Blood Rose (8 page)

It was a release dropping the weight of the day with her clothes and replacing them with her tracksuit.

The lagoon stretched towards the horizon, burnished a deep copper by the setting sun. A swathe of flamingos took off in a startled flurry of pink. They whirled out to sea before banking to fly inland, stragglers trailing like the tails of a kite. A boy of about seven hurtled past Clare on his bicycle, his hair set aflame by the setting sun. He waved shyly before turning in to the yard of a dilapidated double-storey house.

The wind was picking up, carrying the ice of the Benguela current with it. The last kite-boarders were peeling off their
wetsuits and packing up their equipment. Clare was glad of her hood. The thick grey fabric cocooned her, the rhythmic thud of her feet on the ground as familiar now as her own heartbeat. For the first time since she had opened that Pandora’s box in Riedwaan’s car, her mood lifted. She ran faster, pushing the thought of him from her mind, burying it beneath the task that lay ahead of her.

Some problems are better buried. The boy on the swing, for instance; he would have been less trouble if he had been buried. To the killer, at any rate. Clare wondered what lesson had been intended.

She reached the end of the paved boulevard, but she wasn’t ready to go back to the empty cottage yet. She kept on, running past the arc of streetlights and towards the salt marshes. Beyond them, if she remembered correctly, lay the Kuiseb Delta, an area of treacherous tributaries and restless sand blowing off the dunes. She repressed an atavistic fear of the dark and pressed on into the wind, losing herself in the comforting rhythm of her loping stride. A truck materialised without warning, forcing her off the road.

‘Hey!’ she yelled after it, fright making her furious. She stopped, leaning forward, trying to get her heart to slow down. The vehicle accelerated into the thickening fog, flashing its hazard lights in apology. It was time to go back.

Clare turned towards town, the wind at her back now, the chatter of the sea birds feeding in the shallow water to her left. She rounded a dune, planted with a copse of dusty tamarisks. The trees cut out the sound of the lagoon, but here the wind carried the faint, percussive echo of unfamiliar footsteps. The sound of it goosefleshed Clare’s arms and made her stomach feel hollow. She picked up her pace, certain now that she could also hear the sound of breath rasping in lungs unused to running.

Just before she broke free of the trees, a wiry arm snaked round her, yanking her backwards. The other arm twisted into her hoodie, snapping her neck back. Clare kicked hard backwards. There was a sharp gasp of pain as her foot reached a shin, but the arms around her body did not lessen their hold. Her hood had pulled tight across her throat. She could smell him, the feral tang of adrenaline and wood smoke on his skin. Clare pulled forward, but that made it more difficult to breathe, so she leaned her weight in to her attacker, using the momentary slackness in his arms to twist loose. They both fell onto the damp sand, Clare beneath him. She calculated the distance to the lights beyond the trees. Three hundred metres. The takeaway restaurant she had passed earlier would still be open. She needed fifteen seconds, twenty at the most. She looked at her attacker, trying to see if he had a weapon. There was no glint of steel in the dim light. No knife out. No gun. Clare took a deep breath and fought again to slow her heart rate.

‘I’m sorry, Miss.’ The voice was light, almost girlish. Not what Clare had expected. So was his body, lighter than hers, now that she thought about it. ‘But I need to talk to you,’ the voice said.

Clare’s heart was still hammering against her ribs. She took a breath, trying to slow it down. He wouldn’t be the first man to attack a woman and say he just wanted to talk. But it gave her a gap. ‘Let me sit up,’ she said, the steadiness of her voice hiding her panic.

The figure of a young boy came into focus. ‘Don’t run away,’ he pleaded.

‘I won’t,’ said Clare, although the unwashed smell of him turned her stomach. She moved slowly so as not to startle him. Still no knife that she could see. She realised now that she was sitting up that she was taller than him.

‘I saw you outside the bakery today.’ Clare’s heart was returning to normal. ‘Lazarus. That’s your name.’

The boy nodded, pleased that she had remembered.

Clare stood up cautiously. The boy rose with her. He came up to her shoulder. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got nothing on me.’

‘I’m scared,’ said the boy.

‘You’re scared,’ said Clare.

‘Nobody helps us. Sometimes we die,’ said Lazarus, ‘but then it’s just a drunk person who didn’t mean to kill us dead.’

‘Is that what happened with Kaiser?’ Clare asked gently.

A car pulled in to the lot outside the takeaway, the shards of light from its beams raking through the trees, the glare catching the boy’s face. He looked very vulnerable, very young.

‘Kaiser, he went to stay with his sister.’ The boy blurted the words out. ‘He thought he’d be safe with her.’

‘That’s the last you saw of him?’

The boy nodded. ‘Friday morning. He went to town.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Clare.

The boy shifted his weight. ‘I don’t know. No one saw him. He never came back.’

‘Lazarus, I’m going to start walking now,’ said Clare, moving slowly so as not to alarm him. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘You go home, Miss,’ Lazarus said, glancing nervously in the direction of the car. ‘I’ll be in trouble if someone sees me with you. We go to jail if we bother the tourists.’ He looked down at his scuffed shoes. ‘Mr Goagab said so.’

‘Okay,’ said Clare. She checked instinctively for her keys and her phone. They were both still in her pocket. Clare looked Lazarus in the eye. ‘Was there anything specific you wanted to tell me?’

His gaze slid away. He shook his head.

‘Okay,’ said Clare again. ‘But you find me if you hear anything. Just don’t knock me down again.’

‘There are people who won’t like you if you help us. Be careful, Miss.’

‘Who won’t like it?’ asked Clare. She looked at Lazarus, but it was too dark to read his expression.

‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘There are so many people who think we’re just trouble.’

‘Is that what happened with Kaiser?’ Clare asked a second time. Another car turned in to the parking lot. Clare put her hand up to shield her eyes. When she turned to Lazarus for an explanation, he had blended into the darkness cascading in from the desert. Like a ghost. The thought made her shiver.

She was glad she had left the lights on in her room; the yellow light made it seem like a haven amidst the unlit cottages. She let herself in, locking the door behind her before taking a shower.

When she was dry and dressed, she poured herself a glass of wine and made toast. Then she fanned the dockets around her on the bed and set to work. Monday’s Child: Kaiser Apollis. Nicanor Jones: Wednesday’s Child. Fritz Woestyn: Saturday’s Child. She was becoming accustomed to the unfamiliar names, but she had to reach behind the violence of their deaths to conjure an image of what they had been alive. She picked up a news clipping about the homeless soccer team. The key to the dead was in the living. To find their killer, Clare would have to resuscitate, if only for a moment, the laughing boys they had been, taking a shot at the goal posts at the end of a dusty soccer pitch.

It took Clare three cups of coffee to get going the following morning. Tamar arrived early to take her to the school. The streets were still empty, and wide – wide enough for an ox-wagon to turn. A hundred years ago, they would have been the only form of transport into the waterless interior. The dusty streets would have been the only way inland for the ingredients of civilisation – tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol, and later guns – and the route out for colonial spoils – copper, uranium, gold and diamonds. The only reason anyone would live here, Clare thought, is to take a cut of whatever passes through.

It was five past seven when Tamar stopped before the school’s locked gate. The caretaker eyed them warily, but waved when he recognised Tamar.

‘Herman Shipanga,’ Tamar said to Clare. ‘He found the body.’

‘When will the school re-open?’ Clare asked.

‘Maybe Thursday; otherwise next week. The headmaster Erasmus took it badly. I was surprised. He was such a tough guy when he was in the army.’

‘South African?’

‘Ja, he took Namibian citizenship and stayed on after they pulled out in ’94.’

‘Did many people do that?’

‘A few. Some said they loved this place. For others it was a good way of avoiding Bishop Tutu and his Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Us up north of the Orange River, we decided to just brush our little atrocities under the carpet.’

Tamar parked beneath a wind-ravaged palm tree. ‘Come this way. A path runs behind the school. This is how the boy got in.’

‘You think he was alive then?’

‘No, sorry. I’m sure not,’ said Tamar. ‘I meant the body, which Helena Kotze will confirm during the autopsy later.’

Clare picked her way down the path. It was strewn with chip packets and empty bottles. In places, used condoms had been snagged by the barbed-wire fences.

‘Prostitutes bring their clients here?’ she asked.

‘They do, but we don’t do anything unless there’s a complaint,’ said Tamar. ‘I’ve checked with the regulars. Nobody saw anything.’

‘You think that’s the truth?’

‘That I can’t say.’ Tamar stopped when the playground came into sight.

The houses had their backs to the alley. In the yards, dogs barked, chained to wires staked into the ground. Damp clothes hung on sagging lines. In the yard opposite the flapping strip of crime-scene tape, a faded-looking woman hung up her last item of washing and hitched the empty basket to her hip. A pudgy toddler tried to push his scooter through the sand.

‘Hello,’ greeted Clare, stopping at the fence.

‘What you want?’ The woman’s tone was belligerent.

‘These dogs always bark like this?’ Clare asked.

‘Only for strangers.’ The woman fished out a cigarette from her pocket.

‘Did you hear anything on Sunday night, Monday morning very early?’

‘She asked me already.’ The woman jerked her cigarette towards Tamar. ‘I was watching TV.’ She blew a smoke ring. ‘Then I was asleep.’

‘It’s important, anything unusual,’ said Clare. ‘A boy was murdered.’

‘Ja, the third one. You tell the police to do their job, so that our kids are safe instead of bothering innocent people.’ With that, the woman turned and went indoors, yelling at her child to follow her.

‘Who uses this alley?’ Clare asked Tamar.

‘People taking a short cut to the school,’ answered Tamar. ‘The rag-and-bone men used to come through here with their donkey carts.’

‘Not any more?’

‘Not as much,’ said Tamar. ‘Most of the recycling is done at the municipal site. The Topnaar carts were banned from coming into town. Hygiene reasons apparently, according to our CEO of cleansing. But they still come from time to time.’

‘My friend Goagab?’ asked Clare.

‘The very one.’

The playground stood at the top of a gentle incline. A new wooden fence sequestered the youngest children’s area. It had been decorated with a garish mural, the laughing Disney characters mocking in the childless silence.

‘That’s the swing?’ Clare pointed to the last tyre hanging from the yellow frame.

Tamar nodded. ‘And this is the gap in the fence where he got in.’

They walked together through the desolate playground. The bright-yellow paint had flaked off the links of the chain from which the seat was suspended. Clare sat down on the inverted tyre. The smell of the rubber, the metal sharp against the back of her legs, tipped her down a tunnel of memory again. It took her breath away, the immediacy of it. Herself a solemn six-year-old, swinging in the hot school playground, bare legs pushing time behind her, brown arms bending into the future. Willing herself older so that she could get away. Watched by Constance, her twin, whose face mirrored hers except in what it concealed,
watching her, willing her to stay. Constance, a thought fox sniffing out Clare’s most secret desires to be the only one, whole in and of herself.

Clare stopped, aware that Tamar was looking at her. She steadied the swing and hopped off.

‘It’s got the best view,’ said Tamar. ‘That swing.’

‘You tried it?’ asked Clare, looking out at the expanse of sand circled by the dark arm of the Kuiseb River to the south.

‘I wanted to get a sense of him. Of his death. To see if there was anything left of the violence of it.’

‘And was there?’

Tamar blushed and shook her head. ‘There were some indentations in the sand, though,’ she remembered. ‘Like someone had poked it with a thin stick. Maybe a cane.’

Clare nodded and went over to the classroom block. A single window overlooked the playground. She peered into the dim classroom. The rows of miniature red desks and cheery yellow chairs were empty. A pile of marking lay abandoned on the teacher’s desk. The writing on the board caught her eye: Mrs Ruyters, Grade 1, Monday’s date.

‘Ruyters,’ said Clare. ‘That rings a bell.’

‘She’s on your list for interviewing. She was here early, before Herman Shipanga arrived,’ said Tamar, looking at her watch. ‘Shall we get going? I need to get some coffee and pastries on the way. I can’t do pregnancy on an empty stomach. Post-mortems neither.’

The Venus Bakery was bustling with early-morning trade when Tamar pulled up on the opposite side of the road. At the stop street ahead, a familiar figure peered into the windows of cars caught by the traffic light.

‘That’s the boy I met last night,’ said Clare, feeling the bruise on the side of her arm. ‘I’ll need to talk to him again.’

‘Lazarus,’ said Tamar. ‘Lazarus Beukes. He’s sharp. Been living on the streets most of his life. He’ll spin you whatever story he thinks you want to hear.’

‘You wouldn’t believe him?’ asked Clare.

‘Put it this way,’ said Tamar, ‘Lazarus rarely lets the truth interfere with a good story.’

To the left of the bakery entrance, a wiry girl, her hair a wild black halo, chained her bike to a blue column. Lazarus approached her, trying to sell her a tatty-looking newspaper, his bony shoulders sharp against his worn jersey.