The Red Die Read online

  The Red Die

  A Comandante Felisberto Mystery

  Alex MacBeth

  “A fascinating and truly

  original crime thriller.”

  Michael Radford, Director of 1984,

  The Merchant of Venice and Il Postino

  Copyright © 2018 by Alex MacBeth

  Cover Design: Ross Sneddon

  Editor: Jeff Gardiner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. While the place names mentioned in this book are real, the characters and stories are fictional. The names of offices and departments have been altered in some instances. Any resemblance of characters to real people is purely coincidental.

  First Black Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018

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  Acknowledgements

  I could never have written this novel without the invaluable support of several people. At the top of that list is my mother, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, my harshest editor and number one fan. Without her this book would never have been completed. Thank you, Mamma, for the endless hours you put in to reading early drafts of my work (since I was 14). And for everything else you have given me in my life.

  Thank you, Marketa, my dear partner, for the infinite patience you’ve shown and the encouragement you’ve given me. Your edits were masterful, transforming the beginning and the end of the book. Thank you for putting up with me talking about it 24/7.

  Thank you Maggie Phillips at Ed Victor for reading the manuscript in its first draft and giving me some excellent feedback. Your support has always meant a lot.

  Thank you, dear brother George, for agreeing to read and edit the manuscript when others showed little interest in it. Your suggestions really helped shape the final draft.

  Thanks also to Ross Sneddon for the cover; Anneli H¿ier for feedback and encouragement and Isac Zavala for illustrations for marketing.

  Huge thanks also go out to Jeff Gardiner – my editor at Crooked Cat – for the masterful final edits on the manuscript, as well as to Stephanie & Laurence Patterson at Crooked Cat for publishing the book.

  The truth is there are so many people I need to thank for helping me get this far and it would be impossible to list you all here. I feel lucky to have had your support.

  Thank you.

  Alex

  Prague, 20.01.2018

  About the Author

  Alex MacBeth is a journalist, author, festival founder and publisher based in Prague. As a journalist and editor, he has worked on projects across Europe, Central Asia and East Africa.

  His family live in Mozambique and a piece of his heart remains in the Southern African country. In 2014, he founded Festival Fim do Caminho, a film and literature festival, which takes place every year in the district where The Red Die is set.

  When Alex isn’t writing, he usually finds other ways to make himself inconvenient. He is inspired by Nordic Noir, African literature and walks in Bohemian landscapes.

  The Red Die

  A Comandante Felisberto Mystery

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Felisberto had been called out to the scene of the crime shortly before 4am. He had just fallen asleep on what was a hot, stuffy night when his cellphone rang not once but twice, a sure signal from his deputy Samora that something serious had happened. Quissanga Bay. Urgent! Read the text on Comandante Felisberto’s phone. An armed break in, perhaps a serious brawl, he thought; otherwise Samora would have waited until the morning. He swung half a bucket of water over his head, grabbed a stale puto pastry and stepped into the night.

  A chorus of cicadas, an orchestra of clattering teeth, plagued him like an earworm as he rode down a narrow path in the wilderness of northern Mozambique. The chain was loose again on his Honda motorbike but Felisberto wasn’t going to let that bother him. Samora had called twice – on a Tuesday.

  He dialled Samora’s number but all he heard was an automated voice telling him he’d run out of credit. As he expertly manoeuvred through the dark, round baobabs and under coconut trees, the prospect of finding a top-up became ever more faint and he cursed himself for not being able to find out sooner what the matter was. His impatience was appeased only slightly as he pulled up beside a large rock where Lieutenant Samora, his deputy, and the police station’s manager, Agent Albertina, were standing chewing miswak beside a Moringa. The tree’s branches looked like dreadlocks.

  “What happened?” asked Felisberto, slightly angry that his trusted deputy hadn’t called again to explain the details of the case before he’d arrived.

  “Murder,” said Samora, before casting an apologetic glance at Felisberto and retracting his initial verdict. “We’ve found a dead body, is what I mean, Comandante,” continued Samora. “A local fisherman reported it two hours ago. The fisherman was—”

  “That body?” said Felisberto, sensing one of Samora’s protracted explanations and lacking the patience at such an early hour.

  Samora nodded. The corpse seemed to fit in with the perfect stillness of where it had been found: the waves greeting the beach like an old friend; the mangroves barely flinching as the morning sea breeze tickled a school of huge pink crabs and floated out to sea. Above the punctured idyllic scene, coconut fronds swung in the breeze.

  Comandante João Felisberto puffed on his cigarette and exhaled towards the corpse on the ground. He had stood over a thousand dead bodies before, some cluttered on the battlefield, others he had encountered in the line of duty as a police officer. It meant little to him that that the man at his feet would never speak, eat or love again.

  Down south in Maputo he had seen slit throats and gunshot wounds from Avenida Vladimir Lenin to Avenida Karl Marx. Felisberto had been tasked with policing some of the capital’s toughest neighbourhoods – Matola, Maxaquene – and his powerful body bore the scars. But ever since he’d been reposted to command a rural district over a thousand miles away from the capital, the ebb and flow of corpses before the Comandante’s eyes had somewhat diminished. While death was practically endemic within the far-flung district he policed, there had not been a single suspicious demise in years.

  Felisberto passed the dregs of his cigarette to his deputy, Lieutenant Samora, before exhaling over the cadaver. He scratched his shaved head and his three-day stubble.

  “Have you done the coroner’s report? We need to get this body out of here before the fishermen come to clean their nets,” he ordered. In less than an hour the beach would be filled with crews of fishermen ready to sail out for the morning catch. Samora gave a handwritten sheet of paper to the Comandante and took photos of the crime scene with his mobile. Felisberto read the document.

  Name: Unknown. Age: Unknown, estimated 30-40 years old. Sex: Male. Origin: Unknown, presumed to be of foreign nationality. Proclaimed dead: 3.57am. Location: Quissanga Bay, District of Mossuril, Nampula Province. Cause of death: Unknown. Time of death: Unknown.

  Felisberto inspected the dead man in the dark, stubbing his toe on a coral rock as he stepped towards the corpse. There were no cuts or bruises on the victim’s body, which suggested to Felisberto that there hadn’t been a struggle. He estimated the time of death must be in the last few hours as rigor mortis had hardly set in. The corpse belonged to a large man. A rich man too judging from the cut of his tweed suit; a strange thing to wear in these tropical an
d less than urban lands. Strangest of all he was a white man – an acuna.

  The Comandante had dealt with hundreds of such men in suits when he’d worked for the Special Branch in Maputo, the capital. But that was before the Palma Affair. Here in the desolate north, his daily chores consisted of settling disputes between drunken neighbours and teenage pilferers.

  Death was frequent but not violent in Mossuril Bay, and the corpses never appeared in a three-piece tweed suit. That the deceased wasn’t from here was the one thing of which Felisberto was sure. Maybe the body had floated across the bay from Mozambique Island. Or perhaps somebody had thrown it out to sea, hoping it wouldn’t find its way to the shore. Or had the acuna died where he lay?

  As Felisberto lit a match to catch a better view of the cadaver, Samora approached and shone a torch across the dead man’s face. The eyes had no expression, like a fish’s. The Comandante gave his deputy his cigarette, took the torch and proceeded to inspect the body.

  He shook the man’s wallet. Empty. “Most likely a robbery gone too far, chefe,” Samora hazarded. The Comandante frisked the dead man’s front pockets and found nothing but a single red die covered in mud. Felisberto held the small numbered-cube in his hand and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Did anybody see anything?”

  “The old fisherman found the body at around three,” replied Samora.

  “Have you interviewed him?”

  “He says he’d left his torch batteries in his boat and had gone to find them. When he got to his boat the man was lying there, dead.”

  “Anything else? Did he see anybody or hear anything?”

  Samora shook his head. He handed Felisberto a brief handwritten transcript of the interview.

  “Check with Raquel if they’ve had any suspicious cars pass through Monapo this morning,” said Felisberto, putting on a ripped pair of surgical gloves.

  The Comandante rolled the corpse over in the muddy sand and the tide began to pull the body out to sea. Felisberto emptied the deceased’s back pocket and found a soaked business card. Both officers stood up and analysed the gold-rimmed, smudged ink. “Xin Hua _ _s, Pemba”, read Samora, trying to make sense of the faded ink on the wet card. “Sounds like a whorehouse, chefe.”

  The first rays of dawn were beginning to climb over the ocean, the trees and the sky. Comandante Felisberto held the card up to the sun before handing it to Samora. “We’ll go there tomorrow,” he said. “For now, tell Albertina to have the body taken to the comando. And get the lab boys and Raquel from Monapo to come down tomorrow to take a look. We could have a murder case on our hands.”

  Chapter Two

  The next morning Felisberto and Samora were driving on the mud road out of Mossuril. It had rained the night before and there were new potholes everywhere, making the journey particularly bumpy. All along the road, children, mothers and farmers reached out to Samora with buckets of wild crab apples, bundles of charcoal, packages of fried samosas, or dangling tiger prawns. Some practically reached through the car window as they drove by.

  The officers drove past the old Dynapac roller that lay abandoned on the roadside and Samora snapped a photo on his smartphone. “Put it away,” said the Comandante, a technophobe of the highest order. “What is it with you kids and these things?” lamented Felisberto, who was reluctant to use the dial-up phone his mother had given him fifteen years before, let alone mobiles.

  Samora hated the road and was happy for any distraction he could get, like four children sat in the cockpit of the abandoned road flattener with a steering wheel made out of wire. The Schumachers had sunglasses made of banana leaf and roared engine noises. Samora couldn’t wait to find a clever caption to post above the video on Facebook. Samora loved Facebook. Felisberto had never used it; he thought it sounded like a bad name for a cosmetics brand.

  “What did Monapo say?” asked Felisberto.

  “No suspicious cars passed through their roadblock between midnight and this morning,” replied Samora. If the perpetrators came by car, they must have escaped via the coast road to Nacala, thought Felisberto. Raquel from forensics was examining the body in the afternoon; he was already confident it wasn’t a suicide.

  “Couldn’t the acuna just have gotten lost?” asked Samora. Felisberto shrugged his lips. It was possible.

  They reached Monapo, a transit town that links the booming deep-sea port of Nacala and the inland provincial capital Nampula. The town above the crocodile-infested River Monapo felt like Vegas for anyone from Mossuril, condemned to live at the end of a dirt track. It had a bank, a post office and a petrol station, not to mention dozens of stores. Africa is a lottery, mused Felisberto.

  He shared his thoughts with Samora and they drank a MacMahon beer at a recently opened and thus quite fashionable bamboo shack in the next crossroads town, Namialo. Hundreds of market stalls encroached on the road. Lorries squeezed between children, motorbikes and goats to pass through the town. Shoppers zigzagged between lorries motorbikes and chickens to reach bargains on jerry cans, cooking utensils, linen and buckets.

  “Rural racers!” blurted Samora, wagging his finger before bringing it down purposefully to his phone. Felisberto didn’t understand but was embarrassed all the same by his deputy’s conspicuous behaviour. “The kids in the… It’s a caption. Photos, Facebook. Modern life?” said Samora waving his phone above his head and pointing to others in the street.

  Comandante Felisberto finished the dregs of his beer, ignored Samora and settled the bill. He bought two packs of GT cigarettes, paid the children who had been guarding the car and drove slowly through the crowds. Samora closed his eyes and dreamt of Mora, a girl who worked at Barclays Bank. She had beautiful natural hair and small diamond eyes. Having exhausted all possible discussions about mortgages and life insurance options with her, she had given him her number. They had since made love and Samora was now struck with what the Portuguese call Saudade, a feeling of longing: a melancholy for moments passed.

  The Comandante was lost in graver thoughts. The last thing he needed was some tricky murder case. He had seen a life’s share and had left them behind him.

  He passed the Nampula Wildlife Reserve and soon after another road sign signalled that they were entering the neighbouring province of Cabo Delgado. Felisberto didn’t even have jurisdiction here. The young officers at the interstate roadblock recognised his car and waved him on.

  The Comandante sped on, passing dozens of small mountains, inselbergs, and the vast Lurio River. Samora awoke and kept rereading the coroner’s report throughout the journey, as if the word ‘unknown’ might suddenly become a case-solving clue. The young deputy had a habit of over-analysing superficial details. Samora had come highly recommended from the Provincial HQ in Nampula, but Felisberto couldn’t help but feel that his freshman ways were a liability in the isolated fields of Mossuril.

  The police officers pulled into Pemba shortly after midday. The business card found in the dead man’s back pocket listed an address for Xin Hua _ _s in the burgeoning industrial sector of Pemba, near where large reserves of oil and liquid gas had recently been found. Felisberto and his colleagues had been hearing about this oil and gas for some time but this was the first opportunity the Comandante had found to visit the country’s new mineral hub.

  They parked and Samora took photos of all number plates in the carpark on his smartphone. Felisberto lit a cigarette and watched his deputy photograph cars: how thorough yet how pointless, the Comandante thought. The sea breeze carried a scent of algae and seawater and Felisberto eased his impatience with the calming smells. Out of the corner of his eye on the opposite side of the road he saw someone hastily close the curtains on the second floor of a building. The Comandante signalled to his assistant to stay alert. Both men lifted the safety valves on their weapons, before stepping closer to the building, with an eye towards the road and the surrounding zinc-plated shops and factories.

  Felisberto reached the door and rang the bell marked ‘Xin_ _ _’, guess
ing that Hua had perhaps left the venture. He took a look over his shoulder and rang again. No answer.

  Samora looked at Felisberto whose face seemed to be resigned to the inevitable. Seconds later the door was open and Samora was guiltily packing away a wire and tweezers. They checked the ground and first floor without detecting any signs of life and climbed another flight of stairs. A door on the second floor was flapping wide open and two bowls of instant noodles were still steaming on the table. A small hatch led to the roof. It was open. The phone was off the hook and the safe was unlocked. Outside the sound of screeching wheels dragged both police officers to the nearest window. Two East Asian men in a green Toyota Landcruiser sped off down the seafront. Samora made as if to chase the suspects but Felisberto grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”

  “What are we looking for, chefe?” asked Samora, frustrated. The two officers began to wade through piles of papers stacked beside a cupboard in a corner. “Evidence,” said Felisberto. “Clues, ties, sense. A motive. We’re looking to understand why a man with a nice suit washes up dead in our district.”

  They spent at least two hours, undisturbed, wading through piles and piles of paper; what looked to the Comandante like contracts, notes and receipts. Many of the documents were in Chinese. Since there was no one he knew who could translate them, he saw no point in taking any of them away. If he sent them to HQ, he’d probably see them again in a few years. Besides, HQ had no idea he was there and it would be better if it stayed like that, he reasoned.

  One particular pile of Mozambican receipts caught Felisberto’s eye and as he browsed through them, he recognised the port duty stamps from Nacala, the jurisdiction next door to his own. He took a note to visit the Comandante there and stuffed a handful of receipts in his jacket pocket. From the number of receipts the Comandante could only assume that Xin (and possibly Hua) had been bringing in and taking away a lot of things. But then wasn’t that what all the Chinese were doing at the moment? Why else would the country’s markets be flooded with cheap Chinese batteries and LED lights? The Comandante decided he would get in touch with somebody at the deepsea port in Nacala, in the jurisdiction next to his own, and see if they knew anything about Xin (and possibly Hua).