Emmanuel turned and walked away. He remembered his own mother, injured and hiding in the dark. He cut off the memory. He hadn’t been able to save her either.
*
Five minutes out from the Matebula
kraal
, with Shabalala scouting the way across a rocky field covered in mountain aloes, Emmanuel sensed they were being followed. A small shape darted from boulder to boulder and slipped behind clumps of sagebrush in an attempt to stay undetected.
‘It is the little sister,’ Shabalala said without turning around. ‘She has been with us since we left the chief’s
kraal.
’
‘Let’s sit down to rest for a minute,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Give her a chance to catch up and talk.’
Even with Shabalala as the only witness, Nomusa had added nothing to what she’d said in the yard of Matebula’s hut. Amahle was a good girl. She was loved. She had no boyfriends and no enemies. The cardboard box with the lipstick had come as a surprise to her mother.
Shabalala stopped at a grassy area between two large boulders. They sat down and waited. A breeze lifted the scent of wet rocks from the valley floor. Emmanuel took off his hat and set it down, letting the air cool him.
Stones skittered down the rock behind the detectives and a girl’s voice said, ‘Do not go to the Dlamini
kraal
. Philani is not there.’
Emmanuel turned slowly and saw Amahle’s little sister crouched in the rocky field like a sprite. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.
She shook her head, refusing to give the information: smart move for a child.
‘How do you know the gardener is not home?’ he said.
‘His mother came to the chief yesterday morning and said her son did not come home from work at Little Flint Farm on Friday night. He is missing.’
Shabalala picked up a stone from the grass and examined it closely. ‘Could it be that Philani’s mother is not telling the truth to protect her son?’
‘Mandla and the
impi
went to the mother’s
kraal
.’ The girl twisted her glass bracelets one way and then the other around her wrist: a nervous habit. ‘They did not find Philani even after breaking the hut apart and scattering the goats and chickens.’
‘Amahle knew Philani Dlamini?’ Emmanuel nudged the conversation back to the dead girl. That Mandla was a major problem for the investigation he already knew.
‘They worked for
baas
Reed at Little Flint Farm. Philani tended the garden and Amahle tended the white women in the big house.’
Shabalala smiled encouragement. ‘Philani and Amahle were friends.’
The little sister stopped twisting the bracelets and said, ‘Philani followed her up the mountains and down again and she did not chase him away.’
Walking together over mountains was love in a child’s mind. Emmanuel thought she might be right. He took his notebook and pen from his jacket and scribbled the word ‘flowers’ next to Philani’s name. Ordinary Zulus did not bring flowers to the dead but a Zulu man employed by white farmers as a gardener might have adopted the European habit.
‘Tell me about this chief from Umkomazi,’ Shabalala said. Emmanuel had filled him in on the bride price and the chief’s bitter disappointment. ‘He is rich and handsome, I’m sure.’
‘He is fat and slow and smells of cow dung,’ she replied flatly. ‘The great chief agreed to the marriage because he is greedy and not fit to work in the gold mines in Jo’burg. Amahle had no love for him.’
‘Huh . . .’ Shabalala was impressed by the blunt assessment. At near eleven years old she could already tell the wheat from the chaff and silver from tin. His wife, too, told things as she saw them. ‘Perhaps there was another for whom Amahle had love but that she kept hidden from the chief and from your mother?’
The girl looked away and began to spin the bracelets around her slim wrist, faster and faster. Emmanuel took his cue from Shabalala and focused on the stones peppering the field. They might each have been sitting alone in the grass and listening to the chirp of crickets.
‘There was one other,’ the girl said. ‘A man with a strange name.’
‘Mmm . . . ?’ Shabalala breathed out, keeping the conversation going without asking a direct question.
‘Mr Insurance Policy,’ the little sister said in English.
Black Africans adopted names from a rich array of sources. Emmanuel knew a juvenile delinquent called Justice, a housemaid named Radio and a shoeshine boy with the evocative moniker Midnight Express Train. Every name was linked to a real story, an actual event that had shaped their lives. Where had an Insurance Policy sprung from in an isolated valley connected by a network of dirt paths? This bastion of shimmering cliffs and meandering rivers was surely one of the few places on earth that travelling insurance salesmen had not penetrated.
‘Did you ever meet this Mr Insurance Policy?’ he asked.
‘No.’ The girl shook her head. ‘Amahle mentioned him one time. Never again.’
‘Was it in the winter or now in the spring time that she spoke of him?’ Emmanuel asked. In the country, the seasons told the time. At the turn of each season, the men working in the gold mines of Jo’burg returned home to plough the fields or hand out modern marvels like aluminium cooking pots, lengths of brightly printed cotton, and cash.
‘It was on the day the Dutch farmer burned the edges of the field by the river. I remember that my sister came home after dark and our mother was angry with her.’
Farmers lit firebreaks in winter. The memory of stinging smoke and black ash embedded in his skin and hair for weeks was still vivid in Emmanuel’s mind. Tilling the fields and harvesting crops for six years alongside his adopted father had destroyed any romantic notion he might ever have had of living off the land.
‘I understand,’ Shabalala said. ‘Your sister was with this Mr Insurance Policy and paid no attention to the sun going down. That is why she came home late.’
‘No,
inkosi
.’ The girl’s lips pursed to a perfect rosebud. ‘Amahle was left behind in the town by accident and it took many hours to find and return her to the
kraal
. It was on that night when she couldn’t fall asleep that she whispered his name and said, “He is the one that I have waited for . . .”’
Emmanuel leaned closer to the girl and initiated eye contact. ‘Tell me everything that Amahle said about this man, little sister.’
‘Amahle did not speak of men often. She said they were like stepping stones, to be skipped over lightly until you reached the other side of the river.’
It was deeply cynical attitude for a teenage girl and one that might have led to her death. Emmanuel knew that being ‘skipped over’ by a young beauty was enough of a motive for murder for some men.
‘Did your sister say what was waiting for her on the other side of the river?’ Shabalala asked.
‘Life,’ the little girl said.
Twigs snapped and stones rolled loose from the approach path as a calf stopped to nibble grass. The noise startled the girl, who was up and flying across the field before the word ‘wait’ left Emmanuel’s mouth. He stood and watched her weave between the orange mountain aloes like a little springbok, the outline of her body soon absorbed into the landscape. Fleet as she was, she’d never be able to outrun the future. In three or four years she’d likely be married off in exchange for a herd of long-horned cattle.
‘I can catch her but . . .’ Shabalala cleared his throat, uncomfortable with having to explain his lack of action.
‘Let her be.’ Emmanuel adjusted the rim of his hat. ‘She risked a lot by leaving the
kraal
without her parents’ permission. I don’t want her punished for helping us.’
He did not want her punished either for having the heart of a lion – just like the girl his mother had requested.
*
They swung by the Dlamini
kraal
and found a ransacked hut and two white-haired goats nibbling corn spilled from a broken clay jar. Chickens roamed the yard and a skinny cat dozed in the afternoon sun. Philani Dlamini and his mother were long gone.
Emmanuel reread his notes out loud. ‘The mother told Chief Matebula that Philani didn’t come home from work on Friday. That’s the same night Amahle went missing. It can’t be a coincidence.’
‘We must find the gardener before Mandla and the
impi
do,’ Shabalala said. ‘They think this man is guilty of murder and they will kill him.’
‘What if he pays a fine of twenty cows?’
‘It is too late for an exchange of cattle, Sergeant,’ Shabalala said. ‘Only blood washes blood.’
‘Great,’ Emmanuel muttered. Was there one country, just one on Earth, that did not demand blood for blood? Before striking out for the path leading down to the river he paused to study the terrain. A deep valley cut through a string of towering mountains covered in alpine grass and native forest. The sky stretched in endless blue over Mandla’s vast backyard.
Two detectives looking for one gardener in all that landscape and they were getting tired. Emmanuel hoped Philani was getting tired too.
SIX
E
mmanuel dressed at dawn in a shaft of pale yellow light. Clouds the colour of India ink broke the crests of the far mountains. Birds sang from the branches of the jacaranda trees in the hotel garden, too late to wake him.
He left his jacket hanging in the stained pine wardrobe with mothballs piled in the corners and took the stairs to a side exit. A nightwatchman in a long overcoat and gumboots shone his torch across the garden and the patio. Emmanuel slowed and let the beam find him. He raised his hand in greeting and got a ‘Morning,
ma baas
’ from the watchman.
Emmanuel thought of Shabalala, billeted for the night and for the remainder of the investigation three miles north of town in the black location. The native branch detective had probably already left the back room of the cement-block dwelling with its one window and outdoor toilet, and would be making his way to Roselet. By black location standards, the local shop owner’s house where Shabalala was staying was deluxe but it was many rungs below Roselet’s ‘Europeans-only’ guesthouse and eight-room faux-Tudor hotel.
Shabalala did not complain. He thanked Emmanuel for the lift when dropped off at the house late yesterday afternoon and declined a pick-up for this morning. How many words and thoughts were sealed in the Zulu policeman’s mouth because all that was required in the presence of whites was a ‘Yes,
ma baas
’, ‘No,
ma baas
’, and ‘Thank you,
ma baas
’?
A gravel path cut through the formal garden to the rear of the hotel and led on to a smaller path signposted ‘S
CENIC
W
AY
’. This curled around the outer edges of town and ended at the mouth of Greyling Street. ‘For guests who enjoy a brisk walk after breakfast or before lunch,’ the rotund receptionist had explained over a map of the hotel grounds and an exhaustive list of ‘things to do while in Roselet’. Investigating the murder of a Zulu girl was not one of the recommended activities.
The Reed family were not home when he and Shabalala had called by Little Flint Farm late the day before. The essential facts of the investigation – time of death, last known sighting of the victim alive, suspects and motive – were still unconfirmed. But other worries, less obvious than the puzzle of the murder, had awakened him in the pitch black of his hotel room.
Clumps of sugarbush protea on either side of the path glittered with dew and the air was chilly. Goosebumps prickled Emmanuel’s skin and the knot of heat at the centre of his chest slowly dissipated. It felt good to be cold, to wake from the tangle of images that surfaced only briefly and then disappeared into a void without knitting together into a fluid dream.
Eight years out of his infantry uniform and he’d learned, in an incomplete way, to defeat the dead that visited him in his dreams. Wake up, switch on the light, breathe deeply and name the place where your body lay wrapped in a patchwork quilt: Roselet. At the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains. South Africa.
Last night was different. No firestorms or missiles or swollen rivers washing the dead out to sea broke his sleep. Instead, he remembered Sophiatown. The family shack with the corrugated-iron roof held down by stones. His sister, Olivia, playing in the dirt street with Indira, the Indian shopkeepers’ daughter, the smoke from winter fires blanketing the sky above them. And his parents, sitting in the doorway of their crumbling home laughing at a joke he’d not heard. They were relaxed and beautiful, even in the dusty township light.
Emmanuel walked on. He had unwittingly unlocked a forgotten memory of his mother and father happy and in love.
The heat in his chest was in the exact spot where Baba Kaleni had laid his hand. The old man had smashed a hole in him and now ghosts and secrets were climbing out from the inside. The past bled into the present. He remembered his difficult adolescence. After a staunch, God-loving Afrikaner family had adopted him and his sister, he’d tried to be good. No fighting with the boys who called him unclean and his dead mother a whore, no talking back to the brutal teachers at the Fountain of Light boarding school, no questioning the superiority of whites over blacks despite knowing English and Afrikaners who were thicker than mud.
It was exhausting work. After six months, cracks began to appear. By then he’d learned to exact revenge in cunning and insidious ways.
Not now
: Emmanuel stopped the past from breaching the walls punched in by Baba Kaleni. The damage was done, the cuts and bruises healed. All that mattered was now.
The stars dimmed and a few hundred feet ahead the outline of houses became more distinct. Emmanuel skirted the edges of Roselet. Wide gardens and fences enclosed pretty cottages and a silver stream marked the border between the town and the countryside. He recognised the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of Dr Daglish’s home.
He walked past two more lots and the clustered buildings of the police station appeared. Yellow light shone from the yard.
Curious about the source of the glow, Emmanuel jumped the water. He moved along the back wall of the station house, careful of twigs and loose stones, and edged around the corner.
Constable Bagley sat on the rear steps of the station commander’s house smoking a cigarette by the light of a paraffin lantern. He huddled against the cold, red hair spiked out at odd angles, the chilled mist of his breath mingling with exhaled tobacco smoke. If he’d slept at all the night before, it didn’t show. Spent butts littered the ground.
A smudge of movement at the back window caught Emmanuel’s attention. He squinted and made out the figure of a woman in a white nightdress standing behind the glass. Bagley had no idea she was there, watching his nocturnal struggles tip over into day.
Emmanuel heard a footstep and turned to check the field sloping down to the stream. Shabangu, the older of Roselet’s two native policemen, hesitated on the path to the station, also caught by surprise. He quickly stepped aside to give the visiting city detective right of way, then remained perfectly still, face turned away, eyes to the ground. Questioning the actions of a white man caught spying at dawn was unwise. Playing the silent and obedient native was the safest option.
Emmanuel slipped past the Zulu policeman and continued in the direction of Greyling Street. Hitting the top of the main street, he followed the line of unlit shops and country cottages. The next twenty-four hours were critical to the investigation. He and Shabalala had to generate a list of suspects before the trail went cold.
*
Empty car park, empty yard and empty station. The rustle of the giant sycamore tree provided the only movement at the Roselet police command.
‘So much for “Anything we can do to help”,’ said Emmanuel, looking around the unmanned station. The room was unchanged from yesterday afternoon but for the position of the telephone on the commander’s desk. At some point, Bagley had made or received a phone call.
‘There could have been an emergency, Sergeant.’ Shabalala stopped to examine a map of the world hanging from a nail in the wall. The pink stain of the British Empire spread over several continents.
‘What kind of incident takes three grown men to bring it under control, Detective? A multiple cow theft or a cat stuck up a tree?’
‘Maybe it is both,’ Shabalala said, deadpan, and Emmanuel smiled.
He walked to the window and contemplated the wide grasslands and the steep mountain peaks.
‘It’s odd, don’t you think . . . a station commander stepping back from a murder in his own district? We’re not the Security Branch. We didn’t demand control over the investigation.’
‘Strange, yes.’ Shabalala circled round to the window and gazed out. ‘Maybe the commander does not care about the death of a Zulu girl.’
‘A murder is a murder. Solving a homicide is the closest we come to being heroes. You’d have to be lazy or stupid to give up the chance.’
‘Then we are alone,’ Shabalala said.
‘As always.’ Emmanuel checked his watch. Eight fifteen. ‘We’ll let the doctor know her substitute is on the way and then head back out to the Reeds’ farm.’
‘Just so, Sergeant.’
With hat brims tilted low to block out the sun, they stepped out into the dirt yard. Bagley’s daughters peered through the back window, their noses flattened to the glass as they studied Emmanuel and Shabalala. The older girl rapped her knuckles against the wood frame, demanding attention. Shabalala lifted his hat in greeting. The girls squealed with delight and the hand of an unseen person yanked them away from the window.
*
‘Dr Daglish?’ Emmanuel knocked on the front door of the cottage a third time, harder, and got no response. ‘It’s the police. Open up.’
Shabalala peered through the window into the front room. The curtains were open to let in daylight and a small reading lamp shone on the mantle. A paperback novel lay face down on an oak side table.
‘Someone is home,’ the Zulu detective said, ‘but there is no movement inside.’
‘Around the back. The doc might have skipped town and the lights are just a bluff.’ Emmanuel skirted the hydrangea bushes and walked quickly. He shouldn’t have let the doctor off so easily yesterday afternoon. With a little more pushing, Daglish might have agreed to conduct the examination right away. Now she could be anywhere in the province of Natal.
They took the path to the rear of the house and to the root cellar where Amahle’s body lay on a retired examination bed. The door to the basement room was ajar, held open by an old typewriter with rusted keys. The clinical scrape of surgical steel broke through the music of birds and insects hidden in the dense garden foliage.
‘Doctor . . .’ Conducting an impromptu autopsy on a body she was too scared to examine twenty-four hours ago was beyond the realm of the possible. ‘Doctor?’
‘One minute, Detective Cooper.’ Daglish soon appeared in the cellar doorway, her dark hair held in a fine net. She was gloved and gowned and ready for surgery. ‘This cellar is like a bomb shelter and sound bounces right off the walls. I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘What are you doing?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘Assisting the police surgeon,’ Daglish said. ‘A car dropped him off at the front fifteen minutes ago. I didn’t expect him to get here so fast.’
‘Neither did I.’ Roselet was four hours drive from Durban, putting the doctor’s departure at around four o’clock that morning. ‘Constable Shabalala and I will say our hellos and head out to the valley.’
‘Come in.’ Daglish retreated into the root cellar, pulling off her gloves. The wrist bandage was gone. A bruise darkened her skin but otherwise it seemed she’d staged a remarkable overnight recovery.
Emmanuel and Shabalala ducked under the low eaves. The air in the dug-out room was chilly, the gloom lifted by the glow of two naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling. Glass jars of yellow and pink fruit added a block of colour to the bare walls.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Emmanuel was caught by surprise. ‘You.’
A man, on first impression a mix of mad wizard and wise professor, pressed inquisitive fingers into the back of Amahle’s skull, seeking out what secrets lay below the skin. Gold-rimmed glasses resting on the tip of his nose defied the laws of gravity.
‘You’re thinking of another Jew, crucified two thousand years ago by the Romans,’ Dr Daniel Zweigman replied. ‘As you can see, I am alive and well.’
‘Colonel van Niekerk said . . .’ Emmanuel didn’t bother with the rest of the sentence. He should have known better than to believe the crafty Dutchman’s promise to find another doctor. It had been given all too easily. The colonel wanted the old Jew on the case and the colonel always got what he wanted.
‘
Yebo
,
sawubona
.’ Shabalala greeted the German physician with a fingertip touched to the brim of his hat and a smile. Amahle was in the best hands. In a private moment, when the room was empty, he’d tell the girl to let this good and kind man uncover things that she kept hidden from others.
‘Shabalala.’ Zweigman thumbed the glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose. ‘Your wife sends her best. My wife also.’
The lack of a personal greeting from the wives to him didn’t worry Emmanuel. He was the unpredictable single man who dragged their husbands from their safe domestic worlds into the embrace of a violent and often dangerous one. While Lilliana and Lizzie liked him personally, he knew it would be just fine with them if they never heard from him again.
‘Did van Niekerk strongarm you?’ Emmanuel asked. He didn’t want his friends to be pressed into service as part of the Dutch policeman’s private militia.
‘Colonel van Niekerk is too cultivated to issue threats,’ Zweigman said. ‘He bribed me.’
‘The colonel doesn’t have anything you want,’ Emmanuel pointed out. After spending three years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, Zweigman cared nothing for money, social status or appearance.
‘True, but Lilliana wishes to start another tailoring business like the one she ran in Jacob’s Rest. The colonel placed an advance order for ten dresses for his bride, to be made when they return from honeymoon. Money to be put aside for Dimitri’s schooling.’
Dimitri, a white-blond Russian baby boy, was born at the Zweigmans’ medical clinic during a counter-intelligence operation gone wrong. His father had been an ailing Russian general captured by the South African secret police and his mother, Natalya, a young, beautiful actress. Two weeks after giving birth, Natalya discarded Dimitri. A child would slow her down in her quest to find a new man, drink champagne and see the rest of the world beyond Moscow. The Zweigmans believed Dimitri’s abandonment at the clinic was an act of God. Their own three children had been killed in the German death camps and the orphaned Russian boy gave them a miraculous opportunity to love like that again. Dimitri was now their adopted son. For those with the patience of stone, the German couple had a list of the baby’s outstanding qualities memorised and ready to be repeated ad nauseam.
‘How did van Niekerk know Lilliana’s plans?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘The usual way. Via a direct line to the devil,’ Zweigman replied dryly. ‘It hardly matters, Sergeant Cooper. My wife is happy and I am here. With Dr Daglish’s help, the post-mortem examination to determine time and cause of death will be complete by lunch.’