Blessed Are the Dead Page 26

  “That’s what Gabriel has?”

  “Yebo.”

  Chief Matebula leapt over the impala skin and marched past his kneeling wives. The black mark of his shadow crossed over each woman in turn before hitting the empty spot where the fifth wife had been.

  “You took my daughter from me,” he said. “You robbed me of her bride-price and Chief Mashanini of a bride. How do you answer to this?”

  “I did none of these things, my husband.”

  Gabriel circled around and stopped in her line of sight. He looked her in the eye. “Tell the truth and shame the devil. You are the witch who took Amahle away.”

  The fifth wife looked away from Gabriel’s intense stare and said to the chief, “Amahle was going away from here . . . from all of us. The marriage was never to be. She hated this kraal and this family.”

  “Lies.” Matebula dismissed the words with a flick of his hand. “The marriage was agreed on and Amahle was happy to do her duty to me, her father.”

  “Look.” The fifth wife pulled a piece of paper from the waistband of her black skirt and held it up. She was flustered by Gabriel’s unsettling presence and the chief’s growing anger. “A bus ticket. Amahle lied to you, husband. She had no plans to stay and marry. Her eyes were on Durban. She was a bad daughter.”

  Nomusa rose from the line of kneeling wives. “If this bus ticket belonged to Amahle, how does it come to be in your hands?”

  “I found it on the veldt.”

  “My daughter was careful. She did not drop a stitch when sewing or lose a grain of millet from a calabash.” Nomusa focused on the fifth wife. “That is not Amahle’s ticket. It is yours. You are the one planning to run from this kraal and from your husband, the great chief.”

  “Is this so?” That one of his wives would contemplate leaving offended Matebula.

  “No.” The fifth wife’s voice was strident. “The ticket was in Amahle’s pocket. She was the one to buy it.”

  Nomusa fixed the younger woman with a withering stare. “My daughter would not let you look through her pockets unless she was dead.”

  Angry shouts went up from the inhabitants of the kraal and the fifth wife ran for the exit. Mandla and his impi broke from the men’s section and moved to stop her retreat, and Emmanuel and Shabalala moved out to block her escape path.

  Gabriel was fast and got to the fleeing woman first. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to the ground. Black and white limbs flailed in the dirt and a cloud of dust rose into the air. The Matebula family jumped to their feet, shouting and pushing to get a look at the witch and the white boy.

  “I have her,” Gabriel shouted. “I have her.”

  Emmanuel moved closer and saw the quick dart of a porcupine quill being aimed at Gabriel’s arm. He grabbed the fifth wife’s wrist and pulled it away from the boy. Shabalala held her down. She kicked and punched the air, screaming.

  “Watch out for more quills,” Emmanuel warned the Zulu detective, and knelt to examine Gabriel’s sleeve. A small barb was stuck in the fabric of the King’s Row College uniform. The tip of the quill was stained red.

  “Are you hurt?” Emmanuel asked. “Did you feel a prick on your arm?”

  “No.” Gabriel reached for the quill and Emmanuel grasped his hand. The red on the tip was not blood.

  “Don’t touch,” Emmanuel said. “It’s poison.”

  The quill was a perfect piece of evidence. It matched the two found stabbed into Amahle and Philani. He pulled it free, wrapped it in his handkerchief and placed it in his jacket pocket.

  “Here.” Mandla held the bus ticket out between thumb and forefinger. “For your white man’s courts.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We will escort you from the kraal to the main road. The fifth wife must be taken to the police station in town. She is not safe in the valley.”

  “If you gave the word, she would be,” Emmanuel said.

  Mandla grinned and walked off to collect his impi. He was in the ascendancy, the position of great chief not far away.

  “Sergeant,” Shabalala called. “We must race to beat the sunset.”

  Emmanuel pulled Gabriel to his feet. The Matebula family was now divided into four smaller groups, with each of the remaining wives clutching their daughters and sons. Nomusa held the little sister close in her arms and whispered into her ear. Amahle’s killer was found but the wounds in the hearts of those who loved her would never heal.

  Gabriel looked at Emmanuel. He was bedraggled and vulnerable. “I know I wasn’t supposed to run but I couldn’t stop,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You did well,” Emmanuel said. “You did very well. I’m proud of you for being so brave.”

  “Now will you kill her, Emmanuel? She must die.”

  “That’s not my job or yours. She’ll go to prison for a very long time. That might be enough.”

  “Good.” Gabriel was satisfied. He watched a dragonfly hover in the air, waiting for it to land. Emmanuel thought that perhaps the Zulus were right and that Gabriel was tuned in to the voices from another world.

  Emmanuel crossed to Shabalala, who held the fifth wife by the arm. Her red crown had been crushed in the dirt and the decorative porcupine quills removed and heaped on the ground. None of them had the telltale reddish tint.

  “Why Philani?” Emmanuel asked. By all accounts the gardener was harmless.

  “He found the great chief’s daughter on the path, just after she passed over to the ancestors.” The fifth wife brushed dust off her clothing, still proud of her appearance. “I came out of my hiding place and called him a murderer. He was scared and threw himself on my mercy, saying that he was innocent of the crime. I said that I believed him, but the great chief would not. ‘Go into hiding,’ I said. ‘And I will plead your fate with my husband.’ I gave him money to prove my promise of help was sincere. He did as I asked.”

  “Give me the five pounds you took from Amahle,” Emmanuel said to her.

  She flashed her big brown eyes and smiled. “I have no money, ma’ baas. I’m sorry, ma’ baas.”

  “I can put my hand down your top to search or Detective Constable Shabalala can. Which of us do you prefer?” Emmanuel called her bluff. Forcibly removing evidence from her person would render the search illegal, but she didn’t know that.

  The fifth wife pulled a five-pound note from the neckline of her buckskin top and surrendered it with a coy look. The pretty ingenue was part of her personality and would remain so until the doors of the police van closed and the locks snapped shut. Only then would the consequences of her actions become real to her.

  “Start out for the main road. Mandla and the impi will go with you,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala, and pocketed the five pounds. “Take Gabriel along. I’ll catch up.”

  “This money . . .” Shabalala hesitated and said, “It is not clean.”

  “It’s a piece of cotton fiber,” Emmanuel said. “Nomusa doesn’t know where the money came from and Bagley won’t ask for it back. Giving it away will wash it clean.”

  “You believe this?”

  “Yes,” Emmanuel said. “I do.”

  “Then I thank you for making it so, Sergeant.” Shabalala escorted the fifth wife away. The Matebula clan watched them depart with resentment. Some white man in a far-off city would pass judgment and mete out punishment in their private family matter.

  Mandla and his men closed in behind Shabalala, leaving the great chief isolated under the branches of the umdoni tree. Emmanuel crouched by Nomusa’s side, careful to keep a respectful distance from a married woman.

  “You knew the name of the guilty one before the sangoma started,” she said. The fear of being found a witch and the shock of discovering Amahle’s killer in the family kraal had drained Nomusa’s energy and etched worry lines on her face.

  “There was no proof,” Emmanuel said. “We needed a confession before making an arrest. I’m sorry to have put you both through the ceremony.”

  “It is done
.” She pulled her surviving daughter closer. “Now maybe the great chief will bury Amahle with honor instead of shame.”

  “Mandla has promised to talk to the chief and make this so.”

  “Mandla also knew?” She was surprised and glanced up to check the expression on Emmanuel’s face and judge the truth of his answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “The sangoma was also part of the plan. He was reluctant but Detective Constable Shabalala persuaded him.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Shabalala is a great listener,” Emmanuel said. With great patience, some conversation and an ear for detail, the Zulu detective had found out that the sangoma’s eldest son was moving to Durban to study. The thought of his child adrift in the city and prey to thieves and tsotsis gave the sangoma sleepless nights. Shabalala offered an introduction to the minister of his church, the name of a good boardinghouse for the boy to stay in and a pickup from the bus station on his arrival in Durban. A deal was struck. The plan to expose the fifth wife was almost entirely Shabalala’s doing. Emmanuel simply rode the wave.

  “All has been revealed,” Nomusa said. “Yet my heart is not glad.”

  “In time.” There was no salve for the wounds inflicted on a family by murder. He slipped the five-pound note between his fingers and said, “I wish you well.”

  He took hold of the little sister’s hand and pretended to shake it. Touching a married woman, especially in the presence of her husband, was forbidden. Small fingers gripped the money and removed it. Emmanuel stood to leave. The little sister tucked the note into the waist of her beaded skirt and gave him a quick look of thanks. Emmanuel thought how much she resembled Amahle and wondered if there was a bus seat on God’s Gift in her future, too.

  “Go well, Inkosi Cooper.” Nomusa got to her feet and made the traditional farewell. The sounds of women pounding millet and of children running to draw water from the river had started again. Daily life resumed. Maybe one day it would drown out her grief, or most of it, Emmanuel hoped.

  “Stay well, mother and daughter,” he said, and walked to the mountain path. He left them to mend and repair. He hoped they would.

  He remembered that his sister, Olivia, was due a phone call soon, a monthly exchange of hellos that reminded him that he was not alone in the world after all.

  Roselet glowed in the last light of day. The streetlamps came on. Ellicott and Hargrave slumped in fold-out chairs placed under the sycamore tree and drank sundowner beers. Smoke poured from a perforated drum with an iron grill placed across the top and the wood fire inside the drum crackled. Bagley dropped a curled length of traditional farmer’s sausage onto the heated metal grid and pricked the skin with a long fork. Fat leaked from the boerewors and dripped onto the hot coals.

  “Cheers.” Ellicott raised his beer in salute. “An all-kaffir affair won’t pull the press but General Hyland is very pleased with the result.”

  “Unfortunately, the names Cooper and Shabalala didn’t come up in the conversation,” Hargrave said.

  Shabalala kept a stony face. Emmanuel shrugged. He expected nothing in return for handing the fifth wife over to the two detectives or for allowing Hargrave and Ellicott to sign the case docket. That was the price for running an unsanctioned investigation.

  “In case the boys at West Street might ask . . . what was the reason for the murders?” Ellicott was already mentally back in Durban, sinking pints with the other detectives and talking bullshit about the difficulties of the case.

  Emmanuel kept it simple. “Amahle was killed to stop her father from using her bride-price to obtain wife number six. Motive: jealousy. The second victim, Philani Dlamini, was unlucky. He discovered Amahle’s body on the path and panicked. The woman who actually killed her convinced him to go into hiding while she cleared his name. She gave him some of the money she’d stolen from Amahle’s pocket to prove her sincerity. Two days later she killed Philani, too. Motive: the dead don’t talk.”

  “Kaffirs. Can’t understand them. Never will.” Hargrave drank more beer and contemplated the drifting colors on the horizon. Bagley tended the grill in silence.

  “If you boys are hungry you can stay and grab a bite,” Ellicott said.

  “We’d like to, but we have somewhere we’ve got to be.” An evening of boerewors, beer and bathroom humor didn’t appeal to Emmanuel.

  He wanted to get back to Margaret Daglish’s cottage, where she and Zweigman waited for him and Shabalala. Ella Reed had dropped them off there earlier in the afternoon. From the cottage, she’d taken Gabriel with her back to Little Flint Farm to spend the night before returning him to school. If he didn’t make a run for it again, that is. Emmanuel suspected Daglish’s husband, Jim, had hit the road again. If not, Daglish would most likely kick him out. She wasn’t the same woman who had turned away a detective with a dead body in need of an autopsy a few days ago.

  Ellicott drained his beer and opened another. He took a sip and said, “You’re all right for a queer, Cooper. You too, Shabalala.”

  “Good night, Detective Sergeant. Safe trip back.” Emmanuel cut across the yard to the Chevrolet. Shabalala followed with a frown.

  “He insults us and yet you smile,” the Zulu detective said. “What does this mean?”

  “It means that we just made friends. Hargrave and Ellicott will return to Durban tomorrow and tell the other detectives that we’re okay.” Emmanuel opened the car door and drummed his fingers on the dusty hood. “We’re out of the dogbox and back in the kitchen, Shabalala.”

  EPILOGUE

  EMMANUEL WOKE AT midnight with a pounding head and heart. He remembered the dream, down to the fragments of broken glass shining on the asphalt road leading into the French village outside Caen.

  The platoon marched under a weathered stone archway into a narrow street. An old woman threw white daisies from her window and the platoon stopped to pick them up and thread them into the buttonholes of their uniforms.

  They moved toward the town square. Black smoke poured from a building with broken windows and a tattered flag with a Nazi insignia hanging from one of the front columns. Papers littered the footpath. Overturned desks and file cabinets burned. Ash fell like rain.

  The enemy was gone, slashing and burning in retreat. A Welsh private chanced the flames and pulled down the red and black flag. He stuffed it into his pack, grinning.

  They moved out. The scattered papers littering the street might be important, but combat platoons traveled light. Rear-echelon troops sifted and filed.

  Emmanuel scouted a narrow alley off the main street. It seemed that all light died once he entered it and it felt cold and damp.

  A barefoot woman stumbled out of the darkness. Her head was shaved and she wore a torn silk slip, the two badges of a German collaborator. Her eyes had lost all hope. An older woman who looked to be her mother walked behind her carrying a baby wrapped in a blue cotton shawl. Emmanuel pressed against the wall and let them pass. The mother nodded a silent thank-you and they disappeared into the cold darkness of the alley. The three of them, the mother, the daughter and the baby, were marooned by the shifting tides of war.

  Now Emmanuel got out of bed and splashed water from the kitchen tap on his face. The real incident lasted less than a minute, eight years ago and a world away. He searched for a reason why fragments of this memory disturbed his dreams for weeks yet only became clear tonight, a day after he and Shabalala had returned to Durban from Roselet.

  He remembered Davida Ellis with her hair cropped short and her elegant mother sitting at the kitchen table mourning the loss of her innocence. Zweigman had mentioned them both in the stone tunnel while the morphine pumped through his blood. He said Davida was strong and she’d adjust to her new life with help.

  “She’s at Zweigman’s clinic,” Emmanuel said out loud.

  He knew also the hidden contents of Zweigman’s wallet. The muti fire contained the secret and the dream confirmed it.

  He pulled on clothes and rushed into the tropical night
. The Chevrolet started right up and the headlights illuminated the wide street and the redbrick houses. He drove to the main road connecting Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

  The smooth asphalt turned into an uneven macadam strip winding into the hills. The road would take him all the way to Zweigman’s clinic, to Davida—and their child, his and hers. The rearview mirror reflected the city lights behind him. Ahead, just as Baba Kaleni had predicted by the river, the stars shone bright enough to light his way.

  THE END

  INTRODUCTION

  When Amahle, the beautiful teenage daughter of a Zulu chief, is found murdered in the remote foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is called to investigate. Sensing that something terrible has happened, Emmanuel must navigate the various circles of Amahle’s complex world—interviewing everyone from her English aristocrat employers at Little Flint Farm, who favored her over their other servants, to her misogynist father, who was planning to marry her in exchange for a herd of cows, to the local police and medical offices that seem reluctant to offer any help whatsoever.

  In a community fraught with racism, sexism, and an ever-changing balance of power, finding Amahle’s killer may prove impossible—or even deadly.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. How does Emmanuel’s military background help him with his detective work? How does his background provide an advantage that other detectives might not have?

  2. How does the author evoke the atmosphere of apartheidera South Africa through her descriptions of characters and place? Did you feel you had a good sense of this time period after finishing the novel?

  3. Due to segregation laws, Emmanuel and Shabalala must check into different hotels on their first night on the case. “Shabalala did not complain. . . . How many words and thoughts were sealed in the Zulu policeman’s mouth because all that was required in the presence of a majority of whites was a ‘Yes, ma’ baas,’ ‘No, ma’ baas’ and a ‘Thank you, ma’ baas’?” (page 73). How does Shabalala reconcile his forced submissiveness with the pursuit of justice inherent in his job?