Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) (20 page)

 
He also told them the history of the
Desert Eagle picked up by Lucky Dlamini two years previously in Umlazi.

They had reached a point in their
questioning of Themba, with him in full flow and no longer trying to keep
anything back, when Ryder decided to focus on their decision to attack his own
dinner party and to target him, specifically.

‘Is right. I remember. That Macks.
Moegoe!
Stupid! I remember he was saying
to everyone there that
we want to talk to
the Detective,
Mr
Jeremy Ryder
.’

‘So my question to you, then, is how
did you three come to choose me to attack? How did you know that I was the
detective on your case?’

‘
Hau!
Is simple, that one, Detective. When we hear those witnesses, those girls, that
they were the daughters of that same
skabenga
Mkhize, we go looking for him and then we go looking for them. We not find him
and we not finding them. But we find his mother. That mad one. Big woman. Crazy
woman. Loud
gogo
. She says the girls
they were not there and we say who is the detective they are talking to and she
tells us Detective Jimmy Rider and she tells us - she is shouting at us like a
big fat mad old crazy woman - that she will make sure that
Mr
Jimmy Rider is going to come after us and he is going to get us. Then we leave
the mad woman and we ask questions by my police friends to see if we can find
where you work and where you live...’

He paused as he tried to work through
what information he could part with and what information was best kept to
himself.

‘And then we were looking and we were
finding no Jimmy Rider. We were looking and we were looking. There is no Jimmy
and there is no Rider. Like horse rider,
nè?
Then after another short time, only then were we finding your proper name.
We find
Mr
Jeremy and not
Mr
Jimmy, and
Mr
Ryder spelled funny, not like horse
rider,
nè?
And then we find where you
live. Is simple.’

Ryder pondered a moment. He started
to ask another question but thought better of it. He paused. Pillay looked at
him, wondering what was coming next as he stared in the direction of the
bedridden thug, but miles past him into some distant memory. Finally he spoke.

‘When you talked about those girls,
you said that their father is a what, a
skabenga
?
Why do you say that?

‘Why I say that?
Hau!
Everyone knows that man. You don’t know that man, the father
of those two girls? All the police they know that man. But they never catch
him. Never ever. He is a
clever
, that
one.

The Legal Aid lawyer tried her best
to control her client’s outpourings, but once again he told her brusquely to
leave him alone, so she shrugged her shoulders and kept her protests to
herself.

The two detectives eventually left
the hospital and decided to part company for their remaining tasks of the day.
Ryder would drop Pillay at the police station so that she could pick up Mavis
after her afternoon workshop and drive her out to the Ngobeni family. Mavis had
arranged to help with the next day’s funeral arrangements for Sinethemba. Ryder
would go alone to see the twins in KwaDukuza. To try and unpick what they had
just heard from the interrogation in the hospital. Especially the last thing
the patient had said.

‘The father of those two girls? He is
that
skelm
Spikes Mkhize.’

 
16.20.

Thabethe drove aimlessly for twenty
minutes, thinking through his options. Was the detective on his tail? Had he
put together any connection between him, the gangsters, and Spikes Mkhize? Or
was he, Thabethe, just being paranoid?

Was it a conscious choice he had made
to drive toward Addington Hospital? He found himself pulling Mkhize’s 1974 Ford
XLE into a parking bay outside the Addington Hospital. He wasn’t sure what he
was planning, if anything. He knew the hospital well, having worked there as an
orderly for some months, running patients from floor to floor, sweeping, being
treated like dirt by junior nurses and oppressive managers. He knew his way
around the place better than most people. He had even recently kidnapped a
patient. Could he do it again? Was he even contemplating doing that again?

Thabethe sat in the car, thinking
through the dangers. Was it even worth running the risk of being
recognised
? Or being picked up by a camera? What would he
gain from a hit on one of these three guys? What good would it do? What about
the other two?

It was too complicated. After sitting
there for a full twenty minutes, Thabethe decided against any action and drove
away, slowly.

16.45.

Pillay drove them out to the Ngobeni
family. She had intended merely to drive Mavis out there and drop her off but
an effusive greeting and welcome from cousins and siblings of Sinethemba
compelled her to park the car and stay for a while. She offered to join in and
help. It was something of a baptism of fire, she would later tell her detective
colleagues.

Sitting on benches outside the house
four young teenagers each had a tray on their laps. On each tray there was a
sheep’s head. Pillay was transfixed by the fact that the eyes of the animals
were open but frosted over and the tongues were protruding. The youngsters were
busy removing the fur with what looked like non-safety barbers’ razor blades.
Pillay immediately turned away, only to be confronted by an even more
disturbing sight. A group of women had their hands and forearms dug deep into
large pots. When she moved across for a closer look she saw that the pots
contained sheep intestines.

Mavis smiled and took her aside.

‘Is this some religious stuff?’ asked
Pillay in a whisper.

‘No, not really,’ Mavis explained.
‘It’s just food. But there are lots of traditions and customs that the family
would like to see followed.’

Mavis went on to explain different
facets of what was going on in the various activities taking place both in the yard
and in the house. She made a point of not
generalising
about different religious practices in the country, or indeed the continent.
This was because they tend to be ‘ethno-religions,’ she said, which she then
explained at some length to her companion. She illustrated with different
examples, talking about different belief systems being determined by different
ethnic communities that she knew of throughout southern and central Africa.
Pillay was astounded that the shy Mavis she knew at work had such a wealth of
knowledge and could speak so freely and fluently about it. It was every bit as
impressive as Mavis’s lesson to the detectives earlier in the week on caffeine.

‘For us, Detective Navi, me and
Sinethemba’s family, we believe that when we go to that side by the dead people
the travelling is complicated. If we don’t do the proper things first in our
funeral, then those people who die might come back and cause trouble for the
relatives who are staying behind.’

Pillay
marvelled
at the intelligence behind the awkward sentence construction, and understood
why Koeks and Dipps and the others, including herself, had been taken by
surprise over the caffeine discussion. Mavis probably spoke about six or seven
languages and they had all judged her, to their shame, on her less than perfect
English.
 

‘One of the important things,
Detective Navi, is when the people are killing animals for a
 
part of a - how do you say - ritual
sacrifice. It is not just for providing food for the guests, and then there are
also some personal things of the one who has died. They are buried with them
too because then they can keep her company on the journey to the other side.’

‘Are they going to slaughter an ox,
too?’ Pillay asked with some consternation, looking around in case there was a
tethered beast nearby.

 
‘Not this time. Some people they kill an
ox at the burial. Some other people kill an animal a long time after the
funeral, maybe a few months, or maybe even more than a year. Some of the Nguni
peoples they are saying that if we are killing an ox then that is allowing the
dead person to become an ancestor who then can protect the family members who
are left behind.’

Mavis went on in some detail about
different approaches used by different families in that very
neighbourhood
. She made a particular point about funerals
being both a mourning and a celebration, and an opportunity to build solidarity
in the community, and for the community to re-assert its collective identity.

‘It’s maybe strange when you see us
dancing and singing and looking happy when the relative is being taken to be
buried, but that’s why we do it.’

‘What about that other stuff I’ve
heard about, Mavis, where they smear - what - ash, I think, on the windows?’

‘Yes, sometimes, sometimes they do
that but Sinethemba’s family won’t be doing it. There are very old customs
where, when someone is dying, we put on the ash, turn the pictures on the walls
around to face the wall, and sometimes we cover the mirrors or take them away
so that there are no reflections.’

‘And what happens with a vigil,
Mavis? How does that work?’

‘The beds are taken from the room of
the one who dies and then all the women they sit on the floor. Sometimes for a
few days before the funeral, the people come from the
neighbourhood
and also from far away. They come to visit the family to pay their respects.
The day before the funeral we bring the body home before the sun goes down and
we place
 
her in the bedroom. Then,
like tonight, a vigil will take place all night. Usually the funeral takes
 
place in the very early morning.
Sometimes, in the country, on the farms, it is before the sun comes up. That’s
because the people think witches are moving around in the afternoon looking for
dead bodies for their
muti
. But
because the witches sleep in the morning this is a good time for funerals,
before they wake up. But for the Ngobeni family they’ll have the funeral in the
afternoon. They aren’t scared of the witches.’

Mavis spoke about different aspects
of the funeral customs and ceremonies
favoured
by the
Ngobeni family. She clarified where family members would stand at the
graveside. She described details about the funeral meal, and how the
preparations that had shocked Pillay related to the occasion. She then went on
to describe the cleansing rituals that would occur after the burial and before
the re-entry into the house.

Like most of their colleagues at
work, Pillay had intended to show her respects at the police memorial service
for the four constables that would occur some time later. But by the end of the
explanation by Mavis she had committed herself to coming back the next day for
the funeral.

16.55.

For the first ten minutes of his
visit with the twins and their grandmother in KwaDukuza, Ryder did no talking.
There was no way he was able to. The old woman was in full verbal flow from the
moment he arrived, while she put the sausage-rolls in the already-heated oven
and prepared the coffee for the four of them. The
neighbours
in Haysom Road, on all sides, must have heard her sounding off. It was without
pause and at full volume.

She harangued him as if he was solely
responsible for all the police in the area. She lambasted the police for their
failure to get rid of every
tsotsi
in
the land. In her view they should not be sent to jail, where they would deal in
drugs. Instead, she proclaimed, they should all be lined up against a wall
somewhere and shot. All the things they had stolen from hard-working good
citizens like herself should then be taken back and distributed amongst the
law-abiding citizens. There were so few of those left, she said to Ryder, that
people like herself would do quite well out of such a policy of redistribution.
Ryder and the granddaughters were too young to know that in the good old days
the people themselves knew how to deal with crooks and scoundrels. She had once
beaten the living daylights out of one young
skabenga
with her broom and she had been congratulated by that
boy’s mother, and they had been friends ever since, and when her own drunken
husband went to jail for theft, she said, that was a good thing. He was a
no-good
layabout
and never once helped her around the
house. When he came out of prison and ran away to Johannesburg, she sang the
praises of Jesus, she said. Ever since that day she was determined to ensure
that in her
neighbourhood
she would do her bit to
report every single
layabout
skelm
to the police. The police knew her well and they knew that
she ran a good home.

It was only when she launched into a
tirade about her own no-good son that Ryder finally managed to intervene.

‘Your son, he’s the one who lives
there at the back of Nomivi’s Tavern? He’s the one they call...’

‘Yes, he is living there for many
years. Many, many. That place. Where they do the drugs. I went there that one
time. Only that one time. I went to give him a big hiding, yes he is a man but
I still went there to - how you say there in the Afrikaner
amaphoyisa
- to
bliksem
him. Because he was leaving the girls all alone, you see, they were only
fifteen years that time,
Mr
Jimmy, and they come to
my place crying, to find me because they can’t find their father because he is
with that terrible woman - no, I can’t talk any more about that one,
hayi!
But that one time I was there, and I see what they do
there. They sell that
nyaope
thing
there. Not there in the tavern, you see, I know that lady who she works there.
She is like me. She chases all the
skelms
all the time, but there, outside,
Mr
Detective Jimmy,
there where the young ones come. In the front there and in the back there. They
sell the
whoonga
outside and then she
can’t do anything. But she is calling the police. Many times, and they never
come. Never. Never ever. Never. They do nothing! Nothing!’