‘How long will you be?’
‘Ten minutes or so.’
‘I’ll copy it onto a disk. It’ll be waiting for you.’
Clare looked back at the clinic, its facade hiding more
sins than the confessional of the Catholic Church. A woman pushed open a top floor window. She raised her hand. A blessing or a dismissal. Impossible to say, from this distance.
Mister Henry’s ground floor flat was in a battered council block. His curtains were still drawn. No movement yet. Too early to be at the ballet school; too poor to be out for breakfast. Clare had parked a little way down the street, where she sat listening to the call and response of dogs barking in the neighbourhood.
Twenty minutes later, in her rear-view mirror, Clare saw him. She
sank lower in her seat and watched as he approached. Head down, shoulders hunched, hands deep in the pockets of a long black coat. He picked up his mail – all of it junk, she’d checked – and went inside.
She waited another five minutes before crossing the rubbish-strewn yard. The sliding door was to the right. Henry was sitting on a chair in front of a flickering computer screen, his pale
face reflected in the monitor. Clare tapped on the glass.
He yanked the iPod buds from his ears.
She knocked again and he spun round, blanching when he recognised Clare. He opened the door. ‘Why are you here, Dr Hart?’
‘We’re going to have a little conversation,’ said Clare. Classical music dribbled from the earphones.
Persephone
.
‘About what?’ Mister Henry hobbled back to the
screen. He reached for the mouse, his hand casting a shadow over the image of the child in the play park. But Clare caught his wrist before he could minimise the image on the screen.
‘Let’s talk about Yasmin. It’s a conversation we should have had before.’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Dr Hart,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where she is. And if I did, I would have told you. I love that child. Just like
I…’
‘Just like you what?’ Clare moved closer to him. He tried to move away but she had the back of his chair wedged against the desk. ‘Just like you loved Calvaleen? All those photographs? I think you should show me what you’ve got on your computer.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just documents.’
‘Scroll through them,’ said Clare. ‘Go on.’
He did so, opening word documents and correspondence.
‘There,’ said Clare. ‘Open that one.’
He clicked on the folder. Hundreds of video clips.
‘Home-made movies?’ asked Clare.
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘I don’t think you have any idea what I think, Harries. Open that one.’
He double clicked. The camera was focused on a child’s hands folded delicately in on each other, fingernails bitten to the quick. The camera pulled back
as the dancer moved her arms and raised her torso. Her neck was bent, her black hair in a jewelled bun at the nape. Yasmin looked out of the picture, straight at Clare. Then she raised her arms above her head, turned sideways, and smiled at an older girl with sleek dark hair, whose tulle skirt floated around her thighs as she leapt through the air. Calvaleen.
‘You can look through it all.
It’s not going to lead you to her.’
‘I want you to watch this,’ said Clare. ‘Taken outside the New Beginnings Clinic.’
‘Great name,’ said Mister Henry. ‘Like the township where I grew up. Ocean View. The only way you saw the sea was if someone sent you a postcard.’
Clare inserted the disk.
The surveillance tape flickered to life on the screen. The time code: five forty-five. Fifteen
minutes before Florence April’s Tuesday appointment. A man in a banker’s suit, briefcase in hand, strode down the street. He pressed the bell, spoke into the intercom that Clare had used earlier. The gate slid back to give him access. Another man. Then another. One wearing a pink golf shirt. An elderly man, his brown trousers baggy on his skinny backside. Two arriving together. Blue shirts,
fawn trousers. Indistinguishable. The men who waited on the periphery of lonely children’s lives. Several more. One in blue overalls. A couple that looked like school teachers, their shirts jaunty. Some time after six, limping in late, a tall man on his own. Mr Henry.
Clare stopped the tape. ‘New Beginnings. Cape Town’s only specialised programme for sex offenders.’
‘You’ve got me wrong,
Dr Hart.’
‘Sex offenders are like politicians,’ said Clare. ‘Seven percent conviction rate on a good day. In my book, not guilty isn’t going to make you innocent.’
Henry laughed, a bitter, flat sound.
‘Let me see if I can make you understand something. That cupboard,’ he pointed. ‘Look inside.’
Clare opened the cupboard. Inside, the scuffed pointe shoes hung twisted on their hooks,
long ribbons curling like pale, attenuated leaves against the pink satin. Henry unhooked a pair and handed them to her.
‘Calvaleen’s.’ He turned the satin inside out. He held the shoe out to Clare. There was a dark stain at the tip.
‘Bloodstains,’ said Mister Henry. ‘It’s like Chinese foot-binding, the eroticism of ballet. The fantasy of grace from pain, beauty from agony.’ He ran his
forefinger over the dark stain. ‘Calvaleen never came back after the first Persephone audition. She would have had the part. She never came back either for the audition for the London School of Ballet. I wanted to go and find her, and so I looked in her locker. All I found were her shoes.’
He fingered the satin again.
‘I phoned her mother afterwards, but she wouldn’t let me speak to her.
Gave some weak excuse. When she never pitched up for the second audition, I went to look for her. I found her dancing at the Winter Palace. It’s my fault, I suppose. It was me who told her about the place. I thought it would be a better way of earning a living than what she was doing on the street sometimes.’
He lit a half-smoked cigarette and blew a smoke ring, watching it relax into ribbons
as it floated in the air.
‘I played there sometimes. What Madame Merle pays wouldn’t keep a mouse alive. You see, I tried to watch over her. I understand her.’
‘Isn’t that what every man who seduces children says?’ said Clare. ‘That’s what the director of the New Beginnings Clinic told me when I interviewed her; that he mimics a child’s loneliness. That he mimics their sense of isolation
and neediness, pretending that he feels the same. Isn’t that how the paedophile persuades that child? Grooms her? Wins her trust by convincing her that he’s the one who understands her? That together they can create a perfect world, if the child does as he says? Isn’t that what you did with Yasmin?’
Mister Henry did not stir.
A truck roared past. Then silence. Clare waited.
‘There
were some boys I grew up with who didn’t like dancers, especially ballet dancers.’ His voice, quiet as it was, cut into the surrounding silence. Didn’t like anyone they couldn’t control in the area. It meant a loss of profit.’
He pulled up his trousers. Both ankles were strapped, his long, slender legs ending in a mass of scars, the steel callipers biting his flesh. ‘They stamped on my ankles.
That was one of the ways they taught me how to be a man. The same gang that stopped me dancing sold me the drugs that took away the pain. So you see, Dr Hart, I fought my own demons. Just like Yasmin, like Calvaleen. Both of them are paying for the sins of the fathers.’
‘Their father’s sins?’
‘It’s easier to get to a girl than it is to get at a man with a gun. And getting the girl destroys
the man anyway. Look at Calvaleen’s father, eaten alive with hatred,’ said Mister Henry. ‘I can understand your mistake, Dr Hart, I can see why an intelligent woman like yourself would make it. But I help others now. Not all of us turn our rage onto other victims. I did some counselling for the voluntary sexual offenders group for a while. And I do some volunteer drug counselling. Drug-buddy,
if you like. Calvaleen was at the clinic for a while. I used to visit her there. That’s why I was on that tape.’
‘Is she still there?’ Clare’s voice gentler now.
‘No,’ said Henry. ‘She checked out after the last time I saw her. Couldn’t handle it.’
‘Where did she go?’
His cigarette had burnt down to the yellow filter.
‘She came here.’
‘Is she still here?’
Henry shook
his head. ‘She needed a place. She said she’d stay with me if I didn’t ask any questions. She slept here for a while and then she took off again.’
‘When was that?’
‘Late Saturday night. She’d been to work before she came here, but not for long,’ said Henry. ‘She was very agitated. Said she had to do something. Fix something. She wasn’t making sense, and she didn’t look good.’
‘Did
she tell you what it was?’
‘No,’ said Henry. ‘Like I said, she trusted me because I asked no questions.’
‘Did she say anything else? Where she might go?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘But you must surely have wondered,’ Clare persisted. ‘What did you think at the time?’
‘I thought she was going to score,’ said Henry.
‘What started it all?’
‘The gangsters target cops’ kids. Destroy
a child slowly. The family falls apart. It’s a way to make bucks. Lots – and quickly, too,’ said Mister Henry. ‘I saw it happen in Ocean View, and it’s no different here, in Maitland, or in the rest of the city. She didn’t tell me how it started, but the whole thing knocked a beautiful, talented girl off course and made her father an angry cripple.’
‘Do you know of anyone else she trusted?’
‘Yes. A girl who was one of your Persephones. I watched the programme you did about her on TV. Calvaleen thought she was so brave, standing up to her father like that.’
‘Pearl?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Henry. ‘She was looking for Calvaleen last night. Trying to find Yasmin.’
‘Why was she looking for her?’
‘She told me it was for you, Doc. If anyone knows what’s going on, Calvaleen
will. She’s a cop’s daughter. Like Yasmin. That’s their connection.’
Henry’s eyes were pools where the only thing she could see was her own reflection.
Clare broke Pearl’s first rule: never to try and find where she lived. It wasn’t that hard. She simply phoned the supermarket Pearl worked for. Clare’s clipped accent ensured the collapse of their perfunctory defence of employee confidentiality. In less than ten minutes, the HR department had given her Pearl’s ID number and her address.
The incoming traffic from the Cape Flats had
thinned, so Clare had an easy run.
She’d had one text message from Pearl – a single word that made no sense – and since then, nothing. Clare called her, got her voicemail again. Pearl might be on shift; she may have started at five in the morning. Clare’s anxiety ticking up another notch.
Half an hour later, she was checking the faded number on the house.
‘That’s Ouma Hendriks’s house,’
said a boy of about ten, twisting himself around a lamp post. ‘She’ll shout at you if you go in there.’
The place looked abandoned with its closed windows and unkempt garden. Clare put both hands on the ramshackle gate and pushed it open. The path to the front door was made of concrete pavers; weeds pushed through the cracks. She knocked, listening to the silence behind the door.
‘It’s
never open.’ The boy had followed her. ‘Better to go round the back.’
She followed the path, a faint depression in the grey sand, round the side of the house. A rusted car listed on bricks in the back yard. Washing flapped on the line, a pair of bloomers, a cardigan and a shapeless dress.
The back door was open a crack. Two mugs on the draining board, a plate, an ashtray. A single onion
lay on the table.
An old woman sat in the chair by the door, her arthritic hands curled around a radio.
‘Who’s in Ouma Hendriks’s kitchen?’ Apprehension in her voice as she raised her creased, blind face to the shadow that Clare had cast across her. ‘Is that you, Pearl?’
‘I’m a friend of Pearl’s,’ said Clare. ‘Is she here?’
‘Who are you?’ asked the old woman, her nose wrinkling.
‘Looking for her with your white smell.’
‘I’m Clare Hart.’
‘The doctor.’ Ouma Hendriks’s brow furrowed. ‘You’re the one she’s been meeting. The film.’
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘I told her it was trouble. But she wouldn’t hear anything. She likes you.’
‘I like her,‘ said Clare. ‘Do you know where Pearl is? She sent me a message. I’ve been trying to call her and there’s no answer.’
‘I heard her when it was still dark. If she’s not in the Wendy house, she’s at work still.’
‘It’s locked,’ said Clare. ‘Do you have a key?’
Ouma Hendriks put the radio down. ‘Can you make me some coffee? Nobody came today, so I’ve had nothing.’
‘Sure.’ Clare poured enough water for one cup into the kettle and lit the gas ring. She spooned coffee into a chipped mug. ‘How much sugar?’
‘Three.’ Ouma Hendriks pulled a small bag of sugar from the pocket of her apron.
Clare measured three spoons and handed the bag back to her.
‘She usually makes me something. A piece of bread and tea. She leaves it for me so that my blood sugar doesn’t go funny. But she didn’t come this morning.’
‘Shall I make you something?’ asked Clare.
‘You can look, but there’s
fokôl
to eat.
Pension. Eight hundred rand. It’s all gone in a week. What does the government think we must eat while they
suip
all that gravy in parliament? If you got a cigarette, Doc, that’ll help with the hunger.’
‘No cigarettes, sorry.’ Clare looked in the cupboard: a bit of white bread and some polony. Folding a slice into a sandwich and putting it next to the coffee, Clare asked, ‘The key for Pearl’s
room?’
‘In the coffee tin on top of the cupboard.’ Clare reached up and took out the key.
Ouma Hendriks fiddled with the dial of the radio, coaxing the news out of it. The corpse of another child, Chanel Adams, found this morning, murdered and dumped, just like little Noor on Friday. Yasmin Faizal. Still missing. Captain Faizal under arrest, a statement from Director Ndlovu saying that
Yasmin’s abduction had nothing to do with the other two girls, shot like dogs in Maitland. The media sowing division among the security services where none in fact existed.