Blood Rose

ten

‘I’ll get Elias and Van Wyk,’ said Tamar when she and Clare got back to the station. ‘Then we can get started on our display.’

Tamar, Clare and Karamata made their way to the special ops room. Evidently, Van Wyk had more important matters to attend to, declining Tamar’s invitation to join them without even looking up from his computer screen.

There was a roll of maps and a neat stack of autopsy photographs on the trestle table in the middle of the room. Stacked alongside were three murder dockets, sheets of coloured paper, scissors, blue tac, drawing pins and marker pens.

‘We’ll work backwards,’ said Tamar. ‘Let’s start with Kaiser Apollis.’ She wrote his name large in red.

‘Monday’s Child…’ Clare pinned up the photographs of the boy drifting on the swing.

‘Was fair of face,’ Tamar finished. ‘We’ll have to wait for the autopsy before we can finish him.’

‘There’s a police file for him,’ said Clare, checking through her documents.

‘He was caught trespassing a month or so ago,’ said Karamata.

‘He was beaten?’ Clare asked, glancing through the scrawled report.

‘He worked the docks when he had to,’ said Karamata. ‘Van Wyk handled the case. The volunteer teacher, Mara Thomson, accused Van Wyk of beating Kaiser but it could just as easily have been the Russians on the old Soviet ships.’

‘What are they doing here?’ asked Clare.

‘They’ve been rusting here since perestroika,’ said Karamata. ‘They don’t dock because they don’t want to pay harbour fees. They can’t go home, because the state that owned them disintegrated with Gorbachev.’

‘They like rough stuff,’ Tamar continued. ‘And they pay, but you’ve got to be desperate to go out there. The bar girls have stopped going after they beat up one of them for fun and threw her into the water. Some guy working on the Alhantra pulled her out.’

‘Alive?’ Clare asked.

‘Just. Gretchen was lucky to survive. She worked at Der Blaue Engel, the most expensive of the sailors’ bars. The “Gentleman’s Club” is a new one in Walvis Bay. God knows where the money’s coming from, but the local politicians and businessmen lap it up.’

‘Gretchen von Trotha,’ Karamata picked up the story. ‘Unfortunate surname. Von Trotha was the German general who gave the extermination order for the Hereros a hundred years ago. My great-grandfather survived, so it’s just luck that I’m here today.’

‘Did she lay a charge?’ asked Clare.

‘Not likely in her line of work,’ said Tamar. ‘And she wouldn’t know any better. She’s been selling her body since she was thirteen. Van Wyk told me she’s working the clubs again.’

‘Van Wyk keeps tabs on things,’ Clare noted, picking up the second slim file. ‘Nicanor Jones.’ She checked the date that he was found. ‘A Wednesday’s Child. Full of woe,’ she said, shuffling through the photographs. An eyeless face leered up at her, a small neat hole blown clean through the skull, filigreed flesh peeling back from the snowy bone underneath.

‘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.