A Beautiful Place to Die (31 page)

Emmanuel picked up his pace to catch up with Shabalala, who followed the trail to the edge of the Sports Club playing fields. They crossed from the white side of Jacob’s Rest to the rows of coloured houses and then the paths that led north to the black location. Where the hell was Louis headed?

The buildings of the hospital came into view. Emmanuel and Shabalala sidled past the morgue and the nonwhite’s wing. It was the same stretch of the kaffir path where the captain had parked when he came to pick up Davida Ellis for their last outdoor frolic—and where Donny Rooke had had the bad luck to be at the same time.

The distinctive line of gum trees that marked Granny Mariah’s property was visible up ahead and to the left. A memory stirred and Emmanuel moved faster. He had good reason to know this place as well. It was here, within sight of that back fence, that he’d encountered the watchful human presence breathing in the darkness.

Shabalala stepped off the kaffir path and headed into the veldt at a right angle so that he was almost directly in front of Emmanuel.

“What is it?” Emmanuel asked when he reached the spot where the Zulu constable was crouched down to inspect an area of disturbed earth.

“He has come off the path and parked his motorbike here.” Shabalala pointed to markings in the dirt that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but a tracker. “The young one has parked and then walked back in that direction.”

They looked toward the line of gum trees. The back gate to Granny Mariah’s garden swung back and forth on its hinges in the breeze. Thoughts of the Pretorius brothers’ vigilante rule vanished and he and Shabalala ran to the kaffir path and the open gate.

One step into the yard and Emmanuel spotted Granny Mariah lying in a furrow of turned earth, the blood from the gash in her forehead feeding the newly planted seeds in a steady red stream. He ran to her side and felt for a pulse. Faint but there. He turned to Shabalala, who was wisely locking the gate behind him.

“Go out the front door and get the old Jew. Tell him to bring his bag and his wife’s sewing kit with him.”

Shabalala hesitated.

“Go out the front,” Emmanuel insisted. The coloureds of Jacob’s Rest would just have to deal with the shocking sight of a black man leaving and entering Granny Mariah’s house in plain sight. “The Pretorius boys are still on the kaffir paths, so you have to use the main streets. Get back as quickly as you can without causing a commotion.”

“Yebo.” The Zulu constable disappeared into the house and Emmanuel took off his jacket and rolled it under Granny Mariah’s battered head. He felt her pulse again. No change, so he went to search the old servant’s quarters, already certain he would find it empty. He put his head in and looked for signs of Davida before checking under the bed to make sure she wasn’t hiding there.

“Davida? It’s Detective Sergeant Cooper. Are you here?” He opened the wardrobe. A few cotton dresses and one winter coat with fake tortoiseshell buttons. He walked out to the garden, where he soaked his handkerchief in the watering bucket and gently wiped Granny Mariah’s bloodied face. This mess was exactly what the information in the molester files pointed to: an escalation of violence leading to deprivation of liberty and God knows what else. The captain had only delayed the inevitable by sending Louis off to a farm in the mountains and then on to theological college, where, it would seem, the Holy Spirit had failed to dampen the fires of sin burning within him.

Granny Mariah groaned in pain but remained unconscious. Just as well. The disappearance of her granddaughter would be a heavy burden for the normally resilient old woman to shoulder in her weakened state. She’d be lucky to get her head off the pillow in the next few days.

Zweigman hurried into the garden with Shabalala trailing close behind. The white-haired German got to work quickly, his expert hands checking vital signs and determining the range and extent of injuries.

“Bad. But, thank God, not fatal.”

“How bad?”

“A laceration to the scalp which will require stitching. Severe concussion but the skull is not fractured.” Zweigman the surgeon took control. “We will need to move her inside so I can clean her up and begin closing this wound. Please, go into the house and locate towels and sheets while Constable Shabalala and I move her to a bedroom.”

Emmanuel followed orders and soon Zweigman was setting up. He snapped open his medical bag and placed bandages, needles, thread and antiseptic on a dresser closest to the double bed where Shabalala had placed the unconscious Granny Mariah.

Emmanuel signaled to Shabalala to move out to the garden. They stood at the back door, looking at the bloodied row of turned earth.

“Davida is gone. The captain’s youngest son has taken her. There can be no other explanation,” Emmanuel said.

“I will see.” Shabalala examined the markings on the ground. He worked his way slowly to the back gate, unlocked it, and continued out onto the veldt. Why, Emmanuel wondered, did he find it necessary to have the Zulu constable confirm the obvious? Was it because he still didn’t trust his instinct where Davida was concerned and therefore couldn’t rid himself of the niggling feeling that maybe, just maybe, Davida and Louis were somehow in this together? Two star-crossed lovers bound together by the cold-blooded murder of Willem Pretorius. But that conclusion was no more far-fetched than the teenaged boy turning out, in all probability, to be the molester.

Shabalala reentered the garden and locked the gate behind him. His expression was grave. “It is so,” he said. “The young one has taken the girl with him and they have gone on the motorbike.”

“Did he take her or did she go with him?”

Shabalala pointed to scuffled lines in the dirt. “She ran but he caught her and pulled her back to where the old one was lying in the dirt. After that, the girl went with him quietly.”

“Why would Louis show his hand before we’d even questioned him?”

“We must find Mathandunina,” Shabalala said with simple eloquence. “Then we will know.”

Finding Louis would be a massive task requiring manpower and time—two things Emmanuel didn’t have and was unlikely to get anytime soon.

“What direction did he go in?” Emmanuel asked, visualizing the enormous stretch of veldt that surrounded Jacob’s Rest and spread out across the border into Mozambique. He brought himself back to the blood-soaked garden. He had to work with what he had: a Zulu-Shangaan tracker and an enigmatic German Jew. Things could be worse; he could have been left with Constable Hansie Hepple.

“Toward the location. It is also the way to Nkosana King’s land and the farm of Johannes, the fourth son.”

“Where would a white boy on a motorbike go with a brown-skinned girl he’s holding against her will?” The whole thing carried the stamp of disaster. Surely Louis saw that?

“Not to the location.”

“Or to his brother’s farm. Wherever he goes, Louis is going to attract a lot of attention. My guess is he’s going to have to keep well hidden until he’s—”

“Done with her.” Zweigman finished the sentence from where he stood in the dim hallway, his shopkeeper’s shirt and trousers stained with blood from the operation. “That is what you were thinking, is it not, Detective?”

“I don’t know what to think. As far as I can see, the whole abduction makes no sense.”

“Maybe it makes perfect sense to Louis Pretorius.” Zweigman reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed over. “Your major said to pass this on to you as soon as possible.”

Emmanuel unfolded the lined sheet and read the information. Deep in the Drakensberg mountains of Natal was a farm, a retreat, known as Suiwer Sprong, or Pure Springs, where highbred and wealthy Afrikaners with close ties to the new ruling party sent their offspring to be “realigned” with the Lord. Shock therapy, drug therapy, and water therapy were some of the ways that “realignment” was delivered from the hands of the Almighty to the suffering few. A Dr. Hans de Klerk, who’d trained under the pioneering German eugenicist Klaus Gunther prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, was head of the setup.

“A nut farm with a religious bent. Is van Niekerk sure of this?”

“Your major sounds like a man who is sure of many things. He is certain that this place in the Drakensberg is the only institution that a family such as the Pretoriuses would use to seek treatment for a psychological illness.”

The family should get their money back. Whatever therapy Louis underwent hadn’t stuck. A few weeks back in Jacob’s Rest and Louis had fallen into his old habits in a more dangerous way than before.

Emmanuel considered all the steps that had led to the abduction and assault. Louis wasn’t unbalanced enough to overlook the fact that Davida Ellis was the only one who could tie him to the molester case and to the murder of his father. With Davida out of the way, all that stood between him and freedom was the word of the English detective he’d accused of trying to seduce him. It was a clever plan, well executed. So far.

“This abduction may not be as irrational as it looks.” Emmanuel recalled the information from the molester files. Reading them had given him the feeling that the perpetrator was headed for a violent culmination to his fantasy life. “Louis gets to finish what he started in December and he gets to eliminate the only person who can connect him, however vaguely, to the murder of his father.”

“If that is the case,” Zweigman observed quietly, “he will keep her alive until he has enacted his fantasies.”

“I think so.” Emmanuel didn’t want to delve into the German’s statement. He turned to Shabalala. “Where could Louis go and hide out without being found? It has to be a place large enough to hold two people. I don’t think he’ll go to the captain’s hut. It’s not secret enough. Is there a cave or maybe an old hunting shack?”

The Zulu constable looked up at the sky for a moment to think. Then he quickly picked up a long stick and drew a crude map in the dirt. He made three crosses at almost opposite ends of each boundary.

“There are three places on Nkosana King’s farm that are known to me. The captain and I hid here many times when we were boys. The young one, Louis, has also been to these places with his father when the land was still with the family.”

“Can we get to all three in an afternoon?”

“They are far from each other and this one, here, we must go to on foot. It is a cave high on the side of a mountain and the bush is thick around.”

“The other two?”

“This one is an old house where an Afrikaner lived by himself. It is falling in but some of the rooms have a roof over them.”

“What’s it like? The area around the house.”

“Flat. The house is sad, like the white man who used to live in it.”

“That’s not the place.” Emmanuel pictured the crime scene at the river, the sweep of land and sky shimmering with a quintessentially African light. It was a beautiful place to die. Louis and his father shared a taste for forbidden flesh and they might have been sufficiently alike to prefer courting women in an outdoor setting. There was nothing like the raw beauty of nature to arouse an Adam and Eve fantasy in which the apple was eaten to the core and the racial segregation laws were nonexistent.

“To which one of these places would you take a girl to show her the view?”

Shabalala pointed to the location of the mountain cavern. “From the ledge in front of the cave you can see the whole country and a watering hole where the animals come to drink. It is a place to stir the heart.”

Just the sort of isolated and romantic spot a deranged Dutch boy might take a woman on her final outing. The Afrikaner love of the land was as tenacious as the influenza virus.

The cave was a long shot. But it made sense. The boy hadn’t torn out onto the veldt with a captive girl without a specific place to hide already in mind. And Louis wasn’t going to hide on a working farm trampled over by laborers and herds of cattle. King’s personal fiefdom, once the Pretorius family home, had plenty of open space and very few people to spoil the illusion that South Africa was, in fact, empty when the white man arrived. Louis could hide there for a long while without drawing attention.

“How far on foot to this place?” Emmanuel asked.

“We must park and walk for maybe half an hour to the bottom of the hill and then fifteen minutes to the top.”

Emmanuel rounded it up to one hour. The Zulu-Shangaan tracker covered more ground in a shorter period of time than anyone he’d ever met, and that included soldiers running like hell from the fall of mortar shells.

“We should check the cave. An isolated and sheltered place on a deserted piece of land seems right for what Louis most likely has planned. I’ve got nothing to back up my case. It’s just a feeling. That’s all.”

“Your instinct and Constable Shabalala’s knowledge of the land are all you have, Detective, so you must move and move quickly,” Zweigman said. “The men at the police station will not drop even one pen to set out in search of a dark-skinned girl.”

“Not unless she’s a Communist,” Emmanuel said, and turned to the towering black man standing at his side. Without Shabalala’s help, the wheels were going to fall off the already shaky wagon.

“We’ll need to get my car and head out to King’s farm. Are you still with me?”

“Until the end,” Shabalala said.

18

T
HEY CHANCED THE
main streets in the hope that the Pretorius boys were still prowling the kaffir path. All was clear as they eased onto Piet Retief Street and moved past the white-owned businesses. The garage was open, but under the temporary management of an old coloured mechanic who shouted orders at the black petrol pump attendants from his spot in the shade. No sign of Erich the flamethrower or his big brother Henrick at Pretorius Farm Supply, either.

A Chevy farm truck carting the wide, rusty discs of a plow provided enough cover to get them past the police station and onto the dirt road to The Protea Guesthouse. Emmanuel and Shabalala crossed the raked, tidy yard. Sun sparked off the silver hubcaps of the black Packard. A twig snapped and the Zulu constable tensed, catlike. Another twig snapped and the black policeman released a pent-up breath.

“There is someone behind the big jacaranda tree,” he said. “We must leave this place quickly.”

The car was parked beyond the jacaranda and there was no way to get to it without one of them being caught in the ambush. He couldn’t risk losing Shabalala.

Emmanuel checked their line of retreat. It was clear. He nodded at Shabalala and they ran fast and low toward the whitewashed fence and the dirt street freshly sprinkled with water to keep the dust down.

“Go, go!” Paul Pretorius was in full military mode, calling out orders to his second in command.

Johannes stepped out from behind the fence and took up position in the middle of the driveway. Emmanuel heard the sound of Paul’s boots crunching on the loose gravel behind him. Shabalala split off to the right of Johannes. Emmanuel split off to the left and together they ran a full press toward the startled fourth son. The Pretorius boys expected him to be alone and their haphazard ambush reflected the bone-deep belief that an English detective in a clean suit was easy prey.

“Stand your ground,” Paul Pretorius called out.

Brutal rounds of boarding school rugby training and bruising matches on forlorn country fields surged from the dark pit of Emmanuel’s memory as Johannes moved to block his path. Left hand out, he pushed hard against Johannes’s chest and heard the satisfying crunch of the fourth son’s body hitting the dirt road. It was the first time that the tutelage he had received at the heavy hands of Masters Strijdom and Voss had amounted to anything.

“This way.” Shabalala sprinted toward Piet Retief Street and across the sweating asphalt to the kaffir path opposite. A shout from the direction of Pretorius Farm Supply was enough to push them onto the grass path in record time. Now they had the whole Pretorius clan after them.

“Here.” Shabalala pulled back two loose palings in a splinter-faced row of pickets and they crawled into a squat yard with a smokehouse at its center. The garden boy, milky eyed with a bony face and ash white hair, looked up with a start.

Shabalala put his finger to his lips and the old man went back to weeding the flower bed as if nothing unusual were happening.

“Peter?”

“Yes, missus?” the garden boy answered, and Emmanuel and Shabalala moved behind the smokehouse for cover. They leaned against the corrugated iron wall and waited for the appearance of the Pretorius boys or the nosy white missus.

“What’s that, Peter? I thought I heard something.”

“Just the wind, missus.”

“Okay.” The voice grew fainter as the missus moved back into the sitting room. “You make sure those weeds are gone, hey?”

“Yes. All gone, missus.” Peter’s milky eyes darted up to check the position of the white detective and his third cousin by marriage, the police constable Samuel Shabalala.

“Keep going. Down that way.” The sound of Henrick Pretorius’s voice kept Emmanuel pinned against the smokehouse wall. One call from the gardener or the missus and that would be the end of the rescue mission. Shabalala rested easily against the smokehouse wall. Emmanuel took his cue from the black constable and relaxed his clenched jaw. The pounding of footsteps diminished, then disappeared as the Pretorius boys continued the chase.

“My car’s no good,” Emmanuel said. “If they have any brains, they’ve slashed the tires or left someone sitting on the bumper to guard it.”

“We must find another car. There is one close by.”

“Where?”

“The police station.”

“The police station? How are we going to manage that, Constable?”

Shabalala moved to the front of the smokehouse and indicated a brick dwelling with colored glass panels set into the front door and a wagon wheel fence along its wide stoep.

“The young policeman. He lives with his mother and his sisters. That is his house.”

“You want Hansie to get the car?”

“I can think of no other person who can get the police van from the front of the station.”

“God help us.”

Emmanuel crossed the street with Shabalala and knocked on the front door with two clear raps. Through the colored glass panels he saw the young policeman make his way down the corridor.

The door swung open and Hansie peered out with a sullen expression on his face. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and his nose glowed a dull pink from constant blowing.

“I got the necklace.” He sniffled. “I got it back just like you said, Detective Sergeant.”

“Good work.” Emmanuel stepped into the corridor and forced Hansie back a few feet. Shabalala closed the door behind them. “I need you to get me one more thing, Constable.”

“What?”

“The police van,” Emmanuel said. “I need you to go to the station and collect the police van.”

“But Lieutenant Lapping gave me the day off. He said I didn’t have to come in till tomorrow.”

“I’m putting you back on duty.” Emmanuel made it sound like an instant promotion. “You’re the best driver on the force. Better than most of the detectives I work with in Jo’burg.”

“Honest?” The compliment perked the boy up enough to forget about the necklace and the day off.

“Honest.” Emmanuel looked directly at Hansie in order to gauge just how deeply his words were sinking in. “I want you to go to the police station, get the van, and drive it back here. Can you do that?”

“Ja.”

“If anyone asks you where you’re going with the van, tell them you are looking for a stolen…” His city knowledge hit against the reality of country life. What was there to steal in Jacob’s Rest?

“Goat,” Shabalala supplied. “You are looking for a stolen goat.”

“Have you got that?”

“I’m looking for a stolen goat.”

“Go straight to the police station and come straight back here with the van.” Emmanuel repeated the instructions, hoping some of the information stuck in Hansie’s muddled brain.

“Yes, Detective Sergeant.”

The boy straightened his uniform and quick marched toward the front door with wind-up-toy precision. Everything—Louis’s apprehension, Davida Ellis’s safe return and the service of justice—all rested in the hands of eighteen-year-old Constable Hansie Hepple. A feeling of dread assailed Emmanuel.

A skin-and-bones blond girl, her hands and apron covered in sticky bread dough, appeared. Blue eyes, darker and denser than her brother’s, glimmered with a faint internal light.

“That was a pretty necklace,” she said in Afrikaans. “Hansie cried when he had to take it back, and his sweetheart was angry with him. Ma’s gone to the store to get bicarb of soda to settle Hansie’s stomach.”

“We have got to find an alternate way out of here. This is no place for men like us to end,” Emmanuel said to Shabalala.

They pushed through the rough country, drawn on by the looming mass of towering rock and clouds. In an ancient time, long before the white man, the mountain must have had a spiritual significance. Emmanuel felt the pull of it as he struggled to keep tabs on Shabalala’s agile navigation through the monotonous blur of branches, thorns and termite mounds.

Fifty-five minutes and one brief break later, they reached the foot of the mountain and encountered a solid rock wall softened here and there by tufts of grass and stunted trees growing from crevices carved by centuries of wind and rain. As natural formations went, it had a handsome but unfriendly face.

“How do we get up?” Emmanuel leaned back against a sun-warmed boulder that nestled beside the mountainside like a schoolboy’s marble. It was good to have a break, to feel the air coming in and out of his lungs without the fiery afterburn caused by lack of oxygen.

“We go around and then up,” Shabalala said, and Emmanuel noted with satisfaction that the Zulu constable had broken a sweat on the cross-country trek.

“Is the goat on the mountain?” Hansie asked after drinking deeply from his water canteen. The boy policeman’s face had progressed from white to pink and then finally to a coal-fire red that rivaled a split watermelon for sheer depth of color.

“I hope so,” Emmanuel said, and followed Shabalala around the base of the massive rock outcrop. They walked for five minutes until they came to a deep crease in the mountainside. Shabalala pointed to a path that wound upward and disappeared behind a windblown tree with branches bleached like bones.

“Up here.” Shabalala led them onto the skinny dirt lane, slowing now and then to check a clump of grass or a snapped twig.

“Any sign of them?” Emmanuel asked as he scrambled over loose rocks and exposed roots. Louis and Davida could be a hundred miles in the opposite direction.

“There are three paths to the cave. I can say only that they have not come along this way.”

“Maybe they haven’t come here at all.” The fear that had tugged at him since speeding out of town and heading to the mountain was now lodged like a splinter in his gut. He’d made a meal of the scraps thrown to him throughout the investigation and now he was about to find out if all the hunches and conjecture amounted to anything.

Shabalala stopped at the intersection of three paths that joined up into one and examined the ground and the surrounding loose stones.

“They are here,” he said.

A moment of relief washed over Emmanuel and then he moved quickly up the path, his exhausted muscles fed by adrenaline. Louis had a good three-hour lead on them, and God knows what had happened to Davida Ellis in that time.

The grass trail ended at a wide, flat rock ledge that jutted out over the steep fall of the mountainside and offered a breathtaking view of untamed country running to all points of the compass. A martial eagle, white chest feathers flashing starkly against the pale sky, circled on a warm air current in front of them. Far below on the plain, a watering hole sparkled in the late-afternoon sunlight. It was as Shabalala said, a place to stir the heart.

“There.” The Zulu constable pointed across the ledge to the dark mouth of the cave hollowed into the rock face.

“Detective Sergeant—”

“Shh…” Emmanuel silenced Hansie. “Wait behind this bush and guard the path. If anyone comes, call out to me. Understand?”

“Ja. Call out.”

“Good.” Emmanuel unclipped the holster at his hip, the first time he’d done so since arriving in Jacob’s Rest, and pulled out his .38 Standard Webley revolver. With Shabalala at his side, he ran low and fast across the rock ledge with his ears straining for the sound of voices or the click of a rifle bolt sliding back. An eerie silence followed them into the cave.

Emmanuel did a visual sweep of the interior. The cave was a scooped-out oval, large enough for a Voortrekker Scout troop to hold an all-night sing-along inside. Diffused afternoon light illuminated an unsettling domestic scene. A thin bedroll made up of a sheet and gray blanket was laid out in the middle of the space and next to it was a lantern and a bucket of water. A container of rusks, strips of dried beef, and two enamel plates and cups lay on a flat stone. An open Bible, a box of candles, and a coil of rope were placed on an empty rucksack that served as an altar. Emmanuel holstered his weapon.

“Where are they?” he said. The cave was set up as a living place, a place to sleep and eat and do who knows what with the Bible and the rope. The teenager had every intention of spending the night and possibly longer holed up in his private chapel.

“I will see.” Shabalala checked the tracks on the floor and stepped out of the cave to investigate further. He returned quickly.

“They have gone along the narrow way to a place with a waterfall. It is spring. The water will be flowing.”

“Can we follow?”

“It is narrow. There is space for only one person to walk at a time. I can take you.”

“Let’s go,” Emmanuel said. “I don’t want to take the chance of finding a second corpse in the water.”

Emmanuel swung in behind his colleague and they approached the mouth of the pathway, which disappeared like the tail of a snake into the mountainside. A low, sweet voice singing an Afrikaans hymn stopped them at the entrance. A few swift steps and he and Shabalala were crouched behind a spiked bush with the teenaged constable, who was hot cheeked and flustered.

“What is it?” Hansie asked.

“Whoever steps out from that pathway, you are not to make a sound,” Emmanuel said. “Understand? Not even a whisper.”

Davida Ellis stumbled onto the flat rock ledge in her bare feet with her arms wrapped protectively around her midriff. She was soaking wet and her pale green dress clung to her brown skin. Drops of water splashed onto the rock surface and formed a small puddle at her feet. She shivered despite the mild spring heat.

Louis Pretorius appeared, stripped naked to the waist with a rifle slung across his shoulder like a native scout. He continued singing and dried his face and hair with a handkerchief, which he returned to the pocket of his damp jeans. The words of the Afrikaans hymn circled high into the clouds, as if on a fast track to the Almighty. Louis had the face and the voice of an angel.

He finished his song and laid his hand lightly on Davida’s shoulder. She flinched but he didn’t seem to notice her reaction to his touch. He spoke close to her ear. “‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean.’ Ezekiel 36:25. It feels good to be cleansed and made new, doesn’t it?”

His hand moved to her neck, his fingers brushing the delicate ridges of her trachea. “God hears better if we speak out loud and raise our voices to Him.”