The Monster's Daughter (2 page)

Alet grunted and put the cap back on. “What do you mean? It takes work to look this good.”

Tilly smiled, the skin around her eyes scrunching up. “What happened?”

“Accident out on the highway. Guy hit a truck.” Alet burped.

“Don't they have a rule about drinking in uniform?”

“You're going to tell Mathebe?”

Tilly raised a thin plucked eyebrow. “You know we are like this.” She held up her left hand, crossing her middle and index fingers.

“He was only upholding the law, you know,” Alet said with a straight face. She imitated Mathebe's hound dog expression and thick accent. “Ouwa jop is verry serrious.”

“He stopped me for speeding on an empty road!” Tilly raised her voice in indignation. “Threatened to arrest me. Twice. It's persecution, I'm telling you.”

Mathebe never patronized Zebra House and Tilly crossed the street whenever she saw him walking in her direction. This had all happened before Alet transferred to Unie, before she even knew the place existed. At the time, she'd been up in Jo'burg, training for the Special Task Force, trying to prove that she could be one of the elite. That turned out to be a misguided venture. She'd been caught with her pants down, so to speak, demoted for an “indiscretion with a superior.” Instead of dealing with urban hostage situations or protecting foreign dignitaries, she was forced to live in this small town, dealing with stupid little feuds in the middle of nowhere. An elite
fokop
. Alet wondered if Mathebe knew why she'd been transferred to Unie. The thought that anyone might judge her disgrace really pissed her off.

Alet tipped her head back, emptying the beer can. “Well, if you're not going to report me, you might as well hand me another.”

Tilly reached down into the fridge. “They're all warm.”

“Doesn't matter. And the Thursday special.”

“Maria is only in at four today. It's
saamies
or nothing till then.”

“Fine. Toasted cheese, then.”

Tilly ducked out under the bar and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. Froth spurted out as soon as Alet pulled the tab on her second beer. She licked it off her index finger. Somewhere in the guesthouse, a phone rang. Tilly's muffled voice mechanically recited the standard greeting. There was a short pause, followed by a curt, “Please hold.” She marched back into the bar and held out the cordless. “For you.”

Alet took the handset. “
Ja?
”

“Constable Berg. You are needed at the station.” Even though Mathebe had a precise, pedantic way of pronouncing his words when he spoke English, Alet still had trouble understanding him over the phone.

“Johannes, I told you I'm knocking off for lunch. I'll get the report done before I book off. Promise, hey.” Alet winked at Tilly and took a sip from the can. There was a brief silence on the line. She imagined Mathebe closing his eyes, the way he always did when she said something that frustrated him, as if he was praying for deliverance before answering.

“A call came in, Constable.”

“I'm sure whatever it is can wait for a half hour, Sergeant.”

Another silence. “A body was found on the Terblanche farm.”

Boet and Jana Terblanche's farm was about thirty kilometers west of Unie, off a misanthropic dirt road that cut through the mountain range, high rock faces on one side, sheer drops on the other. The GPS was useless. It didn't even register that they were on a road. Alet could navigate the area from memory now, but in the beginning she only had directions involving trees and gate-counting. The valley below them, caught between jagged black mountains enveloped by fog, stretched out to where blue sky and green earth were separated by a thin line of nothing. At the foot of the cliffs, brown workers picked peaches in orchards, led sheep to pasture, and tilled the red dirt. Their barefoot children hugged the side of the road when they heard the police van approach. Thin arms waved as it sped past, excited chatter and speculation among the smiling faces.

On her weekly community outreach patrol, Alet usually approached the boulders and turns in the road at a snail's pace, feeling a hostility radiating from the landscape. But Mathebe sped along the narrow road, only slowing down when they approached a blind curve, honking the horn in warning. The van's wheels sprayed gravel over the road's edge. Baboons scattered in the trees below.

“When were you last here, Constable?” Dark pearls of sweat beaded on Mathebe's forehead. New sweat on old.

“Day before yesterday. Everything was fine.”

Unie had a low crime rate compared to the rest of the country, but the farms were isolated. Cattle thieves abounded, the farmers easy targets. An elderly farmer and his wife were attacked the year before. The attackers took everything they could lay their hands on, after assaulting the couple and tying them up. It was days before neighbors found them. The wife barely survived. Her husband had a heart condition and hadn't been so lucky.

“And the workers?” Mathebe kept right at a fork in the road.

“Nobody mentioned anything.”

They passed a row of small brick houses with beautifully tended gardens, flowers wilting in the summer heat. An old woman sat outside one of the buildings on an upturned milk crate, her deeply wrinkled face framed by a long white scarf wrapped tight around her hair. Not long ago, one of the coloured women had told her that they refused to speak English because it was the language of the Antichrist. It was the prevailing sentiment in the valley. Mathebe's Afrikaans wasn't good, so Alet patrolled the farms by herself. She didn't mind it. The most serious thing she had to deal with was domestic disturbances on payday, when farmhands bought liter bottles of cheap booze off the back of the smuggler's pickup. Every farmhouse she stopped at usually had tea and baked goods waiting for her. No wonder she had gained weight.

“It's the next gate,” Alet said as they approached a cattle encampment. Bonsmara hides glistened red in the sun as the animals gathered around the feed.

“I know.” Mathebe stopped in front of the wire gate designating the Terblanche property. Alet got out, unhooked the rusted pin and swung the gate open. There was no point getting back into the van, it
was hotter than hell either way, so she walked alongside as it crawled over rocky terrain to the next gate.

Boet Terblanche met them up the road. He leaned against his white pickup, his broad shoulders hunched, his tanned arms crossed over his chest, brown hair falling in his face, long and unkempt. His olive-green sweatshirt was full of holes, the sleeves pushed past his forearms, grass stains on the knees of his cargo pants. Jakob, his coloured foreman, sat on the back of the truck, his blue coveralls' arms tied around his waist, his head resting in his hands, barely looking up as the police van approached.

Boet nodded in their direction and got into his pickup. Alet and Mathebe followed, slowly traversing the rocky mountainside. Jakob jumped off the truck to open and close gates, his sinewy body moving fast for his fifty-odd years. Abandoned ruins were scattered along the path, their roofless white walls patched with brown stains, broken windows like unblinking eyes staring out over the valley. Alet wondered how people lived all the way up there back in the day, without running water or electricity. Even the squatter camps had satellite dishes nowadays.

Boet's truck came to a stop where the road dead-ended at the bottom of a rise, cordoned off by an ancient wire fence. He got out and pointed to a small ruin in the middle of an open patch of dry grass and rocks, forlorn trees perched on the edge.

“On the other side.”

Jakob huddled quietly on the back of the pickup. Alet wondered why he wasn't making a nuisance of himself. The foreman was a boisterous character, full of talk about the way he saw things and the gossip of the valley. Alet had had to lock him up for public intoxication a few weeks before, but he was generally a good bloke, always ready with a smile and a story.

Alet took the camera out of the glove box and followed Mathebe, climbing over heaps of discarded furniture, rusted oil drums and inner tubes—junk left behind by a string of unwelcome transients. Strange smells intertwined, acrid and sweet, growing stronger as they walked past the house, burned rubber and something she couldn't put her finger on right away, something comforting, familiar even. It was the smell of lazy Sunday afternoons, trying to forget your troubles, beer in
hand, men talking about rugby and politics and children chasing each other around the yard, as steaks and
boerewors
grilled on an open fire.

Alet's stomach turned when she saw it. The body lay curled in a fetal position, its hands balled into fists in front of its face, like a boxer readying for a fight. It had been burned, the flesh so charred that it looked as if the slightest breeze might lift the ashes into the air and destroy its integrity. Blackened skin split across the corpse's abdomen exposing charred bowels. A brown flaky substance extruded from the skull. Its jaw hung open, mouth agape in a silent scream. Wire hoops, clearly the remnants of a tire, encircled its shoulders.

“A necklacing?” Alet felt jittery. She had read the case files. Members of the ANC had used necklacings in the mid-eighties to keep dissidents in check. The practice disappeared after the party won South Africa's first multiracial election in '94. But after years of escalating violent crime, necklacings were resurfacing. An old black woman had been attacked in her home in the Eastern Cape the previous year. Two men had raped her and killed her son, then fled with her valuables. During their crime spree, men in the community caught them and dragged them to the town square, where people took turns beating the offenders with planks and throwing rocks at them. Tires filled with petrol were forced around their shoulders and set on fire. The whole community watched them die. And nobody saw a thing.

“It appears that way.” Mathebe laid a measuring stick next to the body. He stepped aside.

Alet focused the camera. “A vigilante killing?” She snapped a photograph of the body.

“Not here.” Mathebe was right. Necklacings happened in high-crime areas, not in towns like Unie.

“Nobody's been reported missing in Unie in the past month.” Alet changed the angle of the shot. “Maybe there were some violent offenders that walked in from George or Oudtshoorn.”

Mathebe made a sweeping motion with his upturned palm. “But look where we are.”

Alet's eyes trailed the movement of his hand over the valley below. God's country, she thought wryly. She turned back to Mathebe. “So?”

“Necklacing is a warning not to step out of line, Constable. It happens where everyone can see.”

“It would have been a hell of a job to get a crowd up here.”

Mathebe went down on his haunches next to the body. “Nobody here to see,” he muttered.

“So, the killer burned the body to get rid of evidence? Made it look like a necklacing to throw us off?”

“He perhaps saw the old tires over there and said, yes, this is how I become invisible.”

“Well, that's a bitch.”

Mathebe closed his eyes.

“I mean, the evidence is burned to a crisp.”

“We will do the best we can.”

Mathebe's stoicism frustrated Alet. He followed procedure like a robot, even at moments like this. She, meanwhile, wanted to punch something, feeling sick, angry, and yet curiously excited, something long dormant in her stirring. “I'll go see if Oosthuizen got lost,” she said.

Dr. Oosthuizen was the only local doctor. He ran a clinic near the
location
, treating minor injuries and venereal diseases, doing double duty as mortician. The white farmers only went to him if it was an emergency, preferring the two-hour drive to Oudtshoorn or George.

“Radio April,” Mathebe called after her. “We need help searching the area.”

Boet Terblanche sat in his truck, his arm resting on the open window, staring off into the distance. He barely took notice of Alet as she walked over.

“Hey, Boet.”

“Alet.” His green eyes were wary, tired. He smelled of earth and animal.

“What time did you find it?”

Boet cleared his throat, his voice hoarse when he spoke. “Jakob saw smoke during morning meeting. Six, six-thirty maybe.”

Alet looked up at the back of the pickup. “Is that right, Jakob?”

“
Ja, Mies
.” Jakob peered at her between the guardrails. The flesh around his left eye was bruised and swollen.

“And you told
Baas
Boet right away?”

“
Ja, Mies
. The
baas
, he always says to be on the lookout.”

“The river's low,” Boet interjected. “No way to get water up here if
a fire gets out of hand.” He ran his thick fingers through his hair. His fingernails were dirty.

“Did you touch anything?”

“No.” Boet watched Mathebe walk into the ruin. “We drove to the house, to call you people, but they said nobody could come out right away. So we waited.”

“I'll need a full statement. From Jana too.”

“I told you everything,” Boet snapped.

Alet touched his forearm. “Are you okay?”

“I have a farm to run, Alet.” Boet looked away. “I don't have time for this. And Jana is almost due …”

Alet withdrew her hand. “I need to talk to Jakob, then.”

Boet sighed and crossed his arms.

“Jakob?”

“
Ja, Mies
?”

“Come with me.”

The foreman climbed down from the back of the pickup and followed Alet to the police van.

“What happened this morning, Jakob?”

Jakob looked at Alet as if she was stupid, the slits of his brown eyes almost closed, a frown deepening the grooves in his leathery face. “We found the body,
Mies
.”

Alet smiled. Patience, she reminded herself. “
Ja
, I know, Jakob. Tell me what you saw when you got here.”