Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

18

Boet Marnewick found his wife’s kneeling body in the living room, her hands tied behind her back with masking tape, her feet bound with a silk stocking. Forty-six stab wounds, made with a sharp instrument, in her stomach and her back, her nipples sliced off, her genitals mutilated beyond recognition. Blood everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room. A murder that shook the community, caused fear and hatred, and was a subject of conversation for years to come. Stilfontein was rough, a town that knew and understood alcoholism and wife beating and immorality and adultery and assault. Even manslaughter. And, occasionally, murder. But not this kind of murder. The deadly blow in a hotheaded, drunken moment, after an excess of alcohol – that was possible to understand, once in a while.

But this was in cold blood, done by a stranger, an intruder, a thief who, taking his time and with malice aforethought, mutilated and murdered a defenseless woman.

I was in my room, busy with homework, when there was a knock at the door. My mother answered and I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone of her voice made me walk to the living room and there was my detective, my Louis L’Amour Samaritan, and suddenly my heart beat in my throat because my mother looked shocked.

“Sir…” I said, and swallowed, and then my mother said, “Baby Marnewick is dead, Zet.”

He pretended not to know me and it was only when he left that he squeezed my shoulder, looked at me, and gave me a small smile. But before that he asked his questions. Had we seen anything? Heard anything? What did we know about the Marnewicks?

And I sat there with my fantasies and my intimate knowledge and my voyeurism and merely affirmed my mother’s negative replies. We knew nothing.

We got the details later. From neighbors and the Klerksdorp Record and Die Vaderland and Die Volksblad and even the Sunday Times. A gruesome sex killing had made Stilfontein national news. I read the reports over and over again and listened with the closest attention to each bit of news a new source could supply.

The details upset me. Partly because of my own unclean thoughts about Baby Marnewick. And the fact that they, however slight the connection, linked me to the murderer who had cut and stabbed, driven by lust. Because I had lusted as well – even though our fantasies had been so dramatically different.

And partly because a human being, someone in Stilfontein, one of us, was capable of such a revolting deed.

They never found him. There were no fingerprints. There was semen on Baby Marnewick’s body, on her buttocks and on her back, but this was in the years before DNA testing and the long arm of the test tube that could reach past your race and sex and blood group to the imprint of your body, that could decipher a microscopic hair or thread from a piece of clothing and dissect you more thoroughly than a scalpel.

There were rumors. Boet Marnewick was a suspect but that was nonsense, he had been a kilometer underground at the time of the murder. There were rumors of the traveling murderer. Another story was of a man from her past, from Johannesburg, and there was even one about the Scot from whom Boet had taken her.

But they never found the killer.

Day after day I stared at the wooden fence and thought about the strangest things. If Betta Wandrag hadn’t interfered, would I have listened at the fence? Perhaps heard something that could have saved Baby Marnewick? Wondered why. How? How did someone do something like that? How do you murder so brutally and without conscience, so bloody and cruel? And who.

Who could have planned something like that? Because rumor would have it that he had brought the masking tape with him, that he had worn gloves. Premeditated, planned murder.

Toward the end of the year my mother put the application forms for Potchefstroom University in front of me, made herself comfortable, and said we had speculated about my plans for a long time. Now it was time to go to university and make my choices, because it was better to go to university first and then do the compulsory army training because graduates quickly became officers, even if I only wanted to become a teacher.

“I’m not going to university, Ma.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m joining the police.”