Daddy's Girl Read online

  3

  The afternoon sun broke though the cloud, splashing small hands on the barre and pooling on the floor; the girls’ serious faces looked straight ahead. From the piano, a simple minuet. One, two, three. One, two, three. Slow enough for everyone in the class to keep up, their tummies tight drums in new pink leotards.

  ‘First position. Heels together. Feet out. Hands held correctly, chins up, plié. And smile and turn. And smile. And turn. And hold. Hands in front and second. Curtsey.’

  The ballet teacher marched down the line of little girls, adjusting a hand, a foot, tapping at protruding bottoms, bellies. She paused next to the dark-haired girl at the front of the line, touching her long nails to the girl’s cheek.

  ‘Smile, Yasmin. This isn’t a funeral.’

  The child smiled obediently. Her slender limbs were correctly positioned; she knew this from her ballet teacher’s approving frown. Madame Merle moved on.

  ‘Hands graceful, girls. First position and music, Mister Henry. And smile. And smile. And curtsey.’

  Clapping her hands, she dismissed the class and accepted a cigarette from the pianist. Mister Henry lit it for her.

  ‘What, Yasmin?’ Madame Merle became aware of the lingering child.

  ‘Isn’t it too early, Madame?’ Madame Merle blew a smoke ring, round and perfect, over the child’s head.

  ‘Darling, it’s the gala tonight.’

  ‘Persephone. The ballet about the girl who disappears,’ Mister Henry explained. ‘At Artscape.’

  ‘Oh.’ Still, Yasmin lingered.

  ‘Run along.’ Madame Merle turned away. The class was over. The beam of her attention switched off.

  Yasmin felt Mister Henry’s eyes on her as she negotiated the stream of six-year-olds rushing to the cars idling outside. Ever since her older friend Calvaleen had stopped dancing, hers was the only dark bun among the blondes.

  The change-room door burst open and the older girls billowed out, all tulle and chatter. Yasmin pressed herself against the wall, and then went to her locker. She had a proper ballet dancer’s crossover cardigan, which Amma had knitted for her as an early birthday present. She tied the bow. Thinking about her birthday gave her a knot in her stomach. It was her birthday that had started all the trouble. Last year, when she turned six. In three sleeps she would be seven. She hoped it would be better this year.

  Yasmin reached into her bag for her takkies. Her mother always threw a fit if she went outside in her satin pumps. She pulled out her old shoes, dislodging a piece of green paper as she did so. She unfolded it, her heart beating faster. Zero-to-panic. That was Amma’s nickname for Daddy. That’s how she felt now. Zero-to-panic. She realised that it was another thing she’d forgotten. Madame Merle had handed out the notices with strict instructions that they get them signed and return them to her.

  ‘So I can be absolutely sure that your mummies and daddies know to fetch you early, darlings,’ is what Madame Merle had said in her posh voice.

  Another thing that would make her mother strip her moer. Two things! She’d forgotten to give her mom the paper. And the picking-up time had changed. Yasmin felt shame wash over her. She tried so hard to do everything right, to make her mother happy, to make her smile like she used to. But everything she did just seemed to make her mother angrier. Ever since her daddy had kept her for the weekend and that Aunty Ndlovu had come with the police papers that said her father was bad like the gangsters he was meant to catch, things had been even worse.

  Yasmin smoothed open the notice that Madame Merle had handed out. The notices were only mailed if you missed a class. ‘Saving money, darlings!’ said Madame Merle. ‘Do you think a person can eat from teaching ballet?’

  Her mother wouldn’t know that the school was closing early today because of the performance of Persephone. Calvaleen was meant to be the star, Persephone. But she’d have got the notice in the post because she had stopped going to the older girls’ class a long time ago. Yasmin missed her. She crumpled the paper. She didn’t like to think about girls who disappeared. She didn’t like to think that her mother was on shift and that she would shout at Yasmin if she phoned her. No one would come to fetch her for a long time.

  She was going to be in trouble again. She knew it.

  She could hear Madame Merle’s voice.

  ‘One, two, three.’ Madame Merle’s voice cut across the music. It was the end of the dance: swan-like in their white skirts, the girls would be skimming across the room, their necks elongated, trailing their arms behind them.

  ‘Like air, girls. You’re ballerinas, not bricklayers. Jeté, jeté, jeté.’

  The tight burn in Yasmin’s throat told her tears were coming. She took a deep breath and made herself think. She was a big girl. She could make a plan. She unzipped her emergency money pouch and looked at the coins in her palm. Two fifty cent pieces. She repeated the cellphone number she needed to dial and stood on tiptoe in front of the call box in the passage. She slotted in the first coin, then the second.

  ‘Oh Eight Two,’ she whispered. ‘Five Four Two Two Oh Oh Seven.’

  The coins clicked down the gullet of the call box. Yasmin’s tummy unclenched when the phone began to purr.

  ‘Faizal.’

  ‘Daddy.’ A lilt in her voice.

  ‘Leave a message.’

  Her father’s voice for other people.

  The call box swallowed the last coin, cutting the connection before she could leave a message. She replaced the receiver. The piano had stopped. Mister Henry would be closing the lid, gathering his score. His eyes were always watery behind his glasses. He smelt funny. Calvaleen had told her. Yasmin didn’t want to have to wait with him. She hoisted her pink rucksack, then slipped past the security guard and through the gate to wait until her mom came.

  The afternoon sunlight slanted between the Roman pines lining the steep street. Yasmin did not like to look at them. They were like the trees in the dark Russian fairytale forests in her book. Forests where cannibal crones like Baby Yaga Bony Legs lurked, waiting for young girls. The street was empty; only one car near the park. Dog walkers. Yasmin could hear barking. She told herself that an hour was not so long, not while it was still light.

  She listened to Madame Merle herding the older girls into the parking lot. When the security gate opened, unleashing the minibus with its cargo of sylphs, Yasmin pressed herself deep into the bougainvillea hedge. She put her hand to her mouth, sucking the bright bead of blood where a thorn had pierced her skin.

  The saltiness reminded her how hungry she was. She had nothing in her bag but a peanut butter sandwich from yesterday. The bread was dry and the peanut butter stuck to the roof of her mouth, but she took another bite as she watched two bergies make their way up the steep hill. The woman stopped to rummage in a dustbin over the road, giving Yasmin a toothless smile. Yasmin did not smile back, but she did wave. The hand with the sandwich she hid behind her back, ashamed to eat in front of people looking for food in a bin. The homeless couple drifted up the road towards the mountain and she ate again.

  She looked up when she heard the car, swallowed, a smile starting as she stepped towards the opening door.

  The arm snaked around her body, squeezing the narrow cage of her ribs until she felt the bones would snap. She bit down hard when the hand clamped over her mouth, pushing her scream back down her throat. The hand fisted into her upturned face. Another slammed into her belly, winding her. Yasmin crumpled forwards into the pizza boxes and Coke bottles littering the floor of the car. The driver slid down the hill, and Yasmin rolled sideways as he turned. He cut the engine, but neither he nor his passengers moved as the afternoon faded into night.

  The beginning of forever.

  She lay still, her mouth full of blood. The tooth that had wobbled for days on its last thread lay on the cradle of her tongue.

  4

  Captain Riedwaan Faizal scanned the building. Nothing moved in the shadowed stairwells. On the top floor, the corner of a curtain twitched against the cinder blocks. He figured out the number of the flat. There weren’t that many people around here who had jobs. Whoever was behind the grimy lace would have been watching all day. That was not where the call had come from.

  A concrete wall ran along the length of the street, separating the pavement from the derelict sports field wedged against the freeway. It was freshly graffitied with chubby, rainbow-hued numbers: 27s. The gang tag stretched its tentacles from the Cape Flats, claiming Coronation Street and its surroundings for the Afghans. Just another franchise establishing its brand. That’s what a sociologist in Jesus sandals had told Riedwaan Faizal. Like McDonald’s handing out happy meals. Riedwaan snorted. More like dogs marking their territory. Dogs with new masters, hoping that a bit of piss and a lot of terror would hand this territory to them.

  The girls had sprinted across the sports field that day, dropping their satchels and scattering schoolbooks along the way. Their shoes and grey skirts were streaked with mud. The younger girl’s bobby socks had slipped below the plaster on her left shin. They had known what was coming. The older girl’s arms were wrapped around the younger one. The bullets that ripped through her back had exploded through the smaller one’s slender body, just below the badge on her maroon school jersey. Puberty had just settled, light as a butterfly, on the child’s body – glossing and thickening her hair, swelling the exposed nipple.

  Riedwaan had brushed her cooling cheek, the coin that was balanced on her open eye sliding into his palm. Heads. It was still warm.

  Sergeant Rita Mkhize was tracking the girls’ path from the pavement. Short hair twisted into dreads, just over a metre and a half tall, forty-five kilograms: too small to hold a machine gun properly. Which might have been a good thing: she got the moer in quickly, and
she was a lethal shot. She had been his partner for a couple of months now. She kept an eye on him, but she knew how to watch his back. He was getting used to her.

  She held up a bloodstained algebra paper.

  ‘The Maitland School for Girls.’ Then she read out the names on their school bags. ‘Sisters. Grade nine. Grade four, the little one.’ Rita stood up, zipping her hoodie and stamping her feet, ‘Can’t be more than ten. A baby.’

  ‘My baby’s seven on Tuesday,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘You signed the Canada papers yet?’ Rita asked.

  ‘Van Rensburg would never have asked me a personal question like that,’ said Riedwaan’s.

  ‘He’s not your partner any more,’ shrugged Rita. ‘So, did you?’

  The arrival of the ballistics van saved Riedwaan from having to answer. Shorty de Lange was alone, the way he liked it.

  ‘Keep that lot away from me,’ De Lange greeted them. The five o’clock crowd, on its way home from work, was pressing against the crime scene tape. The woman who ran the corner café was telling everyone who’d listen what she had seen; it was not much. She had heard the shots. She had waited for a bit. She had heard a car – it sounded like an expensive one – going fast, doing a wheelie. Then she had gone outside to look. Nothing in the street, just the two girls in the field, dead. Riedwaan had written this down in his little black book. Statements walked, in cases like this.

  ‘I’m going to mark my territory and then I’m going to start working. If one of your friends here crosses the line, Faizal, I’m out of here.’

  ‘Nice to see you too, Shorty.’ Riedwaan moved towards the tape. He was not a big man, but there was a tautness to his shoulders that made the murmuring onlookers take a step back.

  ‘A gang hit?’ De Lange scanned the ground. There were a couple of casings on the pavement, one near the bodies. He bagged and tagged them.

  ‘Some slime with a lot to prove climbing the ranks, looks like,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Really proves you’re a man, shooting a girl in the head from close range.’

  ‘Makes a change from cops taking out their own families,’ said De Lange.

  ‘Been bad?’ asked Riedwaan.

  ‘Worse than Christmas. One this month and three in July. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Busy,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘I heard,’ said De Lange. All the time he was talking, he was working too. Close-ups of things that people from ballistics find interesting. Twists of metal. Angles. Grooves in a piece of wood. Holes in things. Casings. Where they were lying. Why they were lying there. ‘This special operation of yours. Got some stupid name, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Operation Hope.’

  ‘More stupid than I thought.’ De Lange retreated behind his camera, bending his lanky frame over the girls for close-ups of the bullets’ entry and exit points. ‘Whose idea was that?’

  ‘Communications said we should project a more positive image to the community,’ Riedwaan said. ‘Not stereotype the disadvantaged young men who might have wished to make alternative life choices. That’s how they put it.’

  ‘How would you put it?’

  ‘Not like that,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘You know these girls?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Although I imagine they had an alternative life choice in mind when they got up in the morning.’

  ‘Pathologist here yet?’

  On cue, the black 1972 Jag nosed its way through the crowd. Same vintage as Riedwaan, though better cared for than himself during the past year or so.

  ‘Doc,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘Faizal, you fucker.’ Piet Mouton heaved his considerable bulk out of the car. He was in black tie, his professorial wisps of hair tamed for the occasion. ‘What’ve you interrupted me for this time?’

  ‘Skipping meals will do you good,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘This wasn’t dinner, Faizal. My wife has ballet tickets. She’s going to kill me for this.’ Mouton pulled his bag out of the boot. ‘Not a good sign that you’re here, Shorty. High e.tv factor?’

  ‘Couldn’t be higher. Schoolgirls who live in a proper house. By the looks of their uniforms, Mom and Dad have jobs. The Minister’s balls on toast for this one.’ De Lange stepped out of the way.

  ‘Shit.’ Mouton paled at the bloody love knot of limbs tangled on the path. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Anonymous call to the gang hotline half an hour ago,’ said Riedwaan.

  ‘You got a trace yet?’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ said Riedwaan. ‘This area, though, the only eyewitnesses you get are blind or dead.’

  Mouton knelt down beside the bodies. He uncurled the fourteen-year-old’s fingers, first the right hand, then the left. There was no staining on the thumbs or the index fingers.

  ‘Makes a change,’ said Mouton. ‘She’s not been smoking tik, this one.’ He lifted the older girl’s skirt and pulled away her panties to reveal pale, unblemished skin. ‘No tattoos. Not gang cherries, these.’

  ‘Captain Faizal?’ Riedwaan turned, facing straight into a lens. ‘Good to see your suspension’s over.’ Stringy hair, not much chin, zoom lens a third arm – the photographer flashed his camera.

  ‘You.’ Riedwaan put his hand up to avoid being flashed again. ‘How do you vultures get here so fast?’

  ‘I got my contacts, Captain. Like you.’

  ‘Faizal.’ Next to him a journalist. Similar-looking, with even less chin. Between the two of them, they had the Flats covered. ‘Voice of the Cape,’ he announced, jerking a thumb backwards in the direction of the dead girls. ‘Names?’

  ‘Next-of-fucking-kin first.’

  The photographer zoomed in on the bags, intending to decipher the names later from the jumble of pixels.

  ‘This linked to your one-man crusade against gangsters, Captain Faizal?’ The journalist flipped open his notebook, pen poised.

  ‘I’m a Muslim,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Crusades are not my thing.’

  ‘You giving up?’ Camera shutter firing.

  ‘We’re following procedure.’ The words unfamiliar. A month ago he had told a journalist how many shootings there had been in Cape Town, how many dockets had walked, and which gangsters had hosted cocktail parties for which city officials. This had pleased the public, but it made the politicians look bad. Politicians were not people Riedwaan lost sleep over, but the threat of permanent assignment to the evidence store had persuaded him to give them and their euphemisms some consideration.

  ‘What does that mean, Captain?’ The journalist again. ‘In practice – when you’ve got two girls executed on the way home from school? It’s got Voëltjie Ahrend’s signature all over it. Voëltjie Ahrend and his new best friends, the Afghans.’ The journalist held up two yellowed fingers. ‘The horsemen of the apocalypse, Captain. You know who they are. You know what they drive. You know where they live. What the fuck kind of procedure do you need?’

  ‘I suggest you phone the SAPS Director of Communications and ask her.’ Riedwaan put his hand in his pocket. The coin was there, in a bag. The third in three weeks. ‘She should be able to explain – if she can get her nose out of a communications manual long enough to pick up the phone.’

  ‘I’ve heard you’re being moved out of the Gang Unit.’ The reporter flipped through his notebook, found his notes, and read from them. ‘A Director Ndlovu has been critical of you. No place for your attitudes, your methods, in a force that focuses on community policing, she says. Any comment?’

  ‘Our communications department will tell you that the human resource deployment strategies of the SAPS are confidential. Shall I explain what that means?’ Riedwaan had him by his shoulder. His mouth was close to his ear. ‘It’s government for fuck off.’

  Riedwaan let the journalist go and wiped his hand on his jeans. ‘Persuade this lot that the show is over,’ he said to a uniformed officer.

  ‘Rita, will you finish here?’ said Riedwaan. ‘I have a strategy meeting with Phiri.’

  ‘You want me to bring you something to eat later?’ she asked.

  ‘The way to a man’s heart.’ Riedwaan had to bang the Mazda’s door twice before it would shut. ‘What you getting?’