Gallows Hill (19 page)

She unpacked
her shopping. A bottle of chilled wine, the mushroom risotto from Giovanni’s, a rocket salad, tiramisu. She pushed the sliding doors open, letting in fresh air and the sound of the sea that rushed against the black rocks below. The lights along the Promenade came on, stringing a necklace along the water’s edge. She breathed in the salt air and dropped onto the white sofa. Her view was uninterrupted.
But she had lost her appetite. Her mind was on Riedwaan and the rage that overwhelmed him – focusing his mind, blurring his judgment.

She had a feeling she should have been more careful about what she wished for. She really was on her own, now.

She and Lilith.

11 February

Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic heartland, rushed up to meet the plane circling towards the runway. An enormous man-made forest, the city was verdant after the heavy summer rains. To the south, yellow mine dumps and endless rows of matchbox houses. Shacklands besieging the gated estates with their red-roofed villas, homes flanked by a blue square, a green one. Swimming pool. Lawn.
Armed guards.

Riedwaan put on his jacket. It made him look like a pimp, he knew it. But it wouldn’t matter in Jo’burg. Here, everyone was on the make.

He was first off the plane. After ordering a double espresso, he went outside into the pale morning light. He ignored the signs that said No Smoking and lit a cigarette. He picked up his anonymous hire car, a white Golf, pulled out onto
one of the city’s endless highways, and headed for Kempton Park. How anyone found their way around a place without a mountain to guide them, Riedwaan had no idea. But it was early, and the Garmin’s instructions got him to the right place.

The house was neat and tidy. Identical to the forty houses to the left and to the right of it. Face brick. Spanish bars on every window. A red tricycle under
a tree. A basketball hoop above the garage. A square of lawn. A black Kia in the drive. An honest man’s toehold on the bottom rung of the middle class.

Riedwaan opened another pack of cigarettes and tapped one out. His rage had begun to subside.

He opened the door to a gush of Highveld air and the raucous, unfamiliar calls of hadedas. An electric gate slid open down the street. A siren
shrieked. The city waking up. He got out and knocked on the door.

A woman opened it. Shapely ankles, black skirt, a white shirt, a gold chain, eyes circled with fatigue.

‘I’m Faizal,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Good morning, Mrs Langa.’

‘My husband’s expecting you,’ she said, letting him into her home. ‘Second door to the left.’

She disappeared into the kitchen.

Goodman Langa was in the
sitting room, a strapping, open-faced man of fifty. Ten years older than Riedwaan. Less anger in his eyes. More defeat. He bear-hugged Riedwaan and handed him the death certificate, the perfunctory autopsy report. Photographs.

‘Did you find out who sent the photos through to me?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Took some doing,’ said Langa, ‘but I did it.’

‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Riedwaan,
reaching for his wallet.

‘It isn’t only money that gets things done,’ said Langa.

‘Ja,’ said Riedwaan, looking Langa up and down, ‘most people would probably tell you stuff for free. You got a name?’

‘And a number,’ said Langa. ‘A farmer called Du Randt. He lives out in the gramadoelas, and seems to belong to some kind of commando up there. Farm protection.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘You fucking mad? Guys like that are still fighting the Border War. They see a black man on the farm, they’ll shoot me and then ask if I’m looking for work. Talk to him yourself.’

‘Afrikaners are pussycats,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You just got to handlethem right.’

‘You come back again, you tell me about it,’ said Langa.

‘Did this Du Randt report the accident?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘No
– that’s the thing that doesn’t fit. No sign of anyone calling the police.’

‘So the cops were just driving around? Just found her by chance?’

‘It happens sometimes,’ said Langa.

‘Ja. Maybe.’

‘Such a little girl,’ he said, shaking his head. He put a shoebox on the table. ‘Her effects.’

‘How did you get this?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘The hospital morgue where they had her,’ said
Langa. ‘It’s out in the middle of nowhere. You can buy any story you want. Even the truth is cheap. If you know the right questions.’

‘Did you get the truth?’ asked Riedwaan, setting out Rita’s things.

‘I haven’t got all the questions yet,’ he said. ‘I thought you might supply me with those.’

On the table was an ID book, Rita at sixteen, grinning, a halo of tiny dreads. She hadn’t
looked much older when Riedwaan had dropped her off at the airport. A wallet. Standard Bank cash cards, a credit card, no cash, a few coins. A Parker pen with an inscription.
From Agnes
. Business cards. Keys. A watch. An inscription on that too. Also from Agnes. Riedwaan wondered who Agnes was. He had spent pretty much every day with Rita for the last two years and he knew nothing about her private
life. Nothing at all, certainly not that there was someone called Agnes special enough to give her an inscribed gift.

A cell phone, discount Nokia.

No iPod.

‘Her cell phone log?’

Langa handed him a printout.

Riedwaan didn’t ask how he’d managed to get hold of that.

Mrs Langa appeared with a tray of tea and Marie biscuits as Goodman let him out.

‘Call me if you need
me,’ said Goodman.

‘Sharp,’ said Riedwaan.

He scrolled through Rita’s numbers till he found Agnes. He took a breath. Somebody had to call her. Tell her. Better be him. He was the reason that Agnes’s gifts would be coming back to her. Death did this to people: revealed things they had kept to themselves. He listened to Rita’s voicemail.

‘Hey, baby. I’ve been trying to get you all night.’
The woman had a husky, morning-after voice. Agnes.

Riedwaan phoned Louise, asked her to find Agnes, to go and see her. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her on the phone.

The roar of a motorbike lifted Clare from a dark well of sleep. A crevasse filled with shards of sound. A woman in a green dress falling, arms raised against a dark sky. A moment of terrified wonder before she plummeted into the darkness.

Clare pulled herself free from the violence of her dreams, thinking of Riedwaan in Johannesburg. She stumbled out of bed, pulling her kimono tight
around her. Images crowded her thoughts. Suzanne le Roux, curled for two decades in her makeshift coffin. Her daughter abandoned.

Clare opened the curtains, the windows. The dawn air was cool, playful, licking at places where her skin was exposed. She made coffee and took it out to the balcony. Signal Hill stretched out long shadows until the sun spilled over, gilding even the meanest tin
roof on the Flats to the east. Smoke trailed in the sky above the Hottentots Holland on the other side of False Bay. Fire and wind. The elements that had shaped the Cape. In Table Bay, dolphins cut a line through the water. A long, slow undulation beyond the breakers. She unwrapped her hands from the empty coffee cup. The caffeine had burnt a hole through the fog in her head.

Clare spread
documents and clippings out on the kitchen table.

And photographs.

The long green dress, the silver bracts clasped around the woman’s neck. A blurred picture of her hugging Lilith. That distanced hug mothers give their children when they don’t want sticky fingers on an evening dress or small lips pressed to a scarlet mouth.

Clare started a timeline made of yellow Post-its. The time
she was last seen alive. Well, not quite the last time. Whoever killed Suzanne would also have seen her. Would have wrapped her still-warm body. The terminal intimacy of murder. A bond closer than any marriage, holding victim and killer tighter than any lover’s embrace.

She put aside the photographs. She had looked at them fifty times or more. Nothing stood out. The jumbled maze of someone
else’s life.

Kommetjie was half an hour away. She locked her car and walked to the beach. The smell of kelp – salty, rotting – hung heavy in the air. A Border Collie stood next to a towel at the high-water mark. The dog was watching the water, still as a cobra poised to strike. Clare followed the dog’s gaze, spotting her master among a small group of early-morning surfers. The man caught a
wave, paddling belly-down on his board. Pushing himself up in one effortless arc, knees braced, he surfed the wave until it dissolved into white surf. He flipped over, his ankle-strapped board briefly silhouetted against the sky as he slipped back into the water and swam to the beach where Clare was standing with a briefcase.

‘You must be Clare Hart,’ giving her a quick once-over. ‘Pedro told
me to expect you. I’m Ian Wilde, as you’ve probably guessed.’

The collie growled in the back of her throat, a low, urgent sound.

‘This old bitch.’ He patted the dog. ‘The reason I’m still single.’

Clare walked with him up the beach towards the car park.

‘Surf’s too good to miss at the moment.’ Ian Wilde propped his board against a rusty old Kombi. He pulled his wetsuit down to
his waist. Decades of surfing had leathered his face but his body was smooth and toned from his daily wrestle with the Atlantic. He shoved the board in the back of the van, turned to the dog and whistled.

‘Get in,’ Wilde said to Clare, pushing a pile of junk off the seat.‘It’s way too windy to talk outside.’ He took out a bank bag, a packet of Rizlas, and rolled a joint. ‘You want some?’

‘Not for me,’ said Clare

‘People have died of lack of vice, you know that?’

‘I’m at no risk of that,’ said Clare. ‘It’s just that mine are secret.’

‘Secrets,’ said Wilde, his eyes sharp. ‘That’s what you’re after, Pedro tells me.’

‘What else did he tell you?’

‘That you’re living with a Muslim cop,’ said Wilde. ‘Says he looks like Johnny Depp after a bad night, and that he’s
got you on the straight and narrow. That you’re looking for information about activists in the 80s.’

‘This is a small town.’

‘One degree of separation, and that’s on a good day,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows everyone. Everyone’s slept with everyone.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Clare.

‘I do,’ he smiled. ‘Pedro and I did the 80s together. Junior Bang-Bang Club. Managed at least to get
me to talk to you. I wouldn’t, for most people. I’ve had nothing to do with anything for so long now.’

‘What did Pedro tell you?’ asked Clare.

‘That you’re looking into a missing woman. I don’t really know how I can help you.’

‘Suzanne le Roux,’ said Clare. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Oh, man.’ Wilde wasn’t looking at Clare. ‘He didn’t tell me that.’

‘Suzanne never
made it out of Cape Town,’ said Clare.

‘She must’ve done,’ said Wilde. ‘There’s the grave, there was the letter. Her daughter…’

‘Have you read about the skeletal remains at Gallows Hill?’

‘What about them?’ asked Wilde. ‘They’re centuries old.’

‘They are,’ said Clare. ‘But buried among them was a woman who was murdered 23 years ago. She was buried in a green silk evening dress.
Part of this silver necklace was with her remains.’ She pointed to a copy of a photo she’d taken out of a folder.

‘I found these too – you took them. It was her last exhibition,’ said Clare. ‘Somerset Gallery. End of February, 1988. You were credited with the pictures.’

‘Not my usual line of work.’ He examined the old
Tonight
pages. ‘But even war photographers have their weaknesses.’

‘And Suzanne was yours?’

‘She had no fucking chance in this country. Not then, anyway,’ said Wilde.

He pulled a T-shirt over his head.

‘She didn’t go missing. She went into hiding right after the exhibition. Security police came for her. There was one guy who had it in for her. She never stood a chance.’

‘Can you tell me anything about that cop?’ Clare asked.

‘There were rumours
about him. About her. She didn’t fit people’sidea of a revolutionary. Stiletto heels and lipstick. It didn’t wash, in those days. Not nice things were said.’

‘Like what?’

‘That she’d slept with him,’ said Wilde. ‘There were a couple of arrests – people she knew, artists. People thought she’d given information to the cops, betrayed her comrades.’

‘Was it true?’ asked Clare.

‘It
was rumours, talk. Nothing stuck to Suzanne, but there was a woman in Grahamstown who was a spy for the security police. A good-looking blonde student who slept with everyone and handed the information she gleaned to the cops. People were paranoid. Painted Suzanne with the same brush, perhaps. Not fair, but it happened then.’

‘What was the information Suzanne’s supposed to have given the cops?’

‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time ago. Arms, maybe. About gunssmuggled in for the armed struggle. I don’t know, a couple of peoplewent to jail for that.’

He opened his window. The wind whirled around the cab.

‘Don’t forget it was February 1988,’ he said. ‘There was a state of emergency and everybody was paranoid, and in those days, once an accusation had been whispered it was impossible
to make it go away.’

‘Have you still got the film?’

‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘I left everything behind when I went overseas, and there was a fire. All destroyed.’

‘
Vula
magazine put Suzanne on the cover,’ said Clare, showing him. ‘It was your picture too, I think.’ She pointed to a photograph of a man with his arm around Suzanne. ‘Who’s this?’

Wilde studied the picture. ‘I can’t remember
his name,’ he said. ‘Some rich guy who liked her. Thought he could buy her by buying her paintings .’

‘Looking at this picture, it seems to have worked.’

‘Suzanne,’ said Wilde. ‘She fucked everyone.’

‘You too?’ asked Clare.

‘Even me,’ he said. ‘Once or twice.’

He took a deep drag of the joint.

‘What I heard is that she had to leave her little girl.’