CHAPTER TWO

 

Something powerful forced a sack over Emmanuel's head and pulled it down hard over his shoulders. Rough hessian scraped against his face. He smelled rotting potatoes. Air hissed from his lungs and muscular arms tightened around his chest like pythons. He was lifted into the air and his feet dangled beneath him like those of a child on a swing.

He could feel a face pressed between his shoulderblades. The man holding him was small, with the strength of a troll. Emmanuel twisted to try to break the hold. The arms tightened a fraction, enough for Emmanuel to feel the slow crush of his own bones. He stopped struggling and listened to the angry chatter of voices talking in overlapping Hindi. He had no idea what was being said and couldn't judge from the tone if it was good or bad news for him.

'Shut up, Amal,' Parthiv snapped in English. 'Find our torch and make sure we haven't dropped anything. I'll get the car.'

'He's a policeman,' Amal said. 'We have to let him go.'

'No chance. Not after you spilled our real names.'

'What about the boy?' Amal said.

'Someone will find him in the morning. Now, move.'

Parthiv fired off a series of commands in Hindi, his voice distant by the final order. Emmanuel's feet scraped over loose stones and the steel spine of the railway tracks. The darkness inside the sack was suffocating. He fought the urge to try to break free; a crushed rib was the only thing he would gain from the exercise. He heard Amal hyperventilating as if he were confined to a hessian sack of his own. A car pulled up, engine idling.

'Geldi, geldi!' Parthiv ordered. 'Quick.'

A door opened and Emmanuel was thrown into the back seat. His captor followed and rested an elbow in the small of his back, a light point of contact with plenty of threat behind it. Emmanuel lay still and breathed slowly. Did they plan to dump him in the mangrove swamp that lapped the harbour or bury his body in the bush scrub around Umhlanga Rocks? He should have listened to van Niekerk. Getting involved was a big mistake.

'If Maataa finds out...' Amal spoke between shallow breaths.

'We'll go in the side way.' Parthiv's tone suggested they were discussing nothing more important than breaking a family curfew.

'Then?'

Silence followed Amal's inquiry. Emmanuel imagined Parthiv's heavy brow furrowed with concentration. Criminals with limited intelligence always resorted to the most obvious solution: get rid of the problem quickly and hope for the best.

The car took a corner and the suspension bounced. The elbow dug into Emmanuel's back to stop him from rolling onto the floor. So far, the strong man hadn't said a word.

'Madar chod.' Parthiv swore in Hindi but continued in English. 'Keep calm, brother. They're just driving by. They got no reason to stop us.'

'Two cars,' Amal panted. 'Two cars.'

'Keep calm. Keep calm,' Parthiv said. 'They are going somewhere else.'

Blue lights flickered across the interior of the car and penetrated the weave of the hessian sack. It was two police vans. Perhaps someone else had called in Jolly's murder. The lights faded. It was just as well, Emmanuel thought. The police would greet the information in van Niekerk's notebook with swinging batons and rhino-hide straps. He was probably safer with the Indians.

'See?' Parthiv was giddy with relief. 'Piece of cake. Smooth going, no problems.'

The car picked up speed till the engine shifted into fourth gear. Emmanuel didn't try to count the turns or listen for the faint cry of a bird found only in one park in the city. Outside of the movies, all forced rides had the same soundtrack: the rhythm of the tyres meeting the road and the abductee's heartbeat.

He slid back against the leather seat when the car climbed up over a steep ridge then continued on a flat for at least fifteen more minutes. The car eased to a stop on a gentle incline and the engine cut.

'You go in the front, quiet, quiet,' Parthiv said. 'If Maataa or the aunties or the cousins wake up, make nice talk. How are you doing today? The house, it looks lovely. I'll take this one up the side to Giriraj's kyaha.'

'Okay.' Amal sounded sceptical. The holes in the plan were obvious even to a teenager on the edge of a panic attack.

'Be a man,' Parthiv said. 'We will deal with this problem on our own. No women.'

Emmanuel was bundled out of the passenger door and pushed along a pathway. The scent of flowers, sweet with a hint of decay, cut through the foetid potato smell in the hessian bag. The thump of his heartbeat slowed. He was in a garden, being led to a servant's room, or kyaha. A metal door scraped open.

'Feet up.'

Emmanuel stepped into the room and the iron man's hands grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him into a chair. A match was struck against a box and there was the brief double hiss of cotton wicks being lit. The smell of paraffin filled the space. He waited a minute, till he was halfway sure that he sounded calm.

'Parthiv ...' he said. 'How about you let me go before your mother comes and finds out the mess you're in?'

'Tie him up,' Parthiv said.

Emmanuel's hands were pinned behind the chair and secured with a length of rough material. The sack was whipped off and he sucked in a lungful of clean air. He was in a one-room house. The bedroom was a single cot pushed into a corner; the kitchen, a small gas burner balanced on a wooden crate stencilled with the words 'saris & all' along the side. Two sharpened butcher's knives hung from hooks hammered into the side of the crate. A third hook was empty. A couple of chairs stood in the middle of the space. A newspaper clipping of an Indian dancer with beguiling eyes stared down from the bedroom wall.

Parthiv pulled up a chair and gave a dramatic sigh. The strong man stayed behind Emmanuel and out of view.

'We got a problem,' Parthiv stated. 'You know what the problem is?'

'I'm guessing it's me,' Emmanuel said.

'Correct.'

'You good at solving problems, Parthiv?'

The yellow light from the paraffin lanterns threw dark shadows across the Indian gangster's face so it took on the menacing quality of a skull. It was an illusion. Emmanuel knew bad men; evil men who killed for pleasure and without hesitation. Parthiv was not in that league.

'I'm the best.' The Indian man leaned in and cracked his knuckles. 'You took a turn into nightmare alley, white man. This room is where danger lives.'

'What does that mean?' Emmanuel asked.

'I'm the public enemy; born to kill. I walk alone and brute force is my best friend.'

Emmanuel almost smiled. Where else did an Indian youth in subtropical South Africa learn how to be a gangster but at the Bioscope?

Emmanuel said, 'That's quite a bunch of movies you've seen. James Cagney in The Public Enemy, Burt Lancaster in I Walk Alone and I can't remember who's in Brute Force. The question is: who are you in real life, Parthiv? Robert Mitchum or Veronica Lake?'

Parthiv delivered a smack to the side of Emmanuel's head. 'You in big trouble,' he said. 'My man can snap you like a chicken bone.'

'If you let me go now, Parthiv, you might get out of this without going to prison and belly dancing for your cellmate.'

'Giriraj.'

The strong man stepped forward and positioned himself in front of Emmanuel. He was barely five foot five, but wide across the shoulders. His bald head was oiled and a waxed moustache twirled out to sharp points over full lips.

Parthiv waved a hand and the man stripped off his cotton shirt and hung it neatly on a hook at the foot of the bed. He returned to the centre of the room and stood in front of Emmanuel. Green cobras waged war across his chest in a tattooed scene that seemed to have been inked into his dark skin by a rusty nail; no doubt the work of a prison artist with limited tools, unlimited time and a subject with the capacity to absorb a lot of pain. Emmanuel noted recent scratch marks on the man's right forearm. Possibly from fingernails? The strong man stepped closer and stretched his biceps. Parthiv was all talk but Giriraj was all muscle. Now was the time to confess all.

Emmanuel said, 'Okay, there is something I have to tell you ...'

'Good, because—'

The door scraped open before another overblown threat could be delivered. Parthiv jumped up as if his chair had caught fire. A torrent of Hindi gushed from him. He pointed to Emmanuel, then Giriraj, then back to himself in an effort to explain the situation. A flash of hot pink sari crossed Emmanuel's eye line and a dozen glass bracelets chimed. An Indian woman in her fifties with sinewy greyhound limbs grabbed Parthiv's ear and twisted till his knees buckled. She muttered insults under her breath and didn't let go even while Parthiv was writhing on the ground.

More bodies squashed into the room. Emmanuel lost count at twelve. The Duttas weren't just a family; they were a tribe in which females outnumbered males three to one.

The number and volume of the women's voices shook the corrugated-iron walls of the kyaha.

Amal was shoehorned between a walnut-skinned lady and an old man with no teeth. He made eye contact with Parthiv and then looked down at the floor, ashamed at his failure to be a man.

Giriraj retreated to the wall and a young woman in a floor-length dressing-gown followed him and yelled straight into his face. 'You grabbed a policeman? Is there even half a brain in that fat head of yours?'

The sinewy woman in the pink sari let go of Parthiv's ear and collapsed into a chair. 'We will lose everything,' she said. 'My sons. My shop. We will end up in a shack on the Umgeni River.'

'No, auntie,' the young woman in the long gown said. 'It will be all right. The boy was already dead when Amal and Parthiv found him. They are innocent.'

'They are Indian,' a voice called from the doorway. 'The police will make sure they are guilty.'

'That is true,' the woman in the pink sari said. 'They will hang.'

The noise was sucked from the room. A life for a life was the law in South Africa. Two Indian men found at the scene of a white boy's homicide would have a hard time convincing an all-white jury of their innocence. Under the National Party's new racial segregation laws, Indians were classified 'non-white'. They were ranked above the black population but still below the 'Europeans'.

The walnut-skinned woman held Amal's hand to her cheek and muttered quietly. Emmanuel spoke no Hindi but he understood every word. The sound of prayer was universal: he'd heard it in the battles and ruined towns of Europe.

An appeal to a mute and deaf God. The woman in the pink sari dropped her face into her hands. A girl, dark-haired and tiny and still too young to understand what was happening, began to cry. The Dutta family had started to unravel.

'I'm not a policeman,' Emmanuel said.

The woman in the long gown turned. She was in her early twenties with a thick rope of black hair that fell to her waist. Light glinted off the silver petals of her nose ring.

'What was that?' she said.

'I'm not a police detective,' Emmanuel said. 'I used to be but I'm not any more.'

'No,' Parthiv said. 'He's a lawman. A detective sergeant. I heard it in his voice.'

'Quiet.' The gowned woman waved four female elders closer. They leaned in, head to head, and whispered. The circle broke but the female council remained tightly bunched. They turned their attention to Emmanuel. The young woman in the long gown stepped forward.

'I'm Lakshmi,' she said politely. 'And you are?'

'Emmanuel Cooper.'

'You're a policeman?'

'Not any more.'

'What is it you do now?'

'I work at the Victory Shipyards on the Maydon Wharf.' It was the truth in part. He couldn't tell them he was also on a surveillance mission for Major van Niekerk, doing an unofficial investigation of police corruption at the Point freight yards. That fact was not for public discussion. 'I'm a shipbreaker.'

The Victory Shipyards employed only veterans of the armed forces. All skin colours were folded into the shipyard ranks and together they constituted the full array of the British Empire's fighting forces: mixed-race soldiers from the Malay and Cape corps; Hindu and Muslim soldiers from the Indian army; and European soldiers from the Royal Marines and the Welsh infantry All were now surplus to the needs of a world at peace and cut loose from the purse strings of a shrinking empire.

'Ahh . . .' One of the aunties called Lakshmi over and the women chattered in quiet voices that were accompanied by wild hand gestures and the vigorous shaking of heads.

'You're an old soldier,' Lakshmi said when the council had reached a conclusion. 'My auntie knows this Victory Shipyards. Her brother was in the 4th Indian Division.'

An interjection was shouted from the gallery and Lakshmi sighed before relaying the message. 'My uncle was at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Have you heard of it?'

'Of course,' Emmanuel said. 'The Indians fought like lions to get the Germans off that hill,'

The aunties nodded their approval of his answer and signalled for Lakshmi to continue.

'What were you doing at the docks?' she said.

'I was lonely. I was looking for a woman to keep me company.' Emmanuel used his ready-made excuse. It was the only believable explanation for being out in the freight yards after dark.

'Oh...' Lakshmi was taken aback at the answer and looked to the female elders for help.

The woman in the pink sari lifted her face from her hands. 'Out, out, out,' she said. 'Lakshmi, you stay.'

Aunties, uncles and cousins left the room in single file. Parthiv tried to go with them but was stopped dead by a pointed finger. He retreated to the edge of the cot. Giriraj sank down by his side; both men miserable.

'You said you were a detective.' Lakshmi frowned. 'Why did you lie to Amal and Parthiv?'

'Habit.'

And a longing to be a detective again. Six months ago his job was to speak for the dead. Other occupations seemed inconsequential. He was, in his bones, still a detective.

'Did you get the sack from the police?' Lakshmi asked.

'I was discharged.'

'Why?'

'I didn't have a choice,' Emmanuel said. He'd gone up against the powerful police Security Branch on his last official case and lived to tell the story. That should have been enough. He should have been grateful to have his life back, almost intact.

Lakshmi nodded and waited for him to say more.

Emmanuel shifted against the wooden backrest. He didn't want to remember how careless he had been. Major van Niekerk was right when he'd said, 'Fucking with the Security Branch out in the boondocks is one thing, Cooper. Fucking with them here in Jo'burg where everyone can see ... that's slapping them in the face.'

And that's what Emmanuel had done. He had maligned the most powerful law-enforcement body in South Africa by delivering a letter to the mother of a black man wrongly accused of murdering an Afrikaner police captain. The young man, a member of the banned communist party, had hanged himself in his jail cell on the eve of the trial. Or so the papers said.

'And what was the content of this letter?' Major van Niekerk had asked Emmanuel after calling him into his office at Marshall Square CIB in Jo'burg six months ago. One of the cunning Dutch major's spies had alerted him to a Security Branch investigation in which a Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper was named.

Emmanuel had told the truth. Lying to the major was a waste of breath and time. 'I wrote that I was sorry for her loss, that her son was innocent of the charges against him and that he was beaten into a confession by the Security Branch.'

Van Niekerk had absorbed the information and calculated the extent of the damage. 'That letter is enough to have you declared unfit to serve in the police force, Cooper.'

'I understand, Major.'

'Do you also understand that as long as the Security Branch has that letter in their hands they can do anything they want to you? And I can't help you.'

'Yes,' Emmanuel had said.

He had been careless and ungrateful. After returning from Jacob's Rest with broken ribs and no one in custody for the murder of Captain Pretorius, the major had shielded him from criticism and questions. He had come back to the city and thrown that shelter away under the delusion that an unsigned letter, even one that told the truth, could wash away the brutal aftermath of the investigation in Jacob's Rest.

'One other thing,' the major had said. 'There was also mention of a murder file being sent over from the Sophia-town police.'

Sophiatown, a chaotic jumble of brick and corrugated-iron houses and shacks just west of Johannesburg, was home to a mix of blacks, Indians, mixed-race 'coloureds', Chinese and poor whites. Overcrowded, poverty-stricken and violent, close-knit and bursting with life and music, Sophiatown was an ugly and beautiful sprawl. And until he was twelve, it was Emmanuel's home.

White noise had roared in his ears. The sound he imagined drowning victims heard before going under for the last time. 'Security Branch must have asked for the police file on my mother's murder.' He was sure of it. 'They're going to use the disciplinary hearing to make the information in the file public.'

The police file raised awkward questions. Was Emmanuel's father the Afrikaner man he grew up calling 'Vader', or was his father the Cape Malay owner of All Hours Traders, where his mother had worked six days in the week?

The major had studied a landscape painting of low green hills hanging on the beige wall, then said, 'Security Branch are going to get you dismissed and then they're going to get you reclassified from European to mixed race. And they're going to do it publicly to inflict maximum damage.'

Emmanuel knew the damage would not be limited to him. The attention drawn to the case would taint everyone. His sister was bound to lose her teaching job at Dewfield College, a 'European' girls' school run by 'European' staff. Major van Niekerk's name would be dropped from promotion lists for allowing a man of uncertain racial origins to rise above the rank of detective constable. Even the Marshall Square detectives' branch would be open to attack. They might all be dragged through the mud. Public humiliation and punishment was, Emmanuel suspected, exactly what Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Security Branch wanted.

Emmanuel knew that there was no one but himself to blame for this situation. He had personally and with great deliberation planned a mission that even the most naive GI could see was a clusterfuck waiting to unfold.

'I'll take the punishment before they can hand it out,' he had said. 'I'll buy my own discharge and request racial classification before they do.'

Van Niekerk had mentally turned the suggestion over for a long while, then looked at him. 'Fall on your own sword. It might work. Plus, your record will show a voluntary discharge, not a dismissal. That might leave the door open for you to come back when things cool down.'

Van Niekerk's optimism had been dizzying. Neither of them would live long enough to see the Security Branch learn to forgive and forget.

The Major took a piece of paper from a drawer and slid it across the leather-topped desk to Emmanuel. He pulled a pen from his pocket and placed it next to the piece of paper. Emmanuel wrote out a request for discharge and backdated it to Friday, two days before his letter to the black man's mother was delivered.

Van Niekerk scrawled a looped signature on the bottom of the request and said, 'I was going to call you in, anyway, Cooper, to tell you some news. I'm being transferred to Durban next month. You should consider relocating out of Jo'burg for a while.'

And now here he was. In Durban . . . tied to a chair in a servant's room somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Major van Niekerk had given him another chance and he'd failed to follow the simple order 'Do not get involved'.

'I'm a shipbreaker,' Emmanuel said again to Lakshmi. 'I went to the yards to find a prostitute. End of story.'

'He's lying, Maataa,' Parthiv said. 'He is a policeman. I swear it.'

'Check me. I don't have a gun or a police ID.'

Lakshmi knotted her fingers together. Physical contact with a sweat-stained male who trawled the docks for prostitutes was akin to plunging her head into a sewer.

'Let me see.' The woman in the pink sari stood and Lakshmi retreated into the 'kitchen' area. Emmanuel was pretty sure that Maataa meant 'mother' in Hindi but this woman had the tenderness of rhino hide. Her dark eyes were rimmed with kohl and devoid of sentiment. He shifted in the chair, conscious of his own sweat and the stink of rotting potatoes that clung to his suit, which, even when clean, looked old. The suit was the most respectable piece of clothing he owned; all the buttons matched. Maataa opened the jacket to expose a pale blue shirt and dark trousers.

'Look,' she said to her son. 'No gun. No ID. No nothing.'

'But...' Parthiv began and clearly thought better of it. His mother was in charge now.

Maataa rifled the other pockets and found the small coffee flask, a pencil and nothing else. The van Niekerk notebook was safe in his back pants' pocket. The ID card listing his age and race classification and his driver's licence were in a drawer back at his flat. He never took them out any more. Let the tram conductors figure out for themselves where he belonged. He was done trying.

'The dead boy at the train yard,' Maataa said to Emmanuel. 'He was white?'

'Under the dirt, yes, he was white.'

'You know this boy?'

'He's not a relation,' Emmanuel said. 'I've seen him around the dock area. That's all.'

'Big trouble.' The Indian woman narrowed her eyes. 'You will go to the police?'

'I won't go to the police,' he said. 'It was a mistake to get involved.'

Maataa's angular face drew closer. She smelled of cloves and a temple fragrance Emmanuel couldn't name.

'You are scared,' she said.

'Yes, I am.' It was better to stay completely off the Security Branch radar.

'This is very good.'

Maataa crooked a finger towards Giriraj. He untied the rope binding Emmanuel's hands, then returned to the bedroom space and awaited the next command.

'I can go?' Emmanuel asked. He didn't want any misunderstanding.

'You will keep your word. This I can see.' She searched Emmanuel's features and frowned. 'What is it that you are . . . European? Mixed race? Or maybe you were born in India?'

Emmanuel said, 'You choose.'

Maataa laughed at the idea that she would ever have that power. 'Ahh, you are a naughty man. Go with Parthiv but do not go back to the harbour. There are plenty, plenty clean women in Durban.'

'I'll go straight home,' Emmanuel said.

He was escorted from the small room by Parthiv. The night garden was fragrant and cream flowers the size of babies' hands twirled in the breeze. He was free to finish the last one or two hours of the van Niekerk job and forget that he'd ever attempted to relive the role of detective sergeant. The memory of Jolly's curled fingers was stark.

'What were you doing in the freight yard?' he asked Parthiv when they stepped onto a narrow driveway at the front of the house. The city of Durban glittered below. Out on the dark mass of the Indian Ocean shone the lights of anchored freighters awaiting the call into the harbour. Emmanuel guessed he was in Reservoir Hills, a suburb created especially for the Indian population. Further out on the urban edges was Cato Manor, the tin-and-mud catchment area set up for the burgeoning black population.

'I too was looking for a woman,' Parthiv confessed and unlocked the kidnap car, a midnight blue Cadillac low to the ground and gleaming with chrome. 'My mother wants Amal only to study, study and study. This is not good. He is clever but he is not a man.'

Emmanuel got into the front passenger seat and waited for Parthiv to fire the engine. Giriraj stepped out of the side pathway and climbed into the back. He moved surprisingly quietly for a big man. They reversed out of the sloping drive and followed an unlit road edged with jacaranda trees.

'Why the docks?' Emmanuel asked. The lowest class of prostitute worked the dockyards and the vacant boxcars.

'There was no choice,' Parthiv said. 'If I took Amal to a house where there are paid Indian women, my mother would find out. She wants him only to make the good marks and be a lawyer.'

'So,' Emmanuel clarified, 'you took your little brother to the docks to find a woman. Maybe even a white woman. As a treat.'

'Exactly.' Parthiv smiled, happy his selfless motives were understood and appreciated.

Emmanuel wanted to swing back to the house, find Amal and tell him, 'Never listen to Parthiv. Unless you want to spend a few years in a tiny cell with a bucket to crap in, keep studying. You can cure virginity quick. Jail goes on forever.'

'He's still a child,' Emmanuel said. 'He'll find his own way in a few years.'

'What happened to that boy in the alley,' Parthiv said, 'that could also happen to Amal. Gone, just like that. Better to die a man.'

'Better not to die at all,' Emmanuel said and tried to block the image of Jolly Marks lying in the dirt. Collecting evidence was what the police did and Emmanuel wasn't one of them any more. He was a civilian working for Major van Niekerk. Still, the crime scene bothered him.

'Where was the boy when you first saw him?' he asked.

Once a few facts about the murder were in place he'd stop and let the Durban police do their job. A dead white child was on the top of the 'murders that matter' list. The detective branch would throw men and expensive overtime into solving the case.

'The boy was lying there,' Parthiv said. 'Blood everywhere.'

'This is while you were looking for a prostitute?'

'Jâ, same like you. We found one, red hair with a shiny purple dress and small titties, but she wouldn't do it with a charra.' Parthiv was offended again at the memory. 'I said, "Only one of us. Good money. No police to see us." This whore said no! We kept going and he was there in the laneway, dead as anything.'

'Anyone come out of the laneway?'

'No.'

'You hear anything? Voices? An argument?'

'Nothing. We was quiet because the police, they see Indians more quickly than they see white people.'

'Did you notice any other men in the area?'

Was Jolly's murder connected to a bad deal? Did he see something he shouldn't have?

'No one,' Parthiv said and fiddled with the dial of the radio despite all the stations being off air till daylight.

'But you knew the boy.' Emmanuel pushed ahead. 'Tonight wasn't the first time you'd seen him. That's right, isn't it?'

'You a cop,' Parthiv said. 'For sure.'

'I'm not.' Emmanuel knew he'd pushed too far. 'I was just curious.'

Parthiv's voice swelled with panic. 'You're working undercover, isn't it?'

'I'm not an undercover policeman,' Emmanuel said. Or any other kind of police, he reminded himself. 'Once you've dropped me at the freight yards, you and I will never see each other again.'

'For real?' Parthiv said.

'For real.'

The Cadillac sped through the empty streets and zipped past municipal parks with deserted swings and scrappy cricket pitches. They soon arrived at the Point freight yards. A drunk zigzagged along the footpath and a stray dog pawed at the contents of a toppled garbage can. There were no police wagons, no crime scene barricades and no guard positioned at the entrance to the alley where Jolly Marks still lay undiscovered and alone.

'Thanks for the lift,' Emmanuel said. Parthiv responded with a humourless snort and swung a U-turn back towards the city centre. Red tail-lights dimmed and then disappeared. Emmanuel scooped loose coins from his pocket. The closest public telephone box was within visual distance of the Point police station. A risky position for what he had in mind.

He flipped his jacket collar up like a second-rate hood in one of Parthiv's gangster films and ducked into the red and cream circular booth. A tattered telephone directory dangled from a metal chain. He thumbed the pages to the list of police stations and fed coins into the slot.

'Sergeant Whitlam.' The voice on the other end was gruff. The morning shift and a soft bed were still hours away. 'Point police.'

'There's a body in the alley behind the Trident shipping office.'

'What's that?'

'Listen carefully, Sergeant Whitlam. This is not a hoax or a joke. Send someone out to the alley behind Trident shipping. A boy has been murdered.'

'Who is this, please?'

Emmanuel hung up. It had come to this: anonymous phone calls in the dead of night to speed the wheels of justice. He retreated into the shadows and crouched across from the entrance to the alley, like a thief. Five minutes ticked by and then ten. Every second magnified just how ludicrous the situation was. He was a grown man hiding in the dark, with no option but to watch and wait. The sensible thing was to get up and walk away.

A gangly foot policeman with sleep-tousled hair turned up to conduct the search a quarter of an hour later. Twenty years old at most, Emmanuel figured, not cynical yet but certain that the charge office sergeant had sent him out to chase a waste-of-time tip-off. The constable entered the narrow pathway with his torch on high beam and re-emerged quickly, gasping for air. The subtropical night was still and the policeman's rasps could be heard across the width of the road. Nausea, shock and disbelief . . . Emmanuel waited for the young man to go through the emotions that came with the discovery of a murder victim. The constable wiped his nose with a sleeve and pulled the police whistle free. A long and mournful note sounded across the Point.