The two-storey brick house had lost chunks of its Victorian facade to wind and weather and was now a classic slum mansion. A warren of cold-water flats occupied spaces originally set out for a prosperous family with need of a library and a music room. The long blast of a harbour tug horn sounded across the water.

A shrunken man in an antiquated wheelchair was parked out on the pavement. Emmanuel rechecked the address and approached the invalid, who stared out at the railway lines and the distant ships in dock. A sign on the sagging fence read 'Slegs Blankes'. Whites Only.

'Does the Marks family live here?' he asked.

The man was thin as a string with unwashed hair that grew past his shoulders. No response. Not even a flicker of an eyelash.

Emmanuel proceeded to the once grand entranceway, selected the first flat and knocked. The door opened and a barefoot girl stared up at him. He recognised her from a sketch in Jolly's notebook. It was the child with the desperate eyes.

'This the Marks place?'

The girl nodded and ran inside the flat. Emmanuel followed her down a long shotgun corridor. Detritus and dirt crunched underfoot. Small alcoves that might originally have been hall closets ran off the sides and were now sleeping quarters. A baby in a cloth nappy played with a wooden spoon in the bare kitchen. Emmanuel kept going. The filth and the poverty did not disturb him. The sense of familiarity he encountered in hovels such as this one did. Slums in Durban and slums in Johannesburg were the same.

He entered a sitting room where the runaway girl was bent over the side of a toy pram. A woman slept on a tatty couch, her body curled like a drunk's on a park bench. Her snores competed with the squabbling of children who played hopscotch in the concrete yard outside the window.

Emmanuel touched the woman on the shoulder. Her eyes flew open and she sat up with a jerk. An undipped nylon stocking fell around her ankle.

'Who're you?'

'He's come about Jolly,' the little girl said and pushed the pram back and forth with motherly concern.

'My name's Emmanuel Cooper.' He couldn't use his old title. Without his official police ID, it was all make-believe. 'I work for the police.'

'Oh ... you don't look like a policeman.'

The cream silk suit, cream shirt and pale mint-coloured tie that Hélène Gerard had laid out on the bed before he emerged from the bath were more suited to the high-roller marquee at the racetrack than to a police station. If Jolly's mother had picked him as a dapper armed robber or a pimp Emmanuel wouldn't have been surprised.

'Besides, I already told the other two everything.' Close- set brown eyes narrowed. 'Jolly went out like usual and he didn't come back. Miss Morgensen from the Zion Gospel Hall. .. she's the one who went down to make sure it was him that the police found. I didn't have the heart.'

Or the energy. Emmanuel had counted six children so far: two indoors and four in the yard. The husband was most likely at sea, in jail or holding up a bar with his elbows. Emmanuel knew the score: a family diet of plain bread with lard for dinner and meat once a fortnight. Vegetables were exotic novelties. No matter how long Jolly's mother slept she would always be too tired to face life.

'The Zion Gospel Hall?' he asked. It sounded like a holy-roller, speaking-in-tongues kind of place.

'It's just here in Southampton Street. The young ones get a blessing whenever we go.'

Whenever we go . . . Emmanuel doubted the Marks family were regular churchgoers, but come Sunday morning he knew he'd be there. Churches were places where people confessed.

'I'd like you to look at something.' He perched on the edge of a wooden chair and pulled Jolly's notebook from his pocket. 'Do you recognise this?'

'Course. It's Jolly's. He was always scribbling things. Got that from his dad. Artistic. Head in the clouds.'

Jolly had cut the notebook free and dumped it. Maybe the children sketched in it were the reason. Emmanuel found the first portrait and held it up. 'Who's this?'

'It's Sophie, the harbourmaster's daughter.'

'She was a friend of Jolly's?'

'I wouldn't say that. They played together sometimes.'

'And she's still around . . . not in any trouble that you know of?'

'No. I saw her yesterday morning at the corner shop.'

The barefoot girl tiptoed away from the pram and craned over Emmanuel's shoulder while he worked through the portraits and collected names and addresses. All the children were local to the Point area and not particularly close to Jolly. None appeared to be in any trouble.

'That's me,' the girl said when they came to the last sketch. 'That's me.'

'Jolly was a good artist. It looks just like you,' Emmanuel said and flicked through to the end of the notebook. Forty-eight hours was not long enough to interview every child individually. If Jolly's murder was connected to the mass exploitation of children, he might as well give up now. The bare-breasted mermaid winked from the page and Emmanuel covered the picture with his hand, conscious of the girl's young age.

'And that's the Flying Dutchman's mermaid,' Jolly's little sister said. 'She lives on the land, not in the water.'

Emmanuel turned to her. 'What's your name?'

'Susannah. It has one S and two N's.'

'Who is the Flying Dutchman, Susannah?'

'A man in a nice car.'

The girl recrossed the room and peered into the toy pram. She gave a loud exhalation then rearranged a scrap of material in the carriage and pushed the pram back and forth. Emmanuel waited till she got her rhythm up.

'Have you seen the mermaid before?' he asked. The girl had an unhinged quality that was disturbing.

'Ja. In the back window of the Flying Dutchman's car when he came to pick up Jolly.'

'Is the mermaid a picture or is she real like you and me?'

'A picture, like Jolly drew. She was stuck up against the glass, looking out,' Susannah said, humming snatches of 'London Bridge is Falling Down' to the doll in the pram.

The mermaid was a sign, an advertisement of some kind for a business run by a man in a nice car. Not an ordinary tax-paying venture but one that probably took customers to places that weren't listed in tourist guides.

'Where did Jolly go with the Flying Dutchman?' Emmanuel said.

'I don't know, but he brought back sweeties for us and American cigarettes for Ma.'

Emmanuel looked at the boy's mother, who had mustered enough energy to pull her undipped stocking up over her knee. A soccer ball hit the window and rolled back to a button-nosed boy in long shorts playing in the yard.

'There's six of them.' She brushed tears away with the back of her hand. 'The building is full of children coming and going ... I can't keep an eye on every one.'

Not from the couch. And the complimentary cigarettes came in handy. Except that nothing in the world, especially the dockside world, was free. Jolly had paid for the candy and the smokes somehow.

'Who is the Flying Dutchman?' he asked the mother.

'Don't know.' Her back stiffened. 'We don't mix with the coons or the riffraff.'

'Except when they have cigarettes.' The pitiable mix of pride and poverty wore on his patience. Black or white, riffraff or missionary, what did it matter? A cigarette was a cigarette. Jolly had known that.

'Well, I've never seen this Dutchman,' she said. 'Don't know anything about him or his mermaid.'

It was a lie and it wasn't. The Dutchman was a sinister Father Christmas who passed through her life unseen and left chocolate and cigarettes to prove his existence.

A filthy hand tugged at Emmanuel's sleeve. The girl had abandoned her pram. Her feathery blonde hair was clumped with knots, her dark brown eyes were as Jolly had drawn them: older than the sun but lacking warmth.

'Come look,' Susannah said. 'My baby's sick.'

Emmanuel followed her to the pram. This scenario was one his sister had enacted a dozen times in an afternoon. It seemed she loved her dolls most when they were sick and she could fix them. The world could be put right with a little medicine and a pat on the back.

Susannah motioned him closer. He squatted next to the pram and peered in. A porcelain doll with creamy skin and startling blue eyes lay in a nest of rags.

'What's wrong with her?' Emmanuel asked.

'Someone cut her throat.'