Read Let the Dead Lie for Free Online

the front door. He knew that the moment
this week was up, Mrs Patterson was going to slip an eviction notice under his
door. He'd committed the cardinal South African sin. A registered non-white, he
had failed to express gratitude for being bullied by a white woman.
    'Lancelot.
No. Bad boy.'
    The
landlady's tone set Emmanuel's teeth on edge. She talked to the dog the same
way she talked to him.
    A
flicker of material at the downstairs window alerted him to the fact that Mr
Woodsmith, the retired postman who rented the ground-floor flat, had witnessed
the confrontation. He nodded in the direction of the curtain and the material
dropped. One week and not a second more.
    Inside
the building, the oak banister of the staircase shone with a fresh application
of wax. Mrs Patterson did run a clean house. Why the Scottish terrier had never
seen a bath or a bar of soap was one of life's little mysteries.
    The
walls of the flat were painted bright yellow; a cheery colour scheme that
depressed Emmanuel every time he entered it. The room possessed a single bed no
wider than a field cot, a two-ring gas burner and a wardrobe laced with
mothballs that easily contained two suits, six shirts and three pairs of work
pants. The private bath and shower squeezed into an alcove and separated from
the rest of the room by a wraparound curtain cost him an extra pound each
month.
    A
tenants' phone in the hallway made it easy to call his sister in Jo'burg on the
first Sunday of every month. The conversations were brief. He repeated the
familiar lies that he'd told her while their parents fought in the kitchen:
life was good and everything was fine. Lies kept them together.
    Emmanuel
reached into his trouser pocket and removed a postcard with a tinted photograph
of misty hills and deep, silent valleys. On the back, in chicken-scratch
writing, was an invitation to visit Zweigman's medical clinic in the Valley of
a Thousand Hills. Doctor Daniel Zweigman, the old Jew who'd saved his life
after a vicious beating by the Security Branch, was two hours' drive away.
Emmanuel laid the card gently on the bedspread. Maybe one day when he was less
worn around the edges...
    He
stripped off his dirty suit and threw it into a small sisal basket in the
corner. The young maid took in tenants' laundry along with her other work.
Emmanuel washed. He'd already planned to have the day off from the shipyards to
rest and regroup after the night surveillance. But he would not sleep this
morning. He would not sleep at all today.
    He
dressed in a clean suit and checked his reflection in the mirror. Five months
at the shipyards had erased any trace of physical softness from his person.
Impersonating a church minister or a gentle family man was now out of reach.
Yet he enjoyed the hard labour of the yards; doing what most Europeans
considered 'kaffir work'. Hauling, lifting and hammering sapped his energy and left his mind
empty. Sleep came like a force of nature, black and unstoppable. Dawn brought
only a vague memory of having dreamt. Being too exhausted to think was the
closest he'd come to happiness since leaving his old life and the detective
branch back in Jo'burg.
    He
slipped Zweigman's postcard into the jacket pocket of the clean suit and
scooped up his driver's licence. He left his ID card in the drawer. He retained
the body language of a white detective and no one had so far dared question his
right of entry to any venue, be it a Europeans-only restaurant or a non-white
queue at the bank.
    He
collected the laundry basket. He was about to break a promise that he'd made to
himself when he left the force: never hang around an official police
investigation. He was going to go down to the freight yards and make sure the
detective branch was at the crime scene. Then he was going to try to find out
if the search had turned up Jolly Marks's notebook. It was a quick ten-minute stop.
    Where
was the harm in that?

Striped
police barricades fenced off the crime scene. A black Dodge