Daddy's Girl (8 page)

‘What do you want from me?’

‘To come home,’ he said. ‘To find her.’

‘You had your chance,’ she said.

‘Shazia, our daughter is missing. If we
work together—’

‘It’s too late for sorry, Riedwaan. If that’s what you are.’

‘If we’re going to find her,’ he tried again, ‘then we need to talk to each other.’

‘Bring her back, sign the papers, and then we can talk.’

‘Shazia, try to hear me. I loved you. I love her. I don’t have her. I would never harm her. She’s gone, yes, but not with me. Not this time.’

‘Bring her back
to me, Riedwaan,’ she hissed. ‘You were there. The security saw you there.’

‘Try and listen. I went past the ballet school. I saw her. I left her there to finish her class.’ Riedwaan felt for a way to get round her anger. ‘Listen to what I’m saying. I don’t know where she is. The longer you shift the blame onto me, the less chance I have of finding her. For Ndlovu, Yasmin is a pawn in some
other game.’

‘You’re always full of conspiracies, Riedwaan. They’re games you’ve been happy to play.’

‘I’m not playing anything, Shazia.’

‘You’re going to sign those papers so we can go to Canada?’

‘I’ll sign anything you ask me to if it brings her back,’ said Riedwaan.

‘So why didn’t you sign before? Why did you push it so far? Why must you always do this? You made this happen.
You and your work; you and your pride; you and your walking out on us instead of facing what you created.’

‘Let me come home,’ pleaded Riedwaan. ‘Let’s do this together.’

‘Not until you bring me my daughter.’

Disconnection.

Riedwaan lit a cigarette, the smoke burning the back of his throat and blurring the city spread beneath him, a carpet of lights and secrets. His daughter hidden
there, somewhere. His phone still in his hand, Riedwaan scrolled through his helter-skelter day again, finding the missed call from a number he didn’t recognise.

Five-thirty-two. He dialled the number again. Inside the ballet school, the phone rang into the night.

He dialled for a message, found it. No words; nothing. Just silence.

Riedwaan rode along the back road behind the windswept
tree line and the blocks of flats. Disa Towers was ahead of him, its three cylindrical tower blocks dwarfed by Devil’s Peak. The lights in 512 were a beacon. Where Yasmin should be asleep under her duvet. The place that used to be his home. He turned his back on the light, flushing out a nightjar as he made his way through the park that ringed the three bleak blocks.

Less than ten minutes
later, he had the door open to the block he used to live in. He’d found the key to the basement in its usual place under the rock near the pine tree. Yasmin had hidden in the basement before, slipping out of the flat while her mother raged and her father refused to talk. The first time, it had taken him half an hour to realise that she was gone. He’d hunted for her for hours, eventually finding her
down here, asleep on a shelf. Riedwaan felt along the shelf where she’d hidden the first time. Nothing but last summer’s beach bats and a faded picnic rug.

He pulled himself onto the shelf. Above him were silky black hairs, snagged on a splinter in the wood. Carefully, he unhooked his daughter’s hair and spread it on the blanket, three black strands on the pale wool.

So this is what it
felt like to have your heart break.

‘Join us, darling.’ Giles Reid had his hand on Clare’s elbow. He had been drinking too much again. The champagne was finished and the after-party was breaking up. They began heading up Long Street: the younger dancers to catch the Friday night clubs; the critics, older dancers and single men for a late dinner.

‘I’ve had a week from hell,’ said Clare. ‘I need to get home.’

‘It’s
been your night.’ He gripped her arm. ‘People will want to talk to you, congratulate. They want their pound of flesh, remember, for all the money they’ve donated to your cause.’

‘Let go of me, Giles,’ Clare lowered her voice. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘It really would be worth your while.’ He leaned closer.

‘The final cut for tomorrow’s programme’s been approved,’ she said. ‘And I need
to start on the next one early tomorrow. You’ll excuse me.’

She fetched her coat, one eye on Giles Reid bearing down on the prettiest dancer. So English, so charming – until you crossed him. She leaned her head on the steering wheel for a second, letting the silence wash over her. Her ears were buzzing with music, people, talk. She drove home, longing for her crisp white sheets.

It was
late, and Beach Road was empty. She saw Fritz silhouetted at her bedroom window, watching. A ragged mist was rolling in, the foghorn wailing its plaintive warning. Clare parked on the street, too tired to get out and open her garage.

It was only when she was already out of the car that the man appeared from the shadows of the half-constructed wall nearby. His hands were deep in his pockets,
his jacket pulled close around his lean body. He had been waiting for her for a while; at his feet were several cigarette butts.

She clenched her fist around her keys, the longest one protruding between her second and third fingers, a weapon.

He was in front of her, taller than she was – but at five foot four, most people were. There was nobody else on the Promenade.

‘Dr Hart?’

Play for time.

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

He was reading her wariness, trying to put her at ease. His hands were at his side, empty, but he had blocked her path.

‘What do you want?’

He handed her an ID. Captain Riedwaan Faizal. It felt warm from being against his body. Something familiar in the photo of his face, black hair growing straight up, full mouth, lines
that said there’d been laughter in his eyes. She glanced up at him. There was none now.

‘I remember you.’ She handed it back to him. ‘My lecture. Profiling sexual predators.’ The man at the back of the classroom, his head at an angle. Sceptical. Asking questions that had disconcerted her, seeing past the surface of what she was saying. Past her suit, the white shirt, the mask of a professional
woman in a man’s domain. She handed his badge back.

‘I… yes. Last year.’ His voice caught in his throat. ‘You might have heard the news. The little girl…’

On her way home last night, the newsreader’s voice. ‘Missing. Six. Dark hair tied in a ballet bun.’ That’s when Clare had muted the radio, not wanting to think about Chanel Adams, pinned like a butterfly to the board in her study – just
like the others.

‘My daughter.’

‘What do you want from me?’ Her guard down.

‘You’re going to help me find her.’ His hand around her wrist.

‘I can’t.’ She gripped the key tightly between her fingers. ‘All you’ll do is make things worse. The cops will find her. You’re one of their own.’

Clare had her back to the wall. His fingers were around her wrist. His other hand was against
the wall next to her face, his feet were planted on either side of hers, trapping her knees between his. She could feel the heat of his body, his arm close to her face. Her alternatives: knee him quick and fast, or jab a key into his eye.

‘Why don’t you let me go?’ There was sometimes a third way. ‘And can we talk about it.’

He released her. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why me?’ Clare didn’t relax
her grip on the keys. ‘In the middle of the night?’

‘Rita Mkhize gave me your number.’

‘Doesn’t answer my question. Why aren’t the cops looking for her, you with them?’

‘They think I have her.’

‘Do you?’

‘Would I be here if I did?’

‘You might well,’ said Clare.

‘Won’t you help me?’ he asked. ‘Please.’

Clare’s refusal died in her throat. And with it, her better judgement.

‘What’s her name?’ asked Clare.

‘Yasmin,’ he said. ‘Yasmin Faizal.’

‘You want to tell me what happened?’ asked Clare. ‘Roma by Night is open.’

Riedwaan was already walking. The motion helped quell his fear, which felt like a pit bull in his gut, about to eat him alive.

Clare took the booth furthest from the entrance. Riedwaan slid a photograph out of his breast pocket, placing it on the table. It lay between them, its corners rumpled, curved in the middle where it had moulded to the shape of his chest. A little girl in a pink leotard, her black hair in a ponytail. Gold hoops in her earlobes, her dark eyes glittering with laughter. Clare glanced up at
Riedwaan. The same full, perfectly formed mouth.

‘This is her?’ asked Clare. The question unnecessary, a rope tossed over the gulf of loss. Riedwaan looked at the coloured lights looped along the Promenade. Many of the bulbs gone.

‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘Will you find her for me?’

‘This is a first,’ said Clare, ‘a cop asking me for help.’

‘I’ve seen your work.’ Riedwaan took out
a cigarette, and bounced it on the table. No Smoking signs everywhere. ‘You’ve got connections I don’t have. The cases I’ve been working on… I need someone who can get under the skin of these gangsters, and find her.’

‘You think she’s…’

‘Alive?’ Riedwaan said it for her. ‘If she wasn’t, I’d know. The people I deal with use bodies instead of email. More direct way of getting the message
across, harder to trace.’

‘Explain to me why you’re a suspect,’ said Clare.

‘
The
suspect.’

‘Okay, the suspect. Why aren’t the cops looking for her? They have that new child-track system. Why not this time?’

‘New unit. New policy. Still trying to straighten us old-school cops out,’ Riedwaan took his lighter out of his pocket, lit his cigarette. ‘Run by a Special Director Ndlovu.
A PhD in
rondfok
from Leningrad University or some fact-free place like that. She got hold of me and my psychological profile. When that happens and you’ve got a profile like mine, you’re fucked.’

‘Why’s she on your case?’

‘Hard to tell if she’s on my case or on Phiri’s case via me. There’s some exile history there. Phiri doesn’t do the reciprocal altruism that the struggle has spawned.’

‘Reciprocal altruism?’ asked Clare.

‘I did you a favour twenty years ago. Now it’s payback time. Contracts, blind eyes, backhanders. Phiri is as straight as they come. Ruffled some senior feathers by expecting them to be the same.’

The waitress brought their coffee, ignored Riedwaan’s cigarette, sauntered off and lit her own.

‘Convince me that you haven’t got her.’ Clare stirred
in the milk.

‘My wife reported Yasmin missing to the police hotline. There’s a new policy that’s meant to stop the SAPS from shooting our wives and girlfriends on rugby weekends. Because there was a complaint against me with the Family Unit, an interdict was activated.’

‘An interdict?’ asked Clare.

‘I hadn’t seen Yasmin for weeks. It was my weekend to see her. Her mother refused. I…’
he stopped.

‘You what?’

‘I took her anyway.’

‘So you hire me and you look innocent.’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’

‘Captain Faizal,’ said Clare. ‘Things are usually simple. We long for complex motives, but you know what? Most of the time, it’s nothing. Just an impulse.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Sometimes I’d have a gun in my hand and I see two limp,
bloody bodies at my feet and the gun is in my mouth, cold and clean and sweet as a Coke on a hot afternoon. Then I’d wake up.’ He focused on her, as if seeing her face for the first time. ‘And they would be breathing, Shazia and Yasmin, in their beds. Alive. Director Ndlovu’s idea of sorting out my head was to send me to a government-issue shrink. She asked me questions about my family, my fantasies,
my thoughts about love, about death.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I asked her how you told love and death apart. She made me another appointment. I didn’t pitch, so that flagged me in some Swedish computer programme that measures mental health, gender attitudes and compliance with authority. I was marked as a man to watch, a man with secrets. A man made dangerous by love, according to the
report. Or was it by death? I can’t remember now.’

‘And if I find her for you?’ asked Clare. ‘Then what?’

‘I didn’t say I wanted to kill them,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m telling you what gets into my head if I sleep. I’m telling you what I saw when we were called to a house in Goodwood. A whole street of policemen. A crescent. That house at the end. A guy I knew who was in the riot squad. He
came home one day and shot his family. Then he called us and waited – with his service pistol in his mouth. He pulled the trigger when we opened the door – we went through and found them all. Wife. Two sons. Baby daughter. Bullet in the forehead. Each of them. I’m telling you why I moved out.’

Riedwaan stopped speaking.

‘Okay.’ Clare held up her hands. ‘I’ll accept what you’re saying for
the moment. You’ve looked at all the places she might have gone to? Granny, cousins, friends, hiding at school somewhere?’

‘What do you think I’ve been doing while you’ve been watching ballet? She’s nowhere.’ Riedwaan pulled out his cellphone and pushed it across the table.

‘Check that. Not one message, not one missed call. Except…’

‘Except what?’ asked Clare.

‘A missed call while
I was at a crime scene. It was the call box at her ballet school.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Five-thirty-two. Her class should have finished at six-thirty. I didn’t know and neither did Shazia, but they finished early today.’

‘Who knew?’

‘I checked with her teacher. Everybody, it seems.’ Riedwaan lit another cigarette. ‘Except me and Shazia, because she won’t…’ He stopped himself.
‘Because we are unable to speak to each other, we seem to have missed that crucial little detail.’

He looked out of the window. Clare watched his reflection, wishing she still smoked.

‘It’s as if she vanished. No sign, no demands, no…’ He couldn’t say body, but both of them thought it, saw it. Saw her in the cold, eyes open, seeing nothing.

‘Help me look for her.’ He faced her again.
‘View the CCTV footage at least. Cyclops Centre tomorrow morning. On the Foreshore.’