Rosamund Kendal is a freelance writer and a general practitioner at Alberlito Hospital in South Africa. She is the author of The Angina Monologues and The Karma Suture.

The Murder of Norman Ware

By Rosamund Kendal

Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Rosamund Kendal
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4314-0444-5
CHAPTER 1

The Murder Of Advocate Norman Ware caused great consternation among the residents of the exclusive San La Mer eco-estate. This was not because Advocate Norman Ware was a particularly well-liked man, nor was it because he held any sort of standing in the San La Mer community, despite the fact that he was a renowned and highly regarded advocate. The murder of Advocate Norman Ware (and he was never called anything other than Advocate Norman Ware: never simply Norman, or Mr Ware, or even, in the private-school manner, Ware) caused a furore in the luxurious gated community because it was not supposed to happen. The residents of San La Mer paid steeply but never reluctantly to ensure that such things did not happen. Their collective, exorbitant levies subsidised the electric fence around the perimeter of the estate and the infrared beams that sensed any human movement where it should not be. They paid for the security guards who patrolled the estate twenty-four/seven and manned both of the entrance gates, carefully screening access to the estate. The payoff for the residents of San La Mer, the pay-off for the expense and for the hassle of phoning the control room for a unique access code every time one of their friends wanted to pop in for coffee or sundowners, was that they were assured that they would not be murdered in their homes. Advocate Norman Ware’s death both made that reassurance extremely tenuous and devalued their properties overnight. Of course, it was also the manner in which Advocate Norman Ware was murdered that caused alarm.

But the residents of San La Mer were needlessly worried. They could have gone back to their marble and cherry-wood mansions, their sedate games of golf, their gin-and-tonics and tipsy trivia-quiz evenings, without another thought of Advocate Norman Ware. Their contained, carefully constructed lives of illusion need not have been disturbed. And perhaps, after the dissipation of the hype surrounding the murder, they would not be. Perhaps the disquiet surrounding Advocate Norman Ware’s untimely and ignominious death would be transient, like a ripple on a lake, disturbing the still, glassy surface for a few seconds and then disappearing completely, leaving behind no trace of its source. Because the fact was that Advocate Norman Ware’s murder was the culmination of a series of seemingly unrelated, purely random events. The chance of something like it ever happening again was infinitesimal. Besides, the motive for Advocate Norman Ware’s murder – if indeed something so at the whim of coincidence could be labelled a murder – was not armed robbery or hijacking. His death was not the result of a paid hit; he was no corrupt mining magnate or overly inquisitive journalist. The motive for his murder was the oldest and purest motive, one repeated throughout history; it was an inexplicable, unreasonable motive; a lonely, private and desperate motive. The motive behind Advocate Norman Ware’s murder was, quite simply, love. But none of the residents knew that when his body was found by one of the groundsmen near the communal swimming pool early in the morning of the third of November, and so there followed among the residents of the estate an inordinate amount of distress, frowning, hand wringing, and phoning of financial advisers and lawyers.

* * *

Jackson Ngombo left work early on the afternoon of the second of November, as he did every Wednesday. His contract allowed him to take off a half day on Wednesdays in order to compensate for his having to work every Sunday morning from five thirty to eleven, mowing the greens so that golfers scheduled to spend their day of rest playing on the world-class San La Mer golf course would have perfect surfaces from which to putt their insignificant little white balls. It didn’t enter his mind to question the legitimacy of this arrangement, even though he had to wake up at three o’clock on a Sunday morning in order to get to work by five thirty. In fact, having Wednesday afternoons off suited him because it gave him the opportunity to meet up with his girlfriend, Pretty.

Pretty was as attractive as her name implied. Few onlookers, struck by the immediate force of her beauty, would notice the hardness that played on her lips for a split second before they broke into a smile. Even fewer would realise that the depths of her cocoa eyes could not be plumbed; that they were shallow and glassy, the windows to her soul shut tightly. There was a darkness to Pretty’s beauty, a side to it that was unnervingly reminiscent of the story of the Flying Dutchman or the legend of Van Hunks, that was somehow suggestive of a bargain with the devil.

When Noluthando Gwala had been pregnant with Pretty, she began to swell up in a way that she had not with any of her five other children. Her fingers and toes had been transformed into sausages. Her belly had become a tense drum streaked with purple-blue veins. Her breasts had turned pendulous and her face had become puffy and round, like the full moon. She had eventually lumbered to the local clinic, fearful that her skin would split if she grew any bigger. The doctor at the clinic, an overworked intern with bloodshot brown eyes and the tremor of a habitual coffee drinker, had mumbled something about her blood pressure and sent her by ambulance to King Edward Hospital, where white-coated specialists cut her baby from her womb. As the infant had left her body, Noluthando began to shrink. The loose skin that had been left by the newborn’s departure hung in shrivelled folds over her belly and around her ankles and wrists, so that it looked as though she were a body inhabiting another’s skin.

As Noluthando looked down on her perfect daughter – born with a head full of thick, black curls; eyes brown and wide and long-lashed like a cow; a rosebud mouth; and flushed pink cheeks – she sighed in awe, not realising for one moment that this tiny being, on her dramatic exit from the womb, had stolen all of her mother’s loveliness.

Noluthando, who was not used to the perfection of a Caesar baby, but knew only the boggy, coned heads and squashed faces of infants who had been forced down a narrow, hostile birth canal, knew without any doubt that the little doll in her arms would break many hearts in her lifetime. She did not know then that her heart would be one of those broken, and that her husband, unable to bear the ugliness of his once-beautiful wife, would take a new wife and discard Noluthando, like an item of clothing for which he no longer had any use. But that would happen in the years to come. At the moment of her daughter’s birth, Noluthando believed she had been blessed, and she had named her daughter Pretty.

Whether it was because she had stolen her mother’s beauty or because her mother had been foolish enough to name her as she did, Pretty was destined for unhappiness. Too beautiful for any man to risk taking as his wife, she would become mistress to a string of men. She would learn at a young age the value of her sexuality, but only later would she learn the price. Years of manipulating men would leave her unable to trust anyone, and with no knight in shining armour to resurrect the scraps of leftover idealism from her childhood, she would become increasingly disillusioned and bitter, until eventually she would tolerate only those relationships that were based entirely on material value.

But now, when we see her waiting at the shebeen for Jackson early on that Wednesday afternoon, she is sixteen years old and in the prime of her beauty. Betrayal and cynicism have not yet taken their full toll on her appearance. She has glossy copper-blonde extensions on her hair, falling midway down her back. Her eyes are lined in thick black eyeliner, and the sensuous fullness of her lips is highlighted in glittering pink. She has been to the beauty salon, for men pay well to have attractive, well-groomed mistresses, and she is sporting long, bright-red acrylic nails. What turns men’s heads, though, is not so much her external appearance as the confidence and sexual energy that she exudes. She is unashamedly for sale to the highest bidder.

Jackson met Pretty at the door to the shebeen, as he had done every Wednesday for the past three months. He kissed her briefly, resting his hands, while their lips touched, on the firm roundness of her buttocks, and then went inside to buy some quarts of Black Label beer. It was dark inside the shebeen, and muggy. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and sweat and alcohol. Men sat on upturned crates. Some talked loudly, gesticulating and laughing; others were silent. Near the entrance, one man had passed out and lay on the dirt floor. His body was spreadeagled, his limbs messily flung out, and Jackson shivered, reminded suddenly of the victim of a hit-and-run accident that he had once glimpsed while passing in a taxi. Usually Jackson would linger for a while with Pretty at his side, having a drink and showing her off, but on that Wednesday the air in the shebeen seemed to want to choke him. He coughed, trying to get rid of the thickness in his throat, but it refused to budge. For the first time, he noticed the despair that hung around the drinking hole, beneath the smoke and the harsh laughter. It was like a ghost, hovering on the periphery, and Jackson felt that, if he stayed, that despair might inhabit him and take possession of his soul. Perhaps that was what had happened to these men, sitting drinking in the middle of the day, and their whores, spilling over them in drunken disregard. He paid for his beers quickly and hurried out of the shebeen.

As Jackson stepped into the sunlight, he noticed that his skin was covered in tiny beads of sweat. Pretty began to nag, asking him why he was in such a hurry to go and moaning that she wanted to stay at the shebeen, and for the first time since they had started seeing each other, he growled at her, warning her to shut up and listen to him. Later, in the taxi on the way to his house, he felt guilty for having shouted at her and he snuggled close to her body, trying to apologise, but Pretty was sulking and refused his advances. He had never seen her petulant and it irritated him, because it was due to him that she had such fancy hair, nails and make-up. Without all that he had given her, she would be like any other teenage schoolgirl. The thought did cross his mind later on in the afternoon, once his wife, Gugu, had walked in on him and Pretty having sex, that if he had listened to Pretty and stayed at the shebeen, his wife would never have found out about his affair.

Gugu was not supposed to come home early on a Wednesday afternoon. She usually arrived home at six o’clock, by which time Jackson had finished with Pretty. On Wednesday the second of November, however, Gugu’s employer, who had cancer, had collapsed and had had to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance, and so the shaken Gugu had been given the afternoon off, which was how she happened to stumble upon her husband and a beautiful teenager making love in her bed. Gugu’s immediate reaction, when she saw her naked husband, was to laugh. He looked ridiculously comical, with his bare, pimply bottom bouncing up and down in the air: a middle-aged man trying to prove his manhood to a little dressed-up doll. Her laughter appeared to scare the copulating couple more than any shouting and screaming would have. The girl scrambled off the bed and grabbed her discarded clothes from the floor, lifting them to cover her naked labia. Jackson sat still, unable to decide how to respond. It was as though Gugu’s stare had turned him to stone, an ignoble and tragicomic David posed upon the rumpled bedclothes.

Gugu’s laughter turned to anger, a fury that boiled in her stomach and made her want to vomit, that caused her hands to shake and her heart to take flight, but she refused to succumb to it. Instead, she made herself walk calmly to the pine cupboard on the other side of the room. It was second-hand, a gift from her employer, and the scruffy remains of stickers, the full cast of Ben 10, were still visible on the doors. They had never bothered her before, because she had seen the cupboard solely in terms of its function, but now the demons seemed to be mocking her and leering at her. How long had they been witness to this debauchery? she wondered. Gugu packed some clothes for herself and the children into an old tog bag, enough to last them for several days. As she walked out, she told Jackson that she would send her brother to fetch the rest of her things on Saturday. He was not to expect her back soon.

When Gugu told her employer, Angela, about the incident a few days later, she realised that she had suspected the affair for a while. ‘Black men are like that,’ she told her employer bitterly. ‘They can’t keep only one woman. They have to have lots of women, but I don’t want that. I don’t want a man who wastes his money buying another woman instead of paying for food and clothes for his children. You wouldn’t understand because white men aren’t like that.’ Angela had not known how to respond. She had wanted to tell Gugu that many white men are like that; that possibly they had just been forced to be more discreet.

* * *

It took Jackson a long time to get up from the bed once Gugu had walked out with the battered Health & Racquet Club tog bag slung over her shoulder. Pretty had dressed and sat waiting for him on the step at the door of the one-roomed house, sipping a beer. The afternoon sun came in through the doorway and framed her, so that she looked like a movie character with burnished copper hair, but Jackson was now unmoved by her beauty. He wanted her gone, wanted her evil temptation as far from him as possible.

Perhaps Pretty was intuitive enough to sense Jackson’s mood because she picked up her handbag, the diamanté-studded silver one that she had bought from Mr Price that morning with money Jackson had given her, and walked out into the road. She was hoping that Jackson would call her back, but he didn’t. He didn’t even get up to watch her walk down the street, two hours earlier than she usually did on a Wednesday afternoon.

All of this – the debacle with Pretty and Gugu; the knowledge that his wife had walked out on him; the fact that he would not see his five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter again for an indeterminate length of time – resulted in Jackson drinking far too much that Wednesday night, which in turn meant that he was late for work on Thursday morning, the third of November.

Jackson was employed by a large landscaping company that maintained both the gardens and the golf course within the San La Mer estate. Usually, Jackson worked on the golf course and had to be at the estate early in order to mow the fairways and greens before the golfing day began. It would not be unreasonable to say that Jackson enjoyed his work. He liked driving the powerful, automated lawnmowers. He enjoyed donning earmuffs, protective glasses and a thick plastic apron and attacking the unruly edges of the course with a weed-eater. He took pleasure in the washing of the machines after a day’s work: hosing down the lawnmower after carefully removing the plastic grass-collection containers from the base; unwinding the cords from the weed-eater and wiping down the body; hanging the edge-trimmer on a thick steel hook in the wall of the maintenance shed beside all the other weed-eaters and branch-cutters and edge-trimmers; and then sharing a cigarette with a colleague. There was something about the power of the machines that excited him and raised him above the level of ordinary gardener. But on the morning of the third of November, he arrived at work late, and so he was delegated to the landscaping section as opposed to the golf-course side and issued with a pair of grass clippers from the maintenance shed (all the weed-eaters had long before been handed out). Along with the grass clippers, he was given his first written warning, which engendered renewed thoughts of anger towards both Pretty and Gugu. It might have been that anger, although it could equally have been the beer he had consumed the previous evening, that made his head feel as though it was going to burst and caused his eyes to burn in the sunlight. But he was not at all nauseous until he stumbled on the body.

Jackson’s job for the day was to trim manually the edges of the flowerbeds in the communal pool area. The communal pool area incorporated three pools (a large one in which exercise fanatics could swim lengths and kids could play water polo; a smaller, kidney-shaped one with submerged seating in which lovers could pet and women display themselves; and a round, shallow one in which toddlers could waddle); a small restaurant that sold light meals, sodas, cocktails and wine by the glass; ablution facilities with toilets and showers; and a sunning area complete with deck chairs and umbrellas. The pool area was one of the attributes of San La Mer that made it such an exclusive and sought-after estate. It was to this pool area that Jackson was banished after arriving late at work. It is important to note here that what was considered late in terms of Jackson’s arrival at work was relatively early in many other respects. In fact, the murder scene was discovered at eight forty-five, which was far too early for any of the San La Mer residents to have even thought about making the leisurely trip down to the pools.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Murder of Norman Ware by Rosamund Kendal. Copyright © 2012 Rosamund Kendal. Excerpted by permission of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.