Present Darkness (60 page)

“Cassie …” Emmanuel crouched beside the girl with Shabalala behind. He pushed away the knowledge that pursuing this child over the precipice could have cost them their lives. But for a few lucky inches, the submerged boulder might have cracked a skull or snapped a spine. “Come. Sit up.”

Cassie burrowed deeper into the sandy bank with her eyes squeezed shut. Goosebumps appeared on her skin and wet strands of hair lay plastered against the side of her face.

Emmanuel touched her shoulder and felt the soft, shivering flesh. “You need to get warm,” he said. “Let’s get you into the sun.”

Cassie remained limp and unmoving. Shabalala stepped closer and said, “Over there on that patch of grass, Sergeant?”

“Yeah.” Emmanuel moved aside. The Zulu detective scooped Cassie up and carried her into a warm spot just outside the spray of the waterfall. The river flowed on: a slender, yet powerful, vein of silver cutting through the dry land. The two detectives crouched either side of Cassie and raised their faces to the heat like sunworshippers in an outdoor temple. They’d be close to dry in a few minutes and ready to walk back to the farmhouse. Emmanuel waited for Cassie’s ragged breathing to ease. Her eyes flickered open but she remained flat on the ground and expressionless.

“Our friend Dr Zweigman is waiting at the house,” he said. “He’ll take care of any cuts and bruises from the jump and he’ll make sure that you’re all right. Can you walk?”

“I don’t want to,” Cassie said.

“You don’t want to walk or you don’t want to go back to the farm?”

“Both.”

Shabalala sank onto his haunches, preparing for a long wait. He didn’t mind the time it took to get the unhappy white girl up and moving. She was alive and, through her, Aaron stayed alive also.

“Fuck this …”
the Sergeant Major seethed.
“Get your Zulu to carry the crazy bitch back to the house or drag her by the hair if necessary. It’s well past the time to play nice, Cooper.”

“Flogging a sick horse never makes it go faster,”
Emmanuel replied.
“Same goes for teenage girls.”

“This is what Mason meant when he said ‘you’re good with women’. You don’t mind the time it takes to get them warmed up and talking. I’d sooner have a wound sewn up with a blunt needle.”

The source of Mason’s observation still remained unclear. Emmanuel’s hat had blown off during the jump and the sun beat down so that the hard light seemed to shine directly onto the back of his retinas.

“We have to go back to the homestead if we want food and shelter for the night,” Emmanuel said. “You don’t have to walk. Detective constable Shabalala is strong enough to carry you most of the way … if you’d like.”

Cassie lifted her head off the sand and looked outside her anguished self for the first time since jumping over the edge. Shabalala nodded encouragement and held out his hands to help her to her feet. She sat up slowly: all the while studying the tall black man intently.

“He looks just like you,” she said.

“I am Aaron’s father,” Shabalala replied. “I am sorry to hear the news of your father’s passing. He was loved I am sure.”

Cassie dug her fingers into the riverbank and gathered the sand into fists. “It’s my fault that he died,” she said. “I lied about the Saint Bart’s boys and God punished me. He took my father away …”

“The European men who broke into your parents house are to blame for what happened,” Emmanuel said. “You weren’t even there. You were in the little hut with Andrew Franklin when they came to the house.”

“How do you know that?” Cassie tilted her head back and blinked hard.

“We spoke with Mr Franklin this morning.” Emmanuel left it at that. He had yet to gauge the high water mark of Cassie’s feelings for her neighbour. Love with a capital L would make getting a true statement difficult. Conflicting emotions flashed across the teenager’s face: joy, apprehension and then a desperate flicker of hope.

“Will Andrew come for me?” she asked.

“No,” Emmanuel said. “I don’t believe he will.”

“He promised that we’d be together.” Cassie sucked in a breath, accepting the truth of the detective’s statement. “I lied about being in the house to help him. He said we’d be together soon. Now my father is dead.”

“Here.” Emmanuel squeezed water from his handkerchief and gave it to Cassie who wiped away tears. She pushed back strands of damp hair and blotted drops of river spray from her arms.

“I don’t care about politics or native education,” she said. “That’s all my father used to talk about: bus passes and passbooks and fighting segregation. He’s up in heaven now and he’s telling my grandfather that I’m a liar. His spirit will hate me for eternity. I know it.”

Shabalala leaned closer and rested his elbows on his kneecaps, graceful and easy in his six-foot-plus frame. “The dead have no cause for hate,” he whispered. “Your father’s spirit wishes for your suffering to end. He cares only for your happiness.”

Cassie rested her cheek on her forearm and focused on the Zulu detective who crouched in front of her. Andrew Franklin had never regarded her with loving kindness and neither had Aaron. One person alone called her freckles “sun kisses” and insisted that her too-wide mouth was beautiful. Now it felt that this strange but familiar black man was looking at her through her father’s eyes.

“My dad was good, like you,” Cassie said to the Zulu detective. “He’d want me to tell the truth, wouldn’t he?”

“Your heart already knows the answer to that question,” Shabalala said.

*

The girl sank to the ground and clutched her knees to her body. Disappointment sapped the last of her energy. The blue-green mountains, so cool and inviting on the horizon, offered no refuge from the heat now that she was here. There was no sign of water. Reality dawned on her. She would die in this barren land, watched over by a cloudless sky.

If thirst didn’t take her then the cut in her leg certainly would, only more slowly. This morning’s ache had progressed to a sharp, stabbing pain in the flesh. It hurt to move. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to look across the land. She’d exchanged a dungeon for an open-air prison with no water or food. Just my luck, she thought.

She lay down on the ground. Small brown birds sang from the thorn trees and, high above, an eagle soared on outstretched wings. A tiny flower sprouted from the earth at her eye level, its bright petals short and spiked. A thought nudged into her head. There was beauty in this harsh place: small and hidden, but it was there. Better to die in the fresh air than in a dark alley crushed between brick walls.

“Hey …” a finger jabbed her ribs. “Hey, you.”

She stirred and blinked into the light. A freckled white girl with ginger hair plaited into two messy braids crouched in the dirt with her head tilted sideways like a curious bird. Two black children, a boy and a girl dressed in a mishmash of traditional skins and cast-off European clothing watched from a safe distance. All three carried slingshots made of rubber bands and Y-shaped sticks. The boy asked a question in a native tongue and the white girl shrugged.

“She’s alive but I don’t know her name.”

Another question, this time from the black girl who scanned the hills and the arid plains with a nervous glance. The freckled girl answered in the native language and then said in English, “I’m Julie. You’re from the Lion’s Kill farmhouse. I saw you in the little room.”

Of course, of course, the girl’s sluggish brain made the connection. She remembered now. This red-haired child had run across the dirt yard in front of the basement cell with a hessian sack slung across her back.

“Water … please …” the words come out in croaks. “Help me.”

The boy spoke in a harsh voice and rubbed his palms together in a gesture that said, “wash your hands of this problem quickly.” The black girl nodded agreement and they spun on their heels and took off at a run across the hard land.

“Don’t.” The girl reached out, tried to grab Julie’s hand. “Stay. Please.”

“Can’t.” Julie dipped into the pocket of her grubby cotton dress and pulled out three speckled birds eggs, the size of walnuts. She cracked the eggs together to break the shells.

“Quick,” she said. “Open wide.”

The girl worked her jaw apart and felt silky egg whites and the taste of yolk coating her tongue and then running wet into her throat. She swallowed and opened her mouth for more.

“All gone. I’ll try to bring some more later.” Julie stood up and looked in the direction that her playmates had run. She threw aside the crushed shells, wiped her sticky fingers on the front of her dress and took off at a sprint, her braids swinging from side to side in rhythm with her steps. The girl struggled to a sitting position in time to see Julie’s diminishing figure winding through the anthills.

“Alice,” the girl said. “My name is Alice.”

A warthog trotted through the thorn trees and stopped to dig up a tuber with its curved tusks. It continued snuffling for food then raised its ugly head at the sound of a car engine shifting gears. Alice got to her feet and shaded her eyes. A red line cut through the veldt; a road.

No sign of the car yet but its destination had to be the farm at the end of the road. She squinted into the light and recognised the stunted orchard and the gravel yard of the house where she’d been held captive. A rusted windmill turned lazy circles in the air, the lonesome creak of its blades terrifyingly familiar. A whole night and a day of running for the three hills had gained her a scant few miles from the concrete cell.

The warthog grunted and took off with its tufted tail raised like a flag. A blue car appeared on the road and travelled at top speed in the direction of the farmhouse. The driver knew the way, it seemed to Alice, or had experience navigating rutted dirt tracks in third gear. Under different circumstances she might have run across the ground to beg for help from the driver but her injured leg and her intuition kept her still.

The last visitors to the house had smashed beer bottles against the walls and fired guns. She doubted the big man knew good people, the sort who’d pick up a battered girl and race to the nearest hospital without questions. Having escaped the cell once she dared not risk being delivered back into the big man’s hands like a piece of lost luggage.

Alice crouched down and gripped her knees tight. Pain throbbed deep in the cut on her leg. She barely noticed. There’d be no more eggs or water or help, no matter what the girl Julie said. Her earlier premonition would come true. This ground would be her grave.

24.

Emmanuel and Shabalala stood on the rear porch of the Clearwater homestead and drank rooibos, red bush tea, from mismatched cups. The elderly maid had made a big show of offering the fine china cup to Emmanuel and then a chipped tin mug to the citified Zulu with no business wearing a suit. The detectives drank in silence and paid the offended servant no mind.

“You did well,” Emmanuel said of the written statement from Cassie Brewer exonerating Aaron and identifying two European males, one big and the other small, as the prime suspects. “We’ll give the new statement to the lawyer, Britz, first thing. He’ll make short work of the police case. The pressure will be on Mason to explain the school badge found in the stolen car.”

They were ahead of the game for once, the end of the line now in sight.

“My thanks, Sergeant.” Shabalala touched the folded paper in his jacket pocket again. Each word written by the school principal’s daughter carried a magic charge. “I am in your debt.”

“Let’s call it even,” Emmanuel said, remembering the time fifteen months ago when Shabalala had spirited his broken body away from a beating at the hands of Piet Lapping of Special Branch.

“Gentlemen.” Zweigman carried a tray of freshly baked buns out of the farmhouse and joined them on the porch. They ate quickly, inhaling the warm bread slathered in butter and honey.

“How is she?” Emmanuel asked when the last bun had been eaten and the crumbs thrown under a bush for the birds. The doctor had taken Cassie into his care the moment they’d arrived back, sun-kissed and badly scraped, from the waterfall.

“Exhausted,” Zweigman said. “I expect she will sleep through till dawn.”

Emmanuel hoped to be gone from Clearwater long before that. “We have enough time to make the drive to Jo’burg before nightfall. Have the children been treated?”

“The boy Hector has so far eluded capture. His siblings are hunting him down as we speak. Give me one more hour, Detective, and I will be ready to leave.”

“We’ll wait,” Emmanuel said. If they left immediately, Zweigman would spend the long drive back to the city worrying about Hector’s red rabbit eyes while calculating the likelihood that the treated children would become re-infected.

Jodea, the smallest of the Singleton children, flew around the corner of the house with a freshly scrubbed face. She waved to Zweigman. “Come quick, doctor. We have Hector under the mulberry tree. Jason says to bring the medicine.”