Free Sacrifices by Roger Smith Page B

Scotch has left him dry mouthed and liverish and he feels a paralyzing depression enfold him like a cloak.
    But, as he conjures up Louise Solomons’s eyes staring at him across the kitchen table last evening, the bitter bile of guilt rises in his throat and he pockets his Nokia and slips out into the corridor.
    The clock radio in Chris’s old room is tuned to a newscast and he hears his son’s heavy tread over the latest crime reports. Lane, feeling a twinge of pain in his swollen testicles, shames himself by hurrying toward the stairs, eager to be gone before his son emerges.
    He scuttles past the main bedroom—door closed, shower in the en-suite bathroom whispering—descends the stairs and crosses the living room, his socks skating on the tiles.
    Lane opens the door onto the deck, inhaling the crisp air (too early to be tainted by carbon emissions) and walks around the side of the house, his socks soaked by the dewy grass. Invisible now to the bedrooms upstairs, he takes Gwen Perils’s card from his pocket and punches her cell number into his Nokia.
    Before he can hit dial a movement draws his eye and Christopher appears beside the pool, dressed in shorts, vest and running shoes, jogging on the spot. Retreating behind an assegai tree Lane pockets his phone, watching his son through the glossy leaves as he stretches, touching his toes with ease.
    Chris shakes his arms to loosen the muscles before taking off down the driveway. The ornate metal gates fling themselves open like swan’s wings, furling when he disappears from view. He’ll be gone for at least an hour, powering his way along one of the trails that lead up the mountain from Newlands forest.
    Lane retrieves his Nokia, his hands slick with sweat. He composes himself, then jabs at the little green phone. When he hears the cop speak he feels a momentary lurch of terror, and he’s speechless for second before he realizes that he’s listening to the woman’s voice mail, telling him to leave a message.
    “Detective, this is Michael Lane. Please call me back as a matter of urgency.” Sounding like his pompous father again.
    As Lane slips the phone back into his pocket a scream—a prolonged, howling descant—rises from Denise Solomons’s room, visible through a thicket of shrubs.
    Lane knows he should retreat into the house and pretend he is deaf to the woman’s distress, but he finds himself hurrying over to the cottage, where he hear s a series of hiccupping sobs. He bangs on the door and after a few seconds it flies open, revealing Louise dressed in a T-shirt and floral pajama bottoms, blinking at him, her short, spiky hair standing in quills.
    “What’s happened, Lou?” he asks.
    “It’s Lynnie. They’ve just called from Pollsmoor. He was murdered last night, in the cells.”
    Lane lays a tentative hand on the girl’s bony shoulder. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Louise.”
    “Fuck you, Michael! Fuck you,” she says, throwing off his hand and slamming the door in his face.
    Lane staggers under the weight of his guilt. But, as he walks toward his wife who stands in the kitchen doorway—looking cool and composed in a white cotton top and ivory-colored slacks, her plucked eyebrows arched in enquiry—he feels the guilt washed away by a surge of pure, unalloyed relief.

18
     
     
    Louise leans her sharp shoulder blades against the door, the wood still trembling from the violence with which she slammed it, and closes her eyes to the cottage and its hand-me-down furniture, colonized—like her life—by Michael Lane’s charity.
    Her mother, reduced to a wailing, drooling mess has been unable to provide any detail about the way Lyndall died, so the dream that woke Louise in the early hours becomes the visual accompaniment to Denise’s garbled account of the call from the prison.
    Louise sees the hands tearing at Lyndall’s flesh, hears him screaming in terror, and knows that she has failed him. She should have fought harder, called a press conference