Blood Safari (27 page)

Maybe.

But Branca was not one of them. I had studied him in detail. I knew his way of moving, his walk, his posture and his measurements. He was athletic, supple, fit. The balaclava men were both shorter, their movements less sure of foot. Not clumsy, but there was an aura of unfamiliarity in the veld; this was not their natural habitat.

Branca could have sent them. They could be part of the network Dick spoke of.

But why would Emma le Roux pose a threat to them? Why would the H. B. group send three masked wonders to the Cape because a small young woman made a phone call to Inspector Jack Phatudi? How would they even have known about the call? What would they have wanted to do to her? What for?

All the different possibilities were paralysing. The Cape Town attack and the train incident could be two different groups. Or the same group. Each option had its own set of questions and implications. Jack Phatudi was part of something, or not. Or perhaps part of something else. Cobie de Villiers was Jacobus le Roux. Or not. The Jeep had a Gauteng registration. Which might be false. Or not.

Nothing made sense. The road sign to Acornhoek prevented me from wrestling with the problem any longer.

I turned left at the railway station as Dick had indicated, and suddenly there were police vehicles everywhere and the dusty street was too narrow to make a U-turn.

There were five SAPS pick-ups parked and a horde of blue uniforms standing around in groups. The Audi stood out like a nun at a sex therapy workshop. They looked at me suspiciously. The pink concrete wall was a startling beacon. Jack Phatudi stood on the threshold of the humble brick house. He shouted, waved his arms and a uniform ran in front of me and held up a commanding hand. Stop.

I pulled off the road and got out. The heat was stifling, not a tree near by for shade. Phatudi approached with a measured tread, through the little gate in the concrete wall.

‘Martin,’ he said with great dislike.

‘Jack.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Very aggressive. ‘I was looking for you.’

‘For me?’

‘I wanted to ask you some questions.’

‘Who told you I was here?’

‘Your office,’ I lied. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Edwin Dibakwane is dead.’

‘The gate guard?’

‘Yes, the gate guard.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘How would I know, Jack? I’ve just come from Mohlolobe.’

‘What were you up to there?’

‘Our account wasn’t paid. What happened to Edwin?’

‘You know.’

‘I don’t’

‘Of course you know, Martin. He was the one who gave you the message.’ He came closer. ‘What happened? Wouldn’t he tell you where the letter came from?’ Phatudi came right up to me. There was terrible anger emanating from him. Or was it hate? ‘So you pulled his fingernails out, didn’t you? Because he wouldn’t tell? You tortured him and shot him and threw him away in the Green Valley plantation.’

The black constables closed in, a cordon of suspicion.

‘Someone pulled his nails out?’

‘Did you enjoy that, Martin?’

I had to stay calm. There was an army of police. ‘Shouldn’t you call the SouthMed Hospital first, Jack, and check my alibi?’

He raised his arms and I thought he was going to hit me. I was ready for him. But his movement was just a gesture of frustration. ‘For what? Trouble? You are just trouble. You and that woman. Ever since you came. Wolhuter dead, Le Roux in hospital. And now this. You have brought us this trouble.’

‘Us, Jack?’ Mustn’t get angry. I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me, why didn’t you tell Emma about the masked men who shoot dogs and tie dead impala to people? Why didn’t you mention the Honey Badgers the day before yesterday when I told you that the men who shot Emma were in balaclavas? Don’t tell me you didn’t make the connection, Jack. You had trouble long before we turned up.’

If I thought I would calm him down with that, I was mistaken. He puffed up like a toad, struggling to form his words in his rage. ‘That is nothing. Nothing. Edwin Dibakwane … he has got children. He … You … Who does that? Who does that to a man? All he did was hand over a letter.’

I didn’t have many options. I was aware of the antagonism of the policemen surrounding me. Phatudi’s argument that Emma and I
were responsible for Edwin’s death was not completely groundless. I held my tongue.

He looked at me with complete revulsion. ‘You …’ he said again, and then bit off his words and shook his head. He flexed his great hands. He turned and walked back towards the little house, stopped and glared at me. Then he came back to me, pointed a finger at me, put his hands on his hips and looked down the road towards the station. He said something in a native language, two or three bitter sentences, and then he directed himself to me again. ‘Order,’ he said. ‘That is my job. To keep order. To fight the chaos. But this country …’

He focused on me again.

‘I told you. You don’t know what it’s like here. We have troubles. Big troubles. This place. It’s like the veld in drought. Ready to burn. We beat out the fires. We run from one fire to the next fire and we beat out the flames. Then you turn up here and want to set everything on fire. I’m telling you, Martin, if we don’t stop it, the fire will burn so big and fast and far that everything will be burnt up. Everything and everyone. Nobody will be able to stop it.’

Some of the policemen nodded their heads in agreement. I was almost ready to see his side of it. Then he got personal.

‘You must leave. You and that woman.’ He spat out the words. With hatred. I could not let myself react. ‘You brought your trouble here.’ His index finger was a gun pointing. ‘We don’t want it. Take it and leave.’

I heard the anger rising in my voice. ‘It’s your trouble that came to her. She didn’t want it. It came and fetched her.’

‘Fetched her? She saw a photo on TV.’

‘She phoned you about it and two days later three men in balaclavas broke down her front door to kill her. What was she supposed to do, Jack?’

He came a step closer. ‘She phoned me?’

‘The same evening that it was on the TV news she phoned you and asked whether the man you were looking for might be Jacobus le Roux. Remember?’

‘Lots of people phoned. Lots.’

‘But she is the only one that was attacked because she phoned…’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Arrogant. Taunting. He wanted me to lose my temper, lose control.

I pulled my new phone out of my pocket and offered it to him. ‘Call your colleagues in Cape Town, Jack. Ask them if there is a case file. Monday, twenty-fourth December. Attack at the house of Emma le Roux at ten o’clock in the morning. Call them.’

He ignored the cell phone.

‘Come on, Jack, take the damn phone and call them.’

Phatudi’s deep frown was back. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’

‘She didn’t think it was necessary. She thought asking for help reasonably would be enough.’

‘She only asked about the photos.’

‘She also asked you about the vulture murders.’

‘That was
sub judice.’

‘Sub judice?
Why? To protect your arse?’

‘What?’ He stepped closer.

‘Careful, Jack, there are witnesses here. She sees the TV news. Twenty-second of December. She phones you. You say Cobie de Villiers can’t be Jacobus le Roux because everyone knows him and he’s been here all his life. That’s enough for her. She drops the whole idea, doesn’t mention it to anyone. On the twenty-fourth of December they break into her house, and she’s lucky to get away. That afternoon someone phones her and says something about “Jacobus”. The connection is bad; she can’t hear properly. She hires herself a bodyguard and comes here. You know what happens here.’

‘So?’

‘So the only connection with the attack on her is you, Jack. The call she made to you.’

‘Masepa.’

‘What?’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Bullshit?’

‘I can’t even remember her phoning, Martin.’ But he was on the defensive now.

‘Who was with you?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Were the calls taped?’

‘We are the police, not the Secret Service.’

‘Did you tell anyone about her phone call?’

‘I told you, I can’t remember her phoning. There were … I don’t know, fifty or sixty … Most of the calls are nonsense.’

‘Why didn’t you tell her about the Honey Badgers? The other day at Mogale?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why not?’

‘What are you saying, Martin? You want me to take responsibility for something?’

‘Yes, Jack. I just don’t know what it is yet, but you are part of this fuck-up, and I am going to find out. And then I’ll come and get you.’

‘You? You’re jailbird trash. Don’t talk to me like that.’ He came right up to me and we stood like two bantam cocks, chest to chest. I wanted to hit him, I wanted to let all my frustration and rage boil over and I wanted to take it out on the man in front of me. I wanted to go to that other place where time stood still, the room of the red-grey mist. The door was wide open and beckoning.

Afterwards I would wonder what held me back. Was it the army of police? Hopefully, I wasn’t a moron. Was I tempered by the knowledge that jailbird trash learned: that you have to come out the other side, back to reality, where you paid dearly for your pleasures? And that I couldn’t afford to pay the price again? Or was it the shadow of a woman standing with her face in the rain and arms stretched up to the heavens?

I stepped back from the abyss – and from Phatudi. Small, deliberate, reluctant steps.

And I turned away.

Phatudi’s troops laughed at me when I walked to the Audi.

As I got in I saw him standing with his chest expanded and a smile of self-satisfaction.

I turned the ignition and drove away.

Past the station I let my rage boil over and banged the car into low gear and stomped on the accelerator. The rear end slid too far around the gravel turn and I fought the wheel, brought it back, accelerated again, spinning the tyres. They found traction and shot the Audi forward, revs too high. I ran through the gears, wanted to stamp the accelerator through the floor, a hundred and fucking sixty, and there was the R40 junction up ahead. I had to brake and the car shuddered and for a while I didn’t know whether I was going to make it, but I stopped in a cloud of dust. I saw that my knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

I opened the door and got out. A truck and trailer thundered past on the R40, loaded high with massive logs. I shouted at it, a meaningless cry.

A minibus taxi passed the other way, filled with black faces staring at me, a crazy white man beside the road.

I didn’t know where to go. That was my problem. It was the primary source of my frustration and rage.

Phatudi had baited, taunted and angered me, but I had handled that. I could wait for him, for the right time and the right place. But the fact that my choices had dwindled to nothing, I could do nothing about.

On the way to the house with the pink concrete wall, I had had three options. Edwin Dibakwane and the letter. Jack Phatudi and the phone call. Donnie Branca and Mogale. And now I had none.

Edwin Dibakwane was dead. Someone had tortured him and shot him and left his body in a plantation. The connection between the letter and its author was broken. Scrap option number one.

No, not entirely. Dibakwane would have told the people pulling out his fingernails where the letter came from. Somebody knew. But I didn’t. It was still no use to me.

Phatudi had been telling the truth. Despite everything, his surprise about the attack on Emma and the connection with the call to him was genuine. Scrap option number two.

That left me with the Mogale rehabilitation centre.

The urge to go there now and thrash Donnie Branca until he told me what was going on was consuming me. I wanted to punish somebody. For Emma.

I wanted to bash someone’s skull against a wall or a rock or a clay floor, over and over again, make the brain bounce back and forth against the sides of the cranium, coup and fucking contrecoup, until his cerebral cortex was a fucking pulp. That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to twist the arms of the two masked wonders at the railway track until they popped out of their joints and I heard the ligaments snap and the bones splinter. I wanted to get that sniper, take his rifle, jam it through his teeth, put my finger on the trigger, look him in the eyes, say ‘goodbye, motherfucker’ and then blow his brains all over the wall.

But who were they? And where could I find them?

Branca was my last hope. What would I do if he refused to talk? What was left if I hit him and he still wouldn’t speak? Because he couldn’t risk it, the whole affair had gone too far – a woman in a coma, a gate guard tortured and murdered, a man dead in a lion pen and mad Cobie de Villiers couldn’t take responsibility for all that. It was one thing to send threatening letters to farmers, to shoot dogs and burn down buildings. Quite another story to go to jail for life.

Scrap option number three.

I walked down the road away from the Audi and then I walked back again. I still had no idea what to do.

I opened the car door and got in. Started the car. Turned right on the tar road, in the general direction of Hoedspruit, Mogale and Mohlolobe.

I just drove. I had nothing else to do.

Past the turn-off to the Kruger National Park, the R351,1 saw the handmade advertising board.
WARTHOG BUSH PUB. COLD BEER!!!!! AIRCON!!! OPEN!
For the first time it meant something. I thought it over for a kilometre, reduced speed and stopped. Waited for oncoming traffic to pass and then I turned around.

Time to think. Cool down. Let me go and see where they tried to recruit Dick-the-dude.

It was not a place for international tourists. One big building and six or seven small ones between the mopane trees and dust. Whitewashed walls, weathered grey thatch asking for maintenance. Three well-used Land Cruisers, an old Toyota 4×4 single-cab, two big old-fashioned Mercedes sedans, a new Nissan double-cab and a Land Rover Defender of indeterminate age. Three had Mpumalanga number plates, the rest were from Limpopo Province.