Titel: Gallows Hill
Skrywer: Margie Orford
Uitgewer: Jonathan Ball
ISBN:9781868424436
Prys: R75.95
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Gallows Hill is the fourth in the Clare Hart series which has made Margie Orford one of this country’s most successful crime novelists. It follows the life of her protagonist Dr Clare Hart, who is an investigative profiler and works closely with the police force on murders, especially those involving women and children. Her work has brought her into proximity with some of the worst specimens of humanity, as well as some of the best. So much so that she and one of the most admired captains in the police force, Riedwaan Faizal, have become lovers. In the previous novels they worked on many horrific cases together and it was inevitable that each fell in love with someone who understands the brutal nature of their work.
When Gallows Hill begins, Clare and Riedwaan are virtually living together, their relationship one of the few positives in their harassed lives. The inciting incident of the plot kicks off with the death of a worn-out “bergie” woman at a construction site. Her death might have gone without mention if it weren’t for the fact that her loyal dog digs up a bone at the scene of her lonely demise. It’s a human bone, one of hundreds covered up in an illegal burial ground.
Clare is called in to the newly discovered burial ground by Faizal as she is working on a film about the history of Cape Town, including all the ethical inconsistencies that would involve. An unmarked burial ground of slaves or prisoners would definitely be a prominent feature in such a film. It’s only a matter of time before one of the students working on uncovering the bones in the burial site finds a small packing crate. In it, cradled into an almost foetal position, is the body of a young woman who hasn’t been interred as long as the mass grave of skeletons. Clare is drawn to the discovery, touched by the fragility of the obviously female skeleton. And when she finds the remnants of a dress label as well as a few strands of green silk and a silver necklace around the skeletal neck, she is even more intrigued. She makes the investigation into the death of the young woman her priority, especially when the forensics department confirms that the body has been interred for only 23 years. As luck would have it the label is traced to an exclusive designer in the Netherlands who happens to take photographs of every person who buys one of his garments. It doesn’t take him long to remember who was wearing a green silk dress around the time the death took place. He is able to produce the photograph of the woman, a prominent visual artist who was exhibiting in South Africa at that time. With this fortunate discovery Clare Hart begins to retrace the life, hopefully to the point of her death, of Suzanne le Roux. She uncovers details about the life of the flamboyant artist, who has a taste for dangerous men yet seemed committed to human rights, a somewhat incongruous marriage in a highly attractive woman. Clare also finds that Suzanne left unexpectedly and was apparently killed in the struggle and buried up north. She left her only daughter, Lilith, alone on the night of her last exhibition and the thought that her mother had abandoned her drove the daughter into a self-destructive path. She attracted the patronage of the same people who worked with her mother, Merle and Gilles Osman. Lilith happens to be exhibiting her work at the same time as her mother’s remains are uncovered, and her exhibition is titled Forensic.
This novel is a good, page-turning read, as are all Margie Orford’s books. Orford’s signature elegant prose always takes the reader on an intriguing journey. Unfortunately, though, I’d read Orford’s Daddy’s Girl before I read Gallows Hill and was a little disappointed in the latter. This is only because I think Daddy’s Girl is one of Margie Orford’s finest novels yet. Its taut timeline and fast-paced action gave it an inherent dynamic which turned it into the most tightly woven and compelling crime novel I’d read in years. The characters in Daddy’s Girl were also more terrifyingly real and their crimes struck me as more violent and horrendous than the death of the artist Suzanne le Roux.
This is not to say that Gallows Hill isn’t good. It is. It’s a good story well told and that’s all a reader asks for. While it didn’t quite match up to Daddy’s Girl for me, that’s a personal preference.