Blue Sunday. Irma Venter
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the room and climb out again, this time with my backside to the street. I drop one foot and feel around until I find the ledge. I look down, let go and land loudly on the reddish-brown roof tiles.
Someone as tall as Willem would likely be able to do it more quietly. I turn around and walk towards the carport.
Whoa!
My feet slip out from under me and I slide down the pitched roof until I’m against the house’s wall. I stay there, back where I was, under Willem’s bedroom. My left side is definitely going to be bruised tomorrow.
I take a deep breath and turn onto my back. Wonder for a moment about the view to the left. Enormous plane trees obscure the neighbours’ view of the Van Zyl house, and pruned thorn hedges protect their boundary wall effectively against any mischief the Van Zyls might bring.
The neighbours wouldn’t have seen Willem slipping out. But Cath would have; her bedroom window is right next to Willem’s.
Maybe she knew what her brother was doing. Maybe he slipped out often.
What if Lafras and Katerien were the kind of parents who micro-managed their children’s lives? What if it made Willem furious? Don’t the cameras reveal that something in this house wasn’t quite right?
And what if Cath slipped out with Willem sometimes? Or did she just keep quiet, as brothers and sisters sometimes do? Everyone says the two of them were good friends in spite of their age difference.
No, AJ, I scold myself. Forget other nights. Focus on what happened on that Sunday night.
I look up at the handful of stars shimmering in the evening sky. Okay. It’s the night of 24 December. I am Willem. It’s just before one am. I walk in through the gates at the Stables. I hope the worst is over. That my family is dead. That I can sit here and cry crocodile tears about the break-in and how I wasn’t here to stop it. If I’m lucky, the life insurance pays out quickly.
But things don’t work out as expected. My father fights like a madman. The men take what they can. They don’t want to wait for the money from the life insurance. They are injured and scared and they don’t trust me. They lie in wait for me to get rid of me. I have to flee.
I turn onto my stomach, get up and limp towards the carport again, searching in the dark. When I reach the end of the tiles, I climb carefully onto the corrugated-iron roof. I lie flat, penlight in my mouth. Swing one leg over, my foot blindly feeling for the steel upright.
The torch swings back and forth as I try to find a foothold.
Hang on …
I pull my leg back with difficulty and stand up. The light just caught something … There, deep in the gutter. What is that?
I look into the dark mouth of the downpipe. Just leaves and sticks. Probably my imagin—
No.
It’s a … phone? I swear it’s a phone.
2
Thursday, 8 February, 20:26
It’s an Apple iPhone, no doubt password or fingerprint protected. After more than six weeks in the gutter it’s dead as a doornail. It’s pure luck that it lodged diagonally in the downpipe. I had to fetch Lafras’s braai tongs to get it out.
Maybe Willem lost the phone when he slipped out on Christmas Eve or when he fled. The rubber cover – black and angular – suggests that it might be a man’s. I can’t imagine how else it could have landed in the gutter.
But the bad luck is as big as the good luck. Did it have to be a bloody iPhone? It’s going to be almost impossible to unlock. Apple isn’t interested in working with the police, not even when it comes to terrorists wanting to blow up the USA.
Maybe Farr can find someone who can help, but I doubt it. And even if they do help, the courts will reject it as evidence.
I don’t even want to think about the recent storms. How many times has the phone been soaked through in the past six weeks? Three times? Six times? If I’m really lucky, there’s a backup of the phone in the cloud – which someone will also have to break open for me.
Wasn’t it the Israelis who recently helped the FBI to unlock that iPhone 5? The one that belonged to the terrorist?
I walk inside and put the phone in a plastic bag for Farr. Look at my watch. Half past eight. Tomorrow I have a whole lot of interviews, including one with Annabel Kirkpatrick.
Is there anything urgent I need to go and do at home? Eat? Nah. And Mrs Darling will feed Noah – there must be three tins of cat food left in her cupboard.
I walk to Katerien’s study, switch on the CD player and sit down in her armchair. I don’t know the music. It’s a rousing choir, men sounding like they’re marching off to make war.
The woman remains a bit of a mystery to me. I pick the book up off the chair’s armrest. A World History of Carpets and Tapestries. Right at the back is a shopping list written on the back of a Pick n Pay slip.
Pick n Pay, not Woolies or some or other organic market where the rich usually buy their groceries.
Bread, fish, potatoes and milk. “Thanks, Willem!” it says at the bottom of the list.
Katerien probably wanted to send him to the shop. The handwriting is hers – it’s the same as the notes in the diary on her desk.
It’s strange, this list, stranger than the paper Katerien used to write it on. Bread is right at the top of the till slip: In-store brown R7,95.
Who knows exactly how much a loaf of bread costs? What woman, living in a house like this one, knows the price of a loaf down to the cent? That’s not something you suddenly learn when your husband’s debts pile up. Knowing the price of bread – that’s linked to your childhood.
The price of all the items Willem had to buy is neatly totalled, with R190,25 circled as the total.
Why would she do that? Doesn’t she trust Willem, or is it just their financial position gnawing at her? Or is this just who she is? A down-to-the-cent person?
Lafras’s money matters were desperate and Katerien couldn’t help. She didn’t work. Her life was far more interesting than the average office routine, and her hobby – freediving – was pricey.
According to Sydney’s notes, Lafras had a mountain of personal debt, with very little money coming in. Over and above the services he suspended, like private security, he was struggling to pay the home loan and car instalments every month. His e-mails promise his creditors that a business transaction at the end of May would change everything. He pleads with the banks to be patient with him.
The only payments that are up to date are the children’s studies, pocket money and hobbies. School. University, rugby and ballet. Which makes me suspect that the kids didn’t know about Lafras’s money predicament.
Katerien even stopped diving.
She and Lafras travelled to Ibiza six years ago where, quite incidentally, they watched the freediving world championship. She fell in love with the sport at the ripe old age of 42. It was something for which she had a completely natural talent – Annabel says she’d always had a fearless love of water.
By the time she disappeared, she could hold her breath for up to eight minutes and dive to a depth of eighty metres, without equipment.
Freediving is so unknown in South Africa that no one in the media really took notice. For the newspapers, it is an absurdity presenting itself as an odd fact in an even odder crime story.
I walk to the furthest cupboard in the study and open it. A freediver doesn’t need much equipment: swimming costume, diving goggles and fins. It’s the travel and practice sessions that are expensive.
How does it feel to dive so deep? Into the sea and the salt?
Eighty metres is deep. Twenty-four storeys deep.
I