Deon Meyer: Dead at Daybreak

He was one of twenty-four men they brought out of the shaft three days later wrapped in blankets.

My mother cried only when she pulled the blanket aside in the mortuary and saw what the pressure of a ton of rock had done to the beautiful body of her husband.

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

7

Van Heerden wasn’t the kind of man she had expected. Kemp had said he was an ex-policeman. “What can I tell you? A bit…different? But he’s damn good with investigations. Just be firm with him.”

Heaven knew, she needed “good with investigations.”

She hadn’t known what to expect. Different? Perhaps an earring and a ponytail? Not the…tension. The way he had spoken to Wilna van As. Tension wasn’t the right word. He was difficult to handle. Like an explosive.

They had decided on two thousand rand per week. In advance. She would have to pay it out of her own pocket at first if Van Heerden found nothing. Too much money. Even if Wilna van As paid it in installments later. Money the firm couldn’t afford. She would have to phone Kemp. She reached out for the telephone.

He stood in her doorway.

“I’ll have to speak to Van As again.” His lean body and his black eye and his fuck-you attitude, a brown envelope in his hand, leaning against the door frame. She realized that she had been startled and that he had seen it, her hand stretched toward the telephone. Her aversion to the man was small, but germinating, like a seed.

“We’ll have to discuss that,” she said. “And perhaps you should consider knocking before you come in.”

“Why do we have to discuss it?” He sat down in the chair opposite her again, this time leaning forward, his body language antagonistic.

She took a deep breath, forced patience into her voice, and firmness. “Wilna van As, purely as a human being, can justifiably expect our compassion and respect. Added to that she was exposed to more trauma in the past nine months than most of us experience in a lifetime. Despite the little time at our disposal, I found your attitude toward her this morning upsetting and unacceptable.”

He sat in the chair, his eyes on the brown envelope that he tapped rhythmically against his thumbnail.

“I see you’re only two women.”

“What?”

“The firm. Female attorneys.” He looked up, gestured vaguely at the offices around them.

“Yes.” She understood neither the drift nor the relevance.

“Why?” he asked.

“I can’t see what that has to do with your insensitivity.”

“I’m getting to it, Hope. Are you deliberately a women-only firm?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because the legal system is a man’s world. And out there are thousands of women who have the right to be treated with sympathy and insight when they are prosecuted or want a divorce. Or are looking for wills.”

“You’re an idealist,” he said.

“You’re not.” A statement.

“And that is the difference between us, Hope. You think your women’s groups, your all-female practice, and a regular contribution to the street children’s fund and the mission washes your heart as white as snow. You think you and other people are inherently good when you get into your expensive BMWs to go to the Health and Racquet Club and you’re so fucking pleased with yourself and your world. Because everyone is basically good. But let me tell you, we’re bad. You, me, the whole lot of us.”

He opened the envelope, took out two postcard-size photographs. He shot them across the desk.

“Have you seen these? The late Johannes Jacobus Smit. Tied to his own kitchen chair. Does that fill you with understanding and sympathy and insight? Or whatever other politically correct words you want to dish out. Someone did that to him. Tied him down with wire and burned him with a blowtorch until he wished they would shoot him. Someone. People. And your untouchable angel, Wilna van As, is in the middle of this mess. Fat Inspector Tony O’Grady of Murder and Robbery thinks she was a part of it because a whole lot of small things don’t add up. And when it comes to murder, statistics are on his side. It’s usually the husband, the wife, the mistress, or the lover. Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong. But if he’s right, what happens to your idealism?”

She looked up from the photos. Pale. “And you’re going to burst my bubble…”

“Have you ever met a murderer, Hope?”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Or a child rapist. We…” And then he hesitated for a single heartbeat before he continued, spoke through it, somewhat surprised at himself. “I…I caught a rapist whose victims were children. A gentle, cuddly old man of fifty-nine who looked as if he was a stand-in for Santa Claus. Who lured seventeen little girls between the ages of four and nine into his car with Wilson’s toffees and up on Constantiaberg – ”

“You’ve made your point,” she said softly.

He sank back in his chair.

“Then let me do my fucking work.”

♦

The northwest wind blew the dark outside against the windows of the house, and inside Wilna van As was talking, looking for Jan Smit with words, her hands with the fingers entwined in her lap never wholly still. “I don’t know. I don’t know whether I knew him. I don’t know whether it was possible to know him. But I didn’t mind. I loved him. He was…It was as if he had a wound, as if he had a…Sometimes I would lie next to him at night and think he was like a dog who had been beaten, too often, too brutally. I thought many things. I thought perhaps there was a wife and children somewhere. Because when I was pregnant, he looked so scared. I thought he had a wife and child who had left him. Or perhaps he was an orphan. Perhaps it was something else, but somewhere someone had hurt him so badly that he could never reveal it to anyone else. That much I knew and I never asked him about it. I know nothing about him. I don’t know where he grew up and I don’t know what happened to his father and his mother and I don’t know how he started the business. But I know he loved me in his way. He was kind and good to me and sometimes we laughed together, not often, but now and then, about people. I knew he couldn’t bear pretentious people. And those who flaunted their money. I think he probably went through hard times. He looked after his money so neatly, so carefully. I think he was scared of people. Or shy, perhaps…There were no friends. It was just us. It was all we needed.”

Only the wind and the rain against the window. She looked up, looked at Hope Beneke. “There were so many times that I wanted to ask. That I wanted to say he could tell me, that I would always love him, it didn’t matter how deep the pain was. There were times that I wanted to ask because I was so dreadfully curious, because I wanted to know him. I think it was because I wanted to place him, because we do that with everybody, place them in a space in our heads so that we know what we can say to them the next time we meet, or what to give them. It makes life a little easier.

“But I didn’t ask. Because if I had asked, I might have lost him.”

She looked at Van Heerden. “I had nothing. I sometimes wondered whether his father also drank and his mother was also divorced and perhaps he also came from the wrong side of the tracks. Like me. But we had each other and we needed nothing else. That’s why I didn’t ask. Not even when I fell pregnant and he said that we would have to do something because children didn’t deserve the wickedness of this life and that we couldn’t protect them. I didn’t ask then because I knew he had been beaten. Like a dog. Too often. I simply went and had an abortion. And I went so that they could fix me so I could never get pregnant again.