The Score. HJ Golakai
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extrapolation of a story they’d told several times already. The last of the group, hard-faced and decked in a trench coat that was absurd considering the building heat, made a beeline for them.
Is it a coincidence that the police look the same every damn where, Vee wondered, or do they follow an international manual? A sudden surge of weariness cut through the shock, overcame, left her feeling like a jaded witness in a cheap private-eye novel, until the policeman tripped on the downhill verge of the lawn and nearly fell. She turned away to hide a giggle.
A crowd of gawkers, guests and staff from the lodge was in full fluster by the time the officers had questioned them. The single crime scene technician, whom Vee had anticipated would be an entire team working with scientific flourish, simply clicked away at different angles on a basic Kodak and cut the body down. Another stab twisted under her ribs as the massive pair of scissors worked through her silk scarf.
Chlöe sighed. “I feel cheated after all these years of watching CSI. We could’ve done that. Well, not take the body down ourselves, but …”
Vee tuned out. The best bit was kicking off. The cops formed a scrum of whispers for what felt like forever. They pulled Zintle, sobbing by now, aside. Head down with hands clamped under her armpits, she seemed to be speaking in fits and bursts. She shook her head and shrugged a lot. As the probing wore on, she stole guilty glances over her shoulder at Vee and Chlöe. One of the cops snuck a comforting arm around her shoulder and leered down the front of her uniform. Finally, Hardface Trench, who was clearly in charge, broke the huddle and set about creating another expert beeline. He had thrown off the coat, revealing a crisp blue shirt and pants of a brown so similar to his complexion that from afar he looked naked from the waist down.
“Ohhh Gooood …” Chlöe groaned. Vee steeled her spine and set her expression to ‘concerned but oblivious’. In the pockets of her jeans, her fingers started to tremble as they stroked the rectangle of paper.
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Hardface scowled in Vee’s direction, not sparing Chlöe a single glance.
“Voinjama Johnson.” She let him blink, purse his lips, mouth the name soundlessly many times as he scribbled in a battered notebook, and offered no help. She wondered what highly revised version he’d put down. Probably just Johnson; most people went with Johnson.
“It’s my understanding you know this man.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hhhmmph. He’s one …” He squinted, flipping at leisure through the notebook.
“Gavin Berman,” Vee blurted.
Hardface stopped and raised his head very slowly. “You just said you didn’t know him.”
“You asked if I know him, not if I know his name.”
The policeman’s head reared a barely perceptible inch as his eyes hardened. His body language computed a rapid adjustment from ‘the easy way’ to ‘the hard way’, now clearly the only option on offer. “Eh-hehhh. Would you mind coming with me so long? So we can work out how everyone here knows everyone else, which you seem to know a lot about.” His arm executed an upswing as if to shepherd her along the path. Neither Vee nor Chlöe, crowded to her back like a fledgling to its mother, fell in line. The arm dropped. He flicked his head in the direction of the front entrance and abruptly strode off, a click of his tongue punching the air.
“Find Lovett now. Start with that blonde’s room, then his,” Vee whispered to Chlöe. “I doubt they’ve left yet. And call Nico.”
“I thought we weren’t calling Nico!”
“Change of plans,” Vee muttered.
Chapter One
“Johnson …”
Vee flipped a hand for silence, frowning over the document open on the flatscreen. It was all over the place. Jumbled, wordy in the wrong places, the punch sucked out of it. The online team were a pack of butchers – why else would every thing of beauty that passed through their feral mitts come out the other end looking, sounding if that were possible, like a mangled carcass? Prose was doomed to play the ugly stepchild to graphics in their world, as if readers only visited the digital page to look at pretty pictures. She chopped a few limp lines off the third paragraph, thought better of it and deleted it completely. “Dammit!” she threw her hands up. “What’ve you done?”
“This,” Darren Februarie tapped the screen, “is a masterpiece.”
“This is shit spattered on a bathroom wall, that’s how readable it is.” She readjusted her chair. “Last time I give you anything for comments.”
“C’mon. You’re not gonna do a full re-write while I –”
“Febs, hush your mouth. This is what you do, make a mess and throw it in my lap to fix at the last minute. Who told you to merge all this? It was separate for good reason.”
“It read better.”
“It read better? Did you actually read this tripe back to yourself after you butchered it, or is comprehension another handicap of your Bantu education?”
“Ohh-hooo! Bitch switch on, people!” Darren guffawed, then slowly, very carefully, raised his middle finger in her face. Vee bared and snapped her teeth as if to bite it off, sending him stumbling backwards, laughing some more. She swivelled back around, dead serious as she sliced the cursor across the screen, muttering to herself. “You are no Hemingway, and I’m no Mark Zuckerberg. Instead of trying to do a mash-up, let’s play to strengths until …” The rest of the sentence – ‘I’m officially part of the team’ – soured in the back of her throat. She shook her head. “Well, just until.” The cursor flitted like a scalpel, ripping out the heart of the story gasping for air amidst entrails of inconsequential fluff, and transplanted it to the top of the page. “Otherwise we end up with this.”
“Fine. I defer to your brilliance only – she’s coming!”
Vee jerked one eye over his head and through the door to the newsroom. A missile of purple bore down on them in the form of a short, plump brunette. She clicked ‘save’, wiggled out the flash drive, tossed it at Februarie’s rapidly retreating back and sprang from the chair.
She didn’t get far.
“Ah, Voinjama!” Swathes of plum crowded out the nearest escape route. Vee groaned inwardly as Saskia Schoeman executed her trademark plastic smile, lips stretching by fractions like they were being tugged at the corners by invisible drawstrings. “There you are.”
“Here I am. Where I always … am.”
“Indeed you are,” Saskia sniffed. “One would think you were hiding from me!”
“Haha. One could think that. And before you ask, I’m headed there already.”
“Wonderful.” The smile cranked up a few extra tight degrees. Trouble brewing, Vee cautioned herself. Experience had shown there was very little difference between office manager and Gestapo in Saskia’s mind. The witch’s cauldron was always on the boil, and as the unfortunate newbies, she and Chlöe often served as the freshest ingredients.
“Oh, and when you run into your, umm … friend, perhaps you can impress upon her the importance of attending my meetings.” Again, hard to miss how Schoeman’s saliva practically curdled at the prospect of using the word ‘assistant’, a luxury no-one below her was supposed to have. “We start in fifteen. If you can spare her, that is.”
Vee ignored the jibe, frowning. “What meeting?” She thought for a second. “Oh, the interns’ thing. Chlöe’s not an intern.”
“She’s not a journalist either, is she?” Saskia’s head did a sly cat’s tilt.
Vee primmed her lips. “Thought that was two-thirty this afternoon, with the group from Urban.” She flicked her watch: closing on nine-thirty