They say it should not have happened, could not have happened. In the first place, the autopsy was proof that she died by blunt force trauma to the cranium after sustaining multiple contusions to her ribs. There were unmistakable signs of struggle – she’d fought back, clawing at his skin with her nails and biting when she couldn’t punch but, in the end, he’d been stronger.
The republic police received a call about a domestic dispute at exactly 2200 hours, arrived on scene at 2330 and declared her dead at 2347 on Wednesday the 23rd of March 2008. A seasoned officer checked for her pulse and many neighbours bore witness. Revai Matanga was a dead woman.
The particulars were taken as follows: she was 19 years of age, she weighed 63 kilograms and she suffered before she died, even before the fatal battery. There were half-healed bruises, there were welts and, the coroner noted, any marital coupling she may have had with her husband must have been by force.
In addition to the evidence on her body, there were statements from her neighbours, and even her husband’s sister had testified against him in the court of law, but in the end, he’d walked free on some technicality – the technicality being a bribe paid to a magistrate the day before the trial was concluded.
They say she could not have been the one who did it in Mexico City, 15 November 2011. But her DNA was found at the crime scene and, DN, they say, never lies. Not that they would have linked her to the crime at first, but CCTV footage kept finding her there. There being Mexico City, Barcelona, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, everywhere. Even the Kremlin held a redacted file, privy only to the highest cleared investigators, that spoke of Krasnaya Shapochka – the Red Hood.
Not that it was possible to see the colour of her clothing on most security feeds but a profiler from The Netherlands could confirm with 89% certainty that the build, gait, and mannerisms of the perpetrator pointed to one UnSub (unknown subject) working alone.
“Even the idiosyncrasies of the crime scene, the separation of entrails, the spilling of blood, point to one perpetrator,” said Anna Jansen in a special briefing for Interpol. She didn’t mention the word serial killer, for it tended to make people panic but any investigator worth their salt knew what it meant when there were multiple murder victims in multiple cities with staged corpses.
And so, unbeknownst to Revai’s family (and because it was against the custom) the republic police exhumed her body by cover of night and concluded that: a) she was indeed still dead and b) she had not escaped her coffin.
“How could it have happened?” her relatives asked when the police kept asking questions, but the international police were beginning to think it was the only thing that could have happened.
There was the fact that the second wife of the first victim, a Bruce Lancaster from Salt Lake City, Utah, wouldn’t meet the eyes of the investigating officer. Her body was bruised. Bruises she’d tried to cover by pulling her jersey tighter around her shoulders as she stared intently at her overly polished shoes while her fingers played at a loose thread on her old couch.
Yet the detective who worked homicide had started off at Special Victims and knew the signs. Bruce Lancaster had died because he was a wife beater, pure and simple. In the end, lack of means and opportunity meant they couldn’t pin it on the Vic’s wife, but in his own mind, the detective pinned it on her till his dying breath. He had a gut feeling about such things.
The Guatamalan detective who questioned the prematurely aged widow of Juan Calabar had reported a different story – the widow cried, he wrote in his brand-new notebook, but the stepdaughter seemed visibly relieved at the shopkeeper’s death, almost smiling her pleasure but only held back by propriety, while the widow kept sniffing into a handkerchief and asking, “¿Por que?”
She wore a brown dress, and her hair was tied back into a severe bun. Her daughter sat stoically next to her, rubbing her shoulders in a circular pattern, a mysterious gleam in her eyes. The detective could see that she was all bruised skin and broken bone, and by the way she shied from his booming masculine voice, he concluded that a man was at the root of those scars.
The detective put her down as a person of interest, but the sheer force of power needed to enact that level of violence? That ruled her out. She was a slip of a thing and by the way she shied from his gaze, he doubted that she could have created such a gruesome crime scene. But if not her, then who?
They say it was a serial killer. The manner of death, the MO as one officer rambled, was similar in all cases: blunt force trauma to the cranium, the murder weapon being an axe, bruises, and contusions consistent with grievous bodily harm before the final blow. DNA under the fingernails of the victims showed signs of struggle. Hard struggle.
These pronouncements were made by a New Orleans cop who drawled around the piece of peppermint gum he chewed. With his tall frame, wrinkled suit and newly bare ring finger, Alfred La Haye was a walking cliché. He even had the coffee breath to go with his persona. It was obvious to anyone who looked that La Haye was recently divorced and married to the job. The bodies of many victims kept him up at night, this one in particular. The body had been found by a homeless man behind a dumpster, his corpse carved like an animal – the entrails set aside. La Haye had lost his diner breakfast to the asphalt in the alley. Although he’d lived in New Orleans all his life, he felt there were some things a man must never see, that corpse being one of them. It was a good thing the uniforms had cordoned off the area.
After he’d regained his composure, La Haye surveyed the crime scene. There was skin under the man’s fingernails. Red fabric intermingled with his navy business suit. La Haye concluded that the “perp” was careless, leaving DNA and fabric behind at the crime scene.
“He’s quite the amateur,” he said later in his warbling accent as he teleconferenced the so-called profiling expert.
Anna Jansen, the analyst from Netherlands disagreed, “A lot can be gleaned from this type of UnSub. The UnSub left their DNA there on purpose. Such UnSubs feel the need to be heard and have probably felt silenced in the past. I would suspect the UnSub to be a victim of a previous crime that went unpunished, or at least they see themselves that way. I would even hazard a guess that such an UnSub may visit the crime scene or try to keep track of police investigations. Such UnSubs may even attend their victim’s funerals in disguise.”
She said “they” but deep down in her heart, she knew it was a woman, despite the M.E.’s reports about weight and force and drag. She had been there before… she remembered the hand of a superior officer wandering into her clothing while she was drunk at an office party, only to wake up naked in his bed the following morning with no recollections, but the year had been 1989 and no one would have cared so she’d kept it to herself.
“We should call him the Deadbeat Killer,” Adebayo Avery said to a group of fellow reporters. The reporters were “up to here” with the police because the police weren’t revealing important facts and what’s more, were dragging their feet in the investigation. Yet the latter was not entirely true.
The FBI and local PDs set up boards with names places, dates, vics until they ran the DNA sample found under a victim’s nails on an international database and concluded that America’s Deadbeat Killer was the Castigadora de Bestias who was wreaking havoc in Latin America and The Viking who was killing sex traffickers in Europe’s red-light district.
“He is a big blond man with muscles and a goatee beard and carries an axe, a very big axe,” the wide-eyed sex workers told the police whenever they were questioned. They shrunk deep into the reflective blankets that shielded them from shock and drank the tea the gendarmes gave them greedily.
The perp looked nothing like the sex workers described, and they knew it, but the police believed them readily enough, what with the coroner’s report about force and drag and weight differentials. Besides, there was a code on the streets – The Red Maiden saved them, and whatever it or she was, they wouldn’t repay her kindness with disloyalty. For the first time since they’d all been drugged and kidnapped, there was a chance to return home or live their remaining lives with some semblance of peace.
In Africa, they hadn’t named him, still burdened by cases of femicide and theft and gang-related violence but Aiden Randera, SAPS veteran in charge of the Cape Flats confirmed that crimes against women had gone down by 5% since the first sightings of Die Rooi Poppie. Most said she was an urban legend, but Randera considered her a miracle.
He’d been battling femicide since even before Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk got the Nobel Peace Prize and if some skirt was going to take the work off his hands, then he wasn’t complaining. The last part, he told the reporter “off the record” while patting her shoulder like they’d been friends since the Y2K explosion.
They all said it was a miracle and secretly, to their wives and girlfriends and lovers and brothers, they admitted that the Deadbeat Killer made them sleep safer at night, knowing there was one less sleaze on the streets but to the cameras and microphones and reporters and paparazzi, they condemned “any and all forms of vigilantism”, saying every man, deadbeat or not, was innocent till proven guilty and if any woman had any charge, any case of assault and battery, gender-based violence or workplace harassment, then she should report it through the “proper channels” but the senseless killings should end.
They say only the minority of abusers are ever put behind bars. The actual figures, of course, vary from country to country. They say, “Look what happened to Cyntoia Brown.” ‘They’ being the army of women on the internet who were pissed off by the statement given by the FBI’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge, ASAC Cho’s statement on the 8 o’clock news, the video having been reshared on Twitter and WhatsApp and Tik-Tok and Reddit.
For a while, ASAC Cho had hunted down their IP addresses, saying it wasn’t a case of single vigilantism but perhaps the day had come when women got so angry that they decided to find vengeance and so they all donned the red hoodie, the way all members of Anonymous donned V’s mask. That way they’d all have alibis for their abusers’ murders. That way they’d be everywhere and nowhere and invincible. ASAC Cho was wrong.
Today
I know different. I was hired to find the killer by the widow of a particularly rich deadbeat. At least, that’s what I tell them when I interview the widows, the cops, the profilers.
The evidence leads me to a sleepy old town called Redcliffe. Southern Africa. A country by the name of Zimbabwe. What Interpol and the FBI didn’t tell members of the public, but what I managed to glean using the 21st-century resource of hacking the internet, is that the DNA under the men’s fingerprints was female and belonged to a Revai Matanga. Born in the village of Hwedza, married at the age of 15 to a local businessman and then bludgeoned to death at the age of 19 for not cooking the correct relish for dinner that night. A senseless killing.
“She didn’t even want to get married,” they say. I’m talking to a gaggle of girls I meet chilling near a service station. Sleepy town, not a lot to do. After the metalworks shut down in the nearby town, everyone here is underemployed and itching to leave. Here, the teenagers can buy snacks and gossip until one of their parents comes looking for them – which is unlikely at 4 in the afternoon. Dusk has not descended yet.
“She was just a girl, but some of these men think they can cure STDs by sleeping with virgins. Her family was poor so…” the girl shrugs nonchalantly when she says this but, in the undercurrent, there is an unspoken message: Revai could have been me, Revai could have been any of us. I’m glad she wasn’t me.
“She hasn’t been here in a year,” another girl says, to erase the last statement.
No one likes to acknowledge that the world is ugly. I’ve learned that in all my years on this trail. I don’t tell the girls that sometimes serial killers circle back to their hometowns, it gives them a sort of closure to come back as powerful avengers but these girls, sixteen going on nineteen still have their naivete and I won’t be the one to burst their bubbles.
The girls say that the murder weapon was an axe. That the whole neighbourhood heard her screaming while her husband wielded it, but no one thought it was their business to intervene until her body was carried off in the white republic police van with blue and gold stripes. Then it was their business to spread rumours about it to this day.
“Zvakaoma!” One of the girls exclaims. It is a word they use when the conversation is heavy, and they have nothing useful to add.
There are details that don’t appear in official records, that I only know because I came here after the first Interpol hit suggested it might be her DNA, her corpse, her body. For instance, her first bed was a sad affair – a simple double bed with dirty blankets on it and no bedspread. Her neighbour remembers this detail as Revai often spoke of it. As a village girl, her family hadn’t afforded beds and simply laid down blankets on reed mats. Revai didn’t often think of herself as a wife, only when it was time to visit the marital bed – and then she would freeze, tense, and sometimes pray she was elsewhere.
***
Notes from my interview with the neighbour also referred to a lot of skinning that Revai did:
“Her husband slaughtered animals. Revai said he was too stingy to buy meat from the butchery, even though he could afford it. So, every weekend, she was in the kitchen cutting and cleaning goats, rabbits, chicken, sheep; always separating the meat from the entrails – in one bucket the liver, in another the intestines, the rest of the carcass in a green metal dish. Her hands were always a bloody mess. Their house always smelled like blood. That’s why I didn’t realise that day. I was used to the smell.”
“Sometimes we sat under that mango tree in the afternoon,” the neighbour points at a gnarled specimen that no longer bears fruit. “She watched the girls coming home from school. Here, there were korokozas – gold panners, you see, men who drove these big cars around the neighbourhood. The girls jumped in and came back with new clothes, new weaves, pizza, money. Sometimes it didn’t end well though. When the girls got old or pregnant, the men abandoned them. Revai just frowned and said she’d stop the men one day; she’d kill them in the act. Redcliff is her town and she felt rage for it. Of course, she scared me with her ferocity, and we never spoke of it again.”
“Never?” I asked.
“Never. But you see, her family… these are things that must not be said… but I believe she’d want to say them.”
I nodded to indicate that she must continue but when I brandished my pen, she pushed my notebook away.
“They beat her grave. They weren’t supposed to. Revai once ran away from her husband. That was after she lost the baby. Her husband followed after a while. They always do. So, when she ran away her husband threatened to take back his roora and her father – he has seven other children – told her to return to the city. Can you imagine?”
I could imagine it, so I nodded.
“So, anyway, when she died, he mourned her like normal. Some say he felt guilty, and others say he was too greedy to think, but the coroner said she was killed, and the judge said she died of natural causes, so her family decided to consult the spirits. Her father wouldn’t have it.”
“Her sister told me they did it the wrong way. It was her mother and sekuru and a distant cousin of her father’s stood for the paternal lineage. They called her spirit home, but it was not their right. They asked for her to name her killer but … nothing.”
By this time, she is whispering, and I angle closer to her. There is load shedding tonight and the only source of light we have is an old paraffin lamp. The neighbour positively looks like a ghoul and the yellow light dances across her face, igniting shadows on the ceiling.
“Then what happened?”
“The next day her husband was found dead in the house – his head was kicked in, his entrails separated, liver in one bucket, intestines in another, his corpse in the green metal dish. The house reeked of blood.” She shifts closer to me. “That was the first time they exhumed her body. There was nothing in the coffin.”
“But…”
“But the second time she was right there wasn’t she?”
***
They say, there have never been survivors, but there must have been, for in her neighbourhood and in her province, there are stories of a hitchhiker.
“She wears a red hoodie,” they say, “stops men on their way home from bars.”
“No, she wears a red trench coat in winter and hitchhikes along Harare Road.”
“You’re wrong. It’s a dress that she wears, and she follows men home from the bar. Anyway, she’s not all bad,” one girl says, “I feel safe at night.”
That’s how I like to think of her, as an unsung angel, caped in red, thumb jacked into the starless night.
They say, “She looks 19, and has looked 19 since she started haunting the neighbourhoods. Ever since she died, she has never looked older!”
“She stops the men’s cars, okay, and they take her on a drive to, like, wherever she wants them to go, then in the middle of nowhere, she tells them, ‘Stop the car, yes, right here.’ And they must think she wants to stop for a quickie (at this the neighbourhood girl looks down in shame for a second, but my eyes are not judgemental) or something because she was pretty cute before she died. That’s why it made her husband jealous. Aichengera, you know?”
Indeed, I know. I’ve interviewed her surviving relatives and they all agree on her husband’s jealousy and rage. Her image in CCTV footage is grainy at best but I can attest to her beauty too.
This particular homicide takes place near her death place. Twenty kilometres outside the town of Kwekwe, not an hour’s ride from where she died. Appledew Farm, to be exact, although given the arid conditions here, it’s more of a cattle ranch than an apple orchard. The officer commanding Midlands Province allows me to ride shotgun because someone at Interpol told him I would be joining him in the investigation. The woman who hired me as a PI has boat-loads of money and even more influence. She wanted me to find out why her husband was killed by the red one and I told her I’d investigate. I could have told her a long time ago that he was implicated in a trafficking ring but then I wouldn’t have a cover and I wouldn’t have money to travel the world. Besides, it’s her dead husband’s money I use to follow the trail, so I feel zero guilt.
The officer picks me up at the service station, as Interpol asked him to, I see him sneer at my short stature and large tote bag before pasting on a fake smile.
“I thought you’d be taller,” he says, “from your passport photo.”
“I thought you’d be handsome,” I retort, and then giggle before he can take offence.
This is a high priority case – the vic happens to be a popular businessman with relatives in high places so they won’t let any old inspector investigate. Heads will roll if the real killer isn’t caught, hence the presence of the commanding officer. He has all the confidence of a man who has never been bested before and I laugh inwardly because I personally know he won’t catch her. No one ever has, not even the coffee consuming La Haye.
“So, HQ sent you down here to consult?” He must still be hung up on my height and deceptively young looks.
I nod. He looks doubtful but shrugs. He can’t fight his superiors, and he knows this. He turns the volume up on the sungura music streaming from his radio before hitting the tarmac. He turns into a bumpy dust road before speaking to me again.
“A small girl like you shouldn’t come to crime scenes,” the policeman says, in heavily accented English, and I bristle because I’ve already told him I’m twenty-nine – a woman – but his types like to establish dominance. He thinks he knows everything about me but these smug types often overplay their hand, I know more about him.
I look out the window for a while, where the landscape is eerie as the sun dips into the horizon, casting an orange pall. The sparse trees turn to dark silhouettes. Something like a jackal or a wild dog cries out. My skin tingles.
“As a matter of fact, crime scenes can get ugly. My first crimes scene was so ugly, I vomited my entire breakfast – eggs, bread, baked beans.”
“I know,” I tell him, pissed that he’d given me a whole shopping list of his morning appetites. I did not need to know that. He was a small-town detective when Revai Matanga was killed, and he turned a blind eye when her relatives begged for justice. He even went farther, burying evidence and making sure the statements in the case file disappeared the night before an enquiry declared that there was no evidence of foul play. Revai’s husband paid him well. Two hundred US dollars was a big bonus for a civil servant back in 2008.
“She only targets violent men, so I have nothing to fear,” I add, feeling a surge of adrenaline.
He turns surly. I’m not kowtowing to his leadership enough. This could get ugly.
“I’ll say it again, crime scenes are ugly, and women like you have no stomach for crime scenes. Women have no stomach for anything.”
There is a lull in which his police radio and the car radio both turn silent, and it is just the two of us in the wilderness. The sky has darkened to a deep blue now and we should have arrived at the crime scene a while ago, instead, the road seems to extend itself onward like a Sisyphean loop. I refrain from responding to his words. The interior of his Ford Ranger is filled with the overpowering aura of smugness – this is a man who has never known fear. It will make everything easier.
“Neither do men. You lost your breakfast when you were called out to investigate the husband’s murder,” I tell him.
“What? You’re a social behavioural consultant from the States. What do you know about my case history or how many murders I have investigated in my time?”
I am undeterred by his insignificant question, and I throw two bloodied hundred-dollar bills into his lap, “You lost your breakfast when the grave was empty and then when it wasn’t.”
His hands tighten on the steering wheel and the car swerves dramatically. The commanding officer sweats even though it isn’t hot. He seems to notice for the first time that the sky has turned to pitch. He checks his phone, but the battery is dead. He glances briefly in my direction and for a fraction of a second, I see the fear of God in his eyes. And now at once I look both foreign and familiar. He makes to grab his service weapon from its holster, but it isn’t there.
The grey coat I wore when I entered his vehicle has transformed into a luminous cherry red. I smile and my teeth are sharp talons. Superintendent Karimanzira’s pupils dilate then constrict in rapid succession. He has finally caught on – there is a monster in his car and for the first time in his life, the monster isn’t him. He has solved the case of Revai’s corporeal disappearance and of her husband’s murder and if only he could call someone at Interpol then he’d be promoted big time but –
Reading his thoughts, I smile when he acknowledges that there won’t be a call to Interpol or any promotion in the near future and, for a while, he just keeps driving, his hands and feet moving of their own accord as if he has become a puppet, enslaved to someone else’s intentions. At the first juncture in the road where there are no signs of life except snakes and hyenas, I command him to pull over before zipping up my cherry-coloured jacket and heaving the axe out of my unassuming tote bag and he has no choice but to comply.
I could tell him he’s been weighed on the scales and found wanting, but that would just be too much of a cliché. I could also tell him about how I was reborn in a body that wasn’t mine when my family called my spirit home, a body that is always shifting – unassuming by day yet terrible in the nighttime, but I do not have time to illuminate these things for him. I simply follow the impulse.
“Get out of the car,” I say, and he complies though his eyes flash with hate and fury. I follow him to a secluded tree where he kneels before me, awaiting judgement. I swing my axe.
