Poison City (11 page)

‘Yeah?’

The guy actually holds up his I.D. ‘Sergeant Anders, SAPS. This is Constable Ndlovu.’

‘Yeah, I know who you are, Anders.’

‘We’d like you to come with us, Mr Tau. We have a few questions we’d like to ask.’

I sigh. Was this about yesterday? Giving him attitude back at the kraal? I have a sudden thought. Maybe it’s about the kids’ hospital? Had Moses the car guard sold me out?

‘Does it have to be now? We’ve got a murder to deal with, Anders. You know that.’

‘It has to be now, yes.’

Might as well just get this over with. If it is about the hospital I’ll just deny everything. I should be back at work for a bollocking from Armitage by noon.

I glance over my shoulder to see the dog watching all this. ‘See you later, dog.’

‘You want to phone someone to come take care of . . .’ Anders looks at the dog and his face furrows with distaste, ‘. . . 
it
?’

I frown. ‘Why? Am I going to be gone long?’

‘That all depends on you.’

That sounds ominous. ‘He’ll be fine,’ I say.

Anders leads the way down the stairs while the constable walks behind me. There’s a white and blue police van waiting for me outside, another worrying sign. I’m one of them. I should be transported in an unmarked car, not a meat truck like every other perp they pick up.

I’m bundled into the back and the door slams shut behind me. I sit on the bench behind the metal grill as Anders and Ndlovu climb in to the front, Ndlovu driving. The back of the van smells of vomit, sharp and vinegary. There are stains on the wooden bench opposite me, very clearly old blood.

The police radio is crackling and beeping. Anders turns it down as we pull into the traffic, heading west through the streets of Durban and finally out onto the M3 freeway. I frown. Why are we heading out of Durban? There are plenty of police stations inside the city limits.

‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

Anders glances over his shoulder. ‘Hillcrest Station.’

Hillcrest? Why the hell are we going there?

Hillcrest used to be one of those sleepy villages, a one-road town all the way up to the early 2000s, when the rich people from Johannesburg suddenly realized it was there and started buying the land up cheap and building their huge houses. Now it’s a bustling town with shopping malls, housing developments, and a way-too-high cost of living, and it
still
only has one main road, although they
had
widened it to two lanes each way.

Oh yeah – and they’d put traffic lights up every thirty feet or so, just to make your blood pressure rise every time you needed to get anywhere.

It takes us about fifteen minutes to get into Hillcrest from Durban, a thirty-kilometre trip, and then another ten minutes to travel the two kilometres along the main street to the police station.

We turn left at the traffic lights, then left again into the
Mr Price Home
parking lot. (Mr Price is a huge furniture shop with a massive parking lot, while the actual police station across the street is tiny, and hasn’t been upgraded since the 1980s. Priorities. Gotta love them.)

Anders opens the back door of the van and I climb out. The three of us cross the road and enter the brick building. A tiny reception area no bigger than my kitchen lies beyond. It’s packed with people waiting to fill out reports on stolen cars or housebreakings. Anders takes me around the back of the faux-marble worktop and into a dingy corridor, walls painted nicotine yellow, then into a room with a steel foldout table and three plastic lawn chairs.

‘Wait there,’ he says.

I sit down. Anders comes back a moment later with some paperwork, a couple of thick files, and an ink pad. He puts everything on the table and gestures for me to stand up.

‘Hand,’ he says.

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Just give me your hand.’

‘You’ve got my prints. They’re on file.’

‘
Hand
.’

‘Do I need a lawyer?’

Anders finally looks at me. ‘Yeah, reckon you will.’

I’m starting to get a bit worried. I thought this was just a basic questioning. I don’t think there’s any real evidence to tie me to the destruction of Addingtons, except for Moses’ say so. But this looks more serious. They had something on me. Had Moses taken pictures on his cell phone? Was there CCTV footage?

I put my hand out and Anders takes my fingerprints, smearing them across the little boxes on the arrest report. He gestures to the corner of the room. There’s a tiny cracked sink there with a hard, ink-smeared block of soap. I do my best to get the stains off my fingers, then tear some paper towel from an industrial-sized roll sitting beneath the sink.

Anders leads me deeper into the station, into another room. A scratched wooden table and two chairs, foam padding poking out through slits and holes in the material.

We sit down and I wait to see how Anders is going to handle this. If there’s no evidence it means they need me to confess. The fact I haven’t been put in cuffs means they’re not a hundred per cent sure what I’ve done, or if I’ve done anything. I don’t know whether to be hopeful or not.

Anders opens one of the files and starts copying information from it onto the arrest report. I peer across the table and see it’s my SAPS personnel file.

‘The fuck is going on, Anders?’

He smirks at me. The prick is loving this.

I lean back in my chair, give him the dead-eye stare. (I learned that from Armitage. She has a look on her that could melt iron into a puddle of molten metal.) ‘What are you? Twenty-seven?’

‘Twenty-nine,’ said Anders.

‘Whatever. I’m not going to sit here and have some snot-nosed fast-track gym-bunny judge me because he’s got an inferiority complex and a power buzz. Tell me what’s going on. Now.’

He smirks at me. Again. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I don’t lean over the table and punch him. I
really
want to.

‘Where were you last night between nine and three?’

I blink. Wasn’t expecting that.

‘Last night?’

‘That’s correct. Can you account for your whereabouts?’

Why the hell does he want to know that? All that stuff at the hospital happened two days ago.

I straighten up in my chair. ‘What’s this about?’ I ask. ‘Why am I here?’

‘Do you know Major Olivia Armitage?’

‘Don’t be stupid. You
know
I do. Christ, what’s she done? Is she here? Have you locked her up for something? I
told
her to stay away from Point Road.’

‘She’s not locked up, no.’

I lean forward, feeling a small tug of satisfaction when Anders leans quickly back. I’m not a small guy. Six-two without my shoes. I can be scary if I want to.

‘Then what’s this about? Why are you asking me about Armitage?’

‘Because she’s dead,’ says Anders, biting off each word and watching me carefully for my reaction.

I don’t say anything. I hear his words, but I don’t believe him. It’s that cliché, isn’t it? When you’re involved in some tragedy or another it doesn’t feel real. It’s like you’re watching it in a movie.

‘No, she’s not,’ I say stupidly. ‘She can’t be. I just spoke to her yesterday.’

‘Nevertheless, she’s dead. Murdered.’

I blink. I shake my head slightly. My thoughts are racing, my heart hammering as if to keep up. I feel sick. It can’t be true. It’s a joke. Has to be. This whole thing. This can’t happen again. I can’t go through all this a second time.

‘You’re taking the piss. Where is she?’

Anders pulls some glossy photographs out of one of his files and lays them out on the table. I glance at them, then look away, feeling the bile rise in my throat. My insides are churning. My heart sinks into my stomach.

I don’t want Armitage to be dead. I always thought she’d outlive me. I could easily see her giving the finger to Death when the skeletal bastard came for her.

I force myself to look at the first photograph.

Armitage lying on tiles. I recognize them as being from her lounge. Suddenly it makes sense why I’d been hauled all the way to Hillcrest Station. She lives here. The death happened on their patch.

Armitage’s chest has been ripped out. Exactly like the ramanga. A huge gouge scooped away revealing her spine. She’s baring her teeth in a snarl. I can almost hear her thoughts, the anger at going out this way. Her fury at being killed.

Another photo shows her heart sitting on the couch, a little numbered marker pinpointing it as evidence.

Armitage’s hand is reaching out to the side, her fingers covered in blood. There are smears beneath her fingers . . .

Anders slides another photograph on top of the previous. Not smears. Writing. Armitage had dabbed her fingers in her own blood and written on the tiles. How that was even possible is beyond me, but she always was a stubborn old cow.

But it’s what she’s written that makes everything clear. I suddenly understand why I’m sitting in this interview room.

Written on white tiles in her own blood is what looks like the word:

Tau.

‘Got anything to say for yourself,
Tau
?’ asks Anders.

‘Come on!’ I snap. ‘You think I did this? Because she wrote my name? We were working on the same case. Chasing down whoever did this . . . !’ I stab the pictures with my finger.

‘I’ll ask again. Do you have anything to say in your defence?’

I lean back in my chair. ‘Yeah. I want my fucking phone call.’

I call Parker and tell her to get over here and get me the hell out of jail. While I’m waiting I get to enjoy the comforts of our wonderful state hospitality. A Spartan cell with a plastic-covered mattress and a toilet that doesn’t work.

I pace. I keep thinking of Armitage. It was obviously the same killer that had murdered the ramanga. Which meant someone didn’t want us investigating the case.
Really
didn’t want us investigating.

The angel. Michael. He’d told us to back off. Warned us away. Could he have done this? Surely not. Even sanctimonious angels would stop at cold-blooded murder.

Wouldn’t they?

I remember all the missed calls on my phone. She’d tried to call me. Probably even tried to leave messages, but I still hadn’t cleared out my voice mailbox. Shit. And while she was being murdered, I was out getting rat-arsed drunk.

I shout in frustration and punch the wall. Which does absolutely nothing except make my hand really hurt. I sink down onto the thin mattress and put my head in my hands. Stare down at the pitted concrete floor.

This was my fault. If I’d had my phone. If I’d answered the call, gone to her . . .

Then you might both be dead
, says a voice in my head.

I can’t believe she’s gone. My mind won’t accept it. Doesn’t
want
to accept it. I think back to the cases we worked on, the nights we spent drinking together. We even drank here in Hillcrest. A place called The Station Masters Arms, a pub built in an old train station building, the outside tables butting right up against the unused tracks.

I shouldn’t be feeling like this. After everything with Cally, I thought I was immune to feeling
anything
for anyone else.

In this job, you’re supposed to develop an acceptance for the end of life, and you deal with it in one of two ways. You either become a pragmatist – you live, you die. It’s all random, and there’s nothing after you croak.

Or you become spiritual. You decide there’s more out there, that maybe death isn’t all that bad because you move on to another plane, or you come back, or you go to heaven, hell, whatever. The point is there’s something
more
than you. Something more than the job.

I still remember the day I chose my own path. This was before Delphic Division. Before Becca, before Cally. Back when I was a normal cop. I was called to a crime scene in the suburbs. High walls. Electric wires running along the top. Burglar bars on all the windows. Two cars. Swimming pool. Pretty standard stuff.

The husband had lost his job, racked up gambling debts. Wanted to commit suicide. But could he do the decent thing and just take himself out? Hell no. He killed his family first. Two daughters, one son, and his wife.

Then he chickened out. Couldn’t do it to himself. He eventually got off. No jail time. Mentally unfit to stand trial.

Where’s the justice there?

I worked that crime scene all morning, trying not to look at those three kids lying on the kitchen floor. I can still see that image in my mind, fresh as if it was yesterday.

I left work that day and drank myself into a stupor, and when I woke up I just felt . . . hopeless. Like I was a tiny sandbag against a metaphorical flood. That nothing I did mattered.

I took a week’s leave and I thought about where I was, what I believed, what the job was
making
me believe. I just kept thinking, if this is all there is to life, I might as well shoot myself in the head right there and then. I even considered it. I really did. Why not? Nothing I did was going to make a difference anyway.