Guilty Consciences - [A CWA Anthology]

by Edited by Martin Edwards

  The next morning, another anonymous comment loomed on my blog: ‘The blame is equal. Note: Victimology identifies similarities between each of the victims of a particular crime to establish a definite pattern.’

  Dread took its prickly constitutional down my spine. Whoever was responding to my blog was no layman.

  That should have tipped me off. It probably would have. Only, my deductive process was interrupted by a text message from my brother, the FIFA benchwarmer: I will be playing in the third match.

  The red card turned out to be a blessing for one family, at least. That evening, our whole clan gathered in Soweto. We wore our happy masks, not wanting to remember the double defeat of Soweto Day, not the one in 1976 nor the FIFA one the previous day. The home-brewed sorghum beer we celebrated on didn’t contain battery acid like isikilimikwiki, the kill-me-quickly some people make; nevertheless, I spent the whole of Saturday tending my head.

  Time stretched and shrank in unrealism like a Salvador Dali painting. I slept.

  ~ * ~

  27 June, 2010

  South Africa fell out of the competition, despite my brother’s dazzling play in the last match of the group stage. While the rest of the country swayed under the blow, I secretly harboured the hope this would herald the end of the serial killings.

  Nobody else shared my optimism. They were right.

  The third victim’s hotel suite belonged in a brothel, or at least in my idea of what a brothel should look like. A circular bed. A large mirror on the ceiling. Red plush chairs with gilded legs and armrests. An opened champagne bottle in an ice bucket of sludge.

  This time, I got to the crime scene before de Vos.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘A few hours ago. Three tops. More likely under two.’

  I checked the time. The victim had played in the soccer match against England earlier that afternoon. De Vos and I had travelled to Bloemfontein to watch it live, because:

  one, I am a soccer addict,

  two, we could claim it as a legitimate investigation cost and,

  three, de Vos loves all things English. Oh, how colourfully he swore when the English equaliser was disregarded, and how loudly he stormed out of our hotel room when the match was over.

  Victimology. The word echoed in my brain. My voice came out all hollow. ‘This guy. He’s the goalie, right?’

  ‘The cheat who pretended the goal never happened,’ de Vos’s voice sounded from the door. ‘Good riddance.’

  I took another look around me. A perfect place to entertain soccer groupies or underage prostitutes. Judging by the multishaded lipstick stains on the champagne glasses and on the victim’s skin, this room was used for that very purpose. I counted the colours. Four. Despite myself, I felt something close to impressed. I know our Zulu boys can give a girl a good time many times in one evening, but I never imagined Europeans capable of the same feat.

  Take de Vos, for example . . .

  ‘Elizabeth? You OK?’

  ‘What?’ I came back to the here and now. ‘Sure.’

  I went back to doing my job. Ostensibly, this was presenting like yet another burglary in which the perpetrators panic and take the crime to a higher level. It wasn’t.

  ‘The third crime scene looks identical to the previous two,’ I said into my BlackBerry. Oh, the wonders of modern technology, when your phone is also your Dictaphone and web browser. I’m waiting for the day this compilation of miracles comes out as a wristwatch with 3D output. ‘The victim was shot with a single bullet to the head. The MO as well as the selection of victims seems to indicate a single killer.’

  Victimology.

  What did the three victims have in common, apart from soccer? A journalist, a ref, a goalie, all of different nationalities. The first victim’s articles may have offended a soccer fan. The second one was hated by all South Africa supporters, the third one by the English. It didn’t add up, and yet I could feel it in the marrow of my bones and on the tip of my thoughts.

  ‘By the way,’ I asked as I packed up to leave the crime scene, ‘where are we with our soccer fan rapist?’

  De Vos shook his head.

  My pulse reverberated hot against my eardrums. ‘You let him go?’

  ‘We had nothing concrete, Elizabeth. Condoms are a wonderful invention against AIDS, but they don’t help the forensics.’

  ‘Hair?’ I asked desperately. Then, remembering his completely bald head, ‘Body hair?’

  Rape is the most reprehensible of all crimes. Murder takes only the remainder of your life. Rape robs you of your dignity, of your womanhood, of your memories and of your chances at future happiness.

  In South Africa, rape is so brutal it robs you of your humanity.

  De Vos shot me a look. He knew about my past, had seen the scars, and not only the ones on the inside. He knew not to give me compassion. His boyfriend mask hid under that of an investigator. ‘The bastard shaves everything.’ The investigator mask slipped. ‘Sorry.’

  Everybody working on the FIFA murder case received a stern warning not to talk to anybody outside our circle, and so my blog entry for the night consisted of a row of question marks.

  That didn’t stop my anonymous comment-writer. Before long, the following words appeared in the comments box: ‘Every serial killer works to a certain set of self-imposed values, values as unique and identifiable as handwriting.’

  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  Trouble was, what values?

  Justice, whispered something inside my very core.

  ~ * ~

  28 June, 2010

  It all went conspiracy theory after that. The official account, to explain the victims’ absence from the games, was food poisoning. It was such a good conspiracy theory, everybody bought it. Our country is good at wearing masks suitable for every occasion. To the overseas crowd, we only ever show the exotic.

  The direct elimination matches were in full swing, the quarter-finals looming, and the boss was pushing me to predict the serial killer’s next move.

  ‘I need a result, Elizabeth,’ he said at the special team meeting this morning, his mask all no nonsense and no excuses.

  I may be sleeping with de Vos, he may be hoping to persuade me to move to England with him, but at work he’s still the boss.

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ was the only appropriate reply, though I did promise myself I’d get him back at home.

  ‘Can you narrow the field for us?’ he asked. ‘Race, age, geographical location?’

  I shrugged. ‘Clearly someone who won’t raise suspicions entering posh hotels. Smart enough to lay false clues. A soccer enthusiast. Someone whom the victims would invite into their hotel rooms.’ You didn’t have to be a crime profiler to come up with any of that. ‘Comfortable using a gun.’ Well, that narrowed it down. Not. Most South Africans, children and old people included, could shoot a gun in their sleep. ‘The gun is untraceable, I take it?’

  De Vos nodded, stretched, got up. ‘OK, people. We have a job to do.’

  I hoped my mask said, ‘Right on it, boss.’ My heart sure as hell didn’t.

  Back in my office, I stared at the wall. The desert-empty whiteboard hung like an accusation next to an A1 sheet with the schedule of all the World Cup matches. With a red marker, I recorded the names of the three victims, the dates of their deaths, their professions. I didn’t need to do this; good memory is in every African’s genes thanks to centuries of illiteracy, but I felt better for doing it.

  Next, in green and thankfully very-much-delible ink, I composed a list of suspects:

  1. Disgruntled soccer fan.

  2. Disgruntled player.

  3. A gambler trying to improve the odds for his wager.

  4. Somebody who wanted to kill only one of the victims and used the others as a smokescreen.

  5. A fellow crime profiler.

  Point number five chafed. I rubbed it out with the heel of my hand. Yet it was hard to argue with the facts. Back it went. No, anybod
y could walk in and see it. Out.

  In the end, I settled for an acronym, FCP: Fellow Crime Profiler. Great. Now what?

  Made fashionable by Hollywood, criminal profiling is the grey area between law enforcement science and the art of psychology. It’s a relatively new field with no set methodology and few guidelines for the practitioners. I spent the rest of the day following bullet trajectories and running statistical analysis on anything that could be analysed.

  ‘Coming to watch the game?’ De Vos stood in the doorway, a six-pack balanced in the palm of his hand, his mask of choice that of a carefree boyfriend bent on NOT talking about his woman’s rape.

  I shrugged. ‘Dunno. Who’s playing?’ I couldn’t remember.

  Funny that. With South Africa out of the Word Cup, my soccer spirit had dwindled. It was no longer a matter of patriotism to follow the sport. I would do my country a far greater service catching the serial killer.

  ‘Come on, Elizabeth, please. It’s Monday and we haven’t exactly had a weekend. Your place, my beer?’

  I capitulated. ‘Whatever you say. You’re the boss.’

  Two hours later, the boss mask changed into a soccer fan. ‘Cheating!’ The beer can crunched, crushed by de Vos’s fist.

  Beer dregs ran down his elbow on to the lounge carpet. Mine. ‘Did you see that? Elizabeth, did you see? What a diver. What a performer. What a fake.’

  ‘Mmmmm.’ There is something hypnotic and mesmerizing in soccer’s rhythm. I was in my zone, reluctant to surface.

  De Vos had found his groove. ‘Doesn’t he know this is South Africa? It’s a dangerous country in which to get on the wrong side of the crowd.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘What? The ref isn’t buying any of it. Just sit down, relax, enjoy the game.’

  The huffy mask went on and De Vos left as soon as the first game of the day was over, ranting and raving and fuming at the alleged cheating side’s victory.

  Another massive headache threatened to emerge, so I went straight to bed. Before I fell asleep, I blogged a few disjointed lines on the topic of, ‘It’s the coach’s fault anyway for letting them fake injuries’. The pain got worse.

  I was jerked awake by a phone call from de Vos. ‘We have another one.’

  My head still hurt. Even before he said it, though, I knew. I let him say it anyway. ‘The coach.’

  ‘I’ll be right there. Which hotel?’

  Despite my promise, I didn’t leave straight away. The laptop took for ever to boot up. The ISP dropped me three times before I got to my blog page.

  The anonymous comment, left three hours earlier, read: ‘According to Turvey, behavioural analysis is not effective in practice. Not only do criminals think differently than most people, but their behaviour has different meanings in different cultures. In some countries, rape is an acceptable way of life.’

  There was no escaping it. Brent Turvey, the authority on forensic science. The serial killer was one of us.

  ~ * ~

  6 July, 2010

  Bribery is most resplendent on Africa’s soil, cracked and ridden with parasites like elephant hide. Despite the international flavour of the murders, the facts slipped away unnoticed by the media. No uproar, no scandal, not even a mention.

  A voice in my head said it was a good thing. My boyfriend, wearing the boss mask, said I had a job to do. I listened to both.

  And I speculated.

  Predominantly, serial killers come from dysfunctional families or suffer a trauma in their formative years. They are almost always assumed to be men, and that’s true when the murders go hand in hand with sexual assault on the victim. Black Widows and Angels of Death, though, are predominantly women. While male serial killers kill for sexual reasons, female ones typically kill for profit.

  The FIFA murders didn’t fit the bill.

  Crime profiling methods had proved useless. The serial killer was too good. I resorted to some good old-fashioned sleuthing.

  ‘Has anybody reviewed any of the hotels’ security tapes?’ I asked de Vos.

  ‘Er.’ He sent me a charming grin. ‘At least we reviewed a lot of soccer footage?’

  I appropriated his computer and settled for a day of boredom. Given the choice between watching security tapes and watching paint dry, I’d go for the latter. Watching paint dry is easier on the eyes.

  De Vos had already done all the grunge work of selecting the recordings taken around the times of the murders, so I was spared having to fast forward through hours of irrelevant copy.

  I recognized the leather jacket on the footage of the first murder, but it took me two more to realize what I was seeing. Every time, the leather jacket had arrived at the hotel before the body was discovered.

  This was not happening. A round, hard ball of foreboding lodged in my throat. Slowly, every shift forward an effort, I walked towards the closet where we kept our coats and gloves in winter, when the African mornings are cold enough to go sub-zero.

  The mossy green of the leather peeked from behind my red woollen poncho and de Vos’s duffle coat. Inside the right-hand pocket of the jacket, my hand encountered the familiar shape of metal death.

  No hesitation, no second thoughts, no guilty conscience. I began by hard-erasing the footage from de Vos’s computer. Nobody was likely to miss it for the moment, and I made a mental note to return with a strong magnet to complete the job. Task one, check.

  Task two. ‘Captain?’ I said in my best professional voice. ‘Would a specialist be able to trace an anonymous comment placed on a blog?’

  ‘Theoretically. You need the blog owner’s permission, or you have to serve a court order on their ISP provider to get the data. Why? Do we have something?’

  His anticipation mask was almost heartbreaking. Almost.

  ‘No, sorry. It was just a random thought. I wanted to give hell to the FIFA officials for not coming down harder on all the cheating. Where is the sportsmanship in soccer? The cheats actually gloat about it in the media afterwards.’

  Task three, delete those comments. Make that, delete the whole blog.

  ‘Your brother played brilliant soccer, though,’ de Vos said, his hand briefly on my shoulder. ‘He’ll make them eat dirt in Brazil.’

  I gave him an empty nod. The next World Cup seemed light years away.

  Now for task four. I’m not proud of what I did next. Yet I did it-I, Elizabeth Mphela, PhD in Multiple Identity Disorders. Nobody else. I take full responsibility.

  Funny thing, though, human conscience. Mine didn’t bother me one bit as I pleaded a headache to de Vos and told him to watch the soccer without me.

  This time, I didn’t have a headache. I arrived at my destination just before the kick-off. Neither of the semi-final matches was held at Soccer City, so I was sure the Soccer City Rapist would be home.

  ‘Hello, Mr Spencer,’ I said to the camera at his gate. Task five, destroy this footage when I’m done. ‘I’ve come to take you up on your dinner invitation.’

  The fool let me in. You should have seen his mask.

  It was child’s play to shoot him with the same gun as those used by the serial killer, the one I found in the jacket pocket. Live by the sword, die by the sword. No remorse. Thanks to my training, I knew exactly where to aim it to make it look like suicide.

  I used his computer to send his confession to the general police email address available on the web. Then I watched the game on his home entertainment centre. The cheating team lost the semi-final. Justice prevailed.

  It was me, my own identity, all the time. No headache, no time distortion, no memory loss.

  What I’d loved most about my doctoral thesis was the controversy surrounding the existence of the multiple identity disorder. Now I loved the irony. Multiple identities, masks for every occasion. I had perfected the concept.

  My BlackBerry rang. I checked the caller ID. De Vos, the man with many masks yet only one identity.

  ‘Elizabeth. How’s your
head?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’ Through the miles that separated us, I could hear he was wearing his mask of a drunk.

  I thought about it. ‘Do we have to emigrate?’

  ‘Probably. Is that a problem? The English are bloody good at soccer, you know.’

  South Africa, my country, from the cradle to the grave. The last thing I wanted was to leave my roots. But I had masks of my own to bury, and faraway seemed like a good place for the funeral. ‘OK.’