Daddy's Girl (4 page)

Clare had designed this eyrie for solitude, the furnishings pared down to the minimum. Shelves. Desk. Chair. The shelves were filled with files, books, and her investigative documentaries. Recording equipment was stacked on the floor next to the desk Clare had inherited from her doctor father, her laptop looking out of place on its worn oak surface. One wall was a pinning board crammed
with notes, press cuttings, photographs, invitations. An aerial map covered two more walls. The fourth wall was glass, giving her an ever-changing view of the sea. On her desk were the final cuts for her television series
Missing
. Each one twenty-seven minutes long, cut to fill television’s prime-time slot. Each programme bore a girl’s name; each was the portrait of a girl who had gone missing.
The quick and the dead, survivors and victims. Not always easy to tell them apart.

Clare rummaged through a box under her desk. She had already packed her tapes away, the bits she’d culled that could still be used for another half-hour programme. She pulled out the one she wanted to see again. The one that haunted her, the one Mrs Adams’s question had recalled.

Pearl.

The camera had
been locked onto her. She faced it, head and shoulders framed by the light filtering through the square of window. Her hair short, spiky; her neck drawn into shoulders that had at an early age discovered the advantage of brute strength, and worked hard to achieve it. Even so, her stance, her man’s shirt, the baggy khakis, the boots – all of this failed to conceal the small bones, the narrowness
of wrist and ankle.

‘Tell me who you are.’ Clare’s own voice, off-screen, startled her.

The silhouetted girl did not respond at once; yet watching her now, once again, Clare could see her draw herself up. She reached for the Coke in front of her and sipped it, preparing for her confession as she faced the eye of the camera.

‘You can call me Pearl.’ Her voice harsh from many years of
smoking. ‘My last name I’ll keep for myself. I’m twenty-two years old and I grew up there.’ She pointed behind the camera towards the cinder block flats bedecked with washing and adorned with graffiti; stone-eyed men were draped against the entrances.

‘It’s not a place for a woman.’

Clare had zoomed in on Pearl’s twisting fingers, the nails gnawed down to the pink half-moons.

‘And
it’s not a place for little girls. If I tell you my story, you’ll know why.’

No one else in the room, just the two of them, with the comforting whirr of the camera. Pearl’s eyes were a yellow-brown – tiger’s eyes – though the left one drooped; a scar ran through her eyebrow, across the lid, disappearing onto the high, wide plane of her cheekbone.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Clare’s voice
interjecting off-camera.

‘How must I tell my secret if I stay hidden?’ Pearl’s hands turned outwards, asking a question she had already answered.

‘My name is Pearl and this is my story,’ she repeated, not to Clare this time, but to some imaginary audience.

‘My mother didn’t stop it. My grandmother didn’t stop it, even though they could have so easily by just telling me who they were,
who my father was. If they’d let me carry their secrets in my heart, they’d have become my weapons. I could’ve protected myself.’

Pearl leaned forward, her face filling the screen.

‘They could have protected me.’

No tears in her eyes: much too late for that.

‘Go on then, Pearl.’ Clare felt it again, the weight of confession, of being the person who asked the question, who appeared
to ease the load because her camera recorded the story, the secrets, the hurt. ‘Start at the beginning.’

‘I always thought I would know where to begin. I would be able to go back there and restart things another way.’ Pearl slowly shook her head sideways. ‘The beginning is lost, but where I can start is at the end. Because the end is always a new beginning.’

Voices in the distance, shouting,
a woman singing. Clare had got up and closed the door, entombing them both in silence as they sat on either side of the bare wooden table.

‘Okay,’ Clare had said. ‘I’m rolling again.’

Pearl had looked down at her hands as if they were not part of her body. She’d undone her top button. Then the next, and the next, until she could shrug off her shirt like a skin she no longer needed.

She moved her fingertips across her clavicle. Smooth on the right, the left jagged where the cracked bone had knitted beneath her skin. She put her hands over her breasts, full against the ribs ridging her skin. Around the left breast a circle of round scars. Bite marks.

‘This is where my story is written,’ she said. ‘On my body. Maybe I should start here. It’s not the beginning but it is all
part of the same book. My name is Pearl. Pearl de Wet. My father is a general in the 27s. Those are the two most important things you need to know about me.’

She peeled back her clothes, revealing the script that bore witness to her secret. Tattoos, scars, cut marks – the slender white lines on her thighs – until she stood naked in front of the camera. Clare froze the image. A daughter of
violence, made lean and sinewy by her refusal to die. This silent witnessing had not made the final cut. Too raw, too shocking for people eating dinner in front of their TV sets.

Clare’s tea had grown cold while she watched. She pushed her cup away and looked out over the choppy ocean. The programme,
Pearl
, had run again last night, moved to prime time on the eve of Women’s Day.

Giles
Reid, her producer for the series, had loved the Pearl episode, was thrilled with a second sale, the publicity it had given the gala performance tonight of the ballet,
Persephone
. He had left her two messages to tell her this – and one to ask about her speech before the gala, reminding her that it would be a live broadcast. She had not replied, unable to think of what she might say, knowing what
he wanted from her.

Clare switched her camera on. It hummed as that afternoon’s footage digitised, the images flickering on her screen. She checked through the tape, jumping through the rough footage until Mrs Adams’s face filled the screen as she pleaded for her daughter. Clare had panned to the child’s portrait in the display cabinet: the kernel around which she would wrap her next film.

The search for the child had begun in earnest after the local police were called. The last part of her interview was done outside: the head of the Neighbourhood Watch street committee and some uniformed cops, behind them a rubbish-filled culvert, the metal grille propped open to reveal an ambiguous heap under a sack in the shadowed tunnel. The credits would run over the image of a missing green-eyed
child, framed and sealed behind glass – before the screen went black. ‘What does one more little girl mean, in a war?’ The mother’s anguished question floating in the dark.

The phone was ringing. Clare scrabbled for it, finding it under the
Cape Times
.

‘Hello.’

‘Dr Hart?’ The voice knotted her stomach.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got another one for you.’

‘Who found her?’

‘Kids. Playing.
She’s Muslim, so I’m doing her now. Bring a pair of socks.’

The kitchen clock chimed six.

Clare put on her coat, pulling the belt tight over her hollow belly. She set the burglar alarm, locked the front door and hurried to her car. No one about, except the Congolese car guard who was her self-appointed protector. She waved at him as she joined the stream of cars heading into town. She
pushed in a CD, turning up the volume. Moby. The music so loud it drowned her thoughts. She would have just enough time for her detour if the lights were on her side.

She put her foot down and took the first set on orange.

‘What size are you?’ Dr Ruth Lyndall’s dark hair was cropped short. If the pathologist had put on make-up that morning, it had long since worn off.

‘Five,’ said Clare. ‘Why?’

‘I thought I might as well set you to work right away. Try these, then.’ She selected a pair of gumboots from the communal heap. ‘They’re our new director’s. She’s the same size. As stubborn as you, too, convinced
that if enough people know what’s happening to our little girls, it will stop. And Senior Superintendent Edgar Phiri signed the approval for your research this afternoon.’

‘Head of the Gang Unit?’

‘That’s your man,’ said Ruth.

‘What’s he like?’ asked Clare.

‘Reminded me of those early pictures of Mandela. Tall and honourable and saintly-looking, but looks like he knows how to fight
his way out of a corner.’

‘He must stand out in the police force.’

‘Phiri’s unit gets things done, and that has pissed off some senior people. Don’t be too hard on the cops. Phiri’s approved your research.’

‘All of it?’

‘All of it,’ said the pathologist. ‘That’s why you’re trying on the new boots. You’re going to be attending more autopsies than you can imagine.’

Clare took
off her heels and pulled on some socks. She pushed her feet into the white boots and pulled a green hospital gown over her evening dress.

‘Let me help you.’

Ruth Lyndall took the belt, looping it twice. She rested her hands on Clare’s narrow waist, her face next to Clare’s in the mirror. Forty-three. Ten years older than Clare. Ten years wiser.

‘You’re running on empty, Clare.’

‘I’m just running.’

‘It won’t fix things.’

‘It might fix me.’ She took a mask and unclipped the perspex eye shield, throwing it into the bin.

‘You won’t be needing that?’

‘I won’t be staying for the blood splatter,’ said Clare.

‘I didn’t think so, dressed like that,’ she smiled. ‘A date?’

‘The gala ballet I’m hosting.’

‘
Persephone
. Of course. Your fundraising thing.’

‘Finding missing girls, helping them heal, returning them to their mothers.’

‘It’s not going to help the little one on the slab. She’s with Hades for good.’

‘Does she have a name?’ asked Clare.

‘A
weggooi
kind
like this?’ Ruth’s voice was bitter. ‘Even a throwaway child has a name. Look in the docket there. She’s one of yours.’

Clare opened the folder. ‘Noor Khan. No address.’

‘Her mother lives in that squatter camp in the Maitland Cemetery. Tik addict, according to the cops. They’re trying to sober her up now.’

‘Where was she found?’

‘Kids found her in a field, that empty land between the docks and Cape Town station. The cops said they were playing. I would’ve said scavenging.’

‘When did she go missing?’ asked Clare.

‘She didn’t, not according to
anybody who should’ve noticed.’

‘No one reported it?’

‘The cops who brought her here spoke to the mother. She said she hadn’t seen the child since yesterday. Maybe the day before. Said she didn’t think about it because she often ran away.’

‘How’d they identify her?’ asked Clare.

‘One of the boys knew her. Her cousin, I think. The mother came here. Confirmed it. Looked tearful for
the tabloids that some enterprising uncle had thought to call.’

‘It says here that someone’s been arrested,’ said Clare.

‘A man who lived nearby,’ Ruth explained. ‘He had blood on his clothes and the mother owed him money. A bit of DNA will tie up that loose end.’

Clare put her mask on, tying it tightly in place. It wouldn’t help with the smell, but it was a barrier of sorts. She followed
the pathologist into the section of the mortuary where no living members of the public were admitted.

‘No investigating officer?’ asked Clare.

‘She couldn’t be here now. She’ll come by later, if she can,’ answered Dr Lyndall. ‘Friday night rush. Two girls dead in Maitland.’

‘When did they go missing?’

‘They didn’t,’ said Ruth. ‘Shot on their way home from school. Gang crossfire,
if you’re feeling charitable. An execution so that someone could move up the ranks of the 27s, if you’re not. Makes no difference to them now.’

‘Were you at the scene?’

‘Piet Mouton went,’ said the pathologist, unlocking her office. ‘But they’re coming here, so I said I’d see to them. I just have to get something to eat first.’

Dr Lyndall greeted the two orderlies smoking outside. ‘
Sal julle die kind inbring
?’ Discussing that night’s soccer match, the orderlies sauntered off to fetch the child’s body.

Clare waited in the draughty passage. To the left of the room facing her, the day’s carnage had been cleared away. Twelve clean metal trays were lined up, six on either side of the room: ready for the first batch who weren’t going to make it through the weekend. To the right,
hidden from her view, were the fridges. The orderlies returned, deftly manoeuvring the trolley, and parked it in an empty space in the cutting room.

‘You ready, Clare?’

‘I’m ready.’

She wasn’t. The gurney was too big. And the body on the steel tray too small, as the pathologist pulled back the sheet. The child’s bloodless lips curved in a parody of the grin slashed into the slender
column of her neck. Clare squeezed the palms of her hands together, the pain of the ring biting into her fingers a distraction.

‘You’re pale, Clare.’

‘I’m fine.’ Clare swallowed. ‘You carry on.’

Dr Lyndall eased the child out of her clothes: pink pants with yellow daisies stitched on the knees, and a shirt, with its bib of dried blood. PEP Stores panties, one red thread unravelling
from the thigh, the static lifting it against the pathologist’s sleeve as she set to work.

Dark lashes fanned out against the child’s cheeks. Ruth Lyndall smoothed the dark curls, the instinctive gesture of a mother. She worked carefully over the body, photographing, cataloguing the pattern of injuries, old and new. A yellowing bruise on the back – last week’s. A ridging in the left clavicle.
An old break. There was a healed tear in the thin skin folded between her legs. Ambiguous. Abrasions on the knees and palms. Ambiguous. The injuries of childhood play, perhaps. Swings, slides, seesaws. Not necessarily a little girl running hell for leather to escape, falling, not getting away. Scraps of pink nail varnish clung to her torn fingernails. Dr Lyndall scraped under them, hoping there
might be some scratched skin amidst the dirt. On her upper arm was a series of round prints. An adult’s hand – a man’s, judging by the spacing of the marks – had held her tight. Then the throat. A knife lifted high in his free hand, plunging down.