‘We used to find them like that,’ he said at last. ‘Outside the villages.’
Clare waited, watching as Shipanga gathered memories, sought words in a language that did not belong to either of them.
Shipanga looked at Clare, frustration clear in his eyes. The words were inadequate for what he wanted to tell her, the shock of a buried past colliding with the present. ‘I found him,’ he said. ‘The bullets to the head. Like the executions when the army was here, in the north …’ His voice trailed off.
The absence of war, thought Clare, did not result in the presence of peace. The elemental force of it, the trauma, shaped a man in unnatural ways, much as the wind along this Skeleton Coast bent the alien trees.
‘You found him,’ prompted Clare. ‘Tell me how you found him.’
Shipanga straightened the seam in his trousers. Someone had ironed them with care. ‘I ate early. I left after the first siren. Before six. I went straight to the school. Got my rake to clean.’
‘Which way did you go in?’
‘I went in the back. I take a short cut down the path between the houses.’
‘Don’t the dogs go crazy?’ asked Clare.
‘I always go there,’ said Shipanga. ‘They’re used to me.’
‘Did you see anybody?’
Shipanga shook his head. ‘My wife was here, my kids. At the school, on the way there, the fog was too thick. I saw nobody. Nobody saw me.’ He paused, thought about the implications.
‘No one was at school before you?’
‘Just Mrs Ruyters. Her car was there. I didn’t see her.’
‘Did you expect her to be there?’ Clare asked.
‘She’s always first.’
‘You always start with the kindergarten playground?’
‘Always. Some of the children come early. Mrs Ruyters likes it to be ready for them.’ Shipanga picked at his fraying cuff. ‘When I saw him there,’ he continued, ‘I thought it was one of the older children teasing. Then the wind turned him and I saw the flies on his face.’
‘Did you touch him?’
‘I told Sergeant van Wyk,’ said Shipanga, ‘I ran for help. The headmaster was there and he called the police. I didn’t see the boy again. My job was to stop anyone coming into the school.’
‘Who came?’
‘There were only a few,’ said Shipanga. ‘Mr Meyer, of course. He’s always early. The little boy, Oscar. He sometimes helps me or he goes to Mrs Ruyters.’
‘The other early people?’
‘They all went away when they saw the police vans and the ambulance. Only Calvin Goagab caused trouble.’ Shipanga’s mouth twisted, as if the name was bitter on his tongue. ‘He wanted to drop his sons at school.’
‘Is he often early?’ Clare asked.
‘He does what he wants. He’s a powerful man. He works for the mayor now. He has a smart house. He forgets that he came from here.’ Shipanga gestured to the grimy dilapidation around him. The silent, staring children shrank out of sight again.
‘Does anyone else use that back entrance?’ Clare changed tack. Tamar had told her about Goagab. She needed more.
Shipanga shrugged. ‘Sometimes the children. The ones who come from the other side of town. Mara Thomson sometimes. She comes by bike.’
Clare was about to get up, but Shipanga put his hand on her arm, restraining her.
‘It was a warning, the boy. Like a warning from the spirits. This is a bad place. I told you we used to see them left dead to warn us, telling us to keep our heads down, not see things, to leave. That boy was a warning. Like the old ones we had during the war.’
‘Who was the warning for?’ Clare asked.
Shipanga shook his head. ‘There are many ghosts in this desert. The desert sees everything. All our secrets.’ He paused, waiting for a distant siren wail to cease. ‘It keeps secrets only as long as it feels like it. Then the sand moves and there are all the skeletons. It is a message.’
‘And what was the message?’
‘That I must go home to my village,’ said Shipanga. ‘I mustn’t die here.’ He traced a curved line in the sand: the river on whose verdant banks he had spent his boyhood.
Clare stood up to go. Shipanga looked up at her. ‘Did you speak to Miss Mara?’
‘Not yet,’ said Clare.
‘Miss Mara knew that boy well. He was in her team. The other boys, too, the dead ones.’
To the left of the house, a woman turned the corner, laden with old plastic shopping bags. She stopped when she saw Clare, her brow furrowed with concern. ‘Herman?’ she said as she approached.
Shipanga stood up. ‘This is my wife. Magdalena, this is the police doctor.’ Clare took the woman’s plump hand. It was as soft and worn as an old glove. Magdalena looked at her husband.
‘He can’t sleep,’ she said to Clare. ‘Since he found the dead boy, he keeps us all awake with his nightmares or with walking about. He says the boy was there to call him home.’
‘What do you think?’ asked Clare.
Magdalena shook her head. ‘I was born in the city. I see no ghosts. There are sailors here, truck drivers, and foreigners from everywhere. It’s one of them. Whoever did it is gone.’ She sat down beside her husband. ‘Gone, Herman.’
Shipanga leant against the sturdy body of his wife, the strength drained from him. ‘You’ll excuse us.’ Magdalena pulled him to his feet, limp as a rag doll. Clare watched the little house swallow them. The radio crackled back to life.
The children drifted away when she returned to her car. She sat for a minute, wishing she still smoked. The caretaker had given her nothing new, nothing concrete.
The hand tapping on her window snapped her into the present. It was Shipanga again. ‘I found this,’ he said, reaching for Clare’s hand and placing a tangle of gossamer threads in her palm. It was a cast, a compact ball of insect remains; wings, shimmering and transparent, some still attached to fragments of insect bodies.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s from insects, after they’ve been eaten. You only find these ones in the desert.’ Shipanga pointed to a red-streaked pair of wings, longer than the others. ‘They come out if it rains.’
‘Termites?’
Shipanga nodded.
‘Why are you giving me this?’ The tangled limbs moved in the breeze, their husky weightlessness horrible in Clare’s hand.
Shipanga stepped back from the car window as Clare tipped the little corpses into the cubbyhole. ‘After they took the boy away,’ he said, ‘I went back to the swing. I found it stuck in the tyre where his head had been.’
sixteen
Karamata was finishing his coffee in Tamar’s office when Clare got back to the police station. ‘Are you ready to see the sights?’ he asked. He was scheduled to take Clare to the dump site where Nicanor Jones was found.
‘I’m ready. Are you coming, Tamar?’ asked Clare.
Tamar shook her head. ‘I am still going through all the ship logs to see if there’s any pattern with which ships were in and these murders.’ She leant back on her yellow couch. She looked so slight, despite her pregnancy.
‘Find anything yet?’
‘Not much. The Russian ships, of course. The Alhantra’s been in all the time. Ragnar Johansson’s the skipper. You know him, I think.’
‘I do,’ said Clare. ‘From the last time I was here.’ She couldn’t read Tamar’s expression.
‘There’ve been a couple of others, but there’s no consistency,’ said Tamar. ‘I need to do a few more checks. I’ll catch you later.’
Clare picked up her files and followed Karamata to the Land Cruiser. He opened the door for her, before heaving himself into the driver’s seat.
Karamata took the road past the lagoon, but soon turned off onto a dusty track. Clare opened Nicanor Jones’s file. A class photograph, taken several years earlier, was stuck in the front. A little boy with shiny eyes and a wide mouth smiled up at her, frozen in his last recording of an official moment. In t
he next picture, his eyes were hollows and the white cheekbones shone through. There was one of his torso. It was bloody, the skin on the bony chest torn away. Clare looked away.
‘Not pretty,’ said Karamata.
‘No,’ said Clare.
Karamata turned right, into pure sand. The wheels held and the Land Cruiser topped the dune. Hidden below at the foot of the dune lay a scavenger’s paradise.
‘That is where I found him.’ Karamata pointed to the rusting razor wire looped along the edge of the dump. He pulled out a panoramic shot and held it up. The composition foregrounded the boy’s limp body, giving perspective to the vast expanse of the sand.
From their vantage point, Clare could see the road that led back to town, the lagoon and the harbour beyond it. ‘On this side of the fence?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He had been tied to that pole.’ Karamata pointed to a sturdy log that held the swags of razor wire in place.
‘Whoever dumped him didn’t come through the dump then. If he’d gone through that wire, alive or dead, it would’ve lacerated him. Whoever dumped him must’ve come across the sand. You didn’t see any tracks?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Karamata. ‘But the wind had been blowing, so anything would’ve been covered with sand.’
It was as sparse a crime scene as the schoolyard, according to the docket. ‘He wasn’t killed here, was he?’
‘No,’ said Karamata. ‘He’d been dead five days when he was found.’
Clare pictured the shrine she and Tamar had made to the child full of woe, Wednesday’s Child. That made the time of death Friday, the same as Kaiser Apollis. She looked at the autopsy pictures again. The mutilation was the work of human hands. So where was he? Why keep his body away from scavengers? When was he put here?
Clare looked over the unforgiving sand and rock. It made no sense, the risky display, the complications of transporting a corpse several days dead, the exhibition in a public place. Or was it intended that children see it? A warning of sorts, like Shipanga had said.
‘The body must’ve been in full view of where the waste-pickers sleep,’ she observed.
‘They say they saw nothing and heard nothing,’ said Karamata. ‘They certainly said nothing.’
A blue dump truck moved along the black ribbon of tar. It lumbered past a windowless brick building then onto a weigh-bridge. A man with a clipboard took note of the number plates and weight before waving the truck on.
‘George Meyer. The boss.’ Karamata cut the engine. ‘That’s his incinerator.’ The chimney, dark against the grey sky, spiralled smoke into the still air. It drifted towards the town.
‘So much easier to just burn a body,’ Clare said, half to herself.
‘You’d think so,’ said Karamata, ‘but you’d have to get it past George first. He’s very German about his record-keeping!’
‘His movements have been checked, I suppose?’
‘We spoke to him,’ said Karamata. ‘He was at home all weekend. Him and that funny little boy of his, Oscar.’
The truck stopped in the middle of the dump site. Scrawny supplicants emerged from the heaps of waste and swarmed around the vehicle, heads bowed, hands lifted. The driver jumped out and walked over to the foreman standing to the side, sjambok at the ready. The waste-pickers worked with practised efficiency, filling sacks with discarded affluence.
‘The other economy,’ Karamata noted. ‘At the moment it’s the only one that’s stable.’
‘The fishing is over?’
‘Finish and klaar. Not even jobs left for pals.’
‘You didn’t put money in fishing?’ Clare asked.
‘Not me,’ he laughed. ‘I didn’t have the right surname or the right connections. I suppose I should be glad about that now.’
Karamata started the engine, and the vehicle pitched forward down the vertiginous dune. He pulled onto a track that led to the dump and parked outside the entrance to the building.
‘Let’s say hello to George Meyer,’ he said. ‘A courtesy.’ He pushed open the screen door and Clare followed him down the immaculate passage. The third door was open.
‘Mr Meyer?’ Karamata ducked slightly as he stepped inside the office. His bulky form dwarfed the furniture.
George Meyer was at his desk. The little redhead Clare had seen cycling along the lagoon was sitting at a small table. The boy’s eyes widened in recognition when he saw her.
‘Sergeant Karamata. Madam.’ George Meyer stood up and smoothed down his hair, nodding at Clare.
‘This is Dr Hart,’ said Karamata. ‘Dr Hart and I want to talk to the boys who live on the dump.’
‘Sign in, please.’ Meyer pushed a ledger towards Karamata. ‘New policy since that body was found here. The boys are afraid. This makes them feel safer.’
‘And are they?’ asked Clare.
‘I doubt it,’ said Meyer. ‘Whoever’s killing them wouldn’t start out here on the dump.’
‘Why not?’ asked Clare.
‘Well, everyone here would recognise a stranger, wouldn’t they?’
‘They would,’ said Clare, ‘if it was a stranger.’ She went over to look at what the child was drawing while Karamata took care of the formalities. Oscar had covered the page with drawings. Flowering people, winged trees, dolphins. The eerie whimsy was so at odds with this rough place.
‘Those are beautiful.’ Clare smiled at the boy, but the child looked down at his freckled hands, twisting them in his lap. ‘What’s your name?’ She bent down beside him.
‘This is Oscar,’ Meyer answered for the child. ‘He’s been mute since his mother died six months ago.’
The pieces clicked into place: Meyer, Virginia Meyer. Clare remembered a book she’d read the last time she was in Walvis Bay. She turned back to the child. ‘Your mother studied the Kuiseb plants, didn’t she? She worked with the desert people, trying to understand how they use them.’
The boy’s eyes lit up, confirming Clare’s question.
‘She was my wife.’ George Meyer looked down as he spoke. ‘Before that, she and Oscar lived in the Kuiseb for many years.’ He held out his hand, and the child sidled over, but Meyer did not draw the child into the shelter of his arms. The two of them stood, side by side, watching Clare and Karamata get back in the vehicle.
‘Unusual colouring Oscar has,’ she said as they drove away.
‘He takes after his mother,’ said Karamata. ‘Virginia was like Moses’s burning bush with all her red hair. And such a white skin, no good for this country.’
‘She wasn’t from here?’
‘She was American. She came here to work at the desert research centre. Then her visa ran out and she found George somewhere and married him. I think for her it was like collecting a rather dull specimen. A husband was something she needed. Oscar is what she wanted. The two of them were always alone out in the Kuiseb, her trying to preserve things, stop any kind of development. That’s where she died, in a car crash.’
‘George Meyer’s not his father?’
‘No. That child has no one now she’s gone. No one came from America to claim him, so he stayed here with the stepfather.’
Karamata stopped the car. The rubbish truck they had seen from the dune stood empty, everything of value winnowed from the rotting black mass lying around it. The truck driver waved as he headed back to town. A group of boys had left off scavenging and were watching them. The foreman came towards them, caressing his palm with his whip, a flock of ragged children at his heels.
‘You looking for work, Karamata?’ asked the thickset man.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Vermeulen. This is Dr Hart from South Africa. She is working with us on the murder of the boy here, and the one at the school.’
‘Nee, fok, Karamata. Foreign experts for a couple of dead street kids.’ He glared at Clare, his muscled neck bulging. ‘Don’t you have enough corpses of your own down south?’
‘Nice to meet you, Mr Vermeulen.’ Clare extended her hand; Vermeulen wiped his palms
on his overalls and held her fingers for a moment.
‘These poor little fuckers, their mothers throw them away.’ Vermeulen caught the child closest to him, a boy of five or six, by the scruff of the neck.
‘Who’s your mother, hey?’ The boy giggled and Vermeulen tossed him aside. ‘He never even knew. He’s lived on the streets since he was three. When he gets a bit sicker, then maybe those nuns will come and get him. They’ll take him to their place out there.’ He gestured eastwards with an arm as thick as a pole. ‘So what you want here now?’
‘I’m not a social worker,’ said Clare. ‘But I might be able to help find who’s killing these boys.’
‘Ag, you can believe what you want, lady,’ Vermeulen sighed. ‘It’s nice of you to try to help. Not many do.’
‘Where do these boys sleep?’ Clare looked around the site; it was hardly an orphan’s haven.
‘A few go sleep in town,’ said Vermeulen. ‘The rest sleep here at the dump. You want to see?’
‘Sure,’ said Clare.
‘Lazarus!’ he bellowed. A scrawny boy was pushed to the front of the group.
‘We’ve met, I think,’ said Clare. Lazarus gave her a shifty smile.
‘Why weren’t you at school?’ Vermeulen demanded. ‘You know how I had to gatkruip that headmaster to get him to take you back?’
‘School’s a waste of time.’ Lazarus was careful to stay out of Vermeulen’s reach.
‘This is our Einstein,’ said Vermeulen. ‘Knows everything, cocky bugger, which is lucky because the school won’t take him back again this time. Take the doctor and show her where you sleep.’
Clare and Karamata followed Lazarus into an enclosure behind the truck. An old tarpaulin served as a roof, and a nest of mattresses was arranged underneath, neat bundles of clothes at the top of each one.
‘That was Fritz Woestyn’s bed,’ said Lazarus. ‘And Kaiser’s.’ Clare looked down at the yellowed sponge mattress. There was a photograph next to the bed.
‘That’s our soccer team.’ Lazarus came and stood next to her. His breath was rank. ‘We were in the newspaper for the Homeless World Cup,’ he said. ‘See, there’s Kaiser and there’s me. There’s Fritz and the other boys. Mara took it. She gave us all a copy. Look, here’s mine.’ He dived onto the last mattress and pulled out an identical shot.
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