Like Clockwork Read Online Free PDF

watched her walk towards him, her stride easy, strong.
    Clare walked faster, as most women did, when she went past the clubs. She ignored the speculative eyes of the bouncers who looked her over and then lost interest. She looked up, not towards Riedwaan but towards the crumbling art deco block across the road. The building was as notorious for its dealers as it was for the waves of desperate immigrants who crammed in there. They paid cash on the first day of each month to hard-eyed men who extorted ever larger amounts. Riedwaan had heard that the building had been sold. Nothinghad changed, though. It didn’t need to. It was a gold mine. You could get anything you wanted there, women, children – even infants – if you could pay. The police force was not going to do anything about it: anyone who tried ended up dead, or shafted. Like him.
    Clare came in and unbuttoned her coat. She knew to look for him in the smoking section. She picked up a tray, two coffees, hot milk, a bagel for Riedwaan, and a croissant for herself. She exchanged the tray for the envelope that Riedwaan passed her with his greeting. She didn’t kiss him. Sitting down, she scanned the report. Her stomach knotted at the pathologist’s dry abbreviations of the horror of Charnay Swanepoel’s death, the brevity of her life. There was a note to say that further pharmacology test results were pending.
    ‘When did he cut her throat?’ asked Clare.
    ‘She was dead when he cut her throat,’ said Riedwaan.
    ‘Any maggots?’
    ‘No,’ said Riedwaan. He put down his bagel. ‘But the weather’s been cold. Mouton reckons that she was killed between Sunday night and midnight on Monday. She was dead at least eight hours before she was dumped.’
    ‘Any indication where she was mutilated?’
    ‘Could have been done there. Mouton thinks a very sharp knife or, more likely, a scalpel. The throat, that is. There was a small amount of leaked fluid on the collar of her shirt. Mouton thinks that he did her eyes before he cut her throat.’
    ‘Same kind of weapon?’
    ‘He’s waiting for the ballistics report, but most probably yes.’
    ‘The eyes?’ asked Clare.
    ‘Look on page four. Mouton says just before he smothered her.’
    ‘So she was alive. How horrible. I wonder what she saw, what he showed her to make him do that.’
    ‘We’d better find out before somebody else sees what she did,’ said Riedwaan, hunting for his cigarettes.
    Clare stared briefly at her untouched croissant. Then she returned to the secrets that Charnay’s body might answer. Seventeen years old, wearing a skirt and top, high-heeled boots. No underwear. All her own teeth, six fillings. Appendix scar. Not a virgin. Not a needle user. Menstruating at the time of death. Bruising on the upper arms and thighs.
    Riedwaan was smoking at the window. ‘Sorry, Clare,’ he said, waving his hands at the smoke.
    ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Reading this makes me want one too.’
    She looked down and continued reading. One tattoo on the left buttock – a symbol, not a picture of anything. Recent – maybe two weeks old – but healing.
    ‘Any idea where she might have had the tattoo done?’ she asked Riedwaan.
    ‘Not sure yet. It’s very distinctive, that mark.’
    ‘What is it?’ Clare asked. She studied the photograph. The tattoo was simple, elegant. Two decisive vertical lines bisected by an X.
    ‘Dunno. Looks like a Chinese ideogram.’
    ‘It’s beautiful, in its sinister way. It’s hard to tell with the scabbing, but it looks like a symbol. Can we ask Mouton to get an exact shape from the body?’
    ‘I’ll ask him,’ said Riedwaan.
    Clare went back to her reading. An incision across the left palm. Mouton had confirmed that it was done before death. Done with a very sharp knife across the hand that held a key. This hand had been intricately bound. Whoever had done it was skilled at bondage. The blood had crusted over the key, which had had to be prised loose. Blood group: