The October Killings (16 page)

“You'll have to slip away from work early.”

“I'll be there.”

“Okay. I really just wanted to hear how you are. You sound a little strained.”

“Oh, God, Robert, please don't stay away any longer. Be on that flight.”

“I will be. You don't sound good.”

“Just be on that flight.”

“You can depend on it. Is it this thing with Leon Lourens?”

“Just be on that flight.”

“Yes, I will be.”

After she hung up, Abigail returned to the window. The bull terrier was lying down on the lawn in a patch of light, its head resting on its front paws, the slit-like eyes closed. Repulsive creature, Abigail thought.

The animal seemed to fall asleep. Abigail remained at the window without moving, looking in the direction of the dog, without seeing him or even the garden. What have I been doing? she asked herself. I know him. How could I influence him, let alone stop him? And who could I involve? The police? My own department?

Abigail became aware of the presence in the shadows near the gate before the dog did. It was little more than a movement of deeper shadow in the already dark outline of the shrubbery. She stared at the place where she had seen the movement until it came again. For a moment the figure of a man was outlined against a narrow section of white wall that was visible between the bushes. He was moving down the side of the house next door, separated from the building where she lived by only a two-meter wall and the electric fencing along the top of it.

Then the dog saw him. The animal rose suddenly and started forward. Even through the closed window and across the intervening twenty or thirty meters she could hear its snarling. Then the dog charged, his stocky body held close to the ground.

Abigail had seen him attack once before. On that occasion the animal's victim had been badly bitten and had only been saved from more serious injury by the arrival of the dog's handler from a security company. Now there would be no handler to come to the intruder's aid.

The dog swarmed into the shadows of the shrubbery, a pale ghost-like form in the darkness, its feet slipping on the paving of the path as it drove itself forward. Later Abigail remembered hearing her own breath racing and feeling a sharp pain in the palm of her right hand as she gripped a protruding hinge on the French windows.

Then, as suddenly as the dog had charged, there was stillness in the shadows. She could still see the pale patch that was the animal, but he seemed to have stopped moving. Something inexplicable had happened. The dog was there, but not attacking, not even snarling. Could it be that he was not alive?

Then she heard the yelp, a single soft, plaintive sound, the kind of cry that did not seem possible from a bull terrier. And he was moving again, slowly this time, back into the light, reversing, his tail wrapped tightly between his legs. He dropped to his belly, facing the shadows he had just left. His head sank to his paws. Abigail saw his tail slowly twitching in apparent friendliness.

The man in the shadows moved again. Not a large man, he seemed to be coming toward the light, but turned back into the shadows, moving down the garden wall that passed below Abigail's window. The dog turned its head to watch him go.

Without pausing to think, she slammed closed the heavy wooden anti-burglary doors that closed off the French windows, and latched them. Then she ran for the front door and wrenched the steel security gate closed, hearing the latch snap into place. From room to room she fled, checking on the burglar bars on every window, but none had been interfered with. Back at her own front door she rang security. “This is number ten,” she told the guard who answered. “I think someone may be trying to break into the complex under my window.”

After the guard had assured her that he had contacted the company's armed response unit, she stood indecisively for only a moment in the center of the living room. Then she fled to the shower, closed the door behind her and locked it. Sobbing, her back pressed against the wall, she slid down to a sitting position, her head between her knees.

Oh, God, she thought, and I am searching for him. What could I possibly do if I found him?

18

To all who knew them, the four Bishop boys were an unremarkable group. None of them had ever achieved anything approaching significance, either in the classroom or on the sports field. None were so badly behaved that their teachers would comment on that either.

If all were unremarkable, the two youngest, Michael and Samuel, were possibly noticed even less by those who came in contact with them. They were not unusually shy, but by the time Samuel was twelve and Michael ten, they simply never offered anything about themselves to anyone. It was not so much that they withheld anything, merely that contact with them was impossible.

Neither seemed to have any ability to express himself. Since their mother had died nine years earlier, a month before Michael's first birthday, the home they lived in had become almost completely silent. Their father worked the farm the same way he had done when his wife was alive. But he worked it because he had always done so, rather than for any rational purpose. He knew how to produce crops, so he produced them. He took away the cattle gate that allowed easy access by cars at the entrance to his farm and replaced it with a heavy motor gate that stayed locked day and night. In a farming community where there was little canned entertainment and people visited back and forth between the farms, the neighbors soon started to avoid the Bishop home. Even the school principal looking for donations for the new gymnasium, the clergyman hoping for help with renovating the church hall, or the member of parliament searching for votes, left the Bishops off their schedules.

Bishop bought the boys what he felt they needed without apparent resentment. In return he expected unquestioning obedience from them. Any disobedience was met with the sort of brutal response that could have put him in prison forty years later. Even in a conservative Calvinist community in which punishment was an indispensable part of life, the other farming families were shocked at old man Bishop's treatment of his sons. After a particularly vicious incident, one of the mothers went to see the dominee about it. The next day the dominee's wife encouraged the other ladies at the women's weekly prayer circle to pray for the Bishops. “It's not right that he punishes his children the way you punish kaffirs,” she said to some of the ladies afterward.

The obedience he expected from his sons was no different from what he expected from his farm workers. Although he never discussed it, it seemed to be a point of honor that he punished his boys in the same way he punished his workers. He was equally ready to use his leather
sjambok
to leave stripes on the backs of either. If a farm worker was held down by his fellow workers and whipped for some minor negligence, so too were his sons. The one to be punished would usually be held down by his brothers, but if none were available at the time, farm workers would do.

On more than one occasion at school, teachers had seen the marks left by whippings. Most had not approved, but a man's sons were his business and you did not tell him how to control them.

If there was a single civilizing influence in the home Bishop created for his sons, it was the piano that his wife had played while she was alive. And he insisted that his sons, rough and carrying the stripes of his attention as they were, take piano lessons.

There were those in the community who said that his treatment of his wife had something to do with the cancer that killed her. Whatever his reasons and whatever he felt about his wife's death, Bishop ordered them to play. Every evening they all took a turn at practice. Of the four, only Samuel showed any affinity for the music. There were times when his father ordered Samuel to play and would lie down in his bedroom to allow the music to calm him. Any of the few visitors to the farm who heard Samuel's young interpretations of Schubert, Liszt or Lehar melodies often commented on how well he played. The school's music teacher even suggested that Samuel be sent to a music academy, but Bishop replied that a farmer did not need that much music training.

As for Michael, he struck the notes in the prescribed order, but without any sense of their meaning or the emotion they represented. There were no louder or gentler passages, no thoughtful pauses and no reflection on the music after he got up from the piano stool.

Bishop and his sons ate at the long wooden kitchen table, served by a barefoot woman who cooked what Bishop brought back from town and what grew in the vegetable patch next to the house. There was also the occasional contribution from the chicken-run or the pigpen. Bishop sat at the head, his
sjambok
at his side, with the boys on either side, the two eldest on one side and the two youngest on the other. Michael sat farthest from him. No one sat at the foot of the table. The eldest boy had tried it once, but the leather tip of the
sjambok
had found him before he could duck, cutting the skin of his left cheek deeply enough to leave a scar. “That's your mother's place,” his father had snarled.

At the table the only conversation had directly to do with the farming in which the boys all had a part to play. What they said was limited to what was essential. It was safest to be silent and keep your eyes on your plate. This was the policy of all Michael's brothers. It had been his too, until a singular incident when he was ten.

Bishop himself, Samuel, Michael and the two elder brothers had been out, fixing fences at a pasture they rented from a family where the father had died and all farming had come to a temporary halt. Bishop's herd of cattle had been growing, and the new calves would mean extra feed. More pasture was essential.

It was already dark as they arrived at the unlocked cattle gate at the entrance to the farm road that their farm shared with two others. The two younger boys were on the back and the others were in the cab with their father. As the headlights fell on the gate they could see a black boy of perhaps eighteen or nineteen in a gray suit that was a size or two too small for him. He had started to open the gate, having just dismounted from a bicycle that he had obviously spent hours shining. When he saw the truck he swung open the gate and saluted. His white teeth stood out against the darkness of his grinning face and the nocturnal landscape.

Instead of driving through, Bishop stopped in the open gate and got out. “Who are you?” he demanded in Afrikaans. “And where do you think you're going?”

In his response, the boy made three serious mistakes. First, he answered in English and, second, he did not address Bishop in a sufficiently servile manner. Finally he told Bishop what he intended to do instead of begging his permission. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “My name is Matthew Baloyi. I'm going to visit my uncle. He works for Mr. Bishop.”

Bishop kept advancing on the boy. He continued in Afrikaans. “What's this English, and what's this ‘sir' business? You call me
baas
if you want to go on breathing.” The anger that underlay Bishop's devotion to his home language was all the stronger because of his English surname. Surrounded by van Dyks, van der Merwes and van Schalkwyks, he had always felt like an outsider.

The boy with the bicycle did not expect to be attacked. “Sir …
baas,
I…” The first blow caught him in the solar plexus and he doubled over like a rag doll. Before he could recover, another blow connected with the side of his head. He went down to his knees and Bishop kicked him, his heavy farm boots digging first into his left side, then his groin.

Michael had been watching, not showing compassion or even concern. If anything, according to one of the older brothers, his expressionless face showed nothing. Only the eyes seemed to reflect something akin to curiosity.

Suddenly there was something else to stir up his curiosity. Without warning Samuel appeared, running fast. He threw himself at his father, the boy upsetting the balance of the man. Bishop went down on one knee and his attention shifted from the African boy in the suit to his son.

Samuel retreated before the blows, dodging and ducking to avoid them. “Catch him, catch him,” his father was screaming. The older boys' entire lives of obedience to this man had removed any possibility of refusal. They caught Samuel and brought him back to their father. “Hold him. Bring him.” Bishop got back into the truck and his brothers dragged Samuel onto the back. Michael sat quietly, pressed against the cab, offering no opinion and making no movement.

Bishop pulled away with a jerk, his foot slipping off the clutch. Matthew Baloyi's bicycle was still where he had dropped it, next to the gate, and Bishop swung the steering wheel toward it, the weight of the truck crushing it and leaving it shattered, the wheels grotesquely buckled. Away to his right on land that had recently been plowed, Michael could just make out a faint white smudge in the darkness. It was a moment before he realized that it was Baloyi. His white shirt was all that was visible. Perhaps he had lost the jacket of his suit.

The drive to the farm house took only seconds. Samuel showed no resistance as he was stretched over a two-hundred-liter oil drum and held there by his brothers, waiting patiently while his father fetched the
sjambok
. No one there was later sure how long the beating lasted. What was clear from the police report—and this was the only time Bishop had ever been reported—was that the skin of Samuel's back was no longer visible under the cuts and the blood.

A mother from a neighboring farm, alerted by a servant who had run all the way from the Bishop place, had called her husband to investigate. Bishop had only stopped when he arrived. When he reported back to his wife, she had called the police. Their report never got beyond the local police station, but the sergeant had come to the farm and warned Bishop that, if it happened again, he would find himself in court. “He's your son, man,” he said, “not a dog.”