him of his arrival time in Bruges, his final destination.
The end of a long journey; the beginning of his new life.
6.
Three hours per day, that was the only private time Ella allowed herself. Well, not per day, strictly speaking, because it was almost dark by the time she went jogging at Alberts Farm, and it was still dark when she left in the mornings to go to the gym with her colleague, young Stallie. But it was the only time she could set aside for personal pleasure. And God knows there was little enough pleasure in her life, personal or otherwise.
Finished with the gym, she was always at the office by daybreak, or knocking on doors in search of witnesses and evidence in a murder investigation. At six in the evening she would drive home, put on her comfortable old Nike trainers, black spandex pants and a T-shirt. The sun had set by the time she was back, had taken a shower, had a bite to eat, pulled on her old jeans and driven off for her harp lessons with Suki Wolski three times per week. When there weren’t lessons, she practised in her living room on the second-hand lever harp Suki had lent her. From this old 36-string Troubadour she would progress to an orchestral pedal harp, Suki said. But she was to practise every evening, Suki had told her, no excuses. Like Harpo Marx, who even took his harp – albeit the smaller folk harp – to the toilet, where he played “I Got Rhythm” on the loo.
“Was Harpo constipated?” Ella had asked.
“Well,” Suki had said, “that’s why he was such a good harpist – he used every minute of his free time to practise. His music came from his heart and his soul, not from his fingers.”
“Just don’t expect me to play ‘Bolero’ on the toilet,” Ella had replied.
She’d positioned the borrowed Troubadour in front of the television in the sitting room; the bathroom was too poky anyway, laundry all over the place.
An hour for jogging, an hour at the gym, an hour for the harp – the sum total of her free time. And she’d just sat down behind the Troubadour, her hands on either side of the strings, little fingers held aloft, when her cellphone rang. Suki had said: “You might as well have your little fingers amputated. You don’t need them for the harp. If a little finger tries to find a string, it contorts the entire hand. Forget about your little fingers; keep them out of the way.”
Ella wanted to ignore the ringtone, R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”, but she’d already seen the caller ID.
“Evening, Colonel.”
You never ignored the boss; he got irritated if his call wasn’t answered by the second ring, day or night.
“What are you doing? Are you busy? If you’re free, phone Sgt. Mfundisi, Kensington uniform branch. Could be something, could be nothing, but phone him.”
“Kensington? That’s outside our jurisdiction, Colonel. Don’t they fall under East Rand Murder and Robbery?”
“It’s not a murder.” A short pause, just a second, then he said, his voice rasping: “Well, it’s not a person. Looks like a cat’s been slaughtered.”
“A cat?”
“In a hotel room.”
“What about the SPCA, Colonel? Aren’t cats their . . . jurisdiction?”
Was it a crime to slaughter a cat? If the cat had been abused, she supposed it was, but hardly a case for Murder and Robbery.
“There was a jam jar on the nightstand in a hotel room. Not filled with jam, but with formalin and a skin . . . hair removed and tanned. The forensic lab identified it and informed Sgt. Mfundisi late this afternoon that it belonged to Felis catus.”
“A skinned cat? So, has a crime been committed?”
“Sgt. Mfundisi says he’s a bit confused as to whether it’s a crime to skin a cat and tan its hide. The bathroom is still cordoned off, but the hotel owner is putting pressure on him. Says if no crime has been committed, he wants his room back; he’s losing money while the police are twiddling their thumbs.”
“But why didn’t the sergeant just report it to East Rand?”
The colonel ignored her question. “Sgt. Mfundisi says after he got the forensic results this afternoon, he sat down and gave the matter some thought. He then remembered a case we investigated – he even mentioned the investigating officer by name, WO Ella Neser – of serial killings involving tanned skins. He said he thought he’d share his suspicions with me. So phone him. I have his number – have you got a pen?”
“I’ll get one.”
She wrote it down and ended the call.
Tanned skins. She felt the legs of a millipede on the nape of her neck, peered at the TV screen, saw nothing of interest. Ran her palms across the strings, strumming the first chords of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” but giving up, and then sat with the harp between her legs, rubbing the hard callouses on the pads of her string fingers.
“Dammit.”
She sighed, picked up the phone and dialled the number Col. Silas Sauls had given her.
* * *
The hotel owner looked surprised when he opened the door. “You’re early, Detective – it’s not even seven,” said Rabie Saadi. “The cops usually keep me waiting for hours.”
“Sgt. Mfundisi not here yet?” Ella asked, staring at the man’s hairdo: black hair oiled and slicked back, gleaming under the dim lights. The stench of the previous night’s revelry – beer, dust, sweat, sweet perfume and stale food – hovered like thick fog in the deserted bar.
He shook his head. “Coffee? While we’re waiting for His Excellency yet again.”
“Black, no sugar. Your guest, the one suspected of killing a cat in his bath, what’s his name? The sergeant told me, but I didn’t quite get it. Unusual name.”
“Fomalhaut. That’s how he wrote it in the register. Neat handwriting.”
“I want a description for an Identikit.”
“I thought the case was closed? Just a cat, no crime committed?”
“There’s a new development,” she said. “The room remains cordoned off. Did he give a first name?”
Rabie brought out the register, opened it on the bar counter, paged back to six weeks earlier, put his index finger under a name. “This is his initial. Looks like a b, why a lower-case b?”
She looked at the name next to Rabie’s dirty fingernail: Fomalhaut b.
“And why write his initial after his surname?” She thought aloud.
“Why did they send you, a Murder and Robbery detective, to invesitgate the death of a cat?”
“Classified
