The October Killings Read online

  Without turning his head he looked toward the doorway through which he had entered. It was empty and, beyond that, there was the emergency exit that he had seen where the door was open.

  In the lobby, Lee McKenzie had been released and had accepted the briefest apology. “But don’t go back into the theater, not yet,” Captain Nkobi told him. “I don’t know where Commissioner Jordaan is,” he said to Abigail. “The last time I saw him, he was going upstairs toward the boxes.”

  “Christ,” McKenzie said, sitting down on a couch against one of the walls. “What the fuck is this? I can’t believe it.”

  Abigail did not hear him. She was again talking to the captain. “You can’t wait, captain. I’ll point him out to you.”

  The captain nodded. As he followed Abigail, he collected his men from their posts. “Two will go down the center aisle,” he said softly, “to cut off that path. Two others will come with me through the side door to make the arrest.”

  Inside the theater, Michael Bishop knew that he had already waited too long. The signs were there. How they could have known was of no interest to him, only that it appeared they did know.

  Some thirty seconds later the captain, Abigail and the two officers stepped into the theater. It took a moment for Abigail’s eyes to become accustomed to the semidarkness. For a second she thought that she must be looking at the wrong row. But it was only a moment, then she realized that the seat he had been occupying was empty.

  “Yes,” the captain whispered through his teeth. “Which one is he?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Christ, was he ever here?”

  “Yes, he was there, in that seat.”

  “There was a man here.” It was the voice of the man whose hand Bishop had shaken.

  A male voice from one of the nearby seats sounded irritated. “Could you pipe down? Some of us came for the music.”

  Michael Bishop was pushing closed the emergency exit through which he had just passed, so that there would be no obvious trace of his flight. He went quickly down a single flight of a fire escape, but not so quickly that he might risk stumbling. His senses were tingling with the possibility of pursuit. He felt no sense of victory, only the animal fear that comes with the need to flee.

  He reached ground level in a narrow alley. The street was no more than thirty meters away. Once he got there he would turn left, then left again at the first corner and disappear into the jumble of streets and alleys that made up the eastern part of the inner city.

  He walked quickly, knowing that if there was a policeman at the end of the alley, it would be important not to run. There would be other people on the pavements around the city hall, and they would be walking. A running figure would only draw attention.

  Ahead, and partly hidden by a corner of the city hall, was a street lamp. It was close enough that he held up a hand to shield his eyes. A ragged street urchin, probably a homeless child, ran past the entrance to the alley. He was followed by another, almost as ragged. Bishop’s eyes followed them for only an instant, but it was too long an instant. In front of him something flashed in the light from the street and his consciousness exploded in a shower of sparks.

  Freek Jordaan stepped away from the wall, massaging the knuckles of his right hand. He bent over and handcuffed the unconscious body of Michael Bishop. Can’t handle him one-to-one? he thought. Whatever gave them that idea?

  From the main entrance to the lobby Abigail saw the growing crowd of policemen around Freek in the mouth of the alley. For a moment the excited knot of men parted and she caught a glimpse of the figure on the ground. It looked limp, almost lifeless. And yet she could move no closer. She saw Yudel walking down the pavement toward the alley, but as she felt Robert’s left arm around her shoulders, she moved closer to him.

  31

  It was just two hours after midnight in the Tshwane West police cells. Michael Bishop had been under interrogation for almost three hours. He answered all questions softly and politely and told his interrogators nothing.

  The national commissioner of police had instructed Freek to contact him when the arrest had been made. Freek called him from the alley behind the city hall and listened to the commissioner’s instructions. “Remember, he’s not just anybody. Nobody touches him. I don’t want to hear about bruises later on.”

  “Yes, commissioner,” Freek had said.

  “Nothing, you understand?”

  “I understand. No one will touch him.”

  “If you’ve got nothing, you can still hold him legally for forty-eight hours. By that time it will be the twenty-third.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good, then do it.”

  “Of course, there’s still the missing man—Lourens.”

  “I know.”

  Now Freek was interrogating Bishop in the police station’s only room that was wired for sound. Abigail was with Robert, Yudel, Captain Nkobi and one lieutenant in a small room adjoining the charge office. They were listening to the interrogation. In the charge office, two constables and a sergeant, who had been told nothing about the night’s activities or about the suspect who was being interrogated in their cells, did their best to look busy while the deputy commissioner was in the building. They had not expected this sort of thing. With luck they may have passed the night quietly, each man taking a turn to keep watch while the others slept.

  Most of Freek’s questions had concerned the matter of where Bishop had been on October 22 the year before, and the year before that, and still another year earlier and every year, all the way back into the 1980s.

  To every question Bishop answered in the same polite, but evasive way. “You can’t expect me to know the details of my whereabouts all those years ago, deputy commissioner. This was all long ago. I can’t remember what happened on a particular day last year, let alone all these other years you’re asking about.”

  “You do know where you were,” Freek said again and again. “And you know that I know.”

  “You’re quite wrong, deputy commissioner.”

  Freek also explored at length his unorthodox arrival at the concert. He had already established that Bishop had a ticket for the seat he had occupied. “And yet you chose to creep in through some back entrance? Innocent people don’t behave that way.”

  “I arrived early. There was no one at the ticket office. There’s nothing unusual in that, is there?”

  Freek had interrogated a great many suspects in a long career, but he had never before met one like Bishop. Every question was answered and every answer was unfailingly polite. He never once raised his voice or showed any sign of tiredness or irritation. Questioning him was like fighting someone who never struck back, but could absorb your punches in a way that rendered them ineffectual.

  Of the people in the police station, most had never heard of Michael Bishop, and only Abigail had ever heard his voice. She had heard it on one night long before and it had been as even and unemotional then as it was now. But she had heard it many times since then, at night, in the tortured corridors of her dreams. At any time, in all those years, she would immediately have recognized his voice, had she heard it. Alone or in a crowd, at work or at home, in darkness or the bright light of day, she knew that she would have recognized even a single word. Now she listened, transfixed, held by the hypnotic monotone that had been imprinted in her mind.

  At the theater Freek had asked her if she would come close to identify Bishop, but although he was still unconscious she would come no closer than twenty paces. “It’s him,” she had said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am absolutely sure.”

  But that had been unnecessary. Bishop had not denied his identity. He had refused to give an address though, saying that he was currently a homeless person, living on the streets. “You are not a homeless person,” Freek had said. “Your clothing is clean. You do not carry the marks of a homeless person.”

  “Nevertheless, I am one.”

  On the dr
ive back to Pretoria, Yudel had traveled with Freek, following close behind the car in which Bishop was being transported. Abigail had asked Robert to fall back to let the police cars go ahead. “Let’s just go home,” she had said. “They don’t need me anymore.”

  Robert had nodded in response without saying anything. But before they reached the city she had told Robert rather to go where the police were taking him.

  “But you said you wanted to go home.”

  “Rather go with them.”

  “But why? They’ll do the rest.”

  “I need to go.”

  “You need to get away from this.”

  “No, I need to be there. I must.”

  “Why?”

  “Capturing Bishop was never that important to me. Finding Leon is.”

  “The police will do it. And Yudel will help.”

  “I have to go.”

  But now it seemed to Abigail that after three hours of interrogation, Freek was going nowhere. This sort of questioning would not even get past Bishop’s outer defenses. For a moment on the pavement outside Johannesburg’s city hall, lying unconscious in the alley, he had looked vulnerable. But it had been only until he regained his senses. Now he was again invincible. Freek was no more than a battering ram against the defenses of a castle that was hopelessly sound. His questioning was a blunt instrument when something far sharper and more penetrating was needed.

  Yudel too had tried. After listening to Freek for a while, he believed that he understood at least some part of the puzzle that was Michael Bishop. “Who did it to you?” he asked Bishop.

  Bishop looked closely at Yudel and then decided he would not answer any of his questions. “Who made you so ashamed?” Yudel asked.

  But an impenetrable wall had descended around the prisoner. Yudel could not know it, but for just a moment the picture of his shame, in the form of the lifeless body of Samuel, hanging from a beam of the tobacco shed’s roof, had returned to him with complete clarity. He could not allow Yudel into that part of his life. Now it was shut off from all access by the present. Yudel too was shut out. His remaining questions could have been directed at a statue and had as much effect.

  Freek had come back and Bishop had slowly returned to the surface of present consciousness. He at least answered Freek, but to Abigail it seemed he controlled the exchanges. Before she could restrain herself, she had turned to Nkobi. “Let me try,” she said.

  “The deputy commissioner…” he started to say.

  “The deputy commissioner is getting nowhere,” she interrupted. “Call him out so that I can ask him.”

  “Do it,” Abigail heard Yudel say. “Let Deputy Commissioner Jordaan decide.”

  It was the sort of suggestion that made sense to someone accustomed to obeying orders. The captain got to his feet and set off to call the deputy commissioner to let him decide.

  When Freek returned with the captain, Abigail was on her feet. She did not know if she had a better chance of success than Freek, but she knew that she could never be free until she faced the man in the interrogation room. And then there was Leon. “Let me try,” she told him.

  Freek seemed to consider the suggestion. He was not accustomed to needing help under any circumstances, but he nodded and stepped aside to let her pass.

  “One thing,” Abigail said. “I want the sound turned down. I want privacy with him.”

  “Certainly,” Freek said. But it came too quickly.

  “Where’s the amplifier?”

  “Down there.” Freek pointed to a metal box, mounted against the wall at ankle level.

  “Can it be opened?” She had already found a hinged door and opened it. The components of the amplifier itself were mounted on a plug-in printed circuit board. Abigail extracted the board and slipped it into her bag.

  “You’re serious about this?” Freek said.

  Robert was on his feet. “No, no, this makes no sense…”

  Freek raised a hand that asked Robert for a moment in which to speak. “Just give me a few moments with the prisoner.”

  “What are you going to do?” Robert demanded.

  “Shackle him. He won’t be able to get close to her.”

  “I don’t want him to feel…” Abigail was trying to object.

  “That’s the only way,” Freek told her. “He’s shackled or you don’t go in alone and the sound stays on.”

  Abigail looked first at Freek, then Robert, before answering. “Shackle him then.”

  “And you stay on your side of the table,” Freek said.

  “Very well.”

  “Promise me that.”

  “I promise you that I will stay on my side of the table.”

  After she had entered the interrogation room, Yudel spoke to Freek. “He’s the worst kind of psychopath. He will endure anything, suffer any pain, wait as long as it takes, to get his way. You could torture him, even kill him, he will tell you nothing. There is no breaking him, ever.”

  “I know,” Freek said.

  When Abigail opened the cell door her eyes immediately met Bishop’s. He showed no sign of surprise. If he had not been expecting her, he was certainly not surprised to see her. His hands were cuffed and his ankles shackled so close that they were almost touching. A chain connected the shackles to a heavy bracket on the wall behind him. Freek was taking no chances.

  Abigail’s was the first to lower her eyes. Bishop’s calm, unblinking stare was just as it had been twenty years before and it was just as impossible for her to meet it for more than a few seconds. She closed the door and sat down on the chair opposite him. Neither had spoken.

  Abigail slowly raised her eyes to meet his. Over twenty years, little had changed in the expressionless face that she had not been able to forget. The hair was thinner and beginning to gray, but the face was unlined. “Good evening,” she said.

  “Good evening.” His way of speaking was seemingly without interest, but she knew that he had recognized her the moment she entered the room.

  Abigail had to hold tightly on to herself. She knew that she could not afford to shrink for even a second. The Michael Bishops of the world, and thankfully there were not many of them, fed off any sign of weakness in others. Her face was less than a meter from his. She remembered seeing it closer than that, much closer. And even then the eyes had been as they were now, the voice showing as little interest.

  Where are you? she thought. You must be in there somewhere, but where? “I did not expect to see you again under these circumstances.” To her own ears her voice wavered uncertainly.

  Bishop answered with only the faintest nod to suggest that perhaps their meeting this way was a surprise to him too.

  “You missed the meeting to honor you last week.” She was trying to give her voice a more confident sound, but with little success.

  He nodded again, only a vague agreement. Perhaps some things could not be avoided.

  “And now you’re here, under these circumstances.”

  Again the little nod, a barely perceptible movement of the head. But this time he spoke. “Memories are short,” he said.

  She waited for more, but he was again silent. Abigail thought that she understood, though. “Everyone remembers,” she said without sympathy. “That’s what the meeting was all about.”

  He paused, apparently considering his response. “But now I am hounded and in chains, if only temporarily.”

  If only temporarily … He was not going to admit to being powerless. Nevertheless, Abigail knew that this was the moment. “Give me Leon and I will try to help.”

  Now she could see the smallest smile, devoid of humor, distorting the corners of Bishop’s mouth. “Is this not just a little arrogant?”

  “Arrogant? I don’t understand.”

  “Remember who it was who dealt with the enemy in Ficksburg. Remember who your department was prepared to honor, just last week. Now you are the one who thinks you have the power to keep me here or let me go.” The mockery in his voice was unmis
takeable.

  “You won’t be able to escape from here,” Abigail heard herself saying. Oh God, she thought, I’m letting him drag me into this.

  “Escape will not be necessary. Do you think this apartheid policeman will be allowed to hold me? Do you know what I have done? Do you know who I have worked with?” The message was inescapable. “You were a child and I dealt with your enemies. I was the only one who could deal with them. As I remember, that oh-so-gentle father of yours was not very effective.”

  Abigail’s face felt as if it was on fire. “My father. Don’t dare mention his name.” She could hear the quivering in her voice. “Someone like you cannot understand…” In her anger and confusion she lost the thread of her response. She was not even sure that she knew what response she had intended.

  “Not very effective, was he? The idea of a revolution is to kill the ruling class, not to let them kill you. It’s as well that he left his life’s blood on the floor of that old house. He was the kind that I can imagine being raped by his guards in an apartheid jail.”

  Abigail was unable to speak. Holding on to consciousness was difficult enough.

  “I saved you—I, a true hero of the struggle. Now you imagine that you hold my life in your hands? And you don’t see what you are offering me as arrogance?”

  I don’t know why, Abigail thought, but he wants me to dispute what he is saying.

  “You’re fighting me now, but you did not fight me in Ficksburg.”

  He was goading her and it was working. Worst of all was that she felt she was no match for him. And the mention of her father had removed any ability she had to deal with this creature. She could not think of him as a man. Her father had been a man. Robert was a man. Michael Bishop was something entirely different. “Ficksburg was long ago.” To her own ears, it seemed an empty response.

  “I remember every part of it. I remember it clearly. I remember the little sounds you made and I remember that you did not resist.”