Cathy wrapped one thin, scarred arm around the pillow, pulling it against her breast. She looked at the bolt on the inside of her daughter’s door, suffused with shame at her own weakness. Cathy opened the bottle of pills. This she could do. She tapped the pills into her open right hand. They looked like sweets. She dropped them into her mouth, washing the bitterness away with lemonade.
The phone rang deep inside the house. She ignored it as the pills started to dissolve, making her feel ill. She swallowed her nausea. It would take an hour, at most, to free her of the terror and guilt she had endured since marrying Brian King. Cathy lay quietly, remembering her phone call to the pathologist who had done India’s post- mortem. Dr Mouton had gently reassured her that all suspicious deaths – car accidents, suicide, murder – came to him, and that the bodies were kept together in one place. He had answered her questions patiently, as if he sensed her need to find out, to know all she could as a way of coping with her bereavement. What Piet Mouton told her that day had made Cathy eager for the end. And she felt especially eager now, even as her body rebelled against the pills she had swallowed. At least she knew that her own body would be taken in a van to the mortuary where India lay. India would no longer be alone among the alphabetically ordered rows of corpses, their naked feet flopped outwards, as if napping. Cathy would be there to watch over her. This time, she would not fail her daughter.
The house phone stopped and her cellphone started bleating. Cathy King waited until it stopped, too, before she pressed ‘play’. She did not hear either of Clare’s desperate messages. She settled herself back into her daughter’s bed and watched the film in which she starred, with her husband directing her gang rape. Here in her home. She recognised Kelvin Landman as she watched him twist and rip her clothes. He had been for dinner here earlier. She had served a perfect rack of lamb that night, she remembered. She watched as he used his beautiful knife to carve his initials delicately into her back, her hand reaching instinctively to touch the scar. It was when the credits rolled that she saw the other name. She pressed ‘pause’, understanding quite clearly now who had killed her daughter. Cathy reached for her phone, but the barbiturates tightened their lethal grip on her body. She slid bitterly towards death, the phone falling uselessly to the floor.
48
Clare woke up feeling cold. The wine had left her with a headache and her duvet had slipped off. She got up, the taste of a nightmare bitter in her mouth. She stripped off the shirt and slacks she’d gone to bed in and showered. Then she pulled on her thick winter gown and wrapped a towel around her wet hair. Fritz badgered her until she fed her – the smell of the fish making Clare gag. She sat down at the kitchen table again, staring at what was left of three young girls – photographs, DNA tests, ballistics reports, interview transcripts. The fourth file was the slimmest, just a missing-person’s report at this stage. Clare prayed it would stay that way.
She stretched, her body stiff from too little sleep. Gathering the papers into her arms – Charnay, Amore, India – she carried them tenderly into her study. The walls there were blank. She pulled out a roll of masking tape from her top drawer and picked up the envelope of Tarot cards.
‘I’ll try it your way, Constance,’ she muttered to herself. She stuck the first card, the Female Pope, on the eastern wall. That was the direction that Charnay Swanepoel’s head had pointed when they’d found her. She placed Charnay’s smiling school photo next to the Tarot card. Clare arranged the photographs and Piet Mouton’s reports in a halo around the picture.
On the western wall, she placed the photo of Amore Hendricks next to the grinning orange devil. Clare gave pride of place to the expensive DNA tests paid for by Amore’s bereft father. The card of self-imposed shackles, the bonds around this girl’s body, were not of her choosing.
South was India King, her laughing, sunlit photograph next to the most catastrophic of cards – the Tower, showing a man and woman hurtling towards the ground. This card indicated the sudden bolt of understanding. Clare stuck what she had around the photo of India King. Her stepfather should be able to help with more information, thought Clare. She looked back at Charnay’s chart – King could have met her through Landman. Or through the Isis Club. She could see no link with Amore Hendricks, but that did not mean there wasn’t one.
Clare turned north. On this side of the room there was nothing but glass. She picked up the last card, the Hanged Man, and taped it to the glass. She looked past the taunting smile of the inverted figure. The sea was calm, with the first light beginning to dance on the breaking waves. Clare turned her back to the dawn and looked at the chilling images of death stuck to her walls. The answer was just beyond her – like a movement glimpsed in the corner of the eye, vanishing the moment she looked at it head on. Tears of impotent rage welled up hot and slid down her cheeks. ‘What am I not seeing?’ Clare fretted. ‘What can’t
Patience was what she needed. And time. The two things she did not have.
The thunk of the morning newspaper being delivered broke Clare’s reverie. The paper was splashed with pictures of the missing girl and a re-run of all the ghoulish details of the dead ones.
Clare felt a strong urge to go for a run. She pulled on her tracksuit, glad that she could leave off her rain jacket today. The air was crisp as she stretched against the sea wall. It lifted her spirits. She ran fast in the direction of the Waterfront. The morning sea was flat, the massive swell that had battered the shore for days exhausted. She turned back after three kilometres, enjoying the trickle of sweat between her breasts and down her back. The sun had swung up above the mountains, pearling the water. A single fishing boat broke the surface, leaving a trail of shattered colour in its wake. Clare absorbed the stillness of the moment. She would need it in the tumult of the day ahead of her.
Her heart contracted as she rounded Three Anchor Bay. A small group of people clustered around the railings. ‘Please not.’ Her words hung with the mist of her breath on the cold morning air. Clare slowed down as she neared the group.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Somebody thought they saw a whale,’ an old woman explained.
‘I don’t think it was a whale,’ said her wiry companion. ‘I’m sure it was that elephant seal. Remember, he was here last year.’ The huge animal had wintered here the year before, wallowing on the beach and bellowing mournfully for his lost females. After three lonely weeks he had slipped back into the water and headed back to Marion Island, thousands of miles south-east of Cape Town.
‘It would be something if he came back again,’ said Clare. The elephant seal had become quite an attraction, and nature conservation had posted a guard to protect him. Clare looked at the smooth surface of the sea, but saw nothing. Just some rubbish bobbing in the little breakers around the rocks.
She went home and downloaded her email. There was a deluge of increasingly frantic messages from her London producer. Clare opened the last one. ‘Where is my next batch of footage?’ it berated her. ‘When will it be here? I have two slots with international broadcasters so where the fuck is it, darling?’
Clare clicked ‘reply’. ‘It’s coming, don’t panic, don’t panic. Am pursuing a home-grown pornography link, so hang in there. C.’ She packed up her interview tapes – with Natalie, with the barmaid from the Isis, as well as two spontaneous ones she’d done later with some of the dancers. And the formal interview with Kelvin Landman. She looked at the tape of her interview with Whitney’s mother, Florrie Ruiters, explaining the metastasising hold of the gangs; how easily they picked up young women and worked them. She hesitated for a second and then threw that in too. Not quite as straightforward as Natalie’s story, but more common in its murkiness because Whitney and her family were helpless in the face of the expanding predations of the gangs.
Clare was rummaging through her cupboard, deciding what to wear, when the doorbell rang.
‘Hello.’ Clare pressed the intercom, expecting Riedwaan’s voice to reply.
‘Hi. It’s Tyrone.’
‘Who?’
‘The barman. From The Blue Room at the Waterfront.’ Hope flickered as Clare pressed the intercom.
‘Come up.’ She phoned Riedwaan. ‘The barman from the Waterfront is here. Come over.’ She snapped her phone shut as he knocked on her front door. Clare held the door open for him. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
Tyrone followed her into the kitchen. ‘Some coffee would be nice.’ He was holding a pink rucksack. He put it down on the table, pulling his hand away as if it was dangerous. ‘I found this,’ he said. He looked down at his hands. The nails were bitten, the nail beds raw, bleeding in places.
