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

turned right onto van Riebeeck Street. The neat country houses with manicured beds of aloe and flowering protea had a deserted air. Garden boys, now usually finishing up for the day, were nowhere in sight. Dried laundry flapped on backyard lines. No maids. No “missus” or “baas,” either.
    The news was out, he guessed. A quick glance down van Riebeeck confirmed it. A group of the captain’s neighbors was gathered in front of a house at the end of the street. Housemaids and garden boys, many of them gray haired despite the title, stood in a group two dwellings down: close enough to look on yet far enough to show respect.
    A woman’s sob floated out into the afternoon. Emmanuel approached a wide gravel driveway choked with cars. An elegant Cape Dutch–style house nestled in an established garden. A dark thatched roof perched over graceful gables and gleaming whitewashed walls. Wooden shutters, the exact shade of the thatch, were shut against the world. A long veranda, decorated with flowerpots, ran the length of the house. There wasn’t a wagon wheel in sight.
    Like the captain’s hand-tooled watch, the house was a surprise. Where was the bleached antelope skull he expected to find nailed over the doorway? He stepped past the front bumper of a dusty Mercedes and into the garden.
    “Hey! Who you?” A hand settled on his shoulder and stayed there. A skinny white man with watery blue eyes stared him down. The crowd turned to examine the interloper.
    “I’m Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper.” He flicked his ID open and held it uncomfortably close to the man’s face. “I’m the investigating officer in this case. Are you a family member?”
    The hand dropped. “No. Just making sure we all act decent toward Captain Pretorius and his family.”
    Emmanuel returned his ID to his pocket and smiled to show there were no hard feelings.
    “He’s okay, Athol. Let him by.” Hansie stood on the veranda in his filthy uniform, cheeks glowing an eggshell pink. Exercising his authority in public agreed with him.
    “This way, Detective Sergeant.” Hansie waved him across the garden flushed with early spring color, and up the stairs that led to the imposing front door. Emmanuel took off his hat.
    “I’ve come to pay my respects to Mrs. Pretorius. The family all here?”
    “Everyone except Paul.” Hansie opened the front door and ushered him in. “Mrs. Pretorius and her daughters-in-law are seeing to the captain. The rest are out on the back veranda.”
    They entered a small receiving area that led farther along to a series of closed doors, most likely the bedrooms. Hansie walked left into a large room dominated by heavy wooden furniture, the kind built to withstand generations of pounding by unruly boys and leather-skinned men. The polished tile floor was smooth as snakeskin under the yellow light of the glass-faced lanterns. An enormous sideboard covered in trophies and framed photos ran along one side of the room.
    The photographs covered several generations of the Pretorius clan. There was a girl in ponytails playing in the snow, then a dour-faced clergyman surrounded by an army of equally humorless children. The next photo showed a young Captain Pretorius and a pretty woman in her twenties seated on a park bench. Then an image stopped Emmanuel in his tracks. The Pretorius boys, ranging in age from five to fifteen, stood shoulder to shoulder in their Voortrekker Scout uniforms. It was night and their faces and uniforms gleamed in the light of the flaming torches held high in their hands. Their eyes stared out at him, hard with Afrikaner pride. Emmanuel thought of Nuremberg: all those rosy-cheeked German boys marching toward defeat.
    “The Great Trek celebration,” Hansie said. “Captain and Mrs. Pretorius took us Voortrekker Scouts on a trip to Pretoria for the ceremony. We got to throw the torches into a huge fire.”
    Emmanuel remembered his own trip to the same celebration well. He remembered the heat of the