I WENT BACK the next day, just before the bookshop’s closing time, and convinced Uriah to let me in to Elijah’s secret room again. This time, I asked him whether Simone had shown any interest in any particular filing cabinet when she’d visited. With a shrug he directed me to an antique dark wood desk that stood unobtrusively in a corner. Uriah said this was where Elijah worked and Simone had always asked to sit here. As he opened the front with a small key on the silver chain, it lowered down to become a work surface – and there inside was what I’d been looking for, a set of ‘De Luc’ folders and notebooks neatly labelled by date on the shelves.
As I sat down in the low wooden chair with its padded torn seat, I noticed that someone had stuck a newspaper photograph on the corner wall, carefully taped all the way round. I’d seen it in Elijah’s office the very first time I was there, the image of a ragged, barefooted street child with a woollen beanie on his head, leaning against a graffiti-spattered wall that summed up the entirety of his young life: I HAVE OF LATE, WHERE FOR I KNOW NOT, LOST ALL MY MIRTH. The phrase had troubled me until I’d looked it up. When I’d mentioned its origin to Elijah, he’d smiled; he was a huge fan of Shakespeare but he felt that sometimes he was a little gloomy.
Some time after the Sarrazins were arrested, Elijah tracked down the housekeeper who had been in the house the day Nathan attempted to break Simone out of there. She had moved to Swellendam to live with her divorced son. For a sum of two hundred rand, she would speak to me, so Elijah and I made the three-hour drive one wet Saturday morning. The picturesque town sat in a misty hollow at the foot of towering dark green mountains. On the veranda, in a corner sheltered from the persistent soaking drizzle by built-in glass panes, we talked with Mrs Sarie Abrahams, a tall unsmiling woman in stretch Crimplene slacks and jersey, her movements stiff as she served us tea and ginger biscuits, offering blankets against the cold, not letting us into the house. She’d been released due to a lack of evidence, even though she’d had a key to the basement where Simone was found. I asked her if she could corroborate Nada’s story.
The girl was always getting into trouble, Sarie said. It was not a normal family that had meals together or went out together on weekends. Once it was shoplifting, another time she stole a bicycle. Mr Sarrazin employed a series of nannies and home teachers to attend to her, but none of them stayed long; the girl was too much of a handful. Sarie informed us she had five children of her own and ten grandchildren, she knew how lazy and naughty children could be. In her view Simone was clever and she could draai the men round her pinkie. Mrs Abrahams looked at me sideways. ‘It was those blue eyes.’
She didn’t like Nada that was clear. ‘She’s the Devil in disguise, that one. She’d sell her own mother if it suited her. You can’t believe anything she says. The one time I needed to take extra time off to be with my husband who had cancer she said no, because there was a big dinner party she needed me for. The only reason I stayed was because we needed the money.’ It was Meneer Sarrazin who had ensured the girl had everything she needed; Mevrou was only concerned about herself and the boy Sasha.
‘But wait,’ I interrupted, ‘in your statement to the police you said it was Meneer Sarrazin who had punished Simone after she ran away, and Mevrou Sarrazin who made the arrangements for Simone’s daily care.’
Sarie waved my question away. Yes, it was true he’d beaten the girl with the belt after the cops left, and many times after that, but it was because Mevrou had screamed at him that the child was destroying everything they’d built up. And then when she was with Simone, she acted like her big sister; the child was infatuated with her; it was not right.
What about the films? Had they used her in the porn films, I asked. Not properly, she didn’t think. Simone was often taken to the filming area, but it was out of bounds to the servants so she couldn’t say for sure. But she did know that ever since the policemen came the first time, the tension in the house had become unbearable; they were always at each other’s throats, mainly over the girl. Once she had heard them having a fight at the breakfast table. Mevrou shouted that the girl was ready, she was older than she was when she’d starred in a film of his, and Meneer slammed his fist down on the table and said he was the one who’d decide when Simone was ready.
‘Mrs Sarrazin was jealous of the girl, if you ask me,’ the surly woman concluded. She didn’t know who’d arranged Simone’s final trip. All she’d been told was that the girl was going away for good. In the last few days before the police descended on the house, everything had been quiet, so maybe they’d reached an agreement.
Quiet? They had her tied up in the basement and you watched over her like a guard dog.
On the way back, Elijah had offered to drive. I’d accepted gratefully, my body shivering with delayed tension and fatigue. I needed to think. The conversation was a reminder of the parallel dimension that sucked little girls and boys into a world where nothing was genuine, not even goodness and kindness. Elijah must have turned the heater on, because when he shook my shoulder to say we’d arrived I woke up sweating.
What I hadn’t known was that Elijah had returned to speak to Sarie on his own.
Night after night, after Uriah agreed to give me a key, I let myself into the control room and read through notepad after notepad to do with Simone’s case. It was all there in Elijah’s small round letters, written in pencil. He described the first time he’d gone back to Sarie, bringing a parcel of food, which she’d accepted. He’d stayed for a forty-five-minute chat and managed to find out that she suffered from arthritis and that her husband had worked for the railway police until his death a few years earlier. Now she lived with her son, who took drugs and worked on and off as a taxi driver. Her daughter was an unmarried mother, and Sarie cared for the toddler while the mother lived in town in a wooden Wendy house on her employer’s property.
Visit after visit, Elijah worked at it, bringing clothes for the toddler and arthritis medicine for surly Sarie, asking if she would be prepared to do his laundry, slowly winning her smiles and her trust. She even brought the toddler out to meet Elijah. And finally the day came when she named a sum for some information that she had not given the police, because she was afraid. She did not want to end up like Meneer Sarrazin. There had been a man who had come to the house often. A very rich foreign man. At first she had thought he might be having an affair with Mevrou Sarrazin, but later she realised he was a business partner of some kind and that he came for the girl. It had happened more than once that he’d insisted on the child being fetched when he attended the film shoots. He’d given Simone a music box for her birthday and made her sit on his lap. Sarie would sell Elijah his business card for ten thousand rand. She had slipped it into her pocket one day when he’d dropped it – something had made her think it might be useful to someone, to know about a man like that. Actually her son had once wanted to be a rap dancer, she’d admitted shyly, she’d been thinking of him at the back of her mind. But now the family had debts to pay off; maybe she could get him off the tik. Eventually, for the sum of five hundred rand, Elijah elicited what he’d been after: a business card with the name Victor Volkov, Theatre Agent.
Elijah had not stopped there. Uncertain whether Sarie could be trusted, he had enlisted Monica’s help to set up a meeting between himself and Tatiana, the hostess who’d been at Pompadour’s the night I’d heard the Sarrazins speak about a man who wanted to buy a young girl. Years ago I’d convinced Monica to take me into the Sarrazins’ gentleman’s club to see if there was any sign of Daniel, and once again I’d found nothing. But it had been a good night for Monica: she and Tatiana had hooked up that night, and although they chose to not live together, they’d been lovers ever since.
It was only when Tatiana confirmed that Victor Volkov, born in 1941 in wartime Stalinist Moscow into the intelligentsia class, was one of the club’s most prominent VIPs, and was able to produce a computer printout that confirmed his entry to the club the same night of our visit, that Elijah allowed himself to believe that he might actually have for the first time in his investigative career tracked down a real live abductor of young girls: a man who could make Simone and his own sister disappear like flowers in the wind, an evil man who deserved to be eradicated from the face of planet Earth.
After that, there was no stopping Elijah. There were pages and pages of notes about the man. Elijah had devoted long hours of his days and nights to finding out everything he could about Volkov, the man he labelled Suspect 1. There were no other suspects as far as I could see. And finally, what I’d been looking for: an address. Volkov lived in a homestead with the name ‘Huis in Bos’ in the Wellington wine area, part of a disused farm sandwiched between two bigger working farms. In his usual diligent manner, Elijah set his sleazy ex-partner August (aka The Rottweiler) onto looking up official records, property plans and deeds of sale with the assistance of his Home Affairs and Town Planning contacts, while he himself interviewed neighbours and past farm labourers. Each supposition, fact or conclusion reached was recorded in the notebook under that day’s date, in diary fashion. A picture emerged of a near-derelict farmhouse hidden by a dense forest and surrounded by a hundred plus acres of unfarmed arable land, with its own spring and a gorge with remnants of an ancient wolf trap – a place with a bit of a geskiedenis, as one farmer put it.
I imagined Elijah’s transcendent joy as he woke up before sunrise each morning and headed up Bain’s Kloof pass and onto the highway leading to the tunnel, encountering family troops of baboons playing on the road verges in the early morning as he made his way to wine country. It was clear from his notes that what had started as a routine check developed into a systematic excavation of the facts conducted with archaeological precision. It was a situation custom-made for Elijah’s peculiar combination of skills: lost children detective, and alien, UFO and paranormal activity investigator. He’d kept his visits a secret from me. Until he could be sure.
Victor Volkov’s neighbours saw little of the Russian who was frequently away and had demonstrated no interest in farming. A farmer told Elijah that the general dealer in town, a friend of his, had sold Volkov a shotgun and ammunition after he complained about the baboons destroying the gutters. Occasionally they heard shotgun salvos. Another farmer’s wife claimed her grocer in town had told her Volkov had brought his own housekeeper and a manservant from Russia to look after the place while he was away, and they brought lists written in English but themselves only spoke Russian. Her husband commented that they’d gone over to welcome their new neighbour and he’d been civil but onvriendelik. They’d done all their talking standing outside on the stoep soos onnooseles; eventually his wife had left her freshly baked milk tart on the stoep table. He’d made a joke about Russian vodka to break the ice, but Volkov had not taken the hint. Elijah had learnt from the talkative couple that security around Volkov’s homestead was low key, with no cameras or electric fencing. Only two young Dobermans, a dog and a bitch, could be seen occasionally coming out of the forest and patrolling the fence. But that was more than enough for any criminals from these parts, the farmer explained – they didn’t like the place anyway, they said there were spooks.
It all probably started with the derelict slave bell, but the wolf trap had something to do with it too. Over the years the stories made themselves up − locals told fireside tales of virgins and pregnant girls disappearing and men turned into werewolves and shape changers − and soon ‘Huis in Bos’ was given a wide berth. The house had stood empty for a long time after the previous owner died. Nobody knew how Volkov had come by the property, but it was better for the farm to be occupied.
Elijah noted that the surrounding farmers were a hospitable and curious lot, but they hadn’t made any headway with Volkov, who had yet to accept a social invite or let anybody beyond the front veranda into his house. Elijah’s visits to the town library had confirmed that next to nothing was known of the farm’s history; no documented record of the original owners or their slave labourers existed. The origins of the wolf trap were unknown. It had apparently been effective, since no one in living memory had ever seen a wolf – mountain leopards, yes, but not a wolf. Despite his best efforts, Elijah had not been able to extract a copy of Volkov’s identity document from the estate agent who made the farm sale, but he would try another tactic. Without such an official document, it would be impossible to determine the man’s real identity.
For my purposes, the computer printout Tatiana provided Elijah with was good enough – it included a photograph of the 68-year-old Victor Volkov, VIP club patron. I quickly slipped it into the plastic folder I was taking with me.
Thank you, Elijah, you are the best PI a girl could ever have, even in death.
I started running the minute I’d locked that inconspicuous door, behind which so many secrets were stored for safekeeping.
Tell me a secret (XI)
https://secrets.net/chatlounge/
(Everyone. Has one. What’s yours?)
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butterfly: |
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Game? |
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diable: |
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Tell me a secret. |
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butterfly: |
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I am in the wolf’s lair. Do i surprise you? |
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diable: |
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Is he dead? |
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butterfly: |
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Soon |
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diable: |
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Why are you still alive? |
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butterfly: |
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He is waiting. It gives him pleasure to wait |
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diable: |
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He takes pleasure in hurting you? |
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butterfly: |
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A little. We are making a film |
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diable: |
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Can i watch too? |
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butterfly: |
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not possible |
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diable: |
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There are others? |
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butterfly: |
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They are in his films. All gone now. Poor butterflies. I must go |
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diable: |
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Go for the neck artery below the jaw. Slice don’t stab. Sting like a bee sweet butterfly |
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butterfly: |
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Don’t go soft on me. Who are you really? Car coming |
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diable: |
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Good luck and good hunting |
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butterfly: |
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My secret wins. End of Game frenchie |