Gallows Hill (8 page)

She pulled over in front of Pedro’s building, her eyes on the three homeless boys digging through the dustbin.

‘You’ll never change, will you, Clare?’

‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘I haven’t really tried.’

He fished his bags out of her car, leaned in at her window. ‘Chef Pons at eight?’

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’ll meet you there.’

It was a relief to be alone in the car. She drove to the mortuary, where Raheema Patel was waiting for her. She’d packed a plaster cast of the skull into a box. Clare signed for it and drove up the narrow lane
in Vredehoek where the forensic artist had her studio. She rang the bell and waited. The woman who opened up was anywhere between forty and sixty years old. Faded jeans, a grey T-shirt, no shoes. A Mahler violin concerto drifting across the garden from the open windows.

‘You’re a very persuasive woman, Dr Hart.’ The hand she extended was brown and strong. ‘I’m Katrin Goldfarb.’

‘Sheralyn
Jantjies told me that your arm is easy to twist,’ said Clare.

‘Well, she’d know, I suppose. You got what I needed?’

‘The forensic anthropologist has done a cast,’ said Clare.

‘Perfect,’ said Katrin Goldfarb. ‘Let me have that.’ She took the box from Clare and tucked it under her arm.

Clare followed her through a tangled garden. The studio was no more than a toolshed. It smelt of
earth, of rotting leaves, of clay, latex, chemicals. Katrin Goldfarb put the box onto a trestle table where she had set out some charts, as well as clay, and white orbs for the eyeballs.

‘Light and shapely,’ she said, easing the skull out of its nest of tissue paper and cupping it in her hands. ‘A young woman’s skull. Do you know when she died?’

‘Between 20 and 25 years ago,’ said Clare.

The artist ran an index finger along the zigzagged lines that marked where the five plates of the skull had knitted to form a perfect shape. She placed the skull on her workbench, and her fingers drifted over the high forehead, around the eye sockets, and down the prominent cheekbones. Her fingers hovered with the same wonderment as a mother’s over the face of her newborn.

Selecting a wooden
pedestal, she balanced the skull on it. She felt along the triangulation from the cheekbone towards the point of the chin.

‘It would have given her face a heart shape. The high cheekbones, the wide-set eyes, the narrow tip of the chin. The ingredients for female seductiveness, childlike features that trigger hate as readily as they do love. Not everyone can tell the difference.’

Katrin
Goldfarb felt along the area that had been crushed. ‘He must have been filled with rage if he’d hit her this hard. Skulls are damn tough, as you know.’

She placed her fingers under the jawbone. Her fingers read the face’s architecture – it was onto the bone that she would fix approximations of muscle and flesh. Clare watched as the artist broke off a piece of clay and rolled it between her
palms, making it warm to her touch.

‘This’ll take me a day. Two, at most. Let yourself out. I’ll call you when she’s done.’

A pall of smog hung over Cape Town. Uniformed police were standing around the gates of Parliament in Plein Street – a VIP detail for officials so easily replaced that no one would bother to assassinate them. Bellies ballooned over the belts of blue uniforms. Many cops were so obese that it seemed their appetites might be as deadly as a bullet or a bomb.

Riedwaan and Rita were in the
parking lot opposite Parliament.

‘Wasn’t she in charge of that school feeding scheme?’ asked Riedwaan, watching a woman struggling to lift her bulk out of a BMW. ‘Scrawny kids who were meant to get a daily slice of bread and peanut butter?’

‘That’s the one.’ Rita watched the woman waddle up the steps. ‘Doesn’t look as if the food went entirely to waste, does it, Captain? Lifestyle audits,
it’s enough to kill an honest cop. You know what these people spend?’

‘Tell me,’ said Riedwaan, as they walked down the street.

‘Their lunch bills alone are more than you and I earn together,’ said Rita.

‘We should have gone into politics.’

‘My skin’s not thick enough,’ said Rita. ‘And for all your Mr Tough-Guy Cop, neither is yours.’

‘You saying I’m soft?’ asked Riedwaan,
as she pushed open the doors to the Deeds Office. A security guard directed them to an office.

‘It was sad the day honest became soft, boss,’ said Rita, knocking on the half-open door.

‘Come in,’ A woman’s crisp voice. ‘Can I help?’ she asked, smoothing down her black skirt. Her tidy four-thirty desk seemed to contradict her offer.

‘I need all the documentation you have on a site in
Green Point,’ said Riedwaan.

‘In connection with?’

‘This is a police investigation,’ said Riedwaan, showing her his badge. Nodding towards Rita, he said, ‘This is Sergeant Mkhize.’

The woman glanced at the badge, glanced at Rita.

‘I want to know how a building got past the City’s heritage regulations,’ said Riedwaan. ‘It’s in a known conservation area, where archeological finds
have been made before, where every time you dig a hole you find a skeleton. Why was the building allowed without any kind of assessment? It’s stirred a hornet’s nest that we have to sort out.’

‘I can’t imagine the Council would be at fault, Captain Faizal,’ she said, folding her hands.

‘If you fetch the plans and the permissions,’ said Rita with a smile, ‘we won’t have to imagine anything.’

The clerk glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘We close in half an hour, Captain,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to come back tomorrow and speak to my supervisor?’

‘The plans come here?’ said Riedwaan.

‘They do, Captain,’ she said. ‘But only if people follow procedures.’

‘How do they not follow procedures?’

‘Well, you do get people who submit plans and then just go ahead with
the building work while the plans are with Council.’

‘Get me the documents,’ said Riedwaan. Rita nudged him. ‘Please. I want everything on that site since it was first surveyed.’

‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘What is it?’

‘Gallows Hill,’ Riedwaan said. ‘Green Point.’

‘Come back in 20 minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the copies for you.’

‘No, we’ll wait here,’ said Rita, settling into
the visitor’s chair.

The clerk handed Riedwaan a thick folder. She picked at a hangnail as he flicked through the pages.

‘This file stops in 2010,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I need to go back a few years.’

‘The sale is not registered with us.’

‘This is a criminal investigation,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You can give me the documents now. Or I make your life really difficult, and you give them to
me later.’

‘My supervisor said that we could not give you anything.’ She cleared her throat twice.

‘Call her in,’ said Riedwaan.

Her eyes flicked from Riedwaan to Rita and back again. She saw no help from either of them. ‘She’s left for the day, and my instructions are that all correspondence about this is closed.’

‘On whose authority?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ she said. Her
eyes flashed.

‘What can you tell me?’

‘Just that this land was not owned by the City Council. Look, there is a letter in the file that might help you,’ she said, dropping her voice and handing over a piece of paper.

Riedwaan scanned the document.

‘The land belonged to central government, not the City,’ said Riedwaan. He handed the document to Rita. ‘Recognise this name?’

Rita
raised her eyebrows, and looked up at the woman standing in front of them.

‘No wonder your supervisor went home,’ said Rita.

‘Please take that and go,’ said the clerk. ‘If I get caught –’

‘It’s okay. We’re out of here,’ said Riedwaan.

She watched him and Rita leave. Then she opened her bag and found her bottle of Rescue Remedy.

‘You want me to tooth-comb this lot?’ asked Rita,
her haul of papers clutched under her arm as they walked back to the car.

‘Everything,’ said Riedwaan, getting into the hot car. ‘Crosscheck, double check, match it with the other stuff you have. I’ll work on it with you.’

‘I like seeing you do paper work,’ smiled Rita. ‘Really brings out the best in you.’

‘Lifestyle audits,’ said Riedwaan. ‘It can really make a man happy, seeing how
good people are at spending my taxes.’

‘They’ll just tell you that you’re lucky to have a job that earns you enough to pay tax,’ said Rita, easing the vehicle into the traffic.

‘Fuck them,’ said Riedwaan.

‘If we check out the paperwork,’ said Rita. ‘Maybe we can. Fuck them, I mean. I need something to eat.’

’Ja, I’m hungry too,’ he said.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Whatever you’re having,’ he said. ‘Order me one.’

Rita stopped outside a café in Sea Street and got out. Riedwaan checked his voicemail.

‘Samoosas,’ said Rita, returning with a bulging bag of takeways in her hand. ‘They can make anything right, neat little triangles of heaven. Here.’

‘Thanks,’ said Riedwaan, biting into one. ‘Clare wants to know when that warehouse floor was thrown.’

‘That’ll be in the files we got from the Council,’ said Rita. ‘You seeing her later?’

‘Is that a personal question, Mkhize?’

‘Get over yourself,’ said Rita. ‘Everybody knows.’

‘Knows what?’

Rita rolled her eyes.

‘Okay,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I am. Later. First we’ve got to get through the paper work. Then I’ve got another plan.’

‘Plan for what?’ asked Rita.

‘A bit of dog
training.’

It was well past 9.30 pm when Riedwaan left Rita with her rows of documents. It was time to find Hond Williams. Riedwaan drew a blank at the first three hotels he tried. He was in luck at the One and Only. The black Hummer was in the parking lot, and for 50 bucks the doorman sold him the fact that Williams was on his cell phone, pushing sushi around his plate at Haiku. The waitress
told Riedwaan for free that Williams was a cunt. But it cost him another 50 to hear from her that Williams had mentioned Nefertiti’s. The perfect venue for a consultation with a lawyer.

Riedwaan headed for the strip club. The night air was stale, the homeless boys were unrolling their bedding in the doorways on Darling Street. There was no sign yet of the Hummer, nor of the Jaguar that he
had seen in Malan’s parking bay in Keerom Street at midday. The new strip club was close enough to Parliament to have survived the recession. Riedwaan Faizal took his time at the entrance. He was the only member of his unit who didn’t get clocked as a cop at the door. But he was not convinced that this was a character reference. Rich scum, poor scum – he blended as easily with one lot as with the
other.

The interior was air-conditioned to an arctic temperature. Even so, it was a relief from the heat. And it had the added benefit of keeping the waitresses’ nipples perky. He allowed his eyes to adjust to the dimness. The decorator’s brief must have been ‘gentlemen’s club’. Red leather sofas, with gleaming brass studs. Wine-red carpet, plush curtains. Gold tiebacks. Potted palms. A gold
Venus in a clamshell. A lot of stuff that would get in the way of a good bar fight.

There was a kitchen off to the right. The sushi adverts were not enough to quell the smell of burgers and chips.

Two exits.

One past the toilets. One behind the bar. For the staff.

The bar ran the length of the room.

Riedwaan ordered a Jameson’s and retreated to the arse-end of the bar.

The place was filling up. Two cabinet ministers he recognised from the newspapers, neither of whom featured because of well-run ministries. There was a smattering of fat MPs. Most of them from Jo’burg, waiting for Parliament to open. Down for the season, they’d dumped their wives in the parliamentary village on the other side of Milnerton. The MPs, of course, were filling up rooms at the President,
the Mount Nelson, the Cape Grace.

Riedwaan scanned the crowd. Girls with expensive breasts and cheap accents draped themselves over laps and the backs of chairs. The music was a series of gasps and shrieks fed through a drum machine. Orgasm ambient. The room smelt of hamburger grease, sweat, aftershave and self-satisfaction.

He lit a Camel. The clean smell of Turkish tobacco cleared a
breathing space around him.

Waleed Williams.
Die Hond
. There he was. Back-lit in the double door. The broad shoulders and chest. Muscles earned in a prison where there was nothing to do but pump iron.

Survival of the fittest, and Williams was fitter than most.

When he had walked out of Pollsmoor Prison, he had gone straight to a plastic surgeon in Sea Point instead of the sheltering
labyrinth that was the Cape Flats. He had had his tattoos removed. Then he had gone to a dentist who had given him a bridge and restored his front teeth. He had bought a fancy watch, three Hugo Boss suits, two pairs of hand-tooled leather shoes, six Armani shirts, and a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Then immediately, he flew to Johannesburg and a new life.

The manager was at Williams’s side as
his entourage arrayed themselves behind him. The Cape Flats muscle he had acquired in prison now formed an archipelago of violence across the province. All of them clean. Tattoos gone, designer suits. Indistinguishable from the newly minted millionaires they partied with. Apart, that is, from their accents and the Afrikaans dialect they occasionally slipped into for tactical reasons.

The manager
cleared a path and seated Hond Williams at the best table. A waitress already there, hovering over a bottle of Moët & Chandon on ice. Nik-Naks. Williams was obviously a regular.

Riedwaan watched as a hard-eyed hostess herded some younger blonde girls over to his table. Unwilling, they seemed, for all their perkiness. There are only so many bruises a pretty girl needs to put up with for cash
and a fix. Williams gestured, and a girl settled, light as a butterfly, on the arm of his chair. Her red-lipsticked smile was not enough to conceal her anxiety.

Williams put a hand on her thigh. Riedwaan imagined how her skin would contract at the touch. Clare Hart had taught him that. Putting yourself into the body of a frightened woman. It was something he would rather not have known.