Blood Rose

forty-five

‘What?’ A man’s bleary eye appeared through a crack in the door. The heavy chain did not let the door three inches from the steel frame.

‘Police,’ chanced Clare. ‘I have a question for you.’

A sharp-featured man unchained the lock. Nicolai, with a dirty sarong wrapped around him, was as unattractive a sight as his dingy flat above Der Blaue Engel.

‘Come into the kitchen. I need some coffee.’ Clare followed him into a gloomy room. A week’s worth of dishes stood in the sink.

‘I know you,’ he said, sitting down at the table. ‘You came in the bar the other night. Gretchen was dancing.’ He smiled, revealing uneven and slightly yellow teeth.

‘That’s me,’ said Clare, sitting down.

‘So, Miss…’

‘Dr Hart,’ said Clare.

‘So, Doctor,’ Nicolai drawled, ‘to what do I owe the honour of your presence?’

‘I’m looking for Mara Thomson.’

‘Why are you asking me?’ The man’s voice rose defensively.

‘I wanted to speak to her. I heard she was at Der Blaue Engel the night before last.’

The sound of running water came from the direction where Clare guessed the bathroom was. It stopped, thickening the silence in the rancid kitchen. ‘Where is she?’ she asked.

‘How the fuck would I know?’

‘Did you see her last night?’ Clare persisted.

‘No.’

‘The night before?’

‘Yes. What’s the deal? She’s a big girl.’

‘Who was she there with?’

‘Juan Carlos, her boyfriend. Works on the Alhantra. Spanish. Pretty boy. I thought he went the other way, but then he arrived there with Mara. Not my type, English virgins,’ said Nicolai, ‘so you won’t find her anywhere here.’

Nicolai leant back, his eyes sliding away from Clare to the doorway. ‘This is more my type,’ he added.

A Rubenesque woman strolled into the kitchen. She looked Clare over dismissively, poured herself a cup of coffee and strolled out again. Clare wondered if the woman had met Sabina.

‘The maid,’ said Nicolai, with a smirk. ‘We were doing the bed.’

‘When did Mara leave Der Blaue Engel?’

‘Sometime after Gretchen’s show.’ Nicolai sipped his coffee. ‘Must’ve been about two. She and Juan Carlos had a fight. Why don’t you ask him where she is?’

Clare ignored his question. ‘What did they argue about?’

‘How should I know?’ Nicolai said glibly. ‘I went outside and saw them in the parking lot. They’d both been drinking. She was crying. He looked angry. Same old, same old.’

‘Did they come back inside?’

‘Juan Carlos came back later. I didn’t see her again. He was upset and said that she’d walked home. Later he left with Ragnar Johansson. You know him, I think?’ Clare nodded. ‘Ask him. But the last time I checked there wasn’t a law that the barman has to know what his customers do in their spare time.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Clare, standing up. ‘But there’ll be consequences if you’re withholding information.’

Nicolai stood too. ‘If what I’ve heard is correct, Dr Hart, you’ve been paid by me and my fellow taxpayers to catch the motherfucker who’s been cleaning up Walvis Bay.’ Again, the suggestive smirk. It made his ratty features even less attractive. ‘She looked very like those boys of hers, Mara did. Let’s hope for her sake there hasn’t been a mix-up.’ Nicolai moved even closer to Clare. The implication of what he said, his breath rank in her face, made her shiver. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some housework to finish.’

Clare needed no further encouragement. She breathed a sigh of relief as she went down the stairs from Nicolai’s apartment. When she got to her car, she pulled out her phone and dialled Tamar’s number; she was going to need help getting to Juan Carlos.

‘Tamar.’ Clare was very happy to hear her voice. ‘Mara never arrived home.’

‘I got your message,’ said Tamar, concerned.

‘I’ve checked at the airport. She didn’t take her flight, but all her stuff’s gone from George Meyer’s house.’

‘You need to go out to the Alhantra to talk to Juan Carlos?’ Tamar guessed.

‘As soon as possible,’ said Clare.

‘I’ll organise you a motorboat. Give me a few minutes.’

‘Thanks. Any news about Spyt?’

‘I’m not holding my breath,’ said Tamar. ‘Spyt knows this desert too well. If he is found it’ll be because he wants to be caught. Van Wyk disappeared out that way early. The evidence that the boys could’ve been there is all Goagab needs to get his lynch mob going. At least it gives me a bit of breathing space.’

‘Did you look at that website I sent you?’ Clare had almost forgotten to ask.

‘I did. I’m working out what to do. I’m not sure if he’s done anything illegal. The site claims all the girls are over eighteen. If they are, my hands are tied.’ There was a beat of silence. ‘I’m also putting out fires here,’ Tamar added.

‘What?’ asked Clare. ‘Riedwaan?’

‘He and Goagab haven’t exactly hit it off,’ said Tamar. ‘I had Goagab in my office, raging that the reason we invited you here was to look for a killer, not for young Englishwomen who stir up trouble.’

‘I need to know if she was more than just their soccer coach,’ said Clare. ‘We need to find her.’

The skipper and speedboat were ready, the engine idling, when Clare got to the harbour. Five minutes later, the nose of the boat was chopping through the swell, to where the Alhantra and other ships were anchored, beyond the bay, where they could avoid harbour fees.

Clare plunged her hands into the front pocket of her jacket, her fingers wrapping around the envelope of Mara’s photographs. More precious than a passport, which could be replaced by enduring the supercilious smile of a British embassy official. She opened the envelope, sheltering it from the wind with her body, to look at Mara’s well-thumbed photos, the dainty drawings Oscar had done for her. The surreal whimsy of the drawing of a tree, ghostly against the endless dunes, hinted at the child’s strange inner world. It was a haunting image. Why had Mara left them?

There was the picture of Mara and Oscar together. Mara searching for a place to belong; the mute boy, yearning for affection. The image caught their fragility and isolation. Mara and Oscar. They had understood each other. The little boy knew that Mara would never leave her pictures, her memories.

That is what he had been trying to make Clare understand.

Clare put herself in the place of the silent, unnoticed boy. She pictured him opening the door off the kitchen. She saw him glide down the passage, a silent red-haired ghost, into Mara’s room. Oscar would have found her room emptied but for the photographs hidden in their secret place. He had given them to Clare, so that she would do something.

Clare looked at them again. The last picture, the date in the corner six weeks earlier, was the photograph of Mara and her team. She had the triumphant smile of someone who has beaten the self-timer. She stood in the middle of the group, wiry-haired, boyish, wearing skinny jeans, with her arms around two boys who had turned up dead. The thought that the predator she was hunting had seen the same androgynous likeness in Mara goosefleshed Clare’s arms. She put the envelope back in her pocket.

The water unfurled a fringe behind the boat until it came to a bobby halt next to the Alhantra. The ship was high in the water, its hold emptied of fish. A ladder lolled like a tongue down the side. At the top of it stood Ragnar Johansson. Clare swallowed the fear that had balled tight and cold in her stomach. She put her hands on the ladder and began to climb, thinking of Mara at the rubbish dump, playing soccer in the dust and broken glass. So needy of love, of acceptance. She thought of her twined around Juan Carlos and wondered if Mara had given everything of herself over to him, if he had made her pay the ultimate price to assuage his loneliness.

Ragnar helped Clare aboard, his delight in seeing her obvious; his disappointment, when Clare told him the real purpose of her visit, equally apparent. He had half-hoped she had come to find him.

‘Wait here,’ said Ragnar, escorting Clare to the bridge. ‘I’ll fetch him for you.’

Ragnar took the steps into the dim interior of the vessel. The metal door screeched when he pushed it open. ‘Juan Carlos,’ he called into the gloomy cabin. The Spaniard lay on the top bunk. He grunted, without looking down to see who it was. ‘You have a visitor.’

Juan Carlos turned onto his back and punched the metal ceiling above him. He licked the blood welling red on his knuckles, then he swung his legs off the side of his bunk and dropped, agile as a cat, to the floor and followed Ragnar to the bridge. He stopped when he saw Clare Hart, pulling his rosary beads from his pocket and passing them through his fingers until the crucifix halted them. Mara had given them to him. If he held the wood to his nose, it whispered of the hot interior.

‘You know Dr Hart?’ asked Ragnar.

Juan Carlos nodded.

‘Where is Mara Thomson?’ Clare dispensed with the formalities.

‘In London,’ said Juan Carlos, the vein at the base of his throat pulsing. He looked from Clare to Ragnar and back again. ‘She left yesterday.’

‘She never arrived,’ said Clare. The creak of the ship was loud in the silence that Clare let stretch between them.

‘Maybe she didn’t go to her mother’s house,’ Juan Carlos tried. ‘Her mother drive her crazy. So lonely.’

‘She didn’t check in at the airport.’ Clare stepped closer to him. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You were with her the night before she left.’ Clare kept her voice low, intimately aggressive. ‘You went home with her, made love to her, I imagine.’

Juan Carlos shook his head. ‘No, no, I said goodbye and then I come back on board.’ He looked at Ragnar. ‘I had a pass. Twenty-four hours.’

Clare took Juan Carlos’s hand in hers, tracing his bloodied knuckles, the scratch along his sinewy wrist, his signet ring, a silver skull and crossbones.

‘You didn’t take her to the airport?’

‘She didn’t want me to go with her,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to her? Why are you here?’ He snatched his hand back.

‘Why did you hit her?’ asked Clare.

‘I love her.’ Juan Carlos said the words with no trace of irony.

Clare pictured the darkened parking lot. The hand raised. Mara’s smooth cheek. The ring tearing open her taut skin. The contusion that would be developing.

‘I was angry because she was leaving,’ Juan Carlos went on. ‘I was… I don’t know the word.’

‘Upset?’ said Clare.

‘Yes, yes, upset. I was very upset. She was too. She was sad to go from Namibia; she loved it here, her work. She was sad for saying goodbye to me too. So we fight. And then she go away.’ He looked Clare in the eye, shifting the balance of power away from her. ‘You never fight with someone before you go away?’

‘That is the last you saw of her?’ Clare shifted the control back. ‘In the parking lot? Where you hit her?’

‘Yes,’ he said, leaning against the metal railing. ‘No.’

‘You were away from the bar a while.’ Clare listened to Juan Carlos’s beads clicking persistently in the quiet. ‘Nicolai says an hour. That’s a long time to spend in a parking lot.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Juan Carlos, lighting a cigarette. ‘She left. I was very angry to start with, but then I think, is she home? I want to tell her I am sorry, so I follow her. Nothing. She was walking fast when she left, so I go to her house. Her light is on and I knock on her window. She doesn’t answer. I call her phone. She doesn’t answer. I think she’s in the bath maybe. But she doesn’t want to speak to me. I leave her a message to call me, that I’m sorry. It’s cold and I don’t want to wake up the other people in the house. She’s angry. She’s still a woman, even if she looks like a boy. And I think, what more can I do? So I come back to the bar.’ He looked at Ragnar, who nodded.

‘What time was that?’ Clare asked.

‘About three, three-thirty, I suppose,’ Ragnar answered. ‘Just before I left.’

‘Then I get her text message to say sorry the next morning from the airport. Here, look.’ Juan Carlos pulled his phone out of his pocket, found the text message and shoved the screen in front of Clare. ‘I was already on board ship,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see her again. I sent her a text, but nothing. It’s too late. She was on the plane already.’

‘You hit her because you were upset, and she forgave you that easily?’ asked Clare. ‘You’re lying, Juan Carlos.’

‘You see that?’ Juan Carlos flung his arm towards the desert. The wind whipped tongues of flame-coloured sand into the sky. The sandstorm was preparing to strike the bunkered town. ‘That is what we fought about,’ he spat.

‘I’m not following you,’ said Clare. ‘Explain.’

‘The east wind… it is on its way,’ Juan Carlos continued. His tone was resigned. ‘It was the same weather the weekend that we fight.’

‘What happened that weekend?’

‘She went out to the desert, and the east wind, it was blowing. She take her soccer boys – Kaiser Apollis, Lazarus Beukes, I can’t remember the other names – to camp in the Kuiseb River. It was a reward because they did well in some five-a-side tournament. We came in to port for the weekend and I phone her. She didn’t want to come back, because she always put them first. She say that’s what they needed to see: someone putting them first. But I tell her to leave them and come and see me. I say she should fetch them in the morning. I told her they were used to looking after themselves. That they would be fine. It was true.’

Juan Carlos watched a gull turn on a column of air, mesmerised by its flight. ‘They were fine that weekend, except the one who got sick. That is what we fight about. She felt bad that she left them out there. She blames herself. We went back to fetch them the next day and they were not there. She found them later at the dump. They say they had walked back; that is why the young one, he got sick.’

‘And that’s why you hit her?’ asked Clare.

‘I didn’t want her to tell you.’ Juan Carlos looked down at his feet. ‘She wanted to come to you or the other lady cop and tell you that she had been with them all and that now they were all dead. She was crazy about it. I tell her it was just coincidence. I was saying, no, if she tells, then the police will want to question her and me. And the ship is sailing tomorrow. If the police want to ask questions, then I can’t go too and I won’t get my fishing bonus.’

‘How many boys did you say there were there?’ asked Clare.

‘Five. It was the five-a-side tournament.’

Two. Three. Five. One with no marking. One unaccounted for. Clare calculated how long it would take to get to the dump when she was finished. Half an hour, she reckoned.

‘You’ll have to stay on board,’ said Clare. ‘Captain Johansson will keep you under guard.’

‘Why?’ Juan Carlos pleaded. ‘What have I done?’

‘You were the last person seen with her,’ said Clare. ‘If you’d prefer you can come ashore and go to the cells.’

Juan Carlos paled.

‘I’ll need your cellphone.’ Clare held out her hand.

‘For what?’ asked Juan Carlos. ‘I tell you already, she text me.’

‘I want to track all the calls on your phone,’ said Clare. ‘Calls in and out. You can choose: I take your phone and check, or you can come in with me and I put you in the cells for refusing to cooperate.’

Clare was bluffing, but he was a foreigner, wanting to get home. It worked. Juan Carlos handed her the phone, the fight gone out of him.

‘Ragnar,’ she said, ‘can you keep him under guard?’

‘No problem,’ said Ragnar. ‘We’re out of here soon. If you want him longer, and you’ve got grounds, I’ll have to hand him over to the Namibian police.’

Ragnar walked with Clare to the top of the ladder. ‘You think he did something to that girl?’ he asked.

‘The odds are against him.’

‘You’re not a gambler, Clare.’

‘No, I’m not. But I won’t take any more chances either. If Mara knew something about what happened to those boys, then Juan Carlos might too. I’d watch him. It might be for his own sake.’ Clare stepped onto the ladder to climb down to the speedboat waiting for her. ‘Where are you headed?’ she asked.

‘Luanda tomorrow, after the shareholders’ inspection,’ said Ragnar. ‘Then Spain. You can imagine that I need this like a hole in the head.’