Free Silent Valley by Malla Nunn

had come as a surprise to her mother.
    Shabalala stopped at a grassy area between two large boulders. They sat down and waited. A breeze lifted the scent of wet rocks from the valley floor. Emmanuel took off his hat and set it down, letting the air cool him.
    Stones skittered down the rock behind the detectives and a girl’s voice said, ‘Do not go to the Dlamini kraal . Philani is not there.’
    Emmanuel turned slowly and saw Amahle’s little sister crouched in the rocky field like a sprite. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.
    She shook her head, refusing to give the information: smart move for a child.
    ‘How do you know the gardener is not home?’ he said.
    ‘His mother came to the chief yesterday morning and said her son did not come home from work at Little Flint Farm on Friday night. He is missing.’
    Shabalala picked up a stone from the grass and examined it closely. ‘Could it be that Philani’s mother is not telling the truth to protect her son?’
    ‘Mandla and the impi went to the mother’s kraal .’ The girl twisted her glass bracelets one way and then the other around her wrist: a nervous habit. ‘They did not find Philani even after breaking the hut apart and scattering the goats and chickens.’
    ‘Amahle knew Philani Dlamini?’ Emmanuel nudged the conversation back to the dead girl. That Mandla was a major problem for the investigation he already knew.
    ‘They worked for baas Reed at Little Flint Farm. Philani tended the garden and Amahle tended the white women in the big house.’
    Shabalala smiled encouragement. ‘Philani and Amahle were friends.’
    The little sister stopped twisting the bracelets and said, ‘Philani followed her up the mountains and down again and she did not chase him away.’
    Walking together over mountains was love in a child’s mind. Emmanuel thought she might be right. He took his notebook and pen from his jacket and scribbled the word ‘flowers’ next to Philani’s name. Ordinary Zulus did not bring flowers to the dead but a Zulu man employed by white farmers as a gardener might have adopted the European habit.
    ‘Tell me about this chief from Umkomazi,’ Shabalala said. Emmanuel had filled him in on the bride price and the chief’s bitter disappointment. ‘He is rich and handsome, I’m sure.’
    ‘He is fat and slow and smells of cow dung,’ she replied flatly. ‘The great chief agreed to the marriage because he is greedy and not fit to work in the gold mines in Jo’burg. Amahle had no love for him.’
    ‘Huh . . .’ Shabalala was impressed by the blunt assessment. At near eleven years old she could already tell the wheat from the chaff and silver from tin. His wife, too, told things as she saw them. ‘Perhaps there was another for whom Amahle had love but that she kept hidden from the chief and from your mother?’
    The girl looked away and began to spin the bracelets around her slim wrist, faster and faster. Emmanuel took his cue from Shabalala and focused on the stones peppering the field. They might each have been sitting alone in the grass and listening to the chirp of crickets.
    ‘There was one other,’ the girl said. ‘A man with a strange name.’
    ‘Mmm . . . ?’ Shabalala breathed out, keeping the conversation going without asking a direct question.
    ‘Mr Insurance Policy,’ the little sister said in English.
    Black Africans adopted names from a rich array of sources. Emmanuel knew a juvenile delinquent called Justice, a housemaid named Radio and a shoeshine boy with the evocative moniker Midnight Express Train. Every name was linked to a real story, an actual event that had shaped their lives. Where had an Insurance Policy sprung from in an isolated valley connected by a network of dirt paths? This bastion of shimmering cliffs and meandering rivers was surely one of the few places on earth that travelling insurance salesmen had not penetrated.
    ‘Did you ever meet this Mr Insurance Policy?’ he asked.
    ‘No.’ The girl