Like Clockwork

21

Clare dreamt of the dead girl, but, to her surprise, she awoke refreshed – and, to her shame, elated to be alive. She lay in bed listening to the pre-dawn silence, drifting between consciousness and her hovering dreams. There was something on the periphery of her mind, but whenever she shifted her mind’s eye to look at it, it disappeared. She gave up when the first call of a dove pulled her into the morning. She stretched and got up, pulling on her running clothes. She felt chilly, despite the warmth of her heated flat, so she put on an extra top and set off. Outside it was dark, except for a cold gleam in the slitted yellow eye of the horizon. In spite of her unease, she ran in the direction of Graaff’s Pool.

The flurried activity of the previous night was gone. Chevroned police tape was looped around the whole area. Clare could see a guard drawing on his cigarette as if it might warm him. The rising sun provided no warmth and Clare was getting cold. She turned to continue her run. She followed the promenade’s paved ribbon to the end before heading home again. By the time she was back at Graaff’s Pool the forensics officers had returned, searching a wider arc now for anything that Amore Hendricks’s killer may have left behind. So far, there was nothing. The tide had risen high the previous night, and if anything had remained it would have been obliterated. Clare doubted they’d find anything.

The way the two bodies they had found so far had been arranged, and the symbolism of the wounds – almost like stigmata – pointed to a killer who made careful preparations. He was not someone who would easily make a mistake. Also, by now the tide would have washed any little slips away. Clare watched for Riedwaan. He had called her last night, keeping the call businesslike and brushing aside her attempt to explain Jakes. He told her that Rita Mkhize called to say that the SMS had come from a phone belonging to Clinton Donnelly. Clare remembered the name – he’d been an enthusiastic student at a lecture she’d once given. Clinton lived in Observatory, a cramped suburb where attempts at gentrification had never really succeeded; it was a place that Clare generally avoided. He had sent the message from a house in Campbell Road.

The mournful wail of the foghorn demanded her attention. She looked towards the rhythmic flash of the lighthouse that accompanied it. It was due east. Then she looked back towards Graaff’s Pool, where the girl’s body had been laid out along a precise north/south axis. Her head had pointed south, as had the blood-soaked bound hand. Clare stood still, the threads of morning mist twisting wraithlike, receding ahead of the breakers before they disappeared. The precision of the arrangement of the corpses – the head of the first one pointing east, this one south – tugged at her mind. She shivered, praying that there would be no west, no north.

The wind was cold, so Clare sheltered in the lee of a small building. The tide was retreating. Clare watched the pattern the waves made as they rushed forward onto the rocks. Their energy spent, they fell back into each other. Foam formed where the crests thrashed against the rocks, and one another, then retreated for respite towards the open sea. This white spine of foam ran along the deep, navigable channel between the rocks. Clare stood up on the bench she had been sitting on. The body had been placed at the end of that channel. Had the killer brought her in there by boat? Last night’s weather would have made this difficult – but then nobody would have have been around to notice, either.

A flash of blue in a rock pool caught Clare’s eye. Something stranded by the receding tide, or rubbish from one of the vessels anchored off the coast, thought Clare, as she leapt down to the beach. She picked her way across the rocks. A bedraggled bunch of flowers tied together with gold ribbon, washing out, and then returning with the tide, dislodged a shard of memory. An old man with a bunch of plastic-wrapped blooms. Clare pulled the flowers out of the sea, even though she was outside the police cordon. She walked over to the tape and called to one of the forensic detectives searching across the beach sand.

‘Joe,’ she called. He came over to her, rubber gloves stretched tight across his plump hands.

‘Hi, Clare.’ Clare had known Joe Zulu all the years she had worked with the police. ‘I hear it was you who found this one.’

‘Ja, it was horrible. Someone I know told me the body was here.’ Clare handed him the flowers and pointed to the beach below. ‘By the way, I found these over there – they seem so out of place here. Also, Harry Rabinowitz mentioned that there were flowers with the first girl. I didn’t see anything in the report, though. I’ll check Riaan’s photos again. Harry Rabinowitz told me there were flowers with the first girl too.’

Joe placed the flowers in an evidence bag. ‘They’re almost the same colour as the ribbon her hand was tied with,’ observed Joe. ‘Who knows what will help solve this?’ and he turned in the direction where Amore’s body had lain. The tide had made sure that any visible trace of her had been erased. But you never knew until later about invisible traces of evidence left behind.

‘Let me know what you find, Joe,’ said Clare. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’ Joe waved and went back to work.

Clare checked her cellphone for messages as she climbed the rough steps that led from the beach back to street level.

‘Hello, Dr Hart. I see you are a morning person too.’ Otis Tohar’s voice raised every single one of the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. ‘Are you a runner?’ he asked.

‘As you can see,’ said Clare, irritated that he had so unnerved her. Tohar was dressed in an expensive tracksuit, but he did not look as if he had been running. He had several newspapers under his arm. Clare made out a headline that clearly relished the sales spike the murder of a beautiful girl would result in. Her heart sank. Chief-Superintendent Phiri was going to throw a fit: it wouldn’t be too long before the history of the case officer came out. Ever since Riedwaan Faizal had punched a journalist who’d questioned his relationship with some of the local gangsters, he’d not been that popular with the more liberal papers.

‘You did not strike me as a vulture, Dr Hart.’ Tohar leaned in close to her. The acrid smell was there again. Clare’s nostrils flared in distaste. This seemed to amuse him. He moved closer, trapping her between his body and the sea wall. ‘Curiosity seems to be a habit with you.’

Clare contained her claustrophobia and stepped away. ‘It is my profession.’

‘It has brought you luck so far?’

‘Not luck,’ Clare replied. ‘Knowledge. Why are you here so early?’

‘I have so much invested here.’ He gestured behind him. The cranes loomed above the road. ‘I need to be sure of what is going on around here. But also to see if I can help.’

He was not the only one. A crowd was gathering around the police cordon.

‘I’m going to fetch Tatiana from gym. I think you met her last night?’

Clare wondered if Tohar knew about their brief meeting in his video library.

‘No,’ she risked. ‘We weren’t introduced.’ He turned to go.

‘Mr Tohar, I hear that Kelvin Landman has put quite a bit of finance into some of your more recent projects.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘You know what Cape Town is like with rumours, especially about other people’s money.’

Tohar hesitated. ‘We work very well together. Mutual interests. We should really do lunch some time. Call me, Clare.’ He wiped a sudden sheen of sweat off his forehead and made his way back to his car. The clouds parted temporarily and the sky gleamed a deep blue. The engine of his car started at once with a rumble, a bass note to the whine of the accumulating morning traffic.

Clare went back to checking her messages. There was one from Riedwaan to say that he had dropped a copy of the preliminary autopsy report off for her. She went home, picking up the envelope he had put in her letterbox. Clare phoned Riaan, asking him to let her have a set of his pictures from the murder scene, and then she had a shower. She was forcing herself to eat a slice of toast with her coffee when the doorbell rang.

‘Who is it?’ asked Clare, pressing the intercom.

‘Delivery. Small package, madam.’ She buzzed the man in and signed for it.

She ripped it open, knowing already who had sent it. She shook open the slim envelope. The face of the Devil, fifteenth card of the Tarot leered up at her, the carnal card, the grinning symbol of desire and entrapment in bodily lust. Clare picked it up. The second card of any Tarot reading revealed past influences. But whether these were her own, or the killer’s, Clare was uncertain. She tucked the repugnant card into her handbag, leaving her breakfast unfinished. She sat at her desk, determined to face her day with composure.