Let the Dead Lie Read online

  He came to within sight of the crime scene. Scraps of orange and white paper streamers lifted into the air and curled against lamp poles. Jolly had probably worked a ten-to-fifteen-minute radius from the freight line. Emmanuel would do the same, and look out for takeaway cafes with pies and boerewors rolls on the menu. Jolly’s notebook was in his pocket.

  A police car crawled from the harbour terminal and stopped so the officer could shine a flashlight between two storage sheds. The plan, to walk the Point openly, wasn’t so much a plan as an invitation to trouble. If the police in the cruiser spotted him twice they’d stop and ask where he was headed. Basic procedure.

  That he was an ex-detective pursuing a lead in his own personal homicide investigation would not get him out of trouble with the uniforms if they nabbed him. The thought of explaining to the police that investigating the murder was more than an intellectual challenge, that it was a desire to restore order and help the dead on their way, almost made him smile. Surely they’d understand? And all of this coupled with an arrogance that he himself acknowledged. Since this particular murder of this particular boy had found him, he was certain that he could put it right.

  Emmanuel walked quickly towards Browns Road. One circuit and he’d be gone. It was too hazardous otherwise. He turned left and glimpsed a familiar figure also moving fast. Dim light from the streetlamps bounced off the high sheen of Giriraj’s bald head. Interesting, Giriraj back at the Point so soon after the beating this morning.

  The strongman followed a rat run through the back lanes of the harbour. Emmanuel trailed behind in the shadows. This lead was too good to ignore. The Indian curved into a blunt lane and disappeared behind a shoulder-high wooden gate. A solitary streetlamp shone a pool of light onto the uneven ground.

  Emmanuel took up post outside the gate and waited. The night was heavy with the industrial scent of spilled fuel and engine oil blowing in from the harbour.

  ‘You got it? Let me see.’ A woman’s voice, sharp enough to shred paper, drifted over the fence. A match struck against the side of a box.

  ‘I want more,’ the woman demanded. ‘A big chunk more or I’ll tell the police you and your charm friends was the ones who cut the boy. You hear?’

  Giriraj growled. Emmanuel rested a hand against the gate, ready to push into the black nook if the trouble escalated.

  ‘Don’t growl at me, charra.’

  Emmanuel held back. The rough voice grated against his eardrums. He’d heard it before; it belonged to the prostitute in the purple dress who’d talked to the senior detective at the crime scene. The one who didn’t do it with charras. There was the sound of a hard, open-handed slap.

  ‘You like a Doberman my pa used to have,’ the woman said. ‘It was an ugly thing. Everyone was scared of him except me. He used to lick my hands and face. That’s what you are, charra. A puppy dog.’

  The mix of contempt and excitement in the prostitute’s voice told Emmanuel exactly how the altercation would end.

  ‘How dare you …’ The female voice pitched higher, the breath now small, hard gasps. ‘You should have your hands cut off for even touching me …’

  Where was there for a European street crawler to go in her fantasy? If she lay down with a white man she was a whore. The law put a premium on her skin. In Giriraj’s dark hands she was a precious white object defiled; a luminous pearl cast before swine.

  The groans got louder and Emmanuel walked away. His heart thundered and his breath burned in his chest. Eight months had passed with nothing but the memory of smooth brown limbs wrapped around his body and his name whispered in the night.

  Davida. Her touch was grafted to his skin in equal parts pleasure and fear. The shy brown mouse with eyes the colour of rain clouds. Last he’d seen of her she was flying across the veldt in a white nightdress; running to find shelter from evil men. Was she building a new life for herself in some distant corner of South Africa, safe from the violence of her past? Some nights, in the stilled hush of the darkness, he dared to imagine her in the doorway of a stone-and-thatch house, looking up at distant hills, thinking of him.

  On the count of twenty Emmanuel headed back. Some of the heat had dissipated, enough so he could walk straight. He arrived back at the gate for the finale.

  ‘Good boy …’ The woman was either giving a stellar performance or was actually having an orgasm. Emmanuel guessed the latter. The sound of their breathing died down and he could hear the rustle of clothes being rearranged.

  ‘You come next week with more.’ The prostitute was all business now that her buttons had been pushed. ‘Double. Or I’ll go to the police, you hear?’

  Emmanuel stood back and waited. The woman was the first to emerge, now dressed in a red satin dress with red pumps and holding a large red handbag. She caught sight of Emmanuel and made a dash for the main street. Her cork-wedged pumps attached to her feet by thin ‘vamp’ straps were not designed for running. He caught her easily and swung her around.

  False eyelashes the size of Japanese fans fluttered in her powdered face. ‘He pulled me in. The charm grabbed me and dragged me behind the gate.’

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ Emmanuel asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to see what’s in your bag.’

  She-clutched the handles. ‘That charra raped me. Call the police.’

  Giriraj stepped out into the alley. If the Indian ran, Emmanuel knew he’d catch him. Keeping him down was going to be the problem. He waited for the bald man to make a move. Giriraj stood like an impala caught in the headlights.

  ‘Arrest him. He took advantage of me.’

  Emmanuel said, ‘Open the bag.’

  The prostitute flipped the giant gold clip. Emmanuel moved his hand along the bottom and felt the usual female beauty tools - a disc of rouge, a brush, a lipstick tube - and then a doughy lump. He extracted a round shape held in a small muslin cloth.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Don’t know. The charra must have slipped it into my bag.’

  ‘Open it.’

  She shrugged a shoulder before she unfolded the cloth and let the edges drop. A dark matchbox-sized lump lay in the centre of the white material. Hashish.

  He looked to the woman for an explanation.

  ‘It’s chocolate,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Eat it.’

  ‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘I got a delicate stomach. That much chocolate will make me sick.’

  ‘I bet it will,’ said Emmanuel. ‘You get all your chocolate from this man?’

  She fiddled with the gold clasp of the handbag, trying to take a stand against revealing more damaging information. Emmanuel waited in silence.

  ‘Used to get it from another charra but now I got an arrangement with that one over there.’

  ‘What kind of arrangement?’

  ‘I don’t let him have more than fifteen minutes.’ She tossed her hair back, full of righteous indignation. She was a whore but a whore with standards.

  ‘Did you get some from him last night?’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘You paid for it?’

  ‘I told you. We have an arrangement.’

  ‘Ahh …’ Emmanuel understood.

  He motioned Giriraj over and got him to stand next to the streetwalker. The Indian man’s head was bowed, like a recalcitrant child. Emmanuel tapped him on the shoulder and forced him to make eye contact.

  ‘Does Parthiv know you’re stealing from him?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Where were you when Parthiv and Amal went to find a woman? You weren’t by the car.’

  Giriraj pointed to the prostitute.

  ‘The two Indian men you told the detective about,’ Emmanuel said to the woman. ‘When did they speak to you?’

  ‘Don’t know. I don’t wear a watch. Too risky.’

  ‘Did you talk to them before or after you got your delivery?’

  ‘A bit before.
This one came with the stuff right after I sent them packing.’

  In just under half an hour Giriraj had managed to steal a chunk of hash, service a prostitute and initiate a kidnapping. Impressive work.

  ‘The boy found in the alley,’ Emmanuel said to Giriraj. ‘Did you see him alive?’

  The Indian shook his head again.

  ‘I seen him,’ the woman said. ‘He was coming from the Night Owl.’

  ‘Where’s the Night Owl?’

  False eyelashes fluttered downward and threw shadows over rouged cheeks. She pursed her lips. ‘What have you got to exchange?’

  ‘Freedom,’ said Emmanuel. ‘That’s the opposite of jail where prostitutes with hashish end up.’

  She took a breath. ‘It’s two blocks back on Camperdown Street. Open late even when it’s supposed to be shut. The boy had a brown paper bag and a bottle. I seen him walk by fast.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Couple of minutes later a white man in a black suit also came by fast.’

  ‘Following Jolly?’

  ‘They was going in the same direction.’

  ‘You tell the police this?’

  She fiddled with the neckline of her satin dress and rearranged the folds. Her long fingernails had flakes of old fire-engine red varnish. ‘No. The more I tell them, the more they want to know and I’ve got troubles of my own.’

  ‘That was the last time you saw Jolly?’

  ‘I had to meet a Norwegian whaler, Sven or Lars, can’t remember which.’ She rubbed her skinny arms. ‘I worked the dock till morning. He was lying there all the time and I didn’t know.’

  ‘Tell me about the man that followed Jolly,’ Emmanuel said when the prostitute had recovered from the spectre of a dead boy just a few yards from her nightly beat.

  ‘I told you. White man in a black suit.’

  ‘Tall or short? Skinny or fat?’

  ‘Skinny and light on his feet. Quick like.’

  ‘Same height as me?’

  She squinted. ‘Little smaller maybe. Can’t really say.’

  That would make the suspect just under six feet. Slightly above average height but not enough to stand out in a crowd.

  ‘Anything else?’

  She shook her head, her attention on the slide. Emmanuel suspected she dreaded the men who ‘just wanted to talk’. They took up more time than a shuffle and a grunt between boxcars. Still, the odd pairing of night-time creatures transcended the ordinary. That a hashish-hungry prostitute and an Indian strongman had found each other was a thing to marvel at, especially in the National Party’s colour-coded South Africa.

  ‘You can go.’ Emmanuel waved the woman away, but stopped Giriraj when he tried to make a break for the street. ‘If Parthiv finds out you’re stealing from him,’ he said, ‘his mother will kill you.’

  Giriraj shuffled a foot in the dirt, impatient for the awkward moment to end. Emmanuel motioned the muscle man forward and examined the fresh scratches on his neck. They were identical to the ones he’d seen on his arm last night. Now he knew who had made them.

  The proprietor of the Night Owl was a big-bellied man with shortened forearms and a dark beard streaked with grey. His place was two rungs down from a cafe and a half step up from a missionary soup kitchen. A string of naked bulbs lit the chipboard tables and chairs scattered under the awning in front of the business. Two tired Greek flags curled at either side of a browning pot plant placed on the middle table.

  The big man took the orders and worked the grill; his dwarf-like forearms strained to reach the onions and fried eggs on the back hotplate. The name ‘Nestor’ was embroidered onto the pocket of his sweat-stained shirt. A small sign, hastily painted in jungle green and nailed under the orders window, read ‘Whites Only’.

  ‘That’s for the sailors,’ Nestor explained gruffly. ‘Otherwise they get into trouble and then we get into trouble.’

  Emmanuel pressed straight in. ‘The kid Jolly Marks, did he get his food from here last night?’

  Nestor weighed up Emmanuel with a look. Decided he was a policeman or near enough to one to be given a quick exit.

  ‘Ask around the back. In the non-white section. That’s where we take his orders.’ He slid rubbery eggs into a puddle of grease.

  Emmanuel went to the back and found a rough square of cracked cement that faced onto a small orders window. No awning, no tables or chairs. A single bulb dangled from a frayed wire suspended across the cement pad. Two black men in overalls sat on upturned fruit crates and played checkers on a hand-drawn piece of cardboard. Durban was a visibly English town and few natives were granted employment passes to live within the urban area.

  ‘Number twenty-seven,’ the short-order cook called out. ‘Bunny chow ‘n’ chips. Coca-Cola.’

  A crinkly-headed youth in repatched pants and a loose brown shirt picked up the meal and leaned against the wall to eat. Emmanuel approached the orders hatch. The man behind the window had features borrowed from every nationality to have dropped anchor in the Natal Bay: Asian eyes flecked green and brown, soft Zulu lips, a long thin nose dusted with freckles and woolly brown hair. Mixed race, no doubt about it.

  ‘Ja?’ The narrow eyes were hard.

  ‘Jolly Marks get his orders from here last night?’ Emmanuel said.

  ‘Who you? A policeman?’

  ‘No. Just curious.’

  ‘Well, you and your curiosity can fuck off.’

  The short-order cook called out two boerewors rolls with onion and tomato sauce. Emmanuel pressed Jolly’s notebook against the glass.

  ‘Recognise this?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Take a good look,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It belonged to Jolly Marks. He was here last night. What time?’

  ‘I told you,’ the man said. ‘I’ve never seen that book before.’

  He was defiant. Even with a detective’s ID slammed against the window, Emmanuel knew the man would not talk. Silence was the only weapon he had against authority.

  Emmanuel returned to the front of the Night Owl intent on questioning Nestor about the time of Jolly’s last order. A police car was parked at the kerb, engine idling while the uniforms ate sausage and onion rolls. Maybe another time. He peeled to the left and bumped into a wiry man setting up a wooden crate on the sidewalk. A stack of religious tracts illustrated with a lurid drawing of a scantily dressed woman engulfed in towers of flame fluttered to the pavement.

  ‘Do I know you, brother?’ the evangelist from the dock asked. ‘Have we met before on the Lord’s highway?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Emmanuel said and kept moving. The roll of car wheels sounded. He glanced over his shoulder to confirm what he already knew. The patrol car was driving towards him. A flashlight aimed out of the passenger window sprayed bright light into doorways and down side streets.

  The entrance to the Harpoon Bar, a watering hole for dockworkers and merchant seamen, was right on the corner. Emmanuel fought the urge to sprint for the doorway. Jolly’s notebook was still in his pocket. He’d have a hard time explaining that to the police.

  The bar entrance was just a few feet away. The front fender of the police car drew almost level with him now. Emmanuel dropped slowly to his knee and retied his shoelace. The beam of the torch moved across the pavement and flickered into a doorway two yards ahead. The patrol car was on a door-to-door street search for something or someone.

  Emmanuel heard the accelerator push the cruiser further down the street and away into the night. Relief sucked the moisture from his mouth. He needed a drink. Maybe three or four.

  The dim interior of the Harpoon Bar reeked of smoke and beer. Three dark-skinned merchant seamen murmured to each other at a corner table. The Separate Amenities Act, which designated places like this into either European or non-European facilities, was being ignored. Some places were beyond classification.

  Emmanuel sat down at the bar and his heart rate slowed. A spotlight search twice in one night meant the uniforms were on the lookout for someo
ne in particular. He wouldn’t want to be an Indian man out in this part of town tonight.

  The younger of the barmaids approached and leaned an elbow on the counter. She was dark-haired with pale skin and dark almond-shaped eyes. A scooped neckline revealed the top swell of her breasts. Emmanuel remembered her from the last time he had been to the Harpoon with another shipbreaker, an ex-corporal of the 3 Commando Brigade.

  ‘Thirsty?’ she said.

  Emmanuel cleared his throat. ‘Double whisky, thanks.’

  He slid a pound note onto the wooden surface. The scene with Giriraj and the prostitute had him stirred up. The scare with the police cruiser had set the adrenaline pumping and his body was awake. Memories of Davida’s mouth on his had reignited a desire to touch and to feel, to lose himself in the tangle of a lover. A tumbler of whisky appeared close to his hand.

  ‘Anything else?’

  He risked an upward glance and a moment of eye contact sent a jolt to every nerve ending. Heat burned his neck. With a penny from every man who wanted her, she could own the bar and a big slice of the waterfront.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He heard the lie in his voice and thought she did too.

  ‘If you say so.’

  Two slack-jawed sailors seated at the bar watched her collect used glasses and stack them onto a tray. The men looked as if they’d turned up at the dock to find their ship headed out to sea without them.

  Emmanuel noticed a black and white photograph of a whaler nailed to the wall above a row of gin bottles. It was a long way yet before he turned into a bar-side pervert. But the languid movements of the barmaid’s body and the dark fall of her hair were hard to ignore.

  He swallowed his drink. Whisky flooded through his arms and legs as if through the branches in the tree of life, and his mind focused. The decision to follow leads in Jolly’s murder was foolish, and this attempt to recreate his past life was more than that: it was dangerous. Walking near the crime scene with Jolly’s notebook in his pocket was bloody-minded stupidity and an invitation to dance the hangman’s jig.

  The words ‘please help’ were not a personal plea from the dead boy. He had to let the kid go.

  ‘Major,’ said the barmaid.