Thirteen Hours

Griessel dipped his head again. Then he looked up at Table Mountain. His eyes measured the distance to Lion's Head. He looked at Joubert. 'Five hours after she was on Lion's Head she arrives at the cafe. And the fucker parks in the street and comes in after her. How did they know, Mat? Where was she in between, why couldn't they find her? Why did she change her mind about the police?' He lifted his hand to his hair again. 'What do you do? A girl, a foreigner, you are desperate to find her, she could be anywhere. How do you watch the whole city?'

They stared at the mountain. As always, Griessel's ability to put himself in someone else's shoes, either victim or the perpetrator, charmed Joubert.

Then he realised what Griessel obviously already had. They had been sitting on the mountain and watching the whole city. 'Could be,' he said.

'Fokkol use to us now,' said Griessel, still one step ahead. 'They've got her.'

'But you can't see this house from the mountain,' said Joubert, nodding at the Victorian building beside them.

'That's true . ..' Lost in thought again, Benny's brain was searching, Joubert knew. He knew the frustration, the junkyard of information from a day like today when everything happened at once. You had to sift through the chaos; everything you had heard and seen, everything you knew, had to be sorted. For him it was the labour of the night, when he lay beside Margaret, behind her warm body with his hand on the rounding of her belly. Then his thoughts would travel down slow, systematic pathways. But

Griessel's process was different: impatient, quick, not always faultless, but much faster. Griessel's head jerked, a tumbler had dropped and he looked down the street and began walking in that direction. Joubert had to stretch his long legs to keep up. A hundred metres further on, Griessel stopped in a driveway, looking at the house, the garage. 'He sat here, in a bakkie ...' Excited. 'He nearly drove us off the road ...'

Griessel jogged up the drive, turned and looked back at Piet van der Lingen's house and said: 'No ...' He walked back and forth, jumped up and down and said: 'Mat come and stand here.'

Joubert came and stood there.

'Stand on your toes.'

Joubert stretched.

'What can you see of the house?'

The big man looked. 'Just too low to see everything.'

'He drove out of here, a guy in a bakkie. Toyota four-by-four, faded red, the old model. Little fucker behind the wheel was young, in a hell of a hurry, drove right in front of us and raced off towards the city ...'

Joubert focused differently, unburdened by memories. 'He could have stood on the bakkie,' he said. 'He would have been able to see everything then.'

'Jissis,' said Griessel. 'Young, he was young, just like the others.' He looked at Joubert. 'I will recognise him, Mat, if I see his fucking face again. I will know him.' He was quiet for a heartbeat, then he said: 'An old Toyota . . . that's not a drug dealer's car, Mat...'

Griessel's phone rang. He checked the screen before he answered. 'Sarge?' He listened for about forty seconds and began walking. Mat Joubert walked behind him, faster and faster, keeping his eyes on Griessel. Here came the tsunami again.

'Get more people, Sarge,' said Griessel over the phone. 'I'm coming.'

Griessel looked back at Joubert, the familiar, spark-shooting fire in his eyes. 'About ten minutes ago someone dropped off a young white guy at City Park Casualties, and then left. In haste. Victim was stabbed in the throat with a blade; they might be able to save him. I'm off, Mat...' Griessel began to run.

'I'll do the scene,' shouted Joubert after him.

'Thanks, Mat.' Benny's words were blown away on the wind.

'Get her, Benny,' shouted Joubert, but he couldn't tell if Benny had heard him. He watched his colleague's running figure, so determined, so urgent, and again he felt that emotion, nostalgia, sadness, as though it were the last time he would see Benny Griessel.

Chapter 38

It was Jess Anderson who broke the silence in the study and put words to their anxiety. 'Why doesn't he call?'

Bill Anderson did not want to sit, he wanted to walk up and down to vent some of his tension. But he couldn't, because he knew that would upset his wife even more. So he sat beside her on the brown leather couch. His lawyer friend, Connelly, and the Police Chief, Dombkowski, had insisted he stay, so he could be here when the South African policeman phoned. Now he was sorry he hadn't gone along to Erin's parents. It was his duty. But he couldn't leave Jess alone in these circumstances.

'It's almost forty minutes,' she said.

'We don't know how far he had to travel,' said Anderson.

'We could call him ...'

'Let's give it a little more time.'

They held her down on the concrete floor, four of them. A fifth put a blade under her T-shirt and cut it away, then her shorts, then her underwear. The same knife that had cut Erin's throat, the same hand, stripped her naked, effortlessly. They pulled her up and pushed her against the narrow steel pillar, her arms bent backwards and tied with something around the pole. Then they stood back and all she could do was sink down as far as her bonds allowed, to hide her shame, so that her gaze fixed on her running shoes.

'Where is it?'

She didn't answer. She heard him coming, footfalls on the floor, two steps only. He grabbed her hair and jerked her head up so that it banged against the metal of the pillar. He knelt in front of her.

'Where is it?' the question was repeated.

Her left eye was swollen shut and painful. She focused the other on him. His handsome face was against hers, calm. As ever. His voice carried only authority, control.

Her revulsion for him was greater than her fear of death. This knowledge came in a rush; it liberated her and brought with it the impulse to do something, to kick, to spit, and she began to collect saliva in her mouth. For everything he had done, everything, she wanted to cast scorn and hatred on him, but she reconsidered. She was not powerless. They could not kill her. Not now. Not yet. She could buy time. She was not alone. I'm on my way, don't open the door for anybody, I will call when I get there, please, Miss Anderson, the policeman's voice, the caring, the will to make her safe, to rescue her. He was somewhere now, looking for her, he would find her; somehow or other he would find out who was hunting her. It was so obvious, he would find out, he would find her.

She answered the man by shaking her head slowly from side to side.

He took her hair in an iron grip. 'I'm going to hurt you,' he said. In his practical way.

'Go ahead.' She tried to keep her voice as even as his.

He laughed, right in her face. 'You have no idea ...'

It didn't matter, she thought. Let him laugh.

He let her hair go suddenly and stood up. 'Their luggage is still at the Cat & Moose ...'

'We should have taken that long ago.'

'We didn't know, Steve. You know what she said in the club ... Where the fuck is Barry? Call him, go get their stuff.'

'They're not going to just give it to us, Jay.'

She lifted her head and saw them looking at each other. There was tension between them.

Steve, the black guy, eventually nodded, turned and left. Jay spoke to another one, one she didn't know: 'There's a hardware shop one block up, right-hand corner ...'

She saw his hand dip into his pocket, take out a few notes and hand them over.

'I want pruning shears. We'll cut off her toes. Then her fingers. Then her nipples. Pity though. Great tits.'