Blood Rose

thirty-six

Clare parked next to Tamar’s car when she got to the Walvis Bay police station on Monday morning. She was impatient to be busy after the town’s Sunday torpor. The constable at reception greeted her as though she had been gone for weeks. Clare could see a strip of light coming from Tamar Damases’s office. She knocked and went inside.

‘How was your Cape Town trip?’ Tamar asked, after offering Clare a cup of tea.

‘Interesting,’ said Clare.

‘Chinese interesting?’ Tamar gave her a sidelong glance.

‘Pretty much,’ said Clare, with a rueful smile. ‘Ballistics tracked that bullet we found in Lazarus Beukes.’

‘To the murder in McGregor. Peculiar,’ said Tamar. ‘I spoke to Captain Faizal.’

‘Same gun,’ said Clare, ‘doesn’t make it the same killer. Guns change hands so fast and for so little. How were the interviews about Lazarus?’

‘No family, so no one to break the news to,’ said Tamar. ‘Should have been a relief that, but it made me feel worse. The other kids told me he was in town on Wednesday, doing his usual trick, selling out-of-date newspapers. The little kids who were with him went back to the dump. They don’t get a meal if they’re late. Lazarus said he’d be along later. He wasn’t, but nobody thought much of that. He’s older, did his own thing anyway.’

‘Did they notice he was missing on Thursday?’ asked Clare.

‘They did. They were afraid.’

‘But nobody said anything?’

‘Habits don’t change that quickly,’ Tamar said. ‘They’re boys for one, so no telling tales. And second, the police give them a hard time. Particularly some of my own colleagues.’ She rose and picked up her jacket. ‘I’m going to the school. Mr Erasmus has asked me to talk to the Grade 1s. They all want to know what we did with the body, if we’re going to catch the murderer. If they’re safe. Would you like to come with me?’

‘I’ll come,’ said Clare, finishing her tea. ‘I want to see Darlene Ruyters anyway.’

Tamar picked up her keys and they walked out together. ‘You missed Mara Thomson’s farewell party, by the way,’ she told Clare. ‘The school hosted a little ceremony for her.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Sad, considering the circumstances. I think she felt that everything she’d worked for came to nothing.’

They arrived at the school at the end of first break. Tamar parked under the palm tree as the bell rang. Erasmus came out to welcome them while the older children drifted back to class. He directed them to the section of the school that overlooked the playground where Kaiser Apollis’s body had been found. The corridor that housed the youngest children was crowded with satchels and pungent lunchboxes. Solemn-faced six-year-olds dropping glass, paper and tins into recycling bins stared at them as they walked to Darlene Ruyters’s classroom. It had a clear view of the playground, the emptied yellow swings slow-moving in the breeze.

Darlene Ruyters sat at her desk, her right arm around a plump, pig-tailed girl. The child spun around when she saw Clare and Tamar at the door. Darlene patted the little girl on her bottom, despatching her back to her seat.

‘Good morning, Captain, Doctor.’ Darlene extended her slender right hand. The children shuffled to their feet and greeted the two interlopers in a singsong chorus. A wave from Darlene seated them again.

‘Finish your seascapes,’ she told the class. Small heads bowed over sheets of colourful paper. After a few furtive glances, they were absorbed once more in scissors and glue and bits of glitter. As Tamar discussed what she’d tell the children with Darlene, Clare drifted to the back of the classroom. A series of postersized self-portraits were pinned to the wall. Cheery collages with a smiling child, a few blonde, most dark, at the centre of each one. Pictures of parents, siblings, houses ranging from modest to mansion, ice creams, braaied fish – the small, familiar pleasures that made sense of life for a child.

The lone redhead caught Clare’s eye. Oscar. He had given himself wild hair out of orange twine. When she turned to look for the original, his green eyes were riveted to her. She smiled at him. He looked down at once, a startling blush creeping up from under his collar.

Clare looked at his portrait again. The images were skeletal, arresting, executed in the colours and form of the rock paintings found in the desert. Oscar’s drawings told a story that the other children, who could speak and shout and laugh, did not need to. Clare looked at his picture of a woman with a mass of hair twisted out of fraying yellow wool. The next picture had the same feeling of bell-jarred silence. A man and boy sat side by side; in a second chair, a woman, taut as a wire, watching television. Another drawing with the woman absent, and Oscar plastered to the man’s side, his limbs uncurled as if they had been released from invisible ropes. Ordinary scenes made extraordinary because of the sense of menace that pervaded them.

Clare felt Oscar’s presence next to her, as she had on the couple of occasions when he had fallen in step beside her on the boulevard. She looked down, startled to see the contusion on the cheekbone, just below his left eye, and a small, livid tear in the tender skin. Clare put her hand on Oscar’s thin shoulder; feeling across his back where there would be more bruises. The child winced.

‘What happened?’ asked Clare, concerned. Oscar avoided her gaze as he tumbled his hands over each other.

‘You fell?’ she asked. ‘Off your bike?’

He nodded and pointed to the single photograph on the wall. It was fuzzy, printed on cheap paper.

‘Mara?’ asked Clare, bending closer. The boy nodded.

‘You’ll miss her now she’s gone.’ In the photograph Mara Thomson stood exultant on top of a dune, arms and face lifted towards the sun, eyes closed in delight. The shadow of the photographer had splashed against her feet, giving the picture an odd perspective.

Oscar was seated next to her shadowed feet, swathed in a hat and long sleeves.

‘You know the desert though, don’t you? That’s the place you went with your mother, isn’t it?’

Oscar nodded, shoulders bowed like an old man.

‘Clare?’ Tamar and Darlene Ruyters were looking at her. So were the children.

‘Sorry,’ said Clare. ‘I was lost there for a minute.’

Oscar looked down, the thick fringe of auburn eyelashes hiding any expression.

‘Mrs Ruyters says the children will want to ask you some questions too,’ said Tamar. ‘They’re always curious about foreigners.’

‘Being South African is hardly foreign,’ said Clare.

Darlene raised an eyebrow. ‘They think Swakopmund is a foreign country and it’s only thirty kilometres away.’

‘Let them ask, then,’ said Clare, smiling.

‘Thank you, it’ll help them be less…’

‘Afraid?’ offered Clare.

‘I was going to say fascinated.’

Tamar explained that the dead boy had been taken to the morgue. And that they were safe. The half-moon of children sitting at her feet stared at her with wide, solemn eyes. Only the bravest had questions: where would he be buried? Could they go to his funeral? Tamar fielded them with practised empathy. Soon the children had sidled closer and she got them talking about other things.

‘This has been a big help,’ Darlene said when she had winkled Tamar away from the children and ushered them out of the classroom. ‘Thank you.’

‘That little redhead,’ Clare said.

‘Oscar?’ said Darlene.

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘His face is bruised.’

‘Oh, Tamar can tell you, we have such bad cases…’ Darlene’s voice trailed off. She looked at Tamar for support.

‘What do you think?’ Clare was thinking that somebody’s ring held a trace of the child’s blood in its setting.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Darlene. ‘The children come to school with bruises, but you want to see some of the mothers on a Monday. They bear the brunt of it.’ She closed the classroom door behind them. The corridor was cold and quiet after the buzz of the children.

‘I met an old friend of yours,’ said Clare. ‘In McGregor.’ Her voice was loud in the empty corridor.

‘Oh?’ Wary.

‘Mrs Hofmeyr,’ said Clare, watching Darlene closely. ‘She told me why you stopped dancing.’

‘I’ve got to get back to my class.’ Darlene cut her short.

‘It was an army boot on your ankle.’

‘So what if it was?’ hissed Darlene. ‘Since when is it a crime to be beaten?’ She put out her hand to open the door. The amethyst bracelet of bruises Clare had seen a few days earlier gleamed citron.

‘You’ve got my number.’ Clare placed her index finger on Darlene’s wrist.

‘I don’t need it.’ Darlene had her mask-like smile back in place when she stepped back into the classroom. Her voice calling her giggling charges back to order followed Tamar and Clare down the passage.