Deon Meyer - Dead at Daybreak

“Schlebusch.”

“Jesus.” Joubert turned. “Tony, Leon, we’ve got to go.”

“There’s nothing left for you,” said Brits.

“Did you interfere with a murder scene?”

“I solved a military problem.”

For a moment Van Heerden thought Mat Joubert was going to hit the Defence Force officer, but then Joubert gave a deep sigh. “I’m getting married on Saturday, and on Sunday I’m going on a honeymoon to the Seychelles. It gives me two days in which I’ll use every possible channel to get you out of this thing, Brits…”

“I object,” said the brigadier.

“Fat lot of difference that’s going to make,” said Orlando Arendse. “You don’t know the Bull.”

Redelinghuys opened his mouth but was forestalled by a woman’s high, distraught voice.

“It’s you!”

Carolina de Jager came walking up, her finger pointing at one of them.

“It’s you,” she said, her voice breaking. She walked past them to Bester Brits, hit him on the shoulder.

“It’s you. You’re the one who took away my son. What did you do, what did you do to Rupert?” She hit the man on the chest and he simply stood there, didn’t stop her. She hammered at him, weeping, until Van Heerden reached her.

“Easy,” he said in a soft voice.

“It’s him.”

“I know.”

“He brought the news of his death.”

He took her hands away from Brits, held her against him. “I know.”

“Twenty years. And I’ll never forget his face.”

He held her.

“He was the one who took Rupert away.” She cried uncontrollably, the sorrow of a lifetime. He could do no more, heard Bester walking away without a word.

There was nothing he could say to comfort her.

♦

Shortly before one, he closed and locked the door of his house behind him, arranged a few loose papers on the table in front of him, put down a pen, and tugged the wallet out of his pocket.

Worn leather that fastened with a stud. Two hundred and fifty rand and loose change. Bank cards. ABSA MasterCard in the name of W.A. Potgieter. ABSA cash card with the same name. Receipts. All in the past week. Van Hunks Tavern, Mowbray, R65.85. The Mexican Chili, Observatory, R102.66. Vee’s Videos, Main Road, Observatory. Pick ’n Pay, Mowbray, R142.55 for groceries, a credit card slip from the Girls-to-Go Agency, Twelfth Avenue, Observatory, R600.00.

That was it.

He gave the little pile a disappointed look. It wasn’t much help. It needed work. He fetched his telephone guide, looked up the number of the ABSA Card Division, dialed. “Art World Frames and Studio, Table View, here. I have a client at the counter,” he said in a whisper, “of whom I want to make quite sure.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He wants to buy a painting for nearly a thousand rand. His card number is 5417 9113 8919 1030 in the name of W.A. Potgieter and the expiry date is 06/ 00.”

“Just a moment.”

He waited. “The card hasn’t been reported as missing, sir.”

“What is his registered address? I want to make doubly sure.”

“It’s…er…177 Wildebeest Drive, Bryanston, sir.”

“Johannesburg?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you very much,” he whispered, and put the phone down.

That didn’t help much.

But what was W.A. doing so far from home? Why was he hanging around the Cape’s southern suburbs?

He leaned back in the chair, tried to make sense of the day’s events, tried to slot the new information into what he had.

So many dead. And now only Venter and Vergottini remained.

Bester Brits had been the messenger of death then. Involved from the start. But not involved enough to know everything. Like who the protagonist behind it all was.

One of them would telephone at 14:00, one of them wanted to come in and talk, one of them said he wasn’t part of the thing.

And the other one had sent four men to shoot his mother.

What kind of man…what was so big, so important, so wicked that he needed to send four armed henchmen? Was it the money, the huge stack of American dollars? Or was it because he wanted to cover up the evil of twenty-three years ago at all costs?

Schlebusch. Why shoot your erstwhile team leader if he was on your side?

And if Schlebusch wasn’t the evil behind the whole thing, who the hell was?

The timing.

Brits had said it was because Schlebusch’s picture had been in the newspaper that he was shot. But the timing was too tight. Between five, six o’clock when Die Burger appeared and the phone call, there had been too little time to commit a murder, develop a strategy to lure him, Van Heerden, to Hout Bay, and send troops to Morning Star.

It hadn’t worked that way.

Shit, he didn’t know how this thing worked, but he had one thin string he could pull on to see what unraveled. The contents of the wallet.

He looked at his watch. 13:12. Still time to drive to Observatory before the 14:00 call came. He would have to call Tiny. He replaced the contents of the wallet, snapped it shut, put it back in his pocket. Walked to the door. The Heckler & Koch stood against the wall next to the door. He looked at it. The thing was too big. Too unwieldy. Too obvious.

He paused.

Perhaps it was time?

No.

What had Mat Joubert told Bester Brits? Unload the burden .

A moment’s doubt, the old, familiar tug in his stomach when he thought about the Z88, and then he walked to the bedroom, opened the cupboard door, shifted the sweaters in front of the small safe, turned the combination lock, and clicked it open. He took out the old police service pistol and magazine, banged the magazine into the grip – Don’t think , he didn’t want to think – pushed the gun into his belt at the back, pulled his sweater over it, walked to the front door, picked up the Heckler & Koch – he must give it back to Tiny – opened the door.

“Hallo, Zatopek,” said Kara-An Rousseau, her hand in the air, about to knock. She looked at the machine pistol. “Still love me?”

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

50

We were standing next to the body of the Red Ribbon Executioner’s first victim when Nagel said: “If anyone ever messes with my wife, I’ll shoot him. Like a dog.”

Unprovoked. He had bent over the middle-aged prostitute and studied the red ribbon with which she had been strangled and suddenly straightened and looked me in the eye and his Adam’s apple had bobbed with each word. And then he looked away again and studied the crime scene.

And my heart skipped a beat and my palms sweat, and, terrified, I wondered how he knew, because he couldn’t know, we were so incredibly careful. After the second time I didn’t even park my Toyota near the Nagel house – I left it two blocks away in a café’s parking lot and walked, stooping, like a suspect, like a criminal.

I, who, despite my minor sins of self-satisfaction and selfishness, had made the conscious decision to strive for integrity, to live with honesty and self-control. I, for whom each crime scene brought a new determination to range myself on the side of the good, to fight and to tame the evil and the bad, the monster that crouched in others.

Then, and in the years thereafter, I turned that moment over and over like a piece of evidence in my hands and examined it from all sides for clues to Nagel’s words.

Had my attitude toward him changed when he came back from De Aar? I thought I’d hidden it so well; we still bickered, joked, argued as we’d always done, but perhaps the thin light-headedness of guilt when I met his eyes was visible, tangible.

Or was it Nonnie’s subtly altered behavior when he came home? Had he perhaps found her in the kitchen, softly singing, and had she said, or not said, something?