The Serpentine Road (9 page)

‘This man wants to ask you about Miss Holt.’

‘Miss Holt has passed on.’

Her speaking voice is staccato, mechanical.

‘I am Don February.’

She stands up. He offers his hand, but she steps back and looks him up and down.

‘What is your rank?’

‘I am a Warrant Officer.’

The girl looks up at her mother, says: ‘That is the same as an Inspector.’

‘Yes,’ Don says, ‘that was what my rank used to be called.’

‘Why are your clothes too big?’

Don stutters.

‘I am . . . I suppose, because I am only small.’

‘Then you should have small clothes.’

‘Lorna,’ the austere women says. ‘Why don’t you let the policeman ask his questions, then you can finish your work.’

Lorna looks from her mother to Don.

‘Let me check your identification.’

Don produces his ID and passes it to her. She does not reach to take it, so he leaves it on the table in front of her. She sits back down, opens it, studies it. Don waits, hears the clock, looks around the room at the dark oil paintings, the deep turquoise velvet on the dining chairs, the ornate crucifix above the dark Victorian fireplace.

‘What do you want to ask?’

‘I want to ask you if you saw Miss Holt.’

‘I saw her from my window, often.’

‘Last Thursday night, did you see her then?’

‘No.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘On Wednesday night at 10.35 p.m.’

‘You remember the time?’

‘Yes.’

Don tilts his head; he does not doubt her.

‘What was she doing?’

‘She drove into her garage. I saw her in her car, but her window was closed.’

‘Was there anybody else in her car?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see anything else?’

‘There was a man waiting in a car on this side of the road. When she had gone in, he went to the door and rang on the bell. The front door opened and he went in.’

‘Can you describe this man?’

‘Black. He was a black man.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Only the police. Every day.’

‘I meant, about the black man.’

‘He was taller than you.’

‘How tall?’

The girl hesitates.

‘Taller than Miss Holt. He was on the step in front of her door. I could see them when they were both inside.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No. What have you found?’

‘We have been investigating.’

‘Have you caught the killer yet?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘No . . . Can I see your notepad?’

‘I . . . I don’t think so. It is for private notes only.’

Lorna pushes Don’s ID towards him across the table.

‘I am working now. Goodbye, Warrant Officer Donald February.’

She ducks her head, picks up a pencil and studies the page in front of her.

Don looks at her a moment longer, turns away. Lorna’s mother gestures for him to follow her back to the hallway. The maid opens the front door.

‘You have a very pretty daughter,’ Don tells the woman.

‘I hope,’ she says, ‘that this will be your last visit. If you must come again, telephone first. Lorna works on routine, and it is best not to break it.’

She turns and walks away from him. Don walks through the door, and turns to the maid. The front door closes firmly.

The light is fading by the time De Vries travels back into town. From De Waal Drive, he can see down to the docks, the Waterfront and the CBD. On the lower freeway into town, cars are backed up, locals and tourists coming into town at the start of the weekend. Lion’s Head and Signal Hill are silhouetted against a phosphorescent dusk sky. Although he knows of all the ugliness on the streets, the evil which lurks in the private homes and squatter camp shacks, he still loves his city; wouldn’t live anywhere else in South Africa.

He strides into his squad-room. A small group of officers are still at work. He stands in front of the whiteboard to see what further information has been accrued. Sally Frazer walks over and stands by his side.

‘I’m only halfway through her cell-phone numbers. She has over a hundred and almost none of them answer our call. I’m hoarse from talking to voicemail . . .’ She sniffs the air. ‘A few beers, sir?’

‘Liquid dinner, Sergeant.’

‘Most of them seem to be artists, agents, galleries and work contacts. I’ve got a couple of male names I can’t identify yet, but I will.’

‘Good.’

‘Anything to add for us on here?’ She gestures at the still largely empty whiteboard.

‘
Ja
. I’ll type them up. None of them liked her very much, even the official boyfriend. Woman with a strong personality, liked to get her way. No one likes them.’

Sally Frazer turns to him, sees he’s smiling. She says: ‘I don’t care what she was like.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘Your timing is spot on,Vaughn.’

Steve Ulton’s forensic laboratory is small, very neat, dimly lit. The vast majority of forensic work gets sent to various labs within the province either through the slow official system or fast-tracked through private companies but, for the Special Crimes Unit, the work is prioritized in-house under the control of Ulton and two fellow supervisors.

He faces De Vries, says: ‘Drinking mid-shift?’

De Vries scowls.

‘What the fuck is this: the dog pound? I’ve never known so many sensitive noses. After being on duty for twelve solid hours, I had one beer.’

Ulton glances quickly at his wristwatch, silently disputing De Vries’s timing, and picks up his clipboard, all business.

‘I’ll start with what we saw at the scene. I liaised with Doctor Jafari, and we’re in agreement that the shot from the furthest range was the one that caused all the mess. I can try to calculate the exact distance if you want, but I don’t think it’ll tell you much. The angle suggests that the victim was standing and the shooter was in the doorway. Because of the damage, I don’t think we’ll get an accurate trajectory on that first shot, and any analysis of the subsequent ones is compromised because she would have been sprawled on the bed.’

‘So we don’t get any idea about the height of the killer?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Anything special about the ammunition?’

‘No. Completely standard. As I said, we found no casings, but we’ve studied the bullets removed from the body and from the bed, and there are defining firing striations so we’ll be able to match it to the weapon, but we need it first.’

‘You talked about a silencer?’

‘It looks like that, and not a makeshift one either. Fitted the weapon.’

‘You got my message about the outside pathway? You checked outside access to the terrace?’

‘We did. There are footmarks – opposed to prints – nothing we can use. Someone has climbed up the rocks by the path and probably reached the terrace area. Could have been last night; could have been previously. Might be the gardener for all I know. There’s nothing there to narrow it down, but there is disturbance.’

De Vries takes a deep breath. His meetings with Ulton are never as helpful as he thinks they will be.

‘Tell me about the rubber dick?’

‘Not my area of expertise, but I sent one of the guys up the road to the Adult Fantasy shop off Long Street. It sells as a novelty called ‘Bestial Pleasure’. Big, muscular black guy with red horns on the packaging. All their branches sell it. Taiwanese manufactured; thousands imported into South Africa every year.’

‘Anything at all to cheer me at the end of another long day in the beautiful Mother City?’

‘I mentioned this morning that I wasn’t convinced that the terrace door had been tampered with from the outside. I’ve refined my opinion. The door could have been opened from the outside, but only because the mechanism had been compromised, and that definitely took place from inside the house.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Either the door developed a fault over time or it was tampered with, but, with the minimum of skill, it could be prised open from the outside. It is possible that someone played with the mechanism from the inside, hence allowing access at a later date.’

‘So the killer, or his accomplice, could have been inside the house on a previous occasion?’

‘That would make sense . . .’ Ulton takes off his spectacles and wipes his face with the sleeve of his white coat. ‘It’s not immediately obvious from inside, either. It could have been like that for days, even weeks.’

‘So we may have to look even further back. What about the alarm?’

‘Okay, this is interesting. On the floor, next to the victim’s bed, we found a remote-control unit for the alarm system. It’s probably because there are movement sensors throughout the house. If, in the middle of the night, the owner wanted to go to the kitchen, say, she could temporarily disable this system and she would be able to go there and then re-activate it when she was back in her room.’

‘But she was in her room. Why would she switch off the alarm?’

‘That’s what I was thinking about, so I looked at it again. Under the microscope it’s clear that the unit has been extensively handled with gloves. I found the unit and I’ve checked no one else touched it. I picked it up by its sides and bagged it. The depression and rubbing marks which are present don’t come from us, so that makes me think that someone else has been handling it – after Taryn Holt – over her existing prints.’

‘Someone else examined it wearing gloves before you?’

‘Look,’ Ulton says. ‘If my guys say they didn’t touch it, I’m sure they didn’t. I think someone
used
it wearing gloves.’ He straightens up to face De Vries. ‘Let’s speculate: the alarm is disabled by the killer using the remote which perhaps he has taken previously. He gains entry to the house through the faulty window mechanism and then replaces the remote unit in the bedroom.’

De Vries narrows his eyes, tilts his head.

‘Can we prove that?’

‘No. But, it’s a theory which might explain what I found on the unit and how the killer beat the alarm.’

‘So, if that’s right,’ De Vries says, ‘we don’t have that wide a window of opportunity after all. Surely she would have missed the remote control?’

‘Yes and no. I guess if she set the alarm from the main panel by the front entrance and didn’t have need of the remote, she might not have missed it for a few nights.’

‘Does the alarm system note the times when it was primed and deactivated?’

Ulton smiles.

‘No. Does just about everything else but not that. That’s more typical of commercial applications . . .’

‘But he’d have to know about the remote, wouldn’t he? That suggests that he’s been in her bedroom, at the very least.’

‘I don’t think that’s right,’ Ulton says thoughtfully. ‘We didn’t find any other remote units in the house, so she could easily have taken it into other rooms. If she was watching television, for example, she could set it to guard the perimeter but then, if there was someone at the door, she could use it to switch off the system.’

‘Why not use the main control panel?’

‘I don’t know. Ease, I guess. It’s to hand.’

‘But then we’re back to the fact that she would have missed it sooner rather than later.’

‘Yes, I guess that’s right.’

‘So, what have we got?’ De Vries says. ‘A working hypothesis: the killer knows about the remote control, takes it, sabotages the terrace door and then re-enters the house last night between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. He leaves the alarm disabled to allow him to leave the property. The maid sees the door open in the early hours and calls us . . .’

‘It seems a sensible theory.’

‘It’s something.’ De Vries proffers his hand. ‘Thank you, Steve. I think we’re looking for someone known to Taryn Holt who had been in her house in the preceding . . . say, three or four days.’

‘Agreed, but you have almost no forensic help. It’s still early, but we haven’t found anything obvious that doesn’t belong there.’

‘If we’re on the right track, we likely won’t, because he – assuming it is a he – will have been there before, so nothing can tie him specifically to the time of the crime . . . But this points in one direction: a boyfriend. And, surely, there can’t have been that many?’

As De Vries pauses in the road, waiting for his double gates to grind their way open, he sees her waiting in her car, fifty metres down the street; he feels his heart sink, breath shorten. He pulls onto the driveway, exits his car and walks back through the open gates. She is just slamming her car door. De Vries mutters under his breath. The deal had been clear, the terms explained: no strings, no promises; she had seemed to understand.

‘What’s the matter?’

She saunters up the road to him, smiles.

‘Not pleased to see me?’

He hesitates, senses her self-confidence; he fears the emotional battle ahead, from which he has sought to free himself.

She laughs.

‘Your face, man. It’s a picture. I’m not here for your body. I left my lighter . . . I hope I left my lighter here. I’ve looked everywhere else and it was from Dickie: one of the few things he let me keep.’

De Vries tries to laugh at himself, but there is relief in his exhalation and he knows that she has sensed it. He leads her back onto the driveway, closes the gates with his remote and opens the front door of the house. He reflects that their silence now is in contrast to the noise they made two nights previously.

‘I’m on a case. My mind is full.’

‘Don’t apologize.’

They walk into the hallway.

‘Where do you think?’

‘I can visualize it: on the shelf under your coffee table. I was kneeling on the floor, saw it, picked it up and slipped it in there . . . I think.’

De Vries blushes.

He met Pamela at the Forrester’s Arms, let her lure him out of the dark wood-panelled bar into the evening-sun lit garden, where they talked about their married lives, stayed for
braaied
supper, each posted a nonchalant self-confidence devoid of neediness, and went home to his house. Now that his desires are empty of emotion, he is fearless in approaching women and confident in their company, so different from the stuttering, incompetent dating of his youth. She has visited him maybe five times and, each time, the sex is better.