Blood Rose

thirty-eight

Four o’clock and Clare was wide awake, her duvet on the floor, a sheet tangled around her bare legs. Her dreams had been horrible: the dead boys winking at her with their bloody third eyes. The laugh of the hyena echoed through her subconscious, mocking her in a language she could not understand. She got up, opened her stoep doors and stepped onto the balcony. The silence pressed in with the fog. Not a sound, not a car. Roosting seabirds rustled their wings, calling softly, occasionally, as if to reassure themselves that they weren’t alone in the vast salt marshes. The cold, and the pulse of an idea, drove Clare back inside; if she couldn’t sleep, she might as well work.

She dressed quickly, flattening two cups of coffee in quick succession. The sound of her car starting was so loud she was convinced that she had woken the whole town, but nothing stirred. No lights came on.

A sleepy night sergeant waved her through the police station gates. In the special ops room, dim light filtered in from the street, making Clare’s pinned-up victims look like a macabre boy band. She flooded the room with neon and sat down at her desk. Opening her notebook, she drew up columns, one for each boy. The first victim with nothing on his chest. Then 2, 3. The missing number 4, and 5, the last one. Five columns, four bodies. Clare wrote down what she knew about them, what she knew about their deaths. Then she wrote down what she didn’t know.

She made another column for the killer. Nothing to put there, but a bullet matched to a shooting two thousand kilometres away, and a white vehicle glimpsed in the dark. A predator that slipped through the night, unheard. Utmost secrecy and yet the bodies displayed where it would be impossible to miss them. She looked again at the map of the place where Lazarus had been found. One road in. One road out. Beyond it, tracks of sand unmarked by vehicles; the only tracks left were those of animals. Kaiser Apollis, too. Moved unseen and in silence. How? When she reached for the answer glimmering on the horizon of thought, it slipped away like a mirage on a desert road.

Debit and credit. No matter which way she juggled it, she could not get the books to balance. The truth was hidden below the surface, like the rivers that coursed deep underground. Clare put her head on her arms and closed her eyes to think and promptly fell asleep. Fully clothed, under a flickering neon light, Clare did not dream at all.

It was the smell of fresh coffee that woke her. ‘Not like you to sleep on the job.’ A voice that should have been in her dreams but wasn’t, a gentle hand smoothing the hair from her forehead.

‘Riedwaan.’ Delight in her voice. She looked a mess; she could feel it. Hair all over the place, her cheek red from where it had rested on her sleeve. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I made you coffee. Here.’ Riedwaan pushed a steaming cup across the desk. ‘And I got you a Florentine from the Venus Bakery. Your favourite.’

The honeyed almonds glistened in their nest of chocolate and dried fruit. Clare picked it up. It was too early in the morning to resist. She bit into the tiny biscuit. It was delicious. Useful too, because she couldn’t eat and grin. Which was what she felt like doing, seeing Riedwaan sitting on the edge of her desk.

‘Thanks for letting me know you were here,’ she said, with her mouth full.

‘I did try. Check your phone.’

Clare pulled it out of her pocket. ‘Damn. So you did. It’s been on silent.’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Clare.

‘You could’ve fooled me.’

‘In bed I couldn’t,’ she said.

‘So you came in here?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Odd choice for soothing company.’

‘I’m going crazy with them.’ Clare gestured to the boys on the wall. ‘Just as I feel I have something, it vanishes like water on hot sand. Have you seen Captain Damases?’ she asked.

‘Not yet. Only Van Wyk, I think it is. He’s about as warm as a KGB agent.’

‘That’s Van Wyk for you,’ said Clare. ‘I don’t think South Africans are at the top of his hit parade. Did you meet Elias Karamata?’

‘Looks like a prizefighter? He said I’d find you in here.’

‘Oh God, I suppose everyone knows I’ve been sleeping here.’

‘Pretty much.’ Riedwaan walked over to the displays, concentrating in turn on each of the four clusters, absorbing what Clare and Tamar had set out.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Fritz Woestyn, the one without a number carved on his chest, he was the first one?’

‘Yes. We’ve been thinking of him as Number 1. Head shot, but not as close as the others. No tattooing that the pathologist could see. So definitely more than two, three metres. The others are all close-up.’

‘Show me where he was found.’

Clare pointed to a red pin on the aerial map. ‘His body was dumped here, but it wasn’t where he was shot.’ Riedwaan was standing close to her, raising the tiny hairs on her arms.

‘Some guys checking a fifty-kilometre stretch just happened to find him?’ asked Riedwaan.

Clare nodded. Riedwaan thought of the vast desert he had just passed through.

‘You could go missing in this desert and not be found for weeks,’ Clare said, reading his mind. ‘The chances of the boys’ discovery were so slim that whoever shot him probably calculated that he wouldn’t be found until he’d been reduced to just another heap of bones. Or they dumped him where they knew he’d be found.’

‘The others?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Jones, Apollis, Beukes. Run me through them.’

‘The killings get more elaborate after that first one. Nicanor Jones with the 2; Kaiser Apollis had a 3 on his chest. Then a skip to Lazarus Beukes with a 5.’

‘Where’s your Number 4?’

‘Alive and well, I hope. No one’s been reported missing.’ Clare fanned out a series of close-ups: the faces, their mutilated chests, the missing finger joints on the left hands. ‘It’s the same person killing them,’ she said. ‘We don’t have a bullet from each scene, but it looks like the same calibre gun and the same rope – nylon washing line – on the wrists. Same victim profile, too. Marginal boy, fifteen or so, fey, small, nobody to look for him. Also, there’s a time thing. It looks like the murders were done on or around a Friday night, except for Lazarus. At least close to the weekend.’

‘And your man?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Where does he hang out?’

‘This is the only place I can fix him,’ said Clare, pointing to the first red pin on the map.

‘The takeaway place at the lagoon?’ said Riedwaan.

‘Lover’s Hill. They went there. Well, I know for sure that Kaiser Apollis was there. The cook saw him on the Friday evening he was killed. He ordered some food and then got into a car a few metres down the road.’

‘Okay,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m with you. What happens?’

‘This guy picks them up somewhere, probably in town where it wouldn’t be noticed. Then he drives out, dropping them off to get something to eat. The cook noticed Kaiser because it was quiet, but otherwise the boys would be in and out. Invisible. Then they go outside, walk down the road a bit and get back into the car and they drive out into the desert.’

‘There’s no sign of recent sexual assault, is there?’ said Riedwaan, checking the post-mortem results.

‘No. Maybe he’s impotent. Maybe he’s a romantic. Maybe they laugh at him, threaten him. Maybe he gets his kicks in his own special way.’

‘By shooting them?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Maybe.’

‘So who moves them?’

‘Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong…’ Clare’s voice trailed off as she stared at the accumulating bank of information. ‘Maybe he meets someone out there. They both do something together…’

‘What’s he like, this romantic of yours?’

‘He’d have to be a loner, maybe a shift worker, so no one notices late comings and goings.’ Clare finished her coffee. ‘A textbook killer for a textbook case.’

Riedwaan walked over to the window and looked out over the flat, featureless town. ‘How do people get around this place?’ he asked.

‘On foot or bike, if you’re poor,’ said Clare. ‘A 4x4 if you’re somebody.’ She cocked her head and looked at her display. ‘He’d have a car, or access to a car. Enough money to lure these kids and then buy them food. Something to drink. I’d put his age at around thirty-five, forty. Maybe a bit more. He might be someone the kids think they could take advantage of, but they’d go with just about anyone with a bit of cash.’

‘Even after a couple of them have been killed?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘It must seem like someone they can trust, someone they don’t expect to be a danger.’

‘I agree,’ said Clare. ‘Someone they wouldn’t see as a threat. The car will also look like everyone else’s here.’

‘White double cab, if what I’ve seen is anything to go by,’ said Riedwaan. ‘What would’ve triggered this spree?’

‘Something unravels, the guy ropes of self-control snap,’ said Clare. ‘Stress does it usually. And there you go: a killer on the loose.’ She looked at the pictures of Lazarus’s bloodied face. ‘Whoever it is knows how to seduce. There’s no sign of a struggle and such an intimate death. Blood would splatter on your hands and face as you fire. Quite a sophisticated rush in a way, the symbolism of it: the union, the consummation. Weird.’

‘With you involved it’s going to be weird, Clare,’ said Riedwaan, looking at the pictures of a dismembered hand. ‘You’re sure it’s someone local?’

‘Whoever’s doing this knows this place very well. He wouldn’t be able to be invisible otherwise.’ She paced up and down in front of the pinboard, stopping in front of the photograph of Kaiser Apollis’s shrouded figure. ‘My profile’s still off-kilter,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The display aspect of the murders. Herman Shipanga went on about bodies being exhibited as a kind of warning. It’s not just the rush that comes with pulling the trigger. Our killer’s trying to communicate something too, through the bodies. Out in the Kuiseb, where Lazarus’s body was found, you had to ask how he got to be there exactly, where Chanel would find him. I keep thinking: someone knows this place, knows where people will stop in this vast desert, knows its secrets and can work with them. I wonder-’ The door swung open, interrupting Clare. It was Tamar. ‘Did you sleep well, Riedwaan?’ she asked. ‘Comfortable where we put you?’

‘Good bar, good bed, good food. Thanks.’

Clare had hardly noticed Tamar come in. ‘What is this?’ she said, almost to herself. She was rifling through the photographs, pulling out the one Tamar had taken of the alleyway behind the schoolyard where Kaiser Apollis had been found. She spun around. ‘Riedwaan?’

‘Morning to you too, Clare,’ said Tamar.

Riedwaan peered at the photograph. ‘Looks like dirt to me,’ he said, puzzled, passing it to Tamar.

‘It’s shit,’ said Clare.

‘What did you say?’ Riedwaan looked at Clare, startled. She saved swearing for emergencies. A grainy crime-scene photo was not an emergency.

Clare strode over to the desk, opened the interview file and flipped through the transcripts. ‘Remember, what you asked me, Riedwaan?’

‘Which question?’ he said. ‘There were twenty or more.’

‘About how people get around?’

‘Yes, by bike, foot, car… it was just a check.’

‘Okay then,’ said Clare. ‘Look at this.’ She brandished a carefully typed page. ‘Tamar, remember, you said the recyclers use the alley behind the school.’

‘They do,’ said Tamar.

‘And that woman we talked to, the one hanging up her washing, said she heard nothing?’

‘I remember.’

Clare walked back to the pinboard. ‘When I came back with Helena Kotze after we found Lazarus, I saw a family going home on their donkey cart. I didn’t hear them until I was practically upon them. You wouldn’t really hear a cart if you were inside and the television was on.’ She pointed to a small heap of dung in the photograph. ‘Look here,’ she said. ‘A pile of donkey shit, right by the opening of the fence. They must’ve passed right here and we never thought to question them.’

Riedwaan was still confused. ‘Who uses donkey carts?’

‘The Topnaars,’ said Clare. ‘The desert people. Their settlements are marked on the aerial survey photos. Here.’ She gestured to a series of little black crosses. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see their shanties. Hot as hell they are. I just didn’t put recyclers and the Topnaars together. But of course it would be them, scavenging bits of scrap for the cash even they need to survive.’

‘It’s so risky,’ said Riedwaan.

Clare turned to look at him. ‘Not if you’ve got nothing left to lose.’

‘Your invisible man?’ Tamar said to Clare. ‘A Topnaar?’

‘Who else moves with such ease through the Namib?’

‘A desert nomad doesn’t fit with your profile,’ Riedwaan noted. ‘They’re as poor as the dead kids.’

‘No,’ said Clare, ‘but surely they’d know who’s moving in and out of the Kuiseb. They’d see.’

‘Wouldn’t they tell?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Tamar thoughtfully. ‘They’re a marginal people, pushed further and further out. Persecuted by the army, silenced by this administration that wants them all settled and schooled and controllable. The Topnaars have a couple of hundred years’ worth of knowing that the underdog gets the blame. If they found a body, they’d want it as far away from their land as possible.’

‘So they wouldn’t want to attract attention.’ Riedwaan was looking at the map.

‘Tertius Myburgh mentioned an old man called Spyt to me. Virginia Meyer used to work with him, because he knew the desert like the back of his hand. Do you know him?’ Clare asked Tamar.

‘I know of him,’ said Tamar. ‘He’s very secretive, avoids people like the plague. He doesn’t speak.’

‘Give me a straight-down-the-line gangster any day,’ muttered Riedwaan.

‘I think we should try to talk to him,’ said Clare. ‘Stupid of me, not to have gone out there before.’

‘We can give it a shot,’ said Tamar sceptically. ‘We’ve got to show Riedwaan around anyway, so we’ll kill two birds this way. I’ll get Van Wyk and Elias. Meet you outside in five minutes?’

Clare nodded.

‘Your profile doesn’t fit,’ Riedwaan said again as Tamar left the room.

‘What if there are two people involved?’ asked Clare. Her voice was very quiet.

Riedwaan pulled on his jacket, suddenly chilled. ‘Two?’ he prompted.

‘One who kills.’ Clare tapped her pen on the window as she stared towards the desert. ‘For whatever reason. And another who displays.’