Like Clockwork

by Margie Orford

Cathy fetched her handbag and went upstairs to India’s room. Her school tights, left hanging on a chair, carried the outline of her slim legs, the grubby marks of her toes. She must have been walking somewhere with no shoes on. Just her lovely stockinged feet. Cathy picked up the tights and put them into her bag. A photo of India was propped next to the bed. Cathy slipped it into her bag, nestling it with the tights. She would not cry yet. She had to find her child. If she let go, even for a second, she would shatter finally. So she held the shards of herself together.

  Downstairs, she took a second Valium. She checked her face in the hallway mirror. The skin was pale, smoothly sculpted over her cheekbones. She remembered to put on her lipstick, grateful that her face was unmarked this time. She went to the garage, hating the flashy little car Brian made her drive. She reversed and drove down the oak-lined road. The houses here were so far apart that no sound you made would ever carry to your neighbours. She took in nothing of the drive around the mountain to Sea Point.

  The police station that Captain Faizal had directed her to was ugly, a squat face-brick building, the windows covered with anti-hand-grenade mesh. Riedwaan Faizal made her feel better. His face was hard, but the eyes had a vulnerability to them that comforted her. He escorted her to the untidy cubbyhole that served as an office.

  She accepted the cup of milky tea he gave her, and then told him what she thought he needed to know. That India was sixteen. That she had gone to watch a friend at a theatre rehearsal. That the friend should have dropped her home at eleven. She did not tell him that none of India’s friends ever came inside the house – why should she? She did tell him, though, that her daughter had not come home. That her daughter had not answered her calls. Yes, she had contacted her mother. She had SMS’d to say she was having a great time and might be late. Cathy had been watching television then, so she had not heard the message come in. And yes. Here was the picture of India. Taken two months before when she and her friend Gemma had auditioned to be movie extras. Their role had been to mill around in a café in Long Street. They had loved the whole experience.

  Riedwaan looked at the photo of the laughing girl. Her long mane of black hair was a blur, caught as she flung her head back, delighted by the photographer. She was holding her elegant hands up in a gesture of mock submission. High, rounded breasts were firmly held in place by the tight white T-shirt. A very beautiful girl.

  ‘Can I keep this, Mrs King?’ There was a feverish look in her eyes. He knew the look. He had seen it in Shazia’s eyes when their daughter had vanished. He must have looked like that, too. Cathy King nodded.

  ‘We need to take a formal statement and I need to get a list of her friends and activities,’ he told her. She nodded again and handed him her daughter’s address book. Then she made her formal, detailed statement, signed it, and handed it back to him.

  ‘She would have had most of her numbers in her phone, I suppose.’

  ‘We will do everything possible, Mrs King. If you think of anything, no matter how small, then call me. If anyone contacts you, any strange calls, let me know at once.’

  She picked up the card he pushed across the table. ‘I’ll wait at home.’

  ‘I’ll be sending someone else to talk to you at home. She will want to look through India’s room – maybe there will be something there.’

  ‘Who will come, Captain Faizal?’

  ‘Dr Clare Hart. She’s been working on the investigation.’

  ‘The profiler – the one I’ve read about in the newspapers?’

  Riedwaan nodded. Cathy King’s last vestige of hope drained away. She put her hand out, as if she was about to fall. But she didn’t. She winced as she straightened her back.

  ‘We will keep you informed, Mrs King. And we will do our utmost.’ The words rang hollow.

  ‘Goodbye, Inspector.’ She turned and walked to her car.

  She looked so alone. Riedwaan went to get some coffee, thinking of Mrs King. The wedding ring was conspicuous on her finger, so it was odd that she had come alone. Where was India’s father? The anger that surged through him was intense. He deliberately turned his mind to the killer they were looking for. If they could just work out who he was. Or if the killer made a mistake, there would at least be a chance of finding India alive. That, to his chagrin, was the truth. He reached automatically for a cigarette, remembering that he had given up only when his hand found nothing there. He went out to bum a smoke, grabbing a cup of coffee on his way out. But he had made all his colleagues swear to refuse him a cigarette and they stuck to it: no one would give him even a drag. He tried to call Clare. There was no reply. She must have gone out of range or switched off her phone. Annoyed, he waited for the kettle to boil.

  When he sat down again, he pulled out the two case files. Amore Hendricks. Charnay Swanepoel. He prayed that he would never label one India King. But he did not hold out much hope. They knew how these girls had died, how long it had taken for them to die, what they had last eaten. And yet nothing pointed them anywhere. There were no witnesses. The DNA they had didn’t match any on record. It could be gang-related – some new initiation method. Or perhaps a coded warning to the increasing numbers of freelancers – Charnay certainly seemed to have been one – who were being pimped in the more upmarket areas. Kelvin Landman was an ideal candidate. The right profile. Sadistic, ruthless, meticulous about cleaning up after himself. No witness had ever testified against him. That could be the answer. But something niggled. He knew Clare suspected that Landman was a candidate. But she was not convinced of this. Riedwaan slipped the note Rita had left for Clare into the file. ‘Only posh florists use that ribbon. See you Monday, R.’

  Clare Hart’s profile pointed her elsewhere. Landman, she argued, was cruel for a reason. That was where he did not fit the profile of a serial killer. With this particular killer, Clare contended – with nothing to back her but her intuition – the killings were an end in themselves. They were too staged, the symbolism was too obscure, to be a message to others. If someone was trying to scare prostitutes, then why Graaff’s Pool? Why not Somerset Road? Riedwaan had worked with Clare often enough to know she was rarely wrong.

  29

  Clare ached with the heaviness of leaving Riedwaan, yet there was nothing to do but get into her car and drive up the lonely road curving between the coast and the green hills, soft in the morning light. There was no other traffic so early on a Sunday morning. Snow gleamed against the black cliffs of the jagged mountains in the distance. They seemed to march relentlessly north, only to peter out, though, defeated by the vast inland plains of the Karoo. Clare gripped the wheel, her knuckles white. She glanced at the skin on her hands, already starting to ridge and coarsen. Then she glimpsed her face in the rear-view mirror. The crow’s feet furrowing the corners of her eyes lingered now, even when she was not laughing.

  Like today: the birthday she shared with Constance. Her twin would have been pacing all night. Clare had given up trying to heal Constance, but she could not abandon her. The sun disappeared behind the clouds and a soft rain started falling. Clare listened to the hypnotic swish-swish of the windscreen wipers. It had been raining on their birthday twenty years before when Clare, desperate to be separate from Constance, had rid herself of her virginity.

  The rain was coming down harder now. Clare slowed, remembering how the need to be independent had driven her out of the school boarding house and into Isaiah Jones’s arms. She had had three hours of perfect freedom – abandoning herself to the pleasure Isaiah had skilfully coaxed from her inexperienced body.

  Swish-swish-swish went the wipers.

  Sometime after midnight, she’d worked out afterwards, when it was all over, Constance had realised she was fine, absolutely fine, on her own. She had followed Clare’s secret path through the chapel window and into the shadowed park adjacent to the school. Constance had wanted to tell Clare that she was able to be alone, that she would let Clare come and go as she pleased – but Constance never made it.

 
Filled with dread, Clare had awoken suddenly from a sticky, satiated sleep. Isaiah had followed her into the night to look for her twin, not questioning Clare’s intuition. They had found Constance barely alive in the park, the marks of the gang’s brutal rite of passage indelibly written on her body.

  Clare turned down the familiar nave of trees. The pale branches reached mournfully over the ribbon of road, brushing their tips against each other. She parked in her usual place, her breath a fine vapour hanging on the cold air. As she walked down the path to her sister’s secluded house, a bright finger of sunshine broke free of the mountains in the east, illuminating the garden. She stepped onto the polished red stoep. It was very cold here where the sun was always absent. She sensed Constance standing on the other side of the heavy door, breathing with difficulty through her hammer-damaged nose.

  ‘Constance,’ said Clare. ‘Open for me.’

  The door opened a crack, and then wider. A white hand, like a plant too long in the darkness, reached out and drew her in.

  ‘Our birthday, Clare.’ She had assumed Clare would come. She always did. Constance held Clare to her, her nostrils flaring at the male smell clinging to her. Riedwaan’s smell.

  ‘You must bath. I must wash you. Come.’ She led her sister down the passage to the bathroom. Here she ran the water hot. Constance removed Clare’s clothes, throwing them away from her as if the smell on them might corrupt her too.

  Constance stroked her sister’s smooth, naked body. Her fingers traced the skin on Clare’s breasts, stomach, thighs – and also her own scars. Clare turned away from her and stepped into the hot water. It was lovely, the warm, enveloping relief from the cold and tension. She lay back. Constance picked up a sponge and rubbed soap onto it. She picked up Clare’s left arm and washed it carefully, as a cat would wash her kitten. Then the right arm. Then the feet, calves, thighs, and between her sister’s legs. Clare submitted. She had managed to pare down the daily rituals to this annual birthday cleansing, which she did not have the heart to resist. She wondered if she might not also need it, this purging of the previous year. Constance moved behind Clare and soaped her smooth back, though seemingly lost in tracing the script that first one man, and then the next, had carved into her own back while they’d taken turns in sodomising her.

  ‘What does it say, Constance?’ Clare always asked her this question. ‘What did they write on you?’

  ‘Can’t you read it?’ she always replied. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

  As Clare got out of the bath, Constance roughly wrapped the white dressing gown around her and pushed her feet into a pair of slippers. Clare was aware of her sister’s anger, and tried to distract her from the violence of her memories.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ she quietly suggested, and walked ahead of Constance to the kitchen. The room was warm and orange-hued: the Aga was burning, as it did all through the winter, and the sun was filtering through the stained-glass windows. Clare opened the fridge, set out milk, cheese, yoghurt, the last remaining figs. She was desperate for coffee, but there wasn’t any. She settled for rooibos tea and honey, a mug for her, and one for Constance. She made the toast and they ate in silence. Constance subsided into herself.

  ‘Constance, won’t you please paint whatever it is you always trace on my back?’ Constance looked startled. Then Clare got up slowly and put a thick piece of paper in front of Constance. She fetched a brush and the blue tube of paint already open on her sister’s easel. ‘Paint it, Constance. Paint what you always draw on my back. Make me see it.’ Constance just closed her eyes and remained perfectly still.

  Clare’s thoughts shifted to Riedwaan waking alone this morning. She wanted, needed to be free of the brutal calligraphy that had tethered her to Constance for two decades. But first she needed to understand. She looked up with surprise as Constance suddenly reached for a brush and dipped it into the paint. She began to draw: angles, loops, spirals. It was beautiful, but it meant nothing to Clare. Constance’s back was just a welter of crude scars, her painting just random shapes.

  Looking exhausted, she eventually gave the picture to Clare. ‘Let’s sleep now, Connie.’ Constance followed Clare to the bedroom, where they lay down – spooned, just as they had slept as children. Clare fell asleep at once and woke hours later, with a sleeping Constance in her arms. Clare extricated herself and got dressed. Then she made tea and took a cup to Constance.

  ‘I’m leaving now, it’s past five already,’ she said, smoothing her sister’s hair from her eyes. Constance smiled and turned towards the wall again.

  ‘There’s something for you on the desk, Clare,’ said Constance. Clare picked up the brown envelope. She could feel the familiar shape of the card inside. She pulled it out gingerly. The sixteenth card. The Tower. Two figures hurtled down, head first, towards the jagged rocks at the base of a citadel.

  ‘What does it mean, Constance?’

  ‘It’s warning you of catastrophe.’ Constance sat up. ‘It’s a warning about the face of evil. Take it with you.’

  Clare put the card into her handbag. There was no arguing with Constance, she knew.

  ‘You can also read it as illumination. Perhaps you are closer to understanding things than you think.’

  ‘I wish I was. I’ll see you soon.’ Clare kissed her sister on the forehead and left, making sure that the door locked behind her. The sky was dreary and cold.

  The remains of a lonely day stretched before her, but Clare turned eagerly to things there was still some hope of resolving. On her own way home, she drove past the Hendrickes’ house. The murdered girl had lived in Mountain View, a bleak estate on a cold, windswept patch of denuded sand dunes. Serried ranks of dwarf houses bunkered down behind high walls, pinioned against their backyard braais by shiny new cars parked most precisely in front. Clare could see women moving back and forth behind the front windows, serving invisible dinners to invisible families – the television flicker making life just bearable.

  In one house, otherwise indistinguishable from the rest, there was a candle in the front window. A small shrine. Clare drove past slowly, turned, parked, and was about to get out to meet the occupants, to ask some questions, to pry. She saw a man come out and bend down with a pleading expression to a woman in the garden who was sitting listlessly on a child’s swing. The intimacy of their grief stopped her. She looked in the cubbyhole for copies of the interview tapes Riedwaan had given her. She found the one labelled ‘Parents’ and put it into the tape deck. Then she fast-forwarded past the opening preliminaries, to where Riedwaan began to probe the raw wound of a daughter’s murder.

  ‘When last did you see Amore, Mr Hendricks?’ asked Riedwaan, his voice comforting, low, his accent exaggerated by the electronic device.

  ‘Saturday afternoon, nê skat?’ Mrs Hendricks must have nodded. ‘Ja, Inspector, Saturday at about three o’clock.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘She was here, at home.’

  ‘What were her plans?’

  ‘She was going to the Canal Walk shopping centre. She’s mos at that dance college there. They were all rehearsing for the winter dance festival. She was a very beautiful dancer, jy weet. Ballet, modern, even African. Look at all her eisteddfod certificates. There is her letter from the University of Cape Town telling her that she was invited to a final audition.’ Here his voice cracked. ‘It arrived on Thursday. I’m sorry,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Why, Inspector? Why our baby?’ This was the first time that Mrs Hendricks had spoken. Riedwaan, Clare knew, would have had no answer to that question, knowing as he did that an innocent victim was a rare thing. He was silent for a while, perhaps waiting for Mr Hendricks to master his grief.

  ‘How did she get to town?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘She got a lift with our neighbour. They were going to the movies.’

  ‘Who is he?’ Clare could hear a lilt of interest in Riedwaan’s voice.

  ‘Not he. She. Mrs Vermaas and her mother. They dropped her off and sh
e went to her rehearsal.’ Clare knew that her devastated dance teacher had corroborated this. The other dancers in her group had worked with Amore till six before dispersing in twos and threes for supper or home. There was a long pause. Then Mr Hendricks continued. ‘She SMS’d me at seven to say that she had a very exciting surprise for us later. That she would tell us when she saw us.’ The tape crackled in the silence.

  ‘That’s the last we heard.’ It was Mrs Hendricks who spoke eventually, with distilled pain.

  ‘How was she planning to get home?’

  ‘She was meant to meet my brother at ten-thirty. He has a taxi. He was going to drop her off at home, as usual.’ Mr Hendricks’s voice faded as he moved away from the microphone. Clare pictured him moving closer to his wife, holding her hand perhaps. ‘But she never arrived. He phoned her and he says the phone was answered. He could hear Amore’s voice. Heard her laughing. That he could hear glasses and music. He thought it was a bar or a restaurant. And then the phone went dead. Before he could speak to her. He tried to call again but her phone was switched off. And he couldn’t find her.’

  ‘What did he do then, your brother?’

  ‘He alerted security – he knows those guys – and he put a call out to the radio taxis. Then he called us and told us to come. He also called the police. He had a very bad feeling because there was just no sign of her. Nothing. Nothing.’

  ‘What time was that, Mr Hendricks?’

  His wife answered. ‘It was just past eleven. You see, the shift changes at ten-thirty. That is why he always comes home then. He brings the afternoon shift home and quite a lot of them live near here …’

  Clare cut her off by jabbing the rewind button. The tape whined, forced back a few loops. ‘… the shift changes at ten-thirty.’ That is what Mrs Hendricks said again, quite clearly. It would explain why Amore hadn’t been seen. Each shift reported back to one of two security centres. It was here that they handed their two-way radios and their luminous bibs to the next shift, and then went home. If Amore Hendricks had gone somewhere then – willingly or not – none of the security guards would have seen her.