Gallows Hill (2 page)

‘Eva Afrika. The Assisi Animal Hospital, Sea Point,’ he read. ‘You know what that is?’

‘Charity for homeless animals,’ said Cloete.

‘Says she went there for treatment of a dog called Jennie,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Must’ve been that old bitch at the fence that growled at me.’

‘Got sense, that dog,’ muttered Dreyer.

‘No external wounds,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Drank herself to death, looks like. I’d say natural causes,’ said Mouton. ‘But we’ll have to autopsy her. You can take her.’

Two mortuary attendants picked up the dead woman. She seemed no heavier than a bundle of wood as they dumped her onto the gurney. Her pendant slipped to the ground.

Riedwaan picked it up, angling the metal disc towards the light. It had letters engraved on it,
and a number, but they were indistinct, illegible. He tucked it back inside her shirt.

‘Looks like one of those old slave discs,’ he said.

‘I want it listed with her effects,’ said Mouton to one of the mortuary attendants.

‘Okay, Doc.’

Riedwaan stepped out of the way as they manoeuvred their burden out of the doorway. Unceremoniously, they shoved the gurney into the van. A shower
of gravel, and they were off, headed for the mortuary, the old dog loping alongside for a while.

‘This is what you got me out of bed for, Doc?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘No.’ Mouton pointed towards the corner. ‘For this.’

A bone. Cracked open, broken at one end.

‘I found it there in the corner,’ said Mouton.

‘Femur?’ Riedwaan had seen enough of these in his career. He turned the long
bone over in his hand, ran his fingertips across the bite marks.

‘Human,’ confirmed Mouton. ‘That old dog must’ve dug it up.’

Riedwaan turned the bone over. There was sand sticking to one end. Then he looked at the tracks on the floor. Riedwaan followed them outside. The paw prints led to a trench across the site, the turned soil the same grey as the sand clinging to the bone in Riedwaan’s
hand.

He crouched down and found the spot where the dog had been digging.

The recently excavated soil was soft. Riedwaan loosened some soil and removed it. Protruding from the earth was a pair of tea-brown bones. Shackled. The metal had corroded, but the leg irons had not relinquished their grip.

He dug deeper. The first skull was a child’s, the cranial bones like white petals. Another
skull was visible, with glass beads looped around vertebrae. The skeleton of a woman curled around the bones of her baby. Riedwaan sat back on his haunches.

A mass grave.

Just what he needed, first thing in the morning.

None of Clare’s clothes were in Riedwaan’s cupboard. She took that to indicate that she was not living with him. But the fact that her cat was there could be taken to mean otherwise. She fished a clean but rumpled T-shirt from her suitcase and pulled on her Nikes. It would be her first run in a while. The first step to claiming her life back. Getting back to work would be the second.

Clare filled Fritz’s bowl and stepped out. The noise of the awakening city swallowed the sound of her footsteps echoing down the narrow canyon of houses that lined Riedwaan’s street. Red. Pink. White. Yellow. The corner house was pistachio green. A woman, her small daughter gripped between her ample knees, sat on the stoep.

‘Auntie, help me,’ called the child. Half her unruly black curls had
been tied into one tight plait. Her mother was busy with the second.

‘My mammie’s killing me. Tell Uncle Wanie. He’s the police, mos.’

Wanie. What everyone called Riedwaan in this street where he’d grown up. Part of a rough-and-tumble pack of children that were everywhere from the minute the sun came up till their mothers called them in at sundown.

‘Looks to me like she’s just brushing
your hair,’ said Clare.

She set off down Castle Street. Narrow and cobbled, it plunged down the hillside. It had once been a narrow path, carved out by Cape Town’s first barefooted generation of slaves rolling quarried black rock downhill. She was halfway down when her phone rang.

‘How long do you have on your police consultant’s contract?’

Riedwaan’s voice was tense.

‘Till the
end of the month,’ said Clare.

‘Come down here, then,’ he said. ‘I need you now.’

‘Where are you?’

‘A building site in Green Point,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Ebenezer Road, off Somerset, below the elevated freeway. A cul-de-sac I didn’t know existed. Come now. Bring your camera.’ The phone was dead before she could ask any more questions. No endearments, no preliminaries, not even her name.
Riedwaan was at work.

Clare drove too fast, the lamp posts whipping past, festooned with summer posters. Cape Town, wringing the last parties out of a dying summer. A trance party. A bridal show. An art exhibition: FORENSIC. The artist’s face with its high, wide cheekbones, floated above the title of the show.

Clare found parking under the freeway. It was some distance away, but there
was nothing else closer to the site. At least it was in the shade. The sun drilled into her back as she stepped out of the car, the temperature climbing quickly to the predicted high of 37º.

A local radio station had announced the discovery of the bones on the seven o’clock news, drawing the curious on their way to work. A crowd stood clustered against the hoardings, trying to get a view of
the police activity on the other side. A dog panted in a scrap of shade. She bared her teeth at Clare.

‘What happened to you, old girl?’ Clare held out the remains of the toast she’d been eating in the car. The dog limped over, still wary. Clare gave the dog the crust, patted her. The dog whined, hesitated, then trotted after Clare.

‘Hey, Doc. What are you doing here?’

Clare turned.
Bertie Engel. Every inch the tabloid journalist. Cigarette in one hand, cell phone in the other.

‘You’re such a vulture, Engel,’ said Clare. ‘How did you get here so fast?’

‘Must be the smell of death. Confirmed now I see you, babe,’ he said. ‘Is there a serial killer? The Green Point summer rapist?’

‘No such luck,’ said Clare.

A photographer materialised, his gaze fixed on her
shirt. Clare couldn’t help crossing her arms.

‘I heard from a source that there are a number of bodies,’ said Engel.

‘The people are upset,’ said the photographer. ‘There’s talk already of a cover-up. No public hearings about this development. No consultation. Nothing. We looked already, Doc. Whole fucking thing’s under lockdown.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You want me to do
your homework for you, Doc, now that you’re so in with the cops?’ said Engel. ‘My source at the Council won’t tell me anything, says they were warned if they valued their jobs then nothing should leak.’

‘Who told them this?’ asked Clare.

‘That she wouldn’t say either,’ said Engel. ‘I know she knows, fuck it, but she’s not saying. She’s scared of losing her job. Gives carte blanche for
big business and government to
naai
everybody.’

The metro cop at the gate barred their way.

‘Dr Hart,’ he said. ‘Captain Faizal’s waiting for you.’

‘You and Captain Faizal?’ The journalist’s eyes gleamed.

The knot of men standing on the other side of the site was untangling, with Riedwaan walking towards her. The uniformed cop let Clare through, but wasn’t quick enough to block
Engel: wiry as a mongoose, and as inquisitive.

‘Engel.’ Riedwaan had him by the arm. ‘You stay on your side of the fence.’

‘You assaulting me, Captain?’ He called his colleague. ‘Hey, you better photograph this.’

‘If I was assaulting you, Engel,’ said Riedwaan, shoving him back onto the pavement, ‘you’d know about it. I’m helping you obey the law.’

Riedwaan closed the gate. ‘Don’t
let anybody else past, Constable. There’s enough rubbish here as it is.’

‘You certainly have a way with the press,’ said Clare. ‘Do you know who owns this land?’

‘No idea yet,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Give me a break. I’ve only been here an hour.’

Riedwaan led her across the site towards the trench. Nearby was a pile of salvaged metal and wood next to a standing wall that did at least offer
some shade.

‘Tell me what’s going on,’ said Clare.

‘Looks like your slavery film just woke up,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Look at this.’

Clare crouched down alongside the pit.

Small white domes protruded where the earth had been turned. Skulls. Through her viewfinder, they would look like pansy shells, fragile skeletons of sea urchins.

Clare reached for her camera and turned it on, the
familiar whirr a comfort. Long bones protruded where the earth had been turned. Naked, exposed, they resembled fossilised driftwood more than femurs.

‘These have been buried a while,’ she said. ‘Slave remains, you think?’

‘Some of them, for sure,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Executed prisoners. The gallows were near here. And this sand would have been as easy to dig then, just like now.’

‘Gallows
Hill,’ said Clare. ‘Of course. And the Traffic Department’s built on it too.’

‘There’s quite a few people who’d claim these are people who died waiting for their car licences,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Luckily, Solly Friedman’s on his way with Raheema Patel to prove otherwise.’

‘The forensic anthropologist?’ asked Clare. ‘Wasn’t she with the Missing Persons Task Force?’

‘Yes,’ said Riedwaan.
‘But pretty much all the political cases from before Mandela are done now. She’s been seconded to historical excavations.’

Clare did a slow pan of the site. It was filled with building equipment.

‘This is a serious operation,’ she said. ‘D’you know the developers? I haven’t seen any signs anywhere.’

‘Me neither,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I spoke to the watchman. Says he was hired as security.
Jo’burg company.’

‘D’you know who?’

‘I’ve got some good Jo’burg connections,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m forming a theory.’

‘You going to tell me?’ Clare switched off her camera.

‘As soon as I have something,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I must get Rita Mkhize onto it.’

‘Why do you want me here, Riedwaan?’

‘You don’t want it?’

‘Of course I want it,’ said Clare. ‘You knew I’d want it.
I just wondered why you wanted me involved now. With this.’

‘I thought if anyone could get it right,’ he said, ‘if anyone could find a way to tell this story –’ Riedwaan took out a cigarette, put it back. Playing for time. ‘The violence of it. Where these people came from –’

He took the cigarette out again, lit it this time, tried to order his thoughts. Reached for words that would clothe
an instinct, an impulse, with logic. Failed.

‘Fuck it, Clare. Don’t ask me to explain. You’re making a film about Cape Town’s history. A film about slavery. This grave here, how many dead? And it’s too fucking old to be a crime scene. If the money-boys from Jo’burg get their way, it’ll all be wrapped up and under the ground before you can say
Daar kom die Alabama
. Finish and klaar. But you’ve
got it now, from the beginning. It won’t be so easy to hide. You’ll see.’

‘If anyone wants to find someone to blame, it’s going to be you,’ said Clare.

‘That ever worried me?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘It hasn’t.’

‘It’s Valentine’s Day next week,’ he said. ‘Think of it as a present. From me to you.’

‘Most people would give red roses.’

Riedwaan touched her cheek.

‘You’re not
like most people.’

At 9.20 a battered Isuzu pulled up. A giant of a man stepped out. With his shock of grizzled hair, Solly Friedman looked like an off-duty Viking. The woman with him didn’t even come up to his shoulder.

‘Morning, Clare,’ said the towering forensic anthropologist. ‘Shirking work again, Faizal?’

‘Morning, Prof Friedman,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You and Mouton want the guys with the brains
to help you?’ asked Friedman.

‘We thought we’d give you a chance to show off,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Raheema Patel,’ said Friedman. ‘My new forensic anthropologist. On loan from the Missing Persons Task Force.’

Raheema’s glossy black hair was bundled under a hat. She was dressed in khaki pants and shirt.

‘Good to see you again,’ said Clare, shaking hands.

Major Shorty de Lange, Acting
Director of Ballistics, pulled up behind the Isuzu.

‘Faizal,’ he greeted. ‘Clare,’ giving her a brief hug. ‘Morning, morning,’ nodding to the others.

‘De Lange, you’re looking in the wrong place if you need work,’ said Riedwaan.

‘I was meeting with Phiri, your boss –’ said De Lange.

‘I figured out who my boss is,’ interrupted Riedwaan.

‘Proof at last that you can teach on old
dog new tricks,’ said De Lange. ‘He told me about this. Looks like you’re in for some interesting times, Faizal.’

‘One way or another, shit’s going to hit the fan big-time,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But this is for the archaeologists, looks like.’

‘Okay, I’m gone, I’m gone,’ said De Lange. ‘Call me if you need me, Faizal. And you come shooting again, Clare, you sure know how to use a gun.’

‘Thanks, Shorty,’ smiled Clare. ‘I will.’

‘Is Tim Stone here yet?’ asked Friedman.

An even older truck pulled up.

‘Speak of the devil,’ Friedman smiled.

A rumpled man heaved himself out of the driver’s seat. He opened the back, freeing a motley lot of archaeology students.

‘Tim,’ said Friedman. ‘You’ve brought your storm troopers, I see.’

‘Americans,’ said Stone. His dark
eyes were sharp and intelligent as a hawk’s in a face as plump and benign as Friar Tuck’s. ‘Experts in mass burials.’

‘They’ve worked on these before?’ asked Clare, watching the students gathering their tools.

‘No need,’ said Stone. ‘They’re Americans, so by definition they’re experts. That’s why they’re sent to me by their alma maters. My task is to undo years of parentally encouraged
delusions of grandeur and cultural over-confidence, and to excavate their intelligence. With this lot I haven’t reached the latter phase yet, but they’re able and willing, and they all can dig. Which I presume your SAPS boys are not going to do?’