Did Van Heerden read? Richard hadn’t. Richard was a news fanatic. Newspapers and television news and Time and the Economist and radio bulletins, six o’clock in the morning. She had indulged him. A relationship was a question of give and take. For him it was a matter of being given to and taking from.
Eventually he knocked on her door. She got up, peered through the spy hole, recognized him, and opened the door. He stood, again slightly damp from the rain, the face reflecting stormy weather. As usual. “Come in,” she said. He walked in, glanced at the open-plan kitchen, dining area, and living room, walked to the breakfast counter, took out his wallet, and removed bank notes. He placed them on the counter.
“I’ve finished,” he said without looking up.
She looked at him. He seemed so defenseless, she thought. How could she have been so intimidated initially? The vague purplish color around his eye accentuated his vulnerability, though the lip was now nearly healed.
He placed the last note on the little pile. “We’re going nowhere. The thing is dead. It’s not ten months old. It started when Smit changed his name and it’s too long ago. You can do nothing about it.” He folded his arms and leaned against the counter.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked quietly.
“The advance…yes, please.” Somewhat taken aback. She walked around him to the kettle, put it on again, put a teaspoon of instant coffee in each mug.
“I have nothing to serve with the coffee. I’m not good at baking,” she said. “Do you bake?”
“I…no.” Irritated. “The investigation…”
“Won’t you sit down? Then we can discuss it.” Voice gentle. She suddenly wanted to laugh: he was so focused, so predictable, his body language an alarm siren, directed at confrontation. He was lost when it didn’t come.
“Yes,” he said, and sat on the edge of a living-room chair. He was so unbelievably uncomfortable, she thought.
“How do you like your coffee?”
“Black and bitter.” As an afterthought: “Thank you.”
“I appreciate your honesty about the investigation.”
“You’ll simply have to accept that the case is dead.”
“It was worth trying.”
“And there is nothing you can do about it.”
“I know.”
“I just came to tell you.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“What did Kemp tell you?”
“Kemp knows nothing about the investigation.” She poured boiling water into the mugs.
“About me. What did he tell you about me?”
“He said that if there was someone who would be able to find the will, it would be you.” She carried the coffee on her small white tray, put it down on the glass table. “Help yourself,” she said.
He took a mug, put it back on the tray.
“How could he have said that if he knows nothing about the investigation?”
She bent forward, added milk to her coffee, stirred it. “Of course he knows I have a client who is looking for a will that was lost in a burglary. He knows it’s a sort of criminal investigation. That’s why he recommended you. He said you’re the best.” For a moment she wanted to add, Difficult, but the best, but she left it at that, raised the mug to her lips.
“What else did he say? About me?”
“That’s all. Why do you ask?”
“I just want to tell you, I don’t need your sympathy.”
“Why would you need my sympathy? If you say the investigation is dead, then…” She wanted to provoke him; she knew she was doing it deliberately.
“Not the investigation,” he said, irritated.
“Do have your coffee.”
He nodded, took the mug off the tray.
“What made you realize finally that the case was dead?” Her tone of voice was accepting, acquiescent.
He blew on the coffee, thought for a while. “I was at the Drug Squad this morning. And at the neighbors of Van As. I don’t know. I suddenly realized…There is nothing, Hope. And you’ll have to accept it. There is nothing you can do.”
She nodded.
“I…know Van As will be disappointed. But if they hadn’t had such an odd relationship…”
“I’ll talk to her. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried. Because there’s nothing…”
“That she can do.”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you learn to cook?”
He suddenly looked penetratingly at her. “What’s going on here, Hope?”
“What do you mean?”
“I come here to tell you that you and Van As can forget it and you talk about food? What’s going on?”
She sank back in the chair, put her running shoes on the table, rested the mug on her knees, spoke amiably. “Do you want me to argue with you about it? You gave your professional opinion and I accept it. I think you did a good job. I also have tremendous respect for the fact that you’ve returned the money. Someone with less integrity would have let the case drag on endlessly.”
He snorted. “I’m trash,” he said.
To which she had no reply.
“I think Kemp told you more.”
“What should he have told me?”
“Nothing.”
He’s like a child, she thought, watching him as he stared at nothing in the distance, drinking his coffee. She could see his mother’s genes, in and around the eyes. She wondered what his father had looked like.
“There was something in the safe. That’s the key.”
“It could have been anything,” she agreed.
“Exactly,” he said. “It would take a year to examine all the possibilities.”
“If you had more time?”
He tried to read her face for sarcasm. Found nothing. “I don’t know. Weeks. Months, perhaps. Luck. We needed luck. If Van As had remembered something. Or had seen something. If the safe had contained something more.”
You make your own luck, Nagel had said.
“Have you anything else you’re working on?” she asked.
“No.”
She so badly wanted to ask him about himself, his mother, about who he was, why he was the way he was. Tell him his front was so unnecessary, that she knew what hid behind it, that she knew he could again become what his mother said he once had been.
“I’m leaving.”
“Perhaps we’ll work together again one day.”
“Perhaps.” He got up.
∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧
20
I must admit that I remain endlessly fascinated by the small crossroads of life, the forks in the road, seldom indicated, rarely a road sign. Only visible in retrospect.
I joined the police force because I peered through a wooden fence one Saturday afternoon. I joined the police because a detective gave me a second chance with firm warmth – a father figure? Did I join the Force because my father died young? Would I have joined the police if I hadn’t lusted after Baby Marnewick? Would I have joined if Baby Marnewick hadn’t been murdered?
There was a Gauloises advertisement at the movies in those days. A French artist who made clever charcoal or pencil drawings on paper. At first it seemed as if he was drawing a female nude – the sexy breasts, the hips, the waist. But as he drew on, the female figure became an innocuous Frenchman with a beret, a beard, and a cigarette.
The crossroads, the road signs, the milestones, were only visible when each picture was completed.
I joined the police.
With my mother’s blessing. I think she suspected that it had something to do with the Marnewick murder, but her perspective was speculative and wrong. I think she had had other dreams for me, but she…was my mother: she supported me.