Clare was too tired to resist. She nodded and followed him towards her flat, ignoring the whistles from the uniforms. She needed a man’s body in her bed tonight.
Once home, she drifted into sleep, waking very briefly to feel his hands warm on her skin. The fragment of a dream – a car trailing a plume of dust behind it – was already fading. She leaned over to kiss the sleeping man. Riedwaan smiled and pulled her towards him, holding her fast against his chest.
EPILOGUE
Landman is back at his desk. It is very late and the only sound above the distant roar of the surf is the mournful blast of the foghorn. His ears, lulled by the near silence, fail to alert him to the tiny click-click of a key turned deep inside the house. Neither does he sense the silent shadow as it moves down the stairs. He is absorbed in the columns of numbers in front of him. They do not add up, will not add up. He gets up, paces, then sits down in a leather wingback chair. The slow burn of anger in the pit of his stomach ignites into rage at Otis Tohar. The roar of his own blood distracts him so that when the voice – steady, clear – says, ‘Look at me,’ he turns instinctively.
A girl is standing in the doorway. She looks familiar. Cradled in her hand is a revolver. It gleams dully. The blind, round eye looks unblinkingly at him. He laughs, amused. When he stops laughing the silence is stifling. She moves the steady eye of the gun slowly downwards from his face to the arrogant splay of his thighs. She fires once. He laughs again in surprise, clutching at his groin. His manicured hands are drenched with the rhythmic spurt of arterial blood.
She smiles, lowers the gun and steps back. She closes the door. He stays calm, staunching the blood with one hand. With the other he scrabbles for his phone. Panic overwhelms him as he realises that this is the other thing that she has taken from him.
‘Bitch.’ His voice is already fading.
There is nothing to do but drag on the cigarette in his ashtray and hope that someone will come.
Whitney lets herself out of the front door. The car is waiting, its engine idling. The door slams shut behind her. She leans over to the woman at the steering-wheel and lifts the curtain of hair. Whitney kisses the scarred cheek and lets the hair swing back. The woman traces the healed brand under Whitney’s T-shirt.
They drive north. An hour later the city is behind them. They turn off the tar road. The dust rises and hovers above them. It hides them – though there is nobody watching. Constance Hart is heading home. To a house she has not returned to in the twenty years since Kelvin Landman began his career by carving his mark on her back. Whitney sits besides her, cleaning her stolen gun calmly and efficiently. She hums. It is not a tune that Constance knows yet, but she joins her anyway.
Margie Orford
