A Beautiful Place to Die Read online

  The tension in the Zulu constable’s face and body was obvious. “Are you all right?” Emmanuel asked.

  “This one—” Shabalala pressed a hand against the doors. “He will cause trouble wherever he goes. He will try to take one of us with him to the other side. I feel it is so.”

  “If we bring him to his house, that will cause trouble also. He won’t be easy to handle wherever we go.”

  “I know this.” The Zulu policeman made eye contact with Emmanuel. “You must be careful, nkosana. Mathandunina knows it was you who found out about the mountain and it was you who took the little wife from him. You have touched her and he does not like this.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “You put his blanket around her, that is what I mean, nkosana.”

  “So—” Emmanuel said after the surge of embarrassment at his denial ebbed. How could a corpse know about the conversation in Davida’s room or the quickening of his senses at the sight of her so close to the wrought-iron bed?

  “What must we do, Shabalala? I can’t see any way to avoid trouble over Louis.”

  “We must tell his mother where he is. Maybe if we do this, things will not go so badly for us.”

  “When we get to the place where his body will be examined,” Emmanuel said, “I’ll call Mrs. Pretorius and let her know where her son is.”

  “That is good.” Shabalala still looked worried. “I will tell him and if he hears it correctly, he will not want more blood to be spilled.”

  “I’d like that,” Emmanuel said. Less blood to be spilled. He’d spent three years hoping for that very thing and yet he’d come home and stepped right back into the company of the dead.

  Emmanuel read the handwritten statement a second time and looked across the table at Davida. She was flushed and uncomfortable, as if the heat from the kitchen stove had suddenly gotten to her. Mrs. Ellis hovered close to her daughter’s shoulder like a guardian angel afraid of failing a major assignment.

  “The man at the river. You sure you didn’t see who it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know the man who shot Captain Pretorius, Davida?”

  “No.” She was adamant. “I didn’t see who it was. I don’t know who it was.”

  “He sounded like the molester, is that right? Like someone putting on a voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louis admitted to being the molester,” Emmanuel said. “But he denied killing his father.”

  “You believe that mad Dutchman but you don’t believe me?” Her gray eyes sparked with anger. “White men always tell the truth, that’s what you policemen believe. It makes catching criminals easy. Just look for the dark skin, don’t bother with evidence.”

  Her accent caught his attention. It was not quite to the manor born, but desperate to get there by any road possible.

  “Where did you go to school, Davida?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me where you went to school.”

  “Stonebrook Academy.” She paused. “Why?”

  “Your accent,” he said, “it’s…elegant.”

  “So?”

  “What are you doing in Jacob’s Rest, working for the old Jew and his wife in their little rag factory?”

  “My granny and my mother live here,” she said. “I came to be with them.”

  “Surely you were meant for more? An accent like that doesn’t come cheap.”

  “I like cutting patterns.”

  “Did you fail your matric, Davida?”

  She flashed an angry stare at him, then thought better of defending herself against the insult to her intelligence. The dangers hidden in the answers she gave were suddenly clear to her. She shut her mouth tight.

  “Tell him, Davida.” Mrs. Ellis took up the fight on her daughter’s behalf. “She passed with flying colors and got accepted at the University of the Western Cape. Top of her class in four subjects.”

  “What happened?”

  “She came to visit Granny and me for the Christmas holidays and decided to stay on for a year. She’ll be going to university next year, hey, Davida?”

  Emmanuel sat forward, pulled toward Davida by a thread of understanding. All those days spent in the company of the old Jew and his wife, reading, dreaming of the world out there. He’d done the same thing at boarding school—gazed out over the dusty fields to the world beyond.

  “Look at me, Davida,” he said, and waited until she did. “You weren’t going anywhere, were you?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “That’s why the captain built the hut. A little place out of town for the two of you. A home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No…” Mrs. Ellis muttered. “This doesn’t make sense.”

  Emmanuel maintained eye contact and the thread with Davida strengthened. Her breath became shorter.

  “Pretorius made the arrangement for you to be his little wife…that’s right, isn’t it, Davida?”

  “What?!” Mrs. Ellis broke from the perfect-servant mold and hit her palm on the tabletop. “You can’t come into my house and talk to my daughter like this. My baby’s got nothing to do with Captain Pretorius. She delivered some papers to him for Mr. King a couple of times but that was it.”

  Davida looked older and wiser than her mother by a hundred years when she leaned back against the tiles depicting pretty rural scenes and wrapped her arms around her waist.

  “Ma…”

  Silence filled the room for a moment.

  “No. No.” Mrs. Ellis stepped close to her daughter. “That life isn’t for you, my baby. You’re going to go to university so that you don’t have to be that kind of woman. You’re going to stand on your own two feet and have a profession.”

  “What country do you think we live in, Ma?” The question was full of sadness. “A coloured woman doesn’t get to choose the life she wants. Not even after she’s been to university. This, here, is how things are.”

  Emmanuel wanted to look away from Mrs. Ellis’s face, the death of her dream for her daughter written clear upon it. He watched the tragedy unfold across the kitchen table.

  The housekeeper cupped her daughter’s cheek with her palm and brushed away a tear that lay there.

  “It’s okay, my baby,” she said, spinning a new vision for the future. “We’ll forget this business and go on like before. You’re young enough to start again without anyone knowing…That’s right, hey?”

  “Detective Sergeant!” Hansie called from outside. “Sergeant! Hurry.”

  Footsteps and the sound of glass smashing came from the front of the house. Emmanuel rushed out of the stifling kitchen and through the hushed luxury of the primitive-themed sitting room to the stoep. Elliot King stumbled against the drinks cabinet, his nose dribbling blood onto the front of his linen suit. Winston stood over him with his fist clenched.

  “Fuck.” The Englishman found an embroidered serviette and held it to his nostrils to stem the blood. “Christ, that stings.”

  Emmanuel looked past King and saw the rear lights of the police van fading into the night. He jumped off the steps onto the gravel drive and started to run.

  “Shabalala’s gone…” Hansie called out.

  Emmanuel sprinted across the cattle grid and onto the dark ribbon of dirt road that split the King property in two. He ran for five minutes. The sound of the engine faded and then disappeared ahead of him. He stopped and gasped for breath. He rested his hands on his knees and tried to figure out what had happened.

  After a minute he straightened up and glanced at the stars puncturing the night sky. The one person he trusted to stay by him had driven off with Louis’s body because of a native superstition. Black policemen weren’t even allowed to drive official vehicles. Emmanuel turned and walked slowly back toward King’s house. Is this how it ends? he wondered. Abandoned and empty-handed on a deserted country road?

  The silent landscape absorbed the crunch of his footsteps and the hiss of his ragged breath. He’d
had worse days struggling across winter-hardened fields, but today was the peacetime equivalent. The moment Shabalala delivered Louis’s body to his mother, the Pretorius family would explode. King’s farm and Davida were going to be the targets of extreme vengeance.

  He broke into a steady run, then heard a faint sound behind him. He checked over his shoulder. Red taillights blinked in the darkness as the police van reversed down the dirt road toward him. He met the van halfway and pulled the driver’s door open once the vehicle had stopped.

  “What happened?”

  “The young man.” Shabalala’s top lip was swollen from a recent hit. “He fought with Nkosi King and then he came to the van and he fought with me. He said he wanted Louis but I would not let him in, so he said he was going to get a gun and ‘bang’ shoot me and shoot the van also. He ran to the house and Nkosi King said to drive because the young man, he was serious.”

  “Did Winston give you that fat lip?”

  “Yebo,” the constable said. “I let him hit me many times, but I do not wish to be hit with a bullet many times.”

  “You did well.” Emmanuel looked back at the lights of the homestead. Something had come loose in Winston. “Stay here. I’ll send Hansie for you when things have settled.”

  “I will return when you say so.”

  “Thank you,” Emmanuel said. Shabalala had gone against his instincts and given up the opportunity to take Louis back to his mother. Winston’s violent threats were reason enough not to return to the homestead, but the Zulu constable held the course.

  Emmanuel raced back to the house and found Hansie waiting for him at the cattle grid. The teenager’s uniform was streaked with dust and embedded with pieces of loose gravel.

  “That Winston pushed me down the stairs,” Hansie said. “Then he went after Shabalala.”

  Emmanuel tried to make sense of Winston’s actions. What fool goes after the police? For what reason? He leapt up the stairs, thinking of Shabalala’s swollen lip and Hansie’s disheveled appearance.

  “Stay out here and make sure no one comes in or out of the house, Hepple.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The stoep was empty and Emmanuel went inside. The sound of voices drew him across the sitting room to the kitchen, where he paused at the open door. Mrs. Ellis leaned over King and wiped his bloody nose with a wet face towel while Winston stood in a corner looking at the floor. Davida sat at the table and twisted a spoon in her hands.

  “Careful,” King groaned. “You have to be more careful with me, Lolly.”

  “Shhh…” The housekeeper whispered close to King’s ear, “It’s not so bad, you silly man.”

  Emmanuel entered the room.

  “You’re a family,” he said, stunned by the revelation. “Mother, father, sister and brother.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” King gave each member of his illegitimate family a warning glance. “You have no proof of your allegations, and if you repeat that slander again, my lawyers will deal with you, Detective Sergeant.”

  “Shabalala was right.” Emmanuel ignored King and spoke directly to Davida. The undervalued sale of the Pretorius farm suddenly made sense. “The captain did pay a bride-price, but it wasn’t in cattle or money, it was in land. The land we’re standing on.”

  Davida glanced at her father, waiting for a cue.

  “King was the one who cleaned the hut up after the captain died.” Emmanuel went on. “He sent you to get any evidence he’d missed when he wiped the place down. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Davida.” King used her name like a blunt instrument. “The detective sergeant is wearing a suit but he’s a police officer and his job is to enforce the law. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes, Mr. King.”

  “You don’t have to protect him anymore, Davida. Tell me what happened.”

  She silenced herself behind her shy-brown-mouse mask and Emmanuel wondered how he would break through.

  “Bride-price?” Mrs. Ellis placed the wet face towel down on the table. “What does that mean?”

  “The detective is playing games, Lolly,” King said.

  Winston snorted in disbelief and the housekeeper took a half step back. She glared at the injured Englishman.

  “You knew what was going on,” she said.

  “No.” King sounded calm but his thumb drummed against his thigh. “Pretorius was someone I did business with, that’s all.”

  “You say you don’t like the Afrikaner, yet you talked with that one for hours about how you both loved Africa. Why did you spend so much time with him?”

  “Business,” King said. “It pays to have interests in common with whoever you’re dealing with. If something happened between Davida and that Dutchman, it was her choice, nothing to do with me.”

  The slap came from nowhere. An arc of crimson blood sprayed from King’s wounded nose and landed on Mrs. Ellis’s starched uniform and the hand-painted tiles. Emmanuel caught the housekeeper’s hand before she went in for a second hit.

  “Liar!” Mrs. Ellis was in a cold rage. “You said this one belonged to me but you broke your promise. You stole her and you sold her.”

  “Lolly—” Red bubbles flew from King’s nostrils as he tried to stem the bleeding and talk at the same time. “Don’t. Not in front of the police, for God’s sake.”

  Years of hard work had made her strong and Emmanuel struggled to keep her away from King. If he let her go, she’d scratch King’s eyes out.

  “How could you do this to her? She was going to study to become a teacher, or even a doctor—”

  “Christ above, Lolly. How long do you think it would take a dark-skinned girl like her to earn even close to what we made on the land deal? Fifteen, twenty years if she was lucky? Pretorius was willing to give me far more than she was worth—”

  Emmanuel loosened his grip and let Mrs. Ellis fly. Elliot King didn’t know when to shut up.

  “Lolly—” King tried to fend off the blows but the housekeeper slapped him down and tore into the suntanned skin of his neck and chin with her nails. His chair tipped over and King went with it, landing on the floor with a thud.

  Mrs. Ellis followed him down and began to rip his hair. Emmanuel gave her another moment and when she showed no signs of slowing, he pulled her away; he already had one dead body to deal with.

  “Okay—” He lifted the vengeful woman up and held her arms loosely by her sides until her muscles relaxed and she fell against him, fighting for breath. “It’s okay now,” he said.

  Winston stepped toward his mother and she surged violently toward him. Emmanuel held her back.

  “You knew,” she cried. “The two of you knew about it.”

  “No,” Winston said. “I was supervising the lodge on Saint Lucia for the last six months. I didn’t know anything about the land deal until it was done. I would never have let that Dutchman touch her.”

  “You’re lying—”

  “I will not take the blame for setting up that deal,” Winston said.

  “Stop.” Davida pushed her chair back and sprang to her feet. “Stop it!”

  King struggled to stand, holding on to the back of a chair for support. His hair resembled an abandoned bird’s nest. Mrs. Ellis began to weep quietly and Emmanuel released her into Davida’s arms.

  The name Saint Lucia rang a bell for Emmanuel. He dug around in his memory and came up with the sign at the jetty in Lorenzo Marques and the beautiful wooden sailboat moored in the berth behind it.

  “What’s Saint Lucia?” he asked.

  “An island.” King was happy to shift the focus away from the land deal. “We opened a lodge there at the beginning of this year.”

  “What do you do on the island, Winston?”

  “I run it,” Winston said.

  Emmanuel took that information onboard. The captain’s killer had slipped into Mozambique. What if the killer had simply gone home?

  “What did you think of Captain Pretorius?” he asked Winston.<
br />
  “Die Afrikaner Polisie Kaptein”—Winston mimicked the rough-edged Afrikaans tongue perfectly—“meant nothing to me.”

  Davida gasped and Emmanuel turned to her. The blood had drained from her face.

  “If I closed my eyes,” Emmanuel said, “I’d think you were a proper Afrikaner. An Afrikaner used to giving orders.”

  Winston went very still. “Plenty of people can put on that accent.”

  “Did Davida ever tell you about the man who molested the coloured women last year?”

  Winston shrugged. “We all heard about it.”

  “He put on an accent,” Emmanuel said, “to cover up his own voice.”

  “And?”

  “Did Davida ever tell you that the man had an accent?”

  “I don’t remember,” Winston said.

  “Did you tell him, Davida?”

  “No…” Her fingers twisted together. “I don’t remember.”

  Emmanuel held his gaze steady on her. “Was it Winston’s voice you heard at the river?”

  “It wasn’t him.” She spoke in a rush. “It was someone else. I swear it.”

  “Where were you last Wednesday night, Winston?”

  Mrs. Ellis stopped crying and the room went quiet. Davida’s face was pinched tight with shock. A horrified realization had just begun to register on King’s bloodied face.

  “Were you on the South African side of Watchman’s Ford last Wednesday night, Winston?” Emmanuel asked, and a phone began to ring in another part of the house.

  “He was in Lorenzo Marques collecting supplies for the island.” King wedged himself into the conversation. “I can have a dozen signed witness statements attesting to that fact on your desk by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Emmanuel said. The telephone continued its insistent ring. He walked to the door and called out. “Constable Hepple! Come in, please.”

  Hansie poked his head around the doorframe.

  “Could you please answer the phone and tell the caller that Mr. King and Winston are busy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, where were you last Wednesday night, Winston?” He asked the question again as the ringing fell silent. “Take your time and try to remember.”