Trackers (76 page)
Authors: Deon Meyer
It was going to be a long night.
The first place they looked was on
the farm in Philippi. They woke up the farmer, drove in convoy to the spot
where October showed them to dig.
Past two in the morning, in the
lights of the SAPS patrol cars and the Forensics minibus, spooky shadows of
police dogs barking, wagging their tails, sniffing and searching, the spades of
the constables rising and falling. The houses of Westridge and Woodlands were
only two kilometres away, Mitchells Plain was asleep. A dairy cow mooed in the
distance.
The cry came at seven minutes past
three. Everyone put down their tools, and gathered at the spot. Torches and
searchlights, while two men uncovered the bundle in the sand. A corpse, wrapped
in what was once a black bedspread with a faded orange floral pattern.
There was enough of the remains for
Joubert to look at the face with the bullet hole between the eyes and say,
'That's him. That's Danie Flint.'
Underneath the cocoon, a firearm.
Johnny October had it carefully stowed in a plastic evidence bag.
Joubert knew he should phone Tanya
Flint. She had the right to know. But he allowed her a few more hours of sleep
before turning her life upside down one more time.
The search near Atlantis only began
at a quarter past five, as the eastern horizon changed colour and the
south-easter picked up, a bleak wind gusting small plumes of sand off the
shovels.
'The gate' in KD Snyders'
minimalistic description was the main gate of the South African National
Defence Force's Good Hope shooting range, permanently wide open, the only
deterrent yellow warning signs with
Ongemagtige toegang verbode, No
unauthorised entry.
And just inside the gate, on the
left, the place where marksmen at 900 metres could fire at targets far to the
right. It was a platform of concrete blocks, sand and gravel as high as
Joubert's head. It stretched for easily twenty paces, and behind it, the
'corner' in KD's description, where two boundary fences and the platform made a
triangle. A hundred and fifty square metres of grass-covered sand. It was a good
place to bury a body, for when the SADF was not there, one person could easily
keep an eye on the single access road, while two more prepared the soft sand
out of sight behind the high platform.
The uniforms from Atlantis and Table
View, under direction of Thick and Thin, the Laurel and Hardy duo of Forensics,
began to dig carefully at the northern boundary.
Six o'clock came and went without
success.
At half past six, Joubert could
postpone the phone call no longer.
He went and sat in his car to get out
of the wind, and phoned.
She answered quickly, as though she
had been up for ages.
'Tanya, it's not good news.'
The sound she made told him that,
despite everything, she had still hoped.
'I'm so sorry,' said Joubert, and he
knew it was inadequate.
'How did he die?'
'He was shot.'
There was silence over the phone.
Eventually she asked: 'Who did it?'
He played for time, said they didn't
know enough yet, but before the day was over they should have the full picture.
'I want to know,' she said.
At ten past six they found the first
body.
It was a shallow grave, in the middle
of the triangle, scarcely a metre below the fine sand.
Joubert knelt beside October and
Butshingi, watching the forensics team in the soft morning light carefully
scrape away the sand from the body with their hand-brooms and brushes. Others
were busy widening the hole, taking buckets of sand away to pour carefully in
a heap.
'A woman,' said October in surprise.
Recognised by the sandals on her feet, the shape of her body. The grey-white
sand clung to her. Forensics brushed it solemnly and carefully from her face.
The features were unrecognisable, thanks to three bullet wounds. Only the long,
black hair in a plait, undamaged.
'They didn't even cover her.'
A minute later a constable pulled the
yellow bag out of the sand. October, wearing rubber gloves, opened it, found a
woman's purse, and inside it, a driver's licence.
'Cornelia Johanna van Jaarsveld,'
October read out quietly.
The surprise was the second body. It
lay barely a metre from the woman, at the same depth, but with a black plastic
bag wound tightly around his upper body. Only when forensics had cut it away,
did October recognise him.
'Jinne,'
he said,
astounded. 'It's Tweetybird.'
Johnny October asked the SAPS Task Force
to arrest Terrence Richard Baadjies and his chauffeur, Mannas Vinck, at
Baadjies' house in Wynberg with a big show of force. And to bring them in in
separate vehicles.
In the Wynberg Police Station, at
nine minutes past eleven, they kept the two of them apart. An imperious Terror
Baadjies in one of the cells, where every now and then he shouted: 'I have the
right to an attorney, you fucking Nazi cunts,' and then grinned smugly.
They kept Vinck in the tea room, the
only place they could question him.
'I'm just the driver,' he kept
saying. He was short, fast-talking, punctuating his speech with animated hand
gestures. The face under the yellowish-white Panama hat was deeply lined.
Tattoos on the sinewy arms.
Butshingi and Joubert sat and listened.
quietly and politely, October sketched the situation. 'You're in trouble now,
Mannas, you're in a really deep hole.'
'I'm just the driver.'
'You're an accomplice, Mannas, to
three murders. We have a video that links you. You know, the one Danie Flint
was using to blackmail Terror? You're in it, large as life.'
'I don't know Flint.'
'You helped to bury him, Mannas, down
at Montagu's Gift. But that's not even your biggest problem. You helped to
murder Tweetybird. You won't last an hour in Pollsmoor. And that's where I'm
going to send you now.'
'I'm just the driver.' But the eyes
were flitting back and forth now.
'I'm taking you to Pollsmoor, and I'm
going to show the video to all the inmates, Mannas. In slow motion.'
'Jirre
.' The hands
were suddenly still.
'But we can help each other, Mannas.'
'It was a buy,' said Mannas Vinck.
'But the whole thing was a fuck-up from the start.'
He and Terror, KD Snyders and
Tweetybird de la Cruz had driven out, past Atlantis, about ten kilometres
beyond Mamre. It might have been the twenty-ninth of September, he couldn't
remember. Terror and Tweetybird had argued over the 'partners', but they had
deliberately never mentioned the partners' names, it was none of Vinck and KD's
business.
What partners, asked Johnny October.
He didn't know, there were partners
in the whole diamond deal, the Ravens were the middlemen, he was just the
driver, he didn't want to know everything.
And then?
Then they went to do the buy, ten
kilometres past Mamre, amongst the Port Jackson bushes. Buying
klippies
from a whitey
bitch with a fucking gun in her hand and some fucking attitude, talking to The
Bird like he was shit.
The words bubbled out of Vinck, a
slippery stream. He said Tweetybird had a bag with four million rand, the bitch
wanted to see it, holding the fucking notes up to the sun as though she would
know what counterfeit looked like. Then she showed the stones, a shit-house
full.
Then Terror hit her, right on the
mouth with his fist. He took the gun away from her and he shot her between the
fucking eyes and The Bird said what the fuck are you doing now and Terror
turned around and shot The Bird in the heart with the bitch's gun, three shots,
and he, Mannas, and KD Snyders stood there and they had no words, Terror had
just shot Tweetybird, the fucking Boss of the Ravens. But then Terror said,
don't look so fucking scared, load them in the fucking boot, what did you think
was going to happen when
he
was sitting
in Bolivia? Are we going to take orders from Moegamat Perkins? Is that what you
want, from that cunt who got The Bird into
this
shit in the
first place?
Then we loaded up and drove away, the
bitch's car is probably still there, if the fucking thing hasn't been stolen a
long time ago. And then the bus buggered into us, just past the shooting range.
Vinck said Terror first thought it
was the bus driver who was blackmailing them.
Then they found out who it was,
someone knew a
chlora
at ABC, Santasha Somebody, but when
KD Snyders confronted the driver with his brass knuckles, they saw, it wasn't
him, it was the fucking supervisor with the red Audi. Then Terror said they
must handle this thing very carefully because if it came out that they had shot
The Bird, it would be total war. And Mannas Vinck thought, what shit is this,
he
hadn't shot
anyone, but what could he do? Then Terror said, pay the supervisor, we don't
need the attention of a whitey murder. So Mannas had to take the plastic bag of
money and put it in the shit-house tank of the Atlantic Sports Pub in Table
View, like the whitey said.
But then it was a fuck-up when the
whitey phoned and said he wanted more.
Then Terror paid again, but he knew,
the whitey wasn't going to stop. So they tailed him, three weeks, and made
their plans. So somewhere late October, KD Snyders hijacked the whitey in his
red Audi at the stop street where Bramwell joined Railway Street in Woodstock.
They dragged him out and put him in Terror's Mercedes. Vinck drove the Audi to
Virgin Active in Table View himself. Then he wiped it clean and took four
fucking taxis to get back to Rosebank.
Then they shot the whitey with the bitch's gun and buried him
there beside the dune.
Mat Joubert sat in Tanya Flint's
home, at the dining-room table. Fatigue weighed him down. He wanted to shower,
eat, sleep, it was nearly three in the afternoon.
She came back from the kitchen with
the coffee mugs on a tray, her movements slow and mechanical, put it down in
front of him. Sat down opposite him, her hands on the table. Silent. There was
weariness in her eyes, far greater than his.
And loss.
108
cape town
. - SAPS detectives are still baffled
by the involvement of Cornelia Johanna van Jaarsveld (28), a professional
tracker from Nelspruit, with crime gangs from the Cape Flats and an alleged
illegal diamond transaction.
Van Jaarsveld's body was found last
week beside that of the murdered gang boss Willem 'Tweetybird' de la Cruz in a
shallow grave at the SADF shooting range near Atlantis.
Supt. Johnny October, leader of the investigation team,
admitted to
Die Burger
that 'we are still looking for a
great many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle'...
Die Burger,
19 February 2010
1 March
2010. Monday.
He hung his degree on the wall of his
new office in the Centre Point building in Milnerton, the MA in Police Science
that he had earned ten years earlier. He wondered if that wasn't bragging too
much.
Then he took a step back. Margaret
had made the place look really nice. An old, used red and blue Persian carpet,
the antique desk she had sniffed out in a shop in Plumstead. Along with the
stylish pair of mahogany and leather chairs for visitors.
On the desk was a laptop. Beside it
lay his writing pad, bought at CNA. An Oregon pine bookshelf against the wall
with his Police Science textbooks, and a photo of him, Margaret and the
children. And on the glass door, just: