They crossed the sodden ground to the patched-together house. The bathing geese scattered from the puddle, honking loudly. Emmanuel reluctantly stepped across the threshold of a porch at the rear of the house.
A young, tanned white woman with thick black hair held in a single braid bent over the carcass of a gutted springbok. The tip of her bone-handled hunting knife flicked under the animal’s skin with expert precision. Flies swarmed over the pile of intestines thrown to the side of her work table.
‘Who are you?’ She stopped working and looked at Emmanuel across the veranda. Her pale green eyes showed mild interest and no fear. A sighted .22 rifle lay within reach of her bloodied hands.
‘Police.’ Emmanuel took shallow breaths. The smell of death brought back the memory of the man they’d left concealed under branches.
‘Is it illegal to hunt for buck now?’ She spoke with a guttural accent. A backwater Afrikaner.
‘No.’ A clean hole was bored into the animal’s bloody temple – a single shot had brought the springbok down. ‘Your name?’
‘Karin Paulus,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘Detective Sergeant Cooper from West Street detective branch in Durban, and that’s Detective Constable Shabalala. Do you have a telephone I can use?’
Karin was probably only in her early twenties but she looked older and harder than that. If she had grown up in the ritzy suburb of Berea, surrounded by flowers and servants, she might have been beautiful.
‘Nearest phone is at the English farm.’ She went back to work. Her strong hands swiftly stripped away the hide before she inserted the blade into the joints to quarter the carcass. Sweat glistened on her top lip. ‘Quickest thing is to send Cyrus, our runner, with a message and one of the English can ring it through for you.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Our car is only half an hour away.’
‘That won’t help you,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘The. Rain.’ She put equal emphasis on both words, as though giving condescending instructions to a native. ‘It will take an hour, maybe two for the creek between here and the main road to go down. Cyrus can make it to and from the English in an hour.’
‘I see.’ They were trapped in this Afrikaner Eden for a few hours longer. Emmanuel retrieved his writing pad and pen. ‘Where are we exactly?’
‘Covenant Farm.’ The butchered carcass was piled on one side of the table and the bloody knife cleaned with a piece of cloth. ‘My great-great grandfather settled this land over a hundred years ago and before the war with the British, but the newer people in the valley might not know where we are. I can draw a map.’
Karin’s words contained both pride and resentment. The Paulus family must have wrestled this fertile valley from the Zulus and tilled its soil with only oxen and a plough. Now the English, with their telephones and tractors, owned most of it and the blood and sweat of the Boer pioneers were forgotten.
‘Would the Roselet station commander know the way?’ Emmanuel asked. He didn’t recall a signpost for Covenant Farm or a track splitting off from the main road.
‘Could be.’ Karin sheathed the knife and stuffed one hindquarter of the carcass into a hessian sack. ‘He came out when the thieving started from the house and barn. That was four years ago. No sign of him since.’
English law was another bitter pill to swallow – for a long time, crimes against Afrikaner families were a lower priority for the mostly English Natal police. As a result, resentment of the British was common among the Boers, but Emmanuel remembered that Nomusa and Chief Matebula had also complained about Bagley’s absence from the valley. This professional neglect might be the reason the anonymous caller had contacted the Durban police rather than the local constable.
He tore a clean page from his notebook and placed it on the corner of the butcher’s table along with the pen. ‘A map would be good,’ he said.
Karin drew a rudimentary map, picked it up by one corner and gave it to Emmanuel. Then she lifted the full hessian bag and shoved it in Shabalala’s direction, saying in perfect Zulu, ‘Boy, take this meat to the hut behind the big barn and give it to the workmen. Tell them it’s springbok for the evening pot. Go. Quick.’
Shabalala grabbed the heavy sack, speechless. Karin crossed the
stoep
with a crunch of boots and said over her shoulder in English, ‘I’ll get Cyrus.’
Emmanuel and Shabalala remained rooted to the spot, stunned by the command and by the faultless Zulu used to issue it. Karin did not speak the ‘kitchen kaffir’ used by whites to give basic orders to their servants. Her inflection and pronunciation were perfect. With eyes closed she’d be mistaken for a native.
‘
Hiya
. . .’ Shabalala made a sound of grudging admiration. ‘I will go, Sergeant. The workmen will be waiting for their food.’ He held the dripping sack away from his suit and made for the
stoep
. A native policeman was still subservient to a white woman.
‘While you’re there, ask around about Mr Insurance Policy and see if the workers have anything to say, good or bad, about Amahle. Someone wanted her dead.’
‘
Yebo
.’ Shabalala set out across the muddy yard, keeping to the grassy edge to save his leather shoes from the mud.
Emmanuel moved away from the bloody table. Impala and springbok were the staple food of his teenage years because his adopted parents couldn’t afford anything else. Even now the memory of eating the gamey meat roasted, dried, fried and stewed made his stomach turn.
He stepped into the yard, which was ringed by lush green fields and hazy mountains. It was easy to see why the early Boer settlers believed that God himself had ceded this land to them. The rise and fall of the terrain and the crystal-clear air were divine.
Karin appeared from behind a low milking shed, a loose-limbed Zulu boy trailing two steps behind her. Emmanuel folded the hand-drawn map into a second piece of paper with a simple message:
Immediate help needed. Covenant Farm.
On the outside he wrote Ella Reed’s name along with instructions to call the Roselet police station with the message and to verbally describe the map if necessary.
‘This is Cyrus.’ Karin motioned the boy forward. ‘He knows the quickest way to the English farm.’
‘
Baas
.’ Cyrus bowed his head in greeting and withdrew from his pocket a stick with a split top. ‘I will return within the hour.’
‘My thanks.’ Emmanuel gave the runner the message, which he slotted into the split at the top of the stick for safekeeping. ‘If Miss Ella Reed, the little madam, is not at home you must give this message to the young
baas
, Thomas Reed.’
‘I understand.’ Cyrus wheeled in a half-circle and hit the muddy yard at a run. Within a minute he’d disappeared into the stand of wild pomegranate trees and was gone.
‘You know Ella?’ Karin asked and returned to the butcher’s table. She lifted a bucket of salt from the floor, balanced it on a corner and wiped down the wood surface with a dry cloth.
‘Not really,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I interviewed her and her brother this morning.’
‘About the chief’s daughter?’ Karin unrolled the springbok skin and pegged it to the table. She scraped the blunt edge of her knife over the underside of the fresh skin, removing fat.
‘You heard about Amahle?’ Emmanuel asked by way of a prompt. If he had to stand by and watch a hide being dressed, he’d make the minutes count.
‘Of course.’ Karin kept scraping. The muscles on her arms and shoulders were strong from physical labour. There was no trace of the pampered white madam about her. ‘The whole valley is talking about that girl.’
The statement was resentful and intrigued Emmanuel. He decided to persist with this blunt Afrikaner female.
‘Do you have much contact with the Matebulas?’ he asked.
‘The Matebula
kraal
is on our land but it’s Pa who collects the rents.’ Karin flicked fat onto the pile of innards slopped on the floor. ‘I could do the job easy but the chief won’t allow it. He only does business with men.’
‘Not much of a chief,’ Emmanuel said.
‘A full stomach and a new wife to stick his
piel
into every five years, that’s all Matebula cares about.’ Karen grabbed a fistful of rock salt and sprinkled it over the hide. ‘He takes everything for himself. The children from the
kraal
come to trade for bread and meat from the farm store – they get sick of eating ground corn and nothing else.’
‘Did Amahle ever trade with you?’ The lipstick, toothbrush and pencils in Amahle’s cardboard box must have come from somewhere.
‘She didn’t have to trade,’ Karin said. ‘The Reeds spoil their servants. Amahle especially.’
‘How do you know Amahle was spoiled?’ Emmanuel asked.
‘It was obvious.’ The statement was sharp. ‘They gave her special food and dresses and even let her wear earrings. She was their pet.’
Emmanuel understood the pet system, knew it well. Afrikaner, English and native boarding schools all practised this colonial institution. The simplest and sweetest version saw the pet following his or her owner, weighed down with books, eager to run and fetch on command. The more complicated version was darker; a relationship of intrusive fingers and tongues perpetrated under the weight of silence. Despite the privileges, being a ‘pet’ could break a person into pieces.
‘Pretty girls always get more of everything,’ Emmanuel said, hoping to provoke Karin into revealing more.
‘That’s the way of things.’ Karin worked the coarse salt into the buck’s skin. ‘The English made a big mistake with that one. She forgot she was a
kaffir
and treated everyone like they were her servants.’ Karin called them ‘the English’ with barely concealed contempt. Little Flint and Covenant farms were adjacent to each other but the only thing the English and Afrikaner families had in common was that they were white.
‘You included?’
The Afrikaner woman glanced up at him across the hide suddenly aware that an answer to the question might reveal more about her than about Amahle. She continued salting and said, ‘Pa knows the Matebula family better than I do, Detective. He’ll be able to answer all your questions.’
Nice try, Emmanuel thought, but too late to cover her antagonism towards the dead Zulu girl. Karin was jealous of a black maid.
‘Tea?’ The question was accompanied by a tight smile before she rapped a salt-encrusted knuckle on the back door of the homestead. ‘Come.’ She opened the door and disappeared into the house without waiting for an answer.
Emmanuel hesitated for a moment, then ducked under the low entry and stepped into a scrappy kitchen.
‘Take a seat over there.’ Karin pointed to an oak table at the centre of the room. A Zulu maid, no taller than a ten-year-old child but well past her fiftieth year, stood aside while Karin reached into an upper cupboard and removed what must have been the good china. She handed the porcelain to the miniature servant, who wiped the inside of the cups with her apron.
Emmanuel’s eyes gradually adjusted to the dim light. He looked around. Thrift and invention characterised the Paulus kitchen. A long wooden counter was inset with an iron bucket to make a rudimentary sink. Old flour sacks covered the dirt floor, a poor man’s carpet.
The maid set two cups on the oak table and then waited for the madam to retrieve the teapot, which was painted with yellow roses and green leaves. Emmanuel leaned forward, curious to see what was in the bowl placed at the centre of the table. A pyramid of fresh honeycomb dripped through cheesecloth into the wide bowl. This was how his adopted Afrikaner mother had strained the honey that he’d collected from the wild bees when he was fifteen.
‘Sugar or honey?’ Karin asked.
‘One sugar, thank you.’ He resisted the urge to run out of the house, away from the smell of blood and wild honey and the faint trace of wet dog mixed with mud. The odour was familiar and repugnant. It was the smell of his adolescence, of hard winters and scorching summers on the veldt, of narrow boarding-school hallways and fistfights. But it was also the smell of praying girls who turned their backs on him in public and then came creeping through the tall grass to the abandoned shed with its bed of stolen blankets and contraband cigarettes.
The maid lifted an iron kettle from a wood-burning stove and poured boiling water into the teapot. Emmanuel returned to the present time. The kitchen was stifling but he decided against removing his tie. He took off his hat.
‘You were born and bred here?’ he asked. The scarred walls and wooden table looked like they’d been there since just after the Voortrekkers came over the hill.
‘
Ja
, of course. Except for boarding school in Pietermaritzburg, the farm is it.’
‘You don’t mind being all the way out here by yourself?’
‘I have my pa.’ Karin sat down and signalled the maid to pour the tea. ‘And I know how to make my own fun.’
Where and with whom? Emmanuel wondered.
‘Cooper. That’s an English name.’ Karin’s tone was accusatory.
‘Afrikaner mother, English father.’ Emmanuel switched the facts around, kept the family lineage simple to put off further digging. He left the possibility that he might be part Cape Malay unsaid. ‘You?’
‘Pure Dutch. My people came over the mountains on the tail end of the Great Trek. Their wagon is in a museum in Pretoria.’
The Paulus family were one of God’s chosen few, then. It didn’t change their fortunes. God had still only given them a basic education, no running water and no cash in the bank. They had plenty of bullets for their guns, though.
Emmanuel brushed off the reference to the Great Trek, the holy Afrikaner caravan traversing Southern Africa in search of land to establish a racially pure, slave-owning society. It meant less than nothing to him.
‘So it’s just you and your father . . .’ That would be unusual. Old Dutch families bred in the tens and the dozens.
‘My ma died having me, so Pa keeps me close.’ Karin traced her fingertips over her arms. The maid poured tea, careful not to clank the spout against the rim of the good cups.
‘Where’s your pa?’ Emmanuel asked. The water in the creek would not recede for another hour and he wasn’t sure he’d last the next ten minutes in the stifling room.