Like Clockwork (12 page)

A wave rushed forward then pulled back with a sigh. The girl’s long boots with their spiked heels were flecked with foam. Clare switched her phone to camera and circled the body at a careful distance, taking photographs. The rising tide would soon obliterate any evidence. One breast was exposed, the other covered by the flimsy fabric of her top. There was a tear near the shoulder, as if someone had tried to cover her. Clare’s blood ran cold when she zoomed in on her hand – a bound, bloody pulp in which a dull metallic gleam was discernible. It would be a key, Clare was sure. The waves pulled back and Clare balanced herself over the rocks to photograph the girl’s feet. The girl’s head pointed south, towards Signal Hill, the rounded hillside that framed the tower block that Clare had just come from. The girl’s eyes were sunken, and the blood had dried into a mocking harlequin’s tear on her soft cheek.

Jakes gasped when he saw the body.

His camera would give them far better photographs than her cellphone. ‘Where’s your camera?’ Clare asked, ‘It could take a while before the police photographer gets to the scene.’

‘It’s in the boot,’ he replied. ‘I’ll get it.’ She walked back
up with him, steadying herself on his arm. She felt him shake and held onto him more tightly.

‘How the hell did anyone get a body here without someone seeing him?’ asked Jakes.

‘Rent boys and their clients are not likely to rush to the nearest police station,’ said Clare.

‘I don’t know. It’s peculiar,’ said Jakes. ‘It’s quite a way from the road to the pool.’ Jakes opened his boot and was taking out his camera bag when Riedwaan pulled up. He got out of his car and looked from Jakes to Clare, noting the absence of Clare’s car. Riedwaan’s hostility was palpable when Clare introduced the men.

‘I took some pictures with my phone,’ said Clare as she led the way back down the path. ‘The tide is coming in so fast that I was worried any evidence might be obliterated. I’ve asked Jakes to take some more pictures with his camera. In case your guys take a while.’

‘How helpful,’ Riedwaan said. Jakes had gone ahead, camera at the ready. Riedwaan put both hands onto her shoulders. ‘How did you know about this, Clare?’ He could see the hesitation in her eyes. ‘You have to tell me. Otherwise we are both in shit.’

‘I told you, someone sent me an SMS.’

‘Who?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘It’s a private number,’ said Clare. ‘Do you think Rita could track it down?’

‘
Ja
,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’ll get her on it ASAP.’

Riedwaan bent down to look at the dead girl. ‘Amore Hendricks,’ he said, his voice heavy with pain. He was going to have to tell her parents. His face would forever be the one that lurked in their nightmares of their daughter’s death.

Riedwaan turned to greet the scene of crime officers. Within minutes the area was taped off and lights had been set up.
The police photographer was taking pictures of the body and the beach sand around it. A uniformed officer bent down and was checking every footprint in the vicinity. Another officer was collecting anything that could be collateral evidence; anything that might show how long the killer had spent with the body, what he had done here. Clare would add this to what she already knew to draw up a profile of the killer. The work of shifting from a single murder case to a special investigation would keep Riedwaan very busy. Clare envied him his preoccupation.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Riedwaan,’ she said

‘Okay. You can come and make your statement. I’ll give you the preliminary autopsy report then.’

Jakes was waiting at the car, smoking a bummed cigarette. He gave her the roll of film he had shot, opened the door for her and drove towards her flat without a word. Riedwaan watched the car until it merged with the late-night clubbing traffic. He turned back to the task at hand, attributing the tightness in his chest to the horror before him.

Riedwaan waited for Piet Mouton to arrive, which he did, ten minutes later. Mouton looked around. ‘The bloody tide is coming in fast, man. Not much to see here any more.’ He straightened up, wheezing at the effort. ‘You’re lucky you found her at all. If the tide had got her, you would have had fuck-all to compare with the last one.’ Mouton shook out a cigarette, and offered one to Riedwaan. The match hissed as it hit the water. ‘Who found her?’

‘Clare did. Somebody SMS’d her. Rita’s tracing the number.’

‘Jesus, Riedwaan, stay away from that woman. She’s a corpse magnet.’ Mouton put his pudgy hand on Riedwaan’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘She’s a bit too clever for me and too skinny, also. Not my type.’ Piet didn’t have a type. He had Mrs Mouton. Soft, plump, could cook like an angel,
allowed no mortuary jokes in her house. She would be waiting for Piet with a slice of cake and a pot of tea when he finished the autopsy.

‘Are we going to autopsy her tonight?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘You trying to show up the rest of the police force, man?’ Piet asked him. Riedwaan shrugged.

‘Okay,’ said Piet, looking at his watch. It was well after midnight. ‘The night is young and it doesn’t look as if the two of us have much else to do.’ A wave splashed his shoes. ‘There’s nothing I can do here with the tide rising so fast.’ Mouton made a series of quick sketches of the girl’s body and tested her limbs for rigor mortis.

‘How long has she been dead, Doc?’

‘Hard to say. It’s been bloody cold tonight, but I’d say pretty much the same as the other girl. Thirty-six hours max. I’d say he likes to keep them with him a while once they are nice and quiet.’

‘You going to do swabs here, Doc?’ asked the older of the two mortuary technicians. He was blowing on his hands to keep them warm. A freezing drizzle was drifting off the sea.

‘No,’ said Mouton. ‘You boys can pack her up. We’ll get her inside. I’ll do everything in the lab. That rain looks like it’s here for the night.’

The two men lifted the girl gently and settled her onto the stretcher. Mouton zipped up the body bag, covering her blinded face just as the rain began to come down in earnest.

Riedwaan followed Piet Mouton to the mortuary, stopping to buy coffee on the way. He would phone Clare in the morning. He did not want Jakes answering the phone. What he felt like doing was punching the bastard in the mouth. That would wipe the smug smile off his face. Riedwaan’s fist was clenched around the polystyrene cup. It spilt, burning him. He balanced the coffee in the open ashtray to avoid doing any more damage to himself, then parked next to Piet’s car. Theirs were the only two in the parking lot. He keyed in the entrance code to the lab and took the lift up. Piet was already setting out his instruments and containers. Riedwaan pushed open the door and gave the pathologist his coffee.

‘No cake?’ asked Mouton.

‘You’re fucking too fat already, Doc. Let’s go.’ Riedwaan sipped his coffee, keeping his eyes off the girl’s mutilated face. He picked up a clipboard and made some notes. Her hand was tied up – just like the last girl. He looked at her long dark hair. A piece had been cut off, close to her scalp.

‘A souvenir for the killer?’ he asked Mouton.

‘Can’t tell, but probably. Sick bastards.’ Mouton was scribbling his own notes.

‘Time of death, Doc?’ Mouton had inserted the probe into the girl’s body. He always did a sub-hepatic probe, moving
the metal behind the liver. He didn’t approve of the rectal scope. In a sexual assault case you didn’t want to mess with evidence. ‘I’d say at least eight hours, maybe more. She’s cold.’ He put the instruments down.

‘When was she moved?’ asked Riedwaan.

Mouton turned the body over. ‘I’ll have to do some more tests, but take a look at this hypostasis. The red blood cells fix after a while. I’d take a bet she lay on her side for some time before she was moved. Maybe even since last night.’

‘So when was she moved?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘It couldn’t have been last night because the tide was up in the morning.’

‘I’d say this evening. Her hair is only slightly damp from the rain.’ He pulled a finger through the girl’s thick hair. ‘I would guess not long before she was found.’

‘Such a public place. How? Why there?’

‘You ask your lady to figure that out for you.’ Mouton was bending in close to the body again, tweezers in his hand.

‘What you got there, Doc? More semen?’ The pathologist grunted. ‘Not this time. Looks like bird shit to me.’ He dropped the tiny fibres he had picked off the girl’s back into the bags he used for samples. ‘I’ll send it away for testing.’ He moved around the body, picking up one of the girl’s hands, then the other. Then he moved to her feet, eased off the high, tight-fitting boots, and scribbled again on his notepad.

‘What happened to her feet, Doc?’

‘Same injuries to the extremities as the other girl had. I’m not sure what they are. Gnaw marks. Rats, maybe. Most of the bodies we see that have been left outside for some time have bites from scavengers on them. In the northern hemisphere most dead bodies are found indoors. Makes it much easier to place time of death because you get a constant ambient temperature. And, of course, a body that’s inside is not going to be interfered with by packs of dogs.’

‘Thanks for the free lecture, Doc.’

Mouton straightened up. ‘You could do with an education, Riedwaan. But these boots were put on after death, after she’d been alone somewhere long enough for the rats to chew her.’

Mouton crouched down beside the girl. ‘Come and look here.’ Riedwaan crouched next to him. He could smell a trace of perfume on her skin, she was that close.

‘The throat is cut in the same way. Another Colombian necktie,’ Mouton turned to Riedwaan. ‘The South Americans moving in?’

‘Not that I’ve heard,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I don’t think this is drug related, do you?’

‘Thinking is not my job, Riedwaan. I’ll leave that up to you. But if you asked my opinion, I’d say no. Whoever did this has some unresolved business with women.’

Piet Mouton reached over for the instruments he used to expose the most intimate recesses of the human body. ‘Okay, let’s get to the real work now.’ Riedwaan’s stomach heaved, but Mouton’s patient dissection would reveal where Amore had been in the last few days of her life and the first day of her death. Finding out where and teasing out how she died were the keys they needed to unlock the secret of who had killed her. The mortuary was quiet. Riedwaan prepared himself for a long night.

Clare dreamt of the dead girl, but, to her surprise, she awoke refreshed – and, to her shame, elated to be alive. She lay in bed listening to the pre-dawn silence, drifting between consciousness and her hovering dreams. There was something on the periphery of her mind, but whenever she shifted her mind’s eye to look at it, it disappeared. She gave up when the first call of a dove pulled her into the morning. She stretched and got up, pulling on her running clothes. She felt chilly, despite the warmth of her heated flat, so she put on an extra top and set off. Outside it was dark, except for a cold gleam in the slitted yellow eye of the horizon. In spite of her unease, she ran in the direction of Graaff’s Pool.

The flurried activity of the previous night was gone. Chevroned police tape was looped around the whole area. Clare could see a guard drawing on his cigarette as if it might warm him. The rising sun provided no warmth and Clare was getting cold. She turned to continue her run. She followed the promenade’s paved ribbon to the end before heading home again. By the time she was back at Graaff’s Pool the forensics officers had returned, searching a wider arc now for anything that Amore Hendricks’s killer may have left behind. So far, there was nothing. The tide had risen high the previous night,
and if anything had remained it would have been obliterated. Clare doubted they’d find anything.

The way the two bodies they had found so far had been arranged, and the symbolism of the wounds – almost like stigmata – pointed to a killer who made careful preparations. He was not someone who would easily make a mistake. Also, by now the tide would have washed any little slips away. Clare watched for Riedwaan. He had called her last night, keeping the call businesslike and brushing aside her attempt to explain Jakes. He told her that Rita Mkhize called to say that the SMS had come from a phone belonging to Clinton Donnelly. Clare remembered the name – he’d been an enthusiastic student at a lecture she’d once given. Clinton lived in Observatory, a cramped suburb where attempts at gentrification had never really succeeded; it was a place that Clare generally avoided. He had sent the message from a house in Campbell Road.

The mournful wail of the foghorn demanded her attention. She looked towards the rhythmic flash of the lighthouse that accompanied it. It was due east. Then she looked back towards Graaff’s Pool, where the girl’s body had been laid out along a precise north/south axis. Her head had pointed south, as had the blood-soaked bound hand. Clare stood still, the threads of morning mist twisting wraithlike, receding ahead of the breakers before they disappeared. The precision of the arrangement of the corpses – the head of the first one pointing east, this one south – tugged at her mind. She shivered, praying that there would be no west, no north.

The wind was cold, so Clare sheltered in the lee of a small building. The tide was retreating. Clare watched the pattern the waves made as they rushed forward onto the rocks. Their energy spent, they fell back into each other. Foam formed where the crests thrashed against the rocks, and one another,
then retreated for respite towards the open sea. This white spine of foam ran along the deep, navigable channel between the rocks. Clare stood up on the bench she had been sitting on. The body had been placed at the end of that channel. Had the killer brought her in there by boat? Last night’s weather would have made this difficult – but then nobody would have have been around to notice, either.

A flash of blue in a rock pool caught Clare’s eye. Something stranded by the receding tide, or rubbish from one of the vessels anchored off the coast, thought Clare, as she leapt down to the beach. She picked her way across the rocks. A bedraggled bunch of flowers tied together with gold ribbon, washing out, and then returning with the tide, dislodged a shard of memory. An old man with a bunch of plastic-wrapped blooms. Clare pulled the flowers out of the sea, even though she was outside the police cordon. She walked over to the tape and called to one of the forensic detectives searching across the beach sand.