The October Killings Read online

  Not since she had tried to discover if any official body had arrested Leon had she tried to contact any government agencies about the matter. She found an agent at his desk at the National Intelligence Service. He declared himself interested and promised to take it up on Monday. Even Military Intelligence had someone on duty, but this was definitely not a military matter and he could not help. She spoke to the commanding officers of five of the city’s fourteen police stations and three of them promised to keep an eye out for suspicious circumstances and someone answering the description of Leon Lourens. They would also ask some questions in likely parts of the city, wherever those were. The railway police promised to check all the sheds on their property.

  She told only as much of the story as she thought was necessary, but she told it too many times. By the time she had exhausted her options she was no longer sure that she believed it herself. Outside her window the street was in deep shadow, the sun only touching the tops of the buildings.

  * * *

  It had taken until late afternoon before Freek felt he could leave. By that time, Captain Nkobi was in consultation with the community leaders. Their weariness and discomfort and a third round of chicken burgers and coffee, which Freek hoped the department would pay for, had at last been decisive in opening negotiations. The captain would stay through to the next night if necessary, in an attempt to have the barricades to the township entrance removed.

  Freek could not guess how long it would take before an agreement would be reached. Now that he had left the township, the need to find out why Nkobi had been ordered to back him up was overwhelming. Whatever the motive, the Tshwane West police station was now too vulnerable for his peace of mind. But what could the motive be? Did someone really think he needed help that badly? Or was the aim something altogether different? It could be that the MEC who was behind his leaving the police station had something to answer for. But Freek knew that there were some answers that he would never be allowed to pursue—and he suspected this may be one of them.

  The piles of tires that blocked the entrance to the township were just smoking mounds by the time he left. The local fire brigade had arrived and put out the flames. The front-end loaders were also ready to go in as soon as the heat from the tires was such that it was safe to start work.

  It was some fifty hours since Freek had last slept, but he was still as alert as ever. He felt his weariness only as a tension in the shoulders and a dryness in the eyes. He was driving quickly, but well within his own capabilities and those of the car. He was old enough to realize that he no longer possessed the immortality of youth. After the length of time he had spent without sleep, driving faster would have been less than wise.

  He had covered half the distance back to the city, when his mobile phone rang for the first time. A CID officer had gone to Tshwane West in answer to a panicky call from the morning shift that came on at nine. He had summoned medics and armed support. He had tried twice to contact Freek by mobile phone, but had not been successful. At that point he gave up, not thinking it necessary to interrupt the deputy commissioner in the important work he was doing. Only in the last five minutes had someone called a disbelieving Captain Nkobi, who was, for the moment, in a patch of good reception. It was Nkobi who now called Freek.

  Freek’s right foot pressed heavily down on the accelerator. For the moment, wisdom was forgotten.

  38

  Yudel came slowly out of his study and wandered into the kitchen. From where she was seated at the television set, Rosa saw him go and followed. “Coffee?” she offered.

  Yudel nodded and sat down slowly, resting his hands on the edge of the table for support. After the coffee percolated and Rosa had poured two mugs, he looked at her for the first time. “I have to go out,” he said. “There is a prison psychologist by the name of Patrick Lesela in the department’s employ. He is said to have been on the staff at UPE, lecturing in criminology, no doubt. Could you try to find out if that is true and call me on the mobile?”

  It had been said almost matter-of-factly, but very seriously. “Is this important, Yudel?”

  “Very.”

  “Are you going to shower first?”

  Rosa would not have asked if he had not looked in need of it. “No,” he said.

  “A change of clothes?”

  “No. I must go now. Please try to find the information and call me.”

  “You know I will.”

  * * *

  Thinking about it afterward, Abigail would never know where the thought had come from. But suddenly there was a new outlet for the seemingly endless nervous energy that was bursting inside her.

  In the telephone directory, she found a number of entries under the name Hamid. None of them had the initial L, but Lou-Anne’s was the third one she tried. “Lou-Anne, it’s Abigail Bukula here.”

  “Oh, Johanna’s boss.”

  “Can you go to your office now?”

  “It’s Saturday afternoon,” Lou-Anne said plaintively. This was not the sort of sacrifice usually expected of civil servants.

  “I know what day it is. Can you come immediately?”

  “I suppose, if it’s important.” The tone suggested a hope that it may not be important.

  “It’s vital. It’s literally a matter of life and death.”

  “Literally?”

  “Somebody’s life depends on it.”

  * * *

  Lou-Anne Hamid was a tiny woman, the kind that is often described as petite. She arrived in the foyer only moments after Abigail. Whatever reluctance she had about being called out on a Saturday had disappeared. There was an eagerness in her that went with something more exciting than her usual day. “I’m glad you waited. Security wouldn’t have let you in,” she explained.

  The archive to which she led Abigail was a mixture of new and old. Rows of computers held the databases with every property in the greater Tshwane area, of which Pretoria was a part. The plans for all the newer properties were also to be found in the computer system. In an adjoining room, on big photocopied sheets, were the plans of the older properties.

  “Another Vyefontein?” she asked. “I don’t believe so. If it had been there, I would have noticed it the first time you asked me.”

  “Let’s just look, please.”

  Lou-Anne called up the database that carried the names of the properties on that side of town. “No, just the one,” she told Abigail. “Does someone’s life really depend on it?”

  “Yes, it does. Are you sure that there is just the one?”

  “There’s just the one. You can see for yourself.” She sounded disappointed that she was not able to play a bigger part in whatever it was that was happening. “What’s it for?” she asked.

  “A man has been abducted.”

  “No? You and Johanna work on the most amazing stuff.”

  Abigail had Lou-Anne by the arm. “Listen, are you absolutely certain?”

  “Yes. Let’s draw the plans. I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t think that will help.”

  “You might as well, while you’re here.” Lou-Anne’s eyes were gleaming. “Is he being held there?”

  “Frankly, it doesn’t look like it.”

  “But maybe. You’d better come and look. Who knows?”

  Abigail, walking slowly with the lack of purpose of one who has just seen a last hope disappear, followed Lou-Anne down one of the rows of filing cabinets that held the town’s older building plans. It took Lou-Anne less than a minute to find the Vyefontein plans. There were perhaps twelve of them, the entire history of a large property’s evolution from bushveld shack to rural manor house.

  Lou-Anne spread them on a table that had been placed there for that purpose. As the wad of plans struck the surface of the table, they fell open toward the back of the file. There, in front of Abigail, was the one image she had not expected to see. Slightly faded, on one-hundred-year-old yellowing paper, was the design of a handsome gabled mansion in the Cape Dutch style, the
house that Jones Ndlovu had told her to expect. It was also the house that she knew was not there.

  “This is not right,” Abigail said. “The house doesn’t look like that.”

  The little town planner had her head cocked to one side as she studied the drawing. “It must have at one point.”

  “No, the walls are all still standing. The style is quite different.”

  “Here. Let’s look at this.” She turned to the front of the file.

  “What are we looking at?” Abigail asked.

  “The plan of the property. You see, here’s the dwelling.”

  The dwelling was shown as a simple block. The scale at the side of the plan revealed that the house was set well back from the fence, some distance from the gate she had climbed when she first visited the place. That seemed right. The property was long and relatively narrow, but it ran to the top of the squat mountain range behind.

  There was something else on the plan—a larger block higher up the hill. “What’s that?” Abigail’s voice was almost accusing in its sharpness.

  “Well, if you’ve seen the lower house and it’s not the one in the plan we saw, that must be it.”

  “You mean there’re two?”

  “It looks like it.”

  A moment later Lou-Anne had the file open at the diagram of the house that Abigail recognized as the one she had already searched twice. “But if there were two houses, I would have seen the second one.”

  “The property’s under brush, isn’t it?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Well, according to the scale, it’s at least one hundred and fifty meters beyond the lower house. You wouldn’t see it from there.”

  Abigail paused only a moment, staring at Lou-Anne with an intensity that made her uneasy. The town planner was about to ask if there was something wrong when Abigail turned and, pulling off her shoes, ran as fast as she could, her bare feet steady on the tiled surface.

  Waiting for the lift was out of the question. With her shoes in one hand, she bounded down the stairs. When she reached the car, her hands were shaking so that it was difficult to find the right buttons on the mobile phone. The phone on the other end of the connection rang one time. “Yudel,” she gasped into the microphone. “Yudel, what are you doing?”

  39

  Freek Jordaan walked slowly through the offices of Tshwane West police station. He had driven from the township barricade and through the suburbs at a speed that, under other conditions, he would have described as irresponsible. From more than a hundred meters away he had seen the police vehicles that had already arrived, and that the street around the station was already cordoned off.

  Until that moment he had been a believer in the idea that small organizations of any kind were more effective than big ones. That was the very reason that he had chosen Tshwane West as the place to hold Bishop. He had known all three men of the duty policemen personally and that they could be trusted without reserve. Very few, including those who had been part of the trap they had set on Saturday night, knew where they had taken Bishop. The staff of the station had not even known their prisoner’s identity.

  One of the bodies was in the cell that Bishop had occupied, the door locked behind him. The key, too, had disappeared and they had not yet been able to gain access to the cell. As Freek stopped outside the cell, a sergeant from a nearby station came running down the passage, waving a key. “Deputy commissioner, I’ve got the master.” His voice was breathless with the effort of locating it.

  Superficially, there were no marks on the policeman’s body. The eyes were open and bulging slightly, but there were no obvious wounds. Freek was certain that the autopsy would indicate that the brain had been starved of blood. He had already examined the body of the constable who had gone outside to find the source of the drunken singing. His body was lying on its side, pushed against the wall of the building. In his case, the wound was obvious. A very thin wire, probably a piano wire, had cut deeply into his neck, almost from ear to ear. In its very neatness the wound was different from the cut left by a knife, but it was at least as effective.

  Only Tshabalala was missing. Freek had known him, both as a law enforcement officer and as a colleague, for more than ten years and he could not believe the sergeant would have been involved in Bishop’s escape.

  “He must have been,” the sergeant said. “He’s not here.”

  A constable, one of four blocking the passage from the cells to the charge office, had his own opinion. “Unless he was abducted.”

  “Get out of the way,” Freek shouted at the constables. “And out of the building if you’re not doing any good.” He pointed at the sergeant. “You, have you seen to it that they searched everywhere?”

  “Everywhere, deputy commissioner.”

  A new officer was coming through the door of the charge office. “There’s a small storeroom under the building,” he said.

  “Who the hell are you?” Freek wanted to know.

  “Lieutenant van Tonder from Wonderboom, sir. I was stationed here last year.”

  “Show me this store.”

  “You get into it from outside,” van Tonder said.

  “Move, man, move.” Freek was pushing him through the charge office door.

  Van Tonder led the way to the side of the building and down a short flight of stairs that led to the storeroom door. The door was ajar and he pushed it open. “There’s a ceiling-mounted light switch with a cord,” he said. “Give me a moment.”

  As the light came on a faint groan reached them from deeper in the room. “He’s here,” van Tonder said. Then, after the slightest pause, “He’s alive.”

  Sergeant William Tshabalala was on his back, partly obscured by one of the shelves that had collapsed. The state of the storeroom reflected what had happened there. Few shelves were still mounted, cardboard boxes that had been neatly piled had come crashing down and were either blocking the space between the shelves or simply scattered across the floor. Clearly, he had fought for his life with more than ordinary determination. The wound caused by the wire was not as complete as the one that had killed the constable.

  “Has someone called the medics?” Freek heard himself shouting.

  “No, sir. We didn’t know he was here. The others are dead.” The voice behind him sounded like that of the man who had found the spare key to the cell.

  “Call them now, for Christ’s sake. Call them immediately. I want this man in hospital in ten minutes.”

  Freek knelt next to Tshabalala. Immediately the sergeant’s eyes widened. Freek thought he saw anguish there that had nothing to do with the sergeant’s pain. His lips were moving. He was trying to speak, but the faintness of his whispering was drowned by the voices of the men in other parts of the station. “Shut the fuck up, all of you,” Freek shouted, turning his head toward the men behind him.” He pointed to a man who was blocking the door behind him. “You, go and shut them all up.”

  The man disappeared and Freek bent over Tshabalala, bringing his face to within a few centimeters of the sergeant’s. As the sounds behind him died down, Freek could make out a ragged whisper. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry I let him get away.” Duty had never been a small thing to the sergeant. His failure was a more pressing matter than his pain. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, William. You’d better not talk.” Freek had been relieved to find the sergeant alive, even in his present condition. He would never have admitted it, even to himself, but he would rather see one of his good men killed in the line of duty than go bad and take money to help a prisoner escape.

  “I made a mistake,” Tshabalala whispered painfully. “You know the way you always tell us to…” But the voice faded. “You always tell us…” he tried again.

  “Don’t talk, William. The medics are coming.”

  But Tshabalala had to explain himself. “You always tell us to do the important things first, but I let a drunk interfere…” His voice was fading again. “I let a drunk man interf
ere with the important thing you gave me to do.”

  “William, quiet now. It’s all right.” One of Freek’s large hands was holding him by a shoulder, a steadying pressure to show him that he was not alone.

  “I don’t know how the prisoner got free, but I was concentrate … concentrating on a drunk man. He was singing…” The voice faded unevenly, for the last time now. Sergeant Tshabalala’s eyes closed slowly.

  Something caused Freek to turn his head. Yudel was at his shoulder, his eyes bright with an intensity Freek had seldom seen in them. “Listen to me,” Yudel said. “You must listen.” He led Freek away from the sergeant’s body. Freek glanced back only once. “Listen to me.” Yudel’s voice held an urgency that forbade discussion. He led Freek out of the storeroom, then out of the charge office and into the gathering twilight. “You know the place Abigail heard about where she thought Bishop may be holding Lourens.”

  “Yes, you searched it with her and there was nothing.”

  “There’s a second house farther up the hill. It’s hidden in the trees. We didn’t even know about it.”

  Freek’s eyes hardened. “Are you telling me this?”

  “Abigail’s on her way there.”

  “My God, that woman.” He turned and shouted at a nearby officer. “How many flying squad men are here?”

  “Six, deputy commissioner,” the answer came back.

  “I want all of them with me. Get to your cars and follow me.”

  “I need to explain to you how to get there,” Yudel was saying.

  Freek seemed to have difficulty believing what he was hearing. “You can tell me on the way.”

  “No. I need to explain. I can’t come with you.”

  To Freek, this was simply another inexplicable Yudel Gordon moment. “Christ, Yudel. Tell me then. Tell me fast.”