Phiri rubbed his eyes. It was two o’clock and he felt worn out. ‘So why Clare?’ he persisted.
‘This is her area, sir. Femicide and sex crimes.’ Riedwaan pointed to the bookshelf behind Phiri’s desk. ‘There’s her doctorate.’ Crimes against Women in Post-Apartheid South Africa was on the top shelf, its pages dog-eared and its margins filled with question marks and comments in Phiri’s precise hand.
‘It’s very good, meticulously researched,’ conceded Phiri. ‘But I’m not sure I agree that because we averted a civil war in South Africa that the “unspent violence was sublimated into a war against women. A war in which there are no rules and no limits”, as she argues whenever she gets the chance.’
‘It’s not her fault, sir, that brutality against women and children is intensifying while conviction rates are falling.’ Phiri was amused at how awkward the jargon sounded coming from Riedwaan Faizal, who went on to argue, ‘She’s profiled for the police since 1994, and she’s been very successful.’
‘She pisses off everybody she works with,’ Phiri argued.
‘Maybe because she’s a woman and she’s good.’
‘Bullshit, Faizal. It’s because she’s a loner and she does what she wants.’ Phiri looked at Riedwaan, then he laughed. ‘That’s why you like her, I suppose.’
Riedwaan smiled. ‘Whatever her faults, you know she’s the best, sir.’
‘I’m going to get shit about that last case you two worked on.’
Riedwaan felt the old anger again. He and Clare had worked on a series of abductions. They had built an excellent case against a gangster who abducted homeless girls of between eight and thirteen for his brothels. But two witnesses had been murdered and the others withdrew their statements. DNA evidence was contaminated, and then a whole docket disappeared. The case collapsed, taking their tentative investigation with it.
‘That wasn’t her fault,’ he said, the anger filtering through into his voice. ‘That was because of someone inside. Dockets don’t just walk.’
‘Some people say a docket can get lost if the person looking after it drinks too much. And when he doesn’t sleep at home.’
Riedwaan suppressed his anger. ‘What is the decision, sir?’
‘Like I said, Riedwaan. Last chance.’
Riedwaan looked at Phiri. ‘Last chance with Clare, too?’
Phiri nodded. ‘Last chance, Faizal, all round.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Riedwaan stood up to leave, the autopsy report in his hands.
He was about to open the door when Phiri spoke again. ‘You catch him, Riedwaan. Not a word to the press yet. They will be on to this one like a ton of bricks.’
Riedwaan turned and looked at him. He didn’t want journalists hounding him again either. ‘Yes, sir.’ Riedwaan pulled the door shut behind him.
Phiri stared after him. If Riedwaan needed Clare Hart’s assistance, then good luck to him. And Phiri hoped that the killer, whoever he was, would still be fit for trial after Riedwaan had caught him.
5
Riedwaan threw the autopsy report onto his desk, ignoring Rita Mkhize’s stare. He hadn’t shaved that morning and he didn’t look his best. The previous day, while Piet Mouton had taken blood, scraped fingernails and taken more swabs, he had waited and watched for any new bruises to bloom, but they hadn’t. Mouton carefully cut open the body to remove and weigh the dead girl’s organs, reading from them how she had lived while searching out the secrets of her death.
‘Who is she?’ asked Rita.
‘Charnay Swanepoel. She was seventeen years old and in her last year of school. She also had a family. One younger brother. Parents alive, but separated. Father an auto-parts salesman who watched rugby on Saturdays. The mother a yoga teacher, New Age seeker, spiritual guide.’ Riedwaan read from the file.
As mismatched as me and Shazia were, thought Riedwaan, sipping his coffee. Shazia was a nurse – and his wife. She had moved to Canada and taken their daughter, Yasmin, with her. Shazia was convinced that the distance, the safety, of Canada would erase the terror etched into their daughter during the endless hours she had been a hostage. Riedwaan had heard her voice. Her kidnappers had called the gang hotline Riedwaan had established for informers, recording Yasmin’s terrified six-year-old pleas to her daddy to find her, for her mommy to come, for a drink of water, please, please. Riedwaan had not been able to prove it, but only Kelvin Landman had such a genius for cruelty. It had made him the Cape Flats’ ultimate hard man.
Riedwaan returned to his desk and opened the folder. The smiling school portrait that Charnay’s mother had given him in return for informing her of her daughter’s murder smiled up at him.
‘Here’s a piece of cake for you,’ said Rita.
‘Just what I needed. Thanks, Rita,’ he said, ‘it’s as sweet as you are.’
‘That gender sensitivity course you were sent on is doing wonders,’ laughed Rita.
She hovered next to his desk. ‘What you got, Riedwaan?’
‘I talked to her father yesterday. Chris Swanepoel. He sat the whole fucking Saturday watching rugby while his daughter was being murdered. You tell me how he did that?’
‘I don’t know, Riedwaan. But you know how people can panic. It freezes them. They just pretend nothing is happening and hope it will go away.’
‘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. H
is 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.
6
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.
Like Clockwork Page 3