Authors: Deon Meyer
‘You’ll call me …’
‘I will.’
‘Anything on the shooter’s panel van?’
Fick shook his head. ‘Chances are good that he stole the Kia. They can’t find anything.’
‘He’s clever,’ said Griessel.
‘We’ll get him,’ said Fick.
Griessel opened his email, and turned the screen so that Fick could see. ‘We still don’t have Sloet’s cellphone records for December?’
‘They should be here any moment now.’
‘Can you see if there is anyone with a Russian surname who phoned her on the twenty-second?’
‘Sure.’
‘I have to go to a meeting …’ He took out his notebook and pen. ‘If you get a chance – I just want to check someone’s criminal record …’
‘Sure,’ said Fick. Eager to help. To be part of a case again.
‘There’s no rush …’ Griessel wrote down the name and surname, tore out the page.
Fick read. ‘Calla Etzebeth. Where does he fit in?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘OK.’
‘Thanks, Fanie.’ It was an effort to keep the pity from his voice.
There was a moment that morning, with the sickening smell of the red spray paint in his nose and the uncertainty gnawing at him like a slow cancer, that the sniper was ready to pack it all in.
There was huge relief in the idea. Just walk away. Drive the Chana and take the rifle and the cellphone and the wig and the clothes and go and pour petrol over them. Set it all on fire and just walk away.
He put down the spray can, untied the rag from over his mouth, pulled off the gloves, and sat down on the garage floor, his head between his knees.
After a while he pictured himself like that, defeated and dejected, and it was too much to bear. He could not let it end here, because then they would have won.
It was the turning point, that knowledge: His life depended on it.
Slowly he crawled back up the slope of despair, warmed his hands over the glowing embers of old fires. And then the plan came to him, the strategy, the knowledge that the best defence was attack. That he held the trump cards. He just had to play them right.
He got up, turned on his computer and searched on Google for ‘Benny Griessel, SAPS’. In the news databases of Media24 and iol.co.za he found enough about the detective’s career to work with: for the previous two years Griessel had been attached to the office of General John Afrika, Western Cape head of Detective Services and Criminal Intelligence, before he was transferred to the Hawks, probably quite recently.
It brought him new insight.
He used the Peninsula telephone directory, and wrote down the possible numbers.
He considered his timing and the fact that the origin of cellphone calls could be determined. He drove the Audi into the city, to the big parking lot at the Waterfront. There he took a deep breath, steadied pen and paper on his knee, and called the SAPS Provincial Office. He asked for the Administrative Department. A woman with a coloured accent answered.
‘Who am I talking to now?’ he asked in an irritable voice.
‘Sergeant April.’
‘This is Colonel Botha, Directorate of Priority Crimes.’ A deliberately intimidating high rank. He went on, obvious frustration and irritation in his tone: ‘Did you send us the correct home address of Captain Benny Griessel? Because his post keeps being sent back.’
‘Colonel knows I can’t give that out over the phone.’
‘Sergeant, what do you want me to do? If I don’t have the correct information, the Captain will not be paid at the end of the month. Is that what you want?’
‘No, Colonel.’
‘And it’s
your
fault. I feel like phoning John Afrika, it can’t go on like this.’
‘Couldn’t Colonel ask the Captain himself?’ she tried to divert him.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Veronica …’ Very intimidated.
‘Benny is busy with the Sloet case, Veronica. Do you really want me to bother him with such nonsense?’
‘No, Colonel.’
‘Let me give you the address I have, and then you tell me if it is the one you have.’
He held his breath, unsure whether his gamble would work, aware of the ticking of the clock, that the length of this call must be limited. She hesitated, and he tried another approach.
‘Sergeant, I understand it’s not your fault. But please help me – you know how it is if someone doesn’t get their pay cheque.’
She sighed at last, then asked, resigned, ‘What is his personnel number, Colonel?’
His brain froze and he mentally kicked himself, he should have thought. Then an inspiration: ‘That’s not here either.’
‘Benny Griessel?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hold on,’ she said apologetically.
Then he heard her typing on a keyboard. And she said, ‘There is only one Benjamin Griessel. Number 128, Nelson’s Mansions, Vriende Street, Gardens?’
‘That’s not what we have.’ He scribbled it down hastily, delighted with the success of his little ploy. Then he made another mistake. ‘And his email?’
‘Colonel, he will have a DPCI email …’
He scrabbled for an answer. ‘We have to remove the old one.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
Relief. But he had to get the email address.
How?
A possibility formed in his mind, another gamble, but with an irresistible pay-off: he could talk to Griessel himself. He could taunt his hunter.
‘Is this the correct cell number?’ He gave her a fictitious one.
‘No,’ she said, and slowly read out the correct one.
He ended the call, switched off his phone, and, with the warm glow of success, drove to Sea Point, to change his location. He parked on the other side of the swimming pool, in the area that looked out over the flat, windless summer sea. He phoned the detective. In that moment, when the man answered, there was a separation from reality, and he was curious to hear his own voice. Would it tremble, would it hesitate?
It didn’t.
The detective, the Benny Griessel he had seen in the news photos, sounded unsettled. Absent. And that gave him pleasure – it was the result of the pressure he brought to bear, his actions, his campaign. He wrote down the email address, put the cellphone down, took out the battery. He put everything in the glove compartment and drove home before the rush hour could detain him. To write the email. And he knew this tranquillity he had found would stay with him.
Tonight, in the dark, he would go and reconnoitre the area around Vriende Street and Nelson’s Mansions. In the Audi, and on foot.
Because that was where he wanted to fire his next shot.
They were all sitting around the big table in Musad Manie’s office – the brigadier himself, Zola Nyathi, Werner du Preez of CATS, Philip van Wyk of IMC, Cloete of Public Relations, Mbali and Griessel.
The voice of Captain Ilse Brody, criminal behaviour analyst of the Investigative Psychology Section in Pretoria, came clearly over the conference phone in the centre of the table. ‘You all know a profile is a moving target,’ she said. ‘But this is what I have: male, white, and Afrikaans. His terminology and ideology betray that, and his age. He is fond of the word “communist”. He also uses “communist bedfellows”. That strongly indicates to me someone who grew up under the previous dispensation. He could be anything between forty and seventy years old. But it takes a certain amount of physical ability to do what he is doing, so he would most likely fall in the age bracket between forty and mid-fifties. If I take everything into account, my best guess is that he is in his mid to late forties.
‘He has a hunting rifle at his disposal, scope and ammunition, and therefore most likely a gun licence. He has the means and space to adapt to his specific purpose. He has access to the Internet, knowledge of anonymous email servers, quotes in Latin, and has relatively good language skills. All that, along with the timing of the police attacks, indicates to me a white collar worker who is not unemployed.
‘I’ll come back to timing later, because it has more interesting implications. But let’s look at the religious and political references first. There is a degree of self-justification in those, but my instinct tells me we are working with someone who is on the right of the political spectrum. Probably not far right, he isn’t fanatical enough for the Boeremag, but he would have sympathy with them. And if I may interject here: the long hair that the eye witness saw, does not fit
this
picture. The anti-communist, the religious right would have short hair, probably a moustache, beard, or both. The chances are good that he was wearing a wig.
‘He is religious, but I don’t think he belongs to an extremist or charismatic group. To tell the truth, I don’t think he is in any way a
community or group person. He sees himself as the white knight, the lone wolf, the solitary protector of moral values and justice. There are no psychoses, but most likely a personality disorder – perhaps a kind of Messiah complex.’
They could hear the rustle of paper over the line. Then she went on: ‘This offers us some possibilities. He is on the social and professional fringes, not the sort of come-and-braai-at-my-place-tonight kind of guy. An introvert, living just a little secretively, very serious about himself and life. He might be married, but will not be loving towards or involved in his wife’s life, rather cold and aloof. The kind who believes he is head of the house, he makes the decisions.
‘The most interesting thing for me is the temporary regression of his correspondence. His first emails are short and powerful, careful and full of confidence, and without spelling or grammatical errors. It seems he spent time on them, went to some trouble. He knew he had the upper hand, he was writing from a position of strength. He is busy positioning and justifying himself, as though he is preparing the stage for the media attention to come. That brings me back to the megalomania and the Messiah complex. Make no mistake, that is how he sees himself: he occupies the moral high ground, the SAPS does not. But then, in the email of February twenty-seventh to the press, it changes. Not spelling mistakes, but typos. Suddenly he’s in a hurry and nervous, as though the moment is greater than he anticipated.
‘I think the email of February twenty-seventh is important, because it tells us he experienced pressure and tension. I can speculate and say it was because he was announcing himself to the media with that message, but things didn’t play out exactly as he expected. He missed, but it may have been because he was nearly discovered, that he had some kind of narrow escape. You might well look into that. A speeding fine? Ran a red light? Or perhaps it was merely a case of his initial motivation decreasing, so that he began to wonder about the moral justification behind it all. He clearly knows the difference between right and wrong – the Bible verses are good evidence – but to shoot someone in reality is a traumatic experience. What I am trying to say, is that he is not a hundred per cent stable. But highly motivated – it takes an enormous amount of faith in your cause to prepare a vehicle and weapon, to wait in ambush and shoot a policeman. And that
combination makes him dangerous. The dilemma is, the more policemen he shoots, the less he has to lose. Mbali, you asked me this morning to take the calibre and the missed shot into account …’
‘Yes, please,’ said Mbali.
‘If you consider the calibre along with the missed shot and the stress of the email, you can deduce that he has not had specialised military training. I know men of the apartheid era all did military service, but this man was most likely in a support unit, and did not have combat experience.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mbali, taking notes.
‘For what it’s worth,’ the psychologist said. ‘Now, I promised to say something more about the timing: the conclusion that he is a white collar nine-to-fiver, is naturally easy. But it could also mean that he has to work among other people, that he’s not alone in an office, with a door that he can lock. Given the fringe personality profile, I believe he is not popular at work, at most in a middle management job, but more likely in a lowlier position. For a man of his age and intellectual ability it must be a frustration and an insult, and might form part of his motivation to regain power and self-respect in this way.
‘But there is another alternative. We know that a crime committed after five o’clock in the afternoon usually results in less accurate eye-witness accounts. People are tired, they are hurrying home, they are reluctant to become involved. Now, the question is: does Solomon know that?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know it’s all conjecture, Mbali, but it could mean that he has knowledge of the nature of police investigations. He may have worked for, or with the SAPS. There is also the fact that he is specifically shooting members of the Service. It could be that he has a grudge. Probably not a policeman, if we look at the calibre and the bad shooting, but you never know. I would look at dishonourable discharges of administrative personnel or reservists, people who were arrested or investigated for misconduct.’
‘In the past year or so?’
‘In the past ten years.’
Colonel Werner du Preez of CATS sighed audibly.
‘I’m sorry, but that’s the reality,’ the forensic psychologist said. ‘If he has a grudge, it could have taken years to progress this far.’
‘Ilse, this is Musad Manie. The shooter phoned Captain Benny Griessel directly to get his email address …’
‘At what time, Brigadier?’ asked Captain Brody.
Manie looked at Griessel. ‘About half past three,’ he said. ‘From somewhere in the city.’
‘Interesting. Has he sent anything yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘The question I have,’ said Manie, ‘is whether we should try to start a conversation with him through Benny?’
There was a long silence over the line before she answered. ‘That is a very difficult one, brigadier. All the usual rules of interrogation apply. You want him to do all the talking, so your communication must be very short and cryptic. It’s almost like hostage negotiation, you want to keep rephrasing what he says in order to draw him out. But in this case he’s sitting safely behind his anonymity, he has time to think everything through before he answers an email.’
‘So you don’t recommend it?’