Govender to stare at David. “You know … my son?” he asked shakily.
David nodded. “I did, Mr Calder,” he said. “I met him at work.” It was the truth, but David still saw the desperation in the man’s face. He imagined Andrew Calder’s need to see his son one last time, just to make sure, battling with the fear of facing reality, the fear of seeing his son’s gruesome remains, of living with that image.
David tried another tactic. “Could you take care of Kathy?” he asked calmly. “While I go with the police?”
Andrew Calder’s shoulders sagged. He nodded, slipping his arm around Kathy’s waist. “I will,” he said, his eyes moistening. He nodded. “Thank you.”
Govender motioned to his sergeant. “Sergeant, if you wouldn’t mind keeping Ms Barnett and Mr Calder company here?”
The sergeant nodded in reply. David steeled himself inwardly and then turned as Kathy put a hand on his arm. “It’s all right,” he told her. “I’ll just be gone a couple of minutes.”
Kathy nodded. She stood there anxiously, wiping her cheek with one hand. Her make-up was running. She looked gorgeous.
David walked off after Inspector Govender, Sergeant van Heerden staying behind with Kathy and Mr Calder, who were holding each other for support as they watched him leave.
Inspector Govender led David towards the house. The once neat home was now a smouldering wreckage in the soggy dirt that firemen were still dousing with water. The aftermath of the fire was thick in the back of David’s throat, a sweet cloying smell lingering there too. He recognised the smell. Burnt human remains. Inspector Govender made towards two men wearing hard hats and yellow fireproof coats who were packing unidentified charred items into plastic bags. They might have been arson inspectors, but when the inspector asked them for their hard hats, both men passed them over.
Govender returned, handing one to David “Wear this,” were the instructions.
David complied and followed the inspector, who made his way up the stairs and onto the veranda that had once wrapped around Peter’s house.
David ducked cautiously under the charred doorframe as he entered what had once been the hall. There was no roof, only blackened walls reaching up to where the ceiling had been, then bare skeletons of scorched roof bracings overhead. He was careful where he put his feet among the wet debris that had fallen onto the floor. There were ceiling boards, tiles, insulation and a hallway closet, partly charred and lying at an angle against the wall.
They walked past a section of the house that was so badly burnt that David couldn’t identify it. The next room must have been Peter’s office – a crumbled desk in a corner, the remains of bookshelves along a wall. They carried on, David following slowly and stepping around two firemen who were hacking with axes as they tried to get to smouldering embers beneath a heap of still smoking furniture and collapsed roof beams.
“Gentlemen?” Inspector Govender called across to a group of men standing at the furthermost section of the house. It was Peter’s bedroom, from what David could see, and the men were paramedics. “A moment please,” Govender requested.
They looked at David before filing silently out of the room.
“Doc, could you stay?”
A tall, elderly man in a white lab coat nodded and remained behind.
Govender walked across to the debris-cluttered room and its charred en suite bathroom. Peter’s bedroom had been badly ravaged. The king-sized double bed was barely intact; only the wrought-iron frame still stood. The bedside tables were destroyed, as was the flat-screen TV which had hung against the opposite wall, the plastic half-molten onto a burnt-out chest of drawers.
David followed Inspector Govender into the room and towards the bed. The iron bed frame had been screening it from the door, but as Govender led him around the bed David saw the body. It was encased in a black body bag, the zip of the upper section undone and Peter’s face uncovered.
“Is this Peter Calder, Mr Roth?” Inspector Govender asked.
It did not matter how much death David had seen, or how many bodies he had come across in his years of practising medicine, he still barely managed to hold it together as he looked at the remains.
They were almost unrecognisable; one side of Peter’s face now only glistening black and red meat. The flesh had fallen away from the left cheek, leaving a partial glimpse of teeth and jawbone along that side. David focused on the right side of the face, on the remains of the blond beard partly burnt away, on the single staring blue eye.
It was Peter Calder.
“Yes,” he managed to reply. “That’s Peter.”
Inspector Govender nodded at the tall doctor standing with them. The doctor wrote something down on his clipboard.
David kept staring at Peter’s face. He was remembering the last time he had seen the man. It had been in Dalton. At the Umvoti Sugar Mill. At another death.
And then David remembered the piece of paper.
CHAPTER SEVEN
David told the police about the accident at the mill. He told them about the piece of paper Peter had asked him to take.
Inspector Govender took out a pencil and pad and started taking notes.
“What was on the paper?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” David replied. “I didn’t see.”
Govender nodded. “You didn’t take it, even though he asked you to?”
“That would have been theft,” David told him. “Wouldn’t it?”
Govender gazed at him blandly. “Did he take it?” he asked.
David shrugged. “He could have. He was holding it before Ms Prinsloo came in. When I next looked his hands were in his pockets.”
“Did Ms Prinsloo see him take it?”
“I’m not sure. She may have suspected it.”
“Why do you think he took it?”
“It seemed important to him. He said it was evidence.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Murder, I think. Peter said the man who was killed in the shredder told him something, that there had been another accident or what he thought was an accident.”
Govender raised his eyebrows. “What was the name of the man Mr Calder was talking to?”
David shook his head. “I don’t know. Peter didn’t say.”
The inspector gave him a jaundiced stare and then returned his attention to his notebook. “So you don’t know the name of the man Mr Calder was talking to, the same man that was killed in the shredders?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know who the other accident involved,
