'You know about the blood out there?' he asked Griessel, watching him while he said 'yes'. Benny was standing still, head tilted sideways, right hand reaching unconsciously for his head and the fingers scratching in the thick, unruly hair just behind his ear.

A feeling of compassion swept over Joubert for this colleague, this friend, this man he had known for a lifetime. Griessel's frame had always been too small for all his energy, so that sometimes it seemed to vibrate, shock waves of passion pulsing through it like a tsunami. That face - twenty years ago it had an elfish quality, the mischievous cheek of the court jester, with an infectious laugh and a preposterous witticism perpetually crouched behind those bright Slavic eyes and wide mouth, ready to take off in full, unstoppable flight. You could barely see it now - life had eroded it away in a network of tiny furrows. But Joubert knew that in that brain the synapses were firing now. Griessel, sent from pillar to post all morning, was trying to get his head around the puzzle. When he succeeded the sparks would fly. Benny had the brain of a detective, always faster and more creative than his. Joubert had always been slow, methodical and systematic, but Griessel had instinct, natural flair, the sparkling fly half to Joubert's plodding front ranker.

'It might be drugs,' said Griessel, but to himself. 'I think the ... the rucksack ...'

'Benny, the panel van was in the Metro pound,' said Vusi.

Griessel stared into nowhere:'... the girls ... no, I don't know. Maybe they stole the drugs. Or took them but didn't pay ...'

Joubert waited quietly, till he saw Benny focus on him and Vusi. Then he asked: 'Is it the girl's blood?'

'No.' Then Benny focused sharply on Joubert, with sudden insight, and he said: 'It's someone else's blood, not Rachel's, it's the blood of one of those fuckers.' He grabbed his phone.

Joubert said, 'Benny, let me phone the hospitals.'

'No, Mat, let Caledon Square do it,' and he called their number and gave the order to the radio room Sergeant: 'Any young man between the age of, say, eighteen and thirty-five, any colour, any race, any language, Sarge, every young fucker with blood on him, I want to know about.' Then Griessel looked at Vusi and said: 'Metro's pound?'

'That's right. The same Peugeot, same registration. It was stolen, and Metro recovered it in Salt River. It has been parked in the pound since October, because the owner died of a heart attack and the estate is frozen. I'm going, Benny. I'm going to find out what's going on there. How did they get it out of the pound?'

Joubert saw a flicker in Griessel's eyes, a momentary realisation. 'What?' He knew the value of Benny's intuition.

Griessel shook his head. 'Don't know. Something. Jissis, I have to sit and think, but there's no time. Vusi, excellent work, go and find out, let's get the van, because that's about all we have ...' A sudden intake of breath. 'Wait,' he called Ndabeni back. 'Vusi, I want to make absolutely sure, the man from the deli, did he look at the pictures of Demidov's people?'

'He did.'

'Nothing?'

'Nothing.'

'OK. Thanks.'

Vusi jogged away and Griessel hung his head while Mat patiently stood and watched him. For a long time. In silence, so that the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the study could be heard. The two of them were the dinosaurs of the SAPS, he thought, an endangered, dying breed. Political global warming and racial climate change should have taken their toll long ago, but here they were still, two old carnivores in the jungle, limbs stiff, teeth blunt, but still not completely ineffective.

Griessel scratched audibly at the bushy hair behind his ear. He grunted: 'Hu ...' turned and went outside. Joubert followed tranquilly across the little doormat and the veranda, past the bougainvilleas and down the slate pathway. Griessel opened the garden gate and went and stood in the street. He turned to face Lion's Head. Joubert stood behind him, looking, seeing the rocky dome rising above the city, feeling the wind, watching how it ruffled Benny's hair even more. This day that had dawned in such perfection, was being overtaken by the southeaster. Tonight it would howl like a demon around the side of Table Mountain.

'Before six this morning, up there,' said Griessel, pointing at Lion's Head, 'she told a woman to call the police. Those young men had been chasing her since two in the morning. At eleven at the deli there, she told her father over the tickey-box that she couldn't talk to the police ...'

Tickey-box, thought Joubert. A prehistoric word.

Griessel dipped his head again. Then he looked up at Table Mountain. His eyes measured the distance to Lion's Head. He looked at Joubert. 'Five hours after she was on Lion's Head she arrives at the cafe. And the fucker parks in the street and comes in after her. How did they know, Mat? Where was she in between, why couldn't they find her? Why did she change her mind about the police?' He lifted his hand to his hair again. 'What do you do? A girl, a foreigner, you are desperate to find her, she could be anywhere. How do you watch the whole city?'

They stared at the mountain. As always, Griessel's ability to put himself in someone else's shoes, either victim or the perpetrator, charmed Joubert.

Then he realised what Griessel obviously already had. They had been sitting on the mountain and watching the whole city. 'Could be,' he said.

'Fokkol use to us now,' said Griessel, still one step ahead. 'They've got her.'

'But you can't see this house from the mountain,' said Joubert, nodding at the Victorian building beside them.

'That's true . ..' Lost in thought again, Benny's brain was searching, Joubert knew. He knew the frustration, the junkyard of information from a day like today when everything happened at once. You had to sift through the chaos; everything you had heard and seen, everything you knew, had to be sorted. For him it was the labour of the night, when he lay beside Margaret, behind her warm body with his hand on the rounding of her belly. Then his thoughts would travel down slow, systematic pathways. But

Griessel's process was different: impatient, quick, not always faultless, but much faster. Griessel's head jerked, a tumbler had dropped and he looked down the street and began walking in that direction. Joubert had to stretch his long legs to keep up. A hundred metres further on, Griessel stopped in a driveway, looking at the house, the garage. 'He sat here, in a bakkie ...' Excited. 'He nearly drove us off the road ...'

Griessel jogged up the drive, turned and looked back at Piet van der Lingen's house and said: 'No ...' He walked back and forth, jumped up and down and said: 'Mat come and stand here.'

Joubert came and stood there.

'Stand on your toes.'

Joubert stretched.

'What can you see of the house?'

The big man looked. 'Just too low to see everything.'

'He drove out of here, a guy in a bakkie. Toyota four-by-four, faded red, the old model. Little fucker behind the wheel was young, in a hell of a hurry, drove right in front of us and raced off towards the city ...'

Joubert focused differently, unburdened by memories. 'He could have stood on the bakkie,' he said. 'He would have been able to see everything then.'

'Jissis,' said Griessel. 'Young, he was young, just like the others.' He looked at Joubert. 'I will recognise him, Mat, if I see his fucking face again. I will know him.' He was quiet for a heartbeat, then he said: 'An old Toyota . . . that's not a drug dealer's car, Mat...'

Griessel's phone rang. He checked the screen before he answered. 'Sarge?' He listened for about forty seconds and began walking. Mat Joubert walked behind him, faster and faster, keeping his eyes on Griessel. Here came the tsunami again.