'City Park. Did the Commissioner call you?'
'Benny, it's nobody's fault. It's that fucking Mouton who made a huge scene. When he saw the blood, he just lost it...'
'We can handle it, Fransman. I'll be there now.' He climbed into his car and wondered if he had missed something in his conversation with Alexa Barnard. Had there been a sign?
Inspector Vusi Ndabeni said: 'I'm your friend. You can tell me anything,' and he saw Oliver Sands reach for his glasses and take them off.
'I know.' Sands began cleaning the glasses on his T-shirt, now with his back to the door.
'So what really happened last night?' Vusi watched for the signs Benny had talked about.
'I told you,' the voice was too controlled.
Vusi allowed the silence to stretch out. He stared unblinking at Sands, but the eyes evaded him. He waited until Sands put the glasses back on, then he leaned forward. 'I don't think you've told me everything.'
'I did, honest to God.' Again the hands went to the glasses and adjusted them. Benny had told him to give Sands a fright. He didn't know if he could be convincing. He took a set of handcuffs out of his jacket pocket and put them on the table.
'Police cells are not nice places.'
Sands stared at the handcuffs. 'Please,' he said.
'I want to help you.' 'You can't.'
'Why?'
'Jeez ...'
'Mr Sands, please stand up and put your hands behind your back.'
'Oh, God,' said Oliver Sands and stood up slowly. 'Are you going to talk to me?'
Sands looked at Vusi and his whole body shivered once and he slowly sat down again.
'Yes.'
09:04-10:09
Chapter 11
Griessel drove down Loop Street towards the harbour. He should have taken Bree Street as there was heavy traffic, slow vehicles, and pedestrians just wandering across the road, all the local chancers. And the Gauteng tourists. They were unmistakable. This was the second wave: the first were the December school holiday brigade, smug motherfuckers who thought they were God's gift to Cape Town. They were usually families with moody, cell- phone-obsessed teenagers, Moms fiercely shopping, Dads unfamiliar with the streets, getting in everyone's way. The second wave would arrive in January, the arrogant fat cats who had stayed behind to make their Christmas killing in Sandton and then come here for their annual spending frenzy.
He saw small groups of foreign tourists, Europeans, so painfully law-abiding, only crossing the road at the traffic lights, noses stuck in guidebooks, wanting to photograph everything. He stopped with the lights showing red as far ahead as he could see. Why couldn't the fucking Metro Police get off their backsides and synchronise them?
That reminded him he ought to call the Field Marshal. Oerson. Perhaps they had found something. No, better to remind Vusi. This was Vusi's case. He drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, realised it was the rhythm of '
She had told him she had a suicide fantasy. 'I wanted Adam to come home at half past six and climb the stairs and find me dead. Then he would kneel down beside me and say, 'You're the only one I ever loved.' But being dead, of course, I would never see Adam plead with me; those dreams could never be reconciled.'
He shook his head. How the hell could he have missed that? That's what happened when you got up too early, an hour earlier than usual. He still wasn't quite with it today. And he had given her alcohol as well. Benny the great mentor who 'had forgotten more than others had to learn.'
He sought some excuse in the way she had said it, the story she went on to tell. It had distracted him, created a false impression of a woman who was somehow still under control. She had manipulated him. When he whispered '
He had fixated on her thirst; that was the real problem. He had poured her two tots and she had pushed the hair back from her face and said, 'I was such a terribly insecure little thing.' And then her history had led his thoughts away from suicide; it had fascinated him. He had heard only her words, the heavy irony, the self-mockery, as though the story was some kind of parody, as if it didn't really belong to her.
She was an only child. Her father worked for a bank and her mother was a housewife. Every four or five years the family relocated as her father was transferred or promoted - Parys, Potchefstoom, Port Elizabeth, and eventually Bellville, which had finally broken the P-sequence. She left half-formed friendships behind with every move, had to start over as an outsider at every school, knowing that it would only be temporary. More and more she began to live in her own world, mostly behind the closed door of her bedroom. She kept a painfully personal diary, she read and fantasised - and in her final years at high school she dreamed of becoming a singer, of packed halls and standing ovations, of magazine covers and intimate sundowners with other celebrities, and being courted by princes.
The source of this dream, and the only constant throughout her youth was her paternal grandmother. She spent every Christmas holiday with her in the summer heat of Kirkwood and the Sunday's River Valley. Ouma Hettie was a music teacher all her life, an energetic, disciplined woman with a beautiful garden, a spotless house and a baby grand in the sitting room. It was a house of scent and sound: marmalade and apricot jam simmering on the stove, rusks or leg of mutton in the oven, her grandma's voice singing or talking, and at night the sweet notes of the piano issuing from the open windows of the small blue house, across the wide verandas, the dense garden and the neighbouring orange orchards, to the rugged ridges of Addo and the changing hue of the horizon.
At first Alexa would sit beside her grandmother and just listen. Later she learned the words and melodies by heart and often sang along.
Duma Hettie loved Schubert and the Beethoven sonatas, but her true joy was the brothers Gershwin. Between songs she would nostalgically relate the stories of Ira and George. 'Rialto Ripples' and 'Swanee' were magically coaxed from the keys, 'Lady Be Good' and 'Oh, Kay!' were sung. She told Alexa how that song was inspired by George Gershwin's great love, the composer Kay Swift, but that hadn't prevented him from also having an affair with the beautiful actress Paulette Goddard.
On a sweltering evening in her fifteenth year, Ouma Hettie suddenly stopped playing and told Alexa, 'Stand there.' Meekly, she took her place beside the piano.
'Now sing
She did, in full voice for the first time. 'Of Thee I Sing', and the old lady closed her eyes, only a little smile betraying her rapture. As the last note faded in the sultry evening air, Hettie Brink looked at her granddaughter and, after a long silence, she said, 'My dear, you have perfect pitch, and you have an extraordinary voice. You are going to be a star.' She fetched Ella Fitzgerald's
That was how the dream began. And Ouma Hettie's offical tuition.
Her parents were not impressed. A career in singing was not what they had had in mind for their only child. They wanted her to train as a teacher, get a qualification, something practical 'to fall back on'. 'What kind of man wants to marry a singer?' Her mother's words echoed ironically.
In her Matric year there was conflict, long and bitter arguments in the sitting room of the bank manager's
