Chase Your Shadow Read Free Page A

nails, examined his body for scratches and bruises. Then more waiting for blood and urine tests, to all of which he numbly succumbed. As it turned out, all the tests drew blanks. No alcohol, no illegal drugs, no physical evidence of a fight. Nothing here that could be used in court against him, making it all the more urgent that while Pistorius’s state of mind was still raw from the shooting, Labuschagne should try and identify something of value for the prosecution case. Labuschagne’s problem was that the lawyers had already intervened to the point of forbidding the police from asking him anything about the events of the night. In fact, apart from the first fraught exchanges with the police at dawn, never at any point did he submit to police interrogation of any kind.
    Labuschagne, casting about for a way to break the ice, mentioned that they had both happened to go to the same high school inPretoria. He spoke about sport, asked him about his running in what turned out to be a vain effort to stem his weeping. But the attempt at conversation yielded, at best, monosyllabic replies, until one question elicited a burst of anger. Labuschagne asked him if he wanted anything to eat.
    ‘How do you expect me to eat now?’ he shouted back. Pleased with the outburst, eager to elicit more of the same, Labuschagne repeated the question moments later. Was he sure he did not want to eat something? Back came the same exasperated response, followed by wails that echoed down the hospital corridors, reaching the ears of his family members Aimée and Arnold who were on their way to the room where he was being held. Escorted by uniformed police who had warned them they could not have any physical contact with him, they had come to bring him some fresh clothing. The police were opposing bail and he would need clothes for the following night, which he would be spending in a cell, and for the next morning when he would appear before a magistrate to be formally charged. The encounter with his relatives was as brief as it was sombre, their faces funereal. The three of them left and he returned to his bed, more shattered than before.
    Towards 4 p.m. Labuschagne and two other policemen drove him back to the police station. There he had his first meeting with his attorney, Brian Webber, whom he had known since the age of thirteen, having gone to school with Webber’s son. He had stayed overnight at the Webbers on various occasions and the two boys had remained close friends throughout their teens. Webber had always been fond of Pistorius and, in later years, had taken pride in his athletic achievements. For the lawyer, fighting a losing battle to preserve some modicum of professional detachment, this first encounter was heartbreaking, all the more so once he took in the tiny holding cell, reekingof urine, where his son’s old pal would have to spend his first night of captivity.
    Labuschagne went to bed that night in some frustration, having derived little of value for the prosecution case. The suspect’s emotional state was entirely consistent, he concluded, with that of someone whose life had abruptly gone to pieces. Nothing he had said or done had offered any clue as to whether he had knowingly murdered Reeva Steenkamp, as the police contended, or whether the shooting had been, as Pistorius had claimed in the very first phone call he had made, a terrible accident.

 
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    Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways
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    SIGMUND FREUD
    O SCAR P ISTORIUS was born on November 22, 1986 with a condition called fibular hemimelia. As mysterious as it was rare, the disease had no traceable genetic link to his parents. The fibula, the thin bone that runs between the knee and the ankle alongside the more prominent tibia, was missing in each of his legs, which were consequently unusually short. The ankles were only half formed; the heels faced not down but sideways, parallel to the Achilles tendons;