Blood Rose (13 page)

She thought of the bodies, of the boys they had been, wondering about this killer who managed to pick up his victims without witness, without leaving a ripple of anxiety. In such a small town, why did no one notice someone away for hours and days on end? Unless it was someone who was working shifts. Someone who could be all over the place, no questions asked. On the ships, in the factories, in the bars, a truck driver passing back and forth, ferrying goods. The silhouette of a killer, just the shadow of a man on a blank wall. Malevolent, shifting, shape-shifting, like a Javanese shadow-puppet theatre. Tamar thought of this figure moving unseen through the fog and she shivered. Who? Why? And where? The questions beat an urgent rhythm.

A siren wailed, insistent as a hungry baby. It was time to get on to her next shift.

Tamar found her niece leaning against the wall outside her day-care centre.

‘What are you doing out here, Angela?’ she asked.

‘The other children …’ The little girl’s eyes glittered with tears.

Tamar put the sobbing child into the back seat of her car and
strapped her in, feeling once again for the package of ARVs in her pocket. Her talisman. She drove home fast, relief flooding her when she realised that Tupac, her nephew, only eleven, had already cooked the macaroni.

She held Angela in her arms and coaxed five, then six, then seven, slow, painful spoons of buttered pasta into the child’s mouth. The boy hovered on the kitchen steps, staring into the darkness. When Tamar thought it was enough, she took her precious package from her pocket and counted out the pills into a Mickey Mouse saucer which Tupac had put out.

Angela pressed her lips together and closed her eyes, but the tears seeped out anyway. They made her feel so sick, the pills. Tupac knelt down beside her, his thin brown hands cupping her face.

‘Please, Angela,’ he said. ‘You’re a dancer. You can do anything.’

Nothing.

‘Take them for me.’ Desperation edged his voice. ‘I’ll tell you a story later.’

Angela opened her eyes. ‘About Mommy?’

Tupac was quick. He popped a tablet in and held her mouth closed. ‘About her and the day you had your first dance class,’ said Tupac.

Angela swallowed. Tamar breathed.

‘Here. Just three more.’

‘Tell me about what she said about me.’

Tupac popped the pills into her mouth, like coins into a slot machine. Tamar was not religious, but she was praying that the expensive drugs would repel the virus that had prowled Angela’s blood since her birth, the virus that had wrested the life from her plump, laughing, fecund sister five years ago.

She put the little girl to bed and helped her arrange her
princess puppet. The child had given her a doek, so that the shadow looked like her mother leaning over the bed, always just about to kiss her.

Tupac lay down next to his sister.

‘They wouldn’t play with me today,’ Angela told him. ‘The other children, they say I’m dirty and that I’ll make them sick. Will you get them?’

‘I’ll get them.’ Tupac had defended his baby sister since their mother had died the previous year. ‘But first let me tell you a story.’

Tamar closed the door on his once-upon-a-time. It was always the same story: a little girl and a mother who didn’t really die, who just went away somewhere for a while, who was coming back.

She went to lie on her bed, too tired to eat or change. It was quiet on the edge of the desert when the children stopped murmuring. From far away came the cry of a jackal; further away the answering call of its mate. Tamar folded her fingers over her belly.

Her child might be fatherless, but it was safe.

Ragnar Johansson was hesitating between two blue shirts. Clare Hart, she made him worry which near-identical shade would be best. He chose the darker of the two, walked over to his apartment window and did up the buttons, looking out at the emptied street. The night had settled in, but he could still make out the cranes offloading the trawlers that had berthed that afternoon. The girls would be busy already. It was eight-thirty and cold out, but Ragnar Johansson decided to walk. He liked the fog. It blocked out the flat desert lines of Walvis Bay, let him pretend that he was somewhere else, not immured here at the arse end of the world, no better off than when he arrived. The security gate rattled shut behind him as he strode towards the lagoon.

Clare was easy to find in the deserted holiday complex. Hers was the only cottage spilling light onto the worn grass, as she had not closed her curtains. Ragnar stopped beyond the pool of light to watch her through the open window. She had her back to him and he could see the curve of her waist, the slim hips in faded jeans. She slipped her hands under her hair and twisted her hair up, exposing the nape of her neck. She pinned up the thick coil, then turned and looked out into the blackness. Wary as a gazelle. Ragnar lit a cigarette, ignoring a tug of desire. When he had finished smoking, he went across the dark garden and knocked. She opened the door, standing aside so that he could enter.

‘Hello, Clare.’

‘How are you?’ She closed the door behind him.

‘You look beautiful,’ said Ragnar.

‘You were watching me.’

‘How did you guess?’ Ragnar kissed her cheek. ‘Same perfume.’

‘No. 19.’ Clare picked up her jacket and they walked along the water’s edge, immediately falling into step. They had been easy together, physically. She let him take her arm, glad to put the day behind her.

‘What happened to your boat?’ she asked.

‘Money’s tight. Had to sell it.’ Ragnar could taste the bitterness of failure on his tongue.

‘I didn’t know,’ said Clare, walking up the steps to the Raft.

The restaurant was built on stilts against which the lagoon’s dark water lapped. It was usually frequented by tourists or locals celebrating rare special occasions. Tonight, the candlelit tables were mostly empty.

‘You didn’t stay in touch, did you?’ said Ragnar.

‘I never said I would.’

A waitress showed them to a window table, the lights rippling on the lagoon beneath them. The lighthouse at Pelican Point pulsed on the horizon.

‘What are you doing now?’ Clare asked. ‘I can’t imagine you without your boat.’

‘Lots of kite-boarding, a little consulting for the mayor and his team. I just got a new ship to skipper, the
Alhantra
,’ said Ragnar. ‘And a licence for orange roughy. Very popular in the US and in Spain. Expensive, so worth fishing. Tonight can be a celebration, if you like. That and seeing you again.’

The waitress brought the wine and bread. Ragnar poured.

‘It didn’t take you long to track me down,’ said Clare.

‘A single woman under two hundred and fifty pounds is always news in Walvis Bay.’

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Who told you? I can’t believe that your nearly running me over was a coincidence.’

‘Actually, that was,’ said Ragnar. ‘But Calvin Goagab had told me you were here. I saw him yesterday afternoon. After you’d been there. There’s official concern about this incident, about what it’ll do to tourism here.’

‘What about official concern about finding who hung a child’s body in a playground?’ Clare bristled.

‘Oh, there is, but this is a port.’ Ragnar leant towards her. ‘Goagab’s saying that what they found in that playground was just a quick midnight transaction gone wrong. Whoever did it was back on board ship before the body was discovered.’

‘And the others?’

‘Unrelated probably,’ said Ragnar. ‘Captain Damases is inclined to jump to conclusions.’

The waitress arrived with their food, before Clare could respond.

‘You did well with that documentary.’ Ragnar noted the flare of anger in her eyes and changed the direction of the conversation.

‘It worked,’ said Clare.

‘You made some people uncomfortable.’

‘Good,’ said Clare. ‘I meant to.’

‘Some quite influential people, Clare. People lost money. A lot of money. Goagab was one of them.’

‘You too?’ asked Clare.

‘That’s not what I lost when you left.’ He took her hand, turning it over and running his thumb over the vein pulsing in her wrist.

‘Let’s not go there, Ragnar,’ said Clare, withdrawing her hand
to pick up her wine glass. The nights they had spent alone together up the Skeleton Coast … she would had to have been an ice queen to resist him.

Ragnar let it go, and they ate their meals without further conflict. They talked of people Clare had met on her last visit: who’d made money; who hadn’t. The bill arrived and Clare reached for her purse.

‘Let me get this.’ Ragnar put his hand over hers. ‘If you owe me I’ll be sure of having dinner with you again.’

‘I’m finessed then,’ Clare smiled.

‘Shall we get a brandy?’ asked Ragnar as they stepped outside into the cold wind.

‘Where were you thinking?’ Clare was tired, but she wasn’t quite ready to go back to her lonely bed.

‘Der Blaue Engel.’

‘Where is it?’ The name was familiar. Clare tried to place it.

‘It’s a club down near the harbour.’ He saw Clare hesitate. ‘Think of it as anthropology.’

Ragnar put his arm around Clare’s shoulders and they walked back towards the harbour. Clare remembered where she’d heard the name. From the story about the lap dancer who’d come off worse for wear after a visit to one of the rusting trawlers anchored outside the harbour.

‘Gretchen von Trotha,’ said Clare, ‘doesn’t she dance there?’

‘How do you know her?’ Ragnar asked with obvious surprise.

‘I don’t,’ said Clare. ‘Elias Karamata, one of the cops who’s working on this case, told me that she’d been beaten and thrown off a Russian ship. The name stuck.’

‘Someone fished her out, a South African,’ said Ragnar. ‘Ironically, he had a Russian name. Gretchen owes her life to that man.’

Clare could feel the dull thump of the bass long before she
could hear any music. The club’s logo was a naked pole-dancing angel, complete with wings and a halo.

‘That must drive the fundamentalists nuts.’

‘It does,’ said Ragnar. ‘Sundays, there are always pickets by the Christian Mission ladies, lying in wait for their husbands, I suppose.’

Inside, the air was thick with smoke. Around the pool table, girls were leaning along their cues to the advantage of their cleavages. A few couples were dancing, and waiting women nursed Coca-Colas at the bar. A group of drunken Russians working their way through a bottle of vodka at the bar looked Clare over then returned to their drink. Only two tables were occupied.

‘That’s him.’ Ragnar pointed to one table where a man sat alone. ‘The guy who pulled Gretchen out of the water.’ The man’s shirt was moulded over his lean belly, long legs stretched out, the steel caps glinting at the end of his dusty suede boots. A cigarette dangled from one tanned hand. He had tilted his chair back and his face was hidden in the shadows.

‘Is he trying to play Clint Eastwood?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t suggest you ask him,’ said Ragnar. ‘He’s not much of a joker.’

Clare recognised some of the occupants at the other table, groaning with champagne bottles, near the stage. D’Almeida had his secretary, the beautiful Anna, on his arm. He raised a glass to Clare. Opposite him sat Goagab, in conspicuous Armani. Two heavy-set men in their forties were with them. One of the men held a delicate girl on his knee, a smile plastered over her discomfiture. The other one ran lazy eyes over Clare, his tongue flicking across his moist, parted lips.

‘Politicians?’ asked Clare.

‘Businessmen. Politicians. One and the same in this part of
the world. My new bosses,’ said Ragnar. ‘They own the
Alhantra
. They’re celebrating the licence too.’

‘You want to join them?’

‘Not now that I have you to myself.’ His hand brushed hers. It was disconcerting, the intimate roughness of his skin.

‘What will you have?’ he smiled.

‘A brandy, please.’

The bar was filling up as men drifted in singly and in compact, eager groups. Chinese, Spanish, Senegalese, South African, freshly showered, hair slicked, eyes darting towards the women unpeeling themselves from bar stools, the pool table.

‘When’s the show?’ Ragnar asked the barman pouring their drinks.

‘Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.’ The barman pushed across a brochure that showed a young woman – maybe twenty-five – coiled around a pole.

Five minutes later, the lights flickered, then stayed off. A prerecorded drum roll drowned out Clare’s objections. The velvet curtains opened, and a nubile blonde stepped into the spectral light, her body voluptuous beneath the transparent layers of blue chiffon, the scar beneath her left eye a slender crescent bleached white by the spotlight. Her eyes, shadowed by dark, arched brows, revealed nothing.

‘Der Blaue Engel?’ asked Clare.

‘That’s her. Gretchen von Trotha. Not yet in all her glory. Then she’s quite something,’ said Ragnar. ‘Another?’

‘One more,’ said Clare. ‘Then home?’ Her interest was piqued.

‘Nicolai,’ called Ragnar. The barman filled Clare’s glass, his eyes on her face. ‘Enjoying the show?’ he asked.

‘It works for the audience,’ she said.

Gretchen moved effortlessly, disdain infusing her movements
with an erotic menace. The rowdy groups of men sat transfixed. She peeled off first one garment then another, until she stood naked except for her tattooed wings, a tinsel halo and the wisp of silk between her thighs.

A movement to Clare’s right drew her attention to D’Almeida’s table. A fat politician was snapping his fingers at the barman. Nicolai bent low for the man’s order. He looked up at Gretchen and nodded. A whispered word from Nicolai and she left the safety of the stage. The fat man leant back in his seat and beckoned her into the space between his splayed knees. She stepped closer, nipples glinting in the dim light as he tucked money into the thigh-high boot gripping her soft flesh. Her skin was milky; her limbs were smooth and firm. The shaved pubis lasciviously childlike as she twirled out of his grip and made her way to the lean man sitting alone at the table in the corner.

The man took a note and slipped it into her halo before standing up and sauntering out. Gretchen removed the rolled-up note and looked at it as she walked back to the stage, ignoring the beseeching, empty hands that reached after her.