Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) (24 page)

‘You must be the first cop I’ve met
who says that.’

Silence.

‘But then there are nice ways for a
cop in your position to supplement your salary, yes?’

Silence.

‘You like having access to the
database?’

‘Excuse?’

‘You like having access to the
database?’

‘I’m not understanding.’

‘Oh, but you do. You understand the
database very well.’

Silence.

‘You know it so well that you’re able
to give private information quite freely to people who ask you for that
information from the database, don’t you? Or maybe not freely. Maybe you sell
that information.’

The sergeant made a move to intervene
but Pillay held up the index finger of her right hand. Something in the glance
she gave him was extremely dangerous. He thought the better of it and subsided
back into his leaning position against the door.

‘How much do people pay you when you
give them private information from the records you have access to?’

Silence.

‘What is the name of the person who
called you on Wednesday?’

‘No-one she call me on Wednesday.’

‘No-one?’

‘No-one.’

‘Now think very carefully about your
next answer, Constable Maishe Manaka. Your sergeant is a witness to this
conversation, and what you say next might be the difference between you going
to jail or not.’

Both Manaka and the sergeant froze as
Pillay continued.

‘At a few minutes before 9.00 am on
Wednesday you received a call from someone asking you for information...’

Manaka panicked. How did she know the
precise time of Themba’s call? They must have someone spying on him. He’d
better be careful.

‘I was not giving him the
information...’

Pillay paused and moved forward from
her position leaning back against the desk. She now stood directly in front of
him. There was something about her that was very unnerving to the constable.
His mind was racing as he tried frantically to remember what he had said to
Themba on Wednesday.

‘So now you’re telling me that it was
a
he
. Just now you told me that
no-one called you on Wednesday. Now you’re telling me that a man asked you for
information.’

‘I was forgetting.’

‘You were forgetting?’

‘
Eh-heh
.’

‘Did the person call you again?’

‘Tchai.
’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘
Ag, shame.
Now you’re forgetting again.’

Silence.

‘You’re
forgetting that the same person called you again at exactly 12.25 on the same
day. Three and a half hours after the first time he called on Wednesday. Three
and a half hours later. Now that’s a very long time, isn’t it? Stands to reason
that someone like you would forget. I mean, you don’t have a good memory at
all, do you? Constable Manaka. Constable Maishe Manaka.’

‘I
am remembering.’

‘You
are remembering?’

‘I
am remembering now.’

‘But
that’s really good, Constable Manaka! That’s excellent! Well done! That’s
really so good! My goodness. What an improvement! In such a short time. Now you
remember, do you?

‘I
am remembering. Yes.’

‘What
are you remembering?’

Manaka
was flummoxed. He had lost track of what she had said. Of what he had said. Of
what he was trying to think
should
be
said.

‘I
was...that man, he was saying to me that he was wanting some information, but
I’m not finding it for him...’

Pillay
squatted right in front of him, eyes level with his. She was deadly serious
this time. She spoke very quietly. So quietly that the sergeant had to take a
couple of paces forward so that he could hear.

‘Constable
Manaka, I want to say one thing to you and I want to say it only once. Are you
listening to me?’

‘I
am listening,’ he said, lips trembling as his thoughts started embracing the plight
of his wife and two toddlers and what might happen if he lost his job.

‘Constable
Maishe Manaka.’

‘Yes,
Madam. I mean Detective.’

‘On
Wednesday morning just before 9.00 am you received a telephone call asking you
for certain information. The same man - you have been truthful and you told me
it was a man - the same man telephoned you at exactly 12.25 on the same day.
You said that the first time you did not give him the information he was
requesting. When he called the second time you gave him the information. Now
think very, very carefully before you answer me, Constable. Take your time.
Think before you answer me, because what you say next can be very serious for
you. What was the information you gave to the man when you spoke to him at
12.25 on Wednesday?’

Manaka
started weeping, quietly. He squeezed the words out, slowly, agonizingly,
weighing what Themba might do to him if he found out, against what this
detective might do to him if he didn’t tell the truth.

‘That
man, he was asking me...he was asking me… he was wanting me to tell him the
name and the address of one detective there in Durban...’

‘What
was the name of the detective?’

‘His
name was spelling funny. With the
y
and not the
i
. His name was Detective
Jeremy Ryder.

15.15.

Thabethe and Mkhize met across the
way from the KFC. Thabethe didn’t leave his car, and watched Mkhize walk toward
him across the road, carrying a KFC bag.

Mkhize hadn’t been able to resist the
extra little touch of buying a bag of chicken and chips, removing the chips for
himself, and handing Thabethe a branded KFC bag containing one chicken burger
and thirty-eight thousand rands in cash.

They didn’t hang about. Thabethe
laughed as he opened the bag, appreciating the gesture. They confirmed that the
next step would be the call from Big Red to Mkhize, and then from Mkhize to
Thabethe. Sometime tomorrow.

Thabethe touched fists with Mkhize,
and drove off.

Mkhize watched him go before walking
back to his own car. He had just handed thirty-eight thousand rands to Skhura
Thabethe and watched him drive away. How many people would do that? How many
people who knew Skhura Thabethe would do that?

He felt OK about it. He knew this guy
a lot better now. He had an intuition that Thabethe would never renege on a
deal.

15.25.

Pillay drove away from the
interrogation of Cst. Manaka with mission accomplished but with mixed feelings.
On the one hand she wanted to nail the guy and see him drummed out of the
police services. On the other she contemplated the culture of work which
conspired to make people like him what they were.

She was sure the guy had, at one
time, had the right motivation, made the right choices, and then tried to make
his way in the system. But with
arseholes
around him
like the sergeant, and others higher up the line, maybe the poor guy felt like
shit all the time at work and saw no prospects for advancement. So one day he
was tempted to make a bit of money on the side, and no-one showed any respect
for him, so why should he have respect for his office?

Wheels within wheels, she thought as
she drove. And got bogged down in traffic.

Maybe she could soften her report.
Maybe the constable would have learned a lesson. Maybe he could reform.

She thought through what had happened
in the interview. Interrogation, more like it. Mission accomplished? She had
nailed the one elusive fact that Ryder had asked her to establish: that it was
indeed one of the three guys now in hospital who had called Cst. Maishe Manaka
in order to ascertain the name and address of Detective Jeremy Ryder. That
fitted with what the Themba guy had told the two detectives in hospital.

But what Ryder didn’t yet know was
what she had just learned from Manaka about the nuances of the telephone
exchanges that had played out on Wednesday. In the first call in the morning
the guy known as Themba had provided the wrong name for checking on the
database. They had spent a long time arguing, the constable had told Pillay,
and eventually Themba had hung up, very angry, because there was no Jimmy Rider.
Then, in the second call, Themba had the correct name, and he was very
confident, and he was correct. The name Jeremy Ryder was indeed on Manaka’s
database.

Pillay pondered these nuances. What
had happened in the interim? How had Themba got the correct name?

Ryder, in his briefing of Pillay, had
sketched out for her the details, the different phones, the times of different
calls, and his own conjectures about how it might all hang together. Pillay had
taken notes, scribbled diagrams, and made a summary on a piece of A4.

She pulled over, suddenly, onto the
verge. She reached for the piece of paper and spread it out against the
steering wheel. Her eyes flickered over the sketch and the notes. She spent
some time on it, making more notes. Then she reached for her iPhone.

‘Ryder.’

‘Jeremy, its me.’

‘Hi, Navi. What’ve you got for me?’

‘Constable Maishe Manaka has been
singing to me, Jeremy.’

‘Nice voice?’

‘Not so nice. It trembled a
helluva
lot.’

‘You and Ed Trewhella both, Navi.
Very intimidating. Far too tough. You didn’t resort to waterboarding, did you?’

‘No need, Jeremy. He’s
poep
scared. Might lose his job. I told
him he might even go to jail. So he gave me what you wanted.’

‘Which was?’

‘He confirms that the guy called
Themba was the one who called him to ask for your full details and home
address.’

‘Thanks, Navi. No surprise, but
another piece of the puzzle in place.’

‘But I’ve been thinking, Jeremy.’

‘Uh-oh.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hit me with it, Navi.’

‘Jeremy, you told me it was phone
number three, as you describe it, that called Constable Manaka on Wednesday,
firstly just before nine and then again at 12.25.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you also told me that what you
call phone number one - the phone that Themba confirmed in the hospital
interview was the one lost on Sunday - called phone number three just before
the 12.25 call to Durban North.’

‘Right again, Navi.’

‘Well, Jeremy, from what Manaka tells
me, the Themba guy was convinced when he called in the morning that the name on
the database
must
be Jimmy Rider as
in
horse-rider
and was very pissed
off when that spelling couldn’t be found by Manaka. Then he was equally, in
fact much more convinced, in the 12.25 call, that the actual name on the
database was the correctly spelled Jeremy Ryder that we all know so well and
love so much. In fact, Manaka tells me, Themba was
absolutely and totally
convinced that he had the correct spelling
when he called at 12.25.’

‘Your point being, Navi?’

‘Maybe it was the call from phone
number one to phone number three that provided the correct information, and one
minute later the 12.25 call was made by Themba to verify that information.’

Silence.

‘Brilliant, Navi.’

‘I know, Jeremy. Do I get a raise?’

‘No. You’ve just had promotion. But
I’ll buy you a beer.’

‘See you tomorrow morning, Jeremy,
for the surprise visit to Mkhize. I’m out for the rest of today. I’m on my way
to the funeral.’

‘Give Mavis a big hug from me, Navi.’

‘Will do. Gotta rush.’

15.30.

Big Red emerged after only a few
minutes onto the deck of the small yacht moored at the end of the pier, having
stowed the small bundle in a cavity behind one of the walls in a spot difficult
to access. He had resolved to bring the stuff down to the boats bit by bit, as
sales determined, rather than to stash whole mountains of the stuff. Just in
case of another bust.

He then walked back to the
Lamborghini and, staying within the perimeter of Wilson’s Wharf, he purred
along the road a few hundred
metres
to the
restaurants. He had long been a regular at the fish restaurant, and the sight
of him had given rise to
rumours
and murmuring among
the John Dory staff. The waitress instinctively chose to ignore what he looked
like as she took his order. Which he appreciated.

He devoured a meal for two and
followed that with three or four beers. Then he ordered dessert. Then coffee.

He thought about the deal he would
make, tomorrow, with this Thabethe guy. In the meantime, he would set about
asking some questions. Find out more about this Ryder bastard that had taken
him down.