SIMONE WAS FOURTEEN years old when she claimed to have killed a man by sedating him before slitting his throat. The police took a statement from her once she was fully conscious and out of danger. She told them that she figured Volkov would take his time with deflowering her after he’d waited so long − she mentioned the music box he’d given her as a gift when she lived in the Sarrazin house − and that she could use that to her advantage. In the meanwhile, a vial with a potent powder sedative, collected over several months from miniscule doses that Sharon used for old Mr Green who had an ulcer and Mrs Robarts who suffered from insomnia, had remained hidden in her cowgirl boots until the opportunity presented itself. ‘Revenge eye drops’ known to reliably induce diarrhoea in the most hardy of bullying teachers had gone into her boots too.
She claimed to be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and I quaked for her. Would it all end with a juvenile detention in a state prison?
‘We should have burnt that place down with them all in it,’ I said to Heidi when she called me to say Klaus had asked her to come in for a second round of questioning.
‘It wouldn’t have been right,’ she replied. ‘We would have destroyed any evidence of the other girls. You’d want to know if you were a parent. This way they can start looking for them.’ I heard from Klaus his unit had brought in a very special border collie, one of a special elite canine unit of sniffer dogs trained to detect blood and semen, to help their investigation.
Simone’s experiences in the Sarrazin house under Nada’s expert tuition had taught her that certain men wanted titillation more than they wanted sex. She understood Volkov better, perhaps, than he understood himself. He was of the class of paedophile who believed that children experienced sexual cravings just like adults did. She had bought time by posing for him in the pretty dresses the police found in a cupboard in the basement and touching herself and acting like a very young child. This was what turned the twisted bastard on, but she had to be careful to play the game carefully, not to send him over the edge, and she knew it. She’d pretended to be enjoying herself and encouraged him to make his home movies of her; occasionally she turned the camera on the perpetrator himself, who seemed to relish starring in his own productions. She’d introduced the sedative slowly so that he would not grow suspicious, but had been uncertain of the efficacy and had worried that she could not keep teasing Volkov forever.
On the night before he died, Volkov had been much rougher with her, using his fingers and making her bleed, but he’d felt unwell and groggy, and soon he’d stumbled away up the stairs and left her alone, locked in the basement. In the police report they called it digital rape. In the opinion of a specialist, the interaction of heart medication found in the house with the substances his victim had administered, combined with Volkov’s age (68), supported the victim’s claim that extreme drowsiness and nausea had prevented her rapist from carrying out his intentions.
Simone told the police psychologist that everything suddenly seemed very clear and simple: if she didn’t kill him he would kill her. So she’d executed the plan that would finally liberate her and all his potential future victims, forever.
‘It made me sick to do it,’ she said in a quavering voice in the recording they played at the hearing, ‘but he deserved it. He was a very bad man. He took Roxy.’
Klaus asked me to go and see him at his office. I was waiting in the chair outside his office when I saw Georgie being led into another office down a corridor.
I was about to go after her when Klaus appeared at my side.
‘You can’t question Simone again.’ I glared at Klaus. ‘Enough is enough. She’s told you everything she knows. She’s been traumatised enough.’
‘It wasn’t her,’ Klaus said, throwing a file across the desk towards me. It was only then that I heard the edge in his voice and saw the black rings around his eyes.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s a copy of the police forensics report. She was there all right and she made the food and dosed it − we found her fingerprints over everything and they pumped his stomach out − but she didn’t kill him. Somebody else did that.’
‘The knife on the floor …?’ I heard my own stunned voice.
‘That was her knife all right, and it was the knife that made a few stab wounds on his chest, but they were superficial wounds. It wasn’t the knife that killed him.’
‘How do you know that? It had her fingerprints on.’
‘Ag, Paola, you’re blind where that girl of yours is concerned. It didn’t sit right, the statement she made. It was like she was an actress in a movie. It didn’t tie up, even if he was half drugged. Slitting somebody’s throat isn’t as easy as it sounds – you have to know the right technique and find the carotid artery. Whoever did it knew how to handle a knife. And it wasn’t a teenage girl. Forensics confirmed what I thought. Her little penknife didn’t slit anybody’s throat.’
‘What does this mean? Why is she saying she did it if she didn’t?’
‘My best guess is she’s trying to take the blame for somebody else. Somebody that helped her out by sticking a knife into Volkov’s jugular. I wondered about that, how she’d know how to do it, but she made up some story about learning it from the Internet.’
‘What are the chances of somebody just coming and helping her …? You’re not making sense, Klaus.’
‘There’s no chance of leaving hell, you’re right about that,’ Klaus said grimly. ‘That leaves us with multiple possibilities: one, somebody is monitoring her movements, maybe even her online chats without her knowledge, and got there just in time. Or two, she’s in on it and set up the whole thing with outside help. Maybe even somebody used her to flush Volkov out the woodwork. Whichever way, your Nikita got out of there alive. Any ideas, Paola?’
‘Don’t call her Nikita,’ I said tiredly. ‘Her name is Simone. And I was there with Heidi, remember? Do I look like an expert knifewoman to you?’ Now I was annoyed.
‘Get off your horse, Paola. I know it wasn’t you,’ he said in an exasperated voice. ‘But you can see why we have to talk to Simone. She is our best lead.’
‘What does that mean?’ I had become sensitive to nuances, to things that lay unsaid. ‘Lead to what? Are you talking about Roxy? Is that why Georgie is here?’ I asked in near hysteria.
‘Bly kalm, Paola. We can’t talk if you are in such a state.’
Klaus picked up his phone and asked for two cups of strong coffee with plenty of sugar. He refused to say anything until the coffee arrived.
‘You can’t speak about any of this, you understand, hey Paola? It will prejudice the investigation. If anything leaks, it’s over for the girl.’
‘Who? Roxy?’
‘All I can tell you is that we found traces of Roxy. She was there, Paola. Your kid was right about that at least. When I interviewed Simone in hospital she kept saying to me, “I know Roxy was in that house before me, he told me she was alive, that she was for somebody else.” At first we couldn’t find anything. They cleaned up after themselves pretty good. Then we called in the dog and a specialist forensics team from up country. I can’t tell you exactly what we found but we did. It looks like that house was a holding place for the kids they were shipping out the country. We’re getting a Russian translator so we can interview the old woman that lived on the property. The doctors say she’s going to make it.’
‘Heidi didn’t kill her?’
‘No, she’s very smart that one, and strong,’ he mused. ‘They teach you stuff at Police College but I’ve never seen anybody handle an axe with skill like that.’
I was speechless with the horror of it. My daughter had come back and Georgie’s daughter had not come back. But we did not know yet that she was dead. Elijah always said that where there was no body, there was hope. Breathe, Paola, breathe. It felt as if every breath was being passed through a colander whose holes were closing up. I’d insisted on leaving hospital as soon as they’d patched my arm up, and I still felt weak. I put my head on the desk to stop the swirling darkness. Riverine weed held me within its waving green-glistening night arms and the black waters flowed.
Klaus was at my side, making me drink water from a paper cup. When I was feeling steadier, he made me walk over to the window behind his desk, holding me around the waist with his strong arm that probably birthed calves on the family farm just as efficiently as it held me up until he had me seated in his chair next to the opened window. The roar of city traffic rushed in. A siren wailed. ‘It’s better anyway,’ he said, as we both stared out the window at the parking area with its national flag blowing in the wind. Part of my mind wondered how the wild cosmos on the road island got there.
‘What’s better?’
‘That Simone didn’t kill him. She’s a young girl. Why do you want her to have killed a man?’
‘I don’t think I wanted her to kill him,’ I said slowly, considering his words. ‘I was just glad she could defend herself.’
He nodded at me, satisfied that I was recovering. I wondered if he ever suffered visions of slaughter and mayhem accompanied by the stench of blood and fear, or if his boyhood on the farm had taught him how to block it out.
‘Do you have any idea … who did it?’ I asked.
‘It was a big mess,’ Klaus said tersely. ‘The crime scene was so contaminated with everybody trampling around, policemen and farmers and who the hell else, that we are struggling to identify the killer’s tracks−’
He stopped abruptly, realising he’d given away too much.
‘The killer?’ My voice was faint and horrified. ‘Volkov is the victim to you people?’
Klaus glanced down at me.
‘My men are calling him die houtkapper,’ he said grimly. ‘Because it happened at Huis in Bos. Like in “Rooikappie”. But I have to remind them it’s our job to find him and bring him in. I tell them when the woodcutter kills the wolf he becomes the hunter. Do you see?’
‘Yes … I see.’
When I dared to look at him again his arms were folded and he had that brooding ‘police business’ expression on his face.
I stood up. ‘I need to use the restroom.’
‘She did well,’ Klaus said suddenly. ‘Just to get out of there alive. There’s no precedent for a case like this. Whoever he was − I’m glad he got there in time, otherwise we might have found her body on the floor, all the flies buzzing round.’
When I looked in on my way out, Klaus asked me to sit down.
He knocked his pen on the table and said, ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this but you’ll be happy to know the Sarrazin woman is in the shit again. Simone said she was the one who encouraged the relationship with Volkov when she was a kid. She brought him to her bedroom and then filmed everything with a hidden camera. We’re taking another look at the videos and we’re questioning the security staff again.’
He shook his head. ‘She said that Mrs Sarrazin pretended to be nice to her, but she let Volkov hurt her and never did anything. It looks like she’s starting to get things straight in her head.’
‘I can’t believe it. Does that mean the appeal won’t go ahead?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s too early to say. The media blackout the judge ordered on Simone’s identity is helping us. It’s bought us time to go through everything with a comb. We have to get our facts straight this time.’
All the way home my mind swung between unease over what it all meant – and the consequences for Simone − to elation that Simone had finally implicated Nada Sarrazin in the crimes committed against her. Merensky’s miracle had happened.