He saw Mat Joubert’s smile.
“And one more thing. Yesterday afternoon, with a gun at my head, Schlebusch spoke about the will, and I can’t stop speculating how he knew about it. Because only we – and Murder and Robbery – know it’s the reason for the private investigation. And we didn’t talk.”
Leave Wilna van As out of it.
“Oh, no,” said Nougat O’Grady, and pointed a fat finger at Bester Brits. “They knew it, too. They’ve been talking to me since early Monday morning, very buddy-buddy, ‘we’re in this thing together,’ and now they’re trying to take it away, double-crossing bastards.”
“Then, gentlemen, I wonder who informed Schlebusch: Military Intelligence or the SAPS?”
♦
The sunlight was blindingly bright outside, the sky cloudless and blue, the smell of sun on wet earth, the grass suddenly a deep green, the wind icy.
“There was snow on the mountains,” his mother said as he drove home with her on the N7, the river at Vissershok broad and gleaming. She said Carolina de Jager was safe at her house with Hope, that they would be waiting for him, and she asked if he was really all right. He said yes, only bruises.
“I met Kara-An Rousseau last night,” she said.
“Oh.”
“She came to the hospital.”
“Oh.”
“Is there something I don’t know about?”
“No.”
She was silent for a long time until they turned in at the gate. “I think Hope is wonderful,” she said.
She stopped in front of his house.
“Here are your keys. They brought them to me,” she said, opening her handbag.
“Ma…”
“Yes, my son?”
“There is something I must talk to you about.”
“Yes, Son?”
“Yesterday afternoon…Schlebusch. He threatened me, Ma. He said he’ll…come and hurt you if I don’t drop the inves-tigation.”
He looked at her, watching for fear in her face. There was none.
“I’m getting help today. I’ll get the best there is. I promise you.”
“But you’re not going to drop the investigation?”
“I’ll…get the best, Ma – ”
She silenced him with a gesture. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell you something, Zet. I went to see Hope. Last Friday. After you’d dropped the job. I went to speak to her. About you. To give you another chance. I’m not going to apologize for it because I’m your mother and I did it for you. I did it because I believed the only thing that could heal you was for you to work like you used to work. I still believe it. I don’t want you to drop it. I just want you to be careful. If you want to get someone to look after me, that’s fine. But who is going to look after you?”
“You went to speak to Hope, Ma?”
“I asked you who is going to look after you, Zet.”
“I…No one. I…”
“Will you be careful?”
He opened the car door. “I can’t believe you went to speak to Hope.”
She put the car into gear. “Water under the bridge. And I’m not going to apologize.”
He got out, almost closed the door, suddenly remembered something.
“Ma.”
“Yes, Zet?”
“Thank you. For last night.”
She smiled at him, moved the car forward. He slammed the door and she drove off to her big house.
He stood in the sunlight, his keys in his hand. He saw the daisies, suddenly in flower, a sea of white and orange stretching from his door as far as the gate. He saw the blue sky, the jagged line of the Hottentots Holland peaks in the east.
His mother had gone to speak to Hope. No wonder they had had such a cozy conversation the day before yesterday.
He shook his head, unlocked the door, drew the curtains in front of the windows, saw white panels of sunshine illuminating his house like spotlights.
He looked through his CDs until he found the right one, turned up the sound to full volume, and sat down in a warm patch of sunlight. First the foundation laid by the orchestra, the prologue to the divine, then the voice of the soprano, so sweet, so heavenly sweet, Mozart’s Agnus Dei from Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento. He sat bathed in the sound, let it flow over him, into him, followed the singer’s voice through each note until it released a deep well of emotion in him; listened to more than six minutes of music and knew that it was the closest he would come to expressing his gratitude for being alive.
Then he had a long, hot, pleasurable shower.
♦
“He was a Recce,” said Carolina de Jager. “And he was immensely proud of it, he and his father, and when we were told of his death, it broke his father. I still claim it was where the cancer originated. His father died in 1981 and I let the farm and moved to town and I don’t know what I’m going to do with the land – there is no one to inherit.”
She sat in the sunlight that fell through the windows of his mother’s house, a big black writing pad and a cardboard box on her lap, and she spoke to Joan van Heerden, not to him, and he thought he understood. Wilna van As sat opposite her, next to Hope, a box of tissues next to her, expectantly, four women and him.
“He was at Grey College in Bloemfontein and he wasn’t an excessively clever child, and he would come to the farm. He was strong because he and his father worked side by side on the farm. He was a good kid, no smoking or drinking. He was an athlete, he ran cross-country, he was second in the Free State. And then the call-up papers came for the First Infantry Battalion and he told his father he was going to try out for Reconnaissance Command. They didn’t know I was worried, didn’t know about the nights I lay awake. His father was so proud of him when he made the grade. His father always said how strict the selection was, and everyone had to listen, Sundays at the Springfontein church: ‘My son Rupert is a Recce – you know how tough the selection is. Rupert is in Angola. I shouldn’t really talk about it, but they’re giving the Cubans what for.’ ”
“Angola?”
“What Rupert did, he wrote letters but he never sent them because of the censors – they put thick black lines through everything, and it frustrated his father so much. He waited for the seven days’ and fourteen days’ leave and then he and his father would sit on the veranda and read, or on the ridge. His father kept this book, his notes when he reread the letters, when Rupert had left again, with cuttings from the Volksblad and Paratus, every single bit about the training in South West and Angola. And then in ’seventy-six they arrived on the farm, two officers in a long black car, the one with a fake bandage on his neck, and they said Rupert was dead and they handed us the small wooden chest with the medal and said he’d been brave but that they weren’t allowed to say what the circumstances were because it was national security but he had been very brave, he and his buddies, and the country would always be grateful to them and always honor them.
“His father took the medal and walked out without a word. There was a spot on the farm, a ridge where they always sat and looked out over the farm and talked until the sun went down, about farming and life. I found him there with the little chest on his lap and death in his eyes. His eyes were never the same again. And then the cancer came, oh, only a few months later the cancer came.”