Detective Inspector Heath had the warrant to the cellphone service provider and traced the murder scene cell number to an address within twenty-four hours; a record he doubted would ever be beaten. The excitement turned to disappointment and then anger when he realised the physical address the subscriber had given to the service provider was a small substation in a dead-end street. It took Heath a further two hours to request a detailed billing from the service provider and identify a frequently dialled number, which he guessed was the home phone number and then found the address of the subscriber. He was in position at 5 a.m. – a small park about twenty metres from the suspect’s driveway. From here he could easily slip into the street and follow the car when it left home. It was an agonisingly long wait until ten past seven when a Land Rover reversed down the driveway, turned into the road and slowly made its way north. Heath clicked on his radio and gave the surveillance unit the go-ahead to follow the vehicle.
Durant longed for something cold to drink, but the area in which he’d parked fifteen minutes earlier was nowhere near a tearoom. The heat was so overpowering, it seemed to have replaced the air inside the vehicle with a moist and foul distillation of the surrounding buildings’ effluence. Durant remembered reading in the agent handlers’ manual never to meet informers in your vehicle, unless it’s an absolute emergency. He figured the author probably wrote that chapter in his car in the Durban summer. This was an emergency, but there was no time to go through the mandatory protocols of the spy tradecraft: indicators, counter-surveillance, alternative meeting places and escape routes. When Splinters phoned him thirty minutes earlier, he sounded like a schoolboy who’d found the marking sheets the day before the final exam.
Splinters was always late for meetings, but he was a necessary evil. Necessary because his information was always reliable and worth the sacrifice and cost of acquiring it; and evil because his criminal activity went way beyond the generous stretching of the boundaries of law the public prosecutor had allowed him. The ace he held up his threadbare and dirty sleeve was that he was irreplaceable, and he knew it, Durant knew it and Masondo knew it.
Splinters’s wiry frame appeared in Durant’s rear-view mirror, darting across the road like an ostrich, his small head belying the genius brain within. As he came around to the passenger door, Durant pondered both the genius and the foolishness of the 50-year-old man whose features were that of a person perhaps ten years older. Many things had, over time, worn the deep lines on his face into a telling and somewhat sad snapshot of the person he once was. The laughter lines under his eyes and the slightly turned-up creases on the corners of his mouth were lines which revealed a once-happy soul which had long since regressed into a cold and hermit-like existence.
Splinters’s lot was badly cast: the bottle took his money years ago; his greed took his conscience and his job at the bank; his wife took what was left. When the auditors uncovered the fraud he’d committed over a ten-year period, they were astounded. It was the work of a genius, not of a crook. In an unprecedented twist to the case, the hushed courtroom heard the forensic auditors testify for the defence and called for leniency and a second chance. The second chance came in the form of Kevin Durant. Splinters was approached, trained in spy craft, briefed and then dangled to one of the biggest Nigerian crime syndicates in the city; it wasn’t long before the float dropped and the baited hook was firmly in the belly of the underworld.
Splinters became an indispensable asset to the criminal organisation; an advisor, a specialist, professional and trustworthy. Every stolen credit card, chequebook, forged banknote and bogus letter of credit the syndicate laid hands on first went through Splinters for approval. And most of these financial instruments came to Durant and were neutralised, worked, jinxed, returned or, for the sake of Splinters’s credibility, allowed to proceed in the criminal supply chain.
Durant had given Splinters purpose in life again. He was nothing more than a hobo, an unkempt, unwashed shell of a man with self-respect as sparse as the few grey hairs on his head. Except when he was with Durant, that is. When he slipped like a timid reptile into Durant’s secure area, his frame straightened perceptibly, and when he spoke his voice had the authoritative tone again, which in years gone by had the bespectacled bank clerks scurrying around at his bidding.
He shuffled into the car nervously, the hallmark smell of alcohol preceding him like an invisible wave. He greeted Durant and they exchanged some pleasantries.
‘Good news all around, Kevin. Good news, and better news for you today, my friend. I need to smoke, Kevin. You mind?’
Durant minded. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.
‘Kovashov. It’s a name, remind me to tell you. But first …’ and he held out a small envelope with the relish of a child holding out a picture he’d just coloured in. Durant took the envelope, flipped it open and took out the credit card that was within. He’d done this dozens of times before, but was unprepared for the flood of excitement which rushed through his body. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Frank.’
‘Nigerian Frank? Where did he get it?’
‘Brought to him. Taken off a woman at one of the malls. A tourist. Careless, Kevin man. Overseas card, big credit limits.’
‘I briefed you about this woman forty-eight hours ago. And you bring me her credit card. This is amazing.’
‘Say it again, Kevin. I love it when you say that.’
Durant wouldn’t say it again, not because he didn’t want to, but because his car door was pulled open without any warning, and he was dragged out of the car by a set of strong, gloved hands. In the split second before his head was pushed down onto the pavement, he saw Splinters dashing up the road and vanishing around a corner.
The voice was authoritative, but mild. ‘Mr Durant, I’m Detective Inspector Heath of the
SAPS
and I’m arresting you for the murder of Leila Elhasomi.’
Heath’s office was bleak and depressing. The furniture was old, the walls were grimy and the desk was littered with manila files, official-looking documents and a variety of pens, punches, staplers, paper clips and scissors. Durant was asked to sit behind the desk and his handcuffs were released by a young constable who offered him coffee. Durant used a few seconds to analyse the desk of the man who had an hour earlier arrested him.
His eyes were drawn to two photographs. One, yellowed by time, showed a young police officer with some of Heath’s features but more matured, holding a newspaper poster which read ‘Top Cop Nails Drug Kingpin.’ Heath’s father, a dedicated and devoted policeman. That made Heath a second-generation cop. This was good. Another photograph showed a young woman and a small child smiling at the camera. The child, possibly five years old, had an oversized police cap on his head. Durant frowned, then smiled. A family man. His young son looked up to his father. This was also good.
The door opened and Heath walked in with a cup of coffee in one hand and a brown folder in the other. ‘Sorry, Mr Durant, for your treatment earlier.’
Durant rubbed the back of his neck and gave an exaggerated grimace of pain as Heath placed the cup of coffee on the table. ‘It was procedural, I assure you. This is a high-profile case and there’s a lot of pressure from the top.’
Durant slapped his hand on the table with a loud bang, although the effect of the coffee cup tumbling over and spilling coffee over Heath’s desk was a little more dramatic than he’d hoped for. ‘I demand an explanation immediately, Heath. You can’t treat people like this, I’ve done nothing.’
Heath calmly righted the cup and dabbed his files with a white handkerchief.
‘Okay,’ he said calmly. ‘But I’d like to ask you a few questions.’ He sat on the corner of the table. ‘The chap in the car with you. Who was he?’
The past tense told Durant that Splinters had got clean away and they would never find him. ‘A hitchhiker. Felt sorry for him. You saw him, pitiful character.’
‘Why were you parked at the side of the road, then?’
Durant upbraided himself for disregarding the rules of tradecraft. The manual was right: this was precisely why you never met agents in your vehicle. ‘Turned out the guy’s a prostitute. You spooked him, he took off. Thanks. Can I go now?’
Heath shook his head. ‘You realise how serious this is, Mr Durant? Do you realise I’m questioning you regarding a murder and you’re our chief suspect?’
‘All I know is this: I have a wife who’s ill and in hospital, I have work responsibilities and I don’t have the time or inclination to help you. We could’ve sorted this out another way.’
‘I tried to. I phoned you yesterday and you said you’d phone me back – you never did.’
Durant rubbed his chin. ‘Sorry, I remember now. Got caught up in a whole lot of issues. Can I phone you tomorrow?’
‘Leila Elhasomi. Talk to me about Leila.’
Durant smiled and shook his head in feigned disbelief. He knew enough about police questioning not to deny what they knew was true, but to neutralise the truths which he knew could implicate him.
‘The Libyan girl? Met her once. If you can even call it a meeting. She was involved in an accident and I treated her at the scene. I’m a medic – I’ve got a professional obligation to help injured people.’
Heath pursed his lips and nodded silently.
Durant drained the remains of his coffee. ‘Look, it’s simple. I was minding my own business when this lady’s car went through a traffic light and collided with a pole. I was across the road. I thought she might have been injured and went to help her. Turned out she was fine.’
‘Also turned out you gave her your cellphone number.’
‘This is true. I felt an obligation. She was obviously a foreign visitor, and I thought she could do with some help.’
‘Did she call you?’
‘No.’
‘And it seems the next day she really did need help. She was murdered.’
‘You said so yesterday.’
Durant looked at his watch. ‘Since when does giving someone your cellphone number make you a murderer? Perhaps I had another motive? Lust, perhaps. But not murder. Can I go now, or are you going to put the plastic bag over my head?’
‘Hold on, sir. I’m not finished. Where were you on Thursday night?’
‘I was at work, and then at the hospital. I told you: my wife’s sick.’
‘So you had no contact with Elhasomi other than treating her at the scene of an accident, and giving her your cell number? You don’t know anything else about her, where she was going, when she arrived in South Africa, where she lived … Is that correct?’
‘I think you’ve got it now,’ Durant said.
Heath paused for a moment, and then said ‘Yesterday I drove past the townhouse Elhasomi was renting and I saw something interesting – your Land Rover parked outside. How d’you know where she lived?’
‘A … friend in the police … gave me her address. I thought I could help.’
Heath was silent for another uncomfortable moment. ‘You really are quite a considerate chap. Why did you have her credit card? We found it in your car.’
For the past hour, Durant had been hoping that by some miracle the card Splinters gave him had disappeared into some irretrievable crevice between the seats of the Land Rover. Obviously because there was such pressure to solve this high-profile case, the police had done their job very thoroughly. The irony wasn’t lost on Durant either: it was the
NIA
that was putting the pressure on the
SAPS
to prioritise the murder.
Durant hoped Heath hadn’t noticed the tell-tale visual clues which betrayed the liar even before he spoke, from the almost imperceptible drops of perspiration on his brow to the quickening pace of his breath. The credit card. ‘Well, you’ve answered one of your own questions, Inspector. The credit card is exactly the reason I was trying to find Elhasomi so I could return it to her. She left it behind at the accident scene.’
Heath stood up and walked to his office door, closed it, walked back and sat down opposite Durant. He was silent for a moment while he studied his palms intently. Finally he looked up. ‘Mr Durant. Your fingerprints were all over the inside of Elhasomi’s townhouse. Your prints are on a bronze statue that we strongly believe was the instrument used to smash in the back of her head. The accident site was close to where she lived. A traffic camera picked up your Land Rover in the vicinity of her flat on the night of the murder. There’s more evidence linking you to Elhasomi than any of the other forty-five million people in this country, so don’t accuse me of wasting your time and don’t insult my intelligence by giving me answers which we both know are lies.’
Durant shook his head while all the time knowing that every word Heath was speaking was true.
‘Don’t deny that you know Elhasomi; don’t deny that your relationship goes beyond that accident scene last week; and don’t deny that by being in possession of her credit card, you had a motive to kill her. Motive, opportunity and the means. You didn’t have to kill her for that credit card.’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘Was it a crime of passion then? You and Leila have a little thing going on the side? Afraid your wife would discover it when she came out of hospital? Damn it, Durant, your fingerprints are on the murder weapon. What do you want me to say? Give me another suspect, ’cos right now, you’re all I’ve got.’
Heath was angry now and Durant could see it. He didn’t like it. He would have to change his strategy, go with his gut feel – Heath was a good cop, a family man, dedicated, thorough, relentless. Heath reminded him of himself.
‘I’m an investigator for the
NIA
. Leila Elhasomi is official business.’
The expression on Heath’s face didn’t change. ‘Is murder official business? I don’t care where you work or who you are, sir. I have a dead body in Gale Street mortuary, a docket here with mounting evidence, and a suspect in front of me.’
‘She was our target—’
‘So you killed her. If you’re an intelligence officer, it couldn’t have been mandated. Was it personal?’