Free Silent Valley by Malla Nunn Page B

grass and native forest. The sky stretched in endless blue over Mandla’s vast backyard.
    Two detectives looking for one gardener in all that landscape and they were getting tired. Emmanuel hoped Philani was getting tired too.

SIX
    E mmanuel dressed at dawn in a shaft of pale yellow light. Clouds the colour of India ink broke the crests of the far mountains. Birds sang from the branches of the jacaranda trees in the hotel garden, too late to wake him.
    He left his jacket hanging in the stained pine wardrobe with mothballs piled in the corners and took the stairs to a side exit. A nightwatchman in a long overcoat and gumboots shone his torch across the garden and the patio. Emmanuel slowed and let the beam find him. He raised his hand in greeting and got a ‘Morning, ma baas ’ from the watchman.
    Emmanuel thought of Shabalala, billeted for the night and for the remainder of the investigation three miles north of town in the black location. The native branch detective had probably already left the back room of the cement-block dwelling with its one window and outdoor toilet, and would be making his way to Roselet. By black location standards, the local shop owner’s house where Shabalala was staying was deluxe but it was many rungs below Roselet’s ‘Europeans-only’ guesthouse and eight-room faux-Tudor hotel.
    Shabalala did not complain. He thanked Emmanuel for the lift when dropped off at the house late yesterday afternoon and declined a pick-up for this morning. How many words and thoughts were sealed in the Zulu policeman’s mouth because all that was required in the presence of whites was a ‘Yes, ma baas ’, ‘No, ma baas ’, and ‘Thank you, ma baas ’?
    A gravel path cut through the formal garden to the rear of the hotel and led on to a smaller path signposted ‘S CENIC W AY ’. This curled around the outer edges of town and ended at the mouth of Greyling Street. ‘For guests who enjoy a brisk walk after breakfast or before lunch,’ the rotund receptionist had explained over a map of the hotel grounds and an exhaustive list of ‘things to do while in Roselet’. Investigating the murder of a Zulu girl was not one of the recommended activities.
    The Reed family were not home when he and Shabalala had called by Little Flint Farm late the day before. The essential facts of the investigation – time of death, last known sighting of the victim alive, suspects and motive – were still unconfirmed. But other worries, less obvious than the puzzle of the murder, had awakened him in the pitch black of his hotel room.
    Clumps of sugarbush protea on either side of the path glittered with dew and the air was chilly. Goosebumps prickled Emmanuel’s skin and the knot of heat at the centre of his chest slowly dissipated. It felt good to be cold, to wake from the tangle of images that surfaced only briefly and then disappeared into a void without knitting together into a fluid dream.
    Eight years out of his infantry uniform and he’d learned, in an incomplete way, to defeat the dead that visited him in his dreams. Wake up, switch on the light, breathe deeply and name the place where your body lay wrapped in a patchwork quilt: Roselet. At the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains. South Africa.
    Last night was different. No firestorms or missiles or swollen rivers washing the dead out to sea broke his sleep. Instead, he remembered Sophiatown. The family shack with the corrugated-iron roof held down by stones. His sister, Olivia, playing in the dirt street with Indira, the Indian shopkeepers’ daughter, the smoke from winter fires blanketing the sky above them. And his parents, sitting in the doorway of their crumbling home laughing at a joke he’d not heard. They were relaxed and beautiful, even in the dusty township light.
    Emmanuel walked on. He had unwittingly unlocked a forgotten memory of his mother and father happy and in love.
    The heat in his chest was in the exact spot where Baba Kaleni had laid his hand.