Текст книги "Thirteen Hours"

Автор книги: Deon Meyer

Соавторы: Deon Meyer
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Chapter 5

The traffic was impossible now. It took fifteen minutes just to get from Long Street to Buitengracht. They were bumper to bumper up Buitesingel's hill. He drained the dregs of the sweet coffee. It would last him until he could get something to eat. But his plan to quickly download Carla's email was stuffed. It would just have to wait until tonight. He had been offline for a week already with that damn laptop – he could wait a few more hours. Carla would understand – he'd had problems with the stupid machine from the start. How was he to know there were laptops without internal modems? He had bought his for a knock-down price at a police auction of unclaimed stolen goods. Once Carla left for London, he needed to know how she was – his Carla who needed to 'sort her head out overseas' before she decided what to do with the rest of her life.

So how did vacuuming floors in a hotel in London sort out your head?

It had cost him R500 to get the laptop connected to the Internet. He had to buy a damn modem and get an Internet service provider. Then he spent three hours on the phone with a computer guy getting the fucking connection to work and then Microsoft Outlook Express was a nightmare to configure. That took another hour on the phone to sort out before he could send an email to Carla saying:

Here I am, how are you? I miss you and worry about you. There was an article in the Burger that said South African kids in London drink a lot and cause trouble. Don't let anyone put pressure on you...

Writing this, he discovered that putting in the Afrikaans punctuation symbols was just about impossible on these computer programmes.

Dear Daddy

I have a job at the Gloucester Terrace Hotel near Marble Arch. It is a lovely part of London, near Hyde Park. I'm a cleaner. I work from ten in the morning to ten at night, six days a week, Mondays off. I don't know how long I will be able to do this, it's not very pleasant and the pay's not much, but at least it's something. The other girls are all Polish. The first thing they said when I told them I was South African was 'but you're white'.

Daddy, you know I will never drink...

When he read those words they burned right through him. A sharp reminder of the damage he had caused. Carla would never drink because her father was an alcoholic who had fucked up his whole family. He might have been sober for one hundred and fifty-six days, but he could never erase the past.

He hadn't known how to respond, his words dried up by his insensitive blunder. It took two days before he answered her, told her about his bicycle and his transfer to the Provincial Task Force. She encouraged him:

It's nice to know what you're doing, Daddy. Much more interesting things than I am. I work and sleep and eat. At least I was at Buckingham Palace on Monday...

Their correspondence found a level both were comfortable with: a rhythm of two emails a week, four or five simple paragraphs. He looked forward to them more and more – both the receiving and the sending. He mapped out replies in his head during the day – he must tell Carla this or that. The words gave his small life a certain weight.

But a week ago his Internet connection stopped working. Mysteriously, suddenly, the computer geek on the phone, who made him do things to the laptop that he hadn't known were possible, was also at a loss. 'You'll have to take it to your dealer,' was the final diagnosis. But he didn't have a fucking dealer: ultimately, it was stolen goods. On Friday afternoon after work he bumped into Charmaine Watson-Smith on the way to his door. Charmaine was deep in her seventies and lived at number 106. Everyone's grandma, with her grey hair in a bun. Devious, generous, full of the joys of living, she knew everyone in the block of flats, and their business.

'How's your daughter?' Charmaine asked.

He told her about his computer troubles.

'Oh, I might just know someone who can help.'

'Who?'

'Just give me a day or so.'

Yesterday, Monday evening at half past six he was ironing clothes in his kitchen when Bella knocked on his door.

'Aunty Charmaine said I should take a look at your PC.'

He had seen her before, a young woman in an unattractive chunky grey uniform who went home to her flat on the other side of the building every evening. She had short blonde hair, glasses and always looked tired at the end of the day, carrying a briefcase in her hand.

He had hardly recognised her at his door: she looked pretty. Only the briefcase alerted him, because she had it at her side.

'Oh ... come in.' He put down the iron.

'Bella van Breda. I'm from number sixty-four.' Just as uncomfortable as he was.

He shook her hand quickly. It was small and soft. 'Benny Griessel.' She was wearing jeans and a red blouse and red lipstick. Her eyes were shy behind the glasses, but from the first he was aware of her wide, full mouth.

'Aunty Charmaine is ...' He searched for the right word. '... busy.'

'I know. But she's great.' Bella had spotted the laptop that he kept in the open-plan kitchen, his only worktop. 'Is this it?'

'Oh ... yes.' He switched it on. 'My Internet connection won't ... it just stopped working. Do you know computers?'

They stood close together watching the screen as it got going.

'I'm a PC technician,' she answered and put her briefcase to one side. 'Oh.'

'I know, most people think it's a man's job.' 'No, no, I... um, anyone who understands computers ...' 'That's about all I understand. Can I .. . ?' She gestured at his machine.

'Please. He pulled up one of his bar stools for her. She sat down in front of the tin brain.

He realised she was slimmer than he had previously thought. Perhaps it was her two-piece uniform that had given him the wrong impression. Or perhaps it was her face. It was round, like that of a plumper woman.

She was in her late twenties. He could be her father. 'Is this your connection?' She had a menu open and the mouse pointer on an icon. 'Yes.'

'Can I put a shortcut on your desktop?' It took him a while to work that one out. 'Yes, please.'

She clicked and looked and thought and said: 'It looks like you accidentally changed the dial-up number. There's one figure short here.' 'Oh.'

'Do you have the number somewhere?'

'I think so ...' He took the pack of documents and manuals out of the cupboard where he kept them all together in a plastic bag and began to sort through them.

'Here ...' He indicated it with his finger. 'OK. See, the eight is gone, you must have deleted it, it happens quite easily ...' She typed the number in and clicked and suddenly the modem dialled up, making its complaining noises.

'Well, fuck me,' he said in genuine amazement. She laughed. With that mouth. So he asked her if she would like a cup of coffee. Or rooibos tea, like Carla always drank. 'That's all I have.'

'Coffee would be nice, thank you.'

He put on the kettle and she said, 'You're a detective,' and he said, 'What didn't Aunty Charmaine tell you?' and so they fell into conversation. Maybe it was purely because they each had a lonely Monday evening ahead. He had no intentions, God knows, he had taken the coffee to the sitting room knowing that in theory he could be her father, despite the mouth, even though by then he had become aware of her pale faultless skin and her breasts that, like her face, belonged to a fuller woman.

It was polite, slightly stilted conversation, strangers with a need to talk on a Monday night.

Two cups of coffee with sugar and Cremora later, he made his big mistake. Without thinking he picked up the top CD from his stack of four and pushed it into his laptop's CD player, because that was all he had apart from the portable Sony that only worked with earphones.

She said in surprise: 'You like Lize Beekman?' and he said in a moment of honesty: 'Very much.' Something changed in her eyes, as though it made her see him differently.

He had bought the CD after he had heard a Lize Beekman song on the car radio, 'My Suikerbos'. There was something about the singer's voice – compassion, no, vulnerability, or was it the melancholy of the music? He didn't know, but he liked the arrangement, the delicate instrumentation, and he sought out the CD. He listened to it on the Sony, meaning to play through the bass notes in his mind. But the lyrics captured him. Not only the words, the combination of words and music with that voice made him happy, and made him sad. He couldn't remember when last music had made him feel this way, such a yearning for unknown things. And when Bella van Breda asked him if he liked Lize Beekman, it was the first time he could express this to someone. That's why it came out: 'Very much.' With feeling.

Bella said, 'I wish I could sing like that,' and surprisingly, he understood what she meant. He had felt the same yearning, to sing of all the facets of life with the same depth of wisdom and insight and ... acceptance. To sing of the good and the bad, in such lovely melodies. He had never felt that kind of acceptance. Disgust, yes, that had been with him all his life. He could never explain why he felt this constant, low-grade disgust for everything and, above all, for himself.

He said: 'Me too,' and after a long silence, the conversation blossomed. They talked of many things. She told him the story of her life. He talked about his work, the reliable old stories of peculiar arrests, preposterous witnesses and eccentric colleagues. Bella said she would like to open her own business one day and the light of passion, enthusiasm, shone in her eyes. He listened with admiration. She had a dream. He had nothing. Just a fantasy or two. The kind you kept to yourself, the kind he dreamed up while strumming his guitar in the evenings. Like handcuffing Theuns Jordaan to a microphone and telling him 'Now you sing "Hex-vallei", and not a part or a medley, sing the whole fucking song.' With Anton L'Amour on lead guitar and Benny himself on bass, and they were gonna rock 'n' roll, really kick butt. Or to be able to ask Schalk Joubert just once: 'How the fuck do you play bass guitar like that, like it was plugged into your brain?'

Or maybe to have his own four-piece band again. Singing the old blues, Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, or the real old rock 'n' roll – Berry, Domino, Ricky Nelson, early Elvis...

But he said none of this, just listened to her. Round about ten o'clock she got up to go to the bathroom and when she came back he was on his way back from the sink to the sofa and he said: 'More coffee?'

They were so close and her eyes looked away and her mouth had a small, furtive smile that showed she had an idea what was going to happen next, and she didn't mind.

So he kissed her.

And as Benny sat in the bright summer sun in the Tuesday morning traffic, he remembered that it had been without lust at first, more an extension of their conversation. It was full of consolation, longing, a gentle coming together, just like Lize Beekman's music. Two people who needed to be touched.

They kissed for a long time and then they stood and held each other tight. He was again aware that her body was slimmer than he had expected. She stepped back and sat down on the sofa. He thought she was saying it was enough. But she took off her glasses and carefully put them on the floor to one side. Her eyes looked suddenly deep brown, and defenceless. He sat down next to her and kissed her again and the next thing he could remember she was sitting up, taking off her bra and offering him her lovely breasts with shy pride. He sat in the police car remembering how her body felt – soft, warm and welcoming. He remembered the slow intensity. How he was in her, there on the sofa and lifting himself up to look at her and seeing in her eyes the same immense gratitude that he felt in his own heart. Gratitude that she was there, that this had happened, and it was all lovely and gentle and slow.

Fuck it, he thought, how could that be wrong?

His cell phone rang and brought him back to the present: it must be Dekker asking where he was. But the screen read ANNA and his heart lurched.

It was the fall that saved her.

Instinctively, she had sprinted up the steep row of steps that led up out of the street, up the slope of the mountain between two high ivy-covered walls, and then up a narrow twisting footpath. Table Mountain was suddenly a colossus looming over her, steep slopes of rock and fynbos and open stretches. She felt sure she had made a mistake. They would spot her and catch her on the slope. They would grab her and hold her to the ground and slit her throat, like Erin's.

She drove herself up the mountain. She did not look back. The gradient sapped the strength from her thighs, her knees, a slow poison that would paralyse her. Above, to the right, she saw the cable car station, sun glinting off car windscreens, tiny, tiny figures of people, so close, yet so terribly far. If only she could reach them. No, it was too steep, too far, she would never make it.

She saw the fork in the footpath, chose the left one and ran. Forty paces and then a sudden drop, the path unexpectedly falling to a rocky gully that sliced down from high up the mountain. She wasn't prepared for it, her foot landed badly on round pebbles and she fell to the left, downhill. Trying to brake herself with her hands, she banged her shoulder hard and was winded. She rolled over once and lay still, aware that her hands were grazed, that something had struck her chin, but her greatest need was for air, she needed to force it back into her lungs with great, ragged breaths. Her first attempt was a bellowing croak like an animal and she needed to be quiet, they must not hear her. Twice she inhaled hoarsely, then in smaller, quieter breaths. The bank of the stream came into focus and she saw the crevice carved out under the giant rock by centuries of water. Just big enough for her to creep into.

She moved like a snake, over the round river rocks, her bleeding hands held out in front of her, towards the opening. She heard the urgent running steps of her pursuers. How close were they? She realised her rucksack would not fit in. She was running out of time; they would see her. She rose to her knees to tear the rucksack off, but had to stop to loosen the buckle around her belly. She pulled the right then left shoulder straps off, wriggled her body into the hollow and dragged the rucksack after her. Three of them jumped over the dry stream bed three metres away from her, agile, athletic and silent, and she held her burning breath, saw how the blood from her chin dripped on the stones. She lay still, and shut her eyes, as if that would make her invisible to them.

He sat in the traffic with his phone to his ear and said: 'Hello, Anna.' His heart beating in his throat as he thought of last night.

'Benny, we need to talk.'

It was fucking impossible. There was no way his wife could have found out.

'About what?'

'Everything, Benny. I wondered if we could talk tonight.'

About everything? He couldn't gauge her tone of voice.

'We could. Do you want me to come home?'

'No, I thought we could rather ... go out to eat somewhere.'

Jissis. What did that mean?

'That's fine. Where?'

'I don't know. Canal Walk is sort of halfway. There's a Primi...'

'What time would suit you?'

'Seven?'

'Thanks, Anna, that would be nice.'

'Goodbye, Benny.' Just like that, as though he had said the wrong thing.

He sat with the phone in his hand. Behind him a motorist hooted. He realised he should move forward. He released the clutch and closed the gap ahead of him. About everything, Benny. What did that mean? Why not at their house? Maybe she felt like going out. Like a kind of date. But when he said: 'That would be nice,' she said goodbye as if she was angry with him.

Could she know about last night? What if she had been there, at his flat, at his door. She would have seen nothing, but she would have been able to hear – Bella who had made such soft, contented noises at one stage. God, he had liked that then, but if Anna had heard...

But she had never been to his flat. Why would she have come last night? To talk? Not entirely impossible. And she might have heard something and waited and seen Bella leave, and...

But if she had, would she want to go out to eat with him?

No. Maybe.

If she knew ... He was fucked. He knew that now. But she couldn't know.

Chapter 6

Brownlow Street was a surprise to Griessel because Tamboerskloof was supposed to be a rich neighbourhood. But here the old Victorian houses covered the whole spectrum from recently restored to badly dilapidated. Some were semi-detached, others crouched on the slopes as free-standing colossi. Number forty– seven was large and impressive, with two storeys, verandas and balconies with curlicued ironwork railings, cream walls, and windows with green wooden shutters. It had been restored some time in the past ten years, but now it was in need of more attention.

There was no garage. Griessel parked in the street behind a black Mercedes SLK 200 convertible, two police vehicles and a white Nissan with the SAPS emblem on the door and Social Services under it in black type. Forensics' minibus was parked across the road. Thick and Thin. They must have come direct from Long Street.

A uniformed policeman stopped him at the big wooden front door. He showed his identification. 'You will have to go around the back, Inspector; the sitting room is a crime scene,' he said. Griessel nodded in satisfaction.

'I think they are still in the kitchen, sir. You can go right here and then around the house.'

'Thank you.'

He walked around. There was not much garden between the wall and the house. The trees and shrubs were old, large and somewhat overgrown. Behind the house there was a view of Lion's Head. Another policeman was on duty at the back door. He took his SAPS ID out of his wallet again and showed it to the Constable.

'The Inspector is expecting you.'

'Thank you,' he said, and went in through a laundry room and opened the inner door. Dekker sat at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee in his hands and a pen and notebook in front of him. He was totally focused on the coloured woman opposite him. She wore a pink and white domestic uniform and held a handkerchief in her hands, her eyes red from crying. She was plump, her age difficult to judge.

'Fransman ...' said Griessel.

Dekker looked up irritably. 'Benny.' As an afterthought, he said: 'Come in.' He was a tall, athletic, coloured man, broad-shouldered and strong, with a face from a cigarette advert, handsome in a rugged way.

Griessel went up to the table and shook Dekker's hand.

'This is Mrs Sylvia Buys. She's the domestic worker here.'

'Good morning,' said Sylvia Buys solemnly.

'Morning, Mrs Buys.'

Dekker pushed his mug of coffee away as if to distance himself from it, and pulled his notebook closer with a hint of reluctance. 'Mrs Buys arrived at work ...' he consulted the notebook,'... at six forty-five and tidied up and made coffee in the kitchen before moving to inspect the living area at... seven o'clock ...'

'Damage assessment,' said Sylvia Buys spitefully. 'That woman can make a mess.'

'...where she discovered the deceased, Mr Adam Barnard, and the suspect, Mrs Sandra Barnard ...'

'She's really Alexandra .. .'With distaste.

Dekker made a note and said: 'Mrs Alexandra Barnard. Mrs Buys found them in the library on the first floor. At seven o'clock. The firearm was on the carpet next to Mrs Barnard ...'

'Not to mention the booze. She's an alky, drinking like a fish every night and Mr Adam ...' Sylvia lifted the handkerchief, and dab-dabbed at her nose. Her voice grew thinner, shriller.

'Was she under the influence last night?' Griessel asked.

'She's as drunk as a lord every night. I went home at half past four and she was well on her way – by that time of the afternoon she's talking to herself already.'

'Mrs Buys says when she left the house yesterday the suspect was alone. She does not know what time the deceased came home.'

'He was a good man. Always a kind word. I don't understand it. Why did she shoot him? What for? He did her no wrong, he took all of her milly, all her drinking, he just took it, every night he would put her in bed and what did she go and shoot him for?' She wept, shaking her head.

'Sister, you're traumatised. We'll get you some counselling.'

'I don't want counselling,' sobbed Sylvia Buys. 'Where will I get another job at my age?'

'It's not as simple as that,' said Dekker as he climbed the yellowwood stairs to the library. 'You'll see.'

Griessel could sense the tension in the man. He knew his colleagues called Dekker 'Fronsman' behind his back, a reference to his frowning lack of humour and consuming ambition. He had heard the stories, because in the corridors of the Provincial Task Force, they liked to gossip about up-and-coming stars. Dekker was the son of a French rugby player. His mother, a coloured woman from the poverty of Atlantis township, was young and buxom in the Seventies when she worked as a cleaner at the Koeberg nuclear power station. Apparently the rugby player was older, long past his glory days, by then a liaison officer for the French consortium that built and maintained Koeberg. There had been just one encounter and shortly afterwards the rugby player returned to France, without knowing of his offspring. Dekker's mother could not remember his name, so she simply christened her son Fransman, the Afrikaans for Frenchman.

How much of this was true, Griessel could not say. But the child had apparently inherited his father's Gallic nose, build and straight black hair – now trimmed in a brush cut – and his mother's coffee-coloured complexion.

I le followed Dekker into the library. Thick and Thin were at work in the room. They looked up as the detectives entered. 'We can't go on meeting like this, Benny, people will talk,' said Jimmy.

An old joke, but Benny grinned, then looked at the victim lying on the left side of the room. Black trousers, white shirt with no tie, one shoe missing, and two gunshot wounds to the chest. Adam Barnard had been tall and strong. His black hair was cut in a Seventies style, over the ears and collar, with elegant grey wings at the temples. In death his eyes were open, making him seem mildly surprised.

Dekker folded his arms expectantly. Thick and Thin stood watching him.

Griessel approached carefully, taking in the book shelves, the Persian carpet, the paintings, the liquor bottle and glass beside the chair on the right side of the room. The firearm was in a transparent plastic evidence bag on the ground, where Forensics had circled it with white chalk. 'She was on this side?' he asked Dekker.

'She was.'

'The Oracle at work,' said Thick.

'Fuck off, Arnold,' said Griessel. 'Had the pistol been fired?'

'Quite recently,' said Arnold.

'But not here.'

'Bingo,' said Arnold.

'I told you he would get it straight away,' said Jimmy.

'Yes,' said Dekker. He sounded disappointed. 'It's an automatic pistol, three rounds are missing from the magazine, but there are no casings here. No blood on the floor, no bullet holes in the walls or book shelves and the shoe is missing. I have gone through the whole house. Jimmy and Co have searched the garden. She didn't klap him here. We have to search the car in the street...'

'Where is she?'

'In the sitting room with Social Services. Tinkie Kellerman.'

'Knock, knock,' said someone from the door. The long-haired photographer.

'Come in,' said Dekker. 'You're late.'

'Because I had to make bloody prints first ...' He spotted Griessel. His manner quickly changed. 'Vusi has his photos, Benny.'

'Thanks.'

'Jimmy, did you test her for GSR?' asked Dekker.

'Not yet. But I did put her hands in paper. She didn't like that.'

'Can you do it now? I can't talk to her with paper bags over her hands.'

'If she touched the pistol she will have GSR. I don't know if you can do anything with that.'

'Let me worry about that, Jimmy.'

'I'm just saying. Gunshot residue isn't what it used to be. The lawyers are getting too clever.' Jimmy took a box out of his case. It was marked 'SEM Examination'. He went to the stairs with both detectives in tow.

'Fransman, you've done a good job,' said Griessel.

'I know,' said Dekker.

The CCTV control room of the Metro Police was an impressive space. It had twenty flickering TV screens, a whole bank of video recorders and a control panel that looked as though it belonged to the space shuttle. Inspector Vusi Ndabeni stood looking at a screen, watching the grainy image of a small figure running under the street lights of Long Street. Nine seconds of material, now in slow motion: seven shadowy people in a desperate race from left to right across the screen. The girl was in front, only recognisable thanks to the dark hump of the rucksack. Here, between Leeuwen and Pepper Street, she was only three steps ahead of the nearest assailant, her arms and legs pumping high in flight. Another five people were sixteen to seventeen metres behind. In the last frame just before she disappeared off the screen, Ndabeni could see her turn her head as if to see how close they were.

'Is that the best you have?'

The operator was white, a little man, owl-like behind big round Harry Potter spectacles. He shrugged.

'Can you enlarge this?'

'Not really,' he answered in a nasal voice. 'I can fiddle with the brightness and contrast a little, but if you zoom in, you just get grain. You can't increase the pixels.'

'Could you try, please?'

The Owl worked the dials in front of him. 'Don't expect miracles.' On the screen the figures ran backwards slowly and froze. The man pecked at a keyboard and tables and histograms appeared over the image.

'Which one do you want to see better?'

'The people chasing her.'

The operator used a mouse to select two of the last five figures. They suddenly filled the screen. He tapped the keyboard again and the image brightened, the shadows lightened. 'All I can try is a high pass sharpen ...' he said. The focus sharpened slightly, but neither of the figures was recognisable.

'You can at least see they are men and that the one in front is black,' said the Owl. Vusi stared at the screen. It wasn't going to help him much.

'You can see they are young men.'

'Can you print this?'

'OK.'

'Are they only on one camera?'

'My shift finishes at eight. I'll have a look if there's something else then. They must have come from Greenmarket or Church Street, but it will take time. There are sixteen cameras in that section. But they don't all work any more.'

'Thanks,' said Vusi Ndabeni. One thing he couldn't understand. If one of the pursuers was only three strides behind her in Pepper Street, why hadn't he caught her before the church? It was five hundred metres away, maybe more. Had he slipped? Fallen? Or deliberately waited for a quieter place.

'One more thing, if you don't mind ...'

'Hey, it's my work.'

'Can you enlarge the two running in front?'

Griessel walked into the sitting room behind Dekker. It was a large room with big couches and chairs and a huge coffee table, tasteful, old and well restored. Small, delicate Tinkie Kellerman of SAPS Social Services sat upright in an easy chair that dwarfed her. She was the one they sent for when the victim or the suspect was a woman, because she had compassion and empathy, but now there was a frown of unease on her face.

'Ma'am, let me take those bags off your hands,' said Jimmy jovially to Alexandra Barnard, a hunched figure in a white dressing gown. She sat on the edge of a large four-seater couch, elbows on her knees, head hung low, and unwashed grey and blonde hair hiding her face. She held out her hands without looking up. Jimmy loosened the brown paper bags.

'I just have to press these discs on your hands. They are sticky, but that's all ...' He broke the seal on the SEM box and took out the round metal discs. Griessel saw Alexandra Barnard's hands trembling, but her face was still hidden behind her long hair.

He and Dekker each picked a chair. Dekker opened his notebook.

Jimmy worked quickly and surely, first the right hand and then the left. 'There you go, thank you, madam.' He gave the detectives a look that said 'Here's an interesting one', and then he packed away his things.

'Mrs Barnard ...' said Dekker.

Tinkie Kellerman shook her head slightly, as if to say the suspect was not communicative. Jimmy walked out rolling his eyes.

'Mrs Barnard,' said Dekker, this time louder and more businesslike.

'I didn't do it,' she said without moving, in a surprisingly deep voice.

'Mrs Barnard, you have the right to legal representation. You have the right to remain silent. But if you choose to answer our questions, anything you say may be used in court.'

'I didn't do it.'

'Do you want to contact your lawyer?'

'No,' and slowly she raised her head and pushed the hair back on either side of her face, revealing bloodshot blue eyes and skin an unhealthy hue. Griessel saw the regular features, hints of former beauty under the tracks of abuse. He knew her, he knew a version of this face, but he couldn't quite place it, not yet. She looked at Dekker, then at Griessel. Her only expression was one of total weariness. She stretched out a hand to a small table beside her and picked up a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She struggled to open the pack and take out a cigarette.

'Mrs Barnard, I am Inspector Fransman Dekker. This is Inspector Benny Griessel. Are you ready to answer some questions?' His voice was louder than necessary, the way you would talk to someone who was a bit deaf.

She nodded slightly, with difficulty, and lit the cigarette. She inhaled the smoke deeply, as if it would give her strength.

'The deceased was your husband, Mr Adam Barnard?'

She nodded.

'What is his full name?'

'Adam Johannes.'

'Age?'

'Fifty-two.'

Dekker wrote. 'And his profession?'

She turned her tired eyes on Dekker. 'AfriSound.'

'Excuse me?'

'AfriSound. It's his.'

'AfriSound?'

'It's a record company.'

'And he owns this record company?'

She nodded.

'Your full name?'

'Alexandra.'