Present Darkness (17 page)

The man pulled out a joint and held it up with a grimace. It was tattered and gaunt, much like it’s owner. “I ran because of this. The white people do not allow such things near their homes.”

“The police don’t allow such things at all,” Emmanuel said with the haze of last night’s smoke and drink buzzing in his head. Davida’s observation had been wholly accurate; being a white policeman in a country beset by rules made for a dangerous sense of freedom. “Where do you come from?”

“I am the yard boy for baas Allen. His house is there on the corner.”

“Name?” He took the joint and held it between thumb and forefinger. Possession of a banned substance and resisting arrest would put the gardener in jail for a solid stretch. This afternoon, however, he and Shabalala were hunting bigger prey.

“I am called Sipho,
ma baas
.” The gardener’s gaze remained pinned to the joint and the policeman holding it as if he might, at any moment, light up and draw deep. “Sipho Zille.”

“You were in Principal Brewer’s garden,” Emmanuel said.

“That is so.” Sipho brushed crushed weeds and twigs from his overalls, stalling for time. The guard dog, a brown and black mutt, bristled, bared its fangs and barked through the chain link fence.

“Sergeant,” Shabalala called from the Brewers’ garden gate. “Come. Bring the man.”

“Up,” Emmanuel ordered Sipho. “Let’s take a walk.”

The gardener sat flat to the ground with his fingers dug into the dirt. Whether trapped by fear or physically paralysed, it hardly mattered. The dog’s owner would be out to check on the disturbance soon. If the police came to investigate and took down names, Mason would find out they were running their own dark investigation.

Emmanuel crouched by Sipho and said, “Show me your passbook.”

“I don’t have it. It is in my hut.
Baas
Allen’s house is just there, near the corner. I can go and fetch it.”

“You could live in that mulberry tree for all I care. You must carry your passbook on your person at all times. That’s the law. So, here are your choices. Walk back to Principal Brewer’s garden or drive with me to the nearest police station where you will be charged with one count of resisting arrest, one count of possessing a banned substance and one count of failing to produce a passbook. Do you think
baas
Allen will hold your job for you while you’re in jail?”

Sipho got to his feet and moved to the Brewers’ lot. Emmanuel was glad to be free of the barking dog and the birds calling danger from the trees.

“This way,” the Zulu detective said and led the way into the wild yard. Grass, trees, climbing vines and flowers wrestled for space. Emmanuel found the chaos beautiful, nature’s version of a slum township where the residents mixed in whatever way they wished. Off the path and deep in the dense foliage, Shabalala stopped at the edge of a plot of land on which chest-high marijuana plants grew in thick stands.

“Yours?” Emmanuel asked Sipho of the flourishing herb garden worked on by an army of bees and butterflies.

“No,
ma baas
. Never.”

“How did you find this place, Detective Constable?” He addressed the question to Shabalala who in turn glanced at the gardener with pity.

“I followed the track of the man’s boots from the lane to here, Sergeant.”

“This man here?” Emmanuel placed a hand on Sipho’s shoulder.

“
Yebo
. The marks of his gumboots are all around.” Shabalala motioned to the prints in the garden dirt where Sipho had stopped to pull weeds. “From this place he must have seen many interesting things.”

The Zulu detective pointed to the thicket that shielded the small plantation from exposure. The walls of Cassie’s shed were visible through the patchwork of trees. A distance of around fifty feet separated the marijuana plot and the shed, yet it was possible to see small portions of the pathway clearly. Emmanuel turned Sipho to face the stone hut and kept his hand on the gardener’s shoulder.

“You lied to us about owning the
dagga
plants.” He used the slang term for marijuana so there’d be no misunderstanding. “We’ll give you that one for free. We’ll make you
pay
for the next lie out of your mouth. Understand?”

“I hear you.” Sipho’s voice thickened with fear.

Emmanuel dug his fingers deeper. “See that stone hut in the trees?”

“
Yebo
, it is clear to me,” Sipho said.

“Who comes and goes there?”

The gardener swallowed hard. “The daughter of the house. She is the one who uses that place … and maybe there is someone else.”

“Is this other person perhaps a European?” Naming Cassie’s visitor right away would be rude. Servants learned to talk in wide circles to avoid dismissal or punishment for being too familiar or forward. Questions and answers needed to unfold in a cautious, roundabout way.

“Yes,” Sipho said. “I have seen a white
baas
in this garden.”

“Does this man live near by?”

“At number thirty-seven; the yellow house with big windows. His wife and child stay there also.”

Andrew “call me Andy” Franklin of the ironed safari suit and neatly trimmed moustache. The helpful neighbour who’d asked after Cassie’s welfare on the morning she’d left for Clearwater Farm in Rust de Winter. Andy was more than curious. He was involved.

“Mr Franklin lives in a yellow house,” Emmanuel said.

“That is the white man who comes and goes from that hut.” Sipho relaxed. His tight shoulders visibly softened with relief. The name hadn’t come from him. It was better, safer to stay in the background of white people’s business. “How many times the man you named came here to visit, I cannot say.”

“Franklin lives two doors down.” Emmanuel brought Shabalala into the conversation. “He gave me the names of neighbours who had problems with Principal Brewer’s native education program but failed to mention he’d been playing with Cassie in the back garden.”

“Mr Franklin must have forgotten.” The Zulu detective’s tone was dry as rhino hide. “A married man has much on his mind.”

“We’ll have to help Andy remember.” He turned Sipho around to face the lush marijuana crop. The neat rows and freshly weeded soil demonstrated a deep love of the herb. “Tell me what you know about Mr Franklin.”

“I don’t work for
baas
Franklin. I am the yard boy for
baas
Allen.”

Emmanuel’s fingers relaxed. He patted Sipho’s shoulder. “No problem. We’ll call Mr Allen from the police lock-up.”

“Wait,” Sipho said. Stuck between white people’s private business and police business made it hard for him to breathe and puzzle a way out of trouble. The tall Zulu and the lean white man could, between them, break every bone and snap every tendon in his body before throwing what remained into a jail cell. “I am not
baas
Franklin’s boy but I have heard that there is fighting in the house. There is no money. The wife is worried for the child.
Baas
Franklin comes to visit the white teacher’s daughter when the sun goes down. I have seen him enter the hut three times. On two Fridays and then on a Saturday.”

“This last Friday night?” Emmanuel asked.

“I don’t know. That is for sure, for real. I stayed in my hut and did not come to tend my garden till now, now.”

Shabalala stood on tiptoe, dwarfing the gardener, and peered into the bush and trees. Then he crouched, taking in the low view towards the main house. “If the daughter was at the hut she could have seen who came through the back door to her parents’ home. The moon was full that night.”

“We get Andy to confess and then we’ll use his statement to break Cassie’s story.” Easier said than done. Andy had a family and a reputation to protect. Cassie was, in all likelihood, a release valve from the pressures of work, wife and baby, not his great love worth sacrificing everything for. “We’ll have to push him hard to get him to admit anything.”

“So it must be,” Shabalala said. His son’s life was like sand running through his fingers; to keep the grains safe he would have to make a fist and hold on as tight as he could.

“
Baas
Franklin is not at the yellow house. Sunday he goes to the home of his wife’s parents and they come back in the night. Seraphina, the house girl, has told me this.”

Emmanuel couldn’t stay till dark. Fatty Mapela’s dance-cum-potential brothel in the train yard started at six-thirty. He and Davida were due to leave the compound at dusk, that time of day when the failing light turned the two of them the same colour.

“You must find out about the car, Sergeant.” The Zulu detective read minds and tracks in the sand with equal skill. “We will come back tomorrow.”

“What time does Mr Franklin go to work on Monday?” Emmanuel asked Sipho, whose extra-curricular gardening gave him opportunity to keep a close watch on the neighbour’s movements. Cultivating a marijuana crop in spitting distance of the homes of white children and their decent, middle-class parents took a rat’s cunning.

“Eight in the morning. He works in the city in a tall, tall building. Seraphina has said so.”

“Six o’clock pick up tomorrow morning,” Emmanuel told Shabalala. Sophiatown was a good hour’s drive away from the house in Houghton.

“I will be ready, Sergeant.”

The fate of Sipho, gifted cannabis farmer and reluctant police informant, remained unresolved. Laying formal charges was out of the question. Police gossipped like fish wives; a compulsive need to exchange news and compare levels of badness became a key part of the job. If they booked Sipho, Mason would instantly learn of the
dagga
plantation found growing on his crime scene.

“The gardener knows how to keep a secret,” Shabalala said of Sipho, who stared at his blooming plants in mournful silence thinking of all he’d lost: job, shelter, money, and the delicious weight of Seraphina’s breasts cupped in his hands. The prison wouldn’t have a garden or a white madam who slipped him an extra pound of sugar on birthdays and at Christmas.

“If you tell anyone we were here, including other police, we will come for you,” Emmanuel said. “We won’t come right away. We’ll come later, when you think you’re safe and we’ve forgotten about you.”

“I will say nothing,
ma baas
. Nothing. I swear it on the ancestors.”

“Go.” Emmanuel gave the gardener a shove in the direction of the back gate. “And stay away from the
dagga
till after the holidays unless you enjoy being interviewed by the police.”

“I am gone,
ma baas
. No coming back.” Sipho started to walk away, resigned to the fact that the policemen would steal every plant and strip each sticky resin bud to fill their own pipes. No matter. He’d start again in the New Year with seeds smuggled back from where the whites had moved his people so they could make citrus farms on tribal land.

Emmanuel’s watch showed one-thirty and his breakfast aspirin had worn off. The pain in his head stirred, pulsing bright and hot behind his eyelids. Certain as summer rain, the pulse would bloom into a fist trying to break a hole through his skull. He needed a jug of water, a plate of hot, salty food and a double dose of painkillers—the good kind, laced with morphine; and soon.

“Is your sister-in-law back from visiting the hospital?” he asked Shabalala.

“Not yet.” Shabalala tugged a weed free from the tilled ground, his fingertips dark with soil. “My brother grows worse and I have not sent word about Aaron’s troubles.”

“Sorry to hear about your brother,” Emmanuel said. The stiff pride with which his Zulu partner shouldered the weight of his family’s problems was painful to witness. Shabalala carried his burdens as a traditional man should, alone and in silence. “I have to sit a while. Let’s drive to King’s place and have lunch.”

“Mr King …”

“Won’t mind. We’ll eat out in the garden.”

The garden, away from the big house, Emmanuel meant. The big house was where white men who supported the idea of racial segregation in public lived free of the rules in private.

“I will take some food.” Shabalala stood and dusted dirt from his fingers.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“I was not hungry, Sergeant.”

“If you faint, I’m not dragging you to the car,” Emmanuel said and picked grass seeds from his trousers. He straightened the lapels of his jacket. Both he and Shabalala wore hand-tailored suits made by Lilliana Zweigman, the expensive material cut to fit them like their own skins. She’d expect to see her creations looking sharp.

“If that is so, I will walk to the car.”

“After you.” Emmanuel paused at the gate to the Brewers’ property, the hunting grounds of Andy Franklin, left to forage for thrills in a wild, suburban garden. The exhilarating chaos of the untamed vines, the hush of the wind in the branches and Cassie’s body must have been irresistible.