The Satanic Mechanic. Sally Andrew

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      CHAPTER TWO

      The frogs and toads were making music like an underwater marimba band. There’s a spring near the Swartberge, the Black Mountains behind my house, and a stream with little pools, where the frogs sing love songs to their mates.

      The potjie was delicious. The meat and onions at the bottom were sticky and brown, and the layers of vegetables had that fire flavour.

      ‘Leave some room for pudding,’ I said. ‘I have a special chocolate cake, and botterkluitjies with brandy sauce.’

      ‘Jinne, I haven’t eaten those butter dumplings since I was a boy. My brother gave me a black eye once, fighting over the last kluitjie.’

      We sat side by side on the stoep, listening to the frogs, holding hands and looking out across the veld. His hand was warm, and wrapped all the way around mine. The moon was not yet up, so the burning stars filled the sky.

      ‘The sky gets so big at night,’ I said.

      ‘It’s big in the day too.’

      ‘Ja,’ I agreed. ‘But I don’t notice it so much. Now it’s so full and busy. All those stars. And planets.’

      ‘Look there, on the hilltop. That’s Venus rising.’

      ‘So that one’s Venus. When I can’t sleep, I sit and watch it setting, early in the morning.’

      Henk’s lamb butted at his thigh with its little horns, and he fed it a piece of rocket. He wasn’t bottle-feeding Kosie any more.

      ‘You still having nightmares, Maria?’

      ‘I’ll go make the coffee.’

      ‘What that man did to you . . .’

      ‘Ja,’ I said, thinking of Fanie. But Henk was talking about the murderer who’d tried to kill me. Henk and I had first met when we were investigating a murder, a few months ago. He didn’t know the whole story about Fanie.

      ‘You can get help, you know,’ Henk said. ‘Counselling or something.’

      The problems I had were bigger than Henk Kannemeyer knew about. The kind of problems no one else could help me with.

      ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

      ‘But sometimes—’ His phone rang. ‘Sorry,’ he said, answering it.

      I went to the kitchen, to prepare the dumplings and brandy sauce. I could hear him talking on the stoep.

      ‘Sjoe . . . They got her? . . . She didn’t run? . . . Ja, they’ll keep her in Swellendam now. Maybe send her off for psychological assessment . . .’

      When I came back with the kluitjies, he was looking out into the darkness.

      ‘What happened?’ I asked.

      Henk shook his head again. He didn’t like to discuss work with me.

      ‘Was it that woman?’ I asked. ‘Who stabbed her boyfriend in the heart?’

      Jessie’d written about it in our Klein Karoo Gazette. I did the ‘Love Advice and Recipe Column’, and she wrote the big stories. The woman was from our town, Ladismith, but the murder had happened in Barrydale. The man had been eating supper in the Barrydale Hotel with a friend, and his girlfriend had walked up to him and stabbed him in the heart. While they were trying to save the man’s life, the woman had just walked out.

      ‘They’ve caught her?’ I said.

      ‘Ja. She went back to the Barrydale Hotel, had supper at the same table . . .’ He shook his head.

      ‘You think she wanted to get caught?’

      ‘She must be mad,’ he said. ‘Stabbing him like that, in front of all those people . . .’

      ‘I wonder—’ I said.

      ‘And then going back . . .’

      ‘I wonder what he did to her,’ I said to the pudding, as I dished it onto our plates.

      ‘I’m sure her lawyers will have a story,’ he said. ‘But it’s over now. The Swellendam police cover Barrydale. Let’s not talk about it on a night like this.’ He swept his hand out, to show the flowers on my dress and the stars scattered across the soft dark sky.

      The botterkluitjies put an end to the conversation anyway, because all that you can say when eating those cinnamon brandy dumplings is ‘mm mmm’. Then there was the cake. I didn’t think my buttermilk chocolate cake could be improved, but then I invented another version with a cup of coffee in the dough, a layer of peanut butter and apricot jam in the middle, and an icing of melted coffee-chocolate. It was so amazing you would think it had come from another planet.

      ‘Jirre,’ said Henk, after a long time of speechlessness. ‘What kind of cake is this?’

      ‘A Venus Cake,’ I СКАЧАТЬ