Present Darkness Read online

  “So it’s true,” Mason said. “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

  “I never met any,” Emmanuel said. That his superior officer knew he’d been a combat soldier during the war and not part of the rear-echelon army was a detail to consider later.

  “All this for a box of jewellery and a stack of bills hidden behind the underwear drawer.” Mason gestured to the broken furniture. “The love of money is truly the root of all evil.”

  “The living room hasn’t been touched,” Emmanuel said. “There’s a row of silver picture frames on the mantle. Why expend so much energy and leave those behind?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a robbery became a murder.”

  “True.” Burglars caught in the act killed dozens of people every year and maimed a few more besides. “But this level of violence seems excessive, almost personal in nature.”

  Sobbing came from the rear of the house.

  “That’s the daughter you hear.” Mason stalked the length of the corridor, crunching debris. “Negus is babysitting her in the kitchen till one of the station secretaries arrives. She needs a female touch.”

  In police code “female touch” meant “the witness is hysterical and won’t stop crying, even though we’ve told her to”. Emmanuel followed Mason and glanced into a room with an upended single bed, a ransacked wardrobe and walls papered in a yellow canary design: a teenager’s bedroom, presumably the girl’s.

  “The police secretary is coming from out Benoni way. She won’t be here for another half an hour at the earliest.” The cold-eyed Lieutenant paused outside a closed door and glanced at Emmanuel over his shoulder. “I want you to get in there and try to calm things, Cooper. If I remember right, you’re good with women.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Emmanuel said. Good with women? He tried and failed to come up with a source for Mason’s observation. They’d never worked together nor even had a beer at the local bar. The undercover operations squad were a tight unit. They believed in secrecy and money. Emmanuel had stayed far away from them his whole career—and especially since arriving back in Jo’burg.

  Dryer sniggered, sure that Mason was referring to a party in Dryer’s imagination at which Emmanuel and the Lieutenant had shared in a repast of whores lain on by an obliging Madam. Dryer was an idiot.

  “In here.” Mason opened the door to a ruined kitchen. Silver cutlery and smashed containers littered the floor and counters. Piles of flour, rice, coffee and sugar were dumped onto the small pine table. A white girl in a cotton nightie sat in a chair with her face buried in her hands, weeping.

  “Name?” Emmanuel whispered before going in.

  “Cassie. We got that from the neighbour who called in the disturbance. Nothing from her yet.”

  Negus, the detective on babysitting duty was a solid, old-fashioned cop Emmanuel knew from the station. He would have come on duty with three things: a loaded gun, adrenaline and a hard man face. Good cop or not, he was ill-equipped to comfort a teenage girl whose parents might die tonight.

  “Thank Christ,” Negus mumbled when he reached the door. “I need a piss and a smoke.”

  The girl, Cassie, sobbed and kept her fingers tightly closed. Eyes shut, face hidden, she was trying to block out the chaos. Emmanuel walked into the room; time for Cassie to put her hands down and open her eyes.

  “The foot police found her in that corner.” Mason pointed to a spot near a four-burner gas stove. “We’ve tried to get her out of here but she won’t leave.”

  The kitchen, at least, smelled of cinnamon and caster sugar instead of blood. There was no blood in this room that Emmanuel could see. The headmaster and his wife had been beaten in the bedroom while the house was turned over: a job for two men, minimum. He found a kettle in the debris and filled it at the sink.

  “Do you want a cup of tea, Cassie?” he asked. “Or cocoa, if I can find it?”

  “Nothing,” she sniffed.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Uh huh.”

  She was talking. That was a start. Emmanuel left the water running and checked her for injuries. Blood running down her thighs or dripping from an elbow would have shown up in the flour sprinkled on the floor. The flour was still clean. Cassie’s freckled legs and pale arms were likewise unmarked by trauma, her yellow nightie, pristine.

  “Is that blood?” Emmanuel leaned closer, heart thumping. Red was smudged across the back of her hand. Christ knows what injuries hid behind those shuttered palms.

  “What?” she hiccupped.

  “There.” He gently touched the spot and noticed the red had a strange metallic sheen.

  “Oh.” She dropped her hands to the table and rubbed at the smear with a fingertip. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  Oh yes you do, Emmanuel thought. It wasn’t blood Cassie scrubbed away at so hard. It was lipstick.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Cooper,” he said. “Are you hurt any place that I can’t see?”

  “No.” Cassie scraped the last trace of red away with a fingernail and looped a strand of frizzy ginger hair behind her right ear. She was about fifteen with bright hazel eyes and a wide mouth that belonged in a broader face. Freckles sprinkled her nose, neck and collarbones so her skin appeared browner than white. “I’m all right. Really.”

  Emmanuel gave her his handkerchief. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  She blew her nose and frowned, thinking.

  “Take your time.” Emmanuel lit the gas flame under the kettle. “There’s no rush.”

  “I … I was asleep in my bed and there was a … a big crash. Like there was someone in the house.” Her frown deepened, cutting a trench into her forehead. “It was dark. I couldn’t see.”

  “Tell me what you did then.” Emmanuel sat at the table. “After the noise.”

  “I got a fright and I got out of bed.” Cassie twisted the corner of the handkerchief into a tight cylinder. “Then I hid behind the wardrobe.”

  “Your wardrobe?” He’d noticed the ripped doors and the scattered contents from the corridor.

  “Ja. That one.”

  “Did you hear voices from there?”

  “What?” The question seemed to startle her and the corners of her wide mouth twitched. “I … I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You were behind the wardrobe while the robbers were in your room. Did they say anything?”

  Cassie took a deep breath, looked away to the kitchen window. The moon now hung lower in the branches of the jacaranda outside. Two minutes ticked by in silence.

  “Zulu,” she said finally. “They were speaking Zulu. I don’t know what they were saying.”

  Footsteps shuffled in the doorway. Mason and Dryer moved closer to catch the rest of Cassie’s story. A few days shy of the Christmas holidays, the Police Commissioner would cancel all police leave pending an arrest. The headlines tomorrow would send a ripple of fear through the white neighbourhoods: Zulu Gang Beats European Couple to Death in their Bed.

  “It wasn’t Pedi or Shangaan that you heard?” Emmanuel asked. Johannesburg was the economic powerhouse of Southern Africa, and the promise of work drew black Africans of every different tribal group. The city was an industrial Babel, with dozens of languages spoken.

  “No. It was Zulu. Definitely. I …” Cassie buried her face in her hands and started to cry again.

  Emmanuel touched her arm, hoping the warmth of human contact would calm her. It didn’t. The girl’s sobs deepened. Only a little while ago, she had been alone in a corner, too terrified to move while her parents bled out onto their carpet a few feet away.

  Emmanuel stood up and put an arm around her shoulders. Her wet face pressed against his stomach. He made the right sounds yet felt no sorrow, pity or anger. He was detached, floating above the wrecked kitchen, wondering when his ability to lie had grown so deep and become so easy. Wiry hair crinkled against his shirt, curlier than his mixed-race daughter’s would ever be. He’d never hold his own girl Rebekah like this in pub
lic.

  “It’s okay.” He recited the given script. “You’re safe now. You can talk to me. Tell me anything.”

  “I recognised their voices.” Cassie’s face burrowed deeper against his tear-soaked shirt. “I know who did it.”

  “You know their names?” Emmanuel asked.

  Lieutenant Mason moved into the kitchen and stood at the edge of the pine table. He watched Emmanuel’s ministrations with snake eyes. If I remember right, you’re good with women. Emmanuel had been meticulous with his lies these last five weeks, especially around Mason. Talking about his personal life would send him to jail for three to six years for “immoral activity”. The beauty of Davida Ellis’s honey brown skin against white cotton sheets and the sky grey of his daughter’s eyes would remain his secret.

  “It was boys from Saint Bartholomew’s College,” Cassie said. “Two of them.”

  “Look at me, Cassie.” Emmanuel waited till she did. He had to be sure there’d been no mistake. “You’re talking about Saint Bartholomew’s College in Sophiatown?”

  She broke off eye contact and licked her dry lips. “Yes.”

  The Anglican school and its well-known red-brick chapel were in Emmanuel’s old neighbourhood. The school was an oasis in the tough streets of Sophiatown for black boys who wanted to become teachers and lawyers instead of gangsters. His good friend Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala’s son attended the prestigious institution.

  “How did you come to meet students from a native school?” Sophiatown was less than thirty miles from the neat grid of suburban streets where Cassie lived but it might as well be on another planet.

  “My father,” Cassie said. “He runs an extra-curricular program for natives. He takes them to the theatre and also to concerts. Once a term they come to the house for dinner.”

  “To this house?”

  “Ja. He thought it would be good for them to see how Europeans lived.”

  Dryer snorted from the doorway. Emmanuel stepped away from Cassie’s burrowed face and squatted by her chair. She chewed her bottom lip.

  “Tell me their names,” Emmanuel said.

  ‘I … I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “We’re just going to talk to them and clear things up. That’s all.” Emmanuel was surprised at having to coax the names of the culprits from Cassie. Christ almighty. What did she care if two black boys from the townships got into trouble for beating her parents and wrecking her home?

  Cassie pressed the handkerchief to her face. “Kibelo Nkhato,” she said. “I think that was his surname. And Aaron Shabalala.”

  Emmanuel slipped back into his body, heart thumping, and panic taking hold like a virus. Shabalala was a common Zulu name. Throw a net out of a bus in Sophiatown and you’d land a dozen. But two boys named Aaron Shabalala attending the same Anglican-run boarding school was unlikely.

  “You’re sure about those names?” Emmanuel leaned in closer to establish eye contact with Cassie. The odds against there being a personal connection between him and this crime scene were astronomical.

  “Yes, of course. They were here tonight for the end of term dinner.” The handkerchief muffled the sharp edge of her voice. “It was Aaron and Kibelo. Those two boys. I’m not making it up.”

  “Okay.”

  Her gaze flickered away to the window for a second time. With any other witness the broken eye contact would point to a lie or an evasion. Emmanuel wasn’t sure the same rules applied here. Cassie was a plain girl who, he suspected, sat in the corner at school functions with an empty dance card on her lap and a carnation wilting behind her ear. He might have overplayed the eye contact and pushed her back into her shell.

  “Aaron Shabalala and Kibelo Nkhato.” Emmanuel sat back down and flipped open his notebook. He proceeded as usual. Until he knew for certain that this Aaron was his friend’s son there was nothing else to do. “Describe the boys to me.”

  “Kibelo is skinny and light-skinned. He wears glasses and he likes to talk. Shabalala is not like that.” Hot colour stung Cassie’s cheeks. “He’s tall with wide shoulders and brown eyes. He doesn’t speak so much and sometimes his face is like a mask so you can’t tell what he’s thinking.”

  Emmanuel had never met any of Shabalala’s sons in person, but a tall Zulu with wide shoulders and the ability to keep his thoughts to himself: that might well be a description of Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala of the Native Branch.

  “Did your father keep money in the house?” Emmanuel’s voice remained flat and cool despite his thudding heart.

  “No,” Cassie said. “He liked to tell the boys that the bank was the only place to keep money. You earned interest on the deposit and the money was insured if there was ever a robbery.”

  Solid advice, which Cassie repeated with a glazed look. Emmanuel imagined the end of term dinners were probably torture for the principal’s daughter, having to sit politely at the table surrounded by native boys while her father divulged the cultural secrets of the white race. The neighbours wouldn’t be pleased with the idea of black boys eating off china plates in the house next door, either.

  “Why do you think they did it?” Emmanuel asked.

  “Who?”

  “The boys. If Nkhato and Shabalala knew there was no money in the house why do you think they did all this?” He motioned to the wreckage.

  “Oh …” Cassie gaze flickered across the debris and her shoulders curled in. She thought a moment then said, “They took the car. That must be what they wanted.”

  “What car?” Mason’s voice was a bucket of ice water thrown onto a fire. Cassie jumped at the sound of it.

  “Tell me about the car.” Emmanuel spoke over the low noise of Mason’s grinding teeth.

  “It’s a Mercedes Benz Cabriolet,” Cassie said. “Red with black leather seats.”

  “Nice …” Dryer gave a soft whistle and nodded approval. A flick from Mason’s index finger sent him scuttling back into the corridor.

  “Go check the garage, Cooper.” Mason jerked a thumb to the back door. “See if the car’s gone.”

  “The boys broke in, found the keys and then stole the Mercedes,” Cassie said. “I heard the engine.”

  “Make if fast, Sergeant.” Cassie’s certainty seemed to agitate Mason more than the assault on her parents. His jaw worked on an invisible piece of gristle between his teeth. “You’d have to be an idiot to take a car like that and expect to blend in.”

  Emmanuel got up, switched off the kettle and walked to the back door. Mason was right. Two black boys in a red, luxury car. The idea was ridiculous. They wouldn’t get past the first roadblock.

  A china fragment crunched under his shoes and he looked down. The imprint of a bare foot pressed into the floured tiles. Not a single print, but a line of them moving from the back door to the corner of the kitchen where the police had found Cassie hiding.

  Emmanuel checked the door handle. The lock buckled inward but the square of glass inset into the wood was intact. This was the point of entry. A simple break and enter that started with the snap of this handle and ended in mayhem. Were the car keys that hard to find?

  “Quickly, Cooper. We need to get to the school and interview those boys. That’s if they’re still in town.”

  He gave the kitchen one last glance. Cassie hunched in the chair and chewed her fingernails. The trail of footsteps snaked around broken glass and skipped over shards of porcelain. Despite being in fear for her life, Cassie had carefully picked her way across the room to a safe corner. She glanced up and met Emmanuel’s eyes. His look said, You’re lying, girl. And I know it.

  She covered her face with her hands.

  2.

  “Car’s gone, Lieutenant.”

  The ghost of a grease spot on the concrete floor was the only evidence that a vehicle had once been parked in the Brewers’ garage. Emmanuel crossed to the rear of the garage and stepped into the moonlight. The backyard was overgrown with fruit trees and climbing vines. Stands of wild fig
and straggly banana plants made Emmanuel feel as if he were back in a country town, like Jacob’s Rest, where he’d first met Davida. An unseen animal, of a sufficient size to make a distinctive dragging sound, seemed to be moving through the leaf litter.

  “Something’s back here,” he said loud enough for Dryer and Mason to hear. “Something big. I’ll take a look.”

  “Go with Cooper, Dryer, and see what it is,” Mason said, but Emmanuel was already searching the moonlit garden. He found a narrow path behind a clothesline and followed it. Gnarled branches and knots of unpruned roses pressed in from either side and slowed his progress. The dragging sound grew louder.

  “Police.” Emmanuel spoke loud and clear. “Step out where I can see you.”

  No answer. He moved deeper into the garden, keeping to the thin dirt path. A noise came from a mass of plants up ahead.

  “Police,” Emmanuel said again, peering into the tangled branches. Darkness peered back. Leather gun holster unclipped, he ducked and shuffled into the underbrush, navigating like a blind man, using an outstretched hand to feel his way. A sharp snap came from his right. He jerked back and pressed a hand to the ground for balance. Wet leaves stuck to his palm and the familiar smell of blood rose from the soil.

  Emmanuel wiped off the leaf litter and moved on as he had done during the war when every forward step might have been his last. The dragging sound came from directly in front on him now. He reached out and touched the crook of an elbow and then a bony shoulder blade. A body shuddered and collapsed under the weight of his fingers.

  “Dryer!” Emmanuel shouted. “Bring a light. Now.”

  “Where are you, Cooper? I can’t see you.”

  “Take the path behind the clothesline into the garden. I’m to the right of the path. Move it.” Every skin surface he touched came back wet and slick. “Get a light in here.”

  A flashlight beam flicked between the tree branches. Emmanuel’s eyes adjusted to the dimness. A slender black man lay on his side in the leaf litter. He bled from the head and seemed to have some smaller wounds in his back. His fingernails were caked with dirt. He must have crawled across the ground one handful at a time, looking for safety or a quiet place to die.