by Deon Meyer
Had to be.
He needed to phone Vaughn, tell him they’ve just nailed Du Toit. He turned to the door, looking for Vaughn’s number.
A figure appeared in the doorway startling Griessel. The man was startled too.
‘Wat maak jy hier? What are you doing here?’ The voice was sharp. A coloured man in overalls.
‘Police,’ said Griessel.
‘Police? Does Meneer know you’re here?’
‘He’s not back yet.’
Griessel saw the sign beside the labourer, just inside the door. It was an advertising board, half a metre wide, fixed to two metal poles, as if made to be pushed into the ground. Green background, white letters. There was a logo of a wine bottle, with four wheels. Something about it drew his attention, but the man was speaking, distracting him.
‘What did you say?’ asked Griessel.
‘I better fetch Meneer,’ he answered nervously.
‘Is he back?’
‘Meneer has been in his office all morning. It’s Christmas bonus day today. I’ll call him . . .’ He turned and walked away.
‘What meneer?’ Griessel called after him, and wondered whether there was a foreman here.
‘Meneer Venske.’
‘What does he do here?’
‘He’s the owner of this farm.’
‘Klein Zegen?’ asked Griessel.
The labourer stopped for a moment. ‘This is Blue Valley, here,’ he said indignantly and then began to jog away, clearly upset.
Griessel didn’t immediately register the implications; he was staring at the sign. Below the bottle with wheels stood three big letters: VBC. And below that: Vintage Bottling Company. In even smaller letters: Estate Mobile Bottling & Labelling. Call Peter McClean. And a cellphone number.
89
He stood in front of the shed, in the bright sunlight. He was still talking to Cupido on the phone when the labourer returned, along with a tall man in glasses.
‘What are you doing on my property?’
Griessel held a hand up in the air to show he would answer soon and said to Cupido: ‘The owner is here now. Will you find it? Blue Valley. It’s just next door, across the river.’
‘I said, what are you doing on my property?’ the tall man asked again, his voice and body language aggressive, the indignant land baron. Now Griessel could see he was in his sixties, a powerful man with a hooked nose like a bird’s beak under the glasses, and a thick moustache camouflaging a somewhat weak mouth. His skin was weathered by the sun.
‘We’re on our way,’ said Cupido. ‘Great work, Benna.’
Griessel rang off. The man was right up against him, intimidating, chest pressing forward.
‘I’m from the police, sir.’ Griessel put out a hand to greet him. ‘Benny Griessel . . .’
The man ignored his hand. ‘You have no business here.’
The labourer stood a few steps away and endorsed his employer’s words with a nod.
‘Are you the farm owner?’
‘I am, yes, and I’m telling you now, to get off my farm.’
‘I am busy with a murder investigation, and I have just identified the possible murder scene here on your property. What is your name?’
‘Where is your permission to come sniffing around here?’
He had seen this kind of behaviour often. The only way to handle it was to remain calm, stay in control. And protect the investigation from attacks that might end up in court.
‘My permission is in Articles Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six of the Criminal Procedure Act, sir. Article Twenty-Five point Three says I may access any area without a warrant during an investigation, if there are reasonable grounds to believe that in the circumstances I would obtain a warrant and a delay might hinder the investigation. I ask you again, what is your name?’
His words had the desired effect. The man’s shoulders slumped slightly and he stepped back a fraction.
‘My name is Dietrich Venske.’
‘Mr Venske, I have reason to suspect that Ernst Richter was murdered here on your property. My colleagues are on their way. We are going to cordon off this area, and we are going to obtain a warrant for a full search. We hope we can rely on your cooperation.’
‘Ernst Richter? Who is Ernst Richter?’ he asked with absolute disgust, as if he was personally insulted by the name. Then he snorted through his nose like a bull and said: ‘This is rubbish. I’m going to phone my lawyer.’
Only Cupido and Ndabeni and the men from Forensics came; the rest of the Hawks carried on with their search of Klein Zegen.
‘Makes sense,’ said Cupido, ‘you ambush Richter on your neighbour’s land, so that you don’t leave evidence on your own farm.’
Griessel just nodded and led him and Vusi to the signboard, which was leaning against the wall just inside the shed door. ‘This is the guy Richter phoned on his secret phone. The guy who had never heard of Richter.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said Cupido.
‘I’m going, Vaughn. I’m going to question him.’
‘Okay. Take Uncle Frankie along.’
They were still making their way through Stellenbosch when Captain Philip van Wyk of IMC phoned. ‘Sorry we took so long, the Kraaifontein thing kept us busy, but I have good news. We found your Martinus Grundlingh in the RICA database. It’s another Richter forgery of an ID document and proof of address. He bought a phone with it, in June this year – just after the other clandestine phone went off-air.’
‘Thanks, Philip,’ said Benny, with feeling.
‘We are just waiting for the subpoena to plot the new number.’
‘Philip, what I also want to know, is whether the Grundlingh number phoned Peter McLean.’
‘We will look. I’ll call when we find something.’
They stopped in front of the house in Kuilsriver. Suburban, middle class, neat. On the green lawn three little boys and a girl, all between the ages of four and seven, ran after a ball, screaming and laughing. Through the open sitting-room curtains they saw the flickering lights of a Christmas tree. In the driveway, behind two other cars, was a Fiat bus, painted green, with the letters VBC and, after that, Vintage Bottling Company. Estate Mobile Bottling & Labelling.
Fillander and Griessel got out, walked up the driveway to the front door. The children stopped and stared at them. The oldest boy ran towards the front door. ‘Oupa,’ he shouted, shrill and excited, ‘here’s two uncles.’
But it was Ouma who came out with a tray of biscuits. She was an attractive coloured woman, maybe late fifties, who smiled in welcome.
‘Good morning, are you looking for Peter?’
‘Please, ma’am,’ said Fillander.
‘I’ll call him now.’ She looked at the cluster of children. ‘Come you; Ouma has made essies and rulle.’
Her words caused great excitement, and they rushed at her. ‘No, no, come and wash your hands first . . .’ Then she called inside: ‘Peter! Here are people for you.’
He appeared in the door, took them in at a glance, the coloured man and the white man, and something changed in his face: a realisation, and insight.
‘Let’s go and talk there by the car,’ he said quietly.
All three of them walked out to the street where the Hawks car was parked. The woman called from the front door: ‘Everything all right, my darling?’
‘Hunky dory,’ Peter McLean called back to her.
‘You were really good over the phone, Mr McLean,’ said Griessel. His problem was that he had nothing apart from a ninety-four second call, an advertising sign and a suspicion. He would have to fish. Cleverly, like the fokken reporter from the Son.
McLean stood by the car, arms crossed. He was somewhere around sixty, hair grey and short, his chest and arms strong from a lifetime of work. Fillander leaned on the Hawks car.
/> Benny took a chance. ‘We found Richter’s other cellphone as well,’ he said.
No reaction.
‘We will be able to see if he phoned you.’
Stoic silence.
‘We’re going to get a warrant to obtain your bank statements.’
McLean just looked at him. He would have to take a bigger gamble. Griessel hesitated, because if he was wrong the man would know he was feeling his way in the dark. ‘We know about you and Francois du Toit.’
Now something moved again in McLean’s face. Griessel knew he was heading in the right direction.
‘Right now we’re searching Klein Zegen. Everything, from one end to the other.’
McLean looked to the right, into the distance, then at Griessel, then at Fillander, and then he turned around, facing the house, and pressed his lips together.
When he spoke, it was to Fillander, as if he would get more sympathy from the coloured detective. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘We talk here, by the car. You don’t put me in handcuffs, and you don’t take me away from her. You leave me to have Christmas with my children and grandchildren. Boxing Day I will come and hand myself over.’
‘Did you kill Richter?’ Fillander asked in astonishment.
‘No. But I’m not an innocent man.’
Peter McLean asked them first to understand, over the last few years bottling companies had been under great pressure, because it had become much more profitable for wine farmers to export wine in bulk, to be bottled abroad, as the European demand for wine increased. He had to retrench people, from 2011 on. People who had worked with him for years. People with families, children at school, people with debt on houses and cars.
‘And I’m four years from retirement. I haven’t had a raise in thirty-six months, my nest egg is small.’
And then Ernst Richter turned up in January 2012 and made Peter McLean an offer. The bottling of ten thousand bottles of red wine; he would pay full price, plus a bonus of a hundred thousand rand. But then McLean mustn’t ask questions about the origin or the destination or the nature of the wine.
‘Then I said, fine, but I want it in cash, fifty thousand now, and fifty thousand when the job is finished. Cash, because I don’t want it going through the books. I met him in Stellenbosch two days later, and he gave me the first fifty thousand. Then he asked me where he could find a farmer to make him a special red wine, no questions asked. I said I would think about it and phone him. Then he gave me a number, and I went away and thought about it. I have been working now forty-two years in the wine industry, and when you drive from farm to farm to bottle or to sell your services, then you hear all the stories. At the time it was only a month after Du Toit senior and his son died in the car crash, and I knew young Francois wanted to take over, and I knew about his harvest, because I had been there to tell him we are the best and the most cost-effective, if he was ready to bottle. So I phoned Richter and said, talk to young Du Toit.
‘A week later he called me back, and he said thank you very much, Du Toit is in. We bottle in June or July. And that’s what happened. That winter on Klein Zegen we filled, corked, sealed and labelled ten thousand bottles. Fake wine. Fake French wine. 2010 Château Lafite Rothschild. Ten thousand bottles. It must have earned Richter a fortune. A fortune.’
McLean stopped. He let his eyes drift back towards his house.
‘And then?’ Fillander asked.
‘Then I got my other fifty thousand, and I thought that was that. But it wasn’t. Nearly two years later, Richter phoned me again, out of the blue. He wanted money . . .’
‘That was the call in May?’ Griessel asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘Then he wanted money, or he would tell my boss about the bottling in 2012. I asked how much, because if I lose my job now . . . then he said a hundred thousand rand, and then I said I don’t have that sort of money, I can give him ten thousand. That’s all that I have. Then he cut the call off.’
‘Did you know about his Alibi business?’
‘No, nothing. I’m not one for the newspapers.’
‘So, when did you hear from him again?’ Griessel was sure there must have been more.
‘Monday twenty-fourth of November, I walked in to work, our head office is in Devon Valley, and my boss called me in and he asked me if I knew anything about French wine that was bottled in June 2012. I got such a fright then, and I said, no, nothing, but why the question? Then he said some guy had phoned and said he was from SARS and he was investigating a case, and my boss must talk to Peter McLean. And I said I don’t know anything. But I was worried, the whole day. And that afternoon, Richter phoned me again, and he said, Are you ready now to pay me my money? And I said I genuinely didn’t have any money. But I do have a story for him.’
‘What story?’
‘A story that would get him his money.’
90
Francois du Toit ran down the steps to where advocate Susan Peires stood waiting. She couldn’t read the expression on his face; only his voice betrayed his emotion. He had his cellphone in his hand, and held it out in front of him like the Holy Grail.
‘Look!’ he showed her, but his hand was shaking so much that she had to take the phone from him to read the message.
There was an SMS on the screen from San. The police have gone again. Said they were very sorry, big mistake. Where are you? Phone me, please. We are VERY worried.
She looked at him, saw the emotion coursing across his face.
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’
‘Don’t trust too much in the stars,’ she said.
He shook his head, self-conscious about the tears that welled up so close to the surface.
‘I assume you no longer need me today.’
‘I hope . . . I don’t think so.’
‘What are you going to tell your wife?’
‘The truth. I’m going to tell her the truth.’
‘That’s good,’ said Susan Peires. ‘The truth is always the best.’
The Blue Valley homestead was modern, set high up against the mountainside, overlooking the Blaauwklippen Valley. The view from the sitting room, with the early evening sun setting over a distant Table Mountain, was indescribably beautiful.
But nobody was looking at the view.
The four detectives sat beside each other on the long couch: Ndabeni, Fillander, Liebenberg and Griessel. Their JOC leader Vaughn Cupido sat beside them on an easy chair, a happy man.
Opposite sat the indignant Dietrich Venske, and beside him, his legal representative Wynand van Straaten, a man with a sharp jackal-like face – an animal association that was heightened by two pointy ears, and eyes that darted from detective to detective.
‘It’s your show, Benna,’ said Cupido.
Griessel paged through his notebook, found the correct page. He nodded and looked at Venske. ‘Mr Venske, when did you buy this farm?’
Venske looked at Jackal van Straaten. The lawyer motioned with his head that yes, Venske could answer the question.
‘In 1994.’ Morose and sullen.
‘And before you bought the farm, what did you do?’
The Jackal nodded, Venske spoke. ‘I worked for KWV.’
‘What did you do there?’
The Jackal nodded. ‘I was the head of the accounts department, at Legal Administration, by the time I left,’ said Venske.
‘What was your salary then?’
‘I don’t see how that is in any way relevant,’ said The Jackal.
‘The question is how Mr Venske could purchase this farm on the salary from KWV,’ said Griessel. ‘Can you tell us how much you paid for the farm?’
‘You don’t have to answer that,’ said Van Straaten.
Venske stroked his moustache, said nothing.
‘I don�
��t understand you lawyers,’ said Vaughn Cupido. ‘All you manage to do is to make us more suspicious. If your client is innocent, why the big silence?’
Van Straaten addressed himself to Venske. ‘Anything that you say, they can use in court, Dietrich. And you know how things are going with our legal system.’
‘There is nothing wrong with our legal system,’ said Vusi Ndabeni.
The Jackal and Venske ignored him.
‘Are you going to answer my question, Mr Venske?’ Griessel asked.
‘I think I have said all I want to say,’ he said, stroking his thick moustache.
‘What is your problem with my client?’ asked Van Straaten. ‘He’s a respected farmer and businessman. He never made use of Ernst Richter’s sinister services.’
‘Sinister services,’ echoed Cupido. ‘There’s one for the classics.’
‘He didn’t know Richter at all.’
‘Let me tell you what our problem with your client is,’ said Griessel and leaned forward, his notebook open in front of him.
Transcript: Interview and Sworn Statement
Name: Mr Peter McLean
Date: 26 December 2014
Place: Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation, Market Street, Bellville
Present: Captain V. Cupido (DPCI), Captain B. Griessel (DPCI), Advocate A. Prinsloo (State Prosecutor)
Peter McLean: Just so we’re on the same page here: I’m turning state witness, and you don’t arrest me for anything . . .
Advocate Prinsloo: The immunity is only relevant to crimes committed as part of what you refer to as Project Champ, between 1990 and 1994. I want to state that very clearly.
Peter McLean: That’s all I ask. And Project Champ was all over by the end of ’92. Just for the record.
Advocate Prinsloo: Then we’re on the same page.
V. Cupido: Okay. Let’s get this show on the road. What happened in ’92?
Peter McLean: It began in 1990.
V. Cupido: Okay, cool. Start from there.
Peter McLean: I think it was around March of 1990, when Mr Venske came to talk to me . . .
B. Griessel: That would be Mr Dietrich Venske, who is today the owner of Blue Valley?