Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

  ‘Looks like something got to his hands.’ Clare pointed to a close-up of his hands. The palms were scored with callouses, freshly healed. The second finger of the left hand ended in a nailless stump.

  ‘A trophy collection.’ Tamar pulled the autopsy report out of the folder. ‘That was post-mortem. The gunshot was ante-mortem.’ She shook her head. ‘Only a pathologist would define life as being pre-death.’

  ‘If death’s your main business then it is, I suppose,’ smiled Clare. ‘Where was he found?’

  ‘Right near the dump. It’s on the edge of the Kuiseb River. It’s on the aerial map there.’ Tamar showed her. The dry river with its fringe of hardy plants held back the dune marching north. The Kuiseb curved along an ancient faultline until it dissipated into the salt flats on the cusp of the lagoon.

  ‘How did you find him?’ asked Clare.

  ‘An anonymous tip-off,’ said Tamar. ‘Two Wednesdays ago. The call came through to the switchboard operator and she told Elias. He went out and looked until he found the body.’

  ‘Do you know who called?’ Clare asked.

  ‘The operator said it was a foreign woman,’ Karamata told her. ‘But Namibians speak more versions of English than I can count.’

  ‘And a boy’s voice could be mistaken for a woman’s,’ Clare suggested. ‘Who else but another homeless kid would have seen him out there? I can’t imagine these kids want any police attention themselves.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ said Tamar. ‘But they’re very frightened. Those who can have moved back to whatever families they have.’

  ‘Nicanor Jones had no family, by the looks of it,’ said Clare, reading his file. ‘Who’s the last boy?’

  ‘Fritz Woestyn. He was found three weeks ago, last Saturday.’ Tamar handed her a sheaf of photographs.

  ‘Saturday’s Child,’ said Clare, ‘works hard for his living.’

  ‘Woestyn, his name. It means desert,’ said Tamar. ‘And that’s where he was found by some municipal workers doing a pipeline inspection.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’ asked Clare, disbelieving.

  ‘Water’s more precious than gold here. The foreman identified him. He’d seen him scavenging.’

  ‘Peculiar that there was anything to find,’ said Karamata. ‘A hyena, even jackals make quick work of anything dead.’ Fritz Woestyn stared up at Clare from the autopsy photograph. She looked over the small evidence boxes. Each contained the remnants of the boys’ lives – shoes, some bloodied clothes, a note found in a pocket – making the displays look like small, morbid shrines.

  ‘Easy targets, street children; many different reasons to do them in and no one around to report them missing.’ Clare paced up and down in front of the boxes. ‘You don’t think it could be some kind of unofficial clean-up operation? Out at the dump where there are plenty of homeless kids scavenging. The school, too’ – she checked Tamar’s notes – ‘where it looks like this Mara Thomson was running some soccer thing for homeless kids. That might make sense of the killer’s desire to display them: that the bodies are a kind of threat. That’s what happened to street kids in Rio.’

  ‘It crossed my mind,’ admitted Tamar. ‘But with those Rio killings, you always had two or three together, kids sleeping in doorways in a city of ten million. You’re not going to get away with that in a town of forty thousand people.’

  ‘Have you done a search for a similar pattern in other ports?’ asked Clare.

  ‘I did. Nothing came up on any of the databases I have access to,’ said Tamar. ‘Rita Mkhize did a search in South Africa too. Nothing.’

  ‘Nasty, brutish and very short, these lives,’ said Clare. ‘Unless the killer’s left town, there’ll be another body before too long.’

  ‘I have to get home,’ said Tamar, stretching her arms up to loosen her shoulder muscles. ‘Let me drop you off at your cottage.’

  Clare picked up her bag and the three files. ‘I’ll go over these again tonight.’

  Tamar drove alongside the deserted harbour. It was fenced off from the road by twenty feet of razor wire. The barbs were festooned with grimy plastic bags: Africa’s national flower.

  Tamar stopped outside a secluded series of stone cottages, all of them closed up. Shadows were deep beneath the palms trees and narrow service alleys. ‘Lagoon-Side Cottages’ said a sign hanging from the bleached whale-ribs that arched up over the entrance.

  ‘The view is great on the few days when the fog lifts,’ said Tamar.

  ‘You don’t like this weather?’ Clare asked, taking her suitcase out of the car.

  ‘I hate it,’ said Tamar. ‘I grew up in the sun, so this cold worms its way into my bones.’

  ‘How did you get posted here?’ asked Clare.

  ‘It was my choice.’ Tamar fished in her bag for keys. ‘My sister needed help before she died, and there’s plenty of scope for promotion in the police force.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  Tamar ran her hand over her swollen belly. ‘There’s only me for this little one.’ Her tone invited no further questions.

  ‘I’d like to see where Kaiser Apollis was found before the autopsy tomorrow morning,’ said Clare, switching tack effortlessly.

  ‘You have to see everything yourself?’

  ‘Photographs flatten things. I’ve looked at your pictures, but there’s something about being where the body was found.’

  Tamar opened the door of the cottage. ‘I hope you aren’t superstitious. It’s number 13; that’s how the police got it cheap. No one ever wants to rent it.’

  ‘Did you think I might be?’ asked Clare.

  ‘From your lectures,’ said Tamar. She unlocked the French doors onto a small stoep. The sea air was welcome in the stuffy room.

  Clare was glad to put her suitcase down. It had been a long day. ‘I usually get accused of being too scientific,’ she said.

  ‘There was one thing you said that stayed with me.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘You said that when you go to a crime scene you like to sit there a while alone or with the body. That sometimes a feeling of what happened washed over you like a warm breeze. That spooked me.’ Tamar was quiet for a second. ‘You weren’t talking about the feeling of the victim. You were talking about the killer. What you feel is what the killer leaves behind. His heart, that’s what you find. When I saw that body in the school playground it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I had that feeling, Clare. The one you described.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put that down in the case file, if I were you,’ Clare laughed.

  ‘I won’t.’ Tamar looked tired, older than her thirty-two years. ‘Stranger killings are the hardest to solve,’ she said.

  ‘Hard to be a stranger in a town this size,’ said Clare. ‘Hard to keep a secret, I’d imagine.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many secrets there are.’ Tamar opened the fridge. ‘I put some wine in for you. And some milk and bread.’

  ‘Very thoughtful,’ said Clare, walking outside with her.

  ‘I’ll see you at 7.00 am, then?’

  Clare nodded and watched Tamar ease her bulk into the front seat of the vehicle. Within moments, the mist had swallowed her car. She was heading due east. Clare guessed that she lived in Narraville, a windswept township that had uplifted itself into a suburb. There had been a few nice gardens there, if she remembered correctly. Roses flowered in some of them, despite the desert.

  eleven

  Out of habit, Clare locked the front door to the cottage. It didn’t take long to put away her tracksuit, T-shirts and jeans. She hung up her black dress and put a framed photograph next to the bed. Three little girls next to a childhood swimming pool laughed up at her. Two identical in frilled white swimming costumes: Clare and Constance. The third stood in the middle: Julia, older, breasts budding in her yellow bikini top, her arms around her twin sisters. Clare always carried the photo with her.

  She opened the sliding doors and stepped onto the sheltered stoep. The
lawn sloped away towards the boulevard that circled a tempting five kilometres around the lagoon. Clare reckoned she still had another hour of light. She was tired, her limbs sluggish, but the nausea from the small plane lingered. She needed a run.

  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.

  twelve

  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.