Description

What happens when a man of absolute integrity finds himself trapped in a world of absolute corruption?

During a weekend spree in Cape Town a young, rich, Afrikaner fatally injures a teenaged street girl with his Range Rover – but is too drunk to know that he has hit her. His companions – who do know – leave the girl to die.

The driver’s mother, a self-made mining magnate called Margot Le Roux, intends to keep her son in ignorance of his crime. Why should his life be ruined for a nameless girl who was already terminally ill? No one will care and the law is cheap. But by chance the case falls to the relentless Warrant Officer Turner of Cape Town homicide.

When Turner travels to the remote mining town that Margot owns – including the local police and her private security force – he finds her determined to protect her son at any cost. As the battle of wills escalates, and the moral contradictions multiply, Turner won’t be bought and won’t be bullied, and when they try to bury him he rediscovers, during a desperate odyssey to the very brink of death, a long-forgotten truth about himself…

By the time Willocks’s tale is finished, fourteen men have died. He shows one again that he is the laureate of the violent thriller.

Prologue: Tuesday Morning

Langkopf, Northern Cape, South Africa

Turner’s vision felt gritty, sometimes blurred, his eyeballs too small for their sockets. His head ached with a dull beat interrupted by sudden shards whenever the tyres hit a bump. He could feel his brain move inside his skull, tugging against the blood vessels as if they were cheese wires. The pain seemed worse than before. The same was true for the rest of his body; his kidneys, his spine, his ankles. Maybe it was because he was recovering, his nerves reawakening to work out how much damage had been done. Maybe he’d drunk too much water; maybe not enough. He had water but he didn’t trust it. He couldn’t remember the science and he couldn’t risk an experiment. He had settled on the idea of eggs. He trusted eggs. If he didn’t get eggs he was afraid his brain would explode before someone put a bullet in it. The one thing he knew for sure was that someone was going to try.

He glanced at the speedometer. 140kph. He was going too fast for his blunted, depleted senses; much faster than it seemed, even on this run-down dead-end country road to nowhere. Easy enough in two tons of luxury technology with a five-litre supercharged Jaguar engine under the lid. The irony was not lost on him. If the engine had been less potent and the car less than huge, a lesser monument to its owner’s unslakable vanity, the event that had brought him here, to the back of beyond and beyond the bounds of his humanity, would never have occurred, and he wouldn’t be driving as if the future were something he didn’t expect to see.

The sun was behind him to the east. For the moment no one else was. Before he knew it the gate to the farm appeared just ahead and he stomped on the brake. The algorithms of the onboard computers raced to prevent catastrophe. The pain in his skull intensified. The red Range Rover slowed with contemptuous ease and Turner braced his hands against the steering wheel as his chest rammed against the seat belt.

The dead man in the passenger seat beside him wasn’t strapped in and lurched forward from the waist. His eyebrows bounced off the dashboard and his head flopped down towards his knees. Fresh rivulets of blood pumped from the bullet holes in his back to further stain the cream leather upholstery.

Turner was more familiar with corpses than most. Less so than a coroner, an undertaker or a geriatric oncologist; and he wasn’t used to ferrying them around, as an ambulance driver might be; but he was responsible for this one being dead. More precisely, he had fired three 9×19mm Parabellum slugs through his belly.

The rusty iron gate was open. He swung a hard right off the tarmac and accelerated up the mild incline of a rough dirt track. The dead man flopped upright again and shunted sideways into the passenger door, his face flattened against the window. Half a kilometre ahead the blades of the wind pump turned on top of its slender steel pylon. Outbuildings, a rusting tractor and an old pickup truck; silage bales; the single-storey farmhouse with its old-style red-stone stoop. In the rear-view mirrors: the plume of his own dust.

Turner made a U-turn in the farmyard and parked. He left the engine on and opened the door to get out. A searing wall of hot air almost drove him back inside. His every joint complained as he levered himself upright and staggered through it towards the house.

The stoop was half laminated by an almost-black veneer of sun-baked gore. The smooth surface had crazed as it shrank in the heat and was blemished by the tracks of wildlife; birds, a jackal, and a business of flies stranded and doomed as the wide pool of blood had congealed. An Olympic barbell loaded with eight twenty-kilo plates sat mired in the middle, as if in the aftermath of some bizarre contest of strength. On a small table stood a two-litre plastic jug from a blender. The inside was coated yellow with dried smoothie. More dead flies, glutted and drowned, floated in the rancid remnant at the bottom. Turner grabbed the jug. He ducked through the open front door and stumbled across the living room.

He stopped as he saw himself in an antique mirror on the wall. His black skin was grey with salt and dust. His features were unnaturally gaunt, his lips crevassed and peeling. He did not recognise his own eyes. They were tunnels drilled into the darkness that now lay behind them. There were pictures in the darkness he didn’t want to see; memories, revelations, he dreaded to revisit yet would have to. He turned away from what he realised, with shock, was himself and continued to the kitchen and survival.

He tore the fridge open. There they were: two boxes of eggs. He opened them: eight left. He rinsed out the jug at the sink, the sound of the water grating on his mind. Still encrusted but the dead flies were gone; clean enough. He cracked all eight eggs into the jug, one in each hand, two at a time, unconcerned by the fragments of shell. Back to the fridge. Coconut milk, cow’s milk, a banana, two oranges, celery, a tomato, a lump of cheese. He piled the jug full to the brim, peeling the banana, ripping the whole oranges apart and cramming them in. He found the blender and the lid and liquidised the concoction for as long as his craving permitted.

He took the lid off and drank.

His eyelids clenched. If he had had any tears he would have cried with something more than pleasure or relief. His gullet convulsed in its haste to suck down the liquid. His whole being affirmed the rightness of the eggs. The contents of an egg could create a living creature strong enough to break through the shell and sing. They had to be perfectly balanced. They wouldn’t explode his brain. Half a litre. His stomach cramped at the sudden assault. He lowered the jug and breathed. Enough for now. The cramp passed.

He took the jug back to the car and sealed himself inside with the dead man and the air con. He watched the empty road in the distance as it quavered in the harsh white sunlight. A flat, featureless terrain of grass and scrub. The Range Rover had a GPS tracker inside it. They knew exactly where he was. He wondered how much time he had before they got here. Not much. But time enough to make sure that when they buried him, they wouldn’t be able to bury him under another mountain of lies.

He took out his smartphone and tapped and scrolled through the app he needed to send a voice memo. He took another swallow of the concoction, chewing on pieces of orange peel, his tongue reviving to the bitter tang, and set the jug on the seat between his thighs. He started to record.

‘Memo from Turner.

‘To Captain Eric Venter, cc Mohandas Anand, Colonel Nyathi, Pieter Meyer at the Times, myself, Cloud.

‘Dear Captain Venter, you told me to keep you up to speed on the hit-and-run.

‘The unknown girl. Culpable homicide, failure to render.

‘I said I’d push it hard and close it fast. That was just two days ago. It seems a lot longer to me but I’ve been in the slowness. The slowness is hard to explain. You have to be in it to know it. To know it, you have to go mad.

‘I haven’t closed. Not all the way, not yet.

‘But I want you to know I’m still pushing. Maybe from beyond the grave.

‘Things got out of hand, as things will. Chaos never sleeps. A good man meets chaos with composure. He does what’s right because that’s the way to cause the least pain and to die with the fewest regrets. That’s what I thought I was. A good man.

‘Now I’m not sure. I’ll never be sure again.

‘You told me it was a different world up here. You were right. You told me all this space would alter my mind. You were right. You told me you would worry about me and I believe that, in a way, you did. But not in the way I understood it.

‘I wonder if you’re worried now.

‘It shouldn’t have been my case. It was my first weekend off in three. But Saturday night in Cape Town left bodies all over the city, and you couldn’t even find a pair of uniforms to spare so you called me in. I wasn’t sleeping. I was up on Devil’s Peak, practising my long notes and waiting for the sun to rise. But you can’t be in Heaven and on Earth at the same time.

‘It was 6 a.m. on Sunday morning …’

1

The girl had no more reason to turn down this street than any other. In the humid labyrinth of Nyanga township all streets looked alike. They weren’t even streets, just strips of baked dirt between rows of shanties and rusted shipping containers turned into homes.

If she had been here before she didn’t remember. She didn’t even try. She had no use for memory. The less she allowed to go in there, the emptier it got, and the more the monsters that lurked within the emptiness seemed inclined to sleep.

She didn’t know what time it was. She had no use for time. The dogs had long since howled and gone to sleep. It was enough to know that the world was quiet and dark and that people would be few.

She had no use for people, for their company, their feelings, their help, their concern, their lies. She only had use for the things they had thrown away and which kept her alive. Even here there was surplus enough to survive on, as a rat survives. She could have bargained for more but she had learned that what little that more might be wasn’t worth the cost in humiliation. And sometimes danger.

The rats were doing fine and so was she.

She walked the maze without destination. Without ambition, intention or anything so grand as desire. Even need, she had found, could be negotiated downwards. At some point fatigue would overcome her and she’d crawl into some hole to join the dogs in their dreams. When she awoke, she’d start walking again.

She had no use for self-pity. Animals felt no self-pity, they only felt pain. Children felt no self-pity. They only felt pain and sorrow and bewilderment. Self-pity was something you learned in a place of safety and the girl had never had the chance.

She saw the cars up ahead and stopped. There were two of them, one white, the other blood red, parked side by side, noses out, in a vacant dirt lot by a shebeen.

They were beautiful.

Stranded among the hovels and rusted containers, they shone as if with their own inner light. The single distant street lamp, the pale half-moon, the waste glow from the bar, could not account for their radiance. They shone with dominance, ingenuity, wealth; with a fanatic and extravagant commitment to a way of being as remote from her own as the constellations wheeling above her head. She was moved simply by their perfection.

She smiled as a child might smile at some new-found wonder.

She looked about and saw no observers. She ran towards the cars.

Up close they seemed to squat there, huge-shouldered and silent. Something in their dormant power made her scalp shiver. Silver letters gleamed on their hoods. Toyota. Range Rover. She circled the white one and peered in the windows. The glass was too dark to see anything inside. She reached for a door handle, hesitated, drew her hand back. The cars would give her nothing that she needed. They had given her a moment of wonder and that was enough. She turned and ducked between the two great machines as a draught of sound gusted across the alley from the shebeen.

Voices. Music. A gust of coarse laughter. The sound faded down again.

She looked towards the shebeen. A long narrow shack half reclaimed by weeds, built from planks of diverse origin and roofed in corrugated iron.

A tall black African stood outside the door. He wore a black suit and a white shirt that somehow conveyed an alien beauty similar to that of the cars. She knew at once that he was a dangerous man. A man who had killed and was ready to do so again. He wore this power of killing as he wore his suit, with the understated confidence that came from having earned it. She knew also that he’d never stoop to hurting her. At worst he would chase her away but she wanted to look at him. He was beautiful, too. He glanced at the two big cars.

She ducked. The cars were his, or in his charge. She crept around the back of the blood-red car, the Range Rover, and edged out one eye to watch him again. He hadn’t seen her.

He lifted his right hand towards his face, holding a burger half wrapped in a paper napkin. The girl felt her stomach clench with hunger. He studied the burger without enthusiasm, then took a bite. He chewed and his face contorted with disgust. He bent forward and spat the mouthful out at his feet.

‘Motherfuck.’

He spat again, looked at the burger in his hand. He could have thrown it into the street, where it would have gone unnoticed among the drifts of trash, but he was not that kind of man. He looked beyond the Range Rover. The girl turned to look too.

A few steps behind the cars, shoved against the cinder-block wall of the building at the rear of the lot, stood three black metal garbage dumpsters. For the first time she noticed their stench. The man walked across the alley towards the cars and passed between them. The girl retreated on her haunches. The man used the paper napkin to raise the lid of the dumpster and tossed the burger inside. As he walked back to stand outside the bar, he pulled a bottle of water from the pocket of his pants and opened it. He rinsed his mouth and spat and drank again.

The girl had a handbag slung around her neck, of cheap striped cloth. She reached in and found a plastic cigarette lighter. She checked the flame. She shuffled back round the blood-red car and looked back at the dumpster. She risked a glance at the man. Could she get into the dumpster without him seeing her? She thought about it.

A gunshot slammed.

Dust and splinters exploded from the wall of the shebeen. Before the splinters reached the ground, the tall man had dropped the bottle and drawn a gun from under his jacket. He opened the bar door and vanished inside.

The girl dashed to the dumpster and threw back the lid. It hit the wall and dropped back. She threw it up again, slid around the side and steadied it in place. She turned her face away from an eruption of acrid vapour. The lid held. The top of the dumpster was level with her shoulders. She peered over the rim into absolute darkness. She stretched her arm over the edge and clicked the lighter. The light of the flame fell across an uneven mass of every kind of waste, much of it organic and seething with tiny life. The dumpster looked three-quarters full. She scanned the filth and waved the small flame but she couldn’t see the burger within range of the light.

She staggered away and doubled over and retched. She leaned her hands on her knees until she’d recovered. She wiped tears from her eyes, took three deep breaths and held the last, and straightened. She stepped back to the dumpster and shoved her head over the front rim. She stood on her toes and reached over with the lighter and clicked the wheel until she got a flame.

Voices rose some distance behind her as the bar door opened, one voice dominant.

‘Simon, take Mark and Chris straight to the hotel. I’ll bring these two clowns.’

Locks clunked open. Lights flashed. She glanced over her shoulder. The tall African herded two young white men towards the white Toyota. They were both unsteady on their feet. If they’d seen her rooting in the dumpster, they didn’t care. She turned back to her search.

‘Dirk? Give me the bloody keys.’ The dominant voice again. A foreign accent.

‘It’s my bloody car.’ This voice slurred, younger.

‘It’s your mother’s. Give me the keys, now.’

Car doors slammed. An engine started up.

‘What do you buggers want?’ The foreigner. Then two new voices shouting together, the words indistinct. The foreign voice rode over them. ‘Shut up and calm down. Here, take this. Take it. Buy a new poster. Buy a new bar. Now fuck off before you get hurt.’

More clunks. Lights flared right behind her.

‘I said: fuck off. Dirk!’

‘You didn’t have to bitch-slap him.’

‘Get behind that wheel and I’ll slap you.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

She sensed the car to her left, the white one, drive away.

She saw the burger.

Her lighter went out. She relit it. She was in luck. The burger had landed on a plastic bag but it was out of reach. She crouched, grabbed the edge of the dumpster with both hands, and jumped, boosting herself up so that she lay doubled over the rim. The metal dug into her belly just beneath her ribs but it wasn’t something she hadn’t done before. The burger was invisible again. She clicked the lighter. Again. Again. A car door slammed; then another. The lighter caught. An engine started. She saw the burger.

She reached out and grabbed it. Heard more shouts of contention. As she levered her body backwards a flood of white light threw her shadow at the raised lid. The engine revs rose to a whine. The girl jumped down and twisted to land sideways. She blinked as white lights hurtled towards her.

Her bones collapsed.

Her guts popped inside her.

Her face bounced on glass.

Her awareness was swamped. She was blind. Dazzled by bright colours. She was pinned above the earth. She was falling. Couldn’t breathe to scream. She saw the night sky.

For a moment she felt nothing, heard nothing. She stared up at the stars. Her body warned her. It was gathering itself, preparing itself, to devote everything it was and everything it had to the experience of intolerable pain. The pain was as yet a ghost, shimmering just beyond the veil of reality, waiting for the energy to become material. She sensed that ghost. It was coming. And it was her own flesh. Terror saturated her mind. Terror so intense that for a moment it kept the ghost at bay. Red lights glared into her face.

‘Turn the engine off! DIRK! Turn the fucking engine OFF!’

The engine cut out.

The girl turned her head towards the voices. She looked down the shining red length of the car. A big white man opened the driver’s door and jutted his bearded chin towards the interior.

‘Satisfied?’

‘It’s my car.’

‘You’re weak. You’re stupid. And you’re pissed. Now move over and put your seat belt on.’

The big man cocked his fist.

‘All right, all right! I’m sorry.’

The girl wanted to speak but was afraid it would invite the ghost. She turned her head. Another man’s face stared down at her from the open rear window. Young, white, a huge muscular neck. He appeared to be horrified. She opened her mouth and a low moan came out and her insides started to scream and she choked the moan off. The young man called to the elder.

‘Hennie, I can’t find my phone. Give me yours.’

‘What do you need a phone for, dickhead?’

The big man turned and looked straight down at her. He frowned but without horror; as if he’d spotted nothing worse than a flat tyre. ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

The girl tried to speak to him with her eyes. The big man got the message. He scratched his beard with a thumb. Grimaced. He didn’t otherwise move.

‘Hennie, the phone, Jesus!’

‘Keep your fucking mouth shut.’

The young man in the back opened the door and the big man, Hennie, took a step and slammed the door in his face. He looked down at the girl. Tiny points of light in dark sockets were all she could see of his eyes.

The drunken voice from the front seat: ‘What’s wrong now?’

Hennie looked at her a moment longer. She raised her arm towards him. She heard and felt the grinding of bones, the bursting of membranes somewhere deep inside her.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Hennie. He turned away from her. ‘Time to hit the road to Dreamland.’

The girl watched him get in the car and close the door. The engine started. The young face appeared at the open rear window and peered down at her. He was crying.

The girl watched the blood-red car drive away between the shanties.

Brake lights flared. The lights disappeared.

And the ghost took possession of her body.

2

Hennie had been driving for seven hours. They were six hundred clicks from Cape Town and thirty minutes from home. He’d been glad to see the dawn, and its eerie splendour had not been lost on him, but in broad daylight the Northern Cape was something to be crossed not appreciated. The province was larger than Germany. Flat scrub desert stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sky was a hard, bright blue. It was always blue. There were days when Hennie would have danced with joy to see a single cloud.

He’d never been much of a sightseer, or a tourist, though he’d seen his share of the world and more. Maybe it was because he was a Londoner. In his view grand landscapes were best enjoyed on a cinema screen – deserts, jungles, canyons, waves pounding the rocks, forests in the snow, and so forth. But then you were only looking at them for a few seconds at a time, and you knew that shortly someone would appear on a horse or driving a fast car, and that they’d shoot someone or meet a long-legged woman or find a suitcase full of cash. He’d hiked through all such terrains in his time, carrying a sixty-pound pack and a rifle. They were impressive for about five minutes, then they were just something to be crossed. He’d shot a good number of people, too, but he’d never met the woman or found the suitcase, or at least not in a landscape. The woman he had met at her husband’s funeral. The cash was a sequence of digits in Switzerland.

His mind had roamed from one random thought to another since they’d left Cape Town and some had seemed profound and even important, yet now he couldn’t remember a single one. He wondered how many thoughts he had had in his life. Probably millions, if you included things like deciding to cut his toenails or how many sugars to put in his tea. Most of them – in retrospect, almost all of them – had been a complete waste of time. Gone forever; and no more significant than the thoughts of a dog. The toenail stuff was the probably best of it. At least that had been useful. He’d seen men killed by neglected toenails.

He rubbed his face with one hand to improve the blood supply to his brain.

Time was catching up with him. He felt that he was in the best shape of his life but objectively that wasn’t possible. Fifty-five-year-olds didn’t win gold medals. But he believed he could take his twenty-three-year-old self on the grounds of stubbornness, meanness and experience. He’d been harder on the outside but softer on the inside. The softness of youth was built into the machine. No matter how brutal your own life had been, you could always put that down to sheer bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong parents. You still had hope. It took another couple of decades to realise that there was no better world somewhere. A better life, maybe, but not a better world. Man was a vicious bastard, pure and simple, and mad into the bargain.

He turned from the tarmac unspooling across the veld and looked at Dirk.

Dirk lay slumped against the passenger door. Drool seeped from the corner of his mouth to soak his Versace T-shirt. A handsome lad. Hennie felt a pang of love stab him in the chest.

Dirk would be twenty-four next month. Since the age of nine he had been Hennie’s stepson. If he’d been Hennie’s real son, Hennie would have made his life a misery and most likely have driven him away. As his stepfather Hennie didn’t feel a genetic responsibility for who Dirk was. Didn’t feel obliged to mould him or feel embarrassed by him. All that was Margot’s business. Hennie’s was to keep Margot happy. Keeping Margot happy was the purpose of his life. No easy chore but he felt glad to have found any purpose at all. When necessary, it meant protecting Dirk. He had protected Dirk from the law. Question was, did he need to protect him from Margot?

‘What a fucking cock-up.’

He realised he’d muttered out loud. A grunt came from the back seat. He glanced up into the mirror. He saw Simon’s white Toyota 4Runner, some hundred metres behind them. Simon was their head of security. He was Zulu, as solid as Table Mountain, and as close to a true friend as Hennie had. Hennie adjusted his angle on the mirror and saw Jason blinking and clutching his throat in the rear.

‘Jesus.’ Jason’s voice sounded like a cheese grater on a rusty pipe.

Jason Britz was of no more than average height but his shoulders half filled the rear of the car. His primary occupation was lifting weights and injecting steroids. In theory, he was a farmer. For two centuries his forefathers had sweated, coaxed and bullied a living from this godforsaken terrain, a land shunned by all flora and fauna edible to Europeans and even to the vast majority of Africans. No soil, no grass, no trees, no fruit, no mammals. In the four years since Jason had inherited his family’s farm, the desert had reclaimed itself almost entirely. In practice he made a living supplying weed and meth to local dealers whose main clientele worked in Margot’s mine. He wasn’t in prison, or buried under the sand, because his uncle, Rudy Britz, was a police sergeant.

Hennie pulled a bottle of water from the holder and drank and put it back.

‘Can I have some of that?’ asked Jason.

‘Get your own.’

‘The other bottles are in the boot.’

Hennie managed not to respond.

Jason said, ‘You think it’s all my fault.’

‘I was enjoying the silence. Why don’t you try it?’

Jason didn’t speak again for all of thirty seconds.

‘I wonder if she’s still alive. I mean, well, you know who I mean.’

‘Shut up. You’ll wake Dirk.’

‘I’ll never forget that look on her face. It’s bad juju, Hennie.’

‘Did you know that farmers are the root of all man’s woes?’

‘Man’s?’ said Jason.

‘Mankind. The human race. Us.’

‘Ag no, man, we’d all starve without farmers.’

‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Crime, war, slavery, tyranny. Greed and murder for greed. Capitalism. Sexually transmitted disease. It’s all down to the farmers.’

Jason laughed. Hennie laughed too.

‘You’re trying to wind me up.’

‘Not at all,’ said Hennie. ‘Before farmers came along we had none of those things. Everyone was too busy, hunting antelope, buffalo, reindeer, seals. Fishing. They were always on the move and the men were all tooled up and fit with it, so there was a limit to how much bullshit any one man could get away with. But a farmer has to stay put, he has a shovel not a spear, and the good farmer – such as your father was – who breaks his back pulling weeds and digging irrigation, grows more produce than he and his family can eat. So the family gets bigger and your population booms and you grow even more food, and the surplus just keeps getting bigger too. So what do you do with that surplus?’

‘You sell it,’ said Jason. ‘Or barter it. Or save it for a drought.’

‘Very good. But to do all that you have to store it, right? And if you store it, sooner or later some evil bastard is going to come along and steal it. So some local gangster gets a bunch of his own villains together and says to the farmers thereabouts, Look, we’ll store it for you and keep it safe for when you need it. For a reasonable commission, of course. Are you following me?’

‘Sounds a bit like the drug trade.’

‘Very much so. Before you know it that gangster is calling himself the king, and the surplus isn’t yours any more, it’s his, all of it, every grain, every goat, every egg. And if your farmer complains, the king sends his boys to kneecap your oxen, or peel the bark from your olive trees and rape your daughters. Now all the farmers are working full-time for the king for no pay, not a red cent, and the king is in his castle, which the farmers built and paid for, and his boys have become an army, but it’s not enough because money’s tight and you farmers can’t be squeezed any harder without dropping dead even sooner than you already do, and somewhere over far yonder hills some other king is working the same scam. So what does our king do, if he’s got the balls?’

‘He muscles in on the new king’s territory.’

‘Right,’ said Hennie. ‘War. War means slaves to work the new fields and give the king his footbaths and build temples for his gods and mine the gold for his crown. Prostitutes for the troops. More people. More surplus. More war. And basically there you have it. Civilisation as we know it. Thanks to the bloody farmers. And as Oscar Wilde said, the downtrodden masses have sold themselves for a very bad pottage indeed.’

‘What’s a pottage?’ asked Jason.

‘A kind of thick soup.’

‘Yeah, but now we’ve got the Internet.’

Hennie snorted. ‘If it was up to me I’d shut it down today.’

‘Are you a communist, Hennie?’

‘My dad was a socialist, much good it did him. I’m more in the way of a king, but to be a king you have to understand how the game is rigged.’

‘Well, you can’t blame me for the wars or the Internet. I’m not a farmer any more.’

Jason fell into what seemed to be a thoughtful trance.

Hennie was peeved that his historical analysis had not provoked greater admiration.

Jason said, ‘We shouldn’t have left that girl.’

‘Forget about the girl.’

‘We should’ve at least called an ambulance.’

Hennie felt a familiar rage simmer in his chest.

‘Jason, do you know what “tolerate” means?’

‘Tolerate? It means we should try not to hate the blacks.’

‘That’s a narrow definition,’ said Hennie, ‘but it’s a start.’

‘Uncle Rudy says we shouldn’t bother.’

‘More generally it means that when a situation – or a person – is a pain in our bollocks but either we can’t do anything about it or the cost of doing so would be more than its worth, we grit our teeth and put up with it. For instance, we tolerate the sun, the dust, the mosquitoes. We tolerate the whims of women and the tantrums of children. And yes, we tolerate the blacks, and Rudy’s wrong, you should bother, because you’re not going to get rid of them any more than you’re going to get rid of the sun.’

‘I see your point, Hennie.’

‘No you don’t because I haven’t made it yet. My point is, I tolerate you.’

‘I always thought you were a good bloke, too.’

Hennie looked in the mirror to see if Jason was taking the piss. He wasn’t.

‘You might also say that I suffer you. For Dirk’s sake. But if you don’t shut your mouth, that can change.’

‘I don’t want Dirk to suffer.’

‘Jesus. Are you still pissed?’

‘She couldn’t have seen Dirk. Pity he didn’t see her.’

Hennie glanced over his shoulder.

Jason was wringing his hands and staring down into the space between his knees.

‘She saw me,’ he said. ‘Did she get a good look at you?’

Hennie braked slowly and opened the electric window.

‘They say we all look the same to them,’ said Jason. ‘You could always shave the beard off.’

Hennie stuck his arm out and waved at Simon to overtake them.

Jason said, ‘I wonder what Margot will say.’ He noticed Hennie’s manoeuvre, the white Toyota swooping past. ‘What’s wrong?’

Hennie pulled over and stopped. He left the engine running. He got out and opened the rear door on Jason. Jason cringed, like a dog who knows he’s done something wrong but not exactly what. Hennie pitied him, but not enough to shirk what had to be done.

‘Out.’

‘What do you mean? Why?’

‘I’m tired. You drive.’

Jason’s lips quivered with gratitude. He stuck one foot on the tarmac and ducked his head and one shoulder out of the door. Hennie stepped behind him and slid his right forearm across Jason’s throat. He grabbed his own right elbow with his left hand and levered his left forearm into the back of Jason’s neck. He dragged him, choking, from the car and dumped him in the scrub at the side of the road. Jason rolled onto his back and stared up at him, panting with fear.

‘Listen to me, you stupid, drug-addled juice monkey. Margot isn’t going to say anything because Margot’s never going to know. Neither are your mates, your uncle Rudy, and most of all Dirk. Only you and I know. And if I ever hear that anyone else does, I will recycle you into the shit of carnivorous beasts. It takes about two days and the smell is peculiar depending on whether or not you get eaten alive. Have I made myself clear?’

Jason nodded. He started to get up until Hennie stabbed a finger at him.

‘Stay down.’

Hennie took a gun from his jacket pocket. Jason’s Vektor Z-88, a Beretta 92 produced on licence for the cops. He ejected the magazine and the cartridge in the chamber and dropped the gun at his feet.

‘The next man who takes that off you might not be so friendly.’

Hennie took the chance to examine the back of the Range Rover in daylight. The bumper, the boot, the window. He rechecked the surfaces from various angles. After a moment he was satisfied. Not a mark on it. There’d be traces of something, but he’d get one of the men to give it a scrub, wax and polish. He tapped the gleaming metal twice.

‘British engineering, mate.’

Jason had not dared move. Hennie slammed the rear door without looking at him and got back behind the wheel. Dirk moaned and shifted but didn’t waken.

‘Jesus, Hennie, you’re not going to leave me here –’

Hennie closed his door and drove away.

He watched Jason, reflected in the wing mirror, scramble to his feet. He stood there, frantically going through his pockets. It felt like abandoning a giant child. But these lads had to grow up. Hennie found Rudy Britz’s number on his mobile and dialled it. In the rear-view mirror, he saw Jason run after him, waving both hands above his head.

‘Christ,’ said Rudy. ‘Seven on a Sunday morning? What do you want?’

‘I want you to hear this from me,’ said Hennie. ‘You’ll be getting a call from that nephew of yours. He’s been a silly boy.’

3

The girl looked as dead as any corpse Turner had seen.

She was a black African, mid-to-late teens, and lay prone with her left cheek resting on the sun-baked dirt of the lot. Flies crawled over her eyeballs and her desiccated lips. A bruise bulged from her right cheekbone. She didn’t appear to be breathing. But greater diagnosticians than he had zipped the living into body bags and he was the first responder. He had to be sure.

He squatted and felt for the carotid pulse between gloved fingers and thumb.

After a moment, he withdrew his hand.

He guessed she weighed well under forty kilos. Her short, thin cotton dress, pale green with yellow flowers, had been torn from waist to hem to reveal emaciated buttocks and thighs. Soiled underwear, more recently soiled with moist red clots and excrement. Her right hip was grossly deformed, the overlying skin pulverised and sheared aside in a ragged, shrivelled flap. Raw white and red shards spiked through the breach in her flesh, their edges and spicules rimed with an obscene coagulant of marrow and blood. More feasting flies.

Turner’s guts rose inside him with something more than mere disgust, something that evoked outrage and confusion, and a memory he rarely dared revisit and never willingly: of another young woman lying broken and dead on another sun-baked street. The police had stood over her body, too. But not in search of evidence, least of all justice.

His mouth flooded with saliva, acrid yet sweet. He stood up and looked away and marked a spot at the edge of the lot where he might vomit without contaminating the scene. He swallowed. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Balance the chi. Engage the mind like the moon. Cool, distant, objective, aware. The memory sank back into the darker regions of his psyche. He turned back to his work.

The girl’s right leg was fractured below the knee, the skin tented above one broken tip of the fibula. He stepped around the corpse. Her left hip was swollen with a huge haematoma but the skin was unbroken. Her whole pelvis seemed abnormally canted from the axis of her spine.

Her left arm was trapped beneath her body. No reason to disturb her until the techs showed up. Her right arm was outstretched and its clenched fist swarmed with copper-coloured fire ants. A narrow column scuttled away with their winnings. He bent for a closer look. The ants were harvesting an organic material extruding from between her fingers. He prised the fingers open and saw a mass of bread and ground meat, mixed with a pale yellow goo. The ants swarmed in. He dusted the insects from his gloves before they could bite him.

He assumed the cause of death to be catastrophic internal trauma. A more expert assessment was up to the techs and the coroner. Where were the uniforms? Lost in the maze of unmapped and nameless alleys. Or doing battle with the living rather than standing over the dead. Statistically, by the square metre, Nyanga township was a competitor for the title of highest crime neighbourhood on the continent.

Turner stood up and took out his phone.

He circled the body, taking photos from a variety of angles.

He took photos of the blood trail that led five metres to the garbage dumpster.

He had noted the dumpster on his walk from the car. It stood at the rear of the vacant lot where she had died, distinguished from its neighbour on either side by a depression punched into the galvanised metal about a metre above the ground. He took a photo and examined the surface. Spray-painted black. At the rim of the depression the paint was marked by fresh abrasions and cracks where clean metal shone through. He assumed that paint fragments would be found on the girl’s dress and skin. He snapped two close-ups. A blue Bic lighter lay on the ground. He shot it and bagged it. He took photos of the tyre marks scored into the dirt in front of the dumpster.

Turner went back to the corpse and sat on his heels. Around her neck was the sling of a handbag. One tatty corner stuck out from beneath her chest. He tugged it free and lifted her head to free the sling. He looked inside the bag. Four coins. A dirty handkerchief. A child’s finger puppet – a penguin. Nothing else but a grubby business card. He looked at the card.

Warrant Officer

RADEBE TURNER

Underneath his name was his office phone number. He turned the card over and saw his mobile number, written in his own hand. He studied the girl’s face.

He studied her for a long time. Her blighted youth. The desperation that had marked her even before her death. The mask of her final agony in this barren trash-strewn garden. Not merely her own history written there, but that of a failing civilisation. He looked again at the handwritten number on the card, as if it represented an indictment from some higher court of his own role in that failure. He was certain he did not recognise her. He did not know how or why she had come to be carrying his card. He handed them out often enough to witnesses. He added his own number less often, for people who might need his help. He hadn’t been much help to her.

He stood up and turned as he heard a sound behind him.

A lean African, thirties, bearded, leaned against the doorway of the shebeen, rubbing the corner of one eye with the first knuckle of his thumb.

‘Nothing worth stealing on her, man. Police be here soon.’

Turner was dressed in light mountain boots, hiking pants and a pale blue hiking shirt that hung out to cover the gun on his hip. The shirt was one size too big to give him the room to move when he needed to. He took no offence at being mistaken for the lowest kind of scum. He held out his identification card in his gloved hand.

The African straightened up and retreated behind a sudden barrier of fear.

Turner took a photo of the front of the bar. The timber was painted green, peeling here and there in the heat. A hand-painted sign named it THE DUBLIN CASTLE. A second sign promised LUXURY! Turner walked closer as something caught his eye. He studied the fresh white wood and splinters that surrounded a bullet hole. He took a photo. He looked at the African. The African hunched his shoulders and sucked his teeth.

‘What’s your name, sir?’

‘Khwezi’ll do.’

‘Did you call this in, Khwezi?’

‘Yeah, about three hours ago. Lucky it wasn’t something important.’

‘Busy night. Do you know who she is?’

‘No, I never seen her before.’

‘What did you see?’

‘I didn’t see the accident.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

‘I saw her lying there when I closed up, when I took out the trash, around three o’clock.’

Turner watched him for a moment. Khwezi shuffled in his flip-flops.

‘At first I thought she’d just crashed out, you know? It happens.’

Turner watched him some more. For township boys like Khwezi, giving information to a police carried a vague stain of dishonour, no matter what the end. It was a mistake to get impatient with them. Let them get impatient.

‘That’s it,’ said Khwezi. ‘She was dead so I called the police. Three hours ago. I just need you to get rid of her before I open up again.’

‘Must have been a big vehicle,’ said Turner. ‘Gangsters?’

‘Shit, they weren’t no gangsters.’

‘So why are you afraid of them?’

‘Afraid of who?’

‘The people who killed her.’

‘I never seen them before either. And I wouldn’t know them if I saw ’em again.’

Turner nodded. ‘Do you sell cheeseburgers?’

Khwezi was taken aback. ‘Yeah, we sell cheeseburgers. Why?’

‘The girl fished one out of the garbage.’

Khwezi glanced at the dented dumpster, then at the dead girl. His head bobbed up and down, as if some lingering question in his mind had been answered.

‘How did it get there?’ said Turner. ‘The cheeseburger.’

‘Now you’re asking me to speculate.’

‘So you’re an educated man. Relatively speaking.’

‘I know the way things are, as in those fuckers are never going to pay for it.’

‘But you think they should.’

‘Damn right they should but they won’t so you’re wasting both our time.’

‘Give me something to work with. I’ll make them pay.’

Khwezi laughed. ‘Excuse me, officer, but you the one needs educating. It doesn’t matter what I saw or what I say I saw. I make a statement, my name comes up as a witness, then I’ve got some private investigator on my back who gets paid twice what you do, and he’s digging into my shit, my family’s shit, my bar’s shit, shit I did ten years ago. He’s standing on my throat while you’ve got your boot on my balls. So let’s say I’m more stupid than you think I am and I wear the cheap shirt and tie you buy me and I stand up in court. A crowd of fat white lawyers take it in turns to piss in my face and I’m the one who looks like he should be doing time.’

Turner said, ‘You’re right.’

Khwezi blinked twice. ‘OK then.’

‘Your name won’t come up. You don’t make a statement. You’re not a witness. You just tell me what happened. I’ll work with that.’

‘Shove her in the ground and move on, man. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody ever did. I mean, just fucking look at her.’

‘I have looked at her.’

Turner let that hang while Khwezi shuffled on the spot. He held the business card in front of Khwezi’s face.

‘Ask around,’ said Turner.

‘Turner. Maybe I hear a bell. What will they tell me?’

‘That my word is good. That you don’t want my boot on your balls.’

Turner bagged the card and put it in one of the pockets of his pants.

‘See?’ said Khwezi. ‘They’ll get away with murder, I’ll get fucked for selling my grandma’s mampoer.’

‘Is that what the driver was high on?’

‘If I didn’t see the accident, like I told you I didn’t, how could I see who was driving?’

‘So tell me who might have been driving.’

Turner saw Khwezi glance past him, a change of expression, a further retreat. Four boys in ragged shorts and bare feet had appeared. They were watching the work of the ants at a respectful distance. An audience wouldn’t help his efforts to loosen Khwezi’s tongue. Turner reached in his back pocket and called to the boys.

‘Hey, come here.’

The boys shrank away. Turner waved a fifty-rand note. The boldest led them over.

‘Any of you know that girl?’ asked Turner. ‘Or see what happened to her?’

The boys exchanged glances and shook their heads.

‘She got hit by a big car,’ said Turner. ‘You ask around for me, see if anyone did see it. If they did, you come back and tell Khwezi. Now go buy yourselves a cool drink.’

The leader snatched the note and skipped away with his comrades in pursuit.

‘So now I’m the neighbourhood snitch,’ said Khwezi. ‘Thanks a lot.’

Turner said, ‘Kinetic energy.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘The vehicle that killed her didn’t move very far. To smash her up that badly in a short distance, it would have to be powerful and heavy. Say a high-end SUV. You said these people were white.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘But they’d hire white lawyers.’

Turner looked into his eyes and Khwezi held his gaze. Turner let his instinct make the calculation, then gave Khwezi the victory his pride required. He broke the stare and looked away at the shanties down the street. He sensed Khwezi recover himself.

‘I grew up in Khayelitsha,’ said Turner. ‘The cop is our enemy. Our money in their pockets. Friends tortured. Relatives who disappeared. I know.’ He turned back to Khwezi. ‘But I am not that cop. And you are lucky, because you are not my enemy.’