Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew Read Free Book Online

light, but the worries were still there, and my mind wouldn’t settle. So I made my farm bread with oats, sunflower seeds and molasses.
    I put the dough into a cast-iron pot and took it outside onto my stoep where the sun was now shining.
    I phoned the Gazette but there was no reply. When the dough had risen, I divided it into two bread pans and put them in the oven. While they baked I got dressed, but stayed barefoot. Then I brushed the loaves with butter and wrapped each one in its own cloth.
    I ate the soft warm bread, with butter and apricot jam on one slice and cheese on the other. I am not sure how settled my mind was, but the food settled very nicely in my belly.
    While I cleaned up I listened to a cicada’s buzzing song. I wondered if he was screaming for rain – the days were just getting hotter. But I suppose he was shouting for a mate. Cicadas aren’t shy to call and call. After years of living underground he comes out for just a short while and makes his mad music. But it seems he only plays one note, which goes on and on. I suppose his life in the sunshine is too short to be fussy. Maybe what sounds like a desperate racket to me is beautiful music to a lady cicada.
    I filled a tin with muesli buttermilk beskuit for the Gazette . I didn’t want to go in to the office; I couldn’t say why. But I brushed my hair and put on lipstick and my khaki veldskoene and headed for the car.
    Lying near the front tyre of the car was a small feathered thing. It was a dead bird. A dove. I wondered if I had hit it, but it didn’t look run over. It was all in one piece, just soft and dead. I put the rusks down on the passenger seat, and picked up the bird. It was so light in my hands, but it gave me a heavy feeling in my heart. I laid it under a bread-flower bush on the edge of my driveway. The bush had little red flowers.
    My sky-blue bakkie was not too hot, thanks to the morning shade of the eucalyptus trees. I wound down my windows as I drove and the warm wind unbrushed my hair and dried my lipstick.
    At the Gazette , I pulled in some distance behind Hattie’s Etios, which was parked very skew. As I walked up the path to the office, I could hear Hattie talking loudly.
    ‘Golly, Jess,’ she was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you an ambulance chaser.’
    Jessie’s voice: ‘Aw, Hattie— ’
    ‘And privacy for the poor chap? The bereaved?’
    ‘I used a telephoto lens, he didn’t even see me.’
    ‘Were you invited there? Or did you really just follow the ambulance?’
    ‘C’mon . . . Its siren was on; it was right in front of me. I’m an investigative journalist.’
    ‘Pish posh.’
    The door was open and they were at Jessie’s desk. Hattie was frowning but she tried to rearrange her face when she saw me.
    ‘Maria . . . ’ she said.
    ‘Hello, Tannie,’ Jessie grinned.
    Hattie was too polite to carry on skelling Jessie out in front of me. But Jessie wasn’t going to let it go.
    ‘Just have a look at the photos,’ she said to us both.
    I looked at the pictures on her computer.
    The first photograph was from a bit of a distance: a farm, an ambulance, and paramedics.
    She clicked slowly through a few pictures:
    Men in white. A stretcher, a woman’s body, her arm in a plaster cast. Pretty nose and mouth, brown hair loose across her shoulder. Pale skin, eyes closed. Maybe in her forties. A man in his fifties, standing, hands hanging useless at his sides, the ambulance driving off. His hair wiry with scraggly sideburns, his mouth a little open. His face full and empty at the same time.
    A photo of the same man, squatting on the ground, in front of a pond surrounded by reeds, his face buried in his hands.
    ‘Is she dead?’ I asked, although my bones already knew the answer.
    Jessie nodded.
    ‘I spoke to my ma, at the hospital,’ she said. ‘Her name is Martine van Schalkwyk. The husband is Dirk.’
    ‘Can you do a close-up on that picture?’ I said. ‘No, not his face, the pond.’
    At the edge of