Hyena Dawn (19 page)

The owner was probably a wealthy, single man. The furnishings were dark - a lot of black leather and stainless steel. There were a few vases, no flowers but plenty of indoor plants. Definitely the taste of a man, not a woman.

The paintings on the walls were originals. Major de Wet did not know much about art but he had an instinctive eye for the value of things. Just one of these paintings would certainly fetch more than the modest house in Parktown he had worked hard for ten years to put down the deposit on. The fact did not make him jealous, it rather appealed to his own Calvinistic view of the role of the policeman in society.

One of the black lacquer cabinets bordering the sitting room was hanging open. Inside was a case containing a magnificent Georgian silver tea service. He’d dealt with a case of forgery recently and had become something of an expert on antique silver. He took the service in its case out into the light and examined a few of the pieces carefully. All the hallmarks matched, all the pieces were of the same set, it was perfect. He took a long, deep breath. He knew what this collection might fetch at an auction at Christie’s in London. Had this been an attempt at a theft to gain insurance money? There were no burglar bars on the windows of this room, and only an idiot would leave articles of such value unprotected.

Deon’s eyes combed the walls of the room, finally spotting an electronic movement-detector mounted close to the ceiling. It had been disarmed. So, whoever they were, they were professionals.

He moved carefully up the blood-soaked staircase, past the chalk-marked areas that marked where the bodies had fallen. The smell of death was strong. He wondered cynically if the owner would demand compensation from the South African Police for the glass table Sergeant Venter had broken.

He walked towards the open door at the end of the spacious passageway, his feet sinking into the deep-cut pile. This must be the master bedroom. It was stark, with a square white bed in the centre. All along one wall were fitted cupboards, along the opposite wall a full-length mirror. He stared at his reflection, then turned away; he did not particularly like the look of the cold, hard man in the mirror.

A third wall was all window, from ceiling to floor. He had never seen anything like it - it must have cost a small fortune to install. The en suite bathroom contained its own jacuzzi and sauna. Like the rest of the house, it was fitted with every possible luxury.

He came out of the bathroom and looked again in the mirror. Something about it was odd. It was as if the mirror had come apart from the wall at one side. He walked up close to it, touched it lightly - and the mirror shifted effortlessly to one side, into a recess in the far wall. He wondered if the runners were mercury- filled, it shifted so silently.

Behind the mirror was a narrow passage that ended in a sophisticated vault door. Deon thought the door was locked, but when he tried the handle it swung open easily. Beyond was a small square room. It was lined with shelves filled with files, safety-deposit boxes, computer discs and reels of film.

De Wet slipped on the thin cotton gloves he always carried. He would be examining articles that might need to be fingerprinted later. He prised open one of the cylindrical cases that held a 16mm film spool, unwound the shiny black film inside and held it up to the light.

Porn, he thought to himself. A skeleton in a rich man’s closet. He closed the metal canister and slipped the reel of film into his pocket. He pulled down one of the files and found himself looking at what resembled a series of personal dossiers. He noted that the numbers on the files corresponded to numbers on the film canisters. He put the file back, and took out the one with the same number as the film spool he had just confiscated.

Photographs. Pages of descriptions. Perhaps this was the way top businessmen analysed their staff? But then there were pictures of a woman. Could it be the woman he had just looked at on the film?

There was a noise on the stairs. Quickly Deon tore from the file the section of photographs that seemed to match the film, and stuffed it inside his jacket. Then he walked out, closed the door and swung the mirror back, hiding the safe.

He walked back into the bedroom just as someone entered through the door. He found himself face to face with General Muller.

‘
Major de Wet, what the hell’s going on!’

It sounded more like a threat than a question. And those eyes, always those bloody eyes. They gave him the creeps, never staying in one place, always shifting, pale yellow orbs recessed in Muller’s toad-like visage. The man was short and round, his uniform bulging at the seams. There was a pistol in one fat hand and De Wet wondered for a few seconds if General Muller would shoot him. This was the man who could make or break his career in the police force.

‘
Major de Wet, what are you doing in this room?’

De Wet was usually scrupulously honest, but this time, for some reason, he decided to lie.

‘
Looking for clues. We obviously surprised them, sir.’

‘
Major de Wet, this is not the home of some middle-class businessman. You have no right to be in this room. You are trespassing.’

‘
Three men dead, one of them a policeman. I suppose that’s incidental.’

He waited for General Muller to explode at his impertinence, but the General’s mind was clearly occupied with another matter.

‘
You’ve made your point, de Wet,’ he said mildly, and walked past him towards the mirror.

De Wet felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. He was scared and he wasn’t shy of admitting it. It was as if Muller knew there was a safe behind the mirror . . .

‘
Well, de Wet, I’m sure you’re not going to find much up here. I suggest you concentrate your efforts on the staircase. Obviously a couple of professional house-breakers - some of the silver service is missing from downstairs.’

‘
But General, the silver . . .’ De Wet had said it before he could stop himself.

‘
What, Major? Didn’t you notice the empty case?’

‘
No, sir.’

‘
I’m surprised at you. A simple case of house-breaking and you haven’t checked what’s missing? Get out of this room, man. You may have a good record, but sloppy work is unforgivable.’

‘
There may be more to this case, General Muller.’

‘
That’s quite enough, de Wet. You should never have left the station, you’re supposed to be in command. Get back to your office. I want a full report on my desk by six o’clock this morning. Do I make myself clear?’

‘
Yes, sir.’

The light of dawn was breaking as Major Deon de Wet drove past the buildings of the University of the Witwatersrand. It was the best university in Johannesburg, if not in the country, with a reputation for liberal thinking. He was slightly in awe of it, of what it represented, and yet he wondered now, as he drove past, whether its liberal academics really had any idea what it was like to be a policeman in South Africa today - or whether they even cared.

He took the Braamfontein off-ramp and swung down into Smit Street, travelling parallel to the Braamfontein Cemetery. As he entered the suburb of Pageview he turned left down Mint Road. After driving for another kilometre he pulled over and switched the engine off. He went round to the boot, pulled off his blue uniform jacket and donned a dark green windcheater that he kept in a holdall with some other clothes. There was no one about.

He walked towards the west, without any fixed destination in mind. Gradually, the thoughts that had filled his head drained away into his subconscious and he began to relax a little. The argument with Muller had set him on edge.

The streets became familiar, evoking memories from his youth, many of them unhappy. There wasn’t much to be happy about in Fordsburg in those days, even less now. Almost without realising it, he arrived at the pokey little house.

It was a terrible mess, and the front yard was filled with rubbish

As the first born, from the moment he was able to walk Deon had been given every attention. His father, Carel de Wet, was a brilliant attorney, a man who lived life to the full, enjoying alcohol, women - even other men’s wives - a giant of a man with saturnine features and eyes that seemed to see right into your soul. Sometimes Deon wished he could have loved his father when he had been alive instead of when he was dead.

They hadn’t lived in the house in Fordsburg then, they’d lived in Kensington, the best suburb of Johannesburg. But he had been too young to remember it well. There were parties that were the talk of Johannesburg’s high society. In those days, his mother had told him, Carel de Wet could do no wrong. His law company was growing at an incredible pace attracting clients from the major mining houses. His courtroom successes were legendary. He could always find a flaw in his opponent’s case and then exploit that weakness to the full. He had the kind of iron constitution that enabled him to wine and dine till the early hours of the morning and still appear in court next day as fresh as a daisy. Nothing, it seemed, could stop his meteoric rise.

Then he took on a case for Max Golden, the owner of one of South Africa’s biggest mining companies. The two were often seen at each other’s houses, their wives became intimate. Suddenly the relationship soured. For some reason that no one could really understand, Carel de Wet refused to represent Max Golden. There was a vague rumour that he had found Golden’s business dealings unethical, and had said so.

The crash came out of the blue. It began with a report in a Sunday paper of corruption in the leading law firm of De Wet and Partners. At first it was dismissed as the work of an over- zealous young reporter, anxious to make a name for himself, but then the evidence had begun to mount up, and though Carel de Wet insisted on his innocence, people began to ask themselves if he was in fact a man who could be trusted. The rumours accelerated. The Bar Council demanded a thorough investigation.

In the weeks that followed Carel de Wet’s name was linked to scandal after scandal: affairs with prostitutes; indiscretions with clients’ trusted information; the bribing of key trial witnesses and the misappropriation of a large sum of money belonging to a leading businessman. Still Carel de Wet declared his innocence, but in a matter of months men who had been proud to say they were his friends were openly stating that they had never had much time for him. The big house in Kensington became a morgue and the bank foreclosed.

Carel de Wet was a broken man. After the crash he lost himself in a self-created hell of low-class women and alcohol. He made a small amount of money by giving legal advice to people and also by playing the piano - a talent he’d never before considered to be of economic value.

Deon, who had never consciously known the wealth of the previous household, accepted their poverty as his natural condition. When he wasn’t running errands for his father or helping his mother in the house, he would play with the other children out in the street. He was respected because of his size, and the other children gravitated towards him because of his natural authority. He had a silent disposition and soon learned that on the street his fists offered the best means of communication.

When he was a bit older, Deon started to earn money by playing as lead guitarist with a local band, The Flyers. He enjoyed the success with girls that playing in the band gave him, and also the night life, but his friends often wondered at his strange, almost religious obsession with doing what was right. Deon never took drugs or drank any alcohol. If he did sleep with a girl, he always took precautions. It was just the way he was. The band would often steal ashtrays and beer mugs from a gig, but Deon would always return them. Once they had been playing at a private function and some men had tried to gang-rape a girl. Deon had laid every one of them out on the floor. No one in the band spoke to Deon on the way back to Fordsburg that evening, but they all silently respected him. . .

Major Deon de Wet continued walking the early morning streets

Deon kicked a can in front of him and thought proudly of his own children. They’d pleased him more than he’d ever dreamed possible. To have enabled his kids to avoid this poverty, this hopelessness, was an achievement in itself.

Yet he did realise that many of his own childhood friends who were now hardened criminals still had their own code of ethics. There were certain things they would never do, and he could never regard them as being essentially bad. But just tonight, in the house of an incredibly wealthy businessman, the sort of house he could never dream of owning, he had found evidence of the lowest form of criminal activity. It was only luck that had produced that evidence; if it had not been for the robbery, he would never have found it.