The grand old inn occupied an entire block, and behind it, sheltering from the pious glare of the church were the small cottages of the original inhabitants, who had named the town after the German branch of their Christian religion, and whose needs were fulfilled by a place for worship, a place for drinking, and simple homes with little more than a bed, a table for eating, and a patch of land for growing vegetables – water provided by the river at the foot of the patch.
The address I had was for one of these small boxes huddled behind the inn. Neatly trimmed grass with a paved path which led to the freshly painted front door, and a window to each side like a child’s drawing. All that was missing was smoke coiling up from the chimney. I wondered who lurked behind the door, and my hand hesitated a moment before knocking. Who was the one person that had meant enough to Sandy that she had broken her complete separation from everyone and everything? In that moment I wondered whether I really did want to know who it was. Because the police officer who had rejected my missing person claim had not been entirely wrong – my relationship with Sandy had changed in the weeks before she disappeared – not soured particularly, but it had lost its verve, the passion had faded. Was I doing the right thing now, in trying to find her?
But it was a fleeting hesitation, and my knuckles were already banging on the wood. The sound of the knock rang with the hollowness of an empty house. But I stood there for a full minute, then knocked again. Still no response. I turned away from the door and discovered an old man in a crumpled felt hat and the khaki uniform of the Afrikaans farmer standing beside my car and watching me. He leaned on a gnarled stick and considered me through narrow eyes.
“You’ll not find him there,” he said in Afrikaans, as if the idea was a ridiculous one. “You selling insurance?”
I doubted I looked much like an insurance salesman. I had sustained some physical damage in the final moments of my job for the Department – a grazed cheek and a partially blackened eye – and hours in the rental car had done little for my general presentation. But I smiled at the obvious mistake.
“Friend of the family,” I said.
“That so?” He sucked his teeth, then used his tongue to demonstrate the way in which his dentures could be made to perform a somersault without leaving his mouth. It wasn’t a particularly pleasing display, but I kept smiling as he decided whether to take our conversation any further.
“He’ll be in the bar then, won’t he?” he said, once his dentures had returned to base with a nasty sucking sound.
“Of course,” I said, as if I should have realised that, and felt an uncomfortable shiver. The thought that this person – so special to Sandy that he had been the only person she had called after disappearing – was sitting in a bar in the middle of the afternoon was not encouraging.
“Where else?” said the man ominously, and he gave a twitch of the head to indicate the hulking purple inn behind him.
Three
The arched oak doors of the Heidelberg Inn gave onto a warm entrance hall with dark wooden panelling, deep pile Persian rugs over polished terracotta, a central table with flowers beneath a ceiling fan that drooped like a palm tree out of season, and a stern lady trapped behind a reception desk who was reading a glossy magazine through half-moon spectacles. She looked up at me by moving her eyes over the half-moons like a chameleon while her head remained static. I had already seen the door leading to the bar and pointed at it so that she wouldn’t have to move any other parts of her body in that creepy way, and she gave me the sort of understanding smile that teetotallers give you when they catch you shaking as you reach for the bottle.
There was only one customer in the bar, but he pretty much filled the place. There must have been two hundred kilograms of him; he’d surpassed the maximum size offered in khaki shirts, so bits of the two hundred kilograms were in evidence where the buttons had popped. I took a moment to take in his full glory, and his pink eyes gazed back at me with disinterest.
Was this the person Sandy had phoned? Sandy, who had persuaded me to put down my gun and take up a camera, who had won awards for her journalism, who had the fiercest sense of independence and pride of anyone I had ever met. I couldn't imagine that this immense and inebriated man was the person she had called. But then, many things that Sandy had done were hard to imagine.
An elderly barman stood behind the counter, working his way through a platoon of glasses that were steaming gently, giving them a polish with a dishcloth bearing the embroidered logo of the inn. He was a tall man with chiselled cheeks and heavy-framed spectacles, not as old as I had initially thought, which was a trick of the tight curls of prematurely white hair against his dark skin. He focused on the glass he was polishing as I settled onto a stool at the bar counter, holding it up to the light in the tradition of barmen around the world. Satisfied with the state of the glass, he gave a slight grunt of approval and placed it into a rack above the counter.
“What can I do you for?” he asked in a deep baritone, and only then did he look at me, his unusually light hazel eyes emphasised by the heavy frames of his spectacles. The bar wobbled on its foundations – they were Sandy’s eyes. The hazel colour, the small flecks of lighter yellow, even the lively humour that lay behind them.
I asked for a whisky. The barman said he had a good Scottish single malt and poured me a double, all the while watching me with Sandy’s eyes because my own had betrayed my surprise. He placed the glass on a card mat and positioned a trio of snacks beside it.
“Dreadful business,” I said, because the television in the corner was playing the report of the Afrikaans socialite who had been killed in a failed bombing attempt at a sports stadium a few days before.
“Hard to believe,” he agreed in a non-committal manner.
Having thus dealt with current affairs, I took a taste of the single malt.
“Passing through?” he asked, and pulled the dishcloth from his shoulder and resumed the glass polishing routine, but his eyes stayed on me.
“No,” I admitted. “I came here to find you.”
He showed no surprise; held the glass up and squinted at it.
“You’re her soldier,” he said, after a pause. It wasn’t a question.
“I was.”
He slid the glass with care along the metal rails of the rack above the bar, then returned the dishcloth to his shoulder, and took two paces to stand before me at the end of the bar, his back to the bottles, and folded his arms.
“She said you were a good man,” he said, and glanced over at the sumo wrestler in the corner, who showed no sign of needing any service, and frankly only minimal signs of the persistence of life. Having established that we had a few minutes to ourselves, the barman turned back and settled Sandy’s eyes on me.
“She didn’t tell you she’d found her father?” he said. “Did she tell you I was dead?”
“No, she never said that. Only that she had been raised by her great-aunt. And that you had not been around.”
“Was not given the chance,” he said without bitterness. “They gave her a good life, no doubt of that. But not a life with space for an impecunious room service waiter.”
Not even one that used words like ‘impecunious’ I thought, but said nothing. He was a man of contrasts – his manner spoke of a life in the service of others, pouring them drinks, cleaning up their spills, perhaps delivering trays of food to their love nests, and yet he struck me as a man who read books late into the night. He had Sandy’s pale eyes, but darker skin than hers. Another contrast – caught between the two races that had mixed higher up the family tree. As chance or genetics would have it, he appeared more African than European, but his daughter had drawn the other card.
“When a woman dies in childbirth,” he said, “you cannot blame the child, can you? If someone must be blamed, it is the man who planted the seed in the first place.” He smiled regretfully and removed his glasses to give them a polish with the dishcloth, then put them back again, and focused on me as if to rea
d something on my face. “They needed someone to blame. You’ve met them, I’m sure; a matriarchy, strong women, all of them.”
“They took Sandy away from you?”
“I had a few hours with her, here and there. But what can a man do in those circumstances? We have none of the tools. I was young, I was naïve, I had lost the woman I loved, I was confused.” He removed the glasses again and blinked at me. “They closed the door on me, took her into their witch’s coven, and told me not to upset her. Some days they would let me in, allow me to visit my daughter, give me a few minutes of gazing on her, let her little hands grab at my fat fingers. But most days they wouldn’t. The time is not right, she’s sleeping, she’s eating, she’s feeling ill, come back next week, next month, next year, or better yet, come back never.” Although his words were harsh, he spoke without rancour, as if he was justifying their actions. “Five years I loitered outside that brothel of theirs, like a man without a soul.”
He laughed suddenly, put the spectacles back on and brought the dishcloth back into his hands and ready for action.
“You know about her family business?” he said with sudden concern.
I did know about her family business – for three generations Sandy’s family had run a brothel. A famous, or perhaps notorious, brothel that had played a part in the history of the vibrant mixed community of an area called District Six. Inclusive of all races, religions and cultures, it stood for everything that was anathema to apartheid. That was probably why the government sent bulldozers in to raze it to the ground.
“Of course you know,” he said. “Why am I telling you this nonsense?” He stepped away to pick up another glass. “Everything okay there, Mister Du Preez?” he called to the sumo wrestler in the farmer’s suit. The man nodded and opened his mouth to speak but only produced a juicy cough that rattled about his chest, as if he was underwater and struggling to surface. The cough reached a climax with a strangled gasp. He cleared his throat and swallowed with a nasty gulp.
“Alles goed,” he said finally, which didn’t seem the truth, but Sandy’s father accepted it.
“Sandy found you?” I prompted after a moment’s pause.
“There was no keeping the truth from her, was there? That’s the one thing those brothel madams didn’t account for.” The bitterness surfaced finally, and the glass that he was polishing took the brunt of it. “No keeping secrets from my Sandy,” he said, and placed the cracked glass on the counter away from the others.
“Although she was good at keeping her own.”
“She was that,” he agreed, then suddenly thrust his hand out towards me. “My name is Benjamin,” he said.
I smiled at that. “Ben,” I said. “I’m just plain Ben.”
I wondered whether Sandy had ever mulled over the coincidence of our similar names, and I almost said something to Benjamin. But who knew what Sandy had ever thought? The way one gets past the voluntary disappearance of someone is by refusing to indulge those kinds of thoughts. At least that was how I did it.
“I wanted to ask you about the phone call Sandy made to you,” I said.
“That last call,” said Benjamin, and he picked up another glass and started polishing it. He was silent for so long that I thought he would not answer me. Then he said: “She used to call me every month, on a Saturday. First Saturday of the month. ‘Happy New Month, father.’ Like clockwork. And twice a year she would visit. A few days was all we needed to fill those missing years. Isn’t that strange? We would walk, talk, cook, eat. But then she missed a call. Suddenly, just like that.”
He raised the glass for an inspection, then gingerly slid it along the rails to join the others. Stepped away from me to collect another one, then stepped back, his focus on the glass.
“She told me about you. Working for the secret government departments we’re not meant to know about. The ones that spy on our every move. I was sure you knew all about her calls to me, and I told her as much, but she laughed and said she had her secrets.” He noticed an invisible spot, which he rubbed angrily.
“I only learnt about the calls a few days ago,” I said.
He didn’t seem to have heard me.
“She didn’t call on her usual Saturday, or the next,” he said. “It had happened again.”
He stared at the glass as if trying to remember what he was doing with it, his eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles.
“Again?” I said.
He looked up at me.
“Sandy is not my only child. She has a half sister. Thirteen years younger than her. Thirteen years and one week exactly. We used to laugh about that. My birthday is only a week before her sister’s. We had blood in common and also our stars. Isn’t that what they say, that your birth can foretell your life?”
“What was it that happened again?”
“I never believed in that astrology nonsense, but it was something that bound us. We needed all the help we could get in trying to belong.”
Benjamin polished the glass. I waited.
“Her sister had a different mother, of course, who survived the planting of my seed, but who didn’t have it in her nature to stay with me or her daughter. Went to visit family in the Transkei one summer when our daughter was only three years old. Said she’d be back, but …” he shrugged, then smiled and his hollow cheeks lifted. But Sandy’s sad eyes were unmoved. “It’s my curse,” he continued. “I know that now, but didn’t know it then. I built a wall around myself and the baby I still had. Bricked up the doors, barred the windows, I would not let her go.”
“It didn’t work?”
“Never does, does it? It’s what all the books say, and all the wise men. If you love something, you must let it go. Build a cage, and the bird will fly.”
“And she flew?”
“Not long after Sandy found me, her sister fell in with a bad lot. She was slipping down the slope, and I knew it. Sandy scolded me. Do something about it, Father, she would say. But nothing I did seemed to work. Or perhaps it worked in reverse, my fumbling effort pushed her further away.”
From the corner of the bar, came the sound of the sumo wrestler struggling to overcome another respiratory problem. Benjamin took a fresh tumbler, a bottle of water, and some rum over to him. The man survived the attack. Benjamin returned to his post behind the bar.
“Pushed her where?” I asked.
Benjamin shook his head. “There was no where. No here, no there. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t.”
“And the bad lot she fell in with? They didn’t know where she was?”
“Drifters, nobodies, all I knew of them was their nicknames, not a single real name between them. The police accepted the forms I filled in with my blood and tears and put her photograph at the bottom of the pile. Do you have any idea how many people go missing every year?”
I had a vague idea, garnered from Sandy’s passion for the research she did on what she called ‘her girls’. She had mentioned numbers, and quoted statistics that turned every conversation we had on the subject into a display of bad temper on her part because it made her so angry.
“Perhaps you do,” said Benjamin when I failed to reply. “The police certainly didn’t. Just a huge pile of photographs of other people’s children. Each one stapled to a form and pushed to the bottom of the pile.” He looked up at me, and I realised now where Sandy’s passion for the story had started. I had played those last weeks over and over in my mind in my search for sense and reason. And here was the only reason she needed.
“Sandy followed her sister,” I said. “That’s what happened to her, isn’t it?”
“Amanda,” said Benjamin, pronouncing the name in the Afrikaans way with three flat As. “That was her sister’s name. She had my pale eyes, like Sandy. Even paler. Her friends used to tease her about her golden eyes.”
“Did Sandy discover what happened to her?”
Benjamin nodded.
“In that last call to me she explained what had happened.”
Benjamin looked down at his hands, which were fidgeting as if they were trying to unpick the dishcloth.
“Can I ask you a question, Ben?” He didn’t look up.
“Of course.”
“How long did it take you to forgive her? Sandy.” He looked up at me now. “For doing what she did.”
“Is that what I’m meant to be doing, forgiving her?”
He nodded, as if that was an answer.
“She called to tell me she had found Amanda,” he said.
I could guess the rest, but Benjamin needed to say it.
“There was no mistake about it. She met with others who were with her when she died. No mistake at all.”
A spluttering sound from the sumo wrestler’s corner signalled his need for some more refreshment. Benjamin was there in moments with water for health, and rum for the soul.
Benjamin and I talked for another hour. He was a gentle and kind man, who seemed to have suffered the many injustices of his life with a calm stoicism. I could see much of Sandy in him, the quiet but intense passion; the solid core of moral integrity; the absolute knowing of the difference between right and wrong, which contrasted with my immersion in the murky, grey areas where I found it difficult to distinguish the two. Sandy had such clarity that she had been my rudder when we had been together and kept me on what she called the ‘straight and narrow’. It occurred to me, talking with her father, that I had drifted so far from the straight and narrow I don’t think I would have recognised it if I stumbled across it again.
Benjamin told me about Sandy’s discovery of the depths to which Amanda had sunk. About her arrest for prostitution, the drug addiction that he had spent so long denying. And about the three-month prison sentence for solicitation.
“She served her sentence? Or disappeared before?”
“It was after prison,” said Benjamin. “Do you know the authorities don’t tell the family when a prisoner is coming out? I didn’t even know when Amanda was being released.”
Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3) Page 2