The locked-jaw accent evoked green playing fields and robust schoolgirls lolling in the shade of ancient yew trees: a mythical England that hadn’t existed for a hundred years, if at all.
‘Swimming.’ Ella leaned a hip against the railing and motioned Emmanuel closer. ‘This is Detective Cooper. He’s come about Amahle.’
‘A terrible thing,’ Mrs Reed said. ‘Right here in the valley. Not five miles from the house. I can’t sleep at night thinking about it.’
The big madam wore an immaculate jade-green dress. Her hair touched her shoulders with the casual perfection of a movie star. Her appearance was probably not her own handiwork but that of unseen hands that washed and ironed her clothes, heated her curling irons and drew her bath. She smelled of dried roses and cinnamon.
‘Do you have any idea who might have harmed Amahle, Mrs Reed?’ Emmanuel figured a few questions couldn’t hurt. If cracks began to appear in the madam’s façade, he’d back off.
‘Nobody I know would be that wasteful,’ she replied. ‘The other natives cook and clean but Amahle was the only one I trusted with the flower arrangements and setting a proper tea service for guests. She was an impeccable housekeeper.’
The porch railing creaked as Ella shifted her weight; she was still damp from the lake swim, with tousled brown hair and dirty feet, and ‘impeccable’ was not a word that could be used to describe her.
‘How much did Amahle get paid on Friday?’ Emmanuel asked. Robbery was an unlikely motive for the murder but the thought kept niggling.
‘Two pounds. She got more than the other servants. She did extra projects around the house.’ Mrs Reed lifted the cushion from her lap and held it out. ‘This is her work. See if you can find one dropped stitch or loose thread.’ A delicate branch of orange blossoms was embroidered onto the silk fabric, the stamens sewn in with clear glass beads.
‘Don’t waste your time, Detective,’ Ella said with an edge of bitterness. ‘Everything is perfect.’
Emmanuel imagined a drawer in Ella’s room stuffed with unfinished arts and crafts projects: pillowcases with mismatched seams, unravelling scarfs, hessian dolls with one eye and no hair. Children invariably failed their parents. To fail in comparison to a servant must smart.
‘That’s right.’ Big madam tucked the cushion back onto her lap. ‘There’s nothing sloppy or ungainly about the design or execution.’
Heavy steps hit the rear stairs and eased the tension between mother and daughter. Thomas Reed in a hurry, Emmanuel guessed. He checked over his shoulder. Yes.
‘What are you doing here?’ Thomas demanded. ‘I said my mother was sick and couldn’t be questioned. Your native has done taking statements from the servants and you’re still here, badgering a sick woman.’
‘If Detective Constable Shabalala is finished, I’ll be on my way.’ Emmanuel began to walk away towards the stairs.
‘Listen here, Detective . . .’ Thomas started the lecture. Emmanuel stopped listening. He was a servant of the South African police force and one master was enough.
He cleared the corner of the house. Shabalala stood at the foot of the steps with the old guard dog still tagging along. Emmanuel held up his hand, giving the signal to wait. He strained to hear the scene he’d left behind.
‘You did this.’ That was Thomas, sounding like a vindictive headmaster. ‘You allowed that man to question our mother out of spite.’
‘I didn’t
allow
anything. He’s a policeman and I’m just a girl,’ Ella said. ‘Why didn’t you stop him just now when he walked off without listening to you?’
‘Children . . . please,’ Mrs Reed said.
The children talked over their mother’s interjection. ‘The sooner you’re married and off Little Flint the better,’ Thomas said.
‘I plan on being a spinster,’ Ella replied, more adept at the family game of tit for tat than her brother.
‘Good. Because I don’t know a man who’d have you.’ Thomas’s footsteps creaked on the hardwood floor. He was heading back to the cattle yard.
Emmanuel closed the distance to the rear steps and took them two at a time on the way down. Another lesson from boarding school and perhaps the most valuable one was: Don’t get caught.
‘Quick and steady to the car,’ he said to Shabalala. ‘We’ll talk on the way.’
The sun was higher in the sky, the clouds darker than when they’d arrived an hour ago. A thunderstorm was building.
‘Get anything, Detective?’ Emmanuel said.
‘Yes, Sergeant. There is no Mr Insurance Policy here. The kitchen maids and the garden boy have never heard this name.’ Shabalala produced his notebook and scanned the pages. ‘Also, Philani the gardener did not leave with Amahle on Friday night but fifteen minutes after her. It was customary for them to walk home together but the madam said Philani must finish weeding the flowerbeds.’
‘Amahle left when?’
‘At six o’clock. Philani at six fifteen.’
‘You got the gardeners to talk,’ Emmanuel said. ‘What did you use, threats or charm?’
‘Neither, Sergeant. The young gardener is also a Shabalala. He told me everything. The gardener with the broken face said not one word.’
‘And the housemaids?’
Shabalala grinned. ‘For them I used charm.’
‘So the National Party government is right.’ Emmanuel kept a straight face. ‘A black man in a suit is a danger to the community. What else did the maids tell you?’
‘That Philani was angry that he was left behind. He ran after the chief’s daughter and tried to catch her.’
‘Maybe he did,’ Emmanuel said.
EIGHT
E
mmanuel slowed the Chevrolet to thirty and shifted down to third. The dirt road connecting Little Flint to Roselet was a rough strip of corrugated bumps and loose sand. Tall kaffirweeds whipped against the car doors. He checked the western sky and saw black thunderheads swollen with rain. Dark specks circled in a clockwise direction against the gathering tempest.
‘Vultures?’ Shabalala said and leaned out of the open passenger window to get a better look.
Emmanuel pulled over and parked in a patch of dried mud. ‘Could be anything,’ he said and got out. ‘How far off, do you think?’
Shabalala studied the terrain. The land sloped down from the road to a trench and then climbed steeply again to a hill covered in thick native forest. The vultures circled the peak, riding the air current, patient as undertakers at a funeral.
‘Half an hour,’ Shabalala said. ‘A quick climb.’
Worth the detour, Emmanuel figured. He shrugged off his jacket, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. Reviewing the information gathered at Little Flint could wait another hour without any damage being done to the investigation. Shabalala laid his folded jacket on the passenger seat and wound up the window. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and eyed the rise.
‘You enjoy this,’ Emmanuel said. Shabalala was a Zulu sphinx but Emmanuel was learning to see beyond the mask. ‘Climbing mountains, running across the fields and breaking a sweat.’
‘Sitting at a desk and writing notes, that is no life for a man, Sergeant.’ Shabalala shrugged an apology for maligning the job of detective. ‘But my wife, she likes the pay and the nice suit and the hat.’
‘Then you’re stuck,’ Emmanuel said with a grin and dropped the car keys into his pants pocket. The clouds edged closer, casting blue shadows over the grasslands.
‘Yes, stuck,’ Shabalala agreed but his tone said, ‘Happily so.’ He set out across the narrow dirt road and down the slope. At the bottom was a ditch overgrown with prehistoric-looking ferns and moss-covered stones.
Emmanuel followed close. ‘Happily stuck’ also described his relationship with the detective branch, for now. Three months of hard graft he could take. But if this case hit a wall and he slipped back into a series of thankless investigations broken up by troubling dreams and the occasional night with a woman, the future looked grim. Unlike him, Shabalala and Zweigman had wives and children to hold them steady through rising and falling tides of fortune.
Emmanuel used two stepping stones to cross the stream at the bottom of the trench, setting off a chorus of frogs. Saplings with lichen-covered trunks gave way to stands of Natal mahogany, wild fig and marula trees. The men climbed higher on an overgrown walking trail for twenty minutes, then Shabalala slowed and tilted his head to the wind.
The odour filtering from the woods was familiar to Emmanuel. Blood, spilled stomach contents and urine: butchered animals and humans smelled very much the same. Seven vultures rode the air current, their black shapes now almost indistinguishable against the rain-swollen clouds overhead.
‘Dried blood and flesh,’ Shabalala whispered. ‘Behind that rock.’ A raised stone outcrop surrounded by bush blocked a view of the kill.
‘Slow and steady.’ Emmanuel crept through ankle-deep leaf litter and climbed onto a flat sandstone ledge wide enough to lay a blanket and a picnic basket on. Vultures rose up from their meal, their black and brown wings blocking the sky.
Emmanuel leaned forward with his hands on his knees, fighting the urge to vomit. The flies, the overwhelming stench, the odd twist of limbs were all too familiar.
‘
Inkosi yami
, my god.’ Shabalala stumbled back. He made it to the rock edge and threw up over the side, his body convulsed.
‘Get it all out.’ Emmanuel moved a little closer to Shabalala but not too close. Leaving well enough alone and letting a person know he was
not
alone was a fine balance. ‘You’ll be sick for a while longer and then again, just when you think your stomach is empty.’
A vulture descended from a tree limb and hopped across the sandstone ledge, eager to continue feeding. Emmanuel chased it off and stood awhile to steady his nerves. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to his nose and mouth to block out the smell.
A black man of small build lay on his right side with his arms and legs twisted in opposite directions. He wore a pair of faded blue overalls: the uniform of the South African labourer. The heel of his right foot was rough and cracked from walking barefoot across the mountains, while his left foot still wore a blue sandshoe. Broad, calloused hands confirmed that the man did hard physical work. A deep cut sliced his stomach open to expose lengths of bloated intestine.
‘One of us has got to take up smoking,’ Emmanuel said when Shabalala joined him, looking drawn and washed out.
‘First thing, Sergeant.’ The Zulu detective acknowledged the joke with a wan smile and pressed his handkerchief to his face. He studied the corpse and said, ‘Philani?’
‘That’s my guess. He’s wearing the blue sandshoes given to Little Flint’s workers at Christmas. And there are grass stains on the knees of the overalls. We’ll still need to get a formal ID from someone who knew him.’
The vultures had been at work on the man’s face and body, breaking him down to flesh and bone. Emmanuel leaned closer and said, ‘That cut across the stomach is deliberate.’
‘
Yebo
. From the blade of a knife or a spear.’ Shabalala circled the body, reading hidden signs. ‘Made after he was already dead.’
‘Mutilation,’ Emmanuel said.
‘No, Sergeant. A kindness. We Zulu believe the soul lives here in the intestines.’ He pointed to the wound. ‘If the stomach is not cut the soul will be trapped in the body and fester. It is a tradition from the old days.’
Emmanuel absorbed that fact and said, ‘So a Zulu did this.’
‘More than one. Four men were here, around the body and on this ledge. Maybe five hours ago.’
‘Mandla and his men.’ It all added up. The motive was simple: revenge for Amahle’s death. ‘They tracked down the gardener and killed him. Blood washes blood, like you said.’
Blue cloud shadows darkened the ledge and lightning forked across the sky. The wind picked up. Leaves and dust blew across the ground. Rain would come soon.
‘Four men. One cut across the stomach made post-mortem.’ Emmanuel puzzled over the sequence of events. ‘What actually killed him?’
Shabalala followed some tracks to a curve of basalt jutting from the hillside to form a natural shelter. Rising wind blew a pile of burned twigs and ash against the back wall of the sanctuary: the remains of a night fire. Scraggy tree branches were thrown in a pile a few feet away.
Emmanuel skirted the ledge and approached the shelter, sure that this was where Philani the gardener had hidden away after disappearing on Friday night. He hadn’t run far enough.
‘This is where he lay covered in the branches.’ Shabalala crouched close to the spent fire. ‘This is the place he died. Lying on his back.’ A few tablespoonfuls of dried blood stained the rock, very similar to the discrete pool found under Amahle’s body.
‘Let’s check his lower back for injuries.’ Emmanuel returned to the corpse. Deep lacerations made by tearing beaks crisscrossed the man’s spine and shoulders. There might be a small puncture wound on the skin somewhere but finding it would take a detailed examination: yet another job for Dr Daniel Zweigman.
‘Died over there. Placed out here in the open for the vultures to devour,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Make sense of that for me, Detective.’
‘I can think of only one reason for the four Zulu men to uncover the body and bring it onto the rock. They wanted this man to be found.’
Thunder rolled and the birds in the trees raised a chorus. Lizards and ants scurried into cracks and crevices. The rain came down, first in fat lazy drops and then in a lashing torrent. Shabalala and Emmanuel raced to the shelter and crouched under the rock like cavemen. They stayed quiet for a long while, content to watch the power of the storm on the landscape. Tridents of lightning sliced the sky, illuminating the treetops and the far valley.
Emmanuel shook raindrops from the brim of his hat and said, ‘You’re right, Shabalala. The only logical reason for leaving the body out like bait was because the men wanted to draw attention to the location of the murder. The question is, why?’
Shabalala pointed to brush marks across the loose sand in the shelter. ‘Whoever killed the man wiped their tracks from the scene. They did not want to be found; but the men did not try to hide what they had done with the body.’
‘Like pointing a finger and saying, “Come and see what’s happened, but we’re not responsible.”’
‘
Yebo
,’ Shabalala agreed. ‘That is what I think.’
‘The motive for attracting attention could be selfish. Someone got to Philani before Mandla and his soldiers and they want the guilty party found and punished. They’ve got no leads of their own so they’ve handed the job over to us,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Do you think the Durban detective branch called Mandla and told him that hopeless cases are our speciality?’
Shabalala laughed softly. It was the best self-defence for a detective surrounded by vultures and decomposing human remains.
The rain continued to lash the hillside. Thunder boomed and spectacular rods of lightning forked across the mountaintops. From the damp ground rose the scent of Africa after the rains: a mix of dust, crushed leaves and clean rivers cutting through open veldt. What Emmanuel’s mother had described as ‘the smell of heaven in the morning’.
Within minutes the storm dissipated and the lightning faded. Birdsong filled the silent woods and the world was fresher, greener than before.
‘We need to find the nearest farmhouse and phone the murder into Roselet.’ Emmanuel stood up and brushed creases from his trouser legs. ‘If Bagley’s available, we’ll request backup to get the body off the mountain and to Zweigman for examination.’
A big if. Instinct told Emmanuel that Constable Bagley and his native police were still out in the countryside and would be for hours yet. There was no way that he and Shabalala could transport the corpse over rough terrain without help.
‘There will not be much of him left in one or two hours.’ Shabalala motioned to a string of vultures gathered in the branches of a yellowwood tree. They’d fly away if chased and come back just as quickly. Time was their ally; all they had to do was wait.
‘Christ above . . .’ Emmanuel knew what had to be done and so did Shabalala, who took a jagged breath to calm his nerves. ‘I’ll sketch the scene for reference and then we’ll move him back under the shelter.’
Shabalala gathered the discarded branches and pulled them across the ledge. He laid them next to the corpse to make a bush stretcher and waited. Emmanuel finished drawing the crime scene and then scribbled the victim’s approximate height and weight in the margin. At around five foot three and between nine and ten stone the victim was a compact man. Next, Emmanuel added details of the rock shelter, the raked-over footprints and the deliberate exposure of the body, then tucked the writing pad away.
‘One moment, please, Sergeant.’ Shabalala turned away from the smell and the flies. His broad shoulders hunched and flexed and his breath was laboured.
‘There’s no hurry.’ Emmanuel took the lead. Working quickly and with grim determination, he rolled the man onto the branches and settled his arms across his distended stomach. War was the best training ground for dealing with the dead: malnourished children, pretty girls in tattered dresses, and soldiers barely old enough to shave, Emmanuel had seen and buried them all.
‘I am ready,’ Shabalala said and turned back to the corpse without being sick.
‘Take the right branch, I’ll take the left.’ Emmanuel grabbed the thickest limb of the makeshift stretcher and prepared to haul. ‘Straight to the shelter on the count of three.’
‘
Yebo
.’ The Zulu policeman grabbed a branch and helped drag the body to the spur of rock.
‘In the hollow,’ Emmanuel said and they laid the body in the sandy indentation with the blood spill. Philani’s next journey would be much longer: all the way down the hillside, into a mortuary van or car and into town. It might be the only time the diminutive Zulu had had the luxury of travelling in a motor vehicle. ‘Let’s cover him and find the nearest telephone.’
They collected fallen branches from the damp undergrowth and re-covered the body. Shabalala found two heavy logs and weighed the branches down to make it harder for the wild cats and jackals to uncover it.
‘We can see all the farmhouses from up there, Sergeant. At the top.’
‘Not all the white-owned farms have telephones,’ Emmanuel said on the slippery climb to the summit. ‘But the nearest European house will do as a starting point.’
They gained the rise in under five minutes and scanned the valley for whitewashed walls and the glitter of corrugated-iron roofs. Smoke from cooking fires rose from
kraals
and from two European dwellings connected to the main road by narrow access lanes.
‘Little Flint Farm.’ Shabalala gestured to a sprawl of buildings miles away from their vantage point and then pointed to a smaller homestead much closer. ‘That house is the nearest.’
*
Glimpses of mud-brick walls and a silver roof showed through the dripping trunks of the wild pomegranate trees. Emmanuel led the way along a grass path, which brought them to a dirt yard and homestead. Geese bathed in the mud puddles and a rooster crowed in the world made bright by the rain.
‘It doesn’t look promising,’ Emmanuel said. ‘No electricity wires. No generator. And I’m betting no book in the house but the Bible.’
His adopted father was a staunch Afrikaner who viewed modern conveniences as works of the devil. The mean little homestead and the scrappy yard he stood in now triggered memories of days on the sun-blasted veldt and of his stepfather and mother praying through endless cycles of drought, flood and bushfire.
‘On the back veranda,’ Shabalala said. ‘There is a person.’