Clare parked her car at the reception area and got out. She always remembered not to lock here. To do so would bring the fear of the world that surged back and forth on the freeway into this haven, but it took her some effort to override the instinct to both lock and double check.
Father Jones was waiting for her on the polished red steps. ‘Hello, Isaiah,’ she said, lifting her face to be kissed. He leaned towards her, breathing her in. His hand smoothed the familiar curve in the small of her back, and her body softened in response.
‘Welcome, Clare,’ he said. Twenty years had not diminished her feelings for him. When he hooked his arm at her elbow, as a brother would, they were aware of the loss – but it was one they had both accepted…
‘I am glad you came.’ There was no reproach. He understood her long absences. ‘Constance has been so anxious since your call.’
Clare looked at him. ‘More anxious than usual,’ Isaiah amended. ‘She’s waiting for you.’
They walked down the narrow path, the plants they brushed against wafting sharp autumn scents up to them. Isaiah stopped at the edge of the clearing. On the other side of it stood the cottage, white, symmetrical, perfect, where her beautiful twin had purdahed herself. Isaiah pressed her arm.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured.
Clare stepped past the sundial to knock on the front door. Constance would not answer before she had allowed Isaiah to return up the narrow path. Clare listened for the susurration of her sister’s skirts, her body alert as she waited for the door to open to reveal Constance. Her other self.
‘Hello, Clare. I’m glad you came. Come in, you must be so tired.’ A white hand reached from the dim interior and took hold of Clare’s brown arm, drawing her inside. Constance closed the door. The sisters embraced, blonde hair mingling with black.
‘Why did you send me this?’ asked Clare, pulling away to show the enigmatic card to her twin.
Constance took it. ‘The first card is the key to the present. This is the High Priestess.’ She turned the card over in her hand. ‘It’s the Female Pope, the emblem of the law.’
Clare looked blank.
‘This is you, Clare. Always thinking, never understanding.’
Clare followed Constance into the sitting room. She sat down, her arms tight around her legs, her body rocking now.
‘Please keep it, Clare. You will need it.’ Clare capitulated, putting the card back in her bag. Then she knelt beside Constance and held her. Her sister quietened in her arms.
‘He’s out there again. I feel him. He’s moving.’ She turned her face into the hollow below Clare’s shoulder.
‘No, he’s not.’ Clare did not believe her own lie.
‘Who killed that girl, then? Who carved her up like that?’ whispered Constance, her breath hot on Clare’s face. ‘Who?’
‘The police will find him. I’m working with them. I’ll find him.’ Clare pushed her sister’s hair away from her face. ‘Try to rest now. You’ve not been sleeping, have you?’
Constance shook her head and leaned against Clare. There was nothing for it now but to hold her sister until she exhausted herself and fell asleep. Clare settled in to wait. It was dark before Constance fell asleep. Clare covered her and let herself out. The moonlight was cold as she crunched back up the path to her car.
As soon as she got home, Clare stripped and stepped under a scalding shower, trying to erase the ghost scars imprinted on her body when the real scars had in fact been carved onto Constance. She stepped out of the shower for her shampoo and stopped in front of her mirror. She had small, neat feet. Her legs were well proportioned with the muscular leanness to the hips and thighs that comes with running. Her waist curved inwards then flared towards small, curved breasts that had only recently started to soften. That could be disguised when necessary with a quick splash of cold water or a strategic run of a finger down her ribs. Her belly was taut, the unmarked skin stretched tight across her pelvis. She twisted her long hair on top of her head, revealing her elegant neck and the curve of her shoulders. It was a good body. One that had captured the attention of several men and one or two women.
But this body was not the body that Clare saw. The body she saw when she was naked was the body of her sister, Constance. They were the same height. But where Clare’s body was muscular, Constance’s was soft. Criss- crossed with scars, her thighs and breasts carried the knife emblems of the gang that had used her to initiate two new members. On her back, illegible now, were brutal signatures where they had carved their initials. Her left cheekbone was curved as sharply as a starling’s wing, the other had been reconstructed out of the shattered mess left by a hammer blow that had glanced off her skull and spared her life. For some reason the men, how many or whom Constance could never say, had not struck a final blow. They were distracted perhaps, or bored with the messy pulp that she had become. And so she had lived, her hip-length hair hiding a shattered face and the cold snake of fear coiled inside her thin body.
This was the ghost-body Clare saw in her mirror. Clare let her hair go, and its curtain fall ended the familiar hallucination. She returned to the shower and scrubbed. The water was so hot that she did not notice the tears coursing down her perfectly matched cheekbones.
9
The sliding doors were open: the dawn was surprisingly forgiving, despite the unsettled waves. Clare sat on the sofa, the sweat from her run already drying. She forgot her coffee as she watched the sun rise, the colours reflecting on the expanse of white flooring. The door to her bedroom was open, the room empty except for the bed and an exquisite view of the Atlantic and a wall covered with her books. These provided the only colour in Clare’s sanctuary. The mountains, tinged pink by the sun, were an army frozen in its march up the bleak West Coast. She longed for that endless coast road snaking along the base of the mountains that led to the stone house whose low white buildings were screened by dusty eucalyptus trees. It was invisible from the road, secret. There Constance’s voice still echoed happily with hers around that distant, long-abandoned farmhouse of their childhood.
Clare stood up, shaking memories from her as she stretched her stiffening muscles. She walked to the phone and, cradling the receiver in her hand, thumbed in the number without needing to think of the sequence. Three… four… five rings.
It was her defence against the work she did… seven… eight… rings. A ninth ring… Panic rose in Clare, as it always did if someone was not where they ought to be.
‘Hello… Shit! The phone. Hello? Hello?’ Her beloved sister, at forty, still unable to answer a phone without dropping it.
‘Julie! I’m still here. It’s me. Clare…’ Her panic dispelled.
‘Darling! How are you? Where have you been? Weren’t you going to call me?’ Julie had adopted their mother’s way of speaking when they had still been very young children – an effusive torrent that swept along anyone in earshot. ‘It’s a bit mad here. But come for supper. Tonight, or maybe the weekend would be better. I’ve missed you. So have the girls.’
The thought of her nieces, both so alive, so protected, comforted Clare. ‘Thanks, Julie. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Shall I bring something?’ But Clare was talking to a dead receiver. Julie had turned her attention to Beatrice’s breakfast and Imogen’s frantic hunt for her homework and her hockey stick. Clare put the phone down, soothed by the domesticity of Julie’s life.
She made fresh coffee and took it to her desk. The autopsy report and the interview transcripts were there. Riedwaan had faxed the ballistic reports. She fished them out of the tray and read them, letting her mind sift through the information.
There was one body. So far. Clare was convinced that there would be others. Or that there had been others that had not been picked up. She took the picture of Charnay out again and laid it in front of her. There were no injuries to suggest that she had been knocked out and then abducted. Charnay had gone willingly with her killer, so he must be personable. Charming too, to have access to a girl as beautiful as Charnay Swanepoel. It would have been later, when it was too late, that his abhorrence of women, of girls, emerged.
The phone rang. Riedwaan’s name came up on the caller ID. She picked it up. ‘Hi.’
‘How are you doing?’ he asked.
