sake?”
“Suppose someone is joining us.”
I come to a halt, petrified. “Can’t I stay here?” I indicate the space in which we’re standing. “Please?”
“No.” She pushes me inside impatiently.
I turn around, the man is no longer there, I can run away. And if they shoot me? No, I will have to go in. Because it is the choice I have made.
“Hurry up!” the constable snaps crossly.
I step forward slowly, look back a last time. The man is back, he’s holding out a mattress and a grey blanket to me.
“Make room for her!” the constable says to the vague figures in the semi-darkness of the room.
The door slams shut behind me.
I stand motionless, let my eyes get used to the dim light. Six faces look back at me. In one corner a toilet, partly screened off by a low wall around it. To the right of the door a cement bunk, already occupied by a body.
“A white woman,” a voice whispers.
It moves like an echo through the room. A white woman, a white woman, a white woman.
I look up at the naked light bulb hanging from the high ceiling. This is what my world has shrunk to: a dirty room with graffitied walls. A room I have to share with six strangers. With the smell of urine and excrement hanging thick in the air.
All I can feel is exhaustion. My entire body feels dead. My head is foggy, my eyes are burning.
“It’s a small price to pay,” I say aloud. “It’s a very small price to pay.”
“You’re telling me, girla, you’re telling me.” The woman nearest to me grins.
She beckons me towards her, clears a space for me next to her. I let the mattress drop to the floor, fold the grey blanket over double and double again for a pillow, curl up on my side. The mattress is so thin that I can feel the cold cement through it.
I’m cold, I think vaguely to myself, it’s summer in the Free State and I’m cold. My eyes close by themselves.
Bulldog waits patiently for the clock on the microwave to say 07:50. Then he puts a lid on the sausages sizzling in the pan, switches off the stove plate and breaks six eggs into the pan on the next stove plate. Four for him, two for his wife. Not a healthy breakfast, he knows that’s what she is going to say. But this morning he needs something to give him strength.
Just as he removes the pan with the eggs from the stove and lets the toast slide onto a plate, she walks into the kitchen.
“Not a healthy breakfast,” she says and kisses him on the cheek. “What are you doing home this time of the day?”
“Couldn’t stand being in the office a moment longer. And I’m hungry. Did you have a good walk?”
She nods.
For how long has she been going for a walk every morning? he wonders. Five years? Ten?
He will finally retire in November. Perhaps then he’ll start walking the five kilometres with her every morning. He brings the plates to the table. Takes juice from the fridge, pours the filter coffee.
She smiles at him. “Thanks, Leon, it looks delicious.”
When he moves his empty plate away, she turns to him. “What’s worrying you?”
“Worrying?”
“Yes, I can see something’s troubling you. Tell me.”
This is what attracted him to Marie in the first place, apart from her appearance, naturally: her interest. In him. In what he is thinking. In what he is feeling.
“It’s this case,” he sighs.
“A new case?”
He nods.
“Tell me.”
This is another reason he found her irresistible from the very beginning: she does not interrupt you. She gives you a chance to tell your story. She listens to every word and only then starts asking questions. As she does now.
“But is this not an open-and-shut case?”
“It is,” he sighs. “Admission of guilt, fingerprints on the murder weapon – I assume, because we’re still waiting for forensics. Blood on her clothes, on her body. A witness. It is an open-and-shut case, but . . .”
She waits quietly for him to formulate his thoughts.
“But for the first time in my professional career I feel sorry for the murderer. Do you think I’m getting old?”
She laughs. “You will never get old, Leon.”
“Anna Bruwer believes that it was her fate to kill her stepfather, that she had no choice. She drove eight hours to shoot him – twice, in front of a witness. She knelt down by him in his blood to make sure he was dead.”
“Revenge.”
He looks at her for a long time. “Yes,” he finally nods. “I’m presuming that he abused her sexually. Raped her. Her and her sister.”
“Then it’s just as well he’s dead.”
He shakes his head. “No, murder is murder. In all my thirty-five years of service I have never had to shoot to kill. Warning shots, yes, but . . .”
“There are cases where it’s unavoidable, Leon, you must admit.”
“No. You can wound someone, you can threaten them, you can try to reason with them, but murder? No, as I said to Anna Bruwer: You always have a choice.”
It’s still not properly light in the cell when I wake up, although the sun is already high up in the sky. If I turn my head a certain way, I can see it through a small window.
I don’t wonder where I am. I am not disorientated. The sounds, the smells, the absolute sense of desolation leave me in no doubt. In hell, that’s where I am. And it’s through my own doing. My own choice. Did I make the right choice? Why am I having doubts now?
No, it’s just because I’m frightened. I did make the right choice. It was my responsibility to bring an end to it all.
I turn carefully onto my back. The right-hand side of my body is numb. I’ve lain motionless for too long, sunk in a deep sleep. The sleep of death. A word one uses how many times a day without thinking. I’ll kill you, people say. But how many people have the courage to really kill someone, put them to death?
I never threatened him with death. Only that I would tell my mother. Not that that helped. But with death? Never. Wished that, yes. Dreamed about it. Fantasised. Usually imagined a grisly, bloody affair. I wanted to hurt him, as he hurt me. As he hurt Carli. I wanted to humiliate him. Grind him into the dust of the earth. But never, not for one moment, did I think I would kill him. Not me. Not obedient,
