Blood Rose (28 page)

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ said Clare, tension coiled in her belly. ‘I feel so stupid, that I set myself up. Van Wyk and Goagab had me checkmated at that press conference. All that bullshit about Cain and Abel, nomads being vagrants. Just an excuse to persecute people whose land you want.’ Clare took a deep drag of the cigarette. ‘Yes, it was my idea. Yes, I went out there. Yes, there was evidence that the bodies were in Spyt’s cave at some stage. And me like an idiot, saying he didn’t kill them.’ Clare put out her half-smoked cigarette when the waitress brought their food. ‘While Goagab and his goons are flattening the desert in their 4x4s, there’s a killer sitting eating dinner and planning Number 6.’

‘There’s nothing more we can do tonight,’ Riedwaan pointed out.

‘What’re we going to be able to do tomorrow?’ snapped Clare. ‘Van Wyk has pushed Tamar into a bureaucratic corner and me and you are supposed to be off the case.’

‘Not quite,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But let’s leave that for tomorrow.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘Right now the moon is nearly full. I’m here, you’re here, so why don’t we talk about something else?’ ‘Okay,’ said Clare. She took her hand away and fussed with her table mat. ‘Suggest something.’

‘Smoking maybe,’ said Riedwaan.

Clare didn’t laugh.

‘Me? You?’

‘Me and you?’ Clare toyed with the idea of asking him about
Yasmin, or of telling him she was sorry that she hadn’t listened to him earlier, but she couldn’t find a way to start. She gave up and pushed her food around her plate. She looked at Riedwaan, looked away.

‘Talking about something other than work take away your appetite?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just that my stomach’s in a knot.’

‘Does your having dinner with me mean I’m forgiven?’

‘Don’t rush me.’ Clare picked up her wine glass. ‘I’m deciding.’

‘I’m useless on parole,’ Riedwaan warned. ‘It brings out the worst in me.’

‘You’re not—’

Clare’s phone rang. She looked at the screen. ‘I’ve got to take this,’ she said. ‘It’s Constance.’

Riedwaan shook his head at her, irritated, but Clare had already taken the call. He waited for a second, but all her attention was focused on the identical twin murmuring into her ear, drawing her away from him and into a place he could never follow.

He picked up his cigarettes and went to the bar.

The barman poured him a sympathetic double whisky.

The dark was thinning when Clare awoke, smiling, expecting to find herself circled in Riedwaan’s arm. Then she remembered that she had gone to bed alone. She got up and opened the curtains. A sodden west wind was blowing. She pulled on her tracksuit and a waterproof jacket, zipping her phone into her pocket as she left her room. She headed north towards the harbour. Once she was past the Burning Shore Lodge, she found her stride, finally eliminating all thoughts of Riedwaan.

Sweat bloomed under Clare’s shirt. She slowed as the path narrowed, snaking between the lagoon shore and a new hotel. Discarded building materials and other debris littered the track. She waved at the little red-haired boy sitting huddled on a bench.

‘Hello, Oscar,’ she called as she went past. ‘You’re up early.’

He raised one hand in reply, his face solemn.

She whipped her phone out of her pocket when it rang.

‘Riedwaan?’ He had said he’d call first thing.

There was nothing but a hollow echo.

‘Hello?’

No answer. The chill played over Clare’s skin. She ducked behind a wall when her phone rang again.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Dr Hart?’ An unfamiliar voice. Faraway. Foreign.

‘It is.’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I know it’s early.’

‘Who is this?’ asked Clare.

‘She didn’t arrive,’ a woman said.

‘Who didn’t arrive?’

‘Mara.’ There was a break in the woman’s voice. ‘This is Lily Thomson. Mara’s mother.’

‘How did you get my number?’ Clare asked.

‘I phoned the police station. The man I spoke to, Van Wyk’ – she struggled with the unfamiliar name – ‘said it was too soon to do anything. He gave me your number when I asked for you.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at home again, aren’t I?’ Lily Thomson replied. Clare envisaged the bleak courtyard of the housing estate that Mara had escaped. ‘I went to Heathrow.’

‘Yes?’ prompted Clare, unease prickling the nape of her neck.

‘She didn’t come. She was meant to be on that flight. That’s all I know and all I can find out, because she’s not answering her phone.’

‘Might she have changed her mind?’

Lily Thomson clutched at Clare’s straw. ‘That’s what I said to myself: she’s changed her mind. I tried her mobile.’ Her voice broke. ‘But she’s not picking up.’

Clare pictured Lily Thomson in her spring-cleaned flat. The supermarket flowers on the kitchen table. Mara’s single bed made up in crisp white sheets, a chocolate under the pillow, teddies perked.

‘Mara told me about you coming there from South Africa,’ Lily Thomson continued. ‘About the investigation. She was so upset about those boys. That’s just how she is, our Mara: always responsible, trying to make the world right, especially after that trip that went all wrong.’

‘What trip?’ asked Clare. Anxiety tightened her spine. Mara and her soccer team. She had known the murdered boys better than anyone else had.

‘She took them camping or something,’ said Mrs Thomson. ‘She felt so guilty about leaving them out there in the desert like that. But I told her it was fine, if it was the only time she could see her boyfriend, that Juan Carlos, then why not? She was so head-over-heels and she knew she didn’t have long with him.’

Clare thought of the last time she had seen Mara, entwined with Juan Carlos, sharing fish and chips, glowing with whatever he had been doing to her to make her so hungry.

‘Did you report her missing?’

‘I tried. They said they have this all the time with travellers, with volunteers. They meet a new person, go somewhere else. To Botswana. Maybe Cape Town. That the mothers panic because it’s Africa. Van Wyk said to wait twenty-four hours.’ She stifled a sob. ‘But when do I start counting, Dr Hart? When she didn’t come I thought the worst. I thought …’

Panic hit Lily Thomson, doubling her over. It was impossible for her to say what she had thought, as if saying the words would conjure up what she feared most.

‘Please find her for me, Dr Hart. I’m so far from there. You speak English. You can understand me. You knew her.’

Lily Thomson caught it. Clare did too, that slip into the past tense.

Clare set off at a run for George Meyer’s gloomy house where Mara had rented a room. She clung to the hope that she would find her and Juan Carlos asleep in a tangle of sheets and salty limbs. When she got there, the only signs of life were in the kitchen. Clare knocked over Oscar’s fishing rod standing at the back door. She righted it, disentangling it from the roll of washing line as Gretchen, wrapped in her sky-blue robe, opened the door.

‘Yes?’ Gretchen jabbed her cigarette into her mouth, still stained with last night’s lipstick. Smoke curled up to the ceiling.

George Meyer and Oscar were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, Oscar staring down at the rheumy eye of a fried egg. He looked up at Clare, his face lighting up. George Meyer paled.

‘Dr Hart, please come in,’ he said. ‘How can we help?’

‘I’m looking for Mara,’ Clare said as she walked inside.

‘She left.’ Gretchen tossed her cigarette into the remains of her coffee.

‘When?’

‘Yesterday, must’ve been,’ said Meyer. ‘The Lufthansa flight.’

‘You didn’t see her?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I saw her on Sunday evening. She had supper with me and Oscar and then she went out with her Spanish friend.’

‘How was she going to go to the airport?’

‘I offered her a lift, but she said she was sorted,’ said Gretchen. ‘Go and look; her room’s empty. She took all her stuff.’

‘What time did she leave?’ Clare asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Gretchen’s mouth twisted, thin as wire, around a fresh cigarette. ‘I work late. I must’ve been asleep.’

Oscar coughed, his delicate ribcage heaving under his shirt. ‘Do you want to show me Mara’s room?’ Clare asked. ‘Do you mind?’ She turned to George Meyer.

He shook his head.

Oscar slipped his hand into hers and led her down the passage to Mara’s room.

Stripped bare of Mara’s belongings, the room was smaller than Clare remembered. The overhead light had been left burning, the bulb feeble in the daylight. A pile of soiled bed linen was bundled on the floor. On the bedside table were a couple of abandoned paperbacks and an old
People
magazine. Clare sat down on the bed. The little boy sat next to her. The mattress sagged, leaning the child’s warm body against her.

‘Where is she, Oscar?’

Oscar’s hand in hers was clammy, as he tugged her off the bed and led her to the other side of the room. There he lifted up a loose square of carpet to reveal a shallow depression in the concrete.

‘What is this?’

Oscar lifted out a cheerful yellow and red Kodak envelope, taking out some folded drawings, childish representations of Walvis Bay, the desert, and trees against orange sand.

‘Did you do these?’

Oscar nodded again, pointing to where he had written his name. An O bisected with an M inside a heart.

‘They’re good.’

Clare took out the photographs. They were mostly of Mara. With her mother in London, looking triumphant and nervous at Heathrow. Standing against a Tropic of Capricorn road sign, her arms spread, bisecting the featureless plain behind her. Surrounded by grinning children at a school. Camping in the Namib. Her soccer team holding a cup, looking like the cats that had the cream.

Oscar was growing agitated, tugging at Clare’s arm. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

He pointed at the pictures again.

‘Are you upset that she left the drawing you gave her?’

Oscar inclined his head. His expression was unreadable.

‘Was she in a hurry to—?’

Oscar was shaking his head before she was halfway through her sentence.

‘You don’t think she would’ve left a present behind?’

Oscar nodded, this time certain. He turned to face the window that overlooked the concrete yard of the house and lifted his index finger, seeming to point to the sky. Clare frowned,
struggling to see through the grime and dew misting up the glass. Oscar touched the pane. He wasn’t pointing; he was drawing, tracing a familiar shape in the condensation on the window: the scored-through heart on Clare’s bedroom window which had so startled her.

‘That was you,’ she said, ‘watching me.’

Oscar’s nod was almost imperceptible.

‘You were checking on me. Did you watch Mara, too?’

The child nodded, tears welling in his eyes. Clare’s heart went out to the fragile boy. The little Clare knew of Mara convinced her that she would not have rejected the child’s shy gesture of love.

‘And Mara wouldn’t leave a present behind, because she loved you,’ she guessed.

Oscar nodded again.

‘What happened to her, Oscar?’

He shook his head violently and then stopped, his eyes fixed behind Clare’s shoulder. She turned to see Gretchen leaning against the door frame. Clare wondered how long she’d been there.

‘Silly boy,’ Gretchen laughed, low in her throat. ‘Why would she keep your stupid pictures?’

‘When did you see her last?’ Clare asked Gretchen.

‘Sunday night,’ said Gretchen, giving it some thought. ‘She was at the bar of Der Blaue Engel. I was working.’

‘Who was she with?’

‘Juan Carlos.’ Gretchen was quick to answer. ‘Her boyfriend. She loved him, Oscar, not you.’

‘Do you know what time she left?’ asked Clare. She felt Oscar shake.

‘I did my show,’ said Gretchen. ‘I left straight after. Maybe two?

When I got home, everything was dark. I watched TV for a while, then I went to bed. She would’ve left while I was still asleep. Her flight was nine-thirty. So check-in time seven-thirty for international.’

‘You didn’t hear a taxi come? A car?’ Clare put her hand on Oscar’s shoulder.

‘No,’ Gretchen said blandly. ‘I sleep deeply. Is there anything else we can help you with, Dr Hart?’

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Not now.’

Gretchen lingered in the doorway until Clare stood up to leave, then she turned and ascended the stairs, her blue gown sweeping over the steps. Oscar tucked the envelope into Clare’s jacket pocket as they walked back to the kitchen. He fiddled with his fishing bag, humming to himself to fill the space around him, and then he took his rod from behind the kitchen door, averting his eyes from Mara’s empty room. The sound of running water came from the bathroom upstairs.

‘You’ll excuse us, Dr Hart?’ said Meyer. ‘I have to get to work.’

George Meyer picked up his keys and walked Clare to the front gate. ‘Be a good boy, Oscar,’ he said, as the boy wheeled his bike around to the front.

‘Call me if you hear anything about Mara.’ Clare said it to George, but her hand was resting on Oscar’s cheek. She felt him nod.

Clare cut back alongside the rubbish-snagged razor wire that sequestered the harbour from the town. She called Tamar, but her phone went straight to voicemail, so she left a message with the news about Mara. She turned in at the police station. At seven in the morning, the parking lot was empty except for Van Wyk’s white 4x4.

She pushed open the office door, her running shoe protesting against the linoleum floor. Van Wyk was engrossed in whatever was on his computer screen, his hand on the mouse. One click and the image shut down. So did his expression.

‘I’m surprised to see you here, Dr Hart.’ The hurried crackle told Clare that he had hit sleep mode. ‘After yesterday. But if you’re looking for Captain Damases, you’re a bit early.’

‘I’m always early,’ said Clare, wondering what had piqued Van Wyk’s interest in office work. ‘But this morning I also had a call. So I thought I’d come and see you about it.’

‘The media?’ Van Wyk said ‘For another interview with our … expert from South Africa? I’d say your case is dead in the water. It’s just a matter of time before we find that old desert beggar.’ He leant back in his chair, arms behind his head, legs splayed, the denim tight across his thighs. The door clicked shut behind Clare, making her jump.