Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(24)

‘Not you, though. You wouldn’t do anything like that.’ I rolled my eyes.

‘No, no. Not me.’

‘How many kids were in that class?’ I asked. ‘The one about explosives.’

‘’Bout five of us.’ Zac smiled, sat giggling to himself, the only sound in the room as Snale, Kash and I quietly despaired about the four other kids we now had to interview. Kash slapped the table soon enough, shutting Zac up instantly.

‘This is all very hilarious, I’m sure, but the number one suspect as far as the rest of the town is concerned is you, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked in villages outside Johannesburg where suspicion of a serious crime is all it takes to get you dragged into the bush and hung from a tree.’

‘I’ve worked in villages outside Johannesburg …’ Zac waved his hands, his voice a buffoonish imitation. ‘Dude, you’re such a try-hard. You’re not impressing anyone.’

Kash looked like he wanted to leap across the table and strangle the kid. But he met my eye and I shook my head. I was in charge now. If we were going to do any roughhousing of the suspects, it was my call. And if we spent too much time knocking innocent people around, the people of this town would clam up on us. Small towns were full of secrets, and if we became their enemy, they’d hide the killer in their midst just to spite us.





Chapter 32


KASH WALKED OUT of the interview room, veins beginning to creep up from beneath the skin near his sweaty temples. Snale followed. I went to sit in the chair Kash had vacated and put my feet up on the table.

‘Is that tosser your partner?’ Zac asked.

‘At the moment.’ I took an intake form from beside the recorder and tossed a pen at the kid. ‘Fill in this form.’ I would take the paper and compare Zac’s handwriting against the diarist’s. The kid sighed and began writing.

‘So that guy’s your boyfriend, then,’ he said eventually.

‘Certainly not.’

‘I thought that was the whole deal, though,’ he snorted. ‘When dude and lady cops work together they get into dangerous situations. Have to save each other’s lives. Then they fuck.’

‘I’m no lady,’ I told the kid. ‘And you should be less concerned with who’s fucking who and more concerned about the townsfolk lynching you the moment they get a chance.’

‘ The townspeople can blow me.’ He sat back in his chair. This kid had a real fascination with fellatio. ‘You ask me, it’s the Old Man you lot should be looking at.’

‘Who’s the old man?’

‘The dude,’ he waved vaguely behind him, in a westerly direction, ‘I don’t know his name. Us kids just call him the Old Man. He lives out there in the never-never. His people and Dez’s people had some drama back in the day, when Last Chance was first settled. He won’t be friendly, join the town. But won’t fuck off, either. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s scary and old.’

‘Scary and old,’ I said. ‘Right. I’ll make a note of it. Until then you’re going to have to stay low. People around here want your blood.’

‘What else is new? Everything around here falls on me. You get used to it. I’m too big for this joint. They won’t know who to pin shit on when I bust outta here.’

‘You’ve got plans to leave?’

‘End of the term, I can legally leave school,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of here and I’m never coming back. I don’t care if I have to work at a McDonald’s and sleep under a bridge. You’ve gotta start somewhere, man.’

‘Is that what people do?’ I asked. ‘Take off as soon as they get the chance?’

‘No way.’ He put his arms behind his head. ‘Around here you take over your family farms or you go work for the mines and send your money back here. That’s the only reason people have kids in this town – because if they don’t, their farms will close down. If everybody leaves, the whole town closes down, so anyone who makes plans to go hasta keep it secret or people will start calling you a traitor, talking about how you’re abandoning the place. It’s supposed to be one for all, all for one. So people keep having kids, and their kids take over the farms, and then they have kids. It’s an endless, meaningless cycle of bullshit.’

‘So what happens if you’re a kid around here and you don’t want to be a farmer?’

He made a gun with his fingers, put it to his head. ‘Bang!’ ‘Don’t they try going into the cities?’

‘How are you gonna leave and start again in the big city when you grew up your whole life in a hole in the Earth? You got no money. No friends. No family backing you. No work experience. You don’t know the city ways. You try to climb out, it just sucks you back in.’

‘But you’re not going to get sucked back in.’

‘No way.’ He stretched, reached for the ceiling. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

‘None of your business.’

He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers over his skinny chest like he was planning on going to sleep. I knew that kind of calm. The emotionless resolve that comes with knowing you’ve reached rock bottom, that there’s no more trouble that you can get into. No expectations. Maximum ostracism. I’d been that kind of teenager. Wandering around the city at night on my own, spray-painting trains, breaking windows, lighting rubbish bins on fire.