Like Clockwork (2 page)

‘Oh, God, here we go,’ said Julie. ‘She’ll only wear purple at the moment and everything purple is wet. Poor Marcus is trying to persuade her that pink is as good as purple.’

‘Judging by the noise, he’s failing miserably,’ Clare laughed.

‘Utterly,’ said Julie. She closed her kitchen door and the noise was suddenly muffled. ‘Tell me about this new project of yours.’

‘The story about human trafficking?’ asked Clare.

‘That’s the one,’ said Julie. ‘Did you get the go-ahead?’

‘Not yet. I did get a scrap of research money so I’m ferreting anyway,’ said Clare.

‘Be careful, Clare,’ Julie warned. ‘Investigating those guys is like poking a wasp’s nest.’

‘I am careful,’ said Clare. There was a crash and Beatrice was shouting at her mother. She sounded apoplectic. ‘Jules, I can hardly hear you.’

‘That’s because I didn’t say anything,’ said Julie. ‘What you heard was a disbelieving silence.’

‘I’m going for a run now, Julie. Can I call you later?’

‘
Ja
, I want to see you,’ said Julie. ‘I want to hear more.’

The phone was dead before Clare could say goodbye. Clare stepped out onto her balcony to stretch. It was cold despite the sunshine so she pulled on her sweatshirt. A decade of running had earned her a lean, supple fitness that still surprised her.

The summons of her doorbell was intrusive. She went inside. ‘Yes?’ she asked, irritated. The intercom stuttered. Clare could not make out what was being said. ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way out.’ She picked up her keys and cellphone and locked up. Two leaps took her to the bottom of her stairs but there was no longer anyone outside her door. It must have been an early-morning beggar. She was about to break into an easy lope when an old woman called to her from an eddy of people on the promenade along Beach Road.

‘Over here, Dr Hart. Help!’ It was Ruby Cohen. Clare’s heart sank. Clare’s single status offended Ruby’s sense of order, as did her refusal to join the Neighbourhood Watch.

‘Morning, Ruby,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Dr Hart. It’s terrible. Come see. That poor girl is dead.’

Clare saw the body lying on the promenade. A dead body was not that unusual in Cape Town. Ports discard human flotsam, and last night had certainly been cold enough to take a vagrant off before receding with the morning sun. The crowd pressed together, as if to reassure each other that they were alive. Clare went over, wondering if it was one of the homeless who sheltered nearby.

The dead girl froze the blood in Clare’s veins. A lock of the girl’s black hair lifted briefly in the wind, then settled onto a thin brown shoulder. Clare was slipping back into her nightmare. It took an immense exercise of will to bring herself back to the present. To this body. Here. Today. Then her mind made the switch to trained observer, and all emotion was gone. She scanned the placement of the body, logging each detail with forensic precision.

She noted the faint marks on the bare arms, bruises that had not had time to bloom. The girl’s right hand was bound, transformed into a bizarre fetish. It had been placed coquettishly on her hip. Something protruded from the girl’s hand, glinting in the low-angled sunlight. Her boots were so high that she would have struggled to walk. But she was not going anywhere: not with her slender throat severed.

Clare instinctively switched on the camera of her cellphone and snapped a rapid series of pictures, ignoring the indignant whispers around her. She zoomed in on the girl’s hands, but an old man stepped forward and covered the girl before Clare could stop him, separating the whispering living from the dead. The message encrypted in the broken, displayed body was obscured.

Clare stepped away, flicked open her cellphone and dialled. She willed him to answer. ‘Riedwaan,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard about the body found in Sea Point?’

‘We just had the call,’ he answered, his voice neutral. ‘There is a patrol car coming with the ambulance.’

‘You should come, Riedwaan.’ She could sense his reluctance. She hadn’t called him since she had been back and here she was phoning him because someone had been murdered. ‘There is nothing straightforward here.’

‘What?’ he asked. Clare looked back at the small coat-covered mound. The sight of the slim, lifeless legs made her
voice catch in her throat. ‘It’s too neat, Riedwaan, too arranged. And there’s no blood. It doesn’t look to me like an argument over price that went wrong.’

‘Okay, I’ll be there,’ said Riedwaan. He trusted Clare’s instincts. Her work as a profiler was hard to fault, despite her unorthodox methods. His voice softened. ‘How are you, Clare? We’ve missed you.’

Clare heard, but she did not reply. She snuffed the emotion that flared in her heart and snapped her phone closed. The morning felt even colder.

There was nothing more she could do. Clare forced herself to run. She had no need to hover and see what would happen to the girl’s body. She already knew. Clare ran for three kilometres before the rhythm of her feet on the paving dislodged the image of the dead girl from her mind.

She tried to lose herself in the noise of the pounding surf. Clare didn’t want to think of the dead girl on her pavement, but her thoughts returned to her, like a tongue probing an aching tooth. Half an hour later she looped back home along the promenade. Riedwaan’s car was parked next to the taped-off area around the girl’s body. The body was in good hands now.

Inspector Riedwaan Faizal’s taste for vengeance had given him a nose for the killers of young girls. Clare resisted the pull to go up to Riedwaan. And he had not seen her on the edge of the crowd, so she went home. Once inside her flat, Clare showered then grabbed a top, trousers, a jacket and scarf with the swift certainty of a woman who owns good clothes and knows how to dress. The local radio station was already carrying the first reports of this morning’s gruesome offering. By this afternoon, headlines about the murder would be plastered all over the city’s lamp posts.

Clare switched off the newsreader’s voice and sat down at
her desk. She looked out of the window. The view of the sea restored her equilibrium, and after a while she was able to turn her attention to her own work. Clare pulled a bulging file towards herself. She had scrawled ‘Human Trafficking in Cape Town’ in gold down its spine. She had found that women lured from South Africa’s troubled northern neighbours were being pimped along Main Road, Cape Town’s endless red light district bisecting the affluent suburbs huddled at the base of the Table Mountain. The women also stocked the brothels and the plethora of gentlemen’s clubs. The trade was increasingly organised. Clare was preparing herself for an interview that had required delicate negotiation to arrange. Natalie Mwanga had been trafficked from the Congo and she was risking a great deal by speaking to Clare.

Clare’s investigation was not making her any new friends. She had had to persuade her producer far away in safe London to let her ‘feature’ a trafficker in the documentary. It was a risky proposition and she needed more time. Clare had put out feelers before she had gone to the Congo two months earlier. On her return she had heard that Kelvin Landman might talk to her. He had been pimping since he was fifteen. Clare could not verify the rumour that it had started with his ten-year-old sister. Landman, one of her police sources had told her, had moved rapidly up the ranks of a street gang. He was a man with vision, though, and the porousness of South Africa’s post-democracy borders had been a licence for Landman to print money. His name had become synonymous with trafficking for the sex industry. And Landman ruthlessly punished any transgression of his rules.

Clare had once asked a young street prostitute how Landman worked. The girl pointed to two long, light scars across her soft belly. Punishment for a careless pregnancy. She then told Clare that the baby had been aborted and she
had been working again the next day. She’d laughed when Clare asked for an interview, and then wandered away. Clare had not seen her again.

She looked out at the sea again. Mist was rolling in, blotting out the morning’s early promise.

Trafficking was risk free for the trafficker, that was clear enough, and it generated a lot of cash. Lately, Landman had become notorious for insinuating himself into the highest echelons of business and politics. He had even been profiled as a ‘man about town’ by a respectable Sunday paper. Clare pulled out a clean sheet of notepaper and jotted down her questions.

Where did the cash go?

How was it made legitimate?

If Landman was selling, who was buying?

What were they buying?

She would find out. But the dead girl on the promenade surfaced unbidden in her thoughts. Clare stood up abruptly. She needed to get out, to be with people. She picked up her shopping list and headed for the Waterfront. As she drove, she thought she might add a few things to the list she’d made earlier.

Smoked salmon.

Wine.

Maybe some washing-up liquid.

Riedwaan Faizal had stared straight ahead of him after Clare’s call, his phone open in his hand. He could picture her as clearly as if she were in front of him. She was brilliant and obsessive, but difficult to work with. She didn’t like teams, she didn’t trust anybody. Her relationship with the law was flexible, although right and wrong for Clare were absolutes. These were not things that bothered Riedwaan. It was Clare herself who got under his skin. He needed her, like a man needed water. He put his phone back in his pocket and stood up. Being with her was like being thirsty all the time and never knowing if you would get a drink. The minute you thought you had her, she slipped away. The one time she had reached out for him he had turned away. Nothing could change that, so he shrugged the thought away.

Riedwaan turned his attention to the dead girl instead. She had not been ID’d yet, but he was sure it was the girl who had been reported missing since Friday. Today was Tuesday. He did not want to think about what had happened to her in the intervening four days. But he was going to have to. He finished his coffee and picked up his keys. This was going to be awkward. The case officer was Frikkie Bester simply because he had answered the call. He had already opened a docket and he was not going to be pleased to have Riedwaan
Faizal on his turf. But the station commander, who was generally pissed off at having been landed with Riedwaan, had been very happy to assign him to the case. Riedwaan knew Phiri well enough by now: by giving Riedwaan the case there was at least a hope in hell that it would be solved. And if it wasn’t, then there was his record of insubordination and alcohol and violence to wheel out. At least Phiri had volunteered to call Bester himself.

Riedwaan’s battered Mazda coughed into life long enough to drive the three blocks to where Harry Rabinowitz had found the dead girl. There was a press of people around the taped-off area where the body lay. He could see Bester on his phone, bull neck distended with rage. That would be Phiri, thought Riedwaan, telling Bester that Riedwaan was in charge. Bester stalked over to Riedwaan, flinging his folder at him.

‘Good luck, Faizal. I hope you stay sober long enough to work out which bastard did this.’ Riedwaan straightened the papers in the file and said nothing. A
klap
from Bester was not something you wanted to provoke.

‘Thanks, Frikkie.’ He saw the man twitch at the use of his first name. Riedwaan suppressed a smile. Words could be powerful sometimes. He opened the docket to check it was in order. ‘Looks perfect. Thanks.’ He ducked under the tape, and did not flinch at the sight of the splayed girl discarded on the pavement. He bent down next to her.

‘Who covered her?’ he asked.

‘The old guy who found her,’ a young constable answered. Her name tag stretched across her breast pocket: Rita Mkhize.

‘Shit!’ muttered Riedwaan. He removed the coat and handed it to the constable. ‘Bag that.’ Then he snapped his phone open and made the calls he needed to. The photography unit was on their way. He looked at the knife wound to her throat. The force of it had all but decapitated her. He put a call through
to ballistics. They would work out what knife had been used if there were grooves in the bones. And if they found the weapon to match the wound then he would be one step closer to catching the killer.

Riedwaan looked around. He could predict within seconds who had killed a victim. With female victims it was usually the husband or a boyfriend. He was willing to bet that this was a stranger killing. The body had been arranged. There was a message here, but it was written in a language he had yet to decipher. Riedwaan guessed she had been killed elsewhere and dumped here. He would wait for the forensic pathologist to tell him that: he was a cautious man despite his reputation. He called Piet Mouton.

‘Howzit, Doc. Riedwaan here. Are you on your way?’ He heard Mouton’s low laugh.

‘Jeez, no wonder they call you Super-cop. You must catch these guys all the time. Turn around.’

Riedwaan turned to find the shabby, plump figure of the forensic pathologist right behind him. Riedwaan laughed. ‘Doctor Death and his bag of tricks. I’m glad it’s you.’

‘What have we got here?’ asked Mouton. He looked down at the dead girl. ‘Where is that idiot Riaan?’ he asked, looking around for the police photographer who was smoking and trying to flirt with Constable Mkhize. ‘Come and do your job and leave that poor girl alone. You’re so ugly you’ll frighten her!’ called Mouton.

Riaan Nelson sauntered over with his camera. ‘What you want for your necrophilia collection this time, Doc?’ Mouton told him what to photograph. He was meticulous, and he knew his photographs were essential to Mouton and to Riedwaan. And to this dead girl, in the end. Piet Mouton sketched the girl while Riaan worked. A defence lawyer would pounce on one imprecise line on his autopsy report if it ever came to trial.
Mouton checked all around the body. There were two Marlboros very close to her; one was smoked down to the filter, the other had been stubbed out when it was half smoked. He bagged them.

‘Hard to tell with these, but we can give it a try. If there is other DNA on the body, then maybe we can do a match.’