Blood Rose

forty-seven

Riedwaan was in the special ops room, a takeaway coffee in hand and Clare’s notes and several official-looking printouts spread out in front of him. The sheets spiralled on a gust of wind when she opened the door.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Riedwaan got up to retrieve the pages.

‘Out in the desert,’ said Clare. ‘At sea.’

‘That’s how I feel, going through all of this.’ He gestured to Clare’s notes.

‘Did I miss anything?’

‘Nothing that I can see.’ Riedwaan sat down again and picked up a heap of papers. ‘I was just checking through these car rentals. See who’s been passing through.’

‘Any patterns?’ Clare asked.

‘Not yet. German tourists mainly. A few businessmen coming up for meetings. I’m working through them. You haven’t come across the name Phoenix Engineering while you’ve been here?’

‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ said Clare. ‘Why? Are they on your list?’

‘Februarie mentioned the name to me,’ he said. ‘He phoned earlier about Hofmeyr’s murder. It’s the name of a company that one of Hofmeyr’s connections set up after he left the army. A guy called Malan.’

‘Haven’t heard of him either,’ said Clare. She picked up the car hire lists, scanning the names. ‘No Phoenixes here,’ she said. ‘Although there’re a couple of other Greek names sprinkled in. Here’s one: Siren Swimwear. That sounds promising. How about this one: Centaur Consulting?’

‘The advantages of a classical education revealed,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Funny ha-ha,’ said Clare. She scanned the list again. ‘There’s also Arizona Iced Tea and New York Trading and Washington Pan-African Ministries. What’re you looking for?’

‘I’m just casting about for an easy answer, I guess. A psycho ex-soldier running amok would be easy to explain. It’d certainly make the Namibians happy.’

‘You’ve had Goagab on your back then?’ Clare sat down on the edge of the desk.

‘I had the pleasure. He was in here demanding a resolution before his tourism press junket or whatever it is that makes him sweat in his Hugo Boss shirts.’ Riedwaan crumpled his coffee cup and pitched it into the bin on the other side of the room. ‘Tell me about Mara’s sailor boy. You think he did something to her?’

‘I don’t know what he’s hiding, but he implied that she was.’

‘You could hide an army out here and no one would find it,’ said Riedwaan, pointing to the waves of sand on the map.

A movement at the door caught their eye, and they both looked up to find Tamar standing in the doorway. ‘You see nothing,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘Everything’s hidden by the heat and the distance, then these dunes pick up their skirts and move and everything’s exposed. What did you find out about Mara?’ she asked Clare.

Clare gave her the rundown: that Mara and Juan Carlos had fought about a camping trip; that Mara had wanted to tell the police that she’d left the boys alone in the desert while she was servicing Juan Carlos’s needs for the night; that the boys were being targeted now; and that Juan Carlos had shut her up.

‘They fought about it again the night before Mara was supposed to leave,’ Clare said. ‘Mara went home and he says he went back to the club. Says he never saw her again, though she apparently sent him a text message from the airport.’

‘What do you think?’ Tamar asked Clare.

‘About him?’

‘About her, her and the boys?’

‘Hard to say. If someone is targeting homeless pretty boys, then it could be a coincidence, I suppose. She was working with them, spending more time with them than anyone else does, so a “wrong place, wrong time” is possible.’

‘Funny things, coincidences,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Never happens in movies, because no one will ever believe them,’ said Tamar. ‘In real life they happen all the time. Wrong place, wrong time. There’s you: dead.’

‘She left all her photographs behind.’ Clare put the envelope of snapshots on the table.

‘Memories go sour sometimes.’ Riedwaan flicked through them. ‘You move on, leave the past behind. Could be that.’

Clare was sceptical, but said nothing. ‘Tamar, do you know the Sisters of Mercy?’ she asked. ‘Out in the desert, in an old castle?’

‘Yes, towards Rooibank. There’s an oasis there. Some German count built a castle for the love of his life and she never came. So he donated it to the Catholic Church, specifying that it be run as a convent. Now it’s a hospice.’

‘There’s a lesson in that,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m not quite sure what.’

‘Why do you ask?’ said Tamar.

Clare picked up the photograph of Mara and the five-a-side team and pointed to Ronaldo. ‘A boy who played in Mara’s team was out there. George Meyer told me about him. I went to talk to him.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Tamar.

‘Nothing. He’s on his way out,’ said Clare. ‘Full-blown Aids. Too far gone for treatment.’

‘He’s the last boy alive,’ Riedwaan said. ‘Her whole team, redcarded.’

‘There’s something else,’ said Clare. ‘The Mother Superior told me a woman had visited him. She thought it was one of the Christian Mission ladies, but I went past there and they have no record of anyone visiting.’

A sudden gust of the east wind sprayed sand against the office window. Clare jumped, then continued: ‘His hands were infected when he came in, blisters all over the palms. His illness was triggered by exhausting himself doing some kind of digging.’

‘Digging where?’ asked Tamar. ‘None of those kids would be picked up to work. First, nobody would trust them, and, second, if anyone did hire them, they’d be bust under the child labour law – one of the many unintended consequences of a progressive constitution.’

‘Catch 22,’ said Clare.

‘I wonder what they were digging for,’ Riedwaan said. He opened the files of autopsy photographs and sorted out the close-ups. ‘Look at this.’ Kaiser Apollis and Lazarus Beukes both had thin, livid marks across their palms.

‘Could be blisters,’ said Clare, looking at the photographs. ‘Easy to pass over in a homeless child whose hands and feet would be rough and cracked.’

‘You get anything else from your interview with Juan Carlos?’ asked Tamar.

‘His phone.’ Clare held it up. ‘I want to check out his story about the night Mara went missing. I’ve asked Ragnar Johansson to keep him on board until you’ve decided if you want to keep him here. In the meantime, I want to check some phone records.’

‘There’s a place out in the industrial area that’ll figure it out for you in no time.’ Tamar wrote down the address. ‘Cell City. They’ll help you out.’

‘Did you talk to Van Wyk?’ Clare asked Tamar, folding the piece of paper.

Tamar shook her head. ‘He’s still out of cellphone range. He’s scouring the desert with Goagab, but I did find Chesney, the name we saw painted on the cave. Turns out he’s Van Wyk’s nephew.’

The mention of Chesney’s name made Clare shiver: Chesney, Minki, LaToyah, the heat and the stench of the dead cat. ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

‘Not much at first,’ said Tamar. ‘But Elias can be persuasive when he needs to be. He convinced Chesney that it’d be simpler if he just showed him a couple of files, his web cam, and some other incriminating evidence. The girl you saw, LaToyah, is fifteen, so as far as Van Wyk goes, it’ll be a fairly straightforward case of statutory rape.’

‘All we need to do is find him then,’ said Clare.

‘What’s this?’ Riedwaan asked. ‘Van Wyk been cradle-snatching?’

‘A cop getting freebies off the girls he protects. Oldest trick in the policeman’s book,’ said Tamar. ‘How about you find this killer now.’ She was standing in the doorway, keys in hand. ‘My water broke half an hour ago and I’m off to have this baby in peace.’

Riedwaan went pale. ‘We’ll take the bike.’ He tossed Clare the spare helmet.

Outside, the sun sparkled off the razor wire, the snagged plastic flapping, its colour bleaching in the heat. Even the black slagheap across the road managed to give off an ebony gleam.

Clare slipped her arms around Riedwaan and her hands under his jacket.

‘It is better with you here,’ she said as they drove through town.

‘I was waiting for you to say that,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Only because I like having a driver,’ she teased him. ‘There it is. Cell City.’

The two chinless wonders who ran the cellphone shop looked as if they could hack into the Pentagon. Darren was blond, his hair hanging in greasy rats’ tails over the faded picture on his T-shirt – some heavy metal group doomed to permanent obscurity, Clare hoped. She explained that they wanted to know where Mara’s last SMS had come from.

‘No problem,’ he said.

‘You want a list of all the numbers called? Texts?’ asked Carl. He had dark hair, and was as soft and blubbery as his friend was bony. ‘I can download the pictures too.’

‘That’d be great,’ said Clare, writing down Mara’s number. ‘How long will it take?’

‘I can do that for you straight away,’ he said. ‘Darren’ll take a bit of time, but this is a small town, so there’s just a couple of thousand cell users. Do you want to come back?’

‘We’ll wait.’

Darren beamed up at them from behind his laptop. ‘Go get some coffee there.’ He pointed to a Portuguese café across the road. ‘A watched hacker never cracks.’

Carl found this hilarious. He emitted a series of stricken hoots that passed for a laugh.

‘Come on,’ Riedwaan said to Clare. ‘We’ll get some coffee.’ The café served unexpectedly good coffee. They took their cups and some rolls to the only table outside.

‘So, tell me about Van Wyk,’ said Riedwaan.

Clare smiled grimly as she told him of Van Wyk’s sidelines in extortion and amateur porn. Nothing pleased her more than ridding the world of another corrupt bully.

They had just finished eating when Carl undulated across the road. He grabbed a Coke and a Peppermint Crisp on his way to their table.

‘Darren,’ he said admiringly. ‘He’s a fucking wizard.’ He placed a single sheet of paper on the greasy tablecloth. A list of numbers in one column, coordinates in the other. Carl bit off half of his chocolate bar before pointing to the last number. ‘There you go. The SMS you were looking for. That’s it.’

‘Where was it sent from?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘The airport tower is where it’s first logged.’

‘So she was there?’

‘Who was there?’ Carl shovelled the second half of the bar into his mouth and washed it down with Coke.

‘Mara Thomson. The girl who sent the message.’

‘This one?’ Carl scrolled through the photos in Juan Carlos’s cellphone, stopping when he got to one of Mara, naked on a sand dune, smiling at the phone camera.

‘That’s the one.’

‘So pretty,’ said Carl wistfully. ‘What’s she done that you’re looking for her?’

‘It’s what she hasn’t done that’s worrying me,’ said Clare. ‘She left Walvis Bay, but never arrived in London. Her boyfriend claims that the last he heard from her was this SMS from the airport.’

‘Well, from the tower closest to the airport. But that covers quite a range out there. It could be anywhere from the Kuiseb Delta to Rooibank.’

‘These other numbers?’ Clare asked.

‘Recent calls. A couple to Spain. The others are all local numbers. Looks like whoever’s phone this is had this girl’s number on speed dial.’

‘I tried to call her earlier,’ said Clare. ‘It just says the number is unavailable and to try again later.’

‘That means she’s out of range or her phone is off,’ Carl explained. ‘Or her battery’s dead.’

‘If Mara was in the vicinity of the airport,’ said Clare, ‘then why did she never go in?’

‘Oh no,’ said Carl, excited at the prospect of playing detective, ‘she got on the plane all right. Check this out.’ He pointed to a column on the next page, listing all the SMS messages. ‘This is what she said.’

Riedwaan looked at the screen: On the plane. Sorry. I love U. X Mara.

‘I saw that,’ said Clare. ‘But it seemed pretty standard to me. Anybody could have sent that text.’

‘Amateurish as a cover,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Someone was going to phone when she didn’t get to London.’

‘But if you go missing in the desert, it can be a long time before anyone finds you,’ said Clare, deciphering the columns of digital information that Darren had teased from the phone.

‘Unless you’re a homeless boy. Then after two days you’re stuck up like a billboard advertising the fact that someone really didn’t like you.’

‘Have a look at this.’ Clare pointed to the time the message was received: nine-twenty.

Riedwaan and Carl looked at her blankly.

‘Her plane was two hours late. Nobody was even on the plane until eleven.’

Riedwaan parked his bike outside the station. Clare was heading for the door before he even had a chance to switch off the engine.

‘That schoolteacher you mentioned in McGregor,’ Riedwaan called after her. ‘Did she marry again?’

‘Darlene?’ Clare turned around, remembering that she had meant to talk to her again.

Riedwaan nodded.

‘No, she’d had enough of men after her first husband. She just shed her married name. Why do you-?’

The shrill sound of Clare’s phone interjected. She took it out of her pocket and looked at the flashing screen. ‘Tertius Myburgh,’ she said to Riedwaan. ‘My pollen expert. I thought he’d vanished. Let me take this.’ She held the receiver to her ear and nodded a greeting at the receptionist as she entered the station.

Riedwaan followed her down the passage in a daze, his manner unusually calm.

Clare sat down at her desk and disconnected. ‘He’s got my results,’ she said, reaching for a mapbook. ‘I’m going to meet him at Dolphin Beach. It’s halfway between Walvis Bay and Swakopmund.’

‘Can you handle this on your own?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘There’s something I must do.’

‘I’ll call you when I’m back,’ said Clare, grabbing her keys. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To see your ballet-dancing divorcée,’ Riedwaan smiled. ‘Darlene Ruyters. To find out what she can tell me about centaurs and phoenixes.’