Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

as the ‘face’ of their products, or as Hendrik would have it, the ‘body’ of their products. The sister was paid a good deal more to be filmed in the swimwear than the Department paid her to pretend to be Dirk’s sister, and so the honeytrap dried up. Dirk had previously invented a reason to find himself in the little town of Minhoop on occasional Sunday mornings, where he had smiled and waved at Hendrik, who attended the Sunday morning service with his father. According to Dirk, Hendrik and his father never missed a service. They would make the twenty-minute hop in their Cessna aeroplane from the game farm, and they had seats in the front row of the church. Piet van Rensburg was asked to read passages from the Bible on special occasions, and when the church needed new hymnals the Van Rensburg family provided them. Which was why their absence on the day of the massacre was unusual. Hendrik would sometimes travel into Minhoop on a Saturday for an evening of debauchery with a few friends. Dirk interpreted a casual comment as an invitation to such an evening. But Hendrik had not arrived, and Dirk had spent the last evening of his life drinking mineral water alone in a room of the local bed-and-breakfast.

Why had Hendrik not been in the church the next morning? And why had Piet van Rensburg not flown them there in the Cessna? Why had they not been seated in the front row on the one Sunday that unknown assailants had walked in through the teak doors with automatic weapons and a collection of extra magazines?

It was only when I had finished the lamb cooked over coals, and Aldo had opened another bottle and allowed himself a little from the spare glass that he kept on my table for such occasions, that I understood why Khanyi had insisted that I go through the entire file. Because it was not to discover these questions that Khanyi had wanted me to read the file through to the end. It was more personal than that. The final two pages in the folder were print-outs of phone records. At the top of the page, in a large font highlighted in bright pink, was the phone number. It was a number that I recognised, a number that had occupied a prime position in my list of speed dial numbers.

It was Sandy’s number. Sandy, the journalist I had met during my brief stint with Fehrson’s Department, when I had tried to hold down a job following the shattering of my military career. Sandy, the woman who picked up the broken pieces of my life and helped me to put them together again, and seemed to understand why I failed to keep my head above water after seeing Brian step onto a land mine, and then step off it. Sandy, the woman who persuaded me to make something of my love of the expressive power of images, who persuaded me to put down my gun and pick up a camera, as my old captain, a man called Chandler, liked to describe it. The woman who helped me to find a new life.

Sandy, who had walked out of that new life. Who had staged her own disappearance.

The phone records printed beneath the garish pink highlight started a little over three months ago. A list of numbers covered a period of a few weeks, some of which I recognised. My number was there, helpfully annotated by Khanyi in case I missed it. Or perhaps she had done the annotation for Fehrson in order to better explain her cunning plan. Abruptly the calls ceased. I recognised the date of Sandy’s disappearance. And wondered, again, how that had worked. Had she decided on a specific time at which she would stop using her old phone, her old passport, her old identity? Did the minute hand of the Breguet watch I had given her on her birthday roll past the chosen hour, and the switch happened? Did she walk into a public bathroom where she changed clothes, dyed her hair, and tossed the old sim card down the drain? Or knowing Sandy as I thought I had, it would not have been a public bathroom, but a boutique hotel. Had she arrived wearing a high-collared overcoat and dark glasses, undergone a transformation in the night, and left the next morning with blonde hair and a mini-skirt to distract the male staff? But that was not Sandy. It would have been too attention-grabbing. Sandy’s family was ‘coloured’, of mixed race, and blonde hair against her toffee-coloured skin would have stood out. That wasn’t Sandy at all.

On the other hand, who was I to say what Sandy was and what she was not? I had clearly not known her at all.

But the interesting thing about Khanyi’s list of phone calls was what came after that last call on the day that Sandy disappeared. There was one other number. A call had been made from Sandy’s phone several weeks after the moment she had disappeared. A single call that had lasted almost twenty minutes. Khanyi had highlighted the number, and in the process rendered it illegible.

Khanyi had me, and she knew it. I thought back to that morning’s expedition, and Khanyi’s bright teeth and big eyes showing me how much she wanted me to help the Department on this one. But she knew that even Dirk’s depressing role in the drama wouldn’t motivate me in the way that 10-digit number would. The deal was sealed and Khanyi was probably toasting her success at this moment with a glass of sparkling mineral water.

“There’s only one place I know of that still has stock of those old khaki folders,” said a voice behind me.

I turned to find Chandler’s cool, grey eyes on me. To be standing behind me, he must have come into the restaurant through the kitchens because he had certainly not come in through the front doors. Chandler rarely