Gallows Hill (5 page)

‘My size exactly.’

‘A necklace,’
he said. He worked the tarnished metal loose. It nestled above the collarbones, an unusual piece of jewellery.

‘Looks like it snapped,’ said Clare. ‘This is only half.’

‘We’ll check it all once we’ve done with the autopsy. So far, no easy ID.’

‘Is there ever an easy ID?’ asked Clare.

‘Sometimes you hit gold,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘An ID in the pocket. A name tag in a kid’s jersey.
That happened once, some school kids shot by the security police during a riot in the 80s and buried in the dunes out past Macassar. We exhumed the bodies ten years ago, when I first started working for the Missing Person’s Task Force.’

‘Devastating,’ said Clare.

‘For the mothers, yes. But it did save us a lot of time. Not going to happen here, I don’t think.’

‘Let’s get her laid out,’
said Prof Friedman. He and Raheema Patel pulled on their gloves. ‘We’ll get these bones to talk to us, tell us who she was.’

They lifted the bones out with care. A black stone rattled onto the gurney. Friedman picked it up with his gloved hand. It fitted exactly into the palm of his broad hand, the right width, the right length for a hand axe.

‘Cain’s weapon for the very first murder,’
said Friedman, dropping it into a kidney dish. ‘Get this tested for DNA. Hers we’ll get from the femur. And make a note for the lab to check for traces other than hers.’

Clare bagged the stone, wrote the instructions.

‘Not much changes in 6 000 years,’ said Raheema Patel, laying the bones out on the table. She fanned out the metatarsals. Two hands, two feet. Counted and named the long
bones. Tibia, fibula – both, times two.

The ribs, the collarbones, the hyoid bone, the vertebrae.

The skull with its shattered cranium.

‘Are all the bones here?’ asked Friedman.

‘Everything,’ said his colleague.

‘Can you confirm the sex for Clare’s record?’ asked Friedman.

‘Judging by the skull, female,’ said the anthropologist. ‘The brow, the hinge of the jaw. Gracile.
This was a woman.’

‘Age?’ asked Clare.

‘We look down the ribs. Places where you would find cartilage and bone. Now we look for places where the cartilage has ossified.’

Friedman held her rib ends against the samples he had put into a box. Finding the match he wanted.

‘Here you go. Consistent with her being about thirty years old. Give or take a couple of years. She was just on
the cusp of that time where her bones are beginning to tell her own story rather than a generic human story.’

‘And her race?’

‘Look at her skull, Clare. Her features point strongly to a European origin. If she had been South African, or if she’d been a visiting tourist, there would have been a fuss about her disappearance in newspapers at the time.’

‘I’ll be checking the archives,’
said Clare. ‘How long has she been dead?’

‘I’d say 20 to 25 years,’ said Friedman.

‘It’ll be easy enough to confirm this – City Council Planning records should tell us when the slab was thrown,’ said Clare.

‘Good. That’ll give you something more precise to work with,’ said Friedman. ‘But that information would need to be consistent with what the bones are telling us. We’ve got the
broad strokes,’ said Friedman. ‘Now let’s see what was specific about her. What’s her height?’

Raheema Patel measured the right femur, did the standard calculation. ‘Exactly 1.6 metres,’ she said.

‘Same age, more or less, and the same height as me,’ said Clare.

‘Makes sense, with the shoe size,’ said Raheema Patel.

Friedman picked up her arm bones, compared them. ‘I think she was
left-handed. And she was active, too. This kind of wear and tear in a young woman’s body means she was fit and athletic. She did a fair bit of physical work while she was alive.’

‘She wasn’t poor, that I can tell you,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘Look at her teeth.’

The teeth were even, square. ‘With dental care like that in South Africa 20 years ago, you can be pretty sure she was white. Confirms
what we see in the Caucasian features. You can put that in the notes, Clare.’

‘It’d be so much easier if we knew what she looked like,’ said Clare, her pen poised over the notepad.

‘For that, you’ll need a facial reconstruction artist,’ said Solly Friedman. ‘Raheema will make a cast of the skull, in case.’

‘No problem, Doc. I’ve got so much spare time.’

‘It’s good practice and
it keeps you out of trouble,’ said Friedman, picking up a rib. ‘What I can tell you is that she had a healed fracture on rib 12.’ Friedman studied the arched bone for a moment. Then he picked up the bones of the left forearm. ‘There’s another one here, on the radius. It’s aligned with this crack in the left twelfth rib. A childhood injury. They look as if they happened at the same time. It’ll help
you identify her, Clare, if you can find a family who is missing someone who fractured her wrist and her ribs at the same time. Possibly in a car accident. Or maybe riding a horse.’

A girl on a horse. Clare had been a girl like that once, riding the wild white mare that her father had given her. She had galloped over the veld, escaping the farmhouse where her pale and uncommunicative mother
had hidden from the Namaqualand sun with Constance, Clare’s timid twin.

‘The pelvis,’ said Friedman. ‘Look here – these grooves down the back.’

Clare saw what looked like tracks in the bone.

‘She gave birth sometime before she died,’ said Friedman.

‘How old would the child have been?’

‘At least two,’ said Friedman. ‘Possibly even four or five.’

She traced the marks of childbirth
grooved into the back of the dead woman’s pelvis. Clare had a flash of a child waiting for her mother, for that butterfly kiss that would usher it into sleep. Of it never happening, the child waiting wide-eyed in the dark. She tried to imagine the interminable waiting that ossified into a perpetual sense of loss. A waiting that turned into fear. And then rage. Clare wondered where it eventually
found an outlet.

‘You look at any bones long enough,’ Raheema Patel put her hand on Clare’s arm, drawing her back into the clinical atmosphere of the room, ‘and you can read their secrets.’

‘No wedding ring,’ observed Clare.

‘The absence of a ring does not imply the absence of a husband,’ said Friedman. ‘Good time to think of the cause of death.’

Clare picked up the skull.

Distinctive cheekbones, graceful eyebrow ridges possibly shielding almond-shaped eyes, a delicately rounded chin. Above them, the jagged hole in her forehead.

‘Angel – we could call her that,’ said Raheema Patel. ‘I always give my special cases a name.’

‘Yes, our names. Part of what makes us human.’ Clare traced round the fracture on the right temple. ‘This would have killed her.’

‘If it happened pre-mortem, it certainly would have done so. Her hyoid bone is intact.’ Friedman pointed to a small bone in the throat area. ‘So she wasn’t strangled.’

He tweezed bits of stone from the skull.

‘Are those maybe fragments of this?’ Clare picked up the stone Friedman had put in the kidney dish.

‘Looks like you have the murder weapon,’ said the anthropologist. ‘We can get
this tested to make sure, but the shards found in her forehead look the same.’

‘So she was killed and then buried in Gallows Hill.’ Clare held the rock in her gloved hand. It warmed quickly, responsive to heat. ‘Why?’

‘That area was once a fossilised sand dune. Which is one of the reasons it was used as a pauper’s burial ground. Easier to dig than the clay and rock higher up Signal Hill.’

‘I’ll get the rock sent for analysis. If there are tissue remains on it, the lab will tell me that they match those found in the skeleton, which we can probably guess, anyway. But it’s not going to bring you any closer to knowing who hit her, and why.’

Friedman bagged and tagged the rocks as evidence.

‘There’ll be someone out there – her lover, her mother, her child – still waiting
for her,’ said Clare. ‘Someone who’d have reported her missing. People do, when young women disappear. I’ll phone Basie Steyn. He can find his way around the SAPS records.’

‘He’s a genius, in that case,’ said Friedman.

Clare scrolled through the numbers in her phone.

‘Basie.’ She walked over the window and looked out at the bedraggled rose bushes. ‘Clare Hart here. Do you still have
missing persons reports from the 1980s?’

‘What you got, Doc?’

‘A skeleton found at Gallows Hill,’ said Clare. ‘You probably saw the story in the afternoon news.’

‘Those are too old for us, Doc,’ said Basie Steyn.

‘The one I’m looking at is from the late 80s,’ said Clare.

‘Jirre, who’d think to look for a body in a graveyard?’ said Basie. ‘Give me what you’ve got.’

She gave
him the facts that they had gleaned from the bones.

‘I’ll look,’ said Basie. ‘But don’t hold your breath. Those old records are in a mess.’

Friedman turned to Clare. ‘Twenty-odd years is a long time. It’ll take a special trigger to make someone remember anything.’

‘Her face as it was will be frozen in people’s memories – if they even remember it. Frozen and blurred,’ said Raheema Patel.
‘That’s what usually happens. I’ll make a cast of her skull. You never know.’

Clare turned over the remnants of the woman’s clothing. Next to the zip, something had been stitched with silver thread, also rusted, but still intact.

‘Looks like a label here.’ Clare felt her pulse quicken. A possibility. Slender, tenuous, but there, nonetheless. ‘Can you make out what it is, Raheema?’

‘Try this magnifying glass,’ she said.

Clare positioned the speck of cloth. The fabric jumped into focus under the lens, its sea-green threads visible under the dirt. It looked like silk.

‘This label. Size 38. If that’s a European size, then she must have been a South African 32. There wasn’t much of her,’ Clare said.

‘Can you read the label?’

Clare angled the light.

‘It’s distinctive.
Looks like two linked Vs intertwined. A take on Louis Vuitton’s interlocking letters.’ She moved the piece, carefully spreading it out. ‘Do either of you know it?’

‘I don’t do labels,’ said Raheema Patel.

‘Hospital scrubs, that’s the only fashion pinnacle I’ve scaled,’ said Friedman.

‘Can you hold this steady for me?’ Clare asked.

The anthropologist obliged. Clare photographed
the remnants of the woman’s dress.

‘That’s it?’ she said, when Clare was finished.

‘Time for something to eat,’ said Friedman, removing his gloves, ‘Would you like to join us?’

‘Another time,’ said Clare.

‘What’re you thinking?’ asked Raheema Patel as the two women went to change.

Clare tossed the green gown into the laundry basket.

‘It’s a shot in the dark,’ said Clare,
digging her car keys out of her bag. ‘But if it’s a hit, you’ll be the first to know.’

The wind had picked up by the time Clare left the mortuary. It grabbed her hair, tugged at her clothes, threw grit in her eyes. It buffeted her car as she drove towards Table Mountain. She picked up a box of Greek shortbread before turning into a winding Oranjezicht avenue lined with old villas, their red roofs hidden by oak trees four generations tall. Clare parked in a quiet cul-de-sac
where a house had its back pushed up against the mountain’s grey-green skirts. There was a tang of smoke. She scanned Table Mountain. February had been a tinder-dry month. There was no smoke visible, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t fire.

Clare rang the doorbell.

Footsteps, then the sound of a chain sliding back in a lock.

‘Hello, Aunt.’ Imogen stood in the doorway, one hand resting
on an angular hip. Twenty years old, at fashion school. It showed in the outfit she wore. ‘You
have
been scarce.’

‘Here’s a bribe to let me in.’ Clare handed over the biscuits.

‘Okay,’ said Imogen, taking two from the box. ‘You can come in.’

Yellowwood floors, teak windows, no clutter. Clare followed her niece through the cool, tranquil house to the kitchen. Dappled light spilled across
the table. Red apples lay heaped in a blue bowl. Effortless domestic harmony, her older sister’s talent.

‘Has Julia been complaining?’ asked Clare, a pang of guilt at three dinners cancelled in a row.

‘You know what my mother’s like,’ said Imogen, spooning coffee into the plunger. ‘She likes all the family stuff.’

‘Tell her I’m sorry.’

‘We see you on TV, so that’s something, at
least.’

‘Very funny,’ said Clare.

‘I’ve been listening to Cape Talk,’ said Imogen. ‘That Gallows Hill thing sounds bad.’

‘What were they saying?’

‘Lots of skeletons,’ said Imogen. ‘Scientists and cops everywhere. And someone spotted you, too – some tabloid journalist, apparently.’

‘Engel?’

‘That’s the one,’ said Imogen. ‘The lines are still jammed with callers.’

‘It’ll
get worse, I’m afraid.’

‘Is that why you’re here?’ asked Imogen, looking her aunt in the eye. ‘I know you. You only come here when you want something.’

‘That’s not true,’ protested Clare.

‘It is,’ said Imogen. ‘But I don’t mind. Otherwise we’d never see you. Well, what do you need?’

‘Fashion advice.’

‘That makes a change,’ said Imogen. ‘How girly of you.’

‘Vintage fashion.’

‘My favourite,’ said Imogen. ‘You’ve seen my new fashion blog?’

‘I have,’ said Clare. ‘That’s why I thought maybe you could help me.’

‘Cool.’ said Imogen. ‘What do you want?’

‘You saw all the disturbance at Gallows Hill?’

‘Yes. Crime-scene tape and all,’ said Imogen. ‘I thought, what an appropriate assessment of slavery. Conceptual art, pretty much.’

‘The tape was up because
a young woman’s body had been found.’

‘Ag shame,’ said Imogen. ‘They didn’t say that on the news.’

‘Riedwaan will do an announcement when he has to,’ said Clare. ‘A bit of time below the radar is always good.’

‘Who is the woman?’

‘I’m trying to work it out,’ said Clare. ‘She’s been dead for a long time. Twenty years or more. Her remains were found under a building that had been
knocked down.’