Like Clockwork

24

Clare stretched her arms up in the air. It was very late, and the roar of Beach Road had dropped to a hum, indistinguishable from the distant crash of the sea along the promenade. She and Riedwaan had spent the evening in the special ops caravan, shuffling the information they had, trying to make sense of the girls, of their killer. Riedwaan had gone home earlier, leaving Clare to transcribe her interview with Clinton Donnelly.

She should really go home, she thought, and log her interview with Natalie Mwanga. Her documentary deadline was bearing down on her. She had been following up on what Natalie had told her. But she needed corroboration from a border official. One of the long-haul taxi drivers would be ideal. Clare thought about getting a cup of coffee, but she’d already settled into her bones. She did not move.

Giscard walked towards the police station, obscured by the late-night shadows that hung from the buildings. He had long ago learnt to be invisible. It was this that had enabled him to survive in Cape Town. Tonight, though, his stride was hesitant – something that a refugee soon learnt to hide if he wanted to avoid being noticed by the police. He hesitated at the door, looking in through the meshed glass. There was just the woman there, the one he’d been told was trying to find out about the sale of women. She looked so slight. He watched as she slipped her headphones onto her shoulders.

Giscard opened the door but she did not hear him.

‘Good evening, Madame.’ The accented voice startled her.

‘Can I help you?’ She guessed he was an illegal.

‘Madame, I saw something. You must go there now, please, Madame.’

‘What is your name?’ Clare asked.

‘You can call me Giscard. That is enough.’

‘Tell me what you saw,’ said Clare. She reached over for her notebook, clicked the pen against the palm of her hand.

Giscard reached into his pocket, producing a scrap of thumbed newspaper. The phone number had been written with the careful deliberateness of one who has taught himself to read and write. Clare took the paper, jotted down the number, and gave it back to Giscard.

‘What, Giscard, what did you see? Start at the beginning.’

‘I called that number.’ He spoke in a rush in case his fear silenced him. ‘It is a man who answered. I tell him my name. That someone give me the number and tell me that he needs a security. The man say to me: are you strong? I say yes.’

Clare noticed the taut muscles across his shoulders, the broad hands, the gentle eyes. A kind father’s eyes, she thought. His words flowed now.

‘Madame, I say yes and he say I must come to see him. And I go.’ Clare knew how much it must have cost him to come in here: no papers, desperate to avoid all contact with an officialdom that would send him back to the violent mayhem he had fled.

‘Madame, I go there. It is an apartment with many locks. Bars on the window. It is there in Main Road. A man lets me in. He says I must wait – that the man I talked to is coming. I do that. I wait while he goes to call someone. He comes back with another man. They ask me: can I be good security? Can I keep quiet? Do I have papers? I say yes. I say yes. I say not yet. They say I must work at night until nine a.m. I ask them what is the job and they laugh. They say that my job is to forget what I see every night. To forget who I see. They say they know men from my country. How we make our money from our women. I say nothing. We talk about the money. But there is a noise outside. The men go out. I hear them talking, shouting. I think that they are talking on their phones. They go out the front door – I hear the lock sliding – I think that someone is coming. I wait. It is very quiet. I am waiting there then I hear a very small noise. I listen. It sounds like a child that is crying, a girl crying. The men are gone, so I get up. I cannot leave the crying. I think of my own children in Congo. I go through the curtain where the second man came from. There I see more doors. One is open a little bit and it is there that I hear the crying. I go in. Madame.’ Giscard’s voice is soft, urgent. ‘Madame, there is a child. I am afraid for her. She is too much in pain. You must go there now. It is a very young girl that is crying there. She looks very, very bad. I see her hand is bleeding. Her face, it is hit many times.’

‘Where is she?’ asked Clare, reaching for notebook. ‘Can you take me?’

‘No, Madame. I cannot! But you go there, please. Take the other men with you.’ He pushed a scrap of paper towards her. On it was an address she recognised. A block of flats on a notorious stretch of Sea Point’s Main Road. ‘Please, Madame, I cannot tell you more. Can you go there now? Can you fetch the child tonight?’ A car pulled up outside. Clare went to the window to see who it was. She turned round, a question on her lips. But the caravan door was open, and Giscard was gone.

Joe Zulu came in. ‘Who was that guy leaving?’ asked Joe, placing a cup of coffee in front of her. Clare did not answer. She was punching a number into her cellphone.

Pick up, she willed. He did. ‘Riedwaan, it’s Clare. I have a report of an abduction. Can you come?’ she closed her eyes, willing him to come. Then she thought of him in bed, imagined her hand moving down his hairless, brown chest.

‘Clare.’ His voice was irritated. ‘I asked you: where?’

‘In that block on Main Road. I think that we need to visit tonight.’ Riedwaan’s hesitation was palpable on the other end of the phone. Clare thought she could hear someone else’s voice asking who and what and why so late?

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you and Joe up at the station.’ The phone went dead.

‘What’s happening, Clare?’

‘Riedwaan’s picking us up to investigate an assault. Looks like an abduction. Someone came to report it while you were next door.’

Joe folded his arms. ‘You don’t think it’s a set-up?’ he asked.

‘For what?’ asked Clare. ‘Why would an illegal take the risk of coming to the police station?’

‘Who knows? To cause trouble for someone else. Because he was paid to,’ said Joe. ‘I wonder how he got past the gate security.’

‘Jesus, Joe, you could drive a tank past those guards and they wouldn’t wake up after ten o’clock.’

Clare brought her car round from the parking lot at the back and was waiting for her heater to warm up when Riedwaan arrived. He came over to her window and held out his hand. She handed him the slip of paper with the address scrawled on it.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Clare,’ he said. ‘Who gave this to you?’

‘He called himself Giscard. Congolese, I’d say.’

Joe came out of the station. ‘Hey, Riedwaan. Shall we go?’ The two men got into Riedwaan’s car and Clare slipped into their wake. At 12.30 only the most desperate women were displayed along the road in their high heels, skinny thighs blue with cold.

Riedwaan and Joe parked near the block they were headed for and waited for Clare. The three of them then picked their way over the bodies of sleeping street children and made their way to the entrance. A young Somali woman, bright scarf pulled tight around her face, stood aside, eyes glazed with relief when they walked past her.

Riedwaan took the stairs two at a time, with Clare close behind him. Joe, still smoking twenty a day, wheezed after them. On the third floor Riedwaan checked the number that Clare had given him and looked for number four. There was nothing on any of the doors so he counted along. The door he knocked on opened immediately, as if they had been expected. The man who answered was tattooed and wore a tight T-shirt.

‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ He leered at Clare. ‘Lady?’

‘You going to let us in, Kenny?’ said Riedwaan, matching his bulk against that of the doorman. Kenny moved aside just enough for them to pass through. Clare brushed against his bare arm, and recoiled.

‘We had a report that a child was being held here, Kenny. A very unhappy child. You know that means we can inspect the premises, don’t you, Kenny?’

Kenny looked confused. ‘For sure, man. I know that. But I scheme you’ll find yourself on a wild goose chase.’ Kenny sauntered down the passage, pushing doors open. There were women in all the rooms. ‘My sister,’ said Kenny, ‘so keep your eyes front. And my cousins from Malmesbury.’

‘What about that door?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘It’s empty. Check it out yourself.’

Riedwaan opened it. Kenny was right. Except for a bed, the room was empty. Kenny went over and closed the window, shutting out the cold wind billowing the tattered curtain.

‘That’s all, folks,’ said Kenny, shepherding Riedwaan and Joe down the passage. ‘You came, you checked it out, there was nothing to see. You did your job. Now fuck off.’

Clare slipped back into the empty room. Her nostrils flared: she could smell the trace of someone who’d recently been there. She pulled back the cheap floral quilt. Beneath it was a naked mattress streaked with drying blood. She put her hand down to feel between the wall and the mattress. Wedged there, was a single earring. She slipped it into her pocket as she stepped over to the window. There was a three-metre drop to the roof below. It was possible someone had made that leap. Someone very desperate. A fragment of cloth caught on the razor wire whipped wildly in the rising wind, alerting Clare to a narrow alley snaking up behind the buildings. About halfway up the hill the filthy passageway led to a flight of steps, but Clare couldn’t make out any movement.

‘Clare,’ called Riedwaan.

She turned away reluctantly and closed the door behind her. Riedwaan propelled her towards the front door. ‘Your little bird has flown and we can’t do anything more without a fucking warrant,’ he whispered. ‘Do you want me to get into more shit with your crusades?’

‘You know as well as I do that there was someone there,’ Clare retorted, furious at the rigmarole of laws and warrants and having to be fair to scum like Kenny. ‘There’s blood all over that mattress.’

‘And there is nothing I can do about that or the so-called cousins from Malmesbury without a search warrant. And there is no way we will get a warrant without your mystery Giscard. Now let’s go, before Kenny decides we are infringing on his undeserved civil rights.’

‘Where has she gone?’ Clare wondered aloud as they went down the stairs.

‘She could be anywhere,’ said Joe. ‘If she is still alive she’ll be terrified beyond speech. She’s not going to come to us.’

Riedwaan slammed the car door in impotent fury.

‘I’m sorry, Riedwaan,’ said Clare.

‘It’s nobody’s fault. Those guys would have cleared things up in seconds after they realised that your friend had taken off. But without him there will be no case. No witness, no warrant, no evidence.’

‘No girl,’ said Clare.

‘That too,’ Riedwaan said. ‘No bloody girl. Not yet. I’m going to put out an alert so that everyone is on the lookout for her. She’ll need help if she’s been with these guys for a while.’

‘I wonder if she looked like the other two,’ said Clare. There was no need to elaborate.

‘She’ll turn up. Alive, I mean,’ said Joe. ‘I don’t think these gangsters killed the other two. They didn’t look like initiation victims to me: there usually isn’t much left of them when we find them. And pimps don’t like destroying their assets. Beatings, yes, torture for fun, but killing a girl usually means things got a little out of hand. Nothing was out of control when Charnay and Amore were murdered.’

‘I hope you’re right, Joe,’ said Riedwaan. He started the car. ‘Are you coming back to the station, Clare?

She looked at her watch. It was past one. ‘No. Not now. It’s so late. I think I’ll just go home.’

‘Okay, see you,’ said Joe.

Riedwaan didn’t try to dissuade her. Clare got into her car, automatically pushing down the central locking. Maybe whoever had been with Riedwaan earlier was waiting for him. Maybe he had just been watching the late-night movie. She watched as the two men drove off.