Gallows Hill (7 page)

‘Let’s go look at the paperwork,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Gallows Hill. I have a feeling that things are going to get worse before they get better.’

‘A feeling,’ said Rita, gathering what she needed and following him out. ‘I didn’t know
you had them.’

‘Hunger, thirst, hot, cold,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I have feelings.’

It was four in the afternoon by the time Clare picked up Pedro da Silva. He put his film equipment into her car and they drove into the centre of town. Clare parked and took out her call sheet. ‘We’ve got 15 minutes.’

She was out of the car, checking sound equipment, stills camera, notes. The lingering heat made the bag feel heavier than it was.

‘Give me that,’ said da Silva, taking
the bag. He slung it over his shoulder with his camera and his tripod, his other hand on Clare’s shoulder.

As natural as breathing. As if he had not been gone the last six years, the years that had pushed him past fifty, that had streaked his black hair silver, and made him no less attractive.

‘This feels like old times,’ said Pedro.

‘Except, now I’m the boss.’ Clare fell into step
next to him. ‘And not your assistant.’

He laughed. ‘You were always the boss, Clare,’ said Pedro. ‘What made you hire me?’

‘You’re good,’ she said. ‘You were available.’

Clare dropped a few coins into the hands of a begging child.

‘What made you come back?’ She couldn’t resist the question.

‘You.’

She glanced at him. The gleam in his dark eyes suggested amusement, loss,
challenge. She had never been able to tell, with him.

‘I wanted to see what you’d become,’ he said.

The street was summer-crowded.

‘So, what did you find?’

‘Same shapely legs. Same sharp edges. Same sharp mind.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Girl to woman. Always a transition for the better.’

His palm felt warm through her light cotton shirt.

Her skin remembered his touch. Responding.

‘I was a stupid man.’

So easy to slip into conversation with him. It was how he got women into bed with him. Just turning talk into touch. How he’d got her into bed with him, and kept her there. Clare didn’t shrug off his hand. Feeling she should.

‘I liked the film,’ said Pedro. ‘You’re smart. It’s complex what you’re trying to do, find the traces of a buried history. Anyway, if you’re
born here you can only live in Europe this much.’ Pedro measured the gap between thumb and index finger. ‘And then you’re sick of it. The order, the trains on time. You can predict your whole life. Your death, even that is predictable. You might as well buy your funeral plot and lie in it. After a while, you can’t tell if you are alive or not. But here, you can.’

‘You’ve been back to Luanda
since the end of the war?’ She unwound the cables, handed them to Pedro.

‘I tried it,’ said Pedro, checking batteries, sun angles. ‘Went to look at my family’s old house. You cannot live there. Not yet. Not unless you do oil or diamonds. Corrupt, everything needs a bribe, politicians on the make, teenagers with AK-47s, more Lamborghinis than you can count.’

‘Sounds just like Jo’burg.’

‘Traffic’s better in Luanda,’ said Pedro.

A group of drunken Englishmen, sunburnt, beer-bellies stretching their shirts, surged round them. Pedro watched Clare, lithe and supple, as she picked her way through the mob, the hung-over remnants of a lucrative summer season. Two blocks east, and all was quiet. The only sound was the snapping of long narrow banners in the breeze. Printed with
portraits. Ghandi. Sisulu. Tutu. Mandela. South Africa’s sometime moral leaders.

‘This is it,’ said Clare. ‘The Slave Lodge.’

A squat white building at the bottom of the Company Gardens. The Georgian windows were a later addition – it was originally dungeon and home to slaves shipped in from the west coast of Africa and countries that rimmed the Indian Ocean.

‘You want some shots of
the outside?’ he asked.

‘That’d be good,’ said Clare. ‘Those, especially – the mouldings with the Company emblems on them.’

Pedro panned across the building, his eye to the viewfinder.

‘I heard you were in the Caprivi,’ he said. ‘And you got sick?’

‘I was,’ said Clare. ‘I did. Who told you?’

‘A mutual friend,’ said Pedro.

‘It was Julia, wasn’t it?’

‘Don’t blame your
sister,’ he said. ‘She was worried. You vanished in the bush.’

‘I was fine,’ snapped Clare.

‘You weren’t. She called me to see if I could help find you. I tried, but that cop friend of yours –’ Pedro switched off his camera.

‘Riedwaan Faizal.’

‘Him. He’d already got you out. And so he should have, seeing as he got you in there.’

‘I’m fine now.’

‘Thinner.’ Pedro traced the
shadows under Clare’s eyes. ‘Sadder.’

‘I’m older,’ said Clare. ‘That’s all. Let’s get this done.’

Inside the Lodge, the receptionist perused the filming permit Clare handed her. She buzzed the curator and suggested they wait for her in the courtyard. There, Clare and Pedro made their way through meagre displays. Beads, scraps of cloth, metal discs that slaves had worn, each one engraved
with the letters VOC –
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
, better known as the Dutch East India Company. On the reverse side was a number. Emblems of ownership that obliterated a slave’s given name and their natural kin.

‘Some of these were discovered this morning at the old burial site,’ said Clare. ‘There’s going to be hell to pay.’

‘So it is a slave burial ground, like the radio said?’

‘Some slaves, for sure. Some of the skeletons looked at least 200 years old,’ said Clare. ‘But that’s preliminary. It was on New Year’s Day in 1838 that Cape slaves were finally freed. I think, though, that the Green Point graves precede that date. Some skeletons may be identifiable by the tags around their necks,’ Clare said, pointing, ‘the VOC numbers like these ones. The rest were probably
paupers, suicides, soldiers, sailors, executed prisoners ...’

‘Yes, and I suppose those public hangings and dismemberments provided lots of entertainment for the burghers and their families,’ said Pedro, opening the door into the courtyard.

Heat ricocheted off the walls, driving Clare in search of shade. There was a well in the centre of the courtyard, next to a gnarled olive tree. She
looked down. A shaft of sunlight illuminated a face reflected in the black water.

Hers. Buried deep.

She drew back, chilled.

A sturdy middle-aged woman stood behind her.

‘Hello, Dr Hart,’ her hand extended. ‘I’m Sheralyn Jantjies, the curator. Are you ready to go down?’

‘Anywhere out of the sun has to be good,’ said Clare.

‘This way, then.’ The curator pushed open a door.
It had a yellow hazard sign above it. No Entry, in three languages. It shut behind them, cutting off light, heat, sound. There were no windows. The narrow passage was lit with a single neon strip. Along the sides were rows of shelves holding clay busts of men, women and children. All labelled. A Bushman, a Javanese man, the replica of his numbered VOC tag identifiying him as a slave, a Xhosa woman.
Dismantled dioramas, museum displays no longer deemed politically correct.

‘Sorry for the dust,’ said Sheralyn Jantjies. ‘This has been off-limits for years.’

‘Who made these?’ Clare looked closely at the faces.

‘She lives up the road. Katrin Goldfarb. Everyone calls her The Facemaker.’

‘Does she still do work for you?’

‘I know she does police work from time to time,’ said
the curator. ’But not for the museum.’

‘They’re so lifelike,’ said Clare. ‘D’you know how I can get hold of her?’

‘Katrin? Sure. I’ll get you her number, if you like. Why’re you so interested in her?’

‘Just an idea,’ said Clare.

‘It’s a minefield, facial reconstruction, let me warn you. These heads really are a problem now. We can’t display them. But how do you throw them away?’
said the curator.

They went down a flight of stairs, the plaster giving way to paint. Then the paint gave way to narrow 17th-century bricks. Beneath that, rough-cut granite.

The odour caught at the back of Clare’s throat. Damp and despair. The same smell as a prison, or an opened grave.

‘Stop a minute.’ Clare listened, her hand on the curator’s shoulder.

No sound came from above.
But below, there was a rhythmic thud. More sensation, though, than sound.

‘It’s the sea,’ Sheralyn Jantjies explained.

‘It comes up this far?’ asked Pedro.

‘Right up under Adderley Street. The waves finding their way back to the shore, two kilometres from where it is now, held back by all those dolosse at the Waterfront.’

The curator put her shoulder to a sliding door, heaved it
open. Here the sound of the ocean was louder, warning of its return. Or mourning its defeat.

Pedro’s camera whirred, the soft, familiar sound anchoring Clare.

Dying sunlight filtered down from a vent high above them. Below, a slick of water, with a fish floating, belly-up. Blocked passages led off into the darkness, the vestiges of narrow bunks just visible.

‘We found it by chance,’
said the curator, gesturing like an estate agent in a house she was trying to sell. ‘The engineers were looking for the source of a major crack in the building. This is what we found. The Women’s Quarters, according to the old plans.’

‘How many women?’ asked Pedro.

‘Only ever a handful of them, among the thousands of Company slaves incarcerated here during night-time curfew,’ said the
curator.

Clare crept into one of the narrow stone passages. It was dark and claustrophobic.

She felt along the cool, damp stone. Notches, evenly spaced, under her fingertips. A woman marking time. Seconds minutes hours days weeks months years. The interminable time of slavery notched into the stone.

‘The Slave Lodge was once the biggest brothel in Cape Town, too,’ said the curator.
‘For an hour at night, the doors were opened to the men of Cape Town. Sailors, soldiers, burghers. Anyone who took a fancy was let in. Given free access.’

‘And the men?’ asked Pedro.

‘The male slaves,’ the curator’s voice was crisp, ‘collected the night soil, to clean the latrines and the canals.’

‘Little wonder that South Africa turned out the way it has,’ said Pedro.

‘Indeed.
Have you heard about the slave burial ground that’s just been unearthed at Gallows Hill, Dr Hart?’

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘I was there this morning.’

‘Ah. Then you’ll be aware of the controversy that seems to be building up,’ she said.

‘There were a lot of people there today,’ said Clare. ‘Some tension. Not helped, I’d imagine, by the way the story’s been reported.’

‘It’s touched a
nerve,’ said the curator. ‘There are going to be protests and things.’

‘Do you know what’s planned?’

‘Some of us from heritage are meeting with the archaeologists tomorrow. We were thinking of a commemoration this weekend, getting one of the choirs to sing in honour of the dead,’ said the curator. ‘I heard on the radio that some people were forming a group called the Concerned Citizens.’

‘Yes, I heard that too. They want all development in the area to be stopped,’ said Pedro. ‘They want the scientists – they call them grave robbers – off-site, and all the human remains to be reinterred.’

‘They don’t even know who’s buried there,’ said Clare.

‘Their ancestors, apparently,’ said Pedro.

‘Without DNA testing, no one will know,’ said Clare.

‘This kind of thing happens
when you have a past that people can’t agree on,’ said the curator.

‘Thank you for letting me know,’ said Clare. ‘We’ll make sure to record it.’

‘This is a sensitive issue, Dr Hart.’ It was difficult to read the woman’s expression in the gloom, but her tone was chilly. ‘I trust you will deal with it with care.’

Their time was up.

Pedro switched off his camera.

When they surfaced
from the building, the air felt light and caressing after the foetid gloom below. The mountain was etched against the sky.

‘I could take you for dinner first. Purely business,’ said Pedro. His hand on her elbow. ‘I want to discuss the deadline. Tomorrow’s schedule.’

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘But it’s going to be a hell of a day, tomorrow.’

‘Clare, you’ve got to keep the momentum going.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, unlocking her car.

While Pedro packed up his equipment, Clare made two calls. The first one to Raheema Patel, the second to Katrin Goldfarb. She hung up as Pedro got in beside her.

‘This film should be wrapped, like the other two,’ he said. ‘The one in New York, the other in Jakarta. Done. Dusted. If you finish this one on time and do it as well as the others,
you’ll have made your name. The calls for new projects will come to you. That’s worth everything in this business.’

‘True,’ said Clare joining the stream of traffic heading from town to Woodstock. ‘But it’ll have to wait a bit.’

‘This business with Gallows Hill,’ said Pedro, ‘it’s diverting your focus. You’ve got to decide, Clare. Either you’re a journalist or you do this business with
the police. You can’t have it both ways.’

‘We can build it all into the film,’ said Clare, driving towards Woodstock. ‘We’ll shoot at Gallows Hill – slavery’s living legacy. This burial ground, all the stuff around it, throws that into sharp relief.’

‘That’s not all.’ Said Pedro.‘I know you, Clare, we lived together for long enough.’

‘That’s all in the past, Pedro, let’s leave it there.’

‘Fine, deal,’ he said, ‘but explain to me why you’re obsessed with this one dead woman.’

Clare slammed on brakes as a taxi stopped in front of her, her eyes on the school children getting out, cigarette lighters at the ready.

‘Last year I fell apart,’ said Clare. ‘I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t even run. I was haunted by the image of a dead 13-year-old whose murder I
was trying to make sense of. There were 103 stab wounds on her body. She wasn’t even exceptional, she was just the one who breached my defences. I thought of her again when I saw this woman bundled into a box under that broken concrete.’