Blood Rose

fifty-four

Visibility was getting worse. Clare could see a few metres ahead. That was it. The wind was a keening banshee. It hurled the sand in stinging waves off the tops of the dune, driving them down like vengeful furies that flayed the skin and tore at the eyes and ears. Her mouth was soon filled with choking red dust. Clare stopped to orientate herself. The stand of trees was thick, the black bark coated with mica. She fought her way towards the outflung arm of dune in the lee of the wind. Here, the wind was less constricting and she could make out the outlines of trees. She was close. She had to get to the top of the dune. She looked for the signs of human habitation that would be there. Eucalyptus. Here in the desert it would have been planted and nurtured for some time so that its delving roots could tap into the subterranean lake where the Namib hoarded its water. She closed her eyes and pictured the aerial map. If she pulled it out here, it would be whipped out of her hands.

She had seen the eucalyptus earlier, exactly as Oscar had drawn it, with its dark spire squared against the undulating horizontality of the desert. She had seen it and then it had disappeared, so it must be behind the ruff of dunes that had formed in the last flood. She would have to go up and over the dune she was sheltering against. Due east. At least the wind would help her orientate herself: she had to face down the valkyries of sand that screamed past her towards the sea. It was horrible going forward: two steps forward was one backwards. Her throat was dry and cracked, and her muscles screamed at her to stop. There was a momentary lull. An absolute and deafening silence fell. The dust hung in abeyance, waiting for the next onslaught.

Janus Renko. The unfamiliar name. The hard face familiar. And not just from Der Blaue Engel. The chord it had struck echoed through the chaos of sandy wind. The quiet kitchen. Clare saw it with startling clarity: the woman with her gun-metal hair, pointing out her husband in the desert. In the photo, one arm draped over a friend, the unknown man standing aloof, shadowed. The same face, distilled down to its cruel essence. The half-empty ship. The numbers: 2, 3 and 5. Coded for her, inscribed upon the dead boys’ chests by Spyt, the desert’s silent witness. The drums loaded, not with the obscuring load of fish, but with the deadly treasure dug up by five boys, watched, found and delivered by Spyt.

Two, three, five. Unleashed in air or water, a stealthy death no one could fight. Enriched uranium: more than a pension that. A fortune for anyone willing to sell mass murder to the jostling numbers eager and able to make a dirty bomb. She couldn’t think of that now. Not here. She was concentrating on one life. One death.

She was on the summit. Below, a vortex of red dust writhed beneath the yoke of the wind. Her heart thudded at the thought that she had lost her way, but the storm was so wild, the only thing to do was to struggle towards the tree she had glimpsed earlier. It offered the only sanctuary. She plunged over the edge of a dune, into the comparative silence in the well of sand. She rested, recovering from the assault of the wind.

Ahead of her was a mound where the desert had heaped against something. Shelter. She made her way to it. The shape, the outline, a flash of colour. The familiarity of it caught like a cry in the throat. She crawled forward and collapsed against the mound.

Mara.

Clare repressed the hot flare of panic. Face to face with her, the girl’s expression rigid, the eye sockets already emptied. The final bullet a rose on her forehead. Beautiful, for a split second. Mara had been dead a good twenty-four hours, by the looks of her. The wind howled over the top of her discarded body, her outstretched hands covered in sand. Clare brushed the insects away from the girl’s face, curling her hand into hers. Mara’s paisley jacket was open, hanging loose from her body, revealing her white shirt. A few strands of hair stuck in the bloodstain drying on her sleeve.

Clare touched the stain. It was still moist. She picked up one of the blood-sticky hairs. It was a deep auburn where it wasn’t stained. The colour of the dunes where Mara lay.

It could only be Oscar’s hair. There was a faint impression on the sand where the boy had curled, nestling into the stiffening curve of the dead girl’s body. He had crawled here, inching his way across the dune, as she had, to find shelter. Clare shivered, looking out into the wind-blurred sand. There was no sign of the boy.

She wound her scarf tighter around her face. The series of regular impressions leading away from Mara’s body was nearly obscured. The lure of them, the possibility that they were footprints, that Oscar was alive, was overwhelming. Clare stood up and looked north, the direction into which the tracks vanished. There was a gulley on the other side of the dunes, and then nothing but an ocean of dancing sand. If she followed these ephemeral marks she would be lost in minutes. Oscar had survived the desert before. She had to hope that he could do it again.

She struggled up the incline, leaving Mara’s lifeless body to be buried in the desert. Below, she could make out the broken spine of the railway line and the eucalyptus standing in solitary splendour, marking where someone had tried to make a home, or coax a crop out of the sand. Clare made her way down, zigzagging along the contour, dreading what she was going to find. The wind had sculpted the sand over the low scrubby bushes, rocks and any detritus that lay on this dry tributary. It moulded sand over everything, making the shifting landscape surreal, blurred by the whirl of fool’s gold.

Clare crouched as her eye registered a movement at the tree. A woman with her knees parted and bent just a fraction. The arms locked, clasped in front of her body. The man bound and watching the woman’s face as one would watch a weaving mamba.

Riedwaan.

Clare slipped the dust-sticky safety off Tamar’s gun. Before her mind had a chance to even register, she fired.

Riedwaan felt the blood spurt from his right wrist as he wrenched it free. He grabbed the metal rod beside him and brought it across the woman’s knees as she fired, felling her like a ham-strung animal. She lay across his lap, completely motionless. He worked his left arm free and slipped his arms around her. They were both slick with her blood. There had to have been two shots; Riedwaan was sure of it. That was the only thing that explained the sound. He turned Gretchen around to reveal a gunshot wound on her shoulder.

‘Well caught.’ The catch in Clare’s voice undid her attempt at a joke.

Riedwaan looked up. ‘About time,’ he said. The blood was rushing back into his arms. It was excruciating, but the sight of Clare was like a shot of morphine. ‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

Clare knelt beside the bleeding woman and turned her head towards her. The woman moaned.

‘The Blue Angel,’ said Clare. ‘I thought it might be.’

‘A friend of yours?’ said Riedwaan. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around Gretchen’s naked form.

‘In a manner of speaking. You could say we have a couple of mutual acquaintances.’

‘She’s not going to last long,’ said Riedwaan. He pulled out his phone and gave it to Clare. ‘You dial. My hands aren’t working that well at the moment.’

Clare took the phone and dialled Tamar’s number, ducking into the hut to get reception.

Riedwaan found his cigarettes. He put one between his lips and felt around for his lighter. It was gone.

‘You don’t have a light, I suppose?’ he said to Clare as she came out of the hut.

‘I do actually,’ she said, offering him the Zippo with the mermaid on it. ‘I picked it up outside the freezer just before Gretchen’s friend tried to push me inside.’

Riedwaan turned the lighter over in his hand so that he could read the inscription: Magnus Malan. He lit his cigarette. ‘On the Alhantra?’ he asked.

Clare nodded.

‘No sign of its owner?’

‘Just a trace of blood.’

Riedwaan took a deep drag. ‘How much will you bet that Darlene’s husband is freezing in the hold with his uranium cakes?’

Clare sat down next to him and watched him smoke. ‘I’m not much for betting,’ she said. ‘But if I were, the odds would be so low it wouldn’t be worthwhile.’

She thought about kissing him, but the sound of the helicopter approaching drowned out the wind and by then it was too late.