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  Gobey stepped back so suddenly that he bumped into Neo and nearly fell. Neo immediately headed for the door but managed to stop himself when he got there. Venter watched their reactions with a sardonic smile.

  He steadied Gobey by his arm. “Careful, my friend. You’ll fall over something.”

  Chapter 48

  Across the front of the box between the two locks was what looked like the mummy of a small animal. The skull was exposed, and rodent teeth were bared outwards. Perhaps it had once been a bat, because where one might expect paws or legs, there were what appeared to be papery wings wrapped around the body. A separate skeletal claw grasped each padlock. It was obvious what it was: a fetish, something placed as a warning—or worse—by a witch doctor.

  Gobey pulled himself together. “Neo, take it out to the armoured vehicle.”

  Neo didn’t respond. It was clear that he wasn’t coming any closer.

  Venter grabbed one end of the box. “Here, I’ll give you a hand. You take the other end.” He started to lift the box. “Don’t worry. We fingerprinted it, but it was wiped as clean as a pure conscience. Not that you find many of those around here.” He chuckled, then added, “Not even a partial.”

  “They won’t take it,” Neo murmured. “The men. They won’t go in the vehicle with it if they see that.”

  Gobey realised he was right. “Do you still have the sacking, Colonel?”

  Venter looked doubtful. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  He went out, leaving Neo just inside the door and Gobey trying to stare down his fear. When Venter returned, it was with a worn blanket. He carefully wrapped the box and then again invited Gobey to carry it with him.

  They lifted it together, but it wasn’t particularly heavy. However, when they got outside the station, one look at the constables was enough to tell Gobey that they’d heard all about the box—probably they’d been talking to some of the local policemen. They backed away, and Gobey feared he might have a mutiny on his hands.

  He turned to Neo. “Open the boot of our vehicle. We’ll take it.”

  Neo didn’t look happy but did as instructed. They lowered the box into the boot, and Gobey slammed it shut.

  Venter passed Gobey a clipboard with more forms. “I need you to sign these.” Gobey signed in several places and turned to go, but Venter hadn’t finished. “Come take a look at the SUV before you go.”

  Gobey hesitated, keen to get going.

  “It’s just over there. It won’t take a minute.”

  Gobey walked with him across the yard to a fenced enclosure. It was obvious which vehicle was the robbers’ SUV. It looked as though it’d been in a war. Bullet holes peppered the body, and the tyres were down to the rims. All the windows were shattered. He looked through the empty windscreen. There was dried blood on the steering wheel and all over the back seat. The front seats were shredded.

  He pointed at the seat. “What did that?”

  The colonel smiled. “Interesting, hey? That’s not bullets. Someone used a knife, I’ll bet.”

  “Looking for something in the seats…”

  “Maybe finding something, hey? They didn’t tear up the back seats.”

  Gobey nodded. “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “It’s my pleasure, my friend. Let’s get back to your vehicles before all your men run away.”

  Gobey smiled weakly, and they shook hands.

  A few minutes later, Neo and Gobey set off, with the armoured vehicle following close behind.

  Gobey hoped that they wouldn’t be stopped at the border and made to unwrap the box. He couldn’t imagine what the customs officials would do. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t wait to get the box, the diamonds, and most of all the fetish, off his hands.

  Chapter 49

  In the end, the trip was uneventful, and they reached the Debswana sorting plant just after 5:00 p.m. The deputy commissioner met them in the secure loading bay, and he introduced the head of the plant.

  “I’ve explained that the box and the diamonds are evidence, part of our case against the robbers and whoever was working with them. However, we’ve agreed that they can keep the gemstones here for the moment. Probably safer anyway. But we keep the box and everything else.”

  “The witch doctor put something on the locks. It’s…very unpleasant,” Gobey informed him.

  “Really? Bring it inside, Neo. Let’s take a look.”

  Neo swallowed hard and walked up to the boot but didn’t touch the box.

  The deputy commissioner looked surprised, and then frowned.

  “I’ll do it,” Gobey said and lifted it out. Then they followed the head of the plant into the building.

  He dumped the box on a table and unwrapped the blanket.

  None of the men said anything for a few moments. Then the deputy commissioner told Neo to fetch the evidence kit.

  When Neo returned, the deputy commissioner used forceps to detach each claw and drop them into evidence bags. Finally, he dislodged the fetish itself and bagged it. The others watched him in silence as he sealed the bags.

  He handed the Debswana man a pair of latex gloves. “Touch the locks and the front of the box as little as possible. I doubt our South African friends tested for fingerprints there. You can unlock the box now. Try to hold the padlocks only by the sharp corners.”

  The man took out the envelope with the six keys and started trying them in the locks. He tried five keys before he found the right one for the first lock. He gave a sigh of relief when it sprang open. The deputy commissioner used the forceps to lift it and drop it in a bag.

  The man was lucky with the remaining lock. The second key he tried fitted, and the lock sprang open. The deputy commissioner bagged that one too.

  Then he took hold of the two hasps by their edges and lifted the lid.

  “Oh my God,” the Debswana man said.

  The detectives looked into the box, dumbfounded.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Gobey muttered.

  The box was filled with the same worthless gravel as the others.

  THURSDAY

  Chapter 50

  It was a sombre group that assembled the following morning in the conference room at CID headquarters. The news that the diamonds had not been recovered after all had spread like a bushfire on the Savuti plains, leaving everyone without any sense of accomplishment. If anything, however, the bad news made everyone all the more determined to crack the case, and they were all eager to find out what others had discovered. By the time Gobey walked in, every chair was occupied, and a couple of men were standing at the back.

  Gobey settled himself at the head of the table and looked around the room. “Good morning, gentlemen. We’ve been scattered all over the place, so it’s time for all of us to be on the same page. You may have heard that those responsible for the theft of the diamonds attempted to shoot their way out of a South African police stakeout the night before last. All were killed, and the diamonds were apparently recovered. Unfortunately, when we returned the box of diamonds to Debswana yesterday afternoon, we discovered that the box contained only gravel, just like the other two boxes.”

  A murmur rippled around the room.

  “Not only that, but there was a fetish of some sort clinging to the locks. That caused consternation among everyone who saw it. Even some of our own men were reluctant to touch the box, so I ended up having to carry it.” He glared at Neo. “It goes without saying that Debswana management is very upset by what has happened, and the commissioner is blaming us for losing the diamonds.” He shook his head but added no additional comment. Then he poured a glass of water from the jug in front of him and took a long drink.

  He’s trying hard not to say something rude about the commissioner, Kubu thought. He glanced at Mabaku, who was looking studiously at a sheet of paper in front of him.

  Gobey draine
d the glass and put it back on the table.

  “Given all that we’ve seen and heard,” he continued, “I think it’s reasonable to make some assumptions. One, someone on the inside, who knew of the backup, gave its details to the robbers. Two, the plan to steal the diamonds must have taken considerable time and coordination to pull together. And three, the burning of the plane on the Jwaneng airport was the first step of the plan. As of yesterday morning, I thought there was a fourth assumption, namely that the sale or transfer of the diamonds was going to be handled in South Africa, probably Johannesburg. However, since there were no diamonds in the box we recovered yesterday, that assumption probably no longer holds.”

  Mabaku raised his hand. “Actually, Director, I think there was a fifth assumption we made, which has also fallen away. And that is that the box in the hijacked van had the diamonds.”

  Another murmur went around the room.

  “What do you mean? The other two boxes had no diamonds. The diamonds had to have been in the one we recovered in South Africa.”

  Mabaku shook his head. “I think that’s likely, but it’s not definite. We’ll have to look into the teams in the other two vehicles to be confident they didn’t switch the diamonds for rocks en route to Gabs.”

  Or determine whether the diamonds ever left the mine, Kubu thought.

  Gobey took a deep breath and looked around at the men, all listening closely.

  “I’m going to ask each group to bring the rest of us up to speed on its progress. I’ll start.”

  For the next few minutes, Gobey outlined what he’d learnt at the Gaborone Cash in Transit facility. “At this point, my position is that it’s unlikely that knowledge of the backup plan came from there, even though it is likely that one of the guards in the hijacked van was part of the plot. That was a man called Kenosi, who was found at the side of a road on the evening of the robbery. He’d been shot three times. The head of the company—a Rra Henkel—was confident that the other two guards were not involved. They were both executed at short range with gunshots to the face. One was a woman.”

  “What about Henkel himself?” someone asked.

  “We will be looking into his finances and spending habits, as well as his phone calls and people he associated with. I’d be surprised if he was involved, but, of course, I may be wrong.”

  He turned to Mabaku. “You went to Jwaneng, Assistant Superintendent. Tell us what you found.”

  Mabaku cleared his throat. “Three people at the mine knew of the backup plan. The head of the mine, Chamberlain, conceived the plan in the first place and had it approved by the Debswana board. The head of security, Eddie Tau, and head of operations, Elijah Goodman, also knew of it. We’ll be looking closely at their backgrounds and lifestyles and so on. If one of them did tip off the robbers, the most likely is Tau, because he was one of two men present when the diamonds were locked into their container and the two decoys prepared. He could have marked the box with the diamonds in some way, so Kenosi would know which it was. One of the guards where the boxes were loaded told us that Kenosi checked the locks on all three boxes before being authorised to touch them. He could have been looking for a hidden mark, but so far we haven’t been able to find it.”

  Inspector Dow raised his hand. “I think we know how he did it.”

  Gobey nodded for him to continue.

  “When forensics examined Kenosi’s body, they found what appeared to be a small electronic device of some sort in his shirt pocket. One of the electronics fundis in forensics is looking at it right now, but he told me that he thought it was for a transponder.”

  “What does that mean?” Mabaku asked.

  “Apparently, a transponder responds to a signal by emitting one back. It means that someone could have hidden a small transponder among the diamonds, and Kenosi’s device would have guided him to the correct box.”

  “I didn’t know they had batteries that small.”

  “The guy in forensics said that transponders often don’t have a battery. He said they can be energised by the signal they receive.” Dow scratched his head. “I’ve no idea what that means, except that transponders can be very small.”

  Mabaku nodded as he caught on. “So, one would be virtually impossible to notice in a box of diamonds.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That means we need to examine the contents of all three boxes to see if we can find this transponder thing. Just what we need right now.”

  Chapter 51

  Gobey wanted to keep the meeting moving on. “You can examine the boxes later. Now, what about the other guard who helped Tau?”

  “Peter Tshane. At first, I thought he could be involved, but after pushing him hard, I changed my mind. But we’ll continue to dig into his background.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “It could also be someone in the packing area, like the person who initially filled the box with diamonds. He could have marked the box in a way Kenosi could identify it, such as putting a transponder among the diamonds. We don’t think it is one of them, but we need to dig there too.”

  Gobey continued the meeting by having the other groups report. There was a great deal of interesting information, but little was useful in pointing to who had been behind the robbery.

  “We’ll have to wait for details from the SA police—fingerprints, IDs, and so on. They said they’d expedite them.”

  “What about people inside Debswana?” one of the detectives asked.

  Gobey glared at him. “I can assure you that no one who knew the plan inside Debswana was involved. I met with them yesterday, and they confirmed that.”

  That isn’t very convincing, Kubu thought.

  “There’s one other thing I need to mention,” Gobey continued. “When I spoke to a Colonel Venter in Zeerust, he hinted that the behaviour of the police who took the robbers out was strange. They’re from a small town called Motswedi. He said he could find no reason why they would have set up a stakeout for the four-by-four. They said people in the four-by-four opened fire when ordered to stop. The police retaliated and sprayed it with automatic weapons. I saw the vehicle, or what remains of it. Nobody could have survived such an assault.”

  The men in the room digested the implications of what Gobey had said.

  “Does Venter think that they knew about the diamonds and then stole them?” one of the detectives asked.

  “He didn’t say, but questioned why they were so heavily armed for what appeared to be a small-time operation bringing hides into South Africa.”

  Another detective put up his hand. “Maybe they were tipped off about the diamonds.”

  “Debswana tells me that the locks are the best in the world. They are sure that the Motswedi police couldn’t have picked them at all, let alone in the brief time between the shoot-out and when they reported the incident—a mere twenty minutes later.”

  The men sat in silence, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

  “There is one other thing,” Gobey said. “The front seats of the four-by-four were slashed open with what Venter thinks was a knife. I saw the seats and agree with him. But the back seats hadn’t been touched.”

  “Sounds to me they had something hidden there,” Dow commented. “Maybe the robbers had opened the box somehow and hidden the diamonds in the front seats, hoping if there was any trouble, people would focus on the box. A sort of misdirection.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Gobey interrupted. “Our difficult case became much more difficult yesterday when the third box was full of rocks. We have to solve this case. We must find the diamonds.” He looked around. “Anyone got anything else to say?”

  Kubu put up his hand. “Sir, we found a package in the back of the pilot’s car at Jwaneng airport. It was given to him by an unknown man as he left the airport the night before the plane was sabotaged. I alerted the bomb squad and he
ard from them early this morning. The package wasn’t a bomb as I feared, but a fetish of some sort. So was the one on the box, so perhaps there’s a link there. My guess is that the man at the gate was either a witch doctor or working for one. Probably the former because most people here don’t want to get close to a witch doctor.”

  Mabaku laughed. “I would have liked to see their faces when they opened it.”

  Then Inspector Dow had something to say, and he wasn’t laughing. “When we were going over the scene where we found the armoured car, some herd boys came round with their cows. I chatted to them to see if they’d seen or heard anything the day before. They said they hadn’t, but they did tell me a man had come to them and told them they had to keep their cows on the road the following afternoon. That was the afternoon of the hijack. They laughed at him and asked what the cows would eat on the road. But he said he was a witch doctor, and it would be very bad luck to let them wander in the veld. He gave them ten pula and said a man would give them more money the next day, and after that they must keep the cattle on the road. They thought he was a man with much power since he had so much money, so they went to a lot of trouble the next day with the cows. Clearly, it was designed to block the road after the robbery. At the time, I thought the man was just pretending to be a witch doctor to scare the boys, but after Detective Sergeant Bengu’s story, I think it may have been the same man who went on to Jwaneng and gave the pilot that package. So far, we haven’t been able to trace him.”

  Gobey frowned, and no one said anything. Wherever they looked, a witch doctor seemed to be involved, and no one liked that.

  Chapter 52

  When the CID meeting eventually adjourned an hour or so later, everyone had a long list of tasks to take care of. It was obvious to Kubu that despite a plethora of facts, they actually had little or no idea of who was responsible for the theft of the diamonds, or if in fact they had actually been stolen on the way to Gaborone.