Death Dealing (15 page)

‘You mean, like,
Jeremy, maybe we should call Mr and Mrs Khuzwayo and the six
okes
in hospital, along with old
Thabethe, and give them tea and cake and have a nice chat?’

Koekemoer’s
intervention was not what Nyawula had intended, but he let it go, while the
others all muttered their own views, none of them positive about the
Professor’s suggestion. Ryder cut through the hubbub to continue.

‘Not
quite, Koeks.
I think Hutchinson would modify a couple of his ideas after a week in
KwaZulu-Natal, but he certainly does have a few good points to make. I think
he’s right, for example, when he talks about the need for a thorough
investigation of penal culture, policy and practice in this country. That might
be…’

‘Penal culture?’
said Koekemoer, to guffaws from Dippenaar and Pillay and a sigh from Nyawula.

‘Do you know
something, Koeks?’ interrupted Ryder, getting in before the Afrikaner could get
going. ‘This is uncanny. When the professor used those words on me I made a
conscious note not to repeat them in the presence of my good friend Detective
Koekemoer. How could I have forgotten that? As he said those words to me, there
in Oxford, I could see your face. Damn. I forgot. No, Koeks, before you say
anything, let me assure you it’s not what you think.’

Ryder went straight
on, and despite the occasional jibes and comments and snide remarks from his
colleagues about the British, Nyawula had been correct. It was a useful session
and he was able to pull some of his own thinking together. Writing the report
for the donor would be a little easier than he had assumed. He found himself
traversing a lot of the ground he had covered with Hutchinson and others in
England, talking briefly about Hutchinson’s thoughts on public order, community
and urban renewal, and their connection to substance misuse and rehabilitation
programmes. He linked the work of Thames Valley police on crack-cocaine and
heroin use in relation to homelessness, and drew the parallels, as he saw it,
with local work in Durban, and the impact of
nyaope
and other drugs. He called on Pillay to tell them briefly
what she knew about the Qalakabusha work in Albert Park, and the discussion
developed more generally among them all about their role in the context of
various other initiatives.

There ensued a useful
discussion about the realities of their work on the ground compared to
perceptions of the public, and they then moved into discussing the growing
sense among so many local commentators that crime was spiralling out of
control. Ryder pulled the discussion back to the matter of prisons. They came
to some consensus and acknowledged that anecdotal rumours of conditions in
prisons were one thing, but even formal reports were horrific, revealing almost
medieval conditions. Some enterprising journalists had probed deeply into
allegations of torture in prisons, ranging from electric shocks to injecting
prisoners with dangerous levels of sedatives. As well as some other chemicals, they
were sure, that went way beyond sedation.
 

The lively and
profitable conversation then ran into a brick wall with a comment from
Dippenaar.

‘
Ja, manne
, the real problem is
recidivism.’

There was a long
pause as they all looked at him. Mavis giggled loudly in the corner as she saw
Koekemoer’s expression, and she tried to muffle her amusement as Koeks broke
the pause.

‘
Yissus
.
Ou soutpiel
. What’s wrong with you, Afrikaner boy? Three syllable
words not good enough for you? Good old one-syllable Afrikaner words not good
enough for you, hey? Now you need five syllables?’

‘
Ag twak man.
Jy praat kak, Koeks, jy weet?
’

‘
Ja. Sien jy?
’ Koekemoer jumped in with
alacrity.
‘Dis reg, ou
boet.
There, that time. You got it right that time. Every word there
was one syllable. Now we can understand what you’re saying,
ou boet
. Keep your
fokken
five syllable
Engelse
words
to yourself, man.
Praat Afrikaans, jong.
Soutpiel
.’

There was a flurry
of arguments about whether Koeks was wrong and whether recidivism wasn’t
actually five syllables but four, and counter-arguments saying that it was
indeed five syllables.

‘That’s only
because you pronounce
film
as a
two-syllable word, Koeks,’ said Pillay. ‘If you want to…’

‘OK,
guys.
Calm
down,’ said Nyawula. ‘Let’s give Jeremy a chance.’

The discussion
continued and proved more helpful than Ryder had anticipated, as he began to
get his thoughts in order for the report to the donor. By the time they
concluded and left the Captain’s office, teasing and cajoling and punching one
another like playground children, there was some agreement that as desirable as
the notion of
community consent to being
policed
was, there was a more urgent consensus. This was that Skhura
Thabethe needed to be found, and quickly.

Koekemoer added the
thought as they walked out toward the car park that he did not think Thabethe
would consent to being arrested, but maybe he could be enticed to consent with
the offer of a straw of
whoonga
.

‘You think so,
Koeks?’ said Pillay.
‘You going to invite him to your place
for a straw?
What if he brings along his nice sharpened spoke?’

‘He can come along
any day with his spoke, that
ou
. If
he shows me his spoke I’ll show him my hunting rifle.
Yissus
. I’d like to get that guy in my sights.’

‘You should come
along to Navi’s
kick-boxing
this evening, Uncle Koeks.
Then you’ll be able to handle any guy with a spoke.’

‘Mavis is right,
Koeks,’ said Pillay. ‘If a guy pulls his bicycle spoke on you it’s not likely
that you’ll have time to say
excuse me
for a minute, I just want to fetch my hunting rifle and I’ll be back
. Why
don’t you come along to the class this evening? Mavis is coming. Six-thirty.
It’ll be fun. Just for an hour. We’ll get Mavis to demonstrate and kick your
shins.’

‘No
thanks, ladies.
The women in this unit are too tough for us. You go and enjoy yourselves.
Me and Dipps,
we’re gentlemen. Dipps is coming along for a
bite to eat at our place tonight. We’ll think of you two when we have our boerewors
and pap and beer.’

‘OK guys,’ said
Pillay. ‘Have fun, grow fat and become weak and feeble. Come on, Mavis. Let’s
go and have fun, grow thin and become strong and sexy.’

00.25.

Nadine Salm and
Pauline Soames finished a late dinner and worked together for a while before
going to bed shortly after midnight. Pauline was worried. Nadine had been
behaving in a distracted manner. Over dinner her occasional laughter at some
witticism from her companion had sounded forced and unnatural. It was far
removed from the normally infectious belly laugh and high-pitched giggle that
Pauline had become accustomed to.

As they prepared
for bed there were pockets of silence, with both of them deep in thought.
Pauline’s thoughts were all about Nadine’s distraction. Nadine’s thoughts were
eclectic. They roved across different cases, different time frames, and
different people. Every now and then the image of the young Khuzwayo girl
loomed large, and Nadine would force the thought away by consciously focusing
on something else. Eventually they got into bed, and Nadine accepted the
whisky-laden hot toddy that Pauline insisted she should drink in order to get a
good night’s sleep.

They read largely
in silence until Nadine began to doze. Pauline continued reading, watching her
from time to time. Eventually she turned on her side, away from her partner.
She angled the light slightly to take it off Nadine’s face and to favour her
side of the bed, and continued reading. Nadine turned with her into their
favourite
spoons
position. Her
breathing settled into a steady rhythm and the whisky started having some
impact.

Nadine’s thoughts
meandered to bring into focus the dreadful drowning she had had to deal with
two weeks previously. A young woman in her early twenties, found at Brighton
Beach many hours after it was reported that she had gone swimming, alone, in
the rain. Nadine’s careful work on the corpse had thrown up some anomalies.
Within twenty-four hours the boyfriend had been arrested and had confessed to
the murder. As she thought back on the young woman’s body, bloated and lifeless,
she started clenching her jaws. She consciously fought against it. Dentist’s
instructions, she had told Pauline.
Stop
grinding your teeth. Wear this plastic bite plate.
She never did.

Nadine’s thoughts
drifted from Brighton Beach to Umbilo, the scene of last month’s brutal killing
of an old woman. She had been beaten to death with an iron bar. The perpetrator
escaped with nothing more than a cell-phone and less than a hundred rands in
cash. The headlines ran for three days.
Brutal
thugs slaughter eighty-year old woman.
Crime out of control.
Citizens
no longer safe in their own homes
. The
story faded when Nadine and Pauline, working all weekend, finally connected the
forensics to the grandson. The new headline
Man
slays own grandmother
lasted no more than one day.

‘You’re grinding
your teeth again,’ said Pauline, her back still turned.

‘Hmmm?’

‘Your teeth.’

‘Sorry.’

She snuggled down
further into the warmth of Pauline’s back and pushed the murdering grandson
from her thoughts. But she soon found herself back thinking about Brighton
Beach, so she consciously forced her thoughts back to her laboratory.

The images she saw there
were all pinned to the notice board in her office. Photographs. Wounds.
Charts recording Blood Spatter Analysis.
Notes
on Gunshot Residue.
A piece of bone from a human body.
From the left scapula of a young teenage girl.
She
imagined herself sitting at her desk. She found herself staring out of the
window in her office. Someone was crying outside in the street.
A young man.
She stared at the pile of cases stacked on top
of one another at the far left-hand corner of her desk. She watched as the pile
started tipping. She marvelled as she watched them, one at a time, cascade to
the floor. The crying in the street got louder. Now there were two young men,
both crying.
Then a woman wailing in the distance.
A mother, running toward the two young men, trying to comfort them.
A police siren.
Then suddenly the door burst open and
there were the two young men, their mother right behind them. All three of them
charged over to Nadine. It was the Khuzwayo boys. They were bleeding. Their
mother was trying to stop the bleeding. She had a towel in her hand. She
screamed at Nadine to come and help her stop the bleeding. Nadine couldn’t
move. The police siren was getting louder.

Nadine sat up,
panting. Where was the siren? Where was Pauline? Why had the siren been cut
off?

Her heart was
pounding. She was breathless. She realised immediately that it wasn’t a siren.
Pauline had taken the call on her iPhone and had moved rapidly through to the
bathroom in an effort to avoid disturbing her. Now she returned.

‘Can you believe
it? Stupid idiot! Wrong number, at this time of… Nadine? What’s wrong?’

Nadine was staring
into nothingness. She was panting as if she’d run a hundred metres. Then she
started wailing: a deeply disturbing, frightening sound. It seemed to emanate
from deep down in her torso. Pauline was terrified. The sound was that of a
wounded animal. It wasn’t Nadine’s voice. It was an anguished howl that seemed
to reach upward and outward, aimed at nothing in particular. Aimed at the void
that Nadine felt was enveloping her on all sides. Pauline had been ten years
old when she first saw a film about exorcism. It had shaken and disturbed her,
and she had had nightmares about it for some time. The horror she now
experienced as she watched her beloved Nadine was equivalent to what the
ten-year old had experienced.

The two women froze
as they stood watching each other, one trembling wildly in traumatic shock and wailing
out aloud, and the other struck rigid, silent, in helpless immobility.

01.15.

The Ryders were
shocked out of a deep sleep by the sound of Jeremy’s iPhone. Both of them sat
up instantly as he snatched the instrument.

‘Hullo? Ryder.
Who’s that?’

‘Jeremy? I’m sorry.
I didn’t want to… it’s Pauline Soames.’

‘Pauline?
What’s wrong, Pauline.
What’s happened?’

‘I’m so sorry to
call so late…’

‘It’s not a
problem, Pauline. Tell me. Is it Nadine? What’s happened?’

Fiona, shocked at
what he had just said, leaned in to eavesdrop on the conversation. Ryder opened
the face of the iPhone to enable her to hear, and they were both instantly
distressed at what Pauline said next, through a flood of tears.

‘Nadine’s behaving…
I don’t know what to do, Jeremy. I didn’t know who else to call… I think she’s
having a breakdown. She’s been strange all night. She’s incoherent. She’s
talking about the Khuzwayo girl. I can’t…’

‘I’m on my way,
Pauline. Where are you? I don’t know where the two of you…’

‘We’re on the
Berea, Jeremy. Just past the Musgrave Centre…’

She blurted out the
address, barely coherent, and Ryder told her he would be there in ten minutes.
He hung up and both he and Fiona tore around the room getting him ready. She
pulled out clothes for him to wear while he quickly rushed through to splash
water on his hair and face. Within minutes he was dashing downstairs, tucking
in his shirt as he went, with Fiona calling out after him.

‘Call me as soon as
you can. If she needs to get to a hospital, I’ll set it all up…’

‘Don’t do anything
till I call. It sounds as if she’s hit a wall.
Too much of
the stuff she has to do every day of her life.
Looks like the Khuzwayo
murders were a bridge too far. I thought she was… I’ll call. Don’t do anything
till you hear from me.’

He was gone. Fiona
heard the Camry roar out of the driveway and up the road. She paused for a
moment. Then she decided to ignore his advice and call the hospital.

*

Pauline opened the
door and Ryder followed her down the passage to the bedroom. She had recovered
sufficiently to tell him that Nadine had woken her up in a flood of tears,
speaking incoherently about the Khuzwayo girl. As they entered the bedroom he
saw instantly that Nadine Salm’s legendary cool and calm control had completely
evaporated.

She wailed in a
high-pitched voice as she saw Ryder and collapsed into his arms. Her voice sounded
so tortured that Ryder thought she was straining her vocal chords to breaking
point. He held her tightly and let her do what she needed to do. Meanwhile Pauline
was on the phone. Fiona had called just as Ryder entered the bedroom and within
a minute she was giving Pauline clear and precise advice. She had called the
hospital, negotiated her way past the first two sleepy officials, and very
quickly found herself in contact with the right person.

Ryder, in trying to
comfort Nadine, immediately encountered all the signs he had once heard someone
talking about over some dinner, but to which he had paid scant attention at the
time: clammy hands, irregular heartbeat, trembling, dizziness, exhaustion,
tensed muscles, remote, inconsolable. Not the person he knew. Nadine seemed to
be a textbook case of those symptoms, every one of them. For the first time in
a long time Ryder felt completely helpless, unable to decide what to do.

Pauline came to his
rescue, and with her words he immediately thought how idiotic he had been to
tell his wife to do nothing till he called. Fiona was the one that should be
giving the lead in this, not him.
No-one
was more
decisive than her in situations like this.

‘Fiona has been in
touch with the hospital, Jeremy. She’s arranged for an ambulance. She says
they’re on their way.’

Ryder relaxed
slightly, still holding Nadine in his arms as she began to babble.

‘I haven’t watered
the plants, Jeremy. The plants are dry. I have to get the plants. But the
watering can has a hole. The water spews out of it all the time. I need to… I
need to find something else. I can’t hold back the blood. It keeps on leaking.
It leaks everywhere. I’ve tried so hard. So hard…’

The wailing started
up again. Both Ryder and Pauline tried to soothe her. Pauline was also in
tears. She tried her best, but Nadine buried her face into Ryder’s chest and
clawed at his shoulders as she wailed.

Ryder needed Fiona.
He couldn’t handle this without her.

08.05.

Thabethe and his
two companions woke up for once on proper mattresses. After spending the
previous two nights in the bush on different beaches on the north coast, last
night they had had a stroke of good fortune. They struck a deal with two men
who were short on cash but desperate for
whoonga
.
The consequence was a significantly reduced rate for the drugs they had given
the two men, and a night’s accommodation in return, in a flat in Victor Lane, Greyville,
right next to the racecourse.

The two men had smoked
the drug voraciously, and then vomited extensively during the night. The signs
of their accompanying diarrhoea were evident in the bathroom. They were now unconscious,
and their three guests roamed freely through their apartment.

Mgwazeni very soon
filled in the gap in income as a consequence of the lower price paid for the
drugs: he helped himself to an expensive leather jacket, probably stolen but
nevertheless now belonging to him, he told his companions. Wakashe changed his own
battered tennis shoes for a good pair of almost-new lace-up black leather shoes,
removed from the feet of one of the comatose hosts. Mgwazeni helped him tie the
laces
and put on a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt to
disguise the plaster casts
.
Thabethe searched a chest of drawers and took out a brand new pay-as-you-go
Apple iPhone 5s still in its box along with a conveniently placed contract and
simcard. All ready and waiting for a new owner, he said with a snigger to his
companions. He set up the instrument, connected the power for some rapid
charging, and the three friends ransacked the kitchen for a better breakfast
than they had enjoyed for some time.

An hour later, with
their hosts still fast asleep, the three men left the apartment and made their
way on foot down to the centre of Durban, where at eleven a.m. Thabethe was to
meet a contact who was a go-between for a new supply of
nyaope
. As they walked, Thabethe made a few calls on his new phone.

08.35.

Piet Cronje took a
call from Fiona Ryder. She told him she was about to leave the hospital to take
Pauline home. Pauline had agreed that the team should know what had happened to
Nadine. Better to have the facts out there rather than start rumours.

‘Pauline asked if I
would make the calls, Piet. Jeremy was with us until about five-thirty but then
one of us had to go and sort out the children and the dog, so we agreed I would
stay with Nadine and Pauline at the hospital until we knew what was happening.
Has Jeremy been in yet?’

‘Yes, Fiona, he
came in normal time, mentioned it to me very briefly, but then had to leave
quickly to get to the meeting at Durban North.’

‘Yes, he told me
about that appointment. If he calls you before he calls me, please tell him
Nadine has been admitted and all the tests are complete, there’s further
observation necessary but the doctors are happy so far, and Pauline is fine.’