Just a Dead Man (2 page)

B
ACK AT MY EASEL
, I
THOUGHT
about Daniel. His arrival might have been an interruption but I was glad he had come. When he had moved out I worried that Mike's animosity might have soured our friendship, but Daniel seemed to have taken it in his stride. Perhaps he could remember his own, not so distant, teenage days. And now he and Mike seemed to get along well enough when they saw each other.

I hesitated over the painting, nervous of doing too much. It's my besetting sin, the overwhelming of that first fine careless rapture. So I worked slowly, carefully highlighting the edge of the indentations in the apple's flesh. That should do it. I stepped back and looked critically at what I had done. Maybe a little more to the background? It was a soft, dull grey, thinly painted, but perhaps that was right. Stop now, I told myself. Look again tomorrow. I was moving in towards the easel to add one last touch of cool, pale yellow to the apple skin when I started violently, almost stabbing the brush into the canvas. A voice, loud and shrill, was calling my name.

It was Daniel. I dropped the brush and ran through the open door, across to the gate. What on earth …? Had something happened to Grumpy? There are snares set in the narrow game paths in the plantations, but Daniel had
hardly been gone long enough to reach them and, anyway, Grumpy's days of energetic exploration are over. But no. There was Daniel running as fast as he could down the road, with Grumpy trailing on the lead behind, looking indignant at the speed he was being expected to travel. It was hot, and Daniel's face was glistening with sweat, eyes wide, as he reached me. He stopped at the gate, putting out his hand to steady himself as he tried to catch his breath.

“Laura. There's a body … up there … just beyond where the path goes off. Lying there.”

“What? What do you mean ‘a body'? A
dead
body? Who?”

“Of course a dead body! A man. I've no idea who he is. He's just lying there. Grumpy saw him first, went over to him, growling. I thought … I went to look. He's dead all right. There was blood … and …” Daniel's voice trailed off and he swallowed. His face was grey under the coating of sweat. He dropped the dog lead and gripped the fence with both hands. “Oh Christ. I suppose … I suppose he must have been murdered. His head was bashed in.”

I put my hand on his arm and physically dragged him in through the gate, nudging the dog into the garden with my knee. I spun the combination on the padlock with a shaking hand, locking out whatever was out there. Even as I did it, I recognised the futility of the gesture. I unclipped Grumpy's lead and, still holding onto Daniel, probably for mutual support, headed back towards the house. We went in through the open studio door, which I shut and locked as well.

“Are you okay, Dan? I'll make some tea. Here – sit down.” I pushed him onto the old sofa, covered with a faded blue-and-purple throw, that stands under the wide window facing out over the garden and towards the plantations where … no, don't think about that. I looked
at Daniel, sitting with his head in his hands. I hope to God he's not going to throw up, I thought. I'm not good at handling people being sick. I hate it in films, on television, but above all in reality.

“Dan, I must phone the cops. You okay?”

“The cops! Oh God, Laura. Must you?”

“Well, of course I must. If there's a … a body, a corpse, up there, then we've got to tell them. We can't just ignore it. Surely you've got your permit or whatever? So there's no problem.”

“Yes, I have. But I still don't want to have anything to do with the police.” He stopped. “Okay, okay. You're right. We have to tell someone.” He paused again, but didn't look up. “Unless you phone them and I just push off …” His voice tailed away as he sat looking at the strong hands gripped tightly together in his lap.

“You found him, Dan. You'll have to tell them.” Surely he wasn't in some kind of trouble with the police? He would
have
to be here. I went to wall-phone by the door. There were paint smears on the handset, but having it there saved me from messing up the other phone in the living room when I was working. Some time in the past, when he was in an efficient man-of-the-house phase, Rory had put a list of what he thought were important contact numbers on the wall next to it, and I read off the number for the Flying Squad, just below the local pizza delivery. I was venturing into unknown territory here, but the Flying Squad were probably the people to call when you found a corpse.

When someone answered, I began to explain that there was a body of a man in the plantations. I tried to describe the place, but I could hear my voice shaking as the person at the other end of the line, irritatingly calm, made me repeat my address and phone number twice and asked for the details.

“I don't know who it is! I haven't seen it. A friend who's here found it,” I said, hating the sound of “it”. Whatever lay in the plantations, it was a person with an identity, not a thing. But what else could I say? “It looks as if he's been murdered.”

“Please, will both of you wait where you are. We will send a car as soon as possible,” said the voice. I put the phone back on the rest and went into the kitchen, aware of my trembling hands as I switched the kettle on. I was afraid, though I didn't know why. Was it the body, which after all I hadn't even seen? Or did I fear that something nasty was lurking out of sight, about to disrupt my humdrum but ultimately enjoyable existence?

I made two mugs of tea, sugar in Daniel's. Back in the studio he was sitting where I had left him, still looking down at his knees. At least he hadn't been sick. I put the mugs down on the table beside him and rested my hand on his shoulder.

“Okay, Dan? Here, drink this. The cops'll be here in a minute and they'll deal with it. You didn't … it wasn't someone you recognised, was it? I mean, it was just a stranger?”

Dan sighed and at last looked up, making eye contact. “Thanks. No – I don't know. I don't suppose it was anyone I know. It was just a man, just a dead man. I didn't really take a good look once I realised he was dead. But, God, it was horrible. Lying there, on his back, with blood on his head. He was quite neatly dressed. Not a vagrant.” Dan looked at me, almost accusingly. “I don't need this kind of thing, Laura. Involvement with the police; a crime.”

“But you're not involved. Nor am I. You found the body, and you were walking my dog. That's all it has to do with us. They'll take statements, and that'll be the end of it.” But as I spoke, I wondered who I was trying to convince.
I had a nasty feeling that the arrival of the cops wouldn't herald the end of it at all. It was just the beginning, and the beginning of something that was surely going to be unpleasant. And, looking at Daniel, I could tell he thought so too.

I
T WAS AN UNEASY HALF-HOUR
before the police came, two of them.

“Mrs Lorna Moss? I'm Inspector Adam Pillay, and this is Sergeant Thembinkosi Dhlomo. You called in an incident.”

Getting my name wrong wasn't a promising start, and I would hardly have described what I had called in as an
incident
. “It's Laura Marsh, actually. But yes. Come in.”

I led the way to the studio, where Daniel was now standing by the garden door, looking mutinous. He clearly didn't want to be there: his body language, stiff and resentful, made his feelings plain. I wasn't happy either, but there was nothing we could do.

“Inspector, Sergeant, this is Daniel Moyo, who found the body.”

The sergeant eyed Daniel up and down. “What were you doing in the plantation, Mr Moyo?” he asked. To my mind, there was a sneer in his voice, a dismissive emphasis over Dan's distinctively Zimbabwean surname.

“I was walking Laura's dog.”

Dhlomo waited until the pause was a breath too long, and Daniel continued.

“I had come to visit her, and she was busy painting, so I said I would take the dog out for a walk.”

“So, you were walking this lady's dog. And then what?” I didn't like the way Dhlomo made it sound as though there was something obscene about Daniel walking my dog. Who did he think Dan was? Some kind of employee, an immigrant dog-walker to the white madam? But if there was a bait in the sergeant's question, Dan didn't rise to it.

“We'd got to the end of the first bit of path, up the hill, and I was going to take the left fork. But Grumpy – that's the dog – ran off to the right, and then he started to bark. I went to see what he was after, and there it was. The body.”

“Don't you want to go and see it?” I asked. “It – he – is just lying there.” The thought was terrifying me. I wanted it to be gone.

“Oh. You've seen the body too, have you?” Dhlomo turned to me. He was a big, powerful man, his eyes small in a large face, pockmarked with what must have been acne scars, and he looked at me with apparent dislike.

“No. No, I haven't. But Daniel told me about it. Surely someone must move it. I mean, it can't just lie there. I think it's going to rain.” It was a lame remark, and I was beginning to feel defensive, though about what I could not say.

“All in good time, lady.” Dhlomo took a step towards me, obviously about to ask more questions. But Inspector Pillay, who had been standing looking at the painting of the apple so quietly that I had almost forgotten about him, turned round.

“Perhaps you
should
go and have a look at the body now, Sergeant. Wait for the forensic team there: they should be here soon. Take Mr Moyo with you. He can show you the way.”

Dhlomo nodded. I got the feeling that, had anyone other than the inspector told him to go, he would have ignored them in favour of questioning me. But maybe
they were playing good cop/bad cop. I had another unwelcome thought: perhaps Pillay wanted to separate me from Daniel so we would have no chance to concoct anything, or to tally our stories, even though surely we could have done that while we were waiting for the police? Not that we had stories, but maybe they thought we did. I was beginning to feel quite sick.

Dhlomo and Daniel crossed the garden, now baking in the afternoon sun. The piercing sound of a late cicada drilled through my head, drowning out thought as we watched them go. Storm clouds were building up in the west over the distant peaks of the Drakensberg, and my prediction of rain looked likely to be fulfilled. I wanted to tell the police to hurry up, get the body in out of any danger from the weather. Though the man who lay somewhere up there was long past caring.

“Did you paint this?” The inspector's voice made me jump, a physical movement he must have noticed. He looked at me with obvious concern, taking a step towards me. “Are you all right, Mrs Marsh?” For the first time, I took a proper look at him. He wasn't tall, but he looked fit, with a pleasant, aquiline-featured face. His brown eyes had smudges of weariness under them.

“Yes, I'm fine. And yes, I did paint it.”

“Very nice. I like that.” He stepped back to get a more distant view. “You've caught the look of the apple inside. And the skin. Those early autumn ones, when they're still crisp. Very nice.”

Well, either he was an art critic, or a connoisseur of fruit, or he thought I was about to freak out and he wanted to calm me down. I caught a glimpse of my white face in the hideous Castle Lager pub mirror the boys had given me three years ago and which I had been plotting to get rid of ever since. I couldn't risk breaking it: seven years'
bad luck was more than I could handle. I'd already had 15 years of marriage to Simon, and that had been enough bad luck to last a lifetime. Maybe when Mike went off to university, I could simply take it down and stick it in a cupboard. But no wonder the inspector thought I needed to be soothed. Never exactly rosy-cheeked, I now looked like a ghost.

However, he decided the time had come to be a policeman.

“Now, Mrs Marsh, you were working in here this afternoon. Did you see anything, any vehicles, any people, going up the road?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, no. I was painting, and I really wouldn't have noticed. I mean, there are always odd cars and things, and people walking along. It's quiet in the cul-de-sac – the main road along the front is busier, but you can't see that from in here. Nothing struck me. At least … no.” I hesitated, because something tugged at a corner of my memory, but when I tried to follow it, it slipped away like a wisp of smoke, too insubstantial to grasp.

“And Mr Moyo. You say he's a friend of yours. Does he live here, in Pietermaritzburg?”

“Not now. He's been living in Joburg, working at the Bag Factory studios there. He's planning an exhibition, and I think he's come down here to do some research. But he had only just arrived. He saw I was working, and he offered to take the dog out so I could finish. We told you that.”

“Of course. You live here alone, do you?”

“No. My younger son is still at school and he's usually here. He's gone to Cape Town to visit his father for the holidays. So I'm alone at the moment.”

“I see. Now. Perhaps you could show me the way to
where Mr Moyo found the body? I see the forensic guys are here.”

I can't say I was keen. But I didn't get the feeling I was being given an option. We headed out of the garden gate, the inspector asking me how many people knew the combination. It was me, the boys and Daniel, who had learned it when he was living here. It was pretty straightforward – my birthday: 2104, April 21, coming up in a couple of weeks' time. The inspector made no comment, but I sensed he was filing away the fact that Daniel had once stayed here.

We walked up the road and into the lane at the top. It's a pull up the first part of the track to the fork, and I was glad that it inhibited conversation, on my side at least. The inspector continued to breathe easily. Ahead of us a whole bunch of people were milling around: police; someone who was presumably the district surgeon bending over a shape lying in the grass; Daniel who was now looking angry, probably because of the large sergeant who was still at his side; and various onlookers who seemed to have come from nowhere.

“Mrs Marsh, would you look at the body, see if you recognise him? He may be someone local.”

I glared at Inspector Pillay. The last thing I wanted to do was look. If I don't do sick, I certainly don't do bodies, and this, I realised, would be the first I had ever seen. I was about to refuse, but I stopped myself. A man had died. I shouldn't be trying to protect my sensibilities. Pillay was watching me, a sad expression in his shadowed eyes. “It could help us,” he said gently.

I walked over to where the body lay among the autumn grasses, seed heads pink in a low afternoon sun that turned their stems to celadon, a rippling shroud of extraordinary beauty for what lay so still among them.

He was a black man, probably in late middle age, with a little grey in the hair on his temples. He was neatly dressed in dark trousers and an open-necked blue shirt, with practical-looking leather shoes, the tracked soles visible. His eyes were open, staring up into a sky now patched with greying clouds. But even if those clouds shed their burden, the eyes would never blink again. There was little blood, but even I could see that the blow that had crushed his left temple, distorting the shape of his head, would have been fatal. It didn't look as if any attempt had been made to hide him.

I had never seen him before in my life. But looking at him made me feel, if not exactly guilty, at least complicit in his death. And he was diminished by my complicity. I felt the way I feel looking at some horrible event on a 24-hour television news channel. Horror as entertainment. However much we may feel shock, or sadness, or pity, we are also titillated. Seeing that
thing
that had once been human, lying in the grass, I didn't feel nausea, or even shock. But I felt dirty, voyeuristic. Not something I could explain to the police.

“No, I don't know him. People do walk here. There are various paths that connect some of the roads in the area. People use them as short cuts.”

Inspector Pillay nodded, and turned away to speak to the doctor. There was a dark-coloured van – the mortuary van, I suppose – at the end of the road and two men were walking up from it, carrying a body bag and a stretcher. Thank God, our corpse was about to be taken away.

Pillay called the sergeant over and said something to him. The big man bent down and began to go through the pockets in the body's clothes, putting things into a set of clear plastic envelopes he had taken from his own pocket. It all seemed a bit casual, not what I saw on those endless
forensic detective shows that are a staple of television where the police fiddle around, finding one hair or a flake of skin. But I didn't want to watch anyway. I walked over to where Daniel was still standing.

He turned sharply towards me. “Fuck, Laura. This is a bad thing. I don't need this.” He sounded angry, and I saw a tremor in the hand that pushed his glasses up his nose. “Can't we go back to the house?”

“Don't see why not. There's nothing we can do here. I suppose I should ask the inspector, though.”

Pillay nodded when I told him Dan and I wanted to go back. “Please wait for us there. We'll be along just now,” he said, and then returned to looking at one of the envelopes Dhlomo was holding out to him. I couldn't see what was in it, but I sensed Daniel coming up behind me and peering over my shoulder as Dhlomo turned it over, and I heard Dan draw a quick, nervous breath.