by Nicci French
Zill did that same drive for nine years before suddenly – on the morning of 21 May – the boy wasn’t at the off ramp. He tried to imagine the reasons why, hoped that it might be because the boy had found something better: a job, a trade, some way to improve himself.
But, eventually, Zill found out that wasn’t why the boy never came back.
#Friday_22_June_2007
The railway station was barely that any more. Its platform was eighty feet of crumbling concrete, its corrugated iron roof a punctured, broken shell, its lines bent and rusted orange. The building, its walls and its surrounds were adrift in a sea of grass, nature claiming it back inch by inch. In the fifteen years since a train had last run through, it had become a dumping ground. Rotting food. Plastic. Mulched cereal boxes.
Beer cans. Needles.
People.
Lucinda moved under the crime scene tape and down towards the body, forensic gloves on, camera around her neck. The woman had been left face down on what remained of the tracks, her corpse hidden in the long grass. Cars had been unable to see her through the scrub as they’d passed by on the loneliness of the nearest road, two hundred feet back. Instead she’d been found by two girls from a township half a mile east. They’d been chasing a stray dog with pieces of discarded lead piping.
For a week it had been unseasonably warm for June, the sun beating down out of a clear African sky, and as the ground dipped into a cleft in the earth, and then rose again, the smell hit her: a terrible, cloying stench of decay. Lucinda raised a hand to her mouth.
Familiar faces circled the body: Moses, a wiry forty-year-old Xhosa from Matzikama, on his haunches beside the girl, gloves and mask on, talking to one of the forensic techs; a couple of uniformed officers who she’d got into a routine of talking to in the kitchen in the mornings; and then Ben Zill, off beyond the corpse. He wasn’t even looking at the body. Instead, he had his back to the entire crime scene. His gaze was out across the parched yellow scrubland, grass swaying in the breeze, the blue smudge of the city skyline visible in the distance. The crime scene was only five miles from central Cape Town – but it could have been a different planet.
Sometimes this whole country felt like that to Lucinda.
As she got to the body, she stopped. Half-covered by dry grass, the woman’s blue floral dress was up around her waist and her buttocks were exposed. Lucinda placed a hand on her camera, working her finger across the casing. Back and forth, back and forth. She realized she’d started doing it more and more in the time she’d been here, automatically, instinctively trying to seek comfort in something she loved. She’d seen some of the cops here, even hardened detectives like Moses, doing the same; facing down the awfulness of every new crime with something that could anchor them. Moses had a red pen he rolled between his forefinger and thumb. As he stood, glancing at Lucinda, she saw it tucked behind his ear. He backed away and removed it without even thinking.
‘Okay, LB.’
She looked at Moses. ‘You ready for me?’
He nodded.
They’d shortened her name – Lucinda Berrington – to her initials because it was too long for the lazier cops to say, and too complicated for the ones who weren’t confident in English. As she raised the camera to her face, she took a step closer to the woman and saw an evidence marker in the grass off to her right. Beside it lay an old bicycle chain. As she focused in on that, out of the corner of her eye she saw Zill start to move. Snapping a photograph, she dropped the camera to her chest again, watching him return through the grass. When he got to the body he stood there, looking down at the woman, a distant expression on his face. Moses asked him if he needed anything, but Zill just shook his head. Suddenly there was a marked kind of sadness to him.
Most people here sought their sanctuary in something.
A camera. A pen.
Another person.
But not Zill.
Even after more than seven months, Lucinda wasn’t sure what brought him comfort. In fact, after seven months, she wasn’t sure she knew Ben Zill at all.
#Wednesday_27_June_2007
Lucinda watched Zill’s car approach, coming along the dusty track towards the place she was staying in. A creaking 1920s bungalow, the only thing she really liked about it was the view from the front veranda, out across Kleinkop, a small town on the edges of the city. During the day, the sun would act like bleach, revealing the town’s blemishes: the functionality of its layout; the similarity of its homes; the greyness of its industry. When the night came, everything changed: it became a sea of lights, washing off into the darkness, the constant hum of approaching lorries like a mechanical heartbeat. She’d grown up in Dorset but spent most of her adult life in London, so she found the noise of towns and cities comforting. And yet here, on the hill above Kleinkop, there was a kind of solitude too – a quietness that became even more pronounced at night – that reminded her of her childhood, of running with her sisters across the shingle on Christchurch beach.
Zill pulled up, rousing her from her thoughts, and popped the boot. He didn’t get out. She’d discovered pretty quickly that he was never going to win any awards for chivalry. Picking up her camera bags, she hauled them around to the back herself.
‘Morning, Ben,’ she said as she returned to the front.
‘Morning. How are you?’
‘Fine. You?’
He nodded. They pulled a U-turn and headed back down the road, a cloud of red dust forming behind them. ‘Ready for another day in the corps?’
She smiled. ‘I guess I am.’
Lucinda had been in South Africa since the previous November. She’d started out in London as a travel photographer, taking pictures of hotels for holiday brochures. But that had become boring fast, so – at twenty-four – she’d enrolled in a photojournalism course, a decision that had been prompted by dreams of covering important conflicts, of being on the frontline during revolutions. Reality hit a year later: unable to secure commissions from the nationals, and unwilling to settle for work with local papers, her professor – who was from Durban – suggested she apply for a secondment with the South African Police Service that he’d seen advertised in a magazine for ex-pats. SAPS needed a photographer for a year to document the work of their detective teams, as part of a government investigation into whether the department was over-resourced. Two weeks later, she was reporting to Ben Zill. Twenty-four hours after that she was standing on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean close to Cape Point, taking pictures of two dead children.
‘How old are you again, LB?’ Zill asked her.
She glanced at him. ‘Twenty-eight.’
The silence was briefly filled by a pop from the suspension as it hit a pockmark in the road. ‘Almost the same age as Jo Vorster.’
That was the name of the victim they’d found at the abandoned station.
Lucinda didn’t know what to say.
‘I wonder what the killer would have done if that bicycle chain hadn’t been lying around?’ Zill continued. ‘Do you think he would have strangled her with his bare hands?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t have an opinion?’
‘I’m just a photographer, Ben.’
He seemed disappointed.
They sat there in silence again, heading down the track towards the junction for the main road. Zill lived on the other side of Kleinkop. When he’d found out – about two months after she started – that she lived three kilometres down the road from him, he’d offered to start picking her up in the mornings.
‘You ever heard of Twitter?’
She frowned. ‘Twitter?’
‘I hear my wife talking about it sometimes. I think she’s on it. It’s all … ’ He used a flat palm to show it went over his head. ‘Do you use it yourself?’
‘I have an account. It’s all quite new.’
‘What do you do in it?’
‘You follow people and they follow you. You ever heard of MySpace, or this new thing, Facebook? It�
��s a bit like that – but, with Twitter, when you’re speaking to people, or updating your status, you can only use up to 140 characters.’
‘So it’s like a short email?’
‘Kind of. Why do you ask?’
‘We found a bag, discarded in the grass about half a mile west of the body. It was hers. She’d used it to keep her university laptop in. Except the laptop was gone. All that was left inside was the spare battery for it. Anyway, forensics discovered she had a Twitter account. From what I’ve been told, Twitter’s big in the States and Europe, but hasn’t really taken off in most of South Africa yet. Except you know where it has taken off?’
‘No.’
‘The universities.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘One of her friends, Tara Rowe, sent her a message the night she was last seen. Tara told Jo that all their varsity pals were planning an evening out, and that they were meeting at seven-thirty on Rhodes Memorial Street. You know where that is?’
She did. It was in the foothills of Devil’s Peak, part of the range that eventually rolled into Table Mountain.
‘Except,’ Zill continued, ‘Tara Rowe never sent that message.’
Lucinda looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Tara was on the other side of the country until yesterday. The message didn’t come from the east coast. It came from inside the university, here in Cape Town.’
Lucinda got it instantly. ‘So the killer logged in as Tara Rowe?’
Zill nodded.
‘Do we know where in the university he logged in?’
‘The library.’
‘Are there cameras in that part of the building?’
A half-smile. ‘Now you’re thinking like a cop.’
‘Are there?’
‘No.’
‘So basically we’ve got no idea who really sent her that message?’
Zill glanced at her. ‘We interviewed eighty-five students who told us they were in and around the library in the days before Jo was murdered, and a few of them said the passwords had been changed on their accounts. Worse, when they went back through their timelines, they found messages to friends they’d never actually sent themselves.’
‘The killer sent them.’
‘Right. He came into the library, he went through the PCs – probably over the course of two or three days – and, if a student had forgotten to log out of their account properly, he got in, changed their password and started stalking their friends. Some he sent messages to, pretending to be the student in question. But most of his time seems to have been spent trawling accounts and clicking on profile pictures.’
‘He was choosing a victim.’
‘Right again. Fortunately, most of the students realized someone had gained access to their account, and changed their passwords. But Tara Rowe didn’t. She was on the other side of the country at her mother’s surprise sixtieth. It was such a surprise, Tara didn’t tell anyone – so Jo Vorster still thought she was here in Cape Town.’
And went to meet her, Lucinda thought.
‘What did the message say?’
Keeping one hand on the wheel, he removed a piece of folded paper from the breast pocket of his shirt and handed it across to her. She took it from him and unfolded it. Printed out was the direct message conversation between Jo Vorster and Tara Rowe.
Except it hadn’t been Tara Rowe.
It had been the man who’d raped and killed Jo Vorster.
‘The spelling’s terrible,’ Lucinda said, looking at the printout. The messages were innocuous, but even Jo had commented on her friend’s sudden lapse in grammar, joking that she might need to pay more attention in lectures. In response, the man pretending to be Tara had agreed, made light of it, and asked Jo to confirm that she was definitely going to be at the meeting place on Rhodes Memorial Street.
‘What does the spelling tell you?’ Zill said.
She looked down at the printout again, her mind ticking over. ‘That English isn’t his first language.’
‘Correct.’
‘So the assumption is … ’
Zill nodded. ‘He won’t be of British descent. We have fibres from the body and DNA at the scene. That’ll tell us his race.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Is it?’
She frowned. ‘Well, we have a lead.’
‘It’s worthless. He used a public space to log into a public computer, so his IP address isn’t going to take us anywhere. There are no cameras where we needed them to be. And even if we zero in on his race, how is that going to help? There are twenty thousand students at the university, over four thousand staff. Of the eighty-five students we’ve already interviewed, no one remembers seeing anyone suspicious. We’re not talking about some guy who wandered in off the streets here. Her killer blends in. He’s smart.’
‘Ben, I think – ’
‘It’s a dead end.’
They drove in silence for a while after that, accompanied by the gentle wheeze of the car’s suspension as it bounced on the uneven track.
‘Is this how you imagined your life turning out?’
She turned to him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This. Photographing dead people.’
Abruptly, the atmosphere had changed. He sounded funereal, distressed, troubled. In her time here, she’d noticed that Zill was a man beset by sudden despondency, like he kept reaching the end of the same road.
‘I don’t know, Ben.’
‘You’re still young, I guess.’
‘You’re not that old.’
A flicker of a smile on his face.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘What about her?’
‘Who?’
‘Jo Vorster.’
His voice had become brittle and quiet.
‘What about her?’ Lucinda asked.
He didn’t reply immediately, eyes fixed on the road ahead. But then, finally, he turned to Lucinda. ‘Do you think this is how she imagined her life turning out?’
#Friday_29_June_2007
Looking back, Zill had given his wife a lot of reasons to leave. One time, he forgot to pick their daughter up from the airport after she’d returned from a friend’s in Johannesburg. Susan called him in a fit of rage about ninety minutes after April landed, and told him he was a selfish prick. It was hard to argue the point, as he was sitting in a bar at the time. All he ended up doing in the days after was what he’d begun to do a lot: apologize. That was the man he’d become, filling space with weightless words, trying to head her off.
Another time, not long after that, he promised Susan he’d get her car looked at. It had failed to start one morning when she was leaving for work and she’d had to call in an emergency day’s holiday because he was on the other side of the city with his phone turned off. They’d always had problems with the car. Little, niggly things: ticking in the engine, rattly windows, flat batteries. He’d take it down to a guy he knew in the city, the guy would tweak one thing on it, then a couple of weeks later something else would go. When he got home on that Tuesday night – a week after they found Jo Vorster – he discovered the car had sprung an oil leak.
‘This is ridiculous, Ben,’ Susan said to him.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We need a new car.’
He’d had a bad day – another long, dark, fruitless day stalking the shadows for Vorster’s faceless killer – and didn’t much feel like discussing it, so he fobbed her off, told her to leave it with him, and disappeared into the bedroom. He was tired, bone tired, but in the hush of the room, under the purr of the fan, he felt an unexpected peace take hold: a rare moment of stillness, every terrible moment from another terrible day washing out into the corners of the room. He hadn’t slept well for months. Sometimes, when he lay there in the darkness in the middle of the night, he wondered if he ever would again.
But then Susan came in. Her face was twisted and angry. ‘So you want me to leave the car for you to sort out
– is that right?’
He didn’t reply.
‘That’s just the problem, though, Ben, isn’t it?’
He sat up and swung his legs around. ‘Look, Suze –’
‘Were you even aware we had a damp problem in the kitchen?’
He looked at her.
‘Were you? Because I was the one who called the guy about it. I was the one who waited in for him. I was the one who got it fixed.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t want an apology, Ben.’
He watched as her face filled with colour, blooming in her cheeks like pools of blood. This time, trying to take the sting out of the conversation, he said nothing.
But she wasn’t finished.
‘I told you about the damp problem twice – and you still didn’t do anything about it. I’m not even sure it registers with you when I speak. It’s like I’m talking to a ghost.’
‘I’m sorry, okay?’
‘Stop telling me you’re sorry!’
She paused, breath ragged, standing over him at the edge of the bed, one hand on the dresser next to her, the other on her hip. She looked old for a moment, beaten down, which was rare for her. They were both in their forties, but she’d always looked better on it: he saw himself in the mirror sometimes and got scared by the man who looked back. Pale, almost grey, like a refraction of the person in the photo frames on their walls.
‘I can’t talk about this now,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘If you knew what kind of shit I’d had to deal with today … ’
‘That’s every day of our lives, Ben. Every day.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Anything.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Say anything to me, Ben. Anything. Anything that isn’t to do with your work. Anything that isn’t an excuse as to why you’re late, or why you forgot to pick your daughter up. Because you know what I get out of you the rest of the time? Nothing.’
