Деон Мейер - Cobra

He greeted her politely. He stretched out his hand for the door.

‘No,’ said Mbali, ‘you are not wearing gloves.’ All he wanted was to keep his station’s collective butt, and his own individual one, out of trouble. He didn’t say that many hands had already touched that handle. He merely nodded and watched as she dug a pair of gloves out of her handbag and put them on.

‘Don’t you have gloves?’ she asked.

‘In the car,’ he said.

‘Go and fetch them.’

He nodded, and asked one of his detectives to fetch them.

‘Do you have shoe covers?’ she asked.

He called to the detective to bring them too.

Mbali shook her head in disbelief. ‘You wait until you are properly attired. And then you come in. Only you.’

‘But the sergeant was first on the scene . . .’

‘I will question him when I come out.’ She pointed at the other detective, and the uniform sergeant. ‘You guard this door.’

Then she walked in.

‘What makes you think they’ve bugged our offices?’ Nyathi asked.

They were standing in the underground car park, beside the clubhouse door, where no one could see or hear them: the Giraffe, Griessel and Cupido.

‘It was something she said, sir,’ said Griessel. ‘When she warned me not to tell anybody. “If I hear you speaking out, the phone calls will stop.” She didn’t say “if I heard”, but “if I hear”. Maybe I’m wrong, but it made me very uneasy.’

Nyathi stood there for a long time, his head tilted. He sighed. ‘They are already monitoring our email and our phone calls. The sad thing is, you might be right. And we have to assume that you are.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You go back, and you make copies, just the two of you. Don’t talk to anybody about it. Just do it. Bring me all the original material and I’ll hand it over when the agent comes.’

‘Does that mean we continue the investigation, sir?’ asked Cupido.

‘Damn right it does,’ said Nyathi.

Mbali Kaleni wanted to cry.

It was her greatest secret, greater than the secret packets of crisps or KFC or chocolate that she ate alone in her office. Greater than the fantasies about the actor Djimon Hounsou that she sometimes allowed herself in bed at night. At a murder scene she wanted to cry. It was all about the loss, the senselessness, tragedy, but above all the human capacity for evil. That broke her heart, and she often mused on this with great solemnity and concern. Why did people do it? What was it that, especially in this country, drove people to rape and maim and murder? The heavy burden of the past? Or was it something that came from the bedrock of South Africa, a demonic energy field that unsettled people’s minds?

She was purposefully strict with the SC back in the passage, because she really wanted to come in here alone. That way she would not have to work so hard to hide the tears. She knew, just one sign of weakness, and her male colleagues would be crowing. But now, at least, she could let her shoulders sag and allow the silent tears to well up. She dug in her handbag and took out a bunch of tissues, gripping them in her fist as she looked at the five lifeless bodies. This afternoon their loved ones, fathers and mothers, wives, children, would be torn apart by grief. A few days only in the headlines, but this deed would last so much longer, would ripple outwards creating single breadwinners and greater poverty and misery, far into the future, when a son or daughter of one of these men would say to a social worker or a magistrate: ‘My father died when I was four . . .’

She wiped away the tears, pushed the tissues back into her handbag. She straightened her shoulders, and began to study the crime scene.

Tyrone Kleinbooi ran across August Street, over the empty plot, and jumped up against the high concrete wall of the school. He wanted to be among people, that was his only defence up here in Schotsche Kloof, where the houses were too few and the streets too wide.

He clambered over the wall. The school grounds were quiet.

Holidays, he had forgotten it was the holidays.

He ran past the school buildings, down to the main gate, next to the netball court. An ageing security guard with a military cap set on askew, struggled across a concrete area, shouting and waving a knobkierie stick at him.

Tyrone kept on running.

The main gate was high and locked, but the chain was long, so that he could force it open a crack and squeeze his skinny body through.

He looked back.

He didn’t see anyone, except for the old uncle with the cap, gesticulating wildly and shouting inexplicable things.

He was through. He ran past the Schotsche Kloof flats, the ugly housing projects where washing flapped from windows. An aunty shouted from up there: ‘Hey, look at him run now.’

He was grateful it was downhill. He swerved left, through backyards, into the upper end of Church Street.

He looked back again.

Nobody.

They made hurried copies of everything. Griessel passed the documents on, and the more technologically skilled Cupido copied them.

Griessel’s phone rang. He took it out, annoyed by the interruption while they were under so much pressure. MBALI on his screen.

He answered.

‘Benny, I’m at the Waterfront. There’s been a shooting. Five security people dead . . .’

Griessel suppressed the ‘ Jissis ’, because Mbali didn’t like expletives or swearing.

‘I think you’d better come,’ she said.

‘Mbali, we’re very busy . . .’

‘I know. But the colonel briefed us on the Franschhoek shooting at morning parade, and he said there were shell casings with the etchings of a snake . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘There are a lot of them here, Benny. And I mean a lot .’

Fok , thought Griessel, he should not have been so impatient and hasty – his cellphone was being tapped, now the whole SSA knew it too.

‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

‘Can you bring Sergeant Davids too? There’s a lot of technology we’ll have to figure out.’

‘OK,’ said Griessel, and rang off.

Nadia Kleinbooi sat at the bottom of the Neelsie, the student centre of the University of Stellenbosch, at a long wooden table with some of her classmates. Her cellphone rang. She barely heard it, because it was a noisy environment, the voices of students, music playing.

TYRONE, she read. The guy must have delivered the phone.

She covered one ear and put the phone to the other. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m really sorry to bug you, but there’s nobody home.’ The Good Samaritan’s voice again.

‘No, please, you’re not bugging me. My brother works in the city, he’ll only be back tonight. I . . . Can you maybe put the phone in the mailbox? I will try to . . .’Tyrone lived in the back room, and she didn’t know if the Muslims would realise that it was his phone. She didn’t know what to do.

‘I’ll bring the phone to you,’ said the man.

‘No, I’m in Stellenbosch, it’s far away . . .’

‘Stellenbosch . . .’ His voice became clearer. ‘I have to go there, before I fly out.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. My hotel is there.’

‘Oh. That is . . . You are a very kind person.’

‘No, no, I know about losing a phone. It is a . . . grand dérangement .’

‘You are French?’

‘ Mais oui .’

‘That’s so cool.’

‘So where do I find you?’

‘Oh, yes. I have class until one o’clock. Where is your hotel?’

‘Right there in Stellenbosch. I will call you when I get there?’

‘OK, just after one. Call me just after one.’

24

Further down the corridor, in the belly of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront shopping centre, was the office of the head of security. At two minutes past twelve, Mbali sat on one of the visitors’ chairs. A coloured security official sat opposite her. The Sea Point Station commander stood against the wall.