A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  “We ran.” Vusi rubbed one palm against the other to make a swishing sound. “Fast, fast. No stopping.”

  “You went home?”

  “No, baas.” Vusi shook his head. “We came to the policeman’s house and told what we saw.”

  “What time?” Emmanuel asked Shabalala.

  “It was past six o’clock in the morning,” the black policeman said.

  “They just know what time it is,” Hansie supplied helpfully. “They don’t need clocks the way we do.”

  Blacks in South Africa needed so little. A little less every day was the general rule. The job of detective was one of the few not subject to policies forbidding contact between different races. Detectives uncovered the facts, presented the brief, and gave evidence in court to support the case. White, black, coloured, or Indian, murder was a capital offense no matter what race the offender belonged to.

  Emmanuel spoke to the older boy. “Did you see or hear anything strange when you came down to the river this morning?”

  “The unusual thing was the body of the captain in the water,” said Vusi.

  “What about you?” Emmanuel asked the smaller boy. “You notice anything different? Besides the captain in the water?”

  “Nothing,” the little brother said.

  “When you saw the body, did you think of anyone you know who could have hurt Captain Pretorius?”

  The boys considered the question for a moment, their brown eyes wide with concentration.

  Vusi shook his head. “No. I thought only that today was not a good day to go fishing.”

  Emmanuel smiled.

  “You both did a very good thing by telling Constable Shabalala what you saw. You will make fine policemen one day.”

  Vusi’s chest puffed out with pride, but his little brother’s eyes filled with tears.

  “What’s the matter?” Emmanuel asked.

  “I do not want to be a policeman, nkosana,” the small boy said. “I want to be a schoolteacher.”

  The terror that came with discovering the body had finally surfaced in the little witness. Shabalala laid a hand on the crying boy’s shoulder and waited for the signal to dismiss the boys. Emmanuel nodded.

  “To be a schoolteacher, first you must go to school,” the black policeman said, and waved to one of the farmworkers standing on the ridge. “Musa will take you home.”

  Shabalala walked the boys past the Pretorius brothers to a man standing at the top of the path. The man waved the boys up toward him.

  Emmanuel studied the riverbank. The green spring veldt and wide sky filled his vision. He pulled out his notebook and wrote the word “pleasing” because it was the first thing to come to his mind when he examined the wider elements of the scene.

  There would have been a moment just after the blanket was spread and the lantern turned to full light when the captain would have looked out over the river and felt a sense of joy at this place. He might have even been smiling when the bullet struck.

  “Well?” It was Erich, still put out by being moved away from the questioning. “Did you get anything?”

  “No,” Emmanuel said. “Nothing.”

  “The only reason we haven’t taken Pa home,” Henrick said, “is because he would have wanted us to follow the rules…”

  “But if you’re not getting anything,” Erich said, his short fuse lit, “there’s no reason for us to stand here like anthills when we could be helping Pa.”

  The wait for the big-city detective to work the scene had taken a toll on the brothers. Emmanuel knew that they were battling the urge to turn the captain faceup so he could get some air.

  “I’ll take a look at the blanket, then we’ll take your father back to town straight after,” Emmanuel said when Shabalala rejoined the group. “Hepple and Shabalala, you’re with me.”

  They leaned in close to the bloodstained blanket. The material was coarse gray, scratchy, and comfortable as a sheet of corrugated iron to sit on. Every outdoor event, farm truck, and braai came with blankets just like this one.

  Blood had dried rust-brown on the fabric and spilled over the blanket’s edge into the sand. Deep lines, broken at irregular intervals, led from the blanket to the river’s edge. The captain had been shot, then dragged to the water and dumped. No mean feat.

  “What do you make of this?” Emmanuel pointed to the blood-stiffened material.

  “Let’s see.” Hansie came forward. “The captain came fishing, the way he did every week, and someone shot him.”

  “Yes, Hepple, those are the facts.” Emmanuel glanced at Shabalala. If the captain was right, the Shangaan part of the silent black man would see more than the obvious. “Well?”

  The black policeman hesitated.

  “Tell me what you think happened,” Emmanuel said, aware of Shabalala’s reluctance to show up Hansie’s poor grasp of the situation.

  “The captain was shot here on the blanket, then pulled over the sand to the water. But the killer, he’s not strong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He had to rest many times.” Shabalala pointed to the shallow indentations that broke the line as it ran from the blanket to the water. “This is the mark of the captain’s boots. Here is where his body was put down. Here was his head.”

  In the hollow lay a dried pool of blood and a matted tuft of blond hair. The indentations appeared closer and closer together, the pools of blood larger, as the killer stopped to catch his breath more often.

  “Somebody wanted to make sure the captain wasn’t coming back,” Emmanuel muttered. “Are you sure he didn’t have any enemies?”

  “None,” Hansie answered without hesitation. “Captain got on good with everyone, even the natives, hey, Shabalala?”

  “Yebo,” the black constable said. He stared at the evidence, which said otherwise.

  “Some places have trouble between the groups. Not here,” Hansie insisted. “A stranger must have done this. Someone from outside.”

  There wasn’t much to go on yet. If it had been a crime of passion, the murderer might have made mistakes: no alibi, murder weapon hidden in an obvious place, blood left to dry on shoelaces…if the murder was premeditated, then only careful police work would catch the killer. Outsider or insider, it took guts to kill a white police captain.

  “Comb the riverbank,” he instructed Hansie. “Walk as far as the path where the boys climbed up. Go slowly. If you find anything out of the ordinary, don’t touch it. Call me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hansie set off like a Labrador.

  Emmanuel scoped the scene. The captain’s killer had dragged the body to the water without dropping a thing.

  “Did he have enemies?” he asked Shabalala.

  “The bad people did not like him, but the good people did.” The black man’s face betrayed nothing.

  “What do you really think happened here?”

  “It rained this morning. Many of the marks have been washed away.”

  Emmanuel wasn’t buying. “Tell me anyway.”

  “Captain was kneeling and facing this way.” Shabalala pointed in the direction Hansie had gone. “A man’s boot prints come here from behind. One bullet in the head, captain fell. Then a second bullet in the back.”

  A boot print with deep, straight grooves was pressed into the sand.

  “How the hell did the killer manage a clean shot in the dark?” Emmanuel asked.

  “It was a full moon last night and bright. The lantern was also burning.”

  “How many people can take a shot like that even in broad daylight?”

  “Many,” the black policeman said. “The white men learn to shoot guns at their club. Captain Pretorius and his sons have won many trophies.” Shabalala thought for a moment. “Mrs. Pretorius has also won many.”

  Emmanuel again pressed his left eye socket where the headache was beginning. He’d landed in a town of sharpshooting inbred Afrikaner farmers.

  “Where did the killer go after dumping the body?”

  �
�The river.” Shabalala walked to the edge of the water and pointed to where the captain’s heel marks and the killer’s footprints disappeared into the flow.

  A clump of bulrushes with the stems snapped back lay on the opposite bank. A narrow path trailed off into the bushlands.

  “The killer came out there?” He pointed to the trampled rushes.

  “I think so.”

  “Whose farm is that?” Emmanuel asked, and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—the excitement of the first lead in a new case. They could track the killer to his door and finish this today. With luck he’d be back in Jo’burg for the weekend.

  “No farm,” came the reply. “Mozambique.”

  “You sure, man?”

  “Yebo. Mo. Zam. Bique.” Shabalala repeated the name, long and slow, so there was no mistake. The syllables emphasized that across the bank was another country with its own laws and its own police force.

  Emmanuel and Shabalala stood side by side and looked across the water for a long while. Five minutes on the opposite shore might give up a clue that could break open the case. Emmanuel did a quick calculation. If he was caught across the border, he’d spend the next two years checking ID passes at whites-only public toilets. Even Major van Niekerk, a canny political animal with connections to burn, couldn’t fix up a bungled visit across the border.

  He turned to face South Africa and concentrated on the evidence in front of him. The neatness of the scene and the sniper-like targeting of the victim’s head and spine indicated a cool and methodical hand. The location of the body was also a deliberate choice. Why take the time to drag it to the water when it could have been left on the sand?

  The brother’s smuggler theory didn’t hold water, either. Why wouldn’t the smuggler cross farther upstream and avoid all that attention and trouble? Not only that, why would he compromise his path between borders by murdering a white man?

  “Did the killer come out of the river?” Emmanuel asked.

  The Zulu policeman shook his head. “When I came here the herd boys and their oxen had been to the river to drink. If the tracks were here, they are gone now.”

  “Detective Sergeant,” Hansie said, walking toward them, pink skin flushed with exertion.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing but sand, Detective Sergeant.”

  The dead man floated in the river. A spring rain, gentle as mist, began to fall.

  “Let’s get the captain,” Emmanuel said.

  “Yebo.”

  Sadness flickered across the black man’s face for a moment and then it was gone.

  2

  THE COFFEE WAS hot and black and spiked with enough brandy to dull the ache in Emmanuel’s muscles. A full hour after going in to retrieve the captain, the men from the riverbank were back at the cars, shoulders and legs twitching with fatigue. Extracting the body from the crime scene proved to be only slightly easier than pulling a Sherman tank out of the mud.

  “Koeksister?” asked old Voster’s wife, a toad-faced woman with thinning gray hair.

  “Thank you.” Emmanuel took a sticky pastry and leaned back against the Packard.

  He looked around at the gathering of people and vehicles. Two black maids poured fresh coffee and handed out dry towels while a group of farmworkers tended the fire for the hot water and milk. The wheelchair-bound Voster and his family, a son and two daughters, were deep in conversation with the Pretorius brothers while a pack of sinewy Rhodesian ridgebacks sniffed the ground at their feet. Black and white children ran zigzag together between the cars in a noisy game of hide-and-seek. The captain lay in the back of the police van wrapped in clean white sheets.

  Emmanuel drained his coffee and approached the Pretorius brothers. The investigation needed to move forward fast. All they had so far was a dead body and a killer walking free in Mozambique.

  “Time to go,” Emmanuel said. “We’ll take the captain to hospital, get the doctor to look him over.”

  “We’re taking him home,” Henrick stated flatly. “My ma’s waited long enough to see him.”

  Emmanuel felt the force of the brothers as they turned their gaze on him. He held their stare and absorbed the tension and rage, now doubly fueled by alcohol and fatigue.

  “We need a medical opinion on the time and the cause of death. And a signed death certificate. It’s standard police procedure.”

  “Are you blind as well as fucking deaf?” Erich said. “You need a doctor to tell you he was shot? What kind of detective are you, Detective?”

  “I’m the kind of detective that solves cases, Erich. That’s why Major van Niekerk sent me. Would you rather we left it to him?”

  He motioned to the fire where Hansie sat cross-legged, a plate of Koeksisters on his knees. The thin sound of his humming carried through the air as he selected another sweet pastry.

  “We won’t agree to a doctor cutting him up like a beast,” Henrick said. “He’s God’s creature, even if his spirit has departed his body. Pa would never have agreed to it and we won’t either.”

  True Afrikaners and religious with it. Wars started with less fuel. The Pretorius boys were ready to take up arms for their beliefs. Time to tread carefully. He was out on his own with no backup and no partner. Some access to the body was better than none at all.

  “No autopsy,” Emmanuel said. “Just an examination to determine time and cause of death. The captain would have agreed to that much, I’m sure.”

  “Ja, okay,” Erich said, and the aggression drained from him.

  “Tell your ma we’ll get him home as soon as possible. Constable Shabalala and I will take care of him.”

  Henrick handed over the keys to the police van, which he’d found in the captain’s pocket when they hauled him out of the river.

  “Hansie and Shabalala will show you the way to the hospital and then to our parents’ place. Take too long and my brothers and I will come looking for you, Detective.”

  Emmanuel checked the rearview mirror of the police van and saw Hansie following in the Packard with Shabalala’s bike lashed to the roof. The boy was good behind the wheel, tight and confident. If the killer was a race car driver, Emmanuel noted, Hansie might get a chance to earn his pay packet on the police force, possibly for the first time.

  The vehicles entered the town of Jacob’s Rest on Piet Retief Street, the town’s only tarred road. A little way down, they turned onto a dirt road and drove past a series of low-slung buildings grouped together under a haze of purple jacaranda trees. Shabalala directed Emmanuel into a circular drive lined with whitewashed stones. He paused at the front entrance to the Grace of God Hospital.

  Crude icon images of Christ on the Cross were carved into the two front doors. Emmanuel and Shabalala slipped out of the police van and stood on either side of the filthy bonnet. Mud-splattered and sweat-stained, they carried the smell of bad news about them.

  “What now?” Emmanuel asked Shabalala. It was almost noon and the captain was doing a slow roast in the back of the police van.

  The doors to the hospital swung open and a large steam engine of a black woman in a nun’s habit appeared on the top stair. Another nun, pale skinned and tiny as a bantam hen, stepped up beside her. The sisters stared out from the shade cast by their headdresses.

  “Sisters.” Emmanuel lifted his hat, like a hobo practicing good manners. “I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. You know the other policemen, I’m sure.”

  “Of course, of course.” The tiny white nun fluttered down the stairs, followed by her solid black shadow. “I’m Sister Bernadette and this is Sister Angelina. Please forgive our surprise. How may we be of service, Detective Cooper?”

  “We have Captain Pretorius in the van—”

  The sisters’ gasp broke the flow of his words. He started again, aiming for a gentler tone.

  “The captain is—”

  “Dead,” Hansie blubbered. “He’s been murdered. Someone shot him in the head and the back…there’s a hole…”

  “Consta
ble…” Emmanuel put the full weight of his hand on the boy’s shoulder. No need for specific information about the case to be sprayed around so early. It was a small town. Everyone would know the bloody details soon enough.

  “Lord rest his soul,” said Sister Bernadette.

  “May God have mercy on his soul,” Sister Angelina intoned.

  Emmanuel waited until the sisters crossed themselves before pushing ahead.

  “We need the doctor to examine Captain Pretorius to determine cause and time of death, and to issue the death certificate.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…” Sister Bernadette muttered quietly, her Irish brogue now thick. “I’m afraid we can’t help you, Detective Cooper. Doctor left on his rounds this morning.”

  “When will he be back?” Emmanuel figured he had four hours at most before the Pretorius brothers showed up to claim the body.

  “Two, maybe three days,” Sister Bernadette said. “There’s been an outbreak of bilharzia at a boarding school near Bremer. Depending on the number of cases, he might be longer. I’m so sorry.”

  Days, not hours. Country time was too slow for his liking.

  “What would you do if Captain Pretorius was badly injured but still alive?” he asked.

  “Send you on to Mooihoek. There’s a doctor at the hospital full-time.”

  He didn’t get his hopes up. The situation was fubar, as the Yank soldiers were fond of saying. Fucked up beyond all recognition. He tried anyway.

  “How long?”

  “If the road is in good shape, just under two hours.” Sister Bernadette delivered the good news with a weak smile, then cast about for a friendlier face, one that understood geography. “Isn’t that so, Constable Shabalala?”

  Shabalala nodded. “That is the time, if the road is good.”

  “And is the road good?” Emmanuel asked. The headache suddenly pulsed red and white behind his left eye socket. He waited for someone to answer the question.

  “Good until ver Maak’s farm.” Shabalala spoke up when it became obvious no one else was going to. “Ver Maak told captain there was a donga in the road, but he drove around it to come to town.”