Daddy's Girl by Margie Orford Page A

granite cliffs of the waterfall.
    Like the police dogs, Riedwaan had found no trace of Yasmin. By four, the tablecloth of cloud forced him, cold and exhausted, to take shelter under an overhang. He’d slept fitfully for a couple of hours. At dawn he had worked his way down again, past the ballet school with the Beetle parked outside. Next to it was a green Mini. Clare’s car.

    Riedwaan headed towards his house in the Bo-Kaap. Unlocking it, he paused briefly at the second bedroom.
    ‘Yasmin’s Palace’ – the sign hung askew on her door.
    Feeling his knees give way, he dropped into an armchair. The only chair in the room. He looked at the scattered bits of bunk bed he’d promised Yasmin he’d assemble, the tools still lying there from his first and only attempt. TheJack Daniel’s beckoned him. His glass next to the bottle on the table. Riedwaan got up and put it away in a cupboard, ignoring the voice that said one whiskey wouldn’t hurt.
    One wouldn’t. It’d be the second that would cause the trouble. And the third and the rest of the bottle. He took the glass to the kitchen and filled it without rinsing it, swallowed the water. Traces of whiskey under thedust. He filled the kettle, put on the gas, splashed his face above the dirty dishes in the sink. The kitchen air smelt stale, so he opened the door onto the courtyard. When the kettle boiled, he spooned some Nescafé into the least dirty mug.
    Riedwaan Faizal’s phone was out of his pocket before the second ring. ‘Private number’ flashed on the screen.
    ‘Faizal.’
    ‘De Lange.’
    Shortyde Lange from ballistics, the lab buried in trees and scrub forty kilometres east of Cape Town.
    ‘I heard about your daughter,’ said De Lange. ‘You find—’
    Riedwaan cut him off. ‘Not yet.’
    ‘I’m sorry, man.’ Riedwaan waited; Shorty de Lange was not a man you hurried. ‘I didn’t like that crime scene, those two little girls. Something new, that – two girls with no known connection to anygangsters, shot like dogs.’
    ‘Ja.’ The kitchen door blew shut. ‘Fuck it.’
    The two warm bodies heaped together in that open field in Maitland seemed like a lifetime ago.
    ‘Come over to the lab,’ said Shorty. ‘I think you should see what I’ve got.’
    Riedwaan left the mug on the counter with last week’s bread, and shut the front door behind him.
    Half an hour later, he swerved ontothe off-ramp to the lab, daring the road to claim him. It didn’t, and he slowed down at the security entrance. The guards waved him through.
    De Lange was waiting for him.
    ‘Rita Mkhize called me.’ He held Riedwaan’s eye. ‘Said you’d been suspended.’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘Said I should keep you in the loop. That she’d answer for it.’
    ‘She’s a good girl,’ said Riedwaan.
    ‘Tough, thatlady.’
    They were walking down the unlit corridor. It was empty except for the posters of gunshot wounds tacked onto the walls.
    ‘What you got here?’ Riedwaan’s voice was working, but only just.
    ‘A feeling.’
    ‘Since when did you get feelings, Shorty? Unless it’s winter or your wife forgot to pack your lunch. Cold. Hungry. Those are your feelings.’
    De Lange’s office was decoratedwith the colours of the Free State rugby team. The walls were lined with pictures of the players. Two were autographed by a lock whose parents had been shot on their farm. Shorty had found the cartridges, tracked the guns, matched them. The killers were both fifteen years old. Third offence. They got thirty years each.
    De Lange picked up a brown folder and several small, clear packets. Allexcept one contained cartridges. The other held two crumpled bullets.
    ‘From the younger girl,’ explained De Lange. ‘The pathologist got them for me. Looks like they went straight through her older sister’s body. She didn’t weigh much, according to the post-mortem report – but still, her fifty-two kilos was enough to slow them down. They lodged in the little sister she was