Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

What had driven him to take the wrong turns to nowhere, to seek the dead ends? The road signs had been so clear, so attractive.

Was that not what he wanted? he suddenly asked himself. Wife and children and a lawn mower?

Yes , he thought.

So fucking badly.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

18

Boet Marnewick found his wife’s kneeling body in the living room, her hands tied behind her back with masking tape, her feet bound with a silk stocking. Forty-six stab wounds, made with a sharp instrument, in her stomach and her back, her nipples sliced off, her genitals mutilated beyond recognition. Blood everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room. A murder that shook the community, caused fear and hatred, and was a subject of conversation for years to come. Stilfontein was rough, a town that knew and understood alcoholism and wife beating and immorality and adultery and assault. Even manslaughter. And, occasionally, murder. But not this kind of murder. The deadly blow in a hotheaded, drunken moment, after an excess of alcohol – that was possible to understand, once in a while.

But this was in cold blood, done by a stranger, an intruder, a thief who, taking his time and with malice aforethought, mutilated and murdered a defenseless woman.

I was in my room, busy with homework, when there was a knock at the door. My mother answered and I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone of her voice made me walk to the living room and there was my detective, my Louis L’Amour Samaritan, and suddenly my heart beat in my throat because my mother looked shocked.

“Sir…” I said, and swallowed, and then my mother said, “Baby Marnewick is dead, Zet.”

He pretended not to know me and it was only when he left that he squeezed my shoulder, looked at me, and gave me a small smile. But before that he asked his questions. Had we seen anything? Heard anything? What did we know about the Marnewicks?

And I sat there with my fantasies and my intimate knowledge and my voyeurism and merely affirmed my mother’s negative replies. We knew nothing.

We got the details later. From neighbors and the Klerksdorp Record and Die Vaderland and Die Volksblad and even the Sunday Times . A gruesome sex killing had made Stilfontein national news. I read the reports over and over again and listened with the closest attention to each bit of news a new source could supply.

The details upset me. Partly because of my own unclean thoughts about Baby Marnewick. And the fact that they, however slight the connection, linked me to the murderer who had cut and stabbed, driven by lust. Because I had lusted as well – even though our fantasies had been so dramatically different.

And partly because a human being, someone in Stilfontein, one of us, was capable of such a revolting deed.

They never found him. There were no fingerprints. There was semen on Baby Marnewick’s body, on her buttocks and on her back, but this was in the years before DNA testing and the long arm of the test tube that could reach past your race and sex and blood group to the imprint of your body, that could decipher a microscopic hair or thread from a piece of clothing and dissect you more thoroughly than a scalpel.

There were rumors. Boet Marnewick was a suspect but that was nonsense, he had been a kilometer underground at the time of the murder. There were rumors of the traveling murderer. Another story was of a man from her past, from Johannesburg, and there was even one about the Scot from whom Boet had taken her.

But they never found the killer.

Day after day I stared at the wooden fence and thought about the strangest things. If Betta Wandrag hadn’t interfered, would I have listened at the fence? Perhaps heard something that could have saved Baby Marnewick? Wondered why. How? How did someone do something like that? How do you murder so brutally and without conscience, so bloody and cruel? And who.

Who could have planned something like that? Because rumor would have it that he had brought the masking tape with him, that he had worn gloves. Premeditated, planned murder.

Toward the end of the year my mother put the application forms for Potchefstroom University in front of me, made herself comfortable, and said we had speculated about my plans for a long time. Now it was time to go to university and make my choices, because it was better to go to university first and then do the compulsory army training because graduates quickly became officers, even if I only wanted to become a teacher.

“I’m not going to university, Ma.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m joining the police.”

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

19

Profiling.

Johannes Jacobus Smit had been bound, tortured, and then murdered because he had to supply the combination to a safe and afterward he was an unnecessary and unwelcome witness. The motive was known. The modus operandi clear. The profile simple. A single-minded thief. Someone who was capable of torture and murder. Psychopath, sociopath, at least some symptoms.

Behavior established personality. They had taught him that at Quantico. His three American months.

But the magical power of profiling lay in pinpointing the evidently motiveless, the serial killers, the rapists, the sex murderers who were driven by the demons of their pasts: the fucked-up family life, the violent father, the whoring mother. Not in exposing the simplicity of torture and murder committed to get at the contents of a safe. Robbery. Murder. With aggravating circumstances.

Planned robbery. The wire had been brought to the murder scene. The blowtorch was part of the murderer’s equipment. Here are your sandwiches, love. And don’t forget the wire, the pliers, and the blowtorch. Is the M16 loaded? Have a nice day .

He, the murderer- robber, was known to Smit. Maybe. Probably. No sign of forced entry into the house. And the fact that Smit was shot execution-style. Another potential sign. No witnesses left behind.

Perhaps. Possibly. Conceivably.

He parked the Corolla under a tree at the bottom end of Moreletta Street and switched off the engine.

The blowtorch.

There was something about that blowtorch. The murderer knew he would have to torture, which meant that he knew Smit wouldn’t talk easily. Which also meant that he knew him. Which meant that he knew Smit possessed something that was worth stealing. Something that was hidden or locked away. But there were many ways to torture that caused pain, inhuman pain. Why use a blowtorch? Why not use the pliers to extract Smit’s nails, one by one? Why not beat Smit with the stock of the rifle until his face was unrecognizable and the pain of a broken nose and smashed mouth and cracked skull made him beg to confess, to tell where the documents or diamonds or dollars or drugs were?

Or whatever the fuck was in the safe.

The blowtorch said something about the murderer.

Arson was a primary warning sign of a serial killer in the making. Together with bed-wetting and torturing animals.

They liked fire. Flames.

He took out his notebook.

Crime Research Bureau. Blowtorch burglaries/crimes

He closed the book, put it into his jacket pocket with the pen.

“You must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the murderer and the victim,” they had said at Quantico.

Smit’s shoes. The perspective of the victim acquired from the crime scene, the forensic and pathology reports. Smit, alone at home, follows his usual routine: there’s a knock at the door – was the door locked, had he always kept it locked, habit of fifteen years, or was the door open and had the murderer simply walked in with his rifle and his blowtorch and his wire and his pliers? Here was something that didn’t make sense. There were too many things for one man to carry. Hold the door for a moment, Johannes Jacobus, I just want to get the torture equipment .