Five days after Cobie de Villiers disappeared, Jacobus le Roux’s parents died in a car accident.
Five days.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But Emma hadn’t thought so. She had underlined this entry twice. My belief in coincidence had been severely dented in the last two days.
If it hadn’t been coincidence, what had Cobie’s disappearance to do with the accident?
Where was he going when he left Heuningklip? What had Melanie Posthumus said? Before we got married there was something he had to do. He said he would be away for two weeks and then he would bring me a ring. Something like that. When she asked him what he was going to do, he wouldn’t say. Except that it was the right thing to do and one day he would tell her.
The right thing.
What did it all mean? What had Emma thought?
Not enough information. Not enough to jump to wild conclusions and improbable theories.
I had an idea. I found the pen in Emma’s handbag, picked up the sheet of paper and drew up a table of all the dates and incidents I could remember.
Eight years between the disappearance of Jacobus le Roux and Cobie de Villiers’ appointment at Heuningklip. Let us assume it is the same man. Even though Phatudi, Wolhuter, Moller and Melanie all say the photo of Jacobus does not look like Cobie. Could someone change so much in eight years? I looked at the photo again. Jacobus was more of a boy than a man. Does someone really change that much between the ages of nineteen and twenty- seven? Hard to believe. Yet Emma had seen similarities.
Eight years after he went missing after a shoot-out with poachers in Kruger Park, he reappears. And only two hundred kilometres from where he disappeared. He told Melanie he had grown up in Swaziland. Kruger was not far from Swaziland. Less than a hundred kilometres away. Did that mean anything?
Eight years.
Why eight years? Why 1994? The Year of the New South Africa. He works for Moller for three years and then he is gone again, invisible, for another three years, nearly, appearing again at Mogale. Why? Why not in Namibia or Durban or Zanzibar? If Jacobus and Cobie were the same person and he had reason to disappear, why did he keep coming back to this area? What kept him here?
Six years at the rehabilitation centre and then the incident with the vultures. Was there significance in these time gaps? Three years at Heuningklip, three years missing, six years at Mogale. Coincidence?
Poachers. Twice he disappears because poachers are shot at. In 1986 he shoots at ivory poachers, in 2006 he is suspected of shooting vulture poachers. Twenty years between the two incidents, but the similarities remain.
What the fuck did it all mean?
I had no idea.
I removed the book from Emma’s bag and took it to read to her.
The bandages on her head and shoulder were fresh and less bulky than the previous ones. Yet she seemed just as vulnerable.
‘Hello, Emma.’
‘I found your handbag. Everything is still in there. Your phone and purse too. I looked at your notes. I think I understand better now. But there’s nothing … Nothing makes sense. What bothers me most, Emma, is why he looks so different. Why would his face change so much between eighty-six and ninety-four? It’s the one thing that still makes me doubt that he’s the same man. I know you thought differently. You believed. Maybe it was that phone call you received. And then you realised that he left Heuningklip just before your parents died. Maybe there was something else, something you didn’t tell me.’
She just lay there, the woman whose naked body I had seen two days before in the reflection from the glass of a picture, so perfect, so alive.
I looked down at the book in my hands. It had a green cover, a close-up photograph of a leaf. There was a bookmark in it. I opened it at that page.
‘I thought I might read to you, Emma.’
And so I began. It was a description of a unicorn hunt. And the hunter becomes the hunted.
28
Jeanette Louw had spent the greater part of her adult life in uniform. I suspect she couldn’t do without it. She had developed a type of uniform for her new role as owner and managing director of Body Armour. It consisted of men’s suits, expensive designer wear from some or other shop on the Cape Town Waterfront, with demure shirts and multicoloured ties. In office hours the big blonde hair would be tied back with something to match the tie.
Through the glass of the hospital main entrance, I saw her approaching. Today’s suit was black, the shirt cream and the tie yellow with a blue dot pattern. She had the remains of a white Gauloise between her fingers which she flicked into some shrubs, creating an arc of sparks, before entering the building. A few steps behind came B. J. (BeeJay) Fikter and Barry Minnaar, grey, lean men, unobtrusive, as they should be, each with a black sports bag in his hand.
I rose to meet them.
‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ she said, perspiring.
‘You should see the wounds when I’m naked.’
‘God forbid. How is she?’
‘Stable.’
I shook hands with Fikter and Minnaar.
‘Where can we talk?’
‘In my VIP suite.’
‘It’s our VIP suite now,’ said B. J.
‘But you aren’t VIPs like me.’
‘Of course not. It stands for Very Insane Person.’
‘Very Important Peasant,’ said Barry Minnaar.
‘Jealousy,’ I said. ‘It’s an ugly thing.’
B. J. got carried away. ‘Very Insecure Piss …’
‘OK!’ said Jeanette Louw. She shook her head, ‘Fucking men,’ and we went into the hospital.
I told them everything. When I had finished, Jeanette asked, ‘How are we going to handle her protection?’
‘I will do night shift,’ said B. J. Fikter. ‘Barry can do days.’
‘Do you have firearms?’ I asked.
They nodded.
‘Do the police still have people at her door?’ Jeanette asked.
