Deon Meyer: Dead at Daybreak

O’Grady peered at him over the slab of nougat. “Ah. The will.” He put down the confectionery, pushed it aside. “You know, that was the one thing that never really figured.” He leaned back, folded his arms over his stomach. “That fucking will. Because at first I was sure she did him. Or hired somebody. It fitted the whole damn case. Smit had no friends, no business associates, no other staff. But they got in, tortured him until he gave them the combination, cleaned out the safe, and killed him. Took nothing else. It was an inside job. And she was the only one on the inside. Or so she says.”

“Tortured him?”

“Burned him with a fucking blowtorch. Arms, shoulders, chest, balls. It must have been murder, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Did she know that?”

“We didn’t tell her or the press. I played it close to the chest, tried to see if I could trick her.”

“She says she knew the combination, Nougat.”

“The blowtorch could have been for effect. To take suspicion away from her.”

“Murder weapon?”

“Now there’s another strange thing. Ballistics said it was an M16. The Yank army model. Not too many of those around, are there?”

Slowly Van Heerden shook his head. “Just one shot?”

“Yep. Execution style, back of the head.”

“Because he’d seen them? Or knew them?”

“Who knows these days? Maybe they shot him just for the fun of it.”

“How many were there, do you think?”

“We don’t know. No fingerprints inside, no footprints outside, no neighborhood witnesses. But Smit was a big man, in reasonable shape. There must have been more than one perp.”

“Forensics?”

O’Grady leaned forward, pulled the nougat toward him again. “Sweet Fanny Adams. No prints, no hair, no fibers. Just a fucking piece of paper. In the safe. Found a piece of paper, about the size of two matchboxes. Clever guys in Pretoria say it was part of a wrapping. For wrapping little stacks of money. You know, ten thousand in fifties, that sort of thing…”

Van Heerden raised his eyebrows.

“But the funny thing is, according to the type and all that shit, that they’re pretty sure it was dollars. U.S. dollars.”

“Fuck,” said Van Heerden.

“My sentiments exactly. But the plot thickens. It was the only thing I had to go on, so I put a lot of pressure on Pretoria through the colonel. Forensics has a money expert. Claassen, or something. He went back to his books and his microscope and came back and said the paper indicated that it was old money. The Americans don’t wrap their money like that anymore. But they used to. In the seventies and early eighties.”

Van Heerden digested the information for a moment. “And you asked Wilna van As about that?”

“Yep. And got the usual answer. She doesn’t know anything. She never took dollars as payment for that old-fart furniture, never paid with it. Doesn’t even know what a fucking dollar bill looks like. I mean, shit, this woman lived with the deceased for a fucking decade or more, but she’s like the three little monkeys – hear, see, speak no evil. And that little sexpot lawyer of hers is all over me like a sumo wrestler every time I want to ask some straight questions.” O’Grady took a frustrated bite of nougat and sank back in his chair again.

“No American clients or friends she knew about.” It was a statement. He already knew the answer.

The fat detective spoke with his mouth full but managed to utter each word clearly. “Not one. I mean, with the rifle and the dollars, it just makes sense that there is some kind of Yank involvement.”

“Her attorney says she’s innocent.”

“Is she your new employer?”

“Temporarily.”

“At least get her into bed. Because that’s all you’re going to get from this one. It’s a dead end. I mean, where’s the fucking motive for Wilna van As? Without the will she apparently gets nothing.”

“Unless there was a deal that she would get half of the haul. In a year or two when things had cooled down.”

“Maybe…”

“And without her there were no other suspects?”

“Zilch. Nothing.”

Time to eat humble pie: “I would like to see the dossier very much, Nougat.”

O’Grady stared fixedly at him.

“I know you’re a good policeman, Nougat. I have to go through the motions.”

“You can’t take it with you. You’ll have to read it here.”

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

6

The earthquake woke me, late at night, the deep, rolling thunder from the depths of the earth that made all the windows shiver and the corrugated roof of the mine house creak. I cried and my father came to comfort me, took me in his arms in the dark and said that it was only the earth moving itself into a more comfortable position.

I had fallen asleep again when the telephone rang, an hour or so later. To call him out.

The rest of the tale was told to me by my mother, patched together from the official announcements, the stories of my father’s colleagues, and her own imagination.

He led one of the rescue teams that had to bring out the fourteen men trapped a kilometer underground after one of the tunnels had collapsed.

It was hot and confused down there. Other rescue teams were already at work when they got there, taken down the shaft in the rattling, shaking cage, carrying their shovels and their pickaxes, first-aid kits and bottles of water. No one wore the regulation hard hat; it only got in the way. They all, black and white, folded down the top half of their overalls to work in the heat with naked torsos that gleamed in the glaring electric spotlights, shining brightly in one place and casting deep shadows in another. The black men’s rhythmical singing provided the universal tempo to which everyone worked – the diggers, the soil removers, side by side, the usually rigid divisions drawn between races and trades suddenly forgotten because four of the trapped men were white and ten were black.

Hour after hour in the eternal dark to move a mountain.

On the surface, relatives of the white men had begun to gather, waiting for news with the usual support of the community, friends, and colleagues, as well as families of the rescue teams because they, too, weren’t safe.

My mother painted during those hours, Schubert’s lieder playing tinnily on the radiogram. Calm, she thought my father was invincible, while I knew nothing of the tension of an entire town.

Just before his team was due to return to the surface at the end of their shift, they heard muffled cries for help, exhausted moans of pain and fear, and he encouraged them, the thin edge of the wedge that bit by bit moved rock and stone and earth, to excavate a narrow tunnel, the opportunity for rest suddenly forgotten in the adrenaline high of success in sight. Emile van Heerden was in the lead, his lithe body drawing on the fitness of a lifetime to reach the trapped men.

His team had broken through to the small opening that the survivors had dug with bare hands and bleeding fingers.

The news that there were voices down there quickly spread to the surface, and the people in the small recreation hall clapped their hands and wept.

And then the earth shook again.

He had pulled out the first three on his own with muscled, sinewy arms and loaded them onto the wood-and-canvas stretchers. The fourth one was trapped up to his chest, a black man with smashed legs who suppressed the pain with superhuman effort, the only signs the sweat pouring off him and the shaking of his upper body. Emile van Heerden dug frantically, the soil around the man’s legs moving with the effort of my father’s own fingers because a shovel was too big and too clumsy. Then the earth, once again, moved into a more comfortable position.