Gallows Hill (30 page)

‘Hey, kitty-cat,’ Clare knelt down and gathered the animal into her
arms.

Fritz held out for 30 seconds, but the familiar warmth of her mistress’s body was hard to resist. She started to purr.

‘I missed you too.’ Clare buried her face in the cat’s silky fur.

The taxi’s insistent hooter jolted her back into the endlessness of the day ahead of her.

‘Wait here, Fritzie-girl,’ she said, setting her cat down gently. ‘I’ll fetch you later. The cat glared
as Clare went out again, then hopped up onto the splash of sunlight lying across the kitchen table, curled herself into a fat comma, and went to sleep.

The taxi dropped her off in Sea Point, and Clare unlocked her flat, glad of the sanctuary offered by its silence and subdued colours. She showered, eating enough so that she could swallow her painkillers.

She made herself some coffee and
had it black – there was no milk in the fridge. She changed her phone from silent mode to normal. The battery was on its last bar, but her charger was at Riedwaan’s house. There was a flurry of missed calls from his new number. A text message:
Call me.
Spoke to De Lange. U fine? Coming home. Bakkie with 3 sheep!

She tried him, but the phone went to voicemail. It ached, how much she missed him
when he didn’t answer. So she sent him a text.
@home. Beaten up but alive. Will call. What’s with the sheep? x C

Clare sat at her desk and reached for her notebook, scribbling some thoughts. She spread out her notes, photographs, the newspaper clippings that she’d collected in the past few days. She bit into the end of her pencil, making neat, precise imprints of her teeth.

The time line
so far: Saturday was a patchwork of moments – the early part of the evening that Sophie had remembered. The photographs Ian Wilde had taken of the opening, the guests, Damien Sykes’s fragmented account, the Osmans’ recollection of the evening, the triumph, the sales, Suzanne’s going home.

She had been able to convert that night into neat units of time by using the information Wilma Smit had
given her. Her account coincided with this, and so did Sophie Xaba’s – the discovery of the child. The police, the confusion, the relinquishing of responsibility for a child made mute by terror.

There was blank space, though. No line of post-its from the time Sophie Xaba last saw Suzanne alive after the exhibition on Saturday night, to the moment Lilith was found by police come to arrest her
mother.

Clare looked out at the Promenade. A run would clear her mind, thread her thoughts together. She stretched, testing her body, but her bruises throbbed when she moved, and her muscles were stiff. Clare knew what to do, though.

She packed up her documents, she picked up her keys, her phone, her gun. The hijacking had made her jumpy. The Browning, snug in her hand, soothed her. There
were two people who might hold the key to what had happened in those lost hours before Lilith was taken from her home. And Clare was certain of one of them.

It was 10:30 when Clare and Lilith arrived in Laingsburg in a hired car.

‘My ouma didn’t sound like she’d won the lottery when I told her we were on our way,’ said Lilith, watching the boarded-up shops flick past. ‘Are you feeling
okay?’ she put her hand on Clare’s arm.

The bruises were starting to show, but Clare had banished the ache with Myprodol.

‘A bit spacey,’ said Clare, ‘But all right.’

‘I’m a bit spaced out too,’ said Lilith. ‘No sleep, all that.’

‘Sorry about that,’ said Clare.

‘It’s fine,’ said Lilith. ‘Gave me a chance to think.’

‘About your mother?’

‘Ja,’ said Lilith. ‘What else?
Turn here. At the Pep Stores.’

Clare made her way through the Saturday morning crowd of farm workers come to shop and gossip and drink. The sun shimmered on the parched Karoo veld beyond the village.

‘Voortrekker Street,’ said Lilith. ‘Number 13.’

‘The house looked forbidding, the windows closed, the curtains too. The lawn was dead, the trees pruned, shrubs clipped, given a short-back-and-sides
that had lopped off all blooms. Marigolds stood to attention every metre or so, though some had already been beaten into submission by the morning sun. It was 36º and rising.

‘I really can’t picture you here, Lilith,’ said Clare. She rang the doorbell, and three off-key notes sounded inside.

‘I couldn’t either. So I ran away. I wouldn’t have come back if it wasn’t for you.’ Mrs le Roux
opened the door.

‘Lilith.’ Her eyes flicked down to the girl’s short skirt, her long bare legs. Her mouth turned down at the corners.

‘Hello, Ouma,’ said Lilith.

‘It has been a long time. You haven’t changed,’ said the woman.

The hand that Lilith had extended to her grandmother dropped to her side. ‘Neither have you.’

Mrs le Roux was tall and stern, her mouth a tight line.
White blouse, black skirt, stockings, lace-up shoes. No jewellery, her hair plaited and coiled tightly around her head. Her only accessory a walking stick.

She ushered them into the front room with its ball-and-claw furniture, doilies, and a Bible open on a stand. A tray with a jug of iced water, three glasses, three tennis biscuits on a plate.

‘This is Dr Clare Hart. She wants to talk
to you about Suzanne,’ said Lilith, giving the woman one last chance to salvage a wrecked childhood. ‘Ouma, what happened to my mother?’

‘Your mother ran away, Lilith. When I got you, you told me she’d run away from you.’

Lilith shook her head. ‘But why would she do that?’

‘She let you down by giving birth to you. She shamed her father so that he disowned her. But this business, this
politics of hers – that killed him in the end.’ Mrs le Roux turned to Clare. ‘I tried tofind out who Lilith’s father was. So did Suzanne’s father. We wantedthe man to take responsibility for the girl.’

‘I think you should know that Suzanne le Roux did not run away,’ said Clare. ‘She was murdered.’

The word hung in the air.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Mrs le Roux. ‘She left.
She died far away, up in the north. She’s buried in Mpumalanga. We got the letter.’

‘You never asked one question.’ Lilith’s voice was brittle with years of loss.

‘What should I have asked?’ asked Mrs le Roux. ‘Why would I have asked anything? There was a death certificate. It gave a place and a date. There was even a grave number. And there was also that visit. Two young policemen, they
brought the official letter, so far out of their way. They told me what Suzanne had been involved in. Guns, I don’t know what all. Arms, there were some arrests for weapons smuggling, white women bringing them in. You can check this in the newspapers if you don’t believe me. A few of them went to jail for it. I think some of them even got into the government after Mandela.’

‘And you assumed
Suzanne was involved in that?’ Lilith’s voice was harsh with anger.

Her grandmother fixed cold eyes on her.

‘They were looking for her because she was a danger. To herself. To us. To the country. To you too, Lilith.’

‘Do you remember who they were?’ asked Clare.

‘It escapes me now,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Maybe it’ll come back. All I remember is that there were two of them.
Very polite. They came here and drank coffee. They explained that Suzanne must have gone up north, that she must have waited there by the border so that she could leave the country. They said she caught malaria, and she died.’

‘Why didn’t you ask to bring her body back?’ asked Clare.

Mrs le Roux considered the question, as if for the first time.

‘They explained,’ she said. ‘They said
that the hospital had organised the burial.’

‘Her father didn’t ask for her body to be returned?’ asked Clare.

‘My husband was ill already,’ said Mrs le Roux, twisting her wedding ring. ‘I knew what was best for him, so I made the decision. It was better to leave things. So that is where we left things. There was already enough disruption. And Lilith, you were difficult enough, very unsettled.
So, you see, it was the best decision. The social worker thought so too.’

‘No, Ouma. It would have been much better to know,’ said Lilith.

‘Why would we have doubted anything?’ asked Mrs le Roux. ‘Your oupa was in the army. He knew how things worked, he knew what people like your mother were trying to do.’

‘They lied. They all lied. All the time,’ said Lilith. ‘They lied about her
death. You see, her body has been found. My mother was murdered and buried at Gallows Hill, as if she was nothing more than a dog.’

A clock chimed the hour, eleven long notes. Lilith shuddered, as if the sound evoked the endless stretch of days spent in this silent, stifling house.

‘I need to know what happened, who she was, Ouma,’ she said. ‘This is your last chance. You have to tell
me this time.’

‘If you want to know that, my girl, then I’ll show you what Suzanne was. This mother of yours who you think is such a saint.’

Mrs le Roux reached for her cane. Clare and Lilith followed her into the kitchen. She keyed a number into a heavy padlock, and a door opened into what must once have been a pantry. The shelves were filled with the accumulated detritus of decades.
Mrs Le Roux dug through it all, pulling a large cardboard box from the back of a shelf.

‘Come and help me take this down. Open it and look inside. Then you’ll know your mother.’

Lilith took the box and opened it, eager as a child on Christmas morning. It was filled with sketchbooks. The images were arresting. A series of erotic sketches. Small and vivid, roughs for larger paintings, all
with Suzanne’s vermilion signature.

‘That filth – that is what I protected you from. That is what your mother was. Just filth.’

Lilith paged through a sketchbook. Nudes, bodies in various states of abandonment. It was not always possible to tell whether they were alive or dead. The pages were covered with Suzanne’s spidery handwriting. Names, places, dates, sometimes a single descriptive
phrase, numbers, figures. The measurements for larger works, perhaps for some future exhibition.

‘He looks like Gilles,’ said Lilith, looking at a sketch of a sleeping man with a naked woman crouching beside him, a burning candle in her hand. The woman’s face was serene, but between her legs there was a vivid red gash. Her eyes – Suzanne’s eyes, Lilith’s eyes – stared out of the page.

‘Why did you never show me these?’ Lilith asked.

‘I kept this hidden,’ said Mrs le Roux. ‘I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, but Suzanne, whatever happened to her, she brought it on herself.’

‘I’m going to take them,’ said Lilith. ‘Maybe someone she picked up just had a bit of fun and it went too far, and Suzanne ended up dead. Maybe you’re right, Ouma, maybe that’s all it was. My slut
of a mother. How often isn’t that the only reason for a woman ending up dead?’ She glared at her step-grandmother. ‘That’s no excuse for not showing me these.’

‘Those dirty books,’ said Mrs le Roux. ‘I’ll be glad to have them out of the house. When I went to get the child, they were just lying there in the open on the kitchen table, next to some paperwork, even though the police had turned
the whole place upside down. I brought the whole lot back here.’

‘What were they looking for?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs le Roux, ‘but when they told me later about the guns and things, I just thought that was it. They didn’t find any, though. She must have moved them.’

‘Maybe they were never there,’ said Lilith, the sketchbook open in her hands. A piece of paper slipped
out from the back.

Clare picked it up. An invoice.

‘Give me that last notebook, will you?’ she said to Lilith. ‘The one with the blank pages at the end.’

Lilith handed her the book, and Clare went through it. The early pages were filled with the same drawings, startling and intimate, that filled the other sketchbooks. In this one, however, notes filled the margins of her sketches.
The names of artists. South African, mainly. Painters like Oerder, Pierneef, Irma Stern, the sculptor, Edoardo Villa. Names that had broken free of the provincial backwaters of Johannesburg and Cape Town and found buyers, collectors, in London and New York. Among them were a few names from a different league. Degas, Matisse, Renoir, Picasso.

Suzanne had sketched samples of each artist’s work.
A Pierneef landscape.

‘Suzanne’s ability to mimic in miniature is quite extraordinary,’ said Clare. ‘This Pierneef, I’ve seen it somewhere before.’

‘Ag, that modern stuff,’ said Mrs le Roux, ‘it all looks the same.’

‘Maybe,’ said Clare, turning to Lilith. ‘Recognise any of these artworks?’

Lilith glanced at the page. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, shaking her head.

The sketches were
framed by a series of numbers that made no sense to Clare. Some of the other paintings were also familiar – a still life of summer flowers by Laubser, a portrait of a doe-eyed Zanzibari princess by Stern.

‘What was her interest in these painters?’ Clare asked.

‘I’ve got no idea,’ said Mrs le Roux, irritably.

Clare looked at the piece of paper that had fallen out of the sketchbook.
It was a handwritten list, the ink faded, barely legible. She checked inside the sleeve at the back of the sketchbook. There was a sheaf of yellowed papers.

‘The security police didn’t want these?’

‘They might have,’ exclaimed Mrs le Roux, ‘but I found some constables looking at this filth. I decided I had to take it and put it away. There was already enough skande. They blushed when they
realised that I’d caught them looking at all these dirty pictures.’

Clare riffled through the yellowed papers. ‘This doesn’t look like your mother’s handwriting.’

‘It isn’t,’ said Lilith, glancing at them.

‘Look, the letterhead says Carnarvon something, it’s faded,’ said Clare. ‘I know that name, does it mean anything to you?’

Lilith shook her head.

‘And you, Mrs le Roux?’

‘Carnarvon is a little Karoo dorpie,’ she said.

‘Did Suzanne go there ever?’

Mrs le Roux shook her head. ‘She’d rather die, the Karoo wasn’ta place she loved.’