It was just past five o’clock when Yudel woke. He lay next to Rosa without moving for some fifteen minutes before slipping carefully out of bed. She was sleeping deeply and he did not want to disturb her. Wearing his striped pyjama pants and a vest, he made coffee and took it into his study.
He wondered about Beloved and her interest in Oliver Hall. How had she even become aware of the prisoner? He would rather not have thought about Hall or his parole and even less about Beloved’s interest in him, but this morning he had little control of his thinking. Years before, after going through Hall’s file, he had conducted a few interviews with people who had known him at different times in his life. The picture that had been built up by that study had led him to the conclusion he had offered the minister and that she had to reject.
By all accounts, Hall had come from an unremarkable home. His father had been a bus driver for the municipality at a time when further ambition was unlikely for a man whose parentage was part African and part European. In his community, he was thought of as a big man, a man with a regular job and decent pay where not many had jobs of any kind. He was also a man who drank no more than the occasional beer while most men drank whatever they could get their hands on. And he never hit his homemaker wife – in a neighbourhood in which many wives were bruised or had teeth broken by their men. As far as Yudel could ascertain, he had lived a contented life until Oliver reached the age of nine.
It was common cause among the people Yudel spoke to that, of his four children, he loved the others more than Oliver. In fact, it seemed possible that he feared the boy. According to a social worker who visited the family after Oliver attacked and badly injured a smaller boy from a neighbouring family, the father had tried to hide his preference for the other children.
It was in the year that Oliver turned nine and in the following one that Oliver’s two younger siblings died. The smaller of the two, aged only eighteen months, died in his sleep. Doctors found no explanation for the child’s death. Despite the child’s age, the family was told that it must have been a cot death, one of those mysterious incidents in which children died without obvious reason and without anyone being held responsible.
Oliver’s sister, a year older than him, had fallen from the platform in front of a moving train. No one had seen it happen. Oliver said that he had been in the lavatory at the time. At the inquest, the train driver, who was still in a state of shock, said that he thought he had seen two children on the platform, but he could not say for certain.
When Oliver was twelve, his brother Ashton, five years his senior, had survived an incident with a hunting knife that Oliver had stolen from a department store. Half the length of the blade had entered Ashton’s side, but it had missed any critical organs. Oliver had told the police he had been sharpening the knife on the cement back step of the house where his brother was sitting and had slipped. The police had confiscated the knife and told his father not to let him play with knives. His father had protested that he knew nothing about the knife. The resolution seemed to satisfy the adults involved, but Ashton had asked to be allowed to sleep in the wooden storeroom in the backyard and, from then on, always padlocked his door from the inside.
Four years later, the father died of a heart attack while at work. This time Oliver was not in the vicinity. He had savoured his father’s descent into depression since the two younger children had died and would have done nothing to speed up the process.
His mother had been the only one who ever believed in him and, at the age of seventy-five, she believed in him still. She had told the social worker how Oliver had a terrible life, that he had loved his younger brother and sister deeply, and how they had been taken away from him. It was tragic, but it was God’s will. Perhaps the Lord was punishing the family for something she or her husband or their parents had done. She also described Oliver’s close and loving relationship with his elder brother as like that of David and Jonathan in the Bible.
Throughout everything that followed, she had remained true to her son and her belief in his innocence. During his years in prison, she had intermittently declared his innocence in letters to the president, the minister of Correctional Services, more than one member of parliament, the editors of various newspapers, the director of C-Max and Yudel himself. Her son had fought for liberation and now he was being treated this way. It was a conspiracy of people who wanted to bring back apartheid. Some important people were against him. Anyone could see it.
As a young man, Hall had disappeared from the police radar for a few years, but during that time a girlfriend had disappeared. Hall had helped in the search for her, making telephone calls to friends and relatives, and suggestions to the police. A headless and handless female torso was found a few kilometres from her home some years later, but no serious attempt was made to identify it. What the police did not know was that Hall’s favourite knife had disappeared at the same time, and knives had been a part of his life since the incident with Ashton.
He reappeared when he was sent to prison after being involved in a robbery in which a shop owner was killed by having his carotid artery slashed. Of the two who had been charged, Hall had turned state witness. He confessed to being present, but not to having taken part in the killing. He had made an excellent impression on the court, the judge commending him for answering questions ‘in a truthful and forthright manner and without hesitation’. He had been sentenced to just five years. His accomplice, a simple-minded man, was sentenced to death and hanged. In three years, Hall was out. The police had found no fingerprints on the knife.
On his release, Hall had been recruited by the liberation movement and sent to the notorious Quatro camp in Angola. Within weeks he had gravitated to the intelligence division, but had only lasted a few months when he had been expelled from the movement. Yudel had made a few enquiries, but had not been able to discover the reason for his expulsion. People who had been part of the struggle did not want to share the movement’s darker secrets with anyone, let alone someone who had been in the pay of the apartheid government during those years. It was on the basis of those few months that Hall declared himself to have been a freedom fighter. Yudel believed that none of those who campaigned for his release on political grounds had ever studied the case.
Four years after his summary discharge from the movement, he killed again, this time dismembering a farming family. A large hunting knife had been recovered by the police and this time an identifiable palm print had been found on the base of the handle. By now, Nelson Mandela’s hour was at hand. He had been freed from his long sojourn in apartheid jails and he was just months away from the presidency.
Hall was caught and convicted, but rescued from the gallows by the removal of the death penalty as a method of punishment. He pleaded before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the farmer had been a racist of the worst sort who was cruel to his workers, and that killing him had been a political act in keeping with his status as a freedom fighter. Although there were no witnesses to his testimony, the commissioners had agreed and he had been released, after spending just eight months in Barberton Prison.
His file held no trace of his movements until eight years later, when he was part of a gang that robbed a suburban bank. The bank manager had died of a knife wound, again the carotid being the target, but the alleged killer had himself been killed in the shoot-out that followed. Yudel recognised the similarities between that incident and the killing of the shopkeeper. Neither death had been necessary if the only motive had been robbery. And the method of killing was an unlikely one for a gang that was carrying firearms.
Yudel believed that the facts in the file and his own knowledge were both hopelessly incomplete. According to Hall’s file, the only time he had been guilty of murder was when he had struck down the supposedly racist farmer. The rest of Du Toit’s family, a wife and two children, had also paid for the father’s sins.
Hall’s role in the assassination of a fairly obscure politician in the Mpumalanga province had never been more than a prison rumour. He had been living in that province at the time and had been questioned about the incident, but well-connected people from that province had placed him elsewhere at the time. The killing in Mpumalanga had been the first of many in the area, but the others had taken place while Hall was already in prison. Again, a knife had been the weapon of choice.
Yudel thought about the use of a knife. To use a knife, the killer had to be up close. He would be able to smell his victim and feel the life leaving the body. It was the most intimate possible way of killing.
Hall had never attended any institution of higher learning, but he had long since discarded the speech inflections of the Cape Coloured community he had grown up in. He sounded more like a professional or even a university lecturer than a criminal who had spent much of his life in prison. He used his elegant manner of speaking to try to win trust and often was successful.
Yudel was so deep in thought when the phone rang that it woke Rosa before he answered. She was standing in his study doorway by the time he started listening to the voice on the other end of the line. She heard him say, ‘Phone Deputy Police Commissioner Jordaan immediately. Ask him to come to the scene personally. Tell him I request it.’
‘Yudel, what is it?’ Rosa asked after he had hung up.
‘One of our people has been attacked in his home. Apparently his wife is badly hurt.’
‘How awful. It just shows that no one is safe any more, not even in your own home.’ She looked at Yudel when he did not respond. ‘Yudel, it’s terrible that people are not safe in their homes.’
Yudel only glanced at her. He had not heard anything she said.
‘Yudel?’
But he was on his way back to the bedroom to get dressed.
TWO POLICE CARS
were parked on the grass verge in front of the building that housed just four flats. As Yudel pulled up next to them, a car turned the corner to enter the street. It belonged to Brigadier General Freek Jordaan, deputy commissioner of police for the province and Yudel’s friend of many years. Yudel waited for him in front of the building. ‘One of your men?’ Freek asked.
‘Ordinary warder,’ Yudel said. ‘I saw him yesterday. He’d been screwing a prisoner.’
Freek’s eyebrows rose only a fraction. It was not the most extreme transgression by a prison officer he had ever dealt with. ‘Forcing her?’
‘No. He’d been paying her.’
‘That’s a new one. Pretty woman?’
‘Gorgeous,’ Yudel said.
‘Good figure?’ Freek wanted to know.
‘For God’s sake, Freek, I’ve only seen her in prison uniform and that doesn’t reveal much. But Dongwana said resisting her was impossible.’
‘What’d you do about it?’
‘I recommended that he be moved to a male section.’
Freek nodded. ‘Any reason you wanted me here?’
‘Yes.’
The flat was on the ground floor. The door was standing open and, as they approached, a plain-clothes detective came into the passage and stopped when he saw them. His surprise at Freek’s arrival showed on his face. ‘General?’
‘Sergeant Motsepe, what’s happening?’ Freek asked. Yudel was a step behind him.
The detective spoke quickly. The matter had become a lot more urgent since the province’s deputy commissioner had appeared on the scene. ‘The man’s inside. We sent the wife to hospital. She’s not looking good.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s hurting inside. They hit her a lot and raped her. Her face is finished.’
‘And the husband?’
‘They drugged him.’
‘You sure it’s not the husband who did this?’
‘I don’t think it’s him.’
‘Good.’
Another man was coming out of the flat. Yudel knew him to be Dongwana’s immediate senior in C-Max. ‘Yudel,’ he said, ‘this is a hell of a thing. It must have been another one of our men.’
‘It’s not,’ Yudel said. ‘Where’s Dongwana?’
‘Inside. He’s getting dressed. It’s a hell of a thing. If it’s not one of our men then how did they get in?’
‘You say Dongwana’s getting dressed?’
‘Putting on his uniform to go to work. A hell of a thing to happen.’
Yudel glanced at Freek. This time his friend really did look interested. ‘Going to work?’ he muttered, but more to himself than Yudel.
The living room showed few signs of a struggle. A coffee table had been overturned and the police had marked the place in the centre of the room where Penny Dongwana had been left. ‘That’s where she was,’ Sergeant Motsepe told them. ‘He never moved her. He just put a blanket over her.’
Yudel found Dongwana in his bedroom. He was leaning against a wall. So far, he had been able to pull the pants of his uniform up to mid-thigh, but was struggling to move them any further. His fingers did not seem to be working well. Yudel helped him with his pants, then took him by an arm and directed him to the bed. ‘Mister Gordon,’ he tried to say, but his speech was also not working well.
When he was seated, Yudel crouched in front of him. ‘Alfred, look into my eyes,’ he said. Dongwana looked vaguely in his direction. ‘No, look straight into my eyes.’
‘I’m looking,’ Dongwana said. ‘All the time I’m looking.’
‘His eyes can’t focus,’ Yudel told Freek. ‘Why do you want to go to work?’ he asked.
When he answered, Yudel had to listen carefully to make out the words. ‘Go to work,’ he muttered.
‘He should stay home,’ a voice from the door said. It was the senior warder.
Yudel had a hand on Dongwana’s nearer shoulder. ‘Alfred, you can’t go to work while you’re in this state. A man will stay with you, and when you feel better he’ll take you to the hospital to be with your wife.’ Dongwana’s senior was nodding. ‘Do you know why this happened? Do you know who did it?’
‘Must go to work,’ Dongwana said, more clearly and decisively this time. ‘Must go now.’