‘We can try,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But these look like old bones. Should be simple enough for a couple of professors to manage.’
‘As long as we can
keep Prof Friedman and his CSI speculations in check, we’ll be fine,’ said Stone.
‘You know why the fights between academics are so vicious, don’t you?’ Friedman parried.
‘You won’t be able to resist telling me, Solly,’ said Stone.
‘Stakes are so low.’
‘Sounds like the police force,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You know Clare Hart?’
‘Dr Hart,’ he put out a pudgy hand. ‘Always in the right
place at the right time.’
‘One of her many virtues,’ said Friedman.
‘Helps if you know the right people,’ said Clare.
‘First time I’ve heard Faizal described as one of those,’ said Friedman. ‘Faizal told me you were finished with the cops, Clare.’
‘Not finished,’ said Clare. ‘Just taking a break – I’m making a film.’
‘You call exhuming a mass grave resting?’ asked Stone.
‘They’ve been dead a long time,’ said Clare. ‘These are quiet bones. I won’t need to sit with their mothers and try to find a reason why some criminal had dismembered their children.’
‘How fast can you get going?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘I need to know the extent of this burial site, if that is what it is, as soon as you find out. I’ve already got the press crawling everywhere. Like maggots.’
‘We’re here,’ said Solly Friedman. ‘We’re ready to go.’
‘There’s going to be a very unhappy developer. And with unhappy developers come unhappy politicians,’ said Stone.
‘I can think of nothing better than an unhappy politician,’ said Friedman.
‘You want to make my life worse than it usually is?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘That’s always a temptation.’
The sun was climbing the sky faster
than the latest billionaire up a Johannesburg guest list. The wind was picking up again. It curled around the hoarding, slamming a few students into a wall. In the street outside, an ice-cream vendor was selling granadilla lollies and lots of water. The crowd had swelled to about fifty or sixty, with one man loudly ensuring that everyone knew what he had seen. And the heat and the wind and the
growing police cordon were not making the crowd any happier about events behind the hastily erected screens.
The archaeologists had laid out pegs and markers. The students were noting, photographing, measuring. Raheema Patel and Tim Stone were using brushes to expose the curves of vertebrae. Soil filled in areas where there had once been flesh.
‘More graves here than anyone could wish
for, Clare,’ said Stone. ‘Piled on top of each other, buried crosswise, all over.’
‘Is there nothing on the old maps?’ asked Clare.
Stone dusted his hands on his trousers and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
‘This is what we’ve got.’
He spread out a map on the camping table that had been set up under an umbrella. The map was a replica of an early nineteenth-century map, layered
over detailed satellite images.
‘Many would have been scavenged by dogs. Only a few would have been buried intact,’ said Friedman. ‘It’s going to be a complicated job, working out who’s buried here. Slaves, poor people, suicides, criminals.’
‘See here,’ Stone tapped the sheet with a pen. ‘These are all the old graveyards that lay beyond the city limits. The developer must have known about
this. Two hundred years ago, this whole area was full of unofficial burial grounds. And this was Gallows Hill,’ said Stone, pointing out an area long since flattened for building sand. ‘The gibbets could be seen from Table Bay. A warning to ships coming to dock and trade, what the consequences would be if they were out of line. The bodies swung from the gallows until they rotted and fell.’
‘I hope you get to work on who all these people were,’ said Clare. ‘The collision of history and politics is complicated in Cape Town.’
‘Prof Stone,’ called one of the students, a lanky girl wearing a man’s shirt.
Clare and Riedwaan followed Stone to where the girl had been working, near some bits of broken concrete. The corner of a wooden object stuck out of the sand.
‘What’ve you
got there?’ asked Stone.
The student pushed her sweaty hair out of her face. ‘Looks like something made of wood. It’s obviously been here a while, but –’
She knelt down in the trench.
‘The soil above the wood seems to have been disturbed,’ she said, running her fingers lightly over layers of debris. ‘But there’s no ways it’d be in this condition after 200 years.’
Stone turned to
Raheema Patel. ‘Give me your brush,’ he said.
He cleaned around the object.
‘Hey, Faizal. It looks like a box of sorts,’ said Stone. ‘Take that spade and dig. Like this, slowly. We need to get this thing out. If it’s a coffin, all that should have remained after two centuries is some stains in the sand. And metal hinges, maybe.’
Riedwaan and Stone worked the sand loose around the corner
of the box, revealing first a lid and then two sides. Stone picked up the spade again and scraped more sand away from the box. Another half an hour, and they had all four sides exposed. The remnants of metal braces holding the box together had corroded, but the wood was intact.
‘Looks like a smallish packing crate,’ said Stone.
Clare felt a chill, despite the heat. She photographed the
crate where it was, and took a panoramic shot of the area, including ragged remnants of a concrete floor, and two remaining warehouse walls.
‘I want it open.’ Riedwaan said. ‘Here, so we don’t disturb whatever’s inside it.’
‘You’re the cop, Faizal,’ said Stone. ‘You open it.’
Riedwaan slipped a steel blade under the lid. It popped off with surprising ease. Inside the box was a bundle
wrapped in black plastic.
The sound of the crowd beyond the hoardings filled the silence.
‘There was no plastic builder’s sheeting when the Gallows Hill gibbets were busy.’ Stone passed Riedwaan a knife. ‘This one’s going to be yours, Captain, not mine.’
Riedwaan slit open the sheeting, exposing delicate bones in a foetal curl, swaddled in the dirty plastic.
‘Young and female,’
said Raheema Patel, bending over the skeleton, ‘with bones like that.’
The woman lay curled up inside the small box. She had been jammed into it. Her head must have pressed up against the top, her feet against the bottom. Her belly would have pressed painfully against her lungs, her thighs. If she had been alive to feel it.
‘How long’s she been dead, Solly?’ asked Riedwaan, turning away
and lighting a cigarette.
‘I need to autopsy her to tell you that, Faizal.’
‘We’ll get her to the mortuary. Clare will attend,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But give me an estimate at least.’
‘Balls on a block?’
‘Not that precise.’
Friedman knelt beside the makeshift coffin and studied the bones.
‘Twenty-five years,’ he said, pushing himself upright again. ‘Max.’
‘And the others?’
asked Clare.
‘Two hundred years, maybe three,’ said Stone. ‘Archaeological specimens.’
‘Which she is not,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘Can we get her covered up?’
The student who had found the coffin held out a green tarpaulin, which she and Clare pulled over it.
Riedwaan called the mortuary, and got them to send out another van.
‘Fuck it,’ he said, pocketing his phone. ‘As if I don’t
have enough trouble.’
‘Basie Steyn in Records should have something,’ said Clare. ‘A woman going missing would have left a trace. A missing person’s report, at the very least.
‘Records don’t keep that long,’ said Riedwaan, pocketing his phone. ‘In theory, yes. But in practice, everything older than a few years got moved out and dumped in a shed on the Cape Flats. There are no systems out
there. And rats have eaten half the boxes. It’s a mess.’
‘I’ll find out who she is – if Solly can make her bones tell her story,’ said Clare. ‘It’ll be much harder, then, for the developer to pay to make this go away.’
‘You’re smart,’ said Riedwaan, ‘I always forget how smart.’
‘Maybe it’ll help save the rest of the dead from obscurity.’
Clare tossed Riedwaan a roll of crime-scene
tape, and he wrapped the chevrons around the site.
Black and yellow, nature’s colours that signal danger.
Clare brushed the sand off the soil-stained crate. Faint marks, possibly letters, appeared, but she could not make them out. She photographed them.
‘You’ve always lived nearby, in Sea Point,’ Clare said, turning to Solly. ‘Do you remember what this part of Green Point used to be like?’
‘Warehouses, ships’ chandlers, things like that. Before they moved to Paarden Island. Some of
the art galleries off Somerset Road may have used this area for storage. But at the end of the 90s, things got too pricey and most moved out to Woodstock.’
Clare finished photographing the makeshift coffin. She stepped aside so that the mortuary attendants could remove it. They lifted it onto a gurney, strapping it down securely.
‘I’m on my way,’ said Solly Friedman. ‘I’ll see you at 12.30.
It’s the only autopsy slot I have until next week.’
‘I’ll be there.’ Clare did not look up. She was making notes at the place where the crate had been buried. It was a good few feet away from where the older skeletons were found. And higher up. Only three, maybe four feet below the ground. Two walls and some trusses were all that remained of the warehouse. The remnants of the concrete slab
that had entombed the body lay to one side.
‘When was this built?’ asked Clare.
‘Not so long ago – the 80s, I’d guess. It was easy to push things through planning then.’
‘Doesn’t look like much has changed since then,’ said Clare. ‘They knew there were bones here when they built the first time round,’ she said. ‘Look at these foundations.’
Cores of concrete and aggregate that had
anchored the bulldozed buildings lay adrift in the sand. There were pieces of broken bone, shards of skull, more stained femurs. ‘Whoever built this just drilled through it all and concreted over.’
‘Ja. And they were about to do it again,’ said Riedwaan.
He had his eyes on the black Hummer nudging through the gawking crowd. It came to a stop with its snub nose against the gate. The constables
on guard were forced to step back. The driver was checking himself in the mirror. A Breitling watch flashed from his linen cuffs as he smoothed his clipped hair. He put on his sunglasses, opened the door.
‘D’you know who it is?’ asked Clare
‘Waleed Williams,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Nickname used to be Hond.’
‘Dog?’
‘There’s the pitbull,’ said Riedwaan. A dog jumped out of the car. Studded
collar, 50 kilos of muscle, a flimsy muzzle. Williams raised a hand and the animal was at his heel. ‘I’ve heard he prefers to be called Mr Williams now.’
‘Do you two have a history?’ asked Clare.
‘He used to run Woodstock – tik, abelone, girls, guns, protection for brothels, later for politicians. Then he went to Jo’burg. I haven’t seen him for a while,’ said Riedwaan. ‘He was slapped
with 25 years for murder at the Cape High Court, last time I saw him. I gave evidence against him. I watched him go down the steps into the holding cell. The mothers of the two girls he’d dismembered watched him too.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The witness whose testimony was key to Hond’s conviction retracted his statement.’ Riedwaan adjusted his pistol. ‘Said I put him under duress, forced
him to make the statement. Then Hond claimed that the Gang Unit tortured him.’
‘And did you?’
‘That’s not what I’d have called it,’ said Riedwaan. ‘He’s got expensive lawyers. The charges didn’t stick. Next thing, he went to Jo’burg.’
Williams was speaking to the officers at the gate. They stepped back and Williams picked his way over the rough ground towards them.
‘Faizal.’
‘Hond,’ said Riedwaan.
‘Mr Williams to you, Captain.’ Hands in his pockets. ‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides.’
‘Ezekiel 25:17,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Don’t give me that Morgan Freeman kak again. Watch another movie.
Scarface
or
Deliverance
or
The Lion King
. Anything but
Pulp Fiction
.’
Riedwaan turned to face Clare. ‘This is Dr Clare Hart.’
Hond nodded at Clare.
‘What’s happening?’ Williams asked, keeping his attention on Riedwaan.
‘A body found on site, for starters. Cause of death not yet determined.’
‘A poes-dronk bergie,’ said Williams.
‘Language,’ said Riedwaan. ‘The lady.’
‘Bergies vrek all the time, nobody gives a fuck, constable comes, cleans up the rubbish. So why the sudden disruption?’
‘Because human remains have been discovered
on the site, the area is under SAPS control until we know whose they are, and how old they are,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Only then will decisions be made.’
‘Fuck, Faizal, where did you learn to talk so larnie?’ said Williams. ‘Jesus, man. This kind of thing happens anywhere you dig in Cape Town. The work here is ready to go.’
‘I’m happy to arrest you for interfering with a police operation, Hondjie,’
said Riedwaan. ‘Pollsmoor Prison will be glad to have you back.’
‘I wouldn’t do that unless you want a lawsuit.’
‘Lawsuit,’ said Riedwaan. ‘That’s a big word.’
‘Some of us move on in life, Faizal.’ Williams adjusted his jacket. ‘And this is happening on my building site?’ asked Williams. ‘What’s the story?’
‘Just that, your building site,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You’re a bit overdressed
for a bricklayer.’
Anger flared in Hond’s eyes. Doused instantly.
‘Williams and Associates.’ He thrust a card at Riedwaan. ‘Security Director. If you can read.’
‘Not going to happen,’ said Riedwaan. He held up the card. ‘No matter how many of these you hand out, you are still fuck-all except bought-and-paid-for muscle.’
‘I don’t think you know who you’re fucking with, Faizal.’
Williams took off his sunglasses. His eyes were pale brown. Opaque. Not a flicker of emotion in them.
‘Who hired you?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘Nobody hires me,’ said Williams.