been watching television then, so she had not heard the message come in. And yes. Here was the picture of India. Taken two months before when she and her friend Gemma had auditioned to be movie extras. Their role had been to mill around in a cafe in Long Street. They had loved the whole experience.
Riedwaan looked at the photo of the laughing girl. Her long mane of black hair was a blur, caught as she flung her head back, delighted by the photographer. She was holding her elegant hands up in a gesture of mock submission. High, rounded breasts were firmly held in place by the tight white T-shirt. A very beautiful girl.
‘Can I keep this, Mrs King?’ There was a feverish look in her eyes. He knew the look. He had seen it in Shazia’s eyes when their daughter had vanished. He must have looked like that, too. Cathy King nodded.
‘We need to take a formal statement and I need to get a list of her friends and activities,’ he told her. She nodded again and handed him her daughter’s address book. Then she made her formal, detailed statement, signed it, and handed it back to him.
‘She would have had most of her numbers in her phone, I suppose.’
‘We will do everything possible, Mrs King. If you think of anything, no matter how small, then call me. If anyone contacts you, any strange calls, let me know at once.’
She picked up the card he pushed across the table. ‘I’ll wait at home.’
‘I’ll be sending someone else to talk to you at home. She will want to look through India’s room – maybe there will be something there.’
‘Who will come, Captain Faizal?’
‘Dr Clare Hart. She’s been working on the investigation.’
‘The profiler – the one I’ve read about in the newspapers?’
Riedwaan nodded. Cathy King’s last vestige of hope drained away. She put her hand out, as if she was about to fall. But she didn’t. She winced as she straightened her back.
‘We will keep you informed, Mrs King. And we will do our utmost.’ The words rang hollow.
‘Goodbye, Inspector.’ She turned and walked to her car.
She looked so alone. Riedwaan went to get some coffee, thinking of Mrs King. The wedding ring was conspicuous on her finger, so it was odd that she had come alone. Where was India’s father? The anger that surged through him was intense. He deliberately turned his mind to the killer they were looking for. If they could just work out who he was. Or if the killer made a mistake, there would at least be a chance of finding India alive. That, to his chagrin, was the truth. He reached automatically for a cigarette, remembering that he had given up only when his hand found nothing there. He went out to bum a smoke, grabbing a cup of coffee on his way out. But he had made all his colleagues swear to refuse him a cigarette and they stuck to it: no one would give him even a drag. He tried to call Clare. There was no reply. She must have gone out of range or switched off her phone. Annoyed, he waited for the kettle to boil.
When he sat down again, he pulled out the two case files. Amore Hendricks. Charnay Swanepoel. He prayed that he would never label one India King. But he did not hold out much hope. They knew how these girls had died, how long it had taken for them to die, what they had last eaten. And yet nothing pointed them anywhere. There were no witnesses. The DNA they had didn’t match any on record. It could be gang-related – some new initiation method. Or perhaps a coded warning to the increasing numbers of freelancers – Charnay certainly seemed to have been one – who were being pimped in the more upmarket areas. Kelvin Landman was an ideal candidate. The right profile. Sadistic, ruthless, meticulous about cleaning up after himself. No witness had ever testified against him. That could be the answer. But something niggled. He knew Clare suspected that Landman was a candidate. But she was not convinced of this. Riedwaan slipped the note Rita had left for Clare into the file. ‘Only posh florists use that ribbon. See you Monday, R.’
Clare Hart’s profile pointed her elsewhere. Landman, she argued, was cruel for a reason. That was where he did not fit the profile of a serial killer. With this particular killer, Clare contended – with nothing to back her but her intuition – the killings were an end in themselves. They were too staged, the symbolism was too obscure, to be a message to others. If someone was trying to scare prostitutes, then why Graaff’s Pool? Why not Somerset Road? Riedwaan had worked with Clare often enough to know she was rarely wrong.
29
Clare ached with the heaviness of leaving Riedwaan, yet there was nothing to do but get into her car and drive up the lonely road curving between the coast and the green hills, soft in the morning light. There was no other traffic so early on a Sunday morning. Snow gleamed against the black cliffs of the jagged mountains in the distance. They seemed to march relentlessly north, only to peter out, though, defeated by the vast inland plains of the Karoo. Clare gripped the wheel, her knuckles white. She glanced at the skin on her hands, already starting to ridge and coarsen. Then she glimpsed her face in the rear-view mirror. The crow’s feet furrowing the corners of her eyes lingered now, even when she was not laughing.
Like today: the birthday she shared with Constance. Her twin would have been pacing all night. Clare had given up trying to heal Constance, but she could not abandon her. The sun disappeared behind the clouds and a soft rain started falling. Clare listened to the hypnotic swish-swish of the windscreen wipers. It had been raining on their birthday twenty years before when Clare, desperate to be separate from Constance, had rid herself of her virginity.
The rain was coming down harder now. Clare slowed, remembering how the need to be independent had driven her out of the school boarding house and into Isaiah Jones’s arms. She had had three hours of perfect freedom – abandoning herself to the pleasure Isaiah had skilfully coaxed from her inexperienced body.
Swish-swish-swish went the wipers.
Sometime after midnight, she’d worked out afterwards, when it was all over, Constance had realised she was fine, absolutely fine, on her own. She had followed Clare’s secret path through the chapel window and into the shadowed park adjacent to the school. Constance had wanted to tell Clare that she was able to be alone, that she would let Clare come and go as she pleased – but Constance never made it.
Filled with dread, Clare had awoken suddenly from a sticky, satiated sleep. Isaiah had followed her into the night to look for her twin, not questioning Clare’s intuition. They had found Constance barely alive in the park, the marks of the gang’s brutal rite of passage indelibly written on her body.
Clare turned down the familiar nave of trees. The pale branches reached mournfully over the ribbon of road, brushing their tips against each other. She parked in her usual place, her breath a fine vapour hanging on the cold air. As she walked down the path to her sister’s secluded house, a bright finger of sunshine broke free of the mountains in the east, illuminating the garden. She stepped onto the polished red stoep. It was very cold here where the sun was always absent. She sensed Constance standing on the other side of the heavy door, breathing with difficulty through her hammer-damaged nose.
‘Constance,’ said Clare. ‘Open for me.’
The door opened a crack, and then wider. A white hand, like a plant too long in the darkness, reached out and drew her in.
‘Our birthday, Clare.’ She had assumed Clare would come. She always did. Constance held Clare to her, her nostrils flaring at the male smell clinging to her. Riedwaan’s smell.
‘You must bath. I must wash you. Come.’ She led her sister down the passage to the bathroom. Here she ran the water hot. Constance removed Clare’s clothes, throwing them away from her as if the smell on them might corrupt her too.
Constance stroked her sister’s smooth, naked body. Her fingers traced the skin on Clare’s breasts, stomach, thighs – and also her own scars. Clare turned away from her and stepped into the hot water. It was lovely, the warm, enveloping relief from the cold and tension. She lay back. Constance picked up a sponge and rubbed soap onto it. She picked up Clare’s left arm and washed it carefully, as a cat would wash her kitten. Then the right arm. Then the feet, calves, thighs, and between her sister’s legs. Clare submitted. She had managed to pare down the daily rituals to this annual birthday cleansing, which she did not have the heart to resist. She wondered if she might not also need it, this purging of the previous year. Constance moved behind Clare and soaped her smooth back, though seemingly lost in tracing the script that first one man, and then the next, had carved into her own back while they’d taken turns in sodomising her.
