Thirteen Hours (43 page)

Vusi jogged away and Griessel hung his head while Mat
patiently stood and watched him. For a long time. In silence, so that the
tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the study could be heard. The two of them
were the dinosaurs of the SAPS, he thought, an endangered, dying breed.
Political global warming and racial climate change should have taken their toll
long ago, but here they were still, two old carnivores in the jungle, limbs
stiff, teeth blunt, but still not completely ineffective.

Griessel scratched audibly at the bushy hair behind
his ear. He grunted: 'Hu ...' turned and went outside. Joubert followed tranquilly
across the little doormat and the veranda, past the bougainvilleas and down the
slate pathway. Griessel opened the garden gate and went and stood in the
street. He turned to face Lion's Head. Joubert stood behind him, looking,
seeing the rocky dome rising above the city, feeling the wind, watching how it
ruffled Benny's hair even more. This day that had dawned in such perfection,
was being overtaken by the southeaster. Tonight it would howl like a demon
around the side of Table Mountain.

'Before six this morning, up there,' said Griessel,
pointing at Lion's Head, 'she told a woman to call the police. Those young men
had been chasing her since two in the morning. At eleven at the deli there, she
told her father over the tickey-box that she couldn't talk to the police ...'

Tickey-box, thought Joubert. A prehistoric word.

Griessel dipped his head again. Then he looked up at
Table Mountain. His eyes measured the distance to Lion's Head. He looked at
Joubert. 'Five hours after she was on Lion's Head she arrives at the cafe. And
the fucker parks in the street and comes in after her. How did they know, Mat?
Where was she in between, why couldn't they find her? Why did she change her
mind about the police?' He lifted his hand to his hair again. 'What do you do?
A girl, a foreigner, you are desperate to find her, she could be anywhere. How
do you watch the whole city?'

They stared at the mountain. As always, Griessel's
ability to put himself in someone else's shoes, either victim or the
perpetrator, charmed Joubert.

Then he realised what Griessel obviously already had.
They had been sitting on the mountain and watching the whole city. 'Could be,'
he said.

'Fokkol
use to us now,' said Griessel, still one step ahead.
'They've got her.'

'But you can't see this house from the mountain,' said
Joubert, nodding at the Victorian building beside them.

'That's true . ..' Lost in thought again, Benny's
brain was searching, Joubert knew. He knew the frustration, the junkyard of
information from a day like today when everything happened at once. You had to
sift through the chaos; everything you had heard and seen, everything you knew,
had to be sorted. For him it was the labour of the night, when he lay beside
Margaret, behind her warm body with his hand on the rounding of her belly. Then
his thoughts would travel down slow, systematic pathways. But

Griessel's process was different: impatient, quick,
not always faultless, but much faster. Griessel's head jerked, a tumbler had
dropped and he looked down the street and began walking in that direction.
Joubert had to stretch his long legs to keep up. A hundred metres further on,
Griessel stopped in a driveway, looking at the house, the garage. 'He sat here,
in a bakkie ...' Excited. 'He nearly drove us off the road ...'

Griessel jogged up the drive, turned and looked back
at Piet van der Lingen's house and said: 'No ...' He walked back and forth,
jumped up and down and said: 'Mat come and stand here.'

Joubert came and stood there.

'Stand on your toes.'

Joubert stretched.

'What can you see of the house?'

The big man looked. 'Just too low to see everything.'

'He drove out of here, a guy in a bakkie. Toyota
four-by-four, faded red, the old model. Little fucker behind the wheel was
young, in a hell of a hurry, drove right in front of us and raced off towards
the city ...'

Joubert focused differently, unburdened by memories.
'He could have stood on the bakkie,' he said. 'He would have been able to see
everything then.'

'Jissis,'
said Griessel. 'Young, he was young, just like the others.'
He looked at Joubert. 'I will recognise him, Mat, if I see his fucking face
again. I will know him.' He was quiet for a heartbeat, then he said: 'An old
Toyota . . . that's not a drug dealer's car, Mat...'

Griessel's phone rang. He checked the screen before he
answered. 'Sarge?' He listened for about forty seconds and began walking. Mat
Joubert walked behind him, faster and faster, keeping his eyes on Griessel.
Here came the tsunami again.

'Get more people, Sarge,' said Griessel over the
phone. 'I'm coming.'

Griessel looked back at Joubert, the familiar,
spark-shooting fire in his eyes. 'About ten minutes ago someone dropped off a
young white guy at City Park Casualties, and then left. In haste. Victim was
stabbed in the throat with a blade; they might be able to save him. I'm off,
Mat...' Griessel began to run.

'I'll do the scene,' shouted Joubert after him.

'Thanks, Mat.' Benny's words were blown away on the
wind.

'Get her, Benny,' shouted Joubert, but he couldn't tell
if Benny had heard him. He watched his colleague's running figure, so
determined, so urgent, and again he felt that emotion, nostalgia, sadness, as
though it were the last time he would see Benny Griessel.

It was Jess Anderson who broke the silence in the
study and put words to their anxiety. 'Why doesn't he call?'

Bill Anderson did not want to sit, he wanted to walk
up and down to vent some of his tension. But he couldn't, because he knew that
would upset his wife even more. So he sat beside her on the brown leather
couch. His lawyer friend, Connelly, and the Police Chief, Dombkowski, had
insisted he stay, so he could be here when the South African policeman phoned.
Now he was sorry he hadn't gone along to Erin's parents. It was his duty. But
he couldn't leave Jess alone in these circumstances.

'It's almost forty minutes,' she said.

'We don't know how far he had to travel,' said
Anderson.

'We could call him ...'

'Let's give it a little more time.'

They held her down on the concrete floor, four of
them. A fifth put a blade under her T-shirt and cut it away, then her shorts,
then her underwear. The same knife that had cut Erin's throat, the same hand,
stripped her naked, effortlessly. They pulled her up and pushed her against the
narrow steel pillar, her arms bent backwards and tied with something around the
pole. Then they stood back and all she could do was sink down as far as her
bonds allowed, to hide her shame, so that her gaze fixed on her running shoes.

'Where is it?'

She didn't answer. She heard him coming, footfalls on
the floor, two steps only. He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that
it banged against the metal of the pillar. He knelt in front of her.

'Where is it?' the question was repeated.

Her left eye was swollen shut and painful. She focused
the other on him. His handsome face was against hers, calm. As ever. His voice
carried only authority, control.

Her revulsion for him was greater than her fear of
death. This knowledge came in a rush; it liberated her and brought with it the
impulse to do something, to kick, to spit, and she began to collect saliva in
her mouth. For everything he had done, everything, she wanted to cast scorn and
hatred on him, but she reconsidered. She was not powerless. They could not kill
her. Not now. Not yet. She could buy time. She was not alone.
I'm on my way, don't open
the door for anybody, I will call when I get there, please, Miss Anderson,
the policeman's voice, the
caring, the will to make her safe, to rescue her. He was somewhere now, looking
for her, he would find her; somehow or other he would find out who was hunting
her. It was so obvious, he would find out, he would find her.

She answered the man by shaking her head slowly from
side to side.

He took her hair in an iron grip. 'I'm going to hurt
you,' he said. In his practical way.

'Go ahead.' She tried to keep her voice as even as
his.

He laughed, right in her face. 'You have no idea ...'

It didn't matter, she thought. Let him laugh.

He let her hair go suddenly and stood up. 'Their
luggage is still at the Cat & Moose ...'

'We should have taken that long ago.'

'We didn't know, Steve. You know what she said in the
club ... Where the fuck is Barry? Call him, go get their stuff.'

'They're not going to just give it to us, Jay.'

She lifted her head and saw them looking at each
other. There was tension between them.

Steve, the black guy, eventually nodded, turned and
left. Jay spoke to another one, one she didn't know: 'There's a hardware shop
one block up, right-hand corner ...'

She saw his hand dip into his pocket, take out a few
notes and hand them over.

'I want pruning shears. We'll cut off her toes. Then
her fingers. Then her nipples. Pity though. Great tits.'

It took a while before Fransman Dekker asked Michele
Malherbe if she and Adam had slept together. Her dignity overwhelmed him when
she came through the office door, so it was only later that he realised she was
smaller than he thought. Her hair was blonde, cut short and her face
attractive. Her age hard to pin down until he looked at her hands later and
realised she must be in her late fifties or early sixties. She introduced
herself, listened attentively to his rank and name and sat down in one of the
guest chairs with an aura of controlled loss. Dekker could not sit at Barnard's
desk, it felt wrong at that moment. He took the other guest chair.

'It's a great loss, Inspector,' she said with her
elbows on the arms of the chair and her hands held together in her lap. He
could see she had been crying. He wondered, immediately, how a woman like her
could fall for Adam Barnard.

'It is,' he said. 'You knew him well?'

'Nearly twenty-five years.'

'Ah ... uh ... madam, I understand you know the
industry very well, the circumstances ...'

She nodded, her face serious and focused.

'Why would someone want to ...' He searched for a
euphemism. '.. . do away with him?'

'I don't think Adam's death has anything to do with
the industry, Inspector.'

'Oh?'

She lifted her right hand in a small gesture. There
was a single, elegant ring on her middle finger. 'We may be an emotional lot,
by definition. Music is emotion, after all, is it not? But in essence there is
no great difference between the music industry and any other. We fight, we
argue, we compete with each other, we say and do things that were better not
said or done, but it's like that everywhere. The only big difference is that
the media ... tends to wash our dirty laundry in public.'

'I'm not sure I understand.'

'I'm trying to say that I can't think of a single reason
why anyone in Adam's world would want to murder him. I can't think of anyone
who would be capable of that.' He drew in a breath to respond, but she made the
same gesture and said: 'I'm not naive. I have learned that our nature allows
for anything. But after a quarter-century working with people, you see all
sides, and you pick up a fair amount of wisdom along the way from which you can
draw in circumstances like this.'

'Madam, the way this happened ... points to someone
who had information about Adam's domestic situation.'

She didn't look away. Her eyes were light brown. Her
sensuality was subtle, he thought, maybe in the blend of what he knew about her
and her refinement. 'I'm not sure I know what you are referring to.'

'They knew about his wife, for example ...'

Her smile was sympathetic. 'Inspector, unfortunately
dear Alexandra's situation is general knowledge. Especially in the industry.'

'Did Barnard talk about it?'

Muted indignation. 'Adam would never dream of doing
that.'