The October Killings Read online

  It was true. He did not communicate with her. It had always been his belief that she did not want to know what he was thinking. She thought she did, but on the rare occasions when he had tried her with a little sample, she had usually seemed distressed. Did she want to know about these killings? Or about the real reason for Abigail’s visit? Or about the mind of Marinus van Jaarsveld?

  “Can’t you say anything about the night?” Rosa was almost pleading. “About the stars? Or about the palm trees?”

  “Bush pigeons like to nest in them.”

  “What?” Rosa asked.

  “Bush pigeons like to nest in palms.”

  “That’s very interesting.” Her voice had acquired a sardonic edge. “I had no idea you were an expert on birds.”

  “Just something I picked up.” Rosa was looking at him with the exasperation that comes with hopeless dejection when the waitress returned. Rosa had not quite finished her prawns, but the waitress already had her veal piccata and Yudel’s just-peckish calamari. She placed the veal on the edge of the table for Rosa’s future consumption and leaned forward to slip Yudel’s calamari onto the place mat in front of him. Her arm, the same slender, gently swelling arm that had held his attention before, pale on the underside and brown on the outside, trimmed with fine golden hairs that you could see only when the light caught them, passed close by his face again as she positioned the plate of calamari. He tried not to follow it with his eyes, but she leaned forward a second time to do something to the plate. Whatever it was, Yudel’s mind did not register the action. He saw only the softness of flesh, the subtle change of coloring where the pale underside met the brown outside, the light leanness and the compellingly elegant shape of the muscle. He leaned forward and bit it softly.

  For much of his childhood Yudel had lived alone with his mother. Whatever self-confidence he possessed he owed to those years when he had been the center of her life. She had given him no scoldings, no hidings and only showed displeasure with one simple remark. “Yudel, you’ve done a naughty thing,” she would say.

  In the moment, the small fraction of a second, in which his teeth held the waitress’s arm, Yudel knew that he had done a naughty thing. He released it to look into the girl’s blushing, not entirely displeased face and Rosa’s round, horrified, utterly disbelieving eyes.

  * * *

  Yudel sat in his study, trying to think about Abigail’s matter and what it all meant. This was not made easier by Rosa’s rather noisy presence in the kitchen. Judging by the loud clanking of metallic objects, she could be destroying it.

  Between the clanking of pots and cutlery, Rosa was doing something that could not accurately be described as crying. It was more a kind of hyperventilating. She seemed to be drawing in great lungfuls of air, as if she was struggling to take in enough oxygen, and in the process making loud mezzo-soprano wheezing noises. He had tried to comfort her, but had been driven off by a furious denunciation of his lascivious nature.

  What a fuss about a little bite, he thought. She had fled the restaurant, leaving him to pay a puzzled management and to tip a still-blushing waitress. Instead of waiting at the car, she had set off for home on foot while he followed, driving slowly, like a curb crawler, trying with excessive persistence to make a pickup. After a kilometer’s determined march she had weakened enough to accept a lift. Her weakening had extended no further than that. Yudel’s stopping along the way to buy a newspaper did nothing to improve her disposition.

  To hell with it, Yudel thought. He opened the unread newspaper on the desk before him and tried to absorb the lead item on the front page. If nothing else, it might allow him half an hour in which to avoid whatever confrontation with Rosa the night still held.

  Reading the newspaper did not work. Yudel had read the headline four times without understanding it before he came to that conclusion. He would have to deal with the Rosa matter.

  He found her washing a few dishes and pots that had stood over from earlier in the day. In her anguish she may have been a little heavy-handed, but she had not been destroying the kitchen. When she turned to face him her eyes looked darker than usual and her skin had taken on a pale, waxen appearance. “You’re going out,” she told him between the wheezes. “Yudel, I’m only going to ask this once. Please give me a direct answer. Are you going to meet that waitress?”

  “No,” Yudel said. “And I’m not going out either.” Despite the complete accuracy of his answer, he was aware that it sounded untrue, even to his own ears. “Rosa.” He tried to bring more conviction to his voice. “I don’t even know the name of that girl or where to find her.”

  “You seemed pretty intimate this evening.”

  “It was a momentary aberration.” Yudel was seeking a way to strengthen his protestations. “She was so slow. I bit her arm in annoyance.” As soon as he had said it, he wished that he could have withdrawn the words. To lie successfully sometimes caused a few guilt problems, but to lie so transparently created problems of every imaginable variety.

  “Oh, Yudel.” Rosa looked deeply distressed. “You’re lying to me, you rotten man.”

  “The truth is…” Yudel looked for a format within which to frame the truth. “The truth is that I’m a fool.”

  Rosa did not need to think about this before nodding. “That is the truth,” she said.

  * * *

  The darkness in the apartment was softened by lights in the garden and in the street. Abigail did not know why she felt safer in the darkness. Perhaps, she thought, because this was her home turf. She knew the doors, the obstacles and hiding places, even in darkness. She could also not be seen, at least not readily.

  Michael Whitehead had been just one of many recent surprises. The boy who had been trying to get closer to her at the time was a junior crime reporter. In his desperation to impress her, he had taken her to the place where Whitehead’s body had been found.

  It had lain spread-eagled on an allotment, one of the tiny patches of earth which some Londoners used to try to stay in touch with mother earth, getting their hands pleasurably dirty with the soil from which we are so alienated. The patch of allotments was surrounded by rows of narrow, terraced houses. Perhaps a hundred houses had windows looking down on the place.

  The one where the body was found had belonged to the British fiancée of a military attaché at the South African Embassy. Scotland Yard had questioned the attaché at length before deciding that he was not their man. To the best of Abigail’s knowledge, the case had never been solved.

  Her young escort had brought her to this entirely blameless part of the city and presented it to her like a magician drawing a rabbit out of a hat. “What do you think?” he had said.

  By that time the owner of the allotment had removed every trace of the incident. “Of what?”

  “Of the place where this Whitehead’s body was found.”

  To Abigail, it had not looked like the sort of place where you would find the body of a murder victim. But what did such a place look like? Even to the community of exiled South Africans it had simply been a chance incident, a businessman who had the bad luck to run into the wrong man at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

  She remembered one more thing her young crime reporter had said. “Had his throat slit, from ear to ear.”

  She doubted that he had got that from Scotlard Yard. That had no doubt been his own analysis.

  Abigail shivered. The place was so empty without Robert. This was the worst possible time for him to be away. She could not imagine a worse time. So suddenly and without warning. And with the twenty-second coming closer by the moment. The next day would be the nineteenth … just three days left.

  She would go and see Leon in the morning. Until some sort of finality was brought to the matter, the only solution was for him to remain out of sight, and out of harm’s way.

  She stood for a while at the French windows, looking down into the neighboring garden. The white bull terrier she so hated had appeared out of the shadows and
padded its way through the garden of the adjoining property. Almost immediately a man in ragged dungarees, riding a bicycle, by the look of him a manual laborer, had come down the road, stirring the dog into a frenzy. It charged the iron latticework of the gate, clawing it, trying without success to reach the cyclist.

  The phone rang, taking Abigail away from the window. She paused before answering. God only knew who it could be. But then she realized that it was probably Robert.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” her husband’s voice said, “how are you this evening?” There was some anxiety in his voice. She could hear that he was really not sure how she would be.

  “I’m okay. And you? What happened? What’s it all about?”

  “The briefing’s tomorrow morning. I still know nothing. I’ll be back tomorrow evening. My flight lands at ten past five. I’ll get a cab home.”

  No, she thought. I’m not waiting that long. I want you back now. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said.

  “You’ll have to slip away from work early.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Okay. I really just wanted to hear how you are. You sound a little strained.”

  “Oh, God, Robert, please don’t stay away any longer. Be on that flight.”

  “I will be. You don’t sound good.”

  “Just be on that flight.”

  “You can depend on it. Is it this thing with Leon Lourens?”

  “Just be on that flight.”

  “Yes, I will be.”

  After she hung up, Abigail returned to the window. The bull terrier was lying down on the lawn in a patch of light, its head resting on its front paws, the slit-like eyes closed. Repulsive creature, Abigail thought.

  The animal seemed to fall asleep. Abigail remained at the window without moving, looking in the direction of the dog, without seeing him or even the garden. What have I been doing? she asked herself. I know him. How could I influence him, let alone stop him? And who could I involve? The police? My own department?

  Abigail became aware of the presence in the shadows near the gate before the dog did. It was little more than a movement of deeper shadow in the already dark outline of the shrubbery. She stared at the place where she had seen the movement until it came again. For a moment the figure of a man was outlined against a narrow section of white wall that was visible between the bushes. He was moving down the side of the house next door, separated from the building where she lived by only a two-meter wall and the electric fencing along the top of it.

  Then the dog saw him. The animal rose suddenly and started forward. Even through the closed window and across the intervening twenty or thirty meters she could hear its snarling. Then the dog charged, his stocky body held close to the ground.

  Abigail had seen him attack once before. On that occasion the animal’s victim had been badly bitten and had only been saved from more serious injury by the arrival of the dog’s handler from a security company. Now there would be no handler to come to the intruder’s aid.

  The dog swarmed into the shadows of the shrubbery, a pale ghost-like form in the darkness, its feet slipping on the paving of the path as it drove itself forward. Later Abigail remembered hearing her own breath racing and feeling a sharp pain in the palm of her right hand as she gripped a protruding hinge on the French windows.

  Then, as suddenly as the dog had charged, there was stillness in the shadows. She could still see the pale patch that was the animal, but he seemed to have stopped moving. Something inexplicable had happened. The dog was there, but not attacking, not even snarling. Could it be that he was not alive?

  Then she heard the yelp, a single soft, plaintive sound, the kind of cry that did not seem possible from a bull terrier. And he was moving again, slowly this time, back into the light, reversing, his tail wrapped tightly between his legs. He dropped to his belly, facing the shadows he had just left. His head sank to his paws. Abigail saw his tail slowly twitching in apparent friendliness.

  The man in the shadows moved again. Not a large man, he seemed to be coming toward the light, but turned back into the shadows, moving down the garden wall that passed below Abigail’s window. The dog turned its head to watch him go.

  Without pausing to think, she slammed closed the heavy wooden anti-burglary doors that closed off the French windows, and latched them. Then she ran for the front door and wrenched the steel security gate closed, hearing the latch snap into place. From room to room she fled, checking on the burglar bars on every window, but none had been interfered with. Back at her own front door she rang security. “This is number ten,” she told the guard who answered. “I think someone may be trying to break into the complex under my window.”

  After the guard had assured her that he had contacted the company’s armed response unit, she stood indecisively for only a moment in the center of the living room. Then she fled to the shower, closed the door behind her and locked it. Sobbing, her back pressed against the wall, she slid down to a sitting position, her head between her knees.

  Oh, God, she thought, and I am searching for him. What could I possibly do if I found him?

  18

  To all who knew them, the four Bishop boys were an unremarkable group. None of them had ever achieved anything approaching significance, either in the classroom or on the sports field. None were so badly behaved that their teachers would comment on that either.

  If all were unremarkable, the two youngest, Michael and Samuel, were possibly noticed even less by those who came in contact with them. They were not unusually shy, but by the time Samuel was twelve and Michael ten, they simply never offered anything about themselves to anyone. It was not so much that they withheld anything, merely that contact with them was impossible.

  Neither seemed to have any ability to express himself. Since their mother had died nine years earlier, a month before Michael’s first birthday, the home they lived in had become almost completely silent. Their father worked the farm the same way he had done when his wife was alive. But he worked it because he had always done so, rather than for any rational purpose. He knew how to produce crops, so he produced them. He took away the cattle gate that allowed easy access by cars at the entrance to his farm and replaced it with a heavy motor gate that stayed locked day and night. In a farming community where there was little canned entertainment and people visited back and forth between the farms, the neighbors soon started to avoid the Bishop home. Even the school principal looking for donations for the new gymnasium, the clergyman hoping for help with renovating the church hall, or the member of parliament searching for votes, left the Bishops off their schedules.

  Bishop bought the boys what he felt they needed without apparent resentment. In return he expected unquestioning obedience from them. Any disobedience was met with the sort of brutal response that could have put him in prison forty years later. Even in a conservative Calvinist community in which punishment was an indispensable part of life, the other farming families were shocked at old man Bishop’s treatment of his sons. After a particularly vicious incident, one of the mothers went to see the dominee about it. The next day the dominee’s wife encouraged the other ladies at the women’s weekly prayer circle to pray for the Bishops. “It’s not right that he punishes his children the way you punish kaffirs,” she said to some of the ladies afterward.

  The obedience he expected from his sons was no different from what he expected from his farm workers. Although he never discussed it, it seemed to be a point of honor that he punished his boys in the same way he punished his workers. He was equally ready to use his leather sjambok to leave stripes on the backs of either. If a farm worker was held down by his fellow workers and whipped for some minor negligence, so too were his sons. The one to be punished would usually be held down by his brothers, but if none were available at the time, farm workers would do.

  On more than one occasion at school, teachers had seen the marks left by whippings. Most had not approved, but a man’s sons were his business and you did not
tell him how to control them.

  If there was a single civilizing influence in the home Bishop created for his sons, it was the piano that his wife had played while she was alive. And he insisted that his sons, rough and carrying the stripes of his attention as they were, take piano lessons.

  There were those in the community who said that his treatment of his wife had something to do with the cancer that killed her. Whatever his reasons and whatever he felt about his wife’s death, Bishop ordered them to play. Every evening they all took a turn at practice. Of the four, only Samuel showed any affinity for the music. There were times when his father ordered Samuel to play and would lie down in his bedroom to allow the music to calm him. Any of the few visitors to the farm who heard Samuel’s young interpretations of Schubert, Liszt or Lehar melodies often commented on how well he played. The school’s music teacher even suggested that Samuel be sent to a music academy, but Bishop replied that a farmer did not need that much music training.

  As for Michael, he struck the notes in the prescribed order, but without any sense of their meaning or the emotion they represented. There were no louder or gentler passages, no thoughtful pauses and no reflection on the music after he got up from the piano stool.

  Bishop and his sons ate at the long wooden kitchen table, served by a barefoot woman who cooked what Bishop brought back from town and what grew in the vegetable patch next to the house. There was also the occasional contribution from the chicken-run or the pigpen. Bishop sat at the head, his sjambok at his side, with the boys on either side, the two eldest on one side and the two youngest on the other. Michael sat farthest from him. No one sat at the foot of the table. The eldest boy had tried it once, but the leather tip of the sjambok had found him before he could duck, cutting the skin of his left cheek deeply enough to leave a scar. “That’s your mother’s place,” his father had snarled.

  At the table the only conversation had directly to do with the farming in which the boys all had a part to play. What they said was limited to what was essential. It was safest to be silent and keep your eyes on your plate. This was the policy of all Michael’s brothers. It had been his too, until a singular incident when he was ten.