Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

56

I’ll tell you how one catches a fucking serial killer, Van Heerden, I’ll tell you, not with fucking theories and forecasts and personality profiles and psychological analyses, Van Heerden.” Nagel was driving, a brooding, tense spring at first, a thin man behind the steering wheel, and when we turned up on the N1 beyond the Pick ’n Pay Hypermarket in Brackenfell, he let it all out in that deep voice of his, but there was a new, sharper edge to him, a deep rage, and he talked, spit flecking the windshield, Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. “I’ll tell you, you do it with fucking hard police work, that’s how – elimination, Van Heerden.” He reached his arm out and half turned and the car swerved on the freeway, I didn’t know whether I should duck, and he picked up the dossier from the back seat and threw it in my lap.

“There it is, there’s your fucking textbook – study it. I don’t have a fucking degree, Van Heerden. I grew up too poor even to imagine something like that. I had to work for everything, I didn’t have time to fuck around on a campus and leaf through little books, I had to work, shitface. I couldn’t sit and meditate and philosophize and dream up theories, and that’s how one catches a fucking serial murderer – look in there, Van Heerden, open the fucking file and look at the forensics, look at the lists of carpet fibers and car models, look at the photos of the tire treads, look at the list of retreads, look at the list of motor registrations for fucking Volkswagen Kombi campers, look how I drew a line through them, one by one, Van Heerden, while you…”

And then he was quiet for a moment, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. We drove at 160 kilometers per hour on the N1, weaving through the traffic while he carried on his tirade and I thought he wanted to write us both off, but when he was suddenly silent, when he hesitated on the dreadful brink of direct accusation, I had a momentary insight into the pain I was responsible for.

Willem Nagel knew it was his own fault that he had lost Nonnie. He knew that it was what he had done that had driven her away, made her vulnerable. That was what stopped him from shooting me or hitting me or confronting me. His own culpability.

But he didn’t want to give her to me.

Perhaps he had hated me from the start. Perhaps what I had accepted as friendly teasing had been a far more serious game for him. Perhaps the yoke of inferiority about his background, his growing years in Parow, his infertility – all of it was too heavy a burden for him to realize that I was no threat. Perhaps.

He had hidden the evidence of the carpet fibers and tire treads and registration details from me like a jealous, selfish child who didn’t want to share his toys. This was the first I had heard of it and it made me realize how much all of it must have meant to him. To prove his superiority.

If he couldn’t keep Nonnie…

I said nothing. I didn’t open the dossier. I simply stared ahead.

It was only when we had passed the Green Point Stadium that he spoke again, in the same tone of voice, as though there had been no interruption. “Tonight we’ll see what kind of a policeman you are. Tonight it’s only you and me and George Charles Hamlyn, the owner of a Volkswagen Kombi camper and a fucking long piece of red ribbon. We’ll see, we’ll see…”

In Sea Point he parked near the ocean, took out his Z88, and let the magazine drop into his hand, then shoved it back and took off the safety catch and walked in the direction of Main Road with me following, sheepishly checking my weapon as well. Suddenly he walked into the foyer of a block of flats, pressed the button for the lift, not looking at me. The door opened and we walked in and we rose in silence and the only thought I had was that this wasn’t the way policemen went to fetch a suspect. He got out on a floor somewhere, high up – you could see the mountain, Signal Hill, and the lights against Table Mountain – and he went ahead and stopped at a door and said, “Knock, Van Heerden, then you fetch him. Show me you’re a fucking policeman,” and I knocked loudly and urgently, my pistol in my right hand, my left hand against the door.

I knocked again.

No reaction.

We didn’t hear the lift doors opening or closing. We merely sensed the movement and looked back and saw him in the long passage and his eyes widened and he spun round and ran, with Nagel after him and me behind Nagel, down the fire escape, five, six steps at a time.

I fell, somewhere on the way down, lost my footing and fell, banging my head. My pistol went off, a single shot, and Nagel laughed without looking round, a scornful laugh as he descended the stairs faster and faster. I got up, there was no time to think about the pain, down, down, down, ground level at last. He was up the street, we followed him, three men in a life-or-death race, and he ran up an alleyway and Nagel rushed round the corner and came to a sudden halt and then I stopped, too, almost bumping into Nagel, and when I looked up, George Charles Hamlyn stood there with a gun in his hand, aiming at us, and Nagel squeezed the trigger of his Z88 and there was nothing, only silence. He squeezed again, swore, a nanosecond that stretched into eternity. I aimed my pistol at Hamlyn and saw him aiming at Nagel and my head said, Let him shoot, let him shoot Nagel, wait, just wait one small second, just wait. My head, dear God, it came out of my head, and then he fired and Nagel fell, two shots as fast as light, and then the barrel of Hamlyn’s gun swung toward me and I shot and I couldn’t stop shooting, but it was too late, it was so fucking completely too late.