him to leave the force but he refused. She then approached the Canadian embassy, filled in the form, and was gone. Just before the plane swallowed them, Yasmin had turned to wave at where she guessed he would be watching. A small, dark girl with a pink bag and memories Canadian children would not understand. He thought of calling Yasmin, but she would be asleep in Toronto. Her mother – still his wife, damn it – would fumble for her alarm clock, smoothing her long twist of black hair on top of her head. Unless she had since cut it, of course.
Riedwaan took a sip of his coffee. It was cold and bitter. He turned his attention back to the manila folder in front of him. He spread out the photographs that Riaan had taken at the crime scene. His stomach knotted. He couldn’t save this girl, but he was going to make sure that whoever had done this to her paid in full. Then he thumbed a different number into his phone, imagining the rings slicing through the silence. Clare picked up her phone. She was startled, he could tell – she’d have been busy working, and had obviously forgotten to switch the phone off.
‘Yes,’ she said, annoyed with herself for answering.
‘Clare, it’s Riedwaan.’ He paused, listening to her silence. His image of her was vivid – at her desk, papers, books, notes spread around her, laptop open, thick hair snaking between her sharp shoulder blades. Wing bones, she called them.
‘Hello,’ she said. What else was there to say?
‘I have the preliminary report on that girl you called me about. I thought you might like to have a look.’ Riedwaan waited.
‘Okay,’ Clare said. She wanted to ask why, but didn’t. That would come later. ‘New York Bagel, at six.’ She hung up and took a deep breath. Thinking of him made her throat tighten. Talking to him made the skin around her nipples taut. If she ignored the feeling, she told herself, it would go away. She would meet him for coffee. He would slip her the autopsy report, some phone numbers, and that would be it. Yes, she told herself. That is what would happen. She would gather up the papers, do some interviews, send him the transcripts, give her opinion on who had committed the murder, Riedwaan would catch the killer, and that would be that. Clare reactivated her sleeping laptop. She needed a few more hours before her trafficking proposal would be ready to send. She would fit Riedwaan into the interstices of her busy working days as she did sleeping and running. This time, though, she would keep a proper perspective.
It was much later when her eyes drifted from her screen, her ears tuning out the hiss of her computer finding an Internet connection. Drifts of street rubbish eddied upwards, and dropped again. Her email sent, she shut down her computer. She decided to walk. It would give her time to compose herself before she saw him. She walked briskly to keep warm, the sky turning bleak as the sun set.
6
The restaurant Clare had chosen was a determined outpost in a creeping strip of hostess bars, peepshows and poolrooms. Muscled men leaned on barstools at the entrances of the strip clubs and adult entertainment centres with their blackened windows. Furtive, part-time street prostitutes, full-time junkies, loitered inside doorways, smoking, waiting. Riedwaan watched through the window. He saw a girl he did not recognise dart towards a potential customer. She looked fifteen under her amateur make-up. He knew there would be track marks creeping from the fold inside the elbow towards her wrist. The girl recoiled when the man spat at her. Riedwaan looked at his watch. Six o’clock. Clare was always on time. He looked down Main Road and watched her walk towards him, her stride easy, strong.
Clare walked faster, as most women did, when she went past the clubs. She ignored the speculative eyes of the bouncers who looked her over and then lost interest. She looked up, not towards Riedwaan but towards the crumbling art deco block across the road. The building was as notorious for its dealers as it was for the waves of desperate immigrants who crammed in there. They paid cash on the first day of each month to hard-eyed men who extorted ever larger amounts. Riedwaan had heard that the building had been sold. Nothing had changed, though. It didn’t need to. It was a gold mine. You could get anything you wanted there, women, children – even infants – if you could pay. The police force was not going to do anything about it: anyone who tried ended up dead, or shafted. Like him.
Clare came in and unbuttoned her coat. She knew to look for him in the smoking section. She picked up a tray, two coffees, hot milk, a bagel for Riedwaan, and a croissant for herself. She exchanged the tray for the envelope that Riedwaan passed her with his greeting. She didn’t kiss him. Sitting down, she scanned the report. Her stomach knotted at the pathologist’s dry abbreviations of the horror of Charnay Swanepoel’s death, the brevity of her life. There was a note to say that further pharmacology test results were pending.
‘When did he cut her throat?’ asked Clare.
‘She was dead when he cut her throat,’ said Riedwaan.
‘Any maggots?’
‘No,’ said Riedwaan. He put down his bagel. ‘But the weather’s been cold. Mouton reckons that she was killed between Sunday night and midnight on Monday. She was dead at least eight hours before she was dumped.’
‘Any indication where she was mutilated?’
‘Could have been done there. Mouton thinks a very sharp knife or, more likely, a scalpel. The throat, that is. There was a small amount of leaked fluid on the collar of her shirt. Mouton thinks that he did her eyes before he cut her throat.’
‘Same kind of weapon?’
‘He’s waiting for the ballistics report, but most probably yes.’
‘The eyes?’ asked Clare.
‘Look on page four. Mouton says just before he smothered her.’
‘So she was alive. How horrible. I wonder what she saw, what he showed her to make him do that.’
‘We’d better find out before somebody else sees what she did,’ said Riedwaan, hunting for his cigarettes.
Clare stared briefly at her untouched croissant. Then she returned to the secrets that Charnay’s body might answer. Seventeen years old, wearing a skirt and top, high-heeled boots. No underwear. All her own teeth, six fillings. Appendix scar. Not a virgin. Not a needle user. Menstruating at the time of death. Bruising on the upper arms and thighs.
Riedwaan was smoking at the window. ‘Sorry, Clare,’ he said, waving his hands at the smoke.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Reading this makes me want one too.’
She looked down and continued reading. One tattoo on the left buttock – a symbol, not a picture of anything. Recent – maybe two weeks old – but healing.
‘Any idea where she might have had the tattoo done?’ she asked Riedwaan.
‘Not sure yet. It’s very distinctive, that mark.’
‘What is it?’ Clare asked. She studied the photograph. The tattoo was simple, elegant. Two decisive vertical lines bisected by an X.
‘Dunno. Looks like a Chinese ideogram.’
‘It’s beautiful, in its sinister way. It’s hard to tell with the scabbing, but it looks like a symbol. Can we ask Mouton to get an exact shape from the body?’
‘I’ll ask him,’ said Riedwaan.
Clare went back to her reading. An incision across the left palm. Mouton had confirmed that it was done before death. Done with a very sharp knife across the hand that held a key. This hand had been intricately bound. Whoever had done it was skilled at bondage. The blood had crusted over the key, which had had to be prised loose. Blood group: A positive. Charnay’s blood. Traces of ink under the blood where she had written a number or a name. These were very faint and it was not possible for the pathologist to decipher anything. Some genital trauma, hard to say how recent, no sign of semen in the body. Does not rule out the use of an object. Traces of semen on her clothes. Possible that her killer had masturbated to celebrate his achievement. It had been wiped clean but traces remained on the skirt. Also possible that it had been there before. Signs too of bruising on the right cheek. A cut next to the corner of the eye. Most likely an open-handed blow by a man wearing a ring. The soles of her feet were dirty inside the high-heeled boots. As if she had been walking without shoes. Toenails painted, fingernails not. Stomach empty. Traces of vomit in her mouth. Cause of death: suffocation.
