Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

Carefully I took off her clothes piece by piece. Until she eventually lay, beautiful and pale and ready, on my mother’s enormous living-room couch.

And suddenly the time had come and I had to get rid of my clothes and I got up and undressed feverishly and turned back to her and saw her lying there and the whole time of expectation and fantasies was like an irresistible wave and my entire body was burning, and I came, spectacularly, all over my mother’s living-room carpet.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

11

He walked to the front door of the house. DURBANVILLE CLASSIC FURNITURE was written on a slightly weathered wooden board against the wall. And below it the bell, next to the steel security gate: PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE. He pressed and heard the bell inside, a soft, musical sound, almost cheerful, ding-dong . He heard footsteps on the wooden floor, and then she opened the door.

“Mr. van Rensburg,” she said without surprise.

“Van Heerden,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, and unlocked the security gate. “I’m usually so good with names. Come in.”

She walked ahead of him down the passage. To the left and right there were rooms with furniture, all made of wood, all elegant, tables and cupboards and desks. Her office was in the smallest room of the house. Her desk wasn’t a classic piece, but the wood of the chairs glowed. Everything was painfully neat.

“Please sit down.”

“I only came to ask whether you had Smit… Mr . Smit’s identity document.”

“I have,” she said, and opened a melamine cupboard behind the door.

He took out his notebook and paged through it to where he had written down the identity number.

She took out a cardboard box and put it on the desk. She lifted the lid and put it down next to the box with neat, economical gestures. She didn’t look at him, avoided eye contact. Because he knew , he thought. Because she had to share her secrets with him. That was why she couldn’t remember his name. A defense mechanism.

She handed him the ID. It was one of the old issues with a blue cover. He opened it. Jan Smit’s photograph, younger than the contorted face he had seen in the artistic rendering of the police photograph. He held his finger underneath the identity number, checked it figure by figure. The one he had written down was correct.

He sighed.

“Home Affairs says this number belongs to someone else. A Mrs. Ziegler.”

“Mrs. Ziegler?” Wilna van As repeated mechanically.

“Yes.”

“What can that possibly mean?”

“Only two things. Either they’re making a mistake, which is very probable. Or the ID has been forged.”

“Forged?” There was fear in her voice. “Surely that’s not possible.”

“The other documents in that box. What are they?”

She looked apathetically at the cardboard box as though it had acquired a new dimension. “The registration of the company and the contracts of the houses.”

“May I see them?”

Reluctantly she pushed the box across the desk. He took out the contents. Durbanville Classic Furniture. Registered as a one-man business. 1983. Registered as a close corporation. 1984. A reregistration? Deed of conveyance for this house. 1983. Deed of conveyance for the home. 1983.

“There are no mortgage documents for the houses,” he said.

“Oh,” she said.

“Are they paid off?”

“I think so.”

“Both?”

“I…Yes, I think so.”

“The company books. The financial affairs. Who handles them?”

“Jan dealt with them. And the auditor.”

“Did you have any insight into them?”

“Yes, I helped balance the books every month.”

“Are the records available?”

“Yes. It’s all here.” Her eyes turned to the white cupboard behind her.

“May I see them?”

She nodded and got up. There was a certain absence in her, he thought.

She opened the cupboard door again, wider this time. “Here they are,” she said. He looked. Ledgers and hardcover files stood in neat rows covering two shelves, each one clearly marked with a felt-tip pen for each year since 1983.

“May I see the first lot. To ’eighty-six, perhaps?”

Carefully she took the files out and handed them to him. He opened the first one. Handwritten figures in columns between the narrow blue and red lines. He concentrated, tried to make sense, get a grip on it all. Entries of dates and sums, the figures not large, tens, a couple of hundreds, but obviously chaotic. He gave up.

“Could you explain how it works?”

She nodded. She took a long yellow pencil, using it as a pointer. “These are the debits and these are the credits. There – ”

“Hang on,” he said. “Is this the income, the money he received?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s the money he spent?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the bank balance?”

She turned the page, pointed, using the pencil. “In August 1983 the balance in the books was minus R1,122.35.”

“Is that the amount he had in the bank?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“This amount shows that the business spent R1,122.35 more than it made. The bank balance could be more or less, depending on the original balance.” Patiently, as to a child.

“Hang on,” he said. He had never been stupid with figures. Only uninterested. “This isn’t the bank balance. Only the difference between income and expenditure.”

“Yes.”

“Where is the bank balance reflected?”

“It’s not reflected here. It would be in the bank statements.” She got up, fetched more ledgers from the cupboard.

“Do you have a bookkeeping background?”

“No,” said Wilna van As. “I had to learn. Jan showed me. And the auditor. It’s not difficult, once you understand.” She paged through, searching. “Here. The bank balance for August 1983.”

He looked at where the pencil was pointing. R13,877.65. “He had money in the bank but the business was losing money?”

She paged back in the bank statements. “Look at this. The opening balance of the bank account was R15,000.00. The figures with the minus sign were amounts that he paid out. If you compare it with the figures in the ledger, you’ll see that it’s the same as the debits. And the other figures are income that is entered in the ledger as credit. The difference between the two is R1,122.35. Subtract that from R15,000.00 and you get R13,877.65.”

“Aaaah…”

He pulled the ledger toward him again, paged to September 1983. The balance was minus R817.44; October: minus R674.87; November: minus R404.65; December: R312.05.

“He began making a profit in December 1983.”

“December is always a good month.”

He drew the following year’s ledger and bank statements toward him, studied them with his newfound knowledge. He made notes. The devil was in the detail. His credo. Nagel’s scorn. Wilna van As sat opposite him, her hands folded on the table, quiet. He thought briefly about what was going through the woman’s head. Later she offered tea. He accepted gratefully. She got up. He paged on. A business that grew conservatively: prices of cupboards and desks, tables and chairs, four-posters and headboards, rising steadily, a microeconomic picture of an era. In 1991 the ledger system changed to computer printouts that he had to decipher all over again, with the aid of Wilna van As.

“The houses. Is there no record of the sale of the houses?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could you find out?”

“I’ll ask the bank.”

“I’d be most grateful.”

“What does this all tell you?” she asked, indicating the figures scattered in front of him.