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

one Nqobeni killed with a screwdriver. Nqobeni couldn’t pick the correct screwdriver when they asked him which one he had used. The investigators blamed it on Nqobeni blocking it from his mind.”

“You think the brother killed the security guard?”

Andile looked out of the open window as if only noticing now that there was a wind blowing through it. “I think it’s possible,” he said. “If I’m right, Nqobeni has lived with the constant fear that his brother will do something like that again.”

“He said he received messages from his brother,” I said, remembering Q’s last comment.

Andile nodded. “We found them on his phone. Very odd messages. You know the Zulu tradition of sending young men out to survive for a period of isolation before becoming men?”

“I’ve heard of it. Is that what his pilgrimage is about?”

“According to the messages.”

“But he’s beyond the age for that, surely?”

Andile sucked at his cigarette, and his eyes blinked in the smoke.

“Way beyond it,” he said. “Which is why those messages are so odd. Nqobeni refused to talk about it.”

Andile stood abruptly and grabbed a coat off the back of his chair.

“Perhaps those messages have a different meaning,” he said. “Because he’s not preparing to become a man at all. Come with me. We need to see Nqobeni.”

They kept the shackles on Q this time and sat him on a broken wooden chair in a tiny interview room with no windows. Q looked as if he had shrunk since that morning. His eyes had retreated into the dark caves beneath his bony brow, and the orange jumpsuit looked as if it was hanging from a cheap metal hanger instead of from the shoulders of a living human.

Andile opened with the suggestion that Nqobeni had lied about the death of the man who had killed his father. The screens in the monitoring room where I sat showed the minute details of Q’s reaction. There was the jagged intake of breath, the pause as he held that breath, and then his body slumped slightly as he released it. The close-up showed his eyes backing up into the dark hollows as Andile suggested his brother had killed the security guard. That Nqobeni, protecting his eight-year-old brother had taken the blame.

Nqobeni stared at Andile. There was a blink, then another, and the dull eyes gazed out, but he said nothing. The sergeant sitting beside me pulled a large handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his brow. The equipment in the monitoring room was heating the small space up, and the sergeant was wearing his winter thermals over many layers of extra fat. Having wiped his brow, he made a note on a pad of paper before him.

Andile moved on to the church killings. He told Nqobeni that he knew he had never been inside the church. Told him that on this occasion he could not take the blame for his brother’s actions. Nqobeni said nothing.

The two of them sat in silence.

“That night of the fight,” said Andile eventually. “The night that you took the white man to the sickbay and left Xolani with Hendrik van Rensburg. Was your brother angry that night?”

“Yes,” said Q. “He was angry.”

“With Van Rensburg? With the White Africans?”

Q nodded. “Van Rensburg has no right to treat us like that.”

“Like what?”

“Threatening us. Taking our girls. Shooting his guns.”

“And your brother took it upon himself to stop him?”

Q shrugged.

“What did he do?”

“He did nothing.”

“When you got back to the field in the village from the sickbay, what was your brother doing?”

“He was doing nothing.”

“Where was he?”

Q kept silent.

“Had he gone after Van Rensburg?”

“Xolani had an anger that made him do foolish things.”

“What had he done?”

“He followed Van Rensburg.”

“And you? What did you do?”

“I went after him.”

“Did you find him?”

Q shook his head.

“Where did you follow him to? The Van Rensburg lodge?”

Q nodded.

“But you didn’t find your brother?”

“I got a message from him.”

“What did the message say?”

“Ulwaluko,” said Q.

“Could you explain that? Ulwaluko is the isolation before the ritual of becoming a man.”

“He is becoming more than a man,” said Q. He hesitated, then said: “A saint.”

“A saint? Your brother was preparing to become a saint?”

Q nodded.

“How?”

Q didn’t respond for a good minute. He gazed at Andile from the dark hollows of his eye sockets.

“If, however,” he said eventually, as if he was making a pronouncement, “a man acts presumptuously toward his neighbour, so as to kill him craftily, you are to take him even from My altar, that he may die.”

“Is that from the Old Testament?” asked Andile. “You think your brother will be a saint because he enacted God’s will? Is that the idea?”

Q lowered his eyes again and stared at the floor before him.

“Your court appearance is tomorrow,” said Andile. “They will ask you to swear on a Bible. You will have the chance to speak the truth. Taking the blame for your brother’s crimes is not the truth.”

No reaction from Q.

“You need to speak the truth before your brother does something like this again.”

There was still no reaction. The screens in the monitoring room showed Q’s immobile face, as if the image had frozen. No movement to show he was still breathing. A man of stone with dark hollows in place of eyes.

Whether Q decided to speak the truth was not something we ever discovered.

Nqobeni Nyambawu, or “Q” to his close friends and linguistically challenged people, had not been dealt a lucky hand in life. At least that was what the article in the newspaper explained after the tenth day of his detention passed and he had been driven to court in the back of a caged police vehicle.

Things had not started badly for Q. The poverty of his parents had not prevented them from loving him. But before the age of three, his mother had died when giving birth to his younger brother, and the signs of the unfortunate life ahead of him began to show. Xolani was the one everyone said would be cursed. But he