Let the Dead Lie (5 page)

'Anyone
come out of the laneway?'

'No.'

'You
hear anything? Voices? An argument?'

'Nothing.
We was quiet because the police, they see Indians more quickly than they see
white people.'

'Did
you notice any other men in the area?'

Was
Jolly's murder connected to a bad deal? Did he see something he shouldn't have?

'No
one,' Parthiv said and fiddled with the dial of the radio despite all the
stations being off air till daylight.

'But
you knew the boy.' Emmanuel pushed ahead. 'Tonight wasn't the first time you'd
seen him. That's right, isn't it?'

'You
a cop,' Parthiv said. 'For sure.'

'I'm
not.' Emmanuel knew he'd pushed too far. 'I was just curious.'

Parthiv's
voice swelled with panic. 'You're working undercover, isn't it?'

'I'm
not an undercover policeman,' Emmanuel said. Or any other kind of police, he
reminded himself. 'Once you've dropped me at the freight yards, you and I will
never see each other again.'

'For
real?' Parthiv said.

'For
real.'

The
Cadillac sped through the empty streets and zipped past municipal parks with
deserted swings and scrappy cricket pitches. They soon arrived at the Point
freight yards. A drunk zigzagged along the footpath and a stray dog pawed at
the contents of a toppled garbage can. There were no police wagons, no crime
scene barricades and no guard positioned at the entrance to the alley where
Jolly Marks still lay undiscovered and alone.

'Thanks
for the lift,' Emmanuel said. Parthiv responded with a humourless snort and
swung a U-turn back towards the city centre. Red tail-lights dimmed and then
disappeared. Emmanuel scooped loose coins from his pocket. The closest public
telephone box was within visual distance of the Point police station. A risky
position for what he had in mind.

He
flipped his jacket collar up like a second-rate hood in one of Parthiv's
gangster films and ducked into the red and cream circular booth. A tattered
telephone directory dangled from a metal chain. He thumbed the pages to the
list of police stations and fed coins into the slot.

'Sergeant
Whitlam.' The voice on the other end was gruff. The morning shift and a soft
bed were still hours away. 'Point police.'

'There's
a body in the alley behind the Trident shipping office.'

'What's
that?'

'Listen
carefully, Sergeant Whitlam. This is not a hoax or a joke. Send someone out to
the alley behind Trident shipping. A boy has been murdered.'

'Who
is this, please?'

Emmanuel
hung up. It had come to this: anonymous phone calls in the dead of night to
speed the wheels of justice. He retreated into the shadows and crouched across
from the entrance to the alley, like a thief. Five minutes ticked by and then
ten. Every second magnified just how ludicrous the situation was. He was a
grown man hiding in the dark, with no option but to watch and wait. The
sensible thing was to get up and walk away.

A
gangly foot policeman with sleep-tousled hair turned up to conduct the search a
quarter of an hour later. Twenty years old at most, Emmanuel figured, not
cynical yet but certain that the charge office sergeant had sent him out to
chase a waste-of-time tip-off. The constable entered the narrow pathway with
his torch on high beam and re-emerged quickly, gasping for air. The subtropical
night was still and the policeman's rasps could be heard across the width of
the road. Nausea, shock and disbelief . . . Emmanuel waited for the young man
to go through the emotions that came with the discovery of a murder victim. The
constable wiped his nose with a sleeve and pulled the police whistle free. A
long and mournful note sounded across the Point.

It
was 6.45 a.m. and the morning light was soft on the shop-front awnings and the
tidy red-brick houses sitting behind tidy red-brick fences and trimmed hedges.
Emmanuel buttoned his grubby jacket, plastered down errant strands of hair and
approached Dover, the Edwardian-style apartment box that housed his 'fully
furnished short-term accommodation'. The cross-town tram rumbled off towards
West Street in the heart of the city, the lion's share of the seats reserved
for white office workers, clerks and perfumed shop girls. Non- whites were
squashed into the last six rows of the carriage in a press of saris, khaki suits
and pre-packed lunch pails.

He
approached the entrance to the Dover flats slowly, the better to judge the
chances of slipping in the side gate. He'd waited to see a guard posted at the
murder scene before turning for home. That was a mistake. Mrs Edith Patterson,
the landlady, was out on the front footpath pulling up weeds from cracks in the
pavement. Her purple hair was wound tight over rollers. The brass ring that
held the keys to her building clanked together against the green material of
her housecoat as she worked to tame nature.

The
black maid, a slight Zulu girl in a patchwork dress, collected the debris and
made neat piles ready to be swept up. Rows of paper Union Jacks were strung
along the fence to celebrate Princess Elizabeth Windsor's imminent coronation.
A dirty Scottish terrier panted down the stairs, trotted to Mrs Patterson and
attempted to mate with her arm.

'No,
Lancelot.' The landlady shook off the dog. 'Bad boy!'

Emmanuel
did a half turn towards the tram stop. He'd try his luck later.

'Mr
Cooper.'

Mrs
Patterson was now standing up, a much better vantage point from which to look
down her nose at him. He walked over to her and smiled. Buttoning the jacket
was a mistake, he realised. It only made him more pitiful: as if he really
believed a simple gesture could wipe the smell from his clothes or rearrange
the muddy creases in his suit. He unbuttoned his jacket in a show of defiance.
Five months at the Dover and he'd never been late making the monthly rent. He
was still paid up one week in advance. That counted for something.

'Mr
Cooper.' The landlady's brown eyes narrowed. 'Are you going to make me regret
my decision to take you on?'

She
pointed to the hand-painted sign nailed under the building's name, which read
'Europeans and well-behaved Mauritians allowed. No Exceptions'. Well-behaved
Mauritians being a code for any light-skinned, mixed-race person willing to
pay the inflated rent and refrain from bringing bar girls into the room for a
night of mattress thumping.

'My
car broke down and I missed the last tram,' Emmanuel explained while the mangy
terrier began an unsuccessful liaison with the mailbox pole.

Mrs
Patterson pursed her lips. She waited for Emmanuel to make an apology or show
regret for confirming her worst suspicions about mixed-race men. He relaxed his
shoulders, kept eye contact and said nothing. He'd explained himself enough
for one day. The maid's hand hovered above an unplucked weed, held there by the
sudden tension in the air.

Mrs
Patterson broke eye contact first. 'I run a good house. A clean house.' She
brushed dirt-flecked hands against her housecoat and the keys at her waist
chimed. 'I thought you understood that, Mr Cooper.'

Emmanuel
sidestepped the landlady and walked to the front door. He knew that the moment
this week was up, Mrs Patterson was going to slip an eviction notice under his
door. He'd committed the cardinal South African sin. A registered non-white, he
had failed to express gratitude for being bullied by a white woman.

'Lancelot.
No. Bad boy.'

The
landlady's tone set Emmanuel's teeth on edge. She talked to the dog the same
way she talked to him.

A
flicker of material at the downstairs window alerted him to the fact that Mr
Woodsmith, the retired postman who rented the ground-floor flat, had witnessed
the confrontation. He nodded in the direction of the curtain and the material
dropped. One week and not a second more.

Inside
the building, the oak banister of the staircase shone with a fresh application
of wax. Mrs Patterson did run a clean house. Why the Scottish terrier had never
seen a bath or a bar of soap was one of life's little mysteries.

The
walls of the flat were painted bright yellow; a cheery colour scheme that
depressed Emmanuel every time he entered it. The room possessed a single bed no
wider than a field cot, a two-ring gas burner and a wardrobe laced with
mothballs that easily contained two suits, six shirts and three pairs of work
pants. The private bath and shower squeezed into an alcove and separated from
the rest of the room by a wraparound curtain cost him an extra pound each
month.

A
tenants' phone in the hallway made it easy to call his sister in Jo'burg on the
first Sunday of every month. The conversations were brief. He repeated the
familiar lies that he'd told her while their parents fought in the kitchen:
life was good and everything was fine. Lies kept them together.

Emmanuel
reached into his trouser pocket and removed a postcard with a tinted photograph
of misty hills and deep, silent valleys. On the back, in chicken-scratch
writing, was an invitation to visit Zweigman's medical clinic in the Valley of
a Thousand Hills. Doctor Daniel Zweigman, the old Jew who'd saved his life
after a vicious beating by the Security Branch, was two hours' drive away.
Emmanuel laid the card gently on the bedspread. Maybe one day when he was less
worn around the edges...

He
stripped off his dirty suit and threw it into a small sisal basket in the
corner. The young maid took in tenants' laundry along with her other work.
Emmanuel washed. He'd already planned to have the day off from the shipyards to
rest and regroup after the night surveillance. But he would not sleep this
morning. He would not sleep at all today.

He
dressed in a clean suit and checked his reflection in the mirror. Five months
at the shipyards had erased any trace of physical softness from his person.
Impersonating a church minister or a gentle family man was now out of reach.
Yet he enjoyed the hard labour of the yards; doing what most Europeans
considered
'kaffir
work'. Hauling, lifting and hammering sapped his energy and left his mind
empty. Sleep came like a force of nature, black and unstoppable. Dawn brought
only a vague memory of having dreamt. Being too exhausted to think was the
closest he'd come to happiness since leaving his old life and the detective
branch back in Jo'burg.

He
slipped Zweigman's postcard into the jacket pocket of the clean suit and
scooped up his driver's licence. He left his ID card in the drawer. He retained
the body language of a white detective and no one had so far dared question his
right of entry to any venue, be it a Europeans-only restaurant or a non-white
queue at the bank.

He
collected the laundry basket. He was about to break a promise that he'd made to
himself when he left the force: never hang around an official police
investigation. He was going to go down to the freight yards and make sure the
detective branch was at the crime scene. Then he was going to try to find out
if the search had turned up Jolly Marks's notebook. It was a quick ten-minute stop.

Where
was the harm in that?