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Synopsis
Seven years ago in Cape Town three young white South African schoolboys were abducted in broad daylight on three consecutive days. They were never heard of again. Now, a new case for the unpredictable Colonel Vaughn de Vries casts a light on the original enquiry; for him, a personal failure which has haunted him for those seven years and has cost him his marriage and peace of mind. A former British government agent, friend to De Vries, provides intelligence on this new case, but is any of it admissible? Struggling in a mire of departmental and racial rivalry, De Vries seeks the whole truth and unravels a complex history of abuse, deception and murder. Challenging friends, colleagues, and enemies, De Vries comes to realise he doesn't know who is which. Set against the background of Cape Town and the endless, rolling South African veld, this chilling thriller reveals layer after layer of abuse - physical, political and psychological.
Release date: March 20, 2014
Publisher: Audible Studios
Print pages: 400
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The First Rule Of Survival
Paul Mendelson
Almost in the shadow of the Hex River Mountains, where lifeless scrub meets the valley plains of saturated agriculture, the landscape of low hills rolls like gathering waves in mid-Atlantic, stretching endlessly beneath the vast skies of the Western Cape. Fast-moving clouds send shadows scudding across the sandy-grey palette of patchwork fields, giving them a few moments’ respite from the white sunlight.
The Toyota double-cab shatters the silence, its dark fumes whipped from the rear-pipe. It stutters, steam billowing from the failing engine. The man jumps from the cab, cursing. He calls his dog from the open rear compartment, walks to a small stand of blue gum trees, props himself against the papery, shedding bark of the thickest trunk. He reaches for his cigarettes, growls for his dog to come away from the vehicle. He tries three times to light his cigarette, hears the sound of the flint grating, the lighter firing, the hollow pop of the flame extinguished in the wind.
The cigarette finally ignites; he inserts the drug between his lips and turns back to his stalled, steaming vehicle. He looks towards the sun, estimates the time: if it comes to it, he can walk. It will be dark before he arrives, but it will not be late. He cannot replace the car; he can barely afford for a mechanic to see it. Without it, he is twenty kilometres from the nearest town – no way for him to sell his produce, no way for him to live.
He begins to stride along the dirt track, his dog following, her head still down, ears back. In a lull in the gusts, he hears a wailing cry. It stops him dead: he holds his breath. It is a human scream. He strains to listen again, frowning at the wind in the crackling scrub. Distantly, there is a man’s voice, shouting; then, the scream again. He jogs towards a low peak ahead of him. He is out of breath, sweating, but he is at the top. Two sharp gunshots follow, the sound invisible. He scans his surroundings, swallows hard, his throat gritty. His dog raises her head from the ground and howls into the wind.
Across the gravelled car park of MacNeil’s Cape farm-stall, Colonel Vaughn de Vries strides towards him. Don February starts talking the moment he is in range.
‘Two bodies, both Caucasian, probably teenagers, looks like they have been shot, possibly in the last forty-eight hours. Dog found them at the bottom of a skip outside the kitchens at the back. Scene sealed as soon as we got here.’
‘Good. Trouble from the locals?’ De Vries doesn’t break step.
‘The officer on call is a friend of mine, Ritesh. When he saw what it was, he put the call through to our department immediately. He told me what he saw and then he left. They all knew we were coming.’
‘They knew I was coming,’ de Vries chuckles. ‘I only used to piss off one single department, now I can fuck them over the entire province.’
Warrant Officer February waits for him to finish, then continues, ‘I did the paperwork with him. They have a heavy workload already. He seemed relieved.’
‘I don’t care either way.’
‘No, sir.’
‘He stamp about the place, touching everything?’
‘I doubt it. We were at the Academy together. He is a sound officer.’
‘Well, I’d better not find his big feet all over my crime scene.’
Don February looks up at de Vries, almost half a metre taller, looks at his mouth, wonders whether he should wait for more, or continue his report. De Vries looks down at him.
‘Everyone present is in the farm-stall shop,’ Warrant Officer February resumes. ‘We will check details, ask the basic questions.’
De Vries jerks a thumb at the lines of parked cars as he moves towards the scene. ‘Looks like there’ll be a lot of them.’
‘There are – and the chances are that none of them have any idea about two bodies. They could have been dumped in that skip any time, but we got lucky, sir: I checked with the owner and it only gets swapped weekly. The last took place yesterday morning, approximately eight a.m.’
‘So we have a definite window?’
Warrant Officer February does not look at de Vries again, eyes never leaving his notepad.
‘Close to. The owner did not check the skip, but he says that the drivers would have seen what was in it, and they said nothing. In any case, there is a load of material under the bodies, so that would suggest they were dumped after it started being filled again by the kitchens here.’
‘Check with the skip company.’
Don February makes a note, then looks at him, concludes: ‘I think we can place the arrival of the two bodies between eight a.m. yesterday morning and seven a.m. this morning: twenty-three hours.’
‘Good,’ de Vries tells him. ‘We got enough men on this?’
‘The moment you were assigned, I called for the full team.’
De Vries nods smugly. ‘Serious crime. Two murders.’
Don February stops. ‘Two white boys murdered is a serious crime. Yes, sir. Seems for that, the mountain really does come to Mohammed.’
De Vries moves on, shouts behind him, ‘Why do you think I’m here?’ He waits until his Warrant Officer has caught up with him. ‘The locals think I screw them right up the arse, but that’s what we’re here for.’
He looks at Don February, wonders how the younger man can cope in the dry autumn heat in his thick baggy suit, loose on his skinny frame. It makes him feel claustrophobic, just to look at him. He loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar.
‘What use am I investigating another drug murder in a fucking squatter-camp shebeen? I’m a middle-class white guy; I understand white crime. Let it be politically incorrect – we’ll get the job done better.’
Don looks pretty disgusted.
De Vries tells him, conspiratorially, ‘You’re a fucking find, Don. But don’t forget who saved you from the jaws of the Internal Investigation Bureau and that nice David Wertner.’ Don laughs. This is not an original routine. ‘That’s why we cut you a little slack and let you have one moment, every day, for . . . propaganda. And today,Warrant Officer, you’ve just had it.’ Colonel de Vries is only half joking.
They walk to the far edge of the low buildings, turn the corner, face the yard. De Vries stands stock still, listens to the near-silence in the rectangular space ahead of him; hears the low hum of an extractor fan, cars accelerating across the plain at the top of Sir Lowry’s Pass, the corrugated-tin roof crack in the heat of the morning sun. He traces the boundaries of the crime scene with his eyes, in his head marking everything off into sections, studying their contents. He stares at the battered yellow skip in what is his twenty-fourth section, turns back and puts the scene into the context of the entire farm-stall complex.
Don February stands silently at his side. This is what de Vries likes about this man: he has stillness, the capacity to discriminate between a time to act and talk, and a time to think. He has never known a black police officer like him.
‘Lab guys still not here?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘That’s bad. Scene’s deteriorating by the minute in this heat. Tell them to hurry. And then, Don, go over to that farm-stall and take charge. Get the people processed and on their way – but keep your eyes open. You never know.’
Don February bows almost imperceptibly, backs up a few steps, then turns and ambles away. De Vries calls over an officer to give him plastic gloves; stops the officer putting on his own gloves.
‘I want no more contamination of this scene by any other officer, do you understand? Only me. When the lab guys arrive, they have to take prints of everyone who’s been in there.’
The officer looks mildly embarrassed, struggling to get the right-hand glove off his fingers. He looks up and sees de Vries watching him, mumbles: ‘Yes, sir.’
De Vries takes off his suit jacket, hands it to the officer, tucks his tie inside his shirt, pushes up his sleeves. He looks down at the ground and takes a breath.
He starts to walk slowly around the boundary of the scene, scanning the ground, looking above, in vain, for a security camera. He stares at the back wall of the farm-stall, where he knows the kitchen is located. There are two extractor outlets, but only one long narrow window, high up on the wall, and de Vries estimates that no one could see out of it. He calls to the officer.
‘These two doors. Do they both lead to the kitchen?’
The officer calls back from behind the tape he himself has put in place.
‘The left-hand door leads into the kitchen utility area. The right-hand door is for a storeroom, no access. I checked it: just spare gas bottles for the stoves.’
De Vries realizes that no one would see onto this yard unless they were in it themselves. He looks back to the corner of the farm-stall, around which the bodies must have been carried, or driven, to reach the skip, under the dark overhang of the windblown trees.
When de Vries reaches the skip, he is aware that his senses are at their peak, attuned to anything that might correspond with his training, research and twenty years as a detective.
He knows immediately that it will be almost impossible to find anything of use in the surroundings of the skip. It is an area of heavy traffic: delivery and refuse vehicles, and people running from the kitchen to the four different coloured recycling bins. The skip itself, however, might yield something. He approaches it carefully, climbs the grassy bank at its far side and, holding his breath, he peers in. Amidst the piles of plastic packaging and cardboard the two naked bodies lie twisted, wrapped in thin layers of polythene. Aside from blotches of blood red, the bodies seem very white, very thin. De Vries shudders. One is clearly male, but it is impossible to tell much about the other, and he wonders how Don February knew that he was also a teenage boy.
He turns his back on the skip, lets out his breath, and walks smartly away. He begins to breathe again, but the smell of decay is lodged in his nostrils; it both stimulates and repels him.
The Scene of Crime team arrive and he beckons them through the tape. As they hurry past him, he notes that the team-leader is a man he knows and trusts to do a thorough job. They nod at each other wordlessly; each is moving along his own path and neither hesitates.
De Vries walks slowly from the yard behind the buildings, around the corner to the car park; beyond it, the vista of endless fruit trees, straight lines leading to dark rolling mountains. He imagines a process in reverse: the bodies brought up onto the mountain plain via one of the passes at either end, the drive through thick forest and verdant farmland, and turning into the farm-stall, down the approach track and through the car park; the car driving from a previous point to this place . . . what might have happened there; what led to their deaths. He knows that it is a journey that he will take until he reaches the source.
He walks briskly around the end of the low thatched building to the entrance of the farm-stall, climbs the wide brick steps. There is still a crowd of people, but there is a semblance of order; a cooler, shaded calm. He finds Don February, turns him away from the people, says quietly, ‘Good work, Don. I think it’s worthless ’cos those bodies have been in there for hours, at least. Looks like condensation inside the wrapping, so that suggests overnight.’
‘We are trying to keep it brief.’
‘Good. Next, who told you that the two bodies were both boys?’
Don is concerned. ‘The owner. Is he wrong?’
‘Probably not, but he would have had to move stuff to know. Did he tell you he’d touched them?’
‘No. But I was waiting for an official interview. I did not ask much. He is in his office back there.’
De Vries nods quickly and trots towards the door at the end of the food counter. He knocks, enters immediately.
A broad, ginger-haired man is on his cellphone. The moment he sees de Vries he hangs up, stands, wipes his hands on his check shirt and offers his right hand.
‘Tom MacNeil. It’s my place.’
Vaughn introduces himself, asks: ‘Did you touch the bodies, or get into the skip to identify them?’
MacNeil hesitates.
De Vries says: ‘Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter. I just have to know.’
MacNeil sits back down and looks up at de Vries.
‘I was an idiot. I saw them. I know I should just have called you guys – but I thought, If I’m wrong, if this isn’t what it seems . . . Anyway, one of them was at the top, almost clear of all that shit, and the other was half in. So I pulled him out by his arm, and then . . . then I could see. I knew . . .’
De Vries can’t imagine why anyone would do this, but he’s satisfied that MacNeil is telling him the truth – that he’s stupid, not involved.
‘Why did you look in the skip this morning, Mr MacNeil?’
The owner seems relieved that he has not been chastised; uncrosses his arms, his legs.
‘My dog just went mad. She was in there, and she just barked and barked. I had to go and see what it was about.’
‘So your dog was in the skip?’
He swallows. ‘Yes, in the skip. I called her out immediately though.’
De Vries is trying to stay calm. There is a knock at the door. He spins around and opens it. It is one of his men.
‘Sir, the lab guys want to move the bodies. They’re checking in with you.’
‘All right, tell them to wait until I’m there just now.’
The officer leaves and de Vries turns to MacNeil. ‘How busy is that yard during the day?’
‘Not very.’ MacNeil shrugs. ‘When we’ve unpacked stock we might go out there to the recycling, cardboard and stuff . . . and mid-afternoon, when we’re emptying the kitchen bins after lunch, but we’re not back and forth.’
‘What about the door to the kitchen. Is it ever left open?’
‘Nah. There’d be flies everywhere, and it’s a matter of security too.’
‘Locked?’
‘From the outside, yes. It’s a fire exit – with a bar, you know? You push to release it.’
‘And the gas cylinders. How often are they changed?’
‘I dunno.’ He thinks about it. ‘Probably one each week. We have three cooking areas here. Something like that.’
‘So, it’s quiet out there. Anybody ever park there?’
‘Maybe a few delivery vans, but they’d be early in the morning. People use it to turn round if the car park’s busy. Otherwise, no.’
‘One more thing. When you close, is your car park still open?’
‘The gate should be closed. I usually do it myself. First in, last out. You know how it is.’
‘You lock it last night?’
MacNeil takes a breath, squeezes his eyes shut. De Vries looks at the wide freckled face on a thick neck, knows that these gestures are only for show.
‘Ja. I think so.’
‘How often don’t you lock it, Mr MacNeil? Let’s be quite clear here.’
MacNeil avoids de Vries’ eye.
‘I locked up last night,’ he mutters. ‘For sure.’
De Vries stares at him. The expression on MacNeil’s face is open: the man apparently believes what he has just said. Everything sounds right; nothing is helping.
‘Stay here. My Warrant Officer will be with you now.’
MacNeil asks him plaintively, ‘My business. When will I be able to open again?’
Two dead kids.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ de Vries answers bitterly.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Maybe.’
London is dark and grey, the Thames cow-dung dirty. The entire city is blurred through the dense misty rain. John Marantz turns away from the porthole; the view makes him feel depressed. He has been airborne for eleven hours and has another six hours to wait before the next half of his journey. It will be the first time he has been back on native soil for five years.
In the airport lounge, his cellphone rings and a number he has almost forgotten appears on the screen. On answering, the voice is just as he remembers it.
‘You don’t look well.’
‘See me on the cameras?’
‘Saw you in Vegas. We can see anyone, any time. Are you drinking?’
‘Not for three years.’
‘What are you on?’
‘Seroxat and cannabis. What about you: claret and Prozac?’
A momentary pause, then: ‘Who are you seeing?’
‘Sexually or psychologically?’
‘Either.’
‘Neither.’
‘That’s a pity.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘You’re an asset. I know where you are all the time.’
John Marantz likes no part of that sentence.
‘I need to know you are all right, John.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what happened. Because of what we did.’
‘For that,’ Marantz says slowly, ‘you deserve nothing.’
De Vries walks back to his car with the Scene of Crime team-leader. Most of the vehicles have left the car park now, and there is an officer at the driveway entrance, turning away disappointed customers. MacNeil’s farm-stall seems to be a thriving business, and de Vries knows this will mean that with a steady through-flow of customers, staff will be unlikely to identify anyone who might normally have stood out.
‘One night outside? That your view too?’ de Vries says, lighting a cigarette carefully, shielding his lighter from the breeze, not looking at his colleague.
‘Until the coroner confirms time of death, yes. But based on what I’ve seen, I’d think twenty-four hours tops since they were dumped. Preliminary observations only, Vaughn, but there’s no spatter, almost no blood. I’d say you’re looking at an alternate crime scene.’
‘No IDs?’
‘Not on them, obviously. And nothing that we’ve found so far in the skip or around the site. I’m guessing we won’t find anything. Whoever killed them stripped them. He knew that would make identification harder.’
‘Time of death?’
‘I’ll give you my guess: forty-eight, seventy-two hours perhaps. I want the coroner to open the wrapping. Until then, you can’t see much.’
‘How stacked up are they at the labs?’
‘Same old. You’ll get prioritized, but I can’t promise you anything from my guys for at least forty-eight hours.’
De Vries shakes his head. ‘That’s why they haven’t made CSI: Cape Town,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t have the lab results from the first crime till the series ended.’
Dryly: ‘Nice one.’
‘How long will you be here?’
‘Should finish up before it gets dark. If the bodies were just dumped, there’ll not be much outside the immediate scene – though we’ll look, of course. After that, as far as I’m concerned, we can reopen everything. Unless you have any objection?’
‘Your call now. I’m done here.’
The coroner’s van passes them, heading back towards Cape Town.
‘I’ll have the preliminaries for you by first thing tomorrow.’
‘Good.’
De Vries stands by his car, lost in thought. Something at the corner of his brain, his memory, is plaguing him.
‘Vaughn?’
He exhales two lungfuls of smoke, sputters: ‘Sorry. Was on another planet . . .’
‘I was just asking: this scene – are you a policeman who rejoices because this is what you do and it is all about to begin under your charge, or do you despair because there’s so much death in our country?’
De Vries hadn’t taken his colleague to be a philosopher, not when all he does, week in, week out, is study the detritus of death. He looks over to him, his face blank.
‘Neither.’ He shrugs. ‘Or both?’
The pathology suite is not lit by recessed LEDs, a soothing blue mist of light; nor are the benches gleaming and new – but even if they were, you would not be able to see them for the bodies. There are no banks of slim wide-screen computer monitors. You do not enter through swishing, automatic sliding doors . . .
At 6 p.m., Vaughn de Vries and Don February push through the slatted, grey-blue plastic curtain into the large, white-tiled mortuary. Five fluorescent tubes hang on chains from the grey ceiling. The only moderately blue light comes from the ultraviolet fly traps on the wall. Their zapping punctuates the stench of death as it lodges in the men’s sinuses.
At the far end of the room, a burly, thick-set man in protective, spatter-resistant clothing is hunched over a table. As they walk past the other benches, de Vries looks at each body. They are all young black men. At the final table, the skinny body in the sickly light is very white.
De Vries, his voice loud in the hush, asks: ‘Where’s the other one?’
The pathologist looks up at de Vries. ‘Good evening, Harry. Thanks for jumping the queue for me. I owe you a beer—’
De Vries baulks. ‘Sorry, Harry. Thank you – and, yes . . . Beer.’ Vaughn grimaces. ‘I’m dog-tired and the adrenalin just kicked in again. I want to get this going. Sorry.’
‘Body A has already been processed and is now back in storage. As you can see, we have a backlog.’ Harry Kleinman glances back up the room. ‘These all need attending to before I go home.’ He sighs, looks back at the body on his table, and then back at De Vries. ‘I’m finished here. You want what I have?’
‘Ja. Any clue to identities?’
Kleinman peels off thick gloves and disposes of them.
‘Assuming no one is claiming them, no, not unless we have records on characteristics for missing persons.’ He reaches for two clipboards proffered by an assistant, switches spectacles, balances the bottom of the boards on the top of his small, round beer belly. He glances at the first one.
‘Body A is a Caucasian male, aged between fourteen and sixteen. Shot once through the chest. Clean through and through – that is to say, the heart exploded but the bullet continued on its way. No traces of munition found, but the wound is consistent with that of a high-powered rifle – a hunting rifle, perhaps. I estimate time of death as between noon and six p.m. on Sunday.’
‘That wide?’
‘Impossible to judge accurately. Ambient temperatures are all over the place – the wrapping distorts any normal measures. But,’ Kleinman adds, ‘the wrapping was not done straight after the boys were shot.’
De Vries counts back: the boy died about forty-eight hours ago. The bodies must have been kept for a night, then wrapped in polythene and transported to the farm-stall the following day. They then spent one night out of doors in the skip.
‘Anything on the wrapping?’
‘Nothing yet, but it’s at the lab.’ He looks up at de Vries over his glasses. ‘Heard the CSI Cape Town gag. Very droll,Vaughn.’
‘How long were they wrapped for?’ de Vries asks, ignoring Kleinman’s comment.
‘I would say,’ the pathologist begins, looking down to open a chocolate bar, ‘that both boys would have been dead for at least twelve hours before wrapping. I’ve already heard the theory that they spent one night in the open whilst wrapped, and I’m inclined to concur. But I can’t be definite on that. There are some small areas of post-mortem bruising, possibly from being transported from the original crime scene.’
‘Pre-mortem? Signs of struggle?’
‘No. I wouldn’t expect signs of struggle in a shooting case. However, the wounds indicate that the shooter was standing no more than twenty metres from his targets, and this second boy has classic defensive wounds. He was probably also shot only once, but this bullet made more of a mess. Firstly, it looks like it took the fourth finger of his left hand off. It’s possible that this is a separate shot, but I’m inclined towards the theory that it is the same one. Then it punctures his left lung, before ricocheting through him. If the first boy took twenty seconds to die, this one, it was about as instantaneous as it gets.’
‘Facing the shooter?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Moving towards him?’
‘I can’t tell, but this victim certainly had his hands raised. If I’m right about the same shot taking his finger and piercing his lung, then his hands were more in front of him than up in surrender. I’m merely speculating here, piecing what I have into some kind of a working theory.’
‘The boys are definitely from the same scene?’
‘Judge for yourself. Body B, here, is also a Caucasian male, as you can see – probably a little older, sixteen to seventeen years. Also, the single shot. Although we don’t have the ammunition, it seems pretty clear that it is the same gun. Same estimate of time of death.’
De Vries interrupts him. ‘Can we say, with any certainty, that they were shot at the same time by the same gun?’
Kleinman smiles at him. ‘I know you want me to say that, and I concur that it is highly likely. The evidence all points that way, but it is not conclusive yet, not in a scientifically proven sense.’
De Vries feels the first small steps being taken.
‘But we can work on that assumption. What else?’
‘The contents of their stomachs reveal identical eating patterns leading up to their deaths: both had eaten only one meal, I estimate almost eighteen hours previously, and it appears to be identical: pasta, tomato sauce and carrots. They had drunk only water.’
Kleinman refers again to the boards.
‘I noticed a similarity in their builds. Both are lacking muscle for their general development, and carry excess weight in the stomach region. Both display very poorly maintained teeth, with both boys having large amounts of dental decay, which would surely have been causing discomfort, if not pain. You want to see?’
De Vries shakes his head, rotates his hand to restart Harry Kleinman.
‘We’ve run preliminary blood samples and there is no indication that these boys are related.’
‘Unrelated, yet showing similar signs of upbringing; recent behaviour?’
‘The diet, yes, but they may simply have eaten the same meal on this occasion. The lack of exercise, leading to muscle deterioration, the similar dental patterns, the overall . . . physiognomy of these boys, suggests that they have been living similar lives for many years.’
‘Living rough?’
‘No. At least, I certainly doubt it. Look how pale his body is. This is a boy who spends very little time outdoors. Palms and soles of feet smooth. Same on Body A.’
‘Any forensic interest?’
‘One more thing. Both boys display signs of homosexual activity, over a period of years, and seemingly relatively recently also. It’s difficult to say, but I tend to think that it was not consensual. I can’t identify whether the activity took place between them, or whether it was perpetrated by a third party – or more than one other party. Instinctively I’d say it suggests sexual attack or even sustained abuse.’
There is a silence, interrupted only by a shocking zap from the fly-killer on the wall. Vaughn and Don turn towards the noise, see a narrow wisp of brown smoke rise towards a stained patch on the ceiling.
‘However, I can’t tell you whether there was a sexual element to the attack which resulted in them being shot. It seems unlikely. And the weapon used, if I’m right, suggests an outdoor scene.’
‘Because it is a hunting weapon . . . ?’
‘And also that it would be an unwieldy gun to carry around or use indoors.’
Vaughn notices that Kleinman is still staring at the body on the table. ‘Forensics?’ he asks.
‘One substance on the body, looks post-mortem. Both bodies are pretty clean, underneath all of that. Body A has something on his heel. Not sure what it is. Probably from when his body was dragged to where it was wrapped. It’s in the lab already.’ He looks back down at his clipboards. ‘I retrieved samples from beneath their fingernails and particles from their hair, which may come from the original crime scene, and particulate from their throats and lungs.’
‘What was that?’
‘I can’t tell. It might simply be from dust from whatever area they were confined in, but there is a build-up over time.’
Don February asks, ‘What do you mean, “confined”, Doctor?’
De Vries smiles to himself, glances at his Warrant Officer: rarely speaks, but misses nothing.
Kleinman turns to Don. ‘You’re quite right; that was conjecture. It seems to me that these boys have been confined together, probably without proper exercise, possibly for a long period of time. They have been subject to similar routines and, at least recently, a similar diet. This suggests to me a prison – a children’s correctional centre? An overbearing, perhaps abusive family, where both, though unrelated, are living?’
In the silence that follows, de Vries begins to hear his heart pumping inside his head, deep and sickly.
He stutters, ‘Show me a picture of the other boy, Body A.’
Kleinman gestures at his assistant, who passes him a file.
‘Just the face. I only need to see the face.’ De Vries is very pale. He feels a fever hit his groin, his stomach, begin to move its way upwards through his body. His legs feel wet with sweat. He grits his teeth and wills these sensations away.
Kleinman pins a picture of the face of Body A to the illuminated board. De Vries looks at it and shuts his eyes. Then he opens them and studies it more closely. He looks up, tries to swallow away the bile that is rising in his throat. His eyes dart from side to side.
Kleinman puts his hand on Vaughn’s shoulder.
‘What is it, man? You know this victim?’
‘It’s worse than you can possibly imagine.’
‘Who is it then?’ Kleinman stares at de Vries, uncomprehending.
‘Those boys,’ de Vries murmurs. ‘All these years, I thought they were dead.’
2007
The Area squad room is packed with detectives, uniformed police officers, now even off-duty officers, chattering in low voices. Expectation is rife. Vaughn de Vries watches the men stand loosely to atte
The Toyota double-cab shatters the silence, its dark fumes whipped from the rear-pipe. It stutters, steam billowing from the failing engine. The man jumps from the cab, cursing. He calls his dog from the open rear compartment, walks to a small stand of blue gum trees, props himself against the papery, shedding bark of the thickest trunk. He reaches for his cigarettes, growls for his dog to come away from the vehicle. He tries three times to light his cigarette, hears the sound of the flint grating, the lighter firing, the hollow pop of the flame extinguished in the wind.
The cigarette finally ignites; he inserts the drug between his lips and turns back to his stalled, steaming vehicle. He looks towards the sun, estimates the time: if it comes to it, he can walk. It will be dark before he arrives, but it will not be late. He cannot replace the car; he can barely afford for a mechanic to see it. Without it, he is twenty kilometres from the nearest town – no way for him to sell his produce, no way for him to live.
He begins to stride along the dirt track, his dog following, her head still down, ears back. In a lull in the gusts, he hears a wailing cry. It stops him dead: he holds his breath. It is a human scream. He strains to listen again, frowning at the wind in the crackling scrub. Distantly, there is a man’s voice, shouting; then, the scream again. He jogs towards a low peak ahead of him. He is out of breath, sweating, but he is at the top. Two sharp gunshots follow, the sound invisible. He scans his surroundings, swallows hard, his throat gritty. His dog raises her head from the ground and howls into the wind.
Across the gravelled car park of MacNeil’s Cape farm-stall, Colonel Vaughn de Vries strides towards him. Don February starts talking the moment he is in range.
‘Two bodies, both Caucasian, probably teenagers, looks like they have been shot, possibly in the last forty-eight hours. Dog found them at the bottom of a skip outside the kitchens at the back. Scene sealed as soon as we got here.’
‘Good. Trouble from the locals?’ De Vries doesn’t break step.
‘The officer on call is a friend of mine, Ritesh. When he saw what it was, he put the call through to our department immediately. He told me what he saw and then he left. They all knew we were coming.’
‘They knew I was coming,’ de Vries chuckles. ‘I only used to piss off one single department, now I can fuck them over the entire province.’
Warrant Officer February waits for him to finish, then continues, ‘I did the paperwork with him. They have a heavy workload already. He seemed relieved.’
‘I don’t care either way.’
‘No, sir.’
‘He stamp about the place, touching everything?’
‘I doubt it. We were at the Academy together. He is a sound officer.’
‘Well, I’d better not find his big feet all over my crime scene.’
Don February looks up at de Vries, almost half a metre taller, looks at his mouth, wonders whether he should wait for more, or continue his report. De Vries looks down at him.
‘Everyone present is in the farm-stall shop,’ Warrant Officer February resumes. ‘We will check details, ask the basic questions.’
De Vries jerks a thumb at the lines of parked cars as he moves towards the scene. ‘Looks like there’ll be a lot of them.’
‘There are – and the chances are that none of them have any idea about two bodies. They could have been dumped in that skip any time, but we got lucky, sir: I checked with the owner and it only gets swapped weekly. The last took place yesterday morning, approximately eight a.m.’
‘So we have a definite window?’
Warrant Officer February does not look at de Vries again, eyes never leaving his notepad.
‘Close to. The owner did not check the skip, but he says that the drivers would have seen what was in it, and they said nothing. In any case, there is a load of material under the bodies, so that would suggest they were dumped after it started being filled again by the kitchens here.’
‘Check with the skip company.’
Don February makes a note, then looks at him, concludes: ‘I think we can place the arrival of the two bodies between eight a.m. yesterday morning and seven a.m. this morning: twenty-three hours.’
‘Good,’ de Vries tells him. ‘We got enough men on this?’
‘The moment you were assigned, I called for the full team.’
De Vries nods smugly. ‘Serious crime. Two murders.’
Don February stops. ‘Two white boys murdered is a serious crime. Yes, sir. Seems for that, the mountain really does come to Mohammed.’
De Vries moves on, shouts behind him, ‘Why do you think I’m here?’ He waits until his Warrant Officer has caught up with him. ‘The locals think I screw them right up the arse, but that’s what we’re here for.’
He looks at Don February, wonders how the younger man can cope in the dry autumn heat in his thick baggy suit, loose on his skinny frame. It makes him feel claustrophobic, just to look at him. He loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar.
‘What use am I investigating another drug murder in a fucking squatter-camp shebeen? I’m a middle-class white guy; I understand white crime. Let it be politically incorrect – we’ll get the job done better.’
Don looks pretty disgusted.
De Vries tells him, conspiratorially, ‘You’re a fucking find, Don. But don’t forget who saved you from the jaws of the Internal Investigation Bureau and that nice David Wertner.’ Don laughs. This is not an original routine. ‘That’s why we cut you a little slack and let you have one moment, every day, for . . . propaganda. And today,Warrant Officer, you’ve just had it.’ Colonel de Vries is only half joking.
They walk to the far edge of the low buildings, turn the corner, face the yard. De Vries stands stock still, listens to the near-silence in the rectangular space ahead of him; hears the low hum of an extractor fan, cars accelerating across the plain at the top of Sir Lowry’s Pass, the corrugated-tin roof crack in the heat of the morning sun. He traces the boundaries of the crime scene with his eyes, in his head marking everything off into sections, studying their contents. He stares at the battered yellow skip in what is his twenty-fourth section, turns back and puts the scene into the context of the entire farm-stall complex.
Don February stands silently at his side. This is what de Vries likes about this man: he has stillness, the capacity to discriminate between a time to act and talk, and a time to think. He has never known a black police officer like him.
‘Lab guys still not here?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘That’s bad. Scene’s deteriorating by the minute in this heat. Tell them to hurry. And then, Don, go over to that farm-stall and take charge. Get the people processed and on their way – but keep your eyes open. You never know.’
Don February bows almost imperceptibly, backs up a few steps, then turns and ambles away. De Vries calls over an officer to give him plastic gloves; stops the officer putting on his own gloves.
‘I want no more contamination of this scene by any other officer, do you understand? Only me. When the lab guys arrive, they have to take prints of everyone who’s been in there.’
The officer looks mildly embarrassed, struggling to get the right-hand glove off his fingers. He looks up and sees de Vries watching him, mumbles: ‘Yes, sir.’
De Vries takes off his suit jacket, hands it to the officer, tucks his tie inside his shirt, pushes up his sleeves. He looks down at the ground and takes a breath.
He starts to walk slowly around the boundary of the scene, scanning the ground, looking above, in vain, for a security camera. He stares at the back wall of the farm-stall, where he knows the kitchen is located. There are two extractor outlets, but only one long narrow window, high up on the wall, and de Vries estimates that no one could see out of it. He calls to the officer.
‘These two doors. Do they both lead to the kitchen?’
The officer calls back from behind the tape he himself has put in place.
‘The left-hand door leads into the kitchen utility area. The right-hand door is for a storeroom, no access. I checked it: just spare gas bottles for the stoves.’
De Vries realizes that no one would see onto this yard unless they were in it themselves. He looks back to the corner of the farm-stall, around which the bodies must have been carried, or driven, to reach the skip, under the dark overhang of the windblown trees.
When de Vries reaches the skip, he is aware that his senses are at their peak, attuned to anything that might correspond with his training, research and twenty years as a detective.
He knows immediately that it will be almost impossible to find anything of use in the surroundings of the skip. It is an area of heavy traffic: delivery and refuse vehicles, and people running from the kitchen to the four different coloured recycling bins. The skip itself, however, might yield something. He approaches it carefully, climbs the grassy bank at its far side and, holding his breath, he peers in. Amidst the piles of plastic packaging and cardboard the two naked bodies lie twisted, wrapped in thin layers of polythene. Aside from blotches of blood red, the bodies seem very white, very thin. De Vries shudders. One is clearly male, but it is impossible to tell much about the other, and he wonders how Don February knew that he was also a teenage boy.
He turns his back on the skip, lets out his breath, and walks smartly away. He begins to breathe again, but the smell of decay is lodged in his nostrils; it both stimulates and repels him.
The Scene of Crime team arrive and he beckons them through the tape. As they hurry past him, he notes that the team-leader is a man he knows and trusts to do a thorough job. They nod at each other wordlessly; each is moving along his own path and neither hesitates.
De Vries walks slowly from the yard behind the buildings, around the corner to the car park; beyond it, the vista of endless fruit trees, straight lines leading to dark rolling mountains. He imagines a process in reverse: the bodies brought up onto the mountain plain via one of the passes at either end, the drive through thick forest and verdant farmland, and turning into the farm-stall, down the approach track and through the car park; the car driving from a previous point to this place . . . what might have happened there; what led to their deaths. He knows that it is a journey that he will take until he reaches the source.
He walks briskly around the end of the low thatched building to the entrance of the farm-stall, climbs the wide brick steps. There is still a crowd of people, but there is a semblance of order; a cooler, shaded calm. He finds Don February, turns him away from the people, says quietly, ‘Good work, Don. I think it’s worthless ’cos those bodies have been in there for hours, at least. Looks like condensation inside the wrapping, so that suggests overnight.’
‘We are trying to keep it brief.’
‘Good. Next, who told you that the two bodies were both boys?’
Don is concerned. ‘The owner. Is he wrong?’
‘Probably not, but he would have had to move stuff to know. Did he tell you he’d touched them?’
‘No. But I was waiting for an official interview. I did not ask much. He is in his office back there.’
De Vries nods quickly and trots towards the door at the end of the food counter. He knocks, enters immediately.
A broad, ginger-haired man is on his cellphone. The moment he sees de Vries he hangs up, stands, wipes his hands on his check shirt and offers his right hand.
‘Tom MacNeil. It’s my place.’
Vaughn introduces himself, asks: ‘Did you touch the bodies, or get into the skip to identify them?’
MacNeil hesitates.
De Vries says: ‘Whatever you did, it doesn’t matter. I just have to know.’
MacNeil sits back down and looks up at de Vries.
‘I was an idiot. I saw them. I know I should just have called you guys – but I thought, If I’m wrong, if this isn’t what it seems . . . Anyway, one of them was at the top, almost clear of all that shit, and the other was half in. So I pulled him out by his arm, and then . . . then I could see. I knew . . .’
De Vries can’t imagine why anyone would do this, but he’s satisfied that MacNeil is telling him the truth – that he’s stupid, not involved.
‘Why did you look in the skip this morning, Mr MacNeil?’
The owner seems relieved that he has not been chastised; uncrosses his arms, his legs.
‘My dog just went mad. She was in there, and she just barked and barked. I had to go and see what it was about.’
‘So your dog was in the skip?’
He swallows. ‘Yes, in the skip. I called her out immediately though.’
De Vries is trying to stay calm. There is a knock at the door. He spins around and opens it. It is one of his men.
‘Sir, the lab guys want to move the bodies. They’re checking in with you.’
‘All right, tell them to wait until I’m there just now.’
The officer leaves and de Vries turns to MacNeil. ‘How busy is that yard during the day?’
‘Not very.’ MacNeil shrugs. ‘When we’ve unpacked stock we might go out there to the recycling, cardboard and stuff . . . and mid-afternoon, when we’re emptying the kitchen bins after lunch, but we’re not back and forth.’
‘What about the door to the kitchen. Is it ever left open?’
‘Nah. There’d be flies everywhere, and it’s a matter of security too.’
‘Locked?’
‘From the outside, yes. It’s a fire exit – with a bar, you know? You push to release it.’
‘And the gas cylinders. How often are they changed?’
‘I dunno.’ He thinks about it. ‘Probably one each week. We have three cooking areas here. Something like that.’
‘So, it’s quiet out there. Anybody ever park there?’
‘Maybe a few delivery vans, but they’d be early in the morning. People use it to turn round if the car park’s busy. Otherwise, no.’
‘One more thing. When you close, is your car park still open?’
‘The gate should be closed. I usually do it myself. First in, last out. You know how it is.’
‘You lock it last night?’
MacNeil takes a breath, squeezes his eyes shut. De Vries looks at the wide freckled face on a thick neck, knows that these gestures are only for show.
‘Ja. I think so.’
‘How often don’t you lock it, Mr MacNeil? Let’s be quite clear here.’
MacNeil avoids de Vries’ eye.
‘I locked up last night,’ he mutters. ‘For sure.’
De Vries stares at him. The expression on MacNeil’s face is open: the man apparently believes what he has just said. Everything sounds right; nothing is helping.
‘Stay here. My Warrant Officer will be with you now.’
MacNeil asks him plaintively, ‘My business. When will I be able to open again?’
Two dead kids.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ de Vries answers bitterly.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Maybe.’
London is dark and grey, the Thames cow-dung dirty. The entire city is blurred through the dense misty rain. John Marantz turns away from the porthole; the view makes him feel depressed. He has been airborne for eleven hours and has another six hours to wait before the next half of his journey. It will be the first time he has been back on native soil for five years.
In the airport lounge, his cellphone rings and a number he has almost forgotten appears on the screen. On answering, the voice is just as he remembers it.
‘You don’t look well.’
‘See me on the cameras?’
‘Saw you in Vegas. We can see anyone, any time. Are you drinking?’
‘Not for three years.’
‘What are you on?’
‘Seroxat and cannabis. What about you: claret and Prozac?’
A momentary pause, then: ‘Who are you seeing?’
‘Sexually or psychologically?’
‘Either.’
‘Neither.’
‘That’s a pity.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘You’re an asset. I know where you are all the time.’
John Marantz likes no part of that sentence.
‘I need to know you are all right, John.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what happened. Because of what we did.’
‘For that,’ Marantz says slowly, ‘you deserve nothing.’
De Vries walks back to his car with the Scene of Crime team-leader. Most of the vehicles have left the car park now, and there is an officer at the driveway entrance, turning away disappointed customers. MacNeil’s farm-stall seems to be a thriving business, and de Vries knows this will mean that with a steady through-flow of customers, staff will be unlikely to identify anyone who might normally have stood out.
‘One night outside? That your view too?’ de Vries says, lighting a cigarette carefully, shielding his lighter from the breeze, not looking at his colleague.
‘Until the coroner confirms time of death, yes. But based on what I’ve seen, I’d think twenty-four hours tops since they were dumped. Preliminary observations only, Vaughn, but there’s no spatter, almost no blood. I’d say you’re looking at an alternate crime scene.’
‘No IDs?’
‘Not on them, obviously. And nothing that we’ve found so far in the skip or around the site. I’m guessing we won’t find anything. Whoever killed them stripped them. He knew that would make identification harder.’
‘Time of death?’
‘I’ll give you my guess: forty-eight, seventy-two hours perhaps. I want the coroner to open the wrapping. Until then, you can’t see much.’
‘How stacked up are they at the labs?’
‘Same old. You’ll get prioritized, but I can’t promise you anything from my guys for at least forty-eight hours.’
De Vries shakes his head. ‘That’s why they haven’t made CSI: Cape Town,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t have the lab results from the first crime till the series ended.’
Dryly: ‘Nice one.’
‘How long will you be here?’
‘Should finish up before it gets dark. If the bodies were just dumped, there’ll not be much outside the immediate scene – though we’ll look, of course. After that, as far as I’m concerned, we can reopen everything. Unless you have any objection?’
‘Your call now. I’m done here.’
The coroner’s van passes them, heading back towards Cape Town.
‘I’ll have the preliminaries for you by first thing tomorrow.’
‘Good.’
De Vries stands by his car, lost in thought. Something at the corner of his brain, his memory, is plaguing him.
‘Vaughn?’
He exhales two lungfuls of smoke, sputters: ‘Sorry. Was on another planet . . .’
‘I was just asking: this scene – are you a policeman who rejoices because this is what you do and it is all about to begin under your charge, or do you despair because there’s so much death in our country?’
De Vries hadn’t taken his colleague to be a philosopher, not when all he does, week in, week out, is study the detritus of death. He looks over to him, his face blank.
‘Neither.’ He shrugs. ‘Or both?’
The pathology suite is not lit by recessed LEDs, a soothing blue mist of light; nor are the benches gleaming and new – but even if they were, you would not be able to see them for the bodies. There are no banks of slim wide-screen computer monitors. You do not enter through swishing, automatic sliding doors . . .
At 6 p.m., Vaughn de Vries and Don February push through the slatted, grey-blue plastic curtain into the large, white-tiled mortuary. Five fluorescent tubes hang on chains from the grey ceiling. The only moderately blue light comes from the ultraviolet fly traps on the wall. Their zapping punctuates the stench of death as it lodges in the men’s sinuses.
At the far end of the room, a burly, thick-set man in protective, spatter-resistant clothing is hunched over a table. As they walk past the other benches, de Vries looks at each body. They are all young black men. At the final table, the skinny body in the sickly light is very white.
De Vries, his voice loud in the hush, asks: ‘Where’s the other one?’
The pathologist looks up at de Vries. ‘Good evening, Harry. Thanks for jumping the queue for me. I owe you a beer—’
De Vries baulks. ‘Sorry, Harry. Thank you – and, yes . . . Beer.’ Vaughn grimaces. ‘I’m dog-tired and the adrenalin just kicked in again. I want to get this going. Sorry.’
‘Body A has already been processed and is now back in storage. As you can see, we have a backlog.’ Harry Kleinman glances back up the room. ‘These all need attending to before I go home.’ He sighs, looks back at the body on his table, and then back at De Vries. ‘I’m finished here. You want what I have?’
‘Ja. Any clue to identities?’
Kleinman peels off thick gloves and disposes of them.
‘Assuming no one is claiming them, no, not unless we have records on characteristics for missing persons.’ He reaches for two clipboards proffered by an assistant, switches spectacles, balances the bottom of the boards on the top of his small, round beer belly. He glances at the first one.
‘Body A is a Caucasian male, aged between fourteen and sixteen. Shot once through the chest. Clean through and through – that is to say, the heart exploded but the bullet continued on its way. No traces of munition found, but the wound is consistent with that of a high-powered rifle – a hunting rifle, perhaps. I estimate time of death as between noon and six p.m. on Sunday.’
‘That wide?’
‘Impossible to judge accurately. Ambient temperatures are all over the place – the wrapping distorts any normal measures. But,’ Kleinman adds, ‘the wrapping was not done straight after the boys were shot.’
De Vries counts back: the boy died about forty-eight hours ago. The bodies must have been kept for a night, then wrapped in polythene and transported to the farm-stall the following day. They then spent one night out of doors in the skip.
‘Anything on the wrapping?’
‘Nothing yet, but it’s at the lab.’ He looks up at de Vries over his glasses. ‘Heard the CSI Cape Town gag. Very droll,Vaughn.’
‘How long were they wrapped for?’ de Vries asks, ignoring Kleinman’s comment.
‘I would say,’ the pathologist begins, looking down to open a chocolate bar, ‘that both boys would have been dead for at least twelve hours before wrapping. I’ve already heard the theory that they spent one night in the open whilst wrapped, and I’m inclined to concur. But I can’t be definite on that. There are some small areas of post-mortem bruising, possibly from being transported from the original crime scene.’
‘Pre-mortem? Signs of struggle?’
‘No. I wouldn’t expect signs of struggle in a shooting case. However, the wounds indicate that the shooter was standing no more than twenty metres from his targets, and this second boy has classic defensive wounds. He was probably also shot only once, but this bullet made more of a mess. Firstly, it looks like it took the fourth finger of his left hand off. It’s possible that this is a separate shot, but I’m inclined towards the theory that it is the same one. Then it punctures his left lung, before ricocheting through him. If the first boy took twenty seconds to die, this one, it was about as instantaneous as it gets.’
‘Facing the shooter?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Moving towards him?’
‘I can’t tell, but this victim certainly had his hands raised. If I’m right about the same shot taking his finger and piercing his lung, then his hands were more in front of him than up in surrender. I’m merely speculating here, piecing what I have into some kind of a working theory.’
‘The boys are definitely from the same scene?’
‘Judge for yourself. Body B, here, is also a Caucasian male, as you can see – probably a little older, sixteen to seventeen years. Also, the single shot. Although we don’t have the ammunition, it seems pretty clear that it is the same gun. Same estimate of time of death.’
De Vries interrupts him. ‘Can we say, with any certainty, that they were shot at the same time by the same gun?’
Kleinman smiles at him. ‘I know you want me to say that, and I concur that it is highly likely. The evidence all points that way, but it is not conclusive yet, not in a scientifically proven sense.’
De Vries feels the first small steps being taken.
‘But we can work on that assumption. What else?’
‘The contents of their stomachs reveal identical eating patterns leading up to their deaths: both had eaten only one meal, I estimate almost eighteen hours previously, and it appears to be identical: pasta, tomato sauce and carrots. They had drunk only water.’
Kleinman refers again to the boards.
‘I noticed a similarity in their builds. Both are lacking muscle for their general development, and carry excess weight in the stomach region. Both display very poorly maintained teeth, with both boys having large amounts of dental decay, which would surely have been causing discomfort, if not pain. You want to see?’
De Vries shakes his head, rotates his hand to restart Harry Kleinman.
‘We’ve run preliminary blood samples and there is no indication that these boys are related.’
‘Unrelated, yet showing similar signs of upbringing; recent behaviour?’
‘The diet, yes, but they may simply have eaten the same meal on this occasion. The lack of exercise, leading to muscle deterioration, the similar dental patterns, the overall . . . physiognomy of these boys, suggests that they have been living similar lives for many years.’
‘Living rough?’
‘No. At least, I certainly doubt it. Look how pale his body is. This is a boy who spends very little time outdoors. Palms and soles of feet smooth. Same on Body A.’
‘Any forensic interest?’
‘One more thing. Both boys display signs of homosexual activity, over a period of years, and seemingly relatively recently also. It’s difficult to say, but I tend to think that it was not consensual. I can’t identify whether the activity took place between them, or whether it was perpetrated by a third party – or more than one other party. Instinctively I’d say it suggests sexual attack or even sustained abuse.’
There is a silence, interrupted only by a shocking zap from the fly-killer on the wall. Vaughn and Don turn towards the noise, see a narrow wisp of brown smoke rise towards a stained patch on the ceiling.
‘However, I can’t tell you whether there was a sexual element to the attack which resulted in them being shot. It seems unlikely. And the weapon used, if I’m right, suggests an outdoor scene.’
‘Because it is a hunting weapon . . . ?’
‘And also that it would be an unwieldy gun to carry around or use indoors.’
Vaughn notices that Kleinman is still staring at the body on the table. ‘Forensics?’ he asks.
‘One substance on the body, looks post-mortem. Both bodies are pretty clean, underneath all of that. Body A has something on his heel. Not sure what it is. Probably from when his body was dragged to where it was wrapped. It’s in the lab already.’ He looks back down at his clipboards. ‘I retrieved samples from beneath their fingernails and particles from their hair, which may come from the original crime scene, and particulate from their throats and lungs.’
‘What was that?’
‘I can’t tell. It might simply be from dust from whatever area they were confined in, but there is a build-up over time.’
Don February asks, ‘What do you mean, “confined”, Doctor?’
De Vries smiles to himself, glances at his Warrant Officer: rarely speaks, but misses nothing.
Kleinman turns to Don. ‘You’re quite right; that was conjecture. It seems to me that these boys have been confined together, probably without proper exercise, possibly for a long period of time. They have been subject to similar routines and, at least recently, a similar diet. This suggests to me a prison – a children’s correctional centre? An overbearing, perhaps abusive family, where both, though unrelated, are living?’
In the silence that follows, de Vries begins to hear his heart pumping inside his head, deep and sickly.
He stutters, ‘Show me a picture of the other boy, Body A.’
Kleinman gestures at his assistant, who passes him a file.
‘Just the face. I only need to see the face.’ De Vries is very pale. He feels a fever hit his groin, his stomach, begin to move its way upwards through his body. His legs feel wet with sweat. He grits his teeth and wills these sensations away.
Kleinman pins a picture of the face of Body A to the illuminated board. De Vries looks at it and shuts his eyes. Then he opens them and studies it more closely. He looks up, tries to swallow away the bile that is rising in his throat. His eyes dart from side to side.
Kleinman puts his hand on Vaughn’s shoulder.
‘What is it, man? You know this victim?’
‘It’s worse than you can possibly imagine.’
‘Who is it then?’ Kleinman stares at de Vries, uncomprehending.
‘Those boys,’ de Vries murmurs. ‘All these years, I thought they were dead.’
2007
The Area squad room is packed with detectives, uniformed police officers, now even off-duty officers, chattering in low voices. Expectation is rife. Vaughn de Vries watches the men stand loosely to atte
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The First Rule Of Survival
Paul Mendelson
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