CHAPTER THREE
It was 6.45 a.m. and the morning light was soft on the shop-front awnings and the tidy red-brick houses sitting behind tidy red-brick fences and trimmed hedges. Emmanuel buttoned his grubby jacket, plastered down errant strands of hair and approached Dover, the Edwardian-style apartment box that housed his 'fully furnished short-term accommodation'. The cross-town tram rumbled off towards West Street in the heart of the city, the lion's share of the seats reserved for white office workers, clerks and perfumed shop girls. Non- whites were squashed into the last six rows of the carriage in a press of saris, khaki suits and pre-packed lunch pails.
He approached the entrance to the Dover flats slowly, the better to judge the chances of slipping in the side gate. He'd waited to see a guard posted at the murder scene before turning for home. That was a mistake. Mrs Edith Patterson, the landlady, was out on the front footpath pulling up weeds from cracks in the pavement. Her purple hair was wound tight over rollers. The brass ring that held the keys to her building clanked together against the green material of her housecoat as she worked to tame nature.
The black maid, a slight Zulu girl in a patchwork dress, collected the debris and made neat piles ready to be swept up. Rows of paper Union Jacks were strung along the fence to celebrate Princess Elizabeth Windsor's imminent coronation. A dirty Scottish terrier panted down the stairs, trotted to Mrs Patterson and attempted to mate with her arm.
'No, Lancelot.' The landlady shook off the dog. 'Bad boy!'
Emmanuel did a half turn towards the tram stop. He'd try his luck later.
'Mr Cooper.'
Mrs Patterson was now standing up, a much better vantage point from which to look down her nose at him. He walked over to her and smiled. Buttoning the jacket was a mistake, he realised. It only made him more pitiful: as if he really believed a simple gesture could wipe the smell from his clothes or rearrange the muddy creases in his suit. He unbuttoned his jacket in a show of defiance. Five months at the Dover and he'd never been late making the monthly rent. He was still paid up one week in advance. That counted for something.
'Mr Cooper.' The landlady's brown eyes narrowed. 'Are you going to make me regret my decision to take you on?'
She pointed to the hand-painted sign nailed under the building's name, which read 'Europeans and well-behaved Mauritians allowed. No Exceptions'. Well-behaved Mauritians being a code for any light-skinned, mixed-race person willing to pay the inflated rent and refrain from bringing bar girls into the room for a night of mattress thumping.
'My car broke down and I missed the last tram,' Emmanuel explained while the mangy terrier began an unsuccessful liaison with the mailbox pole.
Mrs Patterson pursed her lips. She waited for Emmanuel to make an apology or show regret for confirming her worst suspicions about mixed-race men. He relaxed his shoulders, kept eye contact and said nothing. He'd explained himself enough for one day. The maid's hand hovered above an unplucked weed, held there by the sudden tension in the air.
Mrs Patterson broke eye contact first. 'I run a good house. A clean house.' She brushed dirt-flecked hands against her housecoat and the keys at her waist chimed. 'I thought you understood that, Mr Cooper.'
Emmanuel sidestepped the landlady and walked to the front door. He knew that the moment this week was up, Mrs Patterson was going to slip an eviction notice under his door. He'd committed the cardinal South African sin. A registered non-white, he had failed to express gratitude for being bullied by a white woman.
'Lancelot. No. Bad boy.'
The landlady's tone set Emmanuel's teeth on edge. She talked to the dog the same way she talked to him.
A flicker of material at the downstairs window alerted him to the fact that Mr Woodsmith, the retired postman who rented the ground-floor flat, had witnessed the confrontation. He nodded in the direction of the curtain and the material dropped. One week and not a second more.
Inside the building, the oak banister of the staircase shone with a fresh application of wax. Mrs Patterson did run a clean house. Why the Scottish terrier had never seen a bath or a bar of soap was one of life's little mysteries.
The walls of the flat were painted bright yellow; a cheery colour scheme that depressed Emmanuel every time he entered it. The room possessed a single bed no wider than a field cot, a two-ring gas burner and a wardrobe laced with mothballs that easily contained two suits, six shirts and three pairs of work pants. The private bath and shower squeezed into an alcove and separated from the rest of the room by a wraparound curtain cost him an extra pound each month.
A tenants' phone in the hallway made it easy to call his sister in Jo'burg on the first Sunday of every month. The conversations were brief. He repeated the familiar lies that he'd told her while their parents fought in the kitchen: life was good and everything was fine. Lies kept them together.
Emmanuel reached into his trouser pocket and removed a postcard with a tinted photograph of misty hills and deep, silent valleys. On the back, in chicken-scratch writing, was an invitation to visit Zweigman's medical clinic in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Doctor Daniel Zweigman, the old Jew who'd saved his life after a vicious beating by the Security Branch, was two hours' drive away. Emmanuel laid the card gently on the bedspread. Maybe one day when he was less worn around the edges...
He stripped off his dirty suit and threw it into a small sisal basket in the corner. The young maid took in tenants' laundry along with her other work. Emmanuel washed. He'd already planned to have the day off from the shipyards to rest and regroup after the night surveillance. But he would not sleep this morning. He would not sleep at all today.
He dressed in a clean suit and checked his reflection in the mirror. Five months at the shipyards had erased any trace of physical softness from his person. Impersonating a church minister or a gentle family man was now out of reach. Yet he enjoyed the hard labour of the yards; doing what most Europeans considered 'kaffir work'. Hauling, lifting and hammering sapped his energy and left his mind empty. Sleep came like a force of nature, black and unstoppable. Dawn brought only a vague memory of having dreamt. Being too exhausted to think was the closest he'd come to happiness since leaving his old life and the detective branch back in Jo'burg.
He slipped Zweigman's postcard into the jacket pocket of the clean suit and scooped up his driver's licence. He left his ID card in the drawer. He retained the body language of a white detective and no one had so far dared question his right of entry to any venue, be it a Europeans-only restaurant or a non-white queue at the bank.
He collected the laundry basket. He was about to break a promise that he'd made to himself when he left the force: never hang around an official police investigation. He was going to go down to the freight yards and make sure the detective branch was at the crime scene. Then he was going to try to find out if the search had turned up Jolly Marks's notebook. It was a quick ten-minute stop.
Where was the harm in that?