Gallows Hill (17 page)

FORENSIC.

The title of the show, in block letters, in the foyer. A girl, night-creature pale,
looked up when Clare opened the door.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘I’m here to see the Lilith le Roux.’

‘The gallery is actually only for private sales viewings today,’ said the girl.

‘I’m sure you can make an exception,’ said Clare

‘All right. But please, you need to take your shoes off first,’ she said. ‘You can go through the blue curtain there.’

‘Thanks.’ Clare took
off her shoes and placed them beside otherson the rack. She pushed the blue velvet drape aside and stepped inside, her bare feet uncertain. Small, hard points pressed into her soles. The room was flooded with sounds.

The rustle of leaves.

Up close, short uneven breaths.

Children calling, playing in the distance.

A school bell tolling.

A muffled shout.

A muezzin’s call.

Silence.

Breathing.

A telephone ringing.

Running feet.

Mocking laughter.

If Clare kept still, there was silence. But if she moved her feet over the rough floor, the noises started. The rustle, the breathing, the children, the bell, the silence, the phone, the feet. Fear flicked a dry reptilian tongue down her neck. She moved further in, across the floor. More bumps, hard
underfoot, triggering different sounds. Wind moaning, the bass thud of a CD in a faraway taxi, the ricochet of descending footsteps on concrete, the metallic echo of a tunnel. The crash and grind of metal on metal. The dull, distant sound of a train. The steady beat of a pulse.

Inky water – dammed-up inside high granite walls, a quarry, perhaps – reflected the moon. The image mesmerised Clare:
the greens iridescent, the blacks deep and alluring as velvet. The night-lit mountain, the dark-grey cliffs, ragged buildings, a small white figure crouching among reeds. Washing her hands.

Alongside this was a close-up. The artist had zoomed in, the image about to pixelate. A reflection in the black water amid trees, roots, rushes. A face, perhaps, the V of a neck. The image elusive, like
a figure in a dream.

The next room contained a series of looped video screenings. A beautiful girl, her face in close-up. Faceless men holding her up, holding her down. Moving her naked body this way and that. Their fingers probing, marking her pale skin. Her thighs tracked with long, slender scars.

Cutting – Clare recognised these symptoms of a person suffering emotional pain. Her twin
sister’s body was covered in self-inflicted scars that wove their way through the latticework left by the men who had stabbed her all those years ago. Left her for dead, a bleeding discard for Clare to find.

A light touch on her shoulder startled Clare, jolting her from her reverie. She turned and saw the angled cheekbones, the heart-shaped face. The living image of the woman Katrin Goldfarb
had fashioned in clay.

‘I didn’t mean to give you a fright. I’m Lilith. Stella told me someone was here.’

‘Clare Hart.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Lilith flicked the remote in her hand and the sound stopped.

‘I’ve been wondering. What are these sounds?’ asked Clare.

‘Recordings I make in places where women have been murdered in Cape Town. You activate them when you step on the mounds on
the floor.’

‘It’s strange how unnerving an accumulation of ordinary sound can be,’ said Clare.

‘Yes, well.’ Lilith put her hand on Clare’s arm. ‘I’ve heard of you.’

‘Ah, Gallows Hill. It’s been all over the news.’

‘Yes, I saw you on TV. I live near there. But it’s not just that. I read your book about your sister. Then I used some of your research, the maps you plotted, for these
sound recordings. Your city murder maps. All the clusters,’ said Lilith. ‘There are things we share, I think.’

‘Lilith, darling.’ The voice jolted Clare as a couple in their well-preserved fifties swooped on Lilith.

‘These are marvellous,’ said the woman. She had a handsome hawk-nosed profile, and her hand-wrought jewellery lay heavily on her neck. ‘Hard to tell if the images are from
a porn film or an autopsy.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Lilith.

‘I knew you’d be fascinated,’ said the woman’s companion. He smiled at Lilith. ‘Osman was lucky to find you again.’

‘Gilles is never lucky. He always gets exactly what he wants,’ said Lilith, her voice gliding over the choreographed violence of the images.

The woman hooked her hand through the man’s arm. ‘Are you joining
us for lunch?’

‘Another time, maybe. I’m a little busy right now.’

Clare was intrigued.

‘Gilles was right about this,’ the woman said to her husband, as they walked out. ‘Delightfully perverse.’

The lift doors closed on them.

‘He buys with his crotch and her money,’ said Lilith. ‘As you can imagine, he has a very consistent collection.’

Clare smiled.

‘Your work is very
unsettling.’

‘Why are you here, Dr Hart?’

Lilith stared at Clare, the expression in her blue eyes inscrutable.

‘I…’ Clare was not accustomed to being unnerved. ‘I wanted to discuss something with you.’

‘I have to finish some things off with Gilles and Merle about the closing,’ said Lilith, handing Clare a card. ‘Why don’t you come to my studio, I’d love to show you more. To know
you more.’

A group of homeless men and women had settled on the benches outside Parliament; a shared papsak passed from one hand to the next. Clare drove down Plein Street, past the bronze statue of a Boer general on a warhorse. Botha had his eyes levelled at the Hottentots Holland Mountains, where his people had trekked into South Africa’s harsh hinterland nearly two hundred years before. Wives
and children piled on the wagons, with slaves and livestock straggling behind.

She turned into Darling Street and found a miraculous parking place, then plunged into the hubbub at the Eastern Food Bazaar. Clare bought two chits for masala dosa from the cashier and joined the queue. She shouted her order to the skinny man in a white apron and he spread a paper-thin layer of rice flour on the
griddle. She watched the pancake bubble, her mouth watering. She took both servings, ladled some chili for Riedwaan’s, and found a table.

He arrived as she sat down. She watched him scanning the crowd. Habit, seeing who was there, checking for exits. He sat with his back to the wall.

‘Thank you.’ He pulled over his plate. ‘I didn’t know how hungry I was.’

‘It’s late,’ said Clare. ‘What’ve
you been doing all day?’

‘Paper-chasing,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Expense accounts, credit card slips, trust funds. Fuck, it makes watching paint dry seem like an action sport.’

‘Got to be done.’

‘That’s what everyone tells me,’ he said. ‘Your day any better?’

‘Much,’ said Clare. ‘I traced the dead woman’s daughter.’

‘That’s what your message said. Who is she?’

‘Lilith le Roux,’
said Clare.

‘I know that name.’

Riedwaan’s plate was already empty, and Clare pushed hers over to him. ‘You don’t want this?’

He took it and ate.

’I saw my friend Magda de Wet. You’ve met her.’

‘At that documentary launch of yours,’ said Riedwaan. ‘She didn’tthink much of me, I don’t think.’

‘She just keeps an eye on my interests,’ said Clare, with a smile. ‘We’ve known
each other since we were both seven years old.’

‘What could she tell you?’

‘The daughter is an artist,’ said Clare. ‘Like her mother was. Her poster’s all over town. Her name’s Lilith le Roux.

‘That must be where I know it from,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I hope it helps, finally having something to bury. You’ll have to confirm, though. DNA’s the quickest.’

‘The sample from the skeleton’s
been processed,’ said Clare. ‘Mouton fast-tracked.’

‘Did you tell her about her mother?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘I must.’

‘What, then? Why not?’

‘It threw me,’ said Clare. ‘
She
threw me. I went to see her art just to get a sense of her. I didn’t think I’d meet her then.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Beautiful. Like her mother was. Troubled,’ said Clare.

‘Sounds like
your type.’

‘Don’t tease me.’

‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘I had the sense that she’s finding a way to look at her personal tragedy, how it may have shaped her,’ said Clare. ‘And I thought, what’s the point of turning it all upside down? It won’t change anything. Her mother will still be dead. She’ll still have grown up alone and unloved. I’m not sure how to handle her.’

‘Trust your instinct,’
he said. ‘What’s it telling you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Clare. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘You’ll have to tell her,’ said Riedwaan.

‘I know,’ said Clare. ‘I think that’s what’s unsettling me. Her life has been built around the fact that her mother abandoned her. Now I have to tell her that her mother was murdered. It won’t change the fact that she grew up an orphan, but I have the feeling
it might just unravel the threads of her identity, her sense of who she is.’

‘People are usually tougher than they look,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Sleep on it. Things will be clearer in the morning.’

Clare shook her head and put her napkin on the table. ‘No. I have to do it now.’

Lilith’s house was at the end of Carreg Crescent. A cul-de-sac, the last road before the yellow veld of Signal Hill.
The lower slopes were a no-man’s-land of litter.

Lilith lived in number three. Pines screened the house at the back, which stood apart from neighbouring houses that had been turned into featureless glass boxes.

Clare rested her hands on the steering wheel, gathering her strength.

What if she was wrong?

What if the photographs in her folder were nothing but an uncanny resemblance,
the silver necklace a mere coincidence? Clare opened the folder again, checked. The DNA test would confirm what the pictures told her. Then she put the folder into her bag and snapped it shut. Lilith had to be the key. There was no other witness.

She pushed the gate open.

Lilith unbolted the door. She was wearing a wrap dress, a smudge of mascara under her eyes.

‘Clare Hart,’ she said.
When she smiled there was a slight gap between her top teeth. ‘Come to the kitchen. You look like you need some coffee.’

As she followed Lilith along the dim passage, Clare looked at the images that hung there. A female figure in each, arms windmilling. The only colour was the hair, a platinum blaze across a pewter sky.

‘Icarus Girls,’ said Lilith. ‘My first series.’

‘The girl in the
pictures. Is it you?’ Clare asked.

‘The photographs are of me, a performance I did,’ said Lilith. ‘About a girl who died.’

Outside, the wind was picking up again, howling as it tried to enter the house.

‘Maybe you should know the back story,’ said Lilith. ‘I was 17. I was running away from a rehab centre. It was dark. She was ahead of me. I heard her cry. I looked up and I saw her
like that, silhouetted against the starlight. Then she vanished.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I froze, I guess. That’s what I told everyone,’ said Lilith, knucklespressed into her eyes. ‘She died,’ said Lilith. ‘The centre wanted to charge me. They said I was responsible.’

‘Were you?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lilith. ‘I felt responsible, but I couldn’t tell them how it happened.
I went mute,’ said Lilith. ‘Like I did after my mother left. No matter what they did to me, I didn’t speak,’ said Lilith. ‘I couldn’t. I wanted to tell them how I’d frozen. Everything so still in the cold, cold night. But I couldn’t even do that.’

She rubbed her eyes.

‘They made me pay for it,’ she said. ‘Again. Silence is one thing adults cannot abide in a child.’

‘And then, how did
you deal with it?’

She turned her palms up. Jagged scars across her skin. ‘Then I started making art,’ said Lilith. ‘I ran away for the last time, came to Cape Town, lay low till I was 18 and didn’t need to run any more. And got myself into art school.’

Compassion flickered across Clare’s face. She cleared her throat and said, ‘Quite a feat, getting into art school after all that.’

‘I did have some help,’ said Lilith. ‘Damien Sykes. The Osmans. The art dealers. They’d exhibited my mother’s work. When they heard what I was trying to do, they took me in. Guided me. They’re the only family I have. Can you imagine? The only connection I have to my mother.’

‘Do you see them much?’

‘They’ve had a hand in my latest show,’ said Lilith. ‘But we don’t always see eye-to-eye
about everything. Come,’ she said.

The afternoon sunlight gleamed red and green through the stained glass panes of the kitchen door. Lilith filled the kettle.

‘The coffee’s on the dresser,’ she said. ‘Won’t you pass it?’

Jars of iridescent ink stood alongside a bunch of wild grasses in a jar, old photographs. Parties and picnics, a time past caught in the yellowing photos.

‘This
has to be you,’ said Clare, picking up the picture of a littlegirl on a blue swing, hair flying, her face offered up to the sun.

‘That’s me. That swing’s in the garden. And that’s my mother pushing me,’ said Lilith, handing Clare a cup. ‘But you’ve come here to talk about art?’

‘In fact, it’s about your mother,’ said Clare, sitting down at the table.

‘My mother’s dead.’ Lilith sat
down, opposite Clare. ‘Dead and buried. You saw my work.’

A brittle laugh caught in her throat. ‘She died for something nobody gives a fuck about any more.’

‘Lilith,’ Clare said gently. ‘That’s not your mother.’

‘So, who is it then?’

Clare searched for words that might soften the truth, but she found none.

‘And where is she, then?’ A flicker in Lilith’s eyes.

Clare closed
her eyes for a moment. She’d gone too fast. She’d gone in the wrong direction. It was her fault that hope was there at all.

‘Your mother is dead,’ said Clare. ‘But she didn’t abandon you.’

‘Don’t fuck with my head, Clare. What are you trying to tell me?’