Daddy's Girl (27 page)

‘Wouldn’t you have known, though, that this was being followed up?’

‘I should have,’ said Riedwaan. ‘If that’s why he was there.’

‘Let’s talk to him anyway,’ said Clare, looking at her watch. ‘Rita told me she had an uneasy feeling.’

‘About Delport?’

‘Not specifically,’ said Clare. ‘But she doesn’t like him. Does he spend much money?’

‘His vices are beer and under-age girls,’ said Riedwaan. ‘The beer, at least, he pays for.’

‘How under-age?’ asked Clare. ‘The girls.’

‘As long as they look under-age and aren’t too expensive,’ said Riedwaan. ‘He’s not fussy. But really, I can’t see him doing anything to Yasmin.’

‘He was at
the lab,’ said Clare. ‘So let’s ask him. D’you think he’ll be home at this time on a Sunday night?’

‘Home’s a place he avoids,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Unless you think of home as a bar stool at the Royal in Maitland.’

The television above the bar roared. Someone had scored a try. Impossible to tell who, as both teams were covered in mud. Delport felt cold air on the back of his neck. He looked around to see Riedwaan pushing open the saloon door. His eye flicked to the woman on the stool next to him. She moved up a seat, taking her brandy and Coke with her.

‘Waste of a game,’ said Delport. His small
blue eyes shifted from the screen to Riedwaan and on to Clare.

‘Took us a while to find you, Delport,’ said Riedwaan.

‘One for the lady,’ Delport said to the barman. ‘This ugly fucker can buy his own drinks.’

The barman poured two shots and pushed them across the counter. Clare ignored hers.

‘Looks like the Royal’s too good for your lady friend, Faizal,’ said Delport. ‘You’d better
have it, after all.’ He knocked back his drink.

‘I’m not here for a
jol
with you.’

‘Okay, so what’s up, if you don’t want to talk rugby and you’re not interested in drinking and Ndlovu’s on to you like a ton of gender-equity bricks because you took your daughter?’

‘That’s what I’m here to talk to you about, Delport.’ Riedwaan moved closer. ‘About Yasmin’s abduction.’

‘Why me?’

‘You have connections,’ Clare interjected. ‘You seem to be able to make things disappear.’

‘You must be out of your fucking mind,’ said Delport, staring at her. ‘Your friend Faizal there would kill me.’

‘He mentioned that,’ said Clare. ‘I thought maybe I’d mediate.’

‘A human shield or what? With Faizal in a rage, you want to be the collateral damage? You know what he does to people
he disapproves of?’

Riedwaan pulled up a bar stool and sat down.

‘l wanted to talk to you about some of your cases. Cases that got buried.’ Riedwaan put the docket numbers on the counter.

Delport glanced at them, at Riedwaan, at Clare.

‘One of which started down the road at the Winter Palace and ended up buried inside a drunk driving charge.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking
about.’ Delport lit a cigarette.

‘Must have been very convenient for Voëltjie Ahrend’s new best friend.’

‘What? What are you talking about, Faizal?’

‘Valentin the Russian, or whatever his name is. You and Voëltjie Ahrend. Seems like he has an interest there too. Although, with that amount of pure Afghan heroin missing, he must be feeling the pinch a bit.’

‘You’ve got this all wrong,
Faizal,’ said Delport. ‘And you’re too
bosbefok
to see.’

‘Delport. Listen to me.’ Riedwaan’s voice dropped dangerously low. ‘As long as my daughter’s alive, you’re alive.’

‘No, you listen to me. I don’t know where the fuck she is. Do you think this was good for anybody, this? All this heat now? I’ve been working with the Gang Unit on this case for months – I had no choice. That means,
like it or not, I’ve been working with you. It’s taken a long time to get where we are. I want to retire alive. Why would I wreck it now by getting entangled with your kid?’

‘Then explain these docket numbers, Delport.’ Riedwaan’s hand went up and twisted Delport’s collar.

‘I can’t read if you’re choking me, you fuckwit.’ Riedwaan let him go, and the woman nearby shifted two more seats
away.

Delport looked at the numbers.

‘Heroin,’ he said, taking a long slug of beer.

‘Don’t fuck with me, Delport.’

‘Busts that I was going to bring up on Friday,’ said Delport. ‘Ask Phiri instead of choking me again.’

‘You bring them in, then they vanish. To someone using a fake ID. What were you up to?’

‘Faizal, I’m seconded by the Narc Squad. For my sins, I’ve got two
bosses. You know what the SAPS is – all chiefs and no fucking Indians. There’s nothing that’d make me do something to attract your attention. My face might not be pretty, but I prefer it where it is and not wiped all over the floor.’

‘Who else knows about these cases?’

‘It’s not a secret,’ said Delport. ‘It was never a secret. It was routine. Routine bust, routine investigation, routine
tests.’

‘But not routine that these get buried,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Nor is it routine that my daughter disappears.’

‘Where are the drugs?’ asked Delport, a note of desperation in his voice.

‘Gone too,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You have no idea who took the drugs?’

‘Nothing,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Just like I don’t know who buried these, nor who hid the documents.’

‘I don’t like you Faizal.
But I wouldn’t harm your kid,’ said Delport. ‘Just because I pay women to wear their hair in pigtails when I fuck them – sorry, Doctor – doesn’t make me a paedophile. Look around you. D’you think I’d be drinking Black Labels here if I had a sideline in heroin? You’re more fucking stupid than I gave you credit for.’ He held up a finger. The barman brought a bottle of beer. ‘Now if you two will excuse
me—’

Clare’s phone beeped. She opened the text message. Charlie Wang. She held out the phone to Riedwaan. ‘We’d better get moving.’

Delport drained his glass.

‘Thanks to Nokia for getting you to fuck off and leave me to drink in peace.’

Riedwaan ran his fingers over the brass medallion fixed onto Clare’s dashboard. The embossed figure with its staff and cloak had a dull sheen. The result of years of touch.

‘St Christopher. You didn’t strike me as superstitious,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t hurt to hedge your bets.’ Clare smiled as she jumped a red light. ‘Patron saint of travellers. My father had this medallion on all his
farm bakkies.’

A taxi hurtled round the bend towards them, lights on bright, on the wrong side of the road. Clare swerved out of its way.

‘Fuck you,’ she hurled after the taxi, its tail lights vanishing into the rain.

‘He obviously knew what he was doing, your father, giving you this saint.’ Riedwaan tapped the medallion.

‘Most times, I wish he’d kept him.’

‘Why do you say
that?’ In profile, when you couldn’t see her eyes, Clare looked naive, almost girlish.

‘Years ago, my father drove me down to university in Cape Town. He bought me a car and insisted that I take his St Christopher to protect me. Then he and my mother drove home. On the N7 the car rolled. A man on a donkey cart found them half an hour later, both dead.’

Riedwaan put his hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry.’

The silence stretched between them.

‘I was too.’ Three cars ahead of them, the lights showed red. ‘But tell me how a Muslim boy learnt his saints.’

‘My mother sent me to a Catholic school, she wanted me to get a decent education. The images of flayed saints didn’t do much to distract me from my own suffering.’

‘Your father?’

‘Killed,’ said Riedwaan. ‘When I
was nine.’

The lights changed.

‘You going to tell me?’ she asked.

‘Not much to tell, really.’ He shifted slightly in his seat, facing her. ‘Some of the sharper gangsters were learning struggle terminology. My father refused to pay what they called a community tax. He said it was extortion. One evening, when I was helping him unpack stock, three men arrived at his shop to discuss the
matter with him. My father hid me. The men searched for the money. Found nothing. Put on a jazz record – loud. Fats Domino. My father’s favourite. Broke my father’s arms. Then his legs. Still he said nothing. So they cut his throat.’

Clare remembered the photograph she’d seen in Riedwaan’s flat, the black-eyed boy staring straight out at the camera. And his father, looking down at his only
son.

‘I hid there,’ said Riedwaan, his voice just audible over the hiss of the tyres on the road. ‘I hid until the blood from my father’s head seeped over the floor and the sacks of Basmati rice where I was hiding turned red.’

‘Why didn’t he just give them the money?’

‘The cash box was in the crawl space under the rice where he’d hidden me.’

Another red light. He waited till it
was green, till the car was moving forwards again.

‘He died to save me, not the money. But that money paid for my schooling. That’s what he kept it for – a school in the suburbs. I slipped into that narrow space that opened up as apartheid choked on its own bile.’

‘Is that why you joined the police?’ asked Clare.

‘I was part of a gang for a while, thinking that that was a way of getting
revenge. But I realised that in a year or so it could be me breaking some boy’s father’s bones for a thousand rand, or less. Then Mandela came out of jail. I gambled, joined the police. It paid off – until I joined Phiri and Van Rensburg to start the Gang Unit. I realised quickly that the worst gangsters are sitting in parliament, or have moved into boardrooms where they’re safe. The high flyers.
They know they’re untouchable. They rent expensive lawyers, buy cheap politicians. And they walk. Take out anyone who gets in their way.’

Clare manoeuvred into the single open parking space on Charlie Wang’s street. His were the only lights on at that hour in the old warehouse. The double slam of the car doors brought the sleepy guard out of his hut.

‘It’s Dr Hart,’ said Clare. ‘To see
Charlie.’

He unlocked the gate and they squeezed through.

Riedwaan followed Clare two floors up the fire escape. Charlie Wang was waiting for them, the door to his lair ajar.

‘Algorithms. A law unto themselves. I’m sorry it’s taken so long,’ said Charlie. ‘But whoever took her knew how to dodge the cameras.’

They followed him to the greenish light flickering from his computer monitors.

A single image, frozen.

Yasmin’s face.

Her face, floating upwards, fish-like, for a second. Then gone again.

‘Where?’ Riedwaan asked hoarsely, staring at the screen as the segment of tape replayed.

‘The garage on Roeland Street,’ Charlie replied.

‘When?’ Riedwaan faced Charlie Wang for the first time, taking in the rumpled white shirt, the belly, the bleary night eyes.

‘Friday. Three minutes past seven.’

‘Can’t be.’ Riedwaan stared at the log that Charlie placed in his hand. ‘I drove past that garage about then. On my way back from the shooting in Maitland.’ His face was ashen. ‘I drove right past her.’

‘There’s more.’ Charlie unwrapped a bar of chocolate and wolfed it down.

‘Look at this.’ Part of a number plate.

‘CF something,’ said Riedwaan.
‘Maybe a G, maybe a number.’

‘CF, CFG. That’s Vredenburg,’ said Clare, her pulse quickening. ‘Or Morreesburg, one of those little farming towns along the N7.’

‘It’s a G,’ said Charlie. ‘That’s my bet.’

The monitor flickered to life again and Yasmin’s ghostly face floated inside the car window. The time code flashing in the corner. ‘I managed to pull this out using some fancy Photoshop
archaeology programme.’

‘Did you trace the owner?’ Clare’s pulse quickened.

‘My hacker friend could get onto eNaTIS – but then nothing.’

‘The national information system? But did the traffic department detect that you were hacking?’

‘No chance,’ said Charlie Wang. ‘The whole system crashed. Technical problems. They may be online again by Thursday. Something going on with the cellphone
networks, too. Messages coming through in African time.’

‘Can’t anything be done in the meantime?’ asked Clare. ‘What about sightings on the national roads? Or other towns?’

‘Nothing. Not even my friend can hack a crashed government department. And ever since they computerised you can’t get in manually, not even to the
dorpies
on the N7,’ said Charlie, turning around on his chair.

‘You’ve got nothing else for us?’ Riedwaan’s voice rasped.

‘I can tell you one thing,’ said Charlie, pulling at a thread on his hoodie. ‘Not that it’ll be any help. There were no other hits that I could find in Cape Town. So I can’t tell you how long the car’s been in the city. If it has been here for a while, it doesn’t get out much.’

Two cars were filling up at the Roeland Street garage, but the parking area tucked behind the building was empty. A short-order cook and a cashier watching the wall-mounted television were the only people inside the convenience shop.

‘Can I get you something?’ asked the cook.

‘Just a couple of answers,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Were you working on Friday night?’

‘Saturday, Sunday,’
said the cook. ‘Ask Cleopatra. She works every day.’

‘Were you working on Friday?’

The cashier with the unlikely name looked at Clare and Riedwaan with fathomless boredom, then turned back to the television.

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for my daughter.’ Riedwaan pulled out a photograph of Yasmin. ‘She may have been here, or somewhere near here, on Friday
evening.’

The girl glanced at the photograph. Not a flicker of interest. ‘Haven’t seen her.’ Eyes back on the television.

‘She was caught on your cameras at 7.03,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Maybe you remember who was in the shop at the time?’

‘Nah,’ said the tattooed girl, twiddling her eyebrow piercing between thumb and forefinger. ‘Lot of people come and go then. Rush hour.’

‘Not at that
time on a Friday night. Not at seven,’ Riedwaan leaned over towards her. ‘Town is empty by six. No clubbers around till ten. It’s as quiet as a fucking grave around here. The car she was in waited in the parking lot for quite a while. So, think. Who was here? Who bought something to eat – a child’s meal, maybe?’