“I’m out of the Force, Mike.”
De Villiers merely nodded. It had never been his place to ask questions. Least of all of officers.
“Coffee?” Martha asked from the kitchen door.
Mike waited for Van Heerden. “That would be nice,” he said.
“Still at the armory, Mike?”
“Yes, Captain.” Old habits. The eyelids. Which blinked from the bottom up like a lizard’s. “Let’s sit down.” He put the screwdriver in the tool chest and walked to the white plastic furniture under the peppertree. Square and neat in the sunlight, each chair in its precise place.
“I’m working on a case, Mike.”
Eyelids blinked, waiting, as always, like years ago.
“M16.”
They sat.
“Assault rifle,” said Mike de Villiers. The eyes closed. How many years had it been since he saw it at the armory for the first time, since Nagel had told him, “I’m going to show you the biggest secret weapon in the Force,” and they had gone to the armory and looked for Mike de Villiers and fed requests for arms information into the man as if into a computer and stood and watched the wheels turning behind the closed eyes and the information coming out, precise and systematic. Sometimes here, in this house, Nagel, who made Martha laugh with his slim body and his deep voice and his charm and then the ritual,
“The Smit case,” de Villiers said.
“You heard.”
An almost invisible nod.
“Did they speak to you?”
“No.” The bare word, hanging.
“It’s an American rifle, Mike.”
“Military. The rifle of their infantry since Vietnam. Good weapon. Up to nine hundred fifty rounds per minute on fully automatic. Light. From less than three kilograms to just under four. Different models. M16, M16A1, M16A2, M4 carbine, La France M16K submachine gun, 5.56 caliber, the whole lot. That’s what makes it so odd because it’s not popular round here. R1 and AK-47 use 7.62; ammunition is freely available.”
“Who would use it, Mike?”
De Villiers looked at him, eyes open now. Nagel had never asked him to speculate.
“How would I know, Captain?”
“Did you wonder?”
The eyes closed again. “Yes.”
“And what did you think, Mike?”
De Villiers hesitated for a long time, his eyes closed. Then he opened them again.
“It’s not a good weapon for housebreaking, Captain. It’s big, even if it’s light. It’s a weapon for the battlefield, for the swamps of the Far East and the deserts of the Middle East. It’s a weapon for killing outside, not inside. How do you hide it under your jacket in a suburb? It’s not a good weapon for close work, in a house, Captain. A revolver would’ve been better.”
“What’s your opinion, Mike?”
The eyes, the strange, hypnotic eyes closed again. “There are a few possibilities, Captain. You want to intimidate, people are scared of a large weapon. M16 is in every movie. Or it’s your only unregistered weapon and you don’t want to leave a trail. Or you’re an American. An American soldier. Or…”
Eyes open. He shook his head slightly from side to side, as if he wanted to leave it.
“Or?”
“I don’t know…”
“Tell me, Mike.”
“Mercenary, Captain. M16 is just as available on the black market in Europe as the AK. Mercenaries. Many of them like it. But…”
“But?”
“What would a mercenary be doing in Durbanville, Captain?”
Martha de Villiers came out with the coffee and somewhere a Karoo Prinia long-tailed tit’s clear song sounded in the sunlight.
¦
When he drove away, Mike and Martha de Villiers stood in front of the house, the buxom woman’s arm around her husband’s waist, a couple in Bothasig on a street with neat gardens and ugly concrete walls and children on bicycles and the low whine of lawn mowers using the sunlit gift of a winter morning, and he wondered why his life couldn’t have been like that, a woman and children and a small castle with its own little pub built on and a mongrel dog and a career and a home loan. That had been, somewhere in the past, a possibility.
What had driven him to take the wrong turns to nowhere, to seek the dead ends? The road signs had been so clear, so attractive.
Was that not what he wanted? he suddenly asked himself. Wife and children and a lawn mower?
So fucking badly.
? Dead at Daybreak ?
18
Boet Marnewick found his wife’s kneeling body in the living room, her hands tied behind her back with masking tape, her feet bound with a silk stocking. Forty-six stab wounds, made with a sharp instrument, in her stomach and her back, her nipples sliced off, her genitals mutilated beyond recognition. Blood everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room. A murder that shook the community, caused fear and hatred, and was a subject of conversation for years to come. Stilfontein was rough, a town that knew and understood alcoholism and wife beating and immorality and adultery and assault. Even manslaughter. And, occasionally, murder. But not this kind of murder. The deadly blow in a hotheaded, drunken moment, after an excess of alcohol – that was possible to understand, once in a while.
But this was in cold blood, done by a stranger, an intruder, a thief who, taking his time and with malice aforethought, mutilated and murdered a defenseless woman.
I was in my room, busy with homework, when there was a knock at the door. My mother answered and I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone of her voice made me walk to the living room and there was my detective, my Louis L’Amour Samaritan, and suddenly my heart beat in my throat because my mother looked shocked.
“Sir…” I said, and swallowed, and then my mother said, “Baby Marnewick is dead, Zet.”
He pretended not to know me and it was only when he left that he squeezed my shoulder, looked at me, and gave me a small smile. But before that he asked his questions. Had we seen anything? Heard anything? What did we know about the Marnewicks?
And I sat there with my fantasies and my intimate knowledge and my voyeurism and merely affirmed my mother’s negative replies. We knew nothing.
We got the details later. From neighbors and the
The details upset me. Partly because of my own unclean thoughts about Baby Marnewick. And the fact that they, however slight the connection, linked me to the murderer who had cut and stabbed, driven by lust. Because I had lusted as well – even though our fantasies had been so dramatically different.
And partly because a human being, someone in Stilfontein, one of us, was capable of such a revolting
