Sibanda and the Death's Head Moth

by C Elliott, C M Elliott

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

'Fans of Alexander McCall Smith will love Scotty Elliott's Sibanda series' Sunday Times (SA) Detective Sibanda and Sergeant Ncube are back! Two bodies are discovered near Gubu, one burning at the base of a tree struck by lightning and, on the banks of the Zambezi, a second killing which threatens to tear Detective Sibanda's life apart. The victims are not connected as one is a foreign wildlife researcher and the other a local driver, but Sibanda's intuition tells him the murders are linked. The only clues are a fragment of material found in the brain of one victim, a puncture wound in the thigh of the other, and a diary full of coded names. As the men investigate further, they find links to an ivory smuggling gang and in their pursuit of the killer, Sibanda and Ncube not only have to cope with their temperamental Landrover, their chief inspector's lack of cooperation, but a rough and remote landscape full of wild and dangerous adventure. Praise for C. M. Elliott: 'C.M. Elliott has created a lively cast of characters and an intricate, clever plot' Margaret von Klemperer, The Witness 'A thrilling detective yarn and a finely-drawn picture of the counterpoint between the gentle music of the bush and the harsher notes of poachers' deadly gunfire' The Citizen 'Her plot keeps readers guessing right to the end, when the monster meets a truly satisfying fate . . . Elliott's skill as a writer lies in her ability to create and flesh out characters that are so lifelike, they thrum in your head for days after finishing her books' Business Live 'Will have you hooked' The Gremlin

Release date: April 2, 2020

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 256

Sample

Detective Inspector Jabulani Sibanda sat bolt upright in bed as though zapped by a scorpion. Something was wrong. He didn’t believe in superstition or omens, but he’d had this feeling before, gut-wrenching gloom in the pit of his stomach and an elephant sitting on his chest, squeezing the oxygen from his lungs. It always spelled trouble for someone. He threw back the covers and drew back the curtains to a thick puddle of blue-black ink that spilled smoothly from the north-eastern sky, blotting out the Gubu township dawn and staining the first sunlit page of the day. It threatened to bring heavy rain. Whatever had dragged him from a deep sleep was out there beyond the houses and shacks. He grabbed a swig of water and, with the crust of sleep still clinging to his lashes, he pushed through his front door and loped gently for some metres. Nothing was stirring; most of the village was still asleep.

The air was moist and sticky with promise. It didn’t deliver the fresh jolt Sibanda was hoping for, but he would settle for tepid fug if it meant the rains would come. This year, they had been erratic. Gubu district and Matabeleland North in general had been overlooked by the gods of falling water. Officer-in-Charge, Gubu police, Stalin Mfumu, and his congregation, The Brethren of the Lord’s Blood, were exhorting everyone to pray for rain on Fridays at noon; as a result, the police station came to a halt.

He stepped up his pace to a steady jog and headed like a homing pigeon for the railway line, crossing over and working his way westwards toward the very limit of the village where it met bushland and the edge of the National Park. He was driven on by instinct or intuition or just plain madness. He didn’t know which. The bonus to his detective’s hunch was that, this early in the morning, he might catch sight of a few nocturnal species, lingering, knocked out of habit by the darkening sky. Leopards in particular loved an overcast day. They languished like liquid kings in the soft light, draping their bodies over branches. Sibanda looked for hanging tails, the unnatural straightness a giveaway among the gnarled and twisted limbs.

Sibanda was running effortlessly now with the lazy grace of the leopard he hoped to glimpse, scanning the track for the trouble he expected. He headed to Buffalo Avenue, the last road in the village. To the right lay bushland unsullied by human habitation until it nudged the Botswana border. To the left, a row of dilapidated railway houses looking out across the rolling Kalahari sandveld of grassland and teak forest. There weren’t many; the railway network had diminished in recent times. Gubu was no longer a great rail hub. It only hosted an occasional goods train or a collier when the drag line at the Hwange pit was working. The houses lay empty. The drivers and stokers, the conductors and station masters had been shunted into a forgotten spur on a track going nowhere.

Sibanda, still driven by the certainty of crime, was scanning the road for a clue, any hint of what might have happened. He noted fresh, wet, elephant signs on the potholed road. The elephants had started to graze on the summer grasses; gone were the dry, stringy, bark-filled droppings of winter. Slightly older, darker coils of buffalo pats dotted the lacy tarmac that had been excavated by previous rains and filigreed with neglect. The Park herds didn’t understand boundaries; the villagers didn’t understand their taking of territorial liberties. This very road marked the conflict between man and beast. Baboons had raided the mango trees, plucking the fruit indiscriminately and discarding anything unripe, leaving behind a trail of half-eaten fruit, fibrous pips, crushed leaves and very human-like excrement. No, not a road for the fainthearted; he wished he lived there.

A flash of lightning stripped across the morning sky followed on its heels by a crash of thunder. Maybe nothing had gone on, maybe it was just the heavy weather that was messing with his mood, flooding his gut with karmic antibodies that were hounding him. An even louder, closer clap of thunder caused him to flinch. It was pointless. His reaction would be too late. If lightning struck, he would never hear the thunder, never know what hit him. He put on a spurt. He was wasting his time and perhaps there would be rain sooner than he thought. He didn’t want to get caught in a torrent to satisfy some ridiculous whim.

His thoughts strayed, as he sprinted, to the last storm he had been caught up in – literally and figuratively. His chase through the bush after the viscous, twisted muthi murderer had taken place on a stormy night with lashing rain and fierce lightning. The administrative thunderstorm that followed was an even bigger squall. An influential governor had been questioned as part of the investigation. Sibanda had been hauled well and truly over the coals for breaking protocol without authority. He had narrowly missed demotion. None of that worried the detective though. He had crossed swords with the powerful before, and nothing would stop him from doing his job. It was the personal turmoil of meeting up with Berry again and losing her for a second time that was causing him sleepless nights. Not that she had ever been his in the first place.

He came to an abrupt halt near the last house in the road as if the grapple hooks of the gods had reined him in. It was a solitary and abandoned relic of the colonial railway service with a shabby veranda, cracked windows and a front door that hung listlessly from its hinges. He sensed he was near to whatever was causing the unease. The racing wind, sucked to areas already cooled off by rain, was bristling the leaves of a couple of teak trees. Sibanda jogged on the spot, deciding whether to go in, but his instinct told him otherwise.

Pity, he thought, he would like to move to a house like this, but now was not the time to explore. The dwelling was surrounded by bush on two sides and, being on a bend, faced away from the distant neighbours. The nearest inhabited house was probably two hundred metres away. He would need time, money, influence and reams of bureaucracy to secure the unwanted lodging, none of which he had access to, or patience for.

His reverie probably saved his life.

The detective left the width of Buffalo Avenue, loping like a wild dog on fresh blood spoor and took a narrow path through the bush. It led back in a loop to the centre of the village and his house in the vibrant eastern township of Soweto, named, almost as a joke, for a much more famous, but equally crowded conurbation on the western boundary of a much larger city. So far there was nothing out of place. Was he mistaken? Was his mind playing tricks? But the churning hadn’t gone away, his disaster-meter was still on red alert. Sibanda kept his wits about him in the high grass. He could run full tilt into an old buffalo bull, a cantankerous old dagga boy who wouldn’t think twice about charging at anything that irritated. Or worse, a puff adder curled on the path, diamond markings blending with the shadowed sand, too indolent to get out of the way. Cytotoxic fangs in the ankle were the most common bite in this part of the world.

Sibanda was unwittingly focusing his hazard alert wide of the mark, and he was wrong about the lightning. He heard the ear-splitting explosion moments before he was slammed to the ground with such violence that his running vest shredded like cheese through a grater. Winded, deafened and dazed, he lay prone in the high elephant grass a metre from the path and about fifteen metres from a large mopani tree in front of him – or rather, that had been in front of him. It was now reduced to a smouldering bonfire of logs, splinters and shrivelling leaves. The pungent smell of sulphur revived him with the jolt of smelling salts. His understanding was immediate, arriving in a wave of awareness along with the pain – he had just missed being fried by lightning, his thigh was in agony and this was the rendezvous he had been led to. He touched his leg. The exploration produced a handful of blood. He had been stabbed by a large shard of wood, sharpened and hurled like a dagger by the powerful blast. It was still embedded in his flesh.

Once his lungs reinflated, he stood up, the wooden wedge still sticking out of his thigh. It had missed the major arteries, a small consolation for the pain he was in. He couldn’t walk even though he had to go forward. The impulse was strong.

He had no choice. He grasped the wooden stiletto and wrenched it from his thigh with one great heave, collapsing in a groaning heap. He cursed every bad word he knew in every language and dialect he could remember. When he had recovered enough to move again, he bound the wound as best he could with strips of his running shirt. It was several minutes before he levered himself up with the aid of a branch, intact despite the explosion. Using this makeshift crutch he limped along the path with some urgency until he came level with the site of the strike.

Around the stricken mopani, the grass for a wide radius was flattened and burnt, and several small fires were smouldering at the periphery. The wind that had earlier blown up was gusting and encouraging the flames to grow. Sibanda groaned. He had no option but to try to extinguish them before they flared up and became a bush fire. The tall grass was tinder dry and leaf litter lay in small hillocks, gathered by the wind. There was plenty of fuel lingering from winter to start a fire big enough to threaten Gubu village.

He hobbled around the circumference of the burn, hopping and stamping out the licking flames with his good foot until he was satisfied the site was safe. And then Sibanda’s internal radar was suddenly beeping with the frequency of a scud missile honed onto a target. He leaned heavily on his branch. The breeze that chased away the bubbling, magenta clouds had stirred up ashes and unearthed a distinctive smell hiding behind the sulphurous vapours – burning flesh, and if Sibanda wasn’t mistaken, burning human flesh. He had only smelled it once before, but it assaulted his nostrils now as it had that day in Nottingham, where he was on secondment. A little terrace had gone up aided by an accelerant, incinerating a young mother and her toddler triplets. He had been sent along with others on the first response team. The fire fighters in attendance took one look at his youth and wished him a strong stomach.

‘You’ll not see worse than this,’ one of them said, as they left the burnt-out building, rolling up hoses, tipping back visors and checking equipment in a sort of mechanical routine designed to minimise the impact of viewing burnt babies.

Sibanda had no routine or distracting behaviour to fall back on. The horror and suffering of the scene seeped into his psyche, raw and not yet numbed by experience. He hoped he would never see the like again. He returned to the station white faced.

‘If you can tolerate that, lad, then we’ll make a copper of you yet. We might even make an Englishman of you if you continue to turn pale,’ commented the grizzled duty sergeant with a chuckle.

Sibanda did not take offence. He knew none was meant. ‘I’m not sure I want to be a policeman if I’m going to be dealing with people who can do this.’ He kept his thoughts on becoming an Englishman to himself.

‘You’ll get over it. Those black, contorted crisps huddled together in a corner will fade from your memory and you’ll be the better cop for it. We see sights every day in this job, sights the general public can only guess at, depravity not yet invented, even by the tabloids. Put your disgust to good use. Get the bastard that did this. It’s a rum old world, son, full of more deadly sins than you can shake a biblical fist at. Welcome to it.’

He had taken the advice to heart, although he didn’t sleep that night for the visions that came when he closed his eyes. He had several tormented nights over the next couple of weeks, but they did catch the arsonist, the mother’s boyfriend; he had wanted the children gone. They cried and complained and kept their mother occupied when her attention should have been focused solely on him. Sibanda remembered thinking how close to animals the human species was. Lions did that, killed and ate cubs so that the mother would come into season again – lust, the deadliest of the sins in any species.

The old sergeant had been right. The tableau of twisted, charred corpses had faded, but the memory of the stench had remained. It had clung to his clothes and crawled up his nostrils with long claws like a bat finding its roost. It was unfurling its wings again now.

Sibanda hopped across the burnt ground, stirring up the black snow of carbonised grass with his makeshift crutch. He used it, balancing on one leg like a marabou stalk, to dig around in the smouldering branches and fragmented wreckage of the tree. The mopani had been in full leaf and the fallen canopy made a good fist of concealing anything beneath it. It took a while to push aside the debris, but Sibanda rummaged harder as the stink of the sizzled flesh became overpowering. It brought back long-buried images.

He unearthed an arm first. The fingers were clawed. The heat had shrivelled and contracted the tendons. A few fingers were missing and some flesh torn from the bones. Squatting on his one good leg, he gently lowered himself into a sitting position. The pulse was gone. He hadn’t expected one. No one could have survived lightning at the heart of the strike. Could he have saved this man if he’d run faster, told him not to shelter under a tree? Was this what all his early morning angst was about?

He glanced at the display on his phone. It was already 6:14am. He hit the button for Gubu station and was grateful when Police Constable Khumalo answered. She was the most switched on of all the constables at Gubu.

‘Zanele, who’s on duty?’ he cut off the niceties of station telephone etiquette.

‘Is that you, sir?’

‘Yes, it’s me, Zee. Is Sergeant Ncube there?’

‘No, he came in at six, but he’s already on his way to roadblock duty on the Vic Falls road at Gwaai.’

Sibanda clicked his teeth in frustration. Ncube had been with him on the previous case, a murder for body parts and muthi, involving political untouchables. The sergeant had come in for censure by association. The whole station knew he hated roadblock duty. They knew he objected to the mindless checking of licences and the unloading of overstuffed buses full of travellers who had passed through several similar stops on the way from Bulawayo. Each roadblock delayed the journey by at least fifteen minutes and exacted a toll to line the pockets of the underpaid police. Ncube didn’t have the stomach for corruption, bribery or terrorising weary travellers, although he did have a stomach … Sibanda smiled wryly at the girth of the jovial sergeant and wished he was here now.

‘I need someone at the path leading from Buffalo Avenue to Giraffe Way. There’s a body, a lightning victim. The corpse has to be guarded until an ambulance can get here.’

‘That’ll make it four this month. We had three deaths a couple of weeks ago near Cross Gubu,’ she said, referring to the small group of shops and houses that had grown up at the point where the Gubu road intersected the main road. ‘Why do people shelter under trees during a rain storm? It’s crazy; don’t they know it’s a death wish?’

‘So, who have you got for me, Zee?’

‘Constable Tshuma, sir, he’s new, just been posted here.’

‘Does he know the village yet? Can he get here without getting lost?’

‘I’ll give him directions, but he’ll have to walk. The only vehicle we have running is on its way to drop the roadblock detail off at Gwaai. It’ll be at least an hour.’

‘Right, get Tshuma on his way then.’

Sibanda pocketed his phone and lamented the demise of the station’s other vehicle, an antique Land Rover, Miss Daisy. She was the most cantankerous, unreliable, steam-snorting vehicle he had ever come across, but she had four wheels and consented to move on a good day. She had been languishing in the station car park for some weeks and the only trip she was likely to take was to the wrecker’s yard.

Something Constable Khumalo had said struck home. There had been no rain worth sheltering from so what was this person doing under a tree this early in the morning? He dug further with his stick, uncovering more of the body. A lightning strike usually left a hideous exit wound. A standing victim might have his feet blown off or a severe leg wound. By the time the electrical charge exited the body in a blow hole of energy, it had cooked most of the internal organs. So far this victim was only displaying injuries associated with a blast and some burning from the pyre of logs. It was difficult working from a sitting position and with one leg throbbing, but he managed to move a large branch that had been covering most of the body, revealing a face untouched by flame, but obliterated by fury. This man looked as though he had been shot through the head.

The detective studied the wound. It was massive and gruesome. A large section of the forehead was missing, exposing the brain. The back of the head was blown away. Could this have been caused by the electrical blast or a shard of wood like his personal mopani dagger? He stroked his chin as he thought. Violent death was rarely a clean-cut affair.

He hauled himself in closer. His instincts were not wrong. The injury had the distinctive hallmarks of a bullet wound. The damaged skull bone showed the tell-tale signs of inward bevelling left by a round. It was difficult to get a better look at the bullet channel because he couldn’t squat over the body. He bent forward from his sitting position and got as near to the opening as he could. It was not a pretty sight. Fragments from the skull had been carried into the brain. The back of the head had been blown away, dwarfing the damage at the front. What weapon could have caused so much damage? It had to be something low velocity, relying on destruction over energy and speed. This wasn’t the sort of damage that came from a high-calibre rifle – a shotgun maybe? But there were no signs of dispersed pellets. Sibanda’s brain began to tick over, flicking through references to previous gun crimes he had investigated. Nothing fitted the bill.

Sibanda was about to straighten his back, beginning to ache and cramp from the strange posture he was forced to adopt, when he spotted something out of place in the bloody crater. It wasn’t bone or a bullet fragment. It had a frayed edge. Carefully, and against all police crime-scene protocol, he teased the foreign body from the cerebral cortex of the victim. A piece of fabric had been carried into the brain. Had the victim been wearing a hat or a cap? If so, there was no sign of it now. He should have left it up to Forensics to decide, but they were notoriously slow in getting results.

Sibanda straightened and hoisted himself upright using his crutch. The renewed blood flow to his thigh sent fresh waves of pain to his own wound. He took a moment to recover.

The detective heard the pounding of size tens on the sandy track before he saw the accompanying body. Around the bend in full trot swung a young police officer.

‘Hello, sir, I am Police Constable Tshuma, here to guard the body.’ The young man was breathing hard from exertion. It was a fair run from the station, but he had done it in good time.

Sibanda took in the impressive constable. He was smartly dressed, fit looking and had an intelligent glint in his eye. Perhaps things were looking up if this was the calibre coming to Gubu these days.

‘Constable, the victim is no longer simply a lightning casualty. He has a bullet wound. I’m returning to the station. I’ll send more support and alert Forensics. This site will have to be scrutinised with a fine-tooth comb to find anything that survived the blast. Don’t touch a thing.’

‘Yes, sir, do you think it’s a suicide or a suspicious death?’

‘Impossible to tell with all the destruction to the site and the body,’ but even as he answered he knew without doubt this was a murder. His sixth sense had been right. He had done well not to ignore it. Unseen, he slipped the bloodied square of cloth between the screen and cover of his phone and began to stumble away down the path leaning heavily on his branch, aware he made a pathetic sight.

‘Are you alright, sir? You are limping. Can I run back to the station for help?’ the young constable was both eager and concerned.

Sibanda turned, ‘No, thanks Tshuma. Look after the evidence. I can manage.’ In turning, he caught sight of a movement from one of the logs that hadn’t fully burnt. A swarm of bees was exiting a knot hole in the fallen limb, frantically buzzing around what was now a destroyed hive. From their confusion and panic emerged a moth, much larger than the bees, but striped in similar fashion. On its thorax was a perfectly formed skull and crossbones, like the Jolly Roger on a pirate galleon. Nature didn’t normally mimic such a distinctive human design. It was always the other way around. The detective registered the unusual markings and thought he would look it up. These things interested him.

‘Tomorrow, I’m on roadblock duty,’ Sergeant Ncube had announced at dinner the previous evening, once the little ones had been put to bed. He shared his disappointment with his wives not only out of frustration, but because he knew they would lavish sympathy on him. There would be something special in his breakfast and lunch boxes. He was not wrong and he needed the extra attention at the moment. He had a lot on his mind.

‘I will prepare my amaqanda esidlekeni for you,’ Suko the youngest of his wives chirped in, ‘it will cheer you as the day opens and give you heart and strength to deal with the drivers.’

‘That will be mnandi, delicious, Sukoluhle. I am honoured.’

He had watched Suko as she had taken two fresh, brown speckled eggs collected from her hens that morning, and boiled them gently. She mashed some baked beans, added a little fried onion and chopped chilli and plastered it to the roughed-up outside of the peeled egg. Carefully, she lowered the delicacy into the empty bean tin oiled with cooking fat and lined with a thick paste of leftover mealie meal. Once the egg was sealed in its white nest, the tin was placed at the edge of the fire and turned until the outside coating became crisp and golden. He barely restrained himself from eating it there and then.

‘I thank you, my stomach thanks you, and the drivers, who might otherwise be plagued by my irritability, thank you. Suko, you are a queen in the kitchen.’ Ncube said this while glancing across to Nomatter, wife number two. She was already busy preparing his lunch. He could smell simmering bones and the pungency of chopped herbs. It would be his favourite: herbed mealie dumplings in a sea of rich gravy. A little competition between his wives was not a bad thing. Sometimes he thought they got on too well. He never favoured one above the other. A leopard, after all, licked all its spots, both black and white.

Blessing, his senior wife, was washing the evening pots. One glance and he knew her sympathy would be dispensed in the sleeping hut.

He reported early for duty the next morning with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, although he hoped the culinary offerings from his wives might allay this shortly. He even snapped at the comely constable Zanele Khumalo. Life recently had become difficult and confusing.

‘Check car licences and driving licences,’ instructed Stalin Mfumu, Officer-in-Charge, Gubu, seated comfortably behind his desk, ‘and there has been a report from Bulawayo of a number of robberies, small electrical stuff, and a stolen car … licence plate …’ he hesitated in the interests of accuracy, carefully leafing through some papers. ‘ADN 468 – a silver Toyota Hilux.’

‘Right, sir,’ said a glum Ncube when he received his instructions. He didn’t want anything to do with Toyotas of any colour or model after the trouble the last case had got him into.

Constable Khumalo came into the office. Ncube’s spirits lifted a little. There was nothing like a well-padded woman to brighten his day, particularly Zanele Khumalo. She oozed the best of Matabele womanhood with plentiful curves, full lips, and eyes that promised something he knew he would like to be on the receiving end of.

‘Sir, you should read this before Sergeant Ncube is deployed,’ she passed the Officer-in-Charge a report. He read it carefully, two or three times, his lips mouthing the words, nodding his head and murmuring understanding with a bi-tonal ‘hmm umm’ at the end of each sentence. Stalin Mfumu was a considered man, careful and measured in all his dealings. He was not about to rush an important communication from the Zambian Police.

Sergeant Ncube waited patiently. In fact, he didn’t mind the delay at all. Each moment was a reprieve from a day of sorting through bags of blankets and clothing, and intimidating drivers.

Finally Mfumu spoke. ‘Sergeant, we have received this report from our Zambian colleagues. They sus. . .