Blood Rose

fifty-one

There was no one at the station when Clare got back from her meeting with Tertius Myburgh. She closed the door to the special ops room and sat down at her desk. She dialled Riedwaan’s number. Nothing. A flash on her screen told her she had a call waiting.

‘Dr Hart?’ It was Karamata.

‘Yes?’

‘George Meyer’s son is missing.’

‘Where from?’ Clare felt faint at the inevitability of it, her own failure to protect the child.

‘Kuisebmond beach.’ Clare knew the beach. It was a crescent of grey, littered sand near the harbour.

‘I’ll come over.’ Clare cut the connection, but not the image of cold water creeping over the face of a lonely, wide-eyed boy.

She drove fast along the beach road, which glistened like a strip of kelp stranded by a receding tide on the high-water mark. Karamata was there with a couple of uniformed officers. George Meyer stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. The vehicles blocked off the area of beach where the boy had been. The wind was too strong for tape.

‘He must’ve been here,’ said Karamata, beckoning Clare over.

The yellow rod was wedged into the ground. Next to it was Oscar’s khaki bag. The bottle of water was still full. A half-eaten sandwich was wedged in next to his bait. Peanut butter and Marmite.

‘You didn’t see him again, did you?’ Meyer asked Clare. The question was framed around the hopes to which the parents of missing children cling. But with George Meyer, it was a formality. Hope was absent.

‘I didn’t see him,’ said Clare, her chest tight with sadness.

‘He was upset this morning after you were there. He was upset that Mara had left. I thought maybe he’d tried to find you.’ Meyer moved out of the way of a wave that reached up the beach. It retreated, leaving a fringe of foam. ‘He liked you, Dr Hart. He thought you’d be able to find Mara and bring her back.’

Clare saw Oscar’s face before her, eyes accusing at her inability to understand his mute explanations. ‘When did he disappear?’

‘When I got home at lunch time, he was gone. His rod was gone too, so I came looking for him at the beach. I found the bike and the rod. No Oscar.’

‘He wouldn’t have gone off somewhere?’

‘Not without his bike,’ Meyer said.

‘That taxi driver saw him here earlier.’ Karamata gestured towards a man leaning against a battered red Toyota, talking to a couple of uniformed officers.

‘The sea’s been rough today,’ said Meyer. ‘He couldn’t swim.’

Rough and cold, Clare thought. The Atlantic was not a place for a little boy alone.

‘They’re going to put a radio alert out,’ Meyer said.

‘And we’ll search the harbour,’ Karamata added. ‘Why don’t you go home, Mr Meyer? Maybe he’s been somewhere and he’ll turn up.’

‘Maybe.’ Meyer looked at the keys in his hand as if he had never seen them before.

‘I’ll take you back.’ Karamata pointed to the police car. Meyer walked towards it, obedient as a child.

‘Where was he?’ Clare asked Karamata.

‘At work all the time. I checked. They were doing an audit, so he was with the accountant. There will be a search, so there won’t be anyone at the station for a while.’

‘Did you speak to Captain Faizal?’ Clare asked. ‘I thought he’d arranged with you to take him to the Kuiseb Delta.’

‘He’s said nothing to me.’

‘I can’t get hold of him,’ said Clare.

‘I hope he doesn’t go out there alone,’ said Karamata. ‘It looks so easy on the map, but once you’re in the desert a map’s useless, especially with this east wind.’

‘Don’t count on it, Elias,’ said Clare. She knew Riedwaan too well to assume he’d do the sensible thing. She tried his number again. ‘Caller out of range,’ said the electronic voice. ‘Try again later.’

‘I have a sea search,’ said Karamata. ‘All I need is a desert search during a sandstorm.’

With an effort of will, Clare put her anxiety about Riedwaan on hold. ‘You’ve spoken to Gretchen, I presume?’ she asked.

‘I did,’ said Karamata. ‘On the phone. She said she was in the bath when Oscar left the house.’

‘That polite?’ Clare raised an eyebrow.

‘Not actually,’ said Karamata, with a rueful smile. ‘She told me to fuck off, that he wasn’t anything to do with her and that she was busy.’

‘Charming.’ Clare looked out at the choppy sea. ‘He was a little boy to be out fishing alone.’

‘Nobody’s child,’ said Karamata. ‘There are so many of them here, not all of them poor.’

‘Who uses this beach, Elias?’

‘The Chinese come and fish here. Couples with nowhere else to go. Kids come to fish. No one else really.’ Karamata’s phone was ringing. ‘I must go and speak to the divers. They’re here.’

Clare picked her way to the last rocks on the small headland that protected the harbour and looked back at the beach where Oscar had left his rod and his frugal picnic. Litter circled the small bay, nudging against the man-made promontory where she stood. The first diver splashed off the bobbing rescue vessel. If the boy had drowned, then his body would have been sucked down and flung up here, against these rocks. She worked her way back, her heart beating fast when she spotted a red smudge, but it was an old piece of T-shirt.

A wave ran high up the beach, obliterating all trace of Oscar and those who had been looking for him. Half an hour later and nobody would have known where he had stood and cast his line. Clare looked up the beach towards the road. The sand behind where Oscar’s things had been had not yet been smoothed by the water. She walked towards his last-known location. Several mussel shells lay crushed in the disturbed sand. It looked as though a vehicle had stopped right behind where Oscar had been standing. It had stopped and then reversed and gone back onto the road.

Clare picked up a fragment of shell.

Oscar wouldn’t have gone swimming and he hadn’t fallen in. They weren’t going to find Oscar’s body here. She felt it with chilling certainty. Someone had picked him up and taken him elsewhere. Someone he had had to obey. Clare thought of the portraits hanging in her gallery. Each had slipped from life without a ripple.

Fritz Woestyn.

Nicanor Jones.

Kaiser Apollis.

Lazarus Beukes.

Mara Thomson. A girl, but so similar. The slenderness of the limbs, the brown skin, the faces planed and angled.

Now Oscar.

The coda to this symphony of pain. Small, russet-haired, pale… he struck the wrong note.

Clare dropped her head into her hands and imagined herself sliding under the translucent skin of the child, the silhouette of evil taking shape in her mind. She pictured him watching Mara pack, holding the break in his heart in, locking away this new loss with the loss of his mother. And then before the allotted, dreaded time of the taxi, before the final flurry of packing and goodbye, a gun in her back. The middle of the night. The shadow-man removing his last witness. Mara’s room brutally emptied of everything except the secret pictures that she and Oscar shared.

Mara hurtling towards the desert, her life receding with the grey fishing village sinking behind the horizon. Oscar shrinking back, unheard, unseen, except for the crack in the upstairs curtain. And now he was gone, the witness. Like the others. Killed not for the way they looked, but for what they knew.

Clare looked out to sea. A fishing ship, laden and low in the water, made her way between the buoys towards the quay where the Alhantra had docked to be loaded. One last shot, thought Clare, at finding where they had all connected.

She parked outside the Pesca-Marina factory as the shiftchange siren went, the silver fish in the logo catching the light. She slipped in unnoticed through the stream of workers on their way out. On the wharf, front-end loaders scurried back and forth, heavy with stacked boxes. She went past the men concentrating on offloading the catch and slipped on board. There was no sign of Ragnar Johansson on the bridge, so she went below in search of Juan Carlos.

The second-last cabin door was closed. There was no answer when she knocked, but, to her surprise, when she tried the handle it opened. She went in and sat down to wait. It didn’t take long for the door handle to turn again. Juan Carlos closed the door behind him, the expression on his handsome face unreadable.

‘Dr Hart,’ he said. ‘Again.’ The hum of the engines preparing to sail seemed to have restored his confidence.

‘You’re free to move about?’ Clare asked.

‘Change of command.’

‘I need to know where Mara went camping,’ said Clare.

‘You didn’t get a warrant?’ Clare’s beat of hesitation was enough for him. ‘What do you have to trade?’

‘You’re free to go,’ Clare bluffed. ‘No word to the police in Spain, so no trouble when you dock.’

‘I’m innocent?’

‘Not the word I’d have chosen,’ said Clare. She took out her map. The coordinates Myburgh had given her needed to be narrowed, and fast.

She spread it out in front of Juan Carlos. ‘Show me.’ The tone of her voice brooked no argument.

‘Here. This is where Mara went.’ Juan Carlos took the pen from her hand and marked a place with a sure, black X alongside a railway line. An arc of dunes had moved across it, severing the dry tributary from the rest of the delta.

Clare thought of Lazarus Beukes, the no-entry signs shining in the dark. She had been there, or near there, before. The hairs on her arms stood on end. ‘What happened there with Mara?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I’ve told you. She went with those street boys of hers. She loved them.’ He smiled a slow, smug smile. ‘But she loved me more. Once I show her how.’

‘What do you mean?’ Clare did not like him so close to her. He made her skin crawl.

‘I told you, I got a pass, so I call her and tell her to meet me. She left them out there. Her boys. It was late. We met. We made love. She go back to fetch them, but they were gone. She found them at the dump again. They say they walked.’

‘All of them? Were they all there?’

Juan Carlos looked down and said nothing. Clare waited.

‘Okay, okay, all except for one,’ he said at last. ‘He only turn up later… dead.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t Mara say anything?’

‘She was too ashamed. She was afraid. She say she should have stayed with them. Take your pick.’

‘Which one’s your choice?’ asked Clare.

‘It was me or them.’ His eyes glinted with the subtle charge of sexual power.

‘What did you do, Juan Carlos?’ asked Clare. ‘Four boys are dead and a girl who loved you is missing.’

‘The ship is full. I’ve made my money. I don’t want delays,’ Juan Carlos shrugged. ‘Why would I do something?’

‘Where is Captain Johansson?’ asked Clare.

‘Go and check on the bridge.’ Juan Carlos turned his back on her. ‘I say nothing more.’

The passage was a relief after the closeness of the cabin. Clare went up to the bridge before the boxes were stowed. A halfsmoked pack of Marlboros was wedged on the barometer. It was Ragnar Johansson’s brand, but there was no other sign of him. Clare looked below. The centre of the ship was open as the winch lowered packed fish into the refrigerated hold. She guessed that Ragnar would be directing things from below.

There was a metal staircase near the bridge. Clare closed the door behind her and swung down. The metal banister was slick and cold and her feet tingled as she spiralled down into the dark hold.

Ragnar wasn’t on the first level. She asked one of the packers if he had seen him, but he shook his head. Clare went lower into the ship’s belly. It was eerie, just the roar of the engines and the thud of the winch as it lowered its precious load. Something gleamed on the floor next to the packed and padlocked cold room. A Zippo. Clare picked the lighter up and rubbed away the dark fluid staining the engraving of a mermaid. Not Ragnar’s, but familiar. She slipped it into her pocket.

‘Are you looking for something?’ Clare swung around. She didn’t recognise the voice. Light and chill, as dry as ice.

The man was blocking the light in the narrow corridor. He had his cellphone up, directed at Clare, and he snapped her as she turned.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ she asked, furious. ‘Who the hell are you?’ But she remembered the leanness. She had seen him at Der Blaue Engel. It was the man who had pulled Gretchen out of the sea.

‘I like a record of the people who come onto my ship without permission.’ The man was blade-thin, his face sculpted, handsome. He pressed a button on his phone, a smile creasing his tanned cheeks. Then he slipped his phone into his pocket and looked directly at Clare for the first time. ‘Janus Renko. The new owner.’

‘I’ve seen you,’ said Clare. ‘With Gretchen von Trotha.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m looking for the captain,’ said Clare. ‘Where is he?’

Renko lit a cigarette. ‘Ragnar Johansson?’ He flicked the name away with the match. When he took off his dark glasses, he exposed pale, blank eyes. ‘Ragnar went kite-boarding.’

‘When will he be back?’ Clare asked. Renko had not moved from the doorway. Clare glanced towards the light behind him, the smell of diesel oil, cold and fish heavy in the air. Renko smiled at her discomfort.

‘He was made an offer he couldn’t refuse,’ he said.

The churn of the engines crescendoed. The ship was ready to sail.

‘We’re on our way, Dr Hart.’ He rolled her name in his mouth, the intimacy of it was chilling. ‘If I speak to him, I’ll tell him you were here.’

Then Renko’s hand was on her elbow, his grip a vice, propelling her back down the icy corridor, walking her faster than was comfortable. Clare’s heart hammered against her ribs when she saw the refrigerated room ahead of her, the door into its icy maw now ajar.

She tried to pull free, but Renko had her arm twisted up her back. He was very close, his arm, sinewy and hard, was round her throat, cutting her breath. He laughed when she kicked backwards at him.

‘This can be slow, Clare.’ His voice sibilant, his breath intimate on her neck. ‘Or it can be qui-’

‘Janus!’ A voice from above. ‘Goagab’s here with your authorisation. He wants us out of here.’

Renko’s grip loosened an involuntary fraction, enough for Clare to twist herself free of him. In three strides, she was clear of him and past the startled harbour master holding out a sheaf of papers. Back on the deck, she dashed towards the gangplank; the shouts of the men she pushed out of her way were snatched away by the wind. Clare sprinted past the packers, through the ice shed and out of the factory gates.