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

me with the message in all three languages. “Unusual for it to be Zulu, surely? Here in the Cape, wouldn’t you expect Xhosa?”

Of the many tribes that constituted the indigenous population of South Africa, the two largest were the Zulu and Xhosa tribes. The Zulus were fierce warriors who had blazed a trail of destruction from the north in the days before the European colonists arrived. They had encountered the more peaceful Xhosa tribe loitering in what is now known as the Eastern Cape. Many fierce battles were fought between them, and to this day the two tribes lived together in an uneasy truce.

“Xhosa would be sisiqalo nje,” said Khanyi, who was herself a fearsome Zulu. “Pronunciation differs, but there’s only one additional letter when you write it.”

“We have so many languages,” said Fehrson, as if it was something he regretted.

“What do you need from me?” I asked.

“You can imagine,” said Fehrson, “the threat of this being ‘only the beginning’ triggered desperate calls to my chiefs.” Fehrson sniffed. His Department of State Security was a small and increasingly insignificant one. Any mention of his superiors required a sarcastic tone, or a joking dismissal.

Sara returned with a dishcloth to clean up the syrup spill. The Afrikaners called a dishcloth a lappie, and I wondered whether Fehrson’s absent-minded use of the word indicated the extent to which his English shell was cracking under the strain of being surrounded by a community so much like the one of his upbringing, in such a state of distress.

“You want coffee?” Sara asked listlessly as Fehrson busied himself with cleaning up the syrup.

Khanyi ordered. A latte for her, and a short black for me.

“Cream or foam?” asked Sara.

“Do not be difficult, Khanyisile,” said Fehrson. “None of your European fripperies, only good old-fashioned moer coffee here. It is brewed in a pot and allowed to sit for hours,” he explained to me. I nodded. Fehrson preferred to think of me as a foreigner, particularly on days like this.

“They are keeping quiet about it, of course,” resumed Fehrson when Sara had returned to the kitchen. “Don’t want to start a nationwide panic. Egg on lots of faces.” He gave a smile to show that his face was not one of them.

“No one saw it coming. No one but us. There have been no anxious flag wavers or whistle-blowers warning about disgruntled farm workers dreaming of wandering into their employer’s place of worship with automatic weapons. Now the First World is breathing heavily down my chiefs’ necks, asking why they did not see it coming.”

“But you did see it coming?”

“You saw the symbol? Underneath the words.”

“Khanyi said you would tell me what that was.”

“And so I shall,” said Fehrson. Then he inserted his knife into the waffles again, which retaliated with a fresh spurt of syrup. It rather spoilt Fehrson’s moment.

“The hyena they called it, although honestly I do not think it looks anything like the animal. More of a scribble, but the experts said hyena, so hyena it is. When you see them all together, it makes more sense.”

“All together? There are more of these scribbles?”

Fehrson gave Khanyi a nod, and she pulled a folder from her shoulder bag. Making certain that Sara was not within range, she opened it and revealed a matte print of the splashed lines beneath the dribbling letters on the church wall. They made up a symbol of sorts, a triangle standing on one of its points with twin plus signs in the upper part of the triangle, and the lower part broken by two angry downward slashes.

“Eyes,” said Khanyi, pointing at the plus signs with a sparkling fingernail. “And fangs,” she indicated the dripping slashes at the lower point.

“It’s a bit of a stretch,” I said.

“Look at them together,” said Khanyi, and she spread out three more photos like a magician about to ask me to choose one. The other photos were older, the colours a little faded, the edges worn, and the whites a yellow grey. Three different walls, each of them bearing similar roughly slashed triangles with cross eyes and drooling fangs.

“Those are older?”

“Twenty-five years ago,” said Fehrson. “The time of the first free elections. You were still throwing porridge around your boarding school canteen or doing whatever those English schools encouraged. You would not remember it, but the country was struggling out of its cocoon. A difficult time, with the apartheid government preparing to hand over the reins; angry people on both sides. Those photos are from a spate of farm killings around that time.”

“The kind of farm killings that are making the news now?” I asked.

“The same,” agreed Fehrson. He shovelled another portion of waffle into his mouth and gazed out of the window as he chewed. Attacks on farmers in the country had recently been making headlines. Violent attacks in which gangs invaded homes and killed entire families or laid ambush to them on the long roads that spanned the distances between the isolated farms.

“The press might have you think it is a recent phenomenon,” said Fehrson. “They will keep coming up with new names, but there is nothing new. In the 1990s there were farm killings, just as there are today.”

“And those hyena symbols are from the ’90s?”

“They didn’t carry tins of red paint with them in those days,” said Khanyi, “Dipped their hands into the blood. But it’s the same mark.”

“A copy-cat killer?” I suggested. “Or the same killers come back for more?”

“You know better than to ask me to speculate,” said Fehrson, then paused as Sara delivered large bowls of pungent smelling coffee to us.

“Need another lappie?” she asked Fehrson.

“If you don’t mind, my dear. These waffles of yours are little syrup bombs.”

Sara surveyed the damage and sighed. “You with the police?” she asked.

“Something like that,” said Fehrson.

“It wasn’t someone from round here,” said Sara. “We treat the blacks well, don’t we? They’re happy here, the blacks are. Why would they go and do something like this?” She looked from Fehrson to me, but