What can I tell you about Police College in Pretoria? Rookies, young men from every level of society thrown together. We paraded and learned and carried on like young bulls in the evening. We argued and talked nonsense and laughed and dreamed of more sex and less physical effort. We paraded and perspired in classes without air-conditioning and made beds with perfect edges and learned to shoot.
Let me be honest. The rest of my intake learned to shoot. I shut my eyes and eventually, with the minimum number of marks, managed to stay on the course. From the start, firearms were my Achilles’ heel, my nemesis as a policeman. It was inexplicable. I liked the smell of gun oil, the glimmer of black metal, the cold, effective lines. I picked up the weapons with the same amount of bravado and the same feeling of power as did the other recruits, handled them, and fired them. But the projectiles I sent off by pulling the trigger, the physics I initiated, were always less effective than every other rookie’s. I was teased endlessly about it but it didn’t damage my ego, mainly because my achievements in the tests and examinations tipped the scales of mutual respect in another direction. In theoretical work, on paper, with a set of questions, I had no equal.
And then the training was over and I was a constable in a uniform and I asked for Stilfontein or Klerksdorp or Orkney, heaven only knows why, and got Sunnyside in Pretoria and for the next two years locked up drunken students and dealt with disturbing-the-peace complaints and smoothed down marital scraps in thousands of apartments and investigated burglaries from cars and served in the charge office and learned how to fill in SAPS forms, over and over and over again, adding to the tons of paper of the documentation of justice.
And was branded as the classical-music constable, the one who read (but couldn’t shoot worth a damn). For the Sunnyside office of the SAP I was what a teddy bear was for the center line of a high school rugby team: a kind of totem, a defense against the darkness of total cultural decline in a city area of gray crime.
Because that was our daily task: not the screaming colors of injustice committed in hatred, but the drab world of minor, white-collar transgressions, of human weakness on the colorless part of the police palette.
I lived in a bachelor pad with a single bed and a table and a chair that my mother gave me and I made a bookcase with bricks and planks and saved for three months for the deposit on a Defy stove and taught myself to cook from magazines and read virtually every book in the library and worked shifts that didn’t do much for romance or socializing, but I did manage, however, among the enormous number of lonely young girls in Sunnyside, to strike it lucky, one or two or three nights per month of wriggling, struggling, despairing sex. They were back scratchers, virtually without exception, as if they wanted to leave a physical mark that would outlast the brief flame of physical passion.
There were times when I could not remember why I was a servant of justice. I first had to think back to Stilfontein, to stand at the wooden fence of shame again, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.
It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing years, growing-up years.
∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧
21
You make your own luck.
He drove to Table View, the rain sifting onto the shallow lagoon, a discomfort within him, displeased with himself, with Hope Beneke. He knew she knew something, didn’t want to say anything. Kemp who probably still let the rumors live. That was what everyone thought, that he had seen Nagel die and it had fucked him up.
Ha.
Discomfort about the whole investigation. There was something he’d missed, he knew it, there was something, somewhere. Something Van As had said, something in O’Grady’s file.
You make your own luck.
Uncomfortable. He wasn’t a loser. With his life, yes, but that was different, you couldn’t battle the odds, but this thing was dead, just another murderer who had joined the hordes of the unarrested, just another statistic. It happened, he knew it; sometimes there wasn’t enough evidence or enough luck.
He needed a great deal of luck with this case, he needed an explosion, a piece of fucking dynamite that could blow away the cobwebs of fifteen years, blow open the secrets of Johannes Jacobus Smit, blow away the dust so that the bones and the fossils – the facts – could be distinguished from the rocks.
How the fuck could he make his own luck with this thing?
How could he gain more time?
Gain time.
You must be able to go back in time.
If he could only…
Hang on.
No, it wouldn’t…
Quantico. What had they said?
No.
Yes.
Jesus.
He braked, suddenly and hard, swearing as a car behind him complained with a blast of the horn, missing him by inches, and he turned, drove over the central ridge in the road, heard the Corolla’s undercarriage flattening the shrubs, let the wheels kick up wet sand, turned back to Hope Beneke because he had a fucking idea, he had a bomb, he had a plan to blow away the spiderwebs.
♦
She simply sat, coffee mugs still on the table, unwilling to think about the full implications of his visit, her thoughts random, disappointed.
She had no choice: she had to accept that he had been right, that they wouldn’t get any further. The police had achieved nothing, either; he had at least achieved a bit more, discovered a false identity. He’d been so positive with his theories last night, and she’d been so hopeful, excited that they were going to solve the problem, but he wasn’t only…
She’d been pleased with herself earlier, with her handling of him, her calmness, her avoidance of potential conflict. She’d thought she’d discovered the key to Zatopek van Heerden, the mystery: Simply defuse every explosive situation. Don’t react. She had hidden her disappointment well, she had been so brave when she said that she would tell Wilna van As, but she would find it hard. She knew she would be brokenhearted.
Disappointment. Because Van Heerden was out of her life. Better that way. He was, despite the hurt and the defenselessness, trouble. With a capital T.
Was there really nothing else he could do?
No. She had to accept that. He had even returned the advance. She looked at the little pile of notes on the breakfast counter. The testimony of her detective.
She got up, put the mugs on the tray. She had to carry on. Join Valerie and Chris for a barbecue this evening. She needed an evening of laughter and relaxation. It had been a hard week. She walked to the kitchen, put the mugs in the sink. Was struck by a sudden idea.
Joan van Heerden was never going to be her mother-in-law. And she laughed, loudly, above the soft sounds of Céline Dion and shook her head, still laughing, opened the taps, took out the washing-up liquid from the cupboard below – what absurdities the mind could suddenly conjure up – then heard the sound of her front-door bell.
She wasn’t expecting anyone, she thought, turned off the tap, walked to the door, and peered through the spy hole. Zatopek van Heerden.
Had he forgotten something? She opened the door.
“There is something we can do,” he said, and his eyes were bright and his voice urgent, and she wondered whether he had heard her laughing.
“Come in,” she said, “please,” her voice under control, and he walked past her, stood at the counter as she closed the door behind him.
“I…” he said. “It…”