Blood Rose

thirty-nine

‘Spyt’s going to hear us long before we’re even close,’ said Elias Karamata. ‘We won’t find him unless he wants to be found.’

Clare, Riedwaan, Tamar and Karamata had left Van Wyk at the station. Claiming that he wanted to see what else the South African experts had missed was his tactful way of putting it. After showing Riedwaan where the bodies had been found, they had gone from one Topnaar settlement in the Kuiseb to the next, each one drier and dustier than the last. An old woman, her weathered skin the same texture as her cloak, had said she knew where Spyt lived. She had led them through a lattice of desiccated tributaries to a desolate refuge.

‘It looks as if he lives here alone,’ said Clare. Unlike the other settlements, there were no dogs, no goats and no bug-eyed children staring at them from the inside of tin huts.

The camp was well hidden, backed up against a protrusion of black rock. Rusting lumps of metal and old tyres lay around between the little pyramids of bottles and old tins.

‘Bully beef,’ Tamar said, picking up an old tin. ‘Old army issue. This must be twenty years old.’

Nothing moved on the black rocks. High above them a lone vulture drifted in the wash of blue sky. The Namib’s eyes and ears, its silent witness. Like Spyt, Clare thought, hidden in a place that even his practised eyes would struggle to find.

‘Eitsma miere, Spyt,’ Tamar Damases called in Nama, the ancient mother tongue that she and Spyt shared. Her voice echoed off the rocks, the only reply.

The old woman led them around the side of the rocky protrusion to a small cave. A ring of stones circled the shelter, demarcating the point at which the desert ended and Spyt’s dwelling began. A fireplace marked the epicentre of the domestic circle, the coals half-covered with sand.

‘Still hot,’ said Riedwaan, putting his hand close. The back of Clare’s neck prickled as if she were being watched. She looked about; there was nothing but a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

A shallow oval of bark had been abandoned alongside the cave. Karamata picked it up and moved it back and forth between his hands, winnowing the wild grass seed Spyt must have harvested from a termite heap. He blew away the husks, and the breeze caught them, dust-devilling them across the sand. The chaff landed in the fireplace, the coals flaring briefly. ‘You make pap with these,’ he explained to Clare and Riedwaan. ‘Spyt has to eat food that’s as soft as a baby’s because of his mouth.’

‘His name means regret in Afrikaans,’ said Riedwaan. ‘What happened to him?’

Tamar asked their wizened guide, who burst into an animated tale in Nama. Clare could not understand a word, but the lilt of the tonal language, punctuated by a complex series of clicks, carried her with the emotional flow of the tale.

Tamar translated: ‘She says that when he was a toddler his mother went to work on a farm on the edge of the Namib. Spyt ate caustic soda and it dissolved the inside of his mouth. That’s why his mother took him back into the Namib. They lived together, just the two of them until she died. Then he lived alone. It was his mother who taught him how to hunt, how to hide.’

‘Must’ve been why the military were always after him,’ said Karamata.

‘Were they?’ Riedwaan asked.

‘Oh yes.’ Karamata gestured at the sand sprawling into the horizon. ‘They made him work as a tracker for a while. They wanted to know everything about the desert, claim it, then own it and keep everything secret.’

‘Let’s look around,’ said Tamar, ‘but I don’t think he’s going to pitch.’

Clare went into the small cave shelter. It was narrow, dark beyond the splash of light at the entrance. There were few things inside, a sleeping roll, a leather bag, a pair of handmade shoes with pieces of tyre serving as the soles. Strips of cloth hung off a hook. Clare touched the fabric. It had perished from the heat, but the green stripe was still visible. The faint lettering too.

‘Looks like old army sheeting,’ said Riedwaan, following Clare into the cave. ‘SWATF. The letters make the green stripe.’

The smell of years of wood smoke, of stale human sleep was overwhelming. Clare stepped outside, her heart pounding. It was a relief to be in the open air, but it did nothing to clarify her dervishing thoughts.

‘A scavenger,’ said Riedwaan, ducking out of the cave. ‘Looks like he collected all sorts of rubbish lying about the desert, but not your boys. They were kept for a couple of days at the most and then displayed where you couldn’t miss them. And they couldn’t have been kept in there. It’s too hot. Mouton said that the bodies must’ve been kept somewhere cool.’

‘Give me your binoculars,’ said Clare. ‘I’m climbing up there to have a look.’ She scrambled to the top of the cliff face and scanned the desert. The sand roiled in the east, where it had been agitated by the wind. Apart from the slender sentinel of a distant gum tree, there was nothing to see that way. To the south and west was a sea of dunes, some covered with spiny!nara plants, which flowed towards the ocean. Nothing moved. No tracks. No trail of dust to indicate a retreating cart.

‘What’ve you got?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Nothing,’ said Clare, climbing down again. ‘No donkeys, no cart, no Spyt, no tracks. Just sand.’

‘You have to learn to see,’ said Tamar. ‘Not just to look.’ She tugged Clare’s arm, getting her to crouch alongside her. The light, angled low, transformed the blank slate of the desert sand, revealing the crisscrossings of jackal, oryx, lizards, the circular twist of seed pods eddied by the wind. And wheel tracks, barely visible. Neat crescents, close together, paired.

‘Your donkeys.’ Tamar stood up.

‘That way?’ asked Clare, pointing down the gulley that twisted away from them.

Tamar nodded. ‘Elias, stay here on the off-chance he comes back.’

Clare and Riedwaan followed Tamar past a midden. Bones and shells, and other waste that had no further human use, were scattered about. They went on further; the ground became increasingly flinty.

Tamar stopped. ‘I’ve lost them,’ she said, frustration clear in her voice. Clare looked ahead. The shallow canyon they had entered broke into a labyrinth of tributaries. The sunlight shimmered on the mica, distorting the distances.

‘Where to begin?’ asked Clare.

‘We’ll need a helicopter if you want to pursue this,’ said Riedwaan, turning back.

Tamar followed him, drinking from her water bottle. Clare waited. The silence the other two left in their wake was profound. She could hear the rush of her own blood, pulsing with frustration.

The sound came when she was halfway back to Spyt’s cave. The sharp clink of a stone dislodged. Clare stopped, every sense alert. She looked about. Nothing but sand and rock and the sheer wall of the canyon. An agama eyed her, its reptilian body vibrating with anticipated movement. Clare let out her breath. The lizard bolted, vanishing straight into the rock. Curious, Clare went over to see where he had gone. To her surprise, she found a fissure in the rock, eroded by some prehistoric river that had long since changed its course. She stepped through the entrance into an amphitheatre of rock.

In the shade of an acacia thicket stood two creamy white donkeys. The animals shifted, pulling their tethers tight, as Clare approached them. She made a series of quiet, soothing clicks deep in her throat, and the donkeys were still again, motionless except for the occasional twitch of a velvet ear.

The entrance to the second cave was a dark opening in the cliff, a cool vestibule to the large cavern that opened to the right.

Clare ran back to the entrance. ‘Riedwaan,’ she yelled, her voice echoing behind her. ‘Tamar, come back.’

The other two returned, Riedwaan’s look of anxiety disappearing as soon as he saw Clare was unharmed.

‘I think this is it,’ said Clare, leading them back.

It was cool inside the cave, as dark as a crypt. A bat, disturbed by their presence, swooped low as they entered. Clare shivered at the little rush of air it left in its wake.

Riedwaan flicked on his torch and passed it to Clare. She shone it around the cave, bringing the beam to rest on the cart standing right at the back of the cave. It glinted in the light. The cart had been made from the back of an old bakkie. It had a bench in the front for the driver. Clare went closer and shone her torch over the back. Several empty jerry cans were secured on one side of it. On the other was a narrow space fitted with an old mattress, blotted with dark stains.

Riedwaan let out a long, low whistle. ‘You are so lucky, Clare. What were the chances?’

‘This’ll teach you to be a nature lover,’ she teased.

‘We’re going to need luminal to see if that’s blood,’ said Tamar, businesslike.

‘You’ve got some here?’ Riedwaan asked, impressed.

‘I have. And a UV light.’

‘Sharp,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Field forensics.’

‘If you’ve got six months, then send the cart to Windhoek and file an official request to move and test a vehicle,’ said Tamar. ‘This works. If we need more we take it all in and fill in the forms.’

‘Where is the stuff?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘On the truck. There’s a trunk on the back.’

Riedwaan slipped out of the cave entrance. Clare switched off the torch while she and Tamar waited, sheltered from the heat of the desert. Safe and cool and restful. It was not a bad place to be alone.

‘You’ll need a slow exposure to get the patterning… if there is any.’

Clare jumped. She hadn’t heard Riedwaan come back. He handed Clare the camera and sprayed the luminal over the back of the cart. Tamar held up her handmade ultraviolet light. For a second, there was nothing, then it glowed purple, a small patch on one end of the mattress.

‘We’ll send that through to the lab,’ said Riedwaan. ‘But I know what they’ll take five pages to tell us: something or somebody was on this, something not that long dead. But they didn’t die here.’ He pointed to the contained patterning. ‘It would’ve pooled a little when it was moved for transport. Post-mortem.’ Riedwaan looked around the cool, clean cave. ‘Doesn’t look like they were killed here either.’

‘No,’ said Clare. She shone the torch into the recesses of the cave. On the floor were gossamer heaps. Wings, discarded exoskeletons. She arced the beam up towards the roof, the light exposing the huddled, roosting bats.

Riedwaan ducked instinctively as a dozen or so of the tiny, disturbed creatures took off.

‘These must be the bats whose droppings got caught in Kaiser Apollis’s hair.’

‘So what was Spyt doing, bringing dead bodies here and then dropping them off in public again?’ Tamar asked the question they were all thinking as they walked back towards Karamata and the vehicle. ‘And how are we going to find him if he doesn’t want to talk to us?’

‘Why would Spyt have done this?’ wondered Clare. ‘Knowing that eventually someone would come out here and look for him? What was he trying to say to-?’

The roar of a vehicle cresting the dune cut Clare off.

‘We’ve got company,’ said Karamata as they joined him.

The doors opened and Van Wyk emerged, followed by Calvin Goagab, incongruous in his city suit.

Goagab reached them first. ‘Mayor D’Almeida will be pleased to have a suspect after so much investment in this case,’ he said. ‘We should get back to the press conference.’

‘What are you talking about, Calvin?’ Tamar’s voice rose with fury.

‘Captain Damases,’ Van Wyk interrupted. ‘I tried to call you, but got no reply. So, I called Mr Goagab.’

‘You know there’s no cellphone reception out here, Van Wyk.’ Tamar’s voice vibrated with anger. ‘And you were supposed to be checking interviews, not making public announcements.’ She watched him as one would watch an unpredictable dog. ‘What did Van Wyk tell you, Calvin?’

‘That our experts have led us to a suspect,’ Goagab replied. ‘We’re very pleased. It’ll allow me to justify the expense.’ He nodded towards Clare and Riedwaan. ‘And it vindicates my policy to get the desert nomads properly settled.’

‘He’s not a suspect yet,’ Clare observed.

‘Oh, we’ll have him soon enough and then he will be.’ Van Wyk put his hand on Tamar’s shoulder. ‘The mayor is waiting for you to address the press conference, Captain Damases. We’d better head back if we’re to make the news tonight.’

‘We’ll discuss this, Van Wyk,’ said Tamar. ‘This insubordination.’

‘I did a little check,’ he replied, ‘and I don’t think we’ll be discussing anything in the near future. I see our very progressive leave policy stipulates that pregnant officers go on leave from the seventh month. I looked at your medical records and noticed that your due date is next week.’

‘How dare you go through my private records?’ asked Tamar.

‘We care, Captain Damases,’ said Goagab, with an oily smile. ‘Our administration’s concern for gender issues means that we can’t allow you to jeopardise your unborn child. We must ask you to return to town immediately.’

Speechless with rage, Tamar looked from Van Wyk to Goagab.

‘Let’s go, Captain,’ Karamata said, his hand on Tamar’s elbow. He walked her back to the vehicle.

Van Wyk turned to Riedwaan. ‘It’s going to look good, Captain Faizal. An almost-arrest the day you arrive,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re looking forward to addressing the media. It’s all been set up.’

‘I wouldn’t like to see what Spyt looks like after a night in the cells with him in charge,’ Clare said under her breath, watching Van Wyk and Goagab swagger back to their vehicle.

‘I’m not sure I want to see what we are going to look like after this press conference,’ said Riedwaan.

They joined Tamar and Karamata at the car and were forced to follow Van Wyk and Goagab out of the Kuiseb, tagging behind in the vehicle’s dusty wake. Van Wyk angled his rear-view mirror so that he could catch Clare’s eye. He grinned. He had won his battle. She’d helped him win. Clare wished she could figure out what the war was.