Strong Medicine (13 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I nosed my car into an empty parking bay, pressing as close as I could to the scraggly tree between the two rows of sun-kissed cars. Windscreens glinted in the glare of the sun. Even in winter the car would get swelteringly hot in a few hours, and I wasn’t prepared to pay extra to park underground.

I have always hated malls. It’s not only the frantic gaggle of shoppers that bothered me, although that was a big one. It was the subtle competition between complete strangers, walking past one another and comparing the quantity and origin of the bags they were carrying. I sneered at a woman with three bags full of clothes from Woolies and a smug look on her face.

The mannequins also pissed me off. With their perpetual smiles and too-thin waists. The clothes always looked so good on their marble-smooth bodies. They looked shit on me, barely hanging on to my jutting-out hip bones, drooping from my narrow shoulders.

The rich chocolate-nutty aroma of coffee soothed my jangling nerves. Tea might be Besta’s drink of choice, but I preferred a good strong cup of coffee any day. I never kept any in the house though because it would disappear within a few days, and nobody could ever tell me who was drinking it.

Luke’s parents were already seated at a table in the coffee shop when I arrived. His mother waved forlornly at me and her husband stood to shake my hand. Would these two really have valuable information regarding Lindsey? They looked like they had trouble understanding the weather, never mind having important information about kidnappers.

“We’re very glad you decided to come,” he said. “My name is Clinton, my wife is Julia.”

The corners of Julia’s mouth twitched upwards in a weak smile.

“Erin du Toit,” I said as I sat. “You say you’ve got some information about Lindsey’s disappearance?”

“We do.” Julia twisted her hands together, untwisted them to hold her coffee cup, and then ran them through her hair. Why was she so nervous?

“Well, it’s not exactly about Lindsey,” Clinton said.

My stomach clenched. What good were these people it if they couldn’t tell me anything about my daughter? I leaned back sharply in my chair and bumped into a waitress carrying a tray full of drinks.

She stumbled, the tray wobbled and a few of the drinks looked like they were about to tip, but she managed to right herself and the tray without spilling a drop. She glared at me, then plastered on a fake smile.

“That was a close one,” she said before threading her way past me.

“Please,” Clinton grabbed my arm. His fingers were cold and clammy, they felt like old noodles, and they made my skin crawl. “Sit down again, give us a few minutes of your time. Coffee is on me. Lunch too if you want.”

“It’s important,” Julia said. “We promise.”

“Okay.” I lowered myself back into the chair. I would hear them out. If they had anything useful to say about Lindsey it would be worth the time.

“Thank you,” Clinton said.

“Thank you so much,” Julia echoed. “You won’t regret it.”

A well-groomed young man arrived at our table, all smiles and politely clasped hands. We placed our orders for coffee and food. The waiter scribbled down everything in a dog-eared little notebook then darted off to the kitchen.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“We mentioned our son, Luke.” Clinton looked at me expectantly.

I still had no idea who the kid was, but I couldn’t tell them that now. Not if I wanted lunch. I just nodded and motioned for him to continue.

“He was in Lindsey’s class last year,” Julia said. “He went… missing about a year ago. Walking home from school on the fourteenth of July last year. He always walked home and it was fine. That day he just didn’t come home. His teacher said he’d left school like normal, she’d seen him walking out the gate and turning right to go up the road towards our house.” Julia stopped talking, and Clinton picked up right where she’d left off.

“We searched the neighborhood. We went to the police. We put up posters and handed out flyers at robots and we even got an article in the Reporter. But we never saw Luke alive again.”

“The worst part,” Julia said as she wiped tears from her eyes with a tissue. “Was the way the cops treated us. They did nothing. No matter what we did. We phoned them every day, we spoke to the station commander, and we did everything we could.” She held her hands up in front of her face, half prayer, half surrender.

“They said there were just too many missing children,” Clinton said. “They’d had more than a hundred reported last year alone before Luke went missing. They said we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

“Then, three weeks after Luke’s disappearance, we got a phone call early in the morning. It was Detective Nyala. He said we should come down to the police station.

“They had found Luke. Down by the train station. Someone had dumped him there. Whoever took him… they’d cut pieces away. For
muti
.”

Clinton stopped talking, his jaw clenching and unclenching, and the tendons in his neck standing out. Julia wept quietly into her hands. I had no idea what to say. It was too awful. Nobody should ever have to go through what they had been through. Would I end up like them? Pale and sick, too shaky to stand without holding on to someone?

“I’m so sorry.” My throat clenched and I couldn’t get any more words out. Tears ran down my cheeks.

Just then, our smiling waiter returned carrying our meals. He took one look at our tear-streaked faces and whatever pleasantry he’d been about to say died on his tongue. He placed our plates quickly and disappeared into the restaurant.

“The worst part,” Clinton said, his voice thick with emotion, “apart from losing a child, is the way the cops treated us. It wasn’t just that they didn’t care. It was deeper than that. It was like they were trying to cover something up. Like they were involved.”

Clinton had confirmed my worst suspicions about the police. Yet I was stunned into silence. I had felt the same way about their reaction to Lindsey’s disappearance. Hell, I’d said as much to Besta and Busi. Hearing it from someone else drove it home, like a thousand nails slamming into my body.

“We never had any proof,” he said.

“We would have done something, anything.” Julia pushed her salad around on her plate. “But sometimes you just know when something is wrong. You can feel it in your stomach.”

I could feel something in my stomach and it felt an awful lot like too much vodka. My mouth filled with the taste of bile. I needed to get out of there. Fuck the food. Fuck these sad people and their lost boy and all their shit.

I pushed away from the table, glasses clattered and a woman’s voice rang out. I didn’t look to see what had happened. The room spun around me and I put my hand on the back of a chair, forcing my body through the maze of diners and into the throng of shoppers in the mall. I let the human tide carry me towards my car, and let my tears wash down my cheeks.

#

I didn’t want it to make sense. I told myself the Armitage’s were wrong, over and over, as I drove home from the mall. Regardless of what Julia and Clinton thought. It went against everything I’d been taught about the cops, even the corrupt ones. They couldn’t be involved in something as terrible as this. I could barely bring myself to think the words.

Covering up for someone who killed children for muti
.

No matter how fucked up our country was, it couldn’t be that broken, could it?

My hands shook on the steering wheel. I gripped it tight, tighter. What if they were right? What if Nyala and Brits were in on it? They wouldn’t be interested in any of the evidence I brought them. They weren’t. They basically ignored me whenever I phoned them. I’d found her bag, even an eyewitness, and they didn’t care.

“Fuck this!” I slammed my fist into the steering wheel, making the hooter cough a weak
honk
.

I would get answers from the cops, one way or the other. I pulled into an empty taxi stop on the side of the road and turned off the car. I reached into the cubby hole for my cell phone. My hands were shaking so hard that I almost dropped it as I dialed Detective Nyala’s phone number.

His phone went to voice mail.

I jabbed the green button and phoned again. He answered on the fourth ring, the sounds of crying children almost drowned out his weary “Hello.”

“Detective Nyala, it’s Erin du Toit. I really need to speak to you about Lindsey’s case. When can we meet?”

“Erin, um, it’s my weekend off. Can we meet on Monday?”

My stomach twisted with anger. More stalling. This was getting ridiculous. “I don’t think so. I’m worried about the lack of progress on Lindsey’s disappearance. I really need to speak to you.”

“Nothing’s going to change between now and tomorrow morning. I’ll be in the station around nine. You can meet me there.” Nyala hung up before I could object, before I could insist that he get off his lazy ass and find my daughter.

“Fuck!” I threw my phone at the windscreen and it bounced off with a hollow
thwack
before landing on the passenger seat next to me.

I sat in my car while the traffic streamed past. Of course he wouldn’t meet me, what was I thinking? He didn’t want to find Lindsey. He might even know where she was.

I couldn’t face going home yet. I couldn’t go back to the room I shared with Lindsey and face the walls full of photos of her. Instead, I sat in my car on the side of the road, my gaze darting back and forth between the mirrors, as I watched for anyone approaching my car from behind. You could never be too aware on Joburg’s streets. Hijackers could materialize out of thin air and, before you knew it, you’d be facing the barrel of a gun, scrambling out of your car, praying the thugs didn’t put a bullet in your skull for shits and giggles.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Transcript of Interview

Inmate Number: 7865649

Bongani Zulu

13 September 2005

CMAX Prison, Pretoria

Detective Tshabalala (DT): Do you know a man called Sipho Mazibuko?

Bongani Zulu (BZ): I used to know someone with that name.

DT: He’s in prison down in Cape Town. He says he knows you. He says he can tell us things about you.

BZ: He’s lying.

DT: He doesn’t know you?

BZ: He can’t tell you anything about me that I haven’t told you.

DT: Is that true? I think you’re lying. I think that Mr. Mazibuko knows things about you that you don’t want us to know. You feeling hot? Shall we turn on the aircon?

BZ: Anything he tells you isn’t true.

DT: Well, why don’t you clear some details up for us then? Can you tell us about Goodness Mathale?

BZ: I don’t know who that is.

DT: She was a young girl who lived in Limpopo. She was murdered there in 1989. Mr. Mazibuko says he knew you then, that you were both living in the same village as Goodness, and that you were involved in her murder.

BZ: I wasn’t living in Limpopo then. I was in KwaZulu.

DT: Are you sure about that?

BZ: Yes. You can ask my cousin. I was living with him.

DT: We will do that. In the meantime, will you have a look at these photos and see if they jog your memory?

BZ: I don’t need to look at that. Why would you show me things like that?

DT: Does this make you uncomfortable? It makes me sick. I can’t stand looking at the damage done to this little body. Her lips are gone, you almost can’t see through the blood. Look, here at her fingerti—

BZ: I don’t need to look! I don’t need to! Fuck you! Take this away.

DT: I find it hard to believe, Bongani, that you would react like that to these photos if you weren’t involved in this murder.

BZ: Fuck you. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t involved.

DT: Do you know who was?

BZ: It was the child minder.

DT: Ah, so you do know what happened.

BZ: I was there. In the village. The aunty left the girl with the child minder. She took the girl down to the river to wash. Then she said the river took the girl, she couldn’t swim. We searched for her and found her body two days later. Like that photo.

DT: Mr. Mazibuko has a different story. He says that the child minder worked for you, that she waited for Goodness’s mother to go to work then she brought the child to the river. You were waiting there and you hit the girl on the head with a rock to make her weak. There, you see that wound on the skull? That’s blunt force trauma. Like from a rock.

He says after you did that, you cut here, here to remove her genitals. Then here for the fingers. And the lips.

BZ: He’s lying. He made it up when he saw the photo.

DT: We never showed him the photo.