Dead at Daybreak

“What’s your name?”

She hesitated. “Hope.”

“Hope?”

“My parents were somewhat…romantic.”

He rolled the name around in his mouth. Hope Beneke. He looked at her, wondered how someone, a woman, thirty years old, could live with the name Hope. He looked at her short hair. Like a man’s. Fleetingly he wondered with which angle of her face the gods of features had fumbled – an old game, vaguely remembered.

“I don’t have a wife, Hope.”

“I’m not surprised…What’s your name?”

“I like the Mister.”

“Do you want to accept the challenge, Mister van Heerden?”

¦

Wilna van As was somewhere in her indefinable middle years, a woman with no sharp edges, short and rounded, and her voice was quiet as they sat in the living room of the house in Durbanville while she told him and the attorney about Jan Smit.

She had introduced him as “Mr. van Heerden, our investigator.” Our. As if they owned him now. He asked for coffee when they were offered something to drink. Strangers to one another, they sat stiffly and formally in the living room.

“I know it’s almost impossible to find the will in time,” Van As said apologetically, and he looked at the female attorney. She met his gaze, her face expressionless.

He nodded. “You’re sure of the existence of the document?”

Hope Beneke drew in her breath as if she wanted to raise an objection.

“Yes. Jan brought it home one evening.” She gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “We sat at the table and he took me through it step-by-step. It wasn’t a long document.”

“And the tenor of it was that you would inherit everything?”

“Yes.”

“Who drew up the will?”

“He wrote it himself. It was in his handwriting.”

“Did anyone witness it?”

“He had it witnessed at the police station here in Durbanville. Two of the people there signed it.”

“There was only the one copy?”

“Yes,” said Wilna van As, in a resigned voice.

“You didn’t find it odd that he didn’t have an attorney to draw up the document?”

“Jan was like that.”

“How?”

“Private.”

The word hung in the air. Van Heerden said nothing, waiting for her to speak again.

“I don’t think he trusted people very much.”

“Oh?”

“He…we…led a simple life. We worked and came home. He sometimes referred to this house as his hiding place. There weren’t any friends, really…”

“What did he do?”

“Classical furniture. What other people describe as antiques. He said that in South Africa there weren’t really any antiques; the country was too young. We were wholesalers. We found the furniture and provided traders, sometimes sold directly to the collectors.”

“What was your role?”

“I began working for him about twelve years ago. As a kind of…secretary. He drove around looking for furniture, in the countryside, on farms. I manned the office. After six months – ”

“Where’s the office?”

“Here,” she indicated. “On Wellington Street. Behind Pick ’n Pay. It’s a little old house – ”

“There was no safe in the office.”

“No.”

“After six months…” he reminded her.

“I quickly learned the business. He was in the Northern Cape when someone telephoned from Swellendam. It was a jonkmanskas, a wardrobe, if I remember correctly, nineteenth-century, a pretty piece with inlays…In any case, I phoned him. He said I had to have a look at it. I drove there and bought it for next to nothing. He was impressed when he got back. Then I started doing more and more…”

“Who manned the office?”

“We started off by taking turns. Afterward he stayed in the office.”

“You didn’t mind?”

“I liked it.”

“When did you start living together?”

Van As hesitated.

“Miss van As…” Hope Beneke leaned forward, briefly searched for words. “Mr. van Heerden must unfortunately ask questions that might possibly be…uncomfortable. But it’s essential that he acquire as much information as possible.”

Van As nodded. “Of course. It’s just that…I’m not used to discussing the relationship. Jan was always…He said people didn’t have to know. Because they always gossip.”

She realized that he was waiting for an answer. “It was a year after we began working together.”

“Eleven years.” A statement.

“Yes.”

“In this house.”

“Yes.”

“And you never went into the safe.”

“No.”

He simply stared at her.

Van As gestured. “That’s the way it was.”

“If Jan Smit had died under different circumstances, how would you have got the will out of the safe?”

“I knew the combination.”

He waited.

“Jan changed it. To my birth date. After he had shown me the will.”

“He kept all his important documents in the safe?”

“I don’t know what else was in it. Because it’s all gone now.”

“May I see it? The safe?”

She nodded and stood up. Wordlessly he followed her down the passage. Hope Beneke followed them. Between the bathroom and the main bedroom, on the right-hand side, was the safe’s big steel door, the mechanism of the combination lock set in it. The door was open. Van As touched a switch on the wall, and a fluorescent light flickered and then glowed brightly. She walked in and stood in the safe.

“I think he added it. After he bought the house.”

“You think so?”

“He never mentioned it.”

“And you never asked?”

She shook her head. He looked at the inside of the safe. It was entirely lined with wooden shelves, all of them empty.

“You have no idea what was inside?”

She shook her head again, small beside him in the narrow confines of the safe.

“You never walked past when he was busy inside?”

“He closed the door.”

“And the secrecy never bothered you?”