Fruit of a Poisoned Tree - Anthony Altbekker

Fruit of a Poisoned Tree - Anthony Altbekker - Jonathan Ball - 2010 - Paperback in good, clean and tight condition.

The video begins with a shot of a doormat and the bottom quarter of a door. A muffled, off-screen voice says in Afrikaans, ‘It is March 17, 2005. The video operator is Inspector Desmond Share. I am at Klein Welgevonden Estate, 21 Shiraz, Stellenbosch. The video begins.’ Two shadowed legs move into frame. A hand swings the door open to the right, and a shaft of light falls onto a doormat before the camera bounces into the room. The cameraman steps over a yellow strip of plastic bearing the blue-printed legend ‘South African Police Service: Do not cross’. We are in a small kitchen of plastic-coated, processed wood. As the camera turns to the left, before it pauses on the empty sink and the kitchen counter on which lie a pair of sunglasses, a set of car keys and a cellphone, before it is pointed into a half-opened straw basket in which we see something indistinct (a book or a large envelope, perhaps), before it scans the walls and curtains of the living areas beyond the kitchen, before it does all that, it captures a tangle of hair hanging over the arm of a small sofa.