HEIDI’S BEEN incommunicado for months but she’s organised an entire security detail for the impending release of Nada Sarrazin so she must be around – much more often than she cares to let big brother Nathan know. And I know from Samba that she checks in occasionally. She’s the person I need right now. There’s always been a lack of formality between us, maybe because we see right through each other.
‘I need a gun, Heidi. Something small and efficient. I know where Simone is. She’s right here in Wellington on a farm, in South Africa, not in France. We were all completely wrong.’
‘I have this feeling of déjà vu,’ Heidi says pointedly. ‘I’d say it’s late for lessons. Last time we talked you called me some fine names.’
‘I’ve thought it over. You once told me that we might not be on the same side, but that if it had something to do with Simone I should call you. And I’ve been practicing at a shooting gallery. So here I am.’
Heidi is an action woman. She thinks in terms of milliseconds. She does not know what it is to dwell in the past. Her life has depended too many times on making the right call in the here and now. In this we are similar.
‘We don’t know how long she’ll be there. Do you want company?’
I laugh mirthlessly. Heidi is strangely polite in matters of life and death. ‘Do I want my own wonder woman to come along and help me rescue my daughter from a psychopathic maniac? Hell, Heidi, that’s a tough one.’
‘I’ll do it on one condition,’ she says. ‘You won’t argue with anything I say. I’ll be leading this expedition. I decide when we go in, I decide if we leave, basically I decide every move we make. Do you think you can handle not being in control?’
‘I don’t have much choice, do I? Can we just go now?’
‘I’ll be there in twenty,’ she says. ‘Dress warmly in black − have you got some kind of strong outdoor shoes?’
‘Hiking boots?’
‘They’ll do. And take a bottle of water along.’
While I wait for Heidi, I try to call Nathan on his private line, but as usual there’s no reply. I can’t wait for Pudmilla so I leave a voicemail. Then I call the Cape Town police headquarters and ask for Klaus, but he is not in his office, so I ask to speak to Klaus’s second-in-command, Detective Lucas Mbata. I tell him an email will be coming through that will explain where my daughter is being held, and that he must get the message to Klaus regardless of what he’s doing. Something must come across in my voice because Mbata tells me I must wait in the apartment for his call back. I thank him and hang up.
It’s a long time since I’ve ridden pillion on a motorbike, and never with a woman. She hands me a helmet and a black leather jacket and pants, and tells me to put them on. I do as I’m told.
‘Call us Thumper and Bambi,’ Heidi says, grinning at my biker-girl gear as I walk over and sit behind her on the bike.
‘Live and Let Die?’ I ask nervously, getting ready to hang on.
‘Diamonds are Forever,’ she shouts before she kick starts the powerful engine to life. I realise she’s enjoying herself.
By the time Heidi and I reached the outskirts of the farm ‘Huis in Bos’, the sun was going down. It had been a hair-raising drive across Bain’s Kloof pass, Heidi pushing the big bike hard as she took one tight corner after another, with a mountainside on the left, a sheer precipice on the right, overtaking on blind corners. She stopped the bike at a roadside eatery outside Wellington and asked me for directions. I was amazed we were both still alive and that my hands were steady enough to take out the annotated map, carefully stored in a plastic A4 sheath, that Elijah had cross-referenced in his notebook − filed under the property number in a drawer labelled MAPS. Simple and ingenuous.
There were notes with the map as to best approach routes by car or by foot. We followed Elijah’s instructions exactly and stopped one kilometre before the farm on a dirt road, after which I helped Heidi wheel the heavy bike up an incline into a pine forest that lined the road on one side. We placed the helmets under the bike behind a fallen tree trunk and covered it with branches so that you’d have to walk right up to it to see it or know it was there. We quickly took off our black leather clothing and hid that too. Then we walked twenty paces uphill from the tree, right next to a telephone pole next to a termite heap, until we hit a path the farm labourers used to cross the farm to other farms. Heidi checked her stopwatch and nodded: Elijah’s GPS coordinates were accurate. She led the way, every fibre of her body as taut as an antenna, her Afro hidden under a black beanie. Back there she’d taken a small tin out of her pocket and said, ‘Close your eyes.’
‘Why?’
‘You can keep wasting time or you can do as you’re told,’ she’d said evenly. And a moment later, as she started applying, ‘You know the only white woman I ever wanted to be?’
‘No, but you’re going to tell me.’
‘Ursula Andress. In that white bikini.’
‘Anybody ever tell you you’re manic obsessed?’
She snorted softly. ‘You’re one to talk. Close your mouth.’
Now I was wearing an identical beanie to hers but I had the added discomfort of a face covered with black shoe polish. I felt like an idiot for arguing about something that was going to help keep me alive.
‘What about the dogs?’ I whispered, suddenly remembering, as I pulled on a thin pair of black gloves that Heidi had handed me. ‘Elijah said there were two Dobermans.’
‘I’ll handle them,’ Heidi said, but her face tightened.
From an incline we looked down. The farmhouse was eerily quiet, no people sounds, no water running, no dogs barking, no hens scrabbling in the dirt, just a thick, heavy silence. Heidi made a signal that I must go off the footpath into a group of bushes under a tree and wait there for her. Just from her finger and the stance of her body, I knew she was reminding me of my promise and telling me to stay put. It’s what we agreed: she would go in, cut the fence with her wire cutters and scout around, and she would come and get me when she knew it was safe. If she didn’t come back after thirty minutes I was to go back to the motorbike, take out the map with the GPS coordinates and use the mobile phone to get help. She made a barking motion with her hand as she set her white teeth in a snarl and pointed to the tree under which I was crouching. If the dogs came I was to climb the tree.
She was back in twenty-five minutes. My heart was pounding, perspiration was pouring down my blackish face and trickling down my backbone, and I was having difficulty breathing without gasping.
‘There’s no sign of life anywhere.’
‘What about the dogs? Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re asleep. I’m going to go inside the house. You stay here.’
‘I’m coming. She’s my daughter.’
‘He could be waiting for us.’
‘I know, Heidi. I’m the one who called you.’
She reached inside a scabbard on her calf, and removed a small handgun that she quickly loaded and cocked, pointing at the forest. ‘It’s a special Russian pistol. There are only two cartridges. I’m taking the safety catch off. Stay behind me. Just aim and pull the trigger if one of the dogs comes for you.’
‘What if I don’t see the dog?’
‘Just try to stay alive, okay?’
The front door was open. Heidi stepped inside with me just behind her. She switched her flashlight on and motioned me to follow her. I was struggling to keep the gun steady with the gloves on.
The stench hit us in the face. There were millions of flies everywhere. We followed the stench. The chair stood in a pool of blood that was running over the brick kitchen floor. On it was a man, face down in a bowl of partially eaten pasta. Heidi approached the body tied to the chair with a nylon rope, her gun cocked, looking around and listening before she leaned over, making sure her shoes didn’t get into the blood on the floor, and pulled the dead man’s head up gently by the hair. Blood gushed from his throat, and his teeth were bared in a terrible grin as a greenish fluid dribbled out his mouth and down his chin, sliding downwards over the red-stained shirt. Liquid excrement ran down his trouser legs and mixed into the blood. A place was laid opposite him, and a bowl of pasta had been left.
‘Is it him?’ she asked in a low voice.
I held the nausea down. Where was my daughter?
‘Yes … Where is Simone?’
I stood transfixed as Heidi casually dipped a spoon in the mince sauce and brought it to her nose. ‘I’m guessing it’s some kind of strong sedative,’ she said, sniffing delicately as her eyes scanned the bloodied shirt. ‘The throat wound’s fresh, maybe a couple of hours. He died quickly.’ There was approval in her tone.
‘But who …?’
‘You go that way to the living area, I’ll go this way down the corridor to the bedroom area. If you see or hear anything, shout my name like your life depends it. And it’s probably a good idea to get out the way.’ She put a hand out and steadied the gun. ‘Paola, you’ve got to keep it together. Don’t shoot at anything that moves, it could be Simone.’
We reached a stairway leading down at the same time.
‘Nothing.’
‘There’s no sign of her.’
‘It probably leads to a wine cellar,’ I said.
The thick oak door to the cellar stood open. It was freezing cold, with a small stretcher bed in one corner and a latrine bucket in another corner. I could hear Simone’s voice in my head, telling Roxy about her dream of being trapped in an igloo, and I realised that the basement room they’d kept her in at the Sarrazins had probably also been an ice box. There were bars on the inside of the two small windows, and the outside was boarded over. I turned the pillow over and pulled Simone’s Charlie Brown nightie out. There were brownish blood stains on it.
‘Bingo,’ Heidi said. ‘Now we’ve got the bastard.’
‘He’s dead.’ My voice was dull and helpless as I held the nightie up against myself. ‘What if he’s hidden Simone somewhere and we never find her?’
That’s what happened with the milk carton girls. They never found them.
We were moving through the lounge when we both heard it. The door that led from the porch to the kitchen opening and swinging shut. A light came on in the kitchen. A man cursed loudly in a foreign language and a woman gave a short guttural scream that was cut off abruptly. Heidi dropped to her knees behind the sofa and pulled me down behind her, but she was too late. We’d both seen the man with an axe raised above his head framed by the lit doorway, and he’d seen us.
‘Run!’ Heidi shouted.
Before he could reach us, Heidi had reached behind her back, thrown a knife and rolled away from the axe that was about to leave his hand. I heard the man roaring with pain, floundering around the room, cursing and shouting, and in the half-light coming in from the kitchen I could see the knife sticking out of his cheek. The axe flew toward me and it was Heidi who grabbed my jacket and pulled me around and away from certain death. A searing pain shot through my left arm as the axe connected with a sideways splicing blow before skidding off across the floor. I staggered to my feet, registering the fact that my right hand was still clamped around the gun. The man had finally pulled the knife out of his cheek and he’d sighted his axe; he was lurching towards it.
‘Shoot him!’ Heidi yelled.
I swallowed, steadied my hand, took aim and pressed the trigger, remembering what I’d been told, that even a hair trigger required strength, that you had to look at your target with your eyes open.
There was a quiet ‘click’ and the man dropped to his knees and then to the floor. It was all the time Heidi needed to grab the axe with one hand and throw it in a single fluid movement as accurately as a knife. It hit the woman’s shoulder with a terrible thunk and blood spurted. She fell to the ground.
‘Let’s go,’ Heidi said, pulling me away. I screamed out in pain. ‘Sweet Jesus, your arm …’ She ran into the kitchen and came back with some dishcloths that she cut into strips. She bandaged the arm quickly, using the cloths to make a tourniquet. ‘It’ll have to do,’ she said grimly. A piece of flesh had been gouged out of my arm right up to the bone.
‘What outbuildings are there?’ Heidi asks, panting, looking around from the front porch. ‘What’s that building over there? Stay with me, Paola. Here, take small sips.’ I sip obediently from the silver hip flask, spluttering at the fiery warmth of the whisky as it slips down my gullet. Heidi’s voice reaches me from a small patch of moonlight in thick black clouds. ‘Paola, think!’
‘It must be the barn. Elijah said there was a barn with rusted farming equipment and a tractor that hadn’t been used in years.’
‘What else is there? Think. Something that Elijah might have mentioned. If you wanted to get away from this place as quickly as possible?’
My mind scrambles through all the material Elijah put together and then it comes to me. ‘The river. There’s a river with a pontoon.’
‘Give me the map … I’ll do it.’ She extracts the plastic folder from my pocket. ‘There it is!’ Heidi’s finger jabs at a spot in the torchlight. ‘Follow me.’
‘We’ll never find it in the dark. I’m not feeling too good, Heidi.’
‘Never say never,’ she says. ‘You stay here. Don’t move. I’ll come back for you.’
Heidi is standing in front of the house, pointing right, saying that’s where the river is, setting her watch to the right coordinates, getting ready to head off into the thick shrubbery, when we hear the helicopter in the distance. I learn later that, with the paranormal ability of a bat with ultrasonic hearing, Heidi avoided obstacles in the forest as she ran at full speed towards the road and signalled with her torch for the helicopter to land there.
Detective Lucas Mbata has come through for me – Captain Klaus Knappman and his team have arrived. Men in uniform come crashing through the trees. Soon more policemen arrive with vehicles, and the farmhouse and its environs are lit up like a scene from a police procedural. There is a police dog unit, and the eerie silence is replaced by the excited barking of German Shepherds on leads. When there is a frenzy of barking, I think they’ve found her, but the policeman with the radio says they’ve found the two Dobermans unconscious and frothing at the mouth. It could be rat poison. But Simone is nowhere to be found.
I’m covered in a blanket and holding a cup of thermos-flask coffee with my good hand, my throbbing bandaged arm now in a makeshift sling, when Klaus gets the call. A farmer in the area was checking his leopard trap when he saw the unmanned pontoon drifting past with somebody lying on it. He swears it was a naked woman with long blonde hair − he could see her in the moonlight. She wasn’t moving. He’s going to drive to the bridge further down to see if he can stop it. The river’s full at this time of the year and that patch of river is dangerous because of the rapids.
Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women … pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death … Strapped in next to Klaus in a loaned 4x4 vehicle, I mumble the prayer of a Christian childhood that comes back to me automatically at bad moments, the prayer I’ve pushed away so often, muffled so deep inside me. Klaus drives over terrain without roads, Mbata pointing a searchlight ahead of us and shouting instructions as tree trunks appear suddenly out of the night and we swing from side to side and we leap into the air and come crashing down. And I hang on, and I pray, and I pray. Behind us is a cavalcade of vehicles belonging to farmers alerted by the radio SOS sent out by the farmer who caught a glimpse of the pontoon with its unconscious occupant.
At last we jerk to a stop.
I try to get out, but Klaus tells Heidi to keep me there. I kick and bite and manage to roll out of the back seat and fall onto hard ground. Heidi grabs me, and I wriggle out of her grasp and stagger away, trying to run from her, but I’m too weak from the loss of blood. She comes up from behind and holds me with iron arms against her.
‘Paola, you don’t want to see this. Let the police take care of her.’ I am inside Heidi’s head: Simone is probably dead. And if she isn’t, she’ll probably wish she was.
‘Heidi, I’m her mother. You would want to see your daughter, even if she was dead, wouldn’t you?’ I plead. She hesitates and then her arms loosen and she accompanies me over the rough terrain, holding the blanket off the ground so I don’t stumble and fall, guiding me towards a high point on the riverbank next to a tree. All my senses are hyper alert. At that terrible moment it feels as if I have finally understood something important. I am one with the concealing black night that surrounds me, with the sounds and smells of the small creatures scurrying in the undergrowth, and the breathing vegetation swirling in the running waters of the river echoes my own booming breaths.
Somebody is holding a powerful lamp up and there are torches shining down. Now I’m standing on the riverbank looking down at the pontoon.
Simone is lying on her back, her blonde hair untidily loose on the wooden deck, looking as if she has fallen asleep, half-dressed. In the halogen light her fragile white skin is luminous and her lace top is ripped and bloody. She lies unmoving, arranged as if someone has offered a sacrifice to the river.
I cry out, ‘No!’
Klaus swings round and curses as he sees me. Lucas Mbata is on the pontoon taking his jacket off and laying it over my daughter’s unconscious body. Klaus turns back to the paralysed men staring at the pontoon and barks orders. ‘We need blankets. Now! Lucas, call the flying ambulance. Jackets, everybody!’ I throw Heidi’s cautionary hand off and I half scramble, half slide down the bank thick with vegetation and then crawl onto the pontoon on my hands and knees. ‘She has to be turned sideways,’ I say. ‘She gets blackouts.’ Klaus helps me and we shift her, and I fold a jacket to cushion her head and we arrange jackets over her, and she moans softly.
‘She’s alive.’ I say to Klaus. And he nods and squeezes my shoulder.
I sit next to her and I wipe strands of damp hair off her face and I sing softly to her under my breath, the same Presbyterian hymn that I heard Georgie sing to Josh and that Simone used to sometimes play with her own improvised honky-tonk tune after she found the sheet music stored in the stool of my old piano: I would be true, for there are those who trust me; I would be pure, for there are those who care; I would be strong, for there is much to suffer; I would be brave, for there is much to dare. I repeat the stanzas again and again, commanding her to keep breathing.
I don’t remember much else of that night, after the paramedics took her away from me. Her pulse had grown slower and slower, and her temperature had dropped, and the men had found blankets and they’d piled them on top of her and then they’d stood there in the bitter cold, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers. Klaus had ordered a fire to be made on the riverbank and that had helped. But the flying ambulance had been delayed by a technical problem. By the time they airlifted Simone away, her breathing was shallow and terribly slow, like the dripping of a tap that had no more water.
I wake up alone in a hospital bed. I manage to stagger to the door, my left arm painful and stiff in a tight sling, and open it. One of Klaus’s men jumps up off the chair where he’s been sitting in the hospital corridor.
‘Mrs de Luc, you must get back in bed,’ he says nervously. ‘Please …’
‘Take me to her,’ I demand. ‘Where have they put her? I want to see her.’
‘Who you looking for, Mrs de Luc?’ he asks, sounding even more nervous.
‘My daughter. I want to see my daughter’s body. Now. Do you understand? Now!’
A nurse appears with another man, and she appears to be smiling. It’s so incongruous that I go for her face. How dare she? As my nails scratch, she cries out in pain.
‘Paola, she’s alive. Simone is alive, she’s not dead.’ Nathan is holding my wrists and talking in that smooth, sane voice. ‘You can see her tomorrow morning. They’ve got to stabilise her, and you need to rest.’
I look into Nathan’s eyes, the man who’s never lied to me. As far as I can tell. Then his words penetrate. ‘She’s not dead? How …’
‘No. She’s alive. She’s suffering from hypothermia and dehydration and loss of blood − the whole shebang − but the doctor on duty says she’s responding well. They’re waiting for her to get stronger before they question her. Maybe it was all those Hail Marys. And some kind of a hymn? Heidi told me you were on a roll,’ he says, grinning. ‘I thought you weren’t religious.’
He looks as if he hasn’t slept in a while, but he has his Nike sneakers on and he’s not a grumpy bear tonight. He must have driven through from Cape Town after he saw my message.
‘I’m not,’ I say. And I try to grin back but my parched lips stick to my gums.
He takes my free hand and leads me back to my hospital bed, and I let him. I sleep fitfully that night, my mouth dry from the sedative, the adrenalin still coursing through my veins, and each time I make that passage from the near suffocation of the icy basement, where the man Volkov kept my daughter, back to breathing life, I open my eyes to dimmed hospital lights. And to the sight of Nathan hunched up in a chair next to my bed, a hospital blanket over him, his eyes open and watchful. There’s a sports bag at his feet as if he’s planning on staying a few days.