The Hunter (29 page)

I can also assure you that I appreciate this matter is a sensitive one. I have no idea why Ms Munns would have sought to defraud anyone, but if we can meet soon I will do my best to ensure that the matter remains private and confidential and is not drawn to the attention of any law enforcement officers in Africa or the United Kingdom.

He looked at Peter Cliff. Sometimes he really hated this job.

23

S
ergeant Goodness Khumalo held her police issue hat between her knees to stop it blowing away as she sat in the uncovered back of the white police Land Rover
bakkie
.

Six other officers were sitting in the rear of the vehicle. They had all been dragooned off other duties in Bulawayo to provide extra security for a big party conference to be held in Victoria Falls in three days’ time. They would boost the local station’s numbers, setting up additional roadblocks on the way into town and searching the route of the president’s convoy, checking for bombs under bridges and culverts, and possible sniper positions.

Goodness was not happy about the duty. It would be boring and, besides that, she resented the police being used to provide a visible show of the party’s influence. She knew their presence in the tourist town was as much about political muscle flexing as it was security. In her heart she supported the opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change, not ZANU-PF, the old president’s party. She suspected that many of her colleagues, particularly the younger ones like her, shared her view that it was time for real political change in their country, but there was no way they could voice or demonstrate their allegiances. The police were seen as a tool of the ruling party, not as servants to the people. She tried where she could, quietly, to do the right thing; just last week she had driven past a known MDC political organiser who was wanted for ‘acts of subversion’. Goodness knew that if the man was taken into custody the hardline ZANU-PF guys at the station would beat the man to a pulp because he had dared to distribute pamphlets pointing out the government’s shortfalls. The man’s picture was on a wanted poster at the station and she had seen the flash of panic in his eyes as she had rounded the corner in a Mercedes. Her partner had not noticed the man. Goodness eyeballed the activist, but said nothing – she could see his relief and thanks in the slight nod of his head.

What she really wanted was a place on the next detectives’ course. To get there she had to toe the party line for a while longer, and keep her political opinions to herself. When she returned to Bulawayo she would take up the task she had begun, of reviewing the death certificates issued by the Cuban doctor over the past two years. It was an enormous job, but she had already found thirteen issued by Dr Elena Rodriguez; she wanted to check all of those out. Her supervisor knew how keen she was to get on the course, but when she told him of the lead she had been given on the fake deaths he reminded her that she was a traffic policewoman, not a detective. However, he had told her that if she wanted to pursue the case in her spare time he would not object. He could have told her to hand over all her information to the Bulawayo detectives, but he had given her this chance to prove herself. She had spent her last day off going through the records, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon.

The leaves on the mopane trees on either side of the road were red gold, dried to a crisp by the long dry winter. The summer rains, which promised renewal and new life, could not come fast enough. The movement of the
bakkie
produced a stiff breeze, but the sky was clear and the sun beat down on Goodness and her comrades. She could feel her skin drying to parchment. The truck slowed. One of the other officers sat up on the side wall of the
bakkie
’s load area to look ahead.

‘What is it?’ Goodness asked him.

‘
Maningi
police and onlookers; some sort of commotion.’

Goodness stood up in the back, bracing herself with her hands on the roof of the cab. As the officer had said there were indeed many people clustered in a vacant block of land by the whitewashed wall of the Sprayview Hotel, on the left-hand side of the road at the edge of the town of Victoria Falls. A uniformed officer flagged them down and exchanged greetings with the driver.

‘Can you spare some guys to help with crowd control?’ the officer on the ground asked.

‘We were on our way to see the member in charge,’ the sergeant driving said, ‘but I can give you three for now. I may need to come back for them.’

‘Sure. Thanks,’ said the other officer, looking back at the milling crowd.

‘Khumalo, Moyo, Shumba, get out and help these guys.’

Goodness didn’t mind leaving the truck. She was curious about what had caused all the fuss in the vacant lot, and her bottom was sore from sitting on the bare metal of the Land Rover’s floor for the past four hours.

She climbed down from the vehicle, put her cap on and adjusted it tidily. As the
bakkie
drove off, heading for the main police station, she asked the sergeant who had stopped them what was going on.

‘A street vendor found a body this morning.’

‘Serious? Male or female?’ she asked.

‘What does it matter to you? Come, help me keep these vultures away from her. There must be a hundred people already gathered.’

Goodness and the other officers followed the sergeant, pressing their way through the crowd. ‘Move aside, move aside,’ she said, ‘step back and let the police do their work.’

Men, women and children were all jostling to see what was going on. The new officers joined the two uniforms on the scene, linked arms with them, and started forcing the crowd back. Goodness looked over her shoulder and saw a detective pull back a plastic sheet that had been placed over the body. She glimpsed the face of a coloured woman, young, pretty.

The detective looked across at the crowd and caught Goodness’s eye. He smiled and winked at her. ‘Good to see we’ve got some reinforcements.’

‘Happy to help, sir,’ she said. He was a handsome man and she knew a smile of her own could occasionally help her along in the male-dominated world she worked in. ‘What happened to her?’

‘Keep those people back,’ the detective said to her, businesslike now.

‘Yes, sir.’ Goodness returned her focus to the crowd. A young man in front of her, two back, had his mobile phone raised high; he was trying to take a picture of the body. ‘Hey, you can’t do that.’

The phone’s camera shutter noise sounded and the flash went off. ‘I just did.’

Goodness thrust herself into the melee and grabbed the young man’s hand. He tried to pull himself away from her, so she twisted his arm behind his back, as she’d been taught some years earlier in unarmed combat training. He winced and yelped in pain.

‘Hey, don’t hurt him,’ another man said.

Goodness found herself mobbed by people. Someone shoved her in her back. Her male counterparts were trying to get to her. ‘Get off me!’ she yelled, but she held on to the man with the phone, even as she was pushed to her knees.

‘You heard the sergeant, get off her!’ The handsome detective had weighed into the crowd now and was punching and shoving people out of the way. Goodness got to her feet.

‘Sorry, sir, thank you,’ she said, panting, as the onlookers backed away and the police regained control.

The detective grabbed the yelping man’s other hand. ‘You did well to hang on to this one.’ He snatched the phone from the man and put it in his pocket. ‘You, get away from my crime scene. You can come by the station later for your phone once I’ve deleted the pictures and recorded all the numbers in your memory. If I find out you’re a subversive, you’ll be in trouble.’

The young man scurried away, nursing his sore wrist, as soon as Goodness freed him. The others in the crowd who had seen the exchange were backing away even further.

‘Thanks again,’ Goodness said.

‘Always happy to help a beautiful lady,’ the detective said, ‘and you did well to keep hold of him even when the crowd was on you.’

Goodness didn’t like his sleazy tone, but she played along. ‘Thank you, sir. We don’t want the anti-government media getting hold of pictures of a murder victim in Victoria Falls when the president is due to visit.’

‘Exactly. But as much as I’d love to chat to you, sister, I have an investigation to conduct.’

‘I’ve applied for the next detectives’ course. I know it’s against procedure, but do you think I might watch? I’d love to pick up some tips from an expert.’

The detective rubbed his jaw and looked across to his partner, who smiled and nodded, seeing the interaction between the two. ‘But tell her to keep those people away while we work,’ the other man said.

‘OK. I’m Isaac. My partner is Takeshaw.’

Goodness introduced herself, saying she was from Bulawayo. ‘What happened to her?’

Isaac knelt and pulled back more of the plastic sheet. He looked up at Goodness, perhaps thinking she might be shocked by the blood that saturated the woman’s skin and the cocktail dress that had been pushed high up her thighs. Goodness had worked too many traffic accidents to be shocked any more by death or gore. ‘Was she stabbed down there, between her legs? That’s a lot of blood, even for a brutal rape.’

‘Looks like it,’ Takeshaw said.

‘What kind of a monster does something like that?’ Goodness asked. Random, accidental death was part of her working life, but someone who hated this woman, or women in general, had taken this woman’s soul.

‘They say she was seen at The Kingdom last night with an American. Another
goffel
, if we are to believe the witness.’ Isaac nodded to a woman of a similar age to the dead person, who sat on a rock with a uniformed constable watching over her.

Goodness ignored the detective’s use of the slang term for a Zimbabwean person of mixed race. She herself never used racially derogative terms.

‘A coloured American man?’ Her heart started beating faster.

‘Perhaps the American president has come to our town to view the Falls?’ Isaac laughed at his own joke, but Goodness did not join in.

‘There can’t be many of those in Zimbabwe at the moment. What else does the woman know about him?’

Isaac regarded her with mild annoyance, but when she smiled at him and tucked a stray lock of hair under her hat, he gave a snort of indulgence. ‘If you
must
know, sergeant, the woman said he was dressed in safari clothes, not so much like a tourist, but maybe a guide.’

‘
Ah
, I think I might know who he is,’ Goodness said, unable to stifle the rush of excitement she felt. ‘Can I talk to her?’

‘Now you want to question my witness? You should go back to crowd control, Sergeant Khumalo,’ Isaac said. Takeshaw shook his head and knelt by the body, to continue his examination of it and the ground around her. ‘But you say you know an American?’

‘The crowd is dispersing,’ she said, waving to the thinning ranks. The additional officers and the commotion with the man who had tried to take the pictures with his phone had dampened the onlookers’ interest. Unauthorised public gatherings were illegal in Zimbabwe and no one wanted to provoke the police any further, particularly with an army of party bigwigs due to arrive any day. ‘I suppose I must get back to the station now and then go spend the rest of the day standing by a boring roadblock.’

‘That is your job, sister,’ Isaac said. However, he opened his police notebook and took out a pen. ‘Who do you think this American coloured man is?’

‘Like you said, I must go do my job, stopping cars and checking tourists’ driver’s licences.’

‘Don’t be coy with me. If you have information that can help me investigate a murder, then you know you must share it with me. To withhold evidence is a crime, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

Goodness knew he was right, but this was also her chance to take part in a proper investigation. ‘Let me talk to the witness, find out if it’s the same man I’m thinking of.’

‘No. Tell me what you know or I’ll have you charged,’ Isaac said.

‘The coroner is here, Isaac,’ Takeshaw said, standing and snapping off his rubber gloves. ‘Stop wasting time with this woman, we have work to do.’

Isaac looked to the seated woman and back to Goodness, still undecided. ‘Two minutes with the witness, and I’ll have dinner with you tonight,’ she said to Isaac. ‘You’re paying, though.’

Isaac put his hands on his hips and regarded her with a look of surprise. ‘My, you are the feisty one, aren’t you? How do you know I’m not married?’

‘No wedding ring, and you look like a player.’

Takeshaw couldn’t help but laugh from the sidelines. ‘Who’s playing who here?’

‘All right,’ Isaac said. ‘One minute. Now, I must go meet the coroner. Find me this American murderer and I’ll buy you dinner at the Victoria Falls Hotel.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Goodness said, lacing the title with honey. The Victoria Falls Hotel? She looked at his shoes; they looked new, like his watch. No one in the police force made enough money for such an extravagance as dinner at the hotel they called the grand old lady of the Falls. Isaac was probably crooked, like half the cops she served with, but that didn’t mean he would shirk his duty to catch a murderer.

Goodness hurried across to where the woman was sitting, still under the watchful eye of a uniformed officer with an FN rifle. The man looked her up and down, disdain clear in his bloodshot eyes. ‘The detectives want me to talk to this woman. Give us some privacy, please.’

The officer looked across to Isaac, who nodded and waved him away.

‘My name is Sergeant Goodness Khumalo. I am a police officer.’

‘I can see that by your dress sense.’

The woman was young, pretty, but too thin for Goodness’s liking. Her wrists looked like they might snap if you shook her hand too hard. She smelled of cigarette smoke, last night’s booze, and something else from her previous evening’s revelry. Goodness knew a prostitute when she saw one. She was not judgemental though, and ignored the woman’s jibe. ‘Was the deceased woman a friend of yours?’

The thin woman shrugged. ‘We worked together.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Hotels, mostly.’

‘Let me guess, you’re in the . . .
hospitality
business?’

‘Something like that. Have you got a cigarette?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Goodness said. ‘It’s bad for you.’

The woman gave a small laugh that turned into a hacking cough. ‘Life is bad for you.’ She looked to where the coroner’s men were lifting the body and carrying it, wrapped in a cheap plastic tarpaulin, to a van. ‘Just ask Melanie.’