Gallows Hill (33 page)

‘Then what?’ asked Clare.

Lilith twisted the pencil in her fingers, her breathing too fast.

‘Let your memory play,’ said Clare. ‘Watch it, like a movie.’

‘I got up,’ said Lilith. ‘Maybe something scared me.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘I used to sit on the landing sometimes,’ said Lilith. ‘I’d have gone there.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She’d have gone to the kitchen.’

Lilith sketched rapidly. The blue table,
the oak dresser, the sink with the riot of bougainvillea flowers outside the window. A child flattened against a railing, one squished fish-eye staring. Lilith drew faster, the drawings rougher. A woman in a green dress, her bare arms on the table.

Lilith stopped. Her brows puckered.

‘Her sketchbook was there,’ said Lilith. ‘But she wasn’t just drawing, there were papers in front of her.
She read them, drew in her book, I’m not really sure what she was doing.’

‘Do you think she may have been working on these?’ Clare opened Suzanne’s last sketchbook.

Again, Lilith looked at the perfectly executed reproductions of the artworks, the numbers.

‘I wish I could tell you,’ said Lilith, distressed. ‘All I know is this. She pushed the papers back into the envelope, she must
have. Because when I went past the table there was nothing on the table any more.’

‘Where did she go?’ asked Clare.

‘My mother opened the door.’

‘Who’s there?’ asked Clare.

Lilith hunched her shoulders.

‘He had a long shadow.’

Clare felt Lilith’s fear, the undertow of memory, pulling her in.

‘When did you go past the table, Lilith?’

‘I don’t know,’ she snapped.
‘Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I’m just making this up for you.’

‘Please, try to think. What did you do? What did she do?’

‘Can’t we stop?’

‘Soon, Lilith, soon,’ Clare soothed her. ‘Try to remember… who would she have gone off with?’

‘They were in the garden.’

A shaft of light cut through the chaos of a frightened child’s memory. ‘I’m going downstairs. There’s a blade of night pushing
into the lit kitchen. I’m in the garden now. She’s at the back gate. The latch is clicking, she slips out.’

‘And you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘This stone,’ Clare said, placing it on the table. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘We used to walk there.’ Lilith picked up the stone, held it in her palm.

‘We had a game. We’d pick up stones. Me one, her one. We wanted to see how long it would take us
to carry away the whole mountain, bit by bit. Maybe this was the last stone I picked up, who knows?’

‘Did you follow her? Catch up with her?’ asked Clare.

‘I was in the kitchen, in the garden.’ Lilith curled her legs under her.

‘How did you cut your feet, Lilith?’

She shook her head.

‘Think back,’ said Clare, ‘your feet. The pain in your feet –’

‘Slippery,’ she whispered.
‘The rocks, they were wet.’

Clare waited.

Lilith closed her eyes. ‘She was with the man.’

‘Which man?’

‘I don’t know which man, Clare. The grass, it was so high. Taller than I was. Don’t push me so. If I knew, I’d tell you. I would have told them then.’

‘I’m sorry, Lilith,’ said Clare. ‘I just have this feeling we’re so close, so close.’

‘A mirage gives one the same feeling,’
said Lilith. ‘It’s there – and then it’s gone.’

She stretched out her fingers. There were crescents of paint under each nail.

‘You’ve been working on something?’ asked Clare.

‘Something for tonight,’ said Lilith, ‘a surprise piece.’

‘What is it?’

‘Wait and see.’ Lilith gave a faint smile. ‘Later on, there were more. The police. They had guns. They came. They said they were
looking for her. They were angry with me, as if I had done something to her. As if I had hidden her.’

‘And had you?’

‘No,’ said Lilith. ‘She walked out, and then she was gone. I waited,but she never came back.’

‘Who locked the door, then?’ asked Clare. ‘You were too small to reach.’

Lilith twisted her pencil.

‘He must have come back.’

‘What did he want from you?’

‘I
don’t know,’ said Lilith. ‘I couldn’t speak. Even later, when all the men came – the policemen – everyone was trying to make me talk, but I felt a stone was in my throat, blocking the words.’

She paused.

‘It also blocked the pain.’

‘And when it slips?’ asked Clare.

Lilith turned her scarred wrists upwards.

‘You see, Clare, if I remember too much, maybe I’ll lose the ability
to speak again,’ Lilith said. ‘And I’m afraid that if I remember everything I’ll die.’

‘You won’t,’ said Clare. ‘You’re a survivor. You can do it.’

‘You think so?’ she asked,

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Go put on a glam dress, some lipstick, do your hair.’

‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Lilith gave her a wan smile. ‘Like putting on armour.’

‘In a way, it is,’ said Clare. ‘That public face
that gets you through things you simply have to do.’

‘You’ve convinced me.’ Lilith stood up. ‘But if I am a survivor, I’m a very grubby one. I need a shower.’

‘You do that,’ said Clare, unplugging her phone. ‘Heels too, don’t forget.’

‘Will you be changing before you come to the gallery?’

‘If there’s time,’ said Clare. ‘I want to go down to Gallows Hill.’

‘Why?’ asked Lilith.
‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I believe you,’ Clare reassured her, ‘but to figure out what happened, I need to immerse myself in the place where this thing started.’

‘Or ended,’ said Lilith. ‘What exactly are you looking for?’

‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ said Clare. ‘A sense of the place, maybe; of how it was possible to get a mother away from her childand then onto Signal Hill and then
bury her down in Gallows Hill –all without a single witness. I have to try and find what it is I’m missing, I guess.’

‘I s’pose,’ said Lilith. ‘You’ll take care though, won’t you? I lost one person there already.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Clare.

‘That’s what my mother always said before she went out,’ said Lilith.

‘Did she say it to you that last night?’ asked Clare.

Lilith lit
a cigarette. ‘No,’ she said, waving away the smoke. ‘I don’t think she did.’

‘Well, I will be fine,’ said Clare, firmly, ‘and I will see you at the Osmans’ later. Sounds like it’s going to be quite a party.’

‘Everyone who wishes they were someone will be there,’ said Lilith. ‘You’ll make things bearable for me.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Clare, stacking the papers on the table.

‘Okay,
but don’t schlepp that stuff around with you. It’ll be safer here for now,’ said Lilith. ‘Take the spare key. Then you can come back and get it all later.’

‘Sounds like a good plan,’ said Clare.

She closed Lilith’s kitchen door behind her. A golden shower draped the old pergola, dripping orange flowers. The frame of an abandoned swing protruded like a gibbet above the shrubs. In the west,
the sun was on its rapid slide towards the ocean.

Clare opened the gate at the back of the garden and looked up at the slopes of Signal Hill. The place where Lilith had enjoyed walks with her mother, trotting briskly behind the swish of her skirt, on her short child’s legs. Pushing the grass out of her path, slipping on black rocks made treacherous by the water that seeped down Signal Hill
and filled the quarry, even in the dry month of February. Water that had once flowed freely into the ocean behind the breakwater was now channelled into storm-water drains – like Lilith’s half-remembered tunnel.

She walked on along the path and stood at the top, where Signal Hill rolled away to High Level Road. Below that, Green Point, where plate-glass windows flashed at the sinking sun.
Clare pictured it 20 years ago, the vacant lots, the old houses, an unobstructed route from Gallows Hill to the ocean. And from the house on Carreg Crescent to the building site at Gallows Hill.

An old dog, yellow as a hyena, loped past. Clare recognised Jennie, the dog from Gallows Hill – even more emaciated than before. She slunk through the tawny grass and disappeared below, under the lip
of a culvert on High Level Road.

The wind whipped sand and debris around Clare’s legs when she got out of the car at Gallows Hill. The guards shifted the razor wire and let her onto the site. Pegs indicated where the human remains had been disinterred. Some were slaves, some vagabonds, some criminals, and some merely poor. All had been unceremoniously thrown into graves. All that was left
was a hole, dark and empty. But not all the bones had been removed – Clare shuddered as she saw bones protruding, vulnerable to the predation of the air.

The broken ends of the crime-scene tape fluttered above the trench where Suzanne le Roux had been buried. Clare squatted on her haunches, closing her eyes, running sand through her fingers. She looked up and saw lights coming on in houses
on Signal Hill. Lilith’s among them. Nearby, just a few blocks away.

Clare closed her eyes. She imagined Suzanne in the place where she was standing, a man’s arm rising, a black stone in his fist, his arm falling, the stone splintering a skull. She saw Suzanne falling, as in the dream image she’d had: arms outflung, her green dress unfurled like an angel’s wings. At the moment of death, Suzanne’s
flashback to her daughter alone in her bed. The knowledge that she would never again tuck Lilith in, never sit on her bed and tell her a story to take her from wakefulness to sleep.

Suzanne le Roux. Lilith. They crowded into Clare’s thoughts, a mêlée of discordant images.

This way.

That way.

All jumbled.

An impenetrable darkness.

Clare thought, too, of the two bergies who
had been shot nearby. She orientated herself, calculating where their bodies may have lain slumped against the wall, despised like vermin. Was the killing simply a coincidence – or the deliberate elimination of witnesses? A terrible business, as Lydia Gonzalez had suggested.

A furtive movement drew Clare’s attention. To her surprise, the scrawny dog had reappeared near an opening that was
just visible in the churned earth.

Clare walked over to it. She was glad of the little Browning under her shirt. She squatted down and peered into a dank storm-water drain. It seemed wide enough to walk through, its curve leading up the hill.

She got her phone out, called Shorty de Lange.

‘Hey, Shorty,’ she said. ‘Remember those two dead bergies I told you about, the ones at Gallows
Hill in the 80s. You didn’t find anything for me, did you?’

‘Riedwaan didn’t give you the results of those test-fires?’

‘He’s okay, then?’

‘Ja, okay, but about as beaten up as you were last night,’ said De Lange. ‘He’s not with you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We keep missing each other. Staying alive seems to be a full-time job. What happened to him?’

‘Long story,’ said De Lange.

‘Involving gunfire and dead people?’

‘He’ll tell you when he sees you. The hijacking –’

‘Yes, Waleed Williams was true to his word.’

‘Clare, there’s no link with Williams,’ said De Lange. ‘It’s with this Suzanne le Roux case. The gun found in your car is the same one that killed those two bergies you asked me about.’

Clare was silent.

‘Shorty, I need to speak to Riedwaan.’

‘He should be with you soon,’ said De Lange. ‘He was coming that way. Said he was going to sort out some business first. Some oke called Jacques Basson. Ex-security cop.’

‘When?’ Clare whispered

‘An hour or so ago,’ said De Lange. ‘Cut him some slack.’

‘I’ve got none to cut, Shorty,’ said Clare. ‘I need him.’

‘I think he knows that,’ said De Lange.

FORENSIC. The police-blue neon sign stretched across the front of Woodstock Gallery. A knot of newly-arrived guests were blocking the entrance when Clare arrived. The last summer show, Cape Town’s summer madness, nearly over. She made her way into the foyer, putting her anxiety about Riedwaan out of her mind. For now.

‘Where’s Lilith?’ Clare asked the stilt-legged gallery girl.

‘Through there.’ She waved towards the white interior.

‘Has she finished giving her talk?’

‘Half an hour ago,’ said the girl, her eyes reaching for the next arrivals as she spoke to Clare. ‘She’s with Damien Sykes and some other buyers now. There’s quite a bit of interest in her work since her mother’s body was found.’

Clare thanked her and joined the jostling crowd.

There was a
scrum at the bar. Tight clusters of people stood around the works on display. The room was heaving with people. Women whose veined hands were curled around the necks of champagne glasses watched, bored, as their husbands eyed women in short tight skirts. Some, though, had eyes only for the slender, artfully dishevelled young men drifting from group to group.

Magda de Wet waved Clare over and
handed her a champagne flute. ‘I don’t see you for months, and then twice in one week,’ she said, fingering the blue silk around Clare’s neck. ‘Lovely scarf.’

‘Thanks,’ said Clare. ‘I’m looking for Lilith. Have you seen her?’

‘She was here a moment ago,’ said Magda. ‘Looking very strung out.’

‘She’s had a hard couple of days.’

‘You too, by the looks of it.’ Magda placed her fingertips
on Clare’s cheek.

‘It’s been hectic,’ said Clare.

‘
Ag, nee, skat
. You’ll have to tell me about it,’ Magda dropped her voice and said, ‘There goes Merle Osman. Makes Wallis Simpson seem an amateur in the too-rich and too-thin stakes.’

Clare caught a glimpse of the woman gliding down a corridor marked Private.

‘Have you seen her brother?’

‘Gilles should be around somewhere,’
said Magda. ‘He usually finds himself a corner. Holds single-malt court to a select few. Oh, and Pedro da Silva’s here, by the way. He tells me you’ve got some good stuff for your movie.’

Clare shot a glance at her friend. ‘We have, though not enough. I’ve been distracted. Tell him I say hello and sorry. I’ll come find you two later. Give him this. I’m not up to drinking. She handed Magda
the untouched glass.’