Devil Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 1) Read online

  Devil Dealing

  by Ian Patrick

  Text copyright © 2015 Ian Patrick

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction and except in the case of historical fact any resemblance to any persons living or dead is coincidental

  Cover designed by RGS

  Dedication

  To my wife and sons for love, support and glorious music.

  To honorable men and women in uniform.

  To my mother, who reads crime thrillers more avidly than anyone I know.

  OTHER BOOKS BY IAN PATRICK

  GUN DEALING

  PLAIN DEALING

  DEATH DEALING

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Glossary

  PREFACE

  This crime thriller is the first in a series of four stand-alone books. Each can be read as an independent self-contained volume. Or they can be read in sequence or out of sequence as four related episodes in which the central themes and major characters reappear in other episodes, the intention being to provide an overall organic and cohesive narrative for the quartet.

  The four individual volumes explore moral and ethical choices made by police in their day-to-day confrontation with rampant and brutal crime in contemporary South Africa. The texts are fictional but based on field research and the author’s physical exploration of the local environment, including actual locations where different events take place. Interviews were conducted with detectives and forensics experts both currently active and retired, and with local observers and participants, including victims of crime. The action aims for authenticity and plausibility, and strives to be resonant of conditions on the ground. The research included detective-guided tours of front-line scenes in the war against crime, and of police facilities, protocols and procedures. Actual events are reflected alongside fictive events, although all characters are fictional.

  In the thoroughly absorbing task of writing this work and its sequels over a few years, I owe an inestimable debt to many people. Some of them prefer to remain anonymous. Others have graciously allowed me to name them. To all of them I offer enormous thanks and gratitude.

  First and foremost in the ranks of people to whom I am grateful are my wife and two sons. As much as I value reading, and however indebted I am to the craftspeople of literature throughout history who have instilled in me a love of words, I cannot find language that will sufficiently express my gratitude to them. They have tolerated with great patience my frequent retreats into the silent joys of research and creative writing.

  The detective who took me into KwaMashu in April 2015 to study some of his work on the front line, as he described it, had no idea that he would be taking me into the teeth of a dramatic xenophobic storm on that particular day. He allowed me to sit with him while we watched drug-dealers at work. He explained in meticulous detail exactly what was going down before my eyes, and how the team of children (for that’s what they were) played their individual roles in a sophisticated series of drug trades. We watched as the various role-players passed money and contraband on the street, as cars and motorcycles and pedestrians slipped past the youthful traders and quick sleight-of-hand saw packages and money being exchanged, unnoticed by most of the people passing in the road.

  After taking me to different locations to watch the kinds of crime that permeate society on many street-corners, it was time for the detective to return me to base. As he did so, we ran into a horde of people caught in the throes of massive protest. Violent action hit the streets and the country reeled in shock at what became media headlines for the following week about xenophobic violence. The detective ensured that I was returned safely to my base in Durban, and I wrote that night into the early hours of the morning, trying to capture the flavour of what I had seen that day. I begged my detective to allow me to identify him and thank him for his work, but he declined. Nevertheless, although he felt more comfortable remaining anonymous in this prefatory statement, he kindly allowed me to re-name after him one of my characters who appears in the sequel to this volume. I am pleased to pay homage to this extraordinarily helpful detective in this way, and I thank him for his time, dedication, interest, and unwavering commitment in the mammoth task of South African police work.

  I am grateful to many people for their willingness to correct my misconceptions, and to enable me to adjust some of the nuances in my writing in the interests of ensuring more authentic depiction of the day-to-day work of the police. Any remaining mistakes are entirely mine.

  I am indebted to Gerrit Smit for very helpful detailed conversations about police procedure and protocol. This ranged from day-to-day interactions among police both in the field and in the station office, to procedures and protocols and actions and behaviour at crime scenes. In particular he gave me wonderfully detailed descriptions covering the work of police divers (who feature primarily in another sequel to this volume).

  My thanks go also to Captain Saigal Singh. The enormous wealth of his experience as both a detective and a forensics specialist were particularly exciting for me after I had studied different courses on forensics and crime scene management. Having him hold up a mirror of extraordinary reality to what I had until then only studied academically, was most helpful.

  Penny Katz was helpful beyond any call of duty. Apart from referring me to front-line detectives she gave me insights into aspects of crime and policing that have proved enriching beyond what I had imagined possible. To interview victims of crime, and to go some small way toward understanding the pain and loss and trauma involved, has greatly affected my approach to research and writing. My personal experience of family trauma as a result of crime plays only a background role in my writing, but Penny allowed me insight into facets of this experience that I greatly value.

  Some potential interviewees chose to decline my requests for interviews, and of course I entirely respect their choices in this regard. In one or two other cases, after initial readiness to participate the contact went cold and emails and phone-calls were simply ignored. I suspect that this was not unrelated to me mentioning that I would also be covering police corruption in my work. But even in those cases willing and helpful comments were received from people working in the very same offices as those who ignored my calls and emails.

  I extend grateful thanks, therefore, to many people, ranging from police Brigadiers to Detectives and Constables both retired and currently active, from victims of crime to forensic investigators, and from my family to friends and colleagues. Many of them don’t know exactly how helpful they have been to me even in brief communications or by referring me to other sources. Hennie Heymans, a retired policeman in Pretoria, has done extraordinary work in preserving the historical record on policing in South Africa, and he answered my questions promptly and with extensive knowledge of the past.

  For any shallowness, superficiality or mistakes that might remain in my text, I apologise to these sources. I can only offer the excuse that the act of writing transports me into realms of satisfaction and joy. Not a day goes by during which I do not marvel at my good fortune in being able to create characters both evil and understandable. I live each day with them, exploring their thoughts and actions, enjoying their deviousness, their energy, their joyfulness, and the excitement of their lives.

  I derive great pleasure from coaxing my characters out of the shadows and refining and polishing them in an attempt to reflect authenticity and plausibility. Some of them move me emotionally, and some of them ar
e devilishly evasive and lying villains. But they all fascinate me and I still carry them in my head. I want to know what makes them tick, and I want to know their counterparts in real life. I have gone out into the field to find my fictitious characters because I insist on plausibility and authenticity in fiction. Otherwise how will we learn about our lives?

  Ian Patrick, August 2015

  PROLOGUE

  The eyes were the objects that attracted much of the whispered discussion about his looks.

  It was not just that the eyeballs bulged more prominently than most, though that feature in itself produced discomfort in anyone meeting him for the first time. No, it was rather the knotted red – almost purple – arterial networks bursting out of the yellow sclera, and appearing distinctly separated from the corneas by very dark limbal rings, that produced most of the discussion.

  ‘His eyes are evil,’ they whispered.

  What was it about them? No-one could accurately describe them, or put their finger on what it was about them that so unnerved the observer.

  They were like deep wells. The opaque dark brown of the irises was so near in colour to the black coal of the centre that the effect was of pupils unnaturally large and permanently dilated. When he glanced at you, it was as if he was staring at you. When he stared at you it was as if you were in the presence of the devil. So they said…

  The eyes were the last things the young freckle-faced Afrikaner saw as the life drained out of him.

  MONDAY

  01.35.

  He sat naked in the thick bush, facing the sea; eyes fixed straight ahead on the everlasting nothing. The clamour of insects and frogs, heightened by his arrival, settled into an incessant low hum with counterpointed croaks. He leaned back against the arthritic tree. The glint of moonlight in the black centre of each of his eyes worried even the most adventurous of nocturnal creatures peering through the foliage at him. They might have thought, or they might have sensed, that his eyes were evil.

  The only evidence of the sea in the implacable blackness of the night was the crashing of waves two hundred metres away, and the jagged moon-path on the water lurching from the horizon, searching for him. To right and left, far out, he saw pinprick lights of ships at anchor. They crawled up the south coast and down the north coast, waiting their turn to disgorge cargoes known and unknown at Durban’s overworked wharves.

  He inhaled deep into his lungs the toxic mix of the nyaope joint held lightly between a thumb and two fingers. The pungent fumes seemed to him to work their magic in two ways. With each inhalation he felt intense and indescribable hatred of everything that came to mind. At the same time he felt physically empowered, as if the drug infused him with unimaginable strength. As if he could fearlessly take on any adversary that might confront him. Such was the power of nyaope.

  He sat in cold contemplation, waiting for the salt water to drip and dry away before he would put back on the clothes he had earlier draped over the bushes.

  Six hundred metres away to his right a drunken sixty-something man, a portly British tourist, stumbled toward him over the soft beach sand broken in parts by succulent ground creepers. Stumbled in drunken expectation on the arm of a young prostitute. Slouched toward a messy death that would involve less than a minute of traumatic pain. A death that would preclude the much longer, much slower, agony that would have been his if the as yet undiagnosed cancer in his spine had had its chance to mature.

  The man in the bush was not yet aware of the oncoming couple. Memory fixed his eyes on the horizon. And beyond, a million miles away. As he stretched back against the tree his tortured memory mustered twenty-three years of parental beatings - real and imagined - and countless incidents in which he was spurned, cajoled, teased, reprimanded, assaulted and raped. The acts had been perpetrated by parents, an uncle, a once-favourite teacher, friends, unknown thugs and assailants, the police, and - most recently - other prisoners.

  He had shrewdly suppressed this painful history at his early-release hearing, exactly eight months after the assault on the banker. The assault that had put him behind bars and had reduced him to no more than a plaything. A dustbin. An ashtray. A receptacle for the filth of other much stronger men.

  And now it was less than seven days since he had been set free. On each of those seven days he had made his way to the beach before midnight. At different points up and down the coast he had found a new spot each night, depending on the relative solitude of each place. A thicket of bush within a short distance of the breaking surf was the prerequisite.

  He had washed himself in the sea each night, forcing the salt water into every orifice as if to scrub and scour the invasive filth from his body. Not just the filth that had been forced into him over many years, but the humiliation and the anguish and the violence that had been perpetrated upon his body and upon his psyche. He screamed in furious humiliation each night under the water, hearing the burbling of his voice under crashing waves, and he emerged from the surf each night with the hate burning stronger in his veins, and throbbing through his temples as he thought constantly of revenge. He sat in the bushes for an hour or more after each submersion, drying off and thinking deep, dark and violent thoughts as the salt crusted on his almost ebony skin.

  He thought back to his life before being imprisoned the last time. Sent straight to the tronk for fracturing the skull of a man wearing a suit. For no discernible reason, they had said, other than that he had worn a suit.

  He had experienced his first-ever nyaope fix just hours before that hit on the banker. He had felt strange. Supremely strong. Confident. Happy. He had discovered a new world. The man in the suit had pricked his bubble by spurning him. Not just spurning him, but abusively shouting at him and humiliating him. Right there, in the passageway of the hospital where he used to transport patients on trolleys to whatever floor was required. In front of everyone the man had said those things to him. Those things.

  He had waited for the moment. He had followed the man at a distance. And then he had pounced.

  They catch me for smacking one banker. And just because I was with amaphoyisa before, they say they going to make a big example of me. So they send me downstairs for eight months. Eish! For a simple one smack across the head. They send a man to jail for that. Then they do those things to me. Those things. They do that to me!

  His desperate thoughts were ruptured by the sound of a high-pitched giggle, less than fifty metres away. He reacted instantly, flicked the joint into the bush, scrambled to his feet and reached for his clothes.

  *

  The tourist’s young companion had fallen to her knees on the sand in front of her victim. She was laughing as she ripped off his belt and flung it aside. The tourist’s first reaction was to laugh lasciviously, unsteady on his feet but maintaining his balance even as his trousers fell to his knees. Then he paused, and his confidence evaporated as he suddenly appreciated the reality of his situation. His wife of more than a quarter-century in Dorset. His two children in different universities in Scotland and Wales. His office colleagues. His boss. What was he doing with a young woman, younger than his own daughter, on a beach in South Africa after midnight? The bravura evaporated. The bravura that had been fuelled four hours ago by his sudden good fortune at the Blackjack table, followed by the cheers and applause he had received at the bar afterward, when all drinks had been for his account. Round after round. And now suddenly he was alone with this woman. This stranger.

  ‘No, lissen, love. I don’t think we can do this, OK? I’m too drunk, you see...’

  ‘Is what? You say what? You say you want me, you pay big money. You pay me money, now, or I’m calling the police. I call my boyfriend.’

  ‘No way, lovely. No way. No way you gonna get money from me, you little tart...’

  ‘You white pig. You don’t mess with me. Rape! Help! He raping me!’

  ‘’Wait! Wait, you f… No, wait! Lissen, love, OK! I’ll pay. Wait a minute, lovely. Cm’ere! Cummon, then. Here you go, I got...’
<
br />   Suddenly she screamed. A higher pitched scream he had never heard in his entire life. It reached all the way from Durban to Dorset and it turned him instantly more sober than he had been for hours. He tried desperately to clamp her mouth with his big meaty paws. This made it worse. She bit him and then started scratching and kicking. Her screams rose in pitch. He lunged at her and stumbled in the process. She was on him in an instant, tearing his jacket and ripping his wallet out of its inner breast pocket. She grabbed at it. He grabbed at it. She came away with a fistful of cash. Shocked at the realisation, she started stumbling away across the soft beach-sand and tangled ground creepers toward the lights of Battery Beach Road in the distance. The tourist tried to follow, then dropped his wallet, stumbled, and fell flat on his face. The woman melted into the night.

  The fat man turned over onto his knees, cursing, reaching out, feeling for his wallet and the remaining cash. As he grabbed frantically for the wallet, he became aware of a new adversary.

  Now clothed, the man had walked slowly from the bush during the course of the fracas, and had waited for the right moment. As the woman ran off, he positioned himself two or three paces from the tourist, his left foot on the wallet. As the terrified drunk looked up, he saw the eyes of the man, reflecting back to him two tiny circles of moonlight. He froze for a moment as he looked at the eyes. Then he pleaded, softly.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate. So sorry. My wallet. She tried to… can I just have my wallet...’

  ‘Is mine.’

  ‘What? Sorry, I...’

  ‘Is mine. You think you can take our women? For fifty rands? One hundred?’