Daddy's Girl (28 page)

‘I can’t remember.’ The girl’s expression did not change. ‘I don’t remember stuff
like that. How would I be able to do this job if I did, the number of fuckfaces that come in here. Now let me go before I press the panic button. Cop or no cop.’

Clare put her hand on Riedwaan’s arm, the tendons taut beneath her fingers.

‘Can I ask you something?’ said Clare.

‘You too?’

‘Have you ever seen this tattoo?’

The girl swivelled her eyes from the television to the
sketch that Clare had placed on the counter.

‘That’s so cool,’ she said, picking it up. ‘I asked him where he got it.’

‘Who?’ asked Clare.

‘The guy here on Friday.’

‘Did you recognise him?’

‘Never seen him before, but I liked his tattoo.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was his height,’ nodding at Riedwaan. ‘Skinny jeans, hoodie. Like everybody else. I told you, I don’t
remember what people look like.’

‘What time was he here?’

‘The news was on,’ she popped a jelly tot into her mouth. ‘It was dark, so I suppose about seven.’

‘What did he buy?’

‘Three burgers and a happy meal.’

‘Who was he with?’

‘By himself,’ said Cleopatra, eyes drifting again.

‘So why so many meals?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘How the fuck should I know? Do I look like
someone’s mom?’

‘Did he take them out to the car?’ asked Clare.

‘Must have,’ said Cleopatra. ‘He didn’t stay here.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Nothing. Just thanks. He had manners.’

‘You remember the car?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you. I don’t remember that kind of shit.’

‘You remembered the tattoo.’

‘I love tattoos,’ she said. ‘I saw it when he paid. Those two
snakes, red and black.’

‘I want the CCTV footage from inside on Friday,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You can ask the boss,’ said the girl. ‘But there’s no point. They tape over every twenty-four hours. You’re a day too late.’

Riedwaan went upstairs and found the owner watching television in his underpants. He shrugged when Riedwaan asked for the tape and told him to help himself. The girl was
right. Nothing from Friday.

‘Told you,’ she smirked when he came downstairs again.

Riedwaan kick-started his bike and the engine growled as he rode towards the Bo-Kaap. Clare swung right and headed towards home. To go over everything again. To wait for first light.

He got the Jack Daniel’s, fetched a glass and knocked back the first shot in the kitchen. Riedwaan breathed in, counting to four, then out, for a count of four. Shrink tricks. Useless. He closed his eyes.
He saw Yasmin. He opened his eyes, he saw Yasmin. Her picture on the fridge. Smiling at him.

The wind rattled the old house. Making him hear things.

A car inching its way down Signal Street.

Again.

He checked the windows. They were latched. The kitchen door too.

He heard the car stop.

Riedwaan picked up his Browning. He didn’t really miss the police-issue Beretta. He shoved
the ammunition into his pocket, stepped away from his chair, and moved to the dark kitchen. He climbed onto the counter and peered at the street through the grimy fanlight. Two unmarked cars at the crest of the hill. Halfway down, another vehicle was angle-parked on the cobbles. Someone in the driver’s seat, watching.

The street was blocked off.

One man with his back to him; two others
crossing the street disappeared out of his line of vision directly below him. All of them armed.

One at the front door, one at the garage. Testing the roller door, which stuck against the metal bar he had wedged there.

The front door was an easier option. Riedwaan calculated that he had sixty seconds before the men broke through the wood.

He locked the kitchen door behind him. That
would buy him another thirty seconds. He pulled himself up onto the courtyard wall and clambered his way to the rooftops he had explored as a boy.

He bent low, his feet following the familiar path over the rooftops. He heard his front door splinter. Thirty seconds later, a single shot. The back door. He kept low, ducking and weaving, until he dropped down into Rose Street.

He saw his car
parked there – Signal Street was too steep to risk such an old handbrake. But Riedwaan kept moving through the narrow alleys between the houses. Then he ducked into a recess between two houses. By now he was on Buitengracht. Then the gunning of an engine as a vehicle hurtled into view, its doors opening wide. Two men coming at him. The first two bullets whistled past his head.

Riedwaan bolted
past the Catholic Church, heading towards the lights and the crowds on Long Street.

The next two bullets screamed past his head.

He dived down a dark lane.

The music from the clubs pulsed in the night.

Riedwaan flattened himself against a wall and checked the intersection. Apart from a couple of vagrants nesting in a shop doorway, there was nothing to the left.

He looked up
the road, towards the mountain.

On the rain-splashed tar, a shadow. Moving slowly. Closer.

His back to the buildings, Riedwaan slid away, up the lane towards the church.

He felt razor wire at his back, coiled across a back entrance to the church. High above him was a recessed window.

The footfalls of two people moving up the lane.

Riedwaan pulled off his leather jacket. He
wrapped it around his right hand and, steadying himself against the wall with his left, he grabbed the razor wire. He looked up at the slice of sky and hoisted himself up, hooking his right foot. He found purchase with both feet, and the wire held. The window was one metre closer. Two metres to go.

Twice more, and he’d be there. He pulled himself up again, then swung onto the window ledge,
curling his body against the stained glass as the men flashed their torches at the spot he’d just left.

One of them kicked at a grubby blanket lying on the ground.

‘Hey, I heard something,’ he said.

‘Just rats,’ said the other. He shone his torch upwards, and then down along the narrow passage on the other side of the gate.

Riedwaan held his breath, his heart hammering in his chest.

‘Too high,’ he said. ‘If he’s gone, we’re fucked. The boss is going to have our heads.’

Riedwaan crouched motionless until all he could hear was the distant beat of music from the clubs on Long Street. Then he waited another half an hour before dropping to the ground.

Stealthily, he worked his way back to the Bo-Kaap. His car was still in Rose Street. He waited another fifteen minutes,
satisfied that no one seemed to be watching. He got in, took the handbrake off, coasted down the hill, and only started the engine when he was well clear of the area. Taking a back road, he turned towards Sea Point, and waited at the lights before turning into Beach Road. There was very little traffic.

Clare’s lights were on. Again, she was working through her maps and her precise notes to
try to discover what they were missing. Riedwaan was about to pull over when he noticed the car parked in the lee of a copse of wind-crippled trees. In the driver’s seat, the glow of a cigarette.

The same vehicle he’d seen earlier outside his house.

Watching her.

Waiting for him.

It was too late for him to turn round, so he drove on, slowing for the woman teetering towards him
from the shelter of the garage. He stopped and she bent down to his window, a smile in place.

‘
Ag, nee
, Captain.’ The smile vanished when she saw who it was.

Riedwaan kept his eyes on the vehicle behind him. The cigarette was gone, but the tail lights glowed red against the trees. He was being watched.

‘Get in, Candy.’ He leaned over and opened the passenger door. ‘Now.’

‘What
is this?’ she asked, sliding in. ‘Charity?’

She crossed her legs, her skirt riding up. There was a yellow bruise on her thigh.

‘Rough client?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘I can handle them,’ she said. ‘Not your business, anyway.’

‘You working all night tonight?’ he asked.

‘Don’t lecture me, Captain.’ She took one of Riedwaan’s cigarettes. ‘I’ve got a living to make, just like you.’

‘Where were you headed?’

‘Business was slow,’ she said. ‘The Chinese sailor bar in Prestwich Street.’

‘You need a lift?’

‘What you want in return?’

‘I need a place where I can be out of sight for a few hours.’

She looked at him warily.

‘Just a bed.’

‘Three hundred.’ He opened his wallet. ‘That’s what I’ve got on me.’

She rummaged in her bag for a key.

‘Three
hundred for a bed without a duvet.’ She reached for the money. ‘You could stay in a hotel for that.’

‘Too many people,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I need to be someplace where no one will look.’

‘What you done this time, Captain?’ She tucked the notes into the lining of her bag.

‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Number 801.’ She handed him the key when he stopped the car. ‘Bella Vista, behind
the stadium. You can’t miss it. You can sleep in my baby’s bed.’

For a moment before she got out, Candy’s fingers rested on the back of his hand. She picked her way through the puddles towards the bar on the corner. A quick negotiation with the doorman, and she was in.

Riedwaan walked up the eight flights of stairs to the flat. The main room was both sitting room and bedroom, the kitchen
alcove was curtained off. Two doors. A bathroom, and a tiny bedroom with a panoramic view of the neighbouring block’s water pipes. But Riedwaan wasn’t there for the view.

Taking his phone from his pocket, he punched in Clare’s number.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

‘I’ve just been chased all over town.’

‘By whom?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’ve just seen one of their cars
parked outside your place.’

Clare looked out the window. ‘Across the road?’ she asked. ‘Near the trees?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘That’s Salome Ndlovu’s car,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Same car she was in last night, when I was attacked outside the Winter Palace.’

‘Call Rita and find out what the fuck’s going on, will you, please?’

Five minutes later Clare called back.

‘Salome Ndlovu wants to bring you in. Apparently she wants to speak to you,’ she said. ‘About Yasmin.’

‘Strange ways of talking, they have,’ said Riedwaan. ‘They have something new?’

‘Rita’s trying to find that out,’ said Clare. ‘Where are you?’

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’m safe. I’m going to put my phone off in case they’re tracking it.’

‘And if I need to speak to you?’

Riedwaan picked up the phone next to Candy’s bed.

‘Use this number.’ He read it to Clare.

Then he lay down on Candy’s daughter’s bed. Staring up at the Barbie poster stuck onto the ceiling, Riedwaan waited for the night to turn into morning.

There were no lights on in any of the surrounding houses when Pearl unlocked the door to her Wendy house. The cool night wind scoured the stuffy room. Her dishes in the sink still. Her panties soaking in the orange plastic bowl. She dumped her jacket on the scrubbed table.

Home.

She put on the radio, the volume low. It chattered at her, repeating the warnings of the coming storm.
The DJ played a late-night request. Gloria Gaynor. ‘I will Survive’. A stupid song, but she loved it anyway.

She dropped into the chair. Her legs finished, her ears still buzzing with music she hadn’t wanted to listen to, her head fuzzy with alcohol she hadn’t wanted to drink. The tik straw had been hard to pass up, but she’d only had the one hit. Thinking how nice to smoke the whole thing.
And forget about the little girl. And Doctor Clare fucking Hart with her larnie accent and her confidence that she’d be strong. Pull through for her.

The message would wake Clare up, but she didn’t think the doc would mind. She hadn’t wanted to phone her earlier. Couldn’t from the shebeens and
hokke
she’d ended up in. Couldn’t in the taxi home either. Business about the cops and Voëltjie Ahrend
wasn’t something you spoke about where someone could hear you. The taxi driver with his mirror shades, checking her
skeef
. She’d been glad to get off before the last passengers, even if they were just
makwerekwere
chatting away in their Somali language.

Pearl poured a glass of Coke, tracing Clare’s name in the condensation. Thinking that she must let her know. Hoping Clare would be able to
make sense of the scraps of information. Trying to unscramble the stoned bits she’d heard. Thinking where to start. Starting to key in a message to Clare.

‘It’s taken me a long time to find you, Pearlie.’

Reflected in the window above the sink, the shadowed face of a man standing in the doorway. Shaven head, angular features.

Pearl froze.

‘I followed you tonight, Pearlie. You were
a busy girl. From work, talking to that TV doctor. Then all over. From Voëltjie Ahrend’s fancy Palace, then out to the Flats. But I said to myself that Pearlie-girlies are always the best at home.’

The voice she’d believed she’d never hear again, sitting that day in the gallery when the judge sentenced him to life. Three times. Once, for the old woman. Again, for the mother. Life plus ten
for the little girl. But nothing for her, watching. Nothing to compensate for her life, what he had done to her.

The sinewy body tilted against the door frame. The nightmare of her childhood, returned.

‘What does Pa want?’ The ingrained manners of a child, betraying her.

‘Why were you with that
vuilgoed
? That crippled cop’s daughter, that little junkie who Voëltjie’s boys played with?’

‘Calvaleen?’ Pearl faced him. ‘What did you do with her?’

‘Nothing,’ her father said, and smiled. ‘Well, nothing that Voëltjie’s heroin – or the little movie he made about her – won’t do for me. I saw the film inside. Got it from a warder. But it’s not her you should be worrying about, or that little doctor.’