Like Clockwork (4 page)

‘He told me he didn’t want to make a mistake and report her missing to the police, and then she comes home with a
babalaas
or something.’

‘
Eish
,’ murmured Rita. ‘When did they report her missing?’

‘On Sunday. He says that when she wasn’t home by lunchtime he started to look for her. Looked for her everywhere. That’s when they reported her missing. Three days later.’

‘Poor man,’ said Rita. ‘He must feel so terrible.’

‘Your heart’s too soft, Rita. You should have been a social worker, not in the police. I’m going to check out every move he made.’ For Riedwaan, fathers – like boyfriends – were always suspects.

‘What more could he have done, Riedwaan?’

‘Found her. Alive. Reported it earlier.’

Rita looked at him and shook her head. ‘You’re a hard man, Riedwaan.’ She went out, leaving him to his thoughts.

How could Swanepoel have failed to find his own daughter? Riedwaan had traced Yasmin to an abandoned warehouse by the faint signal emitted by the cellphone of the gangsters holding her, terrified that his discovery would be relayed through the metastasising web of gang informers and corrupt policemen. So he had gone in alone, and executed Yasmin’s kidnappers as they dozed undisturbed by the little girl’s desperate whimpering. Riedwaan had wiped his hysterical child clean of the blood spattered over her. But Yasmin still woke from her nightmares convinced that she was bathed in it. Riedwaan had found Yasmin, but as Shazia began telling him more and more frequently, that did not mean he had succeeded. There had been an investigation. The specialised and ruthless anti-gang squad he had established was dissolved. But community outrage at the rising number of child corpses in the latest bout of gang warfare had made it impossible to either charge or fire Faizal. His maverick justice had made him a community hero, so the best they could do was to shunt him sideways. He was posted to Sea Point, given a desk job and a pile of papers to shuffle. It was designed to make him fail – and he had. Shazia had begged him to leave the force but he refused. She then approached the Canadian embassy, filled in the form, and was gone. Just before the plane swallowed them, Yasmin had turned to wave at where she guessed he would be watching. A small, dark girl with a pink bag and memories Canadian children would not understand. He thought of calling Yasmin, but she would be asleep in Toronto. Her mother – still his wife, damn it – would fumble for her alarm clock, smoothing
her long twist of black hair on top of her head. Unless she had since cut it, of course.

Riedwaan took a sip of his coffee. It was cold and bitter. He turned his attention back to the manila folder in front of him. He spread out the photographs that Riaan had taken at the crime scene. His stomach knotted. He couldn’t save this girl, but he was going to make sure that whoever had done this to her paid in full. Then he thumbed a different number into his phone, imagining the rings slicing through the silence. Clare picked up her phone. She was startled, he could tell – she’d have been busy working, and had obviously forgotten to switch the phone off.

‘Yes,’ she said, annoyed with herself for answering.

‘Clare, it’s Riedwaan.’ He paused, listening to her silence. His image of her was vivid – at her desk, papers, books, notes spread around her, laptop open, thick hair snaking between her sharp shoulder blades. Wing bones, she called them.

‘Hello,’ she said. What else was there to say?

‘I have the preliminary report on that girl you called me about. I thought you might like to have a look.’ Riedwaan waited.

‘Okay,’ Clare said. She wanted to ask why, but didn’t. That would come later. ‘New York Bagel, at six.’ She hung up and took a deep breath. Thinking of him made her throat tighten. Talking to him made the skin around her nipples taut. If she ignored the feeling, she told herself, it would go away. She would meet him for coffee. He would slip her the autopsy report, some phone numbers, and that would be it. Yes, she told herself. That is what would happen. She would gather up the papers, do some interviews, send him the transcripts, give her opinion on who had committed the murder, Riedwaan would catch the killer, and that would be that. Clare reactivated her sleeping laptop. She needed a few more hours
before her trafficking proposal would be ready to send. She would fit Riedwaan into the interstices of her busy working days as she did sleeping and running. This time, though, she would keep a proper perspective.

It was much later when her eyes drifted from her screen, her ears tuning out the hiss of her computer finding an Internet connection. Drifts of street rubbish eddied upwards, and dropped again. Her email sent, she shut down her computer. She decided to walk. It would give her time to compose herself before she saw him. She walked briskly to keep warm, the sky turning bleak as the sun set.

The restaurant Clare had chosen was a determined outpost in a creeping strip of hostess bars, peepshows and poolrooms. Muscled men leaned on barstools at the entrances of the strip clubs and adult entertainment centres with their blackened windows. Furtive, part-time street prostitutes, full-time junkies, loitered inside doorways, smoking, waiting. Riedwaan watched through the window. He saw a girl he did not recognise dart towards a potential customer. She looked fifteen under her amateur make-up. He knew there would be track marks creeping from the fold inside the elbow towards her wrist. The girl recoiled when the man spat at her. Riedwaan looked at his watch. Six o’clock. Clare was always on time. He looked down Main Road and watched her walk towards him, her stride easy, strong.

Clare walked faster, as most women did, when she went past the clubs. She ignored the speculative eyes of the bouncers who looked her over and then lost interest. She looked up, not towards Riedwaan but towards the crumbling art deco block across the road. The building was as notorious for its dealers as it was for the waves of desperate immigrants who crammed in there. They paid cash on the first day of each month to hard-eyed men who extorted ever larger amounts. Riedwaan had heard that the building had been sold. Nothing
had changed, though. It didn’t need to. It was a gold mine. You could get anything you wanted there, women, children – even infants – if you could pay. The police force was not going to do anything about it: anyone who tried ended up dead, or shafted. Like him.

Clare came in and unbuttoned her coat. She knew to look for him in the smoking section. She picked up a tray, two coffees, hot milk, a bagel for Riedwaan, and a croissant for herself. She exchanged the tray for the envelope that Riedwaan passed her with his greeting. She didn’t kiss him. Sitting down, she scanned the report. Her stomach knotted at the pathologist’s dry abbreviations of the horror of Charnay Swanepoel’s death, the brevity of her life. There was a note to say that further pharmacology test results were pending.

‘When did he cut her throat?’ asked Clare.

‘She was dead when he cut her throat,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Any maggots?’

‘No,’ said Riedwaan. He put down his bagel. ‘But the weather’s been cold. Mouton reckons that she was killed between Sunday night and midnight on Monday. She was dead at least eight hours before she was dumped.’

‘Any indication where she was mutilated?’

‘Could have been done there. Mouton thinks a very sharp knife or, more likely, a scalpel. The throat, that is. There was a small amount of leaked fluid on the collar of her shirt. Mouton thinks that he did her eyes before he cut her throat.’

‘Same kind of weapon?’

‘He’s waiting for the ballistics report, but most probably yes.’

‘The eyes?’ asked Clare.

‘Look on page four. Mouton says just before he smothered her.’

‘So she was alive. How horrible. I wonder what she saw, what he showed her to make him do that.’

‘We’d better find out before somebody else sees what she did,’ said Riedwaan, hunting for his cigarettes.

Clare stared briefly at her untouched croissant. Then she returned to the secrets that Charnay’s body might answer. Seventeen years old, wearing a skirt and top, high-heeled boots. No underwear. All her own teeth, six fillings. Appendix scar. Not a virgin. Not a needle user. Menstruating at the time of death. Bruising on the upper arms and thighs.

Riedwaan was smoking at the window. ‘Sorry, Clare,’ he said, waving his hands at the smoke.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Reading this makes me want one too.’

She looked down and continued reading. One tattoo on the left buttock – a symbol, not a picture of anything. Recent – maybe two weeks old – but healing.

‘Any idea where she might have had the tattoo done?’ she asked Riedwaan.

‘Not sure yet. It’s very distinctive, that mark.’

‘What is it?’ Clare asked. She studied the photograph. The tattoo was simple, elegant. Two decisive vertical lines bisected by an X.

‘Dunno. Looks like a Chinese ideogram.’

‘It’s beautiful, in its sinister way. It’s hard to tell with the scabbing, but it looks like a symbol. Can we ask Mouton to get an exact shape from the body?’

‘I’ll ask him,’ said Riedwaan.

Clare went back to her reading. An incision across the left palm. Mouton had confirmed that it was done before death. Done with a very sharp knife across the hand that held a key. This hand had been intricately bound. Whoever had done it was skilled at bondage. The blood had crusted over the key, which had had to be prised loose. Blood group: A positive. Charnay’s blood. Traces of ink under the blood where she had written a number or a name. These were very faint and
it was not possible for the pathologist to decipher anything. Some genital trauma, hard to say how recent, no sign of semen in the body. Does not rule out the use of an object. Traces of semen on her clothes. Possible that her killer had masturbated to celebrate his achievement. It had been wiped clean but traces remained on the skirt. Also possible that it had been there before. Signs too of bruising on the right cheek. A cut next to the corner of the eye. Most likely an open-handed blow by a man wearing a ring. The soles of her feet were dirty inside the high-heeled boots. As if she had been walking without shoes. Toenails painted, fingernails not. Stomach empty. Traces of vomit in her mouth. Cause of death: suffocation.

Clare put the pages back into the envelope and slipped it into her bag.

‘I couldn’t bring the photos,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But I will let you know when we get the toxicology results. The ballistics tests are not conclusive about the scalpel or knife. Something very sharp, at any rate. She did struggle. Piet found some skin under her nails. But it looks like her efforts were feeble. Piet Mouton is sure that she was drugged when she was killed. Rohypnol or something like it.’

‘That’s typical, though,’ said Clare. ‘Rohypnol makes the victim confused and acquiescent. If they survive they won’t remember. The survival instinct kicks in if your life is threatened with death.’

‘Hence the bruising,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Piet says she was suffocated. The killer used his hands. There were tears on the lips. Her own teeth marked her lips too, so he used a fair amount of strength.’

Clare looked at the picture of the slender girl. ‘Her throat was cut after she died? Why?’

Riedwaan nodded. ‘That’s your department, Clare. Why
would he want to silence someone who was already dead? Try and find out what she knew. It might not have any relevance, but it’s something to start with.’ Riedwaan handed her a slip of paper. An address and phone number were written on it. ‘Her family,’ he said. ‘Call them. Talk to them. See what you can find out.’

‘Have they been interviewed?’ asked Clare.

‘Of course,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You can read the transcripts.’ He handed her another envelope.

‘All right,’ said Clare. ‘What are you looking for?’

Riedwaan shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just a feeling. The interviews didn’t go that well.’ He did not need to explain. Clare knew how short the station was on everything – staff, vehicles, computers. Unless there was another murder, the case would not get any additional resources.

‘I’m doing an interview for my trafficking documentary tomorrow.’ Clare stopped short. Then she stood up, putting on her coat, suddenly clumsy.

Riedwaan got up too. He put his hand on her arm, steadying her. ‘Let me give you a lift home,’ he said, his voice gentle despite himself.

Clare leaned towards him, his warmth. ‘Yes, please.’

He could smell her hair, warm and alive against his lips. Then she pulled away.

‘Actually, no, but thank you, it’s not quite dark yet. I’ll walk.’ She turned and was gone.

Riedwaan watched, waiting for her to emerge on the street below. Her arms were hugged close around her body, as if she was carrying something heavy. He lit another cigarette, and when his eyes returned to the pavement below, she had disappeared.

He spent much longer than he had intended at the bar next to New York Bagel. He drove past Clare’s flat on his way
back to his cold, empty house. Her lights were on. He was glad she was safely at home.

Inside, Clare sat dead still. She held the familiar Tarot card, the envelope it had been sent in abandoned on the table with the autopsy report. She was looking at the card. The High Priestess. Or the Female Pope. The second card of the major arcana. The card that warned against the rational in favour of intuition. The card was both warning and summons to the dark world where her sister paced, hidden, full of fear and hate. Clare’s heart was heavy with the knowledge that Constance had heard of the murder, had summoned her twin to see her.

Clare slipped the card back into the envelope, putting it into her bag. Then she settled down with the transcripts that Riedwaan had given her and tried to make sense of the girl’s murder.

Clare cleared her thoughts of Charnay Swanepoel. This morning her obsessive attention was turned on Natalie Mwanga. Nosing her car into the traffic, Clare took the N1, slipping into the correct lane and peeling away on the road that skirted the edge of Atlantis. It was a desolate place. Drifts of young men gathered at street corners, hoping against forlorn hope for some work for the day. Clare glanced at her watch. Nine forty-five. Unlikely that those remaining would be picked up now. She drove past a boarded-up factory, looking for Disa Street. There it was. She turned, looking for the Vroue Helpmekaar Centre for Abused Women and Children. She drove straight past the nondescript house before registering the steel mesh on the windows. She parked under a tree that was bent double by years of relentless wind. Clare greeted the tall woman who came out to meet her.