Like Clockwork

by Margie Orford

  ‘No cake?’ asked Mouton.

  ‘You’re fucking too fat already, Doc. Let’s go.’ Riedwaan sipped his coffee, keeping his eyes off the girl’s mutilated face. He picked up a clipboard and made some notes. Her hand was tied up – just like the last girl. He looked at her long dark hair. A piece had been cut off, close to her scalp.

  ‘A souvenir for the killer?’ he asked Mouton.

  ‘Can’t tell, but probably. Sick bastards.’ Mouton was scribbling his own notes.

  ‘Time of death, Doc?’ Mouton had inserted the probe into the girl’s body. He always did a sub-hepatic probe, moving the metal behind the liver. He didn’t approve of the rectal scope. In a sexual assault case you didn’t want to mess with evidence. ‘I’d say at least eight hours, maybe more. She’s cold.’ He put the instruments down.

  ‘When was she moved?’ asked Riedwaan.

  Mouton turned the body over. ‘I’ll have to do some more tests, but take a look at this hypostasis. The red blood cells fix after a while. I’d take a bet she lay on her side for some time before she was moved. Maybe even since last night.’

  ‘So when was she moved?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘It couldn’t have been last night because the tide was up in the morning.’

  ‘I’d say this evening. Her hair is only slightly damp from the rain.’ He pulled a finger through the girl’s thick hair. ‘I would guess not long before she was found.’

  ‘Such a public place. How? Why there?’

  ‘You ask your lady to figure that out for you.’ Mouton was bending in close to the body again, tweezers in his hand.

  ‘What you got there, Doc? More semen?’ The pathologist grunted. ‘Not this time. Looks like bird shit to me.’ He dropped the tiny fibres he had picked off the girl’s back into the bags he used for samples. ‘I’ll send it away for testing.’ He moved around the body, picking up one of the girl’s hands, then the other. Then he moved to her feet, eased off the high, tight-fitting boots, and scribbled again on his notepad.

  ‘What happened to her feet, Doc?’

  ‘Same injuries to the extremities as the other girl had. I’m not sure what they are. Gnaw marks. Rats, maybe. Most of the bodies we see that have been left outside for some time have bites from scavengers on them. In the northern hemisphere most dead bodies are found indoors. Makes it much easier to place time of death because you get a constant ambient temperature. And, of course, a body that’s inside is not going to be interfered with by packs of dogs.’

  ‘Thanks for the free lecture, Doc.’

  Mouton straightened up. ‘You could do with an education, Riedwaan. But these boots were put on after death, after she’d been alone somewhere long enough for the rats to chew her.’

  Mouton crouched down beside the girl. ‘Come and look here.’ Riedwaan crouched next to him. He could smell a trace of perfume on her skin, she was that close.

  ‘The throat is cut in the same way. Another Colombian necktie,’ Mouton turned to Riedwaan. ‘The South Americans moving in?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I don’t think this is drug related, do you?’

  ‘Thinking is not my job, Riedwaan. I’ll leave that up to you. But if you asked my opinion, I’d say no. Whoever did this has some unresolved business with women.’

  Piet Mouton reached over for the instruments he used to expose the most intimate recesses of the human body. ‘Okay, let’s get to the real work now.’ Riedwaan’s stomach heaved, but Mouton’s patient dissection would reveal where Amore had been in the last few days of her life and the first day of her death. Finding out where and teasing out how she died were the keys they needed to unlock the secret of who had killed her. The mortuary was quiet. Riedwaan prepared himself for a long night.

  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.

  22

  Riaan dropped off the copies of his photographs of Amore Hendricks. Clare ignored his request for coffee and opened the envelope as soon as she had got rid of him. She set the photographs alongside those of Charnay Swanepoel, checking them carefully, looking for similarities, for differences. The killer had twinned the bodies with uncanny exactitude.

  She looked closely at all the pictures of Charnay Swanepoel. There it was – a small heap in the gutter that could be flowers. She called Riedwaan to tell him.

  ‘Won’t you ask Rita to check which florists use gold ribbon? Joe will have the sample of it,’ said Clare.

  ‘I’ll do that – could work. But most florists will be closed now, so it’ll have to be tomorrow. What do you think they mean, the flowers?’

  ‘Maybe some kind of apology. Or maybe it’s part of some wedding fantasy, an ultimate union. White irises are sometimes used for wedding bouquets.’

  ‘The ones you found were purple.’

  ‘I know. I’m just thinking aloud.’

  ‘Give me a call after you’ve talked to the boy,’ said Riedwaan.

  Clare then drove to Observatory. She found the café the boy had suggested as a meeting place. She looked at her watch again. Five-thirty. She hoped that the boy hadn’t changed his mind about coming. But he arrived just as the waitress sloshed Clare’s cappuccino onto the table.

  ‘Dr Hart?’ He was very nervous, but his handshake was firm. His blazer hung elegantly on his athletic frame. Yet his beautiful face was strained, and there were dark circles under his wide-set brown eyes.

  ‘Hello, Clinton,’ said Clare. She was relieved to see him. ‘Would you like something?’ The boy looked through the menu, ordered a Coke and a toasted cheese.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ said Clare. ‘I was beginning to think you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry about being late. I had band practice at school and it went on a bit. I’m a trumpeter.’ The waitress placed his Coke and cutlery on the table. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and the young woman beamed at him.

  Clare leaned towards him. She placed her small tape recorder in front of them. ‘It’ll be useful to everyone if I tape this,’ she explained. ‘Tell me about last night.’

  Clinton shifted, as if his seat had hardened.

  ‘Tell me how you found her. Why were you there?’ Clare’s voice was gentle but Clinton recognised the steel in it. He picked at the small tear of skin on his left thumb.

  ‘I was at Graaff’s Pool. I saw her lying between the rocks. I read in the paper that you were involved in the investigation, so I thought you’d be the best person to tell.’ He stopped, sucking at the bead of blood welling on the edge of his nail. ‘She looked so peaceful there in the moonlight. So perfect.’

  ‘What time was that, Clinton?’ He hesitated. ‘Try to remember. It is very important.’

  ‘It must have been about eight-thirty. The rain had stopped then. I went there. I saw her. Then I sent you the SMS.’

  ‘I got the message after eleven. Why did it take you so long to tell someone?’

  ‘I was busy. There were things I had to do,’ he muttered.

  ‘Who was with you?’ Clare’s eyes were unwavering on the boy’s face. He looked away.

  ‘I was alone. Just me.’

  ‘At Graaff’s Pool?’

  ‘I went there to look at the view. To think.’

  ‘No boy is alone there for long. So what were you thinking there, Clinton?’

  He turned to look her straight in the eye for the first time. ‘I was thinking how lucky that girl is.’ Clinton reached for his Coke, but his hands shook so much that he put it down without taking a sip.


  ‘You knew her?’ asked Clare in surprise.

  ‘I didn’t recognise her that night. But when we saw it in the paper my mother remembered her.’ He stopped, as if regretting that he had told her this.

  ‘How did your mother know her?’ prompted Clare.

  ‘We were at the same junior school,’ he explained. ‘My mom knew her mom. Then they moved to Panorama and built a house there. Then my dad died and when my mom got remarried we moved to Observatory. Later I got the music scholarship to the larnie school I’m at now.’ He stopped speaking, his breathing hurried.

  ‘But when you saw her last night you did not know who she was?’

  Clinton shook his head and picked up his Coke again. His hands were steadier now. He looked pleased, as if he had negotiated a rough stretch of water. Clare softened her voice and put her hand on his. ‘Tell me who you were with, Clinton. It will come out, you know.’

  ‘With Rick.’ His hands flew up, as if to catch the name, take it back. ‘That is what he said his name was.’

  ‘Who is Rick?’ asked Clare, her voice gentle but relentless.

  ‘Rick the Prick.’ His childish giggle was laced with revulsion. Then the bravado evaporated and the boy’s shoulders slumped forward. He had capitulated. Clare re-angled her tape recorder.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Clare.

  ‘I met him that night at Lulu’s.’ Clare knew the bar he was talking about. It was at the heart of Sea Point’s red light district, catering to men who liked young boys. The seventeen-year-old in front of her could pass for fourteen in the right light.

  ‘Come on, Clinton, why are you trying to protect him?’

  ‘All right.’ Anger flashed across his face. It vanished as quickly, leaving tears in its wake. ‘He was a regular. He called himself Rick, but I saw his ID when I went to a party at his house. It said Luis Da Cunha.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to go to Graaff’s Pool?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Usually I just do him in his car quickly. But this time he insisted that we go there.’ Clinton’s voice was almost inaudible. ‘I don’t like it there, it’s so creepy. I hadn’t been since those guys were attacked there last year.’