Silent Valley by Malla Nunn

The old man had smashed a hole in him and now ghosts and secrets were climbing out from the inside. The past bled into the present. He remembered his difficult adolescence. After a staunch, God-loving Afrikaner family had adopted him and his sister, he’d tried to be good. No fighting with the boys who called him unclean and his dead mother a whore, no talking back to the brutal teachers at the Fountain of Light boarding school, no questioning the superiority of whites over blacks despite knowing English and Afrikaners who were thicker than mud.
    It was exhausting work. After six months, cracks began to appear. By then he’d learned to exact revenge in cunning and insidious ways.
    Not now : Emmanuel stopped the past from breaching the walls punched in by Baba Kaleni. The damage was done, the cuts and bruises healed. All that mattered was now.
    The stars dimmed and a few hundred feet ahead the outline of houses became more distinct. Emmanuel skirted the edges of Roselet. Wide gardens and fences enclosed pretty cottages and a silver stream marked the border between the town and the countryside. He recognised the thatched roof and whitewashed walls of Dr Daglish’s home.
    He walked past two more lots and the clustered buildings of the police station appeared. Yellow light shone from the yard.
    Curious about the source of the glow, Emmanuel jumped the water. He moved along the back wall of the station house, careful of twigs and loose stones, and edged around the corner.
    Constable Bagley sat on the rear steps of the station commander’s house smoking a cigarette by the light of a paraffin lantern. He huddled against the cold, red hair spiked out at odd angles, the chilled mist of his breath mingling with exhaled tobacco smoke. If he’d slept at all the night before, it didn’t show. Spent butts littered the ground.
    A smudge of movement at the back window caught Emmanuel’s attention. He squinted and made out the figure of a woman in a white nightdress standing behind the glass. Bagley had no idea she was there, watching his nocturnal struggles tip over into day.
    Emmanuel heard a footstep and turned to check the field sloping down to the stream. Shabangu, the older of Roselet’s two native policemen, hesitated on the path to the station, also caught by surprise. He quickly stepped aside to give the visiting city detective right of way, then remained perfectly still, face turned away, eyes to the ground. Questioning the actions of a white man caught spying at dawn was unwise. Playing the silent and obedient native was the safest option.
    Emmanuel slipped past the Zulu policeman and continued in the direction of Greyling Street. Hitting the top of the main street, he followed the line of unlit shops and country cottages. The next twenty-four hours were critical to the investigation. He and Shabalala had to generate a list of suspects before the trail went cold.
    *
    Empty car park, empty yard and empty station. The rustle of the giant sycamore tree provided the only movement at the Roselet police command.
    ‘So much for “Anything we can do to help”,’ said Emmanuel, looking around the unmanned station. The room was unchanged from yesterday afternoon but for the position of the telephone on the commander’s desk. At some point, Bagley had made or received a phone call.
    ‘There could have been an emergency, Sergeant.’ Shabalala stopped to examine a map of the world hanging from a nail in the wall. The pink stain of the British Empire spread over several continents.
    ‘What kind of incident takes three grown men to bring it under control, Detective? A multiple cow theft or a cat stuck up a tree?’
    ‘Maybe it is both,’ Shabalala said, deadpan, and Emmanuel smiled.
    He walked to the window and contemplated the wide grasslands and the steep mountain peaks.
    ‘It’s odd, don’t you think . . . a station commander stepping back from a murder in his own district? We’re not the Security Branch. We didn’t