A bit of twine came loose at one end.
He peered inside. A bloodied sole, five little toes as tender and round as peas curved along the ball of the foot. On the other foot, a white sandal buckled around an ankle. Some mangy dogs that had been hanging around nearby moved nearer. He picked up a rock and flung it at them, catching one on the flank. It howled and bolted, then sat down just out of range.
Opening the gate to the yard,
Jimmy met the old lady as she came out of the kitchen, a steaming plate in her hand. Eggs, bread, two samoosas.
‘Your breakfast, Jimmy.’
Scarlet tinged the clouds above the mountains, the morning carrying on, regardless.
‘I’m calling the police,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s a little girl, Aunty.’
When the wind subsided, Clare pulled on a tracksuit; the bedroom window was her mirror as she twisted her hair up. The lights strung along the Promenade winked at her in the dull light of dawn. She ran to the pool at the end of the Promenade. The water was ink, and the lights glinted on its flat surface. Then she turned and headed home, the scudding clouds whipped pink as the sky lightened
in the east.
Fritz sat, a cut-out at her bedroom window. The light was still on in her study, where Riedwaan Faizal had kept his night vigil, anxiety and anger shadowing his eyes. Thirty-six hours had ticked past since Yasmin’s disappearance. And Clare had nothing for him. The plaintive cry of a pair of oystercatchers drew her attention to the beach. They dipped their orange beaks into crevices
in the slick black rocks, hunting for scraps as the waves ebbed.
All she had was scraps, thought Clare, as she let herself in again. The scraps of information that she and Riedwaan had analysed endlessly last night.
A note lay on the table.
Clare
Took your notes. Thanks.
Getting coffee. Checking some things with Rita.
R F
Clare took her coffee to
her study, where Riedwaan had fallen asleep the night before, his face on Charlie’s aural map. The place where Yasmin had last been seen was circled in red. She made a tag for Yasmin, pinned it to the map on the wall, and stood back. Still, it made no sense to her. She laid out the photographs she’d taken the previous morning while crouching down in the hedge where Yasmin had hidden.
The jarring sound of her phone at that moment was no help either.
‘What?’ Clare said, shuffling the pictures, imagining something there – like the shadows imagined on the periphery of one’s vision.
‘Clare?’
‘Yes?’
‘I think we might have found her,’ said Rita Mkhize.
‘Where?’ Clare prayed silently to a god she did not believe existed. She wrote down the address.
‘What about Riedwaan?’ she asked.
‘I thought maybe you would get hold of him.’ Rita paused. ‘I don’t think I could tell him.’
Clare dialled his number, wishing that this time, just this once, he wouldn’t answer.
‘Riedwaan, Rita called. She said they…’
‘Where?’ he cut in. ‘Give me the address.’
Clare drove straight to Maitland, the Monday morning placards
announcing Yasmin’s abduction flicking past her.
She found the street, where small front gardens were planted with daisies and marigolds, the easy, eager plants of the working poor. She didn’t need the street number Rita Mkhize had given her. Several police vehicles were parked outside the last house in the row, their blue lights flashing. Neighbours pressed in, the news travelling fast,
bringing the press and onlookers from further afield. Two people were getting out of an old red car. They nodded at Clare. Mrs Adams and Lemmetjie – the son’s arm tight around his mother’s hunched shoulders. Members of their Neighbourhood Watch crowded round them.
Clare didn’t wait long for Riedwaan. When he arrived a greeting seemed pointless, and in silence they walked round to the back
of the house. An old woman was sitting in her kitchen, a plate of food in front of her. She pointed towards the hedge. Jimmy April hovered nearby. Not his fault. Not his child. But that small foot had got to him, and he was waiting for her to be unrolled from the grey office carpeting.
Station cops, detectives, the press. Clinton van Rensburg arrived, his crutch digging into the damp sand.
He greeted Clare and Riedwaan, then stood aside and waited calmly.
Riedwaan’s hand shook as he lit a cigarette. The mortuary attendants arrived next and waited for forensics. Forensics arrived and waited for the area detectives. They arrived and waited for the police photographer. The police photographer arrived and waited for the pathologist. When Ruth Lyndall arrived, everyone set to
work.
The pathologist unrolled the carpet.
A sandal on the left foot. The right one torn and gashed. The big toe, with its swirl of pink nail polish, was bloodied.
A torn scrap of skirt, the little triangle between her legs a bloody pulp.
A tumble of black hair. Plump earlobes pierced with gold rings.
Green eyes open in her battered face.
Riedwaan’s
intake of breath.
Not Yasmin.
Mrs Adams’s knees buckled and she slipped through her son’s arms, her high-pitched wail slicing open the new day. A woman in uniform helped her up and escorted her into the old lady’s kitchen. Van Rensburg headed back to his vehicle.
Riedwaan let go of the breath that it seemed he had been holding forever.
His phone rang and he turned
away, his conversation rapid and urgent.
‘Riedwaan, I was…’ Clare began.
‘Can you give me an hour? Rita and I need to get back and strategise with Phiri,’ he cut in. ‘The press will be all over Phiri about this child. Nothing the tabloids love more than the hint of a serial killer.’
He was already on his phone, walking back to his car with Rita Mkhize. Clinton van Rensburg
turned and drove away in the opposite direction.
‘This is quite a way to start a Sunday, Clare.’ Ruth Lyndall’s lipstick left a red imprint on her takeaway coffee cup.
‘Ruth – I didn’t see you there.’
‘Where’s Rita Mkhize?’
‘She and Captain Faizal have just gone back to Caledon Square,’ Clare said.
‘His daughter still missing?’
‘A flash of CCTV footage
from Friday night, a voice message, then nothing.’
Ruth Lyndall took in Clare’s pallor, the shadows under her eyes as dark as bruises. ‘You’re sure about what you’re doing?’
‘This little girl went missing on the same day as Yasmin Faizal,’ said Clare. ‘When we found her, Riedwaan looked as if the world had come to an end. And then they unrolled her, and he could breathe again –
because somebody else’s world had come to an end.’
‘The identity’s confirmed?’
‘Chanel Adams. She disappeared three days ago.’
‘Her poor mother,’ said the pathologist.
‘Mother and brother,’ said Clare. ‘They’ve been hunting for her all weekend.’
The pathologist drained her coffee. ‘What happened?’
‘The family lives in a gang-infested area. 27s. The
child’s mother had sent her to her grandmother’s after a couple of kids were killed in crossfire. She went to the shop to buy cigarettes for her ouma. Was last seen talking to an ‘uncle’ outside the shop. She never came back. They called me there last Friday morning to tell me she was gone. The mother wanted me to do something – put it on television. Mrs Adams was convinced that she’d be killed
if they went to the police. But the son, Lemmetjie, reported it to the police – against his mother’s will.’
Dr Lyndall nodded at the two mortuary assistants. They strapped the body to the gurney and bumped across the uneven ground.
‘She’s been dead three days. She’d have died of these injuries. Looks to me like this happened at exactly the time she went missing.’ The doors of the
mortuary van banged shut. ‘So in the end, your knowing about it would probably have made no difference.’
‘And the others?’ asked Clare. ‘That child you autopsied on Friday evening?’
‘There is no pattern, Clare. But I know why you look for one. To give this some coherence, some sense of order.’
‘Their feet,’ insisted Clare. ‘Missing shoes. The cuts on the soles.’
‘Little girls trying to get away. Running on hard ground.’
The photographs of the place where Yasmin had waited lay where Clare had left them. They were far too dark; there hadn’t been enough light when she’d taken them. At the time, what she’d been reaching for wasn’t an idea yet, just a feeling, a ray of hope. Not at all scientific. Clare picked up her clothes, shoved them into the machine, washed the dishes in the sink, letting her thoughts
follow their own path, undirected.
Yasmin Faizal had waited outside this gate.
She had called at five-thirty-two.
She had returned to wait in this leafy niche.
At five-forty she had stepped off the pavement, out of the CCTV image, and disappeared.
Yesterday morning there had been darkness everywhere.
Just one light gleamed.
The detail that had been nagging at Clare.
Fritz jumped off the window sill, flicking her tail from side to side.
The sound wrong for Sunday: the clack of the letterbox. Clare was downstairs in seconds. An envelope lay at the front door, her name on it in plump, unfamiliar letters.
Inside, a single sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, with three bulleted numbers, one below the other. Clare’s heart lurched when she
took out the loop of worn elastic.
She scanned the boulevard. To the south, a woman roller-blading. To the north, a shadow moving along the buildings where the road curved out of sight. Clare took the bend at a sprint. She was gaining on the shadow, though it kept ahead of her, cutting across the lawn as it headed for the taxi coming down Beach Road. A hand out, slowing the taxi, a tattooed
arm sliding the door shut.
Sorry mom, sorry dad
. The prison-gangster tattoo was blazoned on the back window of the taxi, pulling away.
Clare got into her car and went after it. She knew the route, but the taxi eluded her. No commuters, so no stops this early Sunday morning. When she arrived at the taxi rank above Cape Town Station, she pulled up next to the driver and asked him about his last
passenger.
‘Got on at Beach Road,
né
?’ He called his conductor, a skinny boy who’d had his front teeth pulled.
‘Ja,’ he said. ‘Got on there. Gave me the right change. Sat in the back. Got out before we turned into the rank.’
‘You seen him before?’ asked Clare.
‘You know how many people we drive, lady?’ asked the driver.
‘But it wasn’t a he,’ said the conductor. ‘It was a girl.’
‘Oh?’ said Clare.
‘Sat in the back. Said nothing, but you can always tell with the hands,
mos
. Women have small hands.’
‘You see where she went?’ asked Clare.
‘Took off towards Woodstock. I
mos
told my friend someone would be after her,’ said a stout woman, pointing towards the Victorian slums on the other side of the dilapidated Civic Centre. ‘I was right, but you’re not going
to find anyone in there that doesn’t want you to.’
Clare pulled out her phone. One ring, and Riedwaan answered. ‘Just a moment.’ Noise in the background and Phiri’s deep tones. Hope flared in Riedwaan’s voice. ‘You got something?’
‘An envelope,’ said Clare. ‘A sheet of paper with three numbers on it.’
‘What’s that got to do with Yasmin?’
‘There was a piece of elastic, Riedwaan.’
Clare had it, grubby and pink, in her hand. ‘Tummy elastic. Young dancers wear them around their tummies. It’s so they can imagine where their waists will be when they grow up.’
‘Read me the numbers.’
Tension in his voice. The sound of a door closing behind him.
Clare reeled off the numbers and asked, ‘They mean anything to you?’
‘Docket numbers,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But I don’t recognise
any of them. Who did the drop?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Clare. ‘Jumped into a taxi on Beach Road, disappeared from the rank above Cape Town Station, then headed for Woodstock. Slim. Black hoodie. Jeans. Adidas takkies.’
‘A girl?’
‘That’s what they said,’ said Clare.
‘Must’ve been Pearl,’ said Riedwaan. ‘She said she’d get something to you.’
‘Yes, could have been,’ said Clare.
‘But Sea Point’s way out of her comfort zone.’
‘Who else?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘Someone who wants to make the link between these case numbers and Yasmin.’
‘Fucking cryptic ransom note – if that’s what it is,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’ll wrap up with Supe Phiri as soon as I can. Then I’m going to check on the numbers. You coming?’
‘Well, I was busy on something—’
He disconnected before
she’d finished. Clare felt strangely bereft.
The security guard opened the gate for her. He called up and spoke briefly, then he stood back and let Clare in, pointing to the entrance. Third floor, flat number five.
The polished floor gleamed. Clare walked up the stairs, then pushed open the swing door on the top floor. Under one of the doors, a dull strip of light.
A nameplate: ‘Joan & Hymie Levy’, with a wavering blue line
through ‘Hymie’. Clare knocked. A shuffle. The door opened. One beady black eye, a strip of wrinkled skin and a nimbus of white hair was revealed in the space allowed by the security chain. The door closed again before Clare could say anything – and then she heard the chain shift as it was unlocked.
‘You don’t look like a burglar.’ Joan Levy stood aside. ‘You may come in.’
‘Thank you,’
said Clare, and introduced herself. ‘It’s very early, I know, but I saw your light was on and I wondered if I might ask you some questions.’
‘What about?’ A trace of eastern Europe in her accent.
‘A little girl disappeared on Friday evening,’ Clare began, ‘from outside the school over the road—’
‘The ballet dancer?’ interrupted Mrs Levy. ‘I heard it on the news. What’s she to you?’
‘I’m working with the investigation.’ That sounded broad enough, but Mrs Levy’s eyes were sharp and clear, and they searched Clare’s face.