A Beautiful Place to Die Page 31

  “Louis…” Hansie’s vacant blue eyes brimmed with tears of frustration. “Tell the detective sergeant this is all a mistake. You didn’t touch those coloured women and Captain didn’t do like what he says…with the sex and the devil and the little wife.”

  Louis smiled, truly the most beautiful of God’s angels. “You know what my pa told me once, Hansie?”

  “No.”

  “That you cannot know God until you have wrestled with the devil and the devil has won.” He turned to Davida to illustrate his point and found her gone. The rifle swung easily in the boy’s hands and he raised it to his eye and took aim at the cave mouth, where the woman appeared as a dark fleeting shape. His legs were spread in the classic marksman pose that gave stability to the torso and increased the likelihood of hitting the mark.

  “Drop the weapon, Louis!” Emmanuel shouted across the rock ledge, handgun squarely on target. “Drop it or I will shoot you.”

  The shadow disappeared from the cave mouth and Louis slowly lowered his rifle to his hip. His fingers twitched around the barrel but the gun stayed put.

  “Do not move.” Emmanuel’s voice was clear and authoritative as he closed the distance between them. “Drop the gun to the ground and kick it toward me. Now.”

  Louis loosened his grip and the rifle clattered across the ledge, where Constable Shabalala picked it up and swung it across his back. The captain’s youngest son sank down into a crouch and stared out across the miles of brown-and green-speckled veldt. It was midafternoon and the light had a soft and yielding quality that made the scrub appear hand-painted on the canvas of the earth.

  “Now,” Louis said, “she will never be saved.”

  Emmanuel signaled to Shabalala to stand guard while he checked the cave.

  “Davida.” He called out her name and stepped into the interior of Louis’s bizarre mountain home. She sat near the cave entrance with her knees drawn up tightly underneath her. Emmanuel crouched next to her but didn’t touch her despite the fact that her body shook with a bone-rattling intensity. She’d had enough of white men trying to help her for a lifetime.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe now,” he said. Her skin was scratched with fine red lines from the wash-down Louis had given her with rocks and pure spring water. “Did he hurt you anyplace that I can’t see, Davida?”

  “Not like you think. Not that way.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “No, not now. Did you find my granny?”

  “Zweigman is with her. He says she’s injured, but she’s going to be all right. You know he’ll take good care of her.”

  “Good. Good.” She started to cry and Emmanuel retrieved the gray blanket from the made-up bedroll. He held it out for her to see.

  “Can I put this on you? You need to get dry and warm before we make a move.”

  “Outside. I’ll put it on outside. I don’t want to stay in here.”

  They left the cave and she huddled near the entrance, her instincts telling her to stick close to shelter. Emmanuel wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and noticed that she didn’t look across to where Louis was under guard.

  “It smells of him,” she said. “Like flowers on a grave.”

  “You’ll need to keep it on until you’re warm, then we’ll head back to Jacob’s Rest.”

  “I’ll go when you go,” she said, and rested her chin on her knees to watch long wisps of white cloud stretch across the sky. Emmanuel walked over to Shabalala and stood by his side. The Zulu constable looked weary, as if this end to things was more terrible than he had imagined.

  “What now?” Louis asked over the sound of Hansie’s sniveling. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “I’ve got no choice,” Emmanuel said. “You are charged with assault and kidnapping. Both are criminal offenses and you will have to stand trial.”

  “My mother…” There was a glimmer of fear in Louis’s eyes. “She’ll know all the ways the devil has led me astray.”

  “Most likely, yes.” Emmanuel checked the position of the sun. It was time to get moving if they wanted to make it back to Jacob’s Rest before nightfall. The police station was still out of bounds. They’d have to use Zweigman’s store as a holding cell for Louis at least until Davida Ellis was safely returned home. After that he’d have to make a dash for Mooihoek with the captain’s youngest son in custody. The Pretorius boys would skin him alive and boil his bones for soup if they caught him in the company of their sweet little brother.

  “You’re going to put him in prison?” Hansie was shocked.

  “That’s generally where people accused of assault and kidnapping end up, Hepple. That is the law.”

  “But it’s not right putting a white man in jail over one of them. It’s not decent.”

  “What’s decent or not is for a judge to decide. Collect the evidence, complete the docket, and present the case in court. That’s my job. And yours, too.” Emmanuel checked Davida to see if she’d stopped shivering. The long march back to the car was going to be difficult with Hansie, Louis, and a traumatized woman in tow.

  “I’ll get her,” he said to Shabalala. “You get Mathandunina.”

  They split off to their separate duties but didn’t get far. The distinct sound of a safety catch releasing caught them midstep. Emmanuel turned to see Hansie standing, tearstained and snot-faced, with his Webley revolver aimed right at his midsection. A bullet in the gut administered by a dull-minded Afrikaner boy was a lousy way to die.

  “Constable Hepple.” He used the title to remind the teenager that he was an officer of the law. “Put the gun down, please.”

  “No. I won’t let you take Louis to jail.”

  “What should we do with your friend, Constable Hepple?”

  “Let him go.”

  “Okay,” Emmanuel said, and left Hansie to fill the sudden power void.

  “Go,” the boy policeman urged his friend. “Go. Run.”

  The bare-chested prophet was crouched down, staring out across country, as if mesmerized by the colors of the veldt spread out below him.

  “Louis.” Hansie’s voice was loud and raw in the arena of rock and cloud. “What are you doing? Go.”

  The teenaged boy stood up and walked to the very edge of the rock platform, where he spread his arms out wide to feel the wind blowing in from the bush lands. He turned back to face the cave, his hair bright as a halo.

  “This is a holy place. Can you feel it, Detective? The power of God so close.”

  “I can,” Emmanuel said.

  “You’re right, Detective. I should have brought my father here and tried to save his soul. If I’d done that he’d be alive today.”

  “It wasn’t your job to save him.” Emmanuel could feel the pull of gravity dragging on Louis’s heels, threatening to suck him over the edge and into the void. “A man is responsible for the health of his own soul. You did nothing wrong.”

  Louis smiled. “The sin is that I didn’t try. I left him adrift in a sea of iniquity.”

  “It’s hard for sons and fathers to talk. You said yourself that it was difficult to bring up the topic of what your father was doing.”

  “I didn’t want him to stop. You know there were evenings when, right after Pa had finished, I’d lie out on the grass and look up at the stars. What happiness I felt inside, knowing that he and I were alike. I was my father’s son, not Mathandunina.”

  Hansie lowered his revolver so it was now aimed somewhere between Emmanuel’s pelvis and his kneecaps. There was still no room to make a sudden move toward Louis, who remained perilously close to the cliff. Constable Hepple was too dull of mind to see that the threat to his boyhood friend came entirely from within.

  “Remember, Shabalala?” Louis switched to Zulu. “When I was a child the people would say, ‘Look at this one. Whom does he belong to? Can he really belong to that man there?’”

  “Your father knew well that you were his son,” Shabalala said. “He had you close in his heart.” />
  “That’s why it pains me that I did nothing to save him.”

  “You were not at the river.” Shabalala threw out a lifeline in the hope that it reached the boy’s hands. “The man who shot your father is the one who is at fault in this matter.”

  “The wages of sin is death. I knew that and yet I did nothing because what Pa did gave me pleasure also. My mother will hear of this but she will not understand. She will never forgive.”

  “Your mother loves you also.”

  “She will be in disgrace because of me. Her family will cast her out if I go to jail.”

  “You are loved by her.” Shabalala walked slowly toward the boy. “She will take you back into her arms. It is so.”

  The wind rising up from the veldt was cold on Emmanuel’s face. Even Shabalala, with his breathtaking physical speed, would not be able to reach the melancholy boy in time to stop him from testing his angel’s wings.

  “You’ll tell her I’m sorry, hey, Shabalala? You’ll say to her that I know we will meet one day on the beautiful shore.”

  “Nkosana…” Shabalala sprinted toward the boy he’d seen stumble and fall as a child. His hands were outstretched with the mute promise: “Hold on to me and I will keep you safe from harm.”

  “Stay well,” Louis said, and stepped backward off the cliff and into the Lord’s embrace. There was the dry snap of branches, then the breath of the wind as it stirred the silence.

  19

  EMMANUEL STOOD AT the edge of the sheer drop. There was no sign of Louis Pretorius. He wasn’t in a crevice with minor injuries or balancing precariously on a tree limb awaiting rescue. The boy had fallen all the way to the veldt floor.

  “I must get him,” Shabalala said, and headed for the path that led down the mountain. He was breathing hard, his giant chest rising and falling under the starched material of his uniform. “I must find him and return him to his home.”

  “You are not at fault.” Emmanuel felt the black man’s pain. It was deep in his flesh like a thorn. “You did all that could be done for Mathandunina in his last moments.”

  Shabalala nodded but kept his own counsel. It might take years for the thorn to work its way to the surface and fall away.

  “We will meet you by the boulder.” Emmanuel let the black constable get on with the job of recovering the dead. Nothing he could say would take away the pain that Shabalala felt for failing to save the son of his friend. “We will wait there until you are ready.”

  The Zulu constable started on his journey without looking back at the cave where he had played for long hours as a boy. He would not return to this place again without a powerful medicine woman, a sangoma, by his side. Ghosts and spirits were so thick in the air, a person could not draw breath without choking. Mathandunina’s body and spirit must be picked up and together taken back to his home in order to avoid more bloodshed and misfortune.

  Shabalala disappeared into the bush and Emmanuel pulled the bottle of white pills from his pocket. A place to stir the heart or crush it, he thought as he swallowed the painkillers and looked out over the African plains. The light here was completely different from the cool white sunshine that lit the sky during the European winter, but with Louis’s death he felt the same: old and tired.

  “Dear Jesus.” Hansie was on his knees, his hands clasped together in prayer. His words came out between broken sobs of grief. “Help him. Give him strength to overcome the fall. Raise him up, Lord.”

  “He’s dead, Hansie.”

  “Ja…” The boy made a mournful sound and rocked back onto his heels. “I should have helped take him off the mountain when you said.”

  Emmanuel didn’t have the strength to reprimand Hansie. He waited until the boy’s sobs lessened.

  “You weren’t to know,” he said.

  Hansie shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry, Sarge. I still don’t understand what happened.”

  “In time. Maybe.”

  Emmanuel walked to where Davida sat with the blanket draped over her shoulders. She’d stopped shaking and gazed at the breathtaking vista.

  “We have to go.” Where to exactly, Emmanuel didn’t know. Returning Davida to Jacob’s Rest was out of the question. As soon as the news of Louis’s death spread, she would become kindling for the fire that would engulf the small town. She would be safer with her mother out here on King’s farm.

  Davida stood up and let the blanket drop to the dirt. She walked to the ledge and stared into the void.

  “I hope the lions eat him,” she said.

  The lights of Elliot King’s homestead clustered on the horizon and glowed bright against the night sky. Emmanuel breathed deeply. He felt sick. In the back of the van, Shabalala cradled Louis Pretorius’s body: an empty cocoon of flesh and bone now broken beyond repair. The Zulu constable was convinced that Louis’s spirit was conjuring a violent revenge against them. The only way to avoid trouble, Shabalala said, was to take the boy’s body back to his mother, but Emmanuel couldn’t let that happen.

  “Park close to the stairs,” he said once they’d crossed the cattle grid at the entrance to the drive. They had to deliver Davida to her mother, then drive Louis to the nearest morgue. A police inquiry into the death was certain and a public inquest couldn’t be ruled out. The spotlight would illuminate all the secrets of Jacob’s Rest.

  Hansie pulled in behind the red Jaguar in the driveway and cut the engine.

  Elliot King and his picture-perfect nephew, Winston, stood at the top stair to the porch. The world was going to hell while they sipped sundowners and admired their own little piece of paradise.

  A black ranger in a Bayete Lodge uniform appeared from nowhere and stood guard at the front of the police van with a nightstick in his hands. Like all chiefs, the rich Englishman had his own private army.

  King dismissed the ranger with a wave of his gin and tonic, and Emmanuel reached for the door handle. Davida grabbed hold of his arm. She trembled.

  “I don’t want to go out there,” she said.

  “Hepple,” he instructed the constable, “go into the house and fetch the housekeeper, Mrs. Ellis. Tell her to come straightaway.”

  Hansie slid out of the driver’s-side door and took the stairs two at a time. He crossed paths with the King men on their way down to the van.

  “Your mother’s coming,” Emmanuel told Davida, and she pressed closer to his side. “I have to talk to King.”

  “Don’t let them near me,” she said.

  “I won’t,” Emmanuel promised, and swung the door open and stepped out. King and Winston peered through the front window at Davida’s huddled shape.

  “Has she been hurt?” King demanded.

  “Where’s my Davida?” Mrs. Ellis stumbled down the stairs toward the triangle of white men standing between her and her daughter.

  Emmanuel waved King and Winston aside so the housekeeper could coax Davida out of the vehicle and into the house.

  “Take her inside. I’ll take her statement in a little while. Stay with her until I get there.”

  “Statement?” The housekeeper was dazed and afraid. “Why does my baby need to give a statement?”

  “Take her inside,” Emmanuel repeated, “and get her a blanket and a cup of tea. Keep her warm.”

  “Davida? Baby girl?” Mrs. Ellis leaned into the van and put her arms around the balled-up shape hiding there. “It’s Mummy. Come on, darling…”

  Davida reached up and the two women clung tight to each other. Emmanuel stepped farther away and tried to block out the sobbing.

  “Come on, baby…” Mrs. Ellis said, and led Davida toward the stairs.

  Emmanuel watched the women disappear into the house. Soon he would talk to Davida about the man at the river.

  “Did you do that?” Winston said. “Did you put those bruises and scratches on her, Detective Sergeant?”

  “No.”

  “That was Louis,” Hansie cut in. “He’s the one who did it.”

  “Louis Pretorius?
” Winston asked.

  “Ja. He took her up to the mountain and washed her with stones under the water. He was trying to save her. That’s what he said.”

  “He raped her?” King asked.

  “I don’t believe so.” Emmanuel was sure that something else, possibly just as unpleasant and intrusive, had happened under the waterfall.

  Winston seemed stunned and angry.

  “I’ll know more once I’ve spoken to her.” Emmanuel kept King and Winston back from the van. He didn’t like the look in Winston’s eye.

  “Well,” Winston said. “Where is Louis? Is he in custody?”

  “He’s in the van with Shabalala,” Hansie said. “Shabalala wants to take him back home to his ma but we can’t. Not yet.”

  “What?” Winston moved fast toward the back of the van and grappled with the door handle. Emmanuel grabbed him, spun him around by the shoulders and pushed him hard toward the house. Winston turned to face him and stepped toward him again. Emmanuel stopped him cold with two hands on his chest.

  “Move away from the van.”

  “He has to pay for what he did,” Winston said.

  “He will,” Emmanuel said. “Now move away from the van.”

  Winston stared him down for a moment and Emmanuel recognized something in his look. Where had he seen that look before? Winston broke eye contact and strode in the direction of the house. King reached out a sympathetic hand but Winston pushed him away and climbed the stairs.

  Something is going on, Emmanuel thought. Why is Winston this angry about the assault of a housekeeper’s daughter?

  “You need to move away,” Emmanuel told King. “I don’t want to see you or Winston within ten feet of this police van. Understood?”

  King nodded. “What happens now?”

  “I’ll take Davida’s statement and then we’ll transport Louis to Mooihoek.”

  “You won’t take him home?”

  “No,” Emmanuel said. “Go inside and finish your drink. Constable Hepple will escort you.”

  Hansie followed the Englishmen up the stairs and took up position between the stoep and the vehicle. Emmanuel unlocked the back doors of the police van and motioned Shabalala out.