Gallows Hill (15 page)

‘Oh, man.’ Basie Steyn pushed his hands through his brush cut. ‘There are some sick fuckers out there. She’s looks
just like a 50s movie star. The kind my mother loved.’ He angled the photograph towards the light. ‘Not Marilyn. The other one, the one who died in the car crash.’

‘Grace Kelly.’

‘That’s the one,’ said Steyn. He flipped through the autopsy pictures, stopping to examine the crushed skull.

‘Boyfriend,’ he said. ‘Find him.’

‘I’m looking,’ said Clare. ‘And I’m keeping an open mind.’

Steyn stared at her a moment.

‘That shows you’re not a cop.’ He swung round to the filing cabinet. ‘You want to see what’s on record?’

‘Please,’ said Clare. ‘Incident reports. That kind of stuff. I want to see what the pattern is.’

‘You still official?’ asked Steyn.

‘My contract expires at the end of this month,’ said Clare.

‘Good. I need to assign the search to someone.
Can I use your number?’

‘Sure.’ Clare handed him her ID.

‘Okay, this dinosaur is alive and well.’ Fat fingers on the keyboard. ‘Susan le Roux.’

He tapped in the information. Waited. ‘Nothing.’

‘Try Suzanne,’ said Clare.

Steyn’s computer made feeble pleading sounds. He whacked it.

‘Sorry for this,’ said Steyn. ‘Management took my laptop. Said they’re trying to work out who’s
been leaking stuff about corruption in the senior ranks. If you make the cops look bad, you’re fucked.’

‘Did they find anything?’

‘Place is like a sieve. Leaking staff, leaking information,’ he said.

He pointed to the computer screen. ‘See? Nothing.’

‘There must be something,’ said Clare, leaning over. ‘Somebody crushed her head with a rock and then buried her. A beautiful woman
wearing a silk dress. Someone must have noticed that she was gone. Someone must have looked for her.’

‘I wish I could help you, Doc,’ said Steyn.

The pelvis. Ah. She had forgotten the grooves in the skeleton’s bone.

‘Actually, she had a child,’ said Clare. ‘Pathologist’s guess was that the child would have been at least two years old. Maybe as old as four when the mother was killed.’

Steyn looked at her for a moment.

‘There’s one other place I could look,’ he said. ‘The old Child Protection files. I kept them when I moved.’

‘You must have lots of storage space,’ said Clare.

‘Nobody wants to throw a life’s work away,’ said Steyn. ‘And, like now, some little kid may still need help from an old dinosaur like me.’

More two-finger typing.

‘Hey, there is a
Le Roux on the system. Suzanne.’

Clare waited. A car backfired in the road outside, a sound like a gunshot.

‘There’s nothing on her, so I don’t know why she’s here. No docket numbers, nothing.’

He typed some more.

‘There’s something wrong here, Doc.’ He looked up at Clare. ‘She’s listed as deceased.’

‘How can she be?’ asked Clare. ‘That skeleton at Gallows Hill never had a
death certificate. That you can be sure of.’

‘Records not up to much from then,’ he said. ‘You said you looked in the archives?’

‘Nothing there,’ said Clare.

‘Let me try something else, then.’

He typed another code. A few more numbers.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor. A door banged. Silence.

‘There was a daughter. Name of Lilith,’ said Steyn. ‘That’s why her mother,
Suzanne le Roux, was in the system.’

‘Lilith le Roux,’ said Clare. ‘Did something happen to her too?’

Steyn rocked back on his chair. ‘She has a record.’

‘What for?’

‘It was sealed when she was 18,’ he said. ‘I can only access the contents page, but from what I can see, it’s not good. Juvenile case. Some violence.’

‘Towards herself or others?’

‘Impossible to say from this,’
said Steyn.

‘How can I find out?’

‘She was with Cape welfare,’ he said. ‘Wilma Smit was her caseworker. Strict old tannie. She got the most difficult ones. She knows her way round the files like nobody, she’ll find what you need. She’ll get what she can on the daughter. Might also be stuff about the mother in there.’

He paged through an old diary.

‘Here’s her number.’

Wilma
Smit rasped a hello, and Clare introduced herself.

‘Basie Steyn gave me your number,’ said Clare. ‘There’s a case I’d like to discuss with you.’

‘Does he know how many cases I had in my career, Dr Hart?’

‘This is a very particular case,’ said Clare.

‘Tell me the surname,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll see if I can remember.’

‘Le Roux,’ said Clare. ‘Lilith le Roux.’

The silence
was so long that Clare wondered if she had hung up.

‘You’d better come and see me,’ she said, and Clare heard a click.

Clare stood up. ‘Thank you.’

‘Clare.’

She turned at the door.

‘Maybe there are other files,’ he said. ‘You said Suzanne le Roux was an artist.’

‘No. Just a possibility,’ said Clare.

‘Politics and art. Not always friends in those days. Security police
were spying on everybody then.’

‘Do you think there are classified files?’

‘There’s a good chance,’ said Basie Steyn.

‘I owe you,’ Clare said as she opened the door.

‘You just let me know when you’re single.’

‘Basie, you’re married.’

‘So was Faizal when you met him.’

No quick comeback to that.

The building was a bunker on a drab street in Bellville. There was rubbish in the flowerbeds and the windows had clearly not been cleaned for years. Inside, however, it was cool, and the receptionist polite. Clare signed in and took the lift to the third floor, as directed.

Wilma Smit was waiting. Her handshake was firm.

Clare handed her a card.

‘I know who you are, Dr Hart.’
She waved it away. ‘Us social workers often use the documentary films you’ve made about the Cape gangs. You’re a brave woman.’

‘I’m glad they’ve been useful,’ said Clare.

‘You’re working on something different now?’

‘A film on slavery at the Cape,’ said Clare. ‘I sometimes think slavery is the origin of many of our current woes.’

‘Ja, all that trouble at Gallows Hill. Your photograph’s
been all over the papers. But that’s not why you’re here, is it?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Not directly.’

She followed the social worker down the corridor. Mrs Smit was spry and quick, despite a limp. Shoulders squared. Head erect. A lifetime of standing to attention. A lifetime of giving orders and seeing them obeyed. Her office was crammed with books and papers, the desk covered with ordered
stacks of client files. The newspaper was folded open at the cryptic crossword.

‘Old habit of mine.’ Catching Clare’s gaze. ‘It’s the only part of the world I can solve, no matter how hard it seems when you start. I was stuck on six down when you called.’

‘And have you figured it out yet?’ asked Clare, taking the straight-backed chair the social worker offered her.

‘It’ll come to me.
So, Basie Steyn put you onto me?’

‘He did,’ said Clare. ‘He said he worked with you for many years.’

‘I was a social worker attached to the Child Protection Unit. But I retired with the first wave of golden handshakes in the 90s. The gold didn’t go far, though.’ She gave a snort. ‘In any case, I got so bored, sitting at home listening to my husband complain about the new government. Are
you married, Dr Hart?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘It’s not for me.’

‘Very wise, my girl,’ she said. ‘You never realise quite how bad your taste in men is until they retire. Double the husband, half the money. And they complain, complain, complain. I wasn’t any more impressed with the new government than anyone else was then. But I always said to him, as he poured his first brandy and Coke of the
day, if you don’t do something about it, you can’t really talk. And anyway, half of the problems we made ourselves, with apartheid and all that nonsense. He really drove me up the wall.’

She smiled across the desk at Clare. ‘That’s why I came back to work. But it didn’t take long before he had a heart attack – happened watching the Springboks lose.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clare.

‘You wouldn’t
have been if you’d been married to him. Anyway. You were asking about Lilith le Roux. Is it research for something?’

Clare sidestepped the question.

‘Actually, Suzanne le Roux is the one I’m interested in. Lilith’s mother.’

‘I dealt with the child,’ said the social worker. ‘That first night.’

‘What first night?’

‘The night after her mother left, the child spent such a long
time all alone at home. Just a couple of apples to eat.’

‘Her mother left her alone?’ asked Clare.

‘Ja, her mother was an artist. Involved in politics, all sorts of funny business. They found the child there.’

‘Who did?’ asked Clare.

‘The police, it was them that called us in.’

‘But who called them? Who reported missing? I haven’t found any record of any of this,’ said Clare.

‘They said her mother had gone into hiding. That kind of thing was happening all the time.’

‘So it was the security police who called you?’

‘They had to,’ she said. ‘The child was terrified. Delirious. Refused to speak at all.’

‘Hang on. You’re losing me,’ said Clare. ‘Tell me why the security police were there.’

‘To detain the mother,’ she said. ‘As I said, strange things were
happening at the time, the country was very unstable. And you know, our department was honest. So were the Child Protection cops. It was the security police that gave us all a bad reputation. We were all painted with the same brush. They were the ones to ask what was going on, but they didn’t like answering questions.’

‘Did you ask?’

‘No,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘Not at first. And then it was
too late.’

‘So they took the mother,’ said Clare. ‘And just left the child with you.’

‘No, no. There were procedures. They’d have tried to find the next of kin, or a neighbour to place the child. But there was no one for her, so they called us instead, and we did it.’

‘And the father?’

‘No one knew who he was,’ she said. ‘There was nothing on Lilith’s birth certificate. She lived
with her grandmother. Her step-grandmother, actually. She lived in the Karoo, in Laingsburg.’

‘So nobody looked for Suzanne le Roux?’ asked Clare.

‘We tried, but someone must have warned her that the Special Branch – it’s what we called the security police those days – was coming for her. She just left. Went into hiding, it looked like.’

‘What made her run?’

‘The Special Branch
had been after her. She must have been tipped off, because after the opening of that last exhibition she disappeared. Went north. Got malaria. She’d have had no immunity, being from Cape Town. She died up there. By the time we knew, she’d been buried. That was it.’

‘Were there never any questions?’ asked Clare.

‘Not from the family.’

‘And not from you either?’ Clare’s gaze was level.

‘No. That was not my role. My job was to take care of an abandoned child. Her mother left no instructions, there was just the nanny who pitched up early that morning. She was in a toestand because her good-for-nothing son had got himself mixed up in all that townships nonsense. But she told us about the child’s grandmother. Showed us the phone numbers. Step-grandmother, as it turned out. No
blood-tie there, and no love lost, either.’

‘And that was a success?’ asked Clare.

‘Old Mrs le Roux came to fetch her, but she didn’t like the child, no,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘I could see there would be trouble. Couldn’t breathe in that house without praying. She just pretended nothing had happened. Refused to speak about the past with the child.’

‘So you stayed in touch?’ asked Clare.
‘Was that procedure?’

‘Well, because I dealt with her case right in the beginning, and because it was so unusual, I made sure she remained assigned to me. I visited her at home, then later, after she ran away, I visited her when she was caught again. She was wild, but I didn’t blame her. Her ouma was really verkramp.’

‘A small town is enough to drive anyone round the bend,’ said Clare.
‘I grew up in one. I know. How did you find out about Suzanne’s death?’

‘A letter came,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a copy of it somewhere in her file. After she died of malaria we dropped the charges and closed the case.’

‘What charges?’ asked Clare

‘Child neglect. We had to lay them in order to get the child processed. Otherwise she could have stayed in limbo for weeks. Months, even.’

‘And nobody asked after the little girl, or her mother?’

‘A couple of her friends enquired,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘Fewer than you would’ve thought. Suzanne le Roux didn’t really have roots here. She’d studied somewhere else, as far as I remember. Lived in Europe. She’d only been in Cape Town a year, maybe 18 months. Cape Town is a tribal place. It usually looks after its own.’

‘Not with
this litle girl,’ said Clare.

‘No,’ said Wilma Smit quietly, ‘not with Lilith. She was alone. There was nothing to make a case with, really.’

‘And it’s stayed with you all this time,’ said Clare. ‘You haven’t forgotten her.’

‘Something started that night.’ Wilma Smit squared her shoulders. ‘And it kept on happening to her. Her juvenile files are filled with it. Nothing direct, just
a long list of misdemeanours.’

‘Behaviour as symptom?’ asked Clare.

‘You could say that,’ said the social worker. ‘I’ve always believed you can’t stop a child harming themselves – you know, even cutting themselves, carving into themselves, like Lilith did. Or harming others. You can’t stop this behaviour until you find out what started it all.’

‘That’s not a popular view with the cops
you’ve had to deal with,’ said Clare.

‘Did you ever meet a cop who was against the death penalty?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘I can’t say I have.’

‘She assaulted the matron once in a home for girls. She was placed there after she ran away from her grandmother,’ said Wilma Smit. ‘The woman had a reputation as a bully, though. So the department just let it drift. Then a girl in rehab with Lilith
died. There was talk then.’