Gallows Hill (26 page)

‘Fatima and Hind,’ she said. ‘Mother and daughter.’

‘What beauties.’ Clare held out her hand to the wary animals. They sniffed her,
their eyes on their mistress for approval.

‘Expensive, but devoted and loyal.’ Merle Osman put out her hand, her grip firm to the point of hurting Clare.

‘You’re here to watch the ceremony?’ asked Clare.

‘No, no. We live close by,’ she said, pointing into the darkness. ‘I was just walking the dogs when I saw all this activity. What is it all about?’

‘It’s the film about slavery,’
said Clare, ‘the one I mentioned to you. But this business at Gallows Hill has diverted my attention somewhat.’

‘Poor Suzanne,’ said Merle Osman. ‘So tragic. Is that why so many people are about?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘This is a commemoration for the dead. A kind of wake, I suppose.’

‘The singing is very moving,’ said Merle Osman. One of the soloists was singing a dirge, his high, pure
voice haunting in the gathering darkness.

‘The Slave Lodge staff originally organised a night vigil at Gallows Hill,’ said Clare. ‘But after the riot there, the police werenot happy to give permission for another gathering. So they decidedto hold it here instead. This is the quarry that supplied the stone for the Castle, so it fits, I suppose.’

‘Castle Street. Of course, that must be where
it got its name.’

‘Exactly,’ said Clare, ‘Rather like Sisyphus, rolling the rock down, climbing back up. The whole thing took 17 years, and so there are no forests at the Cape. Every single tree was felled for the fires that kept the lime kiln going.’

‘Remarkable.’ Merle Osman arched an eyebrow. ‘I look forward to seeing your film. Maybe we can do a screening at the gallery, do something
with Lilith, perhaps?’

‘Yes, that’d be interesting,’ said Clare.

‘I worry about her. So much work, this exhibition of hers, and it seems she’s busy on a final piece now for the closing. Some kind of body art, I believe. Poor girl.’

‘Lilith seems pretty resilient.’ said Clare. ‘Even though she’s had a lot to deal with in the last couple of days.’

‘It’s so sad she’s never been able
to remember what happened that night,’ said Merle Osman. ‘I’ve asked her a couple of times. Thought it might help her to talk. But it was just a blank. As if her mother abandoning her has erased her entire memory of that time.’

‘I don’t know. Some things might be coming back,’ said Clare. ‘Tiny fragments. It’s like archaeology, I suppose, trying to remember, building up a picture of the past
by means of remnants.’

‘I’m sure we could do something interesting together. Let’s talk soon. But right now I must get these girls back home. Then get to bed. It’s a fiendish month, February.’

She headed down the hill with her dogs. Clare watched until the trees swallowed her. Then Clare turned back, away from the past, to face the task at hand.

‘One more take,’ said Pedro da Silva.
‘That last song. I need some close-ups.’

The plaintive melody made the hairs on Clare’s arms rise. These were love songs that had been sung by slaves two hundred years earlier, passed down through generations. The liedjies evoked dislocation, melancholy and doomed love in a lost dialect that mixed Javanese with Dutch. Haunting music played the heart, made it ache with longing, with loss.

‘That’s it,’ said Pedro, switching off his camera. ‘The perfect soundtrack to the Gallows Hill story.’

‘I’m still keeping my eyes on the prize,’ said Clare.

‘I got the same call you did, Clare,’ he said. ‘Finishing this properly and on time is more important than this other business.’

‘This other business is a murdered woman, Pedro. She’s enmeshed with this film.’

‘Film-making
is your career, Clare,’ he said. ‘Keep the two things separate.’

‘I’m not sure they are separate,’ said Clare, her voice low. ‘I need to keep both in focus.’

‘There’s only ever one focal point,’ said Pedro. ‘You know that.’

‘She’s gotten to me, that dead woman.’ Clare wound a cable tightly around her wrist. ‘I see a woman who went out fully intending to come home, to kiss her child,
to get into her nightie and into her own bed.’

She snapped a box closed, filled another. The endless equipment needed for filming.

Clare rejected Pedro’s offer to walk her to her car.

‘It’s fine,’ she Clare. ‘I know this area so well.’

The street was dark and deserted when Clare parked her car in Carreg Crescent. Lilith opened the front door.

‘Clare. You look like you need
a drink,’ said Lilith, drawing her inside.

‘You are so right. A very strong whiskey is what I need,’ said Clare. ‘Where can I wash my hands?’

‘Up the stairs.’

The white bathroom was unadorned except for a single painting on the wall. Suzanne le Roux’s signature in the corner. A tender painting of a child asleep, her arms around a teddy bear. It had to be Lilith. Clare dried her hands,
dabbed herself with perfume and went downstairs to the kitchen. Lilith had put a bottle of cold water on the table. Bread, cheese, tomatoes.

‘I’m starving,’ said Clare, making a sandwich.

Lilith handed her a whiskey and opened a box on the floor.

‘All old records,’ she said, riffling through the stack of old LPs. ‘I went into the basement after you dropped me off. Nothing’s been moved
for 20 years. It’s spooky.’

She pulled a record out of its sleeve. Pearl Jam. Then a few more. Joy Division. Tears for Fears. Simple Minds. ‘My mother’s music, mine too, for a time,’ said Lilith. ‘I used to sit on her lap, leaning my head on her. In one ear, the music, in the other ear, her heartbeat.’

Lilith lit a joint. ‘You want some?’

Clare hesitated. The sweet-smelling smoke was
tempting.

‘It’ll relax you.’ Lilith held it out to her.

‘Just one drag,’ said Clare.’

‘What’s the house been used for since the time you lived here?’ asked Clare.

‘It was a half-hearted art school,’ said Lilith. ‘Those things for NGOs that survived on anti-apartheid funding in the 80s and 90s and then just petered out. It was all shut up. I inherited the house, but I only moved
back when I started working on the exhibition. I suppose I was waiting for her, or her ghost, to return. So far, it hasn’t. But all I’ve had since I’ve been here is nightmares. I don’t sleep. I have this feeling of déjà-vu. As if something’s lurking, just around the corner of my recall. I suppose that is what my exhibition is about. All About My Mother would have been a better title. It’s where I
can put what I half-know, I suppose.’

‘What do you know about your mother?’

‘My mother seems to have slept with so many men. All the men I meet who knew her say they were her lovers.’ Lilith rubbed the scars that ran down the inside of her wrist. ‘Quite a few of them have tried to sleep with me. Nostalgia, I suppose.’

‘My gran told me my mother was a whore who got what she deserved,’
said Lilith. ‘She tried to destroy her, but my mother escaped. For me, though, it wasn’t so easy.’

‘When last did you see your grandmother?’

‘I was 15, the last time we had contact. I was making stuff up about my mother, about all the feelings I had at the time. It did my head in. I went wild, smoked dope, had sex with all the boys in my school. So she sent me to a place for delinquent
girls. Then to the Osmans.’

‘Merle Osman,’ said Clare. ‘I bumped into her at the quarry this evening, she was walking her dogs.’

‘They’re the only things she loves. Apart from Gilles and some guy from her past.’

‘She never married?’

‘No,’ said Lilith. ‘Merle’s damn ugly. Though you don’t notice it so much, now that she’s older and grooms herself to death.’

‘Did you ever meet
the man?’

‘No,’ said Lilith. ‘I don’t think so. I just remember them arguing about him once when I was staying there. This guy used to come round when he was in town. I think he’d been in the army with Gilles. They came from the same small town in the middle of nowhere. Made good, all three of them. He used to sleep with her. I suppose she was grateful. That always makes for a good fuck, I
suppose. Who knows, with her? Maybe it suited her. Because that way, nothing rocked the boat with Gilles.’

‘They seem to be very close,’ said Clare.

‘Separately, they were nothing, but together they’re a force to be reckoned with.’

‘She asked about you this evening,’ said Clare.

‘What did you say?’

‘That you were coping,’ said Clare. ‘Are you?’

‘Sort of,’ said Lilith. ‘Head
like a carousel. Images, thoughts, chasing each other round and round. I wish it would stop.’

‘I met someone else today – Jacques Basson,’ said Clare. ‘He had a painting of your mother’s.’

‘A trophy. The kind killers keep in the movies,’ said Lilith, folding her arms.

Outside, an owl hooted. Called out again.

‘It’s terrible to call and have no one answer,’ said Lilith.

‘It’s
been a long day, I’m done in,’ said Clare.

She stood up, and as she did so Lilith’s fingers brushed the brown inch of smooth skin between Clare’s trousers and her top.

‘Another whiskey?’ she asked.

‘I need to get home,’ said Clare.

‘The owl’s stopped,’ said Lilith. ‘You know, when it’s quiet like this it feels like the darkness absorbs everything. As if the night is holding its
breath. It’s far too concentrated.’

Clare moved Lilith’s hand away.

‘That’s what I remember from that last night,’ said Lilith, closing her eyes. ‘From before. The night holding its breath. Concentrating. Me at the top of the stairs, listening. There are no lights in the depths of the house. Just the thud of my heart against my ribs. No cars, no people, not even a dog.’

She opened
her eyes and looked at Clare.

‘That silence has been like a noose around my throat. The more I try to remember, the tighter it gets.’

It was cooler now, the sea air stealing ashore.

‘Lilith,’ she said. ‘Your grandmother. Are you still in contact with her?’

‘Same old house in the same old dorp, as far as I know.’

‘I think we should pay her a visit tomorrow.’

‘Then why don’t
you stay here with me,’ said Lilith, her hand on Clare’s cheek. ‘It’s so late. And we’d have to get up so early.’

‘Sorry, I need my own bed,’ said Clare.

‘Goodnight, then.’

Lilith rested her fingers, light as moths, on Clare’s mouth.

Clare closed the front door, took a deep breath. A gnarled bougainvillea dripped scarlet onto the cracked pavement. The lights were still out, and
the street empty. Clare walked briskly down the middle of the road. Just a hundred metres or so, and she’d be in her car. A minute or two after that, she’d be enveloped in the comforting rumble of the evening traffic heading into town.

The wind swirled rubbish past her ankles. Nearby, two vagrants were packing their belongings into a storm-water drain, watching her. Not hostile. Not friendly
either.

Clare hoped her remote wouldn’t let her down again – she was fumbling to find it when the tang of stale sweat overwhelmed her.

But the cool blade was already at her throat, intimate as a kiss.

The metallic smell of blood filled the car. The first drop was creeping down her throat, away from the knife biting into her skin. Clare looked at the face in her rear-view mirror. A
stranger. Not wearing a mask. Not a good sign.

‘Drive, Doctor. Nice and slow.’

The knife at her throat eased.

Up ahead, the flash of a police van.

‘I know your tricks. Jus’ go slowly, till they go.’

The police vehicle jumped the red light a block ahead.

‘Now we can go. Put the lights on, your flicker, go slowly.’

Clare obeyed.

She stopped at the red light. The only
vehicle. Her phone vibrated. On silent, thank god. Lilith. Or Riedwaan. Keep calling. Please. Find me. Don’t let me die.

‘What do you want?’ asked Clare.

‘You jus’ drive.’ He caressed her throat with the knife. ‘You don’t ask the questions.’

‘Where are we going?’ Clare kept her voice steady, but there was terror just below the surface. It made him smile.

‘We going where we can
work in peace. It take a long time, what I do.’ He ran one gloved hand down her arm. Clare’s stomach lurched.

‘Take the N2.’

The lights overhead were brilliant flashes. Speed cameras everywhere. He pressed the knife to her throat. She drove sedately.

They passed the airport, then Old Crossroads, with its patchwork of little farms.

‘Next off-ramp,’ said the man, his eyes on the
traffic police cruising in the emergency lane. ‘Slowly. Nobody must see us. There in the darkness, we will talk.’

‘About what?’ Clare turned off left. An ocean of shacks lapped at the road. A shebeen was wreathed in coloured lights.

‘Gallows Hill.’ He slid a hand over her shoulder, into her shirt. It scuttled across her breasts. ‘And other things.’

Up ahead there was nothing but Port
Jackson, the dark, dense scrub where corpses often lay for months before children, scavenging for wood, stumbled upon them. Her body in that bleak scrub.

‘Who sent you?’

A passing taxi backfired. Her captor lifted the knife momentarily at the sound. Clare snapped from flight to fight. She yanked the wheel, winning herself the split second she needed to open the door and fling herself out.
She rolled down the embankment – stars, fires, a segment of orange moon, all orbiting around her.

A rock.

A splintering sound.

Silence.

A woman wailing.

Sirens.

Clare lay curled up in a patch of sandy litter on the Flats.

Riedwaan drove back up the road where he had met Du Randt earlier that day in the driving rain. Now the road was dark. Desolate. The isolation of the bush made him uneasy. He preferred a different kind of jungle – concrete, storm-water drains, culverts.

For the second time that day, Riedwaan spread out the map, fitting over it the coordinates that gave the readings of Rita Mkhize’s
cell phone. A mast on a rocky outcrop near a triangle of remote farms – Jakkalseinde at the apex. The last place where Rita Mkhize had been, according to the phone’s GPS system. She had driven up there and stayed there. Or her phone had. Three hours later, she was dead. Riedwaan looked at the map again. Du Randt’s farm was nearby. A different road led up to it, but as the crow flew, the farms were
close.