Authors: Deon Meyer
‘Tweeeet,’ Cupido stretched the vowel to correct the pronunciation. ‘It’s social media, Pops. You broadcast yourself.’
‘What for?’
‘It’s the new way. You tell the world what you’re doing.’
‘But why?’
‘For the fun of it, Benny. To say: Check me out, I am here.’
‘That’s what Sloet did. With the photos.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was her way of saying: Check me out.’
‘But for who?’
‘For herself. That’s what the photographer said. It’s a woman thing.’
‘And you believe that shit?’ Cupido worked his phone again. ‘Let us see if Sloet had a Twitter account …’
‘Forensics report says Lithpel checked the computer.’
Reginald ‘Lithpel’ Davids was Forensics’ lisping computer whizz, small and frail, with the face of a boy, two missing front teeth and a big Afro hairstyle.
‘OK. Lithpel doesn’t miss much. Canny coloured, that bro’ … Nope. No account, not under her own name anyway. Big tits, no tweets … So what were you and the Giraffe and the Camel doing just now?’
The Hawks’ bush telegraph, lightning fast as usual. ‘Politics,’ said Griessel. ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘
Fokken
politics.’ Cupido picked up the photos again and stared at them. ‘What a waste. Majestic jugs …’
The Bonne Espérance estate was on the R310, just beyond the Helshoogte Pass. They drove through the white, gabled gate and the avenue of oaks to the visitor’s centre.
‘Tourist trap,’ said Cupido when they got out and he looked at the advertising signs. ‘Wine tasting, five-star dining, spa … Don’t they make enough money from the wine?’
Griessel went to ask reception where Egan Roch could be found. The young woman gave them directions: behind the cellar, in the cooper’s shop.
‘Another shop,’ said Cupido. ‘What do you sell there?’
She giggled. ‘Nothing. That’s where Egan and the guys make the barrels, sir.’
That shut Cupido up as they walked, past the gracious old homestead and the cellar, to the back, where crates were stacked beside tidy
rows of viticulture implements. A farm labourer had to direct them again, until they found the entrance, a nondescript wooden door.
Griessel pushed it open, smelled the smoke and the fire. It was a large space, with yellow lime-washed walls. It was hot inside. In one corner a big man stood with his back to them. He was working on a small vat. He was tap-tapping a metal hoop down over the pieces of wood, with smoke coiling through the opening of the barrel. His white T-shirt was wet with sweat.
‘Hello,’ said Cupido.
The man did not respond. Griessel noticed the earphones behind the thick black hair, the little wire down to an iPod on his belt. He went closer.
‘Benny,’ said Cupido and pointed at the wall.
Rows of tools hung there, odd hammers and axes, wood planes, files, and a series of long, thin metal staves. The points were very sharp.
Cupido tapped the broad shoulder. Roch looked around, smiled apologetically, put the adze down on a wooden workbench and took out the earphones. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Egan Roch?’
‘That’s right, excuse the dirty hand,’ he said, and held it out to Cupido, his voice deep, his smile full of self-confidence.
Griessel recognised him from the photos in Sloet’s album. Roch in real life looked even more like a man who should be on TV, his face strong and symmetrical. Powerful arms, big hands, he was a head taller than Cupido.
‘Captain Vaughn Cupido, Hawks. And this is Captain Benny Griessel.’
‘Oh … OK, pleased to meet you. Do you … I have a little office …’
‘No, this is fine,’ said Cupido. ‘Tell me, where did Tommy Nxesi interview you?’
‘Who?’
‘The investigating officer. The one who took your statement.’
‘I went to see him. In Green Point. He asked … Why?’
‘Just routine. So, you make barrels.’
‘Vats.’
‘How does a guy learn to do that?’
‘You do an apprenticeship. Overseas. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down. Coffee? Tea?’
‘No thanks. What do you learn when you make barrels?’
‘Phew. It’s a long list. You first have to learn to select the right wood. French oak, the best comes from the forests of Tronçais and Jupilles …’
‘No, I mean what sort of manual work. Woodwork? Metalwork?’
‘Oh, yes, of course, a bit of both, it’s very specialised …’
Griessel knew Cupido was also thinking of Prof Pagel’s pathology report, the ‘considerable force of the stabbing action’, the possibility of a home-made weapon. He knew his colleague would take over the interview, it was his way. But he was in too much of a hurry, his approach was too aggressive.
‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee,’ said Benny.
‘Great, I could do with a cup myself. Please come through.’ Roch gestured at an interior door.
The ‘little office’ was a work of art. The desk was raw oak, the same fine grain as the vats, the chairs were antique ball-and-claw, upholstered in red, the floor was grey cement, polished to a shine, with a single Persian carpet over it. Against the wall was a painting of a cooper’s workshop from a bygone era, against the other a huge oil painting of a vineyard landscape in a foreign country.
Roch made a phone call to order the coffee, and came and sat down with the detectives in one of the old chairs, stretching his legs out in front of him in a relaxed way.
‘I heard on the radio that you have taken over the case. It’s rough, the guy shooting …’
‘We have to interview everyone again,’ said Griessel quickly, before Cupido could get going again.
‘Of course …’
‘According to your statement you and Hanneke broke up a year before her death.’
‘It wasn’t a whole year. Eleven months. February last year.’
‘She ended the relationship?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Roch made a gesture with his hand that said: Who knows? ‘It was … You know how it is …’
‘How did you meet?’
‘At Moyo, the restaurant at Spier. One Sunday evening, December 2007.’
‘You remember well,’ Cupido said.
Roch smiled with nostalgia. ‘It was a night to remember. Hanneke was … There were five or six women at the table, and she stood out. In every way …’
‘So you introduced yourself?’
‘That’s right. I couldn’t resist the temptation. We … myself and two friends, we went and sat with them. And … the rest is history.’
‘Why did she end the relationship?’ Griessel asked again.
‘Relationships cool off, I suppose that’s life … We’d been together for two years, her hours kept getting longer. And those last two, three months, we barely saw each other. Now and then on a Saturday night, a Sunday morning. We would have gone skiing together that December, but she had to cancel. And then, in February last year, she arrived here one evening …’
‘Here at the workshop?’ Cupido asked.
‘No, I live in a cottage up against the mountain. She phoned from her office, about five, to ask if she could come over. She was late, she only arrived after nine. She came to tell me we should take a breather.’
‘A breather?’
‘Those were her words. She said … she was very sorry, very sad, she said it was unfair to both of us, the fact that we never saw each other any more. And she didn’t want to prevent me from finding anyone else.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said I didn’t want anyone else, and I understood that she was working hard. It didn’t worry me, it was temporary, she wouldn’t be that busy for ever.’
‘So you didn’t want to break up?’
‘Of course not. I … Hanneke … I thought she would be my wife.’
‘But then she told you it was over?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were angry?’
‘Not angry. Disappointed. No, more than that … Hang on, surely you’re not insinuating …’ The outstretched legs were pulled back and he sat up straight in the chair.
‘I’m not insinuating anything. I’m asking,’ said Cupido.
Roch put his forearms on his knees, leaned forward. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘You actually think that I … It’s one helluva insult. About everything,’ he said, controlled but hurt.
‘I think that you
what
, Mr Roch?’
‘You think that I could … do anything to Hanneke. A year after we broke up? A year? What sort of person do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know you.’
‘Did you read my statement? I wasn’t even in the country when Hanneke died. How do you do your work?’ he asked with more astonishment than rage.
Griessel said soothingly, ‘Mr Roch, we need your help. We have to investigate everything over again. We have to make sure …’
He looked from one to the other. ‘Good cop, bad cop. I see.’
‘What do you see?’ Cupido asked.
‘I see what you’re trying to do. But hell, it’s insulting …’
‘Why? Because we think a guy gets angry when his future wife drops him? That’s insulting?’ Cupido asked.
Griessel wanted to calm things. ‘Mr Roch …’
‘Wait, please.’ A polite request, with his big hand in the air. ‘I can understand … I was probably angry too.’
‘With her?’
‘With the bunch of lawyers who made her work so late. With myself, for not seeing it coming, for not doing something about it earlier. I could have made more time, been more supportive. But with her … I was very disappointed. Because she didn’t love me enough, because she was so stubborn, because she didn’t want to wait, because she wouldn’t give us a chance.’
‘But not angry with her.’
Roch looked reproachfully at Cupido. ‘Hurt, Captain. The hurt was worse. I loved her. Genuinely loved her. She was an amazing person.
We were great together. In every way. The same interests, the same sort of friends … it’s a great loss, when you lose something like that. But what can you do? You take it like a man and you get through it. Even if it takes six months, nine months, you come out on the other side. You don’t look back. And you respect her decision, that’s what you do, because that is what love means, you respect her decision.’
A soft knock on the door. The coffee had arrived.
Once the coffee was poured and handed around, Roch sat down again, still with a long-suffering, wounded expression on his face.
‘You were overseas in January?’ Griessel asked.
Roch nodded, sipped his coffee.
‘Where were you?’
‘Aime la Plagne, in the Alps, for a week. Then Bordeaux. In France.’
‘When did you return?’
‘The nineteenth. The day
after
she died.’
‘The day her body was found?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What time on the nineteenth?’
‘I landed in Johannesburg in the morning. I was back in the Cape around two o’clock in the afternoon, if I remember correctly. I can go and check …’
‘Do you still have the documentation for the flight?’
‘I faxed it to the other detective.’
‘To Nxesi?’
‘Yes. It must be on record.’
‘The tickets?’
‘No, the reservation, the proof of payment.’
‘But you still have it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The trip – was it a holiday?’
‘For the most part. Aime was for skiing. Then I went to Bordeaux to visit my mentor, at Château Haut Lafitte. So it was sort of work too …’
‘Were you alone on the plane?’
‘Do you mean …? Yes, I was alone.’
‘I would be grateful if you could find the documentation for us.’
‘It’s not in your records?’
‘We haven’t seen it.’
‘OK.’
‘Did you see Sloet again after you broke up?’ Cupido asked.
‘Yes. Once or twice.’
‘Which is it? Once or twice?’
‘It’s an expression, Captain. I saw her twice. If you are together for two years, you leave stuff in each other’s places. About two weeks after … sometime in March last year, I took two boxes of her stuff to her.’
‘When she still lived in Stellenbosch?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Not well.’
‘Why?’
‘I said things I shouldn’t have said.’
‘What things?’
‘I said she’d lied to me.’
‘What about?’
‘About why we broke up.’
‘Go on.’
‘I had … I couldn’t understand it, the whole thing. But it was that time, I was hurt, I just couldn’t figure out how she could just turn her back on everything, out of the blue.’
‘Hurt, but not angry,’ said Cupido sarcastically.
‘What did you say to her?’ Griessel asked.
‘I thought there was someone else.’
‘And what did she say then?’
‘She asked me if I really thought she wouldn’t have the guts to admit it if it was so.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I said, no, that’s true. She had always had guts. For anything.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I left.’
‘And the second time?’
‘That was in December. She called me …’
‘When in December?’
‘The first week. Tuesday night? She had started packing up, for the move to Cape Town. She found more of my stuff. Jerseys, socks, stuff like that. She brought them to me one evening.’
‘How did that go?’
‘Well.’
‘What happened?’
‘She brought the stuff. We talked …’ For the first time the body language was less comfortable, the eyes glanced once quickly at the door.
Cupido homed in on that. ‘What about?’
‘Well … it was the first time I had seen her with the new …’ He cupped his hands in front of his chest.
‘Her boob job?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you talked about it?’
‘Yes. I asked her why.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said she had wanted to do it for a long time. And she asked me if I liked it.’
‘And?’
‘I said “yes”.’
‘The operation – was it a surprise for you?’ Griessel asked.
‘Yes. She never talked about it while we were together. And it wasn’t as if she was small …’
‘Wait, wait,’ said Cupido. ‘She asked you if you liked the boobs?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you said “yes”?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And then?’
Roch’s eyes drifted to the door. ‘Mr Roch …’ Cupido prodded him.
‘Then she showed them to me,’ he said at last, as if he was relieved to get it off his chest.