The Water Man's Daughter (7 page)

It is imperative the rest of the township know nothing about the return of the 28s or the attack on a water company official. Gang killings are fodder for news crews. A foreigner will ensure even more attention.

The national team finishes, too quickly for Zembe’s taste, and she is forced to dismiss her own officers. Men scuttle about, double-checking labels and closing evidence kits before getting into their white sedans. Zembe is the last person to leave. She takes a moment to survey the scene as darkness falls, the way the 28s would have seen it. Hidden from the street, but surrounded by sleeping households, it is a risky place to leave a body.

Zembe takes the long route home. She enjoys the rhythm of the car on the drive and the way she can feel the township settle in around her. When she turns into her own driveway
all the doors on her street are closed. She steers her car into the parking pad behind her house and double-checks the gas level. Years patrolling the highways have taught her that keeping the bare minimum of gas in the tank is the best protection against car theft. Anyone who managed to break into her car wouldn’t get far on the half-litre she leaves.

The front windows of her house are dark, but a yellow light illuminates the front walk and the keyholes in both locks. Once inside, Zembe bolts the door, drops her purse, and walks directly to the bedroom. She changes into her nightgown, folded neatly that morning, and kneels next to the bed.

In the dark house it is easy to slip into prayer. The day washes away. She forgets the cool metal weight of the gun on her hip, the constriction of the suit jacket, and the dust in her eyes. When she prays it is a chance to digest the day and then interpret it according to His word. She tells Him about the dead water man’s blue eye and missing heart. Then she climbs onto the mattress, sets her clock, and falls asleep. She doesn’t have nightmares. In the morning, when the sun wakes her minutes before the alarm sounds, she will thank Him for that.

T
HE SCENE REPORT, READY TWO DAYS LATER, GIVES
Zembe little to work with. There are three flagged pictures. The first is a close frame of the left gouge mark in the chest. Flesh splits in jagged strands. The skin is blue under the white light of the coroner’s lab. A note is scrawled over the red flag: “Serrated edge knife, no larger than 4.5 cm in width.” Zembe makes a rough estimate with her fingers in front of the magnified cut. It would have taken serious force to cut through the thick chest muscle to access the ribcage. She starts the profile in her head.

The second picture is of the back of the head. At the base of the skull there looks to be a soft impression. The notes to the side identify cause of death as a cracked skull. Injuring a grown man this seriously would have taken strength or a surprise attack that incapacitated him for longer than a few seconds. Black marker arrows point to a few places on the skin. Zembe peers closer, holding the frame up to the single light on her desk. She can’t see anything.

Outside the office, she hears the sound of a group of officers in for their morning break. Tosh, her newest and
most promising recruit, laughs his high-pitched laugh as he walks past the door.

“Tosh,” Zembe bellows. “Get in here. I need your help with something.”

Tosh looks uncertain, always nervous. His fingers shake when he reaches for the photo, his lips stay pursed long after he’s done scrutinizing.

“I can’t see what’s flagged. These glasses are no good.”

“They’re hairs, ma’am.”

“Pardon?” Zembe takes the photo again. She sees nothing, no black at all cutting across the white skin.

“Right there.” Tosh motions to one of the arrows. “Small black circles. My hair does that. Drives my mother crazy, says she’s always picking little rings out of her clothes.”

Zembe looks at Tosh’s hair. It’s long enough to add a centimetre or two to his height. The hair is soft, but tight to the head, rolled into thin coils sticking out in all directions.

“Is there a skin tag on them?”

“A what?”

“Do these hairs come straight from the scalp?” Zembe hands Tosh her glasses, he holds them like a magnifying glass.

“Oh, no, they’re just pieces that break from the end.” Tosh looks sad to disappoint.

“So, no good to us, then,” Zembe says more to herself than to him. “Thanks, officer. That’s all.”

Tosh’s lips, which had almost relaxed, scrunch back up upon his dismissal. He thinks he’s done something wrong.
But Zembe doesn’t take the time to make him feel better, she’s already concentrating again on the photo. She picks out the other ten hair rings on the victim’s body.

The third photo is of a piece of paper. “Found ten inches from right side of body, half buried in the sand,” the note says in the coroner’s scrawl. It is a receipt. The top has a faint sun-shaped logo and the words “Central Sun” printed in cursive. There is a bill for one drink: a beer. The space for the room number at the bottom is blank.

Zembe puts down the file and straightens the papers on her desk, then she walks out to the front foyer.

“I’m going downtown. I’ll have my phone on me.”

The young woman in uniform looks concerned. “Shall I forward your calls there?” She must be nervous about so much attention from senior officers.

“Give them Sipho’s number if they insist on speaking to someone.”

Z
EMBE ARRIVES AT THE WATER COMPANY’S MAIN
office by noon and walks briskly into the marble atrium of the building. There are two security guards in white uniforms stationed on either side of the front desk. It is a small room, and the four big men press into one another, rocking slowly, vying for space. The woman between them is skinny, her light complexion fading into bleached orange hair. She watches Zembe while talking into the phone. She is laughing when Alvin Dadoo steps out from the opening elevator doors.

“Officer.” He gestures to the elevator, a big smile crossing his face that then disappears too quickly.

Zembe enters the elevator. She feels imposing as her hips crowd the stocky man next to her. They don’t speak until they are through his front office and behind a closed door.

“Thank you for taking the time to see me, Mr. Dadoo,” Zembe says as they take seats in his large, cool office, masking her township accent as best as she can.

“Not a problem. Thank you for making the trip here. Very sad thing, very sad indeed. I was a friend of his, you know. We weren’t just business partners. I mean, we were partners and friends.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

“It’s the company’s loss, really.”

“Did Mr. Matthews come here often?”

“This was his fifth visit to Johannesburg on this project. I can’t speak of his travels before.”

“Is there reason to believe he travelled here before his employment with your company?”

“No … I am just not privy to his conduct before that time.”

Zembe looks around the office while Dadoo sails through his answers. It is a classic executive’s office. The wood is all real, no peeling finishes, and the windows are huge, overpowering the walls. It is as if the small room is hanging in the sky.

“The project Mr. Matthews was supervising, it was the water privatization in the city?”

Dadoo grimaces at Zembe’s choice of words. He shifts his chair and taps on the bare surface of his desk. “Public-private partnership. He was here to report on our progress to the North American parent company. He would arrive, spend a week checking reports and meeting with key figures in the company, and then return to Toronto and summarize his findings.”

“What were his findings from this trip?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How is the public-private partnership working out?”

“He was reporting on normal progress. That is, he would have been, if …” Dadoo’s eyes meet Zembe’s when he says this. They are unwavering, false in their certainty. Zembe doesn’t let him have a moment.

“Mr. Dadoo, part of my job is to find out if Mr. Matthews might have done something, said something, to create animosity among the people he worked with. We both know the water privatization is causing trouble in the townships. I’ve read the reports about water workers being attacked during meter installation. The police have been briefed more than once about the slashing of Amanzi truck tires and the makeshift roadblocks to as yet unserviced areas of the township. I need to know what he was reporting on, exactly.”

“I thought this was a gang killing.” Dadoo can’t help but let a smug smile play for just a second on his lips before allowing his face to relax into a serious expression.

Zembe is caught off guard. She sits back in her chair.

“We take very good care of our partners, Ms. Afrika,” Dadoo continues. “We have made it our business to know every detail of this investigation.”

“We are looking at a particular gang that has been known to operate in Phiri. My office is in the process of tracking down the senior members of that organization.”

“I trust that process will not take too long.”

Zembe wonders how she was pushed to the defensive so quickly. She ignores Dadoo’s question and changes the subject. “Walk me through Mr. Matthews’s day here.”

“The hotel can provide you with better details than I can.”

“The national office is in charge of the hotel room and surrounding area. They will issue a report on their findings within a few days, but I want to hear your version.”

“We had a meeting with some of our partners here on the ground. We used the conference room in his hotel. The meeting went very late, but I know that Mr. Matthews was at the hotel when I left.”

“We found a receipt for a beer at the hotel lobby bar on his body. It was issued at 11:53.”

“Beer?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Matthews never drank beer. He only had Jack Daniels. Occasionally with Coke. At least as far as I have ever seen.”

Zembe makes a mental note to re-examine the receipt. “Did he have any friends here, any other acquaintances? Anyone he might have called to join him after you left?”

“Mr. Matthews knew no one but me. And maybe a few of our employees. I will be happy to provide you with a list.”

“Thank you.” Zembe moves to get out of her seat.

“Feel free to call my office if you need any further assistance, Detective Afrika. And do keep us updated on the gang investigation.”

As if I need to
, Zembe thinks as she nods, and leaves.

B
ACK AT THE STATION
, Z
EMBE CALLS
S
IPHO AND
scolds him for leaking information to the water company.

“It wasn’t me,” he insists.

Zembe, undeterred by his profession of innocence, continues. “Now he is waiting for gang investigation results. This ties my hands, Sipho, I have no freedom to pursue other leads.”

“Do you have other leads?”

Zembe thinks about the receipt, a beer Matthews didn’t drink, and decides to keep it to herself, for now.

“No.”

“Then it’s going to be a gang investigation. Either way, start at the top and work your way down.”

“You mean track down Kholizwe? It’s not easy to find that man even when we know he is in the vicinity.”

“You worried you’re not up to the job?” Sipho asks.

“No. I was going to start on the other end of the spectrum, work my way up the chain of command.”

“Try for Kholizwe,” he says. “He is always around when things like this happen.”

“Things like this? When was the last time a foreign businessman was murdered in a township? There is nothing like this.”

“I trust you, Afrika. Keep me updated.” He hangs up.

She would love to keep Sipho updated, but wonders how to run a murder investigation while dealing with the barrage of petty crimes she handles every day. If only she could hole up in her office and study the file until the workday finished. Instead, she takes out a buggy, miraculously available and waiting in the office lot, and begins her rounds. She covers the lok’shini only, focusing on the centre of the township and leaving the violent and cluttered outlying areas to teams of two younger officers. She used to avoid doing rounds altogether, but then started hearing complaints from shopkeepers about a lack of police presence in the downtown leading to increased robberies. It seems the relatively quiet centre of Phiri was a convenient place for junior officers to skip when making it through the informal settlement took too long. Now, Zembe takes a downtown route every other day, and covers all lok’shini robberies herself, proving that a desk job in the township is anything but.

Zembe’s first stop is the café outside of the community centre. Ice cream, ginger beer, and Coke are the only things on the menu, but it’s still a popular spot. Behind the bar today is a girl, no more than fifteen. She pours ginger beer out of the bottle into a paper cup and hands it to Zembe. Zembe scans the crowd. At the far end, Nomsulwa
Sithu sits chatting with her tall cousin. Nomsulwa catches sight of Zembe and she and her cousin stand up and try to slip inconspicuously out the back gate. Before she is out of earshot, Zembe calls out. Nomsulwa stops, her cousin continues past her almost at a run. Zembe motions for Nomsulwa to meet her outside and then leaves, ginger beer in hand, with a nod of thanks to the girl behind the counter.