Authors: Deon Meyer
He parked, switched off the engine. He felt the prickle of nerves in his neck, the tension in his guts, the bottled-up worry. Why couldn’t he get rid of it?
Because he had missed twice already. That was what was ratcheting up the pressure, and what took away the pleasure. All his perfect planning, but
this
he could not have foreseen.
Calm down. Solve the problem.
He waited. Looked. Listened. Eventually he got in the back, unhooked the fabric curtain, got the gun, and slid open the side panel.
He aimed for the tree.
So much easier if the target was not alive.
He shot.
Looked through the telescope.
Perfect.
So much easier if the target did not move.
It wasn’t the rifle. The problem lay with him.
The urge to do something, to build up momentum, to utilise the time, took Griessel back to Sloet’s apartment. He had no other immediate options, he would have to search the place anyway, thoroughly and meticulously, sooner or later. And there was the undefined question about the place, which since his visit to Gabby Villette, was lurking in the back of his mind.
In the lift, the security woman asked, ‘When will you be finished?’
‘Soon,’ he said.
She didn’t respond.
In the apartment he shut the front door behind him, then pulled at it. It had locked automatically. He leaned back against the door.
There was one problem with his theory that Sloet knew the murderer: the missing spare key for this door. The bunch he held in his hand now only had four; one for the front door, one for her Mini,
two for the cupboards in the bedroom. And Nxesi said there were extra cupboard keys in a drawer upstairs, but that was all.
Before he left Villette, he had asked her who Sloet would trust with her spare key. She nodded and thought it over and shook her head. ‘I don’t know … I’ll think about it,’ she promised.
He turned around, studied the security chain. There was absolutely no damage to it.
Had someone stolen the spare keys? Someone she didn’t know? Maybe she sometimes forgot to hook the chain or close the bolt, because she could use the peephole?
Why then a murder without robbery or sexual assault?
The big question: who had motive?
He began his search upstairs, in the second bedroom, already used to the way it felt, the odd mix of vague voyeurism and excitement. Using a knife he fetched from the kitchen, he carefully slit open every cardboard box, unpacked the contents one by one, and then back again.
Textbooks, probably from her student days. African Customary Law, Private Law, Roman Law, Criminal Law, Public Law, Interpretation of Law, Law of Criminal Procedure, Competition Law, Insurance Law, Intellectual Property Law, Internet Law.
So much Law. No wonder the courts and the jails were chock-full. No wonder the police couldn’t keep up.
A stack of coffee-table books about wine and art and interior decorating, a couple of Afrikaans novels by Marita van der Vyver, Etienne van Heerden and André P. Brink, a diverse collection of English paperbacks by, among others, Jodi Picoult, Anne Tyler and John Grisham.
Nineteen DVDs. Most looked like European art films, the sort with subtitles. Two were pornographic, but the covers were tasteful.
Five Hot Stories for Her
and
Urban Friction
.
A whole box full of music CDs. Vanilla Ice, Mariah Carey, Nirvana, Paula Abdul, Whitney Houston, Duran Duran, Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette, Laurika Rauch, Boyz II Men, Nine Inch Nails, Al Jarreau, Koos Kombuis, Madonna, Riku Latti, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead. Six classical music collections with titles such as
The Best Classical Album Ever
and
Chill with Mozart
.
Memorabilia. Old programmes and tickets to concerts and plays, postcards, greetings cards of congratulations for birthdays, graduation,
promotion. Used plane tickets and brochures for trips to Europe and the USA, cheap jewellery, a chunky old cellphone. Decorative hair combs and grips, two scratched pairs of sunglasses, iPod cables, loose photos of groups of people.
Six photograph albums and a smaller box of letters. He put them to one side. The other boxes were filled with clothes and shoes. Lots of shoes.
He carried the letters and photo albums down to the sitting room, sat down on the couch, lifted the lid of the box of letters. Foreknowledge made him hesitate: he knew he would be crossing a boundary now. Sloet would become flesh and blood, a person with a life, with emotions and regrets and few secrets. It would rob him of his distance, his objectivity, it would all become that bit more personal. That was where the trouble lay, the root of the evil. Because he knew what came next. This case had been easier from the start. He hadn’t been at the scene of the murder. He hadn’t stood beside her, and seen the terrible fragility of the female body, her expression caught at the moment of death. He hadn’t smelled the blood and perfume and decomposition. He hadn’t lived her last moments with her in his mind, felt her acute fear of the darkness of death, or heard the silent scream they all uttered when they lost that final grip on life.
Doc Barkhuizen said over and over again: ‘Don’t internalise it, Benny.’ Doc knew that was his reason for drinking. Until, at last, about a month ago, Griessel had confessed: ‘I don’t know how, Doc.’
‘Go and talk to a shrink, Benny.’
And he asked, ‘What for, Doc?’ because he already knew where it had begun, he could remember the first time, crystal-clear, although it was fourteen years ago. The sunny Saturday morning, the five-year-old child in the middle of the park at Rylands, her white socks and white sandals, the blue ribbons in her ponytails, the heart-rending beauty of her delicate features. The red and purple bruises of the rape and strangulation, the dried semen, the tender little hand gripping a Wilson’s toffee wrapping like a last treasure.
It was his fourth murder that week, an impossible time. Too few people, too little sleep, too much work. They all suffered from post-traumatic stress, but nobody knew. That morning, he saw her expression at her moment of death and he heard the primitive scream,
and he knew, everyone screams when they die, everyone holds on to life terribly tightly, and when someone loosens their fingers, they fall and cry out in terror. Of the end.
Of course he drank before that – controllably, four, five times a week, in the afternoon with the guys. But after that it got out of control. Alcohol was the only thing that could keep all the noises and images out of his head, the all-consuming fear that it could happen to his family too, to Anna and Carla and Fritz.
Tell all that to a shrink and all he would say was: ‘Here’s a bunch of pills.’ And then he, Griessel would be addicted to something else. Or even worse: ‘Get another job.’ At forty-five. White. With the maintenance payments after the divorce and university fees and not a fucking cent saved in the bank.
Life was never simple.
Eventually he reached into the box.
Systematically, he built up the jigsaw puzzle of her life. The phantom pieces from the albums and letters were not enough to form a clear image, so he had to fill the gaps with his imagination. The story was ordinary, mostly typical Afrikaner middle class. It began in Ladybrand in the Free State in the mid-seventies. Willem Sloet, co-op clerk, tall and thin and slightly stooped; the hairline already beginning to recede in the face of more than thirty summers, the little moustache uncertain, like an experiment – on some of the photos he had the intimidated expression of a man who had married above his station and had, slowly, begun to realise the consequences. His wife, Marna, with her pleasant face, her smile frequently determined and brave. And the only child, Hanneke, lucky to have inherited from the start the best combination of her parents’ features.
In the early eighties there was a move to Paarl, apparently a better position for Willem, because the old reddish-brown Ford Escort in the holiday photos is replaced by a white Volkswagen Passat station wagon. Hanneke grows into a lanky schoolgirl, her thick hair in a plait, the slight gap between her front teeth displayed without embarrassment in every smile, cute, plucky and carefree.
Willem Sloet becomes a marginal character, presumably behind the camera most of the time. Where he does appear in the photos, the space
between him and Marna has subtly widened, a deliberate distancing by one of them perhaps. Marna’s grace increases, her attractiveness becomes more interesting with the years, and their offspring blossoms, in a single album page, somewhere around her fifteenth year. In the photo on the top left she was still a child, skinny, crouching before the unpredictable leap into puberty; bottom right the metamorphosis is nearly complete, and the chips have fallen in her favour. Suddenly a head taller than her mother, athletic, but with feminine, elegant lines, the eyes wider apart, the mouth full, the curve of her neck and shoulder enchanting. And, along with that, another apparent awakening: at the Paarl Girls High School, she was chairperson of debating, hockey captain, member of the student council, and winner of the academic prize for accountancy.
He looked through the letters. There were two from boys, raw and clumsy declarations of teenage love and desire, warm letters of friendship from other girls, their admiration shining through. And a series written by mother Marna, initially just best wishes for her daughter’s achievements in school – the encouragement and aspiration delicately camouflaged. Later, at university and during Hanneke Sloet’s backpacking year in Europe, her mother’s wistfulness over her own lost opportunities, her disappointment in her husband, and her ambitions for her daughter glimmered through ever more strongly.
The letters ended there, at the end of 2000, just before Hanneke Sloet started at Silberstein Lamarque. The glued and captioned snapshots too. In the back of the last album was a sheaf of loose photographs of Sloet and someone whom Griessel assumed must be Egan Roch. The man was tall, with powerful shoulders and arms, and abundant self-confidence. They were, in the words of Gabriélle Villette, ‘two good-looking people’. The photographs showed they had frequently walked in the mountains, had visited a wine farm, sailed in Table Bay, socialised, and been to New York together at least once.
Loose photographs, thought Captain Benny Griessel. As though Hanneke Sloet didn’t want to commit this relationship to permanent record.
He thought it all over while he searched the master bedroom meticulously. He tried all the parts of Villette’s revelations for fit and what he could glean from the albums and letters.
Hanneke Sloet the Ambitious.
Should he be concerned with this?
The thing was, he had often seen the dangers of extreme ambition. In women, the consuming desire to rise in social stature, to keep up with neighbours and colleagues, sometimes led to fraud and theft from the employer, or the smuggling of drugs on planes.
But Sloet had followed another route, honourable and acceptable. Hard, disciplined work at school and university, later at Silbersteins. The alleged affair with the older, married man early in her career could as easily be attributed to compensation for a weak father figure as to the desire for advancement.
This was the territory that roused his instincts: the forbidden affair, the sensual photos, the breast enlargement, the pornographic movies, the bizarre vibrator. Therein lay a pattern, and he believed absolutely in patterns of behaviour – you always find one if you look long and acutely enough. Add to that the fact that eight out of ten women were murdered by the husband, the fiancé, the lover, the hopeful suitor, the sex partner …
He could find nothing. No spare key, no new insights or clues.
In the sitting room, out of desperation, he examined the telescope and decided it was ornamental, the magnification unimpressive, the interesting peeping tom possibilities outside the window just too far away.
Griessel walked to the door, stopping in frustration and indecision beside the pool of dry blood. He understood why Nxesi’s investigation had yielded nothing, because there were only shadows of possibilities, vague spectres that evaporated when you looked more closely. Communists? The shooter had the wrong end of the stick – there were no communists in her life, just a Big Boy vibrator in the bedside cupboard. A whole day wasted and he had made no progress, and tomorrow the bastard would blow another policeman’s leg away.
He bit off the F-word with considerable effort.
He would phone Cupido and tell him he was leaving the case files at the DPCI office, see if
you
can find something. He reached out to turn off the light and suddenly came to a realisation, the thing that had been in his subconscious since his visit to Villette: the contrast between the two apartments. Villette’s was personal, with obvious signs of life – the framed photographs of fruit on the wall, the coffee table in the sitting room strewn with books and magazines and newspapers … But Sloet’s was too bare, too neat, too impersonal.
Before he could consider the meaning of this, his cellphone rang – the DPCI office number.
He answered.
‘Benny, can you come down here?’ asked Brigadier Manie, and Griessel knew this spelled trouble.
He said he was in the city, he could be there in fifteen minutes. He hastily locked the apartment, waited impatiently for the lift, jogged to the BMW and drove with sirens and lights flashing through the sparse Sunday traffic. It took him twenty minutes anyway, because Durban Road was, as usual, a traffic light mess.
He found them in the brigadier’s office. Manie, Nyathi, du Preez, Mbali Kaleni, and Cloete, the liaison officer. No John Afrika.
‘The bastard sent emails to the papers,’ said Manie.
‘The sniper?’ Griessel asked, and sat down in a vacant chair.
‘Yes. And now there are two stories. One about how he is going to shoot policemen until the Sloet case is solved, the other about how the SAPS tried to keep it quiet.’
‘Three,’ said Cloete. ‘They are asking if we only reopened the Sloet case because someone was shooting at us.’