Free Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) by Ian Patrick

whose car he had broken into at the time.
    He retrieved the tin, took half the
cash, and stuffed it into three pockets. He then buried the tin again with the
remaining twelve thousand rands. Emergency fund for the future.
    Once he’d filled in the hole, he
patted down the disturbed soil, scattered the leaves and twigs, and stood up,
looking around in all directions. No witnesses. He concealed the spade under a
bush three or four paces away, and made his way back to the street. The SIG
nestled into the small of his back, held by his belt and covered by a shirt, a
cardigan, and a jacket.
    As
he walked he withdrew from his jacket pocket the cell-phone he had retrieved
from the bush in Blythedale. He powered up. The b attery was still OK, but barely. Less than ten per
cent remaining. He switched off.
      He walked a few blocks and eventually
hailed a taxi. Twenty minutes later he was making his way to a busy
intersection where hawkers and vendors were plying their trade. After testing
various options he bought a cell-phone charger from one of them. Standard
Nokia, early generation. Quick and easy to charge up with the right charger.
    Time for something to eat. Somewhere
with an electricity outlet next to his table, so that he could charge up while
eating, and while planning his next move.

 
    10.30.
    Ryder and Pillay were at the
KwaDukuza murder and rape scene. They were in separate cars, having come from
different cases each of them was handling and which needed their attention
notwithstanding the priority of this particular matter. They arrived almost at
the same time and parked their cars well off the verge, back from the area that
had been cordoned off and that was guarded by two uniformed constables. They
identified themselves to the constables and moved carefully within the areas
permitted by the police tape.
    Nadine Salm was there along with
other forensics people. While two of them were working in the bush on the
northern side of the R74, Nadine’s own focus was on the opposite side. Ryder
pointed her out to Pillay and they looked up the hill on the southern side of
the road to see her moving slowly through the bracken. Police tape marked
various spots on the slope. Nadine had an assistant who was taking photographs
and marking different locations with tape and luminous markers. The two of them
hunched down together, as the detectives watched them, and they appeared to be
discussing a specific point in the ground in front of them.
    Ryder wanted Pillay to meet Nadine
Salm, but it was clear that they would have to wait for her to come down. She
would be unlikely to appreciate two detectives trampling on her taped-out area.
So the detectives questioned the other two forensics people, who were more
accessible for the moment. They received replies to their questions on the more
detailed analysis being undertaken in the case of the hit on Cst. Xana, the
diagrammatic representation of the shootings based on the reports from the two
witnesses, the positions of the bodies in the car and on the road, and the
likely trajectory of the bullets. The two forensics officers deferred on the
last of these to Nadine, whose full report would materialise only later, they said, after full investigation. She was balancing very
carefully her own lifting of the
evidence, they told the detectives, with the testing of it, which in this particular case would be done not by
Nadine but by others.
    Ryder and Pillay both took notes and
compared cross-references about the two Isipingo constables, one who died in
the front of the car in her seatbelt and the other who had been in the back
with Lindiwe Xana and who had been shot dead in the road. They checked the
markers, showing the position of the bodies against the photographs they had
been given, and questioned the two forensics officers about various aspects of
the crime scene. One of them did a rough sketch on a clean sheet of flipchart
paper laid out over the bonnet of Pillay’s car, scribbling a