Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) (8 page)

Once he’d filled in the hole, he
patted down the disturbed soil, scattered the leaves and twigs, and stood up,
looking around in all directions. No witnesses. He concealed the spade under a
bush three or four paces away, and made his way back to the street. The SIG
nestled into the small of his back, held by his belt and covered by a shirt, a
cardigan, and a jacket.

As
he walked he withdrew from his jacket pocket the cell-phone he had retrieved
from the bush in Blythedale. He powered up. The b
attery was still OK, but barely. Less than ten per
cent remaining. He switched off.

 
He walked a few blocks and eventually
hailed a taxi. Twenty minutes later he was making his way to a busy
intersection where hawkers and vendors were plying their trade. After testing
various options he bought a cell-phone charger from one of them. Standard
Nokia, early generation. Quick and easy to charge up with the right charger.

Time for something to eat. Somewhere
with an electricity outlet next to his table, so that he could charge up while
eating, and while planning his next move.

10.30.

Ryder and Pillay were at the
KwaDukuza murder and rape scene. They were in separate cars, having come from
different cases each of them was handling and which needed their attention
notwithstanding the priority of this particular matter. They arrived almost at
the same time and parked their cars well off the verge, back from the area that
had been cordoned off and that was guarded by two uniformed constables. They
identified themselves to the constables and moved carefully within the areas
permitted by the police tape.

Nadine Salm was there along with
other forensics people. While two of them were working in the bush on the
northern side of the R74, Nadine’s own focus was on the opposite side. Ryder
pointed her out to Pillay and they looked up the hill on the southern side of
the road to see her moving slowly through the bracken. Police tape marked
various spots on the slope. Nadine had an assistant who was taking photographs
and marking different locations with tape and luminous markers. The two of them
hunched down together, as the detectives watched them, and they appeared to be
discussing a specific point in the ground in front of them.

Ryder wanted Pillay to meet Nadine
Salm, but it was clear that they would have to wait for her to come down. She
would be unlikely to appreciate two detectives trampling on her taped-out area.
So the detectives questioned the other two forensics people, who were more
accessible for the moment. They received replies to their questions on the more
detailed analysis being undertaken in the case of the hit on Cst. Xana, the
diagrammatic representation of the shootings based on the reports from the two
witnesses, the positions of the bodies in the car and on the road, and the
likely trajectory of the bullets. The two forensics officers deferred on the
last of these to Nadine, whose full report would
materialise
only later, they said, after full investigation. She was balancing very
carefully her own
lifting
of the
evidence, they told the detectives, with the
testing
of it, which in this particular case would be done not by
Nadine but by others.

Ryder and Pillay both took notes and
compared cross-references about the two Isipingo constables, one who died in
the front of the car in her seatbelt and the other who had been in the back
with Lindiwe Xana and who had been shot dead in the road. They checked the
markers, showing the position of the bodies against the photographs they had
been given, and questioned the two forensics officers about various aspects of
the crime scene. One of them did a rough sketch on a clean sheet of flipchart
paper laid out over the bonnet of Pillay’s car, scribbling a few arrows,
crosses, and other characters and explaining the assumed action. The two
witnesses, twin sisters, had been brought onto the scene yesterday, the officer
said, and she had walked the teenagers through what they had witnessed. She
said that their evidence had been crucial in putting together the charts to
which the officer now referred. The version on the flipchart paper was for the
detectives to take away.

Both Ryder and Pillay were deeply
affected by the specific evidence on the shooting of Sinethemba Ngobeni, and
were then taken through the details of Lindiwe Xana’s fate by the second
forensics officer who now joined them. Then Nadine Salm came off the hill with
her assistant, and they also joined the detectives and the others, but only
briefly.
 

Pillay had never met Nadine. Knowing
that they would be meeting for the first time this morning, Ryder had already
warned Navi about Nadine’s distinctive pronunciation, especially on diphthongs,
where she tended to use the OO instead of the long O and the long E instead of
the long A, thus
show
as
shoo
and
table
as
teeble
. He urged
Navi not to register any reaction to the idiosyncrasy, as Nadine had been
teased quite a bit about it in the past and he thought she was a bit sensitive
about it. His own preference was that once Nadine got into the pattern of
conflating vowel sounds the best policy was to pretend that it simply was not
happening.

Fortunately, though, the encounter
was only brief, Nadine saying that she was not in a position to provide any
analysis, and that the present task was to locate every possible bullet then
track back to the likely weapons and put it all together in a thorough shooting
scene reconstruction. She was able, nevertheless, to confirm that everything
pointed so far to the likelihood that the three weapons used were all 9mm, and
from her experience probably something like SIG Sauer pistols.

12.20

Just after midday Koekemoer and
Dippenaar met up after their respective investigations on other cases each of
them was handling and they hit the road together shortly thereafter, heading
south on the M4. The traffic was unusually fluid and they moved quickly onto
the M35, passing Isipingo Hills on their right then swung right through Umlazi
on their way to the Mbokodweni River.

‘
Yissus
.
This is a big place, hey, Koeks.’

‘
Ja
.
Third biggest township in the country, I hear.’

‘Really? What’s first and second?
Soweto and Katlehong? Or Soweto and Soshanguve? What about Khayelitsha?

‘
Nooit
,
man. Soweto and Tembisa.’

‘Oh.
Ja
. Tembisa. I ‘spose so. Never been there.’

‘I hear Umlazi’s so big it has a
different section for each letter of the alphabet. Umlazi A to Umlazi Z. Also
had its own special number-plate for cars.’

‘Really, Koeks? Where you read that?
On a Chappies chewing gum wrapper when you were a
laaitie
?’

‘
Ag
no, Dipps. Somewhere. Who knows? I
dunno
.’

‘I tell you what my
ou
toppie
told me once. He said that the name came from
uMlaza
. That meant sour milk, you know, for the Zulu
okes
at that time. Like fermented
whatchamacallit
. My old man
chuned
me this story that when old Shaka
came through here once and someone offered him a
dop
from the river he said
fokkof
,
man, I’m not drinking any of that sour
uMlaza
stuff. So the name
Umlazi
stuck.
Anyway, who knows?

They began crossing the Mbokodweni on
the way to Folweni.

‘
Jirra
,
Dipps, I remember when I was a
laaitie
we
called this the
Umbogintwini.
Why
they have to mess with the names I
dunno
.’

‘
Ja
,
well, Koeks. Maybe because we didn’t pronounce it so well when we were in
charge, hey?’

‘
Ag
,
‘spose
so. Just so
blerrie
difficult to remember all the
new names. What does it mean, anyway?’

‘River of pebbles, or something like
that. River of small stones. Stones rubbing together, I think. No. River of
grinding stones!
Daarsy
! River of
grinding stones.’

‘Just like the Springbok scrum.’

‘
Daarsy
!’

They followed the main road with
Folweni on their left and pulled in at the police station on the far side of
the township.

Koekemoer and Dippenaar encountered a
deeply depressed team in the station. The loss of Lindiwe Xana had hit them
badly. The detectives heard more about the popular young constable, at
twenty-six a rising star with two merit awards to her credit. She had been a
superb policewoman, fearless, disciplined, and also highly regarded in the
local community. There was widespread devastation at the news of Sunday’s
brutal homicides. Local residents were baying for blood, wanting retribution.

The toughest part of the
investigation by the detectives was the interview with twenty-eight year old
Sergeant Lucky Dlamini. He was a very impressive policeman, in the opinion of
both Koekemoer and Dippenaar. He had been in a personal relationship with
Lindiwe Xana for a few years. They had been very happy together, and had been
planning to get married. He was deeply, deeply upset by her death. But through
his disjointed narrative, interspersed with occasional bouts of anguish and
tears, the two detectives pieced together a picture of the work of the station.

Koekemoer and Dippenaar gained a
positive view of the camaraderie among the personnel at Folweni Police Station.
They listened attentively to the examples of past successes, and of bravery in
the line of duty. They were particularly moved by the 2009 story of the
courageous thirty-one year old Constable Ngwane, who had given his life in the
line of duty by confronting robbers, including a corrupt police detective from
another station, in a shootout in the
Amagwazela General Store.

Dlamini
painted a detailed history of the work of the local police. He shared a
personal highlight in relating his role in cracking a drug-and-gambling
syndicate, seeing off a young white Afrikaner gangster who had since not been
seen, going on now for a couple of years, and whose extensive criminal
activities in both Folweni and Umlazi sections Y and Z had been cleaned out by
the work of Dlamini and his fellow police officers.

‘Umlazi
Section Y and Section Z they’re clean now, Detectives. We at Folweni have
worked hard to clean up the places there across the
Mbokodweni River, where I live. Lindiwe
 
lived on this side of the river, Nkabise
Place...’

Dlamini choked up a bit on the
emotion as he recalled Lindiwe’s home. The detectives waited in silence as he recovered,
composed himself again, and continued.

‘There, too, where Lindiwe lived, we
cleaned up all the
skabengas
and
tsotsi
s. The people on both sides of the
river were happy. No more burglary. No more drugs. No more fighting. Folweni
SAPS did a good job all around here, and me and Lindiwe, we worked together all
the time...’

He hung his head in despair.
Koekemoer stood next to him, and placed his hand on his shoulder as he sobbed.

‘OK, sergeant, OK. Take it easy, hey?
Don’t speak if you don’t...’

‘No. It’s fine, Detective. No, it’s
OK. We did good here. We keep those
skelms
away. The best one, the best time for me, was that Afrikaner white boy they all
called Freckles.’

‘Freckles,’ said Dippenaar, ‘that
name I remember. Young Afrikaans boy. Used to deal in
whoonga
.’

 
‘That’s the same one, Detective. Bad one
that one. Young. Always drugs and gambling, that one. He worked also with some
bad other guys. Two white guys. But Freckles, he was the one always here in
Umlazi and across the river. Always selling
nyaope
and always gambling and always showing his gun...’

Dlamini paused and thought he had
said too much.

‘
Ja,
I remember now, too,’ Koekemoer interjected in the pause. ‘I heard lots
about those three guys. They all used fancy guns, didn’t they? Magnums. People
used to talk about the three white guys in Umlazi with their fancy weapons.’

‘No, I don’t remember what gun,
Detective. But yes. That Freckles, that one he was doing drugs and gambling all
the time. Anyway, one night I caught him big time. Me and Lindiwe, we surprised
him, and he ran, and because I was running after him and shooting after him,
but missing, he was very scared, then the people all around they ran after him
too, and they chased him away, and everyone was happy...’

In
his narrative to Koekemoer and Dippenaar Dlamini omitted any reference to the
weapon that the young Afrikaner gangster called Freckles had dropped on that
occasion as he had fled the pursuing Sergeant. The Afrikaner boy had lost his
weapon and fled into the night, never to be seen again in Umlazi. Dlamini had
picked up his gun and had kept it, without reporting his find to the Folweni
Police Station. It was a beautiful weapon. He had thought it might prove useful
one day, and had kept it in his cupboard at home in Isithupha Close.

Dlamini
loved the weapon he had found. Better than his own weapon, the standard SAPS
Vektor Z88, he thought, when he picked it up. This one was gas-operated, with
polygonal rifling. Six-inch barrel. With a Picatinny rail.