Hello brave: Hello series, #2

By Abbas QriquaS

In Hello brave the attention shifts to the antagonist, Mastandi the father of the triplets narrated from the antagonist point of view. Mastandi a handsome, middle-age, unmarried man, his handsomeness had only intensified over the years. The hair at his temples has begun to turn grey and has grown a thin salt‑and‑pepper moustache that made him look like Omar Sharif. Like a film star, he wore sunglasses everywhere. But it wasn't only his bronzed face, his square jaw, the white teeth that he flashed on the rare occasions when he smiled. It wasn't only this that made him handsome. His manliness had matured like a fine wine. His movements were smoother, his voice deeper. His emotional stiffness seem like self‑control, and his humourless expression made him look like some beast, slumped in the sand, apparently listless, but that can, with a single bound, descend upon its prey with ferocity and devour it. Mastandi presents a sensitive, patient, analytical, unpretentious but deadly character who plays a long game when dealing with Modi. Although Mastandi has the resolve and determination to find TAM, he displays a remarkable lack of anger and urgency in doing so even when he faced abuse and mistreatment at the hands of Modi. Despite the grave subject matter and a mournful voice that is pervaded with a terrible feeling of premonition, Mastandi realises the interiority of his character through digression and deferral by using lyricism and lofty tones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abba QriquaS
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224132508

Abbas QriquaS

Abba Qriquas has the following collection to his name: Fiction Hello series Travel series The world temporarily closed Current affairs Betrayed, broken & corrupted Twilight at dawn Free humanity free the earth 1632 centennial series Biography Ek is 'n Qriqua YA Inspiration Soaring eagle Letters for my sons The kingdom series Book 1 Book 2 Book 3 Book 4

Book preview

All the best stories are true

Bones: scene one

From primeval forest to ribboned tree, from stout trunk to husked log, I wait. Jennifer Rosner

What sort of life would this be if shadows of her crime were to peer at me from silent corners, to mock me from secret places? And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it is to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms and give them visible form.

‘Captain, I foresee lots of interest; curious neighbours and passers-by with their cell phones jostling to take a peek at what you are doing there. Keep them out and don’t let anyone touch anything.’

‘Roger that Sup.’

‘In the meantime, I am organising equipment to be dispatched to the scene. Ensure there’s at least one car with a functioning camera for the link up with the ops command centre. Over and out.’

He drove as fast as he dared on blue lights and wailing siren on an open freeway that stretched away on both sides. He arrived on the scene accompanied by his partner. In his eighth years with the crime scene unit, he had learned that if you were the first car to arrive at the scene, you would find chaos, more so when it was on Saturday.

The first, crucial stage of an investigation is known as the golden hour. The best chance of getting forensic evidence before crime scene became contaminated by increasing number of people. The moment a crime scene controller arrived at a crime scene the site becomes his responsibility. To minimise their chances of contaminating the scene with such minute clothing, one of his key tasks was to see if there were officials on the scene, if so, what they were wearing because anything could lead to false trials.

Upon arrival the two plain clothed detectives armed with orders to keep the paparazzi, gossip peddlers and nosy on-lookers out of the way of police business were in no mood of joking. Mpho and Tladi stood next to their unmarked white Polo Vivo, their backs to the road smoking and talking among themselves.

Mpho wore a light brown linen suit, his hair was ragged, and he looked tense as he gestured with his hands. His left arm rested on Tladi’s shoulder like they were posing for a selfie. Tladi had a blue shirt and baggy Dockers, face was blank. The sound of engine cutting made Tladi look over his shoulder, a second later, Mpho aped him. A grease stain rorschached the front of his pants.

Not long after their arrival sirens, blue and white lights were seen flashing on the N3 highway racing south towards the crime scene, in tandem technicians driving a white Isuzu marked PATHOLOGY & FORENSIC SERVICES tailed them. Upon arrival they were immediately directed by Tladi to park outside the cordoned off area.

Although she had done this job hundreds of times before, she found it never became easier. The shoes got jammed in them halfway down, stuck as she tugged them up over her hips. The two technicians emerged behind their van with light, blue-coated disposable hazmat suits gleaming like headlights under the back-alley illumination.

When they were finally ready, they ducked under a grim sign written POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS walked down to the house. They got over and quickly hunched, peering in and around a tree where next to it was a police photographer making lightning with her Nikon.

A third unmarked van arrived minutes later carrying two cadaver-sniffing dogs, radar imaging equipment and other forensic paraphernalia. To the casual on-looker this was a remarkable display of the might of the force in unprecedented solidarity.

There was no crowd gathered around except a few passer-by who became curious when they saw police vans entered the big house. An old frail-looking couple from the opposite house emerged from behind curtains where they had remained unobtrusively observing police activity at one of their neighbours, inched closer near the police line chatting in hushed tones. Drained with a look of stranded traveller.

A second elderly pair also made tentative approach closer to the police line, bore the startled, terrified look of someone caught in the midst of smarmy, private ritual. Primed for confession but unsure of the crime. Tladi sighted the neighbours whom they reminded of crotchety uncles and flinty characters from the old. Men who might soften once you got to know them but never lost the hard centre. They were now visible to the police but preferred to maintain their distance, arms folded.

The commander of the K9 unit removed the yellow tape from its original position extending it to the gate perimeter. Then released the Alsatian pair to sniff around the property into every corner but turned up nothing, ditto radar and sniff tubes. Nothing remotely iffy inside the house either.

‘It would appear this was a lone antique rather than a cemetery run by a psycho.’

He told the techs working on the grave who merely nodded their heads. 

With stakes and wire Keke and her partner divided the area into four search grids, then began digging with hand shovels and small brushes. They piled the white wooden cross in a mound next to the excavated soil, paper lay scattered on their trays in an inscrutable exhibit.

On the white cross there was no name or date of birth inscribed just bones waiting for someone to find them. About three and half metres below the ground the first exhibit was identified. A blue box. Inside it was an assortment of brown bones that once been a baby’s skeleton, lay scattered on an old blanket.

With skill, the techs carefully extracted the box from the ground where it lay mindful that it might open from the bottom causing them to lose valuable data. They manually lowered the handcart and shifted the hive into the wild grass metres away from the shallow pit. Before hoisting the blue box, they touched the underbelly with their bare hands to check for corrosive effects that might have opened holes on the bottom end. When the detected none, using blunt point forceps, they lifted the box about half a metre over bumpy mound and proceeded to place it on top of the open grass.

Everything was in the open now. They were in the familiar world. The box is solid brass. Beneath the blanket was a wad of newspaper clippings lining a blue metal box around two arm’s length.

They visually examined the contents with scrutiny of a code developer in their preliminary assessment. Even so, identification proved difficult. The grave refused to yield the secrets entrusted to it months earlier. Keke, Burns senior partner was constantly shaking her head, barely had one full thought—it was just loops and spirals and falling stars of anger, hatred and disbelief.

She returned to the van, washed her hands with Betadine, then unwrapped a pair of sterile purple gloves and slipped them on. Having inspected and found them without flaws, she removed a folded spacesuit from the tool kit and placed it in the red border on the grass. It took a bit of play with the suit which looked like a heavy paper accordion, but she found the foot holes.

Samples on hand she switched on the light of her magnifying glass strapped around her head, got an inch from the bones and adjusted the magnifying glass one more time and increased the blue light intensity for perfect visual acuity.

The general shape was of a tiny, disarticulated human body. Open sutures in the skull and a couple of dental eruptions in the mandible made the initial guess four to seven months old baby bones. The bones seemed even smaller, the colour of browned butter in places, nearly black in others. Fragile as lace.

The bones which were extracted from blue metal box, blanket and newspaper covering had been reassembled from the fragments by Burns. It was as if the image caught on the video emerged with its dark nature exposed. A shared darkness.

‘I can see tiny nubs running along the chewing surfaces of both jaws.’ Observed Keke

‘What do you think the box was originally used for?’ Burns wanted to know.

‘A morgue receptacle, I think, intended to transfer lab specimens, and someone thought iron and steel expedited oxidation.’ she replied.

‘I was thinking something used for transferring remains.’

‘The baby died a natural death in hospital, and someone took the body. Bodies don’t stay in hospitals; they go to mortuaries. After that, who knows. Regulations have ceased to matter in the Health Department long time ago.’ She added nonchalantly.

‘No wires or drill holes. So, it does not appear a teaching specimen. She touched the tooth buds. Not a newborn, not with those mandibular scissors about to come through, best guess would be seven months, which fits the overall size of the skeleton. I am not seeing any obvious tool marks – no wounds of any sort. The neck bone appears to be intact, no bone malformations, either.’

‘Asphyxiating a baby is easy and not rare in infanticides. Too young for sexual dimorphism.’

‘Natural death but someone buried it next to a tree, why?’ he frowned.

‘Customarily we wrap bodies in shrouds, then bag them. Typically, mortuaries pick them up for storage, there’d be no reason to use brass containers not for as long as I can remember African customs.’

‘A creepy alcoholic voyeur and a dullard man-boy didn’t add up to the kind of planning and care that had concealed the infant’s body long enough to reduce it to bones. This is the hand of someone who knew the infant closely.’

‘Covet burial does imply some sort of guilt.’

‘Or affinity.’ Corrected Keke.

‘I’ve never seen a thing like this before.’

‘B,’ there is something I am missing in this picture unfolding before us.’

‘The lab will be able to gives us more clues, gender, racial origin, and time since death. I reckon the forensics have their work cut out here and maybe they might shed better light on this macabre event.’

‘I don’t need to remind you we live in scary times.’

‘Nastier things are happening these days. It’s a dark world of shadows. Shadows crept and trembled at the corners and each stain looked like dried blood.’

‘I heard on the radio that prelim data suggests a Paediatric Nurse once lived on the property not so long ago. She seems to have disappeared though; it is difficult to track her down.’

‘Nurse on the move, sounds like a good movie to me.’

‘If that happened to a well-heeled place like Bassonia, what do you think the haunted squatter camps look like?’

‘If it’s true for this infant, none of us are safe anymore.’

Burns secured the box, blanket, the bones, soil in which the box was buried, pictures of the tree and carefully wrapped each piece in a translucent plastic with clear markings, tied each with a stout twine and loaded onto the right-hand stretcher in the white van still standing outside the big house. Bolted metal racks secured the bag and the empty stretch to its left.

Their vehicle remained parked on the lawn next to the kerb side all doors open waited for further instructions from the command centre. Flanking their van were two cars with four blue and white roof lights pulsing. Terse recitation from dispatch operators sparked the night but no one was listening. More crew had since arrived on the scene mostly milled around smoking and laughing out aloud at their recycled banal jokes.

All the dying that summer began with this single discovery. It was a summer in which death, in visitation, assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. You might think I remember that summer as tragic and I do but not completely so.  

I’d heard about the discovery of the bones the way everyone else did. I was eating a solitary dinner and half listening to the broadcast. This caught my attention because I tend to gravitate towards local crime stories. Third story on the evening news, right after the update report on the trial of a prominent hip-hop rapper accused of assaulting his girlfriend and the afternoon floods in Centurion and Khayelitsha.

Blow-dried news readers half smiling as they intoned about the ‘shocking exhumation’ mock-solemn memories.    In the morning, The Citizen ran a follow up piece. The article was buried on page 12, trumped by electricity technical outages, contaminated water in Winterveldt outside Pretoria and unusually high bills for water in Joburg all blaming municipal ineptitude Bla-Bla-Blah. The coverage boiled down to a space-filling rehash ending with the pronouncement that Saps lab are the last hope for putting an end to the saga haunting the suburb of Bassonia. 

I drove to my studio thinking about tiny bones, a life barely lived, a nurse who was both saint and monster. This could be my son Meir, for all I care. Suddenly, this thought lodged in my mind and stayed with me refusing to dissolve. I began to worry, obsession turned into fixation and then I was panic-stricken.

On occasions like these I’d sound out my trusted friend and confidante Meral. So, I called to alert him to the discovery and asked him to begin his own investigation to allay my fears so I may get rest. I asked him if it was plausible theory that the reason, I never found photos of my babies in Modi’s phone was because she hated the dreaded the reminder of my dead son picture in her folders.

‘It’s a terrible thing to have a constant reminder that one of your babies is no longer alive, and you have no way of explaining it to the world.’ He replied.

‘She can’t rationalise anything to forgive herself. Can she?’ I retorted

‘At least, she consoles herself she knows where the surviving members of the trio are.’ He said.

‘This, this disappearance if proven is like double sword into my heart, Bro.’ I said.

Meral sensed my angst did not want to prolong the quizzing promised to look into things and as usual without promising anything would revert to me if there was anything to sharing in this regard.

It’s no secret that police forensic headquarters have high backlog of cases, some goes back two years. The system is utterly clogged. Understaffed, slashed budget and high turnover are among the excuses offered when media ask questions. This is a nightmare scenario for victims who need speedy answers to close murder cases. They ask what good is it that the police would confirm or deny murder two years later when the memory begins to fade and the wounds starting to heal?  

I don’t know for how long I can hold out without knowing the identity of those bones. For me the waiting exacerbates my feeling of ‘aloneness.’ Only thing that makes things to move fast in this country is if media piles up pressure with continuing coverage with more questions, innuendos, and implied blame. On someone higher up the ranks in government. Politicians are sensitive to scandalous fallout tending to panic. Inevitably they push low-level departmental functionaries to get them answers. Things get done. Fast.

Seeing reality for what it is wouldn’t benefit our health. So, evolution selected a veil to be placed over what is really happening before us. And that veil is what we refer to as our perceptions. By perceiving what we take in, we build models of reality instead of having to gaze directly at reality itself. And while this may protect our mental well-being and comfortably lead us to reproduce, it turns out natural selection has also installed something that contradicts this: Our insatiable curiosity to uncover what’s beyond that veil. This desire resides at the heart of any search. My search for my babies.

Bones: scene two

A story always starts before it can be told. Sara Ahmed

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Prisha lived in the leafy suburb of Bassonia. A brief stroll from the recently opened mall leads you to here house. Massive, gated complex called The Rocks is located near Beverly Hills. Fancy apartment blocks surrounded by Torrey Pines. Gorgeous place. Warm nights. A lot more temperate than most parts of Durban. The Rocks is a hidden beauty minutes from the  imposing and the hypertensive drive of the area.

Six hundred plus acres of untamed chaparral, skyscraper cedars, pines and south Joburg oaks surround kilometres of Kibler Park hiking trails and central hub bejewelled by a sun-mirror lake.

A smaller pond is chock full of ducks, turtles, sunfish, and minnows. We drive up to the Rocks gatehouse and roll down the window. No need for Meral to flash his badge, Prisha had left his name by the guards.

We parked in the visitor’s area, walked past fountains, flagstone roundabouts, perfect palms and pines and coral trees, precise sections of velvet lawn. A redheaded, exuberantly freckled woman wearing enormous, blue-framed eyeglasses, baggy green linen pants. Her T-shirt read, I may look lazy but on a cellular level, I am quite busy. She responded to us saying, ‘Hi, I am Sam. Lilly is expecting you, she should be here shortly.’

Dr Lilly Chang worked for Meral on numerous cases before as forensic pathologist. She is here to sift through the mass of data cutting through the police red-tape, get the facts and give us preliminary answers that cannot wait for two years. Lilly Chang is 1.72 and lanky with loose walk that caused her ginger mop of hair to shudder as she led the way into her Range Rover Vogue. I caught sight of her SUV descending the road. A Jaguar and a Porsche rolled that out of the driveway entered the road cutting in front of me thus obscured my vision of Lang’s car.

A nanny walked a baby in a navy-blue stroller. Birds swooped and