Gallows Hill Read Free Page B

presume your SAPS boys are not going to do?’
    ‘We can try,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But these look like old bones. Should be simple enough for a couple of professors to manage.’
    ‘As long as we cankeep Prof Friedman and his CSI speculations in check, we’ll be fine,’ said Stone.
    ‘You know why the fights between academics are so vicious, don’t you?’ Friedman parried.
    ‘You won’t be able to resist telling me, Solly,’ said Stone.
    ‘Stakes are so low.’
    ‘Sounds like the police force,’ said Riedwaan. ‘You know Clare Hart?’
    ‘Dr Hart,’ he put out a pudgy hand. ‘Always in the rightplace at the right time.’
    ‘One of her many virtues,’ said Friedman.
    ‘Helps if you know the right people,’ said Clare.
    ‘First time I’ve heard Faizal described as one of those,’ said Friedman. ‘Faizal told me you were finished with the cops, Clare.’
    ‘Not finished,’ said Clare. ‘Just taking a break – I’m making a film.’
    ‘You call exhuming a mass grave resting?’ asked Stone.
    ‘They’ve been dead a long time,’ said Clare. ‘These are quiet bones. I won’t need to sit with their mothers and try to find a reason why some criminal had dismembered their children.’
    ‘How fast can you get going?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘I need to know the extent of this burial site, if that is what it is, as soon as you find out. I’ve already got the press crawling everywhere. Like maggots.’
    ‘We’re here,’ said Solly Friedman. ‘We’re ready to go.’
    ‘There’s going to be a very unhappy developer. And with unhappy developers come unhappy politicians,’ said Stone.
    ‘I can think of nothing better than an unhappy politician,’ said Friedman.
    ‘You want to make my life worse than it usually is?’ asked Riedwaan.
    ‘That’s always a temptation.’
    The sun was climbing the sky fasterthan the latest billionaire up a Johannesburg guest list. The wind was picking up again. It curled around the hoarding, slamming a few students into a wall. In the street outside, an ice-cream vendor was selling granadilla lollies and lots of water. The crowd had swelled to about fifty or sixty, with one man loudly ensuring that everyone knew what he had seen. And the heat and the wind and thegrowing police cordon were not making the crowd any happier about events behind the hastily erected screens.
    The archaeologists had laid out pegs and markers. The students were noting, photographing, measuring. Raheema Patel and Tim Stone were using brushes to expose the curves of vertebrae. Soil filled in areas where there had once been flesh.
    ‘More graves here than anyone could wishfor, Clare,’ said Stone. ‘Piled on top of each other, buried crosswise, all over.’
    ‘Is there nothing on the old maps?’ asked Clare.
    Stone dusted his hands on his trousers and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
    ‘This is what we’ve got.’
    He spread out a map on the camping table that had been set up under an umbrella. The map was a replica of an early nineteenth-century map, layeredover detailed satellite images.
    ‘Many would have been scavenged by dogs. Only a few would have been buried intact,’ said Friedman. ‘It’s going to be a complicated job, working out who’s buried here. Slaves, poor people, suicides, criminals.’
    ‘See here,’ Stone tapped the sheet with a pen. ‘These are all the old graveyards that lay beyond the city limits. The developer must have known aboutthis. Two hundred years ago, this whole area was full of unofficial burial grounds. And this was Gallows Hill,’ said Stone, pointing out an area long since flattened for building sand. ‘The gibbets could be seen from Table Bay. A warning to ships coming to dock and trade, what the consequences would be if they were out of line. The bodies swung from the gallows until they rotted and fell.’
    ‘I hope you get to work on who all these people were,’ said Clare. ‘The collision of history and politics is complicated in Cape