Authors: Malla Nunn

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

Let the Dead Lie (14 page)

BOOK: Let the Dead Lie

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CHAPTER
TEN

One
forty-five. Electric streetlights lit the sleeping city. The tram lines were
empty and the police cells full of drunks, bar-room brawlers and natives caught
without the official passbook that allowed them to overnight in white urban
areas.

Emmanuel
let himself into Chateau La Mer with the key that Hélène had too kindly given
him in the afternoon and went straight for the guest bathroom. His shoulder-
blades and neck had begun to throb and the presence of the mad Scottish
sergeant major hovered at the edge of the pain.

'Please
be here ...'Emmanuel pulled the medicine cabinet open. His luck had to change.
The last few hours had been a waste. He'd ignored Khan's errand and pushed
ahead with the murder investigation. The Zion Gospel Hall was locked, and the
Cat and Fiddle pub where Joe Flowers had knifed two men in a fight had gone out
of business. Flashing Joe's mug shot to lowlifes in every drinking hole on the
Point had turned up nothing. No white DeSoto with white hubcaps and a mermaid
picture in the window either. He knew no more about the Flying Dutchman than
what Jolly's sister had told him. In fact, all he'd managed to do was appear on
Khan's radar.

'Christ
above ...' Emmanuel shook his head. He was on a losing streak. The cabinet
shelves were empty and wiped clean. He moved to the bedroom to continue the
hunt.

A
brown paper envelope lay on the quilted duvet. He upended the contents onto the
bed and a pair of silver police-issue handcuffs and keys weighed down the
luxurious cover. An official police ID card with his name, photo and detective
sergeant's rank came out to rest next to a freshly printed race-identification
card. Just like that. Two small pieces of laminated paper and he was white
again, a detective again.

The
race-identification card wove a dark magic. People lied and cheated to get the
word 'European' on this square of green paper. Others turned their backs on
South Africa for lack of it. How could such a small thing - a plastic-covered
piece of paper - control an individual's whole world? One flimsy document and
he could walk through the front entrance of Dewfield College, where his sister,
Olivia, taught maths and science. He could sit in the manicured grounds, a
stone's throw from a dozen white schoolgirls, and not be considered a moral
hazard.

He
threw the cards down and pressed his thumbs to his temples. The presence of the
Scottish sergeant major continued to search for a breach. Emmanuel headed for
the kitchen. He'd chew on cloves and garlic if he had to. Anything to hold back
the Scotsman and the splintering pain gathering force behind his eye socket.

He
switched on the kitchen light and found the pantry. Glass tubs of goose fat,
tall cans of peaches suspended in juice, cake flour and jars of raw sugar:
Hélène Gerard was thin now but this was a fat person's larder. He moved aside
bottles of olive oil and checked behind them.

'Mr
Cooper?' The French-accented voice was slurred. 'Is that you?'

'It's
me.' Emmanuel stepped out of the pantry. 'Sorry to wake you, Mrs Gerard.'

'No
matter.' Hélène leaned her weight against the long oak table that ran across
the middle of the room. 'No matter.'

The
gracious woman he'd met this afternoon had disappeared. In her place was a
sloppy housewife with unpinned hair and a slack mouth. She straightened herself
up in the overly dignified pose adopted by drunks trying to appear sober.

'Please
. . .' She formed her words laboriously. 'How can I help? I told the major I
would help you.'

'I'm
fine. You should go to bed.'

'No.
Whatever you want I can find it for you. Then you can tell Major van Niekerk
that I did everything that I promised.'

Emmanuel
glimpsed the panic in her eyes. 'Painkillers,' he said. 'I have a headache.
That's all. Nothing the major has to know about.'

'Aahhaa...'
Hélène sailed towards a ceramic tea canister like a rudderless ship and lifted
the lid. She rifled inside and produced a bottle of pills. 'Not ordinary
painkillers, Detective Sergeant Cooper. The best. It's morphine,' she
whispered. 'For you.'

Morphine
was a controlled drug. Was Hélène Gerard an opium eater as well as a drunk?
Emmanuel checked her face, her eyes, and found none of the dreamy washout that
morphine left behind. He knew the look from the war. He had seen wounded
soldiers and even some of the doctors wrapped in those dreams.

'Please.'
Hélène pushed the bottle into his hands. 'Take them. There are only a few left.
They are yours.'

Emmanuel
turned the glass bottle over and the pills rattled. He didn't trust himself.
Four white beauties and he'd sail through the window and stretch out on a cloud
till midday. And that was the problem with good drugs. They worked so long as
you kept taking them. And if they were good, that's all you wanted to do: keep
taking them.

He
opened the bottle and shook out four pills, thought better of it and returned
one to the container. Two for now and one against the possibility that he
didn't crack the case; that's when he'd need calm. He screwed the aluminium top
back in place and read the label. The pills were prescribed for a Vincent
Maurice Gerard. Two months ago.

'Your
husband?' he asked.

'That's
right.'

'Doesn't
he need the morphine any more?' Emmanuel was curious. There was no evidence of
Vincent Gerard in the house. In fact, there were no family photographs of any
kind on display.

'He
copes without the pills.' Hélène took the bottle and replaced it in the tea
canister then filled a glass with water and gave it to Emmanuel. 'You'll tell
the major I helped?'

'Of
course.'

'Don't
forget.' She tottered out of the kitchen on unsteady pins. A chair toppled over
in the hallway and Emmanuel heard a soft curse. Why was the French-Mauritian so
desperate to please van Niekerk?

He
swallowed two pills and slipped the spare into the breast pocket of his jacket.
Not his jacket. It was Vincent

Maurice
Gerard's property and on loan to him, along with the police ID, for a shrinking
period of time.

Emmanuel
climbed into the wide expanse of the provincial-style bed, safe in his morphine
lifeboat. He drifted over rusted corrugated-iron roofs and chimneys breathing
wood smoke into the air. A dirt lane ran behind a row of ragged shops. His
mother sat on the back steps of the All Hours general store and shared a
cigarette with a dark-skinned Sotho woman. Emmanuel rushed towards her. A hand
gripped his shoulder and dug into the flesh.

'Do
you see,' his father's voice was angry, 'how careless she is?'

The
scrape of a chair leg against the bedroom floor cut across the liquid play of
memory and Emmanuel pulled himself upright. The solid shape of a man was
perched on the edge of the bench in front of the mirrored vanity.

'Who
are you?' Emmanuel said.

The
outline wavered. There was someone in the room, within an arm's length. He
pushed himself up onto his elbows, muddled by the morphine and disoriented by
the unfamiliar surroundings.

'You're
the man who was outside Lana's flat,' he said. 'You've been following me.'

The
male figure stood up and floated to the door. Emmanuel struggled from under the
quilt and the boom of his heart drowned out the warm hush of the morphine.
'Wait. . .' His feet hit the floor and he stumbled after the retreating figure.
A tree branch scraped against the window and night shadows flickered across the
walls.

The
bedroom door opened and the man disappeared into the hallway.

Emmanuel
lunged forwards and bumped the sharp edge of the dressing bureau with his hip.
The police-issue handcuffs skated across the wood surface and the ID cards and
clothes thumped to the floor.

'Shit...'

He
steadied himself against the furniture and checked the door. It was closed. The
fog in his head shifted and ebbed. Morphine took the edge off the fear but not
enough. He switched on the bedside lamp and checked the room. The windows were
locked and the corners were empty. He was alone. He collected the cards and
clothes strewn across the floor and restacked them.

Zweigman's
battered postcard had fallen from the inner pocket of the stained crime-scene
jacket, which Hélène had neatly folded on the bureau. Emmanuel picked it up and
turned it over. A dried spot of the dead maid's blood coloured the handwriting
scratched onto the back of the card and made the script appear ancient. In the
small hours of the morning, the bloodstain foretold violence and death.
Emmanuel flipped the card and studied the pristine beauty of the misty hills
and
kloofs.
Were the Zweigmans in danger?

Don't
worry, the morphine whispered. The drop of blood doesn't mean anything. Go to
the deep valley. Listen to the waterfalls.

Emmanuel
laid his head down in the nest of pillows and rested the postcard on his chest.
The morphine opened a door to the past and he stepped through it into a
landscape of mud ditches and burned trees. The steel ribs of a bridge twisted
at an impossible angle and plunged into a swollen river. Emmanuel crouched in
the dirt and rested. The air smelled of spent aviation fuel and shredded lemon
trees: the scent of spring in wartime. Tracer fire lit the night sky with
bright lines of green, blue and white and he marvelled at how beautiful death
looked.

A
Lancaster bomber swooped over the river. A group of boys sat in the limbs of a
bare, burned tree and their hands reached out to try to touch the plane as it
flew just above them. One of the boys turned to Emmanuel. He had Jolly Marks's
face. He pointed upwards.

'Look,'
he said.

The
bicker of mynah birds awoke Emmanuel and he rolled out of bed. The morphine had
taken him to the briny deep but daylight brought real problems and serious
consequences for failing to solve them.

Zweigman's
bloodied postcard was placed neatly on the bedside table. Last night it had
been on his chest. He checked the room quickly. A pale lemon two-piece suit
hung from the back of the chair where yesterday's cream silk jacket had been.

Emmanuel
crossed the room. The police ID, van Niekerk's money, the morphine tablet, the
Buick car keys and the new race ID card were arranged in a neat row along the
top of the oak dressing bureau.

Hélène
Gerard had been into the room. The idea of being observed while asleep made
Emmanuel uncomfortable. Angry also. The dawn intruder could easily have been
Detectives Fletcher and Robinson. Or maybe someone else? He still couldn't be
sure if the man sitting by the dresser last night had been real or a drug
phantom.

No
more morphine then.

The
IDs were laid out in the same manner as the contents of an evidence folder
awaiting a signature to verify that all was present and accounted for. Hélène
Gerard had not stolen or tampered with a thing but Emmanuel was sure that she'd
looked over the cards.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Zion
Gospel Hall was a grey demountable thrown down between a scrapyard and a
tuckshop with chicken wire over the windows. The first verse of the hymn
'Arise, My Soul, Arise' drifted out of the open church door. Emmanuel looked
in. Many of the congregation had their arms in the air and swayed from side to
side as if caught in a strong cross-current. Black and white limbs, skinny and
malformed by poverty, reached like saplings towards the ceiling.

Three
more verses to go, Emmanuel thought. He knew the song by heart. Five years of
mandatory prayer meetings and weekly services at boarding school had left an
imprint.

He
backtracked along the length of the chain-link fence separating the scrapyard
from the Gospel Hall and absently pulled up a chunk of
kaffirweed
on the way. The bitter scent lingered on his hands and brought back memories of
endless Saturdays spent weeding the gardens alongside the Ndebele labourers;
standard punishment for being unruly and wild at Ligfontein Kosskool: the
Fountain of Light boarding school. His offer to weed the gardens on Sundays as
well was refused. He reached the street and turned back to the Gospel Hall. The
dying notes of the hymn drifted out followed by a loud chorus of 'Amen'. The
congregation filed out of the demountable and gathered around the front
entrance; black, brown and white all mixed together. They looked at Emmanuel,
curious about the stranger loitering in their yard. A grey-haired white woman
approached with squared shoulders. She wore no jewellery, no make-up, no
stockings and no adornments in her plaited hair. Emmanuel couldn't imagine a
way to improve her.