Blood Rose

thirty-three

Clare was ready and waiting when Riedwaan fetched her at five-thirty. Dressed in a black poloneck, black trousers, her hair tamed, lipstick in place, she had the carapace of her professional self firmly back in place.

Riedwaan took the N1 through the dilapidated fringes of Cape Town towards the forbidding mountains that were the gateway to the interior. McGregor was eighty kilometres beyond them. The sun was up, stirring the hamlet awake, when they reached it. Smoke wisped from the crowded houses on the eastern edge of town. Higher up the hill, larger houses were spread out around a sturdy white church. A few children in sports uniforms were chattering their way to school along the main road.

‘Voortrekker Road.’ Riedwaan read the sign in disbelief. ‘This is like a movie set. No burglar bars. No armed response. How do they sleep?’

‘I’m with you. You’ll survive,’ said Clare. ‘Lie your urban hackles down.’

‘I don’t like it.’ Riedwaan tapped his fingers as he waited for an old lady to coax her moth-eaten terrier across the road. ‘It’s like the whole place is waiting for something to happen.’

‘Something did happen. Why else would we be here?’

‘Connecting things will be tricky,’ said Riedwaan. ‘If there is a connection.’

‘It’s worth a shot, so to speak,’ said Clare. ‘Mill Street. Turn here.’

Goedgevonden was the last house. A low, dry-packed wall kept the flinty Karoo scrub out of the lush garden. They hadn’t called. Clare and Riedwaan preferred to see people without warning, before the battlements of the self could be checked for a breach.

‘That’s a welcome mat, not a dog,’ said Riedwaan, ringing the bicycle bell on the gate as a German Shepherd ambled over to the gate and whined. A woman straightened up from her rose bed behind the wall.

‘Mrs Hofmeyr?’ asked Riedwaan.

The woman who approached, secateurs glinting in her hand, was maybe fifty-five, her iron-grey bun severe. She looked at Clare, took Riedwaan in.

‘Can I help you?’

The dog was at its mistress’s side with a single click of her fingers, its eyes wary. Not such a doormat after all.

‘I’m Riedwaan Faizal, SAPS special investigations. This is Dr Clare Hart. It’s about your husband Captain Hofmeyr.’

Mrs Hofmeyr squinted into the sun. ‘Have you got new evidence?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Riedwaan replied. ‘But we need to speak to you to find out.’

‘If you’ve driven from Cape Town, I’m sure you’ll need some coffee. Come into the kitchen. We can talk more privately there.’

They followed her inside and sat down at a scrubbed yellow-wood table. The coffee pot hissed on the stove. Moerkoffie. Mrs Hofmeyr slipped a doily off the milk jug. Its little fringe of glass beads clicked in the silence, disturbing the cat coiled asleep on a blue cushion. The animal took one look at Riedwaan and arched its back and hissed.

‘What is it with me and cats?’ Riedwaan muttered.

‘Rasputin isn’t used to visitors,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, stroking the cat’s gun-metal coat.

‘We need to ask you some questions about Captain Hofmeyr’s death,’ said Clare. Murder was too brutal a word for the ordered domesticity of the room.

‘Major Hofmeyr,’ corrected his widow. ‘Why do you want to stir it up again?’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Clare, ‘but we suspect that the weapon used to shoot your husband has been used in another crime.’

‘How awful,’ whispered Mrs Hofmeyr, bringing her hand to her mouth. ‘Near here?’

‘In Namibia,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Walvis Bay.’

Mrs Hofmeyr frowned. ‘What happened?’

‘Four shootings,’ said Riedwaan. ‘It’d be a great help if you could tell us what happened to your husband.’

‘I’ve already told everything to the police, but all right. He was shot in the head. Close range, single pistol shot. I identified him.’ Mrs Hofmeyr trembled, but there were no tears. She had used up her quota long ago. ‘He looked so young again when I saw him. All those years gone. A life erased.’

‘What time did he leave the house?’ asked Clare.

‘Early. Before seven, I’d say. I was asleep when he left. When I woke at seven-thirty the tea he had left for me was ice cold.’ She twisted her cup in its saucer. ‘Who would want to torture him?’

Riedwaan could think of quite a few people who might want to leave a trellis of knife wounds on a man who had commanded a special operations unit during the dirtiest years of South Africa’s war in Namibia. Hearts and minds. You could say that Hofmeyr’s killer got both. He didn’t say that.

‘One of the officers here said it was gangsters,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr. ‘People in the village said some 28s had been here.’

The number gangs. South Africa’s apocryphal grim reapers, trailing fear and destruction in their wake. Sliding like a knife through the soft underbelly of a country where all felt their houses to be chalked with crosses, where the vultures of fear circled above the living. The perfect slipstream for another kind of killer, well dressed, without tinted windows, to follow. He would have been smoke against a heat-whitened sky, invisible until the roar of the flames was too close. If he existed.

‘They never traced them?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘No,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, acidly. ‘How often do the police find anyone?’

Riedwaan shifted in his chair. He had no answer for that.

‘What did he do, Major Hofmeyr, with his time?’ Clare changed tack. ‘After the army?’

‘Rugby-coaching at the school. He’d started teaching science too. He was a physicist. The army was good to ambitious Afrikaners born on the wrong side of the tracks. Teaching science was his way of saying sorry for what happened’ – she hesitated – ‘for what happened before.’

‘He see anyone from his army days?’

‘Not really. He was a loner. After Bishop Tutu’s thing, the dust settled and we didn’t see anyone much. I suppose they didn’t need each other any more, didn’t need to check up on who was going to say what. Sometimes his old army friends would come through, drink a bit, hunt a bit in season, but other than that the past just went away. We were quiet here. I liked it like that.’ She twisted the obsolete wedding ring on her left hand.

‘I’m sorry to bring up the past,’ said Clare.

Mrs Hofmeyr shook her head. ‘Where does it start? That’s what I never know about the past. Kobus was a soldier. The army was his life and 1994 was the end of it. Is that the beginning or the end of the past?’

‘That’s why you came to McGregor?’ Clare asked.

‘I don’t think my husband cared where he went. He just came here to wait until his heart stopped beating.’

‘Depression?’

Mrs Hofmeyr batted the word away with a dismissive hand. ‘Psychological labels. Human beings aren’t bottles of jam. Depressed, obsessive compulsive, paranoid. Giving it a name doesn’t make it feel any different.’

‘He came out of it?’ Clare guessed.

Mrs Hofmeyr looked up at her, surprised. ‘He did. Slowly. Despite himself. It helped that our daughter came to visit with her baby from Australia. The first time they had spoken in fifteen years, but not even he could fight with a baby. It was as if some knot inside him loosened, released the man I had married. I don’t know. He kept on worrying about the world, about terrorists and bombs, and about what could happen to his skattebol.’

‘What was he like, your husband?’ asked Clare.

Mrs Hofmeyr sighed as she cleared away the coffee cups. ‘If you want a sense of my husband, go and look at his den.’ She opened the kitchen door and gestured down the passageway. ‘I suppose you could say that is what his world shrunk to.’

Apart from the kitchen, the house was dim. The shutters were closed, the curtains drawn. It had the stillness of a museum. Clare opened a door off the passage. A masculine seclusion, free of ornaments. It was irresistible. She stepped inside. The desk was clean, the letter opener and pen standing in quartz holders. A perfect desert rose on an ugly little plinth held down a pile of till slips. Clare checked the dates. All from a few days before Hofmeyr was killed: bottle store, DIY, cigarettes and a paper from the café. Next to the desk was a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. A trophy hunt. Caprivi, Kaokoland, Angola. Clare wondered where the helicopters had hovered, machine-gun bullets studding into the fleeing animals below. She pictured the elephant cows herding their panic-stricken young towards the tree line. One sinking to her knees as her calf nudged her with his forehead, then retreated and watched as the men, laughing, hopped down to hack off the cow’s foot as the last light in her wise eyes was extinguished. Then again, the murdered man could just as easily have bought it in a junk shop and brought it home for a laugh.

One wall was covered with photographs. Clare went to look at them. A 1960s wedding picture. Later, Mrs Hofmeyr in a halter-neck top, a baby in her arms. Then another baby, the first child now a thoughtful little boy bracketed around his mother’s slim legs. Another photo showed a sturdy young woman on a speedboat, a greying Major Hofmeyr grinned next to her.

‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, coming to stand next to Clare. ‘She moved to Australia.’

‘They seem happy here,’ said Clare.

‘They were,’ Mrs Hofmeyr replied. ‘Eventually.’

Clare guessed that politics would have come between them. A father with a decorated career in the defence force of the apartheid years did not go down well in the new South Africa.

Mrs Hofmeyr trailed a finger across a picture of her husband saluting troops on a dusty parade ground. The undulating sweep of sand was unmistakable. Strange, though, to see the vast plain covered with tents. They seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon, a regatta of triangular khaki sails on a sea of sand.

‘Walvis Bay?’ asked Clare.

‘Where else? It looks so different now,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr.

‘How long were you there for?’

‘You want me to give you the hours and seconds? The heartbeats?’ Her bitterness flared, a naked flame. ‘We were there from 1989 to 1994. Five years, three months and eleven days. Before that at the weapons testing site in Vastrap in the Northern Cape. God knows what we were supposed to do there in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. No people. No trees. Nothing but heat and dust and secrets. Not a place to go if you had a family.’

The large photograph hanging behind the door caught Clare’s attention. She stopped, arrested by the photograph of Major Hofmeyr. Lithe and brown, his eyes the blue of the sky above the dune rising in a majestic sweep behind him. Three soldiers, equally confident, were draped over a dusty Bedford. The man next to Hofmeyr, his swagger evident in his muscular, khaki-clad legs, had a hard face. The third one was as thin as a whip, his expression shadowed by his cap.

‘That was Kobus’s unit.’ Mrs Hofmeyr pointed to the date on the bottom. ‘It was taken when they were disbanding. This was the last picture of all of them before they returned.’

‘They came back then?’

‘Kobus and a couple of officers wrapped up the last things, then came back. The troops returned by truck and on the train.’

‘You know them? The others?’ Riedwaan asked.

Mrs Hofmeyr shook her head. ‘Kobus kept us separate, me and his life.’ She stood closer to the photograph. ‘I can’t remember their names.’ She pointed to the shadowed figure. ‘He came to the house sometimes near the end. He and Kobus would talk. He never said anything to me. This one’ – she pointed at the man next to Hofmeyr – ‘had such a young wife. She was a dancer before she married.’ She frowned at the tug of memory. ‘Maylene or Marlene was her name. Something unusual.’

Clare pictured a house on the edge of the dunes. A bracelet of bruises. ‘Not Darlene?’ she asked.

‘That was it: Darlene. Her husband stamped on her ankle at a party. He said she’d been flirting. She never danced again.’

Darlene walking down a dim, polished passage. The awkward gait. A surname jettisoned to mark the end of a marriage. ‘She’s still there,’ said Clare.

‘In Walvis Bay?’ Mrs Hofmeyr was appalled. ‘I suppose it was the only way she could escape her husband.’

‘You never went back?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Never. Neither did my husband. There was nothing left for him there. Or the others. They all got sent home to garden and become security guards in the new South Africa.’ She stood transfixed by the picture as if it were a cobra weaving in front of her. ‘He said it was better to leave things in the past, where they belonged. Walvis Bay was the place where all his dreams died. Fool’s gold is what he called the past.’ Mrs Hofmeyr tapped the photograph of her husband standing in a typical soldier’s pose, unfiltered cigarette in his hand. ‘A fool,’ she said. ‘They were all fools.’

‘Did your husband keep any kind of record of his time there?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Never. He kept everything in his head. Habit from working with classified stuff. He was proud of the fact that he remembered everything even though he wrote nothing down.’

They stood looking at the fading photographs. Deep within the house, a clock chimed ten.

‘There’s nothing else,’ said Mrs Hofmeyr, ‘is there?’

‘He never fought back.’ Clare broke the silence of the journey. They had travelled from McGregor to the outskirts of Cape Town without saying a word.

‘Hofmeyr?’ Riedwaan’s thoughts had been elsewhere.

‘There were no injuries. No defensive injuries. You think he wanted to die? Just gave up?’

‘It’s possible he felt certain he was going to die and decided just to go with it, without the ritual of begging and pleading and trying to run away,’ Riedwaan suggested. ‘Or he knew his killer and he’d reached the end of a road that only the two of them knew about. The war in Namibia was a dirty one, and most of the dirt was brushed under the carpet.’

‘That’s not much help, is it?’ Clare played with the new puzzle pieces Mrs Hofmeyr had given her. ‘I guess we should talk to Darlene Ruyters again. Find out about her ex-husband.’ There were links, but no perfect fits. ‘She’s not very forthcoming, though. If she knows something, I doubt she’ll talk.’

‘Let’s go and talk to the investigating officer, if he’s sober enough.’

‘You know him?’

‘Eberard Februarie. Old connection,’ said Riedwaan, taking the Stellenbosch turn-off. ‘I probably owe him a drink anyway.’