Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

38

There’s another woman, isn’t there?” Wendy Brice had insisted, her mouth stiff, her body language ready to portray the betrayed woman.

And when I think back, in all honesty I can’t blame her. Because why should any right-minded man on the edge of a doctorate and a great career in academe, exchange it for Murder and Robbery in Cape Town? Why would anyone give up the status of university lecturer to join the derided ranks of the SAP?

I tried to explain it in the bloody summer heat of a December afternoon in Pretoria. I walked up and down and up and down in the small living room of our flat and talked about the way I’d found myself in the search for the Masking Tape Murderer, how I eventually discovered the hunter in me, my true calling flowering like a vision, explained over and over again my desire to exchange theory for practice, until I suddenly realized she didn’t want to understand, she didn’t want to be it, Wendy Brice didn’t want to be Mrs. Plod the Policeman’s Wife. Her dream, her vision of herself, didn’t allow it, and I had to choose between her and the work that Colonel Willie Theal had dangled in front of me like a challenge.

I made my choice. I was certain it was the right one. I walked to the bedroom, took a suitcase out of the cupboard. She heard the sounds and knew. She sat in the living room and cried while I packed her future with all my clothes. Wendy, who had invested so much energy, so many words in her dream.

Let me tell you a secret. Months after the death of Nagel, I wondered about all my choices – and the effects of my decision on her life and on my own life. And wondered what it would have been like and realized again the pain I had caused her. I got into my Corolla and drove to Pretoria to visit her, to give her the satisfaction of knowing that the scales of justice had been evenly balanced, that the way I had acted toward her had been revenged. “She doesn’t work here any longer,” they told me at English Lit, and gave me an address in Waterkloof, and I drove there and stopped in front of a house and simply sat and watched, and her husband in the Mercedes came home late in the afternoon and two toddlers, a son and a daughter, rushed out, “Daddy, Daddy,” and then it was Wendy wearing a pinafore and a smile with an embrace for them all, this family that disappeared into the big house with the syringas in the garden, and surely a swimming pool and a patio and a brick barbecue at the back, and I sat there in my Corolla, unemployed and broken and fucked up, and I didn’t even have it in me to cry for myself.