Evening Flight to Durban

48

I read one of the cases on the flight to Durban. I had not intended to do so; I was too tired and thought I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. The aircraft was packed, mostly with businessmen returning home after a day’s business in Johannesburg. They looked as ragged as I must have. In the relative luxury of business class I had a gin and tonic in my hand before the Boeing started to bank to starboard and headed for the coast. I leaned my seat back as far as it could go without landing in the lap of the passenger behind me and closed my eyes. I tried to relax but Antoinette Labuschagne haunted me.

A sister’s loyalty knows no bounds.

I worried about her brother. He had not spoken to his parents since the events at the reservoir; he claimed he was too ashamed to face them. But at some point he was going to have to, I thought. Labuschagne’s attitude to the case was also a concern. There were times when I got the distinct impression that he would have been quite satisfied if he were to be found guilty and sentenced to death. He was not positively courting the death sentence, but his attitude came close to it. His demeanour in the witness box had been a contradictory mix of arrogance and indifference, of self-blame and blame-shift, and of hope and despair. I struggled with the image of him being dragged away to the trapdoors. Would he behave differently from the regular condemned, or would he be resigned to his fate? Would he have to be dragged or would he walk on his own? It nagged at me that I still could not see a clear answer. The outcome of a trial ought to be obvious or at least fairly clear long before the last witness enters the witness box.

Labuschagne hadn’t been as helpful as he could have been as a witness either, and on several occasions there had been surprises for us in the answers he had given under cross-examination. His words and his actions didn’t quite match. He said he did not care, that he wanted to be dead, but then he put up quite a fight when he was under cross-examination. There was also the atmosphere of the place. Did the escorts really play puerile pranks on each other? What if all those suggestions were true? How would that affect our case? I realised that we were going to have to argue the case on the evidence Labuschagne had given, but how could we ask the Court to reject part of his evidence but accept the useful bits? I would have to ask the expert witnesses for explanations.

Apart from the day he broke down, Labuschagne’s appearance was in sharp contrast to his sister’s. Concern was apparent in every feature in Antoinette’s face, the tearful, downcast eyes, the white around the lips and the dark rings below her eyes. But Leon Labuschagne’s face showed a lack of concern, his was sullen, withdrawn, with his jaw set. I thought of my sons, carefree boys running and laughing, always at play, never still. Why did some boys grow up to become angry young men? What about all those young men who made up the majority of the prisoners on Death Row? How did it come to that for them?

That was one thing I had learned from all those cases I had read: that playful boys could grow up to become murdering fiends in one fatal moment. Look at all these young men who had thrown their lives away and in the process had ruined so many other lives. It struck me that Labuschagne’s life was ruined whether he was found guilty or not guilty. How could he have a normal life after what he had been through?

I must have dozed off and was awoken by a passenger bumping into my seat from behind. The stewardess rushed over to offer me another drink. I sat up and took the next case out of my briefcase. It took me to Cape Town.

I sorted the contents of the file Pierre de Villiers had prepared for me. There were two death warrants, but they had been issued by different judges. After scratching around some more I found the reason: the one accused had already been sentenced to death before the second had even been caught by the police. For once, there had been some intrepid work by the Cape police.

And it was another case of young men throwing their lives away.