Blood Rose

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.