He felt for the cell phone with trembling hands. He typed the number and when Barkhuizen answered he just said: ?Jissis, Doc. Jissis.?
29.
At half-past six the next morning he walked to the reservoir and he knew the feeling he had was vaguely familiar, but he did not yet recognize it. First he looked at the mountain. And the sea. He listened to the birds and thought about one more day he had survived without alcohol. Even if yesterday had been touch and go.
?What is it about me, Doc?? he had asked Barkhuizen in despair. Because he needed to know the cause. The root of the evil.
The old man had talked about chemistry and genes and circumstance. Long, easy explanations, he could hear how Barkhuizen was trying to calm him down. The oppression and the gnawing anxiety slowly ebbed away. At the end of the discussion the doctor told him it didn?t matter where it came from. What counted was how he went on from here, and that was the truth. But when Griessel lay in bed with a great weariness upon him, he still searched, because he could not fight a thing he could not understand.
He wanted to go back to the source, wanted to remember how things were when the drinking began. Sleep overcame him before he got there.
By five o?clock he was awake, fresh and rested, with the assegai affair occupying him and his mind full of ideas and plans. It drove him out of bed, here to the park in shorts and T-shirt and he felt that pleasure again. The morning and the view belonged only to him.
?My name is Benny Griessel and I am an alcoholic and this is my ninth day without alcohol,? he said out loud to the morning in general. But that was not the reason he felt a certain rush. Only once he was on the way to work did he realize what it was. He shook his head because it was like a voice from his past, a forgotten friend. Today the race was on. The search was about to begin. It was the first tingle of adrenaline, expectation, a last short silence before the storm. What surprised him most was how hungry he was for it.
Matt Joubert told the detectives on morning parade that Griessel would lead the assegai case and through the tepid applause he heard the jokesters calling, ?Klippies and Coke squad? and, ?So, we don?t really want to catch him.?
Joubert held up a hand. ?The officers who will assist him are Bushy Bezuidenhout, Vaughn Cupido and Jamie Keyter.?
Fantastic, thought Griessel. Now he had the sloppy one and the braggart and the semi-useful detective. Where the fuck were all the stalwarts? He did an involuntary stocktaking. Only Matt Joubert and himself remained from the old days. And Joubert was at least the commanding officer, a senior superintendent. The rest were new. And young. He was the only inspector over forty.
?This morning the commissioner is pulling in four people from the Domestic Violence Unit and ten uniformed people from the Peninsula to help with research,? said Joubert. Here and there people whistled. The political pressure had to be intense because it was a big team. ?They will use the old lecture hall in B-block as a center of operations. Some of you are storing stuff there?please remove it directly after parade. And give Benny and his team all the cooperation you can. Benny??
Griessel stood up.
?Drunk, but standing,? someone said in an undertone. Some muffled laughs. There was an air of expectation in the room, as if they knew he was going to make a fool of himself.
Fuck them, he thought. He had been solving murders when they were investigating how to copy their Science homework without getting caught.
At first he just stood there, until there was complete silence. Then he spoke. ?The greatest single reason that we have case discussions at morning parade is because thirty heads are better than one. I want to tell you how we are going to approach this case. So that you can blow holes in my argument. And make better suggestions. Any ideas are welcome.?
He saw he had their attention. He wondered for an instant if it was astonishment that he could string five sentences together. ?The bad news is the similarity between the assegai vigilante murders and serial murders. The victims are, I believe, unknown to the murderer. The choice of victims is relatively unpredictable. The motive is unconventional and, although we can speculate about it, still reasonably unclear. I don?t know how many of you remember the red ribbon murders about six years ago: eleven prostitutes murdered over a period of three years. Most were from Sea Point, the murder weapon was a knife, and all the bodies were found with mutilated breasts and genitalia and a red ribbon around the neck. We had the same problem then. The choice of victim was limited to a specific category, the motive was psychological, sexual and predictable and the murder weapon consistent. We could build a profile, but not one definite enough to identify a suspect.
?In this case we know he has a hang-up about people who molest or murder children. That is our category, regardless of race or gender. From that we can more or less deduce the motive. And the weapon of choice is an assegai that is used in a single fatal stab. The psychologists will tell us that indicates a highly organized murderer, a man with a mission. But let us focus on the differences between the typical serial murderer and our assegai man. He does not mutilate the victims. There are no sexual undertones. The single wound is deep. One terrible penetration . . . There is anger, but where does it originate? The only reasonable conclusion is that we are dealing with revenge. Was he personally molested as a child? I think the possibility is very strong. It fits. If that is the motive we are in trouble. How do you track down such a suspect? However, there is another possibility. Perhaps he lost a child through some crime. Perhaps the system failed him. We will have to look at the baby that was raped by Enver Davids. Is there a father who wants revenge? The families of the children molested by Pretorius. But it?s possible that he was not directly affected by any of these crimes.
?As far as his race goes, we must not be blinded by the assegai. It could be a deliberate ploy to mislead us. Here is a man who found Davids in a colored neighborhood just as easily as he got into Pretorius?s house in a white neighborhood in the early evening. We must keep our options open. But I swear the assegai means something. Something important. Any comments??
They sat and listened in absolute quiet.
?We can approach this thing from four perspectives. The first is to find out if we can identify any suspects close to the original child victims. The second is to look at all unsolved crimes against children. We must begin in the Western Cape, since that is where he?s operating. If we find nothing, we must expand the search. A long process, I know. Needle in a haystack. But it must be done. The third thing is the murder weapon. We know it?s a typical Zulu assegai. We know it was made by hand in the traditional way, most likely in the last year or so. That means we might determine
