Gallows Hill (24 page)

Sophie turned to Lilith. ‘Lily. And my heart was not with you, it was with my son, with
Scipio. He was gone, no one could find him.’

‘No one told me that, Sophie,’ Lilith whispered.

Sophie took Lilith’s hand in hers.

‘Where did I go then?’ asked Lilith. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Your granny took you that day,’ said Sophie. ‘I didn’t think of you for so long because my mind is full of my son, looking for him in Crossroads, looking for him in Langa, in Khayelitsha, everywhere
that he could be. I never find him.’

Sophie waited for a jet flying into Cape Town airport to pass.

‘Not even in the TRC. All the files were gone, they said. And no witnesses. Afterwards a riot squad man asked for amnesty. He told the TRC they shot and buried some boys – hai, just like dogs – in the sand dunes near Macassar.’

‘What did they find, Mrs Xaba?’

Lilith tightened her
grip on Sophie’s hand.

‘Then these police they dig up the bodies again. The Indian lady, she spoke to me so nice.’

‘Raheema Patel?’ asked Clare.

‘It’s her,’ said Mrs Xaba. ‘A nice lady. She was looking for our people who were killed by the boere. But my son, he wasn’t one of them. Basson, hey, he was a man who was cruel, just to watch you suffer.’

‘I am so sorry, Sophie,’ said
Lilith, ‘so sorry.’

Sophie Xaba looked from the one woman to the other.

‘But with white people, it wasn’t so easy for white people to disappear.’

‘My mother did, for 23 years.’

‘But now you find her, you can lay her to rest, Lily.’ Sophie wiped her eyes even though there were no tears left. ‘That is all I ask for now. Not to be angry, not for revenge, not for justice. Just for
my son’s bones so that I can bury him.’

After that, there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, but Sophie Xaba offered them tea. They sat and drank sweet Five Roses in her cramped lounge, the photograph of her son, Scipio,watching them with the wary smile of a boy posing for his mother. When they were finished they took their leave and retraced their steps, back towards town where the smoke
from the wildfire on Lion’s Head hung on the still air.

‘Talking of Raheema Patel,’ said Lilith, breaking the silence. ‘She said she’d have the DNA results by today. Shall we check?’

‘Call her,’ said Clare. ‘Her number’s on my phone.’

Lilith called and spoke briefly.

‘Nothing final yet,’ she said.

‘What did she say?’ asked Clare.

‘That in all probablility my DNA matches
that of the skeleton,’ said Lilith, her narrow shoulders slumped. She turned on the radio. A report on the heat wave, tourists lost on Table Mountain, gale-force winds predicted for the weekend, three toddlers immolated in a shack fire. A mention of the controversy around Gallows Hill. Still there, but slipping from the lead for the first time since the story had broken.

‘It’s probably not
a matter of being relieved,’ said Clare, glancing at Lilith. ‘Facts are hard things to deal with at the best of times.’

Clare’s phone beeped as a message came through

‘Raheema Patel said she’d be sending an address for you,’ said Lilith. ‘Someone called Basson.’

‘Can you check it for me?’

Lilith opened Clare’s messages.

‘Two messages,’ said Lilith.

‘Okay, you can read them
to me.’

‘Oh, an address in the Strand,’ said Lilith.
Spoke to Phiri. Basson expecting you
.

‘And the other message?’

‘No name,’ said Lilith.

‘Read it anyway.’

Lilith read:
I’m OK. Speak soon. Reception bad
.
Love

‘Alive and uncontactable is better than nothing, I guess,’ said Clare.

‘Is that your boyfriend?’ asked Lilith, her eyes fixed on Clare.

‘Kind of,’ said Clare.

‘You don’t look like the boyfriend type. Have you been togetherlong?’

‘A year, maybe more,’ said Clare, pulling up in front of Lilith’s house.

‘He’s a cop?’

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘But I’ll speak to you later.’

‘Come see me later, will you?’

On impulse, Clare put her arms around Lilith, held her close. Her body was as slight as that of a child.

‘Okay,’ Clare said, turning
the key in the ignition.

‘Thanks,’ Lilith said, and kissed Clare’s cheek.

Clare watched her disappear inside her house, then she turned and drove down Signal Hill.

On the exposed coastal road, the weatherman’s prediction of hurricane-strength winds seemed modest. The white sand bit at the tar. In places, it was already piling up on the surface. Soon the road would be impassable. False Bay was churned to froth, and the wind hurled gobs of it over Clare’s windscreen. Houses huddled behind walls and windbreaks.

Behind her, Clare was barely aware
of the keening of sirens in their futile battle against the roar of the wind. She accelerated. She did not have the time to take the long route and fight her way through the traffic clogging the N2. Ahead of her were a couple of cops, battered by the wind, trying to unload bollards to block the road. They glared as Clare went past.

This was a lonely stretch of road, dangerous at the best of
times, and it was already late afternoon. Clare slowed again, keeping an eye out for hijackers’ rocks blocking the road. In the distance, the buildings along the Strand interrupted the elegant curve of False Bay.

Sunset Vista was the last apartment block. Clare parked. The southeaster tore at her clothes, slapping her hair across her face as she ran up the wide front stairs. The sun had faded
the names and the numbers at the entrance. She figured out which buzzer was 707 and pressed it.

‘Ja?’

‘Is that Jacques Basson?’

‘Ja. Who’s this?’

‘My name is Clare Hart,’ she said. ‘Raheema Patel, Major Phiri–’ The security door clicked open. Clare went inside, escaped the wind. She took the lift to the seventh floor and walked along a corridor, past bathroom windows and kitchen
doors. Flat number 707 was at the far end. A delicious monster stood guard at the door.

Clare knocked.

‘
Kom binne. Die deur is oop.
’

Very deep, the voice, with a contained anger just below the surface. An audible threat. Like the bulge of a gun under a shirt. It was a voice from Clare’s childhood. Her mother’s stern father, her uncles. Calvinistic types who had never forgiven their
daughter for marrying her Engelsman. Or for trying – however unsuccessfully – to escape their tight-knit, tight-lipped, inward-looking tribe.

She pushed the door open. The hallway flooded with afternoon sunlight. A painting that covered one wall was of a naked woman whose truncated body filled the canvas. It showed her from mid-thigh, a bush of hair below the swell of her belly, swollen breasts.
Her arms, raised above her head, disappeared out of the frame. A round chin and full mouth was all that could be seen of her face. A blue cloth was draped over her eyes. The effect at once erotic and chilling.

‘I’m Jacques Basson.’

‘Clare Hart.’ She shook his hand, knowing that he had won the first round. ‘I’m –’

‘I know who you are,’ he said. He stood an inch too close. Calibrating
her response, reading her discomfort with mathematical accuracy. ‘You’re better-looking than your photographs.’ Blond hair faded to grey, a hard, lean soldier’s face. The set of his shoulders still at attention.

‘Come through, Dr Hart,’ he said.

He ushered Clare into the living room. Apart from the single recliner facing a TV screen, the furniture was arranged for display rather than comfort
or hospitality.

‘What a view,’ said Clare. She looked out at Seal Island, and a few fishing boats battling their way back to Kalk Bay harbour.

‘I’m a Karoo boy,’ said Basson, his back to the panorama of False Bay. ‘I’ve never quite got used to the sea.’

It was hot and confined in the flat, and the wind moaned like a supplicant around the windows, pulling at them.

Clare tried to
conceal her discomfort.

‘Shall I open a window for you, Dr Hart?’

Round two. He had won that too.

‘Thank you,’ said Clare, standing by a gap in the sliding windows as the wind screamed to come inside.

The room might be cramped, but Basson – the erstwhile Colonel Basson – had lost none of his authority.

‘Can I offer you some water to drink? February is always so hot.’

He
moved towards the kitchen before she could answer.

She turned to the display of photographs on a cabinet. Family portraits, men who looked like Basson, plump, defeated wives. A formal portrait of soldiers bristling with rifles and moustaches. 32 Battalion. A name that carried terror for some, and for others, lingering pride. Burly young men on a Bedford. The Ovamboland plain stretched wide
and white behind them.

Basson walked in.

Water. Ice. Two glasses. A metal tray.

Hospitality as threat.

‘1980,’ said Basson, motioning her to sit. ‘Didn’t rain for two years. You could go crazy from the whiteness of the oshanas – those dry vleis, you know? – and the sky that stayed the same blue, summer and winter.’

Blank, grey eyes. Like the empty eyes of the boys in the photographs.

‘But you haven’t come here to look at my old photograph collection, Dr Hart?’ A smile, lips just too thin, too pink, as they curled back from his teeth.

He handed Clare a glass of water.

A musician’s hands – or those of a torturer. The Piano Man who encouraged people to sing.

‘No thanks. I’m fine,’ she said, and took a sheaf of papers out of her briefcase.

‘Okay, straight to
business?’ Basson sat opposite her, his fingers steepled.

‘Indeed,’ said Clare. ‘The late 80s.’

‘What do you want to know?’ asked Basson, looking at her closely. ‘You’re too young, I imagine, to have any personal interest in this.’

‘We all have a personal interest,’ said Clare. ‘It might be past, but it isn’t over.’

Clare placed a photograph on the table.

‘Suzanne le Roux.’

A muscle in his jaw tightened.

‘A beauty.’ His eyes on Clare again. ‘Like you. Stubborn, too.’

The silence thickened. Basson snapped his fingers and a black poodle shot into the room and jumped onto his lap. He stroked it. Clare forced her attention away from Basson’s long, slender fingers.

‘You knew her, Colonel?’

‘Yes, I knew her,’ he ran his fingers through the dog’s curls.
‘We all knew her.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘You should ask her political friends.’

‘I have,’ said Clare. ‘They say to ask you.’

‘Right. So you tell me what I should know, Dr Hart.’

‘Raheema Patel has given me some interesting detail,’ said Clare.

‘That woman,’ said Basson, ‘she’s been on my case since the TRC. Nothing stuck then. Nothing will stick now. I was doing my job
and I did it well.’

‘There’s never been any dispute about that, it would seem,’ said Clare. ‘The nature of your work – work you chose to do – is what caused so much anguish.’

Basson sighed. ‘It was dealt with by the TRC. Disclosed, forgiven,forgotten. Case closed, end of story. Nothing there. Or did Patel tell you otherwise?’

‘Mr Basson, a little girl was left abandoned 23 years ago,’
said Clare. ‘You were the one who found her, alone apparently, when you went to detain her mother. She’s grown into a very troubled young woman.’

‘I don’t know what happened to her.’ The ice in his glass clinked.

‘To her? Do you mean the daughter – or her mother?’

‘The mother,’ said Basson. ‘The daughter’s been in and out of the papers ever since.’

‘But you’d detained her before,’
said Clare. ‘In Pollsmoor Prison –and she was terrified of going back there.’

‘Pollsmoor,’ said Basson. ‘Prisons controlled it. Not the Special Branch.’

‘But the security police went where they chose, when they chose,’ said Clare.

‘Bullshit.’ Basson’s hands were on the dog’s ears, his fingers working around the muscles. The dog sighed, settled on his lap, and fell asleep.

‘You
people give us super-powers in retrospect to cover up how you’ve fucked up this country.’

‘It says here you were there the night of Suzanne’s opening,’ said Clare.

‘Yes. I like art,’ said Basson. ‘You can see.’ He gestured to the walls.

The works on display were surprisingly contemporary. Consistent, too. Clare had never before associated good taste with cruelty.

‘And after the
opening, Suzanne le Roux disappeared. Her daughter was found alone and terrified beyond speech the following morning.’

‘She wasn’t cut out to be a mother,’ said Basson.

‘What happened that night?’ asked Clare.

‘We went to pick her up,’ he said. ‘You know that. She was gone.’

‘What happened to Lilith?’

‘She was not my responsibility.’ He looked bored. ‘Dr Hart, I am not sure
what you want from me. This happened a long time ago. Suzanne le Roux is dead. There was a hearing in the 1990s. She died of natural causes, a death certificate was issued, a grave was identified.’

‘But who identified her?’ asked Clare. ‘Who issued the death certificate?’

‘The hospital where she died,’ he said, without missing a beat.

‘And how did you get to know of it?’

‘Look,
we were fighting a war,’ he said. ‘Just because she and others like her went away, did not mean that we lost track of them. We had eyes and ears everywhere.’

‘So what did you find when you arrived at Suzanne le Roux’s house?’ asked Clare.

‘We arrived there, but there was no sign of Le Roux. I went into the child’s room. She was there. The bed wet, stinking. I went to the bed and asked
her where her mother was. I told her if she was a good girl and told us, we would bring her mother back,’ said Basson. ‘She bit me.’

‘Her nanny said that when she got to the house, Lilith was filthy, her feet bleeding. That’s what the medical report said too.’

‘The mother was a hippy,’ shrugged Basson. ‘The child ran wild.’

‘So, what did you do with her?’

‘We waited,’ said Basson.
‘Mothers return usually. But she never came back. Then that old nanny of hers arrived and wanted the child. She was full of shit too. We got social services in. Wilma Smit. You spoke to her.’