Like Clockwork

3

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.’

Riedwaan stood close by, listening to Mouton. He was a fussy, shy man and he muttered away to himself while he worked a crime scene. Riedwaan had long since learned to stick close and glean everything he could.

‘Look here.’ Mouton swabbed a streak on her stomach, ‘Could be semen.’ There was some of the same substance on the skirt too. He collected and labelled it.

Mouton was satisfied that he had enough photographs now. He told Riaan, and the photographer packed his bags and was circling Rita Mkhize before Mouton could close his clipboard.

‘She wasn’t killed here, Riedwaan. I’ll check during the postmortem but I would say she was killed somewhere else and dumped here.’

‘How long has she been dead, Doc?’

Mouton put his head on one side. The girl was cold and stiff. ‘Hard to say until I do the temp with a body probe. But at a guess I’d say between eight and thirty-six hours. I don’t think more than that. Once I start with the post-mortem, I’ll also be able to give you a better idea about when she was moved.’

Mouton picked up the girl’s hand and took a scrape from under her fingernails. He did a vaginal swab, too, bagging both of these and handing them to Riedwaan.

‘Did you have to do that here, Doc?’

Mouton pulled the girl’s short skirt down. ‘Man, you are getting soft. It’s hard to argue with evidence that’s gathered before the body has been moved. Whoever did this to her took her dignity with her life. Don’t you lose those, you fucker. You take that straight to the lab at Delft. And make them sign for it in their own blood.’

Riedwaan did not answer. He had seen enough rapists laugh into their victim’s faces as they walked free. It just took one break in the chain of evidence – be it specimen or statement – and a clever defence lawyer would have a paedophile waiting for his little girl of choice by tea break. There was no way that this evidence would be out of his sight for one second.

Mouton leaned in close and looked at the slash across her throat. ‘This is very high up,’ he said. ‘It’s like he was trying to cut out her tongue. Like he wanted to do a Colombian Necktie, but didn’t have the strength. Very sharp blade that he used, very sharp. Maybe a scalpel.’

‘Look at her eyes, Doc. Surely she hasn’t been dead long enough for that to happen,’ said Riedwaan. The girl’s eyes had sunken in. Mouton reached over and lifted an eyelid.

‘Ja,’ he said, ‘he cut her.’ He pointed to the incisions that formed a cross on the cornea. ‘The eyeball is just a ball of gel. Make a hole in it like this guy did, and the eyeball will collapse.’

‘When was she mutilated?’

‘The hand while she was alive. You can see it from the crusted blood. Her throat – that was done after she died. Look here, there is no blood to speak of.’

‘The eyes?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Just before she died. Maybe as he killed her.’

Riedwaan shivered. ‘I hate to imagine what she saw that needed to be removed so viciously.’

The mortuary van arrived. The mortuary technicians brought their stretcher around to pick her up. ‘You ready, Doc?’ asked the driver. Mouton nodded. The assistant was hardly older than the murdered girl. The boy struggled to stop his hands from shaking as he lifted her body. Mouton looked at the place where she had lain, but it had not been there long enough for any fluids to seep out.

‘You coming to the post-mortem?’ asked Mouton.

‘You’re doing it right now?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Ja,’ said Mouton. ‘I’ve got a feeling this is going to get hot.’ He looked back at the van. ‘I don’t think she’s going to be your last either. I worked on the PMs when they were looking for that killer who was into bondage in KwaZulu-Natal. That girl didn’t look like a once-off to me.’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Doc. They can lead you astray.’

The pathologist gave him a withering look. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘Ja, I’ll be there. I’ve just got to drop this stuff off at the lab. I’ll be with you in an hour.’ Riedwaan walked with Mouton to his car. ‘Can I bring someone?’

‘Who?’ asked Mouton.

‘Clare Hart. I’m thinking of getting her to do the profile for me. If you’re right then we’ll need one. She’s worked with me before.’

Mouton put his hand on Riedwaan’s shoulder. ‘That’s a strange way to pull women, Riedwaan, even for you. But if she’s not in the police force, no way. You can tell her everything later. You can show her all the pictures if you can persuade her to go to dinner with you. But nobody who doesn’t need to be there gets to watch my show.’ Mouton opened his car and wedged his stomach behind the wheel. ‘Jesus, man, I’ve got to lose some weight.’

‘I’ll see you back at the station,’ Riedwaan called to Frikkie Bester, who pretended not to hear. Riedwaan shrugged. Not much he could do about trampled egos even if he had wanted to. He climbed into his own car, putting the swabs and samples down as if they were Ming porcelain. It was a pity Clare couldn’t be at the PM but there was no way he would get Mouton to change his mind. He headed for the lab in Delft and handed over the samples. He was glad it was Anna Scheepers who took the case. She was meticulous about her evidence and brilliant in court. Riedwaan had seen her impale enough lawyers, lulled into complacency by the volume of her hair and the length of her legs, with her expertise in the arcane science of DNA testing.

On the way there he called Clare. She didn’t answer, but he left a message asking if she would profile for him. She was the best there was. And he knew that he wanted an excuse to see her. Maybe this time he would fuck up less badly.

By the time Riedwaan headed for the northern suburbs hospital where Mouton presided like Orpheus in his basement laboratory, the last of the morning traffic had dribbled off the highways and his way was clear, delivering him to his destination sooner than he would have wished.

Riedwaan was not looking forward to the rest of the morning. Mouton supervised swarms of students, and they would be in full swing on the other trolleys while Mouton dissected ‘his’ girl. Mouton had phoned the ballistics experts and two of them were standing around discussing blades and angles, waiting for Mouton to get to the neck vertebrae to see what the marks on those delicate bones would tell them.