Absolution (17 page)

‘This?’

‘Yes, that’s it. But …’

‘Ah. Let me see,’ he said, thumbing through his rack of vials. ‘This one?’

‘Yes. Definitely. This is it.’

‘Lady Grove.’

‘Lady Grove?’

‘Lady Grove.
The housewife’s friend
. Have you not seen the ads?’ the man asked. He hummed a calypso jingle and shuffled a dance, hips swivelling, arms becoming branches. ‘
Lady Grove
,’ he sang, shaking his head, as if even the blind and deaf would know it.

‘I don’t watch television,’ Clare lied.

‘Not an industrial cleaner after all,’ said Ms White, clicking her tongue. ‘A
domestic
cleaner. But madam would not know that. Madam does not know about domestic cleaners. She still has a maid, whom she no doubt calls a maid.’

‘She only comes a few times a week,’ Clare protested. ‘Marie and I do most of the cleaning, it’s just the heavy things, the windows …’

But Ms White had already taken Clare by the arm, leading her back into the corridor, around a corner, a further corner, and into an empty waiting room. ‘I will be back just now, madam. Madam will please wait.’

‘I should like to go home. I have cooperated with you, Ms White. I think that I have been exceptionally cooperative given the circumstances, not to mention the time of the evening. May I remind you that I am not the criminal?’ Clare found herself wiping away tears. The wound on her hand left a streak of blood across her face.

‘Not the criminal? No. Of course not, madam. What a suggestion. What a silly thing to say. You had the
misfortune
to be a victim. And that is a very grave matter, although some might say that victimhood is a kind of delinquency. Some would say you should have been more careful, as you are being now, in your nice, safe house. No one should wish to be a victim. Please wait here. I will be back
just now
.’

It was decades since Clare had been left alone in a waiting room. The last time she had been waiting in a hospital for her parents to come, to see their eldest daughter and son-in-law, or what remained of them. It was to be expected, Clare supposed, that the police had come for her first in that case, so long ago. They had been polite enough initially, a man taking her elbow, much as Ms White did, leading her to an armchair in her own living room, in that house on Canigou Avenue, and sitting her down, kneeling himself, explaining in his crude English that her sister had been murdered, and that a positive identification by
one of her family members was necessary as her husband’s family were away on the other side of the country and would not arrive until the next day. Official confirmation was needed. They had been murdered in their guest house.

Leaving her husband and son at home, Clare had gone with the police in a government car to the hospital. She had expected to be shocked, the sheet removed to reveal a quarter of a face, just enough remaining to be unmistakably her sister: the beauty mark below her lips, pursed even in death, as though her own assassination had triggered nothing but disapproval. The policemen with her had held their breath, as if they expected Clare to throw her body against her sister’s, slake her grief with blood, but she had only nodded curtly, saying in her cool voice,
Yes, that is my sister, now let me see my brother-in-law
.

After she had identified both bodies, the policemen took Clare to a waiting room with rows of orange plastic seats all facing towards the door, where she sat alone, monitoring her heart rate. The policemen had offered to leave a nurse with her, but she shook her head, keeping two fingers on her neck and her eyes on the red second hand of the clock on the wall, timing eighty beats per minute, ninety, slow breaths, seventy-five again, down to seventy. How long had she waited alone, facing the clock on the wall and the door beneath it? Only seconds were recognizable, each second counting beats and after perhaps fifteen thousand of those seconds her parents had appeared in the door like two grey monuments. Her father, she remembered, wore an opposition pin.

‘Are you trying to test them?’ she had hissed.

‘What?’

‘The pin.’

‘Pin? Oh. No, sweetie. It was on the coat. It was the first coat I grabbed. I didn’t think.’

‘Let me take it, Dad.’

‘No one will care. I’m an old man. I don’t mean anything now.’

After being interrogated all night by the police, Clare and her
parents had left the hospital the following morning. The murder of press photographers caught the pin on her father’s lapel. When the photos were published in all the papers, the whole country believed that even in the hour of his daughter’s death Christopher Boyce had staged an act of defiance.

The funeral, another kind of waiting, had been unpleasant on several counts. Clare later heard that before their arrival a crowd had been gassed into submission, clubbed, and taken away in handcuffs, two later dying in custody. Worse still, she and her parents had to stand in the company of the Pretorius family, who had already refused them access to her sister’s papers and belongings. They sang hymns that were foreign to the Boyce family, whose own suggestions for the service were ignored, judged too secular, inadequately Christian. ‘We’re not having a circus here,’ her brother-in-law’s father informed them. While the minister lectured the mourners about the sins of man, Clare had fixed her eyes on a wild fig tree and the mountain in the distance, dust rising from its slopes in spiralling devils around the great pale domes of granite; mute tortoises rearing up from the earth. They had waited then, she and her parents, for the two caskets to be lowered into the ground, dropped on canvas streamers by the muscled hands of her brother-in-law’s family, men red from the sun, sweating under heavy pads of fat. After the others had left, Clare and her parents threw handfuls of dirt on the coffins before two men began to shovel. Later, she wondered why she had not grabbed a shovel herself, and added more than handfuls of dirt instead of just watching the young men, their shirts soaked with sweat, dust running down their faces. She wanted to be sure her sister was in the ground, was not going anywhere.

Sitting again in a waiting room of orange chairs facing a door and a clock, her hands were damp and cold, an old woman with few allies in her own country, a foreigner even in the land of her birth. Crime had set itself upon her, victimhood had been thrust upon her, and as a victim she was somehow also a suspect.

It was hours before Ms White returned, by which time Clare had fallen asleep in the chair. The other woman cleared her throat and Clare righted herself, found her mouth had been open, a line of drool on her shirt. She squinted up at Ms White, at the clock behind her.

‘I apologize, madam. I got delayed. I did not expect you still to be here,’ Ms White said. ‘Why have you not gone home already?’

‘Where did you think I would go in the middle of the night without a lift from you?’

‘I’m sure you could have found your way home. You are good at finding your way, aren’t you? Anyway, you were free to go all this time. Really, I can’t understand why you came with me in the first place if you weren’t prepared to cooperate,’ Ms White huffed.

Clare looked at the woman’s eyes. There was no glitter of irony or sarcasm, only blankness. Who is this stupid woman who abducts me at bedtime and leaves me alone in a waiting room for hours? Surely this is not how the police now operate, surely not.

‘Why didn’t you say so before you left me here?’ Clare tried to control her voice but a screech of rage slipped out.

‘There is no reason to be angry, madam. I will have you driven home by one of my officers just now.’ She turned her back on Clare and, as she walked away, paused, head half-turned. ‘We also discovered something about Lady Grove, the domestic cleaner you say you smelled on your invaders. It is sold in nearly three thousand separate retail outlets across the country. Not unique at all. Any of us could smell of Lady Grove.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes. So you would call us all suspects, I guess, madam.’

‘I can call no one a suspect, for I have no other evidence to provide. There was blood on the floor, was there not? You could conduct DNA tests. There was a car registration number.’

‘There was no match for the number. It does not exist, that registration. Perhaps your assistant made a mistake,’ Ms White said, and sniffed.

‘It is nearly three in the morning. Why are we having this conversation in the middle of the night?’

‘Because you did not order a taxi when you might have, madam.’

‘Stop calling me madam. Call me by my name if you must call me anything. I am in no mood for this. Test the blood that was on my floor. Find DNA matches. Or don’t. But leave me alone now. I don’t want to see you again, Ms White, or hear from you, unless you have firm evidence linking a suspect to the blood that was shed all over the floor of my old house. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly, madam. You are interested only in blood.’

*

Days or weeks passed in which Clare stopped thinking about the house invasion and carried on settling into her new home, learning its peculiar rhythms and idiosyncrasies, the way a closet door would catch or the shower in the master bathroom would drip if the washing machine was on. She had to admit that all the elaborate security features made her feel more protected, while they also made her think constantly about her security in a way that she had never done in the old house on Canigou Avenue. If security came at the cost of paranoia, she supposed it was something that had to be borne.

Then, on yet another evening, when Marie was working late, finishing a batch of correspondence while Clare watched the news, the intercom buzzed.

‘We have good news, madam,’ Ms White said through the intercom. ‘We have caught the miscreants.’

‘Why must you always come unannounced, and always at such inconvenient hours?’ Clare shouted into the microphone, cross with her voice for once again betraying her irritation.

‘The law does not rest. And now we know who is responsible, madam.’

Marie showed Ms White into the living room. Clare did not offer her a seat.

‘Three men and a woman. One of them is known to you,’ Ms White said, consulting a file.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Jacobus Pieterse, the man who was your gardener at the house on Canigou Avenue, he is the killer.’

‘But there was no killing, and–’

‘Yet his DNA matched the blood found in your house. We had almost forgotten that bit of evidence. Why did you not tell us you had a criminal in your employ?’

Clare was astonished by the suggestion. Jacobus was the gentlest, least violent man she had ever known. He had refused to use poisons of any kind in the garden for fear of killing the birds. ‘Jacobus is no criminal. He is certainly no killer. I refuse to believe he had anything to do with it. It’s nothing to do with him. You have the wrong person. He’s been in and out of that house a million times. There are perfectly innocent reasons why his DNA should be present. I remember a time he cut his hand in the garden on a pair of secateurs and I brought him inside to bandage it. No doubt he bled on the carpet.’

‘But he has a gang this one. Him and his wife,’ said Ms White, tapping a binder with the long nail that extended from her index finger like a pointer – a pointer or weapon, Clare thought.

‘Gang? The man is nearly my age.’

‘Yes, but he and his wife are major players as we say. You would have saved us so much time had you told us in the first place he had been your handyman, instead of waiting for us to question your former neighbours.’ Ms White sniffed, wagging her finger at Clare.

‘My gardener. Not my handyman. I never needed a handyman, only a gardener. This is quite impossible. Jacobus and his wife are devout Christians. They would never be involved in any kind of criminal activity. What claim do you make against him?’

‘He invaded your house, madam.’

‘But you said he was already a criminal.’

‘Yes, he invaded your house with his gang. That makes him a criminal, but he was already a criminal. You can tell the type. Or,’ and Ms White laughed at herself, ‘I can tell the type, but clearly you cannot, otherwise you would not have hired the man in the first place.’

‘Jacobus was in my employ for more years than I can remember. He would have had nothing to do with this matter. He had opportunity for years, decades, to break into the house, and I never once had a problem. Nothing ever went missing, nothing was stolen, no blood shed in defence or malice.’

‘Biding his time, madam, waiting for the right moment to strike, a viper,’ Ms White said, sniffing again. ‘He waited until after your husband left you, didn’t he? You are lucky you came away with your life.’

‘And what about my stolen property? Do you mean to say that Jacobus is in possession of my father’s wig?’

‘Oh no, madam. He has disposed of the property already. A very clever thief. No doubt he sold it for a high price on the black market.’

Clare felt the room spin and slant. The woman made her feel nauseated and unsure of everything she knew to be true. ‘This is madness. The wig is all but worthless to anyone but me. You are very mistaken. This is all a mistake. I want it to stop.’

‘But you have put it in motion, madam. It is a serious crime. We go until it is finished,’ said Ms White, opening and closing the binder with a final tap of her fingernail.

Clare

I have been experiencing recurring dreams of such vividness I would be certain they were reality if not for the fact of your presence in them, Laura, and even that makes me wonder if you have not reappeared, or I have slipped unwittingly into a space where the impossible is routine. Each time, Marie wakes me out of a deep sleep in which I have been dreaming another dream – these other, prior dreams are the only things that change, and they are almost always banal: cows in a field, me on the farm as a child, or in a boat off Port Alfred, memories conjured up out of darkness. In the recurring part of the dream it is always half-past six when Marie wakes me, and she says,
You have to get ready, you have to be at the studio
. I am making an audio recording of my new book, doing my own reading. This is what makes the dreams so real, because this week, in my waking life, I am in the process of recording the new book,
Absolution
, a volume of fictionalized memoirs (although it is nothing like the memoir the publishers truly wanted, hence the official biography). In the dream, I thank Marie, go to have a shower, dry off, all very deliberately. I choose black slacks and a black shirt, tie my hair back with a black satin bow and rub moisturizer into my face – always the same actions in every dream, in the same order. Marie has made me a light breakfast – no lemon, no dairy, nothing to constrain or confuse the vocal cords. Hot tea, a soft roll with honey. In the car, Marie tells me this is the last day of recording, and after that we can get back to the usual routine, the humdrum that keeps us happy. I remind her of my biographer’s presence, remind her he may continue to visit daily for months to come, except when I tell him, as in this week (and as in the real week happening now),
that other things keep me busy and we will recommence after a break of ten days. (I know it is cruel the way I play with him, both in dreams and in reality. He knows nothing about the actual contents of this forthcoming book. It is embargoed.)