked Rick Grobler: ‘You did get your c
ar, nè?’
‘I did.’
‘Cool. Everything okay with your car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cool. Then we’re all square, me and you.’ And as tactfully as he could, Vaughn Cupido told Tricky Ricky that there would be no apology. If Grobler hadn’t written the threatening email, the Hawks wouldn’t have had to treat him as a suspect. He got what he deserved. And that was how life worked, everything taken into account, at the end of the day. And here was how things were going to happen: The people who published the database were guilty of theft. A criminal offence. The law worked like this. If a member of the public withheld information about a criminal offence, that member of the public could be prosecuted. It wasn’t a threat, it was just a statement of fact.
But here was the offer: If Grobler could identify the guilty parties, Cupido would make sure that Rick Grobler would get all the praise and credit in public, in the press and in the programmers’ office at Alibi.
‘That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’
The DPCI Commissioner phoned Brigadier Musad Manie from Pretoria, to hear whether anything had been done about the illegal publication of the Alibi database, which had done so much damage to the country and its reputation.
Manie, in his deep voice and with great patience, explained that his team had done as much as they could, but it had not yet produced results. Was there any news from the Chinese?
No, there was no news.
The doldrums.
IMC had to process the Kraaifontein murders; the Richter case was put aside. Griessel went trawling through the docket again. And caught a small fish: in his interview yesterday the scrapyard owner had said he’d sent the package of money to PostNet Stellenbosch, to a Martinus Grundlingh.
He looked up the PostNet number and phoned. Yes, they said, if you collected a letter or a parcel you had to show an ID, unless you had a post office box there. No, there was no Martinus Grundlingh renting a post box from them.
When Cupido came back, he told him Ernst Richter most probably had a false ID: Martinus Grundlingh.
‘Maybe another secret cellphone? It bugs me that the one he used to blackmail went off the air so suddenly. I scheme he was worried that someone might trace him. So he dumped it and got a new one.’
‘That’s possible. I’ll ask IMC to do a RICA search.’
‘And then we go home, because they won’t be doing that today, or tomorrow.’
When he arrived home and opened the door, his cellphone beeped. An SMS from Alexa: In J’burg. Order pizza.
‘Fok,’ he said and walked out onto the veranda, looked up and then down the street, and at the houses opposite and next door. Could she see him? How had she known he had walked in now?
She wouldn’t lie about Johannesburg; did she have someone watching him?
He walked into the street.
Saw nothing.
Walked back in to order pizza and play his bass guitar. And think about the two little bottles in his drawer at work.
85
Two days before Christmas – 23 December – and Cape Town was a seething, scurrying ants’ nest, a massed press and rush as hordes of local and international holidaymakers descended on the city in their tens of thousands.
They had to buy their last gifts and cards and wrapping paper, and the turkeys and chickens and hams and legs of lamb for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day feasts. Or they streamed to the beach, or up Table Mountain, or to Cape Point or the wine estates, to enjoy the sunshine, to have fun, take selfies, because in the Cape you could never be sure when the wind or clouds would roll in to ruin your fun. It was a city of four seasons in one day, as fortune willed.
Griessel left early to avoid it all. Also because he had slept badly, unused these days to being alone, doing midnight battle with the demons and the bottle, and his anxiety over whether Alexa would return.
He had to do some shopping of his own. The Weet-Bix was finished, the milk too, the coffee tin was almost empty. Those were things that Alexa took care of and he didn’t know if she was ever coming back. Nor could he blame her, because if you are an alcoholic, and you live with an alcoholic, it can be like crossing a deep chasm on the thinnest of cables, without a safety net.
Doc had said if you are forty-six years old and you go back to drinking uncontrollably again, it’ll be the death of you. Your blood pressure will shoot up, and you will suffer uncontrollable diarrhoea. You will develop alcoholic cardiomyopathy of the heart, alcoholic hepatitis of the liver, inflammation of the pancreas, and you’ll fuck up your stomach lining, your small intestine and your kidneys.
Alexa was a fraction older than he was. She was aware of all these things, and her head wasn’t filled with altruistic depression, and survivor and other collective guilts. She wasn’t on a mission to destroy herself.
He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t come back.
Cupido got up in a bad mood. Not enough sleep; a restless night. He was cross with himself. Bull in a china shop, walking in like that and telling Desiree I like you kwaai, I’m going to woo you. Jirre, Vaughn, impulse control had never been his strong suit.
And he was JOC leader of a dead docket, and the day stretched out before him like a vacuum.
And he said to himself, it’s par for the course. In the movies and on TV a cop’s life was all action and satisfaction, but in real life, things worked a little differently: 10 per cent action, 90 per cent drudgery, grind, admin.
This is the 90 per cent, pappie. Suck it up.
And he did. He and Benny Griessel did the drudgery and grind, and the admin. And the last minute Christmas shopping. Until 16.56 on the 23 December.
Then they hit the 10 per cent.
They were sitting in Vaughn’s office, a packet of Speckled Eggs on the desk, eating and chatting. Cupido was on the point of saying Let’s go. Because he struggled with impulse control, he wanted to ask Benna, What do you do with a dolly who is out of your league, but you think about her night and day; he please just wanted to talk to someone, get it off his chest.
The tsip-tsap of Mbali Kaleni’s almost silent, sensible shoes came down the passage. They stopped talking and shot each other a meaningful glance. Cupido thought this is either very good news or very bad news, if she’s in this much of a hurry.
She came in, papers in hand. She looked at the Speckled Eggs and Cupido thought he saw lust in those eyes, just for a second. But she pulled herself together.
‘All the way from China,’ she said, holding the document out to him.
‘Jissis,’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘Sorry, Major. Thanks, Major,’ he said, up and out of the chair in an instant. He took it from her, looked at it.
‘Look at the last page,’ said Mbali, ignoring the swearword. Which meant that it was good news. ‘The account belonged to a company called Qin Trading. It was registered as an import export company in Guangdong in China. It existed from December 2011 to March 2013. Both the company and the bank account. The other pages are all the payments received and paid out.’
Griessel stood up to look over Cupido’s shoulder at the document. From the black stripe down the right-hand side and the quality of the type he could tell it was a fax. A header with the bank’s name, and the company’s name. and under that tables with dates and codes and amounts. Of which he understood very little. Here and there someone had circled a few figures in ink.
Cupido apparently also didn’t understand, because he said: ‘How do we know what these codes are?’
‘I’ve left a message for Benedict, but he’s on holiday,’ said Kaleni, referring to Bones in her customary fashion, and came around the desk. She pressed a finger on the document. ‘But look at the currency, in the right-hand column. I’ve circled all the payments that went through in South African rand. See, the ZAR . . .’
‘Okay,’ said Cupido and Griessel, a deep-voiced c
horus.
‘The column just to the left is the dollar amount. There were three amounts that corresponded to the amounts Bones identified in Richter’s account. See? Here, here, and here. Hundred and twenty five thousand dollars, twice. And two fifty.’
‘Right.’
‘But there are four more payments converted to ZAR. I’ve underlined them. The total is about two million rand. And they are not to Ernst Richter’s account.’
Cupido looked at the codes of those payments. They were indecipherable. He quickly glanced at his watch and had to bite back the ‘fok’ on the tip of his tongue.
‘The banks are closed for the day. Even if we can get hold of Bones, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ said Mbali.
Cupido picked up the packet of Speckled Eggs and held it out to her.
‘No, thanks. Prof Tim says that’s poison,’ she said.
Bones called back, just before six. ‘I’m on vacation here, nè. I promised Baba no work; she’ll kill me . . . I’m not the only guy at Statutory Crimes.’
‘Baba’ was an abbreviation of his wife’s name, Babalwa.
‘But you are the best,’ said Cupido, because he knew where Boshigo’s weakness lay. ‘So where did you take the missus?’
‘Hermanus. She wants to do the sea and sand and moonlight thing.’
‘Hermanus? You’re a darkie, Bones. That’s all white, all Boer territory.’
‘Not any more. Listen, Baba’s in the shower, so can we make this quick?’
Cupido told him about the Chinese bank statements and the indecipherable codes.
‘Snap them with your phone and send them to me. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe early tomorrow morning, Baba is going for an aromatherapy massage at the Birkenhead.’
‘Thanks, Bones.’
On the kitchen table was a packet of cold meat, Woolies Wafer Thin Selection, beside a packet of Low GI Mediterranean Chickpea Salad, and Griessel could swear it was still cold, fresh out of the fridge.