7 Days by Deon Meyer Page A

typical Afrikaner middle class. It began in Ladybrand in the Free State in the mid-seventies. Willem Sloet, co-op clerk, tall and thin and slightly stooped; the hairline already beginning to recede in the face of more than thirty summers, the little moustache uncertain, like an experiment – on some of the photos he had the intimidated expression of a man who had married above his station and had, slowly, begun to realise the consequences. His wife, Marna, with her pleasant face, her smile frequently determined and brave. And the only child, Hanneke, lucky to have inherited from the start the best combination of her parents’ features.
    In the early eighties there was a move to Paarl, apparently a better position for Willem, because the old reddish-brown Ford Escort in the holiday photos is replaced by a white Volkswagen Passat station wagon. Hanneke grows into a lanky schoolgirl, her thick hair in a plait, the slight gap between her front teeth displayed without embarrassment in every smile, cute, plucky and carefree.
    Willem Sloet becomes a marginal character, presumably behind the camera most of the time. Where he does appear in the photos, the spacebetween him and Marna has subtly widened, a deliberate distancing by one of them perhaps. Marna’s grace increases, her attractiveness becomes more interesting with the years, and their offspring blossoms, in a single album page, somewhere around her fifteenth year. In the photo on the top left she was still a child, skinny, crouching before the unpredictable leap into puberty; bottom right the metamorphosis is nearly complete, and the chips have fallen in her favour. Suddenly a head taller than her mother, athletic, but with feminine, elegant lines, the eyes wider apart, the mouth full, the curve of her neck and shoulder enchanting. And, along with that, another apparent awakening: at the Paarl Girls High School, she was chairperson of debating, hockey captain, member of the student council, and winner of the academic prize for accountancy.
    He looked through the letters. There were two from boys, raw and clumsy declarations of teenage love and desire, warm letters of friendship from other girls, their admiration shining through. And a series written by mother Marna, initially just best wishes for her daughter’s achievements in school – the encouragement and aspiration delicately camouflaged. Later, at university and during Hanneke Sloet’s backpacking year in Europe, her mother’s wistfulness over her own lost opportunities, her disappointment in her husband, and her ambitions for her daughter glimmered through ever more strongly.
    The letters ended there, at the end of 2000, just before Hanneke Sloet started at Silberstein Lamarque. The glued and captioned snapshots too. In the back of the last album was a sheaf of loose photographs of Sloet and someone whom Griessel assumed must be Egan Roch. The man was tall, with powerful shoulders and arms, and abundant self-confidence. They were, in the words of Gabriélle Villette, ‘two good-looking people’. The photographs showed they had frequently walked in the mountains, had visited a wine farm, sailed in Table Bay, socialised, and been to New York together at least once.
    Loose photographs, thought Captain Benny Griessel. As though Hanneke Sloet didn’t want to commit this relationship to permanent record.
    He thought it all over while he searched the master bedroom meticulously. He tried all the parts of Villette’s revelations for fit and what he could glean from the albums and letters.
    Hanneke Sloet the Ambitious.
    Should he be concerned with this?
    The thing was, he had often seen the dangers of extreme ambition. In women, the consuming desire to rise in social stature, to keep up with neighbours and colleagues, sometimes led to fraud and theft from the employer, or the smuggling of drugs on planes.
    But Sloet had followed another route, honourable and acceptable. Hard, disciplined work at school and university,