Treasonous
The Gabriel Series - Book One
David Hickson
Aeon Books
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One
When the moment comes for my mortal remains to be identified I would like to be afforded the dignity of having it done by someone who knew me when I was alive. Someone who had liked me would be even better: someone who could replace the grey features of the dead with a memory of some lively expression, who could fill in a glint of the eyes, a not forgotten smile, something which spoke of joy or love. But failing that, someone who had at least known me.
Lukas Johansson was not afforded such a dignity. It had fallen to me to identify his dead body. I had barely known him, and what I had known I had not liked. His greasy blond hair had been combed by a mortuary worker in a bizarre attempt to soften the impact of death on his features. The effect was disconcerting because in life his hair had been a tangled mess like a bird’s nest that he carried around behind his head. Even the photograph that went above his inflammatory and mostly untrue articles in The Sun had depicted him as an untidy and unconventional challenger of the traditional, a picture taken in his natural environment – a bar with shelves of bottles behind him, a leering smile on his pale face, the eyes cold, the only colour on his cheeks provided by the consumption of the contents of too many of those bottles.
But now, dead, and lying on a trolley in the morgue, he was no longer that person. There was no leer, and the rosiness of the alcohol had faded. His hair had not been combed back in that way since his schooldays in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, over forty years ago. His thin face still displayed the deep creases of his hollow cheeks, but any other likeness to the living version had dissolved into the water of the Cape Town docks which had taken his life from him.
I confirmed his identity to the sergeant standing on the other side of the body. A sizeable man with a sad, droopy face, he had been watching me intently as he chewed the gum which he’d confided earlier helped him deal with the smell of this place. He accepted my confirmation, shifted the gum aside and explained that I would need to sign some papers. He signalled for the mortuary worker to take Johansson’s remains back to their cold box.
He led the way out through a series of airtight doors which sighed reluctantly as we passed through them, allowing us into progressively brighter corridors until finally we gained the full colour of the autumnal day in the interview room. Outside the morgue a breeze was sweeping the leaves fallen from the oak trees lining the road. The sergeant pulled his standard issue blue coat tight about him as if the chill of the vault had been absorbed into his flesh. He indicated a chair for me to sit in, and shuffled through the papers as if they’d mysteriously been reordered while I’d been identifying Johansson’s body.
“Your friend has no family?” he asked as I signed where his sausage-sized finger indicated.
“Not my friend,” I said for the tenth time. “I honestly don’t know about his family.”
He nodded, but his look suggested he thought I was keeping something from him.
“Just work,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Journalism work.”
We’d been through this before, but the sergeant was clearly of the school that believed in repetition.
“About the president,” he said, making it sound absurd.
“He was doing background research. You know yourself the papers are full of stories about the president-elect.”
“And you too?” asked the sergeant, as if this detail would prove I was responsible for Johansson’s death. “You’re also doing stories about the president?”
“I make video documentaries. Johansson asked me to confirm some details for him.”
The sergeant nodded again and chewed his gum thoughtfully, trying to find the hole in my story.
“Gabriel?” he said.
“Ben Gabriel,” I confirmed. I had written my name down for him in several places, but he wanted to be sure that it hadn’t changed. “Like the angel,” I said.
“Angel?”
“The Archangel Gabriel.”
The sergeant chewed his gum.
“You always did that? Videos?”
“No,” I said, because he would find out anyway. “I was with the military. British army.”
The gum chewing stopped for a moment.
“British?” he asked.
“I grew up there and was a member of the British army. My mother was South African, and my father Canadian. He was in the diplomatic service, posted to the UK.”
The sergeant didn’t look as if this background alleviated his suspicions. He resumed the chewing.
“Normal army?” he asked. “You were a soldier?”
“Special ops.”
“Special? How special?”
“Special Forces, like the SAS. I was originally a paratrooper. Not that special really.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“I was discharged.”
The sergeant nodded very slowly.
“Are you treating his death as suspicious?” I asked.
The sergeant rejected that notion with a sucking noise that might have been an attempt at clicking his tongue that was foiled by the wad of gum. They had pulled Johansson out of the docks with a blood-alcohol level that was so high, the sergeant had explained earlier, that he had clearly been unable to distinguish the paved walkways from the channels of water on the way back to his car.
“You work with this guy before?”
“No. First time. I did mention that earlier.” I tried not to let any irritation show, but the sergeant’s eyes narrowed with displeasure.
“What details?” he said, alighting suddenly on the aspect of my story that had been bothering him. “What details did he ask you to confirm for him?”
“Witnesses,” I said. “To the fire. Johansson thought I might find him some.” I regretted adding that last bit. Too much detail is a sure sign of a lie, and from the searching way the sergeant held my eyes I guessed that he’d been concentrating during that part of his training.
“The Khayelitsha fire?” he said.
I nodded. The new president-elect of South Africa, a man called Thulani Mbuyo, was referred to as ‘The Phoenix’ because of the way in which he had crawled out of a fire that had killed five fellow freedom fighters thirty years ago.
“And did you? Find witnesses?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You were phoning to tell him that?”
“I was,” I confirmed again.
Having pulled Johansson’s body out of the water, the police had found a mobile phone on him, but no other means of identifying him. They had extracted the sim card, inserted it into another phone, then waited for it to ring. I was the first caller, almost eighteen hours after the discovery of the body.
They would have preferred a next of kin, or someone who could be more officially linked to the dead man, but when their other lines of enquiry turned up neither, they settled for me.
The sergeant collected his papers and studied each of my signatures for signs of forgery, then meticulously reached for the paper clip to bind them and tucked them safely into his battered document bag.
“We know where you live,” he said ominously.
“Happy to help if you need anything.”
He nodded sadly and chewed on his gum.
“We’ll find his family,” he sa
id and sighed. “Sweden, you said?”
“I believe he grew up in Sweden,” I said in a helpful way.
“Not many people liked him,” he observed, drawing an inevitable conclusion from my earlier evasive answers about the character of Lukas Johansson. “You say he wrote a lot of shit about people?”
“You know The Sun. Not all fairy tales and happy endings.”
“Think he made enemies?”
I shrugged. I would have thought Lukas Johansson had people lining up at the quayside to push him into the icy water, but it didn’t seem like the right thing to say. The sergeant heaved himself to his feet with a sigh, and we made our way out of the building. He extended his hand to me when we parted ways beneath the oak trees and repeated his threat about knowing where I lived. I pretended to miss the subtlety and gave him encouraging smiles and shook his hand like an innocent man with a clean heart. Presumably he had decided, while watching me look upon the remains of Johansson, that I had not been the one to push him into the water. Or perhaps he was really convinced that no push had been required, and that Johansson’s life had ended in a blur of alcoholic confusion between hard ground and deadly water.
I was not so convinced.
“Gabriel?” Johansson’s voice had a sneering lilt that on other Swedes would have been a charming foreign accent.
“Who is this?”
“Lukas Johansson, The Sun. You’re going to want to hear this.”
“Hear what?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Gabriel. You the Gabriel that worked with Fehrson’s crowd?”
“I stopped working there months ago.”
“I know. And now you’re doing the videos,” he said with a triumphant sneer. Then, like the punchline to a joke: “I knew your girl.”
That was a conversation stopper. The phone felt heavy in my hand. I had the sense it was radiating malice.
“What do you want to tell me?” I asked.
“We’ll meet at the Fireman’s,” said Johansson as if he was reading a crystal ball. “In half an hour.”
“Is this about Sandy?”
Johansson laughed in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “Nothing to do with your girl, Gabriel. I can’t help you with that one. It’s your friend Fehrson. He’s in big trouble and he doesn’t know it yet. You’re going to help him out. Don’t stand me up. You’re buying.”
The phone went dead before I could object. I placed it beside the laptop on which I was trying to compose some ideas about the Angolan bush war and gazed out of the window. Across the jumbled rooftops of Three Anchor Bay I could see a sliver of grey sea.
I knew of Johansson by reputation only, and that largely from the arms scandal that Sandy had worked on, which was probably why he claimed to have known her. Sandy had been one of a team of journalists who had uncovered the greatest abuse of political power to have happened in South Africa since apartheid, which was saying something: South Africa has an international reputation as a leader in political corruption. But Johansson’s angle on the scandal had been the grimy underbelly, the infected bedsores of the monster. It had been his idea to ask the prostitutes what they remembered. The scantily clad sex workers had been in the background of every clandestine meeting, lounging on the furniture of the five-star resorts, decorating the golf courses, and floating in the swimming pools beyond the meeting tables.
It turned out they remembered a good deal, and Johansson enjoyed a moment of fame for providing information that proved critical to the exposure of the scandal. But his reputation among serious investigative journalists was not improved. They regarded him as someone who stirred up the nasty sludge that sank to the bottom of the pond to see what bubbled up to the surface, whether or not that proved beneficial. At least that was what Sandy had said. And she had considered herself to be on the serious side of the business – although sometimes I found it difficult to distinguish between the two approaches.
But Sandy wasn’t around anymore to help me resolve the dilemma. She had chosen to find a different life, one that I sometimes hoped was a better one. On other days I felt less generous about her decision to disappear from my life. Because no matter how many carefully chosen words one might use, that was what she had done. One day she had been there, the next she hadn’t. No goodbye, no tearful discussion about why things were not working. The police had rejected my missing person claim. There was no evidence of wrongdoing, and missing people do not take a small suitcase of clothes with them. ‘Self-managed relocation’ was the term the police officer used, with a sidelong glance at me as the probable motivation for the relocation. But that didn’t change what she had done. She had arranged her own disappearance. Why not be real about it?
The Fireman’s Arms was one of the oldest pubs in Cape Town, a squat brick building that an enterprising developer had added a steel extension onto in the nineties, thereby quadrupling the floor space and the profits. Johansson was sitting uncomfortably at a table in the large warehouse space created by the open steel girders. He sat alone, a buff-coloured paper folder on the table before him and a glass of rum beside it. The cramped space at the bar was more his style, but there were fewer people in this part of the pub and we could talk about things without worrying about what he described as ‘waggling ears’. I recognised his thatch of unruly blond hair, the cold eyes and hollow cheeks, but was surprised by his height when he stood to shake my hand in greeting. A good few inches over six foot. He didn’t stoop in the way many tall people do. He stood up straight and held his head back, pleased to be looking over my head, happy to let me know that he felt superior. His smile as he greeted me was a leer that implied he knew something about me that I’d be embarrassed to have generally known. He drained his glass as we sat down and waved at the barman to bring him another. I ordered mineral water. It was eleven in the morning, and something in Johansson’s face made me feel that I would rather be sober when I heard what he had to say.
“You still not heard from her?” asked Johansson as an opening move, feigning something approaching a sympathetic tone.
He was talking about Sandy, and his arrogance solidified my initial wariness into a clear dislike for him.
“What is it you want to tell me?”
Johansson leaned back and worked at his teeth with a toothpick.
“Lindiwe Dlomo,” he said and then waited as if expecting me to react. I didn’t. Johansson paused as the barman placed the drinks on our table. Then watched the man withdraw to the bar area as if suspecting that he might try to eavesdrop.
“Know who she was?” asked Johansson.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“You think the new Top Dog is above board?” he asked, and leered a little wider in order to get the toothpick at the molars.
“I haven’t thought much about it,” I said. The president-elect was due to take office in six weeks, much to the relief of the populace, who had endured a difficult struggle over several years to rid themselves of the previous incumbent. “He seems more above board than the previous bunch.”
“You ever discuss him with Fehrson?”
“I stopped working there almost a year ago.”
“And started making your little movies … yes, yes I know about that. But Big T came up in conversation at the weekly piss-up?”
“No,” I said. “Big T never came up.”
“No jokes about how you know if Scarface is smiling? Or how to recognise a true hero?”
Thulani Mbuyo, president-to-be, was widely regarded as a hero of the people, an idea supported by the scar tissue that distorted most of his face, a legacy of the fire he’d escaped from with his life, less than a third of his face intact, and a smile that operated only from a corner of his mouth.
“Because Fehrson and his crew know all about what Big T did to Lindiwe Dlomo.” Johansson cracked the toothpick in two with long, thin fingers and leered at my obvious confusion. He reached for another toothpick and peeled back the plastic wrapper, which he to
ssed onto the floor. “And I’m guessing that kind of cover-up takes a team effort.”
“I think you have the wrong Fehrson,” I said, and meant it. Don Fehrson was a stalwart of the South African Security Service, a man who had been a rising star in the last years of apartheid, had survived the regime change, and then continued his career working for the ‘other side’, the new rulers of the country, whom he liked to joke had been his previous enemies. Although it was not so much a joke as it was the truth. In recent years his star had faded as he approached retirement, but the concept that he might be hiding a dark secret about the future leader of the country was laughable.
“I heard that she just up and left. Your girl, Sandy. Made it look like she disappeared. Is that how it played?”
I sipped my mineral water. Johansson fiddled with the cover of the buff folder as if he was resisting the temptation to open it and display the contents.
“Not so much as a goodbye kiss. That’s what I heard.” He abandoned the game with the folder and looked up at me to see how I was taking it. “She was a tough cookie your Sandy, I always knew it. Had style, I’ll give her that. You must be asking yourself whether she did it to get away from you. Or is she in some trouble? Is she waiting for you to ride in on your white horse and rescue her? You’ve been trying to find her, that’s what I heard.”
Johansson grabbed at his glass as if it had been trying to get away from him and threw the contents into his mouth, ice blocks and all. Then he made as if he was rinsing his mouth for a while, and cracked the ice with his teeth.
“You called because you want to discuss my love life, or because of some fairy tale about Fehrson?”
Johansson finished his mouthwash routine and swallowed the rum, which caused his eyes to water slightly. He inserted the toothpick again and spoke through it like a cowboy.
“I have evidence of what Big T did. A witness. Fehrson and his happy band of swindlers think they can stop this from blowing up in their faces,” he said. “But they cannot.”
Treasonous Page 1