Silent Valley (24 page)

‘Good.’ Gabriel was satisfied. He watched a dragonfly hover in the air, waiting for it to land. Emmanuel thought that perhaps the Zulus were right and that Gabriel was tuned in to the voices from another world.

Emmanuel crossed to Shabalala, who held the fifth wife by the arm. Her red crown had been crushed in the dirt and the decorative porcupine quills removed and heaped on the ground. None of them had the telltale reddish tint.

‘Why Philani?’ Emmanuel asked. By all accounts, the gardener was harmless.

‘He found the great chief’s daughter on the path, just after she passed over to the ancestors.’ The fifth wife brushed dust off her clothing, still proud of her appearance. ‘I came out of my hiding place and called him a murderer. He was scared and threw himself on my mercy, pleading his innocence of the crime. I said that I believed him, but the great chief would not. “Go into hiding,” I said, “and I will plead your fate with my husband.” I gave him money to prove that my promise of help was sincere. He did as I asked.’

‘Give me the five pounds you took from Amahle,’ Emmanuel said to her.

She flashed her big brown eyes and smiled. ‘I have no money,
ma baas
. I’m sorry,
ma baas
.’

‘I can put my hand down your top to search or Constable Shabalala can. Which of us do you prefer?’ Emmanuel called her bluff. Forcibly removing evidence from her person would render the search illegal, but she didn’t know that.

The fifth wife pulled a five-pound note from the neckline of her buckskin top and surrendered it with a coy look. The pretty ingenue was part of her personality and would remain so until the doors of the police van closed and the locks snapped shut. Only then would the consequences of her actions become real to her.

‘Start out for the main road. Mandla and the
impi
will go with you,’ Emmanuel said to Shabalala and pocketed the five pounds. ‘Take Gabriel along. I’ll catch up.’

‘This money . . .’ Shabalala hesitated and said, ‘It is not clean.’

‘It’s a piece of cotton fibre,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Nomusa doesn’t know where the money came from and Bagley won’t ask for it back. Giving it away will wash it clean.’

‘You believe this?’

‘Yes,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I do.’

‘Then I thank you for making it so, Sergeant.’ Shabalala escorted the fifth wife away. The Matebula clan watched them depart with resentment. Some white man in a far-off city would pass judgement and mete out punishment in their private family matter.

Mandla and his men closed in behind Shabalala, leaving the great chief isolated under the branches of the umdoni tree. Emmanuel crouched by Nomusa’s side, careful to keep a respectful distance from a married woman.

‘You knew the name of the guilty one before the
sangoma
started,’ she said. The fear of being found a witch and the shock of discovering Amahle’s killer in the family
kraal
had drained Nomusa’s energy and etched worry lines on her forehead.

‘There was no proof,’ Emmanuel said. ‘We needed a confession before making an arrest. I’m sorry to have put you both through the ceremony.’

‘It is done.’ She pulled her surviving daughter closer. ‘Now maybe the great chief will bury Amahle with honour instead of shame.’

‘Mandla has promised to talk to the chief and make this so.’

‘Mandla also knew?’ She was surprised and glanced up to check the expression on Emmanuel’s face and judge the truth of his answer.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The
sangoma
was also part of the plan. He was reluctant, but Detective Constable Shabalala persuaded him.’

‘How?’ she asked.

‘Shabalala is a great listener,’ Emmanuel said. With infinite patience and an ear for detail, the Zulu policeman had found out that the
sangoma
’s eldest son was moving to Durban to study. The thought of his child adrift in the city and prey to thieves and
tsotsis
gave the
sangoma
sleepless nights. Shabalala offered an introduction to the minister of his church, the name of a good boarding house for the boy to stay in and a pick-up from the bus station on his arrival in Durban. A deal was struck. The plan to expose the fifth wife was almost entirely Shabalala’s doing. Emmanuel simply rode the wave.

‘All has been revealed,’ Nomusa said. ‘Yet my heart is not glad.’

‘In time.’ There was no salve for the wounds inflicted on a family by murder. He slipped the five-pound note between his fingers and said, ‘I wish you well.’

He took hold of the little sister’s hand and pretended to shake it. Touching a married woman, especially in the presence of her husband, was forbidden. Small fingers gripped the money and removed it. Emmanuel stood to leave. The little sister tucked the note into the waist of her beaded skirt and gave him a quick look of thanks. Emmanuel thought how much she resembled Amahle and wondered if there was a bus seat on God’s Gift in her future, too.

‘Go well,
inkosi
Cooper.’ Nomusa got to her feet and made the traditional farewell. The sounds of women pounding millet and of children running to draw water from the river had started again. Daily life resumed. Maybe one day it would drown out her grief, or most of it, Emmanuel hoped.

‘Stay well, mother and daughter,’ he said and walked to the mountain path. He left them to mend and repair. He hoped they would.

He remembered that his sister, Olivia, was due a phone call soon, a monthly exchange of hellos that reminded him that he was not alone in the world after all.

*

Roselet glowed in the last light of day. The street lamps came on. Ellicott and Hargrave slumped in fold-out chairs placed under the sycamore tree and drank sundowner beers. Smoke poured from a perforated drum with an iron grill placed across the top and the wood fire inside the drum crackled. Bagley dropped a curled length of traditional farmer’s sausage onto the heated metal grid and pricked the skin with a long fork. Fat leaked from the
boerewors
and dripped onto the hot coals.

‘Cheers.’ Ellicott raised his beer in salute. ‘An all-
kaffir
affair won’t pull the press, but General Hyland is very pleased with the result.’

‘Unfortunately the names Cooper and Shabalala didn’t come up in the conversation,’ said Hargrave.

Shabalala kept a stony face. Emmanuel shrugged. He expected nothing in return for handing the fifth wife over to the two detectives or for allowing Hargrave and Ellicott to sign the case docket. That was the price for running an unsanctioned investigation.

‘In case the boys at West Street ask . . . what was the reason for the murders?’ Ellicott was already mentally back in Durban, sinking pints with the other detectives and talking bullshit about the difficulties of the case.

Emmanuel kept it simple. ‘Amahle was killed to stop her father from using her bride price to obtain wife number six. Motive: jealousy. The second victim, Philani Dlamini, was unlucky. He discovered Amahle’s body on the path and panicked. The woman who
actually
killed her convinced him to go into hiding while she cleared his name. She gave him some of the money she’d stolen from Amahle’s pocket to prove her sincerity. Two days later she killed Philani, too. Motive: the dead don’t talk.’

‘
Kaffirs
. Can’t understand them. Never will.’ Hargrave drank more beer and contemplated the drifting colours on the horizon. Bagley tended the grill in silence.

‘If you boys are hungry, you can stay and grab a bite,’ Ellicott said.

‘We’d like to but we have somewhere we’ve got to be.’ An evening of
boerewors
, beer and bathroom humour didn’t appeal to Emmanuel.

He wanted to get back to Margaret Dalglish’s cottage, where she and Zweigman waited for him and Shabalala. Ella Reed had dropped them off there earlier in the afternoon. From the cottage, she’d taken Gabriel back to Little Flint Farm to spend the night before returning him to school in the morning. If he didn’t make a run for it again, that is. Emmanuel suspected Daglish’s husband Jim had hit the road again. If not, Daglish would most likely kick him out. She wasn’t the same woman who had turned away from a dead body in need of an autopsy a few days ago.

Ellicott drained his beer and opened another. He took a sip and said, ‘You’re all right for a queer, Cooper. You too, Shabalala.’

‘Goodnight, Detective Sergeant. Safe trip back.’ Emmanuel cut across the yard to the Chevrolet. Shabalala followed with a frown.

‘He insults us and yet you smile,’ the Zulu detective said. ‘What does this mean?’

‘It means that we just made friends. Hargrave and Ellicott will return to Durban tomorrow and tell the other detectives that we’re okay.’ Emmanuel opened the car door and drummed his fingers on the dusty hood. ‘We’re out of the dogbox and back in the kitchen, Shabalala.’

EPILOGUE

E
mmanuel woke at midnight with a pounding head and heart. He remembered the dream, down to the fragments of broken glass shining on the asphalt road leading into the French village outside Caen.

The platoon marched under a weathered stone archway into a narrow street. An old woman threw white daisies from her window and the platoon stopped to pick them up and thread them into the buttonholes of their uniforms.

They moved towards the town square. Black smoke poured from a building with broken windows and a tattered flag with Nazi insignia hanging from one of the front columns. Papers littered the footpath. Overturned desks and file cabinets burned. Ash fell like rain.

The enemy was gone, slashing and burning in retreat. A Welsh private chanced the flames and pulled down the red and black flag. He stuffed it into his pack, grinning.

They moved out. The scattered papers littering the street might be important, but combat platoons travelled light. Rear echelon troops sifted and filed.

Emmanuel scouted a narrow alley off the main street. It seemed that all light died once he entered it and it felt cold and damp.

A barefoot woman stumbled out of the darkness. Her head was shaved and she wore a torn silk slip, the two badges of a German collaborator. Her eyes had lost all hope. An older woman who looked to be her mother walked behind her carrying a baby wrapped in a blue cotton shawl. Emmanuel pressed against the wall and let them pass. The mother nodded a silent ‘thank you’ and they disappeared into the cold darkness of the alley. The three of them, the mother, the daughter and the baby, were marooned by the shifting tides of war.

Now Emmanuel got out of bed and splashed water from the kitchen tap on his face. The real incident lasted less than a minute, eight years ago and a world away. He searched for a reason why fragments of this memory disturbed his dreams for weeks yet only became clear tonight, a day after he and Shabalala had returned to Durban from Roselet.

He remembered Davida Ellis with her hair cropped short and her elegant mother sitting at the kitchen table mourning the loss of her innocence. Zweigman had mentioned them both in the stone tunnel while the morphine pumped through his blood. He said Davida was strong and she’d adjust to her new life with help.

‘She’s at Zweigman’s clinic,’ Emmanuel said out loud.

He knew also the hidden contents of Zweigman’s wallet. The
muti
fire contained the secret and the dream confirmed it.

He pulled on clothes and rushed into the tropical night. The Chevrolet started right up and the headlights illuminated the wide street and the red-brick houses. He drove to the main road connecting Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

The smooth asphalt turned into an uneven macadam strip winding into the hills. The road would take him all the way to Zweigman’s clinic, to Davida – and to their child, his and hers. The rearview mirror reflected the city lights behind him. Ahead, just as Baba Kaleni had predicted by the river, the stars shone bright enough to light his way.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
hanks to the ancestors, my parents, my brother and sisters and my children, Sisana and Elijah. Also to my husband, Mark: editor, story guide and ruthless destroyer of adjectives, who was brave enough to tell me what wasn’t working. My agents Catherine Drayton of Inkwell Management and Sophie Hamley of the Cameron Creswell Agency are calm guides in times of doubt. Terence King, military researcher and historian, for fine work on facts and figures. Simon Lapping, Afrikaner Cultural Attaché. My auntie, Lizzie Thomas, for help with Zulu. Eric and Rose Campbell for the cottage and Michael O Klug for his invitation to the Brisbane Writers Festival. A nod to Meg Simmons for asking, ‘How’s Emmanuel going?’ and Burcack Muraben for constantly hounding me for ‘more Shabalala’. Deepest thanks to the fabulous Pan Macmillan team: Alexandra Nahlous, James Fraser, Cate Paterson and Emma Rafferty for their enthusiasm and continued support.

Photograph: Darryl Robinson

Malla Nunn grew up in Swaziland before moving with her parents to Perth in the 1970s. She attended university in Western Australia and then in the US. Upon returning to Australia, she began writing and directing short films and corporate videos.
Fade to White, Sweetbreeze
and
Servant of the Ancestors
have won numerous awards and been shown at international film festivals from Zanzibar to New York. Her first novel,
A Beautiful Place to Die
(2008), was shortlisted for the prestigious US Edgar® Award for best novel and won the Sisters in Crime Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel by an Australian female author. Her second novel,
Let the Dead Lie
(2010), was published internationally. Malla and her husband live in Sydney with their two children.