Let the Dead Lie Read online

  Let the Dead Lie

  Malla Nunn

  First published 2010 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  Australia Pty Limited, Sydney

  First published in Great Britain 2010 by Mantle

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  Copyright © Malla Nunn 2010

  For my parents,

  Courtney and Patricia Nunn

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Paris, France; April 1945

  A flashing neon ‘Hotel’ sign lit the narrow cobblestoned lane. There was a spring chill from the showers that had fallen that afternoon across the Tuileries and the Boulevard Saint Germain, but heat emanated from the GI bars. The smell of sweating bodies, spilled liquor, cigarette smoke and perfume permeated the night air. Emmanuel was glad to be free of the crush inside. A group of Negro soldiers entered a subterranean club on the corner of Rue Veron and a jazz trumpet blared into the night. He strolled the slick lane with three giggling stenographers and Hugh Langton, a BBC war correspondent with impeccable black-market connections.

  ‘That’s it up ahead,’ Langton said. ‘Two double rooms on the fourth floor. You don’t mind a few stairs, do you, girls?’

  Five days of R&R, then back to bully beef in a tin and the parade of demolished towns. Emmanuel had five days to forget. Five days to build new memories over the visions of broken churches and people. The brunette nuzzled closer and pressed a hot kiss on the nape of his neck. He picked up the pace, greedy for the sensation of skin on skin. The hotel sign flashed light into a doorway a few feet ahead. Bare legs, pale and dimpled with rain, jutted into the street. The torn edges of a skirt and an open change purse were visible in the dim recess.

  ‘Mon dieu …’ The brunette pressed slim fingers to her mouth. ‘Regardez! Regardez …’

  Emmanuel unhooked his arm from around her shoulder and moved closer. Another flash of neon illuminated the thickset body of a woman slumped against a door. A bloodied hole was torn into the lapel of her grubby jacket, evidence Emmanuel suspected of a small-calibre entry wound. The blank eyes and slack jaw suggested a passenger who’d missed the last train and would now have to spend the night in the open. Emmanuel checked for a pulse, more a formality than a necessity.

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Then we’re too late to be of help.’ Langton herded the stenographers towards the Hotel Oasis. This little hiccup could seriously extinguish the mood. ‘I’ll get the concierge to call the police.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I’ll find a gendarme and catch up.’

  Langton took Emmanuel aside. ‘Let me point out the obvious in case you missed it, Cooper. Dead woman. Live women … plural. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  Emmanuel stayed put. A kitbag stuffed with spare ration packs and a warm hotel room with soap and fresh towels meant the stenographers would wait. Such was the cold pragmatism of war.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ The Englishman ushered the women towards the flickering neon. ‘Don’t stay out here all night. There’ll be plenty of dead back in the field.’

  That was true, but it was an insult to abandon a body in a city where law and order had been restored. Emmanuel found a stocky policeman enjoying a cigarette under a cherry blossom tree, and an hour later a balding detective with an impressive eagle-beak nose and sad brown eyes arrived on the scene. He peered into the doorway.

  ‘Simone Betancourt.’ The identification, in heavily accented English, was for the benefit of the foreign soldier. Most cases involving the Allied forces were shifted to the handful of bilingual police. ‘Fifty-two years old. Listed occupation, washerwoman.’

  ‘You knew her?’ Emmanuel said.

  ‘She took in the police-station washing and that of many small pensions.’ A hand was thrust in Emmanuel’s direction. ‘Inspecteur principal Luc Moreau. You discovered the body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your name, please.’

  ‘Major Emmanuel Cooper.’

  ‘And you were on your way to …’

  ‘The hotel up there,’ Emmanuel said, certain the French detective had already figured that out.

  ‘The last rain was …’ Moreau checked his gold wrist-watch, ‘… about two hours ago. So, Simone has been here longer than that. Others, no doubt, saw the body. And did nothing. Why did you alert the police and wait here for so long at the crime scene?’

  Emmanuel shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’ The dead were another part of the war’s landscape. Soldiers and civilians, the young and the old were left unattended and without ceremony in the fields and the rubble. But this washerwoman had resurrected memories of another defenceless female abandoned a long time ago. ‘It felt wrong to leave her, that’s all.’

  Moreau smiled and unwrapped a stick of chewing gum, a habit acquired from the American military police. ‘Even in war, a murder is offensive, no?’

  ‘Maybe so.’ Emmanuel glanced towards the hotel. Stopping to mark the death of Simone Betancourt would neither rebalance the scales of justice nor dull the memory of fallen friends. And yet he’d remained. The night had grown colder. Jesus. He could be in bed with a stenographer right now.

  ‘Do me this favour.’ Moreau scribbled on a page and tore it loose. ‘Go to your woman. Drink. Eat. Make love. Sleep. If tomorrow Simone Betancourt is still on your mind, call me.’

  ‘What for?’ Emmanuel pocketed the crumpled paper.

  ‘When you call, I will give an explanation.’

  Distant church bells chimed 11 a.m. Emmanuel awoke dry-mouthed and loose-limbed amid a tangle of sheets. The brunette, Justine from Cergy, stood naked by the window, devouring a block of ration-pack chocolate. Her body was perfect in the spring sunshine that dazzled through the glass. A pot of black-market coffee and a dish of butter pastries were set on the table. Justine climbed back into the bed, and Emmanuel forgot about war and injustice and fear.

  When he awoke a second time, Justine was asleep. He looked at her peaceful face, like a child’s. Every element of happiness was right here in this room. But still he felt sadness creep in. He slipped from under the sheets and went to the window. Directly below the hotel’s precarious wrought-iron balcony was the cobblestoned lane where Simone Betancourt had died in the rain. That a life could be so easily taken without justice or recognition was a lesson he’d learned in childhood. Leading a company of soldiers through war had confirmed that nothing was sacred. It was strange how, after four years of training and fighting, the memory of his mother’s death still lurked in the shadows, ready to ambush the present.

  Emmanuel retrieved the detective’s telephone number and smoothed the paper flat. He
would phone Inspector Luc Moreau, but he had the unsettling sensation that the reverse was happening: he was the one being called.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Durban, South Africa; 28 May 1953

  The entrance to the freight yards was a dark mouth crowded with rows of dirty boxcars and threads of silver track. A few white prostitutes orbited a weak streetlight. Indian and coloured working girls were tucked into the shadows, away from the passing trade and the police.

  Emmanuel Cooper crossed Point Road and moved towards the yards. The prostitutes stared at him and the boldest of them, a fat redhead with a moulting fox fur slung around her shoulders, lifted a skirt to expose a thigh encased in black fishnet.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she bellowed, ‘are you buying or just window shopping?’

  Emmanuel slipped into the industrial maze. Did he look that desperate? Brine and coal dust blew off Durban Harbour and the lights of a docked cruise ship shone across the water. Stationary gantry cranes loomed over the avenue of boxcars and a bright half moon lit the rocky ground. He moved towards the centre of the yards, tracing a now familiar path. He was tired and not from the late hour.

  Trawling the docks after midnight was worse than being a foot policeman. They at least had a clearly defined mission: to enforce the law. His job was to witness a mind-numbing parade of petty violence, prostitution and thievery, and do nothing.

  He scrambled over a heavy coupling and settled into a space between two wagons. Soon, an ant trail of trucks packed to the limit with whisky and cut tobacco and boxes of eau de cologne would roll out of the yard. English, Afrikaner, foot police, detectives and railway police: the smuggling operation was a perfect example of how different branches of the force were able to cooperate and coordinate if they shared a common goal.

  He flicked the surveillance notebook open. Four columns filled the faintly ruled paper: names, times, licence-plate numbers and descriptions of stolen goods. Until these cold nights in the freight yard, he’d thought the wait for the Normandy landing was the pinnacle of boredom. The restlessness and the fear of the massed army, the bland food and the stink of the latrines: he’d weathered it all without complaint. The discomforts weren’t so different from what he’d experienced in the tin-and-concrete slum shacks his family had lived in on the outskirts of Jo’burg.

  This surveillance of corrupt policemen lacked the moral certainty of D-Day. What Major van Niekerk, his old boss from the Marshall Square detective branch, planned to do with the information in the notebook was unclear.

  ‘Jesus. Oh, Jesus …’ A groaned exhalation floated across the freight yards, faint on the breeze. Some of the cheaper sugar girls made use of the deserted boxcars come nightfall.

  ‘Oh … No …’ This time the male voice was loud and panicked.

  The skin on Emmanuel’s neck prickled. The urge to investigate reared up but he resisted. His job was to watch and record the activities of the smuggling ring, not rescue a drunken whaler lost in the freight yard. Do not get involved. Major van Niekerk had been very specific about that.

  The hum of traffic along Point Road mingled with a wordless sobbing. Instinct pulled Emmanuel to the sound. He hesitated and then shoved the notepad into his pants pocket. Ten minutes to take a look and then he’d be back to record the truck licence-plate numbers. Twenty minutes at I he outside. He pulled a silver torch from another pocket, switched it on and ran towards the warehouses built along the northeast boundary of the freight terminus.

  The sobs faded and then became muffled. Possibly the result of a hand held over a mouth. Emmanuel stopped and tried to isolate the sound. The yards were vast with miles of track running the length of the working harbour. Loose gravel moved underfoot and a cry came from up ahead. Emmanuel turned the torch to high beam and started running. The world appeared in flashes. Ghostly rows of stationary freight cars, chains, red-brick walls covered in grime and a back lane littered with empty hessian sacks. Then a dark river of blood that formed a question mark in the dirt.

  ‘No…’

  Emmanuel swung the torch beam in the direction of the voice and caught two Indian men in the full glare of the light. Both were young with dark, slicked-back hair that touched their shoulders. They wore near-identical suits made from silvery sharkskin material and white silk shirts. One, a slim teenager, his face streaked with tears, was slumped against the back wall of the warehouse. The other, who was somewhere in his early twenties, sported an Errol Flynn moustache and had a heavy brow contracted with menace. He hunched over the boy with his hand over his mouth to keep him quiet.

  ‘Do not move.’ Emmanuel used his detective sergeant’s voice. He reached for his .38 standard Webley revolver and touched an empty space. The most dangerous weapon he had was a pen. No matter. The gun was backup.

  ‘Run!’ the older one screamed. ‘Go!’

  The men ran in different directions and Emmanuel targeted the smaller of the two, who stumbled and pitched to the ground. Emmanuel caught his sleeve and steadied the teenager against the wall.

  ‘Run again and I’ll break your arm,’ he said.

  A coupling clanked. The older one was still out there somewhere. Emmanuel rested shoulder to shoulder with the boy and waited.

  ‘Parthiv,’ the boy sniffled, ‘don’t leave me.’

  ‘Amal,’ a voice whispered back. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here. He got me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got Amal,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You’d better come out and keep him company.’

  The man emerged from the dark with a gangster swagger. A gold necklace complemented his silvery suit and a filigreed ring topped with a chunk of purple topaz weighed down his index finger.

  ‘And just who the hell are you?’ the skollie demanded.

  Emmanuel relaxed. He’d put down thugs like this one on a daily basis back in Jo’burg. Back before the trouble in Jacob’s Rest.

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper,’ he said.

  With the National Party now in control, the police had become the most powerful gang in South Africa. The air went out of the Indian’s hard-man act.

  ‘Names,’ Emmanuel said when the men were against the wall. He’d deal with the fact he had no authority and no jurisdiction later.

  ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ the Indian Errol Flynn said. He looked tough and he talked tough but something about the flashy suit and the jewellery made him look a little … soft.

  ‘Names,’ Emmanuel repeated.

  ‘Amal,’ the youngster said quickly. ‘My name is Amal Dutta and that’s my brother, Parthiv Dutta.’

  ‘Stay put,’ Emmanuel instructed and dipped the torchlight towards the ground. A bottle of lemonade lay on its side near the pool of blood. Then, in the shadows, Emmanuel made out the curled fingers of a child’s hand. They seemed almost to motion him closer. A white boy lay in the dirt; arms outstretched, skinny legs tangled together. His throat was sliced open from ear to ear like a second mouth.

  Emmanuel recognised the victim: an English slum kid, around eleven years old, who picked a living among the boxcars and the whores. Jolly Marks. Who knew if that was his real name?

  Starting at the tattered canvas shoes, Emmanuel searched upwards over the body. Army-issue fatigues were rolled up at the cuffs and threadbare at the knees. A line of string was tied to the belt loop of his khaki pants and blood stained the waistband. Streaks of dirt fanned out across the boy’s grey shirt and gathered in the creases around his mouth. The search revealed the lack of something in every detail. The lack of money evident in Jolly’s shabby clothes. The lack of hygiene in the tangled hair and filthy nails. The lack of a parent who might stop a youngster from going out onto the Durban docks after dark.

  Emmanuel shone the light on the stained waistband again. Jolly Marks always had a small notebook attached to the belt loop of the khaki pants, where he wrote orders for smokes and food. The string that held the book was still there but the book itself was missing. That fact might be significant.


  ‘Did either of you pick up a spiral notebook with a string attached?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ the brothers answered simultaneously.

  Emmanuel crouched next to the body. An inch from Jolly’s right hand was a rusty penknife with the small blade extended. Emmanuel had owned a similar knife at almost exactly the same age. Jolly had understood that bad things happened out here at night.

  Emmanuel knew this boy, knew the details of his life without having to ask a single question. He’d grown up with boys like Jolly Marks. No, that was a lie. This was whom he’d grown up as. A dirty white boy. This could have been his fate: first on the streets of a Jo’burg slum, and then on battlefields in Europe. He had escaped and survived. Jolly would never have that chance. Emmanuel returned to the Indian men.

  ‘Either one of you touch this boy?’

  ‘Never.’ Amal’s body shook with the denial. ‘Never, never ever.’

  ‘You?’ he asked Parthiv.

  ‘No. No ways. We were minding our own business and there he was.’

  Nobody in the back lanes of the Durban port after midnight was minding his own business unless that business was illegal. There was, however, a big difference between stealing and murder, and the brothers’ sharkskin suits were pressed and clean. Emmanuel checked their hands; also clean. Jolly lay in a bloodbath, his neck cut with a single stroke: the work of an experienced butcher.

  ‘Have either of you seen the boy before, maybe talked to him?’

  ‘No,’ Parthiv said too quickly. ‘Don’t know him.’

  ‘I wish I’d never seen him.’ Amal’s voice broke. ‘I wish I’d stayed at home.’

  Emmanuel tilted the torch beam away from the teenager’s face. Violent death was shocking but the violent death of a child was different; the effects sank deeper and lingered longer. Amal was only a few years older than Jolly and probably still a schoolboy.