Just a Dead Man Read online

  “No.”

  “Right. We may need to talk to you again.” At a nod from Pillay, Dhlomo went out through the front door, pressing the button to open the gate. Make yourself at home, why don’t you, I thought.

  “Will you be all right on your own?” asked the inspector. “You aren’t nervous? Is there someone you could ask to spend the night with you?”

  “Why? I’ll be fine. You’re not expecting the murderer to come back are you?”

  “No. But this must have been a very unpleasant experience.”

  “Well, yes.” He had that right. But the most unpleasant part had been interacting with his sergeant. “I’m okay. Inspector Pillay … do you think he was killed there, or put there?”

  Pillay moved away from the painting and looked at me. “We can’t be sure yet … though it looks to me as if the body was dumped there. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know. It’s silly I suppose, but I’d feel better if I thought someone had put him there. I mean, around here, we all walk in the plantations, with dogs and so on. It has always seemed perfectly safe.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t notice anyone, any vehicles, going down the road outside that gate today?”

  “No. But I was painting in here, and I was concentrating, absorbed. I mean … there must have been cars, but I don’t think anything struck me. Sorry.” Again, something niggled in my memory and was gone before it could materialise.

  “Now. The Mendi. You say Mr Moyo mentioned it in connection with ideas for an exhibition. Would that be for him or for you?”

  “For him.”

  “Hmm. And he’s come down here from Joburg to do what, did you say?”

  “He’s visiting friends, and doing some research. But you can ask him.”

  “We will, I’m sure. We’ll want to talk to him again.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Dhlomo didn’t seem to like Daniel, maybe because he was a Zimbabwean, though he didn’t seem to like me much either. Pillay seemed to think there was something about the Mendi, a connection between Daniel and the corpse. And, as I stood there, looking at the sad-eyed inspector, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a very unfortunate coincidence.

  5

  AS SOON AS THE POLICE left, I phoned my parents. I didn’t want them to read in the paper next morning that a body had been found within a hundred metres or so of the home of their unsatisfactory daughter. Not that they have ever so much as hinted that they find me unsatisfactory, but my post-divorce anxieties make me fear they do. I don’t think they had really cared much for Simon, though they were far too tactful to say so, and they adore the boys, but I know they worry about me and where I am going with my life. Answer: nowhere. That’s the problem. And knowing they worry makes me think maybe they have a reason. One of life’s vicious circles.

  Dad, a retired GP and a practical man, immediately offered to come over. Then they said I should come and stay with them: they only live a kilometre or so away. But they are in a townhouse complex that doesn’t allow pets and I couldn’t leave Grumpy alone. I said I would be fine, not to worry, and eventually they calmed down.

  Then I thought I had better let the boys know. I was about to phone Rory when the doorbell rang again. This time it was Charlie and Philippa Botha from further up the cul-de-sac. They are good friends, and Phil, who is also a teacher, and I often walk our dogs together in the afternoons after school. They had seen the police cars and all the to-ing and fro-ing and inevitably wanted the low down on what was promising to be a neighbourhood drama. They were horrified, of course, and said that if I was worried about anything, I should just phone them. Their offer made me feel a little better. I didn’t want to go anywhere, but to know there were friends nearby, just a phone call away, was certainly a comfort.

  After the inevitable cups of tea, they left and I phoned Rory, who took the news in his stride. He said it must have been awful for Dan, and was I okay? I could always go to Gran and Grandad. I pointed out that Grumpy couldn’t, and assured him I was absolutely fine. Please not to worry. I spoke to Mike as well, but neither of them seemed unduly bothered by the idea of a corpse on their regular dog walk.

  By now it was after six, and a large whisky was beckoning. I’m not much of a spirits drinker; beer or white wine are more in my line, but today I felt a whisky might dilute, or at least dull, the strains of the afternoon. I poured myself a generous tot, added ice and water and headed back into the studio, flopping down on the sofa with a sigh. I had hardly taken a sip when the phone rang again. I groaned loudly enough for Grumpy to flex an ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Laura. It’s Bob here. My dear, are you all right? I just phoned Rory and he told us what happened. What a terrible thing for you. Are you alone?”

  Bob is my ex-father-in-law. I often think that if I could have married him and left Simon to his mother, we might all have been a lot happier. Bob is charming, kind and sensible and there have been moments when the thought has crossed my mind that he may well have been the reason I married Simon in the first place. Maybe I thought Simon would turn out like his father. Instead, he is all too similar to Joan, his mother. Mean-minded, carping, insensitive and crass. Both of them.

  “I’m fine, Bob. Really. It was horrible, but worse for poor Daniel. He was walking the dog, and they found the body. He ran back here, and we called the police. They’ve been around all afternoon, but they’ve gone now.”

  “Is Daniel still with you?”

  “No, no. But it’s really okay.”

  “I don’t like to think of you there alone. I wish the boys were home.”

  “I could go to Mum and Dad if I wanted, but really, there’s no problem.”

  Bob talked for a bit and while we were chatting – mainly about how Rory was doing at university, and what Mike was likely to do next year – my cellphone rang. I just left it. I could have a look and see who it was after Bob had rung off, and after I had some more of my whisky. This was all getting to be a bit much.

  Bob said he had got the feeling Mike didn’t want to go to the University of Cape Town. He thought perhaps he didn’t want to be in Rory’s shadow – as he had been, to some extent anyway, at school. I felt the same, though my view was that part of the problem was that he didn’t want to be in the same town as Simon and Ms Tits. Mike’s relationship with his father was still a little tense. Obviously I didn’t say that to Bob, merely agreed and said I wasn’t putting on too much pressure at the moment, and had suggested Mike might like some kind of gap year. Eventually, after reiterating his shock, asking again if there was anything he could do, and saying, presumably mendaciously, that Joan sent her love, he rang off.

  I picked up the cellphone. Oh my God. Simon. I supposed I had better phone him back. Otherwise he’d call at some other totally inconvenient moment. And he was the father of my children, so he was probably entitled to be concerned if their home was being overrun by corpses and, by extension, murderers.

  Of course, Simon’s first remark, delivered in the accusatory mood, was to say that he had tried to phone the landline but it had been engaged. I pointed out that it had been his father. Then he went off into a riff about how the house, which I had insisted upon, was in an unsafe area, too near the plantations where all kinds of undesirables and criminals lurked. So, ran Simon’s subtext, it had been my inconsiderate and stupid behaviour that had put the lives of his sons at risk.

  Inevitably, I lost my temper. That’s the effect Simon has on me these days. “Hang on, hang on. You were the one who insisted, for example, that we had to have a fucking swimming pool. The boys were used to one, you said, so they must continue to have one. So we have this bloody pool, which is the biggest bone of contention in our lives because no one wants to clean it. And it hardly gets used. Rory isn’t here during the term, and even when he was, he did his serious swimming at school. Mike has never been a keen swimmer. And nor am I. It was the only house, with a pool, and the other things we needed, in your price range when w
e got divorced. So don’t blame me! And, anyway, it’s bullshit that it’s not safe. This is the only incident we’ve had here in five years. And the cops said the body was dumped there, not killed there. Butt out, Simon.”

  He then had the grace to back down, even if only a little. His reason for phoning was supposedly to see if I was okay, and did I want the boys up there with me? He could put Mike on a plane home early, and stand Rory a round trip, if I needed them. It was a generous offer, although the ungenerous thought did cross my mind that Ms Tits was probably finding two young males in her love nest a bit much. So I did my best to refuse graciously, claiming it would be a shame for Mike to have to cut his holiday short and that the boys seemed to be having a great time together. But over all, it was not a happy conversation. I did not send regards to Sonia. She was the ostensible reason for the break-up of our marriage, though things had been going badly long before she undulated onto the scene.

  6

  IT SURPRISED ME, BUT I slept that night. Maybe the effects of a large whisky and a row with Simon were soporific. But when I woke, I felt guilty. A man had died, but he hadn’t disturbed my rest, though I had woken once to a night-filled room, thinking of Inspector Pillay’s questions about my afternoon and sure that I had seen something going down the road. But it was like waking after a dream: the more I tried to pin it down, the more it edged away.

  In the morning, I did minimal housework and then dashed out to get some stuff from the supermarket: all I had been able to find for supper last night were eggs and cheese and a part-eaten Woolworths snoek paté whose sell-by date was nearly as long ago as the sinking of the Mendi. Not that I had been hungry, but a cheese omelette had not proved to be an exciting meal and I needed to stock up with some other options. I took Grumpy for a quick walk, taking the hard road that skirted the plantations and keeping him on a lead all the way, much to his displeasure. I didn’t want to go near the scene of yesterday’s discovery. That done, I headed into the studio. I wasn’t in the mood for painting, but I could think about the other pieces I needed for the exhibition. But before I got going I flipped through the morning paper.

  The murder made it onto page three, though there wasn’t a great deal to be said: the victim had not been identified at the time of going to press and all the reporter had been able to go on was the police statement. There were a couple of paragraphs, but all they succeeded in saying was that the body of a man had been found by a member of the public on a popular dog-walking path – the name of our road was misspelled – and that police investigations were ongoing. I was glad that neither Daniel’s nor my name had been mentioned.

  Daniel phoned me mid-morning. I was pleased: he had been angry and upset yesterday and I wanted to talk to him. He asked if he could come round, and said he still wanted to model for my next painting. He turned up at lunch-time, and we had a sandwich together but conversation remained stilted. I remembered he had been about to say something when the police had come into the garden yesterday afternoon, and wondered if I should ask him about it. But I didn’t want to push. He obviously had something on his mind.

  I did, however, ask him about Johannesburg and how things were going there. He admitted there had been some trouble a couple of months ago: a group of Zimbabwean and Somali traders had been beaten up by locals, and he had got involved with a group of immigrants who patrolled their area. There had been a couple of scuffles, and he had been among those taken in for questioning. No one had been charged, and it all seemed to have died down. I got the feeling he wasn’t telling me the whole story, but maybe it went some way to explaining his reluctance to have anything to do with the police.

  “Come on, let’s see if we can do a photograph. What fruit have you got?” he asked, changing the subject. I had found mangos in the supermarket that morning, and I showed him.

  “They’re quite nice big ones, and they’re tropical. And the colour’s good. I like that green and red. Stronger colours, deeper than on the apple, but in the same palette. And the inside should be a good contrast. What do you think?”

  “Let’s see once they’ve been bitten into.”

  We took the mangos and camera and went into the studio, positioning Dan against a wall to catch the light. It was the same spot where Mike had photographed my hand, but while the apple had been in my right, we put the mango in Dan’s left to create a mirror image. I had a piece of orange-coloured, hand-printed cloth, which we hung as a backdrop.

  Dan sliced into a mango, then took a bite and we contemplated the result. The colour was good, a vibrant orange, a more powerful shade than the background cloth. The fruit was ripe, and the juice began to trickle out of the bite.

  “Great. That looks luscious and you can exaggerate the drip. Go for it.”

  I got the camera, and fired off various shots. “Just try another one, Dan. See if the colour’s different.”

  We photographed three of the mangos, with different-sized and angled bites. For a while, we managed to put yesterday out of our minds and worked together for the best part of an hour. Then I switched on the computer and began to download the pictures. Dan lounged on the sofa, and picked up a guava from the fruit bowl, taking a bite. I had bought a couple of early ones in case they worked better than the mangos, but the colour was too muted, the fruit too small.

  “Yeuuch!”

  I turned. “It’s got a worm.” Dan spat the flesh of the guava into his hand as we contemplated the maggot jerking up and down in the fruit he was holding.

  “Don’t worry. It’s a whole worm. It’s when you see half a worm that you need to worry.”

  Dan gave me a dirty look, and got up to wash his hand. But somehow the mood had soured. The maggot had made me think of the corpse, and Dan too seemed to be preoccupied as he sat down again.

  “Laura, you know that photograph the cops found on the body?”

  He stopped. I nodded, but for a long moment he sat, looking at his knees. Then he got up. “I didn’t know the man – never seen him before. But I wonder if he was looking for me.”

  “Why? Why would he be looking for you?”

  “I told you I was thinking about this exhibition of colonial stuff. Well. I had been trying to make contact with descendants of Mendi survivors. I wanted to hear the stories, see if there was something I could use. I had heard of a man originally from the Eastern Cape, the Pondoland area, who was a teacher in Durban. His grandfather had been on the Mendi, and had been rescued after the sinking, gone on to the war, and had come back to South Africa at the end of it. I contacted this teacher chap on the phone, and he said he would like to talk to me. I told him I was coming down here, and if he was around, coming up to Pietermaritzburg at all, maybe we could meet. So … I suppose that could have been him. When I saw the photograph of the man with the bicycle, just before we walked back up here, then I began to wonder. And when the sergeant asked about the Mendi, well, it seemed too much of a coincidence.” Dan turned to look at me.

  “But why didn’t you say anything to the cops yesterday? I mean, if you think he might have been the guy you were going to meet, it could help them to identify him.”

  “I don’t want to be involved. Not in any way. Look, Laura, you have no idea how tough it is to be an immigrant here, a refugee. You saw that man, Dhlomo, yesterday. He obviously wanted to have a go at me. Just because I’m not South African. It’s easy for you to say, ‘Go to the cops.’ But no, I want nothing to do with it. The cops don’t like Zimbabweans any more than anyone else does. And anyway, in Joburg recently … I just don’t want to have anything to do with them again.”

  “But, Dan, for God’s sake, a man is dead. If you think you know something about him, you have to say so.”

  “It may just be a coincidence. If they find out who the body is, and if it’s the same man … then maybe I’ll say something. But not unless. He was probably carrying ID anyway. They just didn’t tell us. And if it was him, why was he here, in this road? I never told anyone I was coming here, except Verne, in
passing. And he wouldn’t come looking for me: we were going to set up a meeting. He was coming to Pietermaritzburg for other stuff as well.”

  We stared at each other. Dan had articulated exactly what I was thinking: why here? If it was the same man, and Dan told the police now, they were certainly going to wonder why he hadn’t said anything yesterday. He was making all this worse for himself. They had already picked up on the Mendi connection: our reaction to their questions yesterday had made sure of that.

  “What was the name of the guy you contacted?”

  “Phineas Ndzoyiya. That’s all I know.”

  “Daniel, I really think you have to tell the police. Say you were shocked yesterday, and the Mendi thing came out of the blue. But that this man had said he wanted to talk to you about the survivors’ stories. There can’t really be a connection. I mean, no one would be killed because he was going to repeat stories his grandfather had told him of things that happened in the First World War. It’s nearly a hundred years ago.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I’ll see. I’m sure the cops will be back anyway. Look, thanks for lunch. I’m going to head off now.”

  He left, rather abruptly. I went back to the computer and started fiddling with a couple of the photographs in Photoshop, cropping and highlighting until I got the effects I wanted. But my heart wasn’t really in it. What the hell was going on?

  7

  I PRINTED OUT A COUPLE of the photographs, and was comparing them with my apple painting when the doorbell rang again. I had been half expecting it and, sure enough, there was Inspector Pillay, on his own this time, for which I was grateful. I hadn’t much taken to Sergeant Dhlomo, but then he also seemed not to have taken much to me either. Or Daniel. Either way, his was a presence I could do without.

  Pillay came in looking rumpled and even wearier than yesterday.

  “Tea, Inspector?”