In the bathroom cabinet of the main bedroom at Laaste Hoofstuk, the police found a bottle of prescription sleeping drops. The name on the label was Rentia Middelmaart. Filled at a pharmacy in Stellenbosch on 1 September. It should have been nearly full. It was half empty.
It's the same medicine found in the port.
When the Inspector asked Rentia about it, she said she'd been sleeping badly. Asked whether she'd been sleeping badly enough to use half a bottle in a month, she said she would like to phone her lawyer. Asked whether she'd put anything in her husband's glass, she looked out of the window at the mountains for a long time and said, "I didn't want him dead. I want that written down."
The Inspector wrote it down. Underneath, she wrote: Didn't want him dead. Wanted him what, then?
The police also found, under the bed, eleven paperback romances and a folder of unpaid accounts from three boutiques in Cape Town. The total came to a little over R180,000. Eduard, according to the accounts department at one of them, had refused to pay any of it.
Meanwhile at Laaste Hoofstuk. Carrying towels upstairs on Tuesday evening, Tessa saw Rentia pack a suitcase, unpack it, and pack it again. At dusk a bakkie idled at the bottom of the drive with its lights off for twenty minutes, then turned round and went back down the valley. Rentia watched it go from the bedroom window. She didn't turn on the light.
PS: In 1857, Gustave Flaubert was tried in Paris, along with his publisher and printer, for allegedly offending public and religious morality through Madame Bovary. The prosecutor summarized the novel and cited passages he considered incriminating; Flaubert’s defense quoted passages to argue that the book condemned, rather than glorified, adultery. Flaubert was acquitted on 7 February, and the publicity surrounding the case helped make the novel a major success when it was published in book form later that year. There’s nothing like telling people not to read something.