The First Rule Of Survival (27 page)

De Vries waits for his eyes to adjust again, and then he leaves the room, hands extended in front of him. He negotiates the door, turns right and walks as fast as he dares to the cell area at the far end. In the small kitchenette he finds a tin-opener and a can of baked beans. He retraces his steps to where he thinks the open door to the freezer room is located, his own heavy intermittent breathing blocking out the humming. He runs his hands along the wall, feeling the chalky, damp paint on the concrete cover his hands. Finally, the noise is discernible and he almost falls through the open door, stumbles to the far side and places the key-light on the lid. He switches on the light once more, long enough to insert one handle of the tin-opener between the lock and the front edge of the freezer. Then he takes the tin can and, using it as a hammer, he tries to lever the lock either from the front of the cabinet or from its lid. The light flickers and de Vries knows he has little time.

He takes one last swing at the tin-opener. The lock comes away from the lid, the key-light jumps and lands on the floor – extinguishes – and de Vries hears the metal of the lock jangle against the side of the freezer. He catches his breath, struggles to find the fallen key-light, locates it, and returns to the cabinet. His fingers fail to find purchase on the front of the lid and, when he locates a small groove, the lid still will not open. He sweeps his right foot around the floor until it hits the tin-opener. He bends and picks it up, finds the groove beneath the lid once more and inserts the handle. Now, with leverage, he hears the seals break and a pronounced hiss as the lid opens.

He pushes the lid up and back until it hits the wall. He retrieves the key-light and wills it to produce a few moments of light. He shakes it and switches it on. The beam is brighter for a moment and de Vries points it inside the freezer, and sees nothing but a long white-wrapped parcel. His brain tries to process what he is seeing, tries to form a coherent guess as to what it might be. As he leans inside, it produces an answer: it is a small body, legs bent slightly upwards. De Vries feels his heart begin to pump. He sees that the form is covered in a white sheet, frosted and stiff. He takes hold of an iced flap and pulls gently. It does not budge. The key-light falters once more. He pulls harder and there is a high-pitched cracking squeak as it comes loose in his hand. Beneath, de Vries sees a waxy, frostbitten face, brittle stalks of hair, an indentation in the boy’s cheek where skin has come away with the sheet – skin that de Vries has pulled from him. The key-light dims and dies, and de Vries fights the icy bile in his throat, his eyes bulging.

He throws the key-light to the floor, hears the plastic click echo and hiss between the walls. He knows he has seen Bobby Eames. Cannot know from the flickering glimpse, but knows all the same. He begins to hyperventilate, his mind racing through seven years of yearning to find this place, seven years to dream that he could tear down the walls of hell and rescue his lost boys.

He stands in the absolute darkness, listening to his own straining breathing, feeling the huge weight of concrete, of earth, on top of him. At that moment, he hears himself speak, but does not understand the words; hears himself cry out, registering only a screeching like an animal in pain, an animal to whom you cannot explain what it is feeling. Now he feels only a determination, an iron sense of self-will, that the walls will close in on him, collapse over him; seal him in with seven long years of wretched failure and hopeless misery.

He stumbles towards the door, but he does not pass through it. He finds it and slams it, lets the deafening echo run through his entire body. He crouches down, falls forward, his palms grazing the cold rough floor. Then he struggles to his knees, wraps his arms about himself, staring straight ahead, overcome with the finality of his failure, enveloped by the darkness. He tries to hear something, anything. Not even the unending hum from the freezer breaks the silence he endures. He cannot even hear his own sobbing.

Vaughn de Vries searches empty corridors, opens one door after another. Each room is like the next: cold and dark but for a single dim green light. Each time he sees it, it fades to nothing. In the blackness, he sees children’s faces; each baring a grim smile – a rictus. He slams the doors, listens to the shattering noise echo and reverberate down the never-ending corridor, until it joins the patter, chatter, of distant echoes. He opens a door to a freezer that takes up an entire room, and from it tumble score after score of rigid, frosted childlike bodies. As they fall before him, they disintegrate, one after another – until nothing exists but piles of bones that seem nothing so much as an avalanche of jagged snow. He turns to the room behind him and sees three frozen corpses on metal tables. He sees the children struggle to open their eyes, desperate to breathe. Their lips part and then their faces begin to crack and shatter . . .

He wakes up. He is at home. It is a dream. His daughters stand either side of his bed. They do not smile. He looks down at himself and he is frozen rigid. He lifts his arm to hold out a hand and it cracks at the shoulder and drops to the bed and then to the ground . . .

He wakes up. Sits up quickly, doubles over, a thick cough grabbing his chest and shaking him. It was a dream . . . He retches. Then he remembers: it is only partly a dream; it is also a memory.

He cannot stay awake, cannot move to get out of bed, cry out for attention. It is not a hospital; he thinks a guest-house. A man claiming to be a doctor visits his bedside, speaks soothingly. He does not remember more. Then he wakes to find evening has come and it is almost dark behind his thin curtains. Don February looks around his door. He comes to his bedside;Vaughn cannot wake up, but Don tells him: the body is being driven to Cape Town, to Harry Kleinman, to be identified. Nothing, and no one else, has been found. The building is almost untouched, but two bedrooms have been used at some point. An air-conditioning system was in operation – generators deep underground, with settings to change the air in the middle of the night. The Crime Scene team have taken hundreds of samples and will be reporting in due course.

De Vries cannot focus; cannot think.

His warrant officer says, ‘Go back to sleep. Tomorrow morning, we walk through the crime scene.’

De Vries tries to speak; nothing happens. His eyes close.

He sees that it is now 5.23 a.m. His head drags him back down to his pillow. His legs ache, his head throbs – perhaps, he thinks, from lack of alcohol. Eventually, he pulls himself up to sit on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, and tries to focus, tries to string logical thoughts together – and fails.

At 6.30 a.m., de Vries is dressed and washed. He leaves his room, pads down a creaky wooden corridor, and finds the Crime Scene leader, Steve Ulton, sitting at a dining table, eating a cooked breakfast and drinking coffee. When he sees Vaughn, he stands up.

‘Vaughn. Are you okay, man?’

‘Yes. Think the bastards doped me. Can’t wake up.’

Ulton glances around, pulls out a chair and gestures to de Vries. Vaughn sits, and Ulton pours him coffee. He leans into de Vries, his voice hushed.

‘They couldn’t find you, man. They got to the end of the second corridor and the doors are padlocked and you aren’t anywhere. It was like, there’s nowhere to go, but you’re gone. When they found you, they nearly shot you. They said you were . . .’ He searches for words. ‘In shock. They carried you out. Do you remember any of this?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t think it’s a problem; Warrant February handled it. That place is a dungeon.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Eight of us are billeted here for the night, in Riebeek-Kasteel,’ Ulton continues. ‘Some more of the team are up the road. The press arrived after about an hour – the boys from the city – and they’re probably in every spare room between here and Malmesbury. How the fuck do they find out so fast?’

He sees de Vries’ blank, blurred expression, takes a long sip of coffee and stays silent.

A coloured waitress comes into the room and looks at de Vries, who has his head on his chest.

Ulton says: ‘More coffee, and bring him a cooked breakfast like mine.’

‘Brown or white toast?’ she asks, oblivious to the scene.

Ulton smiles. ‘He looks like a white man to me.’

She ducks back out of the room.

Ulton says, ‘Your boss is due here at nine a.m.’

Vaughn pulls himself up. ‘Du Toit?’

‘Ja, and General Thulani. Wants a full briefing, like always.’

‘So he can deny he knew anything.’

Ulton chuckles.

‘Shit,’ de Vries croaks. ‘And then the press. He’ll love that.’

‘Doc Kleinman told February that he would try to have a positive ID by eight a.m.; would phone it through to him from town.’

De Vries nods. ‘Where is Don?’

‘I think he’s here, but we were working very late last night. We couldn’t decide how to deal with the body. We couldn’t get it out, as it was frozen in. We had four guys carry the entire freezer out. It took eight of them to get it up out of that tank area, up to ground level. Shit, man. That was after midnight.’

De Vries hunts for more coffee, but Ulton’s pot is empty.

‘She’ll be here just now,’ Ulton tells him. ‘I know it’s the worst possible scenario, but at least it’s over. It’s all over.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ De Vries tells him, his bloodshot eyes still blinking in the light, sounding like he is ending a long day. ‘Whatever we know now, it’s nothing. It’s only just beginning, I’m telling you.’

*   *   *

‘It is Robert Eames,’ Kleinman tells de Vries by telephone at precisely 8 a.m. ‘Several strong indicators – long and short of it, it
is
the boy. I can’t place time of death accurately, but combining the information derived from the remains directly, comparing skeletal growth with his last known measurements, and the development of the other boys, I would say that he died between two and three years ago.’

‘How?’

‘I know you want something, but I can’t give it you. He was placed in the freezer immediately after death and his remains are well preserved, but there are no immediate physical signs. So I can discount some obvious causes: he wasn’t shot or stabbed. I don’t think he fell and there is no sign of blunt trauma. In fact, so far, I can’t find any physical evidence on his remains. Toxicology will take longer.’

‘Any thoughts?’

‘Not really.’

‘Thanks, Harry.’

‘Vaughn? I’m around if you want me. If you want to talk . . .’

‘Okay,’ de Vries says tonelessly, and hangs up.

De Vries ends up with over an hour to survey the outside of the bunker. Officers have moved several areas of camouflage from on top of the rectangular basin. Inside, there is bright daylight to illuminate the scene. Steve Ulton, Don February and a police photographer trail de Vries. Together, they try to recreate the scene of the shootings of Steven Lawson and Toby Henderson.

At 9.20 a.m., General Simphiwe Thulani and Director Henrik du Toit arrive for their tour. De Vries accepts no congratulations for finding the site; he stays blearily focused and stutteringly abrupt.

‘Based on what we know so far,’ he tells them, ‘we are certain that Steven Lawson was shot here . . .’ He indicates the bloodied area further from the entry doors to the bunker. ‘And Toby Henderson was shot here.’ He points to the messier scene closer to the entrance.

‘Putting together this information with the coroner’s reports suggests that the boys were walking or running towards the entrance of the bunker, and were then shot by Marc Steinhauer. We have Steinhauer’s fingerprints and DNA all over the rifle – that was the first comparison the Crime Lab made – also on the unique polythene wrap, and the entry doors.’

The senior officers glance at one another.

‘We have speculated that Steinhauer either released the boys from their cells or they escaped by force. They may have attacked and overpowered Marc Steinhauer, on whom we witnessed a head wound, and then attempted to flee. They located the main exit but, once in this tank area, they were unable to escape. The exit gate may have been padlocked, or they may simply not have seen how they could escape. Steinhauer may have recovered, collected the rifle and gone after them. When they ran towards him, he shot them.’

‘And after the shooting?’ du Toit says.

‘In the eighteen hours following their deaths, Marc Steinhauer wrapped the bodies in this distinctive material and subsequently transported them to his car boot.’ De Vries moves the party back towards the trapdoor into the concrete tank. ‘There are drag-marks here, and also here, leading up to the trapdoor. Getting the bodies up the ladder must have been very difficult, but you have to remember that both children were very light.’

‘But why move them?’ du Toit asks.

‘We don’t know,’ de Vries tells him. ‘That doesn’t make sense. One boy was already dead inside the building. Why not leave the bodies here, seal up the building, and leave the site? It hasn’t been discovered in seven years – why should it be located now?’

‘He worked alone?’

‘There is no evidence that Steve Ulton and his team can find to show that there was more than one person involved in either the shooting or the removal of the bodies from the site. However, as you can see, the scene is messy, and could easily have been compromised.’

‘What have you found inside?’ du Toit says.

‘Only what is in the Crime Scene report. We can’t begin to put together a picture of what might have happened to those boys, but we know that they were confined within that cell-block for the last years of their lives; seven in the case of Steven and Toby, and at least three or four for Bobby Eames.’ He lowers his voice. ‘Background research has revealed a family history of abuse, both physical and sexual, going back at least to Marc Steinhauer’s father, who worked as a doctor at the Valkenberg Mental Hospital. There were complaints made against him concerning the mistreatment of his child patients. I have spoken with his sister; she recounts a frightening home-life.’

‘And what about Nicholas Steinhauer,’ du Toit says. ‘The media darling?’