by Máire Fisher
After I’d been there about two hours, there was a noise next to me and I looked up. A young man smiled briefly, then settled to scanning the images that appeared on his screen. I wished I could speak to him, strike up a conversation about the weather, anything to delay turning back to where Dirk Stone stared out at me from the screen.
I read on for as long as I could, and then leaned back and closed my eyes.
‘Are you okay?’
The guy next to me had half risen from his chair. I stopped him with a quick ‘I’m fine’.
‘You’re looking really pale,’ he said.
‘I just need some fresh air.’
He glanced over to what I’d been reading. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the Freezer Killer. No wonder you look sick. Why are you reading about him?’
‘I chose it as an oral topic,’ I said. ‘Notorious South Africans. Stupid of me. I had no idea. There’s still more to read, but I can’t handle any more.’
But as I leaned forward to switch off the machine, a familiar name caught my eye. I sank back into my seat and started to read, stopping to look at photographs, scanning details I already knew.
And then I reached the last paragraphs of the story, the last photo. Bile rose in my throat. I stumbled to my feet and stood, gripping the back bar of the chair.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve finished in here now.’ I swallowed, reached forward to pick up the daisies. I needed fresh air, needed to breathe deeply, away from Dirk Stone and the lives he had destroyed.
My fellow researcher turned back to his screen where pictures of a flooded town showed in grainy black and white. Laingsburg. People died there too. But not because of a monster in human form.
I stood on the steps of the library and breathed in deeply. I had to start moving, fill my head with the sound of cars and people and the city. I walked away from the library as fast as I could and arrived at the station just as a train to Simonstown was about to leave. I flung my rucksack down on a blue leatherette seat and sat. With a slow grind, the train pulled away from the station out into the suburbs of Cape Town: Woodstock, Salt River, Observatory, Mowbray, Rosebank, Rondebosch … the familiar names flashed past, but I didn’t see them. I didn’t see the backyards or the mountains or the coast. Dirk Stone filled every frame: what he looked like, what he had done, what he said. What people said about him. A relentless spool, one image flickering and fading and then sharpening into another.
11
First, a series of power cuts. As simple as that. Dirk Stone had been away in Europe on a climbing trip with the Mountain Club. His two backup generators usually ran perfectly. But not this time. A glitch, caused by sudden and repeated surges in power, and Dirk Stone’s generators failed to kick in. So no power to his house. In the middle of a very hot summer.
Dirk Stone. Very quiet, always polite. That’s why his neighbours were willing to help him, to sort out the smell. ‘I never even knew he had a basement,’ his next-door neighbour told Derek Watts in the Carte Blanche episode about the Freezer Killer. She noticed the smell first. ‘Such a nice ou,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t believe it when we learned about those poor children. And such a terrible smell. It sort of hung around his house. Didn’t go away, even after the wind blew. We reckoned it must be something bad.’ So she called the Sanitation Department.
The Sanitation Department worker stared into the camera and licked his lips nervously. The Carte Blanche interview took place weeks after Dirk Stone’s house had been searched and cordoned off as a crime scene, but the worker’s face became greyer and greyer as he spoke about the basement. He knew, he said. The moment he approached the house, he knew. Worst stench in the world and it usually meant trouble. A search warrant, a police locksmith, a police unit in protective clothing, and Dirk Stone’s secrets became public knowledge.
By the time they broke down the basement door, the power had been out for nearly two weeks. So many children, and all of them dead.
Dirk Stone. Tall. Wiry. Sleek and creepy. Brown eyes, skin fine as bone china. His hair was a dark cap, slicked back from a deep narrow forehead. His face was long with high cheekbones tapering to a square jaw. He looked like a nice guy, if you didn’t know better. Handsome, almost, until you looked at his wide narrow-lipped mouth and then you saw the snake in him.
Image after image. They all showed him impeccably dressed. Trim in a dark brown suit, white shirt, dark tie. His shoes shone. The cuffs of his shirt were crisp and white. His hands … I had expected them to be huge and beefy, weapons of destruction, but they were smooth and slim. Long fingers. Thin wrists. Fine bones.
He sat in the courtroom, his face still. He answered all the questions he was asked. No need to force information from him. No matter what he was talking about, his voice never varied. He didn’t rant and shout the way I’d imagined him doing. On the Carte Blanche tape he spoke in a quiet monotone, delivering horror after horror for reporters to jot down and shape into story after story.
He called them his Sweet Things. He captured them when he went out on his Field Trips. Street children were the easiest; he found them anywhere in the city, under any bypass or in any bus station. So easy just to swoop them up. Refuse, he said. Street pickings. An angry outcry in the courtroom and the judge banging his gavel and shouting for order.
He answered the next question, the one that asked how he did it. His modus operandi, he said, was simple. If he was desperate, he’d go for the easy catch, but he liked a challenge. He lured children from exclusive, but not so secure, private schools, from under their parents’ noses, while they were having a lekker family braai in the garden. So simple to entice children away. Approach them close to home, in a place they feel secure, where well-dressed strangers do not appear as a threat. All you need is a simple question, one that appeals to their sense of importance. Make them feel they matter, as if they can help. ‘Young man, may I trouble you for a second? I seem to have lost my way.’
That way, he said, children feel important and they step forward to help. ‘Is it to the left? Up this road?’
‘Speak to them quietly,’ Dirk Stone said, ‘and they’ll move closer, little arm pointing, and then, one step more, and they’re close enough. Scoop them up, hand over mouth, onto the back seat, a strip of duct tape, a twist of wire for the wrists.’
When the urge for a Field Trip came upon him, a cage had to be emptied. He made notes. Numbered and named and timed every aspect of the procedure. Special capitals for special actions and equipment and events. Piles of documentation, all tagged and bagged and eventually called into evidence. He detailed every second of his Field Trip Days, from the time he awoke in the morning to the time he went to bed, after he had settled his latest Cage-lings down for the night.
He manacled the children to the bars and came down to them every night. He shared his thoughts with them, and when they shared theirs, he fed them. They told him about their friends and where they played and about their parents and brothers and sisters and their schools.
‘Family is important,’ he said looking over to his parents, sitting near the back of the courtroom, his mother with her head bowed, his father staring ahead, blank-faced. His parents, he said, should not be blamed. They tried their best. He was not abused as a child. The only freezer in his home was the one his mother kept stocked with home-cooked meals for her family.
A small smile in their direction.
As the train chugged its way back to Harbiton, images flicked by, frame after frame. Stuttering into darkness as his last words to the courtroom forced their way back into my mind.
Soon I’d have to tell Oz and Ollie what he’d said … about it being quick and painless.
To break a small neck isn’t that hard, I managed to write much later that evening. I’m so sorry, but that’s what he said. He brought his hands together in front of his chest, twisting them, like you do when you’re wringing a towel. His face shone, just for a moment and then flattened out a
gain. But only a few people noticed his change in expression. Because then, you see, I forced more words onto the page, the courtroom went mad. Pandemonium. Parents screaming, weeping, the press galloping for the doors, everyone yelling at Dirk Stone. And he just stood there. Silent in the dock.
12
When I got back to Harbiton, I walked straight to Rafi’s house.
Paolo met me at the door.
‘Bird,’ he said, ‘Amelia. How are you?’ He smiled and I wished my heart could lighten and that I could smile back, but my mind was filled by Dirk Stone and I didn’t want Paolo anywhere near him.
And then Rafi was there, reaching out when she saw my face, hugging me, stroking my back. Paolo patted my shoulder gently and left us.
‘Bird,’ Rafi said, ‘you’d better get home. Your mom’s just phoned and I had to tell her you were in the bathroom.’ She pulled back and looked at me closely. ‘You’re looking really terrible, Bird. Should I walk home with you?’
‘I’m okay, Raf,’ I said. I needed time on my own, to walk and think. ‘Thanks for everything. You’re the best, you know that?’ I turned to walk down the path and Rafi catapulted after me.
She grabbed me and hugged me tight. ‘You’re the best too, Bird, my best friend for ever.’
‘And ever.’ I smiled, but Rafi’s bright love and Paolo’s gentle touch couldn’t lighten the dark cave in my mind. The darkness didn’t end with Dirk Stone’s words in court. There was more. I had to put it all together for Ollie and Oz. From the beginning to the very end – and that meant telling them about that last story, the one that had made me bolt from the library and left me shaking on the steps.
It was in Sies! I told them. My hand was aching from all I had written, but I couldn’t go to bed until I had told them the final part of the saga. The same tabloid that published that other story, the one about me.
The Sies! article, ‘Interview with a Killer’, was fairly recent – January 1995. But it was the reporter’s name that had leapt out at me: Evan Sparks.
‘Figures,’ I’d muttered. Interviewing scum like Dirk Stone. Evan Sparks had found his niche.
For some reason Dirk Stone had asked to speak to him, so the first half of the article was all about how the great Evan Sparks had wangled the interview, how even Dirk Stone appreciated his flair for investigative journalism. After that, a lot of padding, facts about the case that I’d already read.
The photographs of Dirk Stone were more interesting – the most recent I’d seen. He was sitting on a metal chair, wearing a prison jumpsuit. A few grey chest hairs poked out beyond the top button. Prison life hadn’t treated him well. He was a shadow of the man in the courtroom, his smooth hair turned to thin ash, his porcelain-fine skin yellowed, his hands skin and bone, circled by the gleaming bands of his handcuffs. The man who had stood so tall in the courtroom had become a long thin wreck of a body.
The article gave the public the latest on the most notorious killer ever to stalk the streets and suburbs of Johannesburg (and the mountains of Harbiton). There wasn’t much of substance in the story. Dirk Stone was obviously a tougher nut to crack than I’d been. Evan hadn’t managed to ferret out anything new. Nothing, that is, until I read the last few paragraphs.
Dirk Stone had a message and he had chosen Evan Sparks to pass it on. ‘I’ll be making an important revelation to the police soon, very soon. Light has to be cast into dark places, misapprehensions have to be cleared up …’
‘He stared at me as he spoke those words,’ Evan Sparks wrote, ‘and for the first time in our meeting, I saw his mask slip and I was deeply afraid of this quietly spoken killer. What was it that Dirk Stone still had to reveal? But although I asked him to elaborate, all he would say was that I was to be his messenger, I was to tell the police he wanted to reveal information of a critical nature.’
In the final photograph in Evan Sparks’s article, Dirk Stone was smiling, his teeth loose and rotten in their sockets. There was a newspaper on the table in front of him and his hand half covered the image of a young girl in a boater dragging her way along a road. This had nothing to do with Evan Sparks’s writing ability. He had failed to pick up on the clue right under his nose. Sies! had been neatly folded back at the article that had left Orville and Annie devastated, and Ma Bess livid. The one where I said my brothers weren’t dead, that they were out there, somewhere, alive. And Dirk Stone’s hand was resting on me.
He was talking about you. Ollie and Oz. You were his final revelation. He wanted to make sure I had no doubts, no misapprehensions. You were dead. He had killed you. And I had no right to think of you alive. You belonged to him. Not to me.
13
The police combed the area around the harbour, upside down and inside out. Teams of volunteers tramped the streets and the shoreline, day after day, calling your names. They moved mountains and yet they didn’t find you in our mountain, right on our doorstep. No stone unturned, no lead that wasn’t followed. And still you weren’t found for ten years. You’d be there now if Dirk Stone hadn’t told the police where to look. I hate thinking about him, but I wish I could ask him just one question. How long did he keep you in that cave? If I knew that, I could try to see you there. Was it a day? Two days? Was he there all the time, or did he leave you, alone in the dark, hungry, afraid, calling out, hoping to be heard? All I want, more than anything, is to know exactly what happened to you. And I want to see where it happened.
After I’d finished writing, hoping that putting words on paper would help everything settle and make sense, I sat for a long time, staring into nothingness. Was this it? Was this how it was all going to end?
Finally, I pulled myself to my feet and walked slowly over to my ballerina box. I opened it and watched her turn. Then I reached for the daisies, coiled their limp stems into a circle and laid them, dull and wilted, on top of all my other mementos.
14
My obsession didn’t diminish after my trip into Cape Town. I knew, with certainty, that I had to travel with the twins from capture to captivity, to death, to decomposition. I had to see the cave. I had to know where it was before I could go there in my dreams. I had to do it soon, though. The holidays would be over in a week and then I wouldn’t have much free time. So, two days after my trip to the library, I headed up the mountain, following the path my brothers had taken.
It was a bit of a slog, but the cave wasn’t difficult to find. The police and all the other experts had beaten a new trail to it, and if that wasn’t enough, small ribbons of yellow police tape still fluttered around the entrance and on the path on the way up. There were bits caught on the rocks inside the cave too, a Hansel-and-Gretel trail. I unhooked a small piece and put it in my pocket.
The place where Dirk Stone waited as my brothers toiled up this part of the hill was more an overhang than a cave. He’d sat on the flat rock at the shadowy mouth and watched. I sat there and tried to weasel my way under his skin, into his mind. Did his heart beat faster when he saw the gift being delivered to him? Did his throat tighten, his hands twitch and his fingers curl? Did he consider going down to talk to them, or was he happy to trust it all to chance, let them arrive if they were meant to, plan his moves as he watched theirs?
I timed my climb up to the entrance. If my brothers had been walking quickly, it would have taken twenty minutes to reach the cave. A little slower, taking time to talk and stop and look around, and their walk up the mountain could have taken them thirty minutes. I closed my eyes and sat on that rock.
Like lights that flicker through deep mist the images arrive – I’m crouching behind a rock, and I’m watching you talking to a tall man and he’s asking if you like to climb and you’re telling him yes, but usually you prefer to fish. That would be you, Oz, always the first to speak, followed by Ollie, quieter, more sensible – We need to get going Oz, or we won’t get back by supper. Then Oz again, filled with bravado, trying to appear nonchalant: We’re not supposed to be here. My dad said we must never climb the mountain on our own.
Watching from behind my eyelids, I am the only one who notices the quick tightening of Dirk Stone’s lips as he says, So no one knows you are here? and how his mouth slits into a smile as he thinks of the cave behind him.
From behind my rock, I hear him saying, You boys had better get a move on, you don’t want to be late. Don’t upset your mom. But before you go, guess what I’ve just found. A secret cave! Right here. Have a quick look, it won’t take long. He ruffles your hair, and only I can see his eyes, a sudden empty gaze as he looks down on you, and only I notice how his fingers catch the tips of your hair, just for a moment.
I watch you crawling in. Oz, you’re always the first, and then Ollie follows you, more hesitant, but not wanting to be left behind. And there you both are, looking in at the entrance of the secret cave, which no one has ever explored, except the man you have just met on the path.
‘Why were you so stupid?’ I slammed my fist down on the rock, shouted the words out loud. A bird flapped startled into the air and I shouted again. ‘You knew you shouldn’t talk to strangers. You knew you weren’t allowed up here. Boys will be boys? That’s a load of crap! You stupid, stupid little shits. Good thing you’re not here, otherwise I’d kill you myself.’
I slid off the rock and onto the path and pounded my fists into the dust. I screamed their names up to the sky and into the dark mouth of the cave. And then I lay on the path and sobbed until I had no voice and no tears left.
15
‘Why can’t we just take their bones and throw them out to sea?’ I asked. ‘That’s what they’d want.’
Annie looked horrified. Orville squeezed her shoulder. ‘Your mother would prefer for them to be buried in the plot your grandmother bought,’ he said, ‘where we can all be together.’
‘And they should each have their own headstones,’ Annie said, ‘be remembered as people in their own right.’
That’s when I lost it. ‘You can’t do that to them,’ I raged. ‘You can’t separate them. They have to be together. If they aren’t …’