Daddy's Girl (34 page)

‘But it’s my fault.’ Calvaleen curled herself into a foetal position. ‘This is all my fault.’

Latisha cradled her daughter’s body, rocking her.

‘Yasmin?’

‘It’s okay, she’s alive,’ said Latisha, smoothing
the dark tangle of hair from her daughter’s forehead. ‘Like you.’

‘And Papa?’

‘Gone to work,’ said Latisha. ‘Fixing things up, at last.’

The girl stared at her mother.

‘What do you mean, Mama? What’s he doing?’

‘You have to believe him,’ said Latisha. ‘He’s putting things right. Give him this chance.’

‘I have to take a bath,’ said Calvaleen. ‘I’m so dirty.’

Latisha
covered her daughter and ran a bath, filling it to the brim. She went back to Calvaleen’s bedroom and helped her into a sitting position, easing off her top.

‘Can you stand?’ She got her upright and took off her shoes and filthy jeans. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. Calvaleen swayed in front of her mother, the veins on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees tracked with scabs.

‘I’ll hold on to you, Ma.’ Calvaleen put an arm around her mother’s waist and allowed herself to be helped into the bath. Latisha rubbed soap onto a sponge and washed her daughter’s wasted body.

‘We’ll do your hair tomorrow,’ she said.

Calvaleen’s eyes, circled with dark shadows, did not move from her mother’s face.

‘Shall I put you to bed?’ asked Latisha. ‘Then we can think about
what to do.’

She wrapped a clean towel around Calvaleen and got her into bed. Latisha covered her with the quilt.

‘Take this,’ she said, handing her daughter one of her own tranquillisers. ‘It’ll help you sleep. Help you until we can get you back to the clinic.’

‘Don’t leave me, Mama.’ Calvaleen folded herself against her mother’s body.

‘I won’t leave you,
my engeltjie,
’ she whispered,
working her fingers through her daughter’s hair.

She listened to the trucks as they headed into the darkness, towards Johannesburg, until Calvaleen fell asleep.

Latisha lay down, her arm around her daughter, easing her into the hollow of her belly.

‘Phiri said you’d be here.’ Riedwaan, relieved, when Clare buzzed him in.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.

‘Clinton van Rensburg released me. Phiri’s orders. But he told me that if I wanted back-up I had to give him everything. I’m supposed to be at home, staying out of the way.’

‘And did you give Van Rensburg everything?’

‘Everything I had at the time. Filled the back
of a business card.’

‘The heroin dockets?’ asked Clare.

‘Them too,’ he said. ‘Those threw him.’

‘Did he have anything to do with the cases?’

‘Not directly,’ said Riedwaan. ‘He’s off active duty. Does resource deployment now, corruption control. That kind of thing. Van Rensburg’s fanatical. Doesn’t like things to be out of order. And this business with the heroin cases will need
explaining when it’s…’ Riedwaan pulled out his cigarettes. ‘When this is over.’ He crumpled the empty packet and lobbed it into the bin. ‘I’ll be needing more of these. You need anything?’

‘A Coke, please.’

Riedwaan paused at the map, tracing the lines back to the evidence summaries that Clare had made for each of the little girls. The abbreviated lives, the sparse detail. Name, date of
birth, date and cause of death.

Yasmin there too. Not yet marked as dead.

‘It’s been more than seventy-two hours. If she wasn’t mine, I’d recognise this for what it is,’ said Riedwaan at the door. ‘A murder investigation.’

It took a moment for Clare to realise that the unfamiliar sound was coming from Riedwaan’s phone. He’d left it on the desk, with his jacket.

Clare handed him
the phone when he returned. ‘This came through.’

‘It’s a video clip,’ said Riedwaan. An unfamiliar voice spilled into Clare’s study.

‘Rock ’n roll now, daddy’s girl.’

The instruction off-camera.

‘Dance for your daddy.’

Yasmin, hollow-eyed, hair tangled, filled the screen. She lifted her arms above her head and danced.

‘Sing for him too. Rock it, baby girl, see if he can
find you.’

She started singing. Her voice reedy in the darkened room.

‘When I was one. I had just begun.

When I was two, I was nearly new.

When I was three, I was hardly me.

When I was four, I wasn’t much more.

When I was five, I was barely alive.

But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever.

I think I’ll be six foreve
r
and forever.’

The child came to a slow, twirling
halt. Then she crumpled to the floor, the vertebrae in her neck a delicate chain disappearing under her leotard. The screech of metal, a door opening.

The phone connection broke, leaving silence in its wake.

‘That was pre-recorded. Look at the light shafting in, that’s sunlight,’ said Clare.

Riedwaan glanced at the moonless night outside. ‘And it must have been this afternoon. First
time the sun’s been out since Friday.’

‘Let me download that,’ she said. ‘See if we can get more detail on my laptop.’

She pressed play again.

The man’s instructions.

‘Rock ’n roll now, daddy’s girl. Dance for your daddy.’

Riedwaan put his hand on the screen, touching the spectral image of his daughter.

‘She danced this for her last Eisteddfod,’ whispered Riedwaan. ‘Won
gold for it.’

‘Is that why she picked this dance?’

Riedwaan shook his head. ‘It’s a message to me,’ he said. ‘I arrived just as she started,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Yasmin saw me in the doorway. I think it was her smile that won the medal for her. She lit up the stage.’

Clare put her hand out, the desire to absorb the burden of Riedwaan’s despair overwhelming, but he moved out of reach. His
eyes were on his child, collapsing into the dirt, the fight knocked out of her.

Clare led a cable from her computer through to the large screen where she watched her rough cuts. She slotted in the disk that Danny Roman had given her and ran the recording, magnifying the ambient sound. She closed her eyes and listened.

‘When I was one, I had just begun…’

She listened, teasing the sound
out, but she already knew that the recording had been made in the same or a similar environment to the first one.

‘When I was two…’

‘It’s the same background sound. You can put it off.’ said Riedwaan. ‘She’s still in the same area. That’s something. They’re not moving around with her.’

‘Makes it harder to find her,’ said Clare. ‘It means they have her somewhere they feel very secure.
If they moved her, there’d be a better chance of a sighting.’

Clare turned to press play again. ‘The instruction. Sorry, but I need to listen to that again.’

She went back to the beginning of the recording.

‘Rock ’n roll now, daddy’s girl. Dance for your daddy.’

‘The roll on the “r”,’ said Clare. ‘I have to check something. She scratched through her notes for the number, punched
it in. It rang a long time before being answered.

‘I’m sorry, Professor Young,’ said Clare. ‘It’s late to be phoning.’

‘No, Dr Hart,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m just old. It takes me a long time to get to the phone. But you must need something if you’re calling me again?’

‘Would you mind listening to something?’

Clare played the message again.

‘“Now we are Six”, by A A Milne,’ said
the Professor. ‘But you probably know that, you look as if you were decently educated.’

‘Not the poem, Professor,’ said Clare. ‘The voice. The man’s voice at the beginning. Listen to him, the man at the beginning.’

She played it again.

The phone line crackled.

‘Professor, are you all right?’

‘That accent, that Malmesbury bray. It’s just the shock, hearing him again.’

‘Thanks,
Professor.’ Clare disconnected. ‘He recognised the accent.’

‘The tattoo boy. The boys with the bray.’ Riedwaan nodded slowly. ‘The ones who beat up the old man also took Yasmin. So who are they, apart from coming from the platteland?’

‘Who they are, I have no idea. No prints on the pen, and nothing showed up on the tattoo either. No records in any of the tattoo parlours, nor in the gang
member registers.’

‘So they take her and they keep her and then send a clip to torture me – but with no demands. What for? Who for?’

‘Rita also checked the juvenile section,’ said Clare. ‘Nothing. Either it was missed or he’s never been arrested. Freelance, maybe? Pearl thought he could be.’

‘That’s unlikely, on Voëltjie Ahrend’s territory,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Are you going to call
Phiri?’ asked Clare. ‘Hand the info over to him?’

‘He’s got Salome Ndlovu breathing down his neck. I’ve got more chance with just the two of us. Yasmin… Yasmin’s got…’ He couldn’t finish the sentence.

‘There’s some lasagne left in the fridge,’ said Clare. ‘You look like you haven’t eaten. Make yourself some coffee too.’

‘Thanks,’ Riedwaan replied. ‘You want some?’

‘Just the coffee.
Milk, no sugar.’

Fritz padded across the balcony and sat expectantly at the sliding door. Clare opened it to let her in. She stepped outside for a moment, glad to escape, watching the lights in the flats across the road. Only a police van moved along Beach Road, getting a feel of things. Not much going on. Monday night; quiet.

The patrol vehicle turned and headed back, stopping at a red
light. The number of the vehicle was printed on the roof, large enough to be read by a helicopter, if necessary.

By the time the vehicle moved forward, Clare was at her computer again.

Her body rigid, she re-played the clip. The sound off, this time. She froze the images, zooming in so close that the little girl collapsed on the floor dissolved into pixels. Clare zoomed past her, focusing
on a metal box on the wall behind her.

She had it.

‘Riedwaan!’ the urgency in her voice brought him out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist.

‘Look at this.’ She tapped at the old numbers, long-forgotten after the building had been abandoned and the power switched off.

‘An electricity meter?’

Clare held up her hand, her phone already at her ear.

‘Charlie?’

‘Hey, Doc.’

‘Your hacker friend. He can access the city’s records online, can’t he?’

‘Depends.’ Charlie hedged his bets.

‘For Yasmin,’ said Clare.

She took Charlie’s silence as assent.

‘Riedwaan,’ she called. ‘We’ve got a location.’

‘My name is Yasmin. My name is Yasmin. My name is Yasmin.’

The little girl repeats her mantra to the bird cupped in her hands. She keeps still, holding the tiny pocket of warmth close to her belly. She breathes through her mouth, trying to block out the smell of her prison.

‘Sleep tight, baby.’

Her father’s words under her breath, his voice in her head growing fainter.

Yasmin presses her face against her knees, kissing herself better, feeling the ghostly imprint of his hands around her ribs as he picks her up and holds her above his head while she laughs.

Her tears are hot and wet, but their trail on her cheeks is cold. Yasmin lifts her head up. Is it still so dark? The light brings with it sound. If it were Ramadan, everyone would already be up at this time
and there would be cooking smells.

The thought of food twists in Yasmin’s tummy like a blade.

But light also brings the man.

She begins again; her daddy’s voice in her head saying she is a brave girl as she rocks back and forth.

Her daddy will come.

He will.

He will.

He always knows how to find her when they play hide and seek. She isn’t really playing now, but he will
look for her anyway and show her later all the clues he’d found that had led him to her under the bed or in the tree or next door. He always knows what to look for, her daddy.

Far away, a car.

The first time she’d heard the sound, Yasmin’s heart had leapt, but it is far away and travelling fast. She supposes there’s a road somewhere. No robots or stop streets, because all the engines have
the mosquito whine of a car going fast, far away.

She bows over her bird, clasped in her hands.

The doves, the sparrows.

The creak of the roof.

Strange sounds become familiar.

The screech of metal, as a bolt is drawn, claws its way up her spine, blotting out her hunger. She shrinks back into the darkest corner of the rectangular pit. The doves scuffle and coo.

Yasmin listens
for the footsteps, looks for the silhouette of a man against the dull light.

Cigarette smoke. Close by.

A car, closer than usual.

She stands on tiptoe, peering into the gloom, her little bird’s heart beats wildly against her fingers.

Clare glanced up at Riedwaan, wrote down what Charlie Wang was telling her. ‘It’s somewhere to start, at least,’ she said, pulling the map off her wall. She spread it out in front of her and filled in the coordinates.

‘Maitland,’ said Clare. ‘Coronation Road.’

Riedwaan already had his jacket on. Clare fetched hers, opening the safe next to her bed, the gun warming in her hand as
she took it out and loaded it. The spare ammunition she distributed among her pockets. She grabbed the toolbox at the front door and tossed it into the boot.

Clare took the N1, turning off at the bridge to Maitland. She jumped lanes, taking the next exit that looped back onto Voortrekker Road. All the houses were shuttered and dark. No movement on the street or alongside the squatter camp
in Maitland Cemetery. Clare turned into Coronation Road.