Daddy's Girl (33 page)

The answers right there, on the other side of Pearl’s consciousness, but the only reply Clare got was the gentle clicking and beeping that the machines made.

Clare dumped her laptop, her notes and folders on the kitchen table, with Fritz winding between her legs as she put the kettle on. She picked up the cat and stroked her, trying to tease out a thread of thought that might unravel this.

She sat down, the cat on her lap, and arranged everything she had around her. Checking. Re-checking. The list of numbers from the ballet school. The
teachers. The parents.

No. No one had seen anything.

Yes, they knew the child, she was so gifted. They knew she was missing. It was everywhere in the press, but it happened so often, to those children.

Which children?

Poor children, was their reply. Hard to look after them, really, with both parents working shifts.

One of the fathers had Yasmin’s father’s cell number saved
on his phone. Thought it might be useful in an emergency to have a policeman one knew. Always the possibility of being stopped at a road block – God forbid – a little bit tiddly. The holding cells were not where one wanted to be on a Friday night. He’d had a whiskey with the Captain at a parent’s meeting. Talked about fishing. He hadn’t eaten the ham sandwiches. A Muslim, you know, but not radical
at all.

Most worrying, especially because they all had daughters, etc.

Yes, they would all call her, of course, if they remembered anything.

Simpler, really, if one didn’t see things. And if one did, then far simpler not to remember. Safer, too. She tried Calvaleen van Rensburg for the last time. An electronic voice told her to try later as the subscriber she had dialled was not available.
The service did not allow her to leave a message. She tried her home number. No answer, Latisha out. Probably sitting in Shazia Faizal’s half-packed living room. Waiting. Praying, now.

She leaned her head on her arms, Fritz kneading her thigh, the sharpness of her claws a welcome pain. She allowed the cat’s deep purr to lull her.

Calvaleen’s school diary. It lay amid the detritus on the
table.

Clare picked it up, flicking through it again. Homework assignments, tests, rehearsals. One or two hearts drawn in the narrow spaces left for weekends. One crossed out with a black pen. Blank pages. Calvaleen hadn’t been to school much the last couple of months.

At the end of the diary, a list of cell numbers. Each one assigned to the kind of cryptic nickname that teenage girls
give their friends. Clare ran through them. None of the girls who answered had seen Calvaleen for a while. Moved on, said one. New friends, said another. Boyfriends? Maybe a while back, but no one special. She didn’t like men much and her dad was really strict. One said she had had issues, had taken time out.

Clare paged through the diary again. Then went back to the phone numbers.

The
numbers. The chubby twos and threes, the disjointed fours, the sevens crossed.

Clare pulled out the list of docket numbers that had been dropped through her letter box. She compared them to Calvaleen’s phone numbers, her breath coming fast.

The same writing.

The skinny kid running to catch the taxi.

Calvaleen van Rensburg vanishing into the back streets.

Riedwaan’s boss’s daughter.

Clare arrived at the complex and stopped at the security gate. A security guard – a different one, this time – approached her.

‘Number nine,’ she said. ‘Van Rensburg.’

‘Mrs Latisha is gone out,’ the guard said.

‘I’m dropping something off,’ said Clare.

‘Okay,’ he said, pointing. ‘You park there.’

Clare pulled up next to a man in blue overalls. He was decapitating a few dandelions
that had thrust their yellow heads through the cracks in the paving. The man watched her go round the side of the house.

No one in the tidy kitchen. Or in the main bedroom, with its open curtains. Calvaleen’s were tightly closed. No change there.

The living room was also empty. Plumped diamond-shaped cushions stood on the sofa. The only sign of occupation was the desk by the window. On
it was a telephone, some neatly stacked papers, a beer mug filled with pens, a father’s day card propped up against it. For a father who worked non-stop. Strategic human resource deployment. Even at home: a pile of police dockets. She’d seen them during her visit that morning, but not fully registered what they were about. A note was clipped onto the top of one of the dockets, in Van Zyl’s looped
scrawl.

In a corner of the living room a red eye winked at her. The alarm. She wouldn’t get inside without attracting a lot of attention. Clare glanced in at the garage window. The abandoned workbench.

‘Your friends not in?’ The gardener in his blue overalls.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ she replied.

‘You want to leave a note?’ he asked. ‘I can give it to them.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said
Clare, walking towards her car. ‘I’ll phone them.’

She was already dialling the private number Edgar Phiri had given her.

Clare arrived at Caledon Square just as Salome Ndlovu’s large black BMW pulled up at the main entrance. She watched as the driver opened the door for the Special Director. Ndlovu took a minute to straighten her immaculate hair, button her black jacket. Then she picked up her briefcase and slammed the door behind her.

Using her police pass, Clare followed in her wake, slipping into
the hastily convened press conference. There was no sign of Riedwaan Faizal or of Rita Mkhize. Edgar Phiri stood behind a bank of microphones and cables. Special Director Ndlovu had positioned herself next to him. Phiri took all the questions machine-gunned by journalists outraged at the murder of first Noor Khan, and then Chanel Adams. The tabloids were furious at the suspension of Captain Faizal,
and Phiri directed their questions to Salome Ndlovu. She deflected them with turgid quotes from the policies her unit was implementing, and by criticising the ‘macho’ attitudes of both the so-called Gang Unit and the press assembled before her.

The press pack lost interest in Phiri and he stepped back, a police press officer taking his place. Ndlovu was onto her third prepared statement when
he slipped out.

Clare followed him.

‘Dr Hart,’ said Phiri, closing the door behind her. ‘It looks like we have a stalemate.’ The chess game on his desk had remained untouched since Saturday.

‘Seems Director Ndlovu’s gender equity programme’s not going down too well as a measure for combating organised crime?’

‘I apparently fail to understand the programme. Or the complexities of
a globalised economy,’ said Phiri. ‘I pointed out that the South African Police Service is not the Communist Party, that we answer to the people, not to a politburo reborn as a cabinet. And that unlawfully arresting one of my most senior officers will not find a missing child, nor will it reduce crime. Also, just because Faizal functions independently, doesn’t make him a traitor.’

‘Your whole
unit is notoriously independent, though,’ said Clare.

‘Only till the end of the month,’ said Phiri. ‘The order disbanding it was quietly signed on Friday. It goes through cabinet and comes into effect on the thirty-first.’

‘The way of the Scorpions?’

‘Yes.’ said Phiri. ‘But until then, the Gang Unit is still mine and it remains under my command.’

‘It must have helped Salome Ndlovu
and her bosses to have something to pin on Faizal, to get him out of the way for a couple of crucial days,’ said Clare. ‘Don’t you think the timing of Yasmin’s disappearance is remarkable – dovetailing as it did with the trouble he and his wife have been having?’

‘Risky, though,’ he tapped his pen against his watch. ‘The timing of it… the fact that the child’s ballet class ended early.’

‘Still, you wouldn’t put it past the Special Director?’

‘Salome Ndlovu?’ Phiri frowned. ‘But she’s hard to read. During her years in exile she perfected the art of self-erasure. I was with her in a couple of places she stayed in – the USSR, Tanzania. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs on display, no books next to her bed.’

‘Didn’t want to reveal who she was and where she
came from?’

‘Precisely. And she hates Faizal, I know that, and she’s out to destroy him. Him and men like him, but there’s always been an elegance to her cruelty which this abduction lacks.’

‘And Delport?’

‘Easy to box. Apartheid caricature. It can be quite a comfort to have him around. So everyone can be sure who’s the enemy. He’ll go back to the Narcs anyway, so no problem with him.’

‘Van Rensburg?’

‘He’s had a lot to deal with,’ said Phiri. ‘Old school. Won’t go for help. It’ll do him good to be at home, spend some time with his wife and daughter. Maybe find a way to live again.’

Clare considered the black bishop on the chess board.

‘There’s something else on your mind, Dr Hart?’

‘Yes there is,’ said Clare. ‘What does the name Gorky mean to you?’

‘The
park in Moscow I mentioned to you before. Where I learnt to play chess, remember?’ said Phiri. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s a name that’s come up a couple of times,’ said Clare, moving the bishop diagonally. ‘A nightclub that Voëltjie Ahrend seems to be connected with. Gorky Investments is registered as the owner.’

‘Strip clubs and brothels are legitimate businesses these days,’ said Phiri.
‘All those soccer fans to satisfy.’

‘I was attacked outside a Gorky club. The Winter Palace. I never saw the man because he put a sack over my head,’ said Clare. ‘The first person I did see after I got away from him was your colleague.’

‘Salome Ndlovu?’

‘Her and her bodyguards,’ said Clare. ‘So I wondered if she’d been following me to keep tabs on Riedwaan, or if it was just chance
because she had business at the Winter Palace. Or both.’

‘I’ve been told that the lines of enquiry of my unit are misguided. And that several of my operations, particularly into the business ventures of a young entrepreneur called Germaine Ahrend – the name, by the way, on Faizal’s friend Voëltjie’s birth certificate – anyway, these operations are hampering business development in the Cape.’

‘And one of these is Gorky Investments?’

‘Yes, that’s one of the names,’ said Phiri. ‘How did you connect them to this?’

‘Three heroin busts. Very clean, pure heroin. All taken in for testing, then the dockets disappeared. The drugs too.’

‘How do you know this, Dr Hart?’

Clare did her trust calculation. ‘The docket numbers were dropped off at my house.’ For Yasmin’s sake, she
hoped that her instincts were right. ‘With a piece of elastic wrapped around them. The busts seemed fine – random searches, a neighbour complaining about noise, that type of thing. But I did some digging on the venues. Two of the three belong to companies that can be linked back to Gorky Investments. Lots of veils, lots of shells, but that’s where it goes back to. So what I want to know is: who
exactly is Gorky Investments?’

‘Gorky Investments has a long history of cooperation with the struggle, dating back to our time in the USSR,’ said Phiri.

‘Which no longer exists,’ observed Clare.

‘Our operations are threatening current relations with important businessmen in Russia. Many of the people we’ve been targeting have a lot of money to invest, and in these tough economic times
it is apparently important to value business that brings in jobs, money,’ said Phiri.

‘Import export,’ said Clare. ‘Always a good cover. The only cover. Then property and mining to launder the money. South Africa’s the perfect place: financial institutions, flexible politicians, badly-paid cops.’

‘Gorky Investments is on our list. They bring legitimate business, and then they set up the
channels for other far more profitable, but illegal trades. This is what Captain Faizal has been investigating for months, why we’re being shut down.’

‘But kidnapping Yasmin? And without any demands?’ Clare asked. ‘Is it a punishment? What’s the point?’

‘That is what I’m unable to work out,’ said Phiri. ‘Why a small part of me thought that maybe he’d cracked, that he had taken her to keep
the one thing he loves close to him. That is what I hoped for.’

‘So did I,’ said Clare. ‘But he doesn’t have her, and if she wasn’t taken by the man who took Chanel Adams, or someone like him, then she may still be alive. That’s what I’m working with.’

‘Captain Faizal is no longer a suspect in this case,’ said Phiri. ‘He never should have been, but I miscalculated how to play this.’ Phiri
turned his pen over in his hand. ‘I am hoping, Dr Hart, that you will find her alive. What do you need for this?’

‘I need Captain Faizal,’ said Clare.

‘There’s the fact that he’s been accused of assaulting a police officer to be cleared away.’

‘That’s all bullshit,’ said Clare.

‘The essence of politics,’ said Phiri. ‘That, and paperwork. I’ll sort it out. And as soon as it’s done,
he’ll be out of the building. Where shall I tell him to find you?’

‘Like any good woman,’ smiled Clare, ‘I’ll be waiting at home.’

The front door. A click. Then nothing more.

Latisha van Rensburg stiffened.

Someone was at the front door.

She de-activated the alarm, then picked up a paring knife from the draining board and went down the passage. She kept close to the wall so that whoever it was wouldn’t see her outline through the pane.

‘It’s me.’ That voice.

The knife clattered to the floor, Latisha’s
hands slippery as she fumbled for the key to the security grille, slid back the bolts, and got the door open in time to catch her daughter in her arms.

‘Mama.’ Calvaleen’s breath on her neck as she helped her to her bedroom.

Latisha laid her on the clean sheets, a tang of lemon in the air after the spring-cleaning she had given the room after Clare Hart’s visit.

‘Mama,
ek’s jammer
.’ Her daughter’s lips were cracked, her ribs corrugated under the pallid skin, where her blouse had rucked up.

‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said her mother. ‘
Jy’t huis toe gekom
.’