Just a Dead Man by Margaret von Klemperer Page A

and took Grumpy for a quick walk. I chose the old railway line, partly because, being stony, it would be drier underfoot, and partly in case there was something to be seen. But it was devoid of anything significant – in fact, pretty devoid of anything at all. There were birds, and the occasional rustling in the bushes at the sides of the road, but we saw nothing and nobody. I hurried Grumpy along as we had to be home before Paul Ndzoyiya came.
    I had just finished my breakfast when he rang the bell. He was dressed informally, in jeans and trainers that made him look younger. But he was tense, a rigidity in the planes of his face. We went through to the studio again, and sat down facing each other.
    â€œMrs Marsh, something happened on Thursday that worried me and made me want to talk to you again.” He paused. “I got home early from work, just before that storm began.” He explained to me where his house was: an area that, in the bad old days, had been the preserve of working-class whites and was now mixed, thoughthe inhabitants were predominantly lower-middle-class blacks – or that, at least, would be the description offered up by statisticians and those who had to quantify everything. People took pride in their surroundings, and there was remarkably little crime. It was a suburb that could probably be hailed as one of the successes of the new South Africa.
    â€œWell, I put my car in the garage and closed the door. I don’t always, but because of the rain … anyway, no one could see I was home. I went into the house, and the electricity went off, so there were no lights. I was in my living room, and I heard a noise at the back of the house. A kind of scratching sound. It was hard to hear, because of the rain. But I went to look, and as I came up to the back door – it has a frosted glass panel, one of those strengthened ones with wires running through the glass, so someone outside could see me coming to the door – I saw a figure run away and over the fence into the road at the back. Not clearly enough to see who it was. Just a shape.
    â€œI opened the door, and saw that someone had been trying to force the lock off with a chisel or a screwdriver, something like that. At first I thought it was just a burglar, or a young tsotsi taking a chance with an empty house and heavy rain so no one would be around in the road. But then I saw a scrap of paper lying on the step. It was a note of my address.”
    He stopped and looked at me. “So it was not just a child. It was someone deliberately trying to get into that specific house. Where I live, and where my father had been staying at the time of his murder.”
    I swallowed. His story was making me nervous. “Have you told the police?”
    â€œNo. Not yet. I phoned you, because I thought Ishould tell you, but I thought maybe I was concerned over nothing. After all, there was no proof that the paper had been dropped by the person at the door.” Not half, I thought.
    He went on. “But then, yesterday evening, I had a phone call. I will go to the police: in fact, I’m going to go after this and talk to Inspector Pillay or his sergeant. I’ve made an appointment. When I picked up the phone, there was nothing for a moment. And then a man’s voice, speaking English. He said, ‘Be careful. What happened to your father could happen to you. The police have got the right man’.”
    Paul Ndzoyiya was quiet. So was I. This was surreal. I once went to a so-called murder evening, where we were all supposed to detect who “killed” one of our number. It was wildly over the top, fuelled with numerous bottles of red wine, and punctuated by melodramatic statements, just like the one Paul Ndzoyiya had reported. Was he kidding me? Surely no one was going to say something like that? Not in the real world.
    I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Uhm, did you recognise the voice? Was it an African? You say