Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

  Leilah was dressed to kill, in another high-necked silk dress which covered her scar and almost extended below her crotch. Aside from the dress she wore high-heeled shoes with a fantasy of laces that spiralled up her long legs like headless snakes reaching up to nirvana. Her solemn, green eyes filled with tears when she got smoke in them from the cigarette I provided.

  “I’ve been clean,” she said, “since you came around this morning, I’ve not done any shit.”

  Her pupils were no longer mere pin-pricks and her face had a little hardness to it as if some disappointment had come to settle. I said what a good thing that was, and she smiled, but the tears stayed where they were, threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  “Are you hoping to find her, Angel? My Natasha, your Sandy? Is that why you came to Pandora?

  I said I was, and she looked as if she was preparing to break some bad news but didn’t know how to go about it.

  “You won’t find her,” she said.

  “I won’t?”

  Leilah shook her head, which caused the tears to spill. She reached up a hand and palmed them away like a child.

  “She’s dead,” she said. “Natasha is dead.”

  I cannot say it was a shock. Not even much of a surprise.

  “You know that for certain?”

  Leilah sucked on her cigarette, nodded, and wiped away more tears.

  “I killed her,” she said. “That’s how I know.”

  She used the palm of her hand to wipe her nose. Her lips trembled, and she averted her eyes so that I couldn’t see the toll that the performance was taking.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said.

  The performance ended as if someone had dropped the curtain. The crying continued, but now it was messy and entirely real.

  “I might as well have.”

  “Why don’t we stick with the facts instead of the might-haves?” I suggested.

  She pulled a serviette from the dispenser on the bar table and used that to clean her face. Then glanced around the bar as if worried someone had seen her crying, but at this time of night nobody bothered about a working woman crying before her customer. Besides, they were mostly fumbling with each other’s body parts, obscured by the pall of smoke that hung over the cracked linoleum tables.

  “She saved my life,” said Leilah. “I told you that, didn’t I? That’s a fact, we can start with that.”

  “You said she found the men who killed her sister.”

  “Only one of them,” confirmed Leilah. “One of the monsters.”

  She finished the clean-up and gave a small, brave smile that might have been seductive if she’d had more time to hide the little girl that had crept out in the absence of any mind-altering substances.

  “How did she do that?”

  “She used me as bait, didn’t she? She dangled me like biscuits for the dogs.”

  “And the dogs went for it?”

  “Only later, it took us weeks. Natasha had a big plan. At first, when she arrived in hell, she said nothing about her plan. She took us away in her car, cleaned us up, and then we talked. She wanted to understand what had happened to Manda, how it all worked. Asked us about it again and again. Me and Flossie had been with Manda the night she died, and we needed to talk about it. Natasha was like our big sister – she listened to us, and she cried with us.”

  “Where was this, that you did your talking?”

  “In Muizenberg, right near the sea. I love the sea. She rented a house just for the three of us, right by the sea.”

  Muizenberg was an old suburb that had developed as a holiday resort in the late 1800s for mine owners to relax and recuperate from the ardours of sending other men underground to pull the gold out. It boasted a sandy beach almost twenty kilometres long, several historic homes and many shabby, less historic homes.

  “She was like my sister,” said Leilah again. “Told me I had the same birthday as her father, you know that? It bound us together. I believe in star signs, and destiny, and all of that. Do you? I think Natasha did.”

  “The plan to find the men who killed her sister,” I said, without committing to the question of destiny. “When did that come about?”

  “She always had the plan. Don’t you see? But she made like it was our idea. She would make little comments, then bring us back to it when we talked, ask us again how it happened, how we ended up at the party, what we remembered about what they had said to us on the red couch.”

  “And it worked?”

  Leilah pulled out another serviette and blew her nose into it, then gathered up the serviettes and my glass and walked to the bar, saying nothing. She returned with a fresh whisky for me and a chocolate milkshake for her, and settled back into her seat.

  “Yes, it worked,” she resumed. “We got special invites. Another party, very exclusive. Flossie and me agreed it looked the same, and Natasha went and had a meeting with someone to talk about it. It was the same arrangement, the same big money. They wanted three girls, and they said nothing about only two of us coming back. That’s how they did it, Natasha said – they would gather the girls that were already lost. You know what I mean?”

  “Girls who had fallen out of the system? No paperwork, nobody looking for them?”

  Leilah nodded, and sucked at the straw of her milkshake, then looked up at me with her cheeks sucked in and her green eyes glowing. It occurred to me how young she looked; she was probably not yet twenty years old.

  “Do you know how many of us lost girls there are?” she asked.

  I was reminded of Sandy’s father asking me the same question.

  “Many,” I said.

  “Hundreds, thousands maybe,” said Leilah. “We fell through the holes and dropped in the gutter. Some run away from parents who couldn’t care, or some parents do care, but the girls just make the wrong friends. Flossie was one of those. She broke her mother’s heart, she used to say, like she was proud of it. Some boys too, but most of us are girls. We used to joke with Natasha about being her lost girls, and she’d say she was lost too.”

  “Did you go to the other party?”

  Leilah sucked at her milkshake again and shook her head so that the straw dipped in and out and made slurping sounds.

  “When Natasha found the men who organised the party, she said our work was done. That was all she needed us for; to find them. She took us to Pandora, set us up with our new lives.”

  “She didn’t tell you anything about the men who organised the party?”

  “She said it was big; they had a network, like a spider’s web, for finding girls who could get lost. Like magicians, she said, they waved their wands and the girls would be gone. She’d found the apprentice and was going to find the magician.”

  “Your hell-hole with the red couch was a part of it?”

  “Natasha said so. She made loads of notes, and was working the whole thing out like a detective.”

  “She wrote it down?”

  “Always writing. She had pages and pages of things she wrote. We would tease her about it and she would laugh with us, but she kept her pages all together in a folder and said they would help us get our revenge on the men who had done this to us, and then she wasn’t laughing anymore and we would stop too. We also wanted revenge on those men.”

  Leilah’s chocolate milkshake ended with a slurping sound, and she used the straw to suck the last drops from the sides of the glass.

  “Do you know where those notes are?” I asked.

  Leilah shook her head and pushed the empty glass away. “All gone. They took them when they came to kill her.”

  “When who came?”

  “When they came,” repeated Leilah, and she pouted, then looked around the room as if only noticing now that it was a dive.

  “Take me somewhere else, will you, Angel? All this talking you’re making me do is taking the breath from me. I need some fresh air.”

  I paid for our drinks and on the pavement Leilah leaned against me, shivering in the frosty night
wind.

  “Signal Hill,” she said. “There’s plenty of fresh air up there, and I’ll throw in a blow job for an extra hundred bucks.”

  She laughed, and her green eyes mocked my feigned shock. But behind the laughing eyes I could see a frightened girl reluctant to spill more of her horrors.

  Beside the well-known, flat-topped Table Mountain, endemic feature of wall calendars and tourist guides to Cape Town, is a smaller mountain, which viewed from a particular angle resembles the head of a lion, complete with a cluster of pine trees which form the ridge of a furry eyebrow. Beneath the mane of Lion’s Head is a smooth hill resembling the body of a prone lion, ending in the raised haunch of Signal Hill. From here the glittering lights of Cape Town city can be viewed, and on a clear winter’s night one can see all the way across the bay to the Hottentots Holland mountains and watch the airliners as they pick their way over the mountain peaks and line up for final approach over the Atlantic Ocean.

  It is a favoured spot for parking a car and misting up the windows with physical exertions, but Leilah explained she had been joking about the blow job, or at least had been joking about expecting me to pay for it, and that she would rather snuggle together in the back seat of my car than talk anymore. So we snuggled into the back seat, and I said it would be best to get the talking over with – to just say what she had to say quickly. And so she did.

  “I told Thabo,” she said. “Told him everything.”

  “Your main man, Thabo? The pimp who let you go to jail?”

  “I wanted tik, and I knew he could get me some, so I called him.”

  Leilah looked at me with big, green eyes, and she bit her lip. I sensed she was preparing for more histrionics.

  “Let’s not do any more play-acting,” I said. “No more tears; just tell me what Thabo did.”

  “He sent men around to the house. They were his bully-men. Brutes.”

  “What did the men do?”

  “I was there with Natasha. Flossie wasn’t there yet. We’d already moved to Pandora and Natasha was closing everything up. She had asked for our help to clean. The brutes must have followed me, mustn’t they?”

  “What did they do?”

  “They tried to kill me, and they took Natasha. They said there was a man who wanted to see her, and they hit her when she fought back, so badly she couldn’t stand up. Then they dragged her out.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  Leilah reached behind her neck and unzipped her dress. The angry scar across her neck stood out against her skin in the pale moonlight.

  “They didn’t know how to do it, not the way it was done to Manda. I was bleeding so much they just left me there, they thought I’d die. So did I, but Flossie found me when she came in later.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “Because of what I told Thabo.”

  “Which was what?”

  “I told him about Manda, and I told him about Natasha, and the notes she was making. That’s what I told him, nothing else.”

  “How do you know the men were sent by Thabo?”

  “They wore the shirts of a club Thabo worked at. It had to be him.”

  “What kind of club?”

  “A men’s club. He calls it a ‘gentleman’s club’, but it’s just a way of arranging hookers for men who want to do special things, and don’t want to be stopped by the police when they pull over by the side of Long Street. Thabo is one of their pimps.”

  “What did they do with Natasha?”

  “That’s what I asked myself all the days I was in the hospital, when they stitched my head back on.”

  “And what was your answer?”

  “They killed her, didn’t they?”

  “You’ve seen Thabo since then?”

  Leilah shook her head. We sat in silence for a few minutes and watched the lights of an airliner come in over the brightening eastern horizon.

  “Do you think you could find the monsters again?” I asked. “Could you piece it together the way you did before?”

  “No. It was Natasha who did it. It took her weeks.”

  “But she told you a name, told you who one of them was.”

  “No, she didn’t. She never said the name.”

  Leilah looked up at me with her innocent, green eyes.

  “You told me that Natasha found one of them and that she told you his name. She named the devil, that’s what you said this morning. Yesterday morning.”

  “I must have been high,” said Leilah and she blinked her innocent eyes. “Why don’t you call her Sandy if that was her name?”

  “Because Sandy disappeared. Your Natasha is who she became. I call her by the name she chose, not the name she abandoned.”

  “What made her do that?” asked Leilah. “Why did she stop being Sandy? Stop being one person and become another?”

  “You think I know?”

  “I think I need you to hold me, Angel. That’s all I think. The sun is coming up, and it’s like we are the only survivors, aren’t we? The world has gone to hell, but we survived.”

  “So far,” I said. “We’ve survived so far.”

  And I held her frail body tight as the sun rose.

  Nine

  Benjamin looked up from the glass he was polishing and his golden eyes appeared magnified by the heavy-framed spectacles, probably an illusion caused by the way his pupils contracted when he saw me. The hand holding the cloth with which he was wiping the glass released it to flutter silently to the floor behind the bar. He placed the glass down lest he drop that too, and gave me a smile that was friendly, but frightened.

  Several customers were gathered about the wooden tables, engaged in quiet conversation and enjoying the warmth of the fire that crackled against the white noise of the rain drumming on the windows.

  “Don’t say it,” said Benjamin. “Not here, not now.” He must have seen the news I’d brought written all over my face. “I’ll get someone to cover for me and we’ll talk privately.”

  Benjamin had a huge umbrella, which he opened as we stepped out of the entrance lobby. It bore the hotel insignia, and he explained it was a golfing umbrella loaned to guests who wished to risk the capricious Cape weather on the local course. The explanation was merely a means of delaying what I had to say, so I said nothing. The two of us splashed in silence along the muddy strip of sidewalk to his house. I held the umbrella as he inserted a key into the freshly painted front door, then folded it and propped it against the door frame so that it didn’t drip all over the wooden floor.

  The front door opened directly onto a small lounge which resembled more the cosy study of a university professor than a room for socialising or entertainment. There was a fireplace with the embers of a fire, a modest couch which faced the fireplace, a worn Persian carpet and a wall of books, the shelves reaching from floor to ceiling. At the far end of the room two sash windows provided a view of a patch of vegetable garden, some neatly pruned fruit trees and a path of stones leading down to the river.

  “It’s just me,” said Benjamin, as if he felt I needed an explanation. The wall with the fireplace was a Mondrian collection of photographs and framed press clippings. Sandy was there, many times over, smiling at us and laughing. And a girl with the same eyes as Sandy, younger, prettier, but thinner, with hollow cheeks and a haunted look.

  “Are those Sandy’s articles?” I asked, indicating the press clippings.

  Benjamin nodded and removed his spectacles to polish them with a handkerchief that he pulled from his waistcoat pocket.

  “You should just say it, Ben,” he said. “It won’t get any easier by not saying it.”

  I had prepared a short sentence to convey my news, but Benjamin spoke again before I had the chance.

  “My Sandy is dead, isn’t she? You’ve found proof of it. That’s where she’s gone – she’s passed on.”

  “I think so,” I said. “Yes, I think she’s dead.”

  “Do you know how? Who?”

  “No,” I
admitted. “I have some ideas about how it happened and who was involved, but no certain details. I have been told by someone who was there, and suffered injuries of her own.”

  Benjamin replaced his spectacles and sat down heavily on the couch as if his legs had given way. He peered at the fire grate, which produced a trickle of smoke from a heap of ash.

  “Shall I light a fire?” I suggested. The room was cold, the skies outside the sash windows so black with rain clouds it felt as if a bleak night was already upon us.

  “There’s no time,” said Benjamin.

  “We’ve got an hour. That’s enough.”

  I found some kindling in a basket beside the fireplace, with chopped wood stacked neatly beside that.

  “An hour to mourn my daughter,” said Benjamin, “that’s what my life has come to. Months of worry and staving off the grief, and then an hour is all I get.”

  “You don’t need more than that,” I said. “You need to be with people, get back behind your bar.” But I knew that wasn’t true; the barman is invisible, not someone supported by the camaraderie of his customers.

  The kindling caught with little encouragement, and I found a light switch to augment the cold light trickling in through the windows. Soon the room felt a little warmer. Benjamin stared at the fire while I boiled the kettle and set about making some tea.

  “Sandy didn’t phone to tell you she had found her sister,” I said when we were sitting side by side on the couch and were both nursing a hot mug.

  Benjamin turned to me, his damp eyes surprised.

  “The phone call she made to you after she disappeared,” I said. “That was not when she told you Amanda had died.”

  “She made me promise,” said Benjamin, and he turned back to the fire, raised his mug to his lips and blew steam into his glasses as if to close himself off from the world.

  “Promise what?”

  “That I wouldn’t tell anyone I had heard from her.”