A Beautiful Place to Die Page 12

  “Must be,” Emmanuel said, and upped the likelihood of being found out for withholding evidence. Piet Lapping was coolheaded and clever.

  “So, you finally turned up.” It was Paul Pretorius, looming in the doorway to the police cells.

  “I was out working the case,” Emmanuel said. The spit-and-polish soldier swaggered into the room and set himself up behind Hansie’s desk.

  “Tell me,” Paul said, and leaned back in Hansie’s chair, square jaw jutting out. “Why are all the suspects on your list whites?”

  Emmanuel looked at Lieutenant Lapping. Who was in charge of this investigation, him or the tin soldier?

  “Answer the question.” The words barely made it out from between Piet’s clenched teeth. Having Paul Pretorius along for the ride wasn’t Lapping’s idea. Some bigwig must have pulled strings.

  “You think Jews are proper whites?” Emmanuel threw the question out and waited to see if the bait was taken.

  “No,” Paul replied without hesitation. “They’re different from us, but we need their brains and their money to build a new South Africa. We don’t have to worry about them mixing blood with us or the kaffirs because it’s against their religion. Blood purity is part of their thinking.”

  “Are they the chosen people?” Emmanuel wondered out loud, and made a close study of the captain’s second-born son. The man’s barrel-like chest was puffed up like a bellows.

  “They may have been the chosen people in the olden days, but it’s our turn now. We’ve been given a covenant by God to rule over this land and keep it pure.” Paul Pretorius leaned across the desk as if it were his own personal pulpit and continued his sermon. “In years to come, the world will look to us for guidance. You mark my words. We will be a beacon.”

  “Guidance in all areas or just—”

  “Detective Sergeant Cooper!” Piet Lapping couldn’t contain his frustration. “I said answer the question. How did you compile your list of suspects?”

  Dickie and Paul were easy to distract but Piet kept his pebble eyes on the prize: relevant information. If Emmanuel were caught out, it would be by Lieutenant Piet Lapping.

  “Preliminary inquiry found that Zweigman and Rooke both had motive. The captain suspected Zweigman of crimes under the Immorality Act and was known to have reprimanded him. Rooke blamed the captain for his arrest and imprisonment. Mrs. Pretorius supplied me with the names. Both suspects provided alibis.”

  “What about this man King?” Piet asked. “Was there bad blood between him and Captain Pretorius?”

  “Not that I could find. They seemed to have liked each other. The captain even built his own bush hut on King’s farm.”

  “Rubbish.” Paul Pretorius leaned farther across the desk. “My father had nothing in common with that Englishman. They hardly knew each other.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that your father had a deal with King to retain some of the old family farm.”

  “Rubbish again.” Paul waved the information away with a flick of his hand. “Anything King says about my pa is an out-and-out lie.”

  “Okay.” Lieutenant Lapping ground his cigarette out. “Let’s leave that for a moment. Anyone else on your list, Cooper?”

  Emmanuel stopped himself from rubbing the lump at the side of his head. At the top of his personal list was the bastard who’d smashed his skull, pissed on him, and then stolen the evidence.

  “I’m looking at another lead. A Peeping Tom who molested some coloured women a year or so back.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Emmanuel replied. “It’s possible this man killed the captain to keep his secret hidden.”

  Paul snorted out loud. “No man, no white man in Jacob’s Rest would interfere with coloured women. That sort of thing might happen in Durban and Jo’burg, but not here. Have you questioned any native or coloured men?”

  “None of them presented as suspects,” Emmanuel replied evenly.

  “They’re not going to hand themselves over.” Paul spoke with blunt force. “You have to go in there and show them who’s boss and then they’ll start talking.”

  “Okay…” Lieutenant Lapping tried to keep the discussion on the rails.

  “No, man, it’s not okay.” The seams of his blue army uniform stretched under the strain of Paul Pretorius’s muscled bulk. “With your help, my brothers and I could shake the investigation up. Get information flowing instead of following up some stupid rumor put around by the coloureds to shift blame onto an innocent white man.”

  Piet pulled another cigarette from the pack and took his time lighting it before he answered. “You and your brothers are the injured party, but you are not the law. I am the law. Understand?”

  “Ja.” Paul looked almost sulky. For a soldier he didn’t take orders very well.

  “Good,” said Piet, and took a drag of his cigarette. “When the time comes to get your brothers involved in the investigation, I’ll let you know.”

  The lump on Emmanuel’s head throbbed back to life. Giving the Pretorius boys a slice of the investigation would create the potential for disaster. Did the lieutenant support the idea of a family vendetta or was he just trying to keep Paul and his powerful backers on his side?

  “You think there’s something in the pervert story?” Piet asked.

  Enough to make two angry coloured men threaten violence in an attempt to protect their women. The stalker was no storybook phantom.

  “The new laws make men with particular appetites nervous,” Emmanuel said. “Public humiliation and jail time are good enough motives for murder. Even here in Jacob’s Rest.”

  “Any political leads?”

  “Haven’t looked into that yet. The bus boycotts and pass burnings haven’t made much of an impact out here.”

  “Not yet.” Piet was grim. “This resistance campaign is like a fucking disease. The whole country is set to go up in flames. There is nothing the comrades won’t do to crush the government. They want a revolution. They want to destroy our way of—”

  The door to the police station crashed open and the Pretorius men washed into the small room on a wave of crumpled black suits and beer fumes. Shabalala remained out on the porch, sober and impassive.

  “Howzit? Howzit?” Henrick slumped against the edge of Hansie’s desk and addressed no one in particular. His suntanned face was mottled with patches of red brought on by alternating bouts of crying and beer drinking.

  “Detective Sergeant…” It was Hansie, lobotomized by a few drinks too many. “You find anything? You find anything good at King’s?”

  “Nothing,” Piet Lapping said, and looked over at Emmanuel while he said it. All information was going out through the Security Branch, and the Security Branch alone.

  Emmanuel kept quiet. He needed time to work out the calendar while Piet and Dickie crash-tackled their way through the political side of the investigation.

  “You didn’t find anything, Detective?” It was Louis, the only Pretorius male not glassy-eyed and slack-jawed.

  “Nothing,” Piet said.

  Emmanuel shifted uncomfortably under Louis’s continued scrutiny. Despite Piet’s definitive answer, the boy was waiting for him to reply. He shook his head and made sure to keep direct eye contact.

  Out of the corner of his eye Emmanuel glimpsed Shabalala moving quickly off the veranda and onto Piet Retief Street. There was the sound of a scuffle and a loud cry.

  “Captain…” a drunken voice called out. “Captain! Please!”

  “What the fuck is that?” Paul was on his feet, ready to play the commando.

  “Captain. Captain. Please!”

  The Pretorius men pressed out of the building in a rush. Emmanuel followed close behind and saw Harry, the old soldier, in the middle of Piet Retief Street. Shabalala was trying to guide him away, but the gray-coated man refused to move.

  “Captain,” he continued to bay. “Captain! Please…My letters…”

  Paul and Henrick made it first dow
n the stairs. One push on the chest and the skeletal old man fell back onto the hard surface of the road with his arms and legs askew.

  “We buried my pa this morning.” Henrick bent low over the crumpled figure. “Hold your tongue. Hear me?”

  “My letters…” The warning passed Harry by. He struggled to his feet and continued toward the police station. “Captain. Please. Come out.”

  Erich grabbed the addled soldier’s face. “My father’s dead. Now shut up.”

  Emmanuel pushed past Piet and Dickie, who watched the action with bemused smiles. Drinking and fighting were natural Saturday-night activities and getting between white men and a feeble-minded coloured one wasn’t worth the effort.

  “Shut up.” Paul grabbed the old soldier by the lapels and shook him like a dry cornstalk. Johannes and Erich joined their brother, and the medals on Harry’s coat rattled a discordant tune as they pushed him from one to the other. Louis hung back.

  Emmanuel approached the phalanx and felt Shabalala move with him. They shouldered their way into the circle and stood on either side of the old man.

  “What you doing?” Erich’s blood was high and ready to boil over.

  “He’s crazy,” Emmanuel said quietly. “Constable Shabalala and I are going to take him home. His wife will do a much better job of beating the shit out of him than you ever will.”

  “Home.” Harry grabbed Emmanuel’s jacket sleeve. “Not home. No. Not home.”

  “See?” Emmanuel said. “He’d rather stay here with you than go home to his wife.”

  “Not home.” Harry’s thin voice went up an octave. “Not home.”

  Paul laughed first, followed by his brothers.

  “He sounds like an old woman, hey?” Erich imitated the shell-shocked old man. “Not home. Not home.”

  The laughter stepped up a notch and Emmanuel and Shabalala moved slowly out of the circle with Harry between them. They went down Piet Retief Street. They kept their pace measured and deliberate. Walking. Just walking home.

  “Go back to your wife,” Henrick called after them, his mood lightened by the violence and the old man’s comic turn. “You lucky this time, Harry.”

  “Captain…” Harry whimpered softly. “Captain. Please.”

  “Here.” Shabalala pointed to a small path that ran along one side of the police station. “Go here.”

  They slipped onto the path and moved briskly until they were out on the veldt. Harry turned back toward the station, his palsied hands held out like a beggar’s.

  “Captain,” he said. “My letters.”

  Shabalala picked the old soldier up and raced along the narrow kaffir path. Emmanuel struggled to keep up with the black policeman who worked fast to put distance between them and the volatile Pretorius brothers. Guard dogs snarled and barked at a perimeter fence as they slipped past houses lit by the gentle flame of gas lanterns. Night began to fall.

  Shabalala stopped at a rickety wooden gate and put the old man back on his feet. A sheen of sweat on the black constable’s brow was the only indication he’d done more than stroll from the police station.

  “This is his house,” Shabalala said. “You must go in and give him to his wife.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “Captain or Lieutenant Uys go in with the coloured people. Not me.”

  “The captain’s dead,” Emmanuel said. “Tonight, there’s only you and me.”

  Shabalala nodded and followed him in through the gate and past a narrow vegetable patch that ran the length of the yard and pressed up against the back stoep of the house. Emmanuel pounded on the door.

  “The letters.” Harry started toward the gate. “The letters.”

  “Get him,” Emmanuel said as the sound of footsteps approached the back door. “Police. We have Harry.”

  The door opened and Angie, the old soldier’s wife, stepped out. She wore a brown cotton housecoat double stitched along the collar and sleeves to reinforce the fraying material. Her dark crinkly hair was pulled up and stretched taut across the curve of huge plastic rollers.

  “Where did you find him?” she asked curtly. Harry went walking almost every day. Most of the time he found his way home without trouble.

  “Outside the police station,” Emmanuel said.

  “The letters,” Harry wailed. “The letters.”

  Angie crossed the stoep in five quick steps. “You talk about the letters? You say about the letters, you stupid man?”

  Emmanuel rested a warning hand on her shoulder, then withdrew it. “He’s had a hit or two already. He doesn’t need any more.”

  She saw the bruised flesh around her husband’s left eye. “Who hit you, Harry?”

  “I want the letters,” Harry said. “I want the letters.”

  She addressed Shabalala. “Who hit my Harry?”

  “Madubele. He and his brothers.”

  Angie took her husband’s arm and led him into the small cinder-block house. She looked back toward the gate, fearful of what lay beyond it in the gathering darkness.

  “Inside. Quick,” she said to Harry, who shuffled in ahead of her.

  Emmanuel followed without an invitation.

  He signaled to Shabalala, who reluctantly stepped into the house and stayed with his back pressed against the closed door.

  The cinder-block house consisted of two plain rooms joined together by a cracked seam of mud and plaster. The kitchen, a collection of mismatched pots and plates on a chipped sideboard, sat directly opposite a curtained alcove that contained a double bed and a small chest of drawers with a beveled mirror.

  They were in the sitting area: four wooden chairs and a moth-eaten love seat that must have been transported by sea and bullock train from the mother country to the outer edges of southern Africa decades before. A round table with the diameter of a tin bucket displayed two photos in tarnished frames: one of Harry as a young soldier bound for the glory of the battlefield, the other a family portrait of Harry and Angie with a trio of white-skinned girls. The picture was identical in setup to the one he’d seen in the captain’s house, a family group formally arranged against a plain backdrop. The traveling photographer had done a good trade in Jacob’s Rest.

  Harry sat on the edge of the double bed, his palsied hands resting unsteadily on his knees. Angie pulled the curtain closed around them. The clink of campaign medals was followed by the metal sigh of the springs as the old soldier lay down to rest.

  Emmanuel picked up the family photo and motioned Shabalala over. “Where are the daughters?” he asked. There was no sign of them in the cinder-block house, not a ribbon or a hairpin.

  “Gone,” Shabalala answered. “To Jo’burg or Durban. For work.”

  The girls in the photo had taken after their father. Skinny and pale skinned with fair hair and freckles, they were a race classification nightmare. Pose them against the cliffs of Dover and they’d blend right in. They were white girls, pure and simple. Only someone who knew the family could say any different.

  “What’s on their papers?” he asked Shabalala. “Mixed race or European?”

  Shabalala looked at the floor. “I have not seen their papers.”

  “Those are my girls.” Angie reentered the sitting area and took the photo from Emmanuel. She wiped the frame down with her sleeve, as if to clear it of germs.

  “Where are they?”

  Angie tilted the photo so the light hit it fully. “That here is Bertha, she lives in Swaziland. Then Alice and Prudence, they live in Durban now.”

  “How long have they been gone?”

  “Six months or so.”

  “The letters Harry was asking for. Were they from Alice and Prudence?”

  “No.” Angie put the photo down and angled it away from the room. “Harry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The mustard gas, it’s made him imagine things.”

  “He seems certain about the letters,” Emmanuel said.

  “That one is certain about a lot of things. But that doesn’t make it s
o.”

  Angie moved across his line of sight and blocked the photo from view. She was the lioness at the gate whose job it was to stand guard over the family secrets.

  “Make sure Harry stays in until morning,” Emmanuel said. “Tonight’s not a good night for him to be wandering around.”

  “I’ll make sure he stays right where he is.” The furrowed lines on Angie’s bulldog face softened and she showed them out the back door. “Thank you for helping my Harry home, Detective.”

  Emmanuel and Shabalala left by the back gate. The moon was on the wane but its light still shone strong enough to see by. Out on the kaffir path, Emmanuel turned to the black policeman.

  “Tell me about the letters,” he said.

  “I have not seen any letters,” Shabalala replied simply.

  Emmanuel studied the closed face of his partner.

  “Did the captain see the letters?”

  “Uhhh…” Shabalala cleared his throat nervously. “He saw them. Yes.”

  “Who did the captain say they were from?”

  “Those inside. The two youngest children of the old man.”

  “Why was the captain collecting letters for Harry?”

  “Uhhh…” This time, the black constable’s lips closed firm and sealed the words in.

  Emmanuel watched him, saw the gates slam shut.

  “Nobody else will know what you tell me tonight, Constable,” he said. “That is a promise.”

  Shabalala took off his hat and turned it like a spinning wheel in his broad hands. The hat stopped spinning, and he breathed out.

  “The old man’s daughters, they are living among the white people. They cannot write to their own people in case someone finds out.”

  “How did they get white ID papers?”

  “They are white, just like the Dutchmen. Captain said they must register in the city and if there was a problem he would say they were from a European family.”

  “Captain tell you this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he do it?” From all he’d seen, the Pretorius family were firmly in the racial segregation corner. In their world, race mixing wasn’t in bad taste; it was a crime.