A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  Emmanuel rolled and a second kick went wide. He felt the weight of the envelopes as he struggled to his feet and judged the odds. Not good. The guard took up the whole doorway and he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Emmanuel waited for the guard to move. The black man stared him down, nostrils flared with the scent of wounded prey. Emmanuel faked a move to the left and the guard came at him fast. He crouched low, tipped the guard’s legs from under him, and heard a wet smack as the guard’s body landed on the hard concrete.

  The guard pulled himself up to a kneeling position. Emmanuel legged it to the fence. He wasn’t too proud to run from a foe seconds away from beating the crap out of him.

  He reached the gate. It was closed. He hammered his fist against the steel.

  “Open up!”

  “You must go over the fence,” Ahmed instructed him calmly from the other side. “I cannot let you out this way.”

  “Open the fucking door!”

  “You must go over the fence. Over the fence.”

  The top of the fence was too high to jump over, the surface too smooth to get a toehold. The guard came toward him with his nightstick raised. The weight of the files tugged at his shoulder and his plan fell into place. First beat the living hell out of the guard, second get a garbage can and climb out, third beat the living hell out of Ahmed. Not up to the scale of the D-Day invasion, but it would do.

  Emmanuel let the guard get close enough to taste victory, then dodged to the right. The nightstick swung down and grazed his shoulder but he kept moving. He was at the garbage can in two seconds flat. He picked up the half-filled container and turned to get a close view of the nightstick making a comeback. This time it landed square against his arm and sent the garbage crashing down.

  Emmanuel scooped up the lid and held it over him like a shield. The nightstick worked double time, each hit making a dull metal clank in the night air. An alley cat howled as Emmanuel rolled the can toward the fence. He steadied it against the wall and turned his attention to the guard, who was hammering away at the lid with grim precision.

  He crouched low, reached out from behind the safety of the lid, grabbed the guard by the ankles and pulled. The guard fell hard a second time. The nightstick rolled free and Emmanuel threw it over the fence. That was one less thing to worry about. He jammed the lid in place on top of the can, then stripped off his jacket and threw it over the coil of barbed wire along the top of the fence. He placed a foot on the lid, and the night watchman hit him square between the shoulder blades.

  Emmanuel turned, ducked a blow, then landed a solid punch against the guard’s jaw. The man wobbled unsteadily. Emmanuel hit him with his right fist, then again with his left, and the guard went down for good. Emmanuel quickly climbed onto the garbage can and scrambled over the wall. A shard of broken glass sliced into his calf as he hauled himself over. He landed in the alley, bruised and bleeding, and saw Ahmed waiting. He picked up the nightstick.

  Ahmed ran.

  Emmanuel caught the sweaty lab assistant and swung him hard against the wall of an empty shop.

  “You are angry. I understand this.”

  Emmanuel slammed Ahmed back again.

  “I am mildly annoyed,” Emmanuel said. “Angry is when I break both your kneecaps with this nightstick.”

  “The guard, of course. I had every confidence you would deal with him efficiently.”

  “Did you?” Emmanuel made sure Ahmed felt the full press of his thumbs as he dug them deep into the tender muscle of his shoulders.

  “Please.” Ahmed winced in pain. “You must listen to me. We must hurry to complete our plan.”

  “It’s your plan, Ahmed. My plan was to get the photos and walk out the back door.”

  “The photos. They are yours now.” The assistant was unbalanced enough to sound enthusiastic. “You can take them across the border if you allow me to guide you.”

  Emmanuel eased the pressure of his thumbs on Ahmed’s shoulders.

  “Another stunt like the one you just pulled and you will get a taste of this nightstick. That’s a promise.”

  “Follow me and we will complete our mission,” Ahmed said, and slid into the dark with the certainty of an alley rat. They followed a dusty back lane and turned into a wide tree-lined boulevard fronted by white stucco colonial buildings in the Portuguese style.

  Ahmed picked up his pace and they walked past a group of older men playing cards outside a brightly lit café. They cut across the center of a night market offering monkeys in cages, racks of cotton suits and fiery bowls of chili prawns for sale. After ten minutes trudging steadily upward, they stopped at a wooden gate hanging off its hinges. Ahmed squeezed through the entrance and motioned Emmanuel into an overgrown garden bisected by a zigzag pathway leading to a small tumbledown shack.

  “My house,” Ahmed announced with pride, and led the way to a cleared corner of the garden where there was a circle of stones filled with dry leaves and kindling. A can of petrol lay next to the hearth.

  “You were expecting me?” Emmanuel said.

  “Every week I say to myself, ‘Ahmed, burn the filth and be done,’ but I have not had the strength to do so. Now, with your help, I will say good-bye to all my friends.”

  The smell of petrol was strong in the air as Ahmed doused the dry leaves and dropped a lit match onto the incendiary mix. There was a whoosh when the fire ignited the leaves.

  Emmanuel placed the satchel on the ground. Ahmed was welcome to do what he wanted with his “friends” but he needed the captain’s photos and he needed to get the hell out of Mozambique. He kneeled down to unpack the stash of pornography, and his leg and shoulder spasmed with pain. The cut from the broken glass was raw, the hit from the nightstick throbbed.

  “Give me my photos,” he said. “I need to get back to SA before the border closes.”

  Ahmed removed the envelopes from the leather bag and laid them out on the ground at evenly spaced intervals. His index finger stroked every envelope before stopping two from the end of the row.

  “This is yours.” He picked up two identical envelopes but made no move to relinquish them. “You must promise me to look at the photos in order. This is very important. It cannot be done any other way. It must not be done any other way.”

  “What for?” Emmanuel asked with as much patience as he could muster.

  “You must promise,” Ahmed insisted. “You must look at them one at a time and lay them out on a table in order.”

  “How do I know the correct order?” Emmanuel said, humoring Ahmed, who was now hugging the envelopes to his chest like a cherished loved one.

  Ahmed reached into the first package and carefully withdrew two photos. “I have numbered them,” he said, and laid the prints down next to the fire. “You must arrange them just so.”

  Photo number one was a picture of the cells at the Jacob’s Rest police station. Photo number two was of the desks in the front office. Light from the fire flickered over the banal images. Despite the pain and the difficulty of obtaining the photos, Emmanuel was intrigued. He’d been beaten and pissed on at the captain’s hut for whatever was in the envelopes Ahmed was holding.

  “I promise to look at them in order,” Emmanuel said. He’d promise his firstborn if that made Ahmed hand over the goods sooner.

  “You will not regret it.” Ahmed replaced the photos and reluctantly surrendered the package. “You are a very lucky man. I am filled with envy at your joyous introduction to this special friend.”

  The worn skin of the envelope rested softly in Emmanuel’s palm. He was one step closer to the truth about Willem Pretorius and hopefully one step closer to catching the killer. He turned to leave.

  “Mr. Policeman,” Ahmed said. “Please stay a moment. I need you to make sure I complete my task.”

  “Go ahead,” Emmanuel said, and Ahmed pulled the photos from their envelopes and threw them onto the fire. Heat blistered and distorted grainy images of naked blondes, brunettes, black women, white women, twins and
couples arranged in every imaginable configuration. Ahmed’s collection ranged far and wide. Within minutes, all that remained of the mad pornographer’s “friends” was a pile of gray ash on the glowing twigs.

  Ahmed sobbed. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with gusto. “Thank you, Mr. Policeman. You have been my redemption. I will be faithful to my wife as the Creator intended. Please take this leather case as a token of my esteem.”

  Emmanuel accepted the gift and slipped his envelopes inside. For Ahmed he was the redeemer; for the Pretorius family he might be the destroyer.

  14

  THE DARK BLANKET of night had spread over Jacob’s Rest by the time Emmanuel arrived back from Lorenzo Marques. He parked in front of his room at The Protea Guesthouse and eased his aching body out of the driver’s seat. The Security Branch was conducting a raid in another part of the country and that left him free for the first time to use his own accommodation without fear of intrusion.

  He limped to his room with the leather satchel in his hands and unlocked the door. Inside, he flicked the light on and pulled the drawers of the bedside table open. He checked the empty cavity, fingers sweeping into every corner in the hope that one magic pill had come loose from the pack.

  The drawer was empty and Emmanuel calculated a window of perhaps half an hour before the pain burning along his calf worked its way to his shoulder, then up to his head—a half hour tops before he was limping along the kaffir path toward Dr. Zweigman’s modest brick bungalow.

  Drops of sweat broke out on his top lip when he reached down and pulled the photos from the first envelope. His injured shoulder protested at the movement and he narrowed the window of rational function to fifteen minutes.

  He opened the envelope and laid out numbers one to four. The photographs showed the cells, the desks, the table with tea and cups, and the back window. Harmless images that could have been taken by a keen twelve-year-old on a Voortrekker Scouts excursion. Numbers five to ten showed the station’s backyard. A tree. A chair. The circle of stones used for the braai fire.

  A sense of panic welled up. Was Ahmed so desensitized by years of developing hard-core that only images of ordinary things turned him on? The urge to split the pack of photos and check the middle was strong but Emmanuel resisted. Maybe there was method to Ahmed’s madness.

  He laid out numbers eleven and twelve and his luck took a turn. Photo number eleven was a sunlit boulder out on the veldt. Number twelve was the same rock, but with a young woman leaning back against it, her tanned arms crossed over her torso. She was fully clothed. An unremarkable image except for the fact that it was a photo of a mixed-race woman taken by a white man and the woman’s face was not shown.

  Emmanuel laid the rest of the photos from the first package out in order and examined them one at a time. Each image was a fumbling, almost adolescent revelation of the woman’s body, the photographer a novice asking for just a little more in each frame. The woman’s dress, a plain cotton frock tailor-made for church hall revivals and family picnics, was undone two buttons at a time and the sleek curves of breasts, thighs and hips gradually revealed themselves. Then the modest covering was gone. The images contained brown skin, sunlight, dark, hard nipples and pubic hair.

  The last photograph in the pack, number twenty-five, was the woman, face still unseen, leaning naked against the rock with her legs spread wide. She was a beautiful, sunlit invitation to bliss.

  Emmanuel examined the slow-motion striptease. He could see why Ahmed loved the photos; they documented a shedding of innocence more profound than the removal of clothing. There was the sense in every shot that the woman and the photographer were moving slowly and inexorably to a place they had both never been before.

  As evidence, there was a lot less to like about the images. There wasn’t one single element in the photographs to connect Willem Pretorius to the mystery woman. Anyone with access to the police station could have taken the first few shots and there was only Ahmed’s word that the Afrikaner captain was the one to hand over the undeveloped rolls for processing. A dark-skinned half-Arab Muslim pornographer was not a reliable witness in a South African court of law.

  “Open the second envelope.” The sergeant major slid into the room on a wave of pain and took his position at the head of the parade. “You’ll not get the pills until you know exactly what you have, laddie.”

  Emmanuel opened the envelope and pulled out a fresh stack of photographs. His shoulder ached with an intense throbbing that spread across his back and forced him to breathe through an open mouth.

  He laid out the first five photos with shaking hands. Same woman in a different location: a bedroom with a wide wrought-iron bed and lace-edged curtains at the window. It wasn’t the stone hut with its narrow single cot. The room in the photos was a feminine space, possibly the woman’s own bedroom.

  “The naked female is a wondrous thing, is it not, soldier?” The Scotsman was in awe. “Look at that arse. I could bounce a shilling off it, it’s so tight.”

  Emmanuel kept flipping, quicker now as the pain worked its way up toward his neck. In five minutes his head was going to be alive with the sound of jackhammers. The photos flashed in front of him in a blur of hard-core images. The woman naked on all fours, then naked from behind, thighs open to display every fold and detail of her shaved sex.

  “Oh, yes, lad.” The sergeant major was delighted. “After food and water and whiskey, this is the stuff of life. Exactly what the doctor ordered, hey?”

  “Unless I can tie these photos to Willem Pretorius,” Emmanuel said aloud, “the Security Branch will throw them out the window as unrelated to the case. Smut and Communist infiltrators don’t mix.”

  “Not so fast. You’re missing all the good bits, lad. Can’t you take a moment to enjoy your work? Take a look at the last one.”

  Emmanuel picked the photo up. The woman was lying naked on the unmade bed with her hips tilted upward and her hand buried deep between her legs. He backtracked and examined the preceding photo, which showed the woman lying on her side with her face masked by the fall of her long dark hair. A new element was added and he’d all but missed it. Around the woman’s neck was a necklace, an opened flower with a small diamond at the center.

  “Pretty,” the sergeant major cooed. “I like the look of that.”

  “The necklace or what it’s resting against?”

  “Both. Jewelry on a naked woman is a sacred thing, my lad.”

  “You’d say that if she had a tire iron around her neck,” Emmanuel said. The pack of photos thinned to nothing and he flicked the last two photos onto the bed. The woman’s identity was going to remain a mystery. The slim waist ruled out Tottie, and the long hair and bold physical presence of the woman’s body made Davida Ellis an unlikely suspect. Was the captain’s model someone from an outlying farm or hamlet? Emmanuel placed the last photo down and felt its mesmerizing power grab hold of him.

  “Well, well,” he said. The pain in his body drained away and was replaced by an unassailable sense of well-being. Maybe he was going to win the war after all.

  “What in hell makes a man do something so…unsavory?” the sergeant major blurted out.

  Emmanuel wiped the sweat from his forehead and examined the last photograph. A naked man lay on the unmade bed with his forearm thrown over his eyes in a playful parody of the woman’s efforts to hide her identity. A crumpled sheet was pulled low over his hips to expose an edge of wiry blond pubic hair. The hard shape of the man’s erect penis strained against the cotton sheet, proof of his readiness to go again, despite the fact that the smile on his mouth suggested he’d already spent a good deal of time thrusting his way to heaven.

  “Jesus!” The image made the cast-iron sergeant major ill at ease. “It’s wrong for a man to parade himself like that.”

  “She asked him to pose. And he said yes.”

  “He did it to please her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…” The Scotsman consider
ed that fact for a moment. “There’s not much a man won’t do for pussy.”

  “There more to it than that,” Emmanuel said, and traced a finger over the broken nose and the unique gold-faced watch that clearly identified this slab of Afrikaner manhood as one Captain Willem Pretorius, moral defender of the town of Jacob’s Rest and enthusiastic amateur photographer. Pussy, as the sergeant major suggested, was only part of the reason for such a flagrant act of self-revelation. Willem Pretorius had taken a life-threatening risk by posing for the camera.

  “He loves the fact she’s looking at him: seeing him for who he really is. Check the expression on his face. He’s not Captain Willem Pretorius, upholder of the sacred covenant with the Lord. He’s a bad man who’s spent the afternoon doing bad things to a woman his tribe says is unclean and he couldn’t be fucking happier.”

  “Maybe it was love made him do it?”

  “I doubt it,” Emmanuel said. The morphine-like sense of well-being ebbed away and the pain surged up to his jawline. “Forty-something pictures of her doing every imaginable thing for his pleasure and one photo of him looking like the king of cock hall. Being the white induna is what he loved.”

  “The necklace cost a few pounds.”

  “A trinket.” Emmanuel began packing the photos. His thoughts had taken a turn to a dark place. “A piece of insurance to gain her loyalty. You really think he’d stand by her if it affected his perfect Afrikaner family? He’d have her on a bus to Swaziland with ten pounds in her pocket or six feet underground with nothing.”

  “What the hell are you so angry about? I only meant that he gave her presents and made sure no one knew who she was. He protected her, didn’t he?”

  “He protected himself,” Emmanuel said, and returned the pictures to the leather satchel as quickly as he could without damaging them. He needed the pills. He needed something to stop him from limping over to the captain’s house and shoving the feast of hard-core down Mrs. Pretorius’s lily-white throat.