Blood Rose

thirty-one

The flight from Walvis Bay circled Table Mountain, which stood in isolated splendour above the squalor of the Cape Flats. Clare was first off the plane. She slid her passport across the counter, her mind shuttling between everything she had to do in Cape Town and the fragmented picture she had of events in Walvis Bay.

‘This way please, Doctor.’ The immigration officer pulled down the grille in front of his booth. He had Clare’s passport clasped in his hand.

‘What is it?’ All she needed now was officiousness about smuggling body parts across international borders.

‘Come with me.’ He opened a door marked ‘Customs’, standing aside so that she could enter. Riedwaan was leaning against the wall, his shirt white against his throat.

‘Thanks.’ Riedwaan was speaking to the customs official, but his eyes were on Clare.

‘Any time, Captain.’

‘Can I have a look at those?’ said Riedwaan. Clare put her assortment of packages on the scuffed table and folded her arms.

‘You need anything else, Captain Faizal?’ the official asked. Riedwaan shook his head, and the man left, closing the door behind him. Riedwaan picked up the box of samples Helena Kotze had packed for Piet Mouton.

‘What are you doing?’ Clare hissed.

‘I’m here to see you. Like you said. Officially.’ Riedwaan opened the door. ‘Shall we go?’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Clare. ‘Officially.’

‘Security exit. It’s much quicker.’

‘Riedwaan,’ said Clare with an incredulous laugh, ‘you know I have appointments.’

‘I know. I’m driving you, officially.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Orders from Phiri.’

‘Well,’ she snapped, ‘I don’t really have a choice then, do I?’

‘Doesn’t look like it to me.’ He was relieved that she didn’t phone Phiri to check.

Getting her this far was easier than Riedwaan had thought. She got into his old Mazda and he inched through the chaos at domestic arrivals. He turned east along the N2, heading away from Cape Town. So far, so good. He suspected that getting her to talk – or to listen – might be harder.

‘Where did your friend at customs spring from?’ Clare asked.

‘An old friend from my narc squad days. He owed me a favour.’

‘I can just imagine.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask me about my family?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘After you’ve practically kidnapped me, does it matter what I do or don’t ask?’

‘It matters to me,’ Riedwaan said. ‘Yasmin is my daughter. I love her. And you… Look Clare, I’m sorry about that back there.’ He gestured at the space between them. ‘All this…’ He gave up.

Clare stared at the shabby houses blurring past her window. Her autonomy had been so hard-won; loosening the bonds of her damaged identical twin Constance had left her determined to resist the lure of losing herself again in another person.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ asked Riedwaan, exasperated with her silence.

‘You’ve missed the turning.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Riedwaan did a U-turn, bumping over the traffic island. He accelerated across three lanes and took the turn-off to Bellville.

‘It’s red,’ said Clare. Riedwaan braked at the traffic lights. ‘There is the tiny issue of your wife, Riedwaan.’

‘Why’s it so difficult to tell you anything?’ he asked, running his hands through his shock of hair.

‘What you didn’t tell me is what matters. You never gave me the chance to decide about things. You just ducked behind the luck that I was going to Namibia. A most convenient coincidence, seeing as you organised me to go there.’

Riedwaan parked in a visitor’s bay at the large teaching hospital in Cape Town’s northern suburbs. He turned towards Clare, but she spoke before he could say anything: ‘We have to work together on this case, Riedwaan. It’s just easier if you sort your family situation out yourself.’ Clare needed air. She opened the door.

Riedwaan got out too. ‘What’re you so afraid of, Clare? With people, things are messy. That’s how life is.’

‘I’m not up to a philosophy lesson, especially if it’s just a rehash of what some cheap cop shrink tells you when you drink too much.’ Clare picked up her box, holding it like a shield across her chest. ‘Let’s just stick to the case, shall we?’ Easier terrain that, the mechanics of death.

‘Explain your case then. Tell me something I don’t know.’ Riedwaan took the box from her hands. His skin was warm where their hands touched.

Clare snatched her hand away. ‘Leave it.’ She sounded adolescent, even to herself. ‘Let me get this to Mouton.’ She marched over to the hospital’s forensic pathology entrance.

The rotund security guard at the entrance beamed at her. ‘You don’t need to sign in if you’re with Captain Faizal,’ he said. ‘He’s responsible for you.’

‘That’ll be a first.’ Clare could not help herself.

‘The doc’s waiting for you, Captain. In the morgue.’ The guard waved Riedwaan and Clare towards the lift.

‘All I need,’ muttered Clare, standing aside as a group of chattering students rushed past. She followed Riedwaan down the corridor. He opened the last door, revealing Dr Piet Mouton bending over his large stomach, his hands careful as he worked on the yielding body laid out in front of him.

‘Sorry about this.’ Mouton spoke without looking up. ‘I’m almost done. Move my tape recorder a bit closer, Faizal man.’

Riedwaan pushed the trolley with Mouton’s notes and small black recorder closer to the gurney. Clare made herself look at the naked body on the slab – an elderly woman, ribs pulled open.

Mouton lifted the heart and laid it in a dish. ‘Car crashes. I hate them,’ he said. ‘Make an Irish stew out of anybody, the way people drive. BMW jumped a barrier on the N1. Speedometer at 190 when it jammed.’

Whatever it was Mouton was doing made a horrible sound. Clare looked up at the vaulted windows, light-headed. ‘She was driving?’ she asked.

‘You must be joking. She was just on her way to see her grandchildren. The fucker in the BM is fine, just worrying about his insurance and trying to stall a blood alcohol test. You know what it stands for, Faizal? BMW?’

Riedwaan shook his head.

‘Bankrot Maar Windgat,’ said Mouton in disgust. ‘So, Dr Hart.’ He had always refused to call her Clare. ‘Post-mortems are not a spectator sport yet. I presume you want something?’

‘Riedwaan told you?’ Clare had moved to the window. The sun streaming in did nothing to counter the air conditioning, but she was glad of it; the cold stifled the smell of chemicals and bodily wastes.

‘He did.’ Mouton went to rinse his hands. He pulled off his gown, releasing his belly from his tight scrubs. ‘I don’t know who they make these things for. Midgets, I suppose,’ he muttered. ‘So this Namibian serial killer. You had another victim?’

‘Same thing,’ said Clare. ‘Single gunshot to the forehead, body displayed where it would be found. Outside again, and some time after death. No scavenger marks, so someone was keeping him somewhere.’

Mouton ushered them out of the mortuary and into his adjoining office. He opened a cake tin and offered them each a slice of succulent apple cake. Riedwaan accepted but Clare refused.

She took a sip of the tea that Mouton passed her. It was lukewarm and tasted as if it had been brewing since lunch. She put her cup down.

‘We wanted you to look at these.’ Clare handed him the four autopsy reports. ‘In all the cases there’s been a delay between the death and finding the body. I want to find out where they were kept before being displayed.’

‘You got a keeper?’ Mouton looked up from the reports.

‘Seems like it,’ said Clare. ‘It would help me if I could work out where he was keeping these boys and why. What he was doing with them before he shoots them. And why he waits afterwards.’

‘Gunshot wounds. Desert corpse. Mutilation. It’s like Namibia when it was still South West Africa, South Africa’s Wild West,’ said Mouton.

‘I’ll take a look.’

Riedwaan drove fast, rejoining the cars speeding towards Cape Town. The vivid red sky set off the mass of Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak to perfection. Clare felt a pang for the simplicity of the Namibian landscape, composed of horizontals: sea, sand, sky. The Sea Point Boulevard seemed too crowded, the rough swell too boisterous. She wouldn’t really feel at home until she had finished her business in Walvis Bay. With Riedwaan, a mountain of unspoken unfinished business lay between them in addition to the silence that had filled the car on the drive back to her apartment.

‘Rita asked me to give you these,’ said Riedwaan. Clare took the keys he held out. She got out of the car and picked up her scattered belongings from the back seat.

‘Give me that,’ said Riedwaan, pointing to Clare’s evidence box for ballistics. ‘I’ll drop it with Shorty de Lange. He said he’d look at it for you.’ Riedwaan took it from her, his hand brushing against hers. ‘You look exhausted.’

‘I’m finished,’ Clare confessed, before disappearing up the stairs. She picked up an ecstatic Fritz at the door and stopped herself from turning around to watch Riedwaan drive away.

Inside, she ran herself a bath and lay in it, letting the hot water soothe her. She listened to the waves beating against the boulevard, drowning the sound of the evening traffic and the noise in her own head. Her thoughts drifted to Mouton and his plump hands conjuring the secrets from the dead. ‘A keeper’ he had called this killer.

‘Finders were keepers. And losers were weepers,’ she said to herself as she towelled her body. She didn’t aim to be one of those.

Clare took her supper onto her balcony and watched the filling moon rise up over Devil’s Peak, but she didn’t see it. Instead, she saw red sand bleeding to ash in the moonlight. The lights of a plane flying over the city transformed, in her mind’s eye, into a vehicle, headlights dipping as it summitted her imaginary dunes. The lights vanished, and Clare imagined distant doors opening, slamming shut. A hand on a boy’s skinny nape. Comforting in the emptiness. The fingers tightening. The food in his belly a nauseating lump. No struggle in the end.

She put her half-eaten meal aside and went through to her study. From the top of the bookshelf, she pulled down a couple of files with articles on profiling. She flicked through them, reading again about the progression of sadistic complexity that was, in Clare’s mind, the hallmark of organised serial killers: the repeated attempts to recreate a fantasy, the perfect blueprint of which existed only in the mind of the killer. The fantasy behind these desert killings, so organised, so similar in outward appearance, had something cursory, something improvised about it which irked. The symmetry of the killings, the trophy-taking, the mutilation of the chest were textbook signs of a copycat killer. But her thoughts chased their own tails, so when the phone rang at nine she pounced on it. It was Mouton.

‘What you got, Piet?’ she asked.

Mouton got straight to the point. ‘Helena Kotze did a good job on Lazarus Beukes and Apollis. The other two are a first-class bugger-up. Looks like they were done by some idiot who wouldn’t be able to dissect a frog.’

‘I’m not going to contradict that,’ Clare said with feeling. ‘Can you tell me anything about where they were kept?’

‘If they were shot out in the desert?’ asked Mouton.

‘That’s what I’m assuming,’ Clare said.

‘Then I’d say these boys were kept inside, somewhere where the temperature was even. I checked on the weather,’ said Mouton. ‘There were some pretty hot inland temperatures around when these boys were missing. Some isolated showers too.’

‘That’d explain the termites,’ interrupted Clare. ‘Sorry, Piet, go on, I was just thinking aloud.’

‘You think away, Dr Hart,’ continued Mouton. ‘Now, if they’d been outside, and someone had been there to keep the predators off them, they would’ve burnt in that sun.’

‘So where should I look?’ said Clare.

‘A well-insulated house – definitely not one of those tin pondoks. Possibly a deep cave. Somewhere where the temperature would’ve been constant.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I hope it helps.’

Clare put down the receiver and walked to the kitchen in a daze. She made tea and took it into the lounge. She put on a CD. She had missed Moby while she was away. ‘Where were they?’ Clare asked Fritz.

But the cat just purred and curled up like a comma against her back. Clare spread out the photographs of the four bodies and shattered skulls on the coffee table. She stood up, spilling the cat to the floor, and fetched her phone. ‘I need to discuss the case with Riedwaan,’ she told her baleful cat as she dialled, believing herself.

‘Faizal.’

Her heart gave a leap when she heard his voice. ‘It’s Clare.’

‘I know it’s you.’ Riedwaan was guarded.

‘I needed to talk to you… about the case,’ said Clare, watching the sea tumble against the rocks beyond the boulevard.

Riedwaan waited. In the distance, the foghorn wailed into the night. ‘Are those the terms? For us to have a conversation?’ he asked.

‘Mouton called,’ said Clare. ‘There’s a lot to discuss.’

‘You’re telling me? I’ll be there when I can,’ he said. ‘On your terms.’