A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn Read Free Book Online

right into Emmanuel’s investigation and call the shots.
    “When can you get more men onto the case, sir?”
    “Twenty-four hours,” van Niekerk said. “Everyone here is focused on a body found by the railway line. She’s white, thank God. That means the press will keep running with the story. I’ll get a day to pull some men from headquarters and load them onto your case on the quiet.”
    Major van Niekerk, the product of a highbred English mother and a rich Dutch father, liked to keep a clear line of sight between himself and his ultimate prize: commissioner of police. His present rank of major wasn’t high enough for him. His motto was simple: What’s good for me is good for South Africa. Sending out a single detective on a crank call that turned out to be an actual homicide wasn’t something he was keen to make public.
    “And the Security Branch?” Emmanuel asked.
    “I’ll handle them.” Van Niekerk made it sound easy, but it was going to be more like taking a knife from a Gypsy. “Meanwhile, you’ve got a chance to treat this like an ordinary murder, not a test case for the soundness of the new racial segregation laws. Consider yourself—”
    Static swallowed up the rest of the sentence and left an industrial hiss breathing down the line.
    “Major?”
    The singsong beep, beep, beep signaled a disconnected line. Emmanuel hung up. Lucky? Was that the major’s last word? Consider yourself lucky?
    Emmanuel tipped the contents of the captain’s drawer onto the desktop and began sorting through it. Booking forms, paper clips, pencils, and rubber bands got placed to one side. That left a small box of ammunition and a week-old newspaper. The box revealed rows of gold bullets. The newspaper stories he’d read last Wednesday. No luck there.
    “Detective Sergeant?”
    Shabalala stood in the doorway, a steaming mug of tea in hand. For such a large man, he moved with alarming quiet. He’d stripped down to his undershirt, and his trousers were damp from where he’d washed the material in an attempt to clean it. The black location, five miles to the north of town, was too far to ride his bicycle for the sake of a change of clothes.
    “Thank you, Constable.” Emmanuel took the tea, aware of the crisp lines of the shirt he’d changed into half an hour earlier. The Protea Guesthouse, the boardinghouse where he’d thrown down his bag, then washed and changed, was in the heart of town, surrounded by other white-owned homes. Shabalala would have to wait for nighttime to wash the smell of the dead captain from his skin.
    “Where’s your desk?” The front office, like the one at district headquarters, was reserved for European policemen.
    “In here.” Shabalala stepped back and allowed him entry through the side door to a room that included two jail cells and a narrow space with a desk and chair. A row of hooks above the desk held the keys to the cells and a whip made of rhino hide called a shambok, the deadly South African version of an English bobby’s truncheon. A window looked out to the backyard, and underneath it sat a small table with a box of rooibos tea, a teapot, and some mismatched porcelain mugs. Tin plates, mugs and spoons for the native policeman rested on a separate shelf.
    “What’s out there?”
    Shabalala swung the back door open and politely motioned him out first. Emmanuel picked the black man’s tea up off the table and handed the tin mug to him. The police station yard was a dusty patch of land. A huge avocado tree dominated the far end and cast a skirt of shade around its trunk. Closer in, a small fire glowed in a circle of stones. Shabalala’s coat and jacket, wiped down from filthy to dirty by a wet cloth, hung over some chairs crowded around the outdoor hearth. A small sniff of the air and it was possible to imagine the smell of the police station’s Friday-night braai and fresh jugs of beer.
    “Did you know the captain a long time?” Emmanuel’s tea was milky and sweet, the