Kwei Quartey

The World's Female Sleuths
I became interested in the world's female sleuths after writing the first two novels in my Emma Djan Investigations series. Emma hails from Ghana, where, after being kicked out of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), joins a detective agency. Her first case, in which The Missing American man comes to Ghana looking for his online love, plunges her into a bizarre world of Internet scams and devious fetish priests.  Her second adventure, expected 2021, is Sleep Well, My Lady, based on a real case out of Kenya. Like Mma Ramotswe (see below), Emma Djan is inspired by her late father, who was a homicide detective in the GPS.


The World's Female Sleuths: Ghana (Shutterstock)

The Missing American (Image: Kwei Quartey)

Now, off to Japan, where in The Kingdom by Fuminori Nakamura, Yurika is a freelancer in the Tokyo underworld. She poses as a prostitute, carefully targeting potential johns, selecting powerful and high-profile men. When she is alone with them, she drugs them and takes incriminating photos to sell for blackmail purposes. This dark novel that pushes the boundaries of the genre with sympathetic antiheroine.



The World's Female Sleuths: Japan (Shutterstock)



The Kingdom (Image: Soho Press)


Next, we zoom over to South Africa, where we find Jassy Mackenzie's private investigator Jade de Jong. Library Journal says, "...For those readers who like Sara Paretsky and Lynda La Plante and fans of international crime fiction,” giving you an idea of how tough a protagonist she is.
Random Violence: In Johannesburg prosperous whites live in gated communities; when they exit their cars to open the gates, carjackings are common. But seldom is the victim killed, much less shot twice, like Annette Botha. Piet Botha, the husband of the wealthy woman, is the primary suspect in his wife’s murder. As Jade probes into this and other recent carjacking cases, a pattern begins to emerge, a pattern that goes back to her father’s murder and that involves a vast and intricate series of crimes for profit.



The World's Female Sleuths: South Africa (Shutterstock)




Random Violence (Image: Soho Press)


Directly north of South Africa is Botswana, home to a female sleuth that to many will need no introduction: Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith's creation, the dearly beloved Precious Ramotswe, who is revered for her pragmatic, gentle, but just view of the world.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the first detective novel in the eponymous series, was  first published in 1998. Mma Precious Ramotswe begins the first detective agency in Botswana in the capital city Gaborone, after her beloved father dies. She hires a secretary and solves cases for her clients. At first, Smith's novels in this series didn't catch on in the US, although it had a following in Smith's native Scotland. It's said that after September 11, 2001, mystery readers were looking for something comforting rather than violent and murderous, and this series really fit the bill. Today, these novels are seen everywhere in the world in multiple languages, a mere dream for most authors.


The World's Female Sleuths: Botswana (Shutterstock)


First edition of No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Fair use: http://bit.ly/Ramotswe)


Stay tuned for more international female sleuths! We're not done!

Kwei Quartey

Murder in Africa

Michael - Thursday

As the year crawls to a close through the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I thought back over some of the mysteries I’d read in 2017.  Most of them are African, and that’s partly because every month I write a piece called Africa Scene for the International Thriller Writers e-magazine The BigThrill.  The idea is to feature books (and their authors) set in Africa.  Most of the authors do live on the continent, but there are several who live elsewhere, but choose Africa as their setting for a variety of reasons.  I’ve discovered some really good authors, and have an excuse to fire questions at them. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve met many of them and enjoyed that a lot as well.

Hopefully, readers of the magazine are intrigued enough to try some of the books, and experience a bit of sunshine noir.  African thrillers and mysteries have a lot to offer, and they are different!

So here’s a rundown of this year’s articles to give you a flavor. If any catch your fancy, click on the month for the author interview and more details about the book.

January.

Lagos island

Our own Leye Adenle talked about Easy Motion Tourist, his debut thriller set in Lagos. Prostitutes are being murdered. It seems to be for muti—witch doctors’ potions.  But there’s a lot more to it than that as Amaka, whose mission is to keep prostitutes safe, and Guy, from the UK and the easy motion tourist, discover. Nigeria provides a fascinating backdrop for an original plot with a twisty ending.

February.

Antipoaching team

February featured Paul Mendelson’s The History of Blood.  Paul has such a deep grasp of South Africa’s history and culture, to say nothing of Cape Town itself where his thrillers are largely based, that you’d have to believe he’s lived here all his life. No. He’s from England, but this is South African crime fiction at its best.

The body of a girl is discovered at a seedy motel with slit wrists. Suicide is assumed, but the autopsy reveals she has swallowed masses of cocaine wrapped in condoms. The hunt for the mule runners leads to other smuggling and the remains of an elite military group from the apartheid days. Paul’s detective has to unravel this nasty mixture, with lots of surprises along the way.

March.

Kibera, Kenya

Michael Niemann was born in Germany and now lives in Oregon, but along the way he’s spent a lot of time in Africa. His protagonist Vermeulen investigates fraud for the UN, and pretty soon it leads him into very hot water. Legitimate Business was set in the refugee camps of Darfur; Illicit Trade, the second in the series, concerns human trafficking from Africa.

April.

Uranium ingots

April brought us back to South Africa with Jassy Mackenzie’s heart stopping thriller Bad Seeds. During the apartheid era South Africa developed nuclear weapons, I guess for the same paranoid reasons that North Korea does today. After the government changed, the weapons were dismantled, but the nuclear material is still around. This story is as believable and scary as tomorrow morning’s headlines.

May.

Any time Mike Nicol comes out with a new book, it’s an event. Agents of the State is very close to home, and its honey-loving president-for-life (of South Africa) is very close to someone else we know around here. Mike explores how this sort of state operates, and how the agents of the state get away with what they do. We’re not sure who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and real life is like that. If you like sunshine noir and haven’t read Mike Nicol, you’re missing out.

June.

Sally with friend

For a complete change of pace, take Sally Andrew’s second Tanie Maria mystery, The Satanic Mechanic. Everyone loves Tanie Maria and her luscious recipes from the Karoo. But she has real issues too, and the crimes she needs to solve are anything but cozy. Alexander McCall Smith called her first book “a triumph.” 'Nuff said.

July.

One of Hayden Stone's problems

Arthur Kerns started his career in the US Navy, spent many years with the FBI, and then consulted with the intelligence agencies. He doesn’t like to say which ones, but there are no prizes for guessing the answer.  If anyone knows how this stuff works he does. His freelance agent, Hayden Stone, gets into all sorts of trouble with his unconventional methods of sorting out the bad guys. He’s all over Africa in The African Contract.

August.

Weather map by Alex Latimer

Something completely different. Diane Awerbuck and Alex Latimer, both South Africans who usually write in other genres, team up as Frank Owen to write South, a dystopian and scary alternative history thriller set in the US. Okay, I said all the books are set in Africa, but I lied. Yet the book has very African roots. You’ll recognize apartheid in the South, walled off and isolated from the North as deadly viruses are blown in by the wind. And the wall across the country precedes Donald Trump.

September.

Kwei Quartey lives in Los Angeles, but spends time in Ghana researching his novels and visiting friends there. Death by His Grace is the next in his police procedural series featuring Darko Dawson. We’ve been amazed at how his themes and ours often overlap although Ghana and Botswana are so far apart. Great sense of place when you join Kwei and Darko to visit Ghana.

October.

Meeting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Paul Hardisty is a Canadian who lives in Australia, but he shares with Paul Mendelson a deep knowledge and grasp of South Africa. Reconciliation for the Dead, based on the real story of “Dr. Death” from the apartheid era, exposes a gruesome plan from that time. Paul’s novels are passion driven; this one may be his best so far.

November.

Martin Steyn is a young South African Afrikaans writer and Dark Traces is his first book in English. It’s a dark serial killer novel—he admits they fascinate him—but it’s the struggles of his detective with his past and the death of his wife who was the center of his life, and his problems fitting into the new police system, that make this book memorable.

(By the way, Michael Stanley's Dying to Live was also featured in another section of The Big Thrill in November.)

December.

Dam at Amanzi

The year finished with the remarkable book Fever by Deon Meyer, South Africa’s best known crime writer. It’s a standalone set in a small town in South Africa in the near future when most of the population has been wiped out by a virus. I’m betting it’s his breakout book. This is what the London Times said about it:

‘It’s a crime thriller, but it’s far more. The first sentence is: "I want to tell you about my father's murder." The actual crime takes place more than 400 absorbing, emotional and atmospheric pages later; the solution comes even later than that. The narrator, who is aged 47, tells of his teenage years when his father founded a small settlement, safe from a virus that has killed most of the world's population. But as the community grew, so did their problems, their jealousies and the moving relationship between father and son. There are shades of Cormac McCarthy's superb The Road, but Fever grips even more.’

What can I say? If you don’t like African mysteries and thrillers, you haven’t been reading them!

Happy new year everyone, and happy reading!

Ghost Town

Jassy Mackenzie for Michael - Thursday

Jassy Mackenzie was born in Zimbabwe, moved to South Africa when she was eight years old, and now lives near Johannesburg on a small farm with her partner, two horses, and two cats. She says she loves the energy, danger, and excitement of Johannesburg, and believes there is no better place for a thriller writer to live.

She has written four successful thrillers set in South Africa and featuring her private investigator, Jade de Jong, a complex character with an ambivalent background, who goes looking for trouble when it doesn’t find her. She’s also been exploring other genres, but I’m delighted that she’s returned to thrillers and to Jade with BAD SEEDS released in the US by Soho this month. I loved the book, and talked to Jassy about it in ITW's Africa Scene this month. James Patterson is impressed too. She's just published a Bookshot novel PRIVATE GOLD with him and his team.

In her guest blog today, Jassy tells a very different type of  story...

I’ve never thought of Johannesburg as being an especially spiritual place. Brash, expanding, money-driven, yes. A place where lost souls, ghosts and spirits roam, where the thin veil separating worlds can easily be drawn aside… no, not really.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’m wrong.

As far as the spiritual world goes, I can’t see ghosts. I am blind, deaf and dumb in that regard. They don’t appear for me and never have. As a writer, I think it’s a pity, because I’d love to see one, but that’s just the way it is. Maybe ghosts are like cats… they won’t come to the people who really want to interact with them.

I have friends who live in a perfectly ordinary suburb of Johannesburg; a normal residential area with treed streets and old houses. Their house is a happy place; a sprawling home full of children and adopted pets. Some years back – I think it was soon after they moved in – they were haunted by a ghost.

He was a playful, naughty creature and they worked out that he was a little boy. Some nights, they used to hear their young children talking to him. He was a mischievous presence who had a particular obsession with potato peelers. No matter how many they bought, the potato peelers would disappear within days. But occasionally, they’d turn up in weird and random places. From time to time, other things would go missing, too. For them, this was all perfectly normal – the ghost was a part of the family along with the one eyed ancient bulldog and the kitten they found in a drain and the cat with half a tail.

One evening while the family was out, they had a burglary. They came home to find the place had been broken into and ransacked. The TV and hi-fi had been stolen of course, along with some jewelry which was expensive, and also had sentimental value. Living in Johannesburg, they did what we all do. They told themselves they were lucky nobody had been home at the time. They managed the disaster and contacted their insurance company, got the insured items replaced and tried to forget about the irreplaceable stuff. They went on with their lives – except one night, after they had been out again, they returned home to find the missing jewelry. It was in a pile in the middle of the bed.

I wouldn’t have believed this story if my friends hadn’t told me themselves, over a few drinks, during one of our get-togethers. It raises so many questions. Did this friendly spirit hide the jewelry before the burglars reached it? Did he somehow go out and get it back for them? How exactly did any of this happen?

There’s no logical explanation… but that doesn’t mean there is no explanation. If I were blind, deaf and dumb, I wouldn’t know about music and song, the beauty of a sunset, or that you can communicate with someone using only your eyes or a whisper. They say that sailors of old who navigated by the stars, could see them even in daylight. Maybe there are other skills that we modern humans, glued to our smart phones and living in our frenetic world, are losing the ability to do. Perhaps the old Scottish prayer about “Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night” is not as quaint and silly as it seems. Because the veil might not blow back often… but when it does, I think there’s a world waiting for those who are able to see.

You can contact Jassy on Facebook, and Twitter @JassyMackenzieAuthor

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Murder Is Everywhere

Author Recognitions and Events

ANNAMARIA ALFIERI

April 28-26

Malice Domestic

Hyatt Regency

Bethesda, Maryland

Panel: The British Empire

(FYI- Sujata and I will be on the same panel!!!)

May 31

Janet Rudolph Literary Salon:

"The History of Hot Places: Clashes between Colonialism and Local Cultures”

Joint appearance with Michael Cooper

Jun 11

Books NJ

Sounds of the Paramus Library

1-5PM

Panel: How to Write (and Read) Mystery

Signing at the MWA-NY Booth

June 16-18

Deadly Ink Conference

Hilton Garden Inn

Rockaway, New Jersey

CARA BLACK

Murder in Saint Germain, Aimée Leduc’s next investigation, comes out June 6, 2017.

CARO RAMSEY

Paper back of Rat Run published 28th March.

JEFF SIGER

"The Olive Growers,” appears in BOUND BY MYSTERY, an anthology edited by Diane DiBiasi celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Poisoned Pen Press, out in March.

MICHAEL STANLEY

Dying to Live (Kubu #6) to be released in May in UK & South Africa and in October in USA

May 19-21   

Franschhoek Literary Festival (Michael).

May 20        

Panel :One Voice, Two Authors with Alex Latimer and Diane Awerbuck 11:30 - 12:30

May 21        

Panel: The Author as Chemist with Joanne Harris and Ekow Duker 11:30 - 12:30

Panic and Pleasure

The past weekend saw Michael and me putting the full stop at the end of the last sentence of the last chapter of the fifth Detective Kubu mystery.  For reasons that evade me, we don’t write The End.  We just put down the mouse and take our fingers off the keys.  Period.

Of course, before the ink has even dried, panic sets in.  “What will our agent think of the new manuscript, which is very different from its predecessors.  When it gets onto bookstore shelves, what will our readers think?  Will there be any readers?” 

I was going to write this whole blog about our nervousness and trepidation, about the doubts we feel, and the momentary flashes of confidence that pop out of nowhere.  But much of what I would have written was handled most eloquently by Zoë Sharp last Sunday.  So instead I’m going to tell you about a grassroots Literary Festival that is being held this week in Knysna, South Africa, where I lived (when in South Africa) for the past ten years.

Started four years ago by Ling Dobson, the owner of the local franchise of one of South Africa’s best known real estate agencies, Pam Golding Properties, the fifth Knysna Literary Festival has as its goal to help bring the love of reading to the local population and to provide funds to local charities. 

The Knysna Literary Festival (http://www.knysnaliteraryfestival.co.za) is very different from others I attend, which are for mystery readers and writers.  This festival appeals to readers of all types and of all ages. 

A month or so before the festival starts, local school kids are encouraged to enter essays and poems into a competition for different age levels.  The prizes are very appealing, ranging from popular personal electronics to books.  Each year the number and quality of entries has risen.  This year there were 185 entries.  Here is the winning poem:

Just for Today

Just for today I want to be five again

To remember all we did back them.

Pretending to be kings and queens

Putting my head down with no worries or cares

Forgetting about my make-up and hair.

Just for today I want to publicly fart,

I want Superman to steal my heart

I want the pure and simple . . . and not a single pimple.

Just for today I want to smile like the sun

And splash like the sea.

I want to be the best version of me.

I want love in the air and gentlemen who pull out my chair.

I want butterflies, the beautiful kind.

I want to put tomorrow out of my mind.

I want to see the world for all its beauty

And forget all its pain.

Today I want to be five again.

Five was free, five was me.

Sixteen is free, sixteen is me.

Just for TODAY, I’m who I’m meant to be . . .

ME.

Brittany Chalmers – Knysna High School – Aged 16

And I can’t resist giving you the following essay written by Carly Howard – 10 years old and a few days:

The Long Road

Almost there! Almost there! I can’t believe this is finally happening.  I am in the plane and counting down the hours until we land in the desert outside Cairo and tomorrow I will finally be seeing the pyramids of Giza.  This is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I first heard of them.

The next morning our tour guide, Ramid, and driver, Py, picked us up at our hotel and off we set for the pyramids.  Boy, was I ever wrong.  The first stop was the Golden Eagle Jewellery Shop.  “Oh poop,” I muttered under my breath.  Actually it wasn’t too bad and we left with a golden cartouche with my name in Hieroglyphics and a turquoise scarab beetle.

Would the next stop be Giza?  No1  Now we headed off to a carpet-making factory.  That wasn’t too bad either and I left with some camel wool and a gorgeous small carpet with Tutankhamun’s face.

Surely our next stop would be the pyramids.  I really couldn’t take much more suspense.  Maybe that’s a little bit melodramatic, but I really did want to see the pyramids.

“Ramid, when are we going to the pyramids,” I asked trying to hold back my tears. 

“Soon, my girl,” he replied, “just a few more stops.”

“A few more stops!” I screamed in my head so no one else heard it but me.

We drove to a small white building surrounded by Papyrus reeds.  Inside men were demonstrating how they made papyrus.  There were hundreds of pictures of ancient Egyptian scenes painted on papyrus.  I chose a scene from the Book of the Dead and Tutankhamun surround by Hieroglyphic symbols.

After this it was back to the tour bus and now my hopes were high.  “It’s got to be the pyramids now,” I thought.  But no such luck! The next stop was a shop where they sold cotton T-shits of every colour of the rainbow.  I chose a light blue one and while we drank coffee my name was embroidered across the front in hieroglyphics.

At this point I was starving.  My head was bursting with information and new experiences but my stomach was empty and growling.  After a quick lunch of pizza and mango juice we were off again. 

“The next stop the perfume factory,” announced Ramid.  “Oh no!” I thought.  Actually it was very interesting.  It smelled gorgeous.  My favorites were: Cleopatra and the Secrets of the desert.

Where to next?  You’ve guessed it.  The next stop wasn’t the pyramids either.  Nor was the next, or the next.  Finally I dozed off.  I woke up when someone shook me.  “We are here!”

“OK,” I thought, “we’re back at the hotel.”  I opened one eye and saw huge triangular forms.Could it be true?  Were we finally at the pyramids of Giza?  Yes, we were.

They were way bigger than I thought they would be and quite remarkable.  I went inside the Queen’s pyramid.  It wasn’t as big as the King’s but it was still awesome.  It was also a bit freaky knowing that this is where a dead body had been lying for thousands of years.

That night I thought about the long road I had taken to get to the pyramids and all the treasures I had collected on the way.  Yes, it had been a very long road, but worth every minute.

Pretty good!

The actual festival starts with a theatre presentation of Red Riding Hood for primary school kids.  I am told that it strays quite a lot from the original, with many quirks and antics to appeal to the young audience.

Over the next few days, there are presentations by writers of all sorts of books.

There’s a presentation by Frank Chikane of what really happened to cause the ousting of Nelson Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki.  There’s a panel (Ivo Vegter, Max du Preez, and Vusi Pikoli) looking at the current state of affairs in South African politics.

John van de Ruit talks about his immensely popular series of books (and a movie) about “Spud”, a boy who is sent away to a prestigious, all-boy private school.  Tim Plewman, best known for Defending the Cavemen, helps those of us who may be slightly over the hill with his presentation, Fitness for old farts.  There is a local take-off of Fifty shades of gray, as Jassy Mackenzie (Folly) and Casey B. Dolan Appetite for peas) discuss what women would really like to talk about and men would love to hear.

Alan Weyer leads a discussion of the history of the frontier wars in South Africa, which took place when white settlers wanted to move onto black territories in the early 1800s. 

With over 1,000 rhinos having been poached last year in South Africa, Andrew Campbell’s talk on the future of the rhino is sure to attract an overflow audience.

The overseas attraction of the festival is our own Yrsa Sigurdardottir, one of two award-winning authors who will be interviewed by a local publisher. 

Also Yrsa, Jassy Mackenzie, and I are hosting a creative writing workshop.

Yrsa

Jassy

Finally, the event that I enjoy enormously is the Delicious Word Journey – an evening event in which attendees are put in taxis and moved from one venue to another.  At each location, they are entertained by a prominent author, fed fine food, and served excellent South African wines.  Making the event more appealing, each venue is a wonderful home on the prestigious Pezula Private Estate. 

What appeals to me about the overall event is that it is low-key and unpretentious.  It started small and is growing slowly.  And the focus is to raise money for Tsiba - a local college teaching business and entrepreneurial skills, and EPAP, which provides nutritious lunches in local schools, ensuring that kids enjoy proper nutrition, without which learning is so much more difficult.

Each event has a price tag, usually the equivalent of about $10, so people wanting to attend can go to as many or few events as they want without paying a high festival fee.  This brings people to the festival who normally wouldn’t attend and has also led to a growing group of volunteers who like the local flavour and local benefits.

To ensure as much money goes to the charities as possible, the festival pays presenting writers an honorarium of about $50 and, in some cases, helps cover travel costs.  Local hotels and B&Bs donate rooms for accommodation, and hotels provide meeting rooms.

Of course, you are all invited to next year’s festival!  South Africa’s Garden Route is a spectacular holiday location, the gem of which is Knysna.  You will enjoy the eclectic offering, gorgeous scenery, and inimitable South African hospitality.

Cheers.

A still-panicked Stan, looking forward to nearly two weeks of pleasure with Yrsa and Oli - Thursday

The Abandoned Car

Jassy Mackenzie burst onto the South African thriller scene with her debut novel RANDOM VIOLENCE (2010), introducing Jade de Jong, and reflecting the violent tension of Johannesburg that hadn’t been a focus of South African thriller fiction before her book.  Jade was back in STOLEN LIVES (2011) and THE FALLEN (2012) and this month sees the release of the new book PALE HORSES.  The horse in question is the fourth horse of the apocalypse, and, as The Witness newspaper of South Africa commented, “Jade and David Patel find themselves in a race against time as they deal with sinister and very powerful forces in a satisfyingly tense and convoluted plot.”

Jassy lives in Johannesburg. She loves the energy, danger and excitement of the city, and believes there is no better place for a thriller writer to live.  But from time to time that danger gets a bit too close for comfort.  In her guest blog today, Jassy tells us about a scary example of that.

Michael - Thursday

The car came into view, trapped in the beams of our headlights, as my partner Dion and I drove down the quiet and unlit road that led to our country cottage. It was just outside our gate, and we knew for sure it spelled trouble.

Living in Johannesburg, even in the rural suburbs, one soon develops a sixth sense for when things are wrong, and the car was setting off all the alarms. For a start, this is not an area where people park on the side of the road at night. You either get yourself to safety behind tall gates and electrified fences, or you keep driving. But this car – a luxury vehicle – was just... stopped. At an angle, and only partly off the road.

“Is there anyone inside?” Dion asked, giving it a wide berth as we approached.

The headlights offered limited visibility, and we didn’t want to pass by too slowly. But then I saw that something was definitely wrong.

“The passenger door’s wide open!”

There was something strange about the window glass, too. It was opaque and milky-looking.

Don’t stop,” I told Dion.

“I’m not going to,” he reassured me.

With a suspicious vehicle just outside our gate, turning into our driveway would be stupid at best, suicidal at worst. It would mean we would be trapped. Instead, we drove slowly around the block while I called the local security firm, told them about the creepy-looking car, and asked them to meet us outside our house. We kept on the move until their red and yellow truck arrived, and then we got inside fast, making sure the gate was closed behind us and our cottage locked up tight.

Next morning, in the reassuring sunshine, I walked outside and found myself in the middle of a crime investigation. Two police cars were on the scene, as well as security personnel, with the buzz and crackle of walkie-talkies filling the air. In daylight, I could see why the glass of the car had looked so milky – it was peppered with bullet holes.

  I ran back to the cottage and fetched my camera. Standing inside the cover of my gateway, I took some photos of the scene. Then, since it looked as if the investigation was wrapping up, I grew bolder. I ventured outside and started talking to the detective.

“This BMW was hijacked in Fourways last night,” he told me. “While the hijackers were driving away, a security guard opened fire on the car with an automatic rifle.”

Wide-eyed, I peered at the bullet holes, some of which had punched right through the body of the car. I could only imagine the scene – the blast of gunfire filling the air; the screech of tires as the hijackers made their desperate getaway. Now all that was left to tell the story was the damaged glass and punctured bodywork and the silvery streaks and smudges of fingerprint dust.

  “They abandoned the car here,” the detective told me.

“That would explain the open door, I suppose,” I said. “But why leave it here? Did they panic?”

“One of the hijackers was hit by a bullet,” he said. “He was injured – dying, perhaps. I think they called for their accomplices to meet them here, and jettisoned the car. They must have dragged him out of the passenger seat and fled.” He gestured towards the BMW’s plush interior. “The passenger seat is covered in blood.”

 A click of my digital camera, and I captured the gory scene before thanking the detective and hurrying back to the safety of my cottage. An hour later, the car had gone, but the images of this scene still filled my mind. It was scary and sobering – a glimpse into another world that coexisted, mostly parallel to our calm and peaceful life, but just occasionally intersecting. A world where brutal acts were forcefully executed – where the language of violence was the first one spoken.

Where, on that cold July night, thanks to the sharp reactions of a security guard, a job went suddenly, lethally wrong. A desperate ride took these men to this quiet, dark rendezvous point. The driver sweating, terrified, gabbling on his phone. The passenger groaning and gasping as he pressed his hands onto his wounds to try and stem the flow of blood.

What happened to them? Where are they now? Is the driver still doing crime, or did that night, and the sound of his partner’s agony, provide a turning point for him?

None of us will ever know.

Jassy Mackenzie.
http://www.jassymackenzie.com/