Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

30

Life, people, events, are complex, multilayered, multifaceted, with innumerable nuances.

In contrast with the poverty of my words. Even more: the propaganda value of every sentence I offer, the misdirection of everything I omit.

My only experience as a writer is in academia, and I am struggling to keep that out of these chronicles. The words seem heavy, the style forced, unyielding. But you will have to bear with me. It is the best I can do.

I must try to explain who I was in the year 1991, in the weeks when I waited for replies to my letters to the officers commanding Murder and Robbery Units across the country.

Because eventually the purpose of this story is to measure, to compare, to weigh: who I was, what the potential was of the man who, at thirty-one, obsessively started an academic murder investigation. To guess and to speculate about what might have been.

Because it was a time of possibilities. If I think back on all the aspects of my existence, it is astonishing to know that there were so many tiny details that could have influenced the course of events, that could have made the road fork.

I was on the edge of a conventional future, a hairbreadth away from it. If I hadn’t read those two articles, the Marnewick dossier would have held no interest and I might have followed another, more predictable road. Wendy and I might have been married today, Professor and Mrs. Z. van Heerden of Waterkloof Ridge, middle-aged and unhappy, the parents of two or three children being systematically poisoned by the frustration of an unfulfilled marriage.

Because, despite all I’ve said about Wendy Brice up to now, I wasn’t wholly unwilling to follow the conventional route.

You see, we were, for all practical purposes, a couple in Pretoria. Our circle of friends was defined – and they defined us. We were Zet and Wendy, we entertained and were entertained, we had our routine, our moments of flickering happiness, our togetherness. We were each other’s frame of reference, and we fitted into the neat structure of our social milieu.

I’m not about to deviate and philosophize about the ties that bind, but there is substantial pressure in a circle of friends who group you together. Individuality, personal goals, are lost in the collective name: Zet-and-Wendy. The circumstances conspire to force you to conform, to take your place in the larger destiny of humankind: to procreate, to let the genes live on, to play a conservative role. Even if I knew she wasn’t the One.

We were popular. We were in, an item, and we could sparkle. I would like to think we could make heads turn, the athletic dark-haired man and the pretty little blond. It all helped to establish our path, to define our route.

I didn’t protest too much. I didn’t visualize a clear alternative future without her. I was prepared to give in eventually, like a sacrificial lamb, to marry, have children, to follow my academic career to its logical conclusion, to play golf, cut grass, take my son to watch rugby, and possibly own a Mercedes and a swimming pool.

I didn’t yearn for it, but I didn’t fight it.

I was on the border of the conventional. Close.

Who was I then?

Above all, I believed in myself – and because of that, in others. I don’t think I ever sat down to philosophize about the conflict between good and evil in me and in others. Because I didn’t see myself as evil, the belief colored the lenses through which I saw everything. Evil was the deviation of a minority that I could study through the safety glass of academe. A phenomenon like a genetic aberration, scattered percentage-wise through the population, according to the natural statistics of evolution. And my task, as criminal psychologist, as criminologist and police scientist, was to read the figures and make deductions, to develop procedures, and to institute them, assisting those who had to execute them.

I was on the side of the good. Therefore I was good.

That’s who I was.

Despite the obsession with the Marnewick case. Perhaps because of my obsession.