“No, silly, you know what I mean. Talking to you has lifted a weight from me, like I was carrying around a heavy bag of shit. Now I’ve given it to you and it’s all gone.”
“All of it? Or is there more you need to unburden?”
Leilah chewed on her lip and dipped her face to give me more of the little girl effect.
“What more do you want me to say?” she asked, as if I was demanding too much.
“What about the two men who died?”
Leilah kept her face down, her lip pinched in her teeth, and looked at me through her eyelashes.
“Which two men?” she asked, eventually.
“They were in a car which was burnt; but they did not die in the fire. The police say they were already dead when the fuel tank ignited.”
Leilah’s cool green eyes gazed into mine.
“It was a few days after you left the hospital,” I said, to jog her memory. “That’s when they burned.”
Leilah stood up, went over to the bed and reached a hand up to take the seductive pose she’d struck on my previous visit. But after a moment the hand dropped back down, and she slumped onto the bed, causing an avalanche of pillows to fall to the floor and her grumpy teddy bear to tumble after them.
“Are you with the police, after all, soldier-boy?” she said eventually, and her lower lip trembled. “Have you come to arrest me? All your stories about Natasha were just a trick?”
“I’m not with the police. But they are not far behind. Let me help you, Leilah.”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a jagged sigh.
“Shall we cut the histrionics?” I said. “Just tell me what happened – without the performance.”
She glared at me. The lower lip stopped trembling, and her mouth clamped tight.
“The two men,” I prompted. “When you left hospital, what happened?”
“I only helped a bit,” she said. “I didn’t do all of it.”
“You killed one of the men, not both?”
“I didn’t kill either of them. I helped burn them afterwards, that’s all I did.”
“Helped who?”
“Natasha. She cut their throats.”
I said nothing for a moment. Leilah waited – as I drew the obvious conclusion and put all the pieces together – her eyes steady.
“Natasha is alive,” I said, after a long pause.
Leilah nodded, then rushed to explain.
“When I woke up in the hospital, the first thing I did was I called her. But her phone was off. It was off for days. I told the police, but they said there was nobody called Natasha, that I’d done too much tik, I was confused. They thought I was making up stories about one of the other lost girls they couldn’t care less about. So they did nothing. I kept calling her, every few hours. I thought she’d been killed and her body thrown onto one of those rubbish dumps where they find body parts.”
She went silent, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“But she hadn’t?” I prompted. “She hadn’t been killed. And she did answer your call?”
“She said she’d killed them. Cut their throats like the monsters had done to her sister, like she thought they’d done to me.” Her hand reached up to hover over the scar across her throat. “They forced her to watch as they slit my throat. Did I tell you? She was sure I was dead; couldn’t believe it was me when I called.”
“It must have been a surprise for her to hear your voice.”
“She broke down and cried.”
“And the phone, why had it been off for days?”
“The battery died. They’d tossed it into a corner of the shack where the beasts took her.”
“What shack?”
“In the township. They wanted to have their fun with her before they killed her. Tied her up and threw her into a back room, then they raped her. They gave her water and bits of food to keep her alive – only just alive though.”
Leilah watched me carefully to see how I was taking her story. From the look on her face, I guessed she didn’t think I was taking it particularly well.
“Let’s smoke,” she said, and went to stand at the window, where she shivered in the cold air. I suggested she put more clothing on when I joined her there, but she snuggled up to me and said I was keeping her warm enough.
“One man carried a knife,” she resumed when we had our cigarettes alight. “The knife he used on me. One day while he was raping her, she got hold of it. She killed him while he was still on her. Then she cut the rope they’d tied her with and waited for the other man to come back from the shebeen. He’d been out drinking, and didn’t even see her until after she’d sliced his throat.”
Leilah’s hand touched her scar, and she ran a finger along it gingerly.
“She laid the bodies down on the bed in the back, then she panicked. Didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where she was, she’d eaten nothing but bits of bread for days, and there were two dead men on the bed. She stayed in the shack and screamed. That’s what she told me. She screamed and screamed, but she must have done it without making any noise because nobody came. And there were lots of shacks around there. People would have come if she’d made a noise. She found her phone and the spare battery. Turned it on and then didn’t know what to do. She called her father, but couldn’t tell him what she’d done. She wanted to call her boyfriend, but said she couldn’t.”
Leilah twisted under my arm to look at me.
“Was that you, Angel?”
“It was.”
“I called the next morning,” continued Leilah, “after she’d spent the night looking at the bodies of those men she’d killed.”
She paused and sucked on her cigarette.
“I borrowed a car from a friend. Natasha went out and looked at the names of the streets near the shack – she had to walk a way because there in Gugulethu the street names aren’t so good. But she found some, and I found the place on the map. I went to her, still with my bandages and the stitches in my neck. We waited until after the middle of the night, about three o’clock. The men had parked their car up against the shack. Natasha and I carried the bodies out and put them in the back.”
Leilah finished her cigarette and flicked the butt out of the window.
“It’s cold,” she said, as if she had only just noticed. She shivered, then announced: “I’m taking a bath.”
“You just had one.”
“This one is to warm me up.”
She left me to finish my cigarette and a moment later the sound of running water came from the en-suite bathroom.
“You want bubbles?” she called, but by the time I had disposed of my cigarette and reached the bathroom she was already kneeling beside the Victorian free-standing bathtub, frothing the water with childlike glee.
“Natasha drove the car with the dead men to one of those deserted beaches on the Strand,” she said, as she frothed the bubbles. “Where the sand dunes blow over the car parks and you can do anything in a car there, nobody will see you. It was my idea, I’ve been taken there often.”
She stood up and shook her robe from her like she was shrugging off an extra skin. Then she climbed into the bath, lay back, and closed her eyes. I settled onto the closed toilet seat, which had a fluffy pink cover on it, and waited for her to continue.
“I followed Natasha. I don’t know what we would have done if we’d been stopped. We hadn’t even thought about that. We just drove. Natasha was different, she’d changed. It was like something had broken inside her. When I looked at her, it was like I was looking at a stranger. I couldn’t see the Natasha I knew.”
Leilah opened her eyes and two perfect tears rolled out, travelled down her cheeks and dripped into the foamy bath.
“I loved her, soldier-boy, you know that? I loved the Natasha I’d known before. I would do anything for her. Anything.”
She gazed at me through her tears. I said nothing.
“We put the bodies in the front seats, then poured petrol over them; tried throwing ma
tches at the car but they went out. Then I lit a cigarette and threw that. It made such a big flame our eyebrows burnt off. We were lucky we didn’t catch fire ourselves, everything smelt of petrol, and we’d got it all over ourselves. But we didn’t catch fire – we got into my car and drove away.”
“Where did you go?”
“I brought her here. The dragon lady’s got a good heart. She let Natasha stay a few days while she got her strength.”
“And then? When she had recovered her strength, where did she go?”
“She went to find the monsters who killed her sister. She had heard the men who cut my throat and raped her talking on the phone to someone who’d paid them to kill us. A funny name, like one of those Bible names, Jeremiah or Isaiah. They even said he came from a church and they called him the prophet. Natasha was good at digging around, asking questions, and finding people.”
“And she found this prophet, Isaiah?” I asked, thinking of the scowling face of the novitiate with the prominent forehead and too much sin in his heart.
“She found him, but he didn’t recognise her or know who she was. Can you believe that? When Thabo told him people were digging around, he must have described me to them. But he didn’t even know what Natasha looked like. Besides, Natasha said the prophet was nothing more than a servant of a bigger devil.”
“And she found that bigger devil?”
Leilah dipped her chin into the bubbles, then looked up at me with a sad smile, a white goatee dripping from her chin.
“She’s still looking,” she said, and allowed her eyes to fill with tears again.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Still looking,” repeated Leilah.
“But she found some of the devils, didn’t she? You told me she named one of them. It was a judge, wasn’t it? Justice Francois Rousseau.”
“I know nothing about a judge,” said Leilah, and she shivered as if the water had grown suddenly cold.
“And the politician?” I asked. “Tell me about Jessop Ndoro.”
“I don’t know anything about a politician.”
Leilah sighed and lowered herself into the bubbles, as if she could hide from me.
I stood up and pulled a huge fluffy towel off the heated rail.
“Get out,” I said. “I’ve had enough of your games.”
“I don’t know about them. I’ve told you everything,” she protested, and the tears spilt down her cheeks.
“When you’ve got some clothes on, you can tell me about the judge and the politician. Get out of that bath.”
Leilah heard the anger in my voice and climbed out of the bath, then stood dripping before me. She didn’t take the towel that I held out to her, but opened her arms as if to offer herself to me.
“You don’t like what you see?” she asked. “Other men do. Or is that the problem? You think I’m used goods?”
“I think you’re a young girl who’s spent so much of her life lying to everyone that you cannot distinguish truth from fantasy.”
“That’s not true,” said Leilah, and she cried silently, her eyes on mine like great pools of aggrieved innocence. Then she grabbed at the towel with defiance and dried her face with it. She wrapped the towel around herself and strode back to the bedroom.
Leilah had her see-through robe on again when I joined her at the window.
“You’ll catch your death of cold,” I said.
“It would be your fault. You can make the speech at my funeral and tell them it’s because you hated me so much you did nothing to keep me warm.”
I opened my arms, and she snuggled against me.
“I’m a Virgo,” she said. “On the cusp of Leo, but I’ve got Chiron in Virgo.”
“That sounds bad.”
“It is. You know about Chiron?”
“Not as much as I should.”
“He is the wounded healer – given the power of healing, but could not heal himself. That’s why Chiron is so tragic.”
“And you’ve got him in Virgo?”
“My birth sign, that’s why I need to be loved. It’s my gift and my curse. I heal others with my love, but I cannot heal myself. It’s my destiny to spend my life searching for love. No one will ever love me as I love them.”
The two of us stood in silence for a few minutes at the open window, Leilah shivering with each gust of chilled air. Eventually, she sighed.
“Natasha wanted to ask questions,” she said, “but the judge didn’t give her a chance. He booked a night with me, through Natasha. It was her idea – not to get revenge on them, but to reach them. He refused to talk to her when she tried before. She called him up, told him she was a journalist, wanted to ask him some questions. But he wouldn’t talk to her, so she laid a trap with me as the bait. When we arrived, he was surprised there were two of us, but then he realised we’d tricked him. Natasha asked him to confess and tell her who the others were, but suddenly he got nasty. He said he’d been warned that she was after him. He had a knife in a pocket of the disgusting robe he was wearing. He pulled it out and cut Natasha badly. He wanted to kill her. But I …” Leilah paused, and swallowed as if the words stuck in her throat. “I helped to hold him down.”
The nasty thought that had occurred to me earlier as I stood on my neighbour’s balcony beneath the bleeding sky twisted again at the back of my mind. If the judge had not been warned, would he have carried the knife that was used to kill him?
“And the politician?” I asked.
“Natasha knew his initials, because she had some kind of official papers. She mentioned a name to the judge before things got nasty, when he was still denying he knew anything. He laughed about it, and said Natasha would do better to speak to a man called Ndoro. But when we went to see Ndoro he had also been warned – he didn’t have a knife, but he was angry. Natasha had kept the judge’s knife. She attacked him before he’d done anything much. Natasha has changed, Angel, I told you. She’s not the person I knew before. I think she went there planning to kill him, not talk or ask questions.”
Leilah shivered and snuggled closer for more warmth.
“And the third man?” I asked. “The man from the church.”
“I told Natasha I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t help her kill anyone else. She said she didn’t need me, anyway. I look in the newspapers every day because I don’t think she’s planning to ask that church man questions either. I think she’s just waiting to kill him.”
“Tell me where she is, Leilah. We must stop her.”
“No, Angel. We mustn’t stop her. We need to let her do it. You know what those men did.”
“We need to take her to get help, before she gets near that church man,” I insisted. “For her sake, not his. He has security who won’t hold back. They’ll do anything to protect him.”
“But you are too late,” said Leilah, and she turned her green eyes onto me. “She’s already near him. Don’t stop her now, Angel. Those men deserved to die, and he deserves it too.”
Leilah moved closer, and her lips brushed against my cheek. “Besides,” she whispered, “you’ve warned him, haven’t you? Like you warned the others. You’ve done everything you can. Now come and lie with me, Angel. Will you do that? Just lie with me and hold me. Talking about those men has made me cold again. I need you to keep me warm.”
The teddy bear glared at me from its position on the floor as I lay beside Leilah and kept her warm until her breathing settled into the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. I climbed out of the bed, positioned the teddy bear in my place, and allowed myself a cigarette at the window to gather my thoughts.
After the cigarette, I left Leilah a note and let myself out of her room. The lights in the hallway were dim, and the soft carpet dulled the sound of my tread. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, but death, like time, waits for no man.
Thirty-One
If there was one thing I had learnt from Chandler during the second iteration of our relationship – the one that developed while conductin
g criminal activities together, as opposed to the first iteration in which we had defended the rights of the citizens of her Majesty’s government by killing other people – if there was one thing I had learnt, it was that the simplest approach was usually the most effective. And the simplest approach to gaining access to a property guarded by the most advanced security systems available at the southern tip of the African continent, was not to arm oneself with semi-automatic weapons, dress in black and attempt to vault the electrified fences, but to be invited onto the premises and welcomed as someone they wished to see. Which is why at oh six hundred hours, only four hours after creeping out of Leilah’s bedroom, I was sporting a dull grey tracksuit, and jogging at a leisurely pace around the outskirts of the fortress that was the House of Our Lord.
The sun was only just warming the horizon, so I didn’t think there was much chance of my being recognised, but the hooded tracksuit top would conceal my face from the scrutiny of the guards who had recently taken over from the night shift, and were probably watching me with interest as they finished up their cornflakes in front of all their screens. I also didn’t think that they would have been alarmed when I suddenly turned and crossed the road at the point where the stripe of new tar showed clearly the path of the optical fibre cable that provided the complex with its connection to the outside world. It had not been hard to establish which service provider the House of Our Lord used because they had boasted on their website of their pride at connecting Our Lord with the rest of the world. An early call to their 24-hour service centre had been very informative. I had been told not to worry about the cable being damaged by road workers, because the cables were protected within steel tubing, the only vulnerable spots being the junction boxes, accessed by small plastic covers with the helpful insignia of the company which distinguished them from the many other subterranean mysteries that littered our sidewalks.
I jogged around a corner, away from the prying cameras of the House of Our Lord, and identified an emblazoned access point a little further down the quiet sidewalk. I stooped to tie my shoelaces, prised the cover open, and exposed the splitter that lay beneath. I didn’t need to use the knife I had brought along because the splitter could be simply unscrewed once the sealing tab had been broken. I was back on my feet in less than a minute and made my way to the unmarked panel van I had stolen an hour earlier.
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