Valentine put a hand on her arm. ‘Baas,’ he said.
Joepie asked him, ‘Who are the other servants?’
‘There’s Belinda who works inside here with us. The rest, they work on the farm.’ Valentine thought. ‘What must we do now?’
Schalk said, ‘Don’t touch anything in any of the rooms. Nothing. Don’t clean anything. Some people will come look through the house. They’ll take your fingerprints. Understand?’
They did, he could tell from the way they sat, waiting for whatever was about to descend.
Joepie followed Schalk into the study. It was dominated by a desk, a long slab of yellowwood fronting a high-backed black leather armchair. No computer, though cables showed where a laptop had been. On the wall opposite hung a flat TV, flanked by framed photographs. A young Pieterse, uniformed, receiving a medal. Then Pieterse, older, in combat camouflage with a group of serious soldiers. A second photo of the soldiers, this time holding rifles and standing in a semicircle behind three cross-legged black soldiers, also in camouflage. This photo was labelled Tshanene.
The last image, Pieterse on a boat with another man, both in baseball caps, both grinning into the sun and holding each end of a huge tuna. Schalk went up close.
‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘Brian de Jager.’
‘He still alive? I haven’t heard about him since the Commission.’
‘He and Pieterse went into business together. Overseas, America, some sort of security operation. Venter told me.’ Schalk dumped himself in the office chair, stretched out his long legs, arched his back. Thought about smoking. ‘This is going to be one big fucking mess. When Pieterse and De Jager got amnesty there were protests in London, New York, all over. The whole world knows about them; and now Pieterse gets himself necklaced. They’ll say it was payback.’
Joepie perched a well-dressed buttock on the desk. ‘And now necklaces have jumped the colour bar, they’ll be shitting themselves. We’ll have every single whitey in the country on our case. If it was apartheid payback, why wait so long? Maybe the people on the farm, they had enough of him. Happens all the time.’
Schalk shook his head. ‘Nope. Doesn’t feel like a farm murder to me. Why does he make sure he’s alone? Why lock up the dogs? Who was he waiting for?’
‘You tell me, you knew him. You were his blue-eyed boy.’
‘Bullshit! He only noticed me because of the rugby. He was Special Branch then, we saw what they did, they were bad bastards. We were just ordinary cops trying to do our jobs. You know that, you were there. And then he got me suspended, remember.’
‘Ja,’ said Joepie, ‘and when we find out who killed him, I’m gonna give them a medal.’
Schalk snapped on gloves, opened drawers. A chequebook – who wrote cheques anymore? Manila folders, some bits and pieces, everything in its place. He remembered the rigid tidiness of Pieterse’s office in Caledon Square. He could see Pieterse now, not so tall but full in the chest like a bulldog, walking wide-legged down the middle of a passage, forcing everyone else close to the wall.
The folders from Pieterse’s drawers were marked Current, Miri, Global Sec, Languedoc. That was the farm. Schalk flicked through. Working papers. Nothing jumped out. A list of staff with one name crossed through, Franz Huisman. That was all.
Joepie studied his fingernails. ‘If Pieterse was waiting for someone,’ he said, ‘and they killed him, why the robbery? Where’s the laptop? Where’s the gun? What else is missing?’
‘Buggered if I know.’ Schalk took out his phone, pressed redial. This time a woman answered.
‘Yes?’
‘This is Police Captain Schalk Lourens…’
‘I was just going to call you. I have a message to contact you?’ Soft accent, American.
‘Mrs Pieterse.’
‘Yes?’
‘Mrs Pieterse, there’s bad news. Your husband…something happened.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes, he’s dead.’
She took an audible breath and then there was silence, broken by a voice in the background, male. ‘Hang on,’ she said, her voice muffled, ‘just hang on. Wait.’ Then she came back. ‘What happened?’
‘He was killed. On the farm.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
After a while Schalk said, ‘Mrs Pieterse?’
‘Are you sure? How?’
In Schalk’s experience it was best to be as clear as possible. ‘Murdered. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh god, Oh god, oh, how terrible, awful…’ her voice trailed off.
He was grateful she didn’t ask for details. ‘When will you be back? Where are you?’
‘Namibia. In the desert.’
‘This is going to get a lot of media attention, Mrs Pieterse. We’ll meet you at the airport.’
‘No, my car’s at the airport. I’m – it’ll take me a day to reach Windhoek.’
‘You need to get back to Cape Town as soon as possible. Also…it looks like things have been taken.’
‘Taken?’
‘Stolen.’
‘Stolen? A robbery?’
‘Yes.’
When he hung up, he told Joepie. ‘She’s not alone over there.’
Afternoon, country-still. roads and sky empty. Schalk was hungry but Bheki had rounded up labourers, six men sitting in the sun in their dusty clothes. A girl in a housecoat stood with Valentine against the garage wall.
Schalk offered Bheki a Lucky, told him to do a tour of pawnshops in case some of the stolen goods turned up. Then he looked for a place to talk to the staff. In the old barn, an ancient oak dining table and a few vinyl-backed kitchen chairs sat under a window overlooking a force field of tar and ash.
Pieterse himself was gone, in the back of a van on its way to Salt River morgue.
They brought the men in one by one but all of them sang the same song. They got Sundays off. They lived in farm housing, there by the Robertsvlei Road. They spent the night with their families and they hadn’t seen anything, no smoke in the dark, no smell, nothing. Why would they kill Baas Piet? For what? They or their fathers had been with the farm since they couldn’t remember when. There used to be more of them when the farm pressed its own grapes but when the young master Piet took over he decided to send the grapes somewhere else. Now they didn’t know what would happen, what would the madam do? Would she sell the farm, where would they go? Schalk believed them. He’d still get Bheki to check it out.
Valentine was last, his arm round the young woman, holding her up because she was shaking too hard to stand. He saluted them with his free hand.
‘This here’s Belinda Kuilsman. She works with us in the house. She asked me to come with her.’
He deposited the girl in one of the chairs and leaned against the wall. Belinda had big grey eyes, tight-curled hair streaked blonde, and brown skin that could have passed for white in times gone by.
Schalk left the questions to Joepie, reckoning Belinda would be less intimidated by a coloured cop. ‘What have you got to tell us?’ Joepie asked.
Belinda opened her mouth but nothing came out. Valentine patted her shoulder. ‘Kom, meisie,