The October Killings Read online

  Her second stop was at a rundown block of just six apartments in the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. There she spoke to five of the residents and all swore that they had never once seen a white person so much as visit the place, not since they had been living there.

  After that, she visited a culvert that allowed flood water from a nearby seasonal stream to pass under a suburban street to a broader concrete watercourse. Early summer rains had filled the stream to the point where no one, no matter how immune to physical discomfort, could have spent ten minutes, let alone a night.

  At the fourth site a shed, no more than shoulder height for someone as small as Abigail and exactly as described by Ndlovu, was still standing. A screen of trees sheltered it from the road. It was only by standing on the car’s bonnet that she could see it at all. She could see how Bishop could have crept into it to sleep. For his purposes, it was an unlikely place to have found a human being. But now the ground on which it stood had been incorporated into the zoo and was surrounded by an electrified fence. Two rhinoceroses grazed in the enclosure. Certainly the likes of Bishop could get in and out, but the rhinos would simply be too much trouble. And there would be visitors gazing into the enclosure at odd times throughout the day.

  By mid-afternoon when Abigail got to the office, Johanna had exhausted every branch of every government agency that might have arrested Leon. No one had admitted to it. Abigail was not one to close her eyes to any violation of rights, whether in the name of the new South Africa or any other cause, but people being arrested and simply disappearing was not one of them. If the police, the secret service, or anyone else had him, she believed that they would not have hidden it.

  A gloating little e-mail from her boss, the deputy director-general, had informed her that she had to report to the minister at 2 P.M. on the progress they were making with the conference preparations. It was the sort of minor crisis that reminded her once again of the many reasons that she appreciated Johanna.

  She found Johanna at her desk. “I’ve done nothing for nearly a week,” she told her PA. “I don’t suppose I’ve given you much opportunity to work on it?”

  “I’ve managed to do some of the work,” Johanna said.

  “What have you done?”

  Johanna had organized the venue, including the sound system, both well within budget; she had quotes for the transport, the flower arrangements had been approved, the catering had also come in within budget, the speakers had all confirmed attendance, as had most of the delegates, and accommodation for speakers and delegates had been spread across ten hotels, none of them more than fifteen kilometers from the venue. She offered her notes and all documentation to her boss.

  “How am I ever going to thank you?” Abigail asked.

  “I thought I’d better do it with all the other matters on your mind.”

  “Thank you so much,” Abigail said simply. “I want you to come to the meeting with me. I’m not going to pretend that I did all this.”

  “It’s okay,” Johanna said. “I don’t mind.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  At five to two the deputy director-general’s PA phoned down to say that the meeting was already assembled and waiting for Abigail. When she arrived with Johanna he tried to turn the younger woman away, but Abigail had directed Johanna to a seat and sat down next to her. From the grim look on the minister’s face and the unsmiling faces of a few other deputy DGs, it was clear to her that her boss had already briefed the assembled group on the likely lack of progress from Abigail’s office. The minister, who had always looked for the good in Abigail’s work, went straight to the heart of the matter. “So, let’s have your report, young lady,” he said.

  Abigail, who was an extremely fast study, had been through the arrangements Johanna had made, continually referring back to her for details and precise amounts. By the end of the presentation the grim look had left the minister’s face. He nodded in obvious satisfaction and turned to look at the deputy director-general as he spoke. “That seems to be in order. That seems like excellent progress to me. I cannot imagine why anyone would have doubts about the success of the conference. Good work, Abigail. And you too, my girl,” he added in Johanna’s direction.

  “Thank you,” Abigail said, her voice sounding sweet and altogether guileless, even to her own ears. “Most of the work was done by Johanna.”

  “Well done, my girl,” the minister said to Johanna. “And, Abigail, I like people who share the credit.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Minister,” she said. Now let me go, she thought. I have more important issues to attend to than this damned conference. For a moment she considered the possibility of raising the Leon Lourens matter with the minister, but the thought of trying to discuss it with his personal assistant, only to be promised an interview in perhaps a week, was too much to bear.

  As for the deputy director-general, his jaws were clamped so tightly that a little muscle on the left hand side was twitching furiously. Abigail tried not to let her delight show. Well, little man, Johanna has certainly spoiled your party, she thought.

  21

  It was clear to Abigail that Jones Ndlovu’s map, drawn with a quivering hand, was probably not accurate. She remembered that at the Black Management Forum’s annual banquet two years before she had sat next to a young Indian woman from the Tshwane town planning office. But her name was a problem. Robert had also been at the banquet, but when she tried to reach him on his mobile she had only got his voice mail.

  Then she remembered that Johanna had also been there. It had been her first banquet and she had not been able to stop talking about it for weeks. She called Johanna in and put the question to her.

  “Lou-Anne Hamid,” Johanna told her. “We have lunch sometimes.”

  “Have you got her number?”

  “I’ll get it from my desk.”

  “Good girl.”

  Johanna came back from her desk, glowing with new virtue, even if she did not fully understand its source. Abigail dialed the number and introduced herself. “Yes, two years ago at the BMF dinner. No, no, I’m not from Eskom. We sat next to each other. No, no…” A suitable description of herself for someone she had met once in the twilight of a banquet was not easy, then she found it. “I’m Johanna’s boss.”

  “Oh, Johanna’s boss. How is she?”

  “She’s fine. Listen, I need a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s a farm on the northern road between the city and Hartebeespoort dam, called Vyefontein. It’s up against the hillside.”

  “Yes, I know those farms. They’re just bush really. You said the farm’s name is…?”

  “Vyefontein. You know, fig fountain or fig spring.”

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  “Just exactly where it is.”

  “I’ll look it up. What’s your number, so I can phone you back?”

  You’re not getting away from me that easily, Abigail thought. “I’ll hang on,” she said.

  “It may take a while.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll hang on.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  * * *

  Abigail found the locked farm gate nearer the road than she had expected, but otherwise the map that Lou-Anne Hamid had faxed through to her had been exact. She could just see the ruin from the place where she left the car. A thin screen of brush, most of it unruly eucalyptus scrub, imported generations before from Australia, sheltered the gate from the road and made it unlikely that she would be seen climbing it. She was deeply grateful for that. Pretoria was not a big enough town to be seen undertaking undignified activities.

  That Abigail, as always, was wearing one of her trouser suits made the conquest of the gate a lot easier than would have been the case in a skirt. The track between the gate and the remains of the nineteenth-century farmhouse was by now barely distinguishable from the dry veld that surrounded it. It gave the appearance of not having been used for man
y years. She picked her way through the rough grass, trying to limit the number of abrasive seed pods lodging in the material of her pants. It was a task that demanded concentration.

  She was brought to a stop by a straggling hedge. She looked up to find that the ruin was no more than thirty or forty paces away. Suddenly the exertions of climbing the gate and tramping up the old track both disappeared. There was the house, close enough to throw a stone through one of the windows from which the frames had long since disappeared.

  This time there was no questioning herself about the reason for her presence there or what she would do if suddenly confronted by the man she was looking for. There was only the cold, unwavering compulsion to go forward, to see if Leon may just be somewhere in this old ruin.

  Discomfort was nothing to Bishop, Jones Ndlovu had said. And if he had once used this place as a base, and used it successfully, was it not likely that he would return?

  Abigail found an opening in the hedge. The house had been a comfortable farmhouse in its time. The outbuildings, a crumbling line of smaller buildings, were a further twenty or thirty meters down the track. A broad porch extended along the front and down one side of the house. Most of the walls still stood as they had been built, but the roof was almost entirely gone, corrugated iron sheets having long since been removed, probably to reappear in one of the region’s many shack townships. Window frames, electric geysers, doors, door frames, flooring and ceiling boards had all gone the same way.

  Between herself and the house was a strip of sandy ground. Anyone entering or leaving the house would have left tracks in it. She stopped to study the sand, slowly walking its length, but there was no sign that anyone had been there. The only tracks had been made by birds and insects, little scratchy indications of their passing.

  Abigail moved slowly from room to room, the intensity of her concentration dispelling, at least for the moment, any thought of danger. A sudden rustling to her right, under the last remaining piece of roofing brought back her vulnerability. Her head jerked in the direction of the sound, a violent, painful movement. A pair of owls, disturbed by her sudden arrival in their domain, swirled into the air and were gone.

  The sudden appearance of the owls had changed everything. Now the place that had been the terrain of her search had become a threatening den that was somehow waiting for her. Whereas she had been the hunter, now suddenly, because of two frightened owls, she was the prey. Inadvertently, she remembered what the deputy secretary-general of the party had told her: “Do not go to him alone. Never go to him alone.”

  Abigail knew that she had a choice. She could turn and hurry back to the car. And perhaps she could even do it without looking back. Or she could stay and concentrate on what she had come to do, search every room and do it slowly and thoroughly. A part of her said that it would not only be safer to flee back to the car, it would be more sensible too. What good would it do Leon if she were no longer alive to search for him?

  There were good and rational reasons to leave. But staying had to do with her own view of herself. She would have to finish what she had come to do and she would have to do it properly.

  Abigail moved slowly through the ruin, examining every corner for signs of human presence, every exposed piece of sand for tracks, no matter how slight the signs may be. When she had finished searching the house she went to the outbuildings, a shed, the remains of a six-vehicle garage, the foundations of a barn and a small bunkhouse for the farm workers. Again, there was nothing, no sign at all that anyone had for years been inside what remained of a family’s home.

  Jones Ndlovu had been wrong about one thing though. The house was not built in the Cape Dutch style. Either Ndlovu did not know what the Cape Dutch style looked like or else the years in between or the substances he used to dull the pain of living had confused his memory of the house.

  She started back toward her car, still not allowing herself to hurry. She had done the job she came to do, and she was damned if she was going to panic at this late stage.

  From somewhere behind her there was a new sound, a brief rustling in the grass. It’s an animal, she told herself, a mongoose or a hare. To turn to see what had caused the sound would have been to yield to the panic and she was not going to do that.

  When she reached the gate she would still have to climb it, getting herself into the most vulnerable position of all. Then there was the last little stretch between the gate and the car.

  It was only when she reached her car that Abigail turned back to look at the house, the scrub surrounding it and the brown Highveld grass obscuring the track. Whatever had made the rustling sound had gone to ground. As far as she could see, the owls had not returned.

  Then she felt his presence. Somewhere from the scrub above her, he was watching. A ragged, intermittent breeze was blowing from the southeast and the only movement came from its effect on the grass and scrub. Even that was slight. But he was there, watching and waiting.

  No, Abigail thought. I am imagining this. Whether I like it or not, my fear is controlling me. There’s no sign at the house. It can’t be so.

  She got into her car and started the engine.

  22

  As Yudel Gordon neared the café where he was expected, his driving slowed, the result of being deep in thought. Rosa sometimes referred to it as his absent state.

  In Yudel’s view, the city was in the grip of a mild melancholia. The great anxiety of the years immediately after the first democratic elections had dissipated. He was grateful that no black mobs had expelled white suburbanites, like himself, from their homes. It was a relief that the rumblings that had been felt underfoot for decades had resulted not in the cataclysm of a Pompeii, but in a much gentler rearranging of influence and earnings.

  There was something of the resentment of the excluded in Yudel’s thinking when he allowed his mind to dwell on the desperate rush of the previous regime’s politicians and senior civil servants to squeeze what they could from the country when they saw that they were losing all influence. He had been just as excluded from the equally desperate stampede of the new regime’s senior functionaries to extract what they could from a changed country.

  This was Yudel’s Pretoria, the seat of the nation’s government, a place that in the closing years of the apartheid era had lost whatever innocence it once had. There seemed little chance of that quality being restored any time soon.

  The café was in one of the many arcades that weave a north-south network through the center of the city. When Yudel arrived the others were already seated at one of the bright yellow plastic tables that spilled out of the doorway and along the front beside plate-glass windows. A stream of people, big earners and small, eddied back and forth along the arcade and past the café. Most men wore jackets and ties. Women wore their hair styled, the older ones kept theirs in place with lacquer, and skirts were knee-length and shorter.

  After leaning across the table to give Rosa the requisite perfunctory kiss, Yudel shook the hand of Freek Jordaan, deputy police commissioner for Gauteng Province and Yudel’s friend of many years. He smiled at Freek’s wife, Magda, who filled the last seat at the table as he sat down on the only vacant chair. A glance at Rosa’s face showed that she looked reasonably relaxed. She may not yet have forgiven him, but at least she was not openly hostile. You could hardly expect more. After all, the incident at the restaurant was not even twenty-four hours old.

  Freek was a big man, tall and broad in the shoulders. His face was tanned, the result of being out with his men whenever there was a law and order crisis of any sort, and the country still had too many of those. His hair was almost completely gray and thinning fast. Magda was a good-looking woman in her mid-fifties who spoke her mind on all occasions with an almost complete disregard for the consequences. “So, Yudel,” she said. “I understand from Rosa that you are trying to help an attractive female government official in the spirit of reconciliation and so on.” She raised an eyebrow archly. “Or has it got more to do with the wa
y she looks?”

  Damn it, Magda, Yudel thought, not now. “I am no longer assisting her,” Yudel said primly.

  A sudden roar of laughter from Freek, suppressed until that moment, was accompanied by a slap on the back, heavy enough to rattle Yudel’s teeth. “Never mind, Yudel. We all have to do our bit for reconciliation.”

  Even Rosa seemed amused. That, at least, was something. “Has anyone ordered?” Yudel asked.

  “I ordered you a Greek salad,” Rosa said, “And I told them to add bacon, but they seem to be a little bit slow in the kitchen.”

  “Where do you find a place that isn’t slow in the kitchen these days?” Magda asked.

  “Anything is better than eating at home.” Rosa looked meaningfully at Yudel. “Only one plate of my stove is working and we are having some difficulty replacing the fuses.”

  “The fuses shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” Freek said helpfully. He glanced uncertainly at Yudel, wondering if advice on the matter might be the last thing that was needed. Recent years had complicated the relationship between the two men. Under the old government, Freek had risen quickly to become the youngest colonel in the force. But his career had stalled at that point, the consequence of too often following his own mind, instead of his orders. His career had started moving again after the new government came to power. The instruction had come down from above that the country must have at least one white commissioner or deputy commissioner. And, if possible, that officer should be an Afrikaner, a member of the group that had been running the country for the last half-century.

  For Yudel, the new South Africa had left his career floundering. At least he had a job under white rule. As far as he could see, the main effect of the majority of South Africans gaining the right to vote was his retrenchment. He had not been acceptable to the old government and, until his meeting with the commissioner of Correctional Services two days before, his relationship with the new government had possibly been even worse.