Blood Rose

twenty-eight

Keening. High and wild. It feathered fear up Clare’s spine. She sat up, putting her hands to her temples and trying to order her thoughts in the wake of the nightmare. She had been running, faster and faster. Her feet had been bare and bleeding, the flesh ribboned by the broken shells littering a beach. Spectral hands plucked at her legs, pulling her down towards the lagoon, wrapping around her throat. Clare looked around her room and orientated herself. She had been asleep. It was just a dream.

She was reaching for the water next to her bed when the terrible keening started again. Of course. Her cellphone.

‘What?’ Manners would be pushing it at three in the morning.

‘Dr Hart? I woke you?’ She tried to place the voice. ‘It’s Van Wyk.’

Of course it was. The receding dread of her dream circled back.

‘What?’ she said again.

‘Another body. I’ll pick you up.’

‘Where? Who?’

‘From your cottage,’ said Van Wyk. ‘I’ll pick you up.’

‘I meant where was the body found? Who is it?’

‘Out in the Kuiseb, the old military site past the delta. Couple of bikers found him. I wouldn’t be disturbing your beauty sleep if he didn’t fit your bill.’

‘How long have I got?’ Clare needed coffee.

‘Ten minutes.’ Van Wyk hung up.

Clare made coffee and drank it while she dressed. Jeans, anorak. It would be cold out. She was finishing a second cup when Van Wyk pulled up in the double cab. He handed her a packet of rusks and a flask. Clare bit off a piece of the rough, dried biscuit.

‘Thanks.’ She hadn’t thought that she would be hungry.

‘My mother makes them.’

Clare hadn’t thought of Van Wyk with a family either. If her brain had been functioning better, she might have ventured a question about them. Instead, she kept quiet, watching the streets slip past.

Tamar was waiting for them, her house dark except for the light in the kitchen. ‘Is Elias out there already?’ she asked, getting into the back of the vehicle.

‘He took the call, Captain,’ Van Wyk said. ‘So he went straight out.’

‘Is an ambulance on its way?’

‘Karamata said there’s no need,’ said Van Wyk, skirting the sleeping town. ‘It would be impossible to get one out there, anyway.’

The road forked at the salt mine, which gleamed white under the floodlights. Van Wyk turned into the dark cleft of the delta. He drove fast along the twisting track, never hesitating about which tributary road to take, which to speed past. He veered left, heading for a dense thicket of trees. The track narrowed and the tamarisk trees cut out the starlight. Van Wyk braked. Ahead of them was a gate, the only breach in an endless garland of barbed wire. Clare could just make out the sign: ‘Danger/Gevaar’.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘It’s part of an old military site,’ said Tamar. ‘The whole delta used to be the army’s. This place has been off-limits so long that everyone forgot about it.’

‘Not those little lovebirds,’ said Van Wyk. He switched on the hunting lights, serried like evil eyes on the roof of the truck, flooding the clearing with white light.

A whippet-thin girl was hunched over her knees, a jacket wrapped tight across her back. Her eyes sparked with defiance. Fifteen, thought Clare. Sixteen, if you wanted to believe it. A man stood near his motorbike. His wedding ring glinted as he took a deep drag of his cigarette. Ponytail, pushing forty. The proverbial rabbit in the headlights. Wife and children blown for the brief thrill of a nubile body in his hands. The dead boy was slumped against a tree on the edge of the circle of light. A still from a horror movie until Karamata stepped out of the shadows, unfreezing the frame.

‘Elias,’ said Tamar, getting out of the vehicle, ‘phone Helena Kotze and tell her I need her here this time. This one we’ll autopsy tonight.’

‘Has he been moved?’ asked Clare, approaching the body cautiously.

Karamata shook his head.

Tamar handed Clare a pair of latex gloves, then pulled on her own pair before lowering herself next to the dead boy. A child drooped in jest against a tree at the end of a game. He had been secured with riempie, the same strips of cured leather that had kept the shroud around Kaiser Apollis’s corpse.

‘Same shroud for this one.’ Tamar lifted away the gauzy fabric and shone her torch into the boy’s ruined face, revealing a mouth wide open in amazement and a forehead that was nothing but shards of bone and burnt flesh.

‘Lazarus,’ gasped Clare, the shock of recognition a body blow.

‘Lazarus Beukes,’ said Tamar. ‘He’s got a record for petty thieving so long you could knit a jersey out of it.’

‘What’s his story?’ Clare wished that she had heard it earlier.

‘He had a mother who loved him when she was sober enough to remember he existed,’ Tamar said, ‘but she disappeared a few years ago. He’s lived at the dump ever since.’

Tamar circled the body, resisting the urge to close the lids on the dulling eyes, to wipe away the fluid seeping from his forehead, eyes and slack mouth. The cold eye of her camera flashed on Lazarus’s shattered face. The rope, a nylon washing line around the wrists, had been knotted, so that it would pull tighter as the victim struggled. It had been cut through in the middle, and the boy’s hands lay between his knees, bloody tracks scored deep into both wrists. Clare envisaged the moment Lazarus had realised it wasn’t a game, when he had fought for his life.

‘Have a look at that rope,’ she said. Tamar lifted the jaunty blue and white nylon. The ends around the wrists were cut clean through.

‘This is frayed,’ said Tamar, pointing to the longer piece that would have held his hands tight behind his back. ‘Cut with a different knife. The same as Kaiser Apollis.’

‘Two weapons,’ said Clare. ‘Two places. Two people? Or just one crime in two parts?’

‘There’s no blood here,’ said Tamar. ‘This isn’t where he was shot, so there’re your two places.’ She put her hand against the boy’s skin. It was cold, his body flaccid. She tried to move one of his fingers. He was starting to stiffen.

‘It doesn’t look like he’s been dead long enough for rigor to reverse,’ said Clare. ‘There are no visible signs of decomposition. Looks like he was shot yesterday evening.’

A week since Kaiser Apollis had climbed into a vehicle and been driven into the desert to be displayed on a Monday. Now there was this one, Friday’s Child. Loving and giving. Clare checked his left hand. The ring finger ended in a bloody stump. ‘The signature,’ she said. ‘He’s taken his trophy again.’

Tamar pointed to the pullover. ‘This’ll be the second signature,’ she said, pushing back the bloody fabric, revealing ribs concaving into the stomach suspended between delicate hips. The flesh, as smooth as a girl’s, had been ribboned by a series of sure, deep knife strokes. Tamar dropped the fabric.

‘One with nothing, a 2, a 3 and now a 5,’ said Clare.

‘Please, God, there isn’t a fourth victim waiting to be found,’ said Tamar, supporting her lower back as she stood up. She turned to Karamata. ‘You looked for a gun?’ she asked.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I checked both their hands for residue. Nothing. It would last four hours on the hands of a live person after they’d fired.’

‘Unless they washed their hands,’ said Clare.

‘I checked,’ said Karamata. ‘No sign that anyone washed their hands.’

‘Knives?’ asked Clare.

‘Just this.’ Karamata held up a small penknife. ‘It had scraps of biltong on the blade, nothing else.’

‘Who found him?’ asked Tamar, walking over to the forlorn couple.

‘Me.’ It was the girl. ‘I called the police too.’

‘Your name?’ Tamar pulled out a notepad.

‘I’m Chanel,’ the girl replied. ‘That’s Clinton.’

Tamar turned to the man. ‘Why didn’t you phone?’

‘He was afraid to,’ said Chanel, giving the man a look of withering post-coital clarity. ‘He wanted to leave, but the bike’s not working.’

Van Wyk walked over to the bike. ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ he said. ‘Someone cut your fuel pipe. You’re lucky you didn’t end up with brain splattered across the desert like him.’ He gestured to Lazarus’s body.

The girl shuddered and Tamar put a blanket around her shoulders. Still a child under the smudged make-up, her face was drawn, foxy with fear and cold.

‘What were you doing out here?’ asked Tamar. ‘This is a restricted area.’

‘He wanted to come out here.’ Chanel pointed to the ashen man.

‘Why here?’ Tamar addressed Clinton.

‘Old times’ sake.’

‘Why here and why now?’ Clare persisted.

‘No reason really.’ Clinton looked besieged.

‘So let me get this straight: you just decided on the spur of the moment to bring an under-aged girl to a restricted military site?’ asked Clare conversationally.

Clinton shrugged, a failed attempt at cockiness. ‘I saw an old army connection the other day and it made me think about this place. We used to come here in the old days. Then Chanel wanted to go somewhere, and I thought, why not here? Seeing as we can’t go anywhere together in town.’

‘Who’s your connection?’ asked Clare.

‘I don’t even remember his name any more. Something foreign. Polish. Russian maybe, I don’t know. It was years ago. He was an officer in some unit that used to work out here. I was just a troepie. I saw him there in the strip club, sitting alone, as cool as ever in his cowboy boots, and it reminded me of this place,’ said Clinton, his shoulders sagging in defeat. ‘It seems fucking stupid now.’

‘How do you know him?’ Tamar asked Chanel.

‘I babysit for his wife,’ the girl replied. ‘Mrs Nel’s going to kill me. So’s my mother.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Tamar.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ Chanel asked.

Clare tossed her a box of cigarettes. The girl lit one, hands shaking. Then she told them: they’d gone to sleep, she’d woken up, needed a pee, gone over to the trees, and there was the boy, staring at her like some sick joke.

‘Did you look around before you went to sleep?’ asked Clare.

‘Not really,’ said Chanel. ‘It was getting dark when we arrived.’

‘No other cars?’ asked Tamar.

‘We saw no one,’ said Clinton. ‘Heard nothing either.’

‘And you?’ Clare asked the girl.

‘Just those geckos that call at night. Listen…’ She held up her hand. ‘You can hear them now.’

Clare listened: the chill, moaning laugh of a jackal, then there it was in the distance. Tjak. Tjak. Tjak. The knocking sound that solitary reptiles make to claim their territory, to attract a mate.

‘Go and wait in the car,’ Tamar said to Chanel. The girl was shaking now. Cold and shock. ‘There should be some coffee there to warm you up.’

When Van Wyk cut the lights, the starlight washed over the scene, soft-focusing the horror. A bat swooped low along the ground, hunting. The wind rattled through the trees, then died away, leaving a silence so absolute Clare felt it as a pressure in her ears.

Like she was losing altitude too fast.