by Malla Nunn
The sound of feet crunching the dirt broke the quiet and the girl looked up. Car lights swept past, briefly illuminating the dirt strip. A white man stood at the end of the alley, just emerged from the vacant lot. He was tall, big across the shoulders, and still. He wasn’t so much standing in the alley as blocking it.
A chill travelled up the girl’s legs and into her belly.
“Sorry, hey. Bad timing.” Fear sharpened her performance and she sounded every inch a slum-born English prostitute working for coins. “I’m just finished for the night.”
He moved towards her: big and getting bigger. Sure-footed. In no hurry. The girl backed away, worn heels scraping the dirt. Cars passed on the main road.
“Okay, wait.” She glanced over her shoulder and calculated twenty steps to the safety of traffic and people, maybe twenty-two. “Wait. Let’s talk. We can work something out. What is it you want?”
“Everything,” he said.
On another night and with another client she might have joked, “All right. But it will cost you.”
Not this time. She turned and sprinted for the alley exit. Images of a roadside trench and the cold weight of the earth covering her naked body one shovel-load at a time flashed through her mind. Every drop of street cunning accumulated over the hard years told her that the big man would take her blood and her bones. But he would pay nothing for what he took.
Seventeen, sixteen, steps more to the main road. In truth, she lost count. It didn’t matter. The traffic was louder, the headlights brighter. She risked a look over her shoulder. The man sauntered the dirt lane with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He couldn’t catch her at that pace. She was almost safe. Home now, quickly. Turn the handle, slip inside and lock the door.
She turned back and slammed hard into a wiry body. The impact knocked her off balance and breath rushed from her lungs. Her shoulder smacked the ground and dirt filled her mouth. She looked up, dazed. A second man crouched down and cupped a hand over her mouth. His palms smelled of raw sugar; such a sweet scent amid the stench of urine and kaffir weed in the laneway. Then realisation came quickly. There were two men in the alley and together, they’d netted her like a bird.
The one holding her down said, “Make sure she’s white. He’s strict about that.”
The man who’d blocked the exit to the vacant lot slotted a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. The flare of a match briefly lit his face, which was clean-cut and handsome. His black hair was combed back from his forehead. A dream client. He squatted and held the flame inches from her face. Heat licked her pockmarked cheeks.
“White and ugly,” he said and leaned closer. “Do you want to ride home with me tonight, sweetheart?”
The wiry one still blocked her mouth with his hand. She shook her head. Twin funnels of smoke snaked from the handsome man’s nostrils and he smiled.
1.
Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper hurried through the ramshackle garden, jacket unbuttoned in the night-time heat. A fat moon tangled in the branches of a jacaranda tree and the air carried the smell of fresh cut grass and the tree’s shameless purple flowers. It was a perfect Friday night to sit with his daughter Rebekah’s chunky brown arms laced around his neck while Davida sat barefoot on the stairs. Instead, he was at a crime scene in Parkview, in the flashing lights of a street cruiser.
Blue police barricades encircled a brick house with weeds growing from the gutters. The barriers were a physical reminder that the inhabitants had passed through the veil of the everyday and into a darker world of blood and broken things. Emmanuel crossed the crime scene perimeter and left ordinary behind.
“Detective. Sir.” A gangly white policeman reeking of sweat and vomit moved off the house stairs. He’d been inside, Emmanuel guessed, and seen something he wouldn’t forget. “Lieutenant Mason said to go straight in, Detective. Sir.”
A cluster of young uniformed constables stood on the porch. Two more guarded the front door. Middle-class, European victims always brought the force out in force.
“Sergeant Cooper, Marshall Square,” Emmanuel said to the police on door duty. They stepped aside. He stepped in.
Broken furniture littered the entrance and ripped telephone wires snaked across the oak floorboards. Glass from a wrecked hallstand reflected a mosaic of light onto the ceiling. Emmanuel took a deep breath. A single phone call he received minutes before the end of the shift had made the difference between being with Davida and Rebekah and being here, in chaos.
“What a mess, hey?” Detective Constable Dryer, a big-boned Afrikaner with thinning brown hair combed over a bald spot, stood in a doorway to the right of the wreckage. Dryer’s most useful character trait was his ability to state the obvious.
“Uh huh,” Emmanuel said. The white and yellow telephone wires interested him. The actual telephone lay further down the hallway, the receiver torn clean from the cord attaching it to its base. Stripping the wires from the wall might be a sign of extreme caution or violent rage. No way to tell which yet. An ambulance siren wailed in the distance.
“Animals. Who else would do this so close to Christmas?” Dryer hooked his broad thumbs into his belt, which gave his beer gut room to move. “You wait and see, Cooper. The Police Commissioner will work us like dogs till this case is closed. No leave. No overtime. We can kiss our holidays goodbye.”
“Bad timing,” Emmanuel said. Dryer liked to complain. If he worked for the postal service, the mailbags would be too heavy. Emmanuel let him gripe. The man was background noise and part of what Emmanuel had agreed to endure in order to secure a short-term transfer from Durban to Johannesburg. He’d worked his boss Colonel van Niekerk hard for the transfer and knew that the favour would have to be repaid in the future—with interest. Seeing Davida and Rebekah every day, however, was worth the heavier workload, and Dryer was no worse than most of the detectives he’d worked with in other places.
Broken glass crunched underfoot and a tall, pale man with a thin, humourless mouth stepped out of a room further down the corridor. “Detectives,” he said. Black hair, black shoes and an unwrinkled black suit gave Lieutenant Walter Mason a grim, funereal appearance. “Cooper.” Mason crooked a finger. “In here, with me.”
Emmanuel kept to the left of the corridor, careful to avoid disturbing the debris. A living room with lime green carpet, a brown corduroy sofa and a tinsel-laden Christmas tree appeared untouched. Four silver photo frames were arranged in a straight line on the mantle. Sounds of quiet sobbing came from deeper in the house.
“There’s no time for delicacy, Cooper,” Mason said. “The ambulance officers have to get through. Dryer, clear a path.”
“But …” the Afrikaner started to complain. Mason’s icy expression killed the words in his mouth. “Right away, sir.”
Emmanuel approached the doorway where the Lieutenant stood. Oak floorboards creaked underfoot. The air smelled of rusting copper after the rain. Emmanuel knew the odour well. It was the hot, wet funk of blood; a scent etched deep into his memory. He’d smelled too much of it on the battlefields of France during the war.
“Go on.” Mason motioned into a bedroom bathed in bright electric light. The metallic smell intensified. A shirtless white man lay on the cream-coloured carpet; pale arms and legs splayed at bizarre angles. Swollen to twice its natural size, the man’s face resembled a grapefruit left to rot in the field. Stained teeth showed through a split bottom lip. He had been horribly beaten. He might live to midnight.
“Ian and Martha Brewer,” Mason said. “A high school principal and a secretary at the office of land management. Not the usual victims of such a violent crime.”
Emmanuel skirted the bed and found the principal’s wife. She was a tiny thing; a puppet with cut strings propped up against the mattress base. Blood clotted her dyed blonde hair and stained the neckline of her pink cotton nightdress. A pulse point fluttered at the base of her neck, weak but steady. The ambulance siren howled from the front lawn and set the neighbourhood dogs to b
arking.
“Stay here, Cooper. I’ll see the medics in.”
“Yes, sir.” Emmanuel remained crouched and looked around. Middle-class ruin blighted every surface of the room. The wall behind the quilted bedhead was sprayed with an arc of rust-coloured splatter. Summer dresses and plain cotton shirts spilled from broken dresser drawers. The wardrobe had also been riffled.
“In here.” Mason directed two white men into the bedroom. Each carried a canvas and wood stretcher underarm and a medical kit in hand. “See to the woman first.”
Emmanuel stepped into the corridor, gave the attendants room to work. They kneeled on the stained carpet, staunching blood and bandaging wounds. Their hands were soon soaked, the knees of their trousers blotted red. Martha Brewer’s body made a small hollow in the canvas as they carried her to the ambulance, taking a path cleared through the hallway rubble by Dryer.
“The husband is finished,” Mason said when the ambulance roared onto the asphalt road with sirens screaming and Ian and Martha Brewer strapped into the back. “With God’s grace the wife will survive the night.”
“Yes, by the grace of God.” Emmanuel made more right noises. Some days it seemed that all he did was lie by omission.
“I didn’t take you for a praying man, Cooper,” Mason said. The only real colour in the Lieutenant’s face was in his eyes: they were a bright blue. Ice cubes had more warmth.
“I keep my hand in.” Emmanuel examined the telephone wires to avoid discussing religion with Mason, a born-again, praise the Lord Christian. For twelve years the Lieutenant had worked undercover operations, all the while enjoying regular access to his two great loves: sour mash whisky and free pussy. Then a Gospel tent preacher saved him and now he served a joyless god who frowned on all forms of pleasure, even laughter.
“So it’s true,” Mason said. “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
“I never met any,” Emmanuel said. That his superior officer knew he’d been a combat soldier during the war and not part of the rear-echelon army was a detail to consider later.
“All this for a box of jewellery and a stack of bills hidden behind the underwear drawer.” Mason gestured to the broken furniture. “The love of money is truly the root of all evil.”
“The living room hasn’t been touched,” Emmanuel said. “There’s a row of silver picture frames on the mantle. Why expend so much energy and leave those behind?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a robbery became a murder.”
“True.” Burglars caught in the act killed dozens of people every year and maimed a few more besides. “But this level of violence seems excessive, almost personal in nature.”
Sobbing came from the rear of the house.
“That’s the daughter you hear.” Mason stalked the length of the corridor, crunching debris. “Negus is babysitting her in the kitchen till one of the station secretaries arrives. She needs a female touch.”
In police code “female touch” meant “the witness is hysterical and won’t stop crying, even though we’ve told her to”. Emmanuel followed Mason and glanced into a room with an upended single bed, a ransacked wardrobe and walls papered in a yellow canary design: a teenager’s bedroom, presumably the girl’s.
“The police secretary is coming from out Benoni way. She won’t be here for another half an hour at the earliest.” The cold-eyed Lieutenant paused outside a closed door and glanced at Emmanuel over his shoulder. “I want you to get in there and try to calm things, Cooper. If I remember right, you’re good with women.”
“I’ll do my best,” Emmanuel said. Good with women? He tried and failed to come up with a source for Mason’s observation. They’d never worked together nor even had a beer at the local bar. The undercover operations squad were a tight unit. They believed in secrecy and money. Emmanuel had stayed far away from them his whole career—and especially since arriving back in Jo’burg.
Dryer sniggered, sure that Mason was referring to a party in Dryer’s imagination at which Emmanuel and the Lieutenant had shared in a repast of whores lain on by an obliging Madam. Dryer was an idiot.
“In here.” Mason opened the door to a ruined kitchen. Silver cutlery and smashed containers littered the floor and counters. Piles of flour, rice, coffee and sugar were dumped onto the small pine table. A white girl in a cotton nightie sat in a chair with her face buried in her hands, weeping.
“Name?” Emmanuel whispered before going in.
“Cassie. We got that from the neighbour who called in the disturbance. Nothing from her yet.”
Negus, the detective on babysitting duty was a solid, old-fashioned cop Emmanuel knew from the station. He would have come on duty with three things: a loaded gun, adrenaline and a hard man face. Good cop or not, he was ill-equipped to comfort a teenage girl whose parents might die tonight.
“Thank Christ,” Negus mumbled when he reached the door. “I need a piss and a smoke.”
The girl, Cassie, sobbed and kept her fingers tightly closed. Eyes shut, face hidden, she was trying to block out the chaos. Emmanuel walked into the room; time for Cassie to put her hands down and open her eyes.
“The foot police found her in that corner.” Mason pointed to a spot near a four-burner gas stove. “We’ve tried to get her out of here but she won’t leave.”
The kitchen, at least, smelled of cinnamon and caster sugar instead of blood. There was no blood in this room that Emmanuel could see. The headmaster and his wife had been beaten in the bedroom while the house was turned over: a job for two men, minimum. He found a kettle in the debris and filled it at the sink.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Cassie?” he asked. “Or cocoa, if I can find it?”
“Nothing,” she sniffed.
“You’re sure?”
“Uh huh.”
She was talking. That was a start. Emmanuel left the water running and checked her for injuries. Blood running down her thighs or dripping from an elbow would have shown up in the flour sprinkled on the floor. The flour was still clean. Cassie’s freckled legs and pale arms were likewise unmarked by trauma, her yellow nightie, pristine.
“Is that blood?” Emmanuel leaned closer, heart thumping. Red was smudged across the back of her hand. Christ knows what injuries hid behind those shuttered palms.
“What?” she hiccupped.
“There.” He gently touched the spot and noticed the red had a strange metallic sheen.
“Oh.” She dropped her hands to the table and rubbed at the smear with a fingertip. “I don’t know where that came from.”
Oh yes you do, Emmanuel thought. It wasn’t blood Cassie scrubbed away at so hard. It was lipstick.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Cooper,” he said. “Are you hurt any place that I can’t see?”
“No.” Cassie scraped the last trace of red away with a fingernail and looped a strand of frizzy ginger hair behind her right ear. She was about fifteen with bright hazel eyes and a wide mouth that belonged in a broader face. Freckles sprinkled her nose, neck and collarbones so her skin appeared browner than white. “I’m all right. Really.”
Emmanuel gave her his handkerchief. “Can you tell me what happened?”
She blew her nose and frowned, thinking.
“Take your time.” Emmanuel lit the gas flame under the kettle. “There’s no rush.”
“I … I was asleep in my bed and there was a … a big crash. Like there was someone in the house.” Her frown deepened, cutting a trench into her forehead. “It was dark. I couldn’t see.”
“Tell me what you did then.” Emmanuel sat at the table. “After the noise.”
“I got a fright and I got out of bed.” Cassie twisted the corner of the handkerchief into a tight cylinder. “Then I hid behind the wardrobe.”
“Your wardrobe?” He’d noticed the ripped doors and the scattered contents from the corridor.
“Ja. That one.”
“Did you hear voices from there?”
“What?” The question seemed to startle her
and the corners of her wide mouth twitched. “I … I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were behind the wardrobe while the robbers were in your room. Did they say anything?”
Cassie took a deep breath, looked away to the kitchen window. The moon now hung lower in the branches of the jacaranda outside. Two minutes ticked by in silence.
“Zulu,” she said finally. “They were speaking Zulu. I don’t know what they were saying.”
Footsteps shuffled in the doorway. Mason and Dryer moved closer to catch the rest of Cassie’s story. A few days shy of the Christmas holidays, the Police Commissioner would cancel all police leave pending an arrest. The headlines tomorrow would send a ripple of fear through the white neighbourhoods: Zulu Gang Beats European Couple to Death in their Bed.
“It wasn’t Pedi or Shangaan that you heard?” Emmanuel asked. Johannesburg was the economic powerhouse of Southern Africa, and the promise of work drew black Africans of every different tribal group. The city was an industrial Babel, with dozens of languages spoken.
“No. It was Zulu. Definitely. I …” Cassie buried her face in her hands and started to cry again.
Emmanuel touched her arm, hoping the warmth of human contact would calm her. It didn’t. The girl’s sobs deepened. Only a little while ago, she had been alone in a corner, too terrified to move while her parents bled out onto their carpet a few feet away.
Emmanuel stood up and put an arm around her shoulders. Her wet face pressed against his stomach. He made the right sounds yet felt no sorrow, pity or anger. He was detached, floating above the wrecked kitchen, wondering when his ability to lie had grown so deep and become so easy. Wiry hair crinkled against his shirt, curlier than his mixed-race daughter’s would ever be. He’d never hold his own girl Rebekah like this in public.
“It’s okay.” He recited the given script. “You’re safe now. You can talk to me. Tell me anything.”
“I recognised their voices.” Cassie’s face burrowed deeper against his tear-soaked shirt. “I know who did it.”