Blood Rose

fourteen

The crisp air outside the mortuary was a relief. Kaiser Apollis’s secrets would be scalpeled from him. The nestled organs separated. Liver, heart, lungs laid out in stainless-steel dishes to be weighed and tested. Clare doubted that this bloody grubbing would reveal much. The truth of his death lay in the dark maze of someone else’s mind. This was her labyrinth; she an Ariadne armed with nothing but the slender thread of instinct.

A firm foot on the accelerator had taken Clare and Tamar past the warehouses and low-cost houses that sprawled north of the town. The wind lashed the washing, Mondrian blocks of blue, green, yellow and red, pegged to the fence defending the last row of cramped houses. The dunes seemed to sidle closer with each gust. A thin girl was sweeping the apron of cement at her front door. She had the same heart-shaped face and delicate build as the dead boy Kaiser. On her high cheekbone was a bruise, butterfly-winged around the almond-shaped eye. Tied to her back was a baby, perhaps a day or two older than the bruise.

‘Captain Damases,’ the girl whispered as soon as they were in earshot.

‘Hello, Sylvia,’ said Tamar. ‘This is Dr Hart.’ Tamar unlatched the gate and they stepped into the neat yard. A scrawny dog yapped. Sylvia raised a threatening hand. The dog cowered and was silent. She looked back at the two women, dazed. Tamar put a gentle hand on the girl’s arm. ‘Shall we go inside?’

‘Sorry.’ Sylvia jumped. The house was empty, but the air was laden with a fug of sleep, cheap coffee and sadness. A snowy television spluttered into the gloom. It was hard to move among the over-sized furniture. Sylvia switched off the TV and the radio, and silence crackled into the chilly little house.

‘How are you?’ Tamar touched the girl’s swollen cheek.

Sylvia dropped her eyes. Two fat tears appeared, rolled down her cheeks and splashed onto her milk-swollen breasts. That was it.

‘The baby?’ The swaddled infant mewled. Sylvia retied the blanket and he puckered his rosebud mouth and went back to sleep. ‘What’s his name?’ asked Tamar.

‘Wilhelm. For his father.’ Then a surge of defiance glowed in Sylvia’s eyes. ‘I call him Kaiser.’

‘For your brother?’ asked Tamar.

‘For my brother.’ Sylvia looked down, the unblemished side of her face illuminated by the morning light. She would be beautiful without the bruises.

‘The boys at the dump say that Kaiser didn’t always stay with them?’ Tamar inflected the sentence into a question.

Sylvia’s face had the look of a secretive child who refuses to tell tales. Her eyes flicked at the kitchen table. Tucked beneath the overhang of Formica was a thin blue mattress rolled tightly around a grey dog-blanket.

‘Your brother slept here sometimes?’

‘When my boyfriend worked night shift. He didn’t like Kaiser to be here…’ Her voice trailed off. Clare wondered how long the infant’s plump cheek would stay unmarked.

‘Did you know your brother’s friends?’

‘We were always alone,’ Sylvia said. ‘Then Wilhelm took me to live here.’

‘When was that?’ Clare asked.

‘Two years ago.’ There was shame in the girl’s voice. ‘I had nothing to eat.’

‘How old were you then?’

Sylvia shrugged. ‘Maybe thirteen. I’m not sure.’

Clare supposed that at thirteen a regular fist from a man you knew was better than a knife in the guts from a man you didn’t.

‘And Kaiser? Where did he go?’ asked Clare.

‘He was with me sometimes. Sometimes on the street. I gave him money when I had some.’

‘When last did you see him, Sylvia?’ Tamar asked.

The girl slumped. She looked for an uncanny instant like the crone she would be at thirty. If she lived that long. ‘My baby’s father changed his shift,’ she said. ‘Kaiser had to go for good.’

‘Try to remember when,’ Clare pressed. Patience would get them what they wanted.

‘Last week he stopped working night shift. When I came back from the hospital with the baby he told me that Kaiser had to go.’

Her hand touched the bruise on her face. That explained the timing: the bruise was younger than the baby, but only by twenty-four hours.

Sylvia took a deep breath. ‘I left him a note.’ She raised her head, the brief spark in her eyes snuffed. ‘I never saw him again.’ Her voice was so quiet that Clare could hear the tiny panting breaths of the baby sleeping on its back.

‘And Wilhelm?’ asked Tamar. ‘Where was he on Friday night?’

‘No,’ Sylvia said, ‘he was with me all night.’

‘Do you mind if we look round?’ Clare asked.

Sylvia shook her head. She sat down and opened her blouse. The baby’s mouth parted, clean and pink. A fat little hand kneaded her soft flesh. Sylvia cupped her hand over the child’s fragile head. Tamar put on the kettle to make tea, asking Sylvia about the birth, the breastfeeding. The soothing talk of mothers.

Tuning out Tamar’s gentle murmur, Clare unwound the worn bedroll. The faded Superman pyjamas brought her up short with the realisation of how recently the dead boy had been a child. She slipped her fingers inside the frayed blue cuffs. His skinny wrists and ankles would have protruded from them as he grew into his malnourished and delayed adolescence. She picked up the top and held it to her nose, breathing in the lingering, wood-smoky smell of him.

Someone had stood close enough to the boy to breathe in the same essence, to feel his warm, frightened breath on their hands. They had stood that close and then discharged a bullet into the unlined forehead. Tears prickled hot in Clare’s eyes.

‘What else was his?’ she asked Sylvia.

The girl pointed to the window sill: a jagged scrap of mirror, a yellow comb, a jar of Vaseline. A blue bowl stood on the drying rack. The boy would have filled it, perhaps catching a glimpse of his small, peaked face before plunging his hands into the cold water to rub the accumulation of the night’s sleep from his eyes. Outside, he would have heard mothers calling their children for breakfast, as Clare could hear now. Inside, the house was quiet, just the click of the baby’s throat as it suckled, oblivious of the harsh life that awaited it.

Clare opened the Vaseline jar. Kaiser would have opened it one last time to dip his finger in for a final gob of pale jelly. He might have rubbed the grease into his cheeks. The cupboards would have been empty as they were now, and the child’s belly would clench around the water he drank for breakfast. Kaiser’s cheeks would have glowed brown in the morning light, creeping over the desert as he stepped into the cold. At least with his cheeks shining, his teachers wouldn’t get angry with him for looking hungry.

Clare looked into the shard of mirror. It fragmented her face. She could see her mouth or eyes, a cheek or the chin. Her picture of the dead boy was the same, fragmented. A shattered face. A flayed chest. A delicately turned foot in a white Nike, a full bottom lip. A discarded child she had never met and into whose begging hands she probably wouldn’t have dropped fifty cents.

Clare imagined the last afternoon the boy had come home, turning left at the bent fig tree that grew outside the shebeen where his sister’s boyfriend drank before he beat her on Fridays. When he saw his sister’s note, the boy might have wished that he could not read, but he would have read the lines on his sister’s face anyway. The message was clear in black and blue. He would have just turned around and gone back to town. He’d have scoured the dustbins outside the fast-food restaurants.

The voice would have startled him and he’d have looked up to find the driver of a car asking him if he was hungry. Did he nod? Or was he too proud? His eyes would have flared wide at the proffered banknote.

‘Get me a Coke. Something for yourself,’ the driver would have said. ‘Get in.’ As the fog thickened, the boy had done just that. Nobody would have seen the car glide into the mist.

‘Shall we go and watch the sea?’ the driver might have asked. Or the desert. Or the lagoon.

The boy would have nodded. Why not?

At the edge of the lagoon, the tide would be rising, water rushing in over the exposed mud and around the pink legs of the stilted flamingos, necks down, looking for food. The birds would have raised their heads in unison at the sudden retort of a car door slamming. The car would’ve traced the curve of the lagoon towards the fog-blanketed salt flats, the boy watching the fingers on the steering wheel.

‘You got a family?’

Perhaps the boy had thought about the wooden cross that marked his mother’s resting place, or of his sister’s battered face, before shaking his head.

‘You busy now?’

The boy shook his head again.

‘Would you like a drive?’

The boy had obviously thought that he would. They knew that much. Clare wondered if he had known it was going to be his last. If he had sought out what was coming, even welcomed it…

‘Clare, we should go.’ Tamar’s voice drew Clare back into the small, stuffy house. Tamar was holding the baby, and Sylvia held a Mickey Mouse rucksack in her hands.

‘He left his school bag. Take it,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’ll help you.’

Clare looked back at the house as they reached the end of the street. Sylvia was standing at the gate where they had left her, the wind wrapping her skirt around her thin legs. Clare opened the bag. There was a pencil case, a dog-eared Harry Potter in Afrikaans, and a diary. She rippled through the pages: homework assignments at the beginning of the year with longer and longer gaps between them. One hundred Namibian dollars fell out. Clare put her finger in the place where it had been secreted. August. A month earlier when all three boys were still alive.

‘A lot of money not to spend.’ Clare tucked it back into the book as Tamar turned into the station parking lot.

‘I’m going to take a walk,’ said Clare. ‘I need some fresh air.’

She headed towards the water, the wide sweep of it a relief after the confined space of the mortuary and Sylvia’s cramped house. The sun, gilding the drab buildings along the shore, was as warm as a hand on her skin. She missed having Riedwaan as a sounding board for the ideas whirling in her head. All she had to do was swallow some pride and phone him to discuss the case.

She swallowed and dialled, but his cellphone went straight to voicemail. She called his office. It rang for some time and went through to the switchboard.

‘Special Investigations Unit. Can I help you?’

‘Clare Hart here. Put me through to Captain Faizal.’

‘He’s not in. He took a personal day.’

Clare knew the reservist. She was a bosomy law student with a uniform fetish.

‘A personal day,’ she said. ‘That must be a first in the SAPS. You’ve been reading too many magazines.’

‘Something about his wife and daughter, I’d call it personal.’

That silenced Clare.

‘You want to leave a message, Dr Hart?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell him you called then?’

Gabriella. That was her name, Clare remembered.

‘Don’t bother, Gabriella.’

Clare’s stomach growled, reminding her that it had been a long morning and she needed lunch. On her way back to the police station, she stopped at the bakery and ordered rolls and coffee to take away.

‘Twelve-fifty,’ said the cashier, the same thin-lipped woman who had given Mara the third degree the day before. ‘You’re the expert from South Africa.’

‘I’m from Cape Town.’ Clare searched through the unfamiliar notes in her purse.

‘A waste of money. One dies, and they spend how many thousands of our tax money to bring you here.’ A vein pulsed in the woman’s temple. ‘Where are you staying?’

Clare was so taken aback that she answered: ‘On the lagoon.’

‘I knew it. In a town with no money and no work.’

Clare picked up her lunch and went outside, shaken by the woman’s venom. She stepped off the pavement, right in front of a big Ford truck.

The driver slammed on his brakes and she jumped back. Her heart skipped a beat when she recognised him: Ragnar Johansson. She hadn’t calculated on his still being in Walvis Bay.

‘Hey, Clare.’ Ice-blue eyes in a weathered face. Ragnar Johansson put out a vein-roped hand to restrain the Labrador whining next to him. ‘I was wondering if you’d call.’

‘It didn’t take you long to find me.’ Clare pushed her hair out of her eyes, playing for time.

‘Not in a town as small as this,’ said Ragnar.

‘I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.’

‘Well, I found you,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll tell you later if it’s what I wanted.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘Good.’

‘Iceland?’ she hazarded.

‘Didn’t work out. Cape Town?’

‘It’s been fine.’

‘You alone?’

Clare looked away and nodded.

‘You want a lift?’

‘No, thank you.’

He put out his hand and touched her cheek. ‘It’d be good to catch up.’

‘It would.’ It seemed churlish to step away from his forgotten touch.

‘Dinner?’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty tonight.’

‘I’m staying at the Lagoon-Side Cottages.’

‘I know.’

The light changed and Ragnar drove off. He and his wet dog huddled together on the front seat. Both grinning. Clare’s face felt hot where he had touched it. She rubbed her cheek, then licked her finger. It tasted salty. Like blood.