Death Dealing (22 page)

Nonhlanhla and
Ndileko told her, after the neighbours had left, that there was an active group
of people in the street, comprised mainly of women but supported by a few young
men, who thought of themselves as an informal Neighbourhood Protection Watch. They
were known as the Street Committee. They did not consider themselves
vigilantes, but they had no tolerance for crime of any kind in their street.
They had even less tolerance for the criminal justice system, Nonhlanhla said.

‘Why, Nonnie?’
asked Mavis. ‘Why do they say that?’

‘
Hau!
Mavis. I feel bad, with you working
with
amaphoyisa
. I feel bad talking about
this. I know how much you like your work. Shall we tell her, Ndileko?’

‘
Yebo
,
sisi
.
There’s a story, Mavis. But we must ask you not to go and investigate it some
more,
nè?
In this street…’

‘Wait,
bhuti
. Wait. Mavis, you are OK if we
tell you something but you don’t report it?’

‘Yes,
my friends.
Yes, of course. You can trust me,
nè?
’

‘OK, Mavis,’ said
Ndileko. ‘That woman, the old one, you can see she is the leader, yes? The
people in this street they have great respect for her. She is very tough, that one.
She is their leader. Everybody, all of them, they do just what she tells them.’

‘If there are
skelms
coming here, and they bump into
her, they have no chance.’ Nonhlanhla laughed as she spoke. ‘Within seconds she
will call out the men and they will go hunting for those
skelms
.’

‘You see,’ continued
Ndileko, ‘nearly one year ago there was a man killed at the end of the street,
just four houses up from here. Then two months later there was another man
killed on the other side, there, six houses away.’

‘The police came
and spoke to all the residents,’ Nonhlanhla chipped in. ‘
Both
sides of the street, up, down, the whole neighbourhood. They spoke to
everyone.’

‘No-one saw
anything,’ said Ndileko.
‘Not one person.
Me and Nonhlanhla,
too. We saw nothing. Nothing.’

‘
We don’t know, officer
.’

Brother and sister
paused and exchanged a look as both had said this in unison, then burst into
giggles. Mavis got the message. Before she could speak Nonhlanhla continued.

‘I’m sorry, Mavis.
You must be shocked. But you must know what it is like here…’

‘No, no, I see,
it’s no problem. I understand. I think.’

‘The cops gave up
after they had interviewed everyone,’ Ndileko continued. ‘After two, maybe three
months they gave up completely, and they probably just reported back to their
commander and closed the file. Unsolved murder. Persons unknown.’

‘
Hayi
! No, there was more,
bhuti
. Remember that detective who came?
Three or four months later.’

‘Oh. Yes. Yes.
That’s right,’ said her brother. There was this other detective who came right
at the beginning, and then again later. He was clever, that one. We could see
he was very sharp. He came back and asked us more questions. We had nothing to
do with it, but we were also questioned like everyone else in the street. The
first time they asked us, we were genuine. We knew nothing about what happened
in those two murders.
Nothing at all.
It was only a
few days after the second murder that we began to realise there was something
strange happening. Then we were told by one of the neighbours, and we just kept
quiet like everyone else. When police came to ask us questions the second time
we just repeated our story, because it was true, we had heard nothing on the
two nights in question.’

‘But when this other detective, the big one, when he
came back, some months later,’ interjected Nonhlanhla, ‘we were worried because
he was very sharp. We were still able to repeat our story, even though we knew
by that time what had really happened, and we had no problem. But then the
detective asked us if we knew anything about the two girls.’

‘What two girls?’
asked
Mavis.

‘This detective,’
explained Ndileko, ‘he told us he had done some research of his own. Maybe he
was trying to scare us so that we would tell him more, but he gave us some more
details about the murders of the two men.’

‘Those details we hadn’t
heard about before, from the people in the street,’ clarified Nonhlanhla.

‘That’s right. This
detective, he asked us if we knew how the two men had died. We said that we
heard they had been burned, and maybe stabbed or shot before they were burned.
But the detective said that he had studied the pathologist’s reports and all
those documents and he said that before they were killed, their…’

Ndileko suddenly
found
himself
embarrassed and did not know how to
address his next sentence to Mavis, but his sister stepped in to rescue him.

‘Those men, Mavis,
both those men, before they were killed they had their things cut off.’

‘
Hau
!’ said Mavis. You mean…’

‘Yes, continued
Nonhlanhla. The autopsy and all of that, the detective told us, showed that the
men were tortured and –
hayibo
,
Mavis – the detective told us that they found the men’s genitals in their
mouths. Then they poured petrol over the men, and burned them.’

Mavis was shocked
but started understanding the picture her two friends were painting for her.
Before she could comment, Ndileko picked up the thread again.

‘The detective was
telling us these things, I think, because he was trying to scare us so that we
could tell him more. But Nonhlanhla and I, we couldn’t tell him any more anyway,
because we definitely didn’t know anything about what the people did to those
guys. That was the first time we had all the detail. From the detective, not
from the people in the street.’

They went on to
tell Mavis more of the detail they had gleaned from the detective. The two
unsolved murders in the street were suspected by the police to be the work of
vigilantes. The two men had been brutally murdered in separate incidents nearly
two months apart, but after months of investigations the police had given up on
the cases because of a total absence of witnesses. The investigating officers
had found it extraordinary that in both cases the men had been brutally
tortured before having been burnt to death, yet despite the apparent brutality
involved in the removing of the genitalia, and the likelihood of massive
disturbance and screams and chaos in the street, which should have brought
residents running to the scene, not one single neighbour could be found who had
heard anything or seen anything on the two separate nights in question. In both
instances the bodies had been discovered the morning after the events by
passing motorists who had notified the police.

Months later the
big detective’s research into the two separate murders, they told Mavis, had
taken him to the nearby KwaMashu Community Health Centre. Here he had
discovered that in regard to each of the two nights in question a young rape
victim had been admitted earlier in the day for counselling and treatment. In
both cases the women had given addresses in Sikwehle Road.

‘
Eish
!’ said Nonhlanhla. ‘It was scary,
Mavis, being interviewed by that detective the second time. He told us about
his visit to the Health Centre and what he found there. He told us about his
interviews with the two young girls, months later. Then he asked me, and Ndileko
too, if we knew why it was, in his interviews with each of the two girls, that they
would have replied to him in exactly the same way. He told us he asked each of
the girls, separately, why they had chosen not to report the rape to the police
after they had been processed by the clinic. In each of those interviews with
the two girls, he said, they had replied to him with exactly the same
statement.
Amaphoysia can do nothing.
There are better ways to deal with rapists.
’

‘The detective was
watching us, Mavis,’ said Ndileko. ‘He was sharp, that one. Black man. Big man.
Six foot five inches. Maybe more. He worked there at Durban North at that time.
He watched me, and Nonhlanhla too, at the same time, when he asked that
question. We were terrified. But we were OK, because we really didn’t know
about the murders. It was only later that we heard from people in the street
about some of what had happened. Not all. But some.’

‘What did you say,
to that detective’s question?’

‘We both answered
him at the same time, I remember,’ said Nonhlanhla.

‘
We don’t know, officer!
’ brother and
sister spoke in unison and collapsed into giggles as they remembered again their
joint response to the detective’s question.

Mavis now lay in
the bed thinking back on the group of neighbours. She wondered how many of her
colleagues would advise her to simply forget what she had been told by her
friends, and accept that this was the way of the world. She was sure she would
most certainly not report any of the discussion she had had with her two good
friends. She drifted toward sleep with the image of the sixty-year old
matriarch of the street firmly lodged in her consciousness. A strong woman,
Mavis thought.
An intelligent woman.
But, as she had
seen in the attitude of deference displayed toward her by neighbours, a
decisive woman, and one not to be crossed.

Mavis would much later
do her own research into the two cases of the unsolved murders, merely for her
personal interest. There she would learn that the detective who had interviewed
her two friends was a man about whom she happened to know quite a lot. He was
well known across the province for his tenacious methods in the hunt for
criminals, and he was highly regarded as a detective. Just before she had gone
to Greytown, nearly three months ago, the same detective had come perilously
close to death in his uncompromising hunt for criminals. But he had survived.
A close call.
The events described to her by Ndileko and Nonhlanhla
had preceded that close call by a couple of months, but now that Mavis saw who the
detective was, she understood more clearly why he would have simply closed the
file. He would have assumed that the two rapists had been murdered for a good
reason.
They had been murdered by a community that had
endured more than enough crime
.

The detective’s notes
on the files in each of the two cases would corroborate exactly what Mavis had
learned from Nonhlanhla and Ndileko, up to but not including the detective’s
visits to the KwaMashu Community Health Centre. When she got around to reading
the files it would be clear to Mavis that the detective had considered the
matters worthy of closing at that point. The file in each case would show the
exhaustive interviews and investigations that had taken place, but no further
developments beyond the detective’s closing notes indicating
murder by persons unknown
.

On each of the
Sikwehle Road murder dockets the investigating officer, Captain
Nights
Mashego, did not record any
reference whatsoever to the rape victims who lived in the same street.

01.55.

The three men had
decided not to risk going to Wakashe’s mother’s home. They had run, in the
pouring rain, on Wakashe’s instructions. He had screamed at them through the
drenching sheets of water.

‘These
people.
They
are all
impimpis.
They’ll call the
cops. They’ll look for us all over this place, them and the cops. We must go,
comrades. We must get away from here.’

He was wrong in his
surmise. This Street Committee would never call the police. They preferred to
handle things their way. But he was correct in his strategy. Their best bet was
to put distance between them and the neighbourhood protectors. They splashed
through the night all the way along Sikwehle Road toward the M21. There were no
cars. The rain was too heavy for even the most robust of
windscreen-wipers
.
Any cars out on the road had pulled over to wait for the deluge to pass.

At the M21 they turned
right to travel south toward the old Shell Service Station. It was there that they
accosted an unfortunate driver of a battered ancient Volkswagen Beetle, who had
pulled over because his wipers were having no effect on the windscreen. He sat in
his car, waiting for the deluge to stop. It was a bad mistake. The three men dragged
the hapless man from his vehicle, threw him to the ground, and took the car.

The rain stopped
before they reached the turn-off to the M4. As if by magic the clouds started
rolling away to the east and stars began appearing. The final drops had ceased
by the time they turned south onto the Ruth First Highway. They kept going
until they reached Battery Beach Road in Durban. They abandoned the vehicle near
the Suncoast Casino. From there Thabethe took his two companions down onto the
beach to an area he knew well. There they found a place surrounded by succulent
creepers and low bushes, and settled
themselves
down
on the sodden ground.

They seethed with
anger, sucking on joints of
nyaope
and swearing to one another that they would return to the house on Sikwehle
Road to seek their revenge. As the fumes worked their magic on the bloodstreams
of the three men, the talk meandered until it reached a hiatus.