Devil's Peak by Deon Meyer

was playing inside, American rap. He knocked again, harder, and the door opened. A young girl, seventeen or eighteen, in T-shirt and jeans. “Yes?”

“Is this the home of Lukas Khoza?”

“He’s not here.”

“I have a message for John.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What sort of message?”

“Work.”

“John is not here.”

“That’s a pity,” he said, “he would have liked the job.” He turned to go, then stopped. “Will you let him know?”

“If I see him. Who are you?”

“Tell him the guy who gives good work tips was here. He will know.” He turned away again, as if he had lost interest.

“John hasn’t been here for ages. I don’t even know where he is.”

He sauntered towards the pickup and said with a shrug, “Then I will give the job to someone else.”

“Wait. Maybe my father will know.”

“Luke? Is he here?”

“He’s at work. In Maitland. At the abattoir.”

“Maybe I will go past there. Thank you.”

She did not say goodbye. She stood in the doorway, hip against the doorframe, and watched him. As he slipped in behind the wheel he wondered whether she spoke the truth.
    * * *
    She told the minister about the evening her father called her a whore. How he stood over her in the bathroom and made her scrub off the make-up with a face cloth and soap and water. She wept as he lectured her and said not in his house. There would be no whoring in his house. That was the night it began. When the thing happened inside her. As she recalled the tirade, she was aware of what was going on between her and the minister, because it was familiar territory. She was explaining The Reason and he wanted to hear it. They. Men looked at her, after she had done her job, after she had opened her body to them with gentle hands and caressing words and they wanted to hear her story, her tragic tale. It was a primitive thing. They wanted her really to be good. The whore with the golden heart. The whore who was so nearly an ordinary girl. The minister had it too—he stared intently at her, so ready to empathize with her. But at least with him, the other thing was absent. Her clients, almost without exception, wanted to know if it was also a sex thing—really good, but also horny. Their fantasy of the nympho myth. She was aware of all these things as she sketched her story.

“I’ve thought about it so much, because that is where it all began. That night. Even now, when I think about it, there is all this anger. I just wanted to look nice. For myself. For my father. For my friends. He didn’t want to see that, just all this other stuff, this evil. And then the religion thing just got worse. He forbade us to dance or go to movies and sleep over at friends and visit. He smothered us.”

The minister shook his head as if to say: “The things parents do.”

“I can’t get a grip on it. Gerhard, my brother, did nothing. We had the same parents and the same house and everything, but he did nothing. He just grew quiet and read books in his room, escaped into his stories and into his head. And me? I went looking for trouble. I wanted to become exactly what my father was afraid of. Why? Why was I built like that? Why was I made like this?”
    * * *
    The minister watched while she talked, watched her hands and eyes, the expressions that flitted in rapid succession across her face. He observed her mannerisms, the hair she used with such expertise, the fingers that punctuated her words with tiny movements and the limbs that spoke in an unbroken and sometimes deliberate body language. He placed it alongside the words and the content, the hurt and the sincerity and the obvious intelligence, and he learned something about her: she was enjoying this. On some level, probably unconscious, she enjoyed the limelight. As if, regardless of the trash that had been dumped on it, somewhere her psyche sheltered unscathed.
    * * *
    At twelve o’clock, hunger pangs drew Griessel’s attention away from the murder file he had been buried in. That was when he remembered that today