Just a Dead Man (12 page)

I
WAS STANDING ANXIOUSLY
outside Casualty when Dave drove in. Heat radiated up from the asphalt: autumn had scarcely touched the parking lot. Even the low-maintenance succulents in a bed outside the double swing doors looked wilted and dusty. I could feel a drop of sweat squirming down between my breasts, leaving a trail of itch in its wake.

Dave shepherded Mike towards me. He was holding a bloodstained towel to his chin, there were blood spatters on his white T-shirt and his hockey socks were crumpled round his ankles. Dave was carrying his sports bag and hockey stick. Suddenly Mike, who only a week ago had looked like a young man, was a vulnerable child again, his face streaked with blood and sweat. I phoned the doctor and told her we were at Casualty as I walked up to my son, aware of a look of faint alarm in his face. Surely I wasn't going to hug him and make a scene here, in front of his hockey coach and other people?

I didn't. I restrained myself, gave his hand a squeeze and thanked Dave. Then we headed in. A bored-looking nurse met us, and took Mike off to a cubicle while I dealt with the paperwork. God forbid that anyone should set foot in a hospital if they can't pay. I produced the medical-aid card and filled in all the forms. By the time that was
done, Samantha Naidoo had appeared, and we went into the cubicle where the nurse had removed the bloody towel and was cleaning the cut.

“Hello, Michael. Let's have a look.” The doctor bent over him, her perfectly formed coffee-coloured breasts directly in his eyeline, and only just inside her low-cut shirt. Mike perked up immediately. As the nurse wiped his chin, I wondered if she was removing blood or drool.

“It's not too bad – a couple of stitches will fix that.” Dr Naidoo asked him to move his jaw, and nodded. Mike was transfixed by her boobs, male hormones obviously undamaged in the fracas. She seemed aware of his interest but remained entirely unfazed by it, chatting cheerfully to him as she administered local anaesthetic and put in three neat stitches. The nurse stepped forward to dress the wound and give Mike an anti-tetanus shot.

“He'll be fine. Probably a bit sore tonight, but nothing a couple of Panado won't sort out.” She turned to Mike. “It may leave you with a sexy little scar, but that's all.” She smiled at us, and was gone.

Mike slid off the bed and I picked up his gear. “Hey, Ma, that doctor's cool!” he said as we headed out to the car. “I didn't feel a thing.”

“Not surprising, chum. She anaesthetised you.” In more ways than one, I added under my breath. “Come on, Harrison Ford, with your sexy scar. Let's get you home. You won't feel quite so good when the anaesthetic wears off.”

“Sorry to mess up your birthday,” he apologised. When a teenager sheds that famed self-absorption for a moment, especially when he could legitimately be thinking about himself, it is particularly touching. Now, in the privacy of the car, I gave him a little hug.

“No problem, my love. Just don't scare your ancient mother like that too often.”

Mike spent the rest of the day sprawled in front of the television. Normally on match days, he would meet up with some of his friends and they would do whatever it is that teenage boys do. I prefer not to think too hard about what that is. But, although he said he didn't feel too bad, he was obviously going to milk the damage for the rest of the day and enjoy being waited on. Fair enough.

I was making him a cup of tea with a big slice of the chocolate cake my mother had made for my birthday and delivered when we collected the lime trees and which he felt he might be able to squeeze past his bruised jaw when my cellphone rang again. The two silent calls of the morning had slipped my mind in the more recent drama, but the prickles of fear returned as I flipped the phone open. “Private number.” I pressed the button.

“Hello? Laura Marsh here.”

“Mrs Marsh? This is Thabo Mchunu. You called me.” The voice was deep, slow and barely accented.

Mouthing to Mike that I would be back in a moment, I walked out into the garden.

“Thanks so much for getting back to me. As I mentioned in my message, I'm a friend of Daniel Moyo, and I'm very concerned about him. I believe you're the person who gave him Mr Phineas Ndzoyiya's contact details.”

“I am, yes.”

“Well, I wondered if …” How should I phrase this? “I wondered if you could tell me … whether either Daniel or Mr Ndzoyiya ever said anything to you, anything about their discussions? And what do you know about Mr Ndzoyiya's ideas for remembering the victims of the
Mendi
? I believe you and he had a disagreement about it.”

“I don't think I can help you, Mrs Marsh. I know Mr Moyo wanted to do some kind of painting about the
Mendi
. And I told him Mr Ndzoyiya had a wealth of
stories, passed down from his grandfather. I gave him a telephone number. But that was all. I am not privy to any discussions they may have had.”

“But … you and Mr Ndzoyiya had talked about a memorial down in Pondoland. I wondered whether that could have had any bearing …” My voice tailed off. I was floundering. The silence grew, reminding me uncomfortably of the morning's peculiar calls.

“I can't see that any discussions I may or may not have had with Mr Ndzoyiya could be relevant to his contact with Mr Moyo. And certainly not to Mr Ndzoyiya's murder – I presume that is what you are trying to investigate. I would suggest, Mrs Marsh, that you leave that to the police. They are the professionals. My relationship, if I ever really had one, with Mr Ndzoyiya is none of your business. I cannot imagine why you would think it is. Private meddling is not helpful. I would advise you to be careful. Interfering in matters that do not concern you could be dangerous. As you say in your idiom: if you do, it's your funeral.”

Before I could stop myself, I said: “My
Flash
Funeral, you mean?”

There was what seemed to be a long, long silence. “Goodbye, Mrs Marsh.” And that was that.

I closed my phone, and stood for a moment, horrified by what I had done. At the start of the conversation Mchunu had sounded calm, not exactly hostile, but somehow formidable. And I had said the stupidest thing I could have. I regretted my call to him, furiously. He hadn't told me a thing, and I had showed my hand, letting him know I had heard about his quarrel with Phineas Ndzoyiya, which presumably I could only have been told about by Paul.

And, what was worse, he was now aware that I knew about Flash Funerals, if they really existed – and if, in fact, they had something to do with the killing. If Thabo
Mchunu had anything at all to do with Phineas Ndzoyiya's death, I had alerted him to what I had found out and put him on his guard. If he had something to do with the attempted break-in at Paul's house and the threatening phone call, I could now have put both myself and Paul at risk. Nervously, I pinched the leathery green needles of a rosemary bush between my fingers, releasing the lingering, pungent scent that for a moment seemed to fill the air. Rosemary for remembrance, said Shakespeare. Would I look back on this day with regret? I told myself not to be ridiculous, and, completely unpersuaded, made my way back into the house, wondering what on earth I should do now.

L
UNCH WITH MY PARENTS
the next day should have been a return to normality after a difficult couple of weeks. Mum is a good cook, and in honour of my birthday she had cooked a fillet, along with chips (a nod to Mike there) and a salad of rocket and asparagus. For pudding, there was a perfect
tarte tatin
, something I know how to make, but have never been confident enough to tackle. Life with Simon taught me that culinary flops cannot be written off to experimentation – they are a sign of incompetence, and I have never really got my head round trying again since he left.

But escape from the murder could not be for long: what I had said to Thabo Mchunu hammered away in my mind and, inevitably I suppose, Mum and Dad wanted to know more about Daniel. I repeated what I had told them the day before, and confessed that I had been in contact with the dead man's son in an effort to get to the bottom of what his father had been doing, whether he had enemies. My parents looked unenthusiastic as I explained, but I could see Mike thinking it was all quite cool. He, of course, hadn't seen the corpse.

I mentioned the apparent quarrel between Phineas Ndzoyiya and Thabo Mchunu, though I didn't say anything about my telephone conversation with the latter. I said I was wondering whether their argument could have
had something to do with Ndzoyiya's death. I left out the threats to Paul, and the odd phone calls: there had been another one that morning – also from a “Private number”. Of course, they could have been wrong numbers, or anything, but they could also have been someone trying to frighten me – and succeeding. Mike interrupted to ask about the
Mendi
. He had heard of it, but anything more than the name seemed to have passed him by. History was not one of his matric subjects.

My father, something of an amateur military historian, was immediately in his element, and began to explain the whole story: how the
Mendi
had been carrying members of the South African Native Labour Corps to France from Cape Town. After calling in at Plymouth, the ship had sailed for France where the men were due to join the war as support troops, digging trenches and the like.

“In the fog, she was struck by a merchant ship, and sank very quickly,” explained my father. “More than 600 of the soldiers, as well as several of the crew, were drowned. Most of the troops had come from the Pondoland area, on the Wild Coast, and most of them couldn't swim. Not that it would have helped much. It was winter, and the water would have been very cold. The story goes that the chaplain to the troops gathered the men around him on the ship as she was sinking and calmed them, telling them to ‘drill the death drill'.” Dad got up from the table and went off to find a reference book, coming back and reading to Mike what it was Reverend Isaac Dyobha was supposed to have said.

“‘Be quiet and calm, my countrymen. What is happening now is what you came to do … you are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death drill. I, a Xhosa, say you are my brothers … Swazis, Pondos, Basotho … so let us die like brothers.
We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our assegais in the kraal, our voices are left with our bodies'.”

Mike looked suitably impressed. It
is
a moving speech, and one that deserves to be remembered, though perhaps more as an example of the utter futility of war than anything else. Dad went on to explain how the captain of the merchant ship didn't stop to pick up survivors. “Maybe he was frightened, though some people have said he didn't stop because the majority of the victims were black. So, like so much else, it's a political football as well as a human tragedy.”

He explained that, post 1994, the previously forgotten, or at least ignored, story of the
Mendi
had come back into the public eye. Dad looked over the top of his reading glasses at Mike, who nodded. He was very fond of his grandfather, and enjoyed Dad's moments of didacticism. As a teenager, I had objected to them, moaning about being bored when Dad took us to places of what he considered educational value. But as a small child, and now as an adult, I actually rather liked it. It struck me that if I tried to tell Mike the story, he would have fidgeted and his eyes would have glazed over. Grandparents can get away with a lot.

But as my father was talking, I found myself becoming more and more convinced that this tale, almost a century old, had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Phineas Ndzoyiya. There had to be more to it than that. He had quarrelled about it with Thabo Mchunu, sure, and after his reaction to my stupid remark to Mchunu yesterday, I was beginning to think he really was involved in some way: otherwise, why react to the name of Flash Funerals by hanging up on me? But the
Mendi
must surely be a red herring?

When we got home, Mike went off with his mates, presumably for the previous evening's postponed activities. Beyond a passing admonition to be careful of his stitches, I said nothing. Following lunch with Mum and Dad, I was feeling full and lazy, and the idea of passing out on the sofa, allowing myself to sink into its sagging, oblivion-inducing comfort, was irresistible. Telling Grumpy, and my conscience, that I would kip for just 20 minutes and then head out for some exercise, I collapsed in a heap.

My 20 minutes turned out to be an hour and a half, and I only woke because Grumpy, his patience wearing thin, pushed his large, clammy nose into my ear. I rolled over, and penitently foregoing my longed-for cup of tea, pulled on my trainers, picked up the dog lead and headed up the road. We took the path past the spot where the body had been. I knew that, unless I was going to risk losing all pleasure in what bloody Sergeant Dhlomo had called
my
amenities, I was going to have to get used to it. And once it was behind us, I made a concerted effort to put the murder and all its ramifications out of my mind. I walked fast: I needed to shake Mum's lunch off, and I owed Grumpy a decent outing before it got dark.

The shadows of the trees were long and solid across the road by the time I got home and, even though the walk had been brisk, the air was fresh enough to make me wish I had picked up a jersey on the way out. I fed the dog before I turned the kettle on and, from the kitchen, heard a car pulling up. One of Mike's friends had recently passed his driving test and, aware that I couldn't reasonably forbid my son to travel with anyone under the age of 40, I had reluctantly agreed that Stephen could drive him, at least in the hours of daylight. Stephen had obviously borrowed his father's car to bring Mike home, and I strolled out to
meet them, trying not to look too relieved to see them in one piece.

“Was someone here, Ma?” Mike asked. “There was a car parked just outside, but it pulled off when we arrived.”

Anxiety came sweeping back, like clouds obscuring the light. “No, no one. What sort of car?”

“Oh, just a bakkie. Isuzu, I think. I didn't really notice,” said Stephen.

In an attempt to distract myself and avoid answering Mike's question, I offered the boys tea and chocolate cake. My appetite, even for the tea, had vanished. The two of them fooled around in the kitchen for a while, and then went off to look at something on Mike's computer. I told myself there could be a thousand and one reasons why a car was parked in the street. If it was behind the wall, I couldn't have seen it unless I walked out to the gate: it was where Dan had parked his Golf that day. There was no reason to assume it was anything to do with the murder, or that someone was spying on me. The road along the front of the house was busy enough, with a filling station and a couple of small shops less than a hundred metres away.

I shook myself: I was getting paranoid. The police were investigating. I had merely asked Mr Mchunu about his dealings with Dan and Mr Ndzoyiya, presenting myself, genuinely, as a concerned friend of Dan's. Surely no one would come and park outside my house for
that
? And, anyway, didn't Mchunu live in Gauteng? It struck me that I didn't really know where he was based.

If it
had
been Mchunu, and if he had wanted to confront me, what better opportunity than when I was walking my dog in the plantations? No. The bakkie outside the house had to be a coincidence. I almost succeeded in convincing myself. Almost. My stupid Flash Funerals remark hammered away at my feebly constructed comfort.