Death Dealing (19 page)

‘Sorry,
Dipps.
Nobody
gets the bone in our house except Sugar-Bear. Fiona would never forgive me if I
snuck off and gave it to you. The dog will be replacing me in my bed soon. She
says she understands him better than she understands me.’

They filed out of
the office, each on their way to their next chores, amidst various comments
about Ryder’s Border
Collie
. Ryder realised that each
one of them had enjoyed some experience of the talents of Sugar-Bear. It seemed
that the dog’s reputation at Durban Central was much the same as Ryder’s.

He walked into the
car park and experienced a blistering heat. The tarmac seemed to shimmer from
the quickly evaporating moisture. Someone had tried to cool the place with a
hosepipe, but the surface turned bone-dry minutes after the spray hit the
surface. He glanced up at the sky. Not a cloud. Where was all that moisture
going? Surely, he thought, it’ll be collecting somewhere up there, and then
come cascading down in an attempt to cleanse the earth of the filth that lurked
in every dark corner.

He paused for a few
minutes in the car, waiting for the air-conditioning to take effect. His mind
wandered. He thought about Nadine Salm and Hlengiwe Khuzwayo. He wondered to
what extent he was helping to cleanse the world of the filth that lurked in
dark corners. Had he succeeded in achieving even half of what Kwanele Khuzwayo
had achieved in his lone action?

Ryder eased back
into the now much cooler leather and drove away.

20.30.

Mavis Tshabalala was
nervous about the choice she had made. She knew she was stepping way outside
the bounds of responsible behaviour. Captain Nyawula would be dismayed if he
found out.
Navi, also, if she were to find out about her real
intentions for the night.
Sergeant Cronje, too, would be very
disappointed. He always displayed such care for her wellbeing, and supported
her in everything. Now here she was breaking every rule in the book and placing
herself in danger.

She had taken it
upon herself to do her own investigations and find the man about whom she had
become so obsessed in the past few months. Surely, she thought, Wakashe would
sooner or later again visit his old haunts? She knew Thursday nights were
especially popular, so she asked her friend Nonhlanhla if she could stay
overnight with her in KwaMashu Section K. She explained that she wanted to do
some more of the work she had done some weeks ago with the support of
Nonhlanhla’s brother, at the Mabaleng Tavern.

‘
Hau
, Mavis! You’re still looking for that
man? Be careful,
wena
!’ said
Nonhlanhla on the telephone.

She tried to
dissuade Mavis. For one thing, she said, neither she nor her brother Ndileko was
available to accompany her because they were both busy. They each had separate
arrangements for the evening. Mavis was welcome to stay the night, but for her
to go alone to the Tavern was not wise, she warned. They argued back and forth,
Mavis on the one hand saying she would be careful and she had to do this work,
and her friend on the other hand trying to prevail upon her. Eventually
Nonhlanhla asked her to hold the line for a minute while she spoke to her
brother. Mavis could hear Nonhlanhla and Ndileko talking in the background. The
discussion, in
isiNdebele
, sounded
animated. Eventually Nonhlanhla came back on the line. In a rich mix of Zulu
and Xhosa and English suffused with giggles and innuendo, she reported back to
Mavis.

‘My brother is full
of surprises. He was telling me this afternoon
no,
he
couldn’t go with me to our uncle’s family for dinner, because he was busy with
his friends. Now I ask him if he can go with Mavis Tshabalala to the Tavern and
he says straight away, no problem, it will be his pleasure. Maybe he is more
interested in you than you think, Mavis? Maybe after last time when you were
dressing up so sexy you got him thinking about you? He’s changing his plans
with his friends and he’ll go with you instead to Mabaleng Tavern. He says he’s
looking forward to hip-hopping with you.’

The two friends had
chuckled together and made the arrangements, and Mavis undertook to arrive in
time for them to chat before going out their separate ways for the evening. She
and Nonhlanhla now sat in the latter’s living room, waiting for Ndileko who was
still getting dressed.

‘My
brother.
That one, Mavis.
What have you done to him? I think this is
the third pair of trousers he’s put on. He spent the last half an hour brushing
his teeth. He’s changed his shirt maybe four times. You’ve cast a spell on him,
girl! I’ve never seen him so nervous.’

She could tell from
Mavis’s reaction that the electricity between her friend and her brother went
both ways. Nonhlanhla whispered to her friend as if the entire house had been
bugged.

‘I didn’t tell you.
After the last time the two of you went to Mabaleng’s he asked me many times,
trying to look casual, whether I had heard about you, what were you doing, were
you still with the police, did you have a boyfriend. All the time trying to
make it look as if he wasn’t interested, but was just asking, you know? It was
so funny. Shame. I felt sorry for him. My little brother.’

‘Not
so little, Nonnie.
How old is he?’

‘Only
twenty-one, Mavis.
You look after him tonight,
nè?
I
only have one brother.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll
be careful.’

‘I don’t like that
place. You know that, Mavis. Bad people go there.’

‘We’ll only be
looking. We won’t do anything stupid.’

Ndileko entered the
room and both women could see immediately that he was extremely nervous. They
tried to suppress the enjoyment each of them felt at the sight of the poor
young man trying but failing dismally to appear calm and cool and collected.
They did their best to appear matter-of-fact about this simple arrangement
among friends in which he had gallantly offered to act as an escort for the
night to the good friend of his sister. The nonchalance, however, had the
opposite effect as he thought that maybe he was of no interest at all to Mavis,
and he started manufacturing reasons for himself as to why he was so
insignificant in her eyes. Was it his clothes? His demeanour?
The fact that he had splashed too much cologne on his face?

The two women,
seeing this, then did all they could to help him recover. He then found himself
in a position where he had never received so many compliments on what he was
wearing, and how cool he looked. Eventually all three of them could sense that
all of this was going over the top, and he and Mavis left in a hurry, leaving
Nonhlanhla alone and full of mirth.

22.25.

The Ryders were hosting eight for
dinner. Elizabeth, a lecturer in Film and Television at the University of
Bristol, was the partner of Joyce, the research colleague in criminology
mentioned to Ryder by Professor Hutchinson in Oxford. Mongezi was a senior
partner in Fiona’s firm of architects, and his wife Ntombi was a chartered
accountant. Busisiwe was a junior in Fiona’s firm, and a talented young
architect in her mid-twenties. Her husband Hans was a lecturer in mathematics
at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Theresa was a management consultant and an
old school-friend of Fiona. She had emigrated from South Africa in her early
twenties. She had then renewed contact with Fiona when the Ryders had spent a
few years in the United Kingdom. Theresa’s husband Marcus was a writer for
radio in England. They lived in Bristol and during the Ryders’ sojourn in
England some years previously they had on occasion enjoyed a few social
evenings together.

Mongezi and Ntombi, along with
Busisiwe and Hans, had spent a bit of time over the main course talking about a
previous dinner party at the Ryders, during which they had all been confronted
by burglars but had come through the experience unscathed. They laughed as they
recalled the experience.
One of the
things you just have to do when you visit Durban,
said Hans,
is attend a dinner party at the Ryders so
that you can see both crime and policing in action
. Nevertheless, the
description of the incident unnerved Marcus and Theresa. This was their third
visit to South Africa in recent years, they said, and it felt to them as if
crime was becoming increasingly scary. This of course led to the normal
discussion about crime and about law and order, and from that subject they
moved almost seamlessly during dessert to the topics of corruption and cronyism
and politics, in the course of which Ryder escaped to the kitchen to prepare
the coffee and tea.

The eight guests now sat comfortably
with their host and hostess in the living room, nursing their drinks and
swapping anecdotes. With all of them sensing that the conversation toward the
end of dinner had started slipping into uncomfortable territory, they now
kicked off the living-room conversation with some safe and uncontroversial
discussion about the weather.

There was then a brief moment of
respite after the phatic language designed to re-establish convivial discourse.
For the moment all was peaceful, but inevitably, Ryder thought, as night must
follow day, his guests would drift toward more emphatic language. This would
surely revolve around the inevitable discussion of Marcus’s latest opinion on a
movie he had just seen or a book he had just read or a comment made by some
prominent public figure.

Ryder could already envisage
Marcus’s opening comment in such a scenario.
Have you read so-and-so? Absolutely brilliant! Forget about X. This is
the guy you need to read. Absolutely outstanding!
And in this instance
‘guy’ would always mean ‘man’, Ryder mused.

Or, if someone else were to initiate
the discussion, and ask those present whether they had read A or B or seen C or
D, then Marcus might respond differently.
It’s
absolutely appalling!
Absolute
drivel!
 
The initiator, perhaps
taken aback and feeling somehow wedded to the impulse that had prompted their question,
might then ask why he felt that way. Marcus would likely respond with no
specific further elaboration than
It’s
absolutely dreadful! Absolutely terrible!
He would frequently do this with
such passion that some of the guests might then be tempted to mitigate their
loyalty to the film or book about which they had intended to enthuse. In the
interests of maintaining polite discourse they might say, against their better
judgement,
Well, yes, I can see why you
might feel that way, although I do think, actually, that to some extent…

Ryder felt a little mischievous this
evening. Marcus had pontificated just a little too much over dinner, and Ryder
felt that as host he had been sufficiently polite until now in refraining from
comment. Despite warning glares from his wife, he believed he had earned the
right to some mischief.

The inevitable moment arrived.

‘Have you read anything by Z?’ asked
Marcus.

‘No, can’t say that I have,’ said
Elizabeth.

‘You haven’t?’ Marcus responded. ‘Oh
my God. You haven’t? Surely you’ve
heard
of him?’

‘No, actually.
Can’t say that I have. What’s he written?’

‘Good grief.
You can’t be serious. Haven’t you read him? He’s
absolutely brilliant.
Absolutely amazing.
Totally
wonderful! Absolutely outstanding.’

He went on to say that this author
and that author and the next author – all of them top of their respective
best-seller lists in the domain of crime fiction – were
absolutely nowhere
compared to the
towering talents of Z. He went further to suggest that Z was a
totally
original talent and that none of
the others could touch him.

Marcus on his favourite
hobby-horse
, thought Ryder. He liked the man, but he often
wished the guy could be less emphatic about his views. Perhaps he spent too
much time at his desk. He had once told Ryder that he was so busy writing radio
drama that he didn’t have time for socialising, or for reading, he had added.

Ryder was jolted back to the present
by Fiona’s suggestion that a little glass of Laphroaig for the guests might
provide a good way to end the evening. She had sensed that there was some
rising irritation in both Elizabeth and Joyce aimed at Marcus, and she thought
that a diversion was needed.

As Ryder prepared the glasses on a
tray, the conversation continued.

Elizabeth was clinging to the subject
and not letting go as easily as Marcus had thought she might.

‘Look, Marcus, I feel at a bit of a
disadvantage here. I haven’t read anything by Z, I admit, but when you say that
all those other writers we were discussing are not worth consideration, I have
to disagree, along with a few million other readers...’

‘Me too,’ said Busisiwe. ‘I’ve also
just read the thriller you were talking about, Elizabeth, and
..
.’

‘It’s
absolutely terrible
. He writes to the same formula all the time.
It’s
absolutely appalling
…’