A Beautiful Place to Die Page 9

  Emmanuel pressed through a gathering of white farmers and drew parallel with the dapper peacock of a man just as he reached his car. The door to the Land Rover was held open by an older native in a green game ranger’s outfit with the words “Bayete Lodge” embroidered over the breast pocket.

  “Mr. King.” Emmanuel stepped into the space in front of the door and held his hand out in greeting. “I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. Could I have a moment of your time?”

  “Certainly, Detective Sergeant.” The smile was cool, the handshake brief and firm. “How can I help?”

  In the churchyard, the Security Branch goons were deep in conversation with Paul Pretorius. They’d be down at the police station this afternoon, pissing in all the corners to make sure everyone knew the investigation was theirs.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Captain Pretorius. Would it suit you to talk at your house? Town is crowded, and I think it would be better if we had some privacy.”

  “Am I a suspect, Detective Sergeant?”

  “It’s just an informal chat,” Emmanuel said, aware of the thinning crowd and the risk of exposing his leads to the National Party musclemen. “A favor to the investigation.”

  “In that case I’ll be happy to see you at my farm in an hour or so.” King slid into the Land Rover. “As you’re coming out my way, do go to the old Jew’s place and pick up my housekeeper and her daughter, there’s a good fellow. It will save Matthew here a trip back into town. They’ll be ready to come out to the farm in about an hour.”

  The door slammed shut before Emmanuel had a chance to reply. His reflection blurred in the dusty car window. Elliot King had given an order and he expected it to be obeyed.

  Emmanuel gave a mock salute and the car pulled away from the curb and headed out to the main road. He’d met every form of arrogant Englishman on the battlefield, but at least this one, in his tailored khaki suit and new Land Rover, didn’t have the power to order him over a hill littered with land mines. He’d play the lackey for as long as it took him to figure out why Elliot King’s name had been given to him as a clue in the dead of night.

  “When’s my backup getting here, sir?” Emmanuel asked. He’d reached Major van Niekerk at home: a redbrick Victorian mansion nestled on vast grounds in the posh northern suburbs of Johannesburg. “I can’t run this investigation on my own.”

  “No backup,” van Niekerk replied over the sound of a whistling kettle. “The commissioner has told me to step away. The Security Branch is in control now.”

  “Where does that leave me?”

  “Alone,” the major replied. “The Security Branch wants you replaced but I’ve convinced the commissioner to keep you on. That means you’ll be a very unpopular addition to the team.”

  “Why not replace me?” Emmanuel asked.

  “You’re not a Security Branch stooge,” van Niekerk informed him. “You’ll make sure the right person hangs for the crime.”

  Despite what he said, van Niekerk wasn’t big on the pure justice element of policing. The ambitious major was making sure that a detective loyal to him was on the ground to represent his best interests. Van Niekerk wasn’t going to hand over the headline-making murder of a white police captain to the Security Branch without a fight. Fine, Emmanuel thought, except for the fact that van Niekerk was in Jo’burg sipping tea while he was about to go toe-to-toe with the hard men of law enforcement.

  “What are they like?” van Niekerk asked with mild curiosity.

  “They look like they can beat a confession out of a can of paint.”

  “Good. That means you can turn the whole thing around on them.”

  “How do I do that?” Emmanuel asked drily.

  “Find the killer,” van Niekerk said. “Find him before they do.”

  Outside the captain’s office, the Security Branch officers rifled through the contents of the police station’s file cabinet. Their faces made two sides of an ugly coin. They turned to him and Emmanuel felt their hostility radiate outward. “Unpopular addition to the team”? Major van Niekerk had a talent for understatement.

  “We can relax, Dickie,” the older, leaner officer instructed his hefty colleague, his smile a bare stretch of his lips over yellowing teeth. “God is with us. Finally.”

  “You must be the smart one,” Emmanuel said, and threw his hat onto Sarel Uys’s vacant desk. He waited for the second salvo. The Security Branch boys were going to give him a kicking just to let him know who was in charge.

  “God?” Dickie’s brain was straining to keep up.

  “Emmanuel,” the senior officer said. “That’s what his name means. God is with us. According to Major van Niekerk, Detective Sergeant Cooper here can walk on water. He’s a real miracle worker.”

  Emmanuel let the comment ride. If the Security Branch wanted a fight, they’d have to land a few more solid punches.

  “Where are you off to, Cooper?”

  “I report to Major van Niekerk,” Emmanuel said. “No one else.”

  “That was yesterday. From today you report to me, Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Security Branch. Your major was informed of that fact by my colonel.” He paused to let the full weight of the information sink in. “Now, where are you off to, Cooper?”

  “A farm,” Emmanuel said.

  “You sure you want to do that?” Lapping asked. “Farms are dirty places. You might get cow shit on your shoes.”

  Dickie, the muscle of the outfit, rested his beer-fed rump against the edge of Hansie’s desk. “That’s what we heard, hey, Lieutenant? That Manny here likes to keep himself neat and tidy. Always with the ironed shirts and polished shoes.”

  Piet lit a cigarette and threw the packet over to his sergeant. “That’s probably why his friend Major van Niekerk promoted him so quickly. Neat bachelors like to stick together.”

  “Truly?” Dickie asked conversationally.

  “Ja.” Piet blew a cloud of smoke out from between bulbous lips. “They meet in secret and starch each other’s underpants till they’re good and stiff.”

  Emmanuel ignored the urge to shove Piet, headfirst, into the rubbish bin. Security Branch intelligence was becoming legendary, but pockmarked Piet and his partner had only a few days’ worth of it to draw on. They knew he’d been promoted quickly: too quickly for some senior detectives’ liking. His personal hygiene habits and the ugly liaison rumor came from deep inside the district Detective Branch. Somebody had talked.

  “Where does a man learn such unnatural things?” Dickie’s hippo-sized head tilted to one side as they continued their routine.

  “The British army,” Piet replied. “That’s probably why Manny here did so well during the war. Foot soldier to major in a few years, plus all those shiny medals to pin onto his pretty uniform.”

  Emmanuel sifted through the ranks of his detractors and came up with a name. Head Constable Oliver Sparks: a bitter twig of a man due to be pensioned off the force after twenty years of indifferent service. The homosexual liaison rumor was his doing, payback for van Niekerk’s refusal to offer up the high-profile cases.

  “How is Head Constable Sparks?” Emmanuel asked. “Still planting evidence and drinking on the job?”

  The porridge flesh on Piet’s face tensed noticeably and he took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled. Emmanuel knew he’d scored a hit with Sparks’s name. The lieutenant’s pinprick eyes darkened.

  “Whose farm are you going to?” Lapping continued the previous conversation and Emmanuel felt a rising uneasiness. Lieutenant Piet Lapping and his sidekick were not the “hard man/hard man” combination he’d picked them for at the funeral. Beneath the lumpy facial mask and the concrete-reinforced body, Piet had a brain that worked at above average capacity.

  “Elliot King’s farm,” Emmanuel said. “I’m following up a rumor that King cheated Captain Pretorius on a financial transaction. There might have been bad blood between the two.”

  “You’re chasing the personal angle?” Lapping made
it sound like a fool’s errand.

  “Is there another?” Emmanuel asked.

  “None that I can discuss with you.” Lapping waved a hand toward the front door. “Go off to your farm visit and report to me immediately when you get back to town. I am in charge of all aspects of this case. Understand?”

  Emmanuel got the feeling that the Security Branch was way ahead of him. They were searching for specific information. “The personal angle,” as the lieutenant put it, was at the bottom of their list of motives.

  “Back again so soon, Detective?” Zweigman was wrapping a parcel in a length of brown paper. “Are you perhaps interested in our special on apricot jam? Top quality. You won’t find better. Not even in Jo’burg.”

  “The funeral’s put you in a good mood,” Emmanuel said. “Planning a party for later?”

  “Just a quiet drink with my wife,” came the deadpan reply.

  “I though you never hit the bottle, Doctor.”

  “Only on special occasions.” Zweigman tied the parcel up neatly and laid it with a pile of others on the counter. “Do you plan to join the funeral reception at the Standard Hotel, Detective? I hear Henrick Pretorius is serving up half-price drinks until sunset.”

  Emmanuel imagined the Pretorius brothers and their Boer brethren singing Afrikaner folk songs late into the night. Someone might even pull out a squeezebox for good measure. His blood ran cold.

  “Not my kind of gathering,” he said. “I’m supposed to give King’s housekeeper and her daughter a lift to his farm. He said they’d be here.”

  Zweigman stilled. “Mr. King has a driver.”

  “I know that, but as I’m going out to King’s farm, he thought I’d be a ‘good fellow’ and do him the favor of driving his staff back. ‘Saves Matthew making two trips.’”

  “I see.” Zweigman busied himself picking pieces of string off the countertop.

  “Well, are they here?”

  “Of course.” The German shopkeeper collected himself. “I will go out to the back and inform them that you will be providing them with transport.”

  “Thank you,” Emmanuel said, and strolled over to the window that fronted the street. A throng of white men passed across the corner of van Riebeeck on their way to the half-price drinks at the Standard Hotel. Groups of blacks drifted onto the kaffir paths that headed out to the location. The town was emptying.

  He turned and found Zweigman at the counter with Davida, the shy brown mouse, and a graceful woman dressed in a black cotton dress teamed with a row of fake Indian shop pearls.

  “This is Mrs. Ellis and her daughter, Davida, whom you have already met.” Zweigman performed the introductions as though the task itself was distasteful to him.

  “Mrs. Ellis. Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper.”

  “Detective.” King’s housekeeper gave a deferential bow, the kind reserved for white men in power. She was green eyed and brown skinned, her lips full enough to hold the weight of a weary man’s head. Davida stayed in the background with her head bowed like a novice about to take orders. The tiger had given birth to a lamb.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ellis,” Emmanuel said, and fished out the car keys. “I’m afraid we have to get going.”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Ellis hurried to the counter and Zweigman shooed her away while he and the shy brown mouse divided the parcels between them.

  Emmanuel stepped outside. A skinny mixed-race woman with coarse yellow hair walked a chubby toddler past the burned-out shell of Anton’s garage. The wreckage reminded him of any one of a thousand French towns flattened in the march toward peace.

  A cloudbank passed overhead and a dark shadow crossed the street, followed by the blinding light of the sun as the clouds moved on toward the veldt. Emmanuel blinked hard in the changing light. Mrs. Ellis stood on the store veranda, and Davida and Zweigman stood face-to-face on the bottom. They were so close, Emmanuel could almost feel the breath move between them. White glare reflected off the car’s bonnet, then died away to a soft shimmer.

  “Headache bothering you again, Detective?”

  “No, it’s just the sun,” Emmanuel said. He checked Mrs. Ellis for a reaction. She gave no indication that her daughter’s honor might have been compromised in any way.

  Emmanuel opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. He didn’t put much store in Mrs. Pretorius’s lecherous Shylock story: her world was populated with crafty Jews, drunken coloureds and primitive blacks. It was the standard National Party bullshit that poor Afrikaners swore by and educated Englishmen loved to mock while their own servants clipped the lawn.

  The passenger doors closed and he switched on the engine. What he’d seen, so briefly, between Zweigman and the mute girl was not an offense under the Immorality Act. Had he imagined it?

  “Where to?” he asked Mrs. Ellis, who was perched at the edge of the seat, as if she was afraid her weight might offend the springs.

  “Take Piet Retief Street to Botha Drive, then turn left at the Standard Hotel and head out to the main road. Bayete Lodge is about thirty or so miles west.”

  “Is there any way out of town that doesn’t take us past the Standard?” Emmanuel asked.

  Every white man in the district would be there, the Pretorius brothers included. Driving by with two brown women in the backseat when he could be attending the formal reception was the quickest way to get doors slammed in his face.

  “There’s only one way in and out of town,” the older woman pointed out. “We have to go past the Standard.”

  Emmanuel turned onto Piet Retief Street and slowed down. He glanced in the rearview mirror, uncomfortable. “I need to ask you both a favor.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Ellis said as her hands played nervously with the fake pearls around her neck. White men asking favors spelled bad news for nonwhite women.

  “I’d like the two of you to lie down in the back before we get to the Standard. It would be better for the investigation if no one saw you.” He said it all at once, without stopping: he’d never ask a respectable white woman and her daughter to do the same. “You can get back up once we clear town.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Ellis twisted the pink tinted pearls tighter. “I suppose that would be okay. Hey, Davida?”

  Davida smiled at her mother and slowly laid her head down on the backseat, like a child playing a game she already knew the rules to. Mrs. Ellis copied the movement and lay next to her daughter.

  Up ahead, groups of men stood on the pavement in front of the Standard Hotel. It was early afternoon and the crowd hadn’t spilled out onto the street yet. Another hour or two and traffic would have to negotiate a slow crawl through the crush of mourners.

  Emmanuel checked faces on the drive past the hotel. His luck held good. No one from the Pretorius family camp was in the roadside throng. He took the left turn and gave the accelerator a tap. Soon he was out past the town boundary and heading west on the main road.

  He slowed almost to a stop and looked over his shoulder at the women hidden in the backseat. Davida lay with her cheek against the warm leather, her arm thrown across the top half of her face. She breathed slow and deep, her mouth held open slightly. For a moment he thought she was asleep.

  “We’re clear,” he said, and turned his attention back to the road. The veldt rolled out on either side of them in a tangle of wild fig trees and acacia bushes. Against the blur of the landscape he recalled the image of the girl fallen and fragile in the backseat of his car.

  6

  WHAT DO YOU think?” Elliot King pointed to the half-finished construction perched above a riverbank.

  Emmanuel knew there was only one correct answer to the question. “Very impressive,” he said.

  “This is going to be the finest game camp in the southern part of Africa. Five luxury lodges with views to the water hole, top-level trackers and rangers, private game drives on tap. The best food, the best wine, the biggest variety of animals. I have spent an absolute fucking fortune stocking this place, but then a
gain people will pay a fortune to stay here, so it’s only fair.”

  Emmanuel heard pride in the Englishman’s voice: he was filled with the joy that comes from being supreme ruler of your own piece of Africa.

  “This used to be the Pretorius farm,” Emmanuel said, thinking of the captain’s family, who also owned a giant slice of the Transvaal.

  “Yes.” King reached over and rang a small silver bell on the low table next to him. “Captain Pretorius sold it to me about a year ago when he realized Paul and Louis weren’t going to take up farming.”

  “I hear there was some trouble over the sale.”

  “Oh, that.” King smiled. “The problem was between Pretorius and his sons. They don’t have their father’s business acumen…he was an intelligent man.”

  “Mr. King?” It was Mrs. Ellis responding to the bell. She had changed out of her black mourning clothes and was now wearing the lodge uniform, a tailored green shift with the words “Bayete Lodge” embroidered over the pocket. She still managed to look elegant.

  “Tea,” King said. “And some cakes, please.”

  “Right away.” Mrs. Ellis dropped a half curtsy and disappeared into the cool interior of the house. Being in Elliot King’s company was like slipping into the pages of an old-fashioned English novel. Any moment now they’d hear the beating of drums and a frantic call to defend the house against a native uprising.

  “Intelligent?” Emmanuel repeated the word. They were talking about an Afrikaner police captain with a neck the size of a tree trunk.

  “I know,” King said, and smiled. “He looked the part of a dumb Boer, but under all that, he was a complex human being.”

  “How so?”

  “Come with me.” King stood up and entered the house, talking as he went. “Yes, this was the Pretorius family farm. The captain was the third generation to live out here. He only left when he got married and moved to town.”