A siren blared in the distance. Riedwaan flicked his cigarette into his coffee cup.
‘It’s midnight.’ The waitress had her coat on. ‘We’re closed. That’s twenty rand.’
Clare and Riedwaan crossed the road together and stopped outside at her door.
‘A deal?’
Clare put her hands on his arms, held
him for a moment, her face against his. She hadn’t meant to, but he looked so stricken.
‘I’ll see what the cameras have to say.’
She pulled her door closed behind her, leaned against it, listened to his footsteps recede. The smell of him lay on her skin. Fear, loneliness, cardamom.
The light on Clare’s desk was a golden splash in the darkness. The Promenade was empty; even the homeless were tucked away in doorways and bus shelters, out of the wind. A taxi stopped opposite the mini-golf course, which was closed for the winter. A single passenger alighted, a thin man wearing a mismatched suit jacket and pants. He walked towards the copse of trees that surrounded the
overgrown labyrinth. Plenty of place to sleep there, but unpleasant in the cold. He turned once and looked back, seeming to stare straight up at Clare’s window before disappearing into the darkness. Clare, chilled, took the white shawl from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Her Apple laptop bleeped, signalling that the pages she wanted had been downloaded. She turned
her attention to the internet search she’d done on Captain Riedwaan Faizal, the reports that had made it into the press, and a few others from websites she knew how to get into.
He had joined the police in 1990, the year of Nelson Mandela’s release. In 1994 he’d been awarded a degree and transferred to the Detective Services. He had quite a reputation. A series of high-profile arrests. An
apparent obsession with bringing in the hard men who stalked the Cape Flats. The senior gang members. The few cases against Riedwaan – one for assault and a couple for searches without a warrant, had melted away in court. His Gang Unit successful, so far. Most of the cases he’d brought, stuck. Even more unusually, his witnesses survived. An award for bravery for rescuing a fellow officer. Both of
them wounded. What they were doing in the alley behind a crackhouse not well explained. The list of people who’d want him out of the way would probably fill a filing cabinet. A straight cop with a temper, who the tabloids loved?
The tip of an iceberg of trouble.
And his daughter? Maybe Yasmin had gone to visit an auntie or granny in a household where no one wondered at the presence of
another six-year-old. She had simply been fed then ignored, and left to fall asleep with a heap of cousins. One more child, unnoticed. There was a chance – always prayed for, though seldom the case.
Not really.
Clare got up to look at the map on the wall. The wind had dropped, the quiet tightening a knot of anxiety in her throat. She opened the window to hear the waves slapping against
the sea wall. Then she looked again at the portrait that Riedwaan had given her. A delicate oval face balanced on a slender neck. In her ballet pink, what she’d be wearing when they found her.
If they found her.
Clare pulled out her notes, skimming through what Riedwaan Faizal had told her. Winnowing the kernels of fact from the chaff of emotion.
1 Yasmin Faizal. Gifted dancer.
Scholarship to expensive ballet school, six years old, seven on Tuesday. Weight 20 kilograms. Height 115 centimetres. Shoes: child size 12. Eyes dark brown. Hair: black, curly, waist-length when loose. Ears: pierced. Two gold hoops. Body: small birthmark on left hip; scar on right elbow from falling off a merry-go-round.
2 Shazia (mother, estranged wife) comes to collect Yasmin at ± 18:30.
The ballet school is closed. No Yasmin. Shazia calls husband. No answer. Calls friends/relatives. No sign of her.
3 Shazia Faizal reports Yasmin missing. Police hotline. Call is logged.
4 Special Director Ndlovu is notified. Activates interdict against Faizal. Ndlovu declares him chief suspect. Ambiguity: Suspension? Arrest?
5 Yasmin has run away from home twice before. Once
she went to her grandmother’s.
6 Another time she refused to say where she had been, but showed no signs of physical harm. Both events happened after her parents had argued.
7 Riedwaan Faizal (father) misses call at 17:32 from the call box at the ballet school. No message.
8 Neither parent aware that that the school is closing early on Friday. Yasmin forgets to give them the
note? Pianist Henry Harries (Mister Henry) closes up and leaves later. He said he had not seen her.
9 Yasmin’s father went to the school at 16:00. Before her lesson.
10 Barred from case. Main suspect.
Clare ran her hand over the map, her fingers catching on the red pins she’d pushed into it. Open fields, dumpsites, subways, nightc lub toilets, homes, an office, a churchyard.
Each with a girl’s name and a date attached to it. Her Persephone charts. Little girls, their truncated lives reduced to a single red flag on a map, to notes in the brown folder on her desk.
She opened it. Name, date of birth, date of death pencilled on the sheets. Her notes a summary of the evidence, if there was any, statements from witnesses, if there were any. A blurry snap of a smiling
child at her last birthday party before she disappeared. That was usually all that remained: the photograph and a mother trudging daily to work, her grief clutched in her heart.
Noor Khan, who had been post-mortemed that evening, was slaughtered like a goat by a man her mother rented a room from. Chanel Adams had gone to the shop and vanished. Bernadette Jaantjies, seven, was last seen
by her friends walking hand-in-hand with an ‘uncle’ wearing jeans and a blue shirt.
Two little girls she’d tracked with the help of Pearl de Wet to a shebeen in Maitland. Sent by their gangster stepfather to pay off a drug debt. Yvette and Yvonne, six and nine. Cleaning toilets in the morning, their skinny bodies rented out at night. Too little evidence to jail the fat Austrian who’d been
caught with them, and who claimed that girls in hot climates matured younger. He had thrown money at the case. In the end, the frustrated judge made him commit to the New Beginnings Clinic’s sexual rehabilitation programme. The man complied and then flew home.
Then there was Tiffany Cloete, three, playing in the yard one minute, a bullet lodged in her back the next. Whether it was intentional
or a stray from a gang fight, remained unresolved. Lindiwe September, six, seen getting into a taxi with a man nobody on her street recognised. The driver who dropped them in town said the child was crying, and the man told him he was taking her to the doctor. Body found in a drain near the harbour a week later.
Too many of them, the detail blurring with their faces. And now this new one.
The one who didn’t fit.
Yasmin Faizal.
Clare had to presume she was alive; had to bury the image of the child’s body discarded like a used tissue. This work is what her life had become. Work she was good at, maybe the only thing she was good at. She didn’t seem to be good at life.
The twinge of a headache. She switched off her light and put on the Beethoven piano concerto,
as familiar to her as her own breathing. Closed her eyes, willing the music to ease the slow crescendo of the headache, the chords of her secret music.
One-thirty.
Clare closed her folder, the night’s silence whispering around her. She walked down the passage, pulling her evening dress over her head, the black silk clammy as seaweed on her body. Then she wrapped herself in her
gown and stepped onto the balcony off her bedroom. A fine spray drifted over the sea wall. In the pools of darkness between the lights along the Promenade, the shadows shifted.
The policeman’s daughter, her photograph lying on the desk, another girl alone in the night. Another one. By now, Clare’s headache was a vice.
The pressure of her heart beating against her ribs.
Cold.
Dark.
So cold, so dark.
She tries to remember. The food. The takeaways. She’d tried to run but they were too fast for her.
The smell of oil burns Yasmin’s throat. She feels a stickiness against her cheek. She moves the tip of her tongue. One, two teeth, then a gap. The bleeding has stopped but it still feels
raw. Her tongue continues to probe. Another tooth, the pointed canine. Another gap, this one familiar. The tooth mouse had brought her ten rand for it.
She wants her mother.
The burn of not crying turns into a fire. A sob squeezes past her throat, and tears sting where the man’s ring split the skin on her cheek.
She wants her father.
He will find her, save her from the darkness
she’s so afraid of.
He promised.
She breathes in, like her daddy said he does when he’s afraid. The thud of blood in her ears fades, and she can listen.
Silence.
Absolute.
No washing up.
No television.
No mother murmuring into the phone.
She’d got used to her daddy’s voice not being there in the night any more. But this didn’t mean that she did not miss the steady
deep note of his voice below the angry fizz of her mother’s.
The pain in her face is real.
The cold is real.
The hunger twisting in her belly is real.
The piece of metal pressing into her is real.
She tries to lift her right hand but it will not move. Neither will the left. The attempt hurts, as the plastic tie cuts tighter into her wrists. She keeps still. That saves you if
you are in danger. Keeping still, thinking. Her daddy says so, but making her mind work is not easy. Her thoughts are like birds caught against a window. The more you try to help them, the harder they fly into the glass, until, stunned, they fall to the floor, bleeding.
In her mind’s eye she puts out her hands, picks up her thoughts, helps them to the open doorway. Tries to feel where she
is.
If she knows where she is, her Daddy will be able to find her.
Her hands cannot move, but her legs can. Both together. There is a tie biting into her ankles. She swings her feet up, her knees hitting metal. She rolls her knees over to the right.
Metal again.
Back up and to the left. Nothing there. Except for hard rubber against her shins. A tyre. Metal presses into her back.
A jack. Maybe a spanner. She breathes again. The smell of oil. She is in the boot of the car.
So cold, so dark.
Better than being dead.
A rectangle, where the dark is less dense. She twists her neck towards it. Glass by her head, a chink to the outside. Yasmin lies still, listening to the layers of silence beyond the broken tail light. The muffled sound of a dog barking. Then other
dogs. And far, far away, the muezzin, calling her. Tears slide down into her ears. How will he find her when she can tell him so little? Diesel oil, a broken light, a dog, a faraway muezzin.
Footsteps.
A new voice.
The boot opens and hands reach in.
Her bladder, filled to bursting, overflows. She cries at the shame of wetting herself, not for the blow that it earns her.
SATURDAY
The Saturday papers avalanched through Clare’s front door, waking her from a restless sleep. She fetched them on her way to feed Fritz – as taciturn as Clare was until she’d had her morning coffee. She spread the papers out on the kitchen table. MISSING: TOP COP’S GIRL
.
Yasmin Faizal smiled up at her, hair netted, leotard encircled at the waist with a narrow band of elastic, skinny knees
holding a plié. A photograph of Shazia Faizal, prim in her nurse’s uniform. A picture of Riedwaan next to the two crumpled bodies of the girls shot dead in Maitland.
The story was spare on facts; generous on speculation. There was an undigested statement from Director Ndlovu on the need to stamp out domestic violence. An admission from her that searches of Captain Faizal’s residence, that
of his family, and other places where the child might be held, had been fruitless.
Unnamed sources talked about Riedwaan’s service record, his heroism in rescuing his partner, his mandatory leave of absence, the stresses of work in the Gang Unit, the shooting of his previous partner Van Rensburg, the increasingly public feud between Phiri and Salome Ndlovu.
A police spokeswoman said that
a search of the area – house-to-house questioning, dogs, specially trained officers, had revealed no evidence of the missing child. A homeless couple said they’d seen her waiting when they searched the dustbins across the road, that she had been eating something. But the caves nearby had been searched, and the gullies around the river combed for signs. There was no evidence of the child or her
possessions.
Clare turned to page three and was startled to see a picture of herself, taken at last night’s performance of
Persephone
. The ambiguously worded caption said that the child had disappeared during the performance, and there was speculation that Dr Clare Hart, who had been researching the recent murders of young girls, was involved in the case. Publicity. That was all she needed.
She looked over the notes she had made last night. Very little pointed away from Yasmin’s father.
Riedwaan Faizal had been seen there.
He had taken the child on previous occasions.
He had a motive. What would a father do if someone was planning to take his only child to Canada?
What would she do in that case?
Clare opened the kitchen window and put her crusts out for the sparrow
waiting on the ledge. A bright-eyed urban survivor, the bird pecked hungrily.