Blood Rose (18 page)

‘I’m glad we could come,’ said Tamar. She settled herself onto a cement bench, cradling her belly between crossed knees. ‘I’ve been promising to take them on a picnic for weeks, but this business has taken all my time.’

‘It’s nice to catch my breath before I catch my plane,’ Clare
commented. The children splashed, slick as otters in the water, and Clare sipped her lemonade. ‘It doesn’t feel real out here.’

The breeze came up off the desert, hot and short-lived. When it dropped, the mantle of air settled again. Clare leant back against the tree. She was tired and the heat made her sleepy. Tamar unpacked the picnic basket, setting out mounds of white bread.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Butter these.’

Clare took the knife. It sliced through the margarine, separating into an ooze of bilious yellow oil. Tamar sliced cheese, waving away the clumsy flies flustering towards the exposed food. Slices of anaemic tomato wilted under plastic wrap.

‘How are you finding Walvis Bay the second time around?’ Tamar asked as Clare buttered the bread.

‘Quieter. Like half the town left in the middle of the night. Its soul seems to have gone.’

‘But it grows on one, despite itself and against one’s better judgement.’

Clare looked at the dunes, auburn tresses of sand rippling next to the black parting of the Kuiseb River. ‘I suppose it does,’ she said.

‘Your profile? How do you feel about it?’

‘I still feel like I’m missing something.’ Clare put the last buttered slices of bread on the plate. ‘Like a conversation I can hear through a door but that’s just too low to distinguish the words. I get the emotion, the tone, a sense of a dialogue, but the words elude me. Maybe being outside of all this will clear my head.’

‘Phiri called before we left. Captain Faizal should be here early next week. It’s all sorted.’

Riedwaan’s name lay between them. A challenge or an offering of sympathy, Clare wasn’t sure. She wondered what Tamar knew, if anything. Not that there was much left to know.

‘Aunty, Aunty, come and look!’ The children burst from the undergrowth, a flutter of shrieks and pigtails and wide-eyed horror. Tamar’s hand went straight for the pistol tucked inside her trousers, nestled next to the foetus, free-floating in its watery cave. A breeze curled off the dunes and around Clare’s neck, lifting the downy hairs.

‘What is it, Angela?’ said Tamar.

‘Come see, come see.’ The child was hysterical, hopping from one pink-sandalled foot to the other. Further up the river bed, the children had discovered a tunnel in the scrub that had grown up over three seasons of good rain. Clare had to bend as Angela and Tupac wove through the bush. The pathway twisted and turned, as disorientating as a maze. Some of the branches had been cut back to clear a path. The cloying stench of death filled the air. Clare’s blood ran cold as she thought of who might have been there before them.

The little girl stepped into a sun-dappled clearing. A semi-circle of stones faced a small cave in the sheer, black cliff face. In front of it was a makeshift altar; the stumps of a few candles leant drunkenly, melted by the heat. A small body hung limp, a shrivelled fruit among the profusion of white blossoms at the entrance to the clearing. Clare stepped forward to touch the corpse’s ginger fur. The skin was starting to slough off, leaving grotesque strips of exposed flesh. Flies clustered where its life had bubbled away.

‘Tupac, take your sister back to the picnic place,’ said Tamar.

Angela clung to her aunt, tears glistening on her plump cheeks. ‘Who do it? Who do it to the kitty, Aunty Tamar?’

Tamar squatted down beside her distraught niece and drew her into the circle of her arms. The child buried her head in Tamar’s shoulder.

Clare walked around the semi-circle. Faded Coke tins and
discarded cigarette butts littered the place, the milder brands bearing telltale lipstick stains. She picked one up. A menthol ultra-thin. A teenager’s nicotine starter pack.

‘I’m going to take her back to the car,’ said Tamar, gripping Angela firmly by the hand. ‘Will you check here, Clare? Come on, Tupac, you too.’

The undergrowth closed on Tamar and the children, leaving Clare alone. On the other side of the makeshift altar lay a brandy bottle and a red G-string. Clare took a tissue out of her pocket and picked up the wisp of stained underwear. It was dim inside the cave. Once her eyes had adjusted, though, Clare could make out the graffiti: Chesney and Minki. The girl’s name had been scored through when LaToyah had replaced Minki in Chesney’s affections. There wasn’t much else – a couple more empty bottles, a bottleneck with the remnants of a filter in it, a filthy old mattress. Unimaginative, small-town Satanism. A lizard bobbed on tensed elbows, liquid black on the sun-ravaged rocks, watching Clare duck into the tunnel of undergrowth.

‘You get a lot of this Satanic stuff?’ she asked Tamar when she got back to the picnic site.

Tamar had her niece on her lap. Tupac was sitting close to her too. He sidled away when Clare reappeared, an eleven-year-old sensitive about his image. Clare sat down opposite them.

‘There’ve been a few incidents: bored teenagers wearing black nail polish and experimenting with group sex. Nothing too serious.’

‘Crucifying cats is something else. The men I go for often start their careers torturing small animals.’

‘I want to go home, Aunty.’ Tamar stroked the hair out of Angela’s eyes and popped a piece of bread into her mouth.

Clare packed up the picnic. ‘Do you know anyone called Minki?’ she asked.

Tamar shook her head.

‘LaToyah?’

‘Dime a dozen in Narraville, LaToyahs,’ said Tamar. ‘Three in my street.’

‘And Chesney?’

‘I know him,’ said Tupac. It was the first time he had said a word. ‘Chesney used to go to my school, but then he left to go to the school in town, the one where you found that dead boy in the swing.’

The two women looked at each other over the children’s heads.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Tamar quietly, strapping Angela into her seat. They were all silent as they drove back to town through the gathering dusk.

Music blasted through the girl’s iPod as the bike hurtled through the desert. She snaked her arms under the driver’s leathers, and he accelerated, pluming dust behind the bike. It shimmered across the sinking sun as they passed the rusted no-entry sign. ‘Danger/Gevaar’ said the next one. The girl hopped off the bike and opened the gate. In among the trees were the remnants of three huts and a car wreck.

‘Who lives here?’ she asked, climbing back on the bike.

‘Nobody now,’ said her companion. ‘Some Topnaars used to, but the South African army kicked them out twenty years ago.’

The man hadn’t been this way in what … ten years, twelve? He hadn’t even thought of the place since his unit had given up, rolling south in their Bedfords when Walvis Bay was handed back to the Namibians. For their sins, he thought. What anyone wanted in this godforsaken dump was beyond him.

‘When’re you going to stop?’ the girl whined. It would be dark soon and she wanted a fire and a joint. The man was enjoying the feeling of a girl’s tits pressing into his back. It made him feel young again, like the soldier he had once been and not the overweight husband he had become.

‘Where’s the fucking road gone? It should be here.’ Instead of a track leading to a hut under a gum tree, there was a bank of sand, pocked with branches and other long-stranded flood debris.

‘That flood, a few years ago, it shifted the course of the river.
It must’ve blocked Memory Lane,’ said the girl matter-of-factly. ‘Let’s stay here. The desert’s all the same, anyway.’

The man parked the bike under a canopy of gnarled acacia, thinking of the girls he and some of the others in his unit used to pick up and bring out here. Army mattresses, they had called them. A couple of days in the desert made them docile, amenable. Not like this wild thing with the same name as his wife’s fancy perfume.

The girl had logs and kindling assembled before he had the panniers unpacked. She put a match to the grass and blew, showering red sparks across the satin sky. She leant back and offered the man a drag of her deftly rolled joint – another thing girls seemed to have learned to do in the last twenty years. He traded his hip flask for the joint.

The girl tilted her head back and he traced down her throat as she drank, stopping at the hollow between her collarbones where her breath fluttered below his thumb. She put his hand to her mouth, flicking her tongue along his fingers, clicking the piercing in the centre of her tongue against his wedding ring. Then his knee was between her thighs and he was spreading her legs and mounting her. He was finished before he’d really begun. The girl sighed, turning away to light a cigarette. He tried to kiss her, but she brushed him aside.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said, rummaging for food in the bag next to her, propped up on one elbow. She considered brushing her teeth, but the man had fallen asleep beside her, his arms around her stomach. She covered them both instead and lay, watching the stars wink, bright as lanterns in the branches of their tree canopy.

When the girl woke, it was dark. No moon. No wind either. She guessed it was two o’clock. Maybe three. The silence filled her ears, her lungs, making it difficult to breathe. She snuggled
back into the man’s arms, but the pressure of her bladder would not relent, so she wormed her way out from under the covers and felt around for the torch and her shoes. She picked her way towards a denser patch of darkness on the edge of their campsite.

When she flicked on her torch, nosing the light ahead of her into the trees, he was waiting for her. Grinning.

The girl’s scream ricocheted into the night.

Keening. High and wild. It feathered fear up Clare’s spine. She sat up, putting her hands to her temples and trying to order her thoughts in the wake of the nightmare. She had been running, faster and faster. Her feet had been bare and bleeding, the flesh ribboned by the broken shells littering a beach. Spectral hands plucked at her legs, pulling her down towards the lagoon, wrapping around her throat. Clare looked around her room and orientated herself. She had been asleep. It was just a dream.

She was reaching for the water next to her bed when the terrible keening started again. Of course. Her cellphone.

‘What?’ Manners would be pushing it at three in the morning.

‘Dr Hart? I woke you?’ She tried to place the voice. ‘It’s Van Wyk.’

Of course it was. The receding dread of her dream circled back.

‘What?’ she said again.

‘Another body. I’ll pick you up.’

‘Where? Who?’

‘From your cottage,’ said Van Wyk. ‘I’ll pick you up.’

‘I meant where was the body found? Who is it?’

‘Out in the Kuiseb, the old military site past the delta. Couple of bikers found him. I wouldn’t be disturbing your beauty sleep if he didn’t fit your bill.’

‘How long have I got?’ Clare needed coffee.

‘Ten minutes.’ Van Wyk hung up.

Clare made coffee and drank it while she dressed. Jeans, anorak. It would be cold out. She was finishing a second cup when Van Wyk pulled up in the double cab. He handed her a packet of rusks and a flask. Clare bit off a piece of the rough, dried biscuit.

‘Thanks.’ She hadn’t thought that she would be hungry.

‘My mother makes them.’

Clare hadn’t thought of Van Wyk with a family either. If her brain had been functioning better, she might have ventured a question about them. Instead, she kept quiet, watching the streets slip past.

Tamar was waiting for them, her house dark except for the light in the kitchen. ‘Is Elias out there already?’ she asked, getting into the back of the vehicle.

‘He took the call, Captain,’ Van Wyk said. ‘So he went straight out.’

‘Is an ambulance on its way?’

‘Karamata said there’s no need,’ said Van Wyk, skirting the sleeping town. ‘It would be impossible to get one out there, anyway.’

The road forked at the salt mine, which gleamed white under the floodlights. Van Wyk turned into the dark cleft of the delta. He drove fast along the twisting track, never hesitating about which tributary road to take, which to speed past. He veered left, heading for a dense thicket of trees. The track narrowed and the tamarisk trees cut out the starlight. Van Wyk braked. Ahead of them was a gate, the only breach in an endless garland of barbed wire. Clare could just make out the sign: ‘Danger/Gevaar’.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘It’s part of an old military site,’ said Tamar. ‘The whole delta
used to be the army’s. This place has been off-limits so long that everyone forgot about it.’

‘Not those little lovebirds,’ said Van Wyk. He switched on the hunting lights, serried like evil eyes on the roof of the truck, flooding the clearing with white light.

A whippet-thin girl was hunched over her knees, a jacket wrapped tight across her back. Her eyes sparked with defiance. Fifteen, thought Clare. Sixteen, if you wanted to believe it. A man stood near his motorbike. His wedding ring glinted as he took a deep drag of his cigarette. Ponytail, pushing forty. The proverbial rabbit in the headlights. Wife and children blown for the brief thrill of a nubile body in his hands. The dead boy was slumped against a tree on the edge of the circle of light. A still from a horror movie until Karamata stepped out of the shadows, unfreezing the frame.

‘Elias,’ said Tamar, getting out of the vehicle, ‘phone Helena Kotze and tell her I need her here this time. This one we’ll autopsy tonight.’

‘Has he been moved?’ asked Clare, approaching the body cautiously.

Karamata shook his head.

Tamar handed Clare a pair of latex gloves, then pulled on her own pair before lowering herself next to the dead boy. A child drooped in jest against a tree at the end of a game. He had been secured with riempie, the same strips of cured leather that had kept the shroud around Kaiser Apollis’s corpse.

‘Same shroud for this one.’ Tamar lifted away the gauzy fabric and shone her torch into the boy’s ruined face, revealing a mouth wide open in amazement and a forehead that was nothing but shards of bone and burnt flesh.