‘Not exactly,’ Riedwaan replied. ‘But we need to speak to you to find out.’
‘If you’ve driven from Cape Town, I’m sure you’ll need some coffee. Come into the kitchen. We can talk more privately there.’
They followed her inside and sat down at a scrubbed yellow-wood table. The coffee pot hissed on the stove.
‘What is it with me and cats?’ Riedwaan muttered.
‘Rasputin isn’t used to visitors,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, stroking the cat’s gun-metal coat.
‘We need to ask you some questions about Captain Hofmeyr’s death,’ said Clare. Murder was too brutal a word for the ordered domesticity of the room.
‘Major Hofmeyr,’ corrected his widow. ‘Why do you want to stir it up again?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Clare, ‘but we suspect that the weapon used to shoot your husband has been used in another crime.’
‘How awful,’ whispered Mrs Hofmeyr, bringing her hand to her mouth. ‘Near here?’
‘In Namibia,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Walvis Bay.’
Mrs Hofmeyr frowned. ‘What happened?’
‘Four shootings,’ said Riedwaan. ‘It’d be a great help if you could tell us what happened to your husband.’
‘I’ve already told everything to the police, but all right. He was shot in the head. Close range, single pistol shot. I identified him.’ Mrs Hofmeyr trembled, but there were no tears. She had used up her quota long ago. ‘He looked so young again when I saw him. All those years gone. A life erased.’
‘What time did he leave the house?’ asked Clare.
‘Early. Before seven, I’d say. I was asleep when he left. When I woke at seven-thirty the tea he had left for me was ice cold.’ She twisted her cup in its saucer. ‘Who would want to torture him?’
Riedwaan could think of quite a few people who might want to leave a trellis of knife wounds on a man who had commanded a special operations unit during the dirtiest years of South Africa’s war in Namibia. Hearts and minds. You could say that Hofmeyr’s killer got both. He didn’t say that.
‘One of the officers here said it was gangsters,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr. ‘People in the village said some 28s had been here.’
The number gangs. South Africa’s apocryphal grim reapers, trailing fear and destruction in their wake. Sliding like a knife through the soft underbelly of a country where all felt their houses to be chalked with crosses, where the vultures of fear circled above the living. The perfect slipstream for another kind of killer, well dressed, without tinted windows, to follow. He would have been smoke against a heat-whitened sky, invisible until the roar of the flames was too close. If he existed.
‘They never traced them?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘No,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, acidly. ‘How often do the police find anyone?’
Riedwaan shifted in his chair. He had no answer for that.
‘What did he do, Major Hofmeyr, with his time?’ Clare changed tack. ‘After the army?’
‘Rugby-coaching at the school. He’d started teaching science too. He was a physicist. The army was good to ambitious Afrikaners born on the wrong side of the tracks. Teaching science was his way of saying sorry for what happened’ – she hesitated – ‘for what happened before.’
‘He see anyone from his army days?’
‘Not really. He was a loner. After Bishop Tutu’s thing, the dust settled and we didn’t see anyone much. I suppose they didn’t need each other any more, didn’t need to check up on who was going to say what. Sometimes his old army friends would come through, drink a bit, hunt a bit in season, but other than that the past just went away. We were quiet here. I liked it like that.’ She twisted the obsolete wedding ring on her left hand.
‘I’m sorry to bring up the past,’ said Clare.
Mrs Hofmeyr shook her head. ‘Where does it start? That’s what I never know about the past. Kobus was a soldier. The army was his life and 1994 was the end of it. Is that the beginning or the end of the past?’
‘That’s why you came to McGregor?’ Clare asked.
‘I don’t think my husband cared where he went. He just came here to wait until his heart stopped beating.’
‘Depression?’
Mrs Hofmeyr batted the word away with a dismissive hand. ‘Psychological labels. Human beings aren’t bottles of jam. Depressed, obsessive compulsive, paranoid. Giving it a name doesn’t make it feel any different.’
‘He came out of it?’ Clare guessed.
Mrs Hofmeyr looked up at her, surprised. ‘He did. Slowly. Despite himself. It helped that our daughter came to visit with her baby from Australia. The first time they had spoken in fifteen years, but not even he could fight with a baby. It was as if some knot inside him loosened, released the man I had married. I don’t know. He kept on worrying about the world, about terrorists and bombs, and about what could happen to his
‘What was he like, your husband?’ asked Clare.
Mrs Hofmeyr sighed as she cleared away the coffee cups. ‘If you want a sense of my husband, go and look at his den.’ She opened the kitchen door and gestured down the passageway. ‘I suppose you could say that is what his world shrunk to.’
Apart from the kitchen, the house was dim. The shutters were closed, the curtains drawn. It had the stillness of a museum. Clare opened a door off the passage. A masculine seclusion, free of ornaments. It was irresistible. She stepped inside. The desk was clean, the letter opener and pen standing in quartz holders. A perfect desert rose on an ugly little plinth held down a pile of till slips. Clare checked the dates. All from a few days before Hofmeyr was killed: bottle store, DIY, cigarettes and a paper from the cafe. Next to the desk was a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. A trophy hunt. Caprivi, Kaokoland, Angola. Clare wondered where the helicopters had hovered, machine-gun bullets studding into the fleeing animals below. She pictured the elephant cows herding their panic-stricken young towards the tree line. One sinking to her knees as her calf nudged her with his forehead, then retreated and watched as the men, laughing, hopped down to hack off the cow’s foot as the last light in her wise eyes was extinguished. Then again, the murdered man could just as easily have bought it in a junk shop and brought it home for a laugh.
One wall was covered with photographs. Clare went to look at them. A 1960s wedding picture. Later, Mrs Hofmeyr in a halter-neck top, a baby in her arms. Then another baby, the first child now a thoughtful little boy bracketed around his mother’s slim legs. Another photo showed a sturdy young woman on a speedboat, a greying Major Hofmeyr grinned next to her.
‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, coming to stand next to Clare. ‘She moved to Australia.’
‘They seem happy here,’ said Clare.
‘They were,’ Mrs Hofmeyr replied. ‘Eventually.’
Clare guessed that politics would have come between them. A father with a decorated career in the defence force of the apartheid years did not go down well in the new South Africa.
Mrs Hofmeyr trailed a finger across a picture of her husband saluting troops on a dusty parade ground. The undulating sweep of sand was unmistakable. Strange, though, to see the vast plain covered with tents. They seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, a regatta of triangular khaki sails on a sea of sand.
‘Walvis Bay?’ asked Clare.
‘Where else? It looks so different now,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr.
‘How long were you there for?’
‘You want me to give you the hours and seconds? The heartbeats?’ Her bitterness flared, a naked flame. ‘We were there from 1989 to 1994. Five years, three months and eleven days. Before that at the weapons testing site in Vastrap in the Northern Cape. God knows what we were supposed to do there in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. No people. No trees. Nothing but heat and dust and secrets. Not a place to go if you had a family.’
The large photograph hanging behind the door caught Clare’s attention. She stopped, arrested by the photograph of Major Hofmeyr. Lithe and brown, his eyes the blue of the sky above the dune rising in a majestic sweep behind him. Three soldiers, equally confident, were draped over a dusty Bedford. The man next to Hofmeyr, his swagger evident in his muscular, khaki-clad legs, had a hard face. The third one was as thin as a whip, his expression shadowed by his cap.
