Authors: Deon Meyer
But he only partly agreed. There were a few things that bothered
him. The total absence of defensive wounds. Where the blood pooled. And the third drawer in the kitchen.
If she had been stabbed right at the front door, if her hands had been cut or bruised, he might have accepted the chance visitor and the argument story. But she was an adult, a clever lawyer. If someone knocked on her door at ten o’clock at night, she would look through the peephole first. She would only open up if she knew the visitor. She would only unlock the bolt and unhook the security chain if she
trusted
him.
She had been stabbed from the front. She was face to face with the murderer. Three metres into the apartment. She hadn’t fended it off.
And the contents of the third kitchen drawer showed someone who was not keen on cooking. He suspected that was the sum total of her kitchen utensils. Even if there had been a fourth, much bigger, broader, longer knife, he could not see how a murderer could waltz in, open the drawer and scrabble around until he found the right weapon, while Hanneke Sloet stood patiently waiting near the front door.
The murderer had to have brought the weapon along.
Deliberately. With single-minded purpose.
And all that meant that Nxesi was right to suspect the convenient, previously convicted caretaker, Faroek Klein. He would have to check his alibi again.
Alexa opened the front door for him. She was in her dressing gown, still unkempt. But she was sober.
Relief washed over him, and the guilt that he had carried inside since yesterday evening. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, Alexa, I humiliated you and then I had to go off and work, I …’ But by then she had turned away from him, with an odd expression on her face that he could not read.
She walked to the kitchen.
‘Alexa …’ he said. She shook her head, as though she didn’t want to hear.
He followed.
Her mug was on the table, her chair pushed back. That was where she had been sitting when he arrived.
Without a word she poured him coffee and sat down at the table.
She pushed the milk, sugar and teaspoon holder closer, wrapped her hands around her own coffee mug, her faced hidden behind the blonde hair.
He sat down, worried now. She had looked like this the first time he saw her, in the sitting room of this house. The morning after her husband’s death.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
He wanted to disagree with her, but she lifted a hand and stopped him.
‘I do that,’ she said. ‘With people.’
He put milk and sugar in his coffee.
‘And I don’t know how to stop, Benny.’
‘You’re fantastic, Alexa,’ he said, and the word sounded pretentious and inadequate. ‘You are … you have everything. You are the best singer in the country and every time you phone me, I wonder why, because
I’m
a cop.’
Her mouth distorted with emotion.
‘It’s the truth,’ he said.
‘Didn’t occur to you that that is precisely the problem?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Christ, Benny, this industry … You don’t know what it’s like. I’m not strong enough …’
‘You are,’ he said.
‘You don’t understand. It seduces you. The …
attention
. The focus, the intense, never-ending, unnatural attention. It’s like … To sing … it’s such a commonplace talent, it’s no better or no different than any other talent. Like … the man who painted this house, who recommended the colours and textures, he’s so creative, so competent, his talent is so … obvious. But people don’t crowd around him, tell him how wonderful he is from morning to night, how magical he is and how he changed their lives and … You start believing it, Benny, even if you don’t want to. It never stops, every day, every show, every time you stick your nose out the door. I had forgotten what it was like. Until last night. We’re such egotistical creatures. We’re so easily led astray. Addicted to it. Completely. It was … it is my drug. In those days I started collecting people around me who had to give it to me, say it to me, in the moments of doubt. Because sometimes reality and truth
intervene, when you realise you and your talent are just ordinary, this following, this breathless worship and appreciation and applause is for the music, for the emotion it awakes in people. Not for you. And you get scared. That one day people will realise that.’
She sighed, as though it took a lot of energy to say all that, turned the mug between her fingers. ‘So I collect people, Benny. Like Dave Burmeister, my first band leader. And Adam. And now I’m doing the same with you. People who can plaster over the moments of truth, you tell them you’re a failure, and they say, no, Alexa, you’re the best singer in the world. They feed you the drug when the crowds are not there. It’s a vicious circle, a seductive process, not rational or normal or psychologically balanced. Because the world you live in is abnormal. False. Smoke and mirrors and sleight of hand. And if you realise that, if the truth suddenly penetrates through to you one day, then the fear is kindled. Of being caught out. And then you start to drink. Because when you’re drunk, it’s easier to believe it all—’
Then Griessel’s cellphone rang and he wished he could ignore it, he didn’t want to be interrupted, not now.
‘Answer, please,’ said Alexa with a wry smile.
He took out his phone.
CARLA.
He stood up and walked to the dining room to answer it. ‘Hello, Carla.’
‘Fritz wants to get a tatt, Pappa,’ said his daughter in her accusatory I-am-the-older-smarter-sister voice.
‘A what?’
‘A tattoo. Over his whole arm.’
His mind wasn’t wholly on this conversation: ‘What sort of tattoo?’
‘Pa! Does it matter? What will he look like when he’s forty?’ As though that were the age of damnation.
‘Carla, I … Where did that come from?’
‘Since he’s been playing for Jack Parow, Pa. I’m worried about him.’ The maternal Carla, a new phenomenon since the divorce – she worried about her father and brother.
‘No, I mean, how do you know?’
‘He just phoned me now. He said he’s going to a tattoo parlour this week. It’s so … suburban …’
‘I’ll talk to him, it’s just awkward now …’
‘Shame, Pappa, are you working?’
‘Yes. Quite an urgent case.’
‘Ay. Don’t work too hard, anyway, I just thought I’d tell you, Pappa.’ Back in her normal, fizzy, exuberant mode. ‘Will I see you next week?’
‘You must let me know where you want to go and eat.’
‘I will. But not with a kid with a tattoo. Love you, Pappa.’
‘Love you too,’ he said, and then she was gone with a cheerful ‘bye’, and he stood there for a while to get his thoughts together. He went back to the kitchen, stood in the doorway, a foot in two different worlds.
Lost in thought he said, ‘Fritz wants to get a tattoo.’
Alexa Barnard swept the blonde hair out of her face with one hand, and then suddenly she began to laugh. Her head thrown back, the sound deep and surprising, and, so it sounded to Griessel, with a great deal of relief.
The Chana panel van drove into the parking lot of the Sea Point library, just to the right of the Town Hall. Right to the back, up against the M6 Western Boulevard, reversed it into the last parking spot, so that it could exit quickly and easily.
The sharpshooter switched off the engine, relieved about the windfalls: the car park was completely empty on a Sunday morning. In the two side mirrors outside he could see the grey, open terrain behind the vehicle, and then the long tarred bowls club lot where a bunch of cars was parked more than sixty metres away. And right beside the Chana, the screen of milkwood trees between him and the M6. The leaves and branches were still. There was practically no wind.
Through the gap between the two trees he inspected the Green Point Police Station on the other side of the double highway. A hundred and thirty metres, according to his Google Earth calculations. A long shot for this calibre, for his level of skill. But a greater problem was the high fence around the SAPS building. His only unhindered view of the entrance was through the wide front gate. It narrowed his sights
dramatically; gave him very little time to track a target. He would have to wait until a policeman walked towards the door, that instant when he paused to pull it open …
Then there was the traffic on the M6. The trajectory was above normal cars, but a bus or a lorry could divert the shot. And through the tiny opening in the side panel of the Chana his field of vision was too small to refine his timing.
But this position was his only safe option.
He inspected the area one last time. He was aware of the quickening of his pulse, of his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He was disappointed. He had thought he would be calmer the second time.
Alexa told Griessel she had heard, through his conversation with Carla, that he had an urgent case.
With the self-mocking smile of the relapsed alcoholic, she said she had already called Mrs Ellis, her AA sponsor. There was no need to worry, she wouldn’t drink again today. He must go to work, he could come around tonight or tomorrow or whenever he had a little time, and tell her all about it. And, please, he mustn’t blame himself.
Would she please phone Lize Beekman and Anton Goosen and apologise on his behalf?
It wasn’t necessary, she said. They were used to overwrought fans.
Please, he asked.
She would. But only if he went back to work now.
He phoned Mbali, and drove off to meet her at a street café in Greenmarket Square.
He arrived there before her, and watched the Zulu detective coming towards him through the crowds of tourists. The short, stout body with her ‘don’t-mess-with-me’ attitude. She was, as always, dressed in a black trouser suit. The big black handbag over her shoulder, Beretta 92FS on her hip, the SAPS identity card slung on a tape around her neck for all the world to see. The over-the-top dark glasses. And nowadays a white scarf, to hide the scars.
He felt compassion for this woman. Perhaps because she had a kind of hero worship for him. She firmly believed he had saved her life, months ago, when she had been shot and he had staunched the awful wound in her neck until the ambulance arrived. But also because there
were many SAPS members in the Cape who disliked her, since she was outspoken and a feminist, not afraid to criticise, pedantic, and painstakingly methodical. She did not hold her tongue for anyone, and her self-confidence sometimes bordered on the unacceptable. He felt it had something to do with the almost exclusive man’s world of detectives, and her appearance. If
that
personality had come in a slim, attractive package, they would have queued up to work with her. They would have said she deserved her promotion to the Hawks. Maybe it was because he was an alcoholic and a fuck-up that he could identify with her. Because he knew what it was like to have people laugh behind your back. Or maybe it was his experience – after twenty-six years in the Force you knew that good, reliable detectives were scarce, it made no difference what shape they came in.
‘Hi, Benny.’
He stood up, greeted her, and waited for her to be seated.
She did so with a sigh, putting her handbag down on the chair beside her. She fiddled inside it, pulled out a thin file, took one sheet of paper out of it, and placed it in front of him.
‘This is for you.’ Then she pushed her dark glasses up above her forehead and, frowning, looked around for a waiter.
The Green Point Police Station was quieter than the sniper had expected. It made the spring of tension wind slowly tighter inside him: how long could he sit here with the shooting hole open, rifle in hand, before someone noticed – someone walking past, a car pulling off the M6 right in front of him? It was the unpredictable, chance, the things no one could plan for, that presented the greatest risk. He knew that. In his preparation, his research, thinking through his plan over and over, he kept coming back to that truth. The solution was to limit the influence of chance at all costs. Don’t become over-keen or overconfident. Don’t underestimate them. Don’t hesitate. Don’t take risks.
He wished for the euphoria of yesterday afternoon, that lightheaded jumble of relief and satisfaction and contentment – he had outmanoeuvred them, he had got away, he had hit back. He had known then that his strategy was masterful, infallible. But now doubts were eating away at him. And the fear of being caught.
A white SAPS sedan drove through the gate opposite.
More adrenaline.
He pressed his cheek against the rifle, looked through the scope.
Sent: Sunday 27 February. 06.57
Re: To Kaptein Bennie Griessel
I saw the article in the Weekend Argus. Can you do right (Proverbs 21:15)? Are you also hand in glove with the communists? I hope not, because then I would have to escalate things.
I shot the policeman in Claremont yesterday. Today there will be another one. Every day, until you charge the murderer.
You know who it is.
Griessel looked up. Mbali told him General Afrika had forwarded it to both of them that morning, and asked her to take it to him.
He thanked her, and asked her if she had found anything in Claremont.
She counted off the problems one by one, slow and measured, on her podgy fingers, her face filled with frustration. One: there were no eye witnesses. Nobody heard the shot, nobody saw anything strange. Two: the bullet that shattered Constable Brandon April’s knee had disintegrated entirely. Three: the nature of the wound made determination of the trajectory difficult – they still did not know where the shot had been fired. ‘If you take into account the parking area’s possible field of vision, it could have been from the school, or from a block of flats, but he would have had to be inside, or on the roof. All access was locked, and there is no sign of forced entry anywhere. It doesn’t make sense.’ The waiter came and stood beside her, and she said sternly, ‘Coca Cola, but bring the ice separately, no half a glass monkey business.’
The man raised his eyebrows, glanced at Griessel, who indicated he didn’t want anything. Then he left.