Death Dealing (24 page)

16.20.

Thabethe, Mgwazeni
and Wakashe were crowded around the terminal in the
internet
café in Marriott Road. Thabethe found the site he was looking for. Now it was a
matter of scrolling through various issues of the Newsletter in question until
he identified what he knew must be there.

The
internet
café was full. Every terminal was occupied. The
proprietor was busy boasting loudly to one customer, who was trying her best to
shrug him off and concentrate on her email. The proprietor was oblivious to her
irritation and rambled on.

‘
Ja,
I’m telling you. My brother-in-law
was telling me everyone else was closing their
internet
café businesses because people were saying they’re a thing of the past. Coffee
bars with wifi are all the rage, he said, and the
oke
was
chuning
me I
should change my focus and go the same way. Sell coffee and wifi connections to
the
okes
with smartphones, he said.
No way. Not me. Now, guess what? I attract all the other
okes
who don’t have smartphones, but who just want to send a quick
email or check out something on the
internet
, you
know?’

‘Yes,’ she replied,
bending her head close in to the screen so that he couldn’t see what she was
writing in her email, and to convey to him that she was extremely focused and
busy, in the vain hope that he would back off and leave her to work.’

‘
Ja,
I’m telling
you,
I’ve run a very successful operation here for years, now. I was one of the
first…’

‘Sorry. I’m sorry.
Do you mind? I’ve just got to do this very quickly, and I…’

‘
Ag,
ja
, sorry,
lady. Sorry. I’m talking too much, hey? It’s what my wife says, you know. She
teases me a lot about my talking, hey? But one of the reasons I’ve had a
successful operation, you know, is that my customers over the years got to know
me, you know? I mean, and I got to know them, you know? I remember the one…
ag
, ja
, sorry. Anyway. No. I’ll let you
get on with it, then.’

‘Thank you.’

He moved on to the
next terminal and started speaking to the young woman there. Meanwhile,
Thabethe suddenly whispered excitedly to his companions as he found what he was
looking for.

‘There! There she
is! That’s the one!’

They all peered in
closely, looking at what he had brought up on the screen.

‘
Ja
! It’s her,’ said Wakashe. ‘That’s the
one. She’s the one. What’s her name, Skhura?’

They crowded
together, faces close to the screen, as he found her name. He read further,
remembering the facts he had read all those weeks ago when looking at the paper
version of the same article. He remembered, now, the article had described the
talented young SAPS Student Constable Mavis Tshabalala who was seconded to
Greytown, but who lived in a tiny flat right next door to the Musgrave Centre
on Durban’s Berea. Which she found so convenient, she was quoted as saying,
because she so often did her weekly shopping at the Musgrave centre on a
Saturday morning.

09.10.

Ryder had cooked one of his cholesterol
specials for breakfast at 8.00 a.m. His two sons and Sugar-Bear always approved
of them. His wife said on occasion to friends that she merely tolerated them,
but in fact she was enormously impressed at her husband’s catering skills when
he was in the mood. The family enjoyed the meal outdoors on the front lawn,
under a large umbrella in the already blistering heat. Then, with the dog
happily at work on the plates scattered over the lawn, Ryder pecked his wife on
the cheek before leaving for his 9.30 a.m. workshop downtown.

‘Don’t forget Mavis Tshabalala is
delivering something for me sometime in the next few hours,’ he said
as he walked to the car.

‘I remember.
Mid-day, you said. What is it?’

‘Nothing to do with
you.’

‘Oh. I see. Sorry I
asked.’

‘Mind your own
business,’ he said.

‘OK.’ She pouted,
over-acting, knowing that this must have something to do with her birthday the
next day.

‘I’ll be back
around two. Don’t forget we’re watching the game at three o’clock.’

‘I won’t. I’ll aim
to finish cleaning the living room just in time for you to spend the afternoon
littering it with your crisps.’

‘And your
beer-cans.’

‘
You
can talk!’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye, guys.’

‘
Bye dad
,’ the two boys chorused
together, and started to clear the table. They gathered the dishes to take them
inside, followed closely by Sugar-Bear, who felt that he hadn’t quite finished
his work on the plates. Fiona spread the newspaper out while enjoying another
coffee.

10.25.

Thabethe couldn’t
believe his luck. There, twenty paces in front of him in the Musgrave Shopping
Centre, was Constable Mavis Tshabalala. She was in the queue for the counter in
The Body Shop, where customers were paying for their goods and then having them
gift-wrapped by the assistant. Their target was having some hilarious
conversation with another customer. They appeared to be finding something very
funny, and it had been the high-pitched giggle from Mavis that had attracted
his attention.

‘Look! Look, comrades.
It’s her!
The same one.
Look!’

The three of them
were almost out of control with excitement. From the moment they had entered
the shopping centre half an hour earlier they had done their best to keep their
conversations quiet and low-key, and to appear as inconspicuous as possible.
Wakashe wore dark glasses and a cap. Mgwazeni wore a balaclava folded up on his
head but pulled down low to just above the eyes. Thabethe wore a hooded
track-suit
top. They were wary of CTV cameras, and they kept
their distance from anyone who might be a cop in civvies. The three men had
gone about their business in a fairly casual manner, though with their eyes
constantly scouting the terrain. But now, on seeing Mavis Tshabalala, they abandoned
any attempt to appear casual and nonchalant.

They decided quickly
that Mgwazeni should hang around the shelves adjacent to the cash register in
the shop so that he could eavesdrop on the cop’s conversation with the other
customer. No reason was given for why it should be Mgwazeni who should do it,
but they all knew that neither Wakashe with his bandaged hands nor Thabethe
with his distinctive eyes should do the deed.

The other two
retreated to watch from a distance as Mgwazeni casually drifted into the store
and began looking, disinterestedly, at the soaps and oils and lotions on
display, while craning his neck to listen to what Mavis was saying to the
customer behind her in the queue.

‘He’s a very nice
man. They say he’s one of the top detectives in the province. You wouldn’t
think so. He’s such a gentle person. I’m hoping to be a detective like him one
day.’

‘Well, if you
become a detective I’m sure you won’t ask your juniors to go and buy your
husband a birthday present for you,’ said the woman. ‘Trust a man.’

‘Oh,
no.
He didn’t
ask me to do it. I just heard him say it was his wife’s birthday and he needed
to buy her a present, and he wanted something from The Body Shop, and wasn’t
sure when he was going to find the time to do it. He said he had this very big
meeting today. I think it’s all day long. A workshop or some long seminar for
senior policemen, I think. So I just offered. I told him I would be here
anyway, and that I would get the present for him. They live in Westville, and
I’m going out to Westville to meet a friend for lunch today, so I said I would
drop in and give the present to his wife – but all wrapped up, you know,
so that she doesn’t know it’s her birthday present. I’ll tell her he asked me
to deliver a package to his home containing work stuff from the office. So
after the gift-wrapping I’m going to quickly take it home and wrap some old
brown paper all over it and then put it all in a big bag I’ve got and disguise
it before I take it to his wife.’

‘Well, be careful.
Maybe a detective’s wife will know a thing or two. Maybe she’ll know enough to
think you’re up to something.’

‘You’re right. They
say at the station that Fiona Ryder is even sharper than Detective Jeremy Ryder.’

That was the
sentence that got Mgwazeni going. He immediately backed away and went back to
join his friends.

‘What you doing,
Mgwazeni?’ hissed Thabethe. ‘You were right there, and those two they’re still
talking. You can find out more,
bra
…’

Breathless with
excitement, Mgwazeni stopped him in mid-sentence.

‘Skhura, wait. She
was saying something. Big something.’

‘What? What, man?’

‘She was saying
better stuff than we were thinking. She is going to take that stuff she is
buying, and she is taking it to the house of that Jeremy Ryder detective.’

‘What? What? What
you telling me, Mgwazeni?’

‘That one, she is
taking that birthday present there to the wife of that detective. She was
telling that woman next to her that she is taking that stuff to the wife of
Ryder there at his house in Westville, and, bra, better news…’

‘What? What
better?’

‘She is saying to
that woman that Ryder is at a meeting all day today and she is dropping that
stuff at the home there by Ryder’s wife. She is going to her own home first,
then she is going out there to the home of Mrs Ryder in Westville.’

Thabethe was
quivering with excitement.
At last.
At last here was
an opportunity to get back at the man that he hated more than anyone on the
planet. With Ryder away at some meeting, his wife would be completely vulnerable.
This was the opportunity he had been dreaming of. He would destroy Ryder. He
would destroy that cop by killing his wife.

Not just killing
her, added Wakashe. He knew how to make women suffer, he said to his two companions.
Before they killed her he wanted the chance to do a few other things with that
detective’s wife.

10.30.

Ryder and Nyawula
met at the coffee urn outside the conference room at Durban Central Station
Command, each grabbing a cup of very insipid coffee before moving outdoors for
a break from the endless talks on strategy and budgets and statistics and
projections. Ryder was beginning to think maybe that bizarre chairman of the
committee in Oxford might have the right idea after all: downplay the
importance of strategy and just put all your efforts into having a big annual
party for the staff to make them happy. Except in the Oxford case the staff
members had seemed anything but happy.

‘Makes you want to
decline your promotion, I’m sure,
Major
.’

‘Tell me about it,
Jeremy. Can you believe all the crap being spoken?’

‘Are they treating
you any better now that you’re a Major? When you were a mere Captain did they
treat you like a junior at these workshops?’

‘Not really, but it
certainly helps having the rank. How about you, Lieutenant Ryder? You should
also be a Major, of course. The reason you’re not is that you don’t play the
political game as well as I do.’

‘Thanks,
Sibo.
Appreciate it. Good advice from the one guy I respect.
Play the game, Jeremy.
I thought you were different.’

‘Course I am. It’s
a joke, you know. G-O-C-E spells joke, or don’t you get it?’

‘I
get it
,
don’t worry
. It was me who
was joking.’

‘Oh.’

‘Ha! Got you.’

‘How does Fiona put
up with you?’

‘She doesn’t. She
just ignores my bad jokes and talks me into the ground. Trouble is, she’s
usually right, and I’m usually wrong.’

They
both chuckled. Nyawula paused, letting the moment settle, before continuing.

‘You
feeling better, Jeremy?
You seemed to have been hit hard by Khuzwayo’s death.’

‘I was. It was bad.
But worse than that was Koeks reminding me that if I’d taken those six creeps
put of the picture in Albert Park on Monday, Kwanele Khuzwayo would still be
with us. I lost a bit of sleep over that. Koeks has a way of showing us all the
truth, especially at times when we’re not looking at it.’

‘He’s as subtle as
a sledgehammer, old Koeks.’

‘No. I don’t agree.
I think he’s one of the very best.’

‘True.
Him and Dipps.
Both brilliant cops.
Salt of the earth.’

‘But it was like a
slap in the face, Sibo, what he said. Maybe our obsession with always doing the
right thing is not appropriate for this country. Maybe fighting fire with fire
is the best way. The billions of rands going on court cases, lost dockets, bail
for heinous crimes, perps being released and going straight out to kill
innocent people. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to arrest the devil and put him away
for a few years, hoping he’ll reform. Maybe because we know he wants no part of
reform we should simply be trying to execute him. Stop dealing in morality and
ethics, and start dealing in retribution, pure and simple.’

‘I think exactly the
same thought every single day of my life, Jeremy. But then something brings me
back from the brink.’

‘You think that
kind of thinking takes you to the brink?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘The brink of
what?’

‘Chaos. Where
everyone loses. Mutually assured destruction.’

‘It’s good to talk
to you, Sibo. Sorry to have re-visited the same subject all over again.
Speaking to you helps a lot. When I don’t really believe in what I’m saying,
but saying it anyway, that’s when I’m looking for someone to tell me why I’m
wrong. You and Fiona have a knack for doing that.’

‘Look. They’re
calling us back in. Next session is all about the checklist for proposing merit
awards for constables. Stirring stuff. Are you ready for this?’

‘As ready as I am
for anything police management can throw at me, Major. After you.’

They went back into
the conference room, joining the lines of uniformed and non-uniformed police officers
streaming in after the
tea-break
.

12.05.

Thabethe, Mgwazeni
and Wakashe followed Mavis Tshabalala at a distance in the shopping centre
after she emerged from The Body Shop. They watched her, impatiently, as she did
her grocery shopping and then watched her as she went into a cosmetics store
and spent a long time chatting to the shop assistants. Eventually they followed
her as she left on foot to go home from the Musgrave Centre, laden with her
various packages. They watched her go into the block of flats no more than a
hundred paces away. Mgwazeni was then dispatched to fetch their car, parked in
the Musgrave Centre parking garage, while the other two kept an eye on both the
entrance to the block of flats and the entrance to the parking area that served
the residents of the apartments. Mgwazeni pulled up next to them minutes later,
in a white 1990 Opel Astra. They joined him in the vehicle, he pulled over to
the kerb, and they sat and waited.

It was not very
long before Mavis drove out of the apartment block’s parking garage. She was
driving a white Mazda 323. The three men were very excited. They followed her
across the Berea and then onto the highway, driving under the Toll Gate Bridge
out toward Westville. They followed her around under the Rockdale Avenue
Bridge, onto Essex Terrace and then into Cochrane Avenue, pausing at the top of
the road as they saw her turning right up into the driveway of Ryder’s home.

‘That’s it. That’s
where they live. I been there once before,’ said Thabethe.
‘These
people, they’re the only ones in this street with no high walls and security
gate. They think they are safe because he is a cop.’

He recalled walking
up the same driveway some months ago and surveying Ryder’s house in the middle
of the night before finally deciding that the time was not right for him to
act. He wondered now whether he should have proceeded with his plans on that
occasion.