Present Darkness Page 8

  “You are the one?” the nurse asked with raised brows. Zweigman nodded. She moved off quickly to the waiting area, skirting a one-legged man in a wheelchair who wore a miner’s boot on his remaining foot.

  Emmanuel crouched by Zweigman’s side and looked over the third victim of the break-in at the Brewers’ house. He was tall and slender with holes cut into both his earlobes for the display of ornaments; empty cotton reels and circular clay plugs were popular choices. The fashion for male ear piercing was dying out in the cities but continued in the tribal enclaves in the bush. Mr Parkview might have travelled from the country, in which case a passbook and a travel permit were vital. A black man without the proper papers ran the risk of imprisonment if caught by the police.

  “The head wound is healing well, but we will not get answers to our questions this afternoon,” Zweigman said. “There are also the multiple wounds to his back to consider. It might be many days before he is ready to talk.”

  Shabalala crouched at the opposite side of the bed, shoulder muscles tense under his white cotton shirt. For the first time that Emmanuel could remember, the Zulu detective looked tired. A fifteen-hour train journey with bad news at the other end and no help from the police would exhaust anyone.

  “Gentlemen, all that we have lost is time.” Zweigman recognised the signs of frustration in the two detectives. “This man will live. And when he is well, the truth will be told.”

  A white man in his twenties moved through the ward, accepting an orange from a visiting grandmother and refusing a pinch of snuff from a bald man wrapped in a blanket. The duty nurse touched his sleeve and pointed to Zweigman.

  “I’m Dr Botha,” the young physician said when he reached Mr Parkview’s cot. Dr Botha had dark, slicked back hair and a mouth the colour of a cut pomegranate. “And you are the jungle man who sewed up a blunt force trauma wound and four pitchfork punctures on a blanket in the backyard of house in Parkview.”

  “Guilty.” A faint smile touched the German’s mouth. The title “jungle man” pleased him. “I had wondered what weapon made those wounds. Now the mystery is solved.”

  “Look.” Botha gestured to the nurse and together they rolled the patient onto his side. Four blood spots dotted the bandages wrapped around his torso. “One of my first emergency cases was a gardener who tripped over some roots and fell onto his own fork. This injury is exactly the same, only deeper.”

  Botha settled the patient onto his side and the nurse hitched the thin sheet around his naked shoulders. Emmanuel moved to stand next to Shabalala. Maybe the injured man was the gardener, inherited along with the house and the car by Cassie’s mother.

  “A pitchfork isn’t the sort of weapon you bring to a crime scene and then carry home again. We’ll search the Brewers’ yard and find the fork that made those injuries.”

  “Take me to where you found this man and I will find the weapon,” the Zulu detective said without a trace of vanity.

  “We have to get there before the sun goes down,” Emmanuel said. Johannesburg sprawled across miles of dry high veldt; the black hospital and the European suburbs were kept well apart by laws that split the city into white and non-white areas. Zweigman, however, continued a conversation with Dr Botha.

  “A surgeon. You don’t say?” Botha beamed. “What are the chances of a qualified surgeon happening onto a police investigation and operating on the spot?”

  “Very slim,” the German replied.

  Experience alone gave Zweigman the rank of senior physician. A graduate of the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, specialist surgeon to that city’s wealthy and then general practitioner to the inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp, Zweigman’s knowledge of the world and of medicine was unique.

  Emmanuel edged closer hoping to extricate the German doctor from the hospital quickly.

  “You’re busy I’m sure and I hate to take advantage but I … it’s just that …” Botha fumbled for words and then spoke in a rush before courage deserted him. “I have a patient in the female ward, a Mrs Chaza, with a stomach growth that I’d like you to examine. And there are a few other unusual conditions on both wards that might be of interest. If you have the time, that is, and if you don’t mind. We could use the extra help.”

  “A moment please to confer with my colleagues,” Zweigman said.

  “Of course.” Botha moved back into the aisle with the pretty nurse.

  “Stay if you like,” Emmanuel said to the German doctor. “We’ll search the Brewers’ backyard and swing back later.”

  “If you are sure …” The lure of diagnosing a stomach growth and of accessing multiple medical conditions was tempting. So, too, the urgent need to attend to the overflow of patients lying on the floor and the dozens more packed into the waiting room.

  “You’ll do more good here than crawling through the weeds with us. Two hours and we’ll be back.”

  “You must stay, Doctor, the sick cannot cure themselves,” Shabalala added.

  “In that case,” Zweigman said. “Go well, gentlemen and I will see you soon.”

  “Sala khale. Stay well, doctor,” Shabalala and Emmanuel made the traditional Zulu farewell, which drew a “huh?” of surprise from the nurse who had yet to figure out the connections between these three very different men. She watched the detectives move through the ward and disappear into the corridor with a frown.

  Emmanuel stepped outside. He envied Zweigman’s healing skills. Detectives made promises of restitution for rape, theft, and murder, while knowing in their hearts that, even with the best results, what had been broken could never be fixed.

  11.

  The Brewer’s backyard was as Emmanuel remembered it, wild with fruit trees, climbing roses and thick grass woven through with yellow nasturtiums. Birds sang from the branches. Crickets chirped. Lizards scuttled off the dirt path and into the shade. He ducked under a branch and crouched.

  “I found him here, barefoot and with no passbook.” Blood-soaked leaves, now turned a dark brown, spread out like a picnic blanket. “It was dark so the question is, where did Mr Parkview come from?”

  “I will see.” Shabalala bent lower and examined the leaf litter and trampled grass. He tracked to the rear of the yard following a trail of gouged soil. They’d come into the garden via the back gate to avoid attracting the attention of the neighbours. A black man in a suit might prompt a call to the police … especially after what had happened to the Brewers in their own bedroom.

  “Look, Sergeant.” Sprays of dried brown liquid and scuffed shoe prints were visible in the dirt path.

  “Men with shoes,” Emmanuel said.

  “Just so.” The Zulu detective nodded encouragement, the way he’d likely have done when one of his own sons identified their first spoor trail. “Three men were here. Two with shoes, one barefoot.”

  “Mr Parkview and two unknowns.” Three unidentified males a dozen yards from the crime scene.

  “The men with shoes walked in the direction of the house. The barefoot man came onto the path behind them. This is the place they met and the man you found in the bushes was stabbed.”

  “Mr Parkview followed behind the two men?”

  “Yes and no, Sergeant. He came from in there.” Shabalala crossed the path and disappeared into a stand of mango trees heavy with fruit. A crumbling stone wall marked the boundary of a derelict orchard. The Zulu detective stepped over the barrier and peered into the shadows. Emmanuel followed and caught a glimpse of metal in the underbrush.

  “Back here, Constable.” He crouched and parted the branches of a shrub with white star-shaped flowers. A garden fork lay half-buried in leaves. Rust blooms and dried blood coloured the prongs. “This is the weapon that was used on the man in the hospital. The spacing of the four prongs match the stab wounds in his back.”

  Shabalala studied the pitchfork and said, “There is a shed in the trees. Maybe that is where the fork came from.”

  “Hold on a moment.” Emmanuel looked out at the overgro
wn fruit trees, their foliage pierced by the waning light. “Were all three men in this area?”

  “No. Only Mr Parkview walking barefoot through the row of mangoes to the path with the blood.”

  “All right.” He drew a crude sketch of the Brewers’ yard in his notebook, marking the location of the pitchfork, the path to the house and the leaf pile where the black man collapsed. “Now show me the shed.”

  Emmanuel and Shabalala trampled across an abandoned vegetable garden to a stone and iron building overgrown with climbing vines. The door was open. They peered inside. The air was musty, the walls hung with rusting garden tools. Two small windows gave dim light. An old wardrobe, a chest of drawers, broken chairs and a dozen cracked plant pots colonised the rear of the shed. A camp bed with sheets and a turned down blanket was pushed to the left of the door in a cleared space.

  “He slept in here.” Emmanuel indicated a pair of brown shoes and a kerosene lantern placed neatly by the side of the metal bedframe. The floor had been freshly swept. “A space was made for the bed but there’s nothing to say he actually lived here.”

  “You are right.” Shabalala crouched on the threshold, mapping the last movements of the mystery man. “He slept in the bed and then went out through the orchard to the path where he met the other men.”

  “And was stabbed. Probably with a pitchfork from this room.”

  “That is what I believe.”

  “Why was he here to begin with?” Emmanuel moved into the room, stripped the blanket from the bed and searched under the sheets and the pillow for information that might identify the man at Baragwanath hospital. He found a pair of darned socks stuffed into the brown shoes. The shoes themselves were worn and cracked. “The Brewers must have known he was sleeping in the shed. He had their address in his shirt pocket.”

  Shabalala said, “Maybe the prints on the path will lead us to the other men, Sergeant.”

  “It’s worth a try.” Emmanuel left the shack, frustrated. Interviewing Martha Brewer officially was impossible now that he was “on holiday”. There must be a quick way to identify Mr Parkview and find out how he met the sharp end of a pitchfork on Friday night. Shabalala wove through the trees quickly in order to beat the setting sun. Shadows fell across the narrow path and grew longer. The Zulu detective kept a steady pace for a minute and then stopped within sight of the back fence. He peered into a stand of banana plants.

  “Let’s check it,” Emmanuel said of a second stone and iron outbuilding hidden in the Brewers’ urban forest. This one was smaller than the last, with a hole in the roof and no windows: possibly a disused storage shed. Shabalala pushed the door open and automatically stepped aside to allow a European first entry.

  Shapes swam in the gloom. Emmanuel found a box of matches on the floor and struck a match. Light flickered over a mattress rolled on the ground and a white candle stub pressed onto a chipped saucer. Shabalala picked up the candleholder and touched the wick to the flame.

  A half-bottle of Jamaican rum, lipstick, a spray of pink roses in an old jam jar and an opened packet of cigarettes were set on top of an upturned fruit crate placed next to the mattress.

  “What is this place for?” Shabalala asked even though the gritty tone in his voice said he already knew.

  “A girl comes here in secret. She puts on make-up and has a drink and a smoke. You roll. You slip away and come back again until the day you’re caught out by her father.”

  The teenage Emmanuel might have found this shack and furnished it with all the essentials for sex. Shortly after giving up on being a decent Christian youth, he’d learned very fast how to be bad.

  “What’s really changed?” his Sergeant Major whispered. “You still sneak through the bush to sleep with a girl you’re not supposed to touch. Except that now, if Mason catches you, that little family you’ve made? He’ll tear it apart. So you’d better decide quick smart what you’re prepared to do to keep your girls safe.”

  “Everything.”

  “Good boy.”

  Emmanuel leaned against the wall, able to imagine for the first time the terror of having a child in danger. The thought of what he’d do if anyone, including the police, raised a hand to his daughter, Rebekah, chilled him.

  “You will go to war to protect your little girl,” the Sergeant Major said with approval. “And I’ll be with you, soldier.”

  “Aaron and the school principal’s daughter?” The stony look on Shabalala’s face indicated he disapproved of the idea.

  “Did you let your parents pick your girlfriends, Constable?” Emmanuel opened the lipstick and drew a line across his palm. The red had a bright metallic shine; the same colour that had streaked the back of Cassie’s hand on the night of the break-in. “You can ask Aaron yourself tomorrow when we visit juvenile hall.”

  The Zulu detective lowered the candle and the semi-darkness hid the mattress, the alcohol and the cigarettes. Police uncovered secrets. The Detective Sergeant, in particular, had a gift for digging up big ones. A loud click in the garden caught them both by surprise. Shabalala blew the candle out and they simultaneously crouched in the dark. Emmanuel pulled the door closed, breathing deep and slow. The sound of human voices and the snap of twigs drew near.

  “I don’t see it,” a man’s voice said.

  “Look again.” Another male answered. He was farther away, his voice faint. “Keep going in.”

  Footsteps crunched through the underbrush, moving in the direction of the storage room. A burnished sky stretched over the hole in the roof, glowing orange. The detectives remained tense but calm: the soldier and the hunter possessed experience enough to wait out a threat while preparing for action.

  “There’s nothing here but bush and more bush.” The voice was close, almost breathing through the stone walls. “Are you sure this is the place?”

  An indistinct answer came back, the words swallowed by the wind in the treetops. Footsteps receded. Voices trailed off into the distance. Emmanuel stood up slowly, ears strained for the sound of movement outside the storeroom.

  “They have gone nearer to the house,” Shabalala said in a low voice. “Two men, maybe more. Looking for something.”

  “Give them a minute. If Mason or his men catch us digging around here, things will get unpleasant.”

  “Then let us wait, Sergeant.”

  Tongues of dark grey coloured the orange patch of sky visible though the hole in the roof. Birds roosted in the trees, calling loudly to each other about the sun going down. Minutes ticked by. The voices faded.

  “Time to go,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala. “Keep low and head back to the path.”

  “Yebo.” The Zulu detective cracked the door and slipped into the garden. The cry of birds was deafening. They heard the chug of distant car engines. The dirt path lay empty, the twilight fading fast. Shabalala stopped by the area of blood spray and shoe prints and frowned. The soil had been brushed over, the evidence of the attack destroyed by the scrape of a heel.

  Emmanuel split off the path and pushed into the fruit orchard, heart thumping. The shrub with the white star-shaped flowers shimmered in the gathering darkness. He kneeled and bent back the branches.

  “The pitchfork is gone,” he said.

  12.

  Buses, bicycles and pedestrians streamed along the broad, flat expanse of Main Road where it entered Sophiatown. The air hummed with the sounds of thousands of people talking, singing, and arguing. Tonight, the citizens of the township with money would wash off the working week in dance halls and shebeens, the illegal drinking holes squeezed into shacks and living rooms. Those without money would try to get some, by various means.

  Emmanuel slowed, shifted down a gear and swung left into Bertha Street. Shabalala, Zweigman and Emmanuel rode in silence. Lieutenant Mason had out-played them. He parked in front of a wide brick house with bars on the windows. A slender youth lounged on the front stairs with his fedora pulled low onto his forehead and tilted at a sharp right angle despite the darkness.
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br />   “This is not my brother’s home, Sergeant,” Shabalala said from the back seat. Zweigman rode up front. “His house is nearer to the corner.”

  “I know.” Emmanuel switched off the engine and flipped the door handle. “We need a drink and this is the safest place to park a car in Sophiatown on a Saturday night.”

  Zweigman and Shabalala followed him out of the Ford and onto the pavement. The man on the stairs moved to the front gate with a loping stride. He wore a baggy pin-striped suit and a grin that promised trouble.

  “White man,” he spoke in a high soprano voice. “You and your friends are too trustworthy. This is Kofifi. The streets are full of thieves who will take your ride and that fine suit also.”

  “It’s not you that I trust. It’s your boss. There’s no stealing or fighting allowed on his block. This is still Fix Mapela’s house, correct?”

  The guard’s sly fox expression faltered. He was new to the job, with more attitude than experience. “Who wants to know?”

  “Tell him the white kaffir said hello and make sure nothing happens to my car.” Emmanuel moved off with unhurried steps, knowing that Zweigman and Shabalala would follow. They caught up and slipped to either side of him. Lights burned at intermittent intervals along the road, brightening the houses of the lucky people with enough money for electricity.

  “Who is Fix Mapela?” The German doctor wiped his glasses with the tail of his shirt. He’d seen more patients in three hours at Baragwanath than would normally attend a full day at his medical clinic in the Valley of a Thousand Hills; an experience both humbling and exhausting.

  “Fix is a friend.” Emmanuel took a sharp left into a passage between buildings. “I grew up with him.”

  “What does this friend do that he needs a guard and bars on all his windows?”

  “He fixes things. Like his name says.”

  Zweigman made a disparaging sound. “Does he also break things, I wonder?”

  “Frequently.” They crossed over pot-holed black top and Emmanuel took a quick left into a narrow passage where the buildings crowded together more tightly. Rough laughter and the rattle of dice came from one direction. From another came the sound of a hymn being sung over dinner.