Silent Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

the cover of the monthly police magazine: ‘City detectives receive a warm welcome and offers of help from the local uniform branch’. The lack of departmental rivalry should have pleased him but instead he was irritated. Pride and loyalty to your town and your people demanded more than a passive, ‘When you’re ready, you know where to find us.’ Bagley surrendered control of a murder case in his own territory without a struggle. Only a bone-idle policeman did that.
    *
    Emmanuel reversed the Chevrolet onto Greyling Street. Roselet’s main artery was a wide dirt lane with shops for local white farmers and tourists escaping the humidity in the city. The street included a farm supply depot, a small café decorated with blue and white gingham curtains and a general store with D AWSON’S painted across the window in gold leaf.
    ‘The mother was right,’ Shabalala said when the police station was out of sight. ‘The constable did not look for Amahle.’
    ‘Not for a second.’ Emmanuel checked the houses on the left-hand side. ‘Weighed up against a break-in at the general store, a missing black girl was easy to ignore. I’m not saying it’s right, but you know how it works.’
    ‘I understand well the way of things.’ Shabalala pointed to a yellow fence fronting a huge block of land that dipped away from the road. ‘This is the place, Sergeant.’
    ‘Did you notice anything unusual about Bagley besides that vein on his forehead?’ Emmanuel pulled into the driveway and parked.
    ‘ Yebo . His eyes went to the station house, to the cigarette, to the yard but never to us.’
    ‘He was either ashamed of doing nothing or he was lying about something. Talk to the native constables tomorrow and find out what you can about Bagley. Behind-the-scenes stuff.’
    ‘I will,’ said Shabalala as they got out of the car.
    The scent of roses hung in the air and sunlight shone on the whitewashed walls of the doctor’s cottage. The garden was in bloom and alive with bees. A stream meandered along the far edge of the property and on the other side a green valley stretched to distant mountains wreathed in cloud.
    ‘Second round of introductions,’ Emmanuel said as they took a narrow stone path to the front door. He rang a gold bell mounted on the front wall and waited. No answer.
    ‘It’s Sunday. The doctor might still be at church,’ he said and rang again.
    Floorboards creaked inside and Emmanuel automatically reached for his ID. He checked that he had the right one. For reasons that he could not explain, he still carried the now redundant small green identification card stamped with the words ‘mixed race’. To protect his sister’s white identity and under pressure from the Security Branch, Emmanuel had opted to secretly accept racial re-classification to ‘mixed race’ and expulsion from the Jo’burg CID. After his re-classification he moved to Durban and got a job at the dockyard and avoided the attention of the police. He might have spent the rest of his life wielding a hammer and hauling freight if not for Colonel van Niekerk, who reinstated him into the detective branch as a reward for solving a brutal triple murder. With two new pieces of paper, he became white again and a detective.
    Common sense said he should burn the old papers and forget the eight months he’d spent on the wrong side of the colour line. But he could not. Maybe the contradictory ‘European’ and ‘mixed race’ papers reflected the tangled path his life had taken so far. He grew up a white kaffir child in Sophiatown, a slum on the outskirts of Jo’burg, became a teenage outcast stranded among the ‘chosen’ Afrikaner people on the veldt, then went to war in Europe and returned with medals for killing people. Now he held a South African police ID and lived in a schizophrenic society that he felt he’d never fit into.
    The door handle turned. Emmanuel held up his ID and smiled. It was the least he could do. He was about to ruin the