Daddy's Girl (3 page)

She listened to Madame Merle herding the
older girls into the parking lot. When the security gate opened, unleashing the minibus with its cargo of sylphs, Yasmin pressed herself deep into the bougainvillea hedge. She put her hand to her mouth, sucking the bright bead of blood where a thorn had pierced her skin.

The saltiness reminded her how hungry she was. She had nothing in her bag but a peanut butter sandwich from yesterday. The
bread was dry and the peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth, but she took another bite as she watched two
bergies
make their way up the steep hill. The woman stopped to rummage in a dustbin over the road, giving Yasmin a toothless smile. Yasmin did not smile back, but she did wave. The hand with the sandwich she hid behind her back, ashamed to eat in front of people looking for food in
a bin. The homeless couple drifted up the road towards the mountain and she ate again.

She looked up when she heard the car, swallowed, a smile starting as she stepped towards the opening door.

The arm snaked around her body, squeezing the narrow cage of her ribs until she felt the bones would snap. She bit down hard when the hand clamped over her mouth, pushing her scream back down her
throat. The hand fisted into her upturned face. Another slammed into her belly, winding her. Yasmin crumpled forwards into the pizza boxes and Coke bottles littering the floor of the car. The driver slid down the hill, and Yasmin rolled sideways as he turned. He cut the engine, but neither he nor his passengers moved as the afternoon faded into night.

The beginning of forever.

She lay
still, her mouth full of blood. The tooth that had wobbled for days on its last thread lay on the cradle of her tongue.

Captain Riedwaan Faizal scanned the building. Nothing moved in the shadowed stairwells. On the top floor, the corner of a curtain twitched against the cinder blocks. He figured out the number of the flat. There weren’t that many people around here who had jobs. Whoever was behind the grimy lace would have been watching all day. That was not where the call had come from.

A concrete wall
ran along the length of the street, separating the pavement from the derelict sports field wedged against the freeway. It was freshly graffitied with chubby, rainbow-hued numbers: 27s. The gang tag stretched its tentacles from the Cape Flats, claiming Coronation Street and its surroundings for the Afghans. Just another franchise establishing its brand. That’s what a sociologist in Jesus sandals
had told Riedwaan Faizal. Like McDonald’s handing out happy meals. Riedwaan snorted. More like dogs marking their territory. Dogs with new masters, hoping that a bit of piss and a lot of terror would hand this territory to them.

The girls had sprinted across the sports field that day, dropping their satchels and scattering schoolbooks along the way. Their shoes and grey skirts were streaked
with mud. The younger girl’s bobby socks had slipped below the plaster on her left shin. They had known what was coming. The older girl’s arms were wrapped around the younger one. The bullets that ripped through her back had exploded through the smaller one’s slender body, just below the badge on her maroon school jersey. Puberty had just settled, light as a butterfly, on the child’s body – glossing
and thickening her hair, swelling the exposed nipple.

Riedwaan had brushed her cooling cheek, the coin that was balanced on her open eye sliding into his palm. Heads. It was still warm.

Sergeant Rita Mkhize was tracking the girls’ path from the pavement. Short hair twisted into dreads, just over a metre and a half tall, forty-five kilograms: too small to hold a machine gun properly. Which
might have been a good thing: she got the
moer
in quickly, and she was a lethal shot. She had been his partner for a couple of months now. She kept an eye on him, but she knew how to watch his back. He was getting used to her.

She held up a bloodstained algebra paper.

‘The Maitland School for Girls.’ Then she read out the names on their school bags. ‘Sisters. Grade nine. Grade four, the
little one.’ Rita stood up, zipping her hoodie and stamping her feet, ‘Can’t be more than ten. A baby.’

‘My baby’s seven on Tuesday,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You signed the Canada papers yet?’ Rita asked.

‘Van Rensburg would never have asked me a personal question like that,’ said Riedwaan’s.

‘He’s not your partner any more,’ shrugged Rita. ‘So, did you?’

The arrival of the ballistics
van saved Riedwaan from having to answer. Shorty de Lange was alone, the way he liked it.

‘Keep that lot away from me,’ De Lange greeted them. The five o’clock crowd, on its way home from work, was pressing against the crime scene tape. The woman who ran the corner café was telling everyone who’d listen what she had seen; it was not much. She had heard the shots. She had waited for a bit.
She had heard a car – it sounded like an expensive one – going fast, doing a wheelie. Then she had gone outside to look. Nothing in the street, just the two girls in the field, dead. Riedwaan had written this down in his little black book. Statements walked, in cases like this.

‘I’m going to mark my territory and then I’m going to start working. If one of your friends here crosses the line,
Faizal, I’m out of here.’

‘Nice to see you too, Shorty.’ Riedwaan moved towards the tape. He was not a big man, but there was a tautness to his shoulders that made the murmuring onlookers take a step back.

‘A gang hit?’ De Lange scanned the ground. There were a couple of casings on the pavement, one near the bodies. He bagged and tagged them.

‘Some slime with a lot to prove climbing
the ranks, looks like,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Really proves you’re a man, shooting a girl in the head from close range.’

‘Makes a change from cops taking out their own families,’ said De Lange.

‘Been bad?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Worse than Christmas. One this month and three in July. Where’ve you been?’

‘Busy,’ said Riedwaan.

‘I heard,’ said De Lange. All the time he was talking, he was
working too. Close-ups of things that people from ballistics find interesting. Twists of metal. Angles. Grooves in a piece of wood. Holes in things. Casings. Where they were lying. Why they were lying there. ‘This special operation of yours. Got some stupid name, hasn’t it?’

‘Operation Hope.’

‘More stupid than I thought.’ De Lange retreated behind his camera, bending his lanky frame over
the girls for close-ups of the bullets’ entry and exit points. ‘Whose idea was that?’

‘Communications said we should project a more positive image to the community,’ Riedwaan said. ‘Not stereotype the disadvantaged young men who might have wished to make alternative life choices. That’s how they put it.’

‘How would you put it?’

‘Not like that,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You know these girls?’

‘Not yet,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Although I imagine they had an alternative life choice in mind when they got up in the morning.’

‘Pathologist here yet?’

On cue, the black 1972 Jag nosed its way through the crowd. Same vintage as Riedwaan, though better cared for than himself during the past year or so.

‘Doc,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Faizal, you fucker.’ Piet Mouton heaved his considerable
bulk out of the car. He was in black tie, his professorial wisps of hair tamed for the occasion. ‘What’ve you interrupted me for this time?’

‘Skipping meals will do you good,’ said Riedwaan.

‘This wasn’t dinner, Faizal. My wife has ballet tickets. She’s going to kill me for this.’ Mouton pulled his bag out of the boot. ‘Not a good sign that you’re here, Shorty. High e.tv factor?’

‘Couldn’t be higher. Schoolgirls who live in a proper house. By the looks of their uniforms, Mom and Dad have jobs. The Minister’s balls on toast for this one.’ De Lange stepped out of the way.

‘Shit.’ Mouton paled at the bloody love knot of limbs tangled on the path. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Anonymous call to the gang hotline half an hour ago,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You got a trace yet?’

‘We’re working on it,’ said Riedwaan. ‘This area, though, the only eyewitnesses you get are blind or dead.’

Mouton knelt down beside the bodies. He uncurled the fourteen-year-old’s fingers, first the right hand, then the left. There was no staining on the thumbs or the index fingers.

‘Makes a change,’ said Mouton. ‘She’s not been smoking tik, this one.’ He lifted the older girl’s skirt
and pulled away her panties to reveal pale, unblemished skin. ‘No tattoos. Not gang cherries, these.’

‘Captain Faizal?’ Riedwaan turned, facing straight into a lens. ‘Good to see your suspension’s over.’ Stringy hair, not much chin, zoom lens a third arm – the photographer flashed his camera.

‘You.’ Riedwaan put his hand up to avoid being flashed again. ‘How do you vultures get here so
fast?’

‘I got my contacts, Captain. Like you.’

‘Faizal.’ Next to him a journalist. Similar-looking, with even less chin. Between the two of them, they had the Flats covered. ‘
Voice of the Cape
,’ he announced, jerking a thumb backwards in the direction of the dead girls. ‘Names?’

‘Next-of-fucking-kin first.’

The photographer zoomed in on the bags, intending to decipher the names
later from the jumble of pixels.

‘This linked to your one-man crusade against gangsters, Captain Faizal?’ The journalist flipped open his notebook, pen poised.

‘I’m a Muslim,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Crusades are not my thing.’

‘You giving up?’ Camera shutter firing.

‘We’re following procedure.’ The words unfamiliar. A month ago he had told a journalist how many shootings there had been
in Cape Town, how many dockets had walked, and which gangsters had hosted cocktail parties for which city officials. This had pleased the public, but it made the politicians look bad. Politicians were not people Riedwaan lost sleep over, but the threat of permanent assignment to the evidence store had persuaded him to give them and their euphemisms some consideration.

‘What does that mean,
Captain?’ The journalist again. ‘In practice – when you’ve got two girls executed on the way home from school? It’s got Voëltjie Ahrend’s signature all over it. Voëltjie Ahrend and his new best friends, the Afghans.’ The journalist held up two yellowed fingers. ‘The horsemen of the apocalypse, Captain. You know who they are. You know what they drive. You know where they live. What the fuck kind of
procedure do you need?’

‘I suggest you phone the SAPS Director of Communications and ask her.’ Riedwaan put his hand in his pocket. The coin was there, in a bag. The third in three weeks. ‘She should be able to explain – if she can get her nose out of a communications manual long enough to pick up the phone.’

‘I’ve heard you’re being moved out of the Gang Unit.’ The reporter flipped through
his notebook, found his notes, and read from them. ‘A Director Ndlovu has been critical of you. No place for your attitudes, your methods, in a force that focuses on community policing, she says. Any comment?’

‘Our communications department will tell you that the human resource deployment strategies of the SAPS are confidential. Shall I explain what that means?’ Riedwaan had him by his shoulder.
His mouth was close to his ear. ‘It’s government for fuck off.’

Riedwaan let the journalist go and wiped his hand on his jeans. ‘Persuade this lot that the show is over,’ he said to a uniformed officer.

‘Rita, will you finish here?’ said Riedwaan. ‘I have a strategy meeting with Phiri.’

‘You want me to bring you something to eat later?’ she asked.

‘The way to a man’s heart.’ Riedwaan
had to bang the Mazda’s door twice before it would shut. ‘What you getting?’

‘Nando’s.’

‘I can live with chicken,’ said Riedwaan. ‘If it’s peri-peri.’

Riedwaan’s phone vibrated against his chest. He pulled it out to check the calls he’d missed. At five-thirty-two, a missed call from a number he didn’t recognise.

He called it back.

Somewhere, a phone began to ring into the silence.

After twenty rings, the network cut him off.

Clare Hart stood in her bathroom, her nipples darkening as the late afternoon chill came in through the open window. She snapped it shut and turned on the shower, lifting her face to the water and washing away the day. It was a while before she turned off the taps.

Clare dried her hair, twisting it before pinning it on top of her head as she faced her reflection. Dark rings under the
sharp blue eyes. Too much coffee, too little sleep. She erased the rings with concealer, and put colour back in her cheeks with a brush. Her public face.

She was famished. In the fridge was a punnet of strawberries, a jar of mayonnaise, whiskey. And cat food that she tipped into a bowl for Fritz. Clare settled for the strawberries, looking out of the window as she ate, the moon a pale crescent
above Lion’s Head. The muezzin’s call to prayer, beckoning above the melancholy sound of the late-afternoon traffic, insinuated itself into the cold air coming off the Atlantic. She finished the strawberries. The whiskey was tempting, but it did not seem a good idea on such an empty stomach, not tonight.

Shower. Hair. Face. Food.

Clothes.

That’s what she needed next.

In the spare
room Clare searched her underwear drawer, finding a pair of black panties but no stockings. Shaking out her dress, she slid it over her head, the black silk settling against her skin. She slipped on her new shoes and turned in front of the mirror, swirling her dress against her bare legs, a child for a second, playing dress-up in her mother’s finery.

Her handbag was on the floor in her bedroom.
She rifled through it.

Phone.

Comb.

Driver’s licence.

Lipstick.

Speech.

Keys.

Gun.

Taking it out of the bag, she held it a while, the metal warming in her hand. Neither of her sisters liked guns and she’d be seeing them both later. She put it away in the drawer next to her bed. She had an hour or so yet, so she made herself a cup of tea and took it through to her
study.