Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

  In the time it had taken Renko to get to Johannesburg, Goagab’s fear of prison had him confessing to every crime he’d ever even considered committing. The Alhantra, he told Karamata, had been ferrying six cakes of uranium 235. The highly enriched uranium had been siphoned off from Vastrap and buried in the Namib by Hofmeyr and Malan when they were in charge of destroying the nuclear programme in 1990. The cakes had been buried there for over ten years, waiting for Janus Renko to broker a deal with some Pakistani businessmen. When he did, Goagab had signed off the safe passage to Spain for a cut.

  ‘One city, one cake,’ Phiri said. ‘Enough highly enriched uranium to make dirty bombs for six European cities. Which were they? Paris? Berlin? Antwerp?’

  ‘You’ll be sorry for this,’ said Renko calmly, ‘when my lawyer gets hold of you.’

  ‘I hear the Americans are clearing a cell for you in Guantanamo,’ Phiri continued, unperturbed. ‘But I think that might have to wait a bit. That little mermaid you pulled out of the water in Walvis Bay, the one you got to shoot those boys who did your dirty work, she’s decided that her debt to you was cashed up when you left without her.’

  ‘A whore,’ said Renko. ‘Any lawyer would shred her in court.’

  ‘Hell hath no fury …’ Phiri let the phrase linger. ‘After Clare Hart put a bullet through her shoulder, and then kept her alive long enough to get her to ICU, it seems she switched allegiance,’ he went on. ‘Never underestimate a woman scorned. Dr Hart got the lot. You. Gretchen. The boys. Johansson, who incidentally looks like he’ll be testifying, too. Malan.’

  ‘Malan.’ The name erupted from Renko. ‘Too fucking lazy to do his own labour.’

  ‘We found him,’ said Phiri. ‘Not a pleasant sight. What did you use? A filleting knife?’

  Renko was silent again, contained fury vibrating through his body.

  ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me …’ Phiri pulled out his cellphone and dialled the number. ‘Faizal,’ he said when Riedwaan picked up. ‘Tell Dr Hart we’ve got her man.’

  Riedwaan put his finger on Clare’s lips, stopping her question. She waited impatiently, recognising Phiri’s voice on the other end of the line but unable to make out what he was saying amidst the noise of the restaurant.

  ‘They got him,’ Riedwaan said, snapping his phone shut. ‘And his cargo.’

  ‘I’ve had enough to eat,’ said Clare, relief washing over her. ‘Shall we go?’

  Riedwaan signalled for the bill. He winced. The skin on his chest was healing and his shoulder had been expertly bandaged by Helena Kotze, but even after three days in hospital, movement was not easy.

  Outside the restaurant, it was clear, the sky heavy with stars. A curlew on the lagoon called, the sound piercing the cold night. Riedwaan put his arm around Clare’s waist.

  ‘Sexy dress this. I was wondering who you were going to wear it for.’

  Clare unlocked her cottage door. Somehow, they had walked past Burning Shore Lodge.

  ‘You want some coffee?’ she asked, running a tentative finger down his neck.

  ‘Maybe a whisky.’

  Clare poured two and took them through to the sitting room. ‘You didn’t miss these?’ Riedwaan put his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a scrap of silk.

  ‘Whose are those?’ Clare grabbed the black knickers.

  ‘Yours, I hope,’ he laughed. ‘I took them before you left Cape Town. A memento.’

  Clare reached under her skirt and pulled off the pair she was wearing. ‘You want me to check?’

  ‘Not really.’ He caught both her hands in one of his. The other one he slid up her bare thigh. ‘I’d just have to take them off again.’

  ‘True,’ said Clare, pulling him with her onto the couch. ‘And that would be a waste of time.’

  scorpio setting …

  Oscar.

  You hear it, your name formed as a series of soft clicks in the back of a throat. A drop, then two, of water on your lips, your eyelids. You open your eyes. The familiar weathered face: Spyt.

  You try to say his name. Nothing comes but a croak. The man sweeps the flies sipping from your forehead, split by a rock. He disentangles you from the dead woman, Mara, lifting you into his arms, cradling you against his chest. He carries you to the cool shelter of his cave, out of the wind. The silence in the wake of the storm is overwhelming. Spyt lays you down, gentling his donkeys, restless at the intrusion, before he sets to work on you …

  Three days later, the moon is full, obliterating all but the brightest stars. Spyt puts out a hand for you. Together you listen, ears catching the distant purr of an engine, which is nothing but a texture in the silence. You retreat deeper into the shadows when the lights break over the dune, sweeping across the moonlit sand. When the engine cuts, the restored silence is deafening.

  Their voices are low murmurs as the couple unpacks, lights a fire. The pungent smoke purls into the sky. It is getting colder. The man twists the long rope of the woman’s hair in his hands. She sinks into him. The soft undulation of their bodies mimics the desert, radiating away from them. When they subside into sleep, the old man walks with you down to the dying fire. In sleep, the woman has turned her back on the man, but his hand rests on her hip. She is familiar, this woman, the woman who reads your mind. It is Clare. You have watched her sleep before, standing by her window, tracing a heart in the mist your breath made.

  Spyt crouches, holding your hand close to her mouth. Her breath is warm on your palm.

  When the moon arcs up and over, sinking into the ocean to the west, the cold desert wind knifes down the gully, rattling dry grasses. She turns towards the sleeping man; you imagine her breasts soft on his chest. Spyt takes your hand, and the two of you leave. The man and woman will head south to Cape Town, and you, here, will melt into the sheltering desert.

  A jackal cries, unfurling the rosy dawn. Scorpio defers to the new light and sinks below the horizon.

  a short history of walvis bay

  Walvis Bay is Namibia’s only deep-water port. It is situated on the mouth of the ephemeral Kuiseb River. This underground river, in effect a long linear oasis that supports an infinite variety of plants, animals and people, halts the restless, constantly moving Namib sand sea that flows up from the south.

  The town is isolated: to the south lies the Sperrgebied, the Forbidden Territory, where diamonds have been mined for over a century. To the north is the Skeleton Coast. Here, shipwrecks slowly disintegrate along the elementally beautiful stretch of sea, sky and sand.

  People have lived in and around Walvis Bay for about five thousand years. Hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the Topnaar people who live in the Kuiseb fished and harvested the !nara plants, as the Topnaars still do to this day.

  The Portuguese named it Bahia das Baleas, the Bay of Whales. Diego Cao erected a stone cross to the north, at Cape Cross, but he sailed on, leaving the bleak and waterless tracts of land unoccupied. During the eighteenth-century whaling boom, American whaling ships filled the bay, decimating the animals that gave this remote place its name.

  In 1793, Walvis Bay was occupied in the name of Holland, but in 1795, the British occupied the Cape and claimed the port at the same time. But it was only in 1878 that Walvis Bay and the surrounding land, now a busy trading port, was formally annexed by the British. In 1884, the scramble for Africa reached a feverish pitch and the territory that is today Namibia was claimed by Germany. The British proclaimed Walvis Bay to be part of the Cape Colony, however, and it remained a tiny British enclave until 1915, when South African troops seized German South West Africa and imposed military rule. In 1920, after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, South Africa, then a British colony, was granted a mandate over German South West Africa by the League of Nations. Walvis Bay was integrated into the rest of the territory and it was known as the South West African Protectorate. South Africa’s segregationist laws, including the migrant labour system, were extended to the whole territory, including Walvis Bay.

  Wa
lvis Bay was of strategic importance to South Africa, and in 1962 a large army base was established – part of it in the town, most of it in the desert – as internal and international resistance to apartheid in South Africa and South West Africa grew. In 1977, it became clear that South Africa would have to give up control of the territory. The South Africans appointed an Administrator General for South West Africa/Namibia (as the territory came to be called). On the same day, however, they annexed Walvis Bay, justifying this on the British annexation on behalf of the Cape Colony a century earlier. As apartheid laws eased in the rest of the country, they were applied ever more strictly in Walvis Bay.

  Namibia became independent in March of 1990, but from 1990 to 1994, the South African army consolidated its presence and continued to control the harbour, leaving the town in a strange economic and political limbo until South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, when Walvis Bay and its population of about forty thousand were reintegrated into Namibia.

  Taken from Melinda Silverman’s Between the Atlantic and the Namib: An Environmental History of Walvis Bay, published by the Namibia Scientific Society (Windhoek, 2004).

  Margie Orford, an award-winning journalist and internationally acclaimed writer, is the author of Like Clockwork, the debut novel in the Clare Hart series, which has since been translated into more than eight languages.

  She was born in London and grew up in Namibia, the setting for Blood Rose, her highly acclaimed second novel in the series. Educated in South Africa, she currently lives in Cape Town with her husband and three daughters.

  For more information go to her website: www.margieorford.com

  Thanks to Willie Visser and Sharon Roberts, for patiently explaining ballistics to me and for teaching me to shoot straight; to Johan Kok, for detailed information on blood splatter patterns and forensics in out-ofthe-way places; to Leanne Dreyer, for introducing me to the microscopic wonderland of pollens and forensic palynology; to Colleen Mannheimer, who told me which plants grow where in the Namib Desert; to Bruno Nebe, for rescuing me at the last minute with information about the bats that live in the Kuiseb River; to Johann Dempers, for giving me so many rivetingly gory pathology lessons; and to Andrew Brown, for letting me borrow his wonderful Coldsleep Lullaby cop, Eberard Februarie. Special thanks to Martha Evans for being such a creative and patient editor, and to my literary agent, Isobel Dixon, my heartfelt thanks. Also, to Michelle Matthews, for having faith again.

  Any mistakes and all fabrications are mine.