Like Clockwork

hand.

‘What you got there, Doc? More semen?’ The pathologist grunted. ‘Not this time. Looks like bird shit to me.’ He dropped the tiny fibres he had picked off the girl’s back into the bags he used for samples. ‘I’ll send it away for testing.’ He moved around the body, picking up one of the girl’s hands, then the other. Then he moved to her feet, eased off the high, tight-fitting boots, and scribbled again on his notepad.

‘What happened to her feet, Doc?’

‘Same injuries to the extremities as the other girl had. I’m not sure what they are. Gnaw marks. Rats, maybe. Most of the bodies we see that have been left outside for some time have bites from scavengers on them. In the northern hemisphere most dead bodies are found indoors. Makes it much easier to place time of death because you get a constant ambient temperature. And, of course, a body that’s inside is not going to be interfered with by packs of dogs.’

‘Thanks for the free lecture, Doc.’

Mouton straightened up. ‘You could do with an education, Riedwaan. But these boots were put on after death, after she’d been alone somewhere long enough for the rats to chew her.’

Mouton crouched down beside the girl. ‘Come and look here.’ Riedwaan crouched next to him. He could smell a trace of perfume on her skin, she was that close.

‘The throat is cut in the same way. Another Colombian necktie,’ Mouton turned to Riedwaan. ‘The South Americans moving in?’

‘Not that I’ve heard,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I don’t think this is drug related, do you?’

‘Thinking is not my job, Riedwaan. I’ll leave that up to you. But if you asked my opinion, I’d say no. Whoever did this has some unresolved business with women.’

Piet Mouton reached over for the instruments he used to expose the most intimate recesses of the human body. ‘Okay, let’s get to the real work now.’ Riedwaan’s stomach heaved, but Mouton’s patient dissection would reveal where Amore had been in the last few days of her life and the first day of her death. Finding out where and teasing out how she died were the keys they needed to unlock the secret of who had killed her. The mortuary was quiet. Riedwaan prepared himself for a long night.

21

Clare dreamt of the dead girl, but, to her surprise, she awoke refreshed – and, to her shame, elated to be alive. She lay in bed listening to the pre-dawn silence, drifting between consciousness and her hovering dreams. There was something on the periphery of her mind, but whenever she shifted her mind’s eye to look at it, it disappeared. She gave up when the first call of a dove pulled her into the morning. She stretched and got up, pulling on her running clothes. She felt chilly, despite the warmth of her heated flat, so she put on an extra top and set off. Outside it was dark, except for a cold gleam in the slitted yellow eye of the horizon. In spite of her unease, she ran in the direction of Graaff’s Pool.

The flurried activity of the previous night was gone. Chevroned police tape was looped around the whole area. Clare could see a guard drawing on his cigarette as if it might warm him. The rising sun provided no warmth and Clare was getting cold. She turned to continue her run. She followed the promenade’s paved ribbon to the end before heading home again. By the time she was back at Graaff’s Pool the forensics officers had returned, searching a wider arc now for anything that Amore Hendricks’s killer may have left behind. So far, there was nothing. The tide had risen high the previous night, and if anything had remained it would have been obliterated. Clare doubted they’d find anything.

The way the two bodies they had found so far had been arranged, and the symbolism of the wounds – almost like stigmata – pointed to a killer who made careful preparations. He was not someone who would easily make a mistake. Also, by now the tide would have washed any little slips away. Clare watched for Riedwaan. He had called her last night, keeping the call businesslike and brushing aside her attempt to explain Jakes. He told her that Rita Mkhize called to say that the SMS had come from a phone belonging to Clinton Donnelly. Clare remembered the name – he’d been an enthusiastic student at a lecture she’d once given. Clinton lived in Observatory, a cramped suburb where attempts at gentrification had never really succeeded; it was a place that Clare generally avoided. He had sent the message from a house in Campbell Road.

The mournful wail of the foghorn demanded her attention. She looked towards the rhythmic flash of the lighthouse that accompanied it. It was due east. Then she looked back towards Graaff’s Pool, where the girl’s body had been laid out along a precise north/south axis. Her head had pointed south, as had the blood-soaked bound hand. Clare stood still, the threads of morning mist twisting wraithlike, receding ahead of the breakers before they disappeared. The precision of the arrangement of the corpses – the head of the first one pointing east, this one south – tugged at her mind. She shivered, praying that there would be no west, no north.

The wind was cold, so Clare sheltered in the lee of a small building. The tide was retreating. Clare watched the pattern the waves made as they rushed forward onto the rocks. Their energy spent, they fell back into each other. Foam formed where the crests thrashed against the rocks, and one another, then retreated for respite towards the open sea. This white spine of foam ran along the deep, navigable channel between the rocks. Clare stood up on the bench she had been sitting on. The body had been placed at the end of that channel. Had the killer brought her in there by boat? Last night’s weather would have made this difficult – but then nobody would have have been around to notice, either.

A flash of blue in a rock pool caught Clare’s eye. Something stranded by the receding tide, or rubbish from one of the vessels anchored off the coast, thought Clare, as she leapt down to the beach. She picked her way across the rocks. A bedraggled bunch of flowers tied together with gold ribbon, washing out, and then returning with the tide, dislodged a shard of memory. An old man with a bunch of plastic-wrapped blooms. Clare pulled the flowers out of the sea, even though she was outside the police cordon. She walked over to the tape and called to one of the forensic detectives searching across the beach sand.

‘Joe,’ she called. He came over to her, rubber gloves stretched tight across his plump hands.

‘Hi, Clare.’ Clare had known Joe Zulu all the years she had worked with the police. ‘I hear it was you who found this one.’

‘Ja, it was horrible. Someone I know told me the body was here.’ Clare handed him the flowers and pointed to the beach below. ‘By the way, I found these over there – they seem so out of place here. Also, Harry Rabinowitz mentioned that there were flowers with the first girl. I didn’t see anything in the report, though. I’ll check Riaan’s photos again. Harry Rabinowitz told me there were flowers with the first girl too.’

Joe placed the flowers in an evidence bag. ‘They’re almost the same colour as the ribbon her hand was tied with,’ observed Joe. ‘Who knows what will help solve this?’ and he turned in the direction where Amore’s body had lain. The tide had made sure that any visible trace of her had been erased. But you never knew until later about invisible traces of evidence left behind.

‘Let me know what you find, Joe,’ said Clare. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’ Joe waved and went back to work.

Clare checked her cellphone for messages as she climbed the rough steps that led from the beach back to street level.

‘Hello, Dr Hart. I see you are a morning person too.’ Otis Tohar’s voice raised every single one of the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. ‘Are you a runner?’ he asked.

‘As you can see,’ said Clare, irritated that he had so unnerved her. Tohar was dressed in an expensive tracksuit, but he did not look as if he had been running. He had several newspapers under his arm. Clare made out a headline that clearly relished the sales spike the murder of a beautiful girl would result in. Her heart sank. Chief- Superintendent Phiri was going to throw a fit: it wouldn’t be too long before the history of the case officer came out. Ever since Riedwaan Faizal had punched a journalist who’d questioned his relationship with some of the local gangsters, he’d not been that popular with the more liberal papers.

‘You did not strike me as a vulture, Dr Hart.’ Tohar leaned in close to her. The acrid smell was there again. Clare’s nostrils flared in distaste. This seemed to amuse him. He moved closer, trapping her between his body and the sea wall. ‘Curiosity seems to be a habit with you.’

Clare contained her claustrophobia and stepped away. ‘It is my profession.’

‘It has brought you luck so far?’