Blood Safari (2 page)

She began to cry.

Her neighbour’s name was Jerzy Pajak. He led her into his house. He asked his wife, Alexa, to call the police, and then they clucked over her in Polish accents. He gave her a light blanket to cover her embarrassment, and sweet tea. Later they walked with her and two policemen to her house.

The steel security gate hung askew and the wooden front door was beyond repair. The coloured policeman was the more senior of the two, with stripes on the shoulders of his smart uniform. She thought he was a sergeant, but because she was unsure, she addressed them both as ‘mister’. He asked her to check whether anything had been stolen. She said she would finish dressing at the same time. She still had the multicoloured blanket draped over her shoulders and the temperature in the city was rising. She walked up to her room and sat for a moment on the white duvet on her double bed. It was over an hour since she had made it. She didn’t believe they were burglars. She had had enough time to come to a conclusion and develop suspicions.

She dressed in a green T-shirt and trainers. After that she walked through the house to satisfy the sergeant and went to report nothing missing. While they settled themselves in a circle in the sitting room, Pajaks on the couch, she and the policemen on chairs, he questioned her carefully and sympathetically in good, regulation Afrikaans.

Had she been aware of anyone watching her or her house lately?

‘No.’

‘Have you noticed a car or any other vehicle unusual in the area?’

‘No.’

‘Any people loitering in the street or behaving in a suspicious manner?’

‘No.’

‘You were in your bedroom when they came in?’

She nodded. ‘I was dressing when I heard the gate. It makes this noise. Then I saw them running to the front door. No, not running. Walking fast. When I saw the balaclavas, I …’

‘I assume you couldn’t see their faces.’

‘No.’

The Pajaks couldn’t understand the Afrikaans, but their heads followed the interrogation from one side to the other, like spectators at a tennis match.

‘Skin colour.’

‘No …’

‘You seem unsure.’

She thought they were black, but she didn’t wish to offend the other policeman. ‘I can’t say for sure. It happened so fast.’

‘I understand, Miss Le Roux. You were scared. But anything could help.’

‘Maybe … one was black.’

‘And the other two?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘Have you had any work done on or around your house lately?’

‘No.’

‘Are there any items in your house of exceptional value?’

‘Just the usual. A few pieces of jewellery. A laptop. The TV…’

‘A laptop?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they didn’t take it?’

‘No.’

‘You must excuse me, Miss le Roux, but that is unusual. Listening to what happened here, this is not the typical modus operandi of a burglar. Breaking down the doors and pursuing you into the backyard …’

‘Yes?’

‘It sounds as though they meant to attack you personally.’

She nodded.

‘One has to look for motive, you understand.’

‘I understand.’

‘And that is usually of a personal nature. In most cases.’

‘Oh?’

‘Forgive me, but was there a relationship that went bad?’

‘No,’ she said with a smile to mask her relief. ‘No … not that bad, I hope.’

‘One never knows, miss. So there was a man in the recent past?’

‘I can assure you, mister, it’s more than a year since I was in a serious relationship and he was a Brit who went back to England.’

‘The break-up was friendly?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Since then has there been anyone who might be unhappy over a break-up?’

‘No. Definitely not.’

‘What is your line of work, Miss Le Roux?’

‘I’m a brand consultant.’

She saw his confusion and elaborated. ‘A brand consultant. I help companies to position their brand of products in the market. Or reinvent them.’

‘Which company do you work for?’

‘I work for myself. My clients are companies.’

‘So you have no employees?’

‘No.’

‘And you work with big companies?’

‘Mostly. Sometimes there are smaller ones …’

‘Has anything happened at work that might have upset people?’

‘No. It’s not… I work with products, or the perception of the company brand. It wouldn’t upset anyone.’

‘An incident? With your car? With someone doing a job for you? Gardener, domestic?’

‘No.’

‘Is there anything you can think of? Anything that could have led to this?’

This was the question that she was not ready to answer yet.

‘So I said “no”, but I don’t believe it was the truth,’ Emma told me. The floor lamp beside her cast a soft, sympathetic glow over her euphemism.

I did not respond.

‘I … I didn’t want … I wasn’t sure whether they were connected. No, I… I didn’t want them to be connected. Anyway, it was something that happened a thousand kilometres from the Cape and it might have been Jacobus, or it might not, and I didn’t want to bother the police with something that could have been my imagination.’ She suddenly stopped talking and looked at me and smiled slowly, as if she were weary of herself. ‘I’m not making any sense, am I?’

‘Take your time.’

‘It’s just… it doesn’t make sense. You see, my brother…’ She stopped again, drew a breath. She looked at her hands, then, slowly, up at me. Emotion shone in her eyes, her hands made a small hopeless gesture. ‘Mr Lemmer, he died …’

It was the sum of her body language, her choice of words and sudden change of gear which triggered the alarm in my head. As if she had practised this phrase, this offer. There was the tiny flicker of manipulation, as if she wished to distract my attention from the facts on the table. It only made me wonder: why should that be necessary?

Emma le Roux would not be the first client to blatantly lie about a threat with that little frown of absolute sincerity. Not the first to embroider misty eyed, or exaggerate in order to justify the presence of The Bodyguard. People lie. For a million reasons. Merely because they can, sometimes. This was one of the confirming phenomena of Lemmer’s First Law: Don’t get involved. It was also one of the primary sources of Lemmer’s Second Law: Trust nobody.

She recovered quickly; I had to concede that. When she received no response, she shrugged off the emotion with a shake of her head and said, ‘My brother’s name was Jacobus Daniël le Roux …’

She said he disappeared in 1986. Her sentences were less fluent now, her narrative cursory, as if the details were a fountain from which she dared not drink. She had been fourteen at the time; Jacobus had been twenty. He was some kind of temporary game ranger, one of a few soldiers on compulsory military service who volunteered to help the Parks Board in the battle against elephant poaching in the Kruger Park. And then he just disappeared. Later they found signs of a skirmish with ivory poachers, cartridge casings and blood and the remains of the campsite the poachers had left behind in their haste. They searched and tracked for two weeks, until the only meaningful conclusion was reached: Jacobus and his black assistant had been killed in the confrontation, and the poachers had taken their bodies with them out of fear for the reaction they would cause.

‘It’s been more than twenty years, Mr Lemmer … It’s a long time, you see. That’s what makes all this so difficult… Anyway, last week, on the twenty-second, something happened that I haven’t mentioned to the police …’

That Saturday evening, just past seven, she had been in the second bedroom of her house. She had fitted it out as an office with a built-in desk, filing cabinets and bookshelves. There was a television set and a stationary exercise bicycle and a felt notice-board with a few happy social photos plus sober newspaper clippings from the business pages affirming her success as a brand consultant. Emma was busy on her laptop, examining spread-sheets
of statistics that required concentration. She was vaguely aware of the TV news headlines, which brought on only a feeling of déjà vu. President Mbeki and the members of his alliance were at loggerheads, a suicide bomb in Baghdad, African leaders complaining about G8 conditions for debt relief.

Later she could not recall what it was that made her look up. Perhaps she had just finished a graph and needed to shift her focus for a moment, perhaps it was pure coincidence. Once her attention was fixed on the TV screen, it was only seconds before a photograph appeared. She heard the newsreader say, ‘… involved in a shooting incident at Khokovela near the Kruger National Park in which a traditional healer and three local men died. The remains of fourteen protected and endangered vultures were found at the scene.’

The photograph appeared in black and white. A white man in his early forties stared deadpan at the camera, as people do when ID photographs are taken.

He looks like Jacobus would have. It was her abrupt, instinctive thought, purely an observation, and a touch of … nostalgia, almost.

‘The Limpopo police are searching for a Mr Jacobus de Villiers, also known as Cobus, an employee of an animal hospital at Klaserie, to help them with their enquiries. Anyone with information can contact the police station at Hoedspruit …’

She shook her head. She grimaced. Coincidence.

The newsreader moved on to commodity prices and she returned her attention to the computer screen and the large amount of work awaiting her. She drew the pointer over a block of data. She selected the graph icon.

What would Jacobus have looked like at… forty, would he have been forty this year? Her memories of his features were based mostly on the photographs in her parents’ home; her own recollection was less reliable. But she did remember her brother’s incredible intensity, his spirit, and his overwhelming personality.

She turned the graph into multicoloured towers of data meant to bring insight about sales trends in relation to the competition.

Coincidence. Strange that the TV photo man should also be called Jacobus.

She selected more blocks of data.

Jacobus was not such a common name.

She needed to make a pie graph of this, with wedges of market share to demonstrate that her client’s salad dressing was the slow horse, last across the line. The problem was hers to solve.

The remains of fourteen protected and endangered vultures were found at the scene.

That would have upset Jacobus.

She made an error compiling the graph and clicked her tongue at herself. Coincidence, pure chance. If you absorbed a thousand pieces of information every day for twenty years, it would happen at least once, maybe twice, in a lifetime. The numbers would conspire to tease you with possibilities.

She suppressed this vein of thought for nearly two hours, until she had processed all the data. She checked for new emails and turned off her computer. She fetched a clean towel from the linen cupboard and climbed on the exercise bicycle, cell phone in hand. She read SMS’s, listened to her messages. She pedalled systematically harder, watched the television absent minded, channel-surfing with the remote.

She wondered how much like Jacobus the photo really was. She wondered about her ability to recognise him. Imagine if he hadn’t died and walked in here now? What would her father have said about that news item? What work would Jacobus be doing if he were alive? How would he have responded when faced with fourteen dead rare vultures?

More than once she forced her thoughts away to other things, plans for tomorrow, preparations for a few days at Hermanus for Christmas, but Jacobus came back to haunt her again and again. Just minutes after ten o’clock, she dug into one of her cupboards and brought out two albums. Swiftly flipping through one, not dwelling on the pictures of her parents, or the happy family groups. She was looking for a particular photograph of Jacobus wearing his bush hat.

She removed it, put it aside and studied it.

Memories. It took considerable willpower to suppress them. Did he look like the man on TV?

Suddenly she was sure. She took the photo to her study and dialled enquiries to get the number of the police station in Hoed-spruit. She looked at the photo again. Doubt crept back. She called the Lowveld number. She just wanted to ask whether they were sure it was Jacobus de Villiers and not Jacobus le Roux. That was all. Just so she could get this idea out of her head and enjoy Christmas without the frustration of longing for her deceased family, all of them, Pa and Ma and Jacobus.

Eventually, she spoke to an inspector. She apologised. She had no information, didn’t mean to waste his time. The man on TV looked like someone she knew, also called Jacobus. Jacobus le Roux. She stopped then, so he could react.

‘No,’ said the inspector with the exaggerated patience of someone who handles a lot of weird phone calls. ‘He is De Villiers.’

‘I know he is De Villiers now, but his name might have once been Le Roux.’

The patience diminished. ‘How can that be? He’s been here all his life. Everybody knows him.’

She apologised and thanked him and ended the call. At least now she knew.

She went to sleep with the longing unstilled, as though her losses had been renewed after all these years.

‘And then, yesterday afternoon, I was standing outside with the man who was replacing my front door. The sergeant, the policeman, had found someone from Hanover Park, a carpenter. I heard the phone ring in the study. When I picked it up there was static on the line, I couldn’t hear very well, I thought he said “Miss Emma?” It sounded like a black man. When I said “yes”, he said something that sounded like “Jacobus”. I said I couldn’t hear him. Then he said “Jacobus says you must…” and I said I couldn’t hear, but he didn’t repeat it. I asked “Who is this?” but the line went dead …’

For a moment she drifted off in her thoughts, her focus far away, then she came back, turned her head to look at me and said, ‘I’m not even sure that’s what he said. The call was so short.’ She was speaking more rapidly, as if she were in a rush to finish. ‘I drove over here last night. When Carel heard the story …’