Sacrifices (29 page)

Perhaps.

His office door is closed but through the hatch he can hear the rattle of Louise’s laptop keyboard and the murmur of her voice when she answers the phone. No calls are patched through to him. At lunchtime and at the end of each working day she taps on the door and comes in to give him his messages, written on lined paper in her neat handwriting.

He thanks her, but ignores them, adding the pages to the pile in his
desk drawer.

The first few days she was here Louise asked him questions, in her quiet way. He showed how the books were stacked and cataloged and instructed her on the use of the cash register and credit card terminal. Then he retreated to his office and left her to do whatever she wanted, sure that she would become discouraged and disappear.

But she hasn’t disappeared. She’s out there every day—Monday to Saturday—keeping Lane’s Books alive, while he communes with the dead.

During his obsessive Googling of Sally Skinner, Lane stumbled across a website called
Bearing Witness
, and it is this site that he opens each day when he arrives at the office.

The website, maintained by families of
South African murder victims, is simple: a monochrome background with a banner of type crawling across the bottom of the screen—reminiscent of a TV news broadcast—displaying the names of the dead, updated hourly.

The ticker mesmerizes Lane, drawing him into the relentless tide of statistics that baldly sketch the suffering
out in the world, beyond the walls of his office. The sheer volume numbing him, leaving him with the understanding that Tracy was just one more name that skidded across a screen somewhere and was gone.

Or was she gone? Wasn’t death just a failure of storage media? Perhaps nobody dies as long as enough information about them is preserved? Then that insight, too, is washed away by the ever-renewing roll call of the dead in
South Africa’s undeclared war. 

Louise sits at the counter beside the cash register, ceiling fans stirring the thick air—Michael’s office the only part of the store with A/C—creating a database of books on the laptop she brings in with her each day. The cataloging of the stock is as primitive and haphazard as it must have been when Michael’s father started Lane’s Books. If a customer—one of the few who dribble in off Long Street—requests a book, it’s a painstaking process to try and track it down.

So it is Louise’s mission to enter all the books into the database, to have the inventory information at her fingertips.

She leaves the counter and, pretending to tidy the new arrivals shelf, sneaks a glance through the hatch into Michael’s office. He has moved his desk, making himself almost invisible from the store, but she glimpses his hand resting beside his mouse and knows he’s staring at that website again.

She’d waited until he’d left one evening and booted up his computer, checking his browser history, which had led her to
Bearing Witness
. Sitting in his chair, staring at the names flitting across the bottom of the monitor, she had understood its hypnotic power, and wondered if her brother’s name was in there somewhere. Or didn’t a death in prison count as murder?

Still, confronted by the scale of the statistics, she found it reassuring to know that her crime was lost, swept away in the face of this deluge.

The phone rings and she crosses to the counter. “Lane’s Books.”

There
’s a pause, then the unmistakable voice of Beverley Lane says, “Who is this?”

Louise, who hasn’t spoken to the bitch in a year, almost laughs. “This is Louise. May I help you?”

“Louise? It’s Beverley. What are you doing there?”

“Oh, hi, Bev. I work here now.”

Another pause. “I need to speak to Michael. Urgently.”

“I’m afraid he’s in a meeting.”

“Oh nonsense, he’s sitting in his office moping. Put me through.”

“I’m sorry, Bev. I’ll have to take a message.”

“Jesus. Tell him to call me.”

Beverley is gone with no goodbye. Louise replaces the receiver and allows herself a small smile of satisfaction as she carries on punching information into the database.

Then she stops and finds herself staring at the closed door of Michael’s office.

Louise should be happy. She has installed herself here in the bookstore, given herself the best seat in the house to witness the power of her revenge, to see the shadow of the man Michael has become.

But revenge, she realizes, is not enough. She wants Michael Lane. Not in a sexual sense—God forbid—she wants what he cheated her out of all those years ago. She wants his respect. She wants his affection. She wants his fucking attention. This somnambulistic version of Michael Lane is a poor second prize.

When she talks to him his eyes remain unfocused, his smile a rictus. She brings him food at lunch time which lies untouched on his desk
, Louise unloading it on the homeless man who lives in the alley as she leaves at night.

Give it time, she tells herself, as she carries on typing—resuscitating Michael’s business if not the man himself—he’ll get over this. But she feels a familiar depression enveloping her.

She stands and taps on Michael’s door. “Mike, I’m going to get something from Mumeenah’s.”

“Okay.”

“Anything you want?”

“No, I’m fine.”

Louise turns and leaves.

Shut out.

Again.

Lane’s aching bladder uproots him from his chair and drives him to the small bathroom wedged beneath the stairs. He urinates then washes his hands with a cherry-red cake of soap, one of the bars that Tracy bought from the health store down Long Street. She’d also used the soap in the shower at her apartment, and this bar brings back to him the smell of her skin so pungently that he closes his eyes, gripping the cool porcelain of the sink.

Lane is almost pleased when he hears the harsh grind of the door buzzer. He quits the bathroom and sees a woman in a pants suit out on the sidewalk, looking in at him through the glass. It takes him a moment before he recognizes her and presses the button beside the cash register. The lock clicks and the cop who investigated the Melanie Walker murder steps into the bookstore.

“Afternoon, Mr. Lane. Detective Perils.”

“I remember you. Are you shopping for a book?”

“No, not much of a reader, me.” She flashes a smile. “Can we maybe talk inside?”

He nods and leads her into his office, closing the door after them. They seat themselves at his desk and the cop places a buff-colored envelope on the wooden surface before her.

“Mr. Lane I am now handling the investigation into Tracy Whitely’s murder.”

“I see,” he says, not seeing at all.

“The commissioner wasn’t happy with the lack of results from the detectives previously in charge, so he moved the investigation to my unit.”

“I hope I don’t have to go over it all again? It was very painful.”

She holds up a hand. “No, please, don’t worry, I have reviewed your statement and it’s extremely detailed. I’m here about something new that has surfaced, that could be a lead.” She taps the envelope. “There’s a photograph in here, captured by one of the city’s CCTV cameras the night Ms. Whitely died. There was some technical glitch and it initially appeared that the camera, positioned near the Long Street Baths, hadn’t been operational, but I got technicians to do another search and they were able to pull this image from the hard drive.”

Perils opens the envelope and removes a photograph.

“Please tell me if you recognize this person.”

She slides the photo across the desk to Lane and he is jolted out of the half-life he has been living this past month when he stares down at
Tracy’s killer.

The scars on Louise’s arms start to itch, a maddening sting in stereo. This happens only when she’s feeling nervous, a sensation that she’s experienced very seldom since her suicide attempt.

But the arrival of the woman cop—still in the bookstore—has got
Louise’s nerves going, and as she sits at her usual table in the window of the coffee shop she has to grip the cup of decaf with both hands to stop herself from pulling back her long-sleeved T-shirt and clawing at her vexed pulses.

When Louise, crossing Long Street, carrying a couple of greasy samoosas from the
halal take-out, saw Perils entering the bookstore she threw a U-turn and ducked into the coffee shop and ordered an unwanted decaf.

Now, sitting with her eyes fixed on Lane’s Books—the cop still in there with Michael—she feels the approach of something threatening,
leaving her as skittish as a barometer in the face of a looming storm.

At last the door opens and Gwen Perils emerges. She gets into a white Nissan and disappears down Long Street. Louise pays for her coffee and crosses the road, letting herself into the bookstore.

Under the pretext of taking the samoosas through to the kitchen she passes Michael’s office. The door stands ajar, bisecting him as he sits at his desk, staring down at something.

“Louise?” he says, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Yes, Michael?” She dumps the greasy junk food into a saucer.

“Could you come through here, please?”

She wipes her fingers on a kitchen towel and enters his office. He holds a photograph in his hands, tilted so that she can’t see it.

“Close the door please.” She does as he says. “Sit down.” Again, she obeys him.

His eyes are fixed on the photograph, then they lift and lock on hers and he stares at her for what seems like hours, the A/C hissing, the window rattling, the muted babble of traffic spilling in from the street.

Louise realizes she’s holding her breath and sighs it out. “What’s wrong, Michael?”

He blinks. “This,” he says, twisting the photo in his hands, “is an image captured on a CCTV camera outside Tracy’s flat, the night she was murdered.”

He lowers the picture so that it lies face-up, then he rotates it and slides it toward Louise. 

“This is the person who killed her.”

As Michael’s hand moves the glossy monochrome print across
the desk, Louise knows she’s done for. It’s her, of course, in her hoodie and her sweatpants, pack slung over her shoulder, leaving the lobby of Tracy’s building and turning into Long Street, a shaft of streetlight catching her like a followspot. There’s a time code printed at the bottom of the image: the date, hour, minute and second.

Louise looks up at Michael, feeling an enormous pressure in her head, a pressure that leaves her mute and dizzy and when he speaks it’s if she’s hearing him through dense layers of cotton wadding.

“We both know who that is, don’t we?” he says and her heart races to a gallop and she feels a pain in her chest so intense that she’s sure she’s suffering cardiac arrest.

“Michael . . . ” Her voice
is a torn whisper.

Louise is
ready to pass out, the light in the room sucked into the vortex of her terror, and she grips the arms of the chair as if that will stop her plunging into a future of infinite darkness.

Michael says,
“Tell me I’m not crazy, Louise, but that’s Beverley in her gym outfit, isn’t it?”

Louise’s
heart lurches as if she’s been hit with the paddles of a defibrillator, and she looks down at the photograph, seeing what Michael sees: a small, slender woman, face hidden by the hoodie. She flashes on Beverley coming into the Newlands house after her gym sessions, dressed in clothes like these.

Clothes interchangeable with Louise’s.

She looks up into his eyes, eyes hungry for affirmation, and she breathes deeply then says, “It looks like her, Mike. I can’t be sure, but it does look like her.”

He nods and runs a hand through his hair, his haunted eyes locked on hers. “It’s her,
Lou. It’s Beverley. I know it.”

I want her dead.

I. Want. The. Fucking. Cunt. Dead.

The words loop in Lane’s mind as he drives away from Long Street, the road a dark ribbon unspooling in the headlights of the BMW, white lines sucked up and spat out. As he passes The Mount Nelson Hotel he realizes he can’t face his soulless apartment so he turns down toward Dunkley Square, making his way through the narrow streets that wind between rows of Victorian terrace houses.

The area has barely changed since he lived here as a student a quarter of a century ago. A few movie equipment rental companies
, restaurants and bars have moved in, but the neighborhood is still low-rent, waiting for some miracle of transformation that’ll never come.

As he parks outside a bistro a homeless man wearing a day-glo bib appears from the shadows, windmilling his arms, directing Lane into the bay.

Lane locks the car and the man salutes him. “Evening, captain.”