Americans come in but somewhere along the line they have a finger in the pie. We know you paid De Jager in dollars and gave him a new identity. We know Schlebusch murdered De Jager. I suspect he was after the money. But it could be that you asked him to eliminate De Jager. Because he wanted to sing. I don’t know and I no longer care. All that matters is that we have one thing in common. We’re looking for Schlebusch. You, I assume, want to protect him or keep him quiet. Or stop him from murdering again. Murder and Robbery wants to lock him up. This conflict of interests is your problem. All we want is the will.”
“Or his evidence about its existence and its contents,” said Hope Beneke.
“Right,” said Van Heerden. “And let’s be honest: you have no idea where to find Schlebusch.”
“Do you?” asked Redelinghuys.
“No,” he said. “But I’ll find him.”
“How?”
“I know where to dig. And you’re going to leave me alone until I find him. And then you can argue again about jurisdiction and orders from higher up.”
“You don’t know jack shit, Van Heerden. About ’seventy-six. You know nothing.”
“I know enough, Brits. The detail doesn’t matter. I know enough. Yesterday afternoon Schlebusch ran us off the road and, while I hung in the wreck, held a weapon against my head and said I had to leave this whole thing alone, and now I’m wondering about two things, Brits. Why didn’t he shoot me? Because he could have. And why does he want me to stop the investigation? I’ll tell you why. He didn’t shoot me because he doesn’t want to cause more pressure. He didn’t know Mzimkhulu was dead and he didn’t want the official investigation to escalate due to another murder. Why not? For the same reason that he wants me to drop the case. Because he knows I’m close, Brits. Somewhere I hit a nerve in all the speculation and publicity that made him think I’m close. And he can’t run away because if he could, he would have. He has interests keeping him here and he’s nervous. He has dollars and a lifestyle and if the affair escalates, he loses everything. And I’m going to find him. I’m telling you here and now, I’m going to find him.”
He saw Mat Joubert’s smile.
“And one more thing. Yesterday afternoon, with a gun at my head, Schlebusch spoke about the will, and I can’t stop speculating how he knew about it. Because only we – and Murder and Robbery – know it’s the reason for the private investigation. And we didn’t talk.”
“Oh, no,” said Nougat O’Grady, and pointed a fat finger at Bester Brits. “They knew it, too. They’ve been talking to me since early Monday morning, very buddy-buddy, ‘we’re in this thing together,’ and now they’re trying to take it away, double-crossing bastards.”
“Then, gentlemen, I wonder who informed Schlebusch: Military Intelligence or the SAPS?”
¦
The sunlight was blindingly bright outside, the sky cloudless and blue, the smell of sun on wet earth, the grass suddenly a deep green, the wind icy.
“There was snow on the mountains,” his mother said as he drove home with her on the N7, the river at Vissershok broad and gleaming. She said Carolina de Jager was safe at her house with Hope, that they would be waiting for him, and she asked if he was really all right. He said yes, only bruises.
“I met Kara-An Rousseau last night,” she said.
“Oh.”
“She came to the hospital.”
“Oh.”
“Is there something I don’t know about?”
“No.”
She was silent for a long time until they turned in at the gate. “I think Hope is wonderful,” she said.
She stopped in front of his house.
“Here are your keys. They brought them to me,” she said, opening her handbag.
“Ma…”
“Yes, my son?”
“There is something I must talk to you about.”
“Yes, Son?”
“Yesterday afternoon…Schlebusch. He threatened me, Ma. He said he’ll…come and hurt you if I don’t drop the inves-tigation.”
He looked at her, watching for fear in her face. There was none.
“I’m getting help today. I’ll get the best there is. I promise you.”
“But you’re not going to drop the investigation?”
“I’ll…get the best, Ma – ”
She silenced him with a gesture. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell you something, Zet. I went to see Hope. Last Friday. After you’d dropped the job. I went to speak to her. About you. To give you another chance. I’m not going to apologize for it because I’m your mother and I did it for you. I did it because I believed the only thing that could heal you was for you to work like you used to work. I still believe it. I don’t want you to drop it. I just want you to be careful. If you want to get someone to look after me, that’s fine. But who is going to look after
“You went to speak to Hope, Ma?”
“I asked you who is going to look after you, Zet.”
“I…No one. I…”
“Will you be careful?”
He opened the car door. “I can’t believe you went to speak to Hope.”
She put the car into gear. “Water under the bridge. And I’m not going to apologize.”
He got out, almost closed the door, suddenly remembered something.
“Ma.”
“Yes, Zet?”
“Thank you. For last night.”
She smiled at him, moved the car forward. He slammed the door and she drove off to her big house.
He stood in the sunlight, his keys in his hand. He saw the daisies, suddenly in flower, a sea of white and orange stretching from his door as far as the gate. He saw the blue sky, the jagged line of the Hottentots Holland peaks in the east.
His mother had gone to speak to Hope. No wonder they had had such a cozy conversation the day before yesterday.
He shook his head, unlocked the door, drew the curtains in front of the windows, saw white panels of sunshine illuminating his house like spotlights.
He looked through his CDs until he found the right one, turned up the sound to full volume, and sat down in a warm patch of sunlight. First the foundation laid by the orchestra, the prologue to the divine, then the voice of the soprano, so sweet, so heavenly sweet, Mozart’s Agnus Dei from
Then he had a long, hot, pleasurable shower.
¦
“He was a Recce,” said Carolina de Jager. “And he was immensely proud of it, he and his father, and when we were told of his death, it broke his father. I still claim it was where the cancer originated. His father died in 1981 and I let the farm and moved to town and I don’t know what I’m going to do with the land – there is no one to inherit.”
She sat in the sunlight that fell through the windows of his mother’s house, a big black writing pad and a cardboard box on her lap, and she spoke to Joan van Heerden, not to him, and he thought he understood. Wilna van As sat opposite her, next to Hope, a box of tissues next to her, expectantly, four women and him.
“He was at Grey College in Bloemfontein and he wasn’t an excessively clever child, and he would come to the farm. He was strong because he and his father worked side by side on the farm. He was a good kid, no smoking or
