I parked under the big gum tree at Dirk’s place. The house looked very quiet.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come here now,’ I said to the rusks. ‘But I’ve got to find Jessie.’ I opened the bakkie door. ‘I won’t be long.’
The sun had turned the clouds to steam and they were evaporating into the big blue sky. The ground was still cool and damp from the rain. I went around to the stoep and knocked on the front door. While I waited for no one to come, I wiped the mud off my feet on the doormat.
I tried the door; it was unlocked, and I went in.
‘Dirk?’ I called.
I knew he was at work, but it just seemed polite. The silence was like a heavy thing in that house, sitting quietly, waiting to jump. There was a pile of unwashed dishes at the kitchen sink.
I went straight for what I had come for. The recipe books. Martine’s shopping list with ingredients for my recipe had made me think: I’d remembered the books I had seen on her pantry shelf. A recipe book is just the private place I would keep something important.
I put her four recipe books on the kitchen table, and opened them one at a time, carefully shaking them out. The first one, Cook with Ina Paarman, had a loose page with a handwritten recipe for butternut cheesecake in it. The second and third books, Karoo Kitchen and A Celebration of South African Food, were empty. The fourth and biggest book was Cook and Enjoy. I shook it and a page fluttered out: my reply to her in the Gazette, with the lamb curry recipe. It was there in her recipe book, just like I kept her letter to me in my Afrikaans version of the same book: Kook en Geniet. It was a spooky feeling. Like our recipe books could talk to each other after she was dead.
And then I found them, in the middle of Cook and Enjoy. Two pages: one full of figures; another with Martine’s tidy handwriting. I sat down with the papers in front of me. A fly buzzed against a window. There was the sound of a car, and I thought for a moment Dirk might be coming home. I stood up to put the books away, but the car sound did not get any closer. It must be going somewhere else.
I sat down again. I recognised the one page. It was like the bookkeeping pages I’d seen at the Spar. It had a heading – Regional Pensions – and lists of numbers and codes that were hard to make sense of. So I read the other page first.
Dear Mr van Wyk, she’d written.
The pension records you have been passing on to me for the last three years are a lie.
She’d crossed out a lie and had written incorrect.
I found one correct report in your desk, which alerted me to what you have been doing.
Then there were a few columns of numbers, then her writing again: According to my calculations you have stolen at least R900,000.
There were more corrections. This must have been her draft letter and she would have given him her final version. She wrote:
I will not report you. But I would like 33% of the money you have stolen. R40,000 now and R260,000 by the end of the month.
You are to stop skimming from the funds within the next three months. The current level of loss would at present be covered by Old Mutual, who underwrites the pension plan. However, if you continue to do this, Spar will not be able to make the pension payouts that are due in the years to come, and the workers will suffer.
I will destroy my evidence of your crime only when you have paid me in full.
I read it through twice. Her ‘evidence’ must be that bookkeeping page about regional pensions. It was strange that she was taking part in the stealing but at the same time trying to make sure that the workers would not suffer. Maybe even amongst thieves there are different types of wrongdoing.
But it wasn’t the time to be chasing morals around in my head. These papers showed that Van Wyk had a big motive to kill Martine. He would probably also know about her love of pomegranate juice, and could have brought it to her, along with some other shopping from the Spar.
I thought I heard a sound. But I told myself I was just jumpy. I should not have come here on my own. I heard the sound again – something crunching? I got up to go and use the phone in the study. My heart was beating a bit too fast. I picked up the phone. It was dead.
I went back to the kitchen and put the books on the pantry shelf. I picked up the two pieces of paper to take away with me. But before I could get to the front door, it opened.
Cornelius van Wyk stood there. His side-swept hair was in a mess, so his big bald patch gleamed like a china bowl. In his hand he was holding a gun. Aimed right at me.