‘The body?’ asked Clare.
‘Back seat,’ said Tamar. ‘With me.’
The police vehicles, Van Wyk and Tamar in the double cab and Karamata on his quad bike, disappeared over the dune. The hunting bats, flying low over the ground, returned to roost in the large Ana tree where Lazarus had been tied.
‘I need to make a call,’ Clare said to Helena. ‘Can you hang on a minute?’
‘Sure,’ said Helena. ‘Let them get ahead or we’ll sit in their dust.’
Clare climbed halfway up a rise, hoping she would get cellphone reception. Nothing. She stood in the scrub, like any other predator, and scanned the dunes. A thickening of the darkness on the opposite dune caught her eye, thudding her heart against her ribs again. The shadow moved, lengthening down the swell of the dune. Then it stopped and Clare heard the eerie chuckle of a brown hyena, a rare and persecuted animal. She exhaled, and watched the animal lope, swift and sure, into the scrub. Its presence meant that people rarely passed through here. It also meant that no body would last long. Half an hour alone, and the soft bits – stomach, buttocks, face – would be gone. The small bones would be ground away, the long bones cracked open for their sweet, nutritious marrow.
The killer must have kept the dead boy somewhere. He had been able to predict where a sleepy girl would go to relieve herself. He had displayed the body just there, so that her torchlight would find his face leering at her. Clare scanned the empty gulley, the motionless trees. He had to know this place. Like the back of his hand. The phrase echoed through Clare’s mind as she moved out of the shelter of the trees, climbing to the lip of the dune. One bar. She crossed her fingers for the satellite to be around long enough for her to make her call.
‘Faizal,’ mumbled Riedwaan. Half asleep. Warm. Naked in bed. Clare pictured him, one sinewy arm over his eyes to keep the morning at bay. The unexpected ache of longing was a knife-twist.
‘Riedwaan.’ Despite herself, she listened for the muffled sounds of somebody else. ‘It’s Clare.’
‘Baby.’ Worry clear as a bell in his voice. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What did you just call me?’ she asked.
‘I called you baby. It’s … fuck, it’s five o’clock in the morning, Clare. Get off your feminist high horse. What’s happened?’
‘Another boy, Riedwaan.’ Clare put her hand to her mouth. ‘I spoke to him two days ago. Now he’s dead.’
‘What is it now? Three? Four?’
‘Four. Four bodies. But this one had a 5 carved on his chest. I’m scared it means there’s another one out there that no one’s found.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Out in the Kuiseb Delta. Some old military site.’
‘Military?’ Riedwaan was awake now, his ambiguous conversation with Phiri making his hair stand on end. ‘What are you doing there?’
‘A couple of bikers found the body,’ said Clare. ‘Well, a married man and an under-aged babysitter. It must’ve seemed like the ideal place. It’s the middle of nowhere. Someone cut the bike’s fuel pipe so they had no choice but to call for help.’
‘Is there any connection between that place and the school? The other places where the bodies were dumped?’
‘If there is, I’m not seeing it yet,’ said Clare. ‘Other than whoever is dumping these kids intends them to be found.’
Need and opportunity, she thought: malevolent twin moons that guided the ebb and flow of her killer’s mind.
‘You have to find some way of connecting these boys and the dump sites,’ said Riedwaan. ‘If the choice is purely opportunistic, then what does this guy do that allows him to be in the right place at the right time? Then you’ve got a chance of finding where he’s shooting them.’
‘Riedwaan, do you know how big this place is? It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.’ The desert rolled away from Clare, ashen in the starlight.
‘That’s your job, Doc,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Unless this killer is a spook, someone’s going to see him sometime.’
‘It feels like I’m chasing a ghost sometimes,’ said Clare, watching a moth alight on a cluster of creamy blossoms.
‘What’s the plan now?’ asked Riedwaan.
‘Captain Damases went back with the body. We’ll do the autopsy immediately. I’m going back now with the pathologist.’
‘Clare.’ Riedwaan’s tone softened. Not now, thought Clare. Not here. ‘I wanted to tell you …’
Clare broke off a flower-laden branch from the tree she was standing under. She didn’t recognise the species, but the plants that grew in deserts were unique, each evolving to fit some tiny niche. The fragile blossoms smelt of honey, a subtle fragrance as out of place in this harsh place as the delicate, pollen-laden moth that fluttered in the moonlight. She waited.
‘It’s not what you’re thinking. I just—’ he started, but the satellite moved, cutting him off.
Clare wiped her hands on her jeans. Her palms left a swirl of Van Gogh yellow against the blue. She looked at the pollen smudge. It clung to her jeans, her hands, her watch strap. It would travel with her no matter how much she tried to rub it off. She thought of the dead boys and the unchartered paths they had followed to their deaths. All the signs they might have left – footprints, hair, skin particles – had been erased by the desert wind and the tenacious insects that fought for survival. Clare looked again at the pollen clinging to her, determined to journey with her on the off-chance that it would brush against a receptive female plant. She felt her pulse quicken as her idea coalesced. If Lazarus had brushed against a tree or a flowering shrub in the Kuiseb Delta, surely the traces of these plants would have adhered to the tiny crevices in his skin or the folds in his clothes. Adrenaline surged through Clare as she thought of the invisible code encrypted on the dead boy. On the others, too: Kaiser, Nicanor, Fritz.
‘Clare.’ Helena’s voice cut through her thoughts. ‘Shall we head back? I’ll need to get to work on that boy if you’re going to have anything to take to Cape Town with you later.’
Clare went to join her, picking a branch of every flowering tree she passed. ‘I need to find someone who knows about plants.’
‘Tertius Myburgh’s your man then,’ said Helena, giving her a strange look. ‘Plant nut, works at the desert research institute in Swakopmund. Tell him I sent you.’
Helena’s bike roared back to life and Clare got on behind her, cradling her bouquet in front of her. They bumped down the track and turned onto the gravel road that would take them back to Walvis Bay. The bike’s lights flashed over objects, pulling them towards Clare: an old car wreck, a gnarled tree and a donkey cart clip-clopping along, the driver hunched against the cold, a sleepy huddle of children on the back, lulled by the regular thwack of the leather on the donkey’s withers.
Helena parked in the hospital parking lot. Clare needed a hot shower and coffee, but neither of those was going to happen any time soon.
Tamar was waiting for them. ‘Lazarus’s inside already,’ she said, leading the way up the steps of the morgue. ‘Elias has gone over to the dump to try to trace his movements.’
‘And Van Wyk?’ asked Clare.
‘At the station with Clinton and Chanel getting statements. His wife and her mother were waiting for them when we arrived,’ said Tamar. ‘They’d figured it out already.’
‘Ouch!’ said Clare.
In the antechamber, the three women pulled gowns over their dusty clothes before following Helena into her makeshift mortuary. The sheet draped across Lazarus peaked over his nose, his hands folded across his lacerated chest, over his too-large adolescent feet. In the dim light it looked like the marble tomb of a medieval crusader; then Helena flicked on the lights and he was a dead boy on a dented metal gurney again.
‘Okay,’ Helena said. ‘Shall we start?’ She drew back the sheet to reveal Lazarus Beukes, his gangly legs straightened, arms folded, eyes closed.
The scab on his knee was easier to look at than the neat cross bang in the middl
e of his forehead. Clare turned away, holding her hand up in front of her face. The gun here, ten centimetres from his forehead. Close enough to see each calibration of expression, but calm, contained, without the aggression of the barrel rammed against the flesh, twisting it. For the boy it was all the same, the end. The bullet tunnelling through the brain to lodge against the cradling skull at the back of his head.
Helena worked methodically, undressing and packaging the boy’s clothes, recording her initial observations, her soothing tone in stark contrast to the unsettling details she was describing. The amputated tip of the Apollo finger, the 5 scored into the bony chest, the old scars, the new ones, the mapping of a rough and abbreviated life.
‘Yes!’ said Helena, turning Lazarus over. ‘There’s no exit wound here.’ It took a second for the implication of what she was saying to sink in.
‘Are you going to open his head up?’ Clare asked, not sure how much time she had to get to Tertius Myburgh before her plane left.
‘I am,’ said Helena. ‘Hang on, Clare. Five minutes and you’re free.’
Clare felt the bile rising in her throat as Helena picked up the instruments that would tease the last secrets from Lazarus Beukes’s brain. She went over to the window and rubbed one pane clean. With intense concentration she watched the day-shift nurses arrive, ten large women spilling out of the minibus taxi. The doors of the hospital closed on them, silencing their ribald banter. Clare wished the night staff would start their exit procession so that they would distract her from the quiet sawing going on behind her.
There was a low whistle from Helena, followed by a tiny clink. A gasp from Tamar. Then another clink. Clare cursed herself for feeling faint. Helena picked up the bullet in the metal dish with tweezers, rinsing the blood and scraps of brain that clung to the lead. She dropped it into an evidence bag and handed it to Clare. Small, spent, malignant in her hand. Her skin tingled.
‘A bullet.’ Helena’s tired face was triumphant. ‘And here’s another. Two bullets, one behind the other. Means that the first bullet lodged in the tip of the barrel and was forced out simultaneously with the next shot. So when your killer fired again, Lazarus got two for the price of one.’
thirty
Four pairs of shoes rested on the back seat next to the labelled bundles of clothes packaged in brown paper, as neat as gifts. Clare’s desert bouquet was in the boot. She drove through Swakopmund, a quaint holiday town, thirty kilometres north of Walvis Bay. Its coffee shops displayed dripping slices of Black Forest cake, and its snow-roofed German colonial houses seemed outlandish in the desert. But the street children were the same: wheedling, coaxing or pickpocketing money from flustered, sunburnt tourists. Clare turned towards the copper-domed aquarium, tarnished a Florentine green by the sea air. It was sequestered at the end of the road parallel to the beach.
It was early still and no one was about. Clare had made her way around the back of the building to find the air-conditioned shipping container. She pushed her way into the gloomy interior. The dim, dusty windows and the narrowness of the space gave it the air of a mausoleum. A young man was hunched over a microscope. Long hair curtained his face.
‘Dr Myburgh?’
The man turned. His face was narrow, ascetic. He held out a pale, eager hand. ‘Dr Hart?’ His voice was soft, the hand that enveloped hers warm and dry. ‘Tertius Myburgh.’
‘I hope I’m not disturbing your work.’
Myburgh smiled and gestured to the phials and jars on his shelves. ‘My companions are very quiet, so I’m quite happy with the occasional interruption. Helena Kotze said you’d be coming. What can I do for you?’
Clare put the parcels of shoes and clothes and the posy of desert plants on a trestle table. ‘I’m helping with the investigation into the murder of four boys in Walvis Bay,’ she said. ‘The ones Helena autopsied.’
‘Those Aids orphans?’
‘A couple of them were, yes. Homeless children.’
‘How can I help?’ Myburgh looked puzzled.
‘Their bodies have been dumped all over the place,’ said Clare. ‘At a school, on the Walvis Bay pipeline, at the dump. The latest in the Kuiseb Delta. None of them were killed where they were displayed.’
‘Ah, you want me to tell you where they’ve been?’ asked Myburgh, fingering the pale blossoms on the table.
‘Can you?’
‘I can try.’ Myburgh’s eyes gleamed at the challenge. ‘Pollens are unique and they’re tenacious. If they brushed a flowering plant, it’s going to stick somewhere. Shoes, laces, hoodie ties. Pollen is the most conservative part of the plant. Mutations are rare. That’s why we can pinpoint it so accurately. If there’s a mutation it’s like a red flag, pointing you in the direction of the correct species.’
‘How long will it take?’ Clare asked.
‘This can wait.’ Myburgh gestured at the leaves, seed pods and dissected buds arranged on his table. ‘But it’ll take a day or so. Plants are like people. It’s the little differences that make them unique. What distinguishes one type of pollen from another will be just the tiniest mutation, the smallest difference. With a killer I suppose it’s the same: you look for that one calibration of difference that distinguishes him from me … or you.’
‘Those tiny discrepancies,’ said Clare, ‘that’s what I look for.’
‘My mother always told me you could judge a man by his shoes,’ said Myburgh. ‘When you have a suspect, bring me his shoes. They’ll tell me where he’s been. Take this in the meantime. It’s the plant list I’ve been working on, and here are the corresponding pollens.’ He handed her a pile of paper.
‘These are beautiful,’ said Clare, looking at the magnified photographs of the desert pollens. ‘How long have you worked on this?’
‘About two years, but most of the groundwork was done by an American ethno-botanist,’ said Myburgh.
‘He’s no longer involved?’
‘She,’ said Myburgh. ‘Virginia Meyer. She was killed in a car accident last year.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Clare. ‘I’ve heard of her, and I’ve met her son Oscar. One of the bodies was found at his school. Outside his classroom, in fact.’
‘Strange little boy, he is,’ said Myburgh. ‘He used to do fieldwork with her. Him and an old Topnaar man called Spyt, who was Virginia’s guide. Knows the desert like you and I know our own faces. If you want to know anything about anything in the Namib – plants, stones, animals – he’s your man.’
‘Where is he now?’ asked Clare.
‘Spyt?’ said Myburgh. ‘He could be anywhere. He’s even more of a recluse since the accident. He was devoted to Virginia and he loved Oscar.’ He paused. ‘I suppose Oscar was too young to see how odd Spyt is. All he knew was the magic places Spyt could find in the middle of nowhere.’
Myburgh walked Clare back to her car. ‘Give me your cell number. I’ll call you as soon as I have something.’
Clare wrote down her number for him. ‘There was one more thing I wanted to know,’ she said. ‘Maybe you can tell me.’ She stretched over to open the cubbyhole. The insect husks that Herman Shipanga had found tumbled onto her hand. She was revolted again by the scratchiness of the little ball of carcasses.
‘What’s that?’ asked Myburgh.
‘Something else’s dinner,’ said Clare. ‘I was hoping you could tell me more about it.’ She handed it to him.
Myburgh peered at the orb. ‘Moth wings,’ he said. ‘And long-horned grasshoppers. Some termites. Where did you find this?’
‘The school caretaker found it in the swing where Kaiser Apollis was found.’
‘Impossible,’ said Myburgh, looking at the insects again. ‘You won’t find these at the coast. Inland, yes. I’d say this comes from where Egyptian bats have been feeding. They don’t need full darkness, so they roost in large trees in the delta; otherwise caves or other shelters.’
‘So you’d find them in the Kuiseb?’ asked Clare. The importance of what Myburgh was telling her banishe
d her exhaustion.
‘Yes,’ said Myburgh, ‘but they’re rare. There’s not enough food to sustain more than a few colonies, and the curious thing about bats is that they keep returning to established feeding sites with their prey. Find that, then you know where these little mummies came from.’
thirty-one
The flight from Walvis Bay circled Table Mountain, which stood in isolated splendour above the squalor of the Cape Flats. Clare was first off the plane. She slid her passport across the counter, her mind shuttling between everything she had to do in Cape Town and the fragmented picture she had of events in Walvis Bay.
‘This way please, Doctor.’ The immigration officer pulled down the grille in front of his booth. He had Clare’s passport clasped in his hand.
‘What is it?’ All she needed now was officiousness about smuggling body parts across international borders.
‘Come with me.’ He opened a door marked ‘Customs’, standing aside so that she could enter. Riedwaan was leaning against the wall, his shirt white against his throat.
‘Thanks.’ Riedwaan was speaking to the customs official, but his eyes were on Clare.
‘Any time, Captain.’
‘Can I have a look at those?’ said Riedwaan. Clare put her assortment of packages on the scuffed table and folded her arms.
‘You need anything else, Captain Faizal?’ the official asked. Riedwaan shook his head, and the man left, closing the door behind him. Riedwaan picked up the box of samples Helena Kotze had packed for Piet Mouton.
‘What are you doing?’ Clare hissed.
‘I’m here to see you. Like you said. Officially.’ Riedwaan opened the door. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Clare. ‘Officially.’
‘Security exit. It’s much quicker.’
‘Riedwaan,’ said Clare with an incredulous laugh, ‘you know I have appointments.’
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