Talion Page 6

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘So how did Benjamin Rust manage to park his car after he was shot?’

  ‘The victim was conscious, wasn’t he? He was conscious for a few minutes after the shot was fired? So he was shot first, but instinctively carried on parking. A sort of reflex.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘The car was in neutral, sir, and the hand-break was up. Surely,’ – she pauses as the colonel impatiently motions for her to hand over the report – ‘surely the victim wouldn’t have done that after he was shot? It makes no sense.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ he says, scanning. ‘That there was another shooter? That the man in the car with the gun was there by accident? That Freya Rust is lying?’

  ‘Not lying, sir. Just not sure of what she saw.’

  ‘But we have confirmed that a car like the one she describes with a driver like the one she describes was in the area?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Get ballistics to redo these tests. To make sure. We have a gun. We have a car. Surely all we need to do now is try and cross-check all registered gun owners who own a 9-mill and all registered car owners who own a . . . what was it?’

  ‘A red 1980 Mercedes-Benz 450SL.’

  ‘There can’t be many of those in South Africa.’

  ‘There are only two, sir. One belongs to a Saudi businessman from Cape Town who is currently out of the country. The other belonged to a ninety-year-old man who died in 1992, and matches the partial number plate Freya Rust managed to remember.’

  ‘So there’s some kind of ghost driving around? Shooting people?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you think this ghost with a gun just happened to be at the scene on the night of the crime?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, but there is something off about it.’

  ‘Has there been no trace of the car since the crime?’

  ‘We’ve caught it on the night of the shooting, sir. It passed a camera on Lynnwood Road, heading in the direction of the city. It hasn’t reappeared on any traffic camera since then.’

  ‘And the driver?’

  ‘Confirms the description Freya Rust gave us, but he doesn’t have a very distinct face at all.’

  ‘What about the drugs the victim had on him?’

  ‘Two milligrams of marijuana, sir. Only his own fingerprints. Sister had no idea where it came from. I am still waiting for his phone and social-media records to be analysed.’

  ‘Nolwazi, solve the case quickly. This cousin is getting on my nerves, right.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘One more thing. How are you coping?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘The only reason I put you on the case, the reason I took you out of uniform, was because Dr Whatshisname said you were fit for duty, right. But if he was wrong . . .?’

  The question dangles in the air like a dead fish on a hook.

  ‘I’m doing great. Sir.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Because if you need more time in uniform, less pressure—’

  ‘I’ll let you know, sir.’

  ‘Good. And make another appointment with the good doctor, right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dismissed.’

  5

  Eastwood Street runs north to south, down from the Union Buildings – great sandstone seat of power perched atop a steep hill, surrounded by embassies and government residences – through Arcadia and Hatfield and Sunnyside, to the deep, deep centre of the city, where it terminates in the midst of tin fires and street-sleepers. Other than being a busy tributary that can get you quickly from one side of the city to the other, it is known for being one of the few streets not edged by the famous jacaranda tree. This street, like some others in the city, is dominated by a subtler, more beautiful tree. In spring it carries his wife’s favourite flower – the magnolia – and to Mr October, at least, it is a much more potent reminder of home and beauty than the jacaranda is.

  But it isn’t spring, and Mr October isn’t in that part of the street where these trees front the manicured lawns of Victorian dream houses. No, he is at the point where Eastwood Street changes, where it narrows and becomes darker. Where the buildings on either side of it become run-down and abandoned. And flowers of a different kind adorn her edges.

  Mr October is staring at one of these flowers now, his headlights turned low.

  Mr October knows what people say about him behind his back. Tragedy, they say. That he’s lived through a tragedy. But what does that word mean? What do people mean when they say that to each other? That they are sad for him? On his behalf? That the situation is sad?

  Sad? Tragedy? What do they have to do with real life, with getting up every day and carrying on?

  Meaningless, empty words.

  Losing your only son because disease was eating him from the inside. Never stood a chance. Then losing your wife too. A wife who couldn’t live with the tragedy? She couldn’t stay alive even for her husband, her daughter. Couldn’t put them into her equation.

  But he could. Because he had to. Had to carry on. Even as the grief and the pain ripped through his insides like a black frost, turned his core into barren, frozen veld. He had to get up. That’s what you did. That’s what God wants you to do. To stand back up again, to persevere. His son couldn’t because the disease was stronger than he was. Mr October could forgive that. His wife couldn’t because the pain was stronger than her. That, he couldn’t forgive.

  Get up. Do your duty.

  His duty was to the family who stayed behind. To his daughter.

  Still, you have to do something to get through the day. You have to have some distraction to stop you from toppling over, right there in the street, from the hollowness, from the heartbreak.

  Thin and exotic, wearing a short denim skirt and a flimsy circle of material that barely covers her breasts, she comes over to his window. ‘Howdy,’ she says, faux-American. ‘My name is Candy. Do you want to buy a girl a drink?’ She is confident and brassy. Golden bracelets tinkle on her wrist. She smells like bubblegum and vanilla. She smells familiar.

  ‘No,’ he says to her. ‘Not you.’ She seems offended. He wants to explain – she is too young, she is too young. But he doesn’t dare say this out loud; doesn’t dare let the thought do anything more than skim across his mind.

  Back from the street’s edge, standing apart from the others, steadying herself against the wall with a heeled boot, is the one he wants. He points towards her. She has long white hair. A wig.

  ‘You want her?’ Candy asks. ‘She’s so old, man. Come on, pick me, mister. My pussy is much sweeter than hers.’

  Mr October’s chest tightens; his fists clench. ‘Don’t talk like that about yourself,’ he says to her.

  Candy flicks her eyes up and down at him condescendingly. ‘Don’t tell me what to do. Tsssh. Fucking lonely old doos.’

  With each word Mr October stiffens, his control evaporating. He points again at the woman standing behind the rest of them.

  Candy relents: she turns her back on him and gives a high-pitched whistle. ‘Sparkle, jou ou hoer. Die man soek vir jou.’

  Sparkle looks up from painting her nails. Locks eyes with Mr October. Doesn’t smile. She examines him almost clinically before she saunters over to the car.

  She has barely reached the window when he says, ‘Get in . . . Does your father know you’re doing this?’ he can’t resist asking.

  She rolls her eyes at him, her pink-pink lipstick cracking as she smiles crudely. ‘My daddy doesn’t give a fuck about me, sweetheart.’

  ‘Don’t swear like that,’ he tells her, touching her chin.

  ‘I’m sorry, baby. I’ll be good, I promise.’ Her eyelashes flutter, gold glitter gliding from them like the tiniest of moths.

  ‘Good,’ he says, relaxing.

  ‘Good,’ she repeats, unzipping his pants.
r />   Friday

  6

  ‘I’m going over to Frennie’s.’

  Mr October knows that she is lying; that she isn’t going to Frennie’s at all. That she is going out with her friends, going into the city. Going to party. He knows, because he’s been following her since her mother died – the moment he became incapable of putting the thought that something horrible was going to happen out of his mind.

  Too many horrible things have already happened. She is the only good thing left. In a few months she’ll be eighteen and he won’t be able to protect her any more. She’ll leave him; she’ll go into the city to fend for herself. Maybe having a child was the cruellest thing a man could do.

  She is wearing a short black dress. Too short. Her shoulders are bare, her cleavage exposed. He wants to go over there and grab her so desperately that his fingers itch. He wants to throw her over his shoulder and lock her in her room. School. Home. Nowhere else. But she deactivated that threat a long time ago: ‘What are you going to do? Lock me up like you did Ma?’ she yelled at him, like she was throwing hot water at him, like she genuinely feared his answer. And all he could say was, ‘You know why your mother needed to be restrained, girl.’ But the bare-bone truth of it is that he wouldn’t ever be able to bring himself to do the same thing to his daughter. To lock her away. And she knows it just as well as he does.

  So all he says is, ‘Are they picking you up?’

  And she says, ‘They’re already outside.’

  And he just nods. He does nothing even though he knows that she is lying to him, that she is breaking the rules. That she is sinning.

  Sinning.

  And then she leaves the house, and the silence in the corners intensifies, like wet shadows dripping off the wall.

  When she was younger, he would take her to the zoo every other weekend. The zoo, an oasis between cluttered and narrow city streets; a rich, other world that offered respite from their litter-strewn, familiar neighbourhood. All those caged animals made him slightly uncomfortable, but she loved it, so he loved it too. Their visits had a routine: ice cream first, then monkeys. Then the aquarium and the crocodile enclosure, then another ice cream. Then up to the highest point of the zoo, with the cable car, to see the lions in their mountain cages. At the end of each visit he would buy her a stuffed lion toy. She must have collected about thirty of them before their visits to the zoo stopped. Because of Peter.

  After Peter, everything stopped.

  He sits looking out into the darkness.

  Usually he simply parks near the bar or club she’s disappeared into; he sits in his car and waits for her to leave. Then he follows her back to Frennie’s house, where she usually spends the night.

  But tonight.

  He fingers the trigger, the gun light and easy in his hand. The gun he hasn’t used in years, not since he put it away for good, buried it in the hole in the ceiling, the hole he couldn’t afford to fix. But late last year, on a dark October morning, he was prompted by something he couldn’t articulate – a strange ghostly twinge in his stomach, an indigestible paranoia.

  That was the night he saw his daughter with that dangerous boy. The Boy. The Boy who sold his wife her drugs. The Boy who had so casually sneered at him . . . who had turned his family against itself. And Mr October knew immediately he had been right – the gun was a necessity.

  Necessary to protect his daughter from The Boy, and everyone else like him.

  Since then the gun hasn’t left his side.

  And here he is again, making a choice. It’s so easy in the darkness of his car – floating in nothingness, without gravity, without history – to entertain certain instincts. Instincts that are in his blood and his marrow.

  He unbuckles the seat belt and steps out of the car.

  7

  The boy is about to vomit. Freya can see it in his bar-bright eyes. She tries to jump out of the way, but she can’t swing her legs out from under the bench fast enough. Her foot catches and the interrupted momentum throws her backwards. She falls, hits her head on the table behind her.

  Jesus.

  Freya stands, checking for blood on her hair. She was having a good time. But now the dark thing has attached itself to her mind.

  The bar is overfilled. It’s a small, grungy space. The wooden tables are old, beer-soaked. The dance floor is filled with blue, frenetic light. All over the walls, the bar’s logo flashes unstoppably: Oxford’s, Oxford’s, Oxford’s. The music is too loud. It’s rock ’n roll night. An Erotic Earthquake melody is playing. Freya hates Erotic Earthquake. They are Eric’s favourite band. She hates Eric.

  She needs air, silence. She can’t breathe.

  She grabs her bag, moves towards the corridor that runs between Oxford’s and Beercakes next to it: not much more than an alleyway that the two bars have commandeered as their own. A place to smoke, to make friends with strangers.

  She is about to step outside when she sees him.

  He is standing in the entrance of the bar arguing with a teenage girl definitely too young to be in a place like this. His expression is exactly like she remembers it: twisted in anger. Slim and athletic. Fragile and birdlike; his eyes intent and dark, his mouth sharp. These details drop and crystallise on the surface of Freya’s frozen mind.

  There are drops of blood on his cheek.

  It’s him.

  The man who killed her brother.

  After months of no leads, of phoning the police every day, here he is.

  And then the bar lurches. The lights spiral. The music infects her ear, like a dozen insects. She is panicking, shaking. She retches all over the floor. Her head spins as the warm, yellow liquid hits her feet.

  When she looks up, the man is gone.

  A split second in which to make a decision, a universe of emotion exploding through her body: do something. Do something. React!

  Freya runs to the door. She passes the teenage girl in the entrance. The girl is in tears, and for a moment she meets Freya’s eyes. Amber eyes, brittle eyes.

  Where is he? He can’t have gone far.

  She pauses on the steps outside the bar. The cold night assaults her exposed face, nips at the wet patches on her jeans. The parking lot lies before her, the quiet street to her right. To the left, more bars, the clashing of music, the loudness of people.

  Was he here looking for her? Does he know her?

  He could be anywhere, in any of the deep shadows crowded before her.

  But then she spots him – on the far side of the parking lot, through an open door: he is disappearing down a staircase that leads to the basement parking.

  Breathing deeply, she follows.

  The stairs are deserted; she can hear the soft clicks of his feet somewhere ahead of her. The staircase is narrow, twisting. There are unknown stains all over it. It smells like petrol, like the guts of a car. Freya, still dizzy, is struggling to navigate. Her foot slips; she stumbles. Stifles a squeal. The clicking of his feet stops. Freya stiffens. Has he heard her? Does he know she is following him?

  A long moment draws itself out like a last breath. Her clothes are sticking to her body and she can smell the vomit on her shirt; adrenaline is spilling into her heart.

  Then she hears his footsteps resume.

  Freya picks up her pace. Don’t make a sound. Be careful.

  Should she call the police? Should she be following this man into a parking lot? There don’t seem to be any people around, even though the bars above are packed.

  The stairs make a sharp turn and end abruptly. She pauses on the last step. Fingers her phone, ready to dial the officer working on Ben’s case.

  He is standing beside a car, his car. It’s not the same car he was driving the night Ben was shot, and for a moment Freya isn’t sure. But only for moment. Because she would know that face anywhere. She remembers his face in more detail than she does her own father’s, her mother’s.

  He is looking straight at her. She forces herself to make eye contact. She has tho
ught about this moment for months.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ The voice echoes across the parking lot. ‘You dropped your keys, dude.’ Two girls about her age, identical shiny hair, identical shiny dresses, identical shiny teeth, are coming down behind her, giggling.

  ‘Oh,’ she mumbles, ‘thanks.’

  ‘No problem.’ They stumble away.

  Behind her, the sound of an engine.

  He’s leaving.

  She looks down at her keys. The light is dancing in little white circles over the silver.

  Her car isn’t parked far away. She can still reach it in time.

  She runs.

  Freya never wants to see anyone who knew Ben again. Never again. That world is dead; it died with Ben. And she knows that it is only a matter of time before she, too, will be dead. What is the point of living without him?

  But to pass the time, to numb the raw, irreparable grief, Freya has been seeking refuge in the arms of alcohol, drugs, and boys. In reckless pleasure. In dirty, inebriated pain. That was the state in which Ben’s killer found her earlier tonight – right in the middle of her suicide mission.

  Freya stops under a street lamp and watches the man pull into his driveway.

  His car, a filthy green Renault, stops with a choke. She can’t see him, but after a few seconds, she hears his front door slam.

  They’d only driven for about ten minutes, through Hatfield, past the rugby stadium, past a church and a school, into a part of Sunnyside she’s never encountered before – not the Sunnyside of high-rise flats and the hipster music scene, or the Sunnyside that gives way to the inner city, all crooked edges and bedevilled buildings. But a gentler Sunnyside, one not quite as eroded as the rest of it. A saved little corner.

  The house, his house, is at the end of a cul-de-sac – a small white house with a blue roof, surrounded by a low fence. The other houses at the end of the street are covered in darkness. Adrenaline has sobered her up, taken possession of her.