A Beautiful Place to Die Part 1

A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE.

by Malla Nunn.

1.

SOUTH A AFRICA, S SEPTEMBER 1952.

DETECTIVE S SERGEANT E EMMANUEL Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen. He was in deep country. To get deeper he'd have to travel back in time to the Zulu wars. Two Ford pickup trucks, a white Mercedes, and a police van parked to his right placed him in the twentieth century. Ahead of him a group of black farmworkers stood along a rise with their backs toward him. The hard line of their shoulders obscured what lay ahead. Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen. He was in deep country. To get deeper he'd have to travel back in time to the Zulu wars. Two Ford pickup trucks, a white Mercedes, and a police van parked to his right placed him in the twentieth century. Ahead of him a group of black farmworkers stood along a rise with their backs toward him. The hard line of their shoulders obscured what lay ahead.

In the crease of a hot green hill, a jumpy herd boy with fifteen skinny cows stared at the unusual scattering of people in the middle of nowhere. The farm was a genuine crime scene after all-not a hoax as district headquarters had thought. Emmanuel got out of the car and lifted his hat to a group of women and children sitting in the shade of a wild fig tree. A few of them politely nodded back, silent and fearful. Emmanuel checked for his notebook, his pen, and his handgun, mentally preparing for the job.

An old black man in tattered overalls stepped out from the band of shade cast by the police van. He approached with his cloth cap in his hand.

"You the baas from Jo'burg?" he asked.

"That's me," Emmanuel said. He locked the car and dropped the keys into his jacket pocket.

"Policeman says to go to the river." The old man pointed a bony finger in the direction of the farmworkers standing along the ridge. "You must come with me, please, ma' baas."

The old man led the way. Emmanuel followed and the farmworkers turned at his approach. He drew closer to them and scanned the row of faces to try to gauge the mood. Beneath their silence he sensed fear.

"You must go there, ma' baas." The old man indicated a narrow path that snaked through tall gra.s.s to the banks of a wide, s.h.i.+ning river.

Emmanuel nodded his thanks and walked down the dirt trail. A breeze rustled the underbrush and a pair of bullfinches flew up. He smelled damp earth and crushed gra.s.s. He wondered what waited for him.

At the bottom of the path he came to the edge of the river and looked across to the far side. A stretch of low veldt s.h.i.+mmered under clear skies. In the distance a mountain range broke the horizon into jagged blue peaks. Pure Africa. Just like the photos in English magazines that talked up the benefits of migration.

Emmanuel began a slow walk of the riverbank. Ten paces along he saw the body.

Within reach of the river's edge, a man floated facedown with his arms spread out like a parachute diver in free fall. Emmanuel clocked the police uniform instantly. A captain. Wide shouldered and big boned with blond hair cut close to the skull. Small silver fish danced around what looked like a bullet wound in the head and another gash torn into the middle of the man's broad back. A thicket of reeds held the body fast against the current.

A blood-stiffened blanket and an overturned lantern with a burned-out wick marked a fis.h.i.+ng spot. Bait worms had spilled from a jam can and dried on the coa.r.s.e sand.

Emmanuel's heart hammered in his rib cage. He'd been sent out solo on the murder of a white police captain.

"You the detective?" The question, in Afrikaans, had the tone of a surly boy addressing the new schoolmaster.

Emmanuel turned to face a lanky teenager in a police uniform. A thick leather belt anch.o.r.ed the blue cotton pants and jacket to the boy's narrow hips. Wisps of downy hair grew along his jawline. The National Party policy of hiring Afrikaners into public service had reached the countryside.

"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper." He held out his hand. "Are you the policeman in charge of this case?"

The boy flushed. "Ja, I'm Constable Hansie Hepple. Lieutenant Uys is on holiday in Mozambique for two more days and Captain Pretorius...well...he's...he's gone."

They looked over at the captain, swimming in the waters of eternity. A dead white hand waved at them from the shallows.

"Did you find the body, Constable Hepple?" Emmanuel asked.

"No." The Afrikaner youth teared up. "Some kaffir boys from the location found the captain this morning...he's been out here all night."

Emmanuel waited until Hansie got control of himself. "Did you call the Detective Branch in?"

"I couldn't get a phone line to district headquarters," the boy policeman explained. "I told my sister to try till she got through. I didn't want to leave the captain by himself."

A knot of three white men stood farther up the riverbank and took turns drinking from a battered silver flask. They were big and meaty, the kind of men who would pull their own wagons across the veldt long after the oxen were dead.

Emmanuel motioned toward the group. "Who are they?"

"Three of the captain's sons."

"How many sons does the captain have?" Emmanuel imagined the mother, a wide-hipped woman who gave birth between baking bread and hanging up the laundry.

"Five sons. They're a good family. True volk."

The young policeman dug his hands into his pockets and kicked a stone across the bank with his steel-capped boot. Eight years after the beaches of Normandy and the ruins of Berlin, there was still talk of folk-spirit and race purity out on the African plains.

Emmanuel studied the murdered captain's sons. They were true Afrikaners, all right. Muscled blonds plucked straight from the victory at the Battle of Blood River and glorified on the walls of the Voortrekker Monument. The captain's boys broke from their huddle and walked toward him.

Images from Emmanuel's childhood flickered to life. Boys with skin white as mother's milk from the neck down and the elbow up. Noses skewed from fights with friends, the Indians, the English, or the coloured boys cheeky enough to challenge their place at the top.

The brothers came within shoving distance of Emmanuel and stopped. Boss Man, the largest of the brothers, stood in front. The Enforcer stood to his right with his jaw clenched. Half a step behind, the third brother stood ready to take orders from up the chain of command.

"Where's the rest of the squad?" Boss Man demanded in rough-edged English. "Where are your men?"

"I'm it," Emmanuel said. "There is no one else."

"You joking me?" The Enforcer added finger pointing to the exchange. "A police captain is murdered and Detective Branch send out one lousy detective?"

"I shouldn't be out here alone," Emmanuel conceded. A dead white man demanded a team of detectives. A dead white policeman: a whole division. "The information headquarters received was unclear. There was no mention of the victim's race, s.e.x, or occupation-"

The Enforcer cut across the explanation. "You have to do better than that."

Emmanuel chose to focus on the Boss Man.

"I was working the Preston murder case. The white couple shot in their general store," he said. "We tracked the killer to his parents' farm, an hour west of here, and made an arrest. Major van Niekerk called and asked me to check a possible homicide-"

"'Possible homicide'?" The Enforcer wasn't about to be sidelined. "What the h.e.l.l does that mean?"

"It means the operator who logged the call got one useful piece of information from the caller-the name of the town, Jacob's Rest. That was all we had to work with."

He didn't mention the word "hoax."

"If that's true," the Enforcer said, "how did you get here? This isn't Jacob's Rest, it's Old Voster's Farm."

"An African man waved me off the main road, then another one showed me to the river," Emmanuel explained, and the brothers shared a puzzled look. They had no idea what he was talking about.

"Can't be." The Boss Man spoke directly to the boy constable. "You told them a police captain had been murdered, hey, Hansie?"

The teenager scuttled behind Emmanuel. His breathing was ragged in the sudden quiet.

"Hansie..." The Enforcer smelled blood. "What did you tell them?"

"I..." The boy's voice was m.u.f.fled. "I told Gertie she must say everything. She must explain how it was."

"Gertie...Your twelve-year-old sister made the call?"

"I couldn't get a line," Hansie complained. "I tried..."

"Domkop." The Boss Man stepped to the side, in order to get a clear swing at Hansie. "You really that stupid?"

The brothers moved forward in a hard line, cabbage-sized fists at the ready. The constable grabbed a handful of Emmanuel's jacket and burrowed close to his shoulder.

Emmanuel stood his ground and kept eye contact with the head brother. "Giving Constable Hepple a smack or two will make you feel better, but you can't do it here. This is a crime scene and I need to start work."

The Pretorius boys stopped. Their focus s.h.i.+fted to the body of their father floating in the clear water of the river.

Emmanuel stepped into the silence and held out his hand. "Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. I'm sorry for the loss of your father."

"Henrick," the Boss Man said, and Emmanuel felt his hand disappear into a fleshy paw. "This here is Johannes and Erich, my brothers."

The younger brothers nodded a greeting, wary of the city detective in the pressed suit and green-striped tie. In Jo'burg he looked smart and professional. On the veldt with men who smelled of dirt and diesel fuel, he was out of place.

"Constable Hepple says there are five of you." He returned the brothers' stares and noticed the areas of redness around their eyes and noses.

"Louis is at home with our ma. He's too young to see this." Henrick took a swig from the flask and turned away to hide his tears.

Erich, the Enforcer, stepped forward. "The army is letting Paul out on compa.s.sionate leave. He'll be home tomorrow or the day after."

"What unit is he in?" Emmanuel asked, curious in spite of himself. Six years out of service and his own trousers and s.h.i.+rtsleeves were still ironed sharp enough to please a sergeant major. The army had discharged him, but it hadn't let him go.

"Paul's in intelligence," Henrick said, now flushed pink from the brandy.

Emmanuel calculated the odds that brother Paul belonged to the old guard of the intelligence corps-the one that broke fingers and smashed heads to extract information. Exactly the kind you didn't want hanging around an orderly murder investigation.

He checked the brothers' posture, the slack shoulders and unclenched hands, and decided to take control of the situation while he had a moment to do so. He was on his own with no backup and there was a murder to solve. He started with the cla.s.sic opener guaranteed to raise a response from idiots and geniuses alike: "Can you think of anyone who would do this to your father?"

"No. No one," Henrick answered with absolute certainty. "My father was a good man."

"Even good men have enemies. Especially a police captain."

"Pa might have got on the wrong side of some people, but nothing serious," Erich insisted. "People respected him. No one who knew him could do this."

"An outsider, is your guess?"

"Smugglers use this stretch of river to go in and out of Mozambique," Henrick said. "Weapons, liquor, even Commie pamphlets, they all come into the country when no one is looking."

Johannes spoke for the first time. "We think Pa maybe surprised some criminal crossing over into SA."

"A lowlife bringing in cigarettes or whiskey stolen off the docks in Lorenzo Marques." Erich took the flask from Henrick. "Some kaffir with nothing to lose."

"That casts the net pretty wide," Emmanuel said, and studied the full length of the riverbank. Farther upstream, an older black man in a heavy wool coat and khaki uniform sat in the patchy shade of an indoni tree. Two frightened black boys nestled close to him.

"Who's that?" he asked.

"Shabalala," Henrick answered. "He's a policeman, too. He's half Zulu, half Shangaan. Pa said the Shangaan part could track any animal, and the Zulu part was sure to kill it."

The Pretorius brothers smiled at the captain's old explanation.

Hansie stepped up eagerly. "Those are the boys who found the body, Detective Sergeant. They told Shabalala and he rode into town and told us."

"I'd like to hear what they have to say."

Hansie pulled a whistle from his breast pocket and blew a shrill note. "Constable Shabalala. Bring the boys. Make it fast."

Shabalala rose slowly to his full height, over six feet, and made his way toward them. The boys followed in the shadow he cast. Emmanuel watched Shabalala approach and instantly realized that he must have been the policeman who'd set up the series of native men to guide him to the crime scene.

"Quick, man!" Hansie called out. "You see that, Detective Sergeant? You tell them to hurry and this is what you get."

Emmanuel pressed his fingers into the ridge of bone above his left eye socket where a headache stirred. The country light, free from industrial haze, was bright as a blowtorch on his retina.

"Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is Constable Samuel Shabalala." Hansie performed the introductions in his best grown-up voice. "Shabalala, this detective has come all the way from Jo'burg to help us find out who killed the captain. You must tell him everything you know like a good man, okay?"

Shabalala, a few heads taller and a decade or two older than any of the white men in front of him, nodded and shook Emmanuel's outstretched hand. His face, calm as a lake, gave nothing away. Emmanuel made eye contact, and saw nothing but his own reflection in the dark brown eyes.

"The detective is an Englishman." Henrick spoke directly to Shabalala. "You must use English, okay?"

Emmanuel turned to the brothers, who stood in a semicircle behind him.

"You need to move back twenty paces while I question the boys," he said. "I'll call you when we're ready to move your pa."

Henrick grunted and the brothers moved away. Emmanuel waited until they re-formed their huddle before continuing.

He crouched down to the boys' level. "Uno bani wena?" he asked Shabalala.

Shabalala's eyes widened in surprise, then he joined Emmanuel at child height and gently touched each boy on the shoulder in turn. Continuing in Zulu, he answered Emmanuel's question. "This one is Vusi and this one is Butana, the little brother."

The boys looked about eleven and nine years old, with close-shaven heads and enormous brown eyes. Their rounded stomachs pushed out their frayed s.h.i.+rts.

"I'm Emmanuel. I'm a policeman from Jo'burg. You are brave boys. Can you tell me what happened?"

Butana held his hand up and waited to be called on.