Blood Rose (37 page)

‘Water,’ Riedwaan begged.

The woman turned to look at him, not a glimmer of compassion in her pale-blue eyes. ‘You must learn to ask nicely.’ A shadow passed over her face. Pure menace.

She pressed the dropper into the smooth skin on Riedwaan’s chest. The acrid smell of charred skin hit him before the pain convulsed his body. He bit down on his bottom lip, the taste of his own blood sharp on his tongue.

‘A perfect circle,’ the woman said, admiring the mark she had made. She lifted the rod to do it again.

‘Give me some water,’ croaked Riedwaan, watching her face, trying to judge how far she would go, how much he could take. ‘Please.’

‘You can do better than that,’ she laughed, the soft red dunes echoing the curves of her body, but she put the rod down.

Riedwaan felt like he was walking a tightrope in the dark. If he was sure-footed, he might rekindle some empathy in her. If he got it wrong, he would fall, triggering a release of cruelty.

He thought of Clare, the gentleness in her face when she thought no one was watching her. Yasmin, his daughter. She would be calling tomorrow at their usual time.

Riedwaan knew if he drifted, he was going to pass out. And if the woman drifted any further, the slender thread of empathy would snap and he would die. He fought off the siren call of unconsciousness.

Shift things.

That’s what he had learnt when he had trained as a hostage negotiator. Shift things and get them to talk, to trust you. Then the hostages have a chance of survival. It seemed like a rather fragile straw to cling to now that he was the hostage. Unlike Clare, he was a betting man, but he didn’t like to think of his odds.

‘Talk to me,’ said Riedwaan, watching the woman, ignoring the stabbing pain in his bound arms, his seared chest. She was so at home, preparing things. The fire, the rope, the gun. Riedwaan had not picked a winner in this charnel-house hostess. He had to bring her back to him.

‘Give me some water.’ He said the words with an authority he did not feel. His tongue was swelling in his throat.

The woman glided towards him and held the flask to his
mouth, the liquid pouring in, hot and choking at the back of his throat. She was so close Riedwaan could feel the warmth of her body, smell the unsettling, feral mix of perfume and adrenaline. Her hair swung over her shoulder and brushed his skin. It was bleached and porous, the colour and texture of dried grass left from last year’s rain. The desert wind made it crackle with static.

‘Just swallow,’ she said, holding his chin expertly. Riedwaan choked, his lungs burned, but the alcohol gave him a kickstart. ‘It’s only the first time that’s really bad,’ she added.

Riedwaan looked at her face. Her cheekbones, the sweep of her eyebrows were sculpted, beautiful, but the eyes were blank. All he could see in them was his own reflection, twice in miniature.

‘Who taught you that?’ he asked. He could imagine. She had such a perfect mouth, full and red. Made for a certain kind of love.

The woman sat down opposite him, intrigued by his question.

‘A boyfriend?’ guessed Riedwaan. ‘A teacher?’

She clasped her slim arms around her knees, as if folding her forgotten vulnerability away from his prying gaze.

‘Your mother’s boyfriend?’

The woman said nothing, but she shivered. Riedwaan was on target. He had to keep her talking.

‘Your mother?’ The wind had dropped and Riedwaan’s words reverberated in the sudden lull. The pain in his arms was unbearable. He was glad of it. It distracted him from the charred skin on his chest. He inched himself higher up the tree.

‘Not my real mother,’ the woman spoke at last, though she did not look at Riedwaan. ‘The woman who took me after my mother died.’

‘Tell me what she made you do,’ Riedwaan coaxed.

The woman got up and walked away as if she had not heard Riedwaan. She walked into the hut, leaving him alone. Riedwaan moved his body a little higher up the tree. The trunk narrowed a little, a dry cycle must have stunted its growth.

When the woman returned, she was holding a box of menthol cigarettes and a lighter. Riedwaan, though desperate for nicotine, feared what she might do. ‘Can you—?’

‘He was old,’ the woman interrupted. ‘In the army, but he always smelt dirty. He used to come to see her.’

Riedwaan nodded. ‘And he decided he liked the look of you?’

Again, she seemed not to hear him. ‘I choked and he hit me, but she made me finish.’ The memory of it danced like a blue flame as she raised her expressionless eyes to stare at Riedwaan. ‘Once you get used to it,’ she said, ‘it’s such an easy way to pay the rent.’

Riedwaan kept moving his body upwards. He could flex his wrists a little now. ‘How old were you?’ he asked.

The woman picked up a stick and jabbed it into the sand. ‘I was eleven.’

Riedwaan pictured the hand, nails lacquered red, holding the child’s small, round chin to wipe her face clean.

‘Tell me about those boys you shot,’ said Riedwaan.

‘What about them?’ she asked.

‘So close,’ he said. ‘You did it so close. I’m impressed.’

Her eyes glittered. An arc of light again. He had to keep her facing him.

‘Tell me about it, what it felt like.’

She hesitated.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to rush this, do you? When I’m gone, then your fun is over.’ It was true; he could see it in her face. Clare would be impressed with him, he thought. His
new conversational ways with women. ‘How did you feel?’ he pressed.

‘How do you think?’

‘Like no one could argue with you. Powerful.’

‘More than that.’ She came closer.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me where it all began.’

‘I can tell you where it’s going to end.’

‘With me?’

The woman smiled at him and lit a cigarette. ‘Why not? Any requests?’

‘A cigarette,’ he said.

She held the cigarette to his lips.

‘But we aren’t at the ending yet, are we? So why don’t you start with the first one, Fritz Woestyn?’

‘Oh, was that his name?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t do him.’

‘Who killed him, then?’

The woman hesitated. ‘Don’t be clever with me. You think I’d betray him, my guardian angel. I told you, you need one.’

‘Nicanor Jones?’

‘He was sweet,’ said the woman. ‘My dry run.’

‘The others?’

‘Those were all mine. You’ll see later,’ she said. ‘I’ve learnt to be a good shot.’

‘I can’t wait,’ muttered Riedwaan.

The woman stirred the fire with the fence dropper. He didn’t think he could endure another session. ‘Why?’ he asked. It was a weak question, he knew, but he had to do something.

‘Why what?’ the woman shrugged.

‘Why did you do it? Love?’

‘I suppose you could call it that.’ She considered the notion.

‘Who are we waiting for, out here in the middle of nowhere?’ Riedwaan asked.

‘This time’ – she leaned close to him – ‘it’ll be just the two of us. Tête-à-tête.’

‘So why did you do it?’

‘It made me feel. He made me feel, standing close to me. Here.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Close.’

Riedwaan could feel it with her. The man behind her, close, his hands under her elbows, adjusting them, helping her aim, sliding back the smooth upper arms, under the breasts. Stepping back as she fired to watch the dénouement. There didn’t seem any reason why it shouldn’t be pleasurable.

‘Why did the Topnaar move them?’ Riedwaan asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, agitated.

‘I don’t know who moved them. Nobody’s business, but ours.’

‘And why didn’t you stop?’

‘We had to finish what we started.’ She looked at him, surprised that this logic had eluded him. ‘That is what he taught me; to finish what you start.’ She stirred the fire, mesmerised by its flames. ‘And I always pay what I owe.’

‘So now you get the clean-up?’

Rage flared in the woman’s eyes. ‘He’s not like that.’

Her phone purred on cue. She fished it out of her jeans and looked at the screen. Riedwaan watched the pulse at the base of her slender throat. He inched his arms up the tree, closer to where it narrowed. Blood oozed where his skin tore on the rough bark.

‘Who?’ he managed to say. ‘Who’s not like that?’

The woman laughed, the sound low, malignant. ‘You think you’re so clever, making me talk to you, distracting me. You think I haven’t seen it before?’ she sneered. ‘You’ll stop being so full of yourself when you meet him. He’ll fix you as soon as he’s finished.’

‘Finished with what?’

‘Your little doctor friend.’

Riedwaan was quiet. The stakes had just notched higher, and the woman knew it.

‘You want to see?’ She held up her cellphone, so Riedwaan could see the screen: Clare, half-turned, startled, in a narrow passageway.

Horror made him lucid. Riedwaan played his last card. ‘You believe he’s coming back for you?’ he asked.

‘He’s coming,’ said the woman, petulantly.

‘He’s finished with you. He didn’t even bother to kill you, did he?’ The air pulsed. The wind was rising again, fast, and visibility was dropping.

For a moment, the ghost of the broken child the woman had been softened the carapace of her adult face. But only for a moment. It was gone when she started to strip. She unbuttoned her shirt. Off it came and her bra, her jeans, the shoes, the watch, even her rings.

Riedwaan watched her, riveted. A quick shower and any traces of his blood on her skin would be gone. This perfect woman, naked except for the wings tattooed on her back and the pistol in her right hand. She flicked off the safety catch. She was so close, he could feel the warmth of her. It chilled him. She touched the gun against his forehead – cold, like a dog’s snout, and stepped back.

Knees soft, elbows locked.

She breathed in slowly.

Then out.

She knew what she was doing.

Visibility was getting worse. Clare could see a few metres ahead. That was it. The wind was a keening banshee. It hurled the sand in stinging waves off the tops of the dune, driving them down like vengeful furies that flayed the skin and tore at the eyes and ears. Her mouth was soon filled with choking red dust. Clare stopped to orientate herself. The stand of trees was thick, the black bark coated with mica. She fought her way towards the outflung arm of dune in the lee of the wind. Here, the wind was less constricting and she could make out the outlines of trees. She was close. She had to get to the top of the dune. She looked for the signs of human habitation that would be there. Eucalyptus. Here in the desert it would have been planted and nurtured for some time so that its delving roots could tap into the subterranean lake where the Namib hoarded its water. She closed her eyes and pictured the aerial map. If she pulled it out here, it would be whipped out of her hands.

She had seen the eucalyptus earlier, exactly as Oscar had drawn it, with its dark spire squared against the undulating horizontality of the desert. She had seen it and then it had disappeared, so it must be behind the ruff of dunes that had formed in the last flood. She would have to go up and over the dune she was sheltering against. Due east. At least the wind would help her orientate herself: she had to face down the valkyries of sand that screamed past her towards the sea. It was horrible going forward: two steps forward was one backwards.
Her throat was dry and cracked, and her muscles screamed at her to stop. There was a momentary lull. An absolute and deafening silence fell. The dust hung in abeyance, waiting for the next onslaught.

Janus Renko. The unfamiliar name. The hard face familiar. And not just from Der Blaue Engel. The chord it had struck echoed through the chaos of sandy wind. The quiet kitchen. Clare saw it with startling clarity: the woman with her gun-metal hair, pointing out her husband in the desert. In the photo, one arm draped over a friend, the unknown man standing aloof, shadowed. The same face, distilled down to its cruel essence. The half-empty ship. The numbers: 2, 3 and 5. Coded for her, inscribed upon the dead boys’ chests by Spyt, the desert’s silent witness. The drums loaded, not with the obscuring load of fish, but with the deadly treasure dug up by five boys, watched, found and delivered by Spyt.

Two, three, five. Unleashed in air or water, a stealthy death no one could fight. Enriched uranium: more than a pension that. A fortune for anyone willing to sell mass murder to the jostling numbers eager and able to make a dirty bomb. She couldn’t think of that now. Not here. She was concentrating on one life. One death.

She was on the summit. Below, a vortex of red dust writhed beneath the yoke of the wind. Her heart thudded at the thought that she had lost her way, but the storm was so wild, the only thing to do was to struggle towards the tree she had glimpsed earlier. It offered the only sanctuary. She plunged over the edge of a dune, into the comparative silence in the well of sand. She rested, recovering from the assault of the wind.

Ahead of her was a mound where the desert had heaped against something. Shelter. She made her way to it. The shape, the outline, a flash of colour. The familiarity of it caught like a
cry in the throat. She crawled forward and collapsed against the mound.

Mara.

Clare repressed the hot flare of panic. Face to face with her, the girl’s expression rigid, the eye sockets already emptied. The final bullet a rose on her forehead. Beautiful, for a split second. Mara had been dead a good twenty-four hours, by the looks of her. The wind howled over the top of her discarded body, her outstretched hands covered in sand. Clare brushed the insects away from the girl’s face, curling her hand into hers. Mara’s paisley jacket was open, hanging loose from her body, revealing her white shirt. A few strands of hair stuck in the bloodstain drying on her sleeve.

Clare touched the stain. It was still moist. She picked up one of the blood-sticky hairs. It was a deep auburn where it wasn’t stained. The colour of the dunes where Mara lay.

It could only be Oscar’s hair. There was a faint impression on the sand where the boy had curled, nestling into the stiffening curve of the dead girl’s body. He had crawled here, inching his way across the dune, as she had, to find shelter. Clare shivered, looking out into the wind-blurred sand. There was no sign of the boy.