Prof, not even the psychiatrists can agree on who can be rehabilitated or not; everyone has a different story in court. And now we want every Tom, Dick and Harry with an assegai to make that call? And this whole thing about the death penalty . . . Suddenly everyone wants it back. Between you and me, I am not by definition against the death penalty. I have put fuckers away who more than deserved that. But about one thing I can?t argue, it was never a deterrent. They murdered just as much in the old days, when they were hanged or fried in the chair. So, I see no merit in it.?
?Powerful argument.?
?Chaos, Prof. If we allow bush justice. It?s just the first step to chaos.?
?You?re sober, Benny.?
?Prof??
?That?s what?s different about you. You?re sober. How long??
?A few days, Prof.?
?Good heavens, Nikita, it?s like a voice from the past.?
26.
Before he reached his car, Jamie Keyter phoned to report, and without thinking Griessel said, ?Meet me at the Fireman?s.? As he drove down Albert Street in the direction of the city his thoughts were on assegais and murders and the merits of a vigilante.
?Powerful argument,? the prof had said, but where had it all come from? He hadn?t stopped to think. Just talked. He could swear a part of him had listened in amazement to his argument and thought, ?What the fuck??
Suddenly he was this great crime philosopher. Since when?
Since he had given up the booze. Since then.
It was like someone had adjusted the focus so he could see the past five or six years more clearly. Was it possible to have stopped thinking for so long? Stopped analyzing things? Had he done his work mechanically, by rote, according to the rules and the dictates of the law? Crime scene, case file, footwork, information, handing over, testimony, done. Alcohol was like a golden haze over everything, his buffer against thought.
What he was now and the way he thought, wasn?t how it had been in the beginning. In the beginning he had operated in terms of ?us? and ?them,? two opposites, two separate groups on either side of the law, sure in his belief that there was a definite difference, a dividing line. For whatever reason. Genetic, perhaps, or psychological, but that was how it was; some people were criminals and some were not and it was his job to purify society of the former group. Not an impossible task, just a huge one. But straightforward mostly. Identify, arrest and remove.
Now, on this end of the alcohol tunnel, in his rediscovered sobriety, he realized he no longer believed in that.
He now knew everyone had it in them. Crime lay quiescent in everyone, a hibernating serpent in the subconscious. In the heat of avarice, jealousy, hatred, revenge, fear, it reared up and struck. If it never happened to you, consider it luck. Lucky if your path through life detoured around trouble so that when you reached the end and the worst you had done was steal paperclips from work.
That was why he had told Pagel that a collective line must be drawn. There had to be a system. Order, not chaos. You couldn?t trust an individual to determine justice and apply it. No one was pure, no one was objective, no one was immune.
Albert Street became New Market became Strand and he wondered when he had begun thinking like that. When had he passed the turning point? Was it a process of disillusionment? Seeing colleagues who had given in to temptation, or pillars of the community that he had led away in handcuffs? Or was it his own fall? Discovery of his own weaknesses. The first time he had realized he was drunk at work and could get away with it? Or when he raised his hand to Anna?
It didn?t matter.
How do you catch a vigilante? That mattered.
Murder equals motive. What was the assegai man?s? The why?
Was there even a simple motive here? Or was he like a serial killer, motive hidden somewhere in the short circuits of faulty neural wiring? So that there was fuck-all, no spoor leading to a source, no strand you could twiddle with and tug on until a bit came loose and you get hold of it and start unraveling.
With a serial murderer you had to wait. Examine every victim and every murder scene. Build a profile and place every bit of evidence alongside the rest and wait for a picture to form, hoping it would make sense, hoping it would reflect reality. Wait for him to make a mistake. Wait for his self-confidence to bloom and for him to become careless and leave a tire track or a smear of semen or a fingerprint. Or you were just lucky and overheard two nurses chatting about supermarkets. You took a big gamble and the very first Friday you put out the bait, hit the jackpot.
In the old days they used to talk about Benny?s Luck, shaking their heads: ?Jissis, Benny, you?re so fuckin? lucky, my friend,? and it would make him fed up. He was never ?lucky??he had instinct. And the courage to follow it. And in those days he had been given the freedom to do so. ?Carry on, Benny,? his first Murder and Robbery CO, Colonel Willie Theal, had said. ?It?s the results that count.? Skinny Willie Theal, of whom the late fat Sergeant Nougat O?Grady had said: ?There but for the grace of God, goes Anorexia.? In those days the Criminal Procedure Act was a vague sort of guideline that they used as it suited them. Now O?Grady was buried and Willie Theal in Prince Albert with lung cancer and a police pension and if you didn?t read a scumbag his rights before you arrested him they threw the fucking case out of court.
But it was part of the system and the system created order and that was good; if only he could create order in his life, too. That ought to be easy, as the Criminal Procedure Act of the alcoholic was the Twelve Steps.
Fuck. Why couldn?t he just follow it blindly? Why couldn?t he become a disciple without thinking, without a feeling of despair in the pit of his stomach when he read the Second Step which said you must believe that a Power greater than yourself is going to heal your drinking madness?
He turned right in Buitengracht, found parking, got out and walked in the early evening to the neon sign:
