He looked at me with complete revulsion. ‘You …’ he said again, and then bit off his words and shook his head. He flexed his great hands. He turned and walked back towards the little house, stopped and glared at me. Then he came back to me, pointed a finger at me, put his hands on his hips and looked down the road towards the station. He said something in a native language, two or three bitter sentences, and then he directed himself to me again. ‘Order,’ he said. ‘That is my job. To keep order. To fight the chaos. But this country …’
He focused on me again.
‘I told you. You don’t know what it’s like here. We have troubles. Big troubles. This place. It’s like the veld in drought. Ready to burn. We beat out the fires. We run from one fire to the next fire and we beat out the flames. Then you turn up here and want to set everything on fire. I’m telling you, Martin, if we don’t stop it, the fire will burn so big and fast and far that everything will be burnt up. Everything and everyone. Nobody will be able to stop it.’
Some of the policemen nodded their heads in agreement. I was almost ready to see his side of it. Then he got personal.
‘You must leave. You and that woman.’ He spat out the words. With hatred. I could not let myself react. ‘You brought your trouble here.’ His index finger was a gun pointing. ‘We don’t want it. Take it and leave.’
I heard the anger rising in my voice. ‘It’s your trouble that came to her. She didn’t want it. It came and fetched her.’
‘Fetched her? She saw a photo on TV.’
‘She phoned you about it and two days later three men in balaclavas broke down her front door to kill her. What was she supposed to do, Jack?’
He came a step closer. ‘She phoned me?’
‘The same evening that it was on the TV news she phoned you and asked whether the man you were looking for might be Jacobus le Roux. Remember?’
‘Lots of people phoned. Lots.’
‘But she is the only one that was attacked because she phoned…’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Arrogant. Taunting. He wanted me to lose my temper, lose control.
I pulled my new phone out of my pocket and offered it to him. ‘Call your colleagues in Cape Town, Jack. Ask them if there is a case file. Monday, twenty-fourth December. Attack at the house of Emma le Roux at ten o’clock in the morning. Call them.’
He ignored the cell phone.
‘Come on, Jack, take the damn phone and call them.’
Phatudi’s deep frown was back. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘She didn’t think it was necessary. She thought asking for help reasonably would be enough.’
‘She only asked about the photos.’
‘She also asked you about the vulture murders.’
‘That was
‘What?’ He stepped closer.
‘Careful, Jack, there are witnesses here. She sees the TV news. Twenty-second of December. She phones you. You say Cobie de Villiers can’t be Jacobus le Roux because everyone knows him and he’s been here all his life. That’s enough for her. She drops the whole idea, doesn’t mention it to anyone. On the twenty-fourth of December they break into her house, and she’s lucky to get away. That afternoon someone phones her and says something about “Jacobus”. The connection is bad; she can’t hear properly. She hires herself a bodyguard and comes here. You know what happens here.’
‘So?’
‘So the only connection with the attack on her is you, Jack. The call she made to you.’
‘What?’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Bullshit?’
‘I can’t even remember her phoning, Martin.’ But he was on the defensive now.
‘Who was with you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Were the calls taped?’
‘We are the police, not the Secret Service.’
‘Did you tell anyone about her phone call?’
‘I told you, I can’t remember her phoning. There were … I don’t know, fifty or sixty … Most of the calls are nonsense.’
‘Why didn’t you tell her about the Honey Badgers? The other day at Mogale?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Why not?’
‘What are you saying, Martin? You want me to take responsibility for something?’
‘Yes, Jack. I just don’t know what it is yet, but you are part of this fuck-up, and I am going to find out. And then I’ll come and get you.’
‘You? You’re jailbird trash. Don’t talk to me like that.’ He came right up to me and we stood like two bantam cocks, chest to chest. I wanted to hit him, I wanted to let all my frustration and rage boil over and I wanted to take it out on the man in front of me. I wanted to go to that other place where time stood still, the room of the red-grey mist. The door was wide open and beckoning.
Afterwards I would wonder what held me back. Was it the army of police? Hopefully, I wasn’t a moron. Was I tempered by the knowledge that jailbird trash learned: that you have to come out the other side, back to reality, where you paid dearly for your pleasures? And that I couldn’t afford to pay the price again? Or was it the shadow of a woman standing with her face in the rain and arms stretched up to the heavens?
I stepped back from the abyss – and from Phatudi. Small, deliberate, reluctant steps.
And I turned away.
31
Phatudi’s troops laughed at me when I walked to the Audi.
As I got in I saw him standing with his chest expanded and a smile of self-satisfaction.
I turned the ignition and drove away.
Past the station I let my rage boil over and banged the car into low gear and stomped on the accelerator. The rear end slid too far around the gravel turn and I fought the wheel, brought it back, accelerated again, spinning the tyres. They found traction and shot the Audi forward, revs too high. I ran through the gears, wanted to stamp the accelerator through the floor, a hundred and fucking sixty, and there was the R40 junction up ahead. I had to brake and the car shuddered and for a while I didn’t know whether I was going to make it, but I stopped in a cloud of dust. I saw that my knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
I opened the door and got out. A truck and trailer thundered past on the R40, loaded high with massive logs. I shouted at it, a meaningless cry.
A minibus taxi passed the other way, filled with black faces staring at me, a crazy white man beside the road.
I didn’t know where to go. That was my problem. It was the primary source of my frustration and rage.
Phatudi had baited, taunted and angered me, but I had handled that. I could wait for him, for the right time and the right place. But the fact that my choices had dwindled to nothing, I could do nothing about.
On the way to the house with the pink concrete wall, I had had three options. Edwin Dibakwane and the letter. Jack Phatudi and the phone call. Donnie Branca and Mogale. And now I had none.
Edwin Dibakwane was dead. Someone had tortured him and shot him and left his body in a plantation. The connection between the letter and its author was broken. Scrap option number one.
No, not entirely. Dibakwane would have told the people pulling out his fingernails where the letter came from.
