Devil's Peak

?If I see him. Who are you??

?Tell him the guy who gives good work tips was here. He will know.? He turned away again, as if he had lost interest.

?John hasn?t been here for ages. I don?t even know where he is.?

He sauntered towards the pickup and said with a shrug, ?Then I will give the job to someone else.?

?Wait. Maybe my father will know.?

?Luke? Is he here??

?He?s at work. In Maitland. At the abattoir.?

?Maybe I will go past there. Thank you.?

She did not say goodbye. She stood in the doorway, hip against the doorframe, and watched him. As he slipped in behind the wheel he wondered whether she spoke the truth.

* * *

She told the minister about the evening her father called her a whore. How he stood over her in the bathroom and made her scrub off the make-up with a face cloth and soap and water. She wept as he lectured her and said not in his house. There would be no whoring in his house. That was the night it began. When the thing happened inside her. As she recalled the tirade, she was aware of what was going on between her and the minister, because it was familiar territory. She was explaining The Reason and he wanted to hear it. They. Men looked at her, after she had done her job, after she had opened her body to them with gentle hands and caressing words and they wanted to hear her story, her tragic tale. It was a primitive thing. They wanted her really to be good. The whore with the golden heart. The whore who was so nearly an ordinary girl. The minister had it too?he stared intently at her, so ready to empathize with her. But at least with him, the other thing was absent. Her clients, almost without exception, wanted to know if it was also a sex thing?really good, but also horny. Their fantasy of the nympho myth. She was aware of all these things as she sketched her story.

?I?ve thought about it so much, because that is where it all began. That night. Even now, when I think about it, there is all this anger. I just wanted to look nice. For myself. For my father. For my friends. He didn?t want to see that, just all this other stuff, this evil. And then the religion thing just got worse. He forbade us to dance or go to movies and sleep over at friends and visit. He smothered us.?

The minister shook his head as if to say: ?The things parents do.?

?I can?t get a grip on it. Gerhard, my brother, did nothing. We had the same parents and the same house and everything, but he did nothing. He just grew quiet and read books in his room, escaped into his stories and into his head. And me? I went looking for trouble. I wanted to become exactly what my father was afraid of. Why? Why was I built like that? Why was I made like this??

* * *

The minister watched while she talked, watched her hands and eyes, the expressions that flitted in rapid succession across her face. He observed her mannerisms, the hair she used with such expertise, the fingers that punctuated her words with tiny movements and the limbs that spoke in an unbroken and sometimes deliberate body language. He placed it alongside the words and the content, the hurt and the sincerity and the obvious intelligence, and he learned something about her: she was enjoying this. On some level, probably unconscious, she enjoyed the limelight. As if, regardless of the trash that had been dumped on it, somewhere her psyche sheltered unscathed.

* * *

At twelve o?clock, hunger pangs drew Griessel?s attention away from the murder file he had been buried in. That was when he remembered that today there would be no sandwich, no lunch parcel neatly wrapped in clingfilm.

He looked up from the paperwork and the room loomed suddenly large around him. What was he going to do? How would he manage?

* * *

Thobela made an error of judgment with Lukas Khoza. He found him at the abattoir, in a blood-spattered plastic apron, busy spraying away the blood from the off-white floor tiles of the slaughterhouse floor with a fat red hosepipe. They walked outside so Khoza could have a smoke break.

Thobela said he was looking for his brother, John, because he had a job for him.

?What sort of work??

?You know, work.?

Khoza eyed him in distaste. ?No, I don?t know and I don?t want to know. My brother is trash and if you are his kind, so are you.? He stood, legs apart in a challenging stance, cigarette in hand, between the abattoir building and the stock pens. Large pink pigs milled restlessly behind the steel gates, as if they sensed danger.

?You don?t even know what kind of job I am talking about,? said Thobela, aware that he had chosen the wrong approach, that he had been guilty of a generalization.

?Probably the usual work he does. Robbery. Theft. He will break our mother?s heart.?

?Not this time.?

?You lie.?

?No lie. I swear. I don?t want him for a criminal purpose,? he said with spirit.

?I don?t know where he is.? Khoza crushed the butt angrily under the thick sole of his white gumboots and headed for the door behind him.

?Is there someone else who might know??

Khoza halted, less antagonistic. ?Maybe.?

Thobela waited.

For a long time Khoza hesitated. ?The Yellow Rose,? he said, and opened the door. A high scream, almost human, rang out from inside. Behind Thobela the pigs surged urgently and pressed against the bars.

9.