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

“The problem is, I don’t think he did it. There is nobody that can confirm where he was on that Sunday morning. His habit was to attend his own church, but on this occasion there was no morning service. There have been no services for the past few weeks because the pastor is on some kind of pilgrimage. Which is another complication: the pastor is Nqobeni’s brother, Xolani.” The ‘x’ at the front of the name required a softer tongue click that sounded like Andile was tut-tutting.

“What do they call the brother?” I asked. “X?”

“Xolani,” said Andile, conveying the scorn he had for people who couldn’t manage the clicks.

“And Xolani cannot vouch for his brother?” I said, with my best effort at the click.

“Not yet. He has not returned from his pilgrimage.”

“You’ve not contacted him?” asked Khanyi.

“We have no contact details.”

“He’ll come forward, surely.”

“When Nqobeni’s identity is released, assuming that it’s the kind of pilgrimage that involves reading the newspapers. He’s a very religious man. Fresh out of Bible school. Other villagers tell us that he and Nqobeni are model citizens. The heroes of the village. Both graduates of the development program who have been giving back to the community. Nqobeni’s been teaching, nurturing the youth who are where he was.”

“He doesn’t sound like the kind of man to walk into a church with an automatic weapon.”

“There is another side to his story. For one thing, he has had a string of mental health problems. If the village wasn’t so big on handling all their problems on site, he would have been in and out of institutions all his life. That’s what the psych doctors say. At the village everything is holistic, the personal touch, connection to the land, God, and so forth. They don’t ship their problems off to be solved elsewhere, they keep them on the farm where they sort them out for themselves. Or ask God to sort them out. They are a religious community.”

“Sort them out, or let them fester?” I asked.

“Exactly. And there is a lot of festering. Most of the village are supporters of the extreme EFF, the Economic Freedom Fighters.”

“The ones that chant ‘one settler, one bullet’?” asked Fehrson.

“More or less. They like to sing the ‘Kill the Boer’ song. That village might be winning Van Rensburg brownie points with the government, but there are some who would say that if you throw a bunch of delinquents in a pot and stir them up a bit, you’ve got one stinking problem waiting to go wrong.”

“What was Q’s delinquency?”

“He killed a security guard with a screwdriver.” Andile gave us a moment to absorb that. “A white security guard. On the farm where he grew up. There were mitigating circumstances, which is why he ended up in the village, and not in confinement. For one thing, he was only ten years old when he did it. And for another, the security guard had killed Nqobeni’s father a few days before. It was in the late nineties when farms in the Limpopo were employing a new breed of security company, the kind that came with men carrying guns instead of passive infrared detectors and bells. Nqobeni’s father had worked all his life on the farm. He was trusted to make decisions for himself. He decided to move a tractor one evening so he could get an early start the next morning. The guard claimed to have thought he was stealing the tractor.”

Andile stopped as the noise of clinking crockery and a puffing sound like a small steam train rose from the spiral staircase.

“Give her a hand, will you, Ben?” suggested Fehrson.

But Belinda did not want a hand. Her spherical form attained the top stair, and she tottered there for a moment and glared past my offered hand at Fehrson, huffing and puffing as she tried to control her breathing sufficiently to give voice to her dissatisfaction.

“There’s a perfectly good meeting room on the seventh floor, Mr Fehrson,” she said.

“We have an important guest with us today, Belinda,” said Fehrson, and he gave her a smile on full beam to stop the staff from embarrassing that important guest. Belinda looked at me with scorn and opened her mouth to protest my lack of importance, but then she noticed Andile and closed her mouth, a little mollified.

“I brought biscuits,” she said.

“For which we are extremely grateful,” said Fehrson, and he went back to full beam to show that gratitude.

Belinda harrumphed and put the tray down with a clatter. “They’re last month’s,” she said. “You still haven’t given me the petty cash.”

“I will be sure to do that later, Belinda,” said Fehrson, whose smile was getting a little worn around the edges.

“Three months you owe me,” said Belinda, and she planted her feet squarely so we couldn’t roll her back down the stairs.

“That is unacceptable,” said Fehrson. “I will see to it just as soon as we have finished this meeting.”

Belinda hesitated as she decided whether to push the matter and insist that Fehrson settle his debts before we continue. But she thought better of it, swivelled about and rolled herself back down the staircase.

“Help yourself to a biscuit,” said Fehrson with forced cheer when Belinda had huffed and puffed her way out of earshot. He passed the plate around. Only Andile took a biscuit, probably because it was the first time he had been invited to a meeting in the Attic. He tried to conceal the disappointment as he bit into it, but the look on his face revealed that Belinda hadn’t raised the catering bar since my previous visit.

“So this Q fellow,” said Fehrson with inappropriate levity, “he seems an unlikely killer. That is why you are here? We are going to get to the conundrums?”

Andile’s bite of biscuit required some extensive chewing. He chewed.

Fehrson continued: “You say he has a history; mental instability, tragic past, a reason to hate the white folk. Makes more sense in that context. And you have a confession and evidence that