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dry a year yet. Two alcoholics … that’s double the risk
.
    Doc Barkhuizen was a clever man. But he would be able to tell Doc that tonight he had had another revelation, gained an insight. When he had pulled the bedspread over Alexa. A strong feeling of déjà vu, because he had been there before – on the bed, dead drunk, his ex,Anna, pulling the blanket over him with compassion and patience and love. How many times? How many evenings and nights? How had she put up with it for so long?
    He felt the loathing for himself come and sit in his throat, and forced himself back to the case file.
    Hanneke Sloet was born on 18 June 1977 in Ladybrand in the Free State. She graduated with an LLB from Stellenbosch University in 1999, and in 2001 she began work at the law firm Silberstein Lamarque, first as articled clerk, and then in 2002 as attorney in the corporate law department. In 2009 she was promoted to partner.
    Up till December the previous year she lived alone in a town house in Stellenbosch, and commuted by car every day to Silberstein Lamarque House in Riebeek Street in Cape Town, where she had an office on the eighth floor. She bought the apartment in 36 on Rose for 3,850,000 rand ten months ago with a mortgage from Nedbank, but the development was only completed the previous December. On Monday 3 January she moved in on the fifth floor.
    She wasn’t in a serious or long-term relationship when she died.
    On Tuesday 18 January she left the offices of Silberstein Lamarque at 19.46, according to the electronic time stamp on her access card. When she didn’t arrive for a 09.00 meeting with her employer on 19 January, her personal assistant began to worry.
Because Hanneke was never late. Every workday she was in the gym at a quarter to six, and in the office at a quarter past seven
, according to the assistant’s sworn statement.
    I called her cellphone, because she didn’t have a land line yet. She didn’t answer. That is absolutely exceptional, it had never happened before. I went to talk to Mr Pruis, and at 09.40 left the office and drove to her apartment. The door was locked. I went down to the basement and saw her car was there. Only around 10.20 could I track down the caretaker. He refused to unlock the apartment. I phoned the office, and Mr Pruis called his contacts in the police. Two policemen arrived at the apartment around 11.00 and ordered the caretaker to open the door. We found her dead
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    The two uniformed policemen simply established that Sloet was dead, left and alerted Green Point Station that they had a homicide. Warrant Officer Tommy Nxesi from Green Point and a colleague,Sergeant Vernon April, took over the crime scene officially at 11.35, and summoned Forensics and the pathologist.
    The forensic report yielded only two small pieces of useful information: the handle of the front door seemed to have been wiped inside and outside; and apart from Sloet’s own hair, a single, male, probably Caucasian, pubic hair was found in the shower of the en-suite bathroom. There was not enough of the hair follicle to get a DNA result.
    Ten different sets of fingerprints were found in the apartment … 
probably due to the removal company’s workmen who handled practically all the furniture and cardboard cartons on 3 January
, the report read. Six sets were identified as those of Hanneke Sloet, the caretaker who had come to fix a leaking tap a week earlier, and four of the removal company’s workers who could be traced. Only the victim’s fingerprints were on the computer and the glass in her bedroom.
    Blood spatter analysis showed that the victim was dealt the fatal wound probably 3.8 metres from the front door and 0.6 metres from where her body was found
.
    And that was all. No dust, soil samples or tracks. No lip prints, residue, strange chemicals or usable DNA.
    Neither did Sloet’s Facebook page, computer, or cellphone records produce much. Most of the emails, calls and SMSes on 18 January were work