‘You’ve certainly got his routine worked out,’ observed Clare.
‘Been watching him for the past year,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’ve seen his face more times than I’ve seen my own in the mirror.’
‘Nothing to bring him in, yet?’
‘These days you need a judge’s order to be in the same street as a gangster,’ said Riedwaan.
‘So it’s true what the newspapers say?’
‘What’s that?’
‘That your gang unit plays by its own rules.’
‘Hard to do anything else, when our opponents have no rules at all.’
‘I’ll meet you later,’ said Clare.
‘This afternoon,’ said Riedwaan.
‘Where will I find you?’
‘You know the Bo-Kaap? Signal Street, number 17. I’ll call you. Meet you there later.’
‘Okay. And the sooner I get this stuff started, the better. It’s going to take time to build Yasmin’s profile with the photographs I got from Shazia.’
‘How’s she doing?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘She’s okay, I think. Latisha van Rensburg’s with her. But she swings from rage to
terror. She’s convinced you’ve got Yasmin, Riedwaan.’
‘If you were her, wouldn’t you be?’ Riedwaan pulled on his helmet. ‘Considering the alternatives?’
Voëltjie Ahrend had been true to his name. The little bird who’d become an eagle, flying so high he’d bought the penthouse in a plush Waterfront block. Riedwaan turned at the block hunkered down near the harbour. A concierge stared through the glass-fronted entrance doors as Riedwaan rode past and turned into a narrow service alley. It was lined with dustbins, all overflowing except for
the one marked Number One. The Penthouse. He flicked it open. Empty.
He checked the garage, half-f with over-priced cars. The blue Maserati was nowhere to be seen.
Riedwaan knocked on the janitor’s door.
‘Sir?’ A dapper man in a navy-blue uniform appeared, a two-way radio crackling at his belt.
‘Goodman,’ said Riedwaan. ‘How’s your family doing in Harare?’
‘Captain, thank
you, living here now, sir. Children at school.’
‘Papers done?’
‘You pay a lot for them in Zimbabwe, sir. And even more in South Africa. It helped that you knew who I should speak to.’
‘You’re doing well here, though.’ Riedwaan eyed the man’s snow-white Pumas. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t want to take a message from me to Mugabe any time soon?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then you won’t mind if I
look at your logs, will you, Goodman.’
‘No, sir,’ the man replied, his face expressionless. ‘I cannot mind.’
The janitor ducked back into his office. Detailed computer logs, a bank of CCTV cameras showing all the entrances. A screen image of Riedwaan’s bike in the alley.
‘What do you need, sir?’
‘The penthouse,’ said Riedwaan.
‘No one in there now, sir.’ Goodman pointed: an
empty lift, a closed front door, the balcony empty, all the windows and doors shuttered.
‘When last was anyone there?’ asked Riedwaan.
Goodman typed in the plate number Riedwaan gave him. Shook his head. ‘Not for a week,’ he said. ‘He came in last night, was here for a few hours, then he left.’
‘He was alone?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘He’s never alone,’ said Goodman. ‘He had his men with
him, five of them. They came in a BMW, they went up, then they all left.’
‘No one’s been back since?’
‘No one,’ said Goodman. He typed a query into his computer. ‘See, sir? No one has gone in. Each time the door is opened, front or back, it triggers the cameras and there’s a record. This is the last one.’ He called up the images. Voëltjie Ahrend in his white suit, behind him three of his
foot soldiers, pants low, not even bothering to hide the bulges their weapons made.
‘Nothing else?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘You can’t enter from the roof?’
‘You go past me, or you must have a helicopter,’ said Goodman.
‘If you’re lying, Goodman…’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘My daughter,’ said Riedwaan. ‘She’s missing.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Six.’
‘Same age as mine,’ said
Goodman. ‘You think I’d risk having her deported?’
‘No,’ Riedwaan looked at him. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘You want to check?’ asked Goodman. ‘Okay, you’ve got three minutes for the alarm – I’ll turn the power off. And I’ll give you fifteen minutes without cameras.’
An expensive friendship. But a rewarding one, nonetheless.
Riedwaan knew the layout of the building well enough. He’d been
on Ahrend’s tail for months, combing through every transaction they could track, watching the buildings where he did business, getting to know the maids and drivers – better than any phone tap and never needing a warrant. Riedwaan didn’t bother with the entrance lobby, using the service entrance instead. Here, in the domain of cleaners and delivery men and undercover cops, the steps were raw concrete.
He took the fire escape steps two at a time, holding an illegal master key in one gloved hand.
The kitchen was chrome and steel and black slate. He moved through the rest of the apartment. It was as bland as a hotel. In the guest bedroom, a bed that still had plastic on the mattress.
The master bedroom showed signs of occupancy. The bed was unmade and the television remote lay on the duvet.
Voëltjie Ahrend had spent his last night here, alone. Riedwaan switched on the television. The Money channel. He tried the DVD. Porn. Asian girls, so skinny they looked like boys, servicing a huge man in battle fatigues. Riedwaan ejected the disk. Its cover showed a girl in dark glasses sucking a red lollipop. Foreign-made, distributed by Lolita, a city address, a perfectly legitimate pornographer,
as far as these things went. He tried a few more. The rest of the Ahrend collection seemed to be much the same. Bored-looking young women, pig-tailed and skinny; no children, though. ‘Barely legal’ was the by-line of all the titles – but legal, nonetheless.
Nine minutes had passed, and Riedwaan moved on to the bathroom. Damp towels on the floor, a line of scum on the bath, the mirrored cupboard
empty except for a packet of Viagra.
In the living room, a couple of glasses and a bottle of vodka. On the desk was a top-of-the-range Apple Mac in its box, the packaging untouched. Riedwaan didn’t bother with it. If you grew up as Ahrend had, then rule number one was not to hide anything that might incriminate you on your body or where you slept. And Voëltjie Ahrend could barely read, let
alone type. Nothing in the drawers either, apart from a few cigarette boxes and a boarding pass stub. First class. London – Moscow. Two months ago, issued in the name of Jan Niemand. A sure bet that the picture on Jan Niemand’s passport would be Ahrend’s handsome, scarred face.
Riedwaan opened the door to the balcony.
Four minutes left, and he still had nothing.
A flock of gulls wheeled
above the yachts rocking on the water of Table Bay. Behind Riedwaan was Table Mountain. Ahrend’s new territory. Sealed with the blood of the two girls in Maitland, the apex of the triangle of territory that stretched from Sea Point in the south-west to Milnerton in the north-east. Somewhere in that windswept concrete sprawl, Yasmin was waiting for her father to find her. Someone had the key,
Riedwaan knew, but it sure as fuck wasn’t him.
Two minutes.
Riedwaan eased the glass doors closed again, but the heavy glass stuck, just short of the latch.
A minute till the cameras would be activated again. Riedwaan swore under his breath and pushed the heavy glass back again, feeling along the runners – dislodging the obstruction.
A small pink hair clasp, an iridescent butterfly
attached at one end. It lay in the centre of his palm, the icy focus of his despair. He closed the kitchen door behind him once more. Ten seconds to spare.
‘Hey, Doc.’ Charlie Wang, blinking like a mole exposed to sunlight, had torn himself from his computer screen. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine,’ said Clare. ‘You been up all night?’
‘I guess so, if it’s morning now.’ He took off the security chain, opening the door wide for her. ‘Come inside, come inside. It’s dirty, I know. I’m sorry.’
The curtains were closed, like the windows. The
large room where Charlie Wang worked, ate and slept smelt of old takeaways, coffee and sweat. He shoved a couple of pizza boxes under a couch and tugged at a curtain. The whole thing slipped off.
‘I give up, I give up.’ Charlie peered up at the pelmet. ‘Sorry for you. And sorry for the mess, Dr Hart.’
‘I’d be at home if I wanted to be in a tidy place,’ smiled Clare.
‘I hate to imagine,
Doc. I bet you already went running today, ate fruit for breakfast and did five hundred tummy crunches.’ He patted the bulge of his belly. ‘I look like a geek, I smell like a geek, so you’ll spurn me forever.’
‘Your body, maybe,’ said Clare. ‘But not your mind.’
‘You’re looking so like Angelina in all that black, but you’re not here to play Tomb Raider with me, are you?’
‘Not today,’
said Clare.
‘You want more stuff for your murder maps?’ asked Charlie Wang. ‘The psycho-geographies of your missing girls? That’s why you’re here today?’ Charlie Wang had been plotting maps for Clare since she’d started her research, fixing onto the bland record of streets and subways and houses the coordinates of where girls went missing and where they were found dead.
‘I’ve got another
one,’ said Clare, tipping the album she’d got from Shazia onto the table, and stacking the digitised CCTV footage next to it. ‘Not dead yet.’
Charlie Wang rifled through the photographs. He whistled. ‘Too pretty.’
‘Disappeared last night,’ said Clare. ‘So far, no trace.’
‘I’ve tried before for your other little Persephones. It hasn’t worked. Maybe it just doesn’t work.’
‘They’ve
all disappeared from out on the Cape Flats,’ said Clare. ‘That’s outside the camera’s eye, so they weren’t going to register anywhere, were they? This little girl vanished from a wealthy, watched suburb below Table Mountain. She’ll be there. Somewhere on a camera. She has to be.’
‘Clare,’ Charlie shook his head, ‘we’ve tried this before.’
‘She’s six years old.’ Clare held up a picture
of Yasmin on the beach. Blue sea, red swimming costume, yellow bucket and spade.
‘Okay,’ Charlie sighed. ‘Who is she?’
‘Yasmin Faizal,’ said Clare.
‘Captain Faizal? That gang cop’s daughter?’
‘That’s her.’
‘Are you mad?’ Charlie tossed her the
Weekend Argus
. ‘Look at this. The paper says he took her.’
‘Her father hired me to find her,’ said Clare.
‘It’ll be unusual
if it isn’t the father,’ said Charlie. ‘You know that. This country of yours, it almost always is. Father, stepfather, uncle, brother, cousin. A kind of family free-for-all, most of the time.’
‘This time, I think not,’ said Clare.
‘Well, great alternatives then,’ said Charlie Wang. ‘If it’s not him, then one of those gangsters he’s been arresting is after him. Let’s take our pick about
how we want to die. A drive-by? Throats slit by a psychopath with a handmade blade? A hand grenade from that new lot, the Afghans, with a kopek or two placed on our eyelids for good measure?’
‘Might not be them, Charlie,’ said Clare. ‘It might have been a man with some cable ties, a scalpel and a thing for little girls.’
Charlie Wang straightened the photographs.
‘I suppose running
her through my programme won’t hurt.’ He scooted his stool back to the screen. ‘Tell me where.’
‘Gorge Road.’
‘You got anything on it?’ he asked.
‘This DVD here – this is from the camera at the end of the street. There are none in the place where she was. Quiet residential street, so most of the cameras are blind.’
Charlie Wang found the coordinates and fed them into his computer.
The machine whirred, sifting through the compressed information. A three-dimensional map appeared on the screen, showing the street, the school, the kramat.
‘Hand me those photos, will you?’
He was scanning in the photographs of Yasmin, cropping to eliminate everything but her face. Laughing, serious, smiling, asleep, her head resting on a shoulder, leaning against close-cropped black
hair.
‘The father?’ asked Charlie.
‘That’s him.’
‘Nice-looking,’ Charlie looked at Clare from behind his thick glasses. ‘Looks kind of like you.’
‘You think so?’
‘Lean, and like he worries a lot.’
‘Not my type.’
‘So there is hope. Knowing you have a type means I’ve got a chance of a date. I just have to work on myself a little,’ he smiled.
‘This is going to be a
while, Doc. This face recognition stuff uses algorithms. Got to get it set up. I’ll run all these in and compare it to all this CCTV footage you’ve brought. You got something to do, someone to see in the meantime?’
‘I’ve got someone to see,’ said Clare. ‘Someone who knows how much it takes to survive.’
‘Good, then,’ said Charlie, talking more to himself than to Clare. ‘I’ll call you as
soon as I’ve got something. Right now, I’m going to get some more pictures.’
His attention was on the screen. Using the elegant algorithms of the programme he’d invented, Charlie had already begun building up a composite of Yasmin’s face. A web of mathematical information was culled from Yasmin’s plump cheeks, her winged eyebrows, the pink bow of her mouth. He teased out the hidden architecture
beneath the surface distraction of honey skin and expressive features.
‘Come on,’ he muttered, manipulating Yasmin’s smiling face into usable information. ‘Uncle Charlie will find you, baby.’
Clare let herself out. On the landing she made a call.
‘Pearl?’
‘Yes.’
‘Another little girl is missing. I need your help. Can we meet?’
‘Who is she?’ asked Pearl.
‘Yasmin Faizal,’
said Clare. ‘Captain Faizal’s daughter.’
‘Gang Unit?’
‘That’s the one.’
Clare was already at the bottom of the stairs before Pearl made her decision.
‘The Arderne Gardens,’ said Pearl. ‘I’m on tea in half an hour. The children’s park. The benches on the other side of the labyrinth.’
Clare did a U-turn in front of a minibus taxi, accelerating away from it as the driver yelled
abuse at her. She turned up Roodebloem Road, hoping that the Eastern Boulevard would be quicker than clogged-up Main Road. A children’s park. Not quite the place where she’d have expected Pearl to spend her breaks.