Read Online Silent Valley by Malla Nunn - Free Book Online Page B

me.’
    ‘Excuse us, great chief.’ Shabalala stepped forward with his shoulders dipped to decrease his size and presence. ‘We wish only to warn your son and your men that searching for Amahle’s killer is a job for the police and the police only.’
    ‘Why should my impi withdraw when the police stay in the town and never set foot on this land?’ asked Matebula.
    ‘Because,’ Emmanuel said, ‘if the impi continue to threaten witnesses, the chief of police will send more policemen to this valley, enough to trample the cornfields and outnumber the rocks.’
    ‘The truth is spoken,’ Shabalala said to emphasise the point. Black-against-black violence rarely caught the eye of the authorities but if the trouble spilled over to white-owned farms, Matebula could expect his world, and his authority, to come under threat.
    ‘I will talk to my men when they return,’ Matebula said.
    After you’ve rolled your fifth wife, had a nap and smoked another marijuana cigarette, thought Emmanuel. It was time to move on with the information they had obtained. He pocketed his notebook, happy for the one name in it.
    ‘Stay well, great chief,’ Shabalala said, taking up the burden of good manners when Emmanuel turned to leave. A flock of tiny red birds flew overhead and settled in the branches of the umdoni tree, above the chief. The crimson flash caught Emmanuel’s eye and he glanced back over his shoulder.
    The fifth wife remained nestled close to the chief’s thigh but her gaze was no longer on the dried cowhide but on the two detectives leaving the yard. She looked away but not fast enough to hide the calculating expression on her striking face. Not so naive then and probably brighter than her husband by fifty watts. Yet Matebula would go to his grave believing that she was soft and yielding and born to please.
    As they walked through the kraal , Emmanuel asked Shabalala, ‘What do you think of the great chief?’
    ‘Unworthy of the title.’
    ‘Can he rein Mandla in?’
    ‘No chance.’
    ‘Thought not.’ Emmanuel paused outside a hut and noticed Nomusa and her daughter seated in its front yard. They were hunched over a bowl of brown lentils, picking stones and other impurities from the dried food with their fingers.
    Nomusa lifted her head like an impala testing the air for the scent of a predator and saw Emmanuel and Shabalala standing at the boundary of her home. ‘Go,’ she said to them, and shuffled her child back into the hut. ‘Please, go from this place.’
    Emmanuel moved towards the small break in the stick fence outside the hut. He wasn’t happy leaving Nomusa here, battered and grieving. A palm touched his shoulder.
    ‘Sergeant,’ Shabalala said. ‘You must not walk past the fence. Things will go worse for the chief’s wife if you do. This is not her family kraal . It belongs to her husband and his clan.’
    Shabalala was right. Long after Amahle’s murder was written up in a case file and handed to a judge in robes and a wig, Nomusa would still be here, living in the shadow of the great chief.
    Emmanuel turned and walked away. He remembered his own mother, injured and hiding in the dark. He cut off the memory. He hadn’t been able to save her either.
    *
    Five minutes out from the Matebula kraal , with Shabalala scouting the way across a rocky field covered in mountain aloes, Emmanuel sensed they were being followed. A small shape darted from boulder to boulder and slipped behind clumps of sagebrush in an attempt to stay undetected.
    ‘It is the little sister,’ Shabalala said without turning around. ‘She has been with us since we left the chief’s kraal. ’
    ‘Let’s sit down to rest for a minute,’ Emmanuel said. ‘Give her a chance to catch up and talk.’
    Even with Shabalala as the only witness, Nomusa had added nothing to what she’d said in the yard of Matebula’s hut. Amahle was a good girl. She was loved. She had no boyfriends and no enemies. The cardboard box with the lipstick