Present Darkness Read online

  She turned the pin over and studied the sharp point. Maybe there was a way out. It would take hours. She straightened the hairpin and climbed the bed frame. She pushed the point under the window ledge. The dirt loosened. She scraped sand into the cell and dusted it to the floor. Again and again she repeated the action. She worked on her freedom one grain at a time.

  16.

  A dirt lane ran directly behind the Brewer’s house and cut through to the next street. Several homes backed onto the strip of weed-choked land with a fruiting mulberry tree growing wild at the centre. Emmanuel and Shabalala entered the lane and counted garden fences along the way. Ashes from the weekly garbage burn off were sprinkled along the green corridor.

  “Four more gates and we will come to the principal’s house,” the Zulu detective said and gave the rough ground a cursory glance. “Many people use this place to come and go.”

  “Mostly servants, I think,” Emmanuel said. “Whoever kept Cassie company on Friday night didn’t get into the Brewers’ garden via the main house. He must have come this way.”

  Birds flew from the branches of the mulberry tree at the sound of a wooden gate scraping against dirt. Shabalala put a finger to his mouth for quiet and pointed down the lane. The gate to the Brewers’ overgrown yard opened and a black man backed into the lane. He wore the traditional patched blue overalls and dirt-splattered gumboots of a “garden boy”. The man shut the gate and checked the alley in both directions. He’d spot them in a few seconds. Emmanuel stepped into the man’s sight line to make sure he’d be seen.

  “Police,” he said. “We’d like a word.”

  The man wheeled around and took off, churning weeds and purple mulberries underfoot. A guard dog growled from behind the fence of a tidy brick house, its ears pinned back. Emmanuel ran through the shade of the mulberry tree and caught the man close to the street corner. He brought him down easily. The smell of marijuana and beer clung to the mat of the man’s greying hair and his clothes.

  “Take some advice.” Emmanuel kept the man’s bony shoulders pinned to the ground. “If you’re afraid of the police, don’t run. Don’t run because we will catch you. And when we catch you we will beat you for making us run.”

  The black man flinched, expecting a blow. Emmanuel jerked him into a sitting position and said, “Tell me why you took off.”

  “I was scared, ma baas.”

  “Have you got something to hide?” The question put the pressure back onto the suspect and ignored the long list of reasons that a black man might have for fearing the police. “Empty your pockets and let me see.”

  The man pulled out a joint and held it up with a grimace. It was tattered and gaunt, much like it’s owner. “I ran because of this. The white people do not allow such things near their homes.”

  “The police don’t allow such things at all,” Emmanuel said with the haze of last night’s smoke and drink buzzing in his head. Davida’s observation had been wholly accurate; being a white policeman in a country beset by rules made for a dangerous sense of freedom. “Where do you come from?”

  “I am the yard boy for baas Allen. His house is there on the corner.”

  “Name?” He took the joint and held it between thumb and forefinger. Possession of a banned substance and resisting arrest would put the gardener in jail for a solid stretch. This afternoon, however, he and Shabalala were hunting bigger prey.

  “I am called Sipho, ma baas.” The gardener’s gaze remained pinned to the joint and the policeman holding it as if he might, at any moment, light up and draw deep. “Sipho Zille.”

  “You were in Principal Brewer’s garden,” Emmanuel said.

  “That is so.” Sipho brushed crushed weeds and twigs from his overalls, stalling for time. The guard dog, a brown and black mutt, bristled, bared its fangs and barked through the chain link fence.

  “Sergeant,” Shabalala called from the Brewers’ garden gate. “Come. Bring the man.”

  “Up,” Emmanuel ordered Sipho. “Let’s take a walk.”

  The gardener sat flat to the ground with his fingers dug into the dirt. Whether trapped by fear or physically paralysed, it hardly mattered. The dog’s owner would be out to check on the disturbance soon. If the police came to investigate and took down names, Mason would find out they were running their own dark investigation.

  Emmanuel crouched by Sipho and said, “Show me your passbook.”

  “I don’t have it. It is in my hut. Baas Allen’s house is just there, near the corner. I can go and fetch it.”

  “You could live in that mulberry tree for all I care. You must carry your passbook on your person at all times. That’s the law. So, here are your choices. Walk back to Principal Brewer’s garden or drive with me to the nearest police station where you will be charged with one count of resisting arrest, one count of possessing a banned substance and one count of failing to produce a passbook. Do you think baas Allen will hold your job for you while you’re in jail?”

  Sipho got to his feet and moved to the Brewers’ lot. Emmanuel was glad to be free of the barking dog and the birds calling danger from the trees.

  “This way,” the Zulu detective said and led the way into the wild yard. Grass, trees, climbing vines and flowers wrestled for space. Emmanuel found the chaos beautiful, nature’s version of a slum township where the residents mixed in whatever way they wished. Off the path and deep in the dense foliage, Shabalala stopped at the edge of a plot of land on which chest-high marijuana plants grew in thick stands.

  “Yours?” Emmanuel asked Sipho of the flourishing herb garden worked on by an army of bees and butterflies.

  “No, ma baas. Never.”

  “How did you find this place, Detective Constable?” He addressed the question to Shabalala who in turn glanced at the gardener with pity.

  “I followed the track of the man’s boots from the lane to here, Sergeant.”

  “This man here?” Emmanuel placed a hand on Sipho’s shoulder.

  “Yebo. The marks of his gumboots are all around.” Shabalala motioned to the prints in the garden dirt where Sipho had stopped to pull weeds. “From this place he must have seen many interesting things.”

  The Zulu detective pointed to the thicket that shielded the small plantation from exposure. The walls of Cassie’s shed were visible through the patchwork of trees. A distance of around fifty feet separated the marijuana plot and the shed, yet it was possible to see small portions of the pathway clearly. Emmanuel turned Sipho to face the stone hut and kept his hand on the gardener’s shoulder.

  “You lied to us about owning the dagga plants.” He used the slang term for marijuana so there’d be no misunderstanding. “We’ll give you that one for free. We’ll make you pay for the next lie out of your mouth. Understand?”

  “I hear you.” Sipho’s voice thickened with fear.

  Emmanuel dug his fingers deeper. “See that stone hut in the trees?”

  “Yebo, it is clear to me,” Sipho said.

  “Who comes and goes there?”

  The gardener swallowed hard. “The daughter of the house. She is the one who uses that place … and maybe there is someone else.”

  “Is this other person perhaps a European?” Naming Cassie’s visitor right away would be rude. Servants learned to talk in wide circles to avoid dismissal or punishment for being too familiar or forward. Questions and answers needed to unfold in a cautious, roundabout way.

  “Yes,” Sipho said. “I have seen a white baas in this garden.”

  “Does this man live near by?”

  “At number thirty-seven; the yellow house with big windows. His wife and child stay there also.”

  Andrew “call me Andy” Franklin of the ironed safari suit and neatly trimmed moustache. The helpful neighbour who’d asked after Cassie’s welfare on the morning she’d left for Clearwater Farm in Rust de Winter. Andy was more than curious. He was involved.

  “Mr Franklin lives in a yellow house,” Emmanuel said.

  “That is the
white man who comes and goes from that hut.” Sipho relaxed. His tight shoulders visibly softened with relief. The name hadn’t come from him. It was better, safer to stay in the background of white people’s business. “How many times the man you named came here to visit, I cannot say.”

  “Franklin lives two doors down.” Emmanuel brought Shabalala into the conversation. “He gave me the names of neighbours who had problems with Principal Brewer’s native education program but failed to mention he’d been playing with Cassie in the back garden.”

  “Mr Franklin must have forgotten.” The Zulu detective’s tone was dry as rhino hide. “A married man has much on his mind.”

  “We’ll have to help Andy remember.” He turned Sipho around to face the lush marijuana crop. The neat rows and freshly weeded soil demonstrated a deep love of the herb. “Tell me what you know about Mr Franklin.”

  “I don’t work for baas Franklin. I am the yard boy for baas Allen.”

  Emmanuel’s fingers relaxed. He patted Sipho’s shoulder. “No problem. We’ll call Mr Allen from the police lock-up.”

  “Wait,” Sipho said. Stuck between white people’s private business and police business made it hard for him to breathe and puzzle a way out of trouble. The tall Zulu and the lean white man could, between them, break every bone and snap every tendon in his body before throwing what remained into a jail cell. “I am not baas Franklin’s boy but I have heard that there is fighting in the house. There is no money. The wife is worried for the child. Baas Franklin comes to visit the white teacher’s daughter when the sun goes down. I have seen him enter the hut three times. On two Fridays and then on a Saturday.”

  “This last Friday night?” Emmanuel asked.

  “I don’t know. That is for sure, for real. I stayed in my hut and did not come to tend my garden till now, now.”

  Shabalala stood on tiptoe, dwarfing the gardener, and peered into the bush and trees. Then he crouched, taking in the low view towards the main house. “If the daughter was at the hut she could have seen who came through the back door to her parents’ home. The moon was full that night.”

  “We get Andy to confess and then we’ll use his statement to break Cassie’s story.” Easier said than done. Andy had a family and a reputation to protect. Cassie was, in all likelihood, a release valve from the pressures of work, wife and baby, not his great love worth sacrificing everything for. “We’ll have to push him hard to get him to admit anything.”

  “So it must be,” Shabalala said. His son’s life was like sand running through his fingers; to keep the grains safe he would have to make a fist and hold on as tight as he could.

  “Baas Franklin is not at the yellow house. Sunday he goes to the home of his wife’s parents and they come back in the night. Seraphina, the house girl, has told me this.”

  Emmanuel couldn’t stay till dark. Fatty Mapela’s dance-cum-potential brothel in the train yard started at six-thirty. He and Davida were due to leave the compound at dusk, that time of day when the failing light turned the two of them the same colour.

  “You must find out about the car, Sergeant.” The Zulu detective read minds and tracks in the sand with equal skill. “We will come back tomorrow.”

  “What time does Mr Franklin go to work on Monday?” Emmanuel asked Sipho, whose extra-curricular gardening gave him opportunity to keep a close watch on the neighbour’s movements. Cultivating a marijuana crop in spitting distance of the homes of white children and their decent, middle-class parents took a rat’s cunning.

  “Eight in the morning. He works in the city in a tall, tall building. Seraphina has said so.”

  “Six o’clock pick up tomorrow morning,” Emmanuel told Shabalala. Sophiatown was a good hour’s drive away from the house in Houghton.

  “I will be ready, Sergeant.”

  The fate of Sipho, gifted cannabis farmer and reluctant police informant, remained unresolved. Laying formal charges was out of the question. Police gossipped like fish wives; a compulsive need to exchange news and compare levels of badness became a key part of the job. If they booked Sipho, Mason would instantly learn of the dagga plantation found growing on his crime scene.

  “The gardener knows how to keep a secret,” Shabalala said of Sipho, who stared at his blooming plants in mournful silence thinking of all he’d lost: job, shelter, money, and the delicious weight of Seraphina’s breasts cupped in his hands. The prison wouldn’t have a garden or a white madam who slipped him an extra pound of sugar on birthdays and at Christmas.

  “If you tell anyone we were here, including other police, we will come for you,” Emmanuel said. “We won’t come right away. We’ll come later, when you think you’re safe and we’ve forgotten about you.”

  “I will say nothing, ma baas. Nothing. I swear it on the ancestors.”

  “Go.” Emmanuel gave the gardener a shove in the direction of the back gate. “And stay away from the dagga till after the holidays unless you enjoy being interviewed by the police.”

  “I am gone, ma baas. No coming back.” Sipho started to walk away, resigned to the fact that the policemen would steal every plant and strip each sticky resin bud to fill their own pipes. No matter. He’d start again in the New Year with seeds smuggled back from where the whites had moved his people so they could make citrus farms on tribal land.

  Emmanuel’s watch showed one-thirty and his breakfast aspirin had worn off. The pain in his head stirred, pulsing bright and hot behind his eyelids. Certain as summer rain, the pulse would bloom into a fist trying to break a hole through his skull. He needed a jug of water, a plate of hot, salty food and a double dose of painkillers—the good kind, laced with morphine; and soon.

  “Is your sister-in-law back from visiting the hospital?” he asked Shabalala.

  “Not yet.” Shabalala tugged a weed free from the tilled ground, his fingertips dark with soil. “My brother grows worse and I have not sent word about Aaron’s troubles.”

  “Sorry to hear about your brother,” Emmanuel said. The stiff pride with which his Zulu partner shouldered the weight of his family’s problems was painful to witness. Shabalala carried his burdens as a traditional man should, alone and in silence. “I have to sit a while. Let’s drive to King’s place and have lunch.”

  “Mr King …”

  “Won’t mind. We’ll eat out in the garden.”

  The garden, away from the big house, Emmanuel meant. The big house was where white men who supported the idea of racial segregation in public lived free of the rules in private.

  “I will take some food.” Shabalala stood and dusted dirt from his fingers.

  “Did you eat breakfast?”

  “I was not hungry, Sergeant.”

  “If you faint, I’m not dragging you to the car,” Emmanuel said and picked grass seeds from his trousers. He straightened the lapels of his jacket. Both he and Shabalala wore hand-tailored suits made by Lilliana Zweigman, the expensive material cut to fit them like their own skins. She’d expect to see her creations looking sharp.

  “If that is so, I will walk to the car.”

  “After you.” Emmanuel paused at the gate to the Brewers’ property, the hunting grounds of Andy Franklin, left to forage for thrills in a wild, suburban garden. The exhilarating chaos of the untamed vines, the hush of the wind in the branches and Cassie’s body must have been irresistible.

  Emmanuel understood the addictive power of taking risks. He had felt the empty spaces in civilian life after experiencing the roar of Spitfire fighter planes cracking the sky and the boom of Howitzers spitting hot shells onto the earth; your blood sang with adrenaline and every colour became brighter, sweeter and more fierce in the aftermath of all that noise and chaos. Days, months and years later you paid the price for living so far from the ordinary. Andrew Franklin was about to be presented with a bill for the moments he’d stolen from his drab suburban life.

  17.

  Emmanuel handed the night guard twenty pence and expected no change. The guard, a fat black man w
ith a pockmarked forehead said, “Go down, down to the marshalling yard. Park. Then you must get out and walk straight, straight to shed number twenty five.”

  Emmanuel followed instructions; found six cars, a police wagon and a pick-up truck already parked in the gravel square adjacent to a line of dirty locomotives. A freshly painted maintenance repair shop bordered the eastern edge of the lot.

  “Come.” He held Davida’s hand and navigated the darkening yards, keeping the grid of tracks to the right and walking straight in the direction of the machine sheds and smaller workshops. Davida’s fingers squeezed tight around his, holding onto the one familiar thing in the bleak industrial landscape. Odours of oil and diesel fuel and the crunch of dirt underfoot leeched romance from the soft twilight. “Next one,” he said. A long iron building riddled with rust stood up ahead, a large “25” painted on its side. Davida’s steps quickened at the sound of music coming from inside. She was ready to dance and enjoy her night of freedom. A balding European man in greasy overalls sat on an upended crate and peeled an orange with a penknife. He flicked the skin onto the ground and looked up. Emmanuel pegged him right away: poorly educated, Afrikaner, rewarded with a job for life on the railroads for being born white.

  “Ja?” The man stabbed the blade into the flesh of the orange and juice ran over his oil-stained fingers. He addressed Emmanuel but studied Davida from head to toe before his stare returned to the soft, cherry red lipstick on her mouth.

  “I’m here to see Fatty Mapela,” Emmanuel said in Afrikaans.

  “Fatty is inside but this is my shed. I guard the door.” The man answered in Afrikaans. “How badly do you want to get inside, mister?”

  “Here.” Emmanuel scooped coins from his jacket pocket and held out the payment.

  “Nie.” The doorman chewed a slice of orange with an open mouth. “A kiss from your hoer will do the trick.”