Present Darkness (66 page)

“You told that constable at the crime scene that ‘Blood is blood. It looks, smells and stains the same no matter who’s doing the bleeding.’ Let’s put that theory to the test, Cooper. I will work on the kaffir and Leonard will work on you. We’ll see who bleeds the most before answering my questions. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

“Did you learn that in your bible?” Emmanuel said.

The Lieutenant snapped his fingers and called Leonard over like he was a drinks waiter at a fancy restaurant and he, Mason, in need of a refill. The smaller man, Crow, raised the lantern to shed a light on the experiment. Mason tucked Cassie’s statement into his breast pocket.

“You reap what you sow.” Leonard pushed close to Emmanuel’s face so their noses almost touched. Until the cuts and bruises faded, Leonard belonged to a new race group of “purple and blue” people. “I’m going to repay you for last night with interest, my friend. See how you like pissing blood.”

The fight at Fatty’s could have been five minutes ago or a year for all that Emmanuel remembered of the specific details. The evidence suggested that he’d beat Leonard with a scientific thoroughness. What fleeting memories remained were the rage that burned through him like a fever and the bright blue eye that showed through a hole in the stocking mask. There was something in the colour, a familiarity he couldn’t place at the time.

Mason stepped back and drove a fist into Shabalala’s shoulder. Leonard did the same to Emmanuel, putting weight into the punch, stepping into it like a professional boxer.

“Why are you on my farm?” Mason asked, only slightly winded from connecting with Shabalala’s body.

Emmanuel looked directly into a pair of eyes a lighter shade of blue than Leonard’s and saw the near identical shape of brow and jawline shared by the two men. He said to Mason, “We came to talk to your son about the break-in at the Brewers’ house, the manslaughter of Mr Brewer and the theft of a Mercedes Benz Cabriolet from the crime scene.”

“Bullshit,” Leonard said. “Nobody saw us. You’ve got no proof we were there.”

“I do now.”

Mason blanched the colour of sea foam and grit his teeth. “You and your kaffir friend won’t live to see the dawn let alone the inside of a police station.”

“Killing two detectives is a sure way for you and Lenny to end up sharing a cell and pissing in the same bucket. That’s until the hanging. A father and son execution will make
The News of the World
.”

Emmanuel took a hit to the stomach but felt it was worth the pain. He’d opened the door to Mason’s worst nightmare; two graves side by side, both bereft of flowers.

“What’s the alternative, Cooper? That I give up my son to save a black boy from the slums?” Mason turned, fixed Leonard with a hard stare. “My boy’s a killer, I know. But you’ve got to understand that everything he did was for my benefit. My prayers for his salvation have gone unanswered but my boy will be all that remains of me when I’m gone. No deals. Accept that you and your kaffir friend are dead.”

“This place is called Lion’s Kill yet there are no lions,” Shabalala said out of the blue. “Very little buck also.”

“What?” Mason was flummoxed.

“The house is filled with dead animals but the farm is empty of live ones,” Shabalala said. “What is there to hunt in this dead place?”

“Besides detectives, you mean?” Emmanuel said.

Shabalala laughed, drawing on the diamond hard reserves of a black man who’d seen through the pale skin of the “superior race” to their weak and cowardly hearts. Sound worked its way from Emmanuel’s stomach, up to his windpipe and out through his mouth in a chuckle.

“A hunting reserve with no animals to hunt. That is funny.”

“They killed all the animals,” Shabalala said.

“I’m going to let my boy work on you one at a time.” Mason mouth held a smile but his eyes filled with spite. “There’ll be no laughing then. I guarantee it.”

“I believe you,” Emmanuel said. Leonard tortured women for sport.

A fleck of gravel hit the window, soft enough that it might have been blown by the wind. Crow jumped. Lenny put a hand into his jacket pocket and gripped something there. A knife, Emmanuel thought; the same one that had dispatched Vickers, the Afrikaner railway man, to the great train yard in the sky.

“It’s the whore,” Crow blurted. “I told you she’d come back.”

“Shut it.” Leonard broke a sweat and wiped a hand across his forehead. “It’s the wind, you idiot.”

Mason stood at ease; shoulders loose, arms hanging by his side. A face peering through the window would see a calm man, a man in total control of his emotions. You’d have to move closer, pay attention to the deepening lines at the side of his mouth and the narrowing of his eyes to recognise the rage building under the impassive expression. Emmanuel had experience. He could read the signs. Mason’s fuse was burning fast.

“Crow, cover our visitors while I talk to my son,” Mason said in a gentle voice that was worse than shouting.

“Yes, sir.” Crow put the lantern onto the map unfurled on the table and fumbled a snub-nosed revolver from his jacket pocket. He held it in unsteady hands.

Mason placed his palm on the crown of Leonard’s head; a loving touch, but all wrong in the details. His fingers tightened. He jerked Leonard back by the roots of the hair and slammed him to the floor. Emmanuel winced at the sound. He remembered Davida being dragged across Fatty’s club with Leonard’s fingers twisted through her hair. Lenny had learned the technique from the master.

Mason worked two punches into Leonard’s side; finding the kidneys. Emmanuel checked the exit to the corridor, calculated the distance. Shabalala’s body coiled tight, ready to make a run. Crow’s hand shook. Mason kept a firm hold on the Browning.

At this range either man could hit a vital organ or nick an intestine. Emmanuel and Shabalala exchanged a look. Too dangerous, they decided, but the odds of living were better than ten minutes ago. Something was changing.

“You disobeyed my instructions,” Mason said to Leonard who lay dazed on the floor. “How long did you keep her after I gave the order?”

“A day.”

“How long was it really, Crow?”

Crow rolled over without resistance. “Two days, sir. I told Lenny what you said but he wanted to keep the girl for a bit longer.”

Mason patted Leonard’s cheek and found a bruise. “You disobeyed me, boy. Under normal circumstances I’d turn you black and blue but Sergeant Cooper got to you first.” He leaned closer. “Have you got any idea where she is now?”

“I … I don’t know.” Leonard spoke through clenched teeth. “She ran off. It’s summer. There’s no water for miles. I figured she’d make her own grave.”

Mason looked up and caught Emmanuel in a predatory gaze. “You found the whore,” he said. “You and the black.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, Pa.” Lenny flipped and found a foetal position. “I’m sorry I disobeyed you.”

“Shh … quiet now. I need to think.” Mason got a chair from the table and placed it directly in front of Emmanuel. He sat with his arms resting across the top rail, the Browning hanging loose in his right hand. “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Lenny’s friend.”

“Don’t know.”

“Bullshit. She’s at Clearwater. I’ll stake my life on it.”

“You mean you’ll stake Leonard’s life on it,” Emmanuel said. “After the Pretoria police dig up that orchard he’s the one who’s going to swing. And you’ll swing with him, Crow.”

Crow’s hand shook, sent the gun barrel jigging right to left. “I’m clean. Getting those girls was Lenny’s idea. He kept them to himself.”

So Alice was right. More than one girl had occupied the cell before her.

“Shut it,” Mason said. “Cooper is lying but not well enough to fool me. Ten years working undercover, I can sniff out a liar blindfolded.”

“Is that why you read over my files … to catch me out in a lie? And how many times did that happen, Lieutenant? Not once, I’m guessing. I’m from Sophiatown, I was born lying to men like you.”

A flicker of emotion crossed Mason’s face. Fear, followed by the determination to export that fear to others.

“Clever will get you just so far, Cooper. You are in my house now. It’s not like any place you’ve been before.” He nudged the tip of his shoe into Leonard’s ribs. “Get a chair and sit next to me, Lenny.” He waited for his son to take a seat directly opposite Shabalala. “Where did you first encounter these two men?”

“By the river fence. They ran down to the bank and we chased them.”

Mason nodded. “They moved from the mountains where the torch lights were shining, down to the river and then back in the direction of the farmhouse.”

“I never thought of it that way but, ja, that’s what they did.”

Emmanuel caught the moment the geography clicked in Mason’s head and could think of no way to undo it. Shabalala brushed dirt from his trousers, pretending a calm that neither of them felt.

“You came on foot from Clearwater,” Mason said with undisguised pleasure. “Somebody that side saw the whore and you came to the rescue. You risked your skin and the Brewer girl’s statement for a tramp that nobody will miss, not even her clients. What kind of a fool does that?”

Emmanuel shrugged off the question.

Mason rubbed the stubble on his chin. “In all the rush I forgot to make the proper introductions. This is Leonard Hammond. My son. His mother and I never married so he kept her name. He gets his looks from her and his height from me. From both of us he inherited some very bad habits. Tell Sergeant Cooper and this kaffir the ways that you have erred.”

Lenny hesitated and received a fatherly nod from Mason. “I drink, I steal, I take the Lord’s name in vain, I lie, I fight, I bare false witness, I … I …”

“Come. Don’t be shy. Tell Cooper the worst of your habits … the one that gives you the most pleasure.”

A second hesitation on Lenny’s end prompted a second nod of approval from Mason. Emmanuel wondered where this conversation was leading.

“I take women off the street and teach them the error of their ways.”

“All kinds of women?”

“No. Just the bad ones.”

Mason turned to Emmanuel while he talked. “Tell me about the woman Cooper danced with at the rail yards. Was she one of the good ones?”

Emmanuel tried to keep a neutral expression and knew he’d failed when Mason smiled.

“A mix of both,” Leonard said. “She danced like one of the cheap ones but up close she smelled of roses and talked like a girl who does music lessons. I wanted to bring her home.”

“Of course you did,” Mason said. “You found a diamond in the rubble and wanted to keep it. Unfortunately that gem already belonged to Cooper. He thrashed the white off your skin when you laid hands on her.”

“If he hadn’t surprised me I would have had him.”

“No, that would not have happened. Do you want to know why?” Mason continued before Leonard replied. “A man will fight, give everything he has, to protect what he loves. Is that not so, Cooper?”

Emmanuel shrugged stiff shoulders and heard the breath sucking in and out of his lungs. He dared not talk for fear that he’d beg Mason to leave Davida out of their business, to forget that she ever existed. Or worse still, that he’d threaten acts of violence he was in no position to dish out. Either way he’d sound weak.

Mason’s smile widened. “Yes, I thought it was something like that. You’d kill for that girl … almost did, in fact. And I know where she is. Figured it out just now.”

Emmanuel said nothing.

“
Ja
, really. See, I did my homework. I asked around about your private life and got back zero. What I do know is that you’re not the type to fuck and run, not least with a woman like that one. You’d take the night and then steal the morning in bed with your coloured bit.”

“Interesting theory,” Emmanuel said.

Mason laughed, discovering a sense of humour. “Oh, I’m on the money. I see the truth in your eyes. There’s no hiding it, Cooper. Your woman is in that Houghton house … probably waiting for you right now with the sheets turned down.”

Emmanuel turned to Shabalala, seeking a guideline. He could not control his expression. He’d lost the ability to hide the fear and rage churning inside. His brain had taken the long hike back to Sophiatown days when his father, vengeful and self-pitying drunk that he was, smashed the chairs and plates that he’d neglected to break the week before.

Shabalala turned, gave him a calm face and deliberately looked to the window. Emmanuel did the same. Moon-shadows streaked across the dusty glass. Beyond the glass, black sky and stars.

“There’s something out there,” Crow said. “We can’t hear it but the kaffir can.”

“Rubbish,” Mason said. “Cooper and his friend came here alone. Heroes don’t need back-up. Isn’t that so, Sergeant?”

A second piece of gravel hit the window, too loud to be windblown, too deliberate to be ignored. Crow swivelled and took aim at the glass. Leonard pulled a knife from his pocket and flicked the blade; both of them skittish as alley cats.

“Go out there, Crow,” Mason said. “Check the house perimeter and report back.”