‘Well, this woman was murdered,’ said Clare.
‘Nothing to write home
about in South Africa.’
‘She was murdered 20 to 25 years ago, according to the pathologist. Around the time you were working there. You’d have found her corpse if it had been there before you started excavating. I’m thinking someone buried her there just before the slab was thrown.’
‘What are you saying, Dr Hart?’ asked Gonzalez.
‘I’m just telling you what I know,’ said Clare. ‘I’m
going to find out who she was. Who killed her. I thought you might be able to help.’
‘Should I get a lawyer?’
‘Depends, Tony,’ said Clare. ‘On what you did.’
Silence, a long one.
‘It’s hard to put myself back there.’ The cockiness was gone from his voice as the South African vowels crept back. ‘I put it away when we moved. I don’t believe in looking back. What does it help?’
‘It might help me find the person who killed this young woman,’ said Clare.
The silence stretched between them.
‘All the killing.’ When Gonzalez spoke again, his voice was barely audible . ‘It was a war zone then. It’s still a war zone.’
‘What made you leave?’ asked Clare. ‘Just as things were changing?’
‘You couldn’t see it in 1988,’ said Gonzalez. ‘A bunch of striking workers
– comrades, they were called in those days. They got hold of him – my driver – soon after we started work at Gallows Hill. Same time of the year as this, end of February. I wish I could forget it.’ His voice trailed away.
‘What happened?’ prompted Clare.
‘My driver was necklaced. He’d worked for me for 15 years. There was a strike on. He was shit-scared, but I said, let’s take the boys
home. No trains were running, no taxis either. It had been a long day, working in the heat. So we loaded them all up. Took them back to Crossroads. We dropped them off, but by the time we headed back, there was a barricade. The road was blocked.’
Gonzalez cleared his throat.
‘You there still?’ he asked.
‘I’m here,’ said Clare.
‘I haven’t talked about this since I left,’ he said.
‘Take the time you need,’ said Clare.
‘The comrades pulled us both out of the van. The men who got him called him a sellout for not boycotting, they put a tyre around his neck, poured the petrol, struck a match. A good man, burnt to death in front of me. And I did nothing.’
‘What could you have done?’
‘The point is, I didn’t do anything,’ said Gonzalez. ‘You can find it in the papers.
It was a big story. The cops rescued me. Special Branch, I think. So I sold my business, took my wife, took my daughters. Brought them here. I don’t want anything to do with that place. I don’t even want to think about it.’
‘But you need to know that a young woman was buried under that slab,’ said Clare.
‘If you want me to come to Cape Town, you’ll have to subpoena me,’ said Gonzalez.
‘I’ve made another life here. Door’s closed.’
‘She had a child,’ said Clare. ‘A little kid. Maybe four years old.’
A pause, and a bitter laugh.
‘You know how to play a man’s heartstrings, Dr Hart.’
‘You’ve got daughters, Mr Gonzalez,’ said Clare. ‘Three, I think. Granddaughters too, by now.’
Gonzalez was silent for so long that Clare thought he had hung up.
‘What do you
want to know?’
‘The warehouse you built was the only new building. The other buildings were old,’ said Clare. ‘I need to know about the occupants, other people who might have had access.’
‘It’s a long time, 23 years,’ said Gonzalez, ‘and access to the building site was restricted.’
‘You could tell me who rented there. Who used the site. Who had access. Anything,’ said Clare.
‘The
development was speculative, as I remember it. The client was a letting agent, I think it was called Saska – no, Saskia Properties. It was managed by a lawyer and an accountant, they had their offices somewhere in town,’ said Gonzalez, pausing again. ‘I remember that one of the tenants had special security needs, something like that.’
‘So, you never knew any of the tenants?’
‘Sorry, can’t
help you there. The owner’s husband dealt with those details. It was his project, I suppose,’ said Gonzalez. ‘Not that it would have helped much. There was such a high turnover. That area was only one notch up from a slum. Art students lived in the old houses around the development. Some artists had studios around there, and maybe a gallery or two stored their stuff in the warehouses. But there
was no real money. Just one or two sailor’s bars. And in the flats nearby, just prostitutes and old ladies waiting to die. Mainly, it was cheap storage. Import, export. I’m not sure how much of it was legal. Work was scarce then, so I didn’t think it my place to ask.’
‘No names?’
‘Like I said, it was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘Look, my wife’s with my daughter in Brisbane right now, there’s
a new grandchild. I’ll try her, see what she says.’
‘Thanks,’ said Clare, and left her number with him.
‘No worries,’ he replied.
Clare nosed into the traffic. On impulse, she went past Gallows Hill, where the crowd of onlookers had swelled since the day before. Taxis ramped onto the pavement to avoid the stop-go the traffic police had put up to control the crowds. The press had gathered in a tight knot under the only tree near the site. Clare glimpsed Engel and his photographer. She also noticed the black Hummer
parked on the pavement.
Clare’s phone rang, but there were too many cops around to risk talking and driving. She pulled over to take the call.
‘It’s Tony Gonzalez again,’ the voice said. ‘About that warehouse we built. I was just sitting here, thinking about that woman buried under the concrete. I talked to my wife about it. She wanted to know if I’m a suspect. Well, am I?’
‘You aren’t
eliminated, not yet, at least.’
‘But I’m way down your list, surely?’
‘You’re not at the top, no,’ said Clare. She didn’t tell him that he wasn’t at the top because she didn’t have a list. She didn’t even have a name for the dead woman. And until she had that, the chances of having a suspect list were zero.
‘That’s a relief,’ he said. ‘I’d hate anyone to think, you know…’
‘I know,’
said Clare.
‘Anyway, Lydia – that’s my wife, of course – she’s like an elephant. Her memory, I mean, not her size. She reminded me of something else that happened then. I’d forgotten, sorry.’
‘So, what is it?’ said Clare.
‘Two men were found dead. Shot. Lydia says she’s sure it happened just after we started building the warehouse,’ said Gonzalez. ‘Bergies. We knew them. You see, Lydia
felt sorry for them. There were a lot of homeless people, because of, well, how things were back then.’
‘There still are,’ interjected Clare.
‘Well, yes,’ said Gonzalez. ‘She used to give them food on Fridays when she came to do the wages on site. You’ll have to check the date the bodies were found. The story was in the papers, I’m sure. Just like the necklacing.’
‘It didn’t delay
the building?’ asked Clare.
‘No, no,’ said Gonzalez, ‘their bodies were found just outside, at the entrance to a stormwater drain – they must have lived there.’
‘Can you remember how they were killed?’
‘Shot in the back of the head. Execution style,’ he said. ‘My workers were spooked by it.’
‘Do you think this was connected in any way with the development?’ asked Clare.
‘No,’
he said. ‘No. There was some talk at the time but I paid no attention to it.’
‘What talk?’ asked Clare.
‘A serial killer, cleaning up the streets, you know. I was just wondering at the coincidence, that’s all, now that you found this lady buried there. Maybe it’s nothing, though. There’s so often no reason at all for killings in South Africa. They just happen.’
Clare started the car
and headed back towards the city. She’d have to check the archives. It’d happened too long ago to be online.
It was cool in the Company Gardens, with the oaks laying deep shadows across the path. She walked towards the library, where a handful of people were in the archives reading room. Clare filled in her request.
‘This is going to take you forever, Doc.’ The archivist put down the boxes
Clare had requested. ‘January, February, March 1988. The
Cape Times
and the
Argus
. What are you looking for?’
‘Missing persons reports,’ said Clare.
‘Do you know how many people were in detention then?’ he asked. ‘Thousands and thousands, until Mandela was released in 1990.’
‘Yes. I know,’ said Clare.
She paged through the
Cape Times
. All the editions for January and February 1988,
the period just before Tony Gonzalez had laid the slab of the Gallows Hill warehouse. Banner headlines of mass detentions, bannings. Protests everywhere. Flimsy shanties crushed by armoured cars, bulldozers, children shot in the back, women with burning tyres around their necks, burning everywhere. In among it all, protests, statements. By artists, by intellectuals. But the language of stones,
fire and bullets was the dominant one.
There were reports of missing girls; three women had also been reported missing. The girls were too young, though, and the women too old to match the skeletal remains of the nameless woman in the green dress. But Clare noted the details anyway, for follow-up. Names, next of kin, police reports. The names of detectives she might be able to trace. She picked
her way through the newspapers, tracking police reports of banal killings in the midst of a civil war. A body in the boot of a car, one in Newlands Forest. Another in an alleyway in Observatory.
She found a snippet about the necklacing of Gonzalez’s driver, dated 1 March. The report was tucked away inside the paper, below a piece about a series of art thefts from houses belonging to the state.
Valuable works were missing, the loss to South Africa’s heritage huge, according to art expert Gilles Osman, who stood posed next to an abstract sculpture, an Afghan hound on a leash at his side
The art thefts got far more column space than a commonplace murder. But next to the necklacing report, there was a small photograph of an insignificant mound of charred flesh, with a burnt-out vehicle
in the background. And silhouetted against that lurid sunset of 29 February 1988, stood a phalanx of soldiers. This was juxtaposed with a photograph of a missing Pierneef landscape, with its ordered horizon and geometric acacia trees.
The story that Gonzalez had mentioned was there too, reported on 29 February. Two homeless men, well-known strollers, had been shot in the head, execution style,
the day the concrete floor was thrown at Gallows Hill. Their bodies had been found at the mouth of a culvert that was a shelter for many of Cape Town’s homeless people.
There was an interview, too, with the detective who said there’d been a number of killings of bergies in the city: ‘We believe that these two murders are linked to other recent stroller killings. But ballistics reports will
take a while, so the public must be patient. If anyone knows anything, please call Detective Jones: Serious and Violent Crimes.’
Clare mulled this over. A serial killer – even if the victims were vagrants, even if the murders took place in the middle of an undeclared civil war – fired the public imagination. And that meant more eyes on the police. More likely then that cases would be tracked,
evidence kept, handed over to the specialists – the Psychological Crimes Unit, Ballistics, out on the edge of the Cape Flats, would have done the tests.
And she knew Shorty de Lange, Acting Director of the ballistics unit. Acting because of the colour of his skin, director because of his ability. He had taught Clare how to shoot, getting her to fire round after round with her little Browning
until she could sink a bullet into the heart of a target 50 metres away. Twenty-three years ago, Shorty de Lange would’ve been starting out. He and Riedwaan from different sides of the tracks. Riedwaan’s friend because neither of them liked bullshit. Both of them stuck half-way up the ranks because neither was capable of turning a blind political eye.
She took out her phone and tapped out
a detailed email to De Lange while she waited for the archivist to bring the rest of the files.
She turned a few pages. Other stories snagged her attention, slowing her trawl for reports of missing women. Out on the Cape Flats, another serial killer had slithered through the sand dunes. The Station Strangler. His victims were pubescent boys, and that month’s body count was still mounting.
It wasn’t likely that the woman in the green dress had been a victim of this killer. Wrong profile, wrong sex, wrong location.
Clare stretched her arms up and looked at the ceiling.
Unless the woman did not come from Cape Town, she mused. Her dress certainly did not. If no one had known she’d been in Cape Town, no one would have known to look for her. The image of a young woman shoved
into a box that was too small even for her petite frame was hard to banish. This woman who, 23 years earlier, had dressed herself with care one evening, feeling a sense of anticipation, perhaps. A mother who never returned home to slip off her sandals to tiptoe into her child’s bedroom to bestow a midnight kiss.
Who had missed her? Who had looked for her? Who had mourned her? And who had waited
for her? Who had tucked her in and then watched the concrete harden? Did her killer still look over his shoulder?
Clare packed up her things and slipped out. She walked fast, but still the questions pursued her. She pressed the remote of her car. It didn’t beep. And the door was unlocked. Damn. It had been faulty before. She made a mental note to get it checked – yet another addition to her
list of uncompleted domestic tasks.
There were more pressing things right now. Clare called directory enquiries and found Saskia Properties. She asked to speak to Saskia, and a crisp voice told her that Mrs Sykes was only ever in for board meetings. Clare managed to extract the woman’s home phone number.
One call to Rita Mkhize got her the address.
Constantia Valley was green, despite the drought. The vines on the mountainside were uniformly neat. The address, far along Monterey Drive, was about as exclusive as one could find in Cape Town.