The Serpentine Road (3 page)

Nkosi’s eyes remain blank.

‘Yes, sir.’

As the Cape Town Central officers leave, they stare at him. He knows his reputation and he judges that they wear the anticipated expressions: curiosity, fear, some little distain. De Vries scrutinizes each of them, coloured and black officers, makes them lower their eyes. Finally, Nkosi appears, walks slowly down the stairs and pauses in front of him.

‘You might want to talk to me, sir.’

‘Might I? Why?’

‘I know who the victim is.’

De Vries snorts.

‘So do I.’

‘I met her a week ago.’

‘She say who wanted her dead?’

‘No.’

‘Then, Lieutenant, we will talk.’ He looks at a small sheet of folded paper in Nkosi’s hand. ‘Your contact details?’

Nkosi hands it to him, shakes his head, moves on to an unmarked car.

De Vries turns behind him and nods at the Scene of Crime team. When they are inside, De Vries walks over to his Warrant Officer, Don February, who stands by the gate which leads down the side of the property to the terraced garden.

‘Those Central guys all go upstairs?’

‘Not when I arrived, sir. Just the Lieutenant and one other officer. Before that, the same officer and his partner, who answered the original call. But, maybe before I got here . . . ?’

‘You tell the Lieutenant that I was coming?’

‘Just that a senior officer from Special Crimes was coming. Not your name.’

‘Why not?’

‘I do not like the reaction when I say your name.’

De Vries smiles. His Inspector’s wit is dryer than the Karoo.

‘So you bought yourself a moment of respite . . .’

‘A senior officer thinks he is leading a case and then it is snatched away by some elite unit. It is no wonder that it breeds resentment.’

‘He should be glad of the break. That’s what our unit is for: take the tough ones and leave more officers available.’

‘Even you said nobody likes the system.’

‘I lied,’ De Vries says. ‘I like it.’

In the hallway, they dress in blue disposable boiler suits, over-boots and latex gloves. Although the house is full of people, there is a chapel-like hush. Don February speaks in a whisper.

‘Down the stairs is the kitchen and a casual living space, which leads onto the pool deck and garden. There is no evidence that anyone went there. The doors are barred and locked. Everything happened up here.’

They begin to climb the white staircase.

‘Did she live alone?’

‘Miss Holt? I do not know. It is a big house for one woman only.’

Don studies his notes.

‘Miss Taryn Holt, aged thirty-eight. She has been identified as the victim by the live-in maid, her ID, photographs of her in the house. But, I think I have heard that name . . .?’

‘Taryn Holt inherited her father’s company a few years back. Holt Industries is a major heavy-industrial player in Southern Africa. She’s richer than your Uncle Bob Mugabe.’

Don rolls his eyes.

‘I have not heard of Holt Industries.’

‘Me neither, till an hour back. Plenty of big, successful companies operating under the radar. She isn’t involved, but she owns most of it.’

They reach the upstairs landing and, immediately, De Vries can see through the expansive dual-level living space to a huge wall of floor-to-ceiling sliding doors which open to a breathtaking panorama over the city, the Waterfront and Table Bay. The shards of silver sunlight paint lines of smoky perspective over the scene until sea and sky merge on some unseen horizon.

A crime scene technician is bent over the lock on an open door in the corner of the room, another is searching the cream carpet for debris. Everything, De Vries thinks, is very bare, very pale. He looks at the large bronze sculpture on a cream marble plinth: a lioness attacks a wildebeest. De Vries feels that he has seen this scene before, in the same style, but cannot place where. He looks at the large paintings on the walls. They are mainly bright abstracts, garish and vulgar amidst the pure white, but there is one darker portrait of a black African woman. She stares proudly out from the canvas, demands that her gaze be met.

‘What else?’

‘There are many staff members, but they all travel in each day. There is one live-in maid. She has a room at the bottom of the garden. She called us early this morning. I have not spoken with her yet, but she told dispatch that she thought she heard something in the garden, went outside and looked up at the main house to see the terrace door in the corner open. As the alarm had not sounded, she came into the house to check that everything was all right. Her call to the station was logged at 5.14 a.m.’

‘And the victim?’

Don February turns, retraces his steps to the hallway and then gestures towards the door at the end of the long broad corridor.

‘She is in the final door to the right – the master bedroom.’

De Vries begins to walk towards it.

‘It is not nice.’

De Vries pushes the door gently with the back of his gloved hand. It is heavy, but opens smoothly and silently. Ahead of him, he sees the same view of the sea through wide windows. To his right, a crime scene officer is on his knees taking samples from the legs of an antique bureau; to his left, a vulgar display of modern art: still life with blood. He catches his breath. The bedroom: white walls, white carpet, a big broad bed encased in a polished yellow-wood frame – spattered in pink and red, pockmarked in sticky almost-black tar. Like some horrendous Jackson Pollack canvas, everything emanates from the explosion on the bed. There is blood on two walls, on the ornate polished-wood headboard, on the ceiling. A parallelogram of sunshine hits the bed, illuminating her long matted hair, making the droplets of blood on the walls in the corner of the room sparkle.

He turns to Don.

‘Can we approach?’

Don turns back to the crime scene officer, who nods at him.

De Vries pads forward gingerly, aware that he is now amidst the mire of blood.

The woman’s body is sprawled across the end of the mattress, her torso atop it, her legs hanging over the end at a strange angle. Her left foot rests lightly on the carpet; her right a few centimetres above it, floating stiffly. She is naked.

He leans close to her head, starts to squat, peers through the sticky hair to the side of her face, half of a mask, a rictus of agony. He swallows hard. There is something in her mouth: a bulbous brown growth.

De Vries takes a pen from his jacket pocket, points at the object.

‘What is that?’

Don February says: ‘I do not know.’

‘I’m not going to take it out, Vaughn . . .’ De Vries looks up and turns towards the new voice. It is Steve Ulton, the Crime Scene Leader, a man De Vries respects. ‘But, I suspect that it is a dildo. A black dildo.’

‘Part of the attack?’

‘I doubt it. Not my job to opine on C. O. D. but clearly she has been shot several times.’

De Vries nods.

‘So this . . . Dildo. This is something else?’

‘I would say so.’

‘The scene is staged?’

Ulton smiles. ‘Unless she just happened to be sitting on the edge of her bed with a huge rubber dick in her mouth, then,
ja
, I’d say so.’

De Vries regrets his clumsy question; his head is already full of ideas, jostling with the new information every glance at the scene provides.

‘Okay.’

‘You want to work backwards?’

‘You ready already?’

‘Work in progress, thinking aloud . . .’

De Vries nods.

‘Look at the wooden headboard . . .’They turn to it; each tries to avoid running their eyes over the body on the bed, none succeed. It is ornately carved wood, almost like tangled branches, yet highly polished and a rich light brown colour. Using a ballpoint pen, he indicates an area about a quarter of the way across. ‘Look here. You can see that there are deep abrasions here . . .’ He leans over the bed without coming into contact with it and points again, this time to scratch marks about a quarter of the way from the opposite side. ‘The same here.’

‘What are they?’

‘I will take samples and examine them further; if necessary the entire bed can be taken away. However, judging from their position mainly behind and to some extent to the side of each wooden strut, I would say they are marks from where rope or cuffs were tied to the bed-head. I’ve seen this before, both in completely innocent contexts and more sinister ones.’

Don February says quietly: ‘Completely innocent?’

De Vries glances sideways at him. Ulton stands straight, arches his back. ‘Innocent in terms of being consensual.’

Don nods imperceptibly, keeps his head low.

Ulton takes a pace backwards, faces Taryn Holt.

‘If you look at the wrists of the victim, you will see that there are no abrasions, no obvious evidence of being bound in the past.’

‘So, what does that mean?’

‘Possibly nothing. The pathologist will examine the victim for signs of sexual attack, but there isn’t anything immediate to suggest that there was anything of a penetrative sexual angle to the attack – apart from the dildo, and that is likely to have been inserted post-mortem.’

De Vries frowns. The information is detailed and revealing, but it seems irrelevant to the murder itself.

Ulton turns and walks slowly to the doorway.

‘The door closes automatically. The mechanism is balanced very finely. Very high quality workmanship. If the victim was unaware of the presence of an intruder, he – or she – could approach down the corridor without being noticed.’

He indicates the corridor.

‘We’ve examined the carpet along here. There are indistinct footprints all over the place. I doubt we’ll find anything but, since the bedroom windows are all sealed, we can assume that the attacker walked along this corridor, both to and from the scene.’

Ulton exits the bedroom and slowly retraces his footsteps back to the living area. It seems to De Vries even bigger than before, hollow and devoid of identity and personality, unconnected somehow with its owner.

‘The lock on this far window has been tampered with. He might have got in from the terrace through there.’

‘Might?’

Ulton tilts his head. ‘Just a preliminary observation. I’m in doubt that the tampering occurred from the outside.’ He turns back to De Vries. ‘There’s no physical evidence we’ve found so far that leads us to the weapon and, obviously, no sign of the weapon itself.’

‘One assailant?’

‘Nothing, yet, to suggest otherwise.’

De Vries is frustrated. None of Ulton’s responses mean anything.

‘Timing? I know you’ll be guessing . . .’

‘Preliminary readings suggest eight to ten hours. Don’t quote me. The maid found her body just after five, so work it out yourself . . . It’s eight fifteen now. Between ten last night and one this morning. Because of the maid, we got here quickly,Vaughn.’

De Vries stares at him a moment longer, expectant.

‘Aren’t you going to ask?’ Ulton says.

De Vries shrugs.

‘I can’t be certain but I’d say that the weapon was a nine millimetre. She was shot at least five times. There are no shells. The shooter took the time and trouble to collect them.’

‘Planned actions . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes things more complicated. Anything else?’

‘That’s it for now,’ Ulton tells him. ‘They’ll take the body when you’re finished here and I’ll see you back in town.’

‘
Ja
. Give me ten more minutes, then you can take her,’ De Vries says. ‘Glad it’s you working this.’

Ulton turns and descends the stairs to the main hallway. In the distance, De Vries can hear him instructing his team. He turns to Don.

‘You want to see the scene again?’

Don hesitates.

‘If you think so.’

They walk back to the master bedroom and re-enter the expansive space. The crime scene technician has left now, and they are alone. De Vries lets Don stand next to him. He senses the door closing silently behind him, jumps minutely as it clicks shut. He takes a deep breath and surveys the whole room, taking in everything he can, but knowing that the photographs will always be there to remind him of everything physical. He holds his breath now, in the silence absorbing what he feels. There is no stench of death, just mild wood smoke and the acrid smell of fresh blood. He turns his head to scan the entire suite. It is very stark and impersonal, as if the space is too big for a woman on her own. He wonders whether she chose this style and that it reflects her personality or whether she just called in a designer and came home one day to find it all done. He looks down to his Warrant Officer.

‘Any thoughts?’

Don pauses. ‘Yes . . . But I do not have words for them yet.’

De Vries stares at him for a moment.

‘Then say nothing . . .’

In the hallway, De Vries waits for Don February; he wonders what his Warrant Officer is thinking about as he slowly descends the staircase.

‘We should talk to the maid. She still here?’

‘Yes,’ Don tells him. ‘She is downstairs in her quarters, with one of our officers.’

‘Okay, I’m going to take a look at the perimeter. Get her ready, will you?’

De Vries finds the entrance-way empty now, trots down the stairs to the street. He pulls out his cigarettes, lights one in cupped hands, walks to the other side of the road and slouches against the low wall of the opposite building. The smoke is diminishing, but it still taints the clear sea-air with a brown-blue haze.

The street-facing façade of the Holt house is white and minimalist. It is a smart new building, probably designed by one of the famous Cape Town architects on what looks like at least two generous mountainside plots. De Vries ambles across the street and climbs the low gate to a set of steep, narrow stone steps lined by large boulders, scrubby windblown trees and lush ferns. He gazes down to a small building at the bottom of the inclined garden, assumes that this is the maid’s room. He descends a dozen steps, looks back up at the house. From here, he cannot see the terrace or pool deck and notes that there is no direct access from this path. He scrutinizes the rocks, wonders whether an agile man or woman could climb up them to the terrace. After a while, he convinces himself that they could, reminds himself to ask Steve Ulton whether his team have surveyed this possibility. De Vries shakes his head and turns away: the population are gripped by fear of crime, but they do nothing practical to prevent it, expecting the private security firms to patrol them twenty-four hours a day to protect them.