Blood Rose

fifty

The sound of the off-road bike was a flinty staccato across the plain. Riedwaan stopped to get his bearings. He had gone to find Karamata, but there had been no sign of him at his desk, and Riedwaan hadn’t looked for him for long. He preferred being alone. The sun bellied orange over the sea as he passed the place where Lazarus Beukes had been found, but the shallow valley was a dead end, blocked by a wall of sand. So he left the relative sanctuary of the dry Kuiseb River behind him, trusting that his cheap Chinese GPS would see him through the expanse of desert.

The disused railway track, a spine from which the desert fell away, soft as a woman’s flesh, came from the north, running aground in an ocean of red sand. Riedwaan checked the coordinates against the GPS. They told him the same thing as his old survey map: he needed to be on the other side of this waterless strait. Out here, the temperature would strip a body of its cloak of skin, hair and flesh. In weeks, he’d be nothing but white bones and a skull staring up at the blue vault of the sky. Riedwaan calculated the descent of the first dune and the elevation of the second and pitched over the edge, opening the throttle to the full, praying that the momentum would carry him to the top. It did, but all he had in front of him was another dune, then another.

Again Riedwaan took his bearings, trying not to picture his own demise. He made himself go on, following, more or less, the tracks of a vehicle that had preceded him. Three more dunes, and the railway reappeared, its ironwood sleepers scattered like matchsticks in the sand. A kilometre ahead was his destination. He could just make it out: some scrubby bushes and a gnarled eucalyptus tree next to two weathered huts. Riedwaan rode alongside the railway line, stopping under the tree, a ghostly sentinel in the dunes. Apart from the rattle of seeds feathered across the sand by the east wind, the place was silent.

The ground fell away from the huts towards two concretecapped mounds. They could have been a century old, or a single decade. The tracks he had followed were neither, thought Riedwaan, bending down to get a closer look at the compacted earth. A heavy vehicle, a Land Rover perhaps, had passed through recently. An empty bottle of brandy lay discarded against the pale tree trunk. Scattered near it were a few cigarette butts. Riedwaan bent down to look. Two different brands.

It was cooler in the shade, but that did not account for the chill that played over Riedwaan’s skin. A grimy white T-shirt was snagged against the bole of the tree, sweat stains indelible under the arms. The Pesca-Marina logo was only half-hidden by the shovel lying on top of it. Riedwaan stood where the men must have stood, the image forming as crisp as a nightmare in his mind. The back door of a vehicle would have opened, releasing the men’s hurriedly collected human cargo – five boys, hired to harvest a deadly crop planted in another lifetime. Riedwaan lit a cigarette, imagining how their presence would have absorbed the vestiges of warmth from the night air.

The brandy, neat, burning down the throat of one man, then the other. Impossible to say how many, but Riedwaan would put his money on two. The men watching the activity below them would have been accustomed to the backs of others bending rhythmically to their wills.

For the boys, coming out here must have seemed safer than standing against a wall, legs astride, for a paunchy truck driver or a sailor with a knife. They wouldn’t question a hundred for the night. Sickness or fear might have tightened the chest of one boy, hot from digging. The youngest boy slipping off his shirt, the moon sculpting his slender torso, as he stopped to rest. But when he caught the man’s eye on him, as cold as a switchblade, he would have bent down again. And dug.

Riedwaan’s mouth was dry from the heat. He fetched his water from the bike and tried to phone Clare. No reception under the tree, so he walked towards the shelters. One bar, he noted. The door to the first hut was ajar. Two bars. He dialled, ducking inside to avoid the sun.

The blow came without warning. For a brief moment before silence blossomed from agony, Riedwaan heard it: the quiet crack of his own skull.