Death Dealing (14 page)

Pillay could do
nothing. She noticed neighbours with their hands up to their faces, covering
their giggles as they enjoyed the sight of Ma Xaba having a go, again, at the
cops and the entire criminal justice system.

The older woman
continued, telling Pillay that it was only mothers and grandmothers like
herself and Mrs Mkhize who could ensure peace in the street. As she went on,
Pillay thought that somewhere, sometime, Jeremy Ryder had told her of a similar
experience he had had with a cantankerous old woman, but one who, like this
one, was in some perverse way actually on their side, so it was worth it, Ryder
had said, to let them get it all out.

After another
minute Mrs Xaba had got it all out, or a good portion of it, anyway. Pillay then
spoke, and she took the line that she was in agreement with Mrs Xaba’s main
points, and that she knew the police needed to do better work, and after a
minute of such ameliorating verbiage she felt that the old woman started
mellowing. Indeed, she then started to back-track a little, saying that she
knew that policewomen like Pillay were only trying to do their job, and that it
was really the government that was at fault and not
amaphoyisa
, because they didn’t provide the police with enough
support, and that those government people were busy siphoning off money for
themselves instead of giving it to the police so that they could do their jobs
better…

Pillay interrupted
her before the next lesson began, and managed to tie the woman down to a more focused
discussion. Once the volume abated somewhat, other neighbours joined it, and
after twenty minutes Pillay had gained a sense of how the residents in the area
communicated with Mrs Xaba and how they had protocols for reporting the arrival
of newcomers in the area, and how Mrs Xaba then acted on the information.

Pillay did not get
the full picture from this discussion, however. She had a distinct feeling that
there were things the residents were not saying, which had to do with what
happened after Mrs Xaba decided to act on any given report made to her. Pillay
decided not to pursue that line of questioning. Instead, she wrapped up the
discussion with profuse thanks and walked back to her car thinking that if the
three escaped prisoners had indeed been present in Sikwehle Road, they would
very soon have learned about Mrs Xaba and her supporters, and would most likely
have scarpered.

Pillay drove away
thinking that Sikwehle Road was probably a dead end as far as the hunt for
Thabethe and his gang was concerned. But she had one more visit to make on the
same street. She drove to the address at the other end of Sikwehle Road, an
address that the constables had provided. The woman in question was staying there
with her sister and according to the Westville constables she apparently knew
one of the three men who had abandoned the car. The constables had shown her a
photo of the prisoner Mofokeng, and she had nearly exploded, they told Pillay.

Pillay stopped her
car outside the house and walked up the neat gravel walkway skirted by
carefully maintained plants and flowers. The woman responded to the knock
within seconds and immediately identified herself to Pillay as the mother of
one of the men who had escaped from prison. Yes, he was the man known as
Mofokeng, she responded to Pillay’s specific question. She was in an
incandescent rage as she spoke about her no-good son. Pillay talked to her and
her sister over a cup of tea, and then they all went in Pillay’s car over to
the shack in Dada Road, where the mother immediately started cleaning up as she
was speaking to the detective. Now that her son was on the run again it was
unlikely that he would reappear in Dada Road, she said, so she could get the
house back in shape. She was quite happy for Pillay to search the place
thoroughly while she was cleaning up.

After a cursory
search of the place, there was nothing of interest for Pillay. The house gave
up no further clues, and it didn’t seem as if the three men had any intention
to return, so she thanked the woman and left.

14.20.

Mavis read the
first page summary with some difficulty. Given the very untidy handwritten
notes by someone attempting to summarise the latest information for the file on
the prisoner Mofokeng, she had struggled to decipher the meaning of the
scrawled words. Eventually she worked out the facts being recorded. It was a copy
of a note sent back to Westville Station Command from Durban Correctional
Services, only yesterday. It followed the processing on Friday last week of a
new prisoner named Mofokeng, who had been sent for internment in the prison in
Westville.

The note stated that upon his
admission to the prison Mofokeng had tried to bribe the officer taking his
fingerprints. Failing this, he had caused
an uproar
with his frenzied efforts to avoid being finger-printed.

Breathless with excitement, Mavis
quickly paged through the file to find what she already knew must be there, and
she found it within seconds. A copy of a note in her own handwriting, buried in
the middle of the file, in which she had reported to various Station Commanders
across the province on the DNA evidence linking a man called Philemon Wakashe
to a string of crimes. On her note was a further scribbled comment from the
Westville SC himself, stating that with this helpful evidence from Cst.
Tshabalala they had been able to arrest one
Philemon
Wakashe
, also known variously as
Vusi
Gumede
,
Silas Mofokeng
,
Sipho Mphahlele
and
Sugarboy Modisane
.

Mavis returned the file to the
helpful constable. He in turn gave her a one-page summary of reported crimes in
the vicinity since the three prisoners had broken out on Saturday. Nothing
there to match what Ryder was looking for. Three GBH assaults, two robberies
involving firearms, one attempted sexual assault.
Nothing
involving a mugging with the loss of cash.
The constable pointed out
that this was by no means normal. He would have expected at least a couple of
assaults involving the theft of wallets or handbags or purses but in this
instance nothing had come up.
Nothing
that has been reported, anyway
, he added.

Mavis thanked him profusely. Still
excited by the information she had gleaned from the file on Mofokeng she rapidly
took her leave and headed back to Durban
Central,
knowing that she had far more news for Captain Nyawula than he was expecting
from her.

14.45.

Koekemoer and
Dippenaar had little success in questioning people in and around Nomivi’s
Tavern. Not one of the staff members was willing to engage in any discussion
with
amaphoyisa
, especially white Afrikaner
detectives.
They all knew the
possible consequences of doing so, if not at the hands of the people these two
cops were looking for then at the hands of friends and acquaintances of the
drug dealers.

Nevertheless, not
knowing their rights, two of the staff reluctantly showed the detectives around
and even opened the locked back rooms for the policemen.

It was not
Dippenaar’s first visit to the place. He had assisted Ryder some months
earlier, when Ryder investigated a few possible connections to drug dealers at
Nomivi’s Tavern. Upon questioning the cleaners about the whereabouts of the man
known as Spikes Mkhize, long-standing friend of one Skhura Thabethe, he noticed
the give-away pause and stumble and correction as she first said she had never
heard of the man, then said oh, yes, perhaps she remembered seeing the man once,
and then said yes, now she remembered, he had stayed for a while in the back
rooms but he had disappeared a few months ago and had not been seen since.

Dippenaar stared at
her in silence and let her stew a little before he spoke.

‘
Yissus
, sister.
You better go and see a doctor
sometime soon.’

‘Excuse me?’ she
replied, while Koekemoer chuckled, standing with his arms crossed as his
companion handled the questioning.

‘You got a real
problem there with your memory, hey?’

‘I’m not
understanding the question.’

‘First you tell me
you never heard of the man. Then you tell me yes, maybe. Then you tell me of
course, yes, he was staying here. Did you forget, maybe, that you shared a bed
with him? Was the guy so bad in bed that you can’t even remember the
experience?’

Koekemoer
interrupted, speaking in faulty
isiZulu
,
and managed to extract more information from her. The man known as Spikes had
left and was living somewhere in the Transkei, she said. He had disappeared
three months ago and had since then telephoned from Umtata to say that he
wouldn’t be coming back. Since then the rooms had been locked and
no-one
was using them.

A cursory look
around the rooms indicated to the detectives that this version was probably
accurate. The place was filthy and did indeed look as if nobody had entered for
the last three months.

There was no way
the two detectives were going to get any reliable information from Nomivi’s
Tavern, so they left after no more than twenty minutes.

17.30.

Nyawula, Ryder,
Pillay, Koekemoer and Dippenaar all enthusiastically praised Mavis for her
work. They all digested the further feedback from KoeksnDips and Mavis, and
Nyawula was in more of an upbeat mood than any of them had seen for a while.

‘So what we have,
people, is this. Thabethe, Mgwazeni and Wakashe,
aka
Mofokeng, are working together right under our noses. They’ve
made no attempt to leave the province or to even lie low for a while. These
guys are unbelievable. They’re back in the
nyaope
business within a couple of days of breaking out.’

‘Lucrative
business, Captain,’ said Pillay.

‘You’re right,
Navi,’ he replied. ‘These guys obviously have easy access to suppliers as well
as customers. Jeremy, any developments yet with the use of the stolen bank
cards?’

‘Piet tells me
he’ll have the information from the various banks first thing tomorrow,
Captain. They’ve got
information,
apparently, showing
that Thabethe and his crew visited various ATMs at specific times. There are
apparently a few photos from the ATM security devices, but it seems that the
three of them were wise about ATM cameras and there’s nothing very clear. But
they’re sending the photos across to Piet anyway. We’ll have a look tomorrow
when they arrive.’

There appeared to
be a natural break in the conversation, so Nyawula chose that moment to switch
the subject.

‘How’s the report
going, Jeremy?’

‘Getting there,
Captain. Getting there. Slowly.’

‘What report’s
that, Captain?’ asked Dippenar.

‘The donor who paid
for Jeremy’s trip to England needs a report on what Jeremy picked up there,
Dipps. I know that Jeremy would rather be filling in IPID reports than doing this
report.’

Ryder thought how
very true that was. He was struggling with the report. He would much rather be
out there on the front line doing the dirty work, rather than trying to make
sense on paper of the realities of policing in the province. He had been trying
to get to grips with the impact on his work of over-zealous reporting from some
journalists who were drawing inferences from some statistical reports and
ignoring contrary reports, as they strove to build their cases one way or
another either for or against the police in the province. On both sides he saw
massive oversimplifications of what were in practice very intricate
institutional dynamics. Ryder thought back on his visit to Oxford, especially Professor
Hutchinson’s analysis of the equivalent dynamics in the United Kingdom. How
would the gentle professor view the various imperatives of research, as he saw
it, in the South African context? In this province population demographics
could be mapped directly onto the geographical reporting of violent crime, and
there was a distinct difference between KwaZulu-Natal and the United Kingdom in
one major area: the number of uniformed cops who were murdered every couple of
months. This was a population that was miles away from consenting to being
policed, he thought.

‘Those English
okes
teach you anything useful, Jeremy?’

‘Not
really, Dipps.
Well, I lie. There was some interesting information and there were some very
useful ideas. The most interesting was from this nutty professor. Nice guy. He
was something of an expert on some of the more esoteric arguments, you know?’

‘Like what,
Jeremy?’ interjected Nyawula. ‘Why not chat about it now? It’ll help you write
your report.’

Ryder saw the sense
in that. Much easier getting his thoughts together in a situation like this: better
than staring at a desk wanting to be somewhere else.

‘OK, Captain. If
you like. Well, Dipps, what I mean is that this Professor Hutchinson had some
interesting things to say, even though most of it was relevant to British
policing and wouldn’t transfer over here.
Some of it, maybe,
but not all of it.
Prof Hutchinson is very big on what he calls building
community alliances against criminal networks. Getting local communities
involved, more work on restorative justice, building consensus in
neighbourhoods…’