The Hunter (16 page)

The computer pinged and Brand went back to his webmail program. It was a reply from Wayne Hamilton.
Pax are Dr Peter and Mrs Anna Cliff
, said his message.

Brand was mildly annoyed. He hadn’t completed his investigation and the Cliffs were already practically on their way to Africa. If Kate was, in fact, dead, then they would want him to track down Linley Brown. Proving the claim was legitimate would expedite Linley’s insurance payment and that meant one of two things: he could either use the news that she would receive her money as a means of getting her to contact him face-to-face, or she would get her money and disappear. He suspected the latter would be the case as she had not fallen for his white lies the first time around.

He was likely to be placed in a quandary, one which Dani might have to adjudicate since he reported to her and not to the insurance company. If Kate was dead and Linley was the rightful beneficiary of her policy then he had a duty to report that finding to Dani as soon as possible. If she delayed telling the company in order to buy her friend and her husband more time to get to Africa and try to track down Linley, then that was Dani’s call.

Brand’s phone rang again. He didn’t recognise the number, but it was local. ‘Brand.’

‘It’s Sergeant Khumalo.’

‘That was quick. I thought you’d still be at lunch.’

‘I am eating at my desk. You aroused my curiosity, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything of interest to report. The passport is genuine and it was issued to Linley Brown three months ago. My contact at the department of immigration says it was a replacement, the original was stolen.’

‘And you’re sure the woman in the photo was the woman you interviewed at the scene of the accident.’

‘I already told you that.’

‘Right, sorry,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, too,’ she said, her tone softening. ‘I was hoping this might be a case I could investigate.’

‘Well, I meant what I said before. If I find anything untoward, I’ll let you know. It will be a matter for the Zimbabwean police if there is any evidence of fraud.’

‘I’d appreciate that, Mr Brand. Goodbye.’

He checked his watch and logged off; it was time to see Cecelia again.

Brand drove his Land Rover back to the Provincial Registry Office, nodded to the same boy and his blind grandfather and asked them if they could actually watch the vehicle this time. He made a mental note to invoice Dani for car park guards and bribes.

He walked into the musty-smelling room and saw Cecelia. The queue was shorter at this time of the day. She looked up from a form she was scanning, spotted him and waved to him to come to the head of the line.

‘Hey, you are not finished with me,’ a woman with a baby tied to her back with a wrap said indignantly.

‘You need to fill in the blanks in this form. Go away and do so, then come back to me. This man was here before and we have business.’

Yes, and I’m paying good money to jump ahead of you
, Brand thought to himself. The young mother looked miffed, but snatched back her form and went to a desk at the edge of the room. Cecelia took the same ledger book she had shown him earlier from the side of her desk and looked behind her, in case a supervisor was hovering there. She opened the book and leafed through till she found the file she was looking for. ‘The doctor’s name is Elena Rodriguez.’

‘Cuban?’

Cecelia nodded as she flicked through the folios. ‘Yes. They come here because there is nowhere else they can practise. I have a daughter, but I won’t take her to a Cuban, only Dr Fleming. Here, this is what I wanted to show you.’

Brand took his reading glasses out of the pocket of his safari shirt. Cecelia was glancing around again as he looked where her finger was pointing. It was a death certificate, like the others in the file, and he read the printed name
Dr Elena Rodriguez
below an illegibly scrawled signature.

‘Have a look at the name of the deceased.’

He shifted his gaze and whistled softly through his teeth when he read the name:
Katherine Elizabeth Munns
.

‘Same date of birth, as well,’ Cecelia said. ‘But look here, this certificate is dated 16 May, three days before the death in the car accident. It says,
Cause of death, cerebral haemorrhage
.’

Brand processed the information. The odds that there were two women with the same name, born on the same day, who died in the same town in Zimbabwe three days apart were infinitesimally small. ‘Did you file this certificate?’

‘No, I was on leave then. I only came back the day before the other certificate was issued.’

Brand rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘What do you know about this Dr Rodriguez?’

Cecelia shrugged. ‘She is the one the police investigated, but as I said, the case was dropped. I’ve never met her. The police also questioned myself and some of my colleagues at the time. Dr Rodriguez must have a contact here in the registry, but I don’t know who it is.’

‘Two death certificates,’ he said out loud, as he pondered the new information.

‘Should I call the police?’ Cecelia asked.

He guessed she had not told her supervisor about her discovery in case she was asked what she was doing going through the records. Brand saw the mix of worry and guilt on her face; as a private investigator he’d seen that look many times when people were caught out.

‘I don’t want to get you in trouble, Cecelia,’ he said, playing on her fears. She nodded. ‘I have a contact in the local police who I can give this information to, anonymously. She’ll probably come and ask you for the certificate, but you don’t have to say how you came across it.’

‘Thank you. But what does this mean? How can this woman die twice?’

‘That’s a very good question.’

*

Dr Elena Rodriquez’s surgery was on the ground floor of a
run-down four-storey walk-up apartment block on the edge of Bulawayo, in Fife
Street. The flats above had old sheets for curtains and broken window panes. Her offices didn’t look much better from the outside.

When he entered, a woman at the reception counter looked up from reading a newspaper and raised her eyebrows. Half a dozen patients sat on old kitchen chairs around a coffee table laden with torn magazines.

A high-pitched scream came from behind a closed door. A girl of no more than six turned wide dark eyes at her mother, who patted her on the arm. The girl did not look reassured, particularly when the noise came again, louder this time.

‘Can I help you?’ the receptionist asked.

‘I’d like to see Dr Rodriguez, if possible.’

Again the woman raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re not a regular patient here.’

‘I know.’

She sighed, reached for a clipboard and passed a form over to him to complete. ‘Fill this in.’

Brand filled out the form; he used his own pen as none was offered, then reached into his pocket and felt for the twenty-dollar bill he had put there. Careful not to let the other patients see, he slipped it under the form, with just the edge of the note visible as he passed the clipboard back to the receptionist. ‘I really am very unwell and need to see the doctor as soon as possible.’

The woman said nothing. Brand sat down and picked up the same
National Geographic
he’d been pretending to read in Dr Fleming’s surgery. Ten minutes later everyone in the waiting room looked up as the sound of raised voices carried from the other side of the door behind the receptionist. A moment later it was flung open and a man emerged carrying a sobbing child, a girl about the same age as the one waiting. A woman, the mother, Brand guessed, turned as she entered the waiting room. ‘No bloody anaesthetic. I just can’t believe it.’ Brand saw the fresh bandage on the girl’s foot.

A woman in a soiled white coat emerged, tucking a stray strand of dark hair behind her ear. ‘I do best I can, Mrs Hall, and I warn you before the procedure.’

The mother put her hands on her hips. ‘Yes, well, how was I to know how much this was going to hurt my daughter?’

‘How you think it feel if you stick needle in your foot and sew?’

Brand held his smile in check. The doctor passed the receptionist a piece of paper and she said, ‘Fifty dollars,’ to the mother.

The mother looked at the father, who shrugged. ‘I don’t get paid until next week, babe.’

The mother turned back to the doctor. ‘I’m sorry, doctor, not only do I feel we should not have to pay you when you used useless painkillers to operate on our child, but we do not have fifty dollars at the moment. Send us a bill and we’ll pay next week.’

The doctor shrugged. Brand noticed how the coat sagged on her slight frame. She looked almost like a child playing dress-ups, with her sleeves rolled at the wrists. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail and her eyes, while dark-rimmed, were nonetheless attractively large, the whites contrasting with her olive skin. ‘You want to know why I have no proper anaesthetic?’ She looked around the forlorn people in their frayed clothes in the waiting room, ‘because most people here like you will not pay me. Good day, Mrs Hall. Change your daughter’s dressing daily, but don’t come to me for bandage; this one was almost my last.’

As the couple and their daughter left, the receptionist passed the clipboard to the doctor, lifting the form Brand had completed as she did so. ‘Mr Brand? Come this way, please.’

Brand felt the eyes of the other patients on his back as he followed the diminutive doctor through the door.

The paint on the walls of the corridor they followed was peeling and Brand smelled the unmistakable odour of mice. The room the doctor led him into, however, was freshly painted. She went to a stained basin in the corner and washed and dried her hands. ‘Take a seat, please,’ she said over her shoulder.

He sat on a chair similar to those in the waiting room, its foam stuffing exploding from a wound in its vinyl upholstery. The doctor sat behind her desk and crossed a leg, giving him a glimpse of denim skirt and rubber flip-flop. The leg was thin, but the calf shapely.

‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice,’ he said.

‘Twenty dollars will buy you that. You heard what I said out there.’

He nodded. ‘How can you practise if your patients won’t pay you?’

‘Only the poorest of the poor come to me, Mr Brand. If you have money you go to another doctor. What is matter with you?’

‘I’m in a bad financial position,’ Brand said, testing the waters.

Dr Rodriguez tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. ‘I am sorry, I do not understand. My English is not so good, but you pay money to go to head of queue and now you say you have no money? What business is this of me?’

He liked her accent and the way she mangled her words. ‘I have a fully paid-up life insurance policy in South Africa, and a daughter living with my ex-wife in Durban,’ he lied. ‘I’d like to put my daughter through varsity, but I don’t have the money, and neither does my ex.’

‘I still no understand how I can help.’ She looked at her watch.

‘I think you do, Dr Rodriguez. I need to die, or, to be more accurate, I need you to issue me a death certificate.’

Elena looked over her shoulder towards the door to her room, as if expecting someone to break in as soon as she said something. ‘I no know what you talking about. Please leave, Mister Brand. To issue death certificate for someone who is living is crime.’

‘Now, keep your hat on, doctor. You issued a fake death certificate for a friend of mine, Kate Munns.’

‘I do no such thing.’

‘I saw the death certificate.’

She leaned back in her ageing office chair, which squeaked in protest. ‘Kate, she die in a car crash, but I no sign death certificate.’

Brand reached into his shirt pocket and took out his phone. He clicked on the camera icon then went to the gallery and opened the picture he had snapped before leaving the registry office. Brand passed the phone to the doctor and she zoomed in on the picture of the certificate.

Her face paled a shade. ‘Where you take this picture?’

‘Provincial Registry Office. Today.’

‘My God. Is not possible.’

‘It is. If you told someone to pull the phony certificate, doctor, you paid the wrong person.’ Brand recalled Cecelia saying she had been away from work that week; perhaps her crooked colleague was also inept.

‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

‘I’m an investigator for the insurance company that Kate had her policy with.’

‘Please leave.’ Dr Rodriguez started to stand and Brand placed a hand on her forearm. She shook him off but sat down again. ‘Have you told police?’

‘Not yet. Maybe you can tell me what happened and we’ll take it from there.’

She checked her watch again. ‘Not here, not now. I have real sick people to treat. You must let me see the people in the waiting room and then we can talk, tonight, perhaps.’

Brand knew Dr Rodriguez could be across the border in Botswana within an hour if he let her out of his sight, and then he would probably never see her again. He thought of the policewoman, Sergeant Khumalo, eager to put the first notch in her budding trainee detective’s belt. Then Dr Rodriguez reached across to him and put her hand on his and squeezed it. ‘Please, give me this afternoon. These people have no one, and then I attend a clinic for mothers and babies from five to seven. Where are you staying?’

Brand hadn’t booked a room, but he usually stayed in the same place when he came to Zimbabwe’s second city. ‘The Bulawayo Club.’

She nodded. ‘I know it. I will come, and explain. I want to tell you what happen, and why. One thing you must know, however, from start, is that Kate she is dead. Dr Fleming sign death certificate and he is good person, not like me.’

Brand wavered. He had the photo of the death certificate signed by Elena Rodriguez, which said Kate Munns had died of a brain haemorrhage, and it predated the one Fleming had signed and which the insurance company had in its possession.

The doctor slumped in her chair. ‘You can call police now, if you want, and no one will see those people in waiting room. Or, you can wait for me to tell you what you want to know. After that you can decide what to tell police. But please, give me chance to explain.’