Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

  ‘You’ve been watching too much American TV,’ said Tamar with the ghost of a smile. ‘This is Walvis Bay. Scene-of-crime officer? That’s me. Police photographer? That’s me. Forensics? That’s me. Ballistics? That’s me, too.’

  Erasmus stared at her blankly and she softened her tone: ‘Would you call the mortuary and see which pathologist is on postmortem duty? It should be Dr Kotze. Get her to send a van round.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ Erasmus hurried off, relieved to have a task.

  ‘Get some crime-scene tape, would you, Sergeant van Wyk?’ Authority crackled in Tamar Damases’s voice. ‘Cordon off the area. I want to limit access to the crime scene. Both the previous investigations were compromised because everyone was everywhere.’

  ‘Pity you weren’t here to take charge, Captain.’ Van Wyk didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm in his tone. ‘Must be difficult to do a good job’ – he ran his eyes over her full belly – ‘the state you’re in.’

  Tamar watched him go, relieved to be alone with the body. The wind was picking up now from the south, chilly and mean. She zipped her jacket up to her chin and turned to examine the dead boy. Looking at him on the swing, his back to her, he could be just another child carrying on some game for that moment too long. If he could climb out of the swing, if they could stand back to back, she and the boy, as growing children love to do, they would have been evenly matched.

  When she moved towards the swing, marking her path, the boy’s eyes seemed to follow her progress like one of those trick portraits, beckoning her towards him. Tamar obeyed, her feet as small as a child’s, picking through the stony litter, recording each detail on her camera. The sand at the base of the swing was slightly disturbed, punctuated by a series of neat, tapered holes. She inserted an index finger into one. It was about two inches deep.

  The swing that cradled the body faced due north. It was the only one at an angle. It was also the highest off the ground, the most difficult to reach. If Tamar had to hazard a guess, she would say it had been chosen for the view, but the sullen fog had its back hunched low and she could see nothing of the desert. She turned her attention and her camera to record the macabre display before walking down to the edge of the playground.

  There were several gaps in the fence. She bent down, her camera steadied by her elbows on her knees. Tamar was comfortable squatting like this. She had learned to do this alongside her grandmother; the old lady explaining to the sharp-eyed child how to read the hidden signs that told if an animal had moved through an area, if a person had stopped to think or eat, or if a woman had been there to do her secret business. Hurrying. Ambling. Hunting. Hiding. There were signs for all actions if you knew how to look.

  The jungle gym was livid against the fingers of grey mist. The fog flattened everything, bleaching detail from the landscape. Tamar straightened up, waiting for the fog to thin and for an anaemic sun to cast its short-lived shadows. When it did so, she could just make out the marks. They were so faint as to be almost absent: blades of grass broken and angled in the same direction, an impression on the salt-encrusted sand as faint as a palm print on glass. She increased the contrast reading on her camera and snapped pictures until the sun withdrew. She unclipped the loop of yellow tape from her belt, fingering the service pistol nestled below her rounded belly en route. She stepped backwards into her own footsteps and taped off the area, finishing as her phone rang.

  ‘Helena,’ she answered. There was no need to check the caller identity.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Helena Kotze. ‘Another weekend stabbing?’ Working in a port had hardened the young doctor’s heart and sharpened her eye.

  ‘I almost wish it was,’ said Tamar. ‘It’s another dead boy.’

  ‘Same as the others?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Tamar, her voice catching. ‘A boy again. Young. Maybe fourteen. This time in a swing at the school in 11th Street. Looks like a bullet that’s punctured the forehead. Ligatures on both wrists. Wrapped in a dirty sheet.’

  ‘Was he killed there?’ asked Helena.

  ‘No. No blood to speak of. Nothing on the ground. Smells as if he’s been dead a couple of days, too.’

  ‘I’m in the middle of surgery. I can’t come for another hour or so. Can you do the preliminaries?’

  ‘I’m about to,’ said Tamar. ‘Your guys are here. I’ll speak to you later.’

  Tamar looked up at the two mortuary technicians skulking at the gate. The two Willems, she liked to call them. ‘How are you, boys?’ she greeted them.

  ‘Cool. You?’ mumbled the taller Willem. His skin was raw from a rushed shave.

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Tamar. She shook out two evidence bags.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked the other Willem.

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ said Tamar. ‘We’ll only get an ID later.’

  The two Willems stuck their hands in their pockets, hunching their shoulders like a pair of bedraggled crows. ‘Why so sad?’ asked Tamar.

  They shrugged. The taller Willem lit a cigarette. Tamar knew their disconsolateness wasn’t for the dead boy. The pair moonlighted for Human & Pitt, the most enterprising of the flourishing undertaking franchises in Walvis Bay. The funeral director paid them one hundred upfront for the first call to a fresh body, provided it brought in business. A three-day-dead body that nobody had reported missing was not worth getting into a suit for first thing on a Monday morning.

  They watched listlessly as Tamar walked back to the boy and steadied the swing between the uprights and her knee. The stench of decay haloed the body. Another day and it would have been unbearable. Tamar took a deep breath and bagged the hands bound with nylon rope. The boy’s shoes were covered with fine sand. She bagged those too. She looked at the wound in the middle of his forehead. It was seething with larvae. Two, maybe three, days in the life cycle of the blowfly, Tamar guessed.

  Trusses held his arms locked around his knees, but the shroud had loosened. There was a large area of bloodied flesh where the boy’s oversized shirt gaped. Tamar probed the writhing mass of feeding larvae, her nausea dissipating as she worked. She checked the boy’s pockets. She did not trust the pair at the gate. If there was anything of worth on the body, it would be gone by the time the corpse got to a hospital gurney.

  One trouser pocket held nothing but a black pebble. Tamar held it in her hand. She could see why the boy would have picked it up. It was symmetrical, smooth. There was some change in the other pocket and a greasy till slip for twenty-four Namibian dollars. This she dropped into a separate bag. In the other pocket was a pencil stub. There was an initial, looked like a K, inked into one ridge of the pencil. Could be his initials; could be something he picked out of a rubbish bin.

  Tamar stood up and signalled to the two men. Like acolytes, they stepped forward with the stretcher, placed the frail body on it and covered it with a sheet. Tamar opened the wooden gate and walked with them as they carried their small burden to the van where Karamata and Van Wyk were keeping the curious at bay. The two Willems put the stretcher down to open the doors.

  ‘The same thing?’ asked Karamata.

  ‘Looks like it to me,’ said Tamar. ‘Have a look. See what you think.’

  Karamata knelt down beside the dead boy and pulled the sheet back. He pushed the grimy shroud aside and traced the boy’s decaying cheek.

  ‘You know the boy?’ asked Tamar, prompted by the burly man’s tenderness.

  ‘He played soccer with my sons.’ There was a sheen in Karamata’s dark eyes when he stood up. ‘Be careful with him,’ he said as the two technicians picked the body up. The taller Willem sneered, but his swagger stopped at the hips and he picked up the boy without jolting him.

  ‘His name?’ Tamar asked.

  ‘Everyone called him Kaiser,’ Karamata replied.

  Tamar nodded. The pencil with the K was his then.

  The bang of the mortuary van’s doors seemed to release the crowd of onlookers. They pulled out cellphones to tell those who
had been unlucky enough to miss the excitement what had happened: that there was another body; another boy was dead, another of those street children who wheedled money at every traffic light these days.

  ‘His surname?’ asked Tamar.

  ‘Apollis,’ said Van Wyk. ‘He has a sister. Sylvia. A whore, like he was. That’ll be why he’s in the van.’

  ‘You knew him too?’ asked Tamar.

  Van Wyk spat out the match he had been using to clean his teeth. ‘It’s a small town, Captain.’

  Captain Tamar Damases watched the vehicle bump down the road. Twice before this had happened and she had been unable to do a thing. Boys caught, killed, displayed, buried.

  The violent secrets encrypted on their bodies turned Tamar’s mind to Dr Clare Hart.

  three

  Riedwaan Faizal pushed back the covers and went to the window, wrapping a towel around his waist. After a couple of minutes, Clare appeared in the distance, taking the curve of the Sea Point Boulevard in her stride. At this distance, in the thin September sunlight, she was a stranger to him, despite his intimate knowledge of her, gleaned in secret and hoarded. He watched her until she had disappeared, then he pushed his hands back through his hair. It had caused him a lot of trouble at high school, the way it grew straight up. He was always being sent to the headmaster to prove that he hadn’t gelled it. That was long ago now. Two decades, give or take a year or so. Now it showed careless streaks of grey in places.

  Riedwaan wandered through Clare’s flat, picking up her things, putting them down, running a finger along the alphabetically arranged spines of her books. Mainly hardbacks. Above the television were a couple of shelves of Clare’s documentaries, VHS copies of her broadcast investigative pieces, and an award for a film she’d done on human trafficking in the Congo. Putting the world to rights, that’s what her investigative work was about, her beliefs giving her the courage to go where there were no nets to catch her if she fell. It fitted with her profiling work, her conviction that she could find the source of evil and eliminate it. Riedwaan was less sure about that.

  He rifled through the heap of classical and acoustic CDs. ‘How much Moby can one person listen to?’ he asked Fritz. The cat flattened her ears and hissed in reply.

  In Clare’s bathroom, he opened one of the small pots of cream and held it to his nose. The jar carried the scent of her: tender, secret. Riedwaan put it down. He had done this so often in the homes of strangers. It had become second nature to look through the everyday artefacts of a woman’s life after her broken body had been found, searching for reasons why that woman stepped out for that minute and never returned to finish half-used jars of expensive cream or to serve the meal cooking in the oven.

  Clare was tired – he knew it – wrung out by the last case they had worked on together, profiling a killer whose refinements of cruelty had turned the stomachs of men who considered themselves inured to depravity. She needed to visit her reclusive twin, Constance. She needed to be alone, away. But Riedwaan didn’t want her to leave him. He liked to live with the woman he slept with. The patterns of a long marriage like his, even if it was broken, ran deep.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. He could get away without shaving. He showered and dressed, repressing the anxiety riffing down his spine. He fed Fritz. Clare would be back in half an hour. He went to watch for her. The sitting room was sparse, the way she liked it. The wooden floor a pale expanse that merged with the waves hurling themselves against the boulevard. He sat down on her sofa and picked up the pile of books she had been busy with before he had arrived the previous evening. There was a book on desert plants, the pollen of a forgotten cutting staining the index. A history of the Richtersveld, the harsh area around the Orange River. A novel about an early and murderous journey into that desert: Coetzee’s Dusklands. She had made notes in her guide to southern African seabirds. He snapped it shut, amused at the thought of Clare with binoculars around her neck, bird list in her hand.

  In the kitchen, Fritz glared as Riedwaan waited for the kettle to boil. He took his coffee through to the spare room. Clare’s suitcase was open on the bed, half-packed. Clothes lay in methodical order, waiting to be placed in the suitcase. He picked up a dress, ran the silky black material through his hands and held it to his face. She must have worn it recently, because his touch released the feral tang of her sweat that lay just beneath the perfume she always wore. Jealousy surged through him. Who had she gone out with in that dress? Who had made her sweat?

  He put it down and picked up a bra and a matching pair of panties – expensive, silky, low on the hip. Who were these for? Riedwaan could hear her mocking voice: for me is what she’d say. She was right, but her self-containment made him feel adolescent. He folded the dress again. He folded the bra and put it back. Her panties he slipped into his pocket. A memento for while she was away.

  In the kitchen, Riedwaan put tomatoes on to grill and eggs to boil. He watched the last city lights go off. Cape Town in the light of the morning looked to him like a stripper past her prime. The lines were good, the breasts firm, but it was silicone and make-up that gave the nights their charge.

  The front door opened. Riedwaan’s hand curled around the filleting knife on the sink. ‘Clare,’ he called.

  ‘You missed the best part of the day.’

  Riedwaan looked at the knife in his hand in surprise. He passed a drying cloth over it and reached for a ripe melon.

  Clare came in dripping, cheeks scarlet.

  ‘I’m not going to kiss you.’ She evaded him. ‘I’m sweaty and disgusting.’

  ‘Just how I like you.’ Riedwaan sliced the spanspek. He didn’t think much of fruit, but Clare loved it.

  She picked up a slice and bit into it. ‘Perfect.’ She opened the window and put the skin on the sill for the birds waiting there. ‘Come and talk to me in the shower.’ She stripped, dropping her sweaty clothes into the washing machine.

  ‘In a minute,’ said Riedwaan, watching her disappear naked down the passage.

  Clare stood under the shower. She loved the jet of water hot on her face, washing the sweat away. It took with it, though, the imprint of Riedwaan’s warm skin on hers. She was going to miss him, being away for a month. She massaged shampoo into her blonde hair, working it down to the ends that hung below her waist. Damn. She had meant to have it trimmed before she left.

  ‘You distract me with your clothes off.’ Clare had not heard Riedwaan come into the bathroom. ‘Especially when you look guilty like that. You thinking dirty thoughts?’

  ‘I’m not telling.’ Clare reached for the soap and scrubbed her shoulders.

  ‘I can do that for you.’ Riedwaan watched her deft hands lathering her body.

  ‘You’ve seen all this before.’

  ‘I’m not going to see it for weeks,’ he pleaded.

  Clare rinsed her hair. It coiled over her shoulder like a snake, the water making it almost as dark as Riedwaan’s. She switched off the tap and stepped out of the shower.

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in birds.’ Riedwaan did not take his eyes off her. Dripping wet, she was as easy with herself naked as she was clothed.

  ‘Well, I am. My father taught us. He would slam on the brakes in the middle of the highway, do a U-turn and hurtle back to identify some tiny ball of brown feathers. I decided that if I was going to die, at least I should know what I was dying for.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Riedwaan asked.

  Clare caught the look on his face and laughed. ‘You never asked.’ She put on cream, smoothing out her arched brows. She reached for her red kimono and tied the cord tight, emphasising the curve of her hips.

  ‘I’ll come find you in Namaqualand. You can show a city boy what there is to like about all those flowers and birds.’

  The thought of him at her sister’s farm bobbed bright as a lure, hiding the hook that lay beneath.

  ‘I’d love that.’ The need in her voice caught them both by surprise.

  Ri
edwaan opened the door, letting in a blast of cold air. He reached for the words to tell her that things were more complicated than this morning routine. That Shazia was coming back. His wife. Instead, he pulled Clare towards him.

  ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing with the door open and I want my breakfast.’ She kissed him on the mouth and slipped out of his arms. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

  four

  On the desolate southwest coast of Africa, Mara Thomson turned between the houses to take the short cut to school. A year ago, she had arrived as a volunteer teacher in Namibia with hope and two suitcases. The summer heat had buckled her knees as she stepped off the plane in the capital, Windhoek. The light had seared her eyes, but her heart had soared and she had walked across the blazing tarmac as if she was coming home. She had expected acacia trees etched against an orange sky. Instead, she was assigned to Walvis Bay. She cried herself to sleep for a week; then she’d decided to make a life for herself amongst the grime and the fog. A life that she was going to miss, now that she was leaving.

  Mara jumped off her bike and wheeled it up the narrow alley, wondering why the dogs were barking. Elias Karamata was standing guard at a breech in the fence that was looped with chevronned tape. Black and yellow, nature’s danger signal.

  ‘Morning, Mara,’ Elias Karamata greeted the girl. Skinny and brown, in her hoodie and jeans, she looked like one of the boys she coached rather than a volunteer teacher.

  ‘What’s wrong, then?’ asked Mara, the clipped vowels marking her as foreign. English.

  ‘Kaiser Apollis,’ said Karamata, a gentle hand covering her arm. ‘He was found dead in the playground.’ He felt Mara tremble. At nineteen, she was still a wide-eyed child herself. ‘Go around the other way.’

  Mara walked around to the main entrance of the school, glad that she had her bike to lean on. Her legs were shaking.

  ‘Where are you going, Miss Thomson?’