Vendetta, page 7
He ran a hand through his wet hair as she approached him. ‘Captain van Rensburg. Is this an official interview again?’
‘No, I was just out for a walk.’ He really was in very good shape. She needed to start running again. ‘Good news. I spoke to my boss today, and she says there’s no need for any further action in regards to you shooting that suspect, though we will need to call you as a witness for the prosecution if he pleads not guilty.’
‘Of course.’ He picked up his T-shirt and shrugged it on. ‘How goes the househunting?’
‘Who says I’m looking for a house?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘When I first told you the address of my place you asked if it was for sale. Who asks that? I’m guessing you’ve been talking to Pam, and that she probably told you about me coming back from Australia and taking my folks’ house off the market.’
‘Guilty.’ He was clever, observant. ‘I’m taking my time. And I’m off on leave soon.’
‘Going away?’
‘Yes, the Kgalagadi.’
‘Really?’
Sannie noticed how Kruger looked instantly alert and engaged. When she had interviewed him at the boat club, he’d seemed distant much of the time, as if his mind was in another place, or another time.
‘You know it – the Kgalagadi?’ she said, of the Transfrontier Park that spanned the Kalahari Desert on both sides of the South Africa–Botswana border.
‘Um, no, not really . . . it’s just that I have – had – a friend who worked near there.’
‘Me as well,’ Sannie said. ‘Mine’s a guide. You said “had”?’
He picked up his running shoes and cast his eyes away from her. ‘I should get home. Thank you for letting me know, about the case.’
‘I’m heading in the same direction,’ Sannie said. As he started to walk, she stayed in step with him.
‘My friend . . .’ He glanced over at her, briefly, ‘he was a San tracker, working for a larney place, called Dune something.’
‘Dune Lodge?’ Sannie said.
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ he said. ‘Do you know it?’
‘My friend works at the same place. Maybe she knows your friend.’
Adam looked at her again. ‘He killed himself.’
‘Oh. Shame, I’m so sorry to hear that. Did you know he was troubled?’
He looked straight ahead and Sannie worked harder to keep up with him in the soft sand. ‘We’re all troubled, sometimes, but, no, I didn’t know that Luiz was particularly worried. Of all of us, he always seemed the most resilient, the least concerned about the things we saw.’
‘In Angola?’ she asked.
The tide was going out and, mercifully, Adam steered back to the firm, wet sand on the edge of the waterline. His stride was long, and though she was not short, she still had to step out.
‘Yes. My friend, Luiz, was a member of 31 Battalion.’
‘One of the San who fought for the old South African army?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
The setting, the light from the sunset, the temperature were all beautiful, but as happened so often in her world, the talk was of death and loss. ‘I remember reading somewhere, in a newspaper, that life is tough for the San communities, away from their traditional lands and ways.’
‘Luiz had a job, and unlike the rest of us he didn’t drink.’
‘The rest of you, Mr Kruger?’
‘Call me Adam, if you like. A lot of veterans have struggled with alcoholism. Not me – at least not lately.’
The same was true of police officers. ‘My first husband used to talk about you guys, the Parabats – I think with some admiration, maybe even longing.’
‘First husband?’
‘Long story,’ Sannie said. ‘But I want to hear yours first. You were saying, about Luiz? Sorry for interrupting.’
‘We were used in a fire force role, responding to contacts with the enemy in South West and Angola. I never got to do a parachute jump into combat – we mostly flew in choppers, or drove out in Buffels.’
‘The troop carriers?’
He nodded. ‘Anyway, we worked with the 31 Battalion guys, the San, from time to time, and we had our favourites. We went on several patrols with Luiz, and his brother, Roberto. We got to know them – that is, the guys from my section and me.’ He started to trail off again, and looked out to sea.
‘And you stayed in touch . . . ?’
He nodded. ‘We try – a few of us, at least. Or should I say, we tried. We put the word out to help as many of the San as possible find jobs. There’s a colonel who keeps in contact with the community and helps with some upliftment programs. All of us moved on, though.’
‘You went to Australia,’ she said.
He looked at her again, although this time she saw the hint of a smile. ‘Yes, but you ask a lot of questions, even for a cop . . .’
‘Oh. Susan,’ she said. ‘Sannie.’
He put out his hand.
It still felt funny, after COVID-19, shaking hands with a stranger, but she took his. It was cool, from the sea, but not cold.
‘Nice to meet you. I hope you find a house here, and find some peace,’ he said.
‘Who says I’m looking for peace?’
‘People come to the south coast to retire, mostly, or maybe to get away. You’re not old enough to go on pension yet. For sure you didn’t come here to bust hijackers or murderers.’
Sannie laughed. ‘You’re taking care of that, at the mall.’
‘That was a one-off, trust me. The local newspaper’s still fishing around for follow-up stories.’
Sannie watched the waves breaking on the rocks further south on Umdoni Point, the spray flying high into the air. ‘But, yes, I’m looking for a change. I remarried . . .’
They walked on, and he said nothing. Sannie cursed herself, silently, for opening up so soon. She hardly knew this strange, handsome man.
‘Where’s your husband?’
There was the cleverness again, asking an open-ended question that she couldn’t blunt with a yes or no answer.
‘He died, in Iraq. He was also a policeman, in England, but he moved to South Africa to be with me, then he felt like he needed to do more, to earn more money to provide for us. He got a job as a contract bodyguard for diplomats and VIPs. He was killed in a rocket strike in Baghdad.’
Adam said nothing as they walked on. There was just the background noise of waves breaking and their feet squeaking in the sand.
‘Was he happy, do you think, doing that work?’ Adam asked.
Most people just said ‘sorry for your loss’ at that point, but he had asked a good question. ‘I think that it was more than the money. “Happy” may not be the right word, but he felt like what he was doing was worth it, protecting people.’
Adam looked at his feet. ‘He sounds like a good man, Sannie.’
She’d invited him to use her first name, but it was weird, hearing it, from a man walking next to her. He sounded like he meant what he said. ‘He was. We had a son, the two of us. And I have two other children from my first marriage, a boy and a girl.’
‘My son and daughter are in Australia.’
‘You must miss them,’ Sannie said. All of her children lived away from her now, and while Sannie would not want to do anything to limit their horizons or opportunities, she did not want to think of them moving overseas.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘Every day, but they were supportive of me coming back to South Africa.’
‘I felt bad,’ Sannie said, ‘not trying to stop Tom from going to Iraq. We could have survived on the money I made, and Tom was also working part-time as a safari guide in the Kruger Park. The money wasn’t great, but he loved the work. When he was killed, I felt guilty for a long time that I didn’t force him to stay.’
He looked at her again, that penetrating gaze from those striking eyes. ‘It’s not love if you have to force someone to do something.’
She thought he was speaking from experience, but she let it rest. ‘Your friend, Luiz,’ she asked, ‘will you go to his funeral?’
Adam sighed. ‘It’s a long way, and I don’t have a car.’
‘But you’d like to go?’
‘Yes. Although I think that if I take a taxi to Durban and get a bus from there across the country to the Northern Cape, I won’t make it in time.’
‘You can’t fly?’
‘The money I make as a car guard isn’t that good.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She looked at him and saw the grin spreading across his face. Sannie laughed.
They reached a rocky part of the beach where the waves broke further out against a sandbank or submerged reef. There were tidal pools among the fissured granite formations. A fisherman, a hundred metres further on, cast out into the surf.
Adam pointed to a gap in the lush green vegetation on the fringe of the rocks. ‘I live through there.’
Sannie stopped, hands on hips, pleasantly tired. ‘I usually turn around here.’
They looked at each other for a few moments. She was reluctant to head back to her flat so soon, and she wanted to know more about him.
‘Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee?’ he asked. ‘I’m afraid it’s Ricoffy.’
She gave herself a brief moment to change her mind. ‘I’d love a cup. It’ll remind me of my oupa. It’s all he used to drink.’
They walked through the band of jungle-like greenery, a tangle of palms and vines and wild bananas that fringed the coastline behind the beach. He asked her where she had come from and she told him a little of her story, and about her last job, in the Kruger Park. Walking behind him, Sannie’s eyes were drawn to the muscles in Adam’s back, where his thin wet T-shirt clung to his skin.
She felt a pang of guilt; she’d been talking about Tom and here she was inspecting another man’s body. She blushed, and was glad the path through the dense vegetation was too narrow for Adam to be alongside her, where he might see her face. Maybe she should make an excuse to turn back.
They emerged at the single-track railway line and crossed it, to Botha Place. These were nice houses, a mix of newer, two-storey places, and older cottages that had been renovated. Off to the left was a modern, fenced estate called Umdoni Point. There the land rose steeply; new houses and two-storey maisonettes of near-identical designs looked out over the ocean. A troop of a dozen curious vervet monkeys stopped their afternoon foraging patrol to watch the two humans.
‘Won’t you miss the Kruger Park?’ Adam said, glancing over his shoulder as she caught up to him.
‘I don’t know,’ Sannie said. ‘I saw so many terrible things there. I worked serious and violent crimes for a while, in Nelspruit, but there’s something especially tragic about seeing the carcasses of dead rhinos. Such magnificent animals, killed purely for greed, for nothing.’ She wanted to add that it was like seeing a dead child, but filtered herself.
‘I hear you. I’m sickened by what some people will do to satisfy their vanity. It’s the same with many marine species, which are being wiped out so some rich guy can show off to his friends,’ Adam said.
They came to the house she had seen on one of her first tours with Pam, the real estate agent. Sannie walked up a garden path of cracked concrete pavers, wondering just what it was she was doing.
Chapter 7
Outside, the place was a wreck, just as she remembered it. The plastered facade was cracked and had fallen away in places, and the remains of the tin roof over the stoep sat in the front garden like the twisted wreckage of a crashed aircraft. The gutters were sprouting grass and the garden was nearly as wild as the strip of jungle they had just passed through across the road.
Adam led Sannie up the stairs and pushed and kicked a door, swollen with damp, until it screeched open.
Inside was different. She smelled fresh sawdust and her eye was drawn to the pale floorboards, stripped of carpet and sanded back to their natural finish. The timber glowed golden in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun, streaming in through the curtainless kitchen window. The walls of what would probably be the living room had been painted a pale grey and the windowsills were in a contrasting dark blue.
Adam walked through a dividing wall of plastic sheeting which he held open for Sannie. The kitchen was clearly original, perhaps from the 1970s. Sannie shuddered. The chipboard cupboards were swollen, with doors hanging askew or missing, and the old linoleum floor covering was stained and torn. Adam used a match to light a camping gas hob and put a battered saucepan of water on the flame to boil. He blew dust out of a chipped mug and set it next to another. Sannie saw a bag of pap, mealie meal, sitting on the worn benchtop. A rusting fridge rattled in a corner.
‘Come through, while the water boils,’ he said.
Adam held open another piece of sheeting and Sannie once again found herself in a different house.
‘This was one of the bedrooms, originally,’ he said, ‘but I’ve made it my library and office.’
Through a picture window, beyond a gnarled umdoni – a waterberry tree – she could see the ocean, dappled with golden sunlight. Across the hallway she could see into a bathroom, with an old, cracked basin and a grubby shower with a mouldy plastic curtain.
Sannie returned her attention to Adam’s office. She ran her finger along a row of books sitting in built-in shelving that filled two entire walls and looked new. ‘Did you make all these shelves yourself?’
He nodded. ‘I can barely afford the timber, so I only use labour if it’s something I absolutely can’t do on my own.’
She looked at the spines of the books. ‘Marine biology, sharks, whales, seahorses . . .’
‘I had boxes of books from my varsity days. Fortunately, my mom kept them all. I thought she might have given them away to the hospice shop or sold them.’
Sannie’s eyes kept roving. There was fiction, including some Deon Meyer, which she loved, and a shelf of books devoted to the Border War, in Angola and South West Africa. There were also cookbooks and others on gardening and home design.
‘You’re making me feel self-conscious now,’ he said.
‘You can tell a lot about a person from their bookshelf.’
He left, to check on the water. Sannie looked around some more. The furniture was old, but she could tell that Adam had been renovating and re-purposing it, and the paint colours were just like the other work-in-progress room, blues, greys and whites. In the library-cum-office, the bare floorboards shone with coats of varnish. The Apple laptop sat on a roll-top desk, which had also been lovingly restored. The computer was probably the most expensive thing in the house.
On the desktop were more books, mostly on sharks, and printouts. She picked up a piece of paper and saw that it was a draft of a thesis. Adam walked in.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘No problem.’ He set down a cup of coffee for her on the desk and she replaced the paper. ‘You might be the only person other than my supervisor who will ever read that.’
What was interesting was that he had spent much of his time and energy, and presumably his limited savings and income, setting up his study space, before tackling rooms that other people might have considered a priority, such as the kitchen or bathroom.
‘Take a seat.’ He gestured to a leather armchair, well worn but perfectly at home among the books.
‘Guitarfish?’ she said, remembering the cover page of the thesis. She blew on her coffee.
‘It’s actually a type of ray, but looks like a flat shark. They’re facing extinction.’
‘Am I allowed to ask what the thesis is about?’ She sipped the coffee. It wasn’t what she drank these days, but the smell and taste did remind her of her childhood, and made her smile.
‘I’m looking at new ways to track shark fin. Finning’s a huge crime, but it doesn’t get nearly the same amount of publicity as rhino poaching.’ He paused. ‘Oh, sorry.’
‘Why?’ She realised he was referring to her last job. ‘Oh, no need to apologise. Even when it comes to rhinos we didn’t get enough money, although the Kruger and other people involved in anti-poaching and conservation do get a lot of funding from overseas donors. But, yes, I know what you mean. There are so many priorities in this country for tackling crime that it feels like there’s never enough money. You should see the state of our police stations.’
He nodded. ‘I have.’
Her guard went up. ‘You’ve had dealings with the police?’
He looked up from his cup. ‘It’s embarrassing.’
She wished neither of them had said anything. Sannie sighed inwardly. She’d ended up in the home of a criminal.
‘No, no.’ He’d read her face and held up a hand like a stop signal. ‘I was the victim of a crime, but it’s so stupid I almost don’t want to tell you.’
She smiled, relieved. ‘I’ve seen and heard it all.’
He nodded. ‘After the divorce, which was amicable, we sold our house in Australia and split the proceeds. We got a good price for it. I still needed to keep aside money for the kids, especially as I was going back to university so I wouldn’t be earning much. I came back to South Africa because I missed it, but also because property’s much more affordable than in Australia. I had enough to buy a nice house here, on the coast, and still have money left over.’ He drew a breath.
‘What happened?’ She sipped her coffee.
‘You think that fraud and that sort of thing only happens to idiots, or elderly people who are maybe getting a little confused.’
‘Oh, no,’ Sannie said.
‘Oh, yes. Somehow, someone’s email was hacked – either mine, the estate agent’s, the seller or the attorney the owner of the house was using. The con artists were intercepting all our messages and had set up a fake Gmail account that looked almost the same as mine. They set up false versions of the conveyancer’s emails and were passing on all the documentation to me, and reading all of our messages to each other.’
