Gallows Hill (20 page)

‘What did you think?’

‘You know, none of us had kids then,’ he said. ‘So that’s not what caught my attention.’

‘Why was no one suspicious?’ asked Clare. ‘Why did none of you look for her?’

‘She’d been detained before,’ said Wilde. ‘She’d been in solitary for weeks. People did disappear in those days. They had to, if the security police were after them.’

‘And there was still a suspicion that she was a
traitor?’

‘Ja. It sounds mad now, I know. But no one really knew her, and after she was released there were a couple of arrests. It happened; people were tortured, people were left in isolation, people were offered money. They switched sides for whatever terrible reasons, and many of them became police spies. Who is one to judge? I don’t know. I thought –’ Wilde gripped the steering wheel
with his weathered hands. ‘At the time, I remember thinking she probably couldn’t face detention again. I know I couldn’t have.’

‘You were detained too?’

‘Once, yes,’ said Wilde. ‘It’s not something I could’ve done twice.’ He looked at her. ‘You get to know yourself too well alone in a cell. I am a coward.’

‘You think Suzanne was a coward too?’

‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘But the security
police did different things to the women, things that left wounds that were harder to heal than the physical ones.’

‘That’s why you presumed she’d skipped the country?’

‘Yes,’ said Wilde. ‘I presumed, if I think about it now, that someone tipped her off and she left.’

‘You never looked for her?’

The question hung between them. An accusation.

‘No,’ said Wilde. ‘The townships
blew up again at about that time. I was there, I’d been shooting for days. She was gone already. Then the cops picked me up. Two days later I got a call-up to the army. So I left the country, went to Holland. Lived on the dole. It was years before I came back here. When I did, that stuff was all so far in the past that nobody talked about it any more.’

Wilde rummaged for another Rizla.

‘I did go and visit the daughter once,’ he said. ‘She’d gone to live with her grandmother. An old bitch who made Paul Kruger look like Liberace. When I eventually saw the kid, it was as if someone had turned the light out inside her.’

He lit another joint and took a drag.

‘Old Mrs le Roux hated Suzanne. She was her stepdaughter. So she took it out on the child,’ said Wilde. ‘Look, why are
you asking all this? Where’s it taking you? I fucked up, I know, but it’s over now, past.’

The waves thundered up the beach, the wind whipping white plumes off their crests.

‘The security policeman who was after her,’ said Clare. ‘What was his name?’

‘Jacques Basson.’ It was hard to read the expression on his weather-beaten face. ‘Be careful, Clare.’

‘Of what?’

A sunbird chattered
at its reflection in the dusty windscreen.

‘These are old ghosts you are stirring up.’

Clare let her thoughts drift as she drove along Chapman’s Peak, the ocean shimmering below. But she focused again when she got back to the city. Raheema Patel’s office was on the top floor of the Medical Sciences Building. Anatomy books, reference books lined the shelves, which also held a collection
of stone-age artefacts.

‘This might as well be the morgue,’ said Clare. ‘It’s so quiet.’

‘The quiet before the storm,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘No students yet. I’m getting things done while I can. Lilith le Roux was in here first thing this morning.’

‘For the DNA tests?’ asked Clare.

‘Ja. The results will only be done tomorrow.’

‘I’m certain she’s the daughter,’ said Clare.

‘From what I’ve seen, it looks like it. She’s very tense. Intense, too.’

‘I’m meeting her later today,’ said Clare. ‘I’ll make sure she’s okay. Try and get her to do a bit of counselling.’

‘You talk to her, Clare. You’re good.’

‘My boundaries are feeling a little blurred,’ said Clare.

‘I can imagine, actually. On the phone you said you needed something. Who’re you after?’

‘A
security cop from the 80s,’ said Clare. ‘Basson. Does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Jacques Basson,’ said Raheema Patel, leaning back in her chair. ‘His nickname was the Piano Man. He could make anyone sing. If loyalty was offered for free, he took it. Otherwise he’d buy it. He looked after his men well. And looked after himself even better. He knew how to make money. He had lots of it.’

‘You seem to know him quite well,’ said Clare. ‘Did his family have money?’

‘They were well-connected. His father was a colonel in the army. But it was his uncle, a general, who made Jacques what he was. General Basson – he headed up the Special Branch.’

‘Quite a pedigree,’ said Clare.

‘You could say so. He featured in a few of the cases I worked on with the Missing Persons Task
Force in the early days. We were commissioned by Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to trace activists who’d vanished, to find their bones, give their mothers something to bury, at least.’

‘You were very successful,’ said Clare.

‘In most cases, yes. But there are still some men, and a couple of boys, that we never found.’

‘Did Basson eventually go to jail?’ asked Clare.

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘He was too senior for that. Too clever, too. There was never a chink in his defences, so nothing for us to work with. There was some other stuff too, I remember.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Criminal stuff – well, not criminal acts that could be given a political I-was-only-following-orders kind of explanation. Something to do with poaching – rhinos,
ivory – and selling drugs right here on the Flats. They had carte blanche at the end, a lot of those security cops. Did what they liked.’

‘And it came to nothing?’

‘You said it,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘It could all have been rumours. Not my remit, though. I was looking for murdered activists. But the cops who looked like they were going to turn, the ones we thought might know something,
they just died. There was never any evidence.’

‘How did they die?’

‘Insulin overdose, heart attack, hijackings. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. Nothing to link the scenes. Nothing that led back to Basson. The only crime-scene linkage was how little evidence was left behind.’ She frowned. ‘Any witnesses – whether members of the security police who’d seen the error of their ways, or
survivors, passers-by who seen something – died suddenly. But considering what they’d all done in their lives, well… And they weren’t the sort of victims that the new police force cared too much about.’

‘It’s an easy thing to hide a killing where murder is rife, and most killings are so banal, anyway,’ said Clare. ‘Makes me think of Suzanne le Roux. She went missing sometime after her exhibition
opened at the end of February 1988. But no one ever looked for her. There was no case, there’s no record at all of her last movements.’

‘Basson played a double game. Especially with women, the young ones. I never had enough evidence, but he seemed to know where a person’s most vulnerable point was. He’d find that and press.’

‘I’ve just spoken to Ian Wilde,’ said Clare.

‘The photographer?’

‘That’s him,’ said Clare. ‘He told me that Suzanne had been detained before. So when she disappeared, people like him, people who knew her, they presumed she’d gone into hiding and skipped the country.’

‘There were so many people in detention then, so many people going into hiding, avoiding arrest, essentially “disappearing” themselves. That year, ’88, was the endgame. It’s easy to see
in hindsight. But it was terrifying at the time.’

‘There were rumours then, according to Ian Wilde, that she’d had an affair with the security cop,’ said Clare.

‘With Basson?’ Raheema Patel tapped her keyboard, bringing her computer back to life.

‘Yes,’ said Clare.

‘If she was a spy, her name never cropped up in any security files I looked at.’

‘Maybe not, but I’m trying to
fill in gaps,’ said Clare. ‘She left her four-year-old daughter behind. Not with a friend, not with a neighbour. She left her alone at home. After the child was found, social services stepped in.’

‘Odd, especially if the mother had no previous record of neglect,’ said Raheema Patel.

‘What’s concerning me is that Suzanne was so readily presumed to be dead,’ said Clare.

‘Who made the
assumption?’

‘The family – what there was of it – and the social worker assigned to the little girl’s case,’ said Clare. ‘But from what the social worker told me, no questions were asked. At least, none that made it into the records. Everyone seems to have assumed that Suzanne le Roux went into hiding to avoid detention.’

‘So you’re suggesting that Basson’s linked to her disappearance?’

‘He’s the one who reported her missing,’ said Clare. ‘Wilma Smit, the social worker who was called in to fetch the little girl, she told me that.’

‘That doesn’t fit with the other cases he was associated with. Anyone who went missing with Basson around never showed up alive again. In fact, they were never reported missing in the first place.’

‘Fits my jigsaw, though,’ said Clare.

‘The simplest explanations are usually the best. From what I’ve seen, you get a woman, her head’s bashed in or her throat’s been cut, and you find her boyfriend or her husband, and that’s the end of the story.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ said Clare. ‘But this is not so simple, unless I’m missing something.’

‘So, what do you want?’

‘The files on Suzanne le Roux. If she was being
watched by the security police,’ said Clare, ‘there’d be files, surely?’

‘Most of the files were destroyed. But still, let’s see what I can find.’

Clare waited while Raheema Patel searched through scans of files stamped with security police numbers.

‘No mention of Suzanne le Roux here,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t come up anywhere. She was obviously an artist, not an activist.’

‘I didn’t
expect anything, really,’ said Clare.

‘One always hopes for the easy solution,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘Never works that way.’

‘I know,’ said Clare. ‘Still always a disappointment. This Basson. Do you know where I can get hold of him?’

‘He’s retired to the Strand. Plays a lot of golf. Last time I saw him he told me he sleeps like a baby at night.’

‘And you, Raheema, do you?’

‘Not after the things I’ve seen.’

‘I have to speak to Basson about Suzanne le Roux,’ said Clare. ‘What’s the best way to get to see him?’

‘With the right amount of applied pressure, he’ll see you.’

‘Such as?’ asked Clare.

‘You’re a police consultant. I’ll speak to Major Phiri, we’ll tell Basson you’re coming.’

‘That easy?’

‘Not easy at all,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘His strategy
has always been to talk to everyone and say nothing. He did it to me, he did it to other investigators too. Deflects attention by seeming to cooperate.’

‘So far, it seems to have worked for him,’ said Clare.

‘Like a charm.’

‘How shall I play it?’ Clare asked.

‘Just never, ever, underestimate him.’

Carmageddon. The only way to describe the roads on a Friday morning in Johannesburg. Potholes, traffic lights on the blink, taxis driving on the pavements, a roadblock, gridlock. It took Riedwaan an hour to get to the centre of Jo’burg.

He found parking in a side street and glanced up at the dingy high-rises with sad sagging curtains.

He checked into the police guesthouse where
Rita had stayed.

Everything grey. Carpet, blanket, pillowcase, curtains. The mattress as thin as a prisoner’s.

He spread out the cell-phone data he’d received from Langa, fitted it over the Mpumalanga map he’d bought, and plotted Rita’s journey. Tried to make some sense of it all. It wasn’t happening, but it would. If he left it a while, it would.

Riedwaan hunted for a cigarette, but
the pack was finished. He smoked the stompies he’d stuffed into it. He went through his notes again, but he was stiff in the neck and shoulders, hungry. He folded his notes and shoved them into his pocket.

The storm that had threatened all day had not yet broken, and the air crackled with tension. He went outside and bought three samoosas and a Coke from the corner café. Lunch. Also two boxes
of Camels and a packet of Simba chips. Supper. He ate the samoosas in one go. The cigarettes and the chips were for later. The Coke he cracked open as he walked back to the guesthouse.

The fan whirred listlessly in the passage when Riedwaan opened the door. The somnolent receptionist opened one eye, closed it again.

Riedwaan kept walking. Not up the stairs to his first-floor room, but
on to the kitchen. It was empty. He stopped. Bam-bam-bam against his ribs. Fear, the animal gift of survival.

In a split-second, he ran through his movements in reverse.

He’d come into the kitchen. Things felt wrong.

The receptionist’s lazy flick of an eye?

No. Before that, something.

A sound. That single slight sound that jarred with the Jo’burg cacophony of jackhammers and
whooping car alarms. The controlled click a door made when it was carefully closed. He’d heard it in the lobby. His door. One floor up. Someone in his room. Riedwaan went rigid. The silence was thick with concentration. Someone, more likely two people, waiting for him. Watching.

In his pocket, keys, sunglasses, wallet. Ahead of him, the back door. Outside, a dirty courtyard filled with wheelie
bins. A narrow alleyway.

Razor wire. Fuck.

A gate at the end. He’d already checked it out.

Cell phone.

They’d be tracking him. He switched it off. Best the phone die here in the kitchen, a floor below where he was meant to be. That would buy him five minutes.

He closed the kitchen door behind him.

Down the alleyway. Through a gap between the razor wire and the wall. Into
another alley. A dead dog lying in a corner.

He walked faster. Thinking of Rita with a steering shaft through her sternum. He bought a cheap cell phone and a SIM card from a Somalian in a barricaded corner shop. He was about to text Clare. Then he realised that if they were watching him, they’d be watching her.