Free Daddy's Girl by Margie Orford Page A

judgement.

    ‘What’s her name?’ asked Clare.
    ‘Yasmin,’ he said. ‘Yasmin Faizal.’
    ‘You want to tell me what happened?’ asked Clare. ‘Roma by Night is open.’
    Riedwaan was already walking. The motion helped quell his fear, which felt like a pit bull in his gut, about to eat him alive.

13
    Clare took the booth furthest from the entrance. Riedwaan slid a photograph out of his breast pocket, placing it on the table. It lay between them, its corners rumpled, curved in the middle where it had moulded to the shape of his chest. A little girl in a pink leotard, her black hair in a ponytail. Gold hoops in her earlobes, her dark eyes glittering with laughter. Clare glanced up atRiedwaan. The same full, perfectly formed mouth.
    ‘This is her?’ asked Clare. The question unnecessary, a rope tossed over the gulf of loss. Riedwaan looked at the coloured lights looped along the Promenade. Many of the bulbs gone.
    ‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘Will you find her for me?’
    ‘This is a first,’ said Clare, ‘a cop asking me for help.’
    ‘I’ve seen your work.’ Riedwaan took outa cigarette, and bounced it on the table. No Smoking signs everywhere. ‘You’ve got connections I don’t have. The cases I’ve been working on… I need someone who can get under the skin of these gangsters, and find her.’
    ‘You think she’s…’
    ‘Alive?’ Riedwaan said it for her. ‘If she wasn’t, I’d know. The people I deal with use bodies instead of email. More direct way of getting the messageacross, harder to trace.’
    ‘Explain to me why you’re a suspect,’ said Clare.
    ‘ The suspect.’
    ‘Okay, the suspect. Why aren’t the cops looking for her? They have that new child-track system. Why not this time?’
    ‘New unit. New policy. Still trying to straighten us old-school cops out,’ Riedwaan took his lighter out of his pocket, lit his cigarette. ‘Run by a Special Director Ndlovu.A PhD in rondfok from Leningrad University or some fact-free place like that. She got hold of me and my psychological profile. When that happens and you’ve got a profile like mine, you’re fucked.’
    ‘Why’s she on your case?’
    ‘Hard to tell if she’s on my case or on Phiri’s case via me. There’s some exile history there. Phiri doesn’t do the reciprocal altruism that the struggle has spawned.’

    ‘Reciprocal altruism?’ asked Clare.
    ‘I did you a favour twenty years ago. Now it’s payback time. Contracts, blind eyes, backhanders. Phiri is as straight as they come. Ruffled some senior feathers by expecting them to be the same.’
    The waitress brought their coffee, ignored Riedwaan’s cigarette, sauntered off and lit her own.
    ‘Convince me that you haven’t got her.’ Clare stirredin the milk.
    ‘My wife reported Yasmin missing to the police hotline. There’s a new policy that’s meant to stop the SAPS from shooting our wives and girlfriends on rugby weekends. Because there was a complaint against me with the Family Unit, an interdict was activated.’
    ‘An interdict?’ asked Clare.
    ‘I hadn’t seen Yasmin for weeks. It was my weekend to see her. Her mother refused. I…’he stopped.
    ‘You what?’
    ‘I took her anyway.’
    ‘So you hire me and you look innocent.’
    ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
    ‘Captain Faizal,’ said Clare. ‘Things are usually simple. We long for complex motives, but you know what? Most of the time, it’s nothing. Just an impulse.’
    ‘You think I don’t know that?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Sometimes I’d have a gun in my hand and I see two limp,bloody bodies at my feet and the gun is in my mouth, cold and clean and sweet as a Coke on a hot afternoon. Then I’d wake up.’ He focused on her, as if seeing her face for the first time. ‘And they would be breathing, Shazia and Yasmin, in their beds. Alive. Director Ndlovu’s idea of sorting out my head was to send me to a government-issue shrink. She asked me questions about my family, my