Strong Medicine (5 page)
Authors: Angela Meadon
- Investigating Police Officer, Venda, South Africa (Trafficking Body Parts in Mozambique and South Africa, Simon Fellows, Human Rights League, Mozambique)
#
“This is the one, stop over there.” Johan pointed at a silver Hilux parked on the side of the
veld
. A grey-haired man stood with his back against the
bakkie,
looking out across the field. The sky was ice blue, crisp and clear, with only a hint of a breeze.
“Is that Koos?” I asked as I stopped my Uno next to the much-larger Hilux and turned the engine off.
“Ja, he’s getting old but I’d recognize him anywhere.” Johan jumped out of the car and strode over to Koos.
Golden grasses, reaching almost up to my hips, nodded in the warm winter sun. Dust tickled my nose and the sounds of crickets and cars buzzed in my ears. There was a lot of traffic on Third Avenue, but the field was relatively isolated. Especially with the trees.
I jammed a cigarette between my lips and lit it from a shaking match. My hands hadn’t stopped shaking since… And my stomach hadn’t stopped aching either.
Koos greeted me with a warm smile, taking my hands in both of his and looking straight into my eyes. “Johan explained the situation to me over the phone.” His grey mustache curled over his lips as he spoke. “I’m very sorry about what you’re going through. We’ll do our best to get your daughter back.”
“Thank you.” I croaked a reply around the anguish in my chest.
“Did you bring the scent cloth?” Koos asked.
I nodded and handed him the pink-and-green vest I’d brought along. Lindsey had worn it two days ago and we hadn’t washed it yet.
“Perfect. I’ll get the dogs.”
Koos fished a jingling set of keys from his jeans pocket and unlocked the canopy on the Hilux. Two eager canine faces appeared in the opening, a German Shephard and a Labrador.
“This is Frisco.” Koos rubbed the Lab’s broad, golden head. “And this is Kaya.” He reached into the back of the
bakkie
and withdrew two leashes. He clipped one to the collar around each dog’s neck, and then ordered them out of the
bakkie
.
After giving the dogs a chance to get the scent from Lindsey’s vest, Koos set off with the animals. I stood next to his car, sucking down the last of my cigarette and watching the two eager dogs search for the scent of my baby girl.
#
How many people had walked over that same sand since Lindsey passed the field on Monday afternoon? Had she even made it this far on her way home yesterday?
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the screen, but the caller showed as coming from an unknown number. I thumbed the call button and held the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Is that Mrs. Du Toit?” the caller asked.
“Ms. Du Toit. Yes.” I still use my maiden name. Mrs. Du Toit is my mother.
“This is Detective Nyala, working on your daughter’s case.”
My heart hammered. Had he found Lindsey? I wanted to scream at him, demand that he tell me they’d found her, but something in his voice made me hold back.
“Yes, detective? What’s happening?” I asked.
Johan, standing ten meters away, perked up and came to stand closer to me. He tilted his head and scrunched his forehead. It struck me then, that despite our differences, he was as concerned about Lindsey as anyone else in the family.
“I just wanted to update you on our search for your daughter,” Nyala said. “We’ve filed the missing persons report and sent it to all the police stations in Gauteng. If Lindsey goes in to any of them, we’ll know immediately.”
“Thank you.” I said the words but didn’t feel thankful. “What else have you done?”
“That’s… all we’ve been able to do so far. I’m sorry, there’s not much more we can do until someone comes forward with information.”
I scowled at the dirt between my shoes. They were doing less than I was; how would they expect someone to come forward?
“I’ll let you know if anything changes,” Nyala said. “I know it’s really difficult to wait for news. We’re doing our best.”
We said our goodbyes, and then Nyala hung up the phone.
“Fuck!” I swore and kicked the tire of my Uno. My toes crunched together inside my shoe, and a sharp pain shot up my leg. “Useless assholes!”
“What’s happening?” Johan asked. He squinted into the sun and his leathery face squished up around his missing front teeth.
“Absolutely fucking nothing,” I said. “That was the detective on Lindsey’s case. They’re not doing a goddamn thing to find her.” I jammed my phone back into my pocket and glared at Johan. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but he was the nearest person and therefore the natural target for my anger.
“Hey! Over here!”
My head shot up. Koos stood about a hundred meters into the
veld,
waving at us.
Inmate Number: 7865649
Bongani Zulu
19 September 2005
CMAX Prison, Pretoria
Detective Tshabalala (DT): Mr. Zulu, we need to talk more about the Kei Ripper killings.
Bongani Zulu (BZ): Yes, yes. You want to know about the boys.
DT: Yes. We stopped last time where you followed the boys into the forest. What did you do after that, Mr. Zulu?
BZ: I followed them to the river, where they took off their clothes and started swimming. I came down the river bank, called out to them, and told them I had lost a cow in the forest. I asked them if they would help me to find the cow. They didn’t want to help me, they were boys having fun. I told them I would give them money and
dagga
if they helped me.
DT: And they agreed?
BZ: Ja, the little one was afraid, but the bigger ones wanted the money. I told them to go into the forest and look for the cow, and said the youngest one could stay with me for a while because he was afraid. Then, when one of his friends came back he could go and look.
DT: What was the boy’s name? The youngest one?
BZ: His name was Vika. I sat on a rock next to the river and he sat close to me. His friends went into the forest. We spoke about the boy, where he lived and what he liked to do. He was young, he liked to play. I asked him if he would like to play a game of killing each other. I told him he might be scared and it might hurt, but he’d be safe. He didn’t want to play. Then one of the older boys came back. I told Vika to go look for the cow and spoke with the older boy.
I told him we must play a game, me and all the boys together. That it was a scary game but it would give us power. I told him that we would pretend to kill Vika and take things from his body. He wanted to know if Vika would be dead forever. I told him we would be able to make Vika alive again after the game.
DT: How did you get all the boys to agree?
BZ: I spoke to them one at a time. Promised them we would all get power from the game. I told them that we’d start with Vika, and kill each boy in turn, and then I’d bring them all back to life. They agreed.
-Young man attacked for his genital organs. Niassa province, Mozambique.
#
My chest burned and tears blurred my vision. The closer I got to Koos, the further from him I wanted to be. My legs grew heavy, not from running, but from fear. Fear of what might be lying there in the warm winter sun. Fear of what might have happened to Lindsey. I didn’t want to see my daughter there. I didn’t want to know what had been done to her. I stopped twenty meters from Koos and let Johan go on ahead. I’d wait and see his reaction before I went any closer.
My head buzzed with the droning of crickets and the rhythm-less honking of horns on the street behind me. The sun burned into me, amplifying the nervous flush in my cheeks. The noise built up in my head, echoing off the inside of my skull and amplifying like ripples meeting in a pond. Soon I was so dizzy I had to hold my hands out for balance.
My pulse throbbed under my skin as Johan walked through the thigh-high veld grass and stopped beside Koos. He looked down, nodded and shrugged. It was a rolling of the shoulders that spoke of defeat and terrible weight.
Oh God, what had they found?
Johan recognized it. Whatever it was that lay in the dry grass. He turned and looked at me, his mouth down-turned and his eyes wide despite the glare of the sun. He bent down so that only the dark ring of hair around the back of his head was visible.
I took a few hesitant steps forward. I would have to find out what lay there eventually. They would stop me if it was truly awful. Surely they would?
The spiky seed heads of the tall grass caught at my pants, a thousand plaintive fingers trying to hold me back. Brittle stalks crunched beneath my shoes as I took tentative steps forward.
I saw a flash of pink and black between the golden grass and froze again, no more than ten steps away. Lindsey’s school uniform was green and white. Dark green like the derelict swimming pool in our apartment block. It wasn’t her body. Not that I could see. It was something else. I forced myself to start moving again.
Three more steps and the rounded side of a bag came into view. Then I saw it, books protruding from its open top, one strap pulled all the way out of the catch. It was unmistakable.
“It’s her school bag,” I said. My voice was steady, but my legs shook and I had to wrap my arms tightly around each other to keep them from spiraling away. The world grew fuzzy at the edges and everything faded out until the bag, Koos and Johan were the center of the universe.
The two men looked at me, pity and sadness washing from them in a heavy tide. Johan stood up and put an arm around my shoulders.
I looked at the bag, dust all smeared up one side. The books hung out the top like a dead dog’s tongue, with grass and leaves and dirt crowding their pages. It was Lindsey’s. The dead-bunny tippex graffiti she’d scrawled on the black canvas stood out like a fire on a dark night.
“What does it mean?” I asked. My arms and legs felt numb and grey spots swam before my eyes.
“It means that her bag is in the veld,” Koos said. He still held his dog’s leashes in one hand, the fingers of the other scratched idly at the golden fur behind Frisco’s ears. “It doesn’t tell us anything else. We should phone the police though, let them know what we’ve found.”
“It looks like she struggled with someone.” I crouched beside the bag, partly to get a closer look and partly to relieve some of the dizziness that spun through my head. This couldn’t be happening. Not to my baby. Not now. My eyes stung and my vision blurred. My head became too heavy to hold up and I slouched into the dirt.
Tears dropped into the sand between my hands. I reached one hand out to brush some of the leaves off the books.
“Don’t touch it,” Koos said. “There could be evidence on the bag.”
“Of course.” My voice shook more than my hand as I drew it back. That was stupid of me, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I’d seen enough CSI to know you shouldn’t contaminate the evidence. I also knew that the longer we took to find Lindsey, the more likely it was that we’d never find her.
“The best thing for you to do is to phone the detective handling your case,” Koos said. “I’ll take the dogs and try to find the scent again.”
“I need a smoke,” Johan said. He wandered back towards the cars, trailing pungent cigarette smoke into the air.
The two men left me standing alone in the dry veld, with nothing but my daughter’s abandoned school bag for company. I dialed detective Nyala on my cell phone and, staring at the ground trying to make out any clues for where Lindsey might be, told him where we were and what we’d found.