Murderous Read online

  Murderous

  The Gabriel Series – Book Two

  David Hickson

  Aeon Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

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  Also by David Hickson

  About the Author

  One

  I believe in ghosts. A belief reinforced the morning I stood in a small country church in the town of Minhoop, where a day earlier thirty-three worshippers had lost their lives. Their blood was spattered over the pews and across the stone floor. The bodies had been removed, leaving behind the roughly marked outlines of their final postures. Their spirits screamed at us from the echoing reaches of the vaulted ceiling with rage.

  I have encountered so many ghosts in my past I have learnt to recognise the signs of their presence. The way the policemen hunched their shoulders as they painstakingly worked out the trajectory of the bullets, the way they huddled together around the computer models of the church and shielded the screens from no living person. The involuntary shiver as a young policewoman called out the measurement of the spread of blood splatter before the altar where the minister had gone down with his arms raised as if in benediction.

  They were angry, tragic spirits. But not angry with me, which made for a refreshing change. The spirits that haunted me were those of the people whose lives I had ended. They were the ones who never gave up, who visited my nightmares and would follow me to my grave.

  “You let your imagination get the better of you, Gabriel,” said Khanyi, but her face was drawn and her dark skin had a blue tinge that told me she felt those ghosts too. “Six children,” she said. “The youngest was four years old.” She gazed at the diminutive outline of the youngest victim, which merged with the outline of an adult who had fallen trying to shield his child from the bullets.

  “AK-47,” said the young police captain beside Khanyi. “No point in shielding anyone. The bullets rip straight through and do their damage anyway.” He was also transfixed by the outline. “You seen what you needed to?” he asked.

  Khanyi nodded. “Just those,” she said, indicating the words daubed onto the white wall behind the altar. Ten letters, each one about the height of the fallen four-year-old. Dark red letters splashed hurriedly onto the wall, like deep wounds dripping trails of blood. Beneath them a scribbled symbol, like a signature.

  “It’s paint,” said the policeman, “not blood. They wanted it to look like blood.” He gave a shiver and said, “I’ll join you in one of those, if you’ve got one to spare.”

  “I’ve got a whole packet,” I said.

  “He gave up months ago,” said Khanyi, who always felt better when pointing out my weaknesses.

  “So did I,” said the policeman. “But you need something to help deal with all this.”

  I lit his cigarette on the steps of the church and he cupped his hands around mine to shield the flame from the cutting winter wind. It was late in the morning but the sun had failed to penetrate the thick cloud that smothered the miserable little town of Minhoop.

  “Killer must have been known to them,” he said, after exhaling a cloud of smoke downwind from Khanyi, whose face had the non-smoker’s pained expression of intolerance. “Had to have been. We’ve been putting the sequence together, and the shooting started at the altar, not from behind them. He locked the door, walked down the aisle and turned to face them. Not one of them had moved to stop him, as far as we can tell. Then painted those letters while people who’d heard the gunshots were trying to break down the door. Must have slipped out the back moments before they came in.”

  “You’ve not released that yet?” said Khanyi. “That he was known to them? None of the news reports have mentioned it.”

  “More your domain, isn’t it? The spin doctor stuff.”

  “We’re only here because of the words on the wall.”

  The policeman nodded and sucked on his cigarette as if it was a straw through which he was drawing his last breath. His eyes lingered on Khanyi’s face as he took in her full glory. Her high cheekbones and wide eyes gave her the sculpted beauty of a cartoon warrior. She was dressed in black in deference to the tragic circumstances, but the lack of colour in her outfit was made up for by the brevity of the skirt and the inadequate capacity of the jacket, which was held closed by a large silver button, strained to its limit. The policeman’s gaze loitered a while.

  “Makes it easier to swallow though, doesn’t it?” he said, and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “A lone madman is better than a politically motivated gang.”

  “Is that why there’s been no mention of the words on the wall?” I asked.

  “Better some pissed off farm worker than the start of a race war,” he said and sucked on the cigarette again.

  “You’ll be removing the words,” said Khanyi. It wasn’t a question.

  He nodded without taking the cigarette from his mouth or removing the fingers that held it, so that the glowing end bounced up and down. “Chief wants to limit the panic,” he said. “If you’ve got what you need, we can cover it. The techies have the paint samples and everything for the labs.”

  “Best you clear it before they allow the press in.”

  “Won’t make much difference. Words or no words, can’t change the facts, can we?”

  Khanyi shook her head, and we each retreated into our own thoughts as the policeman and I finished our cigarettes. The Minhoop Massacre had already attracted international headlines, and reactions were pouring in from around the world. It had not taken long for anyone to notice that all thirty-three victims were pale-skinned. Not unusual perhaps that a Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk should be filled with white Afrikaans-speaking people. It was the branch of the Christian religion formed by the Afrikaans people. But in a country where only one out of eleven people was white, the odds that thirty-three people killed with such violence should all be white seemed statistically significant. Particularly when racial tensions in the country had reached the point where analysts were describing the situation as a civil war waiting for a spark to set it alight.

  We left the policeman to the ghosts and walked down the path that connected the church with the wide avenue that formed the spine of Minhoop. Like many South African towns, Minhoop had been built around the church, which stood at the end of the main street like a beacon of virtue. A lighthouse which guided the small community towards a life of piety, or perhaps it was the watchtower from which their sins were observed. A shoulder-high fence of painted steel bars protected the neatly mowed grass slope that surrounded the church, because as welcome as everyone was, the feet of the pious were required to stay on the path and keep off the grass. Two military policemen stood awkwardly at the gate, their weapons held up to their chests, trying not to meet the eyes of the huddled group of mourners who had been placing bouquets and wreaths against the fence. Beyond the mourners, a cluster of journalists loitered like jackals waiting for the carcass to be cleared. They braved the icy wind, warm
ing themselves with cigarettes, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands.

  “What’re they doing in there?” one of the older hands called out to us. “Trampling all over the evidence?”

  “Don’t answer,” said Khanyi, and she held up a hand as if it was a screen that we could hide behind.

  Beyond the journalists we encountered the groups of stunned locals who were keeping well back from the luminous evil at the end of the road. They stood in awe and gazed up at the church, or shuffled about aimlessly, nodding at each other, embracing one another. The main street was devoid of cars, given over to the informal gathering of a community reeling from the horror of the massacre.

  ‘Father’ Don Fehrson was the only customer in the lace-curtained, home-baked melktert coffee shop. He was seated at the window through which passers-by looked in at him as if he was a goldfish in a bowl. His white hair was particularly unruly today and, in combination with the rough-weave tweed suit, created the impression of an English professor caught unawares on a country weekend. The English look was one he carefully nurtured, with silk cravats, poorly matched country suits and brightly polished leather-soled shoes. He even spoke the language with the tinge of an unplaceable accent. Because many years ago he had astutely surmised that an Englishman in state security was more likely to survive the transition from apartheid regime to Rainbow Nation than would an Afrikaner. But the truth was that Fehrson grew up in a town very much like Minhoop and was a thoroughbred Afrikaner.

  Fehrson looked up at the merry jangling of the bell on the door as Khanyi and I entered and frowned as if we were being inappropriately noisy and cheerful. Before him was a plate piled high with homemade, misshapen waffles. Fehrson was regarding them with disgruntled confusion. Beside him stood a hapless young girl dressed in black, with wet eyes, also gazing at the waffles as if they were the saddest thing she had seen.

  “I wondered when you two would grace us with your presence,” said Fehrson, his eyes still on the waffles.

  “We have all we need, Father,” said Khanyi as a form of excuse, revealing no inappropriate details in front of the waitress.

  Fehrson harrumphed as if he didn’t believe that and poked at the pile of waffles with a tentative knife. Fehrson had once been an ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and had spent his early years of military service as an army chaplain. That was before his superiors discovered his aptitude for the murkier, more secretive aspects of military operations. In his latter, serene years he encouraged the use of the title as a form of address because it better reflected his new role as nurturing leader, in contrast to his earlier approach of despotic dictator.

  “Sara here had a second cousin in the church,” he said, pronouncing the name in the Afrikaans way with an ‘ah’ on the first ‘a’ instead of the English ‘air’.

  We turned to Sara, who sniffed and showed us her red-rimmed eyes.

  “Dreadful business,” said Fehrson. “Dreadful.” He plunged his knife into the stack of waffles, which belched syrup over the table. “Damn,” he said. “Thought that would happen. Fetch me a lappie would you, Sara? There’s a dear.”

  Fehrson pointed the syrupy knife at the chairs opposite him. We sat down.

  “You saw it?” he asked, using the knife to indicate that he was addressing me.

  “It’s worrying,” I said.

  “Dis maar net die begin,” said Fehrson, speaking Afrikaans, and then in case I had not realised he was using that language, he added: “in Afrikaans,” and he inserted a large forkful of dripping waffle into his mouth. “It is an Afrikaans town,” he said through the waffle, “so they translate it into Afrikaans.”

  “Yes,” I said as we watched him chew.

  “Only the beginning,” said Fehrson, when he had completed his twenty mastications and swallowed.

  “Only the beginning,” I confirmed. Fehrson looked as if he suspected I was mocking him, so I added: “My mother was Afrikaans.”

  “Of course. Don’t know why I keep forgetting that.” Fehrson held his knife aloft as he ran over the details of my provenance in his mind. “Written in Zulu, they tell me. Khanyisile will have do the Zulu part.”

  “Isiqalo nje,” said Khanyi obediently, producing the percussive click on the ‘q’ and the softer dismissive click against her front teeth for the ‘nj’.

  “Yes,” I said. Khanyi had already provided me with the message in all three languages. “Unusual for it to be Zulu, surely? Here in the Cape, wouldn’t you expect Xhosa?”

  Of the many tribes that constituted the indigenous population of South Africa, the two largest were the Zulu and Xhosa tribes. The Zulus were fierce warriors who had blazed a trail of destruction from the north in the days before the European colonists arrived. They had encountered the more peaceful Xhosa tribe loitering in what is now known as the Eastern Cape. Many fierce battles were fought between them, and to this day the two tribes lived together in an uneasy truce.

  “Xhosa would be sisiqalo nje,” said Khanyi, who was herself a fearsome Zulu. “Pronunciation differs, but there’s only one additional letter when you write it.”

  “We have so many languages,” said Fehrson, as if it was something he regretted.

  “What do you need from me?” I asked.

  “You can imagine,” said Fehrson, “the threat of this being ‘only the beginning’ triggered desperate calls to my chiefs.” Fehrson sniffed. His Department of State Security was a small and increasingly insignificant one. Any mention of his superiors required a sarcastic tone, or a joking dismissal.

  Sara returned with a dishcloth to clean up the syrup spill. The Afrikaners called a dishcloth a lappie, and I wondered whether Fehrson’s absent-minded use of the word indicated the extent to which his English shell was cracking under the strain of being surrounded by a community so much like the one of his upbringing, in such a state of distress.

  “You want coffee?” Sara asked listlessly as Fehrson busied himself with cleaning up the syrup.

  Khanyi ordered. A latte for her, and a short black for me.

  “Cream or foam?” asked Sara.

  “Do not be difficult, Khanyisile,” said Fehrson. “None of your European fripperies, only good old-fashioned moer coffee here. It is brewed in a pot and allowed to sit for hours,” he explained to me. I nodded. Fehrson preferred to think of me as a foreigner, particularly on days like this.

  “They are keeping quiet about it, of course,” resumed Fehrson when Sara had returned to the kitchen. “Don’t want to start a nationwide panic. Egg on lots of faces.” He gave a smile to show that his face was not one of them.

  “No one saw it coming. No one but us. There have been no anxious flag wavers or whistle-blowers warning about disgruntled farm workers dreaming of wandering into their employer’s place of worship with automatic weapons. Now the First World is breathing heavily down my chiefs’ necks, asking why they did not see it coming.”

  “But you did see it coming?”

  “You saw the symbol? Underneath the words.”

  “Khanyi said you would tell me what that was.”

  “And so I shall,” said Fehrson. Then he inserted his knife into the waffles again, which retaliated with a fresh spurt of syrup. It rather spoilt Fehrson’s moment.

  “The hyena they called it, although honestly I do not think it looks anything like the animal. More of a scribble, but the experts said hyena, so hyena it is. When you see them all together, it makes more sense.”

  “All together? There are more of these scribbles?”

  Fehrson gave Khanyi a nod, and she pulled a folder from her shoulder bag. Making certain that Sara was not within range, she opened it and revealed a matte print of the splashed lines beneath the dribbling letters on the church wall. They made up a symbol of sorts, a triangle standing on one of its points with twin plus signs in the upper part of the triangle, and the lower part broken by two angry downward slashes.

  “Eyes,” said Khanyi, pointing at the plus signs with a sparkling finge
rnail. “And fangs,” she indicated the dripping slashes at the lower point.

  “It’s a bit of a stretch,” I said.

  “Look at them together,” said Khanyi, and she spread out three more photos like a magician about to ask me to choose one. The other photos were older, the colours a little faded, the edges worn, and the whites a yellow grey. Three different walls, each of them bearing similar roughly slashed triangles with cross eyes and drooling fangs.

  “Those are older?”

  “Twenty-five years ago,” said Fehrson. “The time of the first free elections. You were still throwing porridge around your boarding school canteen or doing whatever those English schools encouraged. You would not remember it, but the country was struggling out of its cocoon. A difficult time, with the apartheid government preparing to hand over the reins; angry people on both sides. Those photos are from a spate of farm killings around that time.”

  “The kind of farm killings that are making the news now?” I asked.

  “The same,” agreed Fehrson. He shovelled another portion of waffle into his mouth and gazed out of the window as he chewed. Attacks on farmers in the country had recently been making headlines. Violent attacks in which gangs invaded homes and killed entire families or laid ambush to them on the long roads that spanned the distances between the isolated farms.

  “The press might have you think it is a recent phenomenon,” said Fehrson. “They will keep coming up with new names, but there is nothing new. In the 1990s there were farm killings, just as there are today.”