Present Darkness by Malla Nunn Read Free Book Online

circle. Emmanuel, however, wouldn’t let the Lieutenant anywhere near pets or children. While Mason appeared utterly indifferent to the call that moments ago had him slamming down the phone, the tightness in his shoulders and the hard lines around his mouth reminded Emmanuel of his own father before a rage. The calm exterior was a lie. Mason had a violent temper fed by a decade of dirty police work.
    “Back to your lonely bed, Cooper. You too, Negus. We’re done for the night. Report in tomorrow at 11 a.m.”
    “Right enough, Lieutenant.” Negus stretched out, shoved a brown fedora onto his head and made for the door.
    “Shabalala is still in the interview room,” Emmanuel said. “I have a few more questions to ask him before finishing up.”
    A ball tightened in his stomach just as it had when his father brooded at the kitchen table, waiting for the one wrong word to justify unleashing a beating. The defenceless slum boy inside Emmanuel, who’d eaten dinner in a sweat of fear, warned him to be quiet in the face of Mason’s demeanour. The combat soldier with a bullet wound in his left shoulder did not listen.
    “We’re not in a conversation, Cooper,” Mason said with an unblinking stare. “Pack up and go home. That’s an order.”
    “If you say so, sir.” Emmanuel reached for his soft felt trilby with a sharply angled brim and tugged it on. Soldiers and police lived and died by orders. God knows he’d followed a raft of incomprehensible commands while fighting the war, and each time he had to stop himself from asking “why?”
    “Cooper.” Negus stood in the corridor with bags under his eyes. “Let’s make tracks, man.”
    “Good night, Lieutenant.” Emmanuel heeded the unspoken warning in Negus’s voice and left the room. Getting into a pissing competition with Mason was futile. The vice cop had already taken too much of a personal interest in him.
    Negus paused at the top of the stairs and said, “Here’s a free piece of advice. Do not fuck with Mason. If you do, he will fuck you back in ways that would make a whore cringe.”
    “How is making an interview request fucking with the Lieutenant? We’re working the same investigation.”
    “It’s his investigation, Cooper. Don’t forget it. Asking a question is the same as spitting on his dead mother’s grave. That’s assuming Mason had a mother.”
    “I thought he was born again.”
    “My Xhosa nursemaid had a saying, ‘The rain wets the leopard’s spots but doesn’t wash them off.’ Mason might take a shower in the blood of Jesus every morning but he’s still the same man who set fire to whorehouses and gambling rooms if they refused to pay him for protection.” Negus fumbled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and slotted one into the corner of his mouth. “You just painted a target on your chest and waved your arms at a man with a flame-thrower. Fade in and fit in, that’s your best defence.”
    “I’ll try.”
    It was too late to take evasive action or to play dead for Mason. The Lieutenant had him square in his sights: from reading over his file and retaining the details, to voicing comments that implied a first-hand knowledge of an incident involving women that Emmanuel couldn’t remember. There was only one course of action open to him if he had any hope of repaying his debt to Detective Constable Shabalala: act like a diplomat but prepare to fight a covert war.

5.
    The rain wets the Leopard’s spots but does not wash them off. The proverb stayed with Emmanuel on the drive through the deserted streets of night time Johannesburg. How far had he travelled from the ramshackle streets of Sophiatown, he wondered? Not in miles but in time, or life, or history? Beneath the veneer of his tailored suits, polished shoes and clean hands, the white kaffir boy with a flexible attitude to the law and no allegiance to any one racial group, remained.
    He hid his roots well. But that invisible split between the respectable