we’re waiting for Sgt. Mfundisi, tell me everything,” she said. “Start at the beginning. The night your guest, Mr Fomalhaut, arrived. What did he look like? Short, chubby round the hips and thighs, like a pear?”
His eyes jumped to her face. She suspected he’d been assessing her, that he’d concluded there wasn’t much under her T-shirt to get excited about. Rabie’s dancers were much better endowed, swinging from the two shiny poles every night.
“How did you know? I mean, about the chubby hips?” he asked.
“Flat nose, almost no chin?”
“No, sharp nose, crooked. Big chin.”
“Sharp nose? Big chin?”
That wasn’t how she remembered Abel. And she’d taken a good look at him that night in his kitchen when they’d talked and he’d made coffee. Later, after she’d been rescued from his house while he was in the process of removing a piece of skin from her stomach, she had described his face for an Identikit. It was now etched in her memory, and she would never forget it; she dreamt of that face, and of the scalpel in his hand.
Before that near-fatal night, she’d called on him twice at his gallery of African masks and ethnic artefacts. The sparse hair, pale eyes, flat nose; the absent chin, pendulous cheeks.
“Are you sure about the nose and chin?”
“Yes, do you want to take a look?”
“I thought the CCTV lens had been spray-painted?”
“Not the one at reception.”
She took the register into Rabie’s office at the back. He sat down at his computer, fingers wriggling like small eels on the keyboard, and the first black-and-white images appeared on the screen, flickering and grainy. She suspected that Rabie had invested in the cheapest CCTV system on the market.
She could make out the guest’s short posture, but millions of men were built like that. He had his back to the camera and was wearing a hat with a floppy brim that cast a deep shadow over the top half of his face as he bent to pick up two pieces of luggage, his face in profile.
“Stop,” she said. Yes, Rabie was right: sharp nose, the chin so big, almost like a caricature. “Is he wearing dark glasses?”
“Yes, at that time of night,” said Rabie. “Said he’d injured his eye in the collision with the train. I could see the swelling.”
She opened the register again, saw he’d booked in at half past eight, three days after the traumatic events at the funeral parlour of Poppe & Son.
“And these are the only pictures you have?”
“He never came to reception again. Used the fire escape. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to him. I saw him briefly a few times and noticed he was growing a beard. Is he the man you’re looking for?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like him. Where’s Sgt. Mfundisi? It’s after eight. Our appointment was for seven?”
“I told you,” said Rabie. “His Excellency takes his time.”
“Show me the room. I can’t wait any longer.”
“It’s sealed. The sergeant said no one except the cops is allowed inside. Threatened me with prison if anyone breaks the seal.”
“I am the cops, Rabie. He won’t put you in prison. Get the key.”
As she was removing the tape, Rabie said behind her: “Here he is now.”
The sergeant was also chubby of hip, his backside and belly even chubbier, boobs bigger than her own, shoulders like an ox, gait like the waddle of a fat goose. She waited for him to get to her.
“Nothing’s been removed from the room?” she asked.
“Only the bottle with the skin,” said Sgt. Mfundisi.
She thought of the skins and furs found in the tumbledown house in Dorado Park, along with the embalmed body of the old woman, Abel Lotz’s mother, with that weird mask on her face. Tanned skins of cats, moles, hares and dassies, still wet, stretched on drying racks, left behind in his headlong flight ahead of the police.
“Forensics haven’t been here?” Ella asked the sergeant. “You took the bottle with the skin to the lab yourself?”
“Can’t waste Forensics’ time with a dead cat, Warrant. If you don’t think this cat-killer is your man, we can clear the scene, close the file, and Rabie can have his room back. I don’t see anything suspicious. But I thought, just to be on the safe side, I’d tell Col. Sauls about the cat skin, just in case it was connected to your investigation.”
She opened a wardrobe door. “If Forensics examine the room and find something that points to the Nightstalker . . . That’s the only way we’ll know, Sergeant, don’t you think?”
“We went over everything, Const. Xala and I: the entire room and the bathroom, the mini-kitchen with the hotplate and pots and pans and stuff. Over there in the corner is the stuff we found: just a pile of old newspapers. And the skin.”
She looked at the pile behind the door. “He didn’t leave behind any personal belongings? No comb or toothbrush or anything like that?” She crouched at the papers and spread them out. There were also a few magazines: South African Sky Guide, Sky & Telescope Magazine, Deep-Sky Observations. The cold millipede continued its journey down her spine. “Excuse me,” she said and took out her cellphone.
She went into the passage and looked for the number of Dr Verhoef at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was the expert who’d looked through Abel’s telescope in his house at Dorado Park and revealed that it had been fixed on the coordinates of the red giant star Betelgeuse.
“Yes?” Dr Verhoef sounded brusque, rushed.
As if the stars could disappear at any moment, Ella thought. As if he didn’t want to miss Betelgeuse’s spectacular implosion.
“Ella Neser here,” she said, tilting her head to look at the black paint on the lens of the CCTV camera.
“Ah, Detective Neser! Still star-struck?”
She was surprised by the change in tone, surprised that he remembered her at all.
“Alas, yes.”
“Still Betelgeuse?”
“You have a good memory, Doc.”
“I don’t often get a visit from the long arm of the law. When a beautiful detective from Murder and Robbery comes to my office, I remember her.”
She let the compliment slide. “This time it’s not Betelgeuse. Or perhaps it is. I don’t know.”
“How can I help?”
“I don’t know how to pronounce it, so I’ll spell it: F-O-M-A-L-H-A-U-T and then a lower case
