The Hunter (14 page)

‘Shit.’

‘
What?
For heaven’s sake.’

‘We may be being followed.’

Lungile tilted her head to check her rear-view mirror. ‘The Eskom dudes?’

‘Yes.’ The electricity authority
bakkie
was on our tail, and closing the gap.

‘You think they’re undercover cops?’ She was trying to sound cool, but failing.

‘Yes.’

‘But how?’

I was annoyed that she hadn’t spotted the trap herself, so I explained: ‘You said it yourself, there were, like, gadgets everywhere in that house. Show me the teenage boy who leaves home without his phone and iPad and I’ll show you a police sting.’

‘
Eish
,’ she said again.

It was all too obvious. Sometimes in the houses we visited silly people would leave a laptop on a desk, just so the buyers inspecting the house knew that the room was meant to be a home office, but generally when we lifted phones and computers we had to rummage through desk drawers. Most of the phones we stole were actually last year’s model or older, consigned by their owners to a drawer when they updated their phone plans and received the latest BlackBerry, Samsung or iPhone. No one actually left a working new-model phone at home on a bench top or desk. The trap had been laid and we had very nearly taken the bait.

‘Did you check that Neanderthal real estate
oke
?’ I said.

Lungile nodded in her burqa. ‘Bull neck, not used to wearing a tie. It all fits now.’

‘Yes, police. And I gave him a stolen ID book.’

‘What do we do?’ she asked me.

Damn good question. I checked the wing mirror again. One of the electricity workers was talking on his phone. ‘Turn left. Now!’

Lungile stepped on the brakes, swung the wheel without indicating, and then accelerated. Behind us the driver of the
bakkie
, taken by surprise, laid some rubber of his own as he overshot the turnoff and skidded to a halt. I could see the passenger gesticulating and talking as the driver reversed in order to take the corner. ‘Go, go, go!’

Lungile geared down and planted her cheap canvas and rubber shoe on the pedal. The BMW lurched forward like a grateful racehorse released from the starting gate. We hit a speed hump and my head connected with the low roof. I ignored the pain and looked over my shoulder. The electricity company truck was blowing black smoke as they tried to catch up; they were definitely cops.

‘Go left up ahead, the mall’s just around the corner.’

Her black cowl nodded. Lungile took the turn and ran a red light, to the honking outrage of the driver who had just started to nudge forward. The next turn was the entrance to the mall, beneath the Game store sign. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said as she punched the button to get us a parking ticket. As the boom came up I could see the Eskom
bakkie
coming through the traffic lights.

Lungile pumped the accelerator as she dodged shoppers and trolleys and took a corner at speed. She raced up to the next level, pulled the handbrake and drifted into another turn, only stopping when she expertly slotted the BMW into an empty space. She was a hell of a driver. As we climbed out of the car we were ripping off our disguises. I went to the back and popped the boot. From inside I lifted the stroller and unfolded it. Once I was done I rolled and bundled our burqas into the pram and we both put on hats we had also stowed in the boot. I pulled mine low over my eyes.

‘Let’s get away from the car. Quickly,’ Lungile said. I pulled the sunshade with its mesh panels over the stroller and did up the zips.

‘Come, Precious, we have shopping to do,’ I said in my best imperious Johannesburg trophy wife voice.

Lungile smiled, hiding her nerves better than I, and said: ‘
Yebo
,
madam.’

I heard tyres squealing and made a snap decision as the
bakkie
swung into view. Instead of heading into the shopping mall I strode past the line of parked cars towards the truck, my arms moving across my body like a power walker’s. I thought that if the cops saw us walking away from the car they would try and stop us and question us; they wouldn’t be expecting us to head towards them. Behind me, Lungile pushed the baby carriage, dressed in a lightweight Pick ’n’ Pay maid’s uniform. After our last close call we had decided to don extra disguises under our other costumes, just in case. The cops in the
bakkie
skidded to a halt next to the BMW.

I heard doors opening. ‘Hey, excuse me!
Mevrou
?’

Slowing, I looked over my shoulder. ‘
Ja
?’

‘Did you just see two women dressed all in black, like in Muslim clothes?’

‘Burqas?’

‘
Ja
, I think that’s what they’re called,’ said the man, who was wearing an Eskom uniform.

‘Why, did they not pay their electricity bill?’ I drawled.

Behind me my maid tittered.

‘We’re police. Where did they go?’

‘They went into the mall. They were running. Now please stop shouting or you’ll wake my baby.’

‘Sorry for that,’ the policeman said, touching a hand to his Eskom baseball cap.

The other cop was out now and he tried the driver’s side door of the BMW. Lungile still had the keys, but hadn’t locked the car. He reached in and hit the boot release. The one who had spoken to me checked the boot and, seeing no burqas inside, he and his partner jogged off into the mall.

‘That was close,’ said Lungile as she drew up beside me. I increased the pace of my power walking and she pushed the pram containing our disguises until she was panting.

‘Too close,’ I said. The police were on to us and were running sting operations to try and catch us. We needed to stop this now, or move to another location, like Spain.

‘Close, but fun. Can we do it again?’ Lungile said.

After a moment we both started laughing as we walked through the car park entrance and into the sunshine, poor, but free.

10

T
his corner of Zimbabwe had not had the early rains that had brought a first flush of green back to the bush in the south of the Kruger Park, near where Hudson Brand had been housesitting.

The grassless earth was baked red under the clear sky and burning sun, the trees bare of any leaves. Heat haze shimmered off the narrow, recently patched road and goats nibbled on rubbish tossed from passing cars. Brand hoped that when the rains did come they would be heavy and sustained; this country needed a break more than others.

He had crossed the Limpopo and queued his way through both sides of the Beitbridge border crossing in two hours – not bad timing for one of Africa’s most infamously congested and chaotic frontiers. His Land Rover was South African registered and a few years earlier this would have guaranteed that every cop on every one of the fifteen roadblocks between the border and Bulawayo, an average of about one every twenty kilometres, would try and shake him down with a bogus fine or a request for cigarettes or a simple demand for cash, but not this time. Brand had smiled and exchanged pleasantries with all the cops and they had asked for nothing other than to see his driver’s licence or the temporary import permit for his vehicle. He hoped it was a sign that the authorities had been ordered to lay off tourists. If Zimbabwe was ever going to bounce back it would probably be a recovery led by holiday-makers, with South Africans leading the charge.

The little towns he passed through – West Nicholson, Colleen Bawn and Gwanda – boasted stores with stock in the windows and people on the streets ready to buy. When the economy had all but collapsed during the years of hyper-inflation there had been nothing to buy.

The Land Rover’s old diesel engine hauled the vehicle slowly uphill through Esigodini, but reaching the plateau on which Bulawayo was situated brought a measure of relief to the old girl. Brand stopped for another roadblock and checked his watch. ‘Good afternoon, how are you?’ he asked the young policeman.

‘Ah, I am fine. May I see your driver’s licence?’

‘Sure.’ Brand had his wallet on the seat beside him in readiness and he handed over the licence. ‘Say, you don’t know where I would find Dr Fleming, do you?’

The policeman looked up from the licence. ‘Dr Fleming? He is in Hillside. He delivered my second child. It was a difficult birth. Are you ill?’

Brand nodded. ‘
Yebo
. I have a sore stomach. What street is he in?’

‘He is a good doctor. You will find him in Weir Avenue. He will make you a better man.’

Brand doubted that, but thanked the policeman and took a can of Coke from the cooler box in the back and passed it to him. Once through the roadblock, he pulled over and entered the street into his GPS. He was still about twenty kilometres outside town. Brand’s stomach was rumbling, not sore, but he was of the view that he could wrap this job up sooner rather than later. It had occurred to him that since he was in Zimbabwe, away from the controversy of his last job in South Africa, he might try and pick up some freelance guiding work. He would contact the owners of The Hide, the lodge on the edge of the Hwange National Park where he had worked before, to see if they could take him on for a spell.

Brand knew Bulawayo well; he had conducted investigations there in the past and had spent time in the city on leave from his work in Hwange. He liked the orderliness of the town’s rectangular grid of streets. Those running one way were numbered, which made them easy to navigate, while the streets crossing them were named after heroes of the revolution – Robert Mugabe, Herbert Chitepo, Josiah Tongarara and so forth.

Despite the country’s economic and political woes Bulawayo always seemed to Brand to be able to muster some sense of civic pride. The people here were Ndebele, formerly known as the Matabele, and they had always opposed Mugabe’s ruling Shona. There was a feeling of stubborn defiance in the population.

He bypassed the turnoff to Hillside for now and headed instead to the government offices in the centre of town. The purple jacaranda blossoms were out and they compensated for the fading paint and run-down look of some of the once stately buildings. Bulawayo was a mix of old colonial architecture, hotels with wide covered verandahs and stark 1960s blocks of low-rise flats and offices. The streets were wide enough to turn a bullock cart in the old days, and today the centre strip was crammed with parked cars. Many of the models were ancient and those moving belched smoke; this was a country where nothing, least of all cars, was thrown out until it died. It wasn’t unusual that Kate Munns and Linley Brown had been driving what would have been a collector’s car anywhere else in the world. Here it was still a perfectly usable, legal means of transport even if it wasn’t required to be fitted with seatbelts.

Brand turned into 10th Avenue and found a parking spot near the corner of Lobengula. The building he wanted, the Bulawayo Provincial Registry, was in front of him, part of a cluster of government offices in the grounds of the old Drill Hall, an imposing white Victorian structure that had been built for the old British South Africa Police. The towers of the city power station loomed behind the buildings. A young boy leading a blind man wearing a threadbare suit and holding a tin cup and a stick zeroed in on him as he got out of the Land Rover.

‘Hello, sir. I will watch your car,’ said the boy.

‘Sure,’ said Brand. In South Africa he was never worried about someone stealing his old beast of burden – thieves there preferred Toyota
bakkies
to Land Rovers, but here in Zimbabwe wheels were wheels. He took his daypack containing his camera, passport and other valuables, and left his other bag in the truck. As he approached the government precinct he saw a line of people stretching out of the compound and along 10th Avenue.

‘What are these people waiting for?’ he asked the boy with the blind man.

The youth wiped a snotty nose with his finger, then ran it down his stained shirt. ‘IDs, birth certificates, that sort of stuff.’

‘They’re queuing for the registry office?’ Brand asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

It was just as he feared. Last time it hadn’t been nearly as crowded. ‘Is this old man your father?’

‘Grandfather,’ the blind man interrupted. ‘His father is dead, of tuberculosis.’

‘How’d you like to make fifty
yusa
, pops?’ Brand asked, using the local slang for US dollars.

The old man frowned. ‘What do you want? Not my grandson.’

‘No, of course not. I need you.’

The old man nodded. ‘I understand.’

Brand, together with the man, whose name was Isaac, and his grandson, Joshua, walked along the queue and through the gates into the grounds of the Drill Hall, then over to the steps of the Provincial Registry Office.

‘What are you doing?’ a big man in the queue asked gruffly. He wore a ZANU-PF baseball cap in the gaudy colours of the ruling party.

‘This man is old and blind,’ Brand said, ‘and he needs a copy of his son’s death certificate. His son was the father of this small boy.’

The big man harrumphed. ‘Let him through,’ said the woman standing next in line.

‘Thank you.’ Brand took Isaac’s arm and Joshua followed him to a walled cubicle at the head of the queue. Brand repeated the lie to two more people along the way.

The woman sitting behind the table in the cubicle was filling in a form. She didn’t bother looking up.

‘Cecelia, right?’

She raised her eyes and took a moment to recognise him. ‘Ah, the American man.’

‘Good afternoon, how are you?’ he asked in Ndebele.

‘I am fine, and you?’

‘Can’t complain.’

She put down her pen. ‘Who is this old man?’

‘A friend. I’m helping him. He needs to check a death certificate.’

Cecelia looked at Brand dubiously. ‘Didn’t I read about you getting into trouble, in Harare?’

Brand shrugged. ‘You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, especially in this country.’ He didn’t need her getting cold feet. ‘About the death certificate for my blind, elderly friend . . .’

‘You were locked up in prison, weren’t you? Something about exposing a crooked
mashona
government minister’s son?’ Cecelia Ndlovu leaned across the counter, adopting a conspiratorial air. ‘You know we don’t criticise the government or the president; it is an offence.’

‘Of course,’ Brand whispered.

‘But, well done.’

The blind man smiled. Brand was relieved. ‘Cecelia, I’ve written the name of the deceased person on a piece of paper here.’

Just as he had done last time, he slid a folded piece of A4 paper across the counter to her. Inside it was not only Kate Munns’s full name and date of birth, but also a crisp, new fifty-dollar bill. Cecelia gave no sign of even seeing the cash as she slid it beneath the bench top and into a small pocket near the waistband of her blue skirt. She studied the name. ‘This Munns is a friend of this old man?’

‘Of course,’ Brand said. The blind man sat quietly, his hands folded in his lap, his stick between his knees and his tin cup by his right foot. The boy looked around, studying the people queuing for the various, tortuous rites of officialdom.

‘I remember this one. Car accident.’

Brand raised his eyebrows. ‘You knew her?’

Cecelia shook her head. ‘Not personally, but I remember when it happened. I am from Binga, originally; my mother was on a bus and passed the scene. She saw the car burning. A couple of days later it was in the
Chronicle
that the white woman had died.’

So, Brand thought, he had a potential witness to the aftermath of the crash, which appeared to have actually happened. ‘Can I see the death certificate?’

‘Of course.’ Cecelia went through a door and returned with a ledger book. She flicked through the certificates and stopped when she found the page. ‘Here we are, Kate Munns, died 19 May.’

She turned the folder around and Brand checked the certificate. ‘Can I get a copy of this?’ It was the same date listed on Sergeant Khumalo’s sudden death docket and investigation report.

‘Ah, sorry, but the photocopier is broken.’

Brand wasn’t surprised; if it hadn’t been that then the electricity would have been off. He took out his phone and switched on the camera. ‘Do you mind?’

She shrugged and he focused on the certificate and took a picture. The certificate was signed by Dr Geoffrey Fleming and dated the day after the crash. The case was turning into a slam dunk, assuming Sergeant Khumalo and Dr Fleming checked out. ‘Thanks, Cecelia. Say, you do know what I’m investigating, don’t you?’

‘You are not looking for the death certificate of this blind man’s friend. You are looking for people who fake their deaths,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Do you have other people checking certificates for the same reason?’

She nodded, and closed the heavy folder. ‘Yes. There was another man, a local, doing the same work, for an insurance company in Australia. He uncovered a doctor selling fake certificates, just as you did in Harare.’

‘Dr Fleming?’

‘No, no, no. Not him. He is well known in Bulawayo. My mother goes to him, even though he charges a lot of money. He is a very honest man.’

‘Do you remember the name of the other doctor who was selling the certificates? What happened to him?’

‘It was a she,’ Cecelia said. ‘There was an investigation and the police came and took the certificate as evidence, but nothing happened and she is still practising.’

‘How come?’ Brand asked.

Cecelia smiled. ‘In Zimbabwe if you have enough money you can buy anything, even your freedom. The police are paid and a prosecution docket and evidence mysteriously disappear. It happens all the time.’

Brand knew it happened and wasn’t all that surprised, and he had to smile at the irony of Cecelia tut-tutting about bribery when she had just palmed a fifty to show him the death certificate file. ‘Do you remember the name of the doctor?’

Cecelia looked at the ceiling for a moment, trying to recall. ‘No, I can’t think of it. It was something foreign, something European, I think.’

‘Tell you what.’ Brand tore a page out of his notebook and wrote on it. ‘This is my Zimbabwean phone number. If you think of that doctor’s name or you can find it, please call me. You can just hang up as soon as you ring so you won’t have to pay for the call, and I’ll call you right back.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I’d
really
appreciate it,’ Brand said. It would be worth another fifty to get the name of a crooked doctor in Bulawayo in case he had more investigations in the future. He could also give the doctor’s name to Dani and she could have her insurance companies run a check on recent suspect life insurance claims.

Brand and the old man and his grandson left the building and went back outside to the Land Rover. Brand thanked his accomplices and gave the young boy some cash. ‘Be careful. If you go looking for the dead, you may find them,’ said the old man as Brand gently shook his hand.

He drove off, away from the queues, and found a coffee shop. He ordered coffee and a toasted ham and cheese sandwich with mustard and while he waited for his lunch he dialled the number for Dr Geoffrey Fleming’s surgery in Hillside, spoke to a receptionist, and was pleased to hear that the doctor could fit him in for a consultation in an hour. In his experience this was the best way to interview a doctor, on his or her time, with a fee paid. If he called explaining who he was and why he wanted to see the doctor he might be fobbed off.

Brand lingered over the meal. As he ate it he remembered the time in the not too distant past when none of these ingredients had been available in Zimbabwe. Although the dollar had brought some stability, times were still tough. Few of the people he saw walking past the plate glass window looked prosperous or well dressed. People were still just hanging on in Zimbabwe, hoping for real change, but the government was doing precious little to stimulate the economy. A recent law requiring all foreign companies investing in Zimbabwe to be fifty-one per cent locally owned had ensured that very few outside businesses could be bothered investing in the country. Unemployment was still high. Even doctors were doing it tough enough to take bribes, or perhaps that was just plain old-fashioned greed.